chowflap

2009-10-21T22:57:00.002-04:00

My new interest in baking really cheap bread (yeast is the most expensive thing about bread, for real) lives symbiotically with my continued visits to the gym. Back when I wasn't working out, I really felt like I had to limit my intake of delicious, thick, buttered slices of bread, all chewy and toothsome... because eating too much bread made my pants tight. I don't know how the bread actually altered the fabric of my clothes, but there it is. Anyway, yeah, I've been working out, still, plus we now use the rock-climbing wall once a week. I think we've gone four times, maybe? It's pretty fun, and scary, and hard. But mostly fun. Even though I know I won't plummet to my death, I definitely get some adrenaline flowing when I'm near the top and I have to lunge upwards to try to grab a hand-hold. My arms give out after about three climbs, which is just pathetic. It's not even that I'm "feeling the burn" or whatever, but my arms just won't hold me anymore. Which sucks. But whatever.

Anyway, I've made two more loaves of sourdough since the first one. The second was a more traditional bread, with short-ish rises and lots of kneading, and it was fine. It rose well, the crumb is nice and even. Like a regular loaf of bread, with a bit of a sour taste. Nothing to write home about.

Here it is sliced open.

It was not really what I was going for, so I went back to the no-knead recipe, and this time I, you know, actually followed the directions. And it came out great!

Unfortunately, I ignored one of the crucial parts of the recipe, because a couple of blogs said I could: the preheating-the-pot part. So I put my dough in the dutch oven, cold, and then put it in a cold oven before turning it up to 425. As a result, the bread became one with the bottom of the pan. Here's what it looked like once I managed to scrape and pry most of the loaf from it.

I had to do two rounds of soaking to get the pan clean. I did some further googling, and it sounds like you can use parchment paper to avoid the problem. There's a "local foods" potluck this Saturday as part of 350.org, and I plan on bringing a loaf of local-yeast bread. And it will be perfect! Or the greenhouse gases will have won!

2009-10-05T22:20:00.003-04:00

My new thing is making sourdough from scratch. I've been working on the starter for a couple of weeks now -- at one point it seemed to have stalled out at the "very stinky" phase, but I added some rye flour and it got right on track -- and tonight I am finally baking my first actual loaf of bread. I put together the "recipe" based on about 10 different sources online. Due to having started this right before a work day, I decided to do a "no knead" dough, which is meant to sit for longer than a regular dough. Anyway, in about 20 minutes, I should find out if I made a lovely, crispy-crust, tender-chewy-inside loaf, or a hard little shitbrick.

I got a cold last week. The past few times I've gotten sick, I've followed the advice of cold medicine advertisements on the television: I took Advil and Sudafed and made my ass go to the office. And lo and behold, I would end up feeling terrible and sick for days -- weeks, even. This time, I started feeling cold-ish on Thursday, I took Friday off (though I felt guilty about it), slept all day Saturday (I didn't even get dressed), and felt well enough by Sunday afternoon to attend an afternoon mulled-wine soiree. I'm still a bit phleghmy but otherwise I feel pretty ok. Staying home and resting a lot did me a lot of good. Is it possible that the cold medicine companies do not have my best interests at heart?

Edited: Ok, here's the bread:

Looks like an actual loaf of bread, right? But no, let me open it up to get the side view:

As you can see, it's way too flat. I think I should have let it rise more once I had loaded it up with the extra flour today. Regardless, it tastes fine (needs more salt), is not too terribly dense, and the crust is impressively crusty. The bottom is nearly burned, though, and I'm not sure what's up with that. I just scraped it off, like you might with some burnt toast.
Anyway, I learned a lot for next time. And now I have a small amount of hearty bread to eat!

2009-09-14T23:55:00.005-04:00

Alright, I am slowly catching up. Go to my Flickr account to see the (annotated) highlights of my trip to Brooklyn last weekend (Sept. 4-7).

2009-09-03T22:17:00.001-04:00

So, I turned 37 on Monday. Today I went to the gym and it was the first time I had to put my new age into the workout machine computer -- looks like my heart rate goal has slipped a beat: 146, down from 147. Just another step downward towards the grave!

I went to that weekend, and there were indeed some hippies. I made sauerkraut and kim chee (both are in my fridge, uneaten -- I never eat that stuff normally, so it's going to take some effort to eat these), I got some sourdough starter (also chilling in the fridge), and I learned how to make yogurt. We did not get innoculated mushroom logs, but that's ok, as it takes like a year to grow a mushroom from it, and you have to leave it undisturbed in the woods during that time. I did not get to swim in the pond because the mosquitoes were voracious and it was not very warm out.

More later!

2009-08-20T15:37:00.003-04:00

What I will be doing this weekend (Friday evening until Sunday mid-afternoon, that is):

HEALING THE EARTH, NOURISHING OURSELVES: Growing, Eating & Preparing Food Locally

Come join Andrew Faust, one of the premier Permaculture teachers in North America, from The Center For Bioregional Living in New York City and Ellenville, NY.
This course will cover how to design abundant and productive local food systems using Permaculture and offer a series of fun, hands-on, food-oriented activities.
Topics include: Local and seasonal foods and their preparation; Extending and over-wintering your backyard or container garden; Growing indoors and fermented foods; Eating right for your region, season and vitality.
Demonstration and hands-on activities will include:
-Lacto-fermention -- kim chee, sauerkraut, etc.
-Water-bath canning of seasonal local tomatoes *
-Root cellaring
-Solar drying
-Culturing raw dairy*
-Sprouting
-Inoculating and baking sour dough bread!*
-Designs and techniques of mushroom cultivation: return home with an inoculated log!

Come and learn how to live well and in harmony with the earth while boosting immunity and increasing longevity!

*Bring a wide mouth pint jar if you would like to take home some sourdough starter. Please also bring a few 1 qt. glass mason jars if you would like bring home some fermented foods.

(It's happening here.) I am not sure I am brave enough for homemade yogurt, but I am totally up for canning tomatoes and making pickles and sourdough. If I liked mushrooms, I'd be psyched about growing them, too. Does anyone want my inoculated log?

2009-08-17T21:35:00.002-04:00

I am alive, I have just been doing things on Facebook (under my real name) and Twitter (under chowflap) and not here. I was sick, and now I'm still a little sick. My house has been being sanded/prepped for painting for weeks now. I finally chose a color, though, so that's progress! (it's a nice golden yellow.)

I have also become addicted to a game on my deactivated iPhone: Bookworm. I used to play this online, but playing on the iPhone is just so, so much nicer. Not only do you just have to touch the letters to spell a word, but since it's on the iPhone, I can play it in bed. In the dark. While CJ smartly falls asleep (at a decent hour) beside me. And suddenly it's 1 a.m. and I have work in the morning. Whoops.

The iPhone version of Bookworm has a few major flaws, however: Occasionally there will be a word that it does not think is a word. Sure, I grumble that it doesn't recognize "shit" or "cunt," but I don't mean those words. I'm talking about "seriously, that is a word, no freakin' question" words like "rut" or "went" or "was." I've actually developed a completely-unfounded theory that the game's dictionary was built by Brits, because "lorry" is in there (except that I'm pretty sure that the English say those words too...). I have screwed myself into losing by expecting to make a word with a burning tile, just to have the word to not show up in the dictionary, leaving me totally hosed. Can't they do an update adding these EXTREMELY COMMON words?

Anyway, besides that problem, it's a good game. Very addictive. Don't download it, though. Save yourselves.

2009-08-02T22:37:00.002-04:00

My goodness, it has been a while! I can account for the past two weeks: first I went to my Quakery retreat thing in the Adirondacks, where my nephew infected me with one of his various viruses, and then (this past week) I was sick with a cold. I was just barely not-sick enough to have to come to work, though I probably would have taken a day or two off if we weren't on deadline. And then yesterday was the big-deal event my neighborhood association puts on. The association of which I am president. However, I had been away, and then sick (see above), and didn't end up contributing nearly as much pre-event work as I thought I would. Yet it still came out okay! Not super-well attended, but whatever, right? Right. Sure.

The event was a few hours of speakers and then a couple of bands, and I emceed the whole dealie. Mainly I said "here's who's coming up to talk" and then "thanks to the person who just talked; the bathrooms are there and there, and there's an art show over there, next speaker is in 10 minutes." Besides getting the title of the author's book wrong, I did a respectable job and did not stress too much about it. I am mainly happy that got to announce, "Ladies and gentlemen... THE FAWNS!"

To our collective knowledge, this is the first time ever that actual rock bands have played here; usually this event features a gospel singer or a barbershop quartet, which excites our elderly residents but doesn't do that much to bring in the under-65 crowd. At another neighborhood event today (one that drew more of the 'established' residents than yesterday's), a few of the older people said that they liked the bands, though they were quite loud. "I guess this rock and roll music is here to stay," they did not say while sighing heavily. (I'm actually surprised at how "edgy" they seemed to think the music choices were -- these people are just a bit older than my parents, who spent their teen years with the Beatles and the Stones and everything.)

Anyway, we are all glad it is over and are already thinking of ways to make it better next time.

Meanwhile, my house is getting painted, at great expense to me. It has been getting scraped and sanded for the past 2 weeks, and they seem to be almost done. The house looks terrible, with trampled plants, muddy holes (where they pulled up the fence that hides the propane tanks), and big ladders lying everywhere -- plus they are re-doing my porch screens, so we are screen-less right now (which means we are porch-less, too, since the mosquitoes are unbearable). I should be picking the color of my house any day now, really... I have the main color choices down to "pear green" and "sherwood forest" and the trim will either be some kind of blue or some kind of yellow ("nacho cheese" is the name of a color in the mix). Pics will be posted once all is shiny and new.

2009-07-12T15:20:00.003-04:00

Pictures, I have pictures!
First are some photos of the epic, 2.5-hour hike CJ and I took last weekend in the Mohawk Trail State Park. Epic only because we had not planned to be hiking for more than an hour or so, but the map we were given was terrible and the paths pretty much not marked at all. Anyway, it was a gorgeous day! See several photos here. My favorite one:

More recently, I did another bike ride to Hatfield, which I do as a nice-weather substitute for the gym, so I try to bike pretty hard (for me) and far (again, for me). This time I finally found a non-tresspassy way to the dyke and the Connecticut River. Photo set is here, and here's a nice representative shot:

Those two photos are pretty similar. Huh. (Armchair analysts, what does it mean? Don't tell me unless it's something good.)

I have been trying to spend plenty of time outside, now that it's stopped being 60 degrees and raining. I am actually typing this on my screened in porch, surrounded by ecstatic cats, a lovely breeze, and the sounds of birds, windchimes, and motorcycles on the highway.

2009-07-01T21:34:00.002-04:00

I have not Zumba'd again, though I did consider it. I was very sore afterwards and that made me feel productive. No pain no gain, right? Do they still say that, or have people gotten soft now that it's no longer the 80s?

Last night we had some new friends over for badminton and dinner. They brought over all of the food, which was both awesome and necessary because our cupboard is nearly bare. I took over the grilling portion because that is what I do. The guy who brought the food was Dutch and apparently they don't really "grill" over there - they just use those ridged pans on the stove, because nobody has a yard, or something. We ate on the porch and once we realized there were fireflies about, we turned out the lights. Then a thunderstorm started, almost immediately. It was very nice sitting there in the near-dark, chatting and watching the pine grove get illuminated in flashes. Yay, summer!

Now in my neighborhood there's some plant blooming -- maybe a tree -- whose perfume is so sweet and heady that you want to go, Hey, maybe take it a little easier with the eau de toilette, grandma. My garden is growing in starts and fits. The eggplant and bell peppers have hardly budged. I think they don't like all of the rain. However, my sweet peas look great, and my bean vines are much taller than me. The peas are almost ready to eat. I took one pod on Monday and shared the peas with CJ. They were the sweetest things ever. This is my first time with shelling peas. I grew up with a scoop of frozen green peas (usually seasoned with margarine) on my dinner plate almost every night because it's an easy way to square up a meal. Real peas, that you can eat raw? It's like a completely different vegetable.

2009-06-22T19:31:00.002-04:00

Friends, two firsts happened to me at the gym today.
1. They ran out of towels twice, so for my shower I had to use one of the tiny towels stacked up in the weight room for the lifters to use to clean their sweat off the bench, and
2. I Zumba'd.
I actually rearranged my appointment with my therapist so I could try this Zumba class because I had heard it was so fun. It's so popular at my gym that you need to pick up a pass at the desk before the class starts, because otherwise the room would fill up. I made sure to situate myself in the far back. The instructor was tiny and tan and wiry and apparently spine-free, so frenetically and effortlessly did her hips swivel and shake independently from the rest of her body.
I am relieved to say I was not the only one having trouble following the moves. I did ok, all things considered. I am fairly uncoordinated — I sometimes have trouble remembering to alternate my legs as I walk down the stairs, seriously. But I kept up, mostly. Though my neighbor complained of burning thighs from all the squats and such, my legs felt fine. I did start feeling it in a bad way in my knees, however, which made me feel old. (The multiple girls with words printed on their asses also made me feel old, but also a little superior.) At one point I got a bad stitch in my side and had to just stand there while everyone else hip-swiveled and did the salsa step back and forth. By the end of it my face was flushed, in the weird way it gets sometimes when it's like the blood has filled every single capillary. My face was super-hot, so red as to be purple. It's not a good feeling. After my shower with the ratty, tiny towel (which tore as I inadequately dried myself), I drove home with the air conditioning directed directly into my face. But only a chocolate eclair bar got me completely back to normal.

I can see why people like Zumba, but I think I need a class that's more about proper form and less about dance steps, since my knobby, inward-facing knees are prone to being messed up.

2009-06-13T13:21:00.002-04:00

Hey, my little village is in the Boston Globe! The main house in the photo belongs to my good friend Kandy. I don't love the article's emphasis on the "low prices" to be found here, since my house was not exactly a steal, price-wise. However, it is one of the biggest houses in the park, so there's that. I need to get it painted this summer, and I want a nice yellow-green that's not too bright. CJ claims the color I've picked is "neon" which is most certainly is not. I've been sitting on two quotes from two painters in the park and god help me, I think I might go with the more expensive one, mainly because I know him better. It's such a huge chunk of change that I haven't been able to bring myself to make the call saying "Do it."

My garden is looking well, though I have an aphid problem. And the peony plant I bought last fall gave me three big blossoms this year! Exciting. I tenderly staked them up so their heads wouldn't droop over. Here are two of them:

That's all for now.

2009-06-02T10:39:00.003-04:00

My overburdened Primary Care Physician's office now does this computerized appointment reminder phone call thing. They called me last week and the recording said I had an appointment for Tuesday, and to press "1" to confirm that I'd be there. That's all it said -- no "press 2 to speak to a receptionist" or "press 5 if you need to cancel" or whatnot; just, press "1" to confirm. Dudes, if you aren't going to give me a choice, why bother make me press anything at all? I didn't press anything, because I had no idea what the appointment was for, so I just hung up. A few hours later I remembered that I still needed a booster shot for an immunization I got right before traveling to Belize, and that I had probably made this appointment way back in January, so I called back and spoke with an actual human to make sure I still had the appointment, which I did (see? I didn't press anything, and it didn't cancel the appointment. So stupid).

Anyway, the booster shot appointment was for this morning, so I hauled ass over to Easthampton, where the receptionist (who looked to be about 16 years old) told me she was sorry, that someone tried calling me but I didn't answer (I was in the shower, duh), but that they actually shouldn't give me the booster for another month and a half. Huh. If only an actual human had called me instead of a computer, or I had been given the option of speaking to a human last week, we could have cleared this up then and saved me some gas and time. Sigh. I made an appointment for the end of July and that was that.

[This post has been #385 in the series "Things that could be greatly improved if only people listened to me, the expert on everything."]

It's pollen time down at the 'park. My "back yard" (really a common area) looks like it's been shot in sepia tone. Pale yellow covers everything. We need a stiff rain to wash it away. Amazingly, this particular sort of pollen doesn't bother my allergies, though the sheer amount of it makes me sneeze (as it would if it were regular dust) so I wear a mask whenever I futilely try to sweep off my porches. The little particles are so tiny, you really can't get them all off the porch floor. And though I have considered it, I think using a vacuum cleaner in what is technically an outside space is a little too close to have-to-scrub-my-hands-100-times-a-day town for my liking.

I've sort of finished an art piece that's been sitting on my desk for months, and I'm in the middle of converting an XL men's buttondown shirt into a shirtdress. The sleeves are tripping me up, big time. I'll try to post a picture of it when it's finished. (I should have taken a "before" shot... oh well.)

2009-05-19T22:18:00.002-04:00

Hey! The event happened. And it went ok! We somehow bought just the right number of hot dogs, ending up with just 3 veggie dogs (and selling out of the beef and turkey ones). And everyone seemed happy with everything. A couple of people even congratulated us on the success, which was nice. I still wish we had had a couple more people on the ball with us, since I needed to be in two places at once for most of the time. But whatever, it worked out.

And the work situation has improved since I met an important deadline yesterday, though some details have yet to be determined and could easily come back and bite me in the ass. (Is this post just full of metaphors? Like, more that you could shake a stick at?)

In other news, my cutie 5-year-old niece apparently thinks my phone number is 4, since that's my speed dial number on her mom's cell phone. CUTE. She keeps calling me to talk about (or leave messages about) the video game Katamari Damacy, with which she is obsessed (like she was with Wall-E, and to a smaller extent, Spongebob Squarepants). She's a pretty cool kid.

2009-05-14T23:46:00.003-04:00

Helloooooooooo! Is anybody in here? *taps door*

Huh.

Well, here I am. Why haven't I written? Because I keep having to write how-to lists like this (actual list; all items need to be completed by noon Saturday, only two or three are done):

Find people who will let us borrow their barbecue grills
Make sample paper kite, procure all ingredients to make multiple kites, make template for kite
Figure out how much food we should buy for an unknown number of people (could be 10, could be 50)
Then, find someone with a CostCo membership who wouldn't mind driving down to West Springfield with us and letting us use their card (I actually found one! A total angel. We are going right after work tomorrow.)
Dust and swab down large screened-in patio, tables, and chairs
Wash two loads of drinking glasses and melamine plates
Find/borrow/purchase Bingo set
Set up parking signs
Send multiple emails and make multiple calls to multiple people arranging help and promoting the event

This is all so dumb. It's for a neighborhood picnic/party thing that my neighbor/coworker K and I are hosting as part of the association we're heading up, and not many people have told us they're coming, so we have no idea what the reception will be. K and I want to live in a place full of interesting, open, and friendly people, but we sure do seem to live amongst a fair share of complainers. And when a person works full time and is giving up big chunks of free time to make something like this happen, and some retiree has some minor complaint about this or that, it can be hard to not say, "Hey you know what? We're just trying to do something fun, for neighbors to get to know each other and have fun. It's taken us hours to put it all together. YOU'RE WELCOME."

Not that I know anyone in a position like that personally. *cough*

Whatever; our goal is to keep the event relatively simple so that we can have fun at it, even if nobody else shows up beyond the few people who promised to help us. Fun is our goal.

I haven't even mentioned the crap going on at work, which I won't, because I do not want to get fired. My job is not in jeopardy or anything -- not today, at least -- but let's just say I have had more than usual to drink the past two nights (which means having two drinks instead of the usual one. Don't freak out, mom). And CJ's motherfucking cat now meows loudly and non-stop from the first dawn's light onward. It's like having a newborn baby, what with the sleep disruption, though at least if it WERE a baby I could breastfeed the fucking thing to get it to fall back asleep.

Time for bed, more later. Thanks for still reading.

2009-04-23T14:37:00.004-04:00

Does anyone else hate my new template? I'm not sure, but I think instead of growing on me, it's shrinking. Or growing mold, instead of something good like carrots or affection.

Speaking of growing! Me and my neighbor/coworker/awesome friend K finally put together our square foot gardens this past Sunday. This is 2009's battle plan against the voles -- planting vulnerable plants inside 8-inch-tall, 4-foot-square boxes, with unchewable steel mesh bottoms. If the voles are brave and determined enough to clamber over the sides, that will mean total WAR. I'm not sure what we'd do. Add a huge mesh cage that goes over the whole thing? Affix broken glass with mortar along the edges, or that spiky anti-pigeon stuff? Perhaps a tiny electric fence? K and I are fairly tender-hearted, but watching our plants last year get destroyed by unseen, under-earth predators has hardened us. We are ready to draw blood if this doesn't work.

I am going to use the rest of my garden space to grow the kinds of things the voles didn't eat last year (mostly flowers and herbs). So far in the box I have planted seeds for lettuce, chard, carrots, and peas. I actually made a second, small, 12-foot-high box -- a cubic foot -- garden just for growing carrots.

In other news, I've been going to the gym regularly, doing cardio stuff and then some hand weights and crunches and crap like that. I went overboard and played a new-to-me Gameboy Advance PS for many hours this last weekend, and now my shoulder and arm is killing me, so I am laying off the upper body stuff for now.

I am getting more familiar with my gym. For instance:

Almost everyone at my gym is already in great shape. There are a few really buff women who I see all the time (naturally, since they're there all the time -- one of them was sighing about going to the gym twice a day to train for some unnamed competition).

Strangers will make friendly small talk with you in the locker room. Even the girl with the perfectly smooth, tanned skin and the dangling, crystal-encrusted bellybutton ring will talk to you about how she's got to put on more makeup before she "gets out there." ("Huh" I said neutrally, as I pulled on my old, holey t-shirt and $10 target shorts.)

It turns out I am NOT the only one on this planet still using a relatively-ancient iPod.

I have been doing the "high interval" heart training routine on the elliptical (in which you alternate three minutes at a high heart rate -- for my age/weight, this is 147, according to the machine -- with then three minutes at a lower rate, 119 for me). In order to slow back down to the lower heart rate, I have to go so slowly that the machine thinks I have actually left the room, and the screen says "WORKOUT PAUSED" for a second, until the machine realizes that I'm still on it, moving, just very slowly. Fuck you, elliptical machine.

My gym has a kid's room with some kind of two-story crawl-through play structure (like you might find at a McDonald's). This room is apparently enough of a draw that kids have their birthday parties at the gym. These parties always involve pizza, which is delivered to and served at the little juice bar area in the center of the gym. Smelling hot, fresh pizza while you are wheezing away on the elliptical machine? Not so helpful. It makes me alternately nauseous and starving.

Anyway, there's a bunch of neighborhood association leadership stuff that I did and am planning but I've already written too much for one post.

2009-04-14T10:47:00.002-04:00

Yesterday the guy at the pizza place said I looked like Cynthia Nixon from Sex and the City. I’ll take it as a compliment, though Ms. Nixon is like ten years older than me. Maybe I should start wearing makeup? It just seems like a complete waste of time.

In other news, I joined a gym! I’ve been there 4 times in the last 9 days (I would have gone more, but I went to NJ for the weekend). I haven’t yet met with a trainer – you get two free sessions with a personal trainer – so my strategy is to spend 30 minutes on a cardio machine (elliptical or recumbent bike), doing interval heart training if the machine’s computer offers it, and then I go stretch and do mat work (sit ups and such) and/or some free weights for a while until I get bored. I know I should up the cardio to 45 minutes, probably. There’s some science that says doing cardio at a low constant level is best for burning fat, and interval training – doing a few minutes at a low rate, then a few minutes at a high rate, back and forth – is better for strengthening your heart, or increasing your metabolism, or something. Whatever it is, that’s the one I want. My vague fitness goal is to increase my endurance and get stronger. I want to be able to ride my bike from my house to the Hadley mall and back (or even all the way to Amherst) without it being a huge, exhausting, multi-rest-stop production.

My gym also offers spin class, which is a mystery to me. I have seen the class cycling away in there, while the male instructor shouts things at them (I can’t make out what he’s saying) and I think there’s some music on, too, maybe? The elliptical machine I keep using is on a sort of second-floor balcony area so I get to watch the spinners exit the first-floor spin room after class. They mostly look happy. Gaunt, pale, and sweaty, but happy. I got to see my aunt over the weekend and I asked her about spinning, since she used to be really, really into it. She talked about it like it was this kind of transcendent physical experience, that if you have a great instructor it can be amazing, it gets you in great shape, etc. I don’t know. She also once told this story about a man passing out on his bike during class, and a helper just came in and pulled him out of the room, and the class didn’t skip a beat. I am pretty sure I would end up being that man, at least right now.

2009-04-01T22:40:00.003-04:00

I've been having symptoms of a cold? Maybe allergies? For about a week now. It's all sinus-related, that's for sure. So yesterday I decided I would try my neti pot again. For those who don't know, a neti pot is a sort of short teapot that you use to pour salted water into one nostril, up in through your sinuses, and out of the other nostril. This takes some doing. For one thing, you have to tip your head forward and to the side just so, then you have to breathe through your mouth so the water doesn't pour down your throat. Pretty much all of the times I've tried using it (I've had mine for 10 years at least) I pour the water in one nostril, I feel it go into my sinuses a little, and then, nothing. The water doesn't flow.

This time, I poured water in one nostril, and let it fill my sinuses, and unlike the other times, it felt TERRIBLE -- like you feel when you fall into a pool and accidentally get water up your nose, except I was pouring it in MYSELF, and not letting myself blow it out. My eyes started watering but I just let it happen, and finally the water came out the other nostril! yay. I poured most of it through, and then I got bored and I stopped. Afterwards you're supposed to keep your face facing the ground and gently blow your nose a lot. Which I did, a lot, but I still had a ton of water in there or something, because I was feeling water and junk drip down my throat for the rest of the evening. Today I don't feel any better.

In short? Waterboarding yourself = not as fun as you'd think.

2009-03-25T10:58:00.002-04:00

My mom sent me this in an email; she found it written on an old scrap of paper:

[Crossed out at the top is "This play is by Debbie," which makes me
think I was taking dictation for the early sentences.]

Debbie, Sarah, and Wendy present a play called "The Mother, The Father, The
Little Kitten, and The Roasted Horse."

The Little Kitten came home pulling a horse in a cart. She wants roasted
horse for dinner. They roast it and eat it, and then the Little Kitten
decides it was her pet horse. Then the Father remembers that when she was at
camp she learned how to make a horse alive again. "Let's see, if I can only
remember...Refrigerate 2 1/2 hours, put salt and pepper on it..."

(The horse is placed under the tall speaker that is serving as the refrigerator. But while the horse is refrigerating, the whole plot changes and the casts wander off to a different set. The horse is left under (in) the refrigerator, and the audience has to put it away.)

2009-03-24T21:25:00.004-04:00

Here's why I haven't posted in two weeks:

Broken Picture Telephone

...and a very busy time last weekend, when I was preparing (cleaning, decluttering, shopping, buying a light fixture at the very last minute, making a lasagna) for CJ's birthday potluck on Saturday. Oh, I also forgot to mention that I bought him an ice cream cake and decorated it with portraits of our three cats?

It was actually pretty magical, since the day before at work, Dunkin' Donuts sent the office a press kit that included tubes of gel icing in brown, orange, pink, and white. So I only had to go buy black. Thanks, DD! I had visions of cat-headed grandeur in my head, but when I finally started working on the actual gel artistry, I realized how incredibly impossible this goop is to work with. Thus, the cake above, which still got a lot of compliments (though I expect most people were just being polite).

Then CJ's cool friend from Boston stayed the night, so of course we had to go to Green Street and get eggs benedict, then since we were right on Smith campus, we had to walk over to the botanical gardens and take in the bulb show. Then it was time for a Crafternoon (trademarked by me) with some ladies from work. And we really get into making stuff, so I was there pretty much until dinner time. Oh, also, I brought a small "extra" lasagna to the crafternoon, and ate some of it there, along with some cheese and a red velvet cupcake with cream cheese frosting. For dinner I had yet more lasagna, but I did have a small side salad too. Because I like to eat healthy.

And then last night I had a 3-hour meeting of the association I am the chairwoman of, and it was somewhat tense and annoying. And here it is, today, and in 20 minutes I am going to watch the new episode of The Real Housewives of New York City, because I DESERVE it, people.

2009-03-09T21:22:00.002-04:00

To read my photo-filled Belize travelogue in order, try these links:

Part 1.
Part II.
Part C.
Part four.
Part 5.
Part VI.
The finale.

2009-03-09T20:28:00.004-04:00

Final Belize post! Here it is! For reals!

So, the day after our Tikal-touring day, we had a long journey to Caye Caulker, which culminated in an hour-long water taxi ride in the rain. Actually, it stopped raining just before we boarded, luckily. But the water was still super-choppy, which I had been scared to death of, but the Bonine worked its magic. We stepped off the boat and retrieved our luggage from where the sailors had hauled it onto the dock, and we walked a long way to our hotel, Shirley's Guest House. It was very windy and somewhat chilly.

It did not look like this at the time (since this photo was taken at a sunny time), but this is part of Shirley's yard:

I had read that she had a dock you could swim from, like most of the other beach-side hotels. But when I asked Shirley, she non-chalantly said, "after the second time a storm took it down, I decided not to rebuild it again." I was a bit miffed, but what can you do?

Here's the back entrance to Shirley's. When you walked there after dusk, you'd here loud clicking and clacking noises from the huge land crabs walking around in the fallen palm fronds:

I'm just going to sum up our three days on Caye Caulker. It was freakishly cold (which here meant temps down to the 50s at night) with scattered showers and gusty wind for much of the time. We had two full days to work with, so we put off our snorkeling adventure for the second day, which ended up being a good bet. Besides the snorkeling, we spent a lot of time just wandering around the town, up and down the sand streets, then going back to our room for a nap, then going out again to eat. I remember feeling sad that I had to wait a few hours before I could reasonably eat another meal.

We bought some reasonably good sweetened bread at the bakery on the right:

Here's another street, this time in the sun:

Here's the shoreline. Lots of mangroves; a lot of the island is mangrove swamp, though it's slowly being build into. That white blob is a great egret; there were many wading birds about. You can't really swim directly from the shore, as there's a lot of sea grass and stuff you don't want to step on.

On one of the days we rented some crappy bikes, which were guarded by this fierce dog.

The bikes made getting from one end of the island to the other a lot quicker. Shirley's is pretty much at the southern end of the inhabited part. At the northern part is The Split, a channel in the island that was created during Hurricane Hattie. There's still the remains of a cement road there. I think I took this photo from the split, looking south:

We ate a lot of good food there, but I think the best meal was at Rose's. They have the fish (caught that day, of course) all laid out at the entrance, and you choose which one you want:

Shish kabobs were $10, the snapper were $20-30, depending on size, and the lobsters were $30. That's in Belize, so in American dollars, it's half that price. Once you pick your fish, the guy slices it open, rubs some seasoning on it, and throws it on the grill. Meanwhile you sit down and order a couple of side dishes (which are included in the price) and a Belikin beer (if you're smart). It was pouring rain the night we went here, and like most of the restaurants here, all of the seating was open to the air (though covered). But it didn't matter. We got a snapper and a lobster and shared them. So. Fuckin'. Good.

It took us a while to decide upon what snorkeling trip we wanted to do. By "we" I mean "me," because it was not getting any less windy and wavey out there, and I was petrified of being stuck on a boat for several hours while throwing up pretty much non-stop. I came very close to not going at all, figuring the stress wasn't worth it. But I finally got over myself, and we went with a "full day" snorkel trip to Shark-ray Alley, the Hol Chan Marine Reserve, and the Coral Gardens. "Full day" just means 10 to 4, by the way, and includes an hour or so stop for lunch at the larger Caye to the north, Ambergris.

The boat trip to the reef action was insanely bumpy, but I didn't get sick at all (again, thank you god for Bonine). It was seriously so bumpy that people were laughing at how hard the boat would slam down onto the water when it skipped off the top of a wave. The first stop was Shark-Ray Alley, and there were many huge rays about, but no sharks. The water wasn't very cold, though getting out and being in the wind was no picnic. The second stop was Hol Chan, which had sharks -- nurse sharks, which are like overgrown catfish, really. The tour leader had thoughtfully brought a small container of chum for the sharks, who swam right up to the edge of the boat as soon as he cut the engines. Here's one begging for a treat:

I hopped in soon after taking that photo and got to pet a baby shark, who seemed to actually enjoy the attention, like a slippery puppy. Cute.
We saw many incredible fish and coral, but I don't have an underwater camera, so you'll have to close your eyes and imagine. Or go to YouTube and search for "Hol Chan" or something.

After Hol Chan we motored over to San Pedro, the main city on Ambergris Caye. We docked on "Bottom Time"'s pier:

You can see it's more upscale and built up than Caulker. Here's a San Pedro street scene, on an actual paved road, with two actual yellow-dyed poodles:

We got cheap, greasy (but tasty) tamales at a counter place and ate them on a beautiful deck on the beach. Then we met at the boat and were taken to Coral Gardens, which was pretty much the same as Hol Chan, except no sharks. Apparently there used to be more sharks around but climate change has fucked with their habitat.

Anyway, we returned to Caye Caulker safely, and the day afterwards, we went home to New England. It was a lovely trip.

2009-02-23T21:28:00.003-05:00

The day after our day of wandering around the San Ignacio area, we packed up and took a cab to the Guatemalan border. We had arranged a driver to pick us up on the other side. We had to pay about $30 in various fees and taxes to leave, and got our passports stamped twice. Here's the scene on the Guatemalan side; lots of taxi drivers waiting, and money-changers wearing fanny packs (they ended up being legit), with a few cops wearing semi-automatic weapons.

The roads in Guatemala are way worse than the ones in Belize; tons of huge potholes and ruts, and cars slow to a creep in order to traverse them. The trip to Tikal from the border took about an hour and a half. About halfway through our driver stopped at a very nice and clean and way overpriced tourist shop which also had bathrooms and free coffee. Parked at the house next to the shop was this car:

(It refers to the end of the Mayan calendar, which some think means the end of the world, or the time the aliens will finally come to collect us, or something.)

The Tikal ruins are in the middle of a huge nature reserve, so they have a lot of animal crossing signs: turkeys, snakes, coati, and of course jaguar:

Our hotel was the Jaguar Inn, one of the three right at the entrance gate to the ruins themselves. It was kind of like Midas -- very jungly, but even moreso since we were in the middle of a reserve. In fact, the power is from a generator that they shut off every night at 9, and hot water is only available a few hours a day.

Here's a path to the dining patio:

We put our stuff in our room and got lunch and watched some toucans while we ate. There's one in the middle of this photo:

Then it was time to do the ruins. At the gate we decided to save the $50 a guide would have cost, and bought a guide map for a few bucks instead. It takes about 10 minutes to get to the beginning of the ruins, and then a half-hour to get to Temple IV (which is what our guidebook suggested). The paths are well maintained and travel through serious jungle. Before we reached Temple IV we passed a bunch of smaller structures -- Tikal is enormous -- and so we looked to the map to explain what we were looking at. That is when we discovered that we should have sprung for the guide. Here's what it says about the first ruins we passed, Complex Q:
"This complex of twin pyramids is the biggest constructed in Tikal. To the north of its square there is located an enclosure inside which one finds the complex alter - stela. To the side south, a structure is located with nine income and at the head of the placed pyramid eastwards, nine stelas and smooth altars. The monuments esculpidos dedicatory for this complex are the Estela 22 and the Altar 10 that date the end of the katun of 771 Classic Late and there were constructed by the leader 29, Yax Nuun Ayin II."

(The map also gave "recommendations to enjoy his visit" such as "To behave for qualified paths, not to take paths it does not know." And "It uses the accesses authorized to rise and to get off only the structures." And "leads 45 kph and avoids to knock down the wild fauna. It takes to himself record of his speed.")

So yeah, we pretty much gave up on trying to glean any information from the map besides where things were. We did eavesdrop on another group's guide a couple of times, which was nice.

Anyway, on to the photos:

Here's the aforementioned Complex Q:

And this is Temple IV peeking out of the canopy; it's in the process of being restored, thus the scaffolding. The six big temples had wooden stairways to use to get to the top, instead of letting you use the steep, railing-free stone steps (which they used to do, apparently). Those signs say stuff about how you have to walk around to the side of the temple to climb up:

And the view from Temple IV:

It is high. Those are some big-ass trees, and the temples just rise right up above them!

Near the base of Temple IV was a rest area with actual bathrooms and even a little soda-selling counter. You can see it in the background here, with a pretty wild turkey hanging around in the foreground:

There was also a coati, which is like a raccoon; it was searching for tidbits in the leaf litter near a trash can, and was totally ignoring all of the tourists taking photos of it:

We were EXPLORING!

(That's CJ on Mundo Perdido.)

The main attraction at Tikal is the grand plaza, which has two big temples and a ton of smaller buildings, full of little rooms to explore. The coolest-looking temple is Temple I, which you're no longer allowed to climb. This shot is taken from the top of Temple II, just across from it:

Temple I from the side, showing some of the Acropolis in the background. There are little people there, for scale:

I captioned this photo with Central Acropolis but I think it's the North Acropolis. But I really don't know for sure:

From, um, one of the Acropoli, we could see Temple V rising up in the distance, which reminded me of the shot of Endor they filmed here (from Return of the Jedi, OF COURSE):

We did a LOT of walking and climbing but I had heard Temple V was the most insane, so we went. We didn't see anybody there, or on the way there or back. Here's the approach to Temple V:

What's insane about Temple V is the way up: A rickety-looking staircase that's so steep it's really more of a ladder. A seven-story-tall ladder.

I was not going to not climb this. DAMMIT, WE HAD COME TOO FAR. So we did. At the top, of course, there was no railing or anything to stop us from slipping and tumbling forward down the steep stone steps. Here's the view from the top:

The climb down was much scarier. We climbed down backwards like we were descending a ladder. Note the angle of the stairway railing, and how very acute it is:

Whew.

After that we went back to the entrance and explored our dinner options at the other two hotels. Not great. While we were peering through the twilight underbrush at a gibnut (we had no idea what it was at the time, but it looked like a cat-sized capybara), a guy in his late 50s or so started talking to us. He said that he had heard the cheap place near the campsites was supposed to have authentic local food, which would be a huge step up from the weird American-diner-like mixture offered by the hotels. So we ended up meeting up with him and hearing about his interesting life as an ex-Earth Firster who had spent some time in the clink, but who now just travels most of the time (possibly financed by his wealthy son). He was a friendly and intriguing guy, and he generously bought us beers, but at the end we decided that one of the reasons he liked traveling around third-world countries so much is that it enabled him to be rude to the waitstaff without any consequence.

The power did in fact go off at 9, and I had a hard time falling asleep without my sound machine (such a delicate flower I am). And then we had to get up and catch our ride at 8 the next morning, so we could get dropped off at the Guatemalan border, take a cab back to Midas, meet a shuttle van there at 12:15, and then get driven an hour and a half or so to Belize City, where we would catch the water taxi for the 45-minute-ride to Caye Caulker. But that's for the next post.

2009-02-16T20:48:00.003-05:00

On to Xunantunich! You pronounce it "zoo-nahn-too-niche." You're welcome, I am sure it'll come in handy. The day after the cave tubing and the zoo, we had wanted to spend the morning wandering around town and the afternoon horseback-riding through the countryside, maybe stopping at a gorgeous swimming hole along the way. That didn't happen; the horse person the resort owner liked was on vacation, and they had a hard time getting in touch with the other one they liked, and when they reached a third place, the price they quoted was ridiculous. So the owner gave us a good alternative plan: Take a cab to the top of Xunantunich (which is on top of a small mountain), walk around, then walk down the hill to the river crossing, and grab a cab. Instruct the cab to take you to the Cahal Pech ruin, and after touring that, walk up the hill to the Cahal Pech Resort, where you can pay $2.50 to use the pool for the day. Then it's an easy walk back to Midas.

Well, the first part of the plan worked great. After a relaxed breakfast in town, we took a cab up to the Xunantunich ruins — which involves crossing the river via hand-cranked ferry. Here's the ferryman:

And here's the ferry, from the other side, taken on the way back. A note here about my photos: Up until this point, actually when I was on top of the pyramid here, I hadn't realized that the light setting on my camera was set to "incandescent light" -- which is why everything beforehand is blue and washed out. I did a lot of work on adjusting the levels in Photoshop, but there's only so much I can do. My photos got a LOT better after I changed it to natural light.

Here's the approach to the main plaza:

The main pyramid, El Castilo. You can climb to the top and all around. Very exciting. No guard rails anywhere.

One of the stairways leading to the top:

A view from the top:

There are two carved friezes on the Castilo, here's one:

And here's a close-up of the other:

The archeologists found three carved slabs called stelae here, and they now live in a little house to protect them from the elements.

I liked the ceiling, which is like a wooden stave church from Norway (well, like the one in Epcot, at any rate. Heh).

Afterwards, we walked the mile down the hill to the bottom, caught a cab to the ruins of Cahal Pech. (Catching a cab = waving down a beat-up car that happens to have "TAXI" painted on the side, and that already has two passengers -- one of them was a guy going to his job at the Cahal Pech resort.) But by the time we got to the second set of ruins, the notion of paying another fee to walk around more ruins was not very appealing. We walked up to the hotel instead and paid our fee to lounge around the pool. The hotel is on top of a hill and it was windy up there; though we had been hot before, we were a bit too cold to swim. It was not too cold to lie around in our bathing suits, though. Eventually we decided to get a snack there, and our waiter was the guy from our taxi! CJ got a delicious mudslide, and I got a nauseating Mai Tai which seemed to be mostly cough syrup. We split some quesadillas too, which were tasty.

Here's a look at the pool. The round one in the foreground is not a hot tub; we were disappointed. I got in up to my waist:

And here's the view of San Ignacio from the pool patio:

Then we walked down into town. We had heard about an iguana sanctuary at a hotel on the way, but it was closed for the evening. So we kept walking. And walking. It was a very long way -- at least 2 miles -- back to Midas. But we can now say that we have seen most of San Ignacio.

Next time: Guatemala and Tikal!

2009-02-16T16:07:00.004-05:00

Continuing in the same vein, I have a few shots of our hotel. It's actually called a "resort" but it's pretty much motel-level lodgings in a gorgeous natural setting. We stayed in one of the single-room cabanas.

The signs at the entrance:

CJ and a dog (there were three) at the Midas office. Behind the little gate is the office where we spent a bunch of time arranging our day trips with Marie, one of the co-owners.

Cement pathways out back lead to the various cabanas and cabins. There's a patch of ground for campers, too.

Midas had three dogs (I think) living there. Like all of the dogs we saw, they lived entirely outdoors and were not spayed or neutered. This one got a nasty gash on an ear one night, which was not treated in any way I could see. Other than that, they seemed to be in dog heaven.

This is one of the three dogs at our hotel. She has oddly-splayed-out front legs, kind of like a dachshunds', though she is labrador-sized. Like the other dogs, she was friendly and well-behaved.

2009-02-16T13:54:00.007-05:00

After cave tubing and the zoo, and the long drive back, we napped then walked into town for dinner and then came back, watched TV and fell asleep. Our little cabana had TV, yes! Half of the channels were in English, and we got Comedy Central and Cartoon Network and everything.

I really liked just walking around the town and looking at everything. Here are a bunch of San Ignacio photos. Travelogue to continue next post.

Nescafe! And note the hand-painted stop sign.

Al's Diner, where we did not eat. I bet it would be tasty, though.

Here's a typical meal that we had: white or black beans over white rice, in a kind of mildly-spiced gravy, with a fried fish fillet (though usually we got a piece of chicken), garnished with a fried plantain. Usually there's a scoop of coleslaw on the plate too. The dish in the middle has hot sauce, and CJ has a skinny burrito. And I always got a Belikin (made by Germans in Belize).

A street downtown. We wanted to go horseback riding, but the good affordable people were on vacation or booked, and so we didn't go. Anyway, Easy Rider seemed like a nice company.

This isn't a grocery store, but, relatedly: Pretty much all of the supermarkets in Belize are owned and run by Chinese people. So you find weird Chinglish stuff along with native Belize/Mexican stuff.

We passed this lot for sale every day. I like that they kept the cement staircase up, because, hey, you can use that for the next house, right? This is along a row of shacks like the one you can sort of see past the metal wall. Even shanty-dwellers can realize the dream of owning property.

The house below is atypical because:
It has actual windows, not just wood shutters.
The top part is larger than the bottom part.
There are no dogs in the photograph.
It's also not a one-story house on stilts, with laundry drying on lines underneath the house.

The house on stilts thing was very common. One of our guides said that they use the space like a deck -- it's shady and cool, after all. And if the kid grows up and needs a place to live with their spouse, you can enclose the space and make it the first story of a now-two-story house. None of these placed have running water, by the way, or if they do, they don't have plumbing for toilets/baths. Outhouses don't seem quite so terrible in a climate where it never really gets cold.

And finally, a wall topped with decorative tires.

2009-02-14T16:34:00.002-05:00

P.S. My blog looks differentL I just changed my template quickly so my photos wouldn't get cropped. Don't know if I'll keep it or not yet...

2009-02-14T15:45:00.006-05:00

The day after our ATM cave tour, we hired a guide named Harry to take us cave tubing at Jaguar Paw (JP is the name of the fancy, way-out-in-the-jungle hotel near the cave). I didn't rent a dry bag, so I don't have photos of it, but it was way cool, though we were a bit cold. It looked like this and this and this. Like the ATM, there's a short hike through the jungle before you reach the cave mouth. Harry demonstrated to us that you can eat termites (and they taste like mint and carrot).

Afterwards we went up to the Jaguar Paw Resort for lunch (rice, beans, chicken, delicious). There was a howler monkey that was kind of the pet of the hotel. As soon as we stopped the car, he hopped on the grill and started picking bugs off and eating them:

Then he climbed onto the hood and rapturously stretched himself above the still-hot engine.

It was pretty cute. Lunch was fine; we ate with our guide and learned more about him. He got into guiding by his father, who was a cab driver. The guides here have to do a lot of safety training and take a ton of history tests. Harry is now going to school to be an architect.

After lunch, Harry drove us to the Belize Zoo. The zoo only has native Belize animals who can't survive in the wild -- mostly they're ex-pets, or nuisance animals. From their website: "The Belize Zoo and Tropical Education Center was started [by Sharon Matola] in 1983, as a last ditch effort to provide a home for a collection of wild animals which had been used in making documentary films about tropical forests."

We saw a sleepy puma:

A very cool harpy eagle:

April the tapir, who is a celebrity in Belize; schools celebrate her birthday and everything. This is her butt:

All of the signs at the zoo are hand-painted and charming. They are both informative:

And inspirational:

But. The best part of our zoo visit was when we happened to walk past the founder of the zoo showing a new trainer how to work with one of the jaguars (sentenced to the zoo after getting addicted to killing cattle). She saw us watching and asked if anyone wanted to try it. I said, "um, YEAH!" and then this happened. That's a chicken foot she's feeding him at the end there. Here's a photo of the guy still munching on the foot:

It was pretty awesome.

To be continued...

2009-02-10T22:58:00.003-05:00

Hey, I'm back! It was frickin' awesome. I didn't get any bug bites that I can see, nor did I get sick, or robbed, or sunburned. I did get sore and bruised, but that was from ADVENTURING! We were adventurers. And now I have 680 photos, plus a few videos, so I will be posting them through the next few days.
here are some shots from the first full day we had in Belize. This was the "jungle" portion of the trip; we were staying in San Ignacio. We did a guided tour of the ATM cave, a big, well, cave, full of Mayan artifacts.
You have to hike for 45 minutes thru the jungle, crossing the Mopan River four times, just to get to the entrance. I'm the one in the bucket hat:

The cave entrance is gorgeous. You have to swim into the cave, just about 15 feet or so. The water was cold.

And then, inside, you are mostly wading in water up to mid-chest-height, plus occasionally clambering over big rocks. Everyone's wearing a headlamp. It's basically a series of huge, 40-foot-tall rooms, linked by narrower passageways with a river running through them. The Mayans used only the first half-mile of the cave, so that's where the tours go.

When you get to the big, main dry place, you take off your shoes and put on socks -- socks so you can feel where you're stepping, while protecting the rock from your foot grease.
There are skulls and bones from sacrificed people, and tons of pots that they used to collect the water that dripped from the cave ceilings. The caves were supposed to be a sort of purgatory place where they were closer to the gods. Read more here, if you care.

Orange tape alerted you to watch your step, there's an artifact nearby. Everything's kind of the same color and covered with dust and calcification. Here's a skull and a pot:

Here's a shot of one of the big rooms. Lots of super-cool rock formations everywhere you looked.

A detail of one of the crystally outcroppings. Scale is hard to tell; the blob in the center is about 18 inches high, I'd say:

In the farthest room, up a very rickety ladder, lies the "crystal maiden." The Mayans were getting desperate at this point, suffering from a very bad drought, and so they started sacrificing girls, which was unusual for them. (That's what the guide told us, anyway.)

To be continued...

2009-01-28T23:28:00.004-05:00

Two more days until it's Belize. I can't hardly belize it! It's unbeliezable.

Ok, I'll stop.

I did get and take the scary anti-malarial meds -- Chloroquine, which comes in big, white tablets the size of a freakin' Sweet-tart, and are uncoated and taste terrible. I took the first one Friday (you take one a week) and I haven't slept well since. It may well be coincidence, but it may also be general pre-trip anxiety. (I actually got out of my warm bed last night and went to my files to make sure my passport was where I saw it last [it was].)

What should I be nervous about? Oh, just this:

"Visitors should exercise caution and good judgment when visiting Belize. Crime can be a serious problem. [...] Road accidents are common (see Traffic Safety and Road Conditions) and traffic fatalities have included Americans. [...] Medical care is limited and emergency response services such as ambulances or paramedics may be either unavailable or limited in capability or equipment.
Boats serving the public, especially water taxis, often do not carry sufficient safety equipment, may carry an excess number of passengers and may sail in inclement weather."

It goes on.

And then there's the botfly problem.

We have 30% Deet spray and will use it liberally, but I am still terrified of getting a botfly. I think if I got one I would just never stop vomiting.

So, why are we visiting a place that wants to kill us? Belize has toucans and howler monkeys, and rivers running through big caves containing with the bones of dead Mayans, and crazy tall temple ruins you can climb. It also has a very big, long reef and lots of neato fish (including sharks and rays) to swim around with. Oh, and did I mention that this week they've had high temps in the lower 80s, and lows in the 70s? It is guaranteed that I will not have to chip the ice off of my car for a full 7 days.

Plus, this will be challenging for me, and I want to see if I can do it. Do it, and enjoy it. Which is what I am expecting, but who knows? I may freak out at all the non-first-world-ness of it and spend the whole time playing Word Warp on my iPhone in the hotel room. But I don't think I will.

2009-01-20T22:03:00.005-05:00

AIM convo with a friend just now:
9:55 PM
F: Wait, WHO is president?
D: Obama?
F: OH SHIT YEAH
D: Bush who, amirite?
F: BUSH FUCKING RAN OUT AS FAST AS HE COULD
F: FUCK THAT GUY OUR GUY IS IN NOW

F: OH SHIT OBAMA IS DANCING WITH ANOTHER WOMAN
D: It's not like "hey that guy would make a great president. Too bad we're stuck with this really, really shitty one" anymore!
D: WHAT
F: he just danced with some Army bitch whose about to get Michelle's arm down her whore mouth.
D: She is smokin' hot and has nothing to worry about.
F: Michele smiled, then fucking kicked her in the face
F: CONDI RICE ISN"T SHIT ANYMORE
D: She smiled, then leaned in to hug her, and whispered in clenched teeth, "I will cut you, bitch."
F: FUCKIN NO MORE DICK FUCKING CHENEY
F: She leaned in and said "Send me a postcard from Falluljah, bitch."
D: Can you believe him in that wheelchair he was all "And a happy new year to you -- IN JAIL!" and then he laughed like The Penguin while stroking a white cat.
D: She shook her hand a little too tightly, and hissed "Gitmo's about to get a new visitor"
10:00 PM
F: She looked at her chief of staff and nodded, who knew what that meant and started making calls.
D: When she hugged her, she placed a tiny tracing tag on her back.

F: I can't believe that scumbag roberts fucked up the oath. It's like 32 fucking words. Can't his fucking clerks have written it on the back of his hand?
10:05 PM
D: There's speculation he did it on purpose to be a dick.
F: I can't actually imagine that.
D: Also that Dick Cheney was in a wheelchair just so he wouldn't have to "please rise" when the president got sworn in.
F: Nah, I think beelzebub is starting to take his fee.

2009-01-13T21:35:00.002-05:00

I have not posted in a long time.
San Diego was nice, except I was sick (just like the last time I was there!) and therefore we didn't get to do some of the funner things on our list, like strolling along the beach and looking at sea lions, or driving to the desert. We did go (with CJ's entire family) on a VIP backstage tour of the Wild Animal Park, which was sort of cool. The highlight was getting to pet an adorable small owl, and to watch two adolescent lions play around inside in a romping area separated from us only via glass. I forgot my camera so I'm at the mercy of one of CJ's sisters-in-law for photos.
And on our last full day there I felt good enough to go to Sea World, where we touched rays, watched otters frolic, and saw the Shamu show. It was also quite chilly and we were under-dressed, so that was a drag. What else did we do on our trip... We had some authentic Mexican food (tostadas), Pinkberry, and Jamba Juice, which was nice. We went to a tacky but fun place called Boomers! where we drove go-karts and played video games (including a Japanese drumming simulation game that was very fun).

And now we're gearing up for our Belize adventure -- gearing up quite literally, since I keep ordering things from Sierra Trading Post like the aforementioned convertable pants, plus a rash guard shirt and some water shoes. I like to be prepared.

2008-12-31T10:52:00.002-05:00

I am at work today, and I'm not happy about it. It's New Year's Eve, there's a blizzard going on outside (8 to 12 inches by the end of the day), and I'm still really tired from a dramatic stomach bug I got on Sunday. The various off-site people I work with have been out of touch since Christmas Eve so there's not a lot I can do today anyway. All in all, I would much rather still be in bed. But I am at work. Unhappily.
I'm going to try to make it to the Sierra later tonight, but we'll see how it goes... Maybe I'll celebrate by going to bed early.
Happy new year anyway, everyone!

2008-12-23T20:56:00.003-05:00

Happy Holidays y'all!

Last time I was at Ikea I got the cats a basket. They had been sleeping on a folded blanket in front of the fire, but we thought a basket would give them even more off an opportunity for max relaxing and cuteness. We were right -- there's usually one of them in there, sometimes two, and even, a couple of times, all three. The unfortunate downside to the popularity of the basket is that my cats no longer come and sleep with us at night. The basket (and the fire, which comes on intermittently during the night) is too attractive to them. I miss the cats, though -- they were good at keeping me warm, plus they protect me from nightmares.* If I want them to sleep with me, I have to get ready for bed completely, then go down, pick one up, and make it back to bed before the cat starts struggling. Then I have to get into bed before the cat decides to run back downstairs because settling down on top of a cold bed is too much trouble.

Hey, do you know it's Christmastime? True. I have a half-day of work -- really a 2/5 day of work -- tomorrow and then we will attempt to drive to NJ in the slushy rain. Pray for us. I did take a young adult mystery audio book from work that we can listen to, at least.

I went out to lunch (Fitzwilly's) with some co-workers today. I mentioned how I was being dicked around by the airline for our flight to Belize (they keep making it worse and even more inconvenient, which seems like it should be illegal -- I paid for a specific service, and now they're telling me they won't give it to me?) and it turned out that one of my co-worker had been to Belize. She said it was great, but then she kept saying things like, "We took this tiny plane from one town to another, and as soon as we stepped off of it, my four-year-old threw up all over my husband," and "We took a boat out to a snorkeling spot, and we almost died. The water was very rough and the driver of the boat was going very fast, and everyone was yelling at him that we would flip over and that he should slow down. He didn't." She was laughing at all of this, she wasn't being a Debbie Downer, just telling it like it is. It was just so dire sounding that it became a Thing, with people being worried for me -- "Don't drink the water, you know that, right? Did you see 'Into the Wild'? Don't eat any strange berries in the wild, either!"

Anyway. That trip's not for weeks. I have San Diego to cross off the list first. On the docket there: Wild Animal park, a trip to the desert, some free dental care, and maybe a trip to Legoland. I just hope it's warmer there than it is here (it was in the 40s there a week ago).

*Note: Not actually true.

2008-12-16T20:57:00.003-05:00

I have STILL not been to the KFC/TB Combo, because every time I drive by the drive-thru lane wraps around the building and makes it impossible to enter the parking lot. Seriously, it's been a week and they are still doing crazy business. Which makes no sense to me. There's good food all over the place in this town, and a KFC a 10 minute drive away.

I have been suffering yet another bout of nose herpes (a cold sore just below my nostrils) for the last 5 or 6 days. It sucks so bad. It's always stinging and feeling weirdly cold, like a burn; and of course it looks gross. I don't know of anyone else in the world who gets cold sores only on their nose and nose-environs and never on their mouth. I guess I'm lucky? Sort of? Though it's the kind of luck like "It's too bad that you lost a finger in that accident. But look on the bright side -- you didn't lose two fingers! Just think about that!" Yeah, no. Right now the sore spot is all scabrific and looks like it might heal into a nice hole right through my face.

I sold my first thing on Etsy! And the same person ordered a custom job via their Alchemy service. I seem to have forgotten how to make these things, though, and I am on my third pair of Shrinky-Dink earrings. The first pair were way larger than I wanted, the second two ended up shrinking into completely different shapes, so I figure the third time's the charm...

And, shockingly, I am almost done with my holiday shopping, with a whopping 8 days to go! I have yet to start making CJ's gift, but he's ok with it being late (actually, I am just assuming he's ok with it. Heh). Speaking of shopping, the new Urban Outfitters is open downtown. I hate to like them, but man if they don't know how to design a store. It just tickles my hipster nerve in the most perfect way. Damn them. Damn them and their pro-life-cause donations and skinny jeans and for my lost youth.

2008-12-08T19:37:00.002-05:00

Today's the big day! The one we've all been waiting for lo, these many months. Such anticipation has been building! I speak of course of the opening of the combo KFC/Taco Bell on King Street. I pass the brand-new building everyday on my drives to and from work. And I've been telling everyone who'll listen that I wanted to eat there on their opening day because the food will never be better than that. The grease in the fryers will be fresh, the food won't have been sitting in a dirty, stale freezer for months, every piece of equipment will never be as clean as it is today.

However! On my way home from work today, on the approach to the KFCTB, traffic was literally at a standstill in both directions. One lane was clear, so I just drove around it. The parking lot was full, the inside of the restaurant was full, the drive-thru was just more parking lot... There was no way I was going to wait an hour for a chicken strip meal. So I will have to hope that it will be just as fresh and tasty tomorrow.

2008-12-02T23:13:00.002-05:00

I just want everyone to know that Local Burger is planning on staying open until 3 a.m. on weekends. Sweet, now I just need to stay awake enough to enjoy the drunken feasting...

I was interviewed by an AP reporter today, in my role as "family craft expert." So that was pretty awesome.

I have more things to mention, some things that actually might be interesting or interestingly written, but I've had a very full day and my brain is shutting down. Time for cereal and bedzzzzzzzz...

2008-11-29T19:18:00.005-05:00

Thanksgiving was a success. There were some food-related mishaps -- the green beans from my garden weren't very good, I had blanched and frozen them, but they were all limp and waterlogged when I tried to cook them; plus, I made the mashed potatoes too early and they got dried out in the oven. But the turkey (cooked by my coworker's husband) was divine, and there were three kinds of stuffing, and homemade cranberry sauce, so that was all good. The ten-year-old boy turned out to be a Lego-maniac, so CJ let him go through this big box of Legos he has for his new office. He kept rustling through it, finding some piece of plastic and yelling 'oh! This is really rare!" And I'd say, all smug in my knowledge, "is that a grappling hook from a snow speeder?" and he'd say "yes, but this is an OLD one! They don't make them like this anymore!" It was kind of mindblowing. I hadn't thought that Legos evolve, and that retired pieces would have value, but apparently they do. It's just another one of those eBay-fueled childhood-completion manias that for some reason I never thought of before.

I spent yesterday being cat-like. I didn't leave the house except for a walk to the bird blind (where I fed some chickadees from my hand) and back, and though I slept in, I ended up back in bed in the afternoon. Warm, cozy bed, with my big plush cat sleeping in it. I curled up around her and played with my iPhone until my eyes got too swimmy and I gave in and napped. Later, B and I finally played the board game version of Halo I got from work. He beat me, but I didn't know what I was doing until halfway through, so now I am itching for a rematch. In sum: Slept too much and frequently, played with birds outside, played inside, ate, and lazed around. It was just fine with me.

I'm feeling less nauseated now. Whew. I felt gross after brunch today, but that is because the Haymarket seems to like their breakfast foods to consist of at least %75 butter, and then, just as an underscore, they put big blobs of butter on top of them. I ordered the "buttermilk pancakes with fruit, almond butter, and maple syrup" but when it came there was only a little fruit, and though I was expecting almond butter (which is peanut butter made with almonds) I think I got butter whipped with almond extract. It was totally delicious, of course, but I felt not so great after. But I have recovered. I think.

2008-11-26T19:29:00.004-05:00

I did get out of work early, and I did make it to the Food Bank Farm. They're down an extremely muddy, rutted road, and the "store" is an unheated garage-type space. But it had good produce and other items, cheap. I got organic potatoes, carrots, and a butternut squash, all grown locally, plus some nice olives. I almost bought some egg nog (from Mapeline Farm) but it was $4.50 and had no list of ingredients. I'm not paying that much for nog if there's a chance it has the same crap the Stop and Shop brands do. Anyway, it looks like my sauteed green beans (from my garden, frozen), carrot sticks, mashed potatoes, and mashed squash will all be local. I bought celery at Trader Joe's because the Food Bank didn't have any; but I walked across the mall parking lot to get it, instead of driving, so that's something, right? Give me a frickin' medal.

I drove on to Target etc. In JoAnn's, a 50-something man was whistling, at full volume, "Ain't Nothing Gonna Break My Stride." I had to pinch myself to keep from saying something to him. "Listen, I know it sucks that you have that song stuck in your head. But do you have to share your affliction with the world? HAVE YOU NO DECENCY, SIR??"

Now I'm home and taking a break from sorting through clutter and doing tiny cleaning tasks that should have been done weeks ago but that I am only now getting to because I have guests coming tomorrow. That is the way things are done around here. I feel better today, mentally at least. Still some queasiness here and there. Chewing gum or ginger candy helps. I can only imagine how badly I'd be feeling if I was preggers. Ugh...

2008-11-25T15:54:00.003-05:00

Hey, look at me, I skipped another day of posting! huh. Time for another list of randomness.

During my therapy appointment last night, a big parade of marchers came through town. I was on the third floor and couldn't see them, but I could hear them yelling, "No justice, no peace!" and "What do we want? Blergabedoobit! [something with two many syllables that I couldn't make out] When do we want it? NOW!" If I had been in a more fun situation I would have gone over to the window to check them out and maybe make fun of their garbled chants. But I wasn't, so I didn't.

The building my office window faces is usually topped with a full row of pigeons, of which there are exactly two all-white ones. All-white pigeon = dove.

I have not been feeling so great physically or mentally and I'm having a hard time pinning down the reason. I'd blame it on The Pill, but I just started it Sunday (no barfing yet, but some queasy feelings). The only things I can pin it on is the recent cyst reappearance, the weather getting colder, annual holiday-related anxiety, an upcoming trip to CJ's parents' place for a week, and restarting therapy. (Therapy usually makes one feel worse before you feel better, right? Please?)

The bad feelings might also be attributed to watching too much Celebrity Rehab and The Real Housewives of wherever and other similarly empty-calorie shows. I need to stock up on some quality DVD rentals for my free time this weekend.

I am excited to get out of work early tomorrow and shop at the Food Bank Farm, a CSA that opens to the public on the Tuesday and Weds. before Thanksgiving. I'm going to try to buy everything I need for my Thanksgiving side dishes there.

And that's all from this chick for now.

2008-11-23T22:47:00.002-05:00

Drive home was uneventful, I did it without stopping, I only flipped the bird at another driver once. I miss my cutie niece and nephew. I keep on remembering my nephew, who is not yet two, counting from one to ten with me. "un? doo? fee? door? die? see? deben? ay? ayn? ehn." I already asked his parents to take a video, but I do not think this has happened.

2008-11-22T22:42:00.004-05:00

I didn't blog yesterday. I worked and then I drove to NJ, and then I couldn't get a signal in the room I'm sleeping in. So there. I had wanted to say that there's a new sign on the Tappan Zee Bridge that says something like "Life is worth living!" to stop bridge jumpers, I guess, which was strange and sad to see, just posted up there right after the "Next exit 2 miles" sign and right before the "road work ahead" sign. But I couldn't post it. Now I'm in a better room for the wifi.

I did this "Tyapealyzer" on my blog, and here's the result:
ESFP - The Performers
[ESFP]
"The entertaining and friendly type. They are especially attuned to pleasure and beauty and like to fill their surroundings with soft fabrics, bright colors and sweet smells. They live in the present moment and don´t like to plan ahead - they are always in risk of exhausting themselves.

They enjoy work that makes them able to help other people in a concrete and visible way. They tend to avoid conflicts and rarely initiate confrontation - qualities that can make it hard for them in management positions."

I really don't think I'm a "performer." But I do like pleasure and beauty (crazy, right?). I do like to plan ahead, but I hate making decisions, so that means the plans end up being a bit vague. And the work thing is probably correct. The thing is, I only write about certain parts of my life here. I don't usually write about politics, or anything too nerdy...

Anyway, I'm at my parents' house for a pre-Thanksgiving, parents' birthdays celebration. When I got there last night I was told that one of their two odd and tiny Abyssinians, Misty, had escaped and had been missing for two weeks, but that we were not to bring it up with my niece. They have four cats and they occasionally jump over the dogs as they're being let out for a pee, but they come back in an hour or two. Anyway, this morning around 11 we were in the kitchen and we saw the missing cat outside! She came right to the door, we let her in, and she ran to the food and started gobbling it up. She is VERY skinny. Like, Animal Cops skinny. Poor little kitty! Poor and kind of dumb. These cats have tiny brains. We have no idea where she was or what she spent the last two weeks doing, except she's clearly not a great hunter, though she must have found water.

The other event of note that happened today is our trip to Costco, at which I got a big bag of nuts, a big bag of clementines, a big box of cereal, and a big box of granola bars. I love a Costco. Also, the kids are ridiculously cute, but nothing new there. They're great.

2008-11-21T00:16:00.003-05:00

We kicked so much ass at trivia, getting 26.5 points (out of 30), but then it turned out everyone else did too, and we didn't even end up placing in the top 3. Sad.

I'm in the middle of a malaise of which I can't find the cause. I almost didn't go out at all tonight, wanting instead to curl up on the couch and watch TV (again). But I did, and I feel much better now. I am looking forward to going to sleep. I'm supposed to start taking The Pill soon, but I'm nervous about it. I already feel bloaty and nauseated, and I am worried about getting morning sickness again and gaining weight and all the other bad stuff that happens when you take it. I am trying to focus on the fact that it's probably a weaker drug than when I took it oh, 15 years ago or so. Also melancholy-ish: stressful hard stuff at work. Today I got the equivalent of a check-minus and a "see me after class" on something I had given to my top editor to approve. Thing is, I knew what I handed in wasn't perfect, but fixing it was making my brain hurt. My head just shuts down after a certain number of hours. Plus there were fractions involved. No good.

I'm planning on driving to Jersey tomorrow after work, but it's almost 12:30 at night and I haven't packed a single thing, I'm already in need of more sleep than I've been getting and I won't get it tonight, so I'll have to come home and pack after work, and since I'll be home I'll have to feed the cats and give Junebug her two pills and maybe a shot.

Also it is very dark and cold. Maybe I have SAD?

2008-11-19T23:20:00.002-05:00

I was so tired after work and dinner that I almost fell asleep lying on the hard floor in front of my (gas) fireplace. Then I managed to make it upstairs to the sofa in front of the TV, where my ifauxn (is that a stretch? it's a disconnected iphone) sits in a charger within arm's reach. And then I was going to write this blog entry with my iphone, so it would be all hi i am typing like a 16 year old who cant be bothered with capital letters or punctuation p s noone understands me i luv twilight ttfn.

But then I got up and got my cereal and here I am in front of the laptop. Tonight my goal is Bedtime by Midnight. It's good to have realistic goals, I say.

Winter has begun, I guess, because suddenly it is freezing cold outside, and I saw a few flakes of snow blow down yesterday. I'm already feeling both antsy and bored. Kandy is also having some after-work motivation problems so we might start a support network. She has a busier social life than I do, though, so she's less bored than I am (but equally unmotivated to be productive).

Anyway, in order to reach my Goal, I should wrap this up.

2008-11-18T22:25:00.003-05:00

Hey, lookit me! I finally did something and started up a shop on etsy. Right now there is, um, just one item up there. But I put up a temporary-ish banner and filled out all of the other info, so I should be good to go, once I'm at home during daylight hours and can take better photos... Which might not be until Thanksgiving. (Mornings are off-limits; I can barely get my ass out of bed, showered, dressed and out the door before 9:30 as it is.)

Also, it looks like the two 2 GB Kingston SD cards I bought for way cheap do work. I bought them in prep of going to Belize without my laptop (and without the ability to dump all of the images off my camera every night).

Edited to add: Now there's 7 items for sale! Go shop!

2008-11-17T23:00:00.002-05:00

Today I was videotaped -- or at least my arms and hands were -- in a quiet, private room in the basement of my office. I was demonstrating how to make a tricky craft. I made one from start to finish once on Friday and once today, so I had to bring the same clothes I wore Friday. Plus, I was supposed to say what I was doing, but the guy (just a co-worker) taping me was so casual about it, I wasn't really sure if he would use what I was saying or not -- maybe one-fourth of what I was saying was useable, mainly because I was talking to the camera guy the other times, or mumbling to myself about the mistakes I was making, or laughing nervously... Ugh. Anyway, he's going to edit it together somehow. I kept offering to do a voice-over after he was done, but he kept telling me I did fine. Well, it might be fine for him, but I have HIGH STANDARDS.

2008-11-17T00:17:00.002-05:00

Today I went to the gym with CJ, which cost $12 for 45 minutes speed-walking on a treadmill and a shower afterwards. I've been wanting to try it out because I know I need to be more fit, and finally I resigned myself to go. The working-out part was fine; the treadmill had its own television screen, so I switched between America's Next Top Model and Man vs. Wild, and the machine had a heart rate monitor so I could see I wasn't pushing myself too much. But after I was done, I stepped off of the machine and almost fell over. It made me super woozy and dizzy. I am guessing it was a combo of watching a stationary TV while walking in place (moving my head up and down), because I have worked out on a treadmill before (not for as long as 45 minutes though) and never had this motion-sick feeling. Next time I'll turn off the TV and listen to a podcast or something. Or I might try working out with Maya again, though I'm going to have to pretend I'm a new user (which will require giving myself a new name) since it's been so long and I couldn't take the scolding.

2008-11-16T00:52:00.002-05:00

I kind of love Beyonce. She does what she does extremely well, and she seems to be really smart, show-business-wise. Tonight's Saturday Night Live reminded me of it. The real video for that 'single ladies' song is incredibly impressive. One of the blogs I follow recently posted the video and the inspiration for the dance moves below it.

2008-11-15T16:49:00.002-05:00

The benefit show last night was amazing. Fantastic music, lots of groovy people, just a really nice atmosphere, though a little conflicted -- bands kept playing these great covers of songs Melissa had really liked, and it was all music I liked too (REM, Flaming Lips, The Police), which made me sad I never had the chance to get to know her. I helped out with selling raffle tickets at the door, and people bought a lot of tickets, so we were very busy. I could only partially watch the Rub Wrongways Supergroup's set, which is too bad, though I did walk away from my post a little bit to shake my booty to Dancin' Queen.
I helped L with the silent auction, too; I ended up with a sleep mask and a framed pencil outline of a horse with the words "FORTITUDE signifying STRENGTH COURAGE and ENDURANCE" because it spoke to me. My necklace and earrings went for $15 and $20, I think, and the doll went for $25, after 2 bids. The first bidder on the doll was very disappointed she had lost, and with her and L's encouragement I agreed to make her a version of the doll for $30. I am assuming it will take me a shorter amount of time this go-round.
The show was in the Center for the Arts, so there was no legal way to sell booze, but people could BYOB. One of the side rooms was the designated cooler and six-pack area. I hadn't brought anything because I had felt kinda woozy after work, but then after I was at the show for a couple of hours I felt better, and suddenly there were a million open bottles of red wine everywhere pouring into the plastic dixie cup I had borrowed. It was nice. I think we made a lot of money for Mark to do whatever he wishes to do with it (slightly better than average preschool for the girls?) and the lineup waqs fantastic. Even the crazy drunken Skexsis who demanded her money back at the end of the show didn't put a dent in the evening (though I obsessively thought of comebacks and insults for her on the drive home).

2008-11-14T10:49:00.003-05:00

I had my lady business looked at ultra-sonically this morning, and guess what! I have a cyst of the same size and on the same side as I had before my surgery. (You know, the cyst that made me opt to get surgery in the first place.) The gyno kind of semi-apologetically explained that because of all of the scar tissue it was hard to get in there and get all of the endo out, or to cut off the blood supply completely, or something -- whatever it was, it was too hard for her to do, and she didn't want to just take the whole ovary out. This time I'm going to try to tough it out as much as possible because that surgery sucked HARD.

I also got some birth control pills called "Loestrin" which is supposedly the lowest hormonal dose you can get. My gyno said that it's the kind her daughter uses. We'll see how it goes (in a few weeks).

Can I just say that when you're infertile, the gynocologist's office is the last place you want to be. I can't imagine how I'd hold it together if I were actually trying to conceive, or god forbid, miscarried. There's photos of babies and happy mothers everywhere, posters for breastfeeding classes and new mother workshops, etc. I'm not even sure I want to carry a baby and I was feeling bitter and resentful.

Thank god I'm an identical twin who already made a couple of kids who are carrying my genetic material. Sure, it's all mixed up with that of my swarthy, asthmatic brother-in-law (I kid because I love) but it's obviously in there somewhere. Now I can feel less weird about buying a baby from some other country or whatnot. And if I do, you'd better believe I'd be all, "Hey look at this baby! I bought him in Ecuador," or, "This little cutie only cost us $15k! Good deal, right?" Because cynicism's the only way I can deal with the unfairness of getting pregnant easily = free, and being infertile but wanting kids = many, many thousands of dollars.

2008-11-13T23:09:00.003-05:00

Wow, I just have nothing to say here. Uh, the piece of fried chicken I got from the hot bar at the co-opseemed undercooked. My friend Kandy donated a piece of art to auction off at the big show tomorrow, even though she doesn't know the people affected and can't make the show. We are working on a plan of having Thanksgiving here, though I refuse to try a turkey (I am just not ready). My lady parts appointment is tomorrow morning at 8:15, which is too early. I have no idea what to get my dad for his birthday, as usual. It's my mom's birthday tomorrow but I already have something cool for her. CJ is away tonight and during our phone call the signal kept dropping out -- note, there is nothing more annoying than saying "I can't hear you, you're breaking up," except for saying it. Bill O'Reilly is on the Daily and it's time to hit the hay.

2008-11-12T22:51:00.004-05:00

Hey, thanks for your comments, ladies. I am feeling a bit better today. I am going to try going on the pill, which I haven't taken since college. It made me very, very emotional, so it will be ... interesting to try it again. It also made me barf whenever I had to wake up in the early morning, including one memorable time around 5:30 a.m. when I was driving my boyfriend to work. I had to pull over on a busy road and open my door to puke into the street as my boyfriend sat next to me. (Later he said, "It was so sudden! You were puketry in motion!") So there's that to look forward to. But hey, it also works as birth control, so I hear! That is a benefit.

I think I'm finished with the item I will be silent-auctioning off this Friday for the Melissa Mulcahy benefit (which you should all attend, as it is going to be amazing). It was supposed to be an "art doll" but instead it just looks like a, um, regular doll. Creepy scan of it here:

I hand-sewed it without a pattern, so it's all wack, and of course it took me many hours, but it really doesn't look worth more than $20 or so. Which is what I'll make my "suggested starting bid" I suppose. Maybe I'll bid on it first, and just give it to my niece.

Also, CJ just told me that he just remembered learning a dance to "Pata Pata" at camp when he was a kid, too! This was in Southern California. Where did the dance come from? It is a mystery!

2008-11-11T23:21:00.003-05:00

I am pretty bummed out today. Last night I had bad cramps that didn't go away even after 2 ibuprofen and a heating pad against my belly. And it's nowhere near my period, so basically the endo is back. I'm getting an ultrasound this Friday morning to find out if there's a "mass" as the doctor said. I'm going to see the doc who did my surgery, even though she has a terrible bedside manner, like really horrible, but she has seen and moved around my insides with her own eyes (well, using a tiny camera) so I can't give that up. I feel almost post-traumatic stress-ful about that surgery I had in March, and now I feel just as bad as I did before I had it. So, I am pretty bummed, as I said. The doctor (not my usual one) I talked to today brought up trying Lupron, which is by far the scariest sounding, worst reviewed drug I've ever seen. It basically puts your body through menopause, which has the side effect of starving the endo of the hormones that make it react. People on Lupron get hot flashes and night sweats, they get migraines, nausea, weight gain, facial hair, vaginal dryness, loss of memory... It makes me think maybe I can handle the pain and nausea and bloating I'm dealing with now.

Sorry to be all sad and shit. On a lighter note, Bare-Naked Granola is really, really delicious. It is almost worth the $5 a bag they sell it for.

2008-11-10T23:05:00.002-05:00

I woke up to a familiar song playing on NPR. Miriam Makeba, the singer of Pata Pata had died. I posted this comment on the appropriate post on Metafilter:

Powell House, the Quaker retreat center whose weekend youth programs generally kept me from going crazy as a teenager, has a very close relationship with Pata Pata. During my teen years in the late 80s, a 45 of Pata Pata hung on a nail next to the record player. It was played every Friday night, and there was a dance similar to the electric slide (but with more funky chicken) that everyone would do, the older kids teaching the younger ones. After being played (and dancing to it) at regular speed, we'd do it again all fast and crazy at 78, and if we were really feeling it that night, we'd play it slowly at 33 which allowed us time to add extra flourishes to the dance moves. The Pata Pata dance was created before I got there and I assume it still lives on today. Hearing it still makes me want to jump up out of my chair and dance goofily around the room.

2008-11-09T23:37:00.004-05:00

As part of my duties as chairwoman of that association I got railroaded into leading, I must take care of (or oversee the taking care of) a large pavilion on the grounds of my neighborhood. Attached to the outside of this building is a very large wooden cross. This cross is illuminated by a spotlight every night. Today I went inside of the little room that forms the back stage of the building and I found the very old-fashioned timer that turns the cross light on and off. It was still on summer-time, so I unscrewed the little tabs and tightened them at the correct hours. But now it is night, and the cross is not on. Clearly I did something wrong.

It is possible I will be relieved of my chairwomanly duties without having to actually try to sabotage myself. How about that.

Actually, I know most of the people whose homes get a nice view of the glowing cross, and I don't think any of them would mind if it was never lit again, or (even) if the cross was removed altogether. I would definitely get in trouble for allowing such a thing as chairwoman, though. There are still many older people who remember my neighborhood as the Christian camp it used to be, where all of their Christian friends lived and hung out together all summer long. Taking this big symbol of the past out of this place, that's already been repopulated with Jews and gay people and atheists, would break their hearts. And I just can't do it.

2008-11-08T22:20:00.003-05:00

Right now CJ is sitting behind me, playing our video game in which we kill orcs and goblins and shit. I can't play, of course, because my arm is still feeling bad, so it's kind of like being grounded the night of a big party. Except sneaking out and going to play with him would only make my arm hurt a lot, so. I recently won a free raffle at work for a Halo board game -- that's right, a cardboard and plastic-playing-pieces version of the super best-selling video game. I was just looking through it before I started writing this, and I think playing it will just make me feel sad. Maybe not, but I wouldn't know, since CJ won't stop playing his video game in order to try it out with me. (I am writing this in order for him to feel guilty later. Don't tell him!)

Today I went to the bead store to get more wire. While I was there a flock of ladies came in and loudly oohed and aahed at everything they saw. It reminded me of the time a couple of weeks ago when two middle-aged couples came in to Faces and tried on wigs, which made them laugh so loudly and so crazily that I thought there was a danger they might wet themselves. I like a wig as much as the next person, but they don't get more than a chuckle out of me. These people were laughing as though seeing their husband wearing a fake afro was the most clever and hilarious thing ever. Maybe my comedic standards are too high?

2008-11-07T20:55:00.001-05:00

I have some good excuses for not posting today, but I won't bore you with them. (Nothing bad, just busy away-from-computer times.) I should start writing some posts in advance so I can just drop 'em in at times like these. Ah well. Enjoy your Friday rocking!

2008-11-06T23:49:00.003-05:00

I'm squeaking in right under the wire here. I just got back from work-->dinner-->trivia, so I haven't had time to blog. But here I am! We didn't win or even come close to winning at trivia tonight, but I did remember what animal is on a caduceus, plus I identified a nautilus from a photo of one. Also, that the much-parodied "You're the Best Around!" training-montage song was originally in Karate Kid. So it was a personal victory, for me.

2008-11-05T21:28:00.006-05:00

So, yeah. Whew! Our guy won. I'm pretty freaking happy about it. Last night I ended up at an election results watching party at a local bar, which was the official spot for the area's Obama campaign headquarters. I had been thinking of just staying home, but my neighbor Kandy talked me in to going out with her, and I dragged CJ along with me. When we showed up at around 8:30, it was so packed that there was a line to get in. Eventually we made our way to the bar, and some pints of Hop Obama beer, and we even scored a barstool to take turns sitting in. The bar erupted in cheers and applause every time they called a state for Obama. During one of those times, this photo was taken for the local paper:

Kandy's the grey-haired bespectacled woman two people to the left of me. Just in case you can't see me well enough, here's a close-up of my lovely mug, very unflatteringly captured in mid-"wow!" (or maybe "awesome!" or "woo!"):

And the best of all is CJ's, which I'm trying to find a funny way to describe, but I'll let the picture do the talking:

It was wicked fun to be with such a jubilant crowd. We were chatting with everyone that happened to be nearby, like the older dude next to me who went to Kansas State, and the baby-faced grad student from France (studying political science, of course). I ran into a bunch of people I knew, like Kshama (sitting next to me in the pic, and I'm sure I'm spelling her name wrong), the WRSI folks (Jaz, Bill, and Scott), and Philip and Flora. We stayed until after Obama's speech, and as we walked through town to our car people were skipping around, yelling and hooting, people in cars were honking their horns, and a church was ringing its bells. Today I've come back down to Earth somewhat -- I'm really saddened by prop 8 passing in California -- but I am still feeling really optimistic and excited to see what the next four years will bring. Yes!

2008-11-05T00:46:00.002-05:00

Fuck. YES.

2008-11-04T19:15:00.002-05:00

It is not yet On the Other Side, but I did find a photo of me as the lady who can't wait for Christmas:

Courtesy of Henning at the good ol' Rockumentary. It is both good and bad that you can't really get the full effect of the pants.

I'm about to go to a bar/restaurant place that's hosting a results viewing party for the local Obama campaign chapter thing, though I did not volunteer with them at all. I am going with my friend and neighbor who DID volunteer, so maybe that's enough? I did vote...

2008-11-03T18:13:00.003-05:00

Tomorrow! Tomorrow is Election Day! When I will be drinking and crying no matter what the results are, though for different reasons! I can't wait until this long national nightmare is over. I can't wait to return to my little bubble, where I don't have to listen to the kinds of people who ignore mountains of actual evidence in order to believe incredible, outrageous stories that fortify their own prejudices and beliefs. You know, the kinds of people who love Sarah Palin. I can go back to pretending that, while there might be people like that out there, there are only a few, and those few are considered harmless crackpots in their communities. After tomorrow I won't have to hear assholes on the radio calling me unamerican because I believe in national health care and taxing the wealthy. (Sure, people will still be saying that, but it will be in easily-avoided pockets of the internet.

And for the first election of my lifetime, I want one particular candidate to win SO BAD. I've always wanted my guy to win, sure, but this time I actually really, really want my guy to win. As in, I'm excited to see where he'll take the country. I don't even want to talk about it because last time (2004) was such a disillusioning heartbreak, and back then I didn't care even half as much as I do now. I can't wait to vote. I wish it were tomorrow night already. Please vote tomorrow; our state is a lock for Obama, but the ballot questions are still a toss up. (Just follow my handy guide: 1. No, 2. Yes, 3. Yes. You're welcome.)

See you on the other side.

2008-11-02T20:41:00.004-05:00

So, yes. We're planning a trip to Belize. Why Belize? We were trying to think of an interesting and warm place to go this winter (since Hawaii rocked so hard last year), and I found a website of unusual hotels. I was hoping I'd find some awesome treehouse inn or something, and I came across the Parrot Nest Lodge. It was cheap, and in the jungle, so I looked up "Belize" online and saw that the country has cool, huge Mayan temples in the jungle and nice snorkel action on the shore. Many, many hours of research later, we've kind of decided to stay at a slightly better hotel. But there will definitely be a jungle portion of the trip, then a beach portion. I have never been somewhere so uncivilized, and I can't wait for the excitement, the iguanas and river otters and howler monkeys and manta rays, but I am also petrified of picking up some debilitating parasite that will make me go blind or just ruin my health for the rest of my life. In preparation, I have done something I never thought I'd do: I purchased convertable pants. (I'm so ashamed.) Hopefully, they will keep the scorpions from biting me on the shins, and the zwip-zwop sound the nylon fabric makes as I walk will scare away the jaguars. I also bought a crazy shirt that has both sunblocking properties and confusingly-located security pockets directly over the boobs. In short, I will look kind of dweeby.

I realize that I spent a lot of the last post talking about bad-looking pants and other clothing, and I promise that I will be branching out on my post topics in the future.

2008-11-01T15:45:00.005-04:00

Hey, it's November! Perhaps I'll try to do the ol' NaBloPoMo or whatever it is. Post a day for the month of November. And they have to be real posts, not Twitter-ish short ones. Let's just see how it goes.

Halloween is over, and I'm going through post-holiday syndrome, where I can't stop looking for things I could use for it even though the holiday is done and my costume is half-disassembled. This year I was A Middle-Aged Woman Who Cannot Wait For Christmas. I had found an excellently tacky Christmas sweater and extremely cringe-worthy Mom jeans at the Salvation Army -- seriously, two different people said, "please never wear those pants again" -- and I borrowed a Santa hat from the prop closet at work. I also had a small strand of battery-operated mini-lights, so I turned those into a necklace. I baked Christmas cookies too, for a prop. It went over well at the show I went to, and I won a set of four classic mini game pens. I only hope my cookies weren't what pushed that drunk girl over the edge and into Barftown, USA.

The day before was Halloween at work, where all of the parents in the office are invited to bring their kids in to do some cubicle-to-cubicle trick or treating. Workers choose whether or not to participate, and if they do, they get a sign and a basket of candy. Since I work with a bunch of bookish nerds, a lot of them dress up for the day -- usually not in full costume, but they'll put on a crazy hat or a wig. I still have my bird costume from 2 years ago, which is essentially just a hoodie with felt fabric-glued onto it, so I decided to wear that. And I wanted to do something to my cubicle, too. I considered finding four big branches and duct-taping them to the corners so I could have a little mini-forest, but that seemed too hard. There happened to be a never-used, still-flat cardboard box nearby my cube, so I stayed late Weds. night and made it into this:

It's a birdhouse! A birdhouse with the added bonus of acting as a door to my cubicle! I got a lot of envious comments from my coworkers, lemme tell ya. It slides to the side to open it, but whenever a person came to my desk to talk to me, they'd just lean over and talk through the hole. In the photo I'm kneeling, which I did throughout the trick or treat thing, and I actually have bruises on my knees now. Corporate-strength berber carpeting is no joke.

I wrote down the costumes the office kids were wearing, just for anthropological interest:
Apollo (the mythological figure)
cowboy
pink bunny
bee
Tinker Bell
dinosaur (2)
classic ghost (2)
Ariel (the little mermaid)
cat
dead bride
headless football player
an "oxymoron" (a dunce cap with ox horns)
crazy clown
Batman (with fancy mechanical wings)
A Bionicle (?)
2 devils
2 Transformers (Optimus Prime and Bumblebee)
turtle
farmer
baby on back of old man
A family with mom: daisy, dad: beekeeper, baby: bee
two renaissance ladies
angel
tiny lion
Lightning McQueen
"girl from the 80s"
skeleton head
candy corn witch
forest fairy girl
Hannah Montana (I assume)
Sponge Bob Squarepants (hand-painted cardboard box)
vampire
gypsy woman
lady bug
Statue of Liberty (a 3-year-old boy)

In other news, we bought tickets to go to Belize in early February. "Fuck the economy," we said, knowing deep in our hearts that my magazine will probably fold before then. (Luckily, there are always going to be crazy people for CJ work with.) More about that later.

2008-10-29T20:30:00.003-04:00

Yes I need to post, I want to post. Halloween is taking up my creative energy at the moment. I stayed late at work today in order to turn the entrance to my cubicle into a birdhouse, so I can wear my old bird costume to work tomorrow (yes, Halloween is Friday, but our "Bring your kids for trick or treating day" is tomorrow). Anyway, more later, gators.

2008-10-20T11:04:00.003-04:00

Over the weekend someone threw a slice of pizza (or maybe a slice of pizza that had been balled up) onto the big window next to mine. If I raise my eyes above my computer screen I can see the big greasy, saucy, chunky 'splat' and the wide swath that slid downward. Right now it's all extra bright and shiny in the sunlight. People are jerks.

Last night CJ's cat, Voo, woke us up a couple of times, meowing. He's really been ramping up the "talking" lately. CJ has been trying to modify his behavior by spraying him with water every time he meows, but usually the cat meows, CJ jumps up from wherever he is, runs to the spray bottle, runs after the cat, and once he's cornered the cat, sprays him. So I am not at all sure the cat is making the connection. Cats are jerks.

[I'm trying to come up with a short anecdote here that I can end with "I'm a jerk," but I can't think of anything, even though I know I am sometimes jerk-like. Oh wait, here's something.] Parts of my garden are still alive (barely), and when I went to visit it on Saturday, I had two giant zucchinis. So yesterday I made 2 loaves of zucchini bread (just one of my zucchini provided more than the 3 cups of grated stuff the recipe needed) with currants and walnuts. I put half the batter in one of the loaf pans, and mixed chocolate chips in the rest before pouring it into the second pan. There was some leftover chocolate-chippy batter int he bowl, so I poured that atop the first loaf. Sure, some weeks ago CJ had expressed some mild disgust at the idea of putting chocolate into a zucchini bread, but I assumed his reaction was due to the brainwashing he received as a child from his dentist father. I knew he'd come around and revel in the unexpected chocolatey goodness mixed with the currants and walnuts. But, after I told him what I had done, he was crestfallen. It turns out that he just doesn't like chocolate chips in things like muffins and scones and stuff. I told him this was more of a cake, but I don't think I convinced him. I just didn't take him seriously. I'm a jerk.

[Yes, that's the jerkiest thing I can think of. That goes to show how jerky I really am, I guess.]

p.s. My arm feels marginally better. Still hurts, but I no longer think amputation would be a relief. I started reading John Sarno's "Mind-Body Connection" book and I'm trying to believe in it.

p.p.s. I have made a few things to put up on etsy, and I'll link to them here once I get them there.

2008-10-06T21:23:00.002-04:00

Hello people. So, I went to an orthopedist this morning who basically said I was doing all I could be doing. The next steps -- cortisone shot, electrical nerve test thing -- are unpleasant, so it behooves me to see how I do in the next few weeks before I get more medical intervention. CJ would love for my arm to magically and instantly get better so we can go back to being half-human warriors in our PS2 game, but I don't think I'll be doing much video gaming for a long time.

This week Mel Gibson is filming a movie in my town. He's the only name actor involved, so far as I can tell. There are big signs all over town saying "EOD" with arrows on them pointing the way to the shoot. old Honda dealership is the new ground zero for the catering trucks and extras parking. I saw them shooting outside of Tully O'Reilly's this morning. Wednesday is going to suck, as they're shutting down Main Street entirely. The town doesn't even shut down Main Street for the very popular sidewalk sales, but they'll go all out for Mel. (I complain, but I do think it's awesome when I see my town on film.)

I just chairwomaned my first meeting. I had 7 middle-aged (and older) people looking at me expectantly, and I had prepared nothing but a vague two-item list of discussion topics that existed only in my head. But it seemed to go ok. I just kept saying, "Yes, that [course of action] sounds good. Would you like to take the next step with that?" I ended up having very little to do before the next meeting, which is what I wanted. Whew.

And that's it for right now. Time to rest the arm.

2008-09-27T13:34:00.002-04:00

I went to Brooklyn last weekend, and shot this video of my cutie-patootie niece, who is four and two-thirds years old.

I don't know how YouTube's compression system manages to make everything I upload look so incredibly terrible.

I haven't posted all week because my right arm is in burny pain pretty much all of the time -- from my neck to my fingers. RSI, probably, but who really knows? I am 99% sure my doctor will tell me to take ibuprofen and take it easy, and I'm already doing that, so I've been avoiding wasting my time and money. I've been trying to use my arm as little as possible, so no more typing for me at the moment.

2008-09-18T18:32:00.003-04:00

Butterfly update! My little transformed friend has flown the coop! On Tuesday, CJ called me to tell me that the butterfly had hatched (sometime in the late morning). He sent me a cell phone picture and took a shot with my camera:

When I got home, the butterfly was standing on the bottom of the pitcher, looking either tired or near death:

After the light had been on for a few minutes, he got very lively and ended up near the top of the pitcher, hanging off a twig I'd put in there. Much better.
The next morning it was time to set him free. I brought the pitcher outside and made him get on my fingers.

He reluctantly got onto the morning glory vine I offered him, and then he just sat. It was too cold to fly (they need it to be 60 degrees out or warmer, says the internets) so he just hung out.

I kept trying to get a photo of him with his wings open, but he just sat there. And every time I'd give up, he'd open his wings for a moment. We eventually figured out that he opened his wings in response to my hand going up and down close to his back, so I gently waved my hand behind him, and got this:

By the time I got home from work that day, it was gone, of course. I hope it started flying due south as soon as the sunlight hit it.

2008-09-15T20:30:00.002-04:00

Sunday morning I went and did a little work in the garden, and when I was pulling out one of my dead tomato plants, I found a chrysalis attached to one of the fabric strips. I brought it home and looked it up online, and sure enough, it's a monarch butterfly! I have never found a chrysalis before, ever. So I am pretty excited about watching this thing hatch. Of course, the actual hatching part takes just a minute, and it usually happens in the morning, so it's unlikely I'll witness it -- but I will see a brand-new butterfly! I loosely tied the fabric strip to a pencil, and placed the pencil over the mouth of a big glass pitcher. I covered the top with a round potholder so the future butterfly can get air but not escape until I've gotten it outside.
Anyway, I have a couple of photos. The first one is from yesterday. Note the little gold specks -- they look like actual gold, all metallic and shit. Crazy.

I love that color of green.
Today, after work, I noticed that the chrysalis is already becoming transparent, and you can see the wings a bit:

Pretty neat.

2008-09-12T17:21:00.003-04:00

A few quick things: The cats are getting along well, though there are still minor hissy fights pretty much every day. One of my cats has recently tested positive for a whole mess of allergies, and since removing her from all of the allergins would require suspending her in a vacuum in deep space, I'm going to be starting allergy shots in a week or so. Daily allergy shots. Shots that will make it quite difficult for me to leave home, since I'll have to pay someone to give her the shots while I'm away. The daily shots will go on for four months before we even know if they're working. Then, I think, I get to taper off the shots until she's only getting one every three weeks or so. For the rest of her life. This is with a cat who freaks out at getting a drop of Revolution between her shoulder blades. Pray for me.

And the mattress seems to have relaxed a bit, or maybe we're just used to it -- either way, our bed is nice and cozy now.

I have no doubt that my tomatoes perished at the hands of the septoria leaf spot menace mentioned by a commenter. I probably got a third of the amount of tomatoes I harvested last year. And this septoria crap leaves its evil spores all over the soil, so in order to grow tomatoes in my plot again, I'm going to have to build a raised bed and bring in clean soil from somewhere else. With the money it'll cost me I might be better off buying heirloom tomatoes at the farmers' market. Maybe.

Tomorrow I am sworn in as president of an old-fashioned social association of which I have been to exactly one meeting (and that meeting was for electing people to serve as president, clerk, treasurer, etc.). I've been asked to say a few words about our vision for the association for the next year. I think I'll start with, "my presidency came about as the result of being the slowest one to say 'not it!' at the nominations meeting. [pause for applause] And I promise to continue to keep this association limping along as it has been for years despite the apathy and general laziness of its long-time members!" Then comes the cheering, "Barracuda" played over the sound system, and balloon drop.

Not really. We (me and my vice president, who is actually the Karl Rove and Dick Cheney of my Bush -- in that she has the ideas and the gumption, and I just stand in front of her and give out orders) are hopefully going to do some cool things. Things which you, local reader, may even want to attend. That's our plan, anyway.

2008-09-01T21:22:00.002-04:00

Hi people! I just (yesterday) turned 36 years old. It's like I'm twelve, but thrice! I had a groovy weekend on Cape Cod, staying at a low-rent motel in Provincetown. Well, not IN P-town proper, but a nice 2 mile walk from the action. Our hotel was also just across the street from a bay beach, so we could go and wander around on the sand during low tide. I didn't choose the place -- my friends made reservations for 2 rooms for their bandmates, and only ended up needing one. So me and CJ went instead. We hung out with them a lot, and did some things on our own -- it was a fun way to vacation. When I left I got all sad that my friends wouldn't be right next door to me anymore. (Because I am 12, remember?) (The sadness could also be attributed to it being my birthday, and for the end of the last trip of the summer.)
Anyway, on the Cape we ate some great food, did a lot of walking, ate some more, walked through the dunes to the ocean, waded in the icy Atlantic, fondled some hermit crabs in the wild, sighted a seal, watched plovers plove, and saw our friends' bands play. On Saturday, CJ and I had a fancy meal in Wellfleet, and got soft-serve in P-town afterwards; he stuck a candle in my cone and sang Happy Birthday to me on the street. My actual birthday was the day we needed to drive home, but we managed to cram in a visit to the seashore, the three-county-fair, and the new episode of Mad Men, so I was happy. I even got some presents: A faux-Creuset dutch oven, a ridiculous stuffed patchwork cat, an excellent ski jacket from the 1980s (found online), The Warriors (an old PS2 game), a how-to-sew-knits book, pinking shears, and a gift certificate to the art supply store. And I have a couple more gifts to come, so I pretty much scored big time.
Here's what we watched at the fair last night, while eating fresh-from-the-oil french fries:

Updates on other matters: My garden has had some issues this year. My tomato plants have contracted some kind of nasty disease that attacks the leaves and makes them yellow, then brown spotted, then entirely crispy and dead. I am still harvesting tomatoes, but not nearly as many as last year. My eggplant are also very disappointing; I have four pieces of fruit total on two plants and none have yet gotten big enough to pick. My bean tepee is out of control, however; my freezer is almost full of blanched, bagged green beans. I am also happy with my zucchini yield (from one plant!), green bell peppers, and basil, which had a very slow start. My zinnias look great, the result of my first seed-saving experiment from last year. I'm growing other fresh herbs (the usual rosemary, parsley, and thyme, but also tarragon and shiso) but I, um, haven't so much been eating those.

And our mattress is much harder than the one we tried in the store. We (and by "we" I mean CJ) went back and talked to the salesguy, who determined that our mattress is formulated slightly differently than the one they have, so they would take ours back, no charge, for another model (store credit only, in other words). We were also assured that the mattress should loosen up over time (and that walking on it would help -- leading CJ to spend 45 minutes pacing on the bed one day), so we finally decided to keep it. It is big (my first queen-sized bed!) and despite having no boxspring and the most basic platform bed possible, feels super tall. I like the size and feel "meh" about the height, so I'm happy enough.

2008-08-17T22:44:00.004-04:00

I spent the weekend in Brooklyn with my sister and her family. On Saturday I went to the Louise Bourgeois show in the Guggenheim, which was incredible, then I walked down to meet up with my sister (S) and my niece (T) at this amusement park place at Woolman Rink. They were there as part of a birthday party (a friend of T's was turning 5) and had unlimited ride wristbands. T was in hog heaven. All of the rides were tailor-made for younger kids and she was loving it, the giant rotating swings being her favorite. But alas, eventually is was time to go home. She was so bereft that we had to carry her out. (And I don't mean "carry her out to our car" — I mean carry her several blocks to the subway station, and then once we got to our stop, carrying her several more blocks.) She cried and cried, inconsolable. "I don't want to go home!" she'd sob. "I want to stay here!" S bought her a hotdog and an apple juice, but it didn't stanch the tearflow. During my turn at carrying her, I tried to distract her by coming up with silly names for the stuffed lizard she (sort of) won at whack-a-mole. "How about Slithery? How about BlueToes? How about Fred? How about Bugeater McLongtongue?" She said no to each one, but at least she wasn't crying... It took being completely absorbed in a sticker-related activity book on the subway to make her stop. She was totally wiped out, of course; with all of the rides she went on, she's probably never spent that much adrenaline before in her life.

The next day, we were supposed to go to the Riis Beach in Queens, and after a cranky morning and an early afternoon nap for T, it was about time to go. But she did not want to go. She wanted to lie on the sofa and stare at the ceiling, instead. Every strategy we tried, failed. "But I came down here just to go have fun at the beach with you," I said. "Remember how much fun we had when we went to the beach a few weeks ago?" S said. "I want to stay here," T said. "You know, there's no TV if you stay home," S said. "And I'm going to go home too, if we're not going to the beach, since that's the only reason I'm still here," I said. "That's OK," she said. "If you don't go, I'm going to be very sad. Very sad, and very angry," said S. "That's OK, mommy," she said. We demanded she give a reason for her reluctance, and she finally said that she was scared of the waves, or something, and we assured her we'd hold on tightly to her hands. Nothing doing, she still wanted to stay here. Then, over her horizontal body, me and S and my brother-in-law talked about forcing her to go. We knew she would love it once she got there, but would it be worth it? Or she could stay home and be bored, but we would be respecting her wishes. Hmm... Finally, T said, wearily and with disdain, "Alright, alright! I'll go."
From then on it was smooth sailing. We got her suited up and slathered with sunscreen, we drove to the beach, we frolicked in the dead-jellyfish-laden waves, we built a sand castle. On the way to the car she started getting very sad; not crying, but melancholy. On the drive home, she said, with sorrow, "I don't want to go home."
S: Why not, honey?
T: I just don't want to go home. I didn't want to go to the beach because I didn't want to go home.
S: What is it about home you don't like? If you tell me, maybe I can do something about it.
T: Well, I guess because it's not the beach.
S: It is really sad to have to leave a place you really like. Everyone feels sad when a fun time is over. But it's worth it to go and do the fun things, even if you feel a little sad after. Otherwise you'd just stay home and be bored all the time.
T: I guess.
S: Is there anything we can do to make going home better for you?
T: I wish our home could be like the beach.
S: How could we do that?
T: Well... We could get a bunch of sand, and put it on the floor. And then we could put a pool in the middle.
S: That's true, though sand is kind of messy. Plus, cats really like to pee and poop in sand, so it could get gross.
T: We could just build a wall around the sand so the cats can't get in.
We drove on in silence for a while, then S said to me, "I think T got the same kinds of strong emotions that we had as kids." "Yes, I know," I said. And I felt sad.

2008-08-11T21:21:00.003-04:00

[You get a two-fer today.] CJ and I have been mattress shopping, my four-year-old "premium" full-size futon not being good enough for Mr. Princessandthepea, Sir Yes-I-have-to-sleep-with-my-head-leaning-on-my-arm-so-we-need-a-mattress-indescribably-
soft-in-order-for-my-arm-to-not go-numb-instein. I have only ever bought futons -- in fact, I've been sleeping on a futon since high school (excepting four years of vinyl-covered Hampshire-supplied mattresses). At the futon store, you try the various kinds, of which there are maybe 8, and the prices are marked, and you pay what the sign says. You can see that I had no idea what I was getting into when I walked into a regular mattress store last Sunday and had a salesman immediately attach himself to my (and CJ's) hip. We were ushered immediately to an air-bladder-filled mattress that measured our bodies and told us what level of firmness we would like best. He took us to various options, taking into account all of our desires as to price, lack of "partner disturbance" (i.e. bounciness), and of course the firmness. When we laid down on a mattress for a few minutes of testing, he would gracefully find something to do at the other end of the store. When we decided we liked a particular mattress, he suddenly remembered that, wait a minute, wasn't this model on sale at another store? Because they can use the coupon codes from any store, you know. He "called the other store" and indeed, the mattress was half off! But we still didn't like it enough to buy it right then, and we wanted to try another store. Somehow, through some kind of sleight of hand, we ended up at his computer terminal, giving him our names, my phone number and address, along with the name and model of the mattress, just to help us when we came back later, you know. I told him I didn't want anyone to actually call me, and he said that was fine, he'd make a note not to call. "Please give us a chance, guys, I think you'll like what {store name} can do for you," he said to our fleeing backs as we made our escape.

We went to the other store, a higher-end place that sold other furniture (which somehow translates into a no-haggling situation), and tried a couple of mattresses we really liked, but that were quite spendy. A couple days later, we decided to drop by the first store again to do some comparing. A different salesguy was there, though he remembered seeing us that Sunday. CJ and I had changed our criteria and were trying some latex, non-spring numbers. The salesguy was, again, very helpful and attentive. But again, we weren't ready to buy without more thought, even though he said that this mattress was part of a special promotion in which we could pick out a free pillow, even after he "checked" with someone unseen and found out that we could actually get THREE free pillows, and even after, once we told him we were going to leave, he said "Is there anything I can do to get you to buy a mattress today?" We had to say no.

I got a call on my cell phone at work on Wednesday from, hey wouldyalookitthat, the mattress store! It was some woman, a "regional manager" who "just wanted me to know" that the mattress we had been looking at was now an additional $100 off, but just for the next 11 hours! I had to break it to her that we had moved on from that particular model, and I couldn't remember the name of the new one we liked, so she had no way of making up some sale that would entice me further.

Even after all of that, we decided that the cozy, all-natural mattress at the furniture store was not $1,000 more comfortable than the one at the big mattress store. So we came back on Sunday (yesterday) to find our original salesguy, who did not offer any free pillows, but who knocked $200 off the price when we asked him what he could do for us, and then 10% on top of that (because of the proximity to tax-free weekend; don't ask), and then let CJ buy a fancy pillow at cost. Despite my amusement/uneasiness with dealing with salesguys on commission, we are very much looking forward to our new sleeping experience. And now that I know my memory-foam-topped Talalay latex baby is coming in a week, my futon feels like granite.

2008-08-11T21:09:00.002-04:00

Tonight, somehow, I got railroaded into being the chairman of a committee for which I am not even yet a member -- I have not even attended a single meeting of this committee. It wasn't that the other people really liked me, just that they were quicker with the "I offer to be the clerk!" I'd like to be a member at large!" until there was nothing left but the top positions. I came into the meeting not even sure I wanted to be a part of it at all -- lately I've been wanting to use my precious free time to make art again, finally, and I don't relish giving more of it up to benefit others. Selfish, sure, but damn -- I work 40-plus hours at work a week already, at a job that is not stress-free. Being chairman means I will need to, shall we say, "work on my patience," as several of the members are retired and find the meetings a social occasion. Tonight's meeting had one item on the agenda and it took two hours. TWO. So yes, more patience will have to be spent, and I usually spend most of my reserves at work, so I don't know where all of this extra will come from. I'll probably end up snapping bitchily at those closest to me, so look out, CJ.

I would like to organize my life so that I am spending time on things that are most important to me, not things that would be nice to do but are not essential. Instead, well, just call me madame chairwoman. Sigh. Perhaps I will cultivate a power-hungry dictator-like persona, and then nobody will ever ask me to lead anything again! (In reality, I will probably do a fairly good job, and will try hard to delegate as much as I can, which may not endear me to anyone, but so what.)

2008-07-31T20:54:00.002-04:00

Not only have I not written, but because I was away on vacation last week, I just noticed that I had four lovely comments to my post below. Thank you for reading.
My vacation was nice, though it rained torrentially for about half of the time. It didn't matter. We still go to sleep, eat, and read, without having to clean up after ourselves, for an entire week. CJ and I went to Inspiration Point (disappointingly, just a high spot on a hill, not a park filled with cars populated by making-out couples) and we kayaked across the lake and around a tiny island, which was the farthest I've kayaked ever. There were nightly fun pre-school crazy times after dinner on the lawn. And when I was tracing kids in chalk on the sidewalk, a 3-year-old friend of mine said, "You're really good at that. You should be an artist when you grow up," which made me want to simultaneously laugh at her cuteness and sob bitterly, but instead I just chuckled and thanked her. And then after every kid got traced, the sidewalk looked as though there had been a particularly tragic mass shooting.

Now I've been back, and working, and work has been stressful, because of course one can't simply go on vacation without somehow making up for that time you were away. And, somehow on vacation CJ seems to have caught ~~hoof and mouth~~ hand, foot, and mouth disease, which is a thing that normally only little kids get. And it stays in your body for weeks after your symptoms go away, so I have to decide how long I really want to go without kissing my very own boyfriend. It feels cruel. Of course, it's very likely that I've already been exposed to it, and might be getting it any minute. My throat has been a little sore for a few days, but who knows what it could be? All I know is that CJ has been unable to eat anything but jello, yogurt, and ice cream for two whole days. And, not being able to sleep because I'm worrying about getting sick is making me more likely to get sick, which stresses me out so that I can't sleep, which forms a perfect and beautiful circle.

Anyway, more soon. I am going to try to do shorter, more frequent posts, which I believe I have promised before and not followed through with. WTF, me? Get it together!

2008-07-19T21:51:00.005-04:00

CJ thinks I should change my profile at right to read something other than single. But it's accurate! I am not married or divorced. Or widowed.
Tomorrow I go away on vacation for a week, to my Quaker thing with my family in lovely Lake George, NY. CJ is coming for the first time (obviously, since we've been dating less than a year). I think he'll have a good time. He claims to enjoy airplane trips because of all of the time you have to sit and read, so he'll do just fine.
The Park where I live has a communal raspberry patch that's incredibly overgrown. I seem to be the only person to be picking from it this year. I've already gotten a couple of pints' worth, and could have picked even more. I've been freezing them, which reminds me of my grandmother, who had a very tidy row of raspberry bushes and would freeze hers in old Cool Whip containers. (Just thinking about how I used to eat a spoonful of Cool Whip right from the tub makes me gag.)
I finally, finally dusted and vacuumed the house this morning. It had been many weeks -- probably 8? Some disgusting number. The dust kitties were the size of actual cats (and mostly made up of cat hair, too). Luckily, CJ bought the Furminator and went to town on his cat, who now, no joke, looks like he's lost 5 pounds. Unfortunately, my cats don't seem to like it. It is a little intense, true. The cats have been getting along a bit better -- no scary, screaming fights, just the occasional hissy fit.
I won an office raffle (they raffle off the stuff companies send us that we both don't want to put in the magazine and can't donate to the various family shelters we usually give our stuff to) for a SingStar karaoke game! It came with a Rock disk, an 80's hits disk and a Pop disk. Of course I know 100% of the 80s, about 75% of the Pop and maybe 40% of the Rock. It is fun, but a little strange to "play" it alone, or even with CJ, though he gamely did a singing "battle" with me. I need more practice, clearly.
So there's the latest from me. Um, how are you?

2008-07-10T23:03:00.003-04:00

What the haps, my friends. I have been sick, but just for the past two or three days. It's a cold. Whatevers. I kind of wish that every cold was different -- like, one time, your skin would turn green, and another time, your toes would really hurt. But instead, it's just the pressure in the ears, the swollen glands, the post-nasal drip, the subsequent coughing and sore throat. Such a snore.
Kitty update! The cats are now mingling 24/7. Voo and Junebug are still fighty sometimes, with the hissing and the sudden, very loud yowling. Junebug is becoming a little bitch, though; earlier today she walked right up to Voo and (silently) whapped him upside the head a couple of times. To his credit, Voo just walked away. He has been kind of a bully over the past couple of weeks, so maybe they just need to be assholes to each other for a while, and then they will build a grudging, mutual respect. Or something. All I know from my own experience is, ignoring bullies doesn't work. (Surprisingly, neither does wincing, pleading, and crying, though I did get a scary girl to take back her promise to "kick my ass after school" because I was such a whiny bitch about it.)
Where was I? Oh yeah, the cats. Junebug has a skin biopsy thing scheduled for Monday, which is not a big deal but will mean she'll be wearing a cone for a few days. And it's hard to be tough with a big ol' cone on your head. She's been licking patches of her fur off and we're trying to figure out what the deal is. It started way before the new cat was on the scene so it's not stress-related.
Look at me, I'm an old lady who talks about her cats! Feedle-dee-dee!

2008-06-27T11:06:00.003-04:00

So, CJ lives with me now, which is very good so far. And we are thinking about getting a joint account for bill-paying. But I am kind of enjoying the $75 in interest I earn with my special rewards checking account... interest I only get if I've made 12 ATM transactions over the month. Several of those are made at grocery stores, where CJ and I would probably be using the joint account. Plus, of course, a lot of the money currently sitting in my personal account would go to the joint, which would be fine if all accounts fit the "12 transactions a month" rule. I imagine I'd be buying packs of gum at CVS just to hit the quota at the end of the month... Maybe a joint account isn't the way to go at all.
So, I ask you, other people living in sin (or even legally together): How do you pay the bills together?

2008-06-26T17:23:00.002-04:00

Shizzle, it's been a week since I posted. So, the wedding. I did not end up wearing my dress for the car ride, but I did end up putting it on in the car while CJ drove, once we got close to the destination. It worked out fine. A stranger even came up to me at the reception and said "you have on the best dress here!" I got this dress as a hand-me-down from my sister, so I can't really take the credit. The wedding itself was fine. It and the after-party were in the middle of nowhere, Rhode Island and southeastern Connecticut. Seriously, for such small states, there's sure a lot of nothing inside 'em.
Blogger thinks I spelled "Rhode" wrong. Fuck you, Blogger.
I've been going back to bar trivia again, after a many-months-long hiatus. I'm playing with H and L and without our "ringer" J, who had been useful in filling some of our knowledge holes. CJ has also come for a couple of games. We haven't really gotten close to winning, but that's ok. We bask in the glow of the answers we do get right, and avoid thinking of the money we are not winning.
Anyway, I am too tired to write more. The cats are back to loudly playing at the first hint of dawn (that would be 4:30, by the way) and yet I still stay up past midnight. Dumb. The cats have not met, yet. We may try mingling them this weekend...

2008-06-18T17:19:00.003-04:00

So I have a new roommate. Yes, CJ moved in on Sunday, and I haven't kicked him out yet, and he hasn't left in a cloud of anger and disgust yet either. It's good. I firmly believe that we can fit all of his stuff in my house, even if it must be crammed in, Tetris-like. My home is spacious but sorely lacking in closets (and there's no basement, attic, or garage; I couldn't buy a shed even if I wanted one, as it's against the rules here). But I am confident it will work out. I have a smaller ladder-accessible loft that I use very rarely, and that will become our storage area. I would like to figure out a way to block my view of the boxes, but that can happen in time.

Right now the biggest challenge is our cats. Voo, CJ's black male cat, moved into the first floor on Monday (my cats get the upstairs, since they're used to . So far, my (female) cats have sniffed and hissed at Voo through the screen, and sort of batted at him through the tarp. Nobody has freaked out yet, but there have been some growly-type meows. Voo was nervous in his new home at first, but now he's being his old affectionate (to humans) self. Oh yeah, he also meowed ALL NIGHT LONG last night. For no reason at all. He's used to sleeping alone, as CJ (cruelly) has always banished him from the bedroom at night; and my cats were on our bed all night, so I really don't know what Voo's deal was. I asked him, but he had no answer. We are continuing to keep them apart until they get bored with each other. CJ is all into this Feliway idea -- it's this stuff that sends out kitty pheromones that make them think that everything smells like themselves, or something, which makes them feel all is right with the world, and it pretty much sounds like kitty Ecstacy. A Feliway purchase is in our future.

I have a wedding on Saturday that's about 2 hours and 15 minutes from here (in Rhode Island). Should I wear my fancy dress in the car the whole time, or stop at a McDonalds right before we get there and change? I'd rather not arrive all wrinkled, but, well, I'd rather not bring my nice dress into a McDonald's bathroom. What would you do, reader?

P.S. I found my planner! It was in my laptop bag. You would know this already if you followed my Twitter.

2008-06-11T22:35:00.002-04:00

Life is busy. CJ is moving in this Sunday, officially (i.e. that's when he's renting the truck), though he prematurely sold his mattress on craigslist last week and so is sleeping here every night. Work is busy, like always, though now we've passed Memorial Day it means we have Summer Fridays, which condenses the work. Which I prefer, anyway. And my neighborhood's tag sale is this Saturday, 8 to noon. Come on by! There are only two tag sales a year here - the other's in September - so they're usually pretty meaty.

And then the weekend after, I have a wedding to go to in Rhode Island and Connecticut (seriously: the ceremony is in RI, and the reception is in CT), for which we got a room to stay the night on Saturday. The weekend after that is open, but the weekend after that one is the fourth of July, and I'll be dog and house-sitting up in beautiful Chesterfield, for my ex-aunt. My sister and her family are coming up for the long weekend and I might even have a little barbecue. I seem to have some sort of mental block for throwing a party; I don't know if I'm too worried that people won't have fun, or won't show up, or if I'm just lazy - probably a mixture of the three. Which is ridiculous. My friends are nice. It's really not much work to go buy some beer and snacks. Come on, lady.

There will not be a good opportunity for having guests at home for at least a few weeks, though. We're separating the two floors of my house with a $20 screen door and a couple of heavy-duty tarps, and it's not going to be pretty. See, CJ has a cat, a solo male (fixed) cat who has shown in the past to not take kindly to other cats. So we are going to try to sequester him on the first floor, and my two kitties on the second, so they can see and smell each other but not truly interact until they stop howling and hissing at each other. Which should happen in a couple of weeks. We hope. Seriously, pray for us.

I have lost my Little Otsu planner, and I am bereft without it. I had written all of my summer Fridays into it, and all of my other future events, so now I have no record of when my hair appointment is and stuff. I have looked everywhere. Every once in a while I'll think something like "Ooh, I know! It's in my other purse!" then I go and look and it's not there. Maybe it's hiding. Or stolen, though it's half-filled-in and not worth much. Consider this post a message to the universe that I want it back. Or, if I wanted to follow The Secret, I could just visualize the planner back in my hands, and that would bring it back to me - like when Luke used The Force to get the lightsaber into his hand when he was hanging upside-down in the ice cave on Hoth. You know.

2008-06-02T21:12:00.003-04:00

CJ's family was in town this past Friday and Saturday. Note to self: Do not take the guys from San Diego out on a nature hike during peak mosquito season. They aren't used to the buzzing and the swarming and the biting and the general horror. We are numb to it, of course, but they don't really have annoying insects in southern California. The people there are soft and pampered, like babies. They did say that it was very pretty, though.
Being around CJ's parents means going out to eat a lot on their dime. It was enjoyable, I must admit. They are similar to my bro-in-law's parents in many ways, and since they are all Jewish, I now have the (probably-mistaken) impression that all Jewish families are helmed by people who are incredibly generous and declarative. (They can also give guilt trips at a professional level of skill.) It's like visiting a foreign country.
My parents, however, avoid making nauseating, cringe-making hints about CJ and I getting married and having babies. And if we have babies, how we should move closer to them so they can spend time with the babies. And how they'll buy us fancy Danish furniture and give us a house if we move there and have babies. They are kind of kidding, but in that way that's obvious they are not kidding at all. I tend to deflect the conversation by making snarky jokes, since they like and appreciate a good cutting remark. So they like me a lot, which is nice.
Not nice? My robin's nest is empty. Empty! It still had two eggs in it on Sunday, but this morning, empty. It shocked me and made me very sad. There are enough robins in the world, but this one was my robin. I looked up robin egg predators online; both squirrels and crows are happy to take an egg from a nest without leaving a trace behind. We have plenty of crows and squirrels here too, but none of them are my crow or squirrel. Thus I now hate all squirrels and crows. (The previous is an allegory about how the personal is political, or all politics is local, or something.)

2008-05-25T12:07:00.004-04:00

[This is way too detailed, but whatevers.] So, yesterday I traveled to the Wonder of it All [i.e. Foxwoods, which I am not linking to here because of their website is quite annoying] with CJ, H, and L, to play Bingo. H and L had played Bingo once or twice before, and have a startlingly good winning record. H, you may recall, even got a stint in the money machine.

So. Foxwoods is loud, and complicated, with a lot of different areas and casinos and restaurants. There's a fake-New-England town area, and a fake-NYC area (though I only "got" the theme after I saw signs for Juniors and Craftwich), a bar with a giant salmon statue, and a buffet where they display huge, bloody pieces of raw meat, which did not make us want to eat there. Their Bingo hall is enormous. Just rows and rows of chairs at long tables with pink plastic trash bags duct-taped to the sides every fourfeet or so, so that you can shove your losing bingo sheet into a bag without getting up. You can also, if you got there early (recommended), put the trash from your El Pollo Loco dinner into them. The hall holds 3,600 people, though there was less than half of that there when we played. But over a thousand, for sure. People bring special bingo dauber caddies and little figurines and stuffed animals brought for good luck. There were a lot of old people, as you'd expect, but also a few couples and small groups of 20- and 30-somethings, which felt encouraging somehow. We paid $20 to get in, which gives you bingo sheets for all of the regular games, and then we bought the maximum extras package with all of the Special and Quickie games for an additional $29. They scatter the Special and Quickie games throughout the regular rounds. Each round is slightly different, so you might be looking to create a 9-square, or an L shape, Bingo the hard way (not using the free space), or an "Indian star". TV screens encircle the room and show you the ball with the number for a few seconds before the caller says it out loud. If you get a Bingo, you have to wait until the caller says the letter and number, and then shout "Bingo!" loud enough for the caller to hear it. Then you hold your sheet up and wait for a person to come over and verify your sheet. Each sheet has a code printed on it, so they read off the code to the caller, and then the caller people punch it into their computer, which will tell if a Bingo was possible on that card or not. The caller says either "No Bingo" (and play continues) or "Good Bingo" which means there's been a winner. If more than one person gets Bingo at the same time, they split the pot. Most sheets have 9 cards on them, so that's a lot of searching for numbers. They don't go slowly, either.

Before we started, CJ and I made a deal to split whatever we won 50/50, and shook on it. Somewhere in the middle of the first act (there's an intermission) was a game where we had to make a "Y". Suddenly I realized I only needed one more number. "I only need one more!" I whispered, and then the very next number came up: 34. "And there it is!" It all happened so fast! I waited until she said "N thirty-four" and I yelled "Bingo!" super loud, as everyone in the room groaned a little (as they did after every call of bingo). A runner person verified my sheet, had me sign a little slip, and a few minutes later she came back and counted out $500 cash for me. I gave CJ $250 the next time we had a spare minute. We were very happy, though CJ said, "I kind of feel like I didn't win," and I was all, feel that bulge of cash in your pocket? I think you won.

At intermission I looked at my watch and saw it was around 9; we had started playing at 6:30, which seemed about an hour ago, tops. I watched a woman do the money machine. She had clearly not gotten any of the helpful hints that H had gotten, because she was just grabbing and crumpling the money and then trying to shove it through the little slot, which wasn't working all that well. I imagine that's about how I'd do it. In the second act, L got a bingo on one of the special games, winning $300. It's like old hat for her; I think she's played 4 times and won 3, or something. Had she won a second time on that game (it's complicated) she would have gotten to spin the big wheel. Instead, a nice older woman did it and everyone cheered her on.

By the time we were done, it was 11 p.m. We wanted to get a snack and play some slots, so we got bagels and soup at Panera, and then found the "smoke-free slots" area (oh yes, smoking is allowed indoors here. It's on a reservation so they make their own rules). I lost $5 on a slot machine, then another $3 at a different one, and $2 at a video poker machine. I did get a free vodka and cranberry from a passing waitress, though, which was nice. I put in another $10 bill, and lost about $8 before moving back to another slot machine. This one was "The Hex-Breaker" and was a 5-cent slot, and my "points" kept going up and down and it was time to leave, so I tripled my bet and hit it, bringing me up to $30.05. So I cashed out $10 ahead.

There were about 1,200 people playing Bingo, and maybe 40 winners, so I was one of the lucky 3%. A couple of the people our age also won, though there were lots more old-timers there. I think this kind of Bingo might be too hard for the elderly. You mis-hear one number, or fall behind at all, and you're screwed. I can't believe how the time flew by. They totally suckered me in with the winning, and I signed up for their free "Dreams card" which gives you points for losing your money. Foxwoods is almost 2 hours away so I don't know how often I'll be tempted to return. Still, though: Bingo. The 5 hours of entertainment was totally worth $50 -- of course I say that since I won something, but still. A+++, would play again.

2008-05-20T18:22:00.002-04:00

Here are some Twitter-like things.

There is a new robin's nest on my second-story porch. This time, it's about three feet off the ground, perfect for spying. I haven't seen a robin near it for a few days, though I think I remember that happening last time, too. (The robin is off getting fat and making little eggs inside herself. Or something. We'll see what happens.

I rode my bike to work today. Yesterday I drove, because I foolishly let THE MAN tell me that it might rain. It did not. So today, I said, 30% chance of rain? I'll take those odds! And I was rewarded with a dry commute both ways. Lesson: Don't listen to the MAN! He's clearly in bed with the oil companies.

I have Asked Metafilter a couple of things. Some questions I haven't asked (yet):

Say I found a dead bird on the ground, and wanted to preserve it without getting a taxidermist involved. Could I, hypothetically, mummify it with a food dehydrator?

How can I make a room in my house, with walls and at least some sound privacy, without adding a separate heat source for the room?

How do I stop feeling dizzy on my bike rides? Do I have a brain tumor?

You know how people who have really loud Harley Davidsons talk about how the noise "means freedom" to them? My counter argument to them is, what if my definition of freedom is screaming at the top of my lungs while walking down the street? Is there a hole in my argument that I'm missing? Because it seems iron-clad to me.

2008-05-13T21:18:00.004-04:00

So we went fishing for real on Saturday. We had gotten the correct bait at the sportsman's shop, and (from the proprietor) the precise location where fish had recently been stocked and were biting. And I caught our first fish! It was a weird short little bass. He had very big, bulbous eyes, and was only about 5 inches long. So back in the lake he went. But then I caught a perch! He was very pretty. And at about 8 inches long, big enough to eat, so we kept him. Keeping him, in this instance, meant putting him in the old kitty litter bucket which was half-full of melting ice. This meant that for the next half-hour or so that we were fishing, there would be an occasional rustling sound from the bucket as the perch slowly froze/suffocated to death. "Do you want me to gut it now?" asked CJ after I glanced sadly at the bucket for the 10th time. Yes, sure. He "took care of it" out of my line of sight. It was a very pretty fish, with cool stripes on the side and bright orange fins. I think I would have felt less conflicted if it had been ugly. I am like most pampered first-worlders in this regard, sadly.

We ended up not catching anything else, and it was kind of cold and windy, so we took our one small perch home. We don't yet have a scaling knife, so CJ filleted it (while I read a book upstairs, under the covers). He had to do some online research to do so, but he did a great job. We ended up with a very small amount of meat, which I sauteed in a bit of olive oil and salt. The flesh was perfect, very little fishy flavor, mostly just really good, really fresh tasting. The texture was divine. Eating it made me want to go fishing again. But fishing is time consuming, and a lot of that time is spent staring out into space as you wait for something to happen. It is, frankly, kind of boring. CJ is still wicked into it, and is fine with it being his solo thing. Which it may be.

2008-05-06T19:15:00.003-04:00

I just got my MA fishing license in the mail. I have never gotten such a thing, but there it is. For $27 a year, I can catch my share of trout and panfish, bring them home, and eat them. (Only one a week or so, though, because of the various heavy metals in the fish. Zero if you're pregnant, which can't be a good sign...) Of course, this is all CJ's idea. I am too squeamish to put a worm on a hook, for example, or to gut a fish, but CJ is experienced in such things. I like the idea of being more connected with the food that I eat, though, so I'm into the fishing idea. Plus I have always liked those Skil-crane games at the arcade, so. You know. Similar.

We actually fished last weekend, when it was cold and drizzly (we had temporary fishing licenses that we'd bought online). CJ has his father's classic, manly old rod and reel and tackle box, and I have a bright yellow Scooby Doo-licensed fishing rod that I got at a tag sale for fifty cents a couple of weeks ago. It works fine, mostly. We went to the conservation area near my house, because we've seen people fishing there before. In fact, there was a guy fishing from atop a beaver lodge when we were there. We arrived baitless, so we dug around in the dirt with our hands to find a few feeble worms. We didn't catch anything, which was fine, as I was considering it a dry run. I had already perfected (almost) my casting technique while inside, using a bobber without a hook. A fishing rod makes for a very alluring cat toy. (Nothing better than having a 10-pound cat at the end of your line with a bobber in her mouth, fighting you with all her might as you reel 'er in.)

Because we caught nothing, we decided to "catch" a couple of trout at the new co-op. They were fairly tasty. CJ stuffed them with tomatoes, garlic, olives, and basil, and then steamed them. Next time I'm going to grill them.

After our failure, we went back to the local sporting goods' store, where the guy gave us advice about where to go and what bait to use (mealworms, which we bought, and this weird neon playdough-like stuff, which we also bought) and how to use it. So we are totally set for next weekend. I may have trouble with the eating, though; CJ is the kind of fellow who doesn't leave a scrap of meat on the bone, and when we ate the aforementioned store-bought trout, CJ opened up the head to get at the forehead meat or whatever. I told him that next time, he needs to do that over the sink when I'm not around.

I am hoping my vegan friends don't disown me now.

2008-04-29T21:17:00.005-04:00

The River Valley Market (a co-op) opens tomorrow! I am a "member-owner" which just means that I paid them $150, will get my name on their electronic "founding member wall", and will get some discounts on store items. I am hoping this will mean I can afford to shop there (though they claim things will be competitively priced for non-members too). You don't have to do any work to be a member, which is a bonus, and the fee is a one-time thing. The store is about a perfect mile from my house, so I've gotten to watch the entire building go up. It's exciting. In anticipation of doing my grocery shopping at a place so close to my home, I bought these. Of course it's currently too damn cold to consider riding my bike anywhere (I am a wimp), but eventually it will warm up again. Of this I have faith.

And I am going to begin carpooling with my neighbor/coworker, finally. Having another person depending on my punctuality will really help me get my ass in gear, because I hate disappointing people even more than I hate leaving my bed. The past two nights I've gone up to my bedroom area and found both cats waiting on the bed for me. I think the dose of ultra-cuteness makes it harder for me to get out of bed in the morning.

Yes, I am an old lady who talks about her cats, and sleep, and the supermarket. Yes.

2008-04-25T11:30:00.004-04:00

It has taken me this long to realize that my shitty, made-in-China, combination pencil holder/paperclip holder/ LCD clock with date/day/temperature readout corporate "gift" may not actually be all that accurate. Besides the obvious problem of it saying today is Sunday (it knows it's April 25) and the fact that the time is fast (it's now a full 10 minutes later than the actual time), it only seems to think that it's either 74.3, 77, or 80 degrees in my cubicle. I thought maybe I wasn't glancing at it often enough, but it slowly dawned on me that I have never seen it be any number in between 74 and 77. So now I have a theory that it has some poor, clunky Celsius-to-Fahrenheit problem, but I can't be bothered to do the research to back me up.

This is what occupies my mind, people. Well, that and my garden; the barely-used bike I bought off of Craigslist for $300 cash (this one); the accessories I might buy for said bike; the recent notice I got in the mail that, although I used "in-plan" doctors, I will owe nearly $1,000 for my recent surgery; Junebug's recent hobby of over-grooming her fur; wondering about the new "noodles" place on Main Street; wanting to sell some stuff on eBay; needing to clean the house; needing a trip to IKEA; and the continuing struggle between my philosophy that paying more for a long-lasting, quality item is worth it in the end, and the deeply-ingrained desire to not spend more than a few dollars on anything, ever. (I had been feeling quite flush when I bought the bike ... and then I got the health care notice.)

Seriously, when is the health care revolution going to come? I have pretty good insurance, subsidized by my employer, and it still sucks ass. They ended up paying about 85 percent of the actual costs of the surgery. That won't be enough coverage if I ever end up staying a few nights in the hospital. What the hell am I supposed to do? And I'm one of the lucky ones! I'm insured! If I didn't love spring and summer so much, I'd move to Canada. But I am always mindful of how much outdoors time we get up here: how many months I can comfortably ride my bike to work, how many months of planting I get, how many months of using the porches... I don't want to tip the indoors-to-outdoors month ratio beyond 50/50, you know?

Sorry, I'm a little obsessive. As you may have noticed.

I'm feeling ok, health-wise. No more lady business to report for a while, I suspect. That's good news for me and for you!

2008-04-18T14:59:00.004-04:00

I had my three-weeks-after-surgery checkup today. My doctor, in whose skills I am confident, was exercising her most emotionally-distant bedside manner. She told me that I was pretty unlikely to get pregnant without in-vitro fertilization, but that I really should try not to get pregnant anyway, because there's a good chance it would end up a tubal. If my cyst-ish pain started again, I should go on birth control pills. And then she seemed to want to move on to the next patient.

To stop her, I kept asking questions. Is it ok if I exercise? Yes, no restrictions. What about forming adhesions? You already have lots, and you've been living with them for years. What about this pain, could it be due to blah de blah? It could be. [Note: I would prefer a yes it's possible, or a no you're crazy.] And I wanted to see the photos she'd taken with the tiny camera she put into my belly button, which I saw were sitting in my plump patient folder (the folder is plump, not the patient). So then I got to see my viscera. It was really disgusting yet fascinating. The less said the better, but everything looked a lot better than I had imagined (since of course I had looked, through my fingers, online at photos of other women's endometriosis-marked abdomens, and had in my mind that mine would be as bad as theirs). It doesn't look great, what with all of the scar tissue she kept pointing at with remarks like, "that's not supposed to be there; this whole area should be empty; that tube shouldn't be stuck to that thing" and stuff. It's best for me to not think about it. Out of sight, out of mind.

And now I really want to get out of work early and get a beer by the big open window at the Dirty Truth, but I have to work a couple more hours first, and I don't know who's around right after work on a Friday for me to drink with. (My coworkers are all moms.) The weather is too nice to just go home. Text me, peeps, if you want to raise a pint.

2008-04-14T21:20:00.003-04:00

Today I met with my ex-aunt's niece (so, my ex-cousin-in-law?) because she's graduating from college this May and is wondering what career she should try out first. First she wanted to know about how a magazine was put together, so I attempted to give her a general overview, which was as garbled and confused and as full of stutters as you might expect. (I don't do so well with the ad-libbing.) Then she asked me an interview question: What do you like best about your job? Which was charming. So I told her, that I get to work on different things every issue, I learn things, I work with good people. She also wondered how much opportunity she'd have, were she to start in the editorial field, to switch over to the art and design side. I had to tell her "almost none" but in a less negative way. I did say, however, that once you have things like a mortgage to worry about, it's hard to switch careers and start over at the bottom of the career ladder. I may have said something like "just one of the fun things about being an adult" which elicited an "aw!" from her. That kind of snapped me out of my old-lady-whose-spirit-is-crushed reverie. It's fine, really, I said, because it is. She is a nice young woman, and is excited about possibly interning in my office, so I must have done an o.k. job in our interview.

In other news, I managed to leave my cell phone -- my only phone -- in Lenox, at CJ's house, this morning. I got up and out of bed before 7:30, so I obviously wasn't thinking clearly. I'm still deciding whether it's worth it (gas, time) to drive an hour each way to pick it up. Of course I get to see CJ, too. But I always end up staying overnight, and driving an hour back home before work is ROUGH. This morning I stopped at the only coffee shop open in Lee at 7:45 on a Monday morning, Juice n' Java. JnJ is always staffed by just one person. One person who mans the register, gets you your coffee drink, toasts the bagels, hand-mixes the flavored cream cheese -- he was mixing up a single-serving's worth of honey walnut for a woman in front of me in line when I walked in -- which makes for a leisurely service experience. Oh Lee, you slay me.

I still made it home in time to shower and ultimately get to work semi-on-time. But the whole routine throws off my game for the day. Not that I have a game. But.

p.s. The take-away from this post: I am phone-less for the time being. It is possible I won't have a phone until late Friday night. Please make a note of it (just not on my voicemail).

2008-04-11T11:14:00.003-04:00

Half of doing well at work is knowing when to stick up for what you know is right – and I’m not talking about social justice or anything, I’m talking about tiny design issues and turns of phrase and shit like that – and knowing when to let it go lest you be seen as argumentative and defensive. It’s too bad I was hired right before annual reviews are happening, because I get to skip it this year, and right now everyone’s all impressed and happy with me. A year from now, the bloom will be off the rose, and my review will be full of things like “After a strong start, Debbie grew resistant to change” and “Debbie was eager to learn everything, at first, but we soon noticed that nothing we were attempting to teach her was really sticking.” [Note; nothing like those two phrases have actually appeared in any of my performance reviews.]

Also, apparently my company has switched from a three-step grading system for our reviews (1. You're doing exceptionally well; 2. You're doing an o.k. job; 3. Maybe this job isn't right for you) to a five-step one. Which at first sounded great to all of us, because then we get two whole new shades of gray to fall into. But then the managers were told that there were quotas. And now, out of the entire office of 60 or so people, we're only allowed one or two "1" ratings, and just a few more "2"s, making it pretty much the same kind of deal as before, with the vast majority of us being called Average. Never mind that more than a few of us go "above and beyond" in our jobs, the managers have to grade us all on a curve. It's very discouraging, and the managers are pissed off and dreading doing this. Yet another downside to working in Ginormous MegaCorp. The bureaucracy involved makes me more anarchist by the day.

2008-04-07T22:07:00.003-04:00

I seem to be healing just fine. I am even wearing real pants today -- true, they aren't jeans, but then do have a zipper in the front and everything. I have hit the big time.

And, tonight I handed in my big freelance fact-checking project! It is finished! Woo-hoo! I have even been paid. The author is a very nice fellow, a professor and all-around creative smarty-pants. He and his wife fed me each time I went to their beautiful old house in the country to work. After dinner, I went over the suggested fact changes to the manuscript. In the text he had mentioned getting Dictaphone recordings on green plastic discs from his father in the 1950s, and I had discovered that the machine with the green discs was called a SoundScriber -- and as soon as I said the name, he said, "THAT'S IT! Oh my word, I haven't heard that name in years! How did you find that?" Just doing my job, sir. I have powerful Google-fu.

Now I can get back to work on things I want to work on. It's been kind of painful reading my usual crafty blogs without being able to spend any time making stuff myself. No more! Plus, tomorrow it'll be warm enough for me to survey my garden, which I haven't visited since November. I am already planning a bean tepee. Soon I may risk my first bike ride to work of the year, and since I have been entirely sedentary for many weeks, it should be a doozy.

2008-03-30T21:43:00.002-04:00

So, yes. I had the surgery. And the doctor says I have a really bad case of endometriosis -- everything in the internal-ladybits area is all stuck together with adhesions. One of my tubes is apparently stuck shut, or nearly shut. If I want to carry a baby, or if I start to have pain again, I need to get this procedure done again, with a reproduction specialist. My doctor was too nervous to start clearing out the adhesions herself. She did get rid of the cyst for me, at least. The worst part of the whole thing -- besides the fact that I may have to do this all over again -- was the two days of nausea. That, and the excruciating pain I had the first night when I tried to pee, which I needed to do every hour since they had pumped me full of fluids because I was so nauseated from the anesthesia ... That was pretty rough. I can't remember the last time I was so much pain I was trembling.

Regardless. It was about two days of hell, one day of not-great-ness, and then today was ok. Not great, but not horrible. I was on Vicodin for about 36 hours, and have been on ultra-ibuprofen since then. I can handle the pain of the incisions and the weird soreness in my shoulder. My belly is still weirdly swollen, but not as swollen as I thought it would be. Actually, during the operation, when they first inflated me my heart rate dropped due to the pressure on my nervous system. So they had to deflate me very quickly and then re-inflate me with about half the normal amount. Also, at one point they had to jolt me with atropene because again my heart was slowing down too much. Both of these things point to "not going to come out of anesthesia without problems."

[Here's the longer story of my after-surgery times, if you care or dare:]
The hospital has a just-out-of-surgery recovery area, where I had a breathing mask on and was much too awake for my preference, probably so I could tell them how much it hurt so they could drug me appropriately (I think I said 6 on a scale of 10). Then there's a secondary recovery area, where your boyfriend (for example) can come visit you. I was in that secondary area a long time. I was fine as long as my head was on the pillow. It was too noisy to really sleep. Every once in a while the nurse would try to get me up. First, sitting on the bed, and then with my legs over the side. After about 30 seconds I'd have to lie down (or else start puking, which I never did). And they'd let me lie down for a while longer. The whole time I had an IV in, with fluid dripping in. Eventually they moved me back to the just-out-of-surgery area (it was unclear why, though they said it was so I'd get more attention -- I figure the nurses in the other area wanted to go home). A very nice nurse there talked to me about getting a real room for me to sleep in -- maybe not overnight, but for a couple of hours, until I felt better. But she also gave me an anti-emetic in my IV, and after some more lying around, I sat up, stood up, and hobbled over to the bathroom (held up by the nurse), where I failed to pee much, due to my urethra being all stuck together from the catheter. And then I had to go back and sit down (the nurse wouldn't let me lie down). CJ ran to bring the car up and the nurse got me into a wheelchair, and I made it home and into my bed without actual heaving. It was close, though. Poor CJ was there through it all... I think I was in the after-surgery recovery place for about 6 hours.

Anyway. If I do this again, maybe they can give me the amount of anesthesia that someone my size needs, and not Average Woman.

2008-03-29T14:10:00.001-04:00

So, that thing happened. I was indeed mightily nauseated. And in pain. And I still feel dizzy and weird and typing isn't helping. It wasn't a dermoid, it was the worse thing (endo). More later.

2008-03-26T11:24:00.004-04:00

I had my pre-op meeting and blood-draw yesterday. My doctor sensed my interest in Thog, and said she would be able to show me photos afterwards. (Of what, she did not say.) I'm not sure I actually want to look, but maybe she can just describe it to me... Also, she and another doctor disagree about what this thing is, so there's still a chance it's endometriosis. Whatever. Also, I'm not allowed to eat or drink or even take a painkiller after midnight tonight, so I'll be in some pain by the time I show up at the hospital for surgery, which will provide some nice incentive for me.

I tried a Vicodin last night. It was ok. I felt super anxious when I woke up at 5 a.m.; I wasn't in pain, but I was freaked out, worried I was going to barf from the Vicodin. Have I mentioned before that I don't like drugs? I don't. Y'all can have your fun with the recreational drugs, I don't judge, and in fact I wish I had the capacity to enjoy them. But I know that I don't. Anyway, the Vicodin works in that I was able to fall asleep and I wasn't in pain, so I have that going for me. I am feeling really dopey and stupid today at work, however.

It's not the barfing that worries me -- a little vom never hurt anyone -- it's the nausea. My doctor said they'll give me something to eat and drink in recovery, and when I said "what about barfing?" she said that if I felt sick, then obviously they wouldn't give me stuff to eat -- plus, the IV will still be in, and they can give me some anti-nausea medication. Sweet. She also said there would be warmed blankets available -- I had forgotten the crazy chills I felt after my wisdom teeth extraction, and how good it felt when I finally got warm (like an hour later; I was at home by the time I got cold).

Anyway, blah blah blah. Tomorrow it's a fond goodbye to Thog. I'm ok with it. At least, this minute I'm ok.

p.s. One of the sheets in the packet of info they gave me at the hospital says, "Do not make any important decisions for at least 24 hours after your surgery." I'd better block eBay from my laptop, or I could end up owning a used car in Seattle or something...

2008-03-24T21:13:00.002-04:00

I scheduled the surgery for Thursday -- this Thursday. I am terrified. From what I've been reading and hearing, as soon as I wake up from the surgery I will be nauseated, and I won't feel un-nauseated for three days. My throat will be plenty sore, since they'll have shoved a breathing tube down into it. I will have gas pains and cramps all over my body for several days. And then of course there's the incisions, for which I will be taking painkillers that make me dizzy and more nauseated. It sounds pretty fucking horrible to me. If anyone out there has had general anesthesia without puking or some other bad thing happening, please let me know.

Of course my cyst -- I've named it "Thog" -- has been making me feel terrible, so I do want it out of my body. I wish it would just go away, somehow become the dissolving type. But no, Thog Want To Live! and so he must be forcibly removed. Sorry, Thog.

2008-03-21T14:38:00.003-04:00

Lady problems update: My doctor looked at the ultrasound film and spoke to one of the other doctors. They think it is definitely a dermoid (because it looks like there's stuff other than fluid in it - so fascinating and disgusting!) but they don't think it's related to endometriosis. So I might not have that at all, though they'll take a look once they're in there (if I don't chicken out and decide not to do the surgery, which has not yet been scheduled, still). I asked her why my belly felt bloated and she had to reason; there's no fluid in there. Am I just fatter, suddenly? Too much Easter candy? I never get like this, though, and I haven't changed my diet at all, really. (The cyst itself is only 3 inches across, so that can't be it.) She did say that exercising would not have brought on the pain, so I can at least stay active without too much fear.

Anyway, she told me that she has a patient that has had ten surgeries to remove ten dermoids, but that's super rare, plus that person has four children. And that's one patient in 25 years of practice, so.

Luckily, tonight it's on to New Jersey, where there will be egg-hiding and more candy (oh well) and lots of niece-and-nephew (and pre-teen cousins!) time. A nice distraction.

2008-03-19T20:57:00.004-04:00

This one's for all the ladies. Seriously, it's more crap about my lady business, so feel free to skip it.

My little cystic friends have been still hurting me, off and on, and they hurt so badly a couple of days ago that I pondered another visit to the emergency room. Instead I waited, and went to the doctor today to check it all out with the ultrasound machine. Turns out I have a dermoid cyst, which is the kind that sometimes has teeth and hair inside of it (I find this secretly thrilling), and I have endometriosis of the ovaries, which is a major bummer. You know that stuff that forms the uterine lining? Of course, who doesn't. Well, some of that stuff is outside of my uterus. And like a zombie hand that still twitches and moves after it has been sliced from its zombie body, the endometrium that's stuck to my ovaries actually produces period blood every month. Ew, and ouch. Between this and the cyst, it's like my body really wants to make a baby, and I'm not cooperating, so it's just going ahead and making do with whatever scraps it can find. My body would apparently be o.k. with a shambling, crudely-formed golem of a child.

The long story short is, my doctor is recommending laparoscopic surgery. That's the kind with the tiny incisions and the little camera, and you get to go home after it. They also inflate your abdomen with gas, which is alarming, and apparently results in having gas pains in strange locations for a few days after surgery. She says that recovery will take a week. People I know who have had their gall bladders removed with a similar technique say it doesn't take as long. But whatever. The extra exciting part is, once they get inside there, they may decide to remove the entire ovary, so I shall become half a woman. Or, the problem may be bigger and more complicated than they thought, and they'll end up slicing me open like a melon, and I'll end up in the hospital for a couple of nights, and recovering at home for weeks. I am really hoping that neither of those things happen. I have not yet scheduled the surgery, I still have some questions for my doctor, who will call me tomorrow after she studies the film. (By "film" I am assuming she means the ultrasound photos, and not "College Road Trip.")

All of this means that if I want to ever have a baby, it will be very difficult for me to do so. Not so difficult that I can stop using birth control, however. Thanks, universe!

2008-03-17T20:10:00.000-04:00

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

2008-03-10T20:33:00.004-04:00

I had a really bad dream last night. It wasn't even funny-bad. I was at H&L's old apartment, at a party, when suddenly an airplane screamed by the window, way too close to the ground. Its engines were wailing and the whine of them kept ascending and descending, like the pilots were trying to keep the plane up but were failing. We all ran out to the porch but it was soon out of view. Then we heard a huge boom. We knew it had crashed, but we were too scared to turn on the TV for a while. Somehow the rumor got around that someone had sabotaged the plane from the inside while someone else on the ground had shot at it with a surface-to-air missile. We were all sickened and terrified and feeling deeply sad. Then I was back on the porch, sitting there with H and a couple of other people. The view from the porch was an Iraq checkpoint. As we watched, a desperate man climbed one of the guard towers, and as he almost reached the top, the guard shot him in the head and the man fell to the pavement below. I started talking about how horrible it was that things like this happen in front of us every day, and what is the world coming to? How can we continue our normal lives amidst this constant violence and death? And H cut me off and said, "Can we not talk politics, please?" Like I was being a total downer.

(OK, that bit is kind of funny.)

There was more that was gross and scary (and not involving any of my friends) but people don't really like hearing other peoples' dreams so I won't share. Plus, it disturbs me to even remember it. So I've been kind of weird all day. I blame the dream, and Daylight Savings Time, which I don't like having while it's nowhere near spring. (How can we "spring forward"? We should be "wintering over" or "frost biting" or "snowplowing through.") I have no idea where the dream came from, or why my brain cast H in the role of asshole. (So random. You could be next, reader!) My stomach must have been a little upset, so my mind blamed it on terrorism.