Sporksforall

Letter to myself

2011-11-14T20:11:00.000-08:00

It seems more blogcationy around here than not. Yet, I think about it. Waiting like the most patient dog in the world. The most patient dog in the world, who would have long-ago starved to death from inactivity.

Today I received a letter from myself in the mail. I wrote the letter in August at a two-week intensive professional development thing I did. The thing was amazing. The letter came at a good moment.

It's been hard, the new job. Some days harder than others, but most hard. There was one where I came home and was able to say it had been a good day. That's one day out of lots.

It's not all bad, of course, just hard. And lonely, as I knew it would be. So, I try to take the moments.

The student who told me that she liked my pants today.

The actual dogs, who do get fed.

Honey, whose birthday is tomorrow.

And, today, the letter. The last line of which I said (to myself, remember), "Take care of yourself and ride your bike more often, without guilt and with joy."

I haven't done that, of course, but I like that I told myself to.

What continuum am I on?

2011-06-04T18:10:00.000-07:00

Recently at work I had to start a social media ad hoc committee. People have behaved badly on social media this year. Blogging mostly, but faceplace, too. It was just at the end of the term and I asked a few folks to get together on the day of commencement (before the string of parties started) to talk. During the conversation, I admitted (not in a confessional way, but I'm sure it was taken that way) that I had a blog and that it was anonymous. Sort of. Earlier this week, someone else mentioned my anonymous blog to me. Clearly trying to get access. No quarter was given.

People still blog. I read them every day. Every once in a while someone who doesn't blog much whose blog I read back when I played blogleague fantasy sports will blog. That makes my day. A little bit of sunshine, you know?

So I have this new job. Start in a month. I can't decide whether the "beyond this place there be dragons" is the right metaphor for the next phase in my professional life.

Or maybe I'm a little like Halo. Will the box be all I want it to be?

Best case is that it's like the entrance to my favorite hotel. It's on a little street in a little town in the desert. You wonder if you've arrived at the right place. You ring the bell. Once you make it through the arch, though, you never want to leave.

I'm hoping the new job is somewhere between Halo's box and Desert Hot Springs.

Recently, in my current job, I've been dealing with several unpleasant circumstances. People causing drama, insisting on controlling the drama narrative. Drama that requires after hours meetings. Ad hoc committees on social media. Me to steel myself against others' crying. It's karma, I think. For leaving. For feeling bad about leaving.

For being a more than a little afraid that the continuum is between the dragon and Halo's box.

The only way out may be through. Halo figured that out. Maybe I will, too.

Wish me luck.

Documenting the Collection, um... Passion, um... Obsession

2011-04-03T12:55:00.000-07:00

My mother is an avid shopper. Deeply avid. I know avid suggests that, but let's be clear that the woman shops. And buys.

I have some of her tendencies in this area and own more shoes than I need. I also own many many products of Apple. Too many, probably. I don't buy clothes much, though, for complicated reasons I'm not going to get into.

I am impulsive when it comes to car purchases. Of late, I've turned cars over every three years. That's too often, really. I like my current car a lot, though, so as I slide toward year three, I'm quite confident we'll make it to year five, at least.

Then, there's bikes. Towit:

Cannondale F400. Sold to get Gunnar (see below).
Want road bike.
Trek 1200. No, too harsh, too small. Sold.
Lemond Zurich. Scared it would break. Sold.
Ibex Classic. Bought for parents house. Too small, terrible riding. Sold.
Surly Cross-Check. Too small. Cross bike brakes don't work. Sold.
Gunnar Rockhound. Yep, still in garage.
Gary Fisher Kaitai. Lives at my parents house.
Soma Smoothie ES. Sold. Didn't ride.
Kona Dew Deluxe. Good, but harsh. Going to get Sold.
Surly Karate Monkey. Getting the Kona's parts as we speak. Anyone need a Kona frame?

So, I've turned over (in the last seven years or so) ten bikes. I still have three, one of which lives 3000 miles away in may parents' basement.

See what I mean?

I used to collect, well, collectibles. But, I stopped. Seemed wasteful, really. You run out of storage. And then they're just plastic. Or ceramic. Or whatever. I still watch antique/collecting shows on tv.

Of recent years, I must confess to a bit of a bag collection. Passion. Obsession.

I built a little wire container system to hold them. I take some comfort in knowing I'm not the only one.

There's the Bag Collector Blog.

Yeppers. He's inspired me to document. Ready? (Since no one actually reads this anymore much, go with it.)

Or not.

Let me note, before I begin, that bags have come in and gone out without making the current collection/cut. I bought some, didn't like them, and let them go. They were mostly Timbuk2, some Chrome. One or two Crumpler. Some bought cheap, others full retail. I wish them well in their current lives.

In college I used an LL Bean backpack. I then have a memory hole until I bought a Hartmann leather bag at their outlet mall in Camarillo.

I used the Hartmann for a number of years. It's a nice bag. Heavy, but good quality and I like it. My one criticism is that it doesn't have a top handle, which makes it hard to move around.

I wanted a lighter, sportier alternative. And thus did my fascination with Timbuk2 begin.

I ordered a custom messenger to "match" the Trek 1200 (see above).

This bag was made of a less shiny nylon than most of their bags are. I worried and worried over the color panels. Ultimately, they ended up sort of meh.

So, I tried again with Timbuk2. They were doing a spate of special fabrics. As documented here I wanted the Eames fabric one. I bought (can't tell you why, really) this one instead.

(You can embiggen these pictures of course, should you want more detail).

It didn't hold up well, the special fabric. Tore a little, got dirty from regular use.

Then Timbuk2 went brushed canvas, in a line they call Single Speed. Happy sigh.

That's the relay. Love that bag. Got it in bigger, too.

That one, Honey and I call the "PIF bag" as I used it to carry my very large, very unwieldy Personal Information File (or PIF) for my tenure and promotion decisions.

I still use the Relay (smaller one) sometimes. It's well worn, with some ink stains inside it.

I like the idea of Timbuk2 custom bags a lot, though I'm not sure I've ever gotten then color choices right. I bought and used a Eula for a while. It's their "girl" bag. Somewhat purse-like, and small.

Dark green and silver. What was I thinking?

Now, as I noted, I like me some products du Apple. And they need to be carried. So, I tried out some Timbuk2 products designed to carry computers and an tablets and other things Cupertino.

Above you have The Blogger, a 333 line laptop bag, and the Freestyle. That last one kind of broke me from Timbuk2. They've moved a lot of their manufacturing overseas (the custom ones are still made in San Francisco). I still like them, but the straps have gotten shorter and shorter (I like a LONG strap). I used the Freestyle some, but, with the exception of the Relay, none of these bags do much for me anymore. I tried to sell the 333. My love affair with Timbuk2 is over. I appreciate them, but don't heart them any more. Basically, those last three bags are available to someone, if they'd promise to use them.

The intersection of bike stuff and these bags is pretty clear. They're all meant for carrying on your back while you ride a bike. I realized from reading online that Chrome seemed to have a lot of credibility with bike folks. So I tried a regular Chrome, with the seat belt buckle. Did not like. When they came out with their "lifestyle" bags, I haunted ebay and managed to get a Vega.

I've used it a fair amount and it's still in light circulation.

Honey bought me this Keen for Christmas in 09. It's a great bag. In medium circulation.

My disillusionment with Timbuk2 laptop bags led me on a search for an alternative. Steepandcheap to the rescue! (Don't know about steepandcheap? It's like woot for outdoor gear, except for one item a day, it's one item after another.)

This is an Osprey Astro. It's my go-to when I want good padding for the laptop or the iPad.

Bonus points for the Osprey: it's made of recycled plastic. Nice long strap, too. It's a little voluminous for non-electronic everyday use. Plus, I'm much more likely to have the iPad than the laptop.

Enter...

My current favorite bag company.

By a lot.

Rickshaw.

They're (to me) what Timbuk2 was once. San Francisco made. Committed to sustainability. When I was up in San Francisco in January, I stopped by their "store," which is the front part of their factory. They gave me a tour. Told me about what they do. They have bike parking, a sofa to relax on, and seem a great company. Their core bag is called the Zero messenger. No fabric is wasted making it (thus the "zero" part, zero waste). It's mailed to you (all their products do) in a "round trip shipper" (a canvas envelope) which you send back to them to use again. Their prices are really reasonable. I have an iPad sleeve and have managed (in a very short time) to acquire four Zero messengers.

My first one was a small. Orange and brown. Not a bad color selection (given that it was me doing the selecting).

When I went up there, I ordered a medium zero, made from a fabric made of old soda bottles. They rushed the order and I picked it up on the way out of town. (They made it for me with a longer strap!)

I love this bag so much that I have trouble keeping others in circulation.

It's brother (bought on ebay) hasn't even been out for a spin yet.

Not that I'm a champion anything. (Those stripes indicate that the wearer is a world champion in some bicycle endeavour).

My latest Rickshaw is a purse. The call it the Zero mini. It's a purse. I am actually occasionally using it as such.

My latest bag (in violation, I must admit of my agreement with Honey to take a "one-in, one-out" approach to bags was acquired with a birthday gift card. It's already loaded to be next week's bag. Seems a good size and I like the design.

Crumpler soupandsalad. I like Crumplers, but they cost too much. This one was on sale at REI.

There are lots of other makers out there I'm interested in. Honey sighs as I write, though she doesn't know why. Some of the more respected companies don't do much for me design-wise. I know people really like REload and Baileyworks. Maybe someone could tell me why. The former seems too busy, the latter too plain. A lot of the American made bags seem really spendy, too. I'd say that was a function of what it costs to make stuff here, but then I remember how much Rickshaw charges.

Oh, and just to be completest. My trusty Canon Rebel xsi, with which the above pictures were taken lives in a camera-specific bag, called the Crumpler 5 Million Dollar Home.

Anyway, Crumpler aside, I'll go back to one-in, one-out now. So, someone please please take one of the Timbuk2s so I can look for a new bag. I'm thinking Seagull or Black Rose.

Along the 101

2011-01-30T19:14:00.000-08:00

I'm just back from five days in San Francisco.

Thanks for having me, Norcal. You were your usual self in all the good ways.

I haven't spent a ton of time in San Francisco, truth be told. When I moved to Los Angeles almost twenty years ago, I talked myself into thinking that living in L.A. was almost as good as living in San Francisco would have been. I had read Tales of the City rather breathlessly. The result was a certainty that if I could get to San Francisco, it would all be just as interesting as Maupin wrote it. It didn't matter, really, that I was to arrive 10+ years later. Or that it was--well--fiction.

At the time I thought Los Angeles would just have to do. No one from Norcal was beating down my grad student door. And L.A. had called. Offered money. So loaded up my babyshitbrownyellow Camry and "hit the San Diego freeway doing 60 miles an hour" to quote Miss Nanci Griffith. (Who--oddly--is playing on itunes right now. It's another song, but still, eerie.)

I told myself that I'd go to San Francisco a lot. I haven't, but I think sometimes about that promise I made to myself and what I thought my life was going to be like back then.

I've come to love Los Angeles. I appreciate it, too. I went to a concert a couple of weeks ago and the artist said, "people in New York always ask why I love L.A. with all the traffic and the freeways, and I say, 'exactly.'" It's not about the freeways, of course. It's about the city itself.

Anyway, I had been looking forward to this trip when I thought Honey could come. Then she couldn't. And it was the first week of the semester. And then it turned out I was staying at a hotel other than the conference hotel and not particularly nearby. All of which served to make me cross.

I decided to drive up the 101. I couldn't take the 5 and feel ok, what with all the crossness. I'm not sure I'll ever take the 5 to get to the Bay area again.

California has all sorts of problems, I know this. I'm not from here. I know this, too.

I thought a fair about about where I was from because I listened to The Help on CD some of the way up and all the way back.

Ok, so it's New Orleans, not Mississippi (where the book is set) or Georgia (where I'm from). She mentions New Orleans and I'm taking a little poetic license based on the photos I just downloaded from my iPhone.

Driving to this city where I thought I wanted to be from the city where I do want to be, listening to a novel about a city that resonates with my past (or at least with my mother's) all served to be a little disorienting, in both time and space.

...

The sea lions weren't out in force to greet me.

I always forget the damn hills, too.

Did I mention that I like Hipstamatic a lot? I do. Made me not want to take my regular camera.

The conference I went to was terrible. Not terrible in the way MLA or AAA can be. That terrible is epic. Shuttle buses, wide-eyed grad students, pretentious papers, really trendy girl glasses, drinking, people having sex with people they don't know, kind of terrible.

This conference was just bad. Boring, tedious, and talking about important stuff from 1000 miles away without acknowledging the distortion.

I stole the time I could.

Went to the Ferry Building.

Had Rickshaw make me an fabulously great new bag (which I deserved). Ok, bag aside. I promised Honey a "one-in, one-out" bag trip. I was determined, therefore, to be deliberate about bag choices. I started with Rickshaw. They couldn't have been nicer. Gave me a tour of the factory. It's a great space. They're committed to the right things. Timbuk2? Not so much. Want to support a good SF based company all about sustainability? Rickshaw, friends. Rickshaw. I got a Zero Messenger made of recycled coke bottles.

I also explored the coffee of the place. Two words to simply your search for goodness of coffee. You ready? You sure?

Blue

Bottle

I had good coffee elsewhere in SF and just made it to Intelligensia a week or so ago down here. It's a good time to like coffee here on the coast of west. Portland and Seattle are out here too, you know. They're not bad at coffee either.

It's a great city, San Francisco. And I need to go back more often. The hills are not fun. The food is great.

It's what I wanted it to be, especially early in the morning when the fog stays thick and I could ignore the conference and walk along the Embarcadero.

And yet, all week I wanted to come back to L.A.

I drove home on the 101 and stopped in Gilroy for lunch. The sullen waitress and cheesy singer seemed bearable with the garlic. As I walked back to my car after lunch, I noticed this cool old building, which had once housed the newspaper in the town.

The earthquake warning was meant to keep me away. Instead I peered into the windows and stood and looked at it a long time.

I moved to Los Angeles just after the riots. The earthquake happened not very long after I got here. I moved to the "wrong" city.

When I pulled into my driveway, my car smelling of fresh bread and coffee, I was home. What's a little unsecured masonry among friends?

As good as my car smelled, the house smelled better. Honey had baked me cupcakes.

of i

2011-01-17T18:49:00.000-08:00

Taking some time off work this month and things are generally ok-ish.

Today, though, I read a book I didn't like that I have to lead a discussion on tomorrow. I also didn't work out. (Or eat much, so I guess it's ok-ish).

Feeling kind of down.

So I cleaned all my Apple products. Pad of i, Pod of i, Phone of i. All with Klear of i and the wonderful blue cloth.

At least one thing went well today.

Poe poetry

2010-12-11T13:31:00.000-08:00

With thanks to Honey, who just did a huge project on Poe. Then she xtranormaled a Poe poem. I've always loathed this poem, so it seems perfect for xtranormal.

Laryngitis, thoughts on having

2010-12-11T12:32:00.000-08:00

So Honey doesn't want me to talk because I have no voice. She's right, of course, but it's hard.

Thanksgiving, vegetarian

2010-11-20T13:36:00.000-08:00

The Honey/animated dogs are back. Now with more talk of food!

Edited to add:

Quorn secured!

I must say I find the color a little disturbing.

NoLa

2010-11-12T09:33:00.000-08:00

King Tut brought me to New Orleans the first time.

Kids in the gifted and talented program at my elementary school did not usually get to take out-of-town trips until the 5th grade. The exhibition of King Tut's treasures in New Orleans prompted a year roll-back and I came--petrified and overwhelmed--to New Orleans. I do remember the exhibit vaguely and the alarmingly gold t-shirt I bought at it.

Some years later I saw plaster of paris replica of said exhibit at the Luxor in Las Vegas. The "best authenticity money can buy," or so I'm told. Standing in LV looking at the plaster did make a vision of my nine year old self come rushing back. I remembered the crowds and the gold.

I didn't come back to New Orleans until my drive from Georgia to California as I departed for programs PhD. That time, I had a po boy, some beignets, and went to Preservation Hall. I came back later with the folklorists.

Ten years or so ago, I came back again for an education conference. I was involved in creating a new kind of undergraduate education program at Commuter State and one of my colleagues suggested we present a paper about it at a big education conference here. The feeling of being at a big conference outside of your field is not unlike being a third grader in King Tut's Egypt. I remember wandering around the city (it was just before Mardi Gras) and watching parades and feeling out of place and out of sorts.

At the end of my stay, I went to check out of the hotel and discovered that I had been charged $1000+ for some equipment. I protested that I had not rented any equipment and the fees were removed. I flew home. A few days later, I got a letter indicating that the charges had been placed on my account again. I called and was assured they would again be removed.

Then I received my American Express card bill. Lo, the charges were once again there.

I switched tactics and protested via American Express. They removed the charges and "investigated." Sure enough, I got a letter from them indicating that the hotel had satisfied them that the charges were legitimate and I was re-recharged. I asked for the "evidence" that the hotel had presented. I was sent a copy of an equipment charge signed by someone named Buffie who has my last name. Buffie. I am not Buffie.

I then had my dad, an attorney who recently compared himself to a late-year Grover Cleveland. Apparently President Cleveland in has late life got rather large and started shooting people when he was cross with them. Anyway, dad wrote a sufficiently threatening letter, mostly referencing his ability to sue and disparaging Buffie and all named Buffie. The charges were reversed and stayed that way.

Sometimes lawyers help when reason does not.

I came back about a year later (and stayed in the hotel across the street). That trip was marked by a missed flight that kept me from driving out to Baton Rogue to see Patti and Tom. I never saw Tom again.

I've been back since that incident, but only briefly when Patti took my mother and I on a post-Katrina view a couple of years ago.

So I'm back now. On the 35th floor of Buffie's hotel. Looking out over the river. It's not a great time for me to travel. The conference I'm attending is fine and interesting and has not reminded me of my King Tut self, for the most part, but I wish I were in the other LA.

Last night, I went to dinner with a whole bunch of folks from my University system. One of the attendees has left the system and is now the vice-president of the college across the street from my high school. The college where Patti was the chaplain for a while. I listened to her tell another person about her experiences. After she talked for a while, I said something about what she was saying, and she said, "I keep forgetting you know all about the places I'm talking about."

Yes. I do know about them. The memory of the past is strong here. It's written on the landscape.

I guess I'd rather start over with New Orleans. Go all the way back to the kid in the gold t-shirt and give her different experiences of this place.

But I'm here now, with all that I do know. So, I'll have a beignet, I guess. And drive to see Patti tomorrow. Then, I'll go home.

Honey has never been here, so I can come one more time sometime. We'll make new memories. And none will involve Buffie.

I know, everyone's all up in it...

2010-11-07T17:00:00.000-08:00

...But I kinda love Xtranormal. So, here's my first try at it. Honey and I before Trader Joe's today.

Oh, and I'm saying Vanana and she's saying Banilla. It's a Trader Joe's yogurt flavor that combines, well, banana and vanilla.

I may have to do more of these. Fair warning. Just saying. It's my blog after all and don't nobody blog no more. Might as well animate the mundane.

Edit to add:

Ok, I did another one. :)

Freedom and loyalty

2010-10-16T19:57:00.000-07:00

I'm a pretty loyal person, when you come right down to it. I'll stick with you, for the most part, if I've decided to be with you in the first place.

As I've gotten older, I've become more willing to admit that I don't always benefit from just doing what I've always done. I don't use Scott toilet paper any more, because Honey convinced me some time ago that it was terribly uncomfortable. I'm happy with Trader Joe's tp, but don't feel some unending bond with it. If something better came along, I'd go with it.

The same thing happened with orange juice. Tropicana didn't deserve the loyalty I gave it, and now I am happier with unpasteurized from Trader Joes, or, preferably, Fresh and Easy. See how flexible I've become?

My loyalty to products is now more carefully given to those I perceive as truly worthy and exemplary. Whole Foods fudge bars, Noah's jalapeno cream cheese. The latter has become so difficult to obtain--Noah's having stopped producing it in to-go tubs--that I have to beg bagelistas (that's what bagel people are called, right?) to dispense it for me into soup containers. Having tried last week to be "brave" (as I referred to this trial) by having plain cream cheese on Trader Joe's bagels, rather than jalapeno cream cheese on Noah's bagels, I succumbed to "loyalty" and went to Noah's today. It was with a sense of real relief that I walked away with my jalapeno cream cheese soup cup well packed by the bagelista.

My loyalty extends, of course, beyond the bounds of products to people and more ineffable things. A recent crisis--which is best left off blogville--has led me to wonder about others' loyalty to me, but, fortunately, that is not a subject I wish to engage with today.

I remember many years ago driving a group of folks to the airport. I was working in my first adult job, as the manager of the circulation desk of alma mater library. My boss, a wonderful and kind woman whose death a few years ago from breast cancer grieves me to this day, had asked me to drive her and some other librarians to the airport. For those folks not familiar with library things, librarians are the professional folks who went to library school. They are faculty at most universities, including alma mater. Should I call alma mater 2nd tier liberal arts school? No, best not at least not in a post about loyalty. People like me, who checked out the books at the desk (and managed the checker outers and shelvers and such) were not librarians. We were staff.

Anyway, there I was, in my early twenties, driving these folks to the airport and one of them starts asking me about music. He was cool and I liked him. (So did my boss, I think, but she didn't date him, since she was dating this even cooler librarian who drank single malt scotch and was kind to her son). I was then in a deep Indigo Girls fan zone and cool librarian was talking to me about them. He said something that stuck with me. "I bet you'll keep buying all their albums, even when you don't like them any more. Some bands are like that for people."

He was right, for a while. I kept buying their albums. Seemed obligatory. I didn't buy the last one or two, though.

Now, though, I mostly listen to podcasts and music I already know. I'm hopelessly out of date on music, though occasionally discover a band I like by listening to Terry Gross. Which, of course, makes me one of those middle aged liberal NPR listening types. Still, the Carolina Chocolate Drops are awesome and just because I "discovered" them on Fresh Air, doesn't mean anything negative about them. Or me. Plus, mostly I listen to podcasts and am more of a fan of Planet Money than I am of any band. Which still makes that whole bit about NPR true.

Which brings me back to the ostensible subject of this post. I just finished Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. I know, I know. Oprah. The National Book Award snub. The Time magazine cover story. Blah Blah Blah.

Thing is, though, he's one of those writers. Can't put the book down (even at 561 pages). Feel all the emotions that are there. Savor all the wonderful bits of writing. And the characters. And the story. And the structure.

Feel genuinely sad and happy about the end. Put it on the shelf and look wistfully at it. Think about how much I remember (still, eight years on) of Corrections. Still sort of regret having sold my true first edition of same with the erratum on ebay. (Pages 430 and 431 were reversed and FSG put a slip of paper into the first printing indicating the error).

I think I got about $50 for it, but whatever. I want it back now. I suppose I could buy another, but it wouldn't be the same.

My point, I guess, is that I fell for Franzen like very few other authors. He writes it. I read it. Then I wait for the next one. The waiting isn't active. I don't go to fan sites. But it's there, somewhere in my brain. It gets rekindled when I read an essay of his. Or someone brings him up. Or asks if the "great American novel" is possible. All of this for a guy who writes about families. And the Midwest. (The bird content of Freedom did make it even better). So, I'll wait until 2018. Or whenever the next one comes.

I guess Patrick (the librarian) was right, but about the wrong thing. I let the Indigo Girls go. As yet, Franzen (and a few other writers) get the bucks every time the publish. No kindle on iPad for them either. The real book. On the shelf.

If you like American literary fiction, ignore the noise over Oprah, Time, and the rest. Go buy Corrections and Freedom. Read them. Be prepared to give some of your time away to them. In the end, though, if you're even a little like me, you'll be glad you did.

I can't lend you my copy of Freedom, though. It's staying here. I learned my lesson letting the last book go. It never came back. But I'm still loyal and I still miss it.

Disrupting "normal"

2010-10-09T13:09:00.000-07:00

Living in a large city like Los Angeles and taking things for granted from the good (there's bahn mi available near my work) to the once-would-have-been-extraordinary to the now ordinary (there are also lots of Starbucks around) to the banal (how many very ordinary pharmacy chain store outlets do we need exactly?) makes it easy to be lulled into a kind of complacency. Things disappear (Chris and Pitts, for example) and things persist (Philippe's). Why am I hung up on restaurants today?

A couple of weeks ago I was at a celebration of my university's (commuter state) founders day. It was very hot (in what passes for Fall in Southern California) and we had been in the celebration tent for far too long. The speaker, when he finally arrived, was decent. He's the author of a book about the sub-region in which commuter state is located. He talked at some length about the history of the place. Much of what he said I knew, but some of it was new to me. The following weekend, Honey and I happened to be near campus and I drove her around a little telling her about the new information I now had lodged into my brain from the talk. About the fair and the horse races and about the now disappeared football team.

I like thinking about the history of places, both recent and distant. I'm especially intrigued by that living in Los Angeles. Because I grew up in Atlanta, the places were all new and exurby. Post Sherman, Atlantans love nothing more than tearing down and redoing.

Los Angeles, on the other hand, keeps some (but not, by any means, all) of its history around. You can see Victorian homes, mid-century ranches, Greene and Greenes, missions, and new mcmansions. There are even restaurants (see how the brain makes loops) that date back 100 years. Beef French dip, hot mustard, chili with, and a custard at Philippe's please.

I've always liked that about LA. I love our O'Keefe and Merritt brown stove with its NuTone copper hood.

I loved learning last week that the area our laundry room and half bath are in is properly (in SoCal) called a "service porch." And so it shall be henceforth in my mind.

Ok, so we don't live in a mid century architectural masterpiece. No one was selling a Lautner for the mid-200s when we bought our house. Still, it's got some fine mid century touches. And laminate flooring. You don't get laminate flooring in a Lautner. Nope.

Anyway, I was thinking yesterday, while waiting in traffic about these things we don't pay attention to until it occurs to us to do so. I was not far from commuter state, where the preserved orange groves remain and I noticed a sign waver. Sign wavers are not an unusual sight in LA, so I looked, noted that he was holding a sign for a Halloween store and wearing a mask. He was dancing and waving the sign, as was to be expected. But he was also occasionally stopping his dancing and moved in a threatening manner at particular passing cars. I'm sure he was doing this because of the scary mask he had on. His intent was, no doubt, benign.

The effect was chilling. Really. I felt relieved when he did it to the car in front of mine and accelerated quickly through the intersection when the stuck traffic allowed me to. I thought most of the way home about why he seemed so scary. It was, I suppose, the juxtaposition of his easy dancing, the sign, the normal street corner, and these quick, sudden violent movements that kept intruding on that scene. Normal. Then not.

It happened that I had been at another campus in my University's system earlier that day. I had not been to that campus before, even though it's our closest sister campus. It, in fact, started as a satellite campus of ours. (I am aware, by the way, that this level of detail makes figuring out which campus is which pretty easy. Since I don't think I have many non-friend readers, I'm going to persist with the semi revelatory. Non-California friends are welcome to ask privately for details in case you don't want to figure out which campuses are which).

Anyway, sister campus has a lovely setting. It's in a valley, near the ocean, surrounded by mountains and touched by sea breezes. Commuter state, on the other hand, has a hot tent. No, let me be fair, it's a beautiful campus, just in a hot part of SoCal.

Sister campus was a long time coming and many many sites were considered. Several of them were met by strong community opposition. Finally they settled on the site of an about to be closed mental hospital. A rather notorious one.

We met in sister campus' spectacular library, the only modern architecture building on campus. It looks out across this series of smaller Spanish colonial buildings. Some of them have been converted into office and classroom space. Many of them sit empty, waiting to be retrofitted with modern HVAC (rather than steam heating through asbestos laden walls) and ADA compliant entrances and bathrooms. As a colleague from sister campus said to me yesterday, "it costs a million dollars to walk into one of these buildings."

My boss and I walked around a little after the meeting and I bought Honey a t-shirt from the campus with their cheesy mascot on it. (Not that commuter state's mascot lacks cheese-factor, mind you).

I realized that I had taken that the normal that was a quiet Friday at a small University for granted. But somewhere in my head and in that space there were other echos. Echos of people whose lives were trapped in that place. Of the past that is being written over with each of the million dollar entrances into each of those unrefurbished buildings.

It's the same kind of echo that I have always tried to make myself hear on the battlefields of the Civil War. It's easy enough to stand in Sharpsburg or Mannassas and think that Antietam and Bull Run are theoretical battles where theoretical people died. (Speaking of the Civil War and battlefields, I cannot recommend enough the recent Slate series on touring them. Go read it when you're done with me today).

Same building, different purpose, different era.

A lot of these building were built with New Deal money. The Great Society indeed.

Seems innocuous enough on first glance, right?

As one commenter on a 2002 Los Angeles Weekly article said about this place, where he had been confined as a child:

Now and then, when I think about those days, I Google the names of the people I knew there. So far, only two staff members have shown up--and no patients. It makes me wonder whether I'm a rarity because I'm still alive. Another possibility I've considered is that they've changed their names and don't want to be found. It's hard to face the ghosts of such a twisted past without someone who shared it to reflect with.

Since I don't share that past, I can't know what that person experienced, any more than I can know what Sullivan Ballou thought as he wrote his wife before the First Battle of Bull Run, where he was killed:

But, O Sarah! If the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the garish day and in the darkest night—amidst your happiest scenes and gloomiest hours—always, always; and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath; or the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.

Sarah, do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for me, for we shall meet again.

What I do know is that when I stand in these places, rich with the sacrifices and mistakes of the past, I would do well to pay attention to that small voice echoing in my head or in the space. I should have stopped and looked more closely. The interactive map of sister campus has all the unrefurbished buildings in gray. They don't "do" anything when you click on them. But standing near them, they do speak to what was once there. I will go back to sister campus soon and look at them again, I think. And listen.

I am not nostalgic for the time of service porches, copper fixtures, and steam asbestos heating.

Things go away, sometimes, for good reasons. Sister campus is surely and better use for that space than its previous incarnation. Soon enough, Halloween will come and go and the guy with the mask will leave the corner.

And we will all remember. And all forget.

The Middle Room

2010-09-05T12:38:00.000-07:00

We moved into our house in 2002. February of 2002. We hired terrible movers (we didn't mean to) who put everything into the room we then and now call the "middle room." By everything, I mean every box and every bag. The furniture basically went where it was supposed to.

The exception to the "everything in the middle room" request was supposed to be the bags and boxes (there were four or five) on which we had written "PERISHABLE! PLEASE PLACE IN KITCHEN." The requested exception was not made. An overfull two bedroom apartment's worth of stuff was, therefore, placed into a room that measures 10' by 10'. In the middle of this, um, pile, was rotting spoiling stuff.

From that moment forward, the middle room was not treated with respect. For months, perhaps years, it remained the repository of all things placeless. Some of that, of course, is necessary. You've got to put the gift wrap and Christmas stuff somewhere. Some of it, though, was a function of fear. Perhaps ennui. Certainly a function of objects at rest tending to stay at rest.

Some years ago, I tried to transform it into a "den." It had a love seat and a chair. It was functional enough, I suppose, but there was still a lot of stuff. Relaxing was hard in there. Once, while reading the paper, I noticed flora, specifically vines. In. The. Room. They had grown in through the window.

It was a Grey Gardens moment if I've ever had one.

I have had spates of organizing the house. (I was just going to post links to a previous post about it, but now realize that all my picture links from my wordpress days are broken since sporksforall.com has expired. Ah well, trust me on it, won't you? I've organized things. The middle bathroom. The utility closet.)

So, flash forward to a couple of weeks ago when I purchased a new chair and a work friend came over to my house to help me move the old one. I showed her around the house and realized my horror at the state of the middle room. There was stuff in there that had literally been moved in with the rotting spoiled perishables and had not been touched or seen the light of day since. Eight plus years.

(Does it need to be said that the perishables were disposed or properly? Perhaps. They were.)

There's another factor at work that I should mention.

Honey has started graduate school. She's in the super intense program wherein she takes seven classes a term.

I have a D of Ph and I took two classes a term mostly. So, Seven. Whew.

I want her to have as much freedom as she needs to move around the house. Living room, office, dining room. Most of the time, I am perfectly happy to be around when the graduate school peripateticity happens. Sometimes, though, I might want somewhere to go. Somewhere that isn't our bedroom where my choices are to lie on the bed, sit on the bed. Or take a shower, I suppose.

Mostly, though, there was the whole business with showing someone that room and thinking, "um, time to get this sorted." Past time, really. Well past.

Yesterday morning I announced my intention to tackle two projects. The first was a sock organizing project. The second was the middle room. It was a bit like saying, I think I'll read Fox in Socks and then see how I get on with Remembrance of Things Past.

The socks went fine. Most are reunited with their mates. They're now all in the same drawer and much more accessible. I've got a bag of unwanted ones to leave for the folks that come around looking for recyclables on trash day.

After the sock success, we ran some errands and got some lunch. At 4pm yesterday we got home and I got started on Proust.

Honey says I sometimes push past my limits. I certainly did last night (and this morning).

Here is most of what was taken out of the room:

Let me take a side moment in praise of my car. I've had it almost a year and it replaced a succession of two SUV type vehicles. SUVs really.

It has accepted every single containment task I've asked of it. The new living room chair? Check. A new office chair and our weekend luggage? Check.

All the crap from the middle room? Check.

America, listen up, you don't need SUVs. You need hatchbacks. They do what SUVs do. And, if you're smart like me, you get one with good gas mileage and it's superveryfun to drive. Thank you Wolfsburg.

From another angle:

That, friends and neighbors, is a lot of crap.

Three hours of clean out lot of crap.

The result?

Look, a usable, crap free room! Forgive the bright spider fleece throw. A gift, don't you know.

I'm really pleased.

There may be some tweaking

Imagine all that stuff in the car in the room and in this closet. It was so shudder worthy that I couldn't even take a picture of it before or in process.

RIP old middle room. 2002-2010.

Welcome new middle room. 2010-

Now, if you'll excuse me the Sunday paper awaits me in the new space.

A craigslist interlude in time

2010-08-15T18:16:00.000-07:00

Late last week I came down with yet another cold. This makes about four (maybe five) this calendar year. I'm sick (ha!) of it if truth be told, but there's not much to be done about it other than suck on zinc tablets and stay home. I've given up on trying to power through it, especially during the summer. Things are quiet enough that I can stay home and watch the celebration of Norma Shearer on TCM and the world and university will not come to a screeching halt because I'm not there. Besides, if I stay home and actually watch old movies on tv, then I don't have to sit I my office mad at myself for not being productive and I can just try to get better. This strategy basically worked. Instead of being sick for ten days, I've managed to mostly feel better by the end of day five. I also haven't needed to take much OTC medicine, which I don't like doing in some weird throw back to puritanical ancestry. (That and my Dad has always resisted OTC medicine, so my reluctance could be linked to a more recent forebearer.)

I did decide yesterday after having a bad taste in my mouth and coughing up little chunks, which turned out to be called tonsil stones, that I needed to have my tonsils out. I haven't backed up that conclusion with any member of the medical establishment other than mayoclinic.com.

I didn't want to go anywhere yesterday and we were expecting a handyman to come fix our faulty drainage tube for the HVAC. (Should I take a potshot at Sears? I have not been happy with Sears vis a vis our HVAC installation. Not even a little bit. So there.)

This conspiracy of forces (HVAC, sickness, Norma Shearer) coincided with a little craigslist focus in our house. Last weekend, I had a fit of pique wherein I decided my customary chair was no longer the least bit comfortable and that I wanted another one. After going to some unholy number of furniture stores, I had come to the conclusion that the only chair that might do as a replacement was an Ekornes Stressless recliner.

The problem? They're a little spendy. The Ekornes recliners.

Then I had a thought; why not check craigslist? Sure enough, there was one listed for 1/4 of retail in Bell. In case you're not wildly familiar with Southern California, Bell isn't exactly a vacation destination. Currently in the news for wildly inflated salaries of civic employees, it's down off the I-5 in an area near, well, Commerce. And Downey. Yep. That's the LA everyone knows and loves.

Nevertheless, down to Bell we go last Sunday night and I procure the chair. The ever versatile GTI accepted it willingly into the hatch and we headed home.

(Not that there weren't any subsequent moments of concern. I did have a near panic attack the next day that it was a fake. Also my bank was pretty sure someone had stolen my ATM card because I kept going to the ATM to try to get money, not knowing what my daily limit was).

The chair was duly installed in the place of its predecessor, which now lives on campus at the Women's Center. As my friend and co-worker who helped me get it over to the Women's Center noted, "they won't know it's not comfortable any more. For them, that's how comfortable it's always been."

So, this weekend, what with the cold and the handyman, we decided to list some stuff for sale on craigslist ourselves.

On offer:

1) Two of our six bicycles. We don't need six. We probably don't need four. But we certainly don't need six.

(That's the one of mine we're selling).

2) One of my Timbuk2 bags (I admit that the pile of them in the front closet seems to consitute a collection at miniumum and an obsession if honesty is in my heart).

I have two sort of like this, briefcasey with a laptop compartment and I like the other one better.

3) My Tony Little Gazelle Elite.

You remember Tony Little right? Screaming guy on the informercials sliding his feet back and forth on this thing? Circa 2003 or so. I bought it off craigslist. Now, when I work out at home, I ride one of my bicycles (not that blue one above henceforth, to be sure). The gazelle has been folded up, next to the hutch in our already small dining room. It needed to go away.

4) What Honey calls my barbie motorcycle helmet. That "calling" goes sort of like, "it's a barbie helmet, barbie, barbie helmet."

I bought it online and didn't think it would be so, um, well, barbie.

Nice, huh?

So, we pop these things up on craigslist. (Or should I quote "Your Mama" The Real Estalker and say we "heaved" them up on craigslist)

Honey starts getting e-mails about her bike right away. The ratio of annoying to not was about 2/1.

I get an e-mail about the gazelle. Could he come tonight? He has lots of questions.

Now, it's time to tell you how much I was asking for the gazelle. $25. Yep. And he was offering $20. Which I said was fine. But still, he had lots of questions. I answered and tried to be nice. He said he'd call and come get it in the morning.

He did not.

So, I listed it in the free section. Which prompted an hysterical e-mail from a woman asking that I hold it for her. She also called it an elliptical. Um, no, not an elliptical. Something you stand on and swing your legs in the air on.

Anyway, I went out to check to see if it was still there, though I was not inclined to hold it for her. That mf was so hard to move that my shins got bruised just looking at it. It was gone. Probably for scrap metal.

No e-mails whatever on my bike. It's now on ebay. We'll see.

The Timbuk2 bag has gone back with its friends in the closet.

The barbie helmet is bound for Goodwill next time Honey goes. (That will be this week, I'm sure).

On the upside, she does have interest in her bike, and not just from the guy who didn't want to raid his daughter's "colleg" fund. I think she'll sell it soon.

Here are some lesson I learned:

1) My panic aside, people don't counterfeit Norwegian chairs and then try to sell them one at a time from their living room in Bell;

2) No one feel responsible for following up on their e-mails. Civility and the social contract don't really exist on craigslist;

3) No one much uses full sentences, proper grammar, or punctuation in e-mails. They don't even make a pretense at doing so;

4) Modelling grammar, civility, etc. for people in your communication with them will not result in their reciprocating;

5) People are way too willing to give out their cell phone numbers;

6) Teresa has better "taste" in bicycles than I do;

7) Gazelles are played;

8) Everyone has better taste than I do/did in motorcycle helmets;

9) Everyone wants a bargain. Perceptions of bargains are not shared across brains.

I'm glad our time with craigslist is coming to a close. I won't miss it.

I did like the generosity of the woman who offered the fat from cooking her cats' dinner to anyone who wanted it, but wasn't sure she'd have any takers.

I suppose I can glance through that window into modern American Internet humanity now and again. There's certainly something to learn. Perhaps a bargain to be found.

Still and all, why do I think it's safer over at Etsy?

Water and grapefruit

2010-08-07T13:09:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking some lately about water and the desert.

I grew up in the east, where the humidity made you wish for a little less water and a little more seersucker.

That's what roads usually looked like as I stared out the window in the cars of my childhood.

I've lived in Southern California a long time now and am still amazed at how adaptable I am to the dry. I say that in what, admittedly, has been a very mild summer with lots of "June gloom." That's the marine layer hanging around the morning and keeping the afternoon cool. Thanks so much Pacific.

I've been doing a little writing (of the academic type) lately about the "real" desert here in SoCal.

(That my paper proposal was rejected for my annual professional conference did give me pause. I've decided to interpret it as a failure on their part, not mine. My annual membership renewal for said society languishes in the mail basket, perhaps to go unpaid. Oh, yeah, deny them that $100 and THEN they'll see!)

Honey and I have been frequenting an inn in Desert Hot Springs for a couple of years. And, yes, I do mean frequenting. Eight times in two years counts as frequent. :)

Sigh. We've just been back a week and I'm ready to go back. I think the GTI has a homing beacon now.

The innkeeper, a man of considerable charm, refers to his pool and hot tub as filled by water from a "fissure." He means, of course, that Desert Hot Springs is sitting on a big old fault in the earth. Those tricky faults that cause all the quaking also can cause the water of spring.

Desert Hot Springs has all the water it needs and can use. It's good water, too. It's good to drink. Lovely to soak in.

Elsewhere in the region, there's less water.

Looks dry.

One of my current fascinations is water of a decidedly undesirable sort in the desert.

That's the Salton Sea. Formed by inadvertent flooding from irrigation canals in the early part of the 20th century, it was once hailed as the new playground to the stars. Now it's a salty mess, that kills fish, smells bad, attracts shorebirds, hosts some odd communities, and just generally sits ignored (as best as people can) in the middle of the Imperial Valley south of Indio.

The kingbird probably has a better idea than the sandpipers. Don't get in the water.

I got to thinking about water closer to home this morning. When we bought our house eight years ago, I planted a very small grapefruit tree. And small it stayed. Mostly because I didn't water it.

When we did landscaping a few years ago, we had a bubbler put on it. I thought it rebounded quite well. Then Honey's mother pointed out that the "rebound" was what she called a "sucker plant" and not the "tree" at all. Today, I looked outside and commented to Honey that a sucker plant had once again attached itself to the little grapefruit that couldn't.

We agreed to plant something else.

A little later in the morning, I decided to feed the backyard birds, something I've gotten a bit out of the habit of recently (for monetary reasons, mostly). Nyjer costs. Don't let anyone tell you it doesn't.

Everyone wants "wild canaries," but I'm here to testify that if you want goldfinches at your feeder, you got to pay for nyjer seed. (Current price about $2/lb.)

Anyway, as I filled the feeders, I glanced at the grapefruit tree and thought, "what the hell, I'll go ahead and shovel it out today." I figured we could replace it in the fall sometime.

So, after I put away the seed implements (bird feeding is complicated, don't you know). Visit a Wild Birds Unlimited near you to find out just how money you could be spending! Don't forget the nyjer is obligatory if you want the little gold ones.

I walked over to the grapefruit "tree." Let me give you a sense of scale.

That's it on the left. The tree (no quotes) on the right is the tangerine. It has had many fruit every year, water or no. Bless its over productive heart.

There's no doubt that water helps these trees. Here's the orange tree that didn't produce more than a dozen in the non-water years.

See all those fruit? We'll be up to our elbows in oranges again this year.

Did I mention that they're navels? Yum.

So I'm standing over the grapefruit and I glance down.

Yeppers, those are actual grapefruits.

Water. I tell you what. Eight years on and the little tree that couldn't has four grapefruit on it. And lots and lots of new growth. I'm giving it another chance. Redemption comes when it does, I suppose.

Now, if only it would rain.

On the eve of a trip away

2010-07-24T11:46:00.000-07:00

Back when I started this blog, there were lots of blogs. I suppose there still are. My RSS feed certainly suggests that the blogs I track keep getting updated. I even find new ones to read occasionally.

What is gone now (and I think for good) is the community of bloggers who I felt part of who read and commented on each other's posts. There may be tweeting now, for all I know. There's certainly facebooking. What we've lost, though, is medium to long form ideas and the exchange thereof. I suppose I'm not anti-tweet per se, but I come close. And every time I update my status on facebook, I am both careful and a little unsure if my "friends" need to know what I've just said.

All of which is to say that I was thinking about vacation blogging this morning.

My morning gave me time and space to think, in part because I do not need or want to run in errands. If Saturday is normally about going to the cleaners and getting bagels and getting the car washed, I have decided none of those things are necessary this particular Saturday. Honey and I leave for vacation Monday. I'm thinking this weekend should be:

bike, riding;
dogs, hanging out with;
movie, seeing;
meals, eating.

Not necessarily in that order. And to be sure, some things need to be repeated.

We were to have gone to Lassen National Park to go camping. (File under: recession, vacation)

It's not really our National Park, but sounded really wonderful. It's only accessible in the summer. I'm pretty sure it's summer, what with the heat rash and all.

So I had turned camping into a bit of a research project.

Tent: check, REI Hobitat 4, vestibule, and footprint
Sleeping platforms: check, cot, zero gravity chair
Coffee: check, titanium coffee pot and individual plunger mugs

I could go on and on. Maps, GPS, hotels. I had it sorted.

Then, we got a phone call. They'd be chainsawing at our campground from 7am until 4pm everyday.

Noise sources expect, National Park camping:

Noise sources unexpected, National Park camping:

Serendipity intervened. I like to think of Serendipity as a person. She's out there somewhere. Sometimes she's hanging around with me. Other times, she's occupied with someone stuck in a tight spot who just happens to have the right tool to get out of it. This may be one of the reasons I buy so many stupid tools on steepandcheap.com. Just trying to help Ms. Serendipity out.

I had, the very morning of the chainsaw phone call, gotten a notice that our most favoritist place we have gone to (a lot) over the past couple of years, the fabulous (truly truly) El Morocco Inn and Spa in (not so) fabulous Desert Hot Springs was running a special. More than half off high season rates. Half off low season rates. As cheap as camping.

So instead of a very long drive, followed by very loud camping, we have a much shorter drive followed by a really nice bed and real mineral springs. And massages. All of which (despite the triple digits) will clear the heat rash right up. Also maybe some of the current ennui.

So back to blogging trips. I like blogging trips. See, for eg:

Bear Aware

or

The Geese of Hawaii

Hmm, maybe I like blogging trips that somehow involve animals.

Anyway, trips happen whether I blog or not. I may or may not blog on this trip.

If I do blog about it, I will assuredly write medium to long form. Spa-tels cannot be tweeted.

Heat rash: 2010 edition

2010-07-17T12:16:00.000-07:00

Some years ago I wrote a short story called "Heat Rash." It was "published" in a "Journal" that I helped produce while a graduate student at UCLA. Lots of quotes in the previous sentence. An acquaintance/sort-of-friend of mine decided she wanted to create a student journal of LGBT, (um, what's the word?), stuff. She asked me to help. She and her gay bff took credit as editors-in-chief. This other guy, Kirk, and I really did the whole thing. Kirk did the layout and the design. I did all the editing. In exchange we got credit as the "editorial board." The acquaintance/sort-of-friend didn't really want to publish my short story, but she had the good sense to know she wouldn't get all the free work from me if she didn't. So, we compromised (there was more give from me, truth told, than her). I was to write a scholarly introduction to my story. Um, ok.

I just reread the introduction (I can't bring myself to do more than skim the story). I cite and discuss Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy. Go me. Remembered something from my oral narrative seminar. Of course, I don't remember the seminar very well now, other than the cute girl who always brought pop tarts to class, but that's another matter.

Anyway, I will quote (with some chagrin) from the story:

"It is April and it is Thursday and I have a heat rash under my left arm that has been bothering me all day. It is red and bumpy and will soon cover my entire body.... The best solution I can come up with is to keep my right hand in my armpit at all times. Left handed only, I am proceeding."

The story is a somewhat autobiographical account of one spring and summer I spent in D.C. Re-skimming it now, many of the things I recall happening that summer seem to be in there. I'll spare the plot to all concerned (mostly myself).

I should make a side note about the acquaintance/sort-of-friend: she moved to D.C. to attend my Alma mater for graduate school. When she did that, she broke up with her girlfriend and left her behind. That girlfriend is sitting behind me now at her own desk, some 16 years later. So something very good came out of the "journal" after all.

Oh, and I do still have the short story on my c.v. I cited Walter Ong, after all.

The acquaintance/sort-of-friend lives in--of all places--Albania now. She and her partner are undoubtedly having adventures of a very Balkan nature. I do not envy her the life she has. I expect the same is true of her in regards to me.

I have what I think may be a heat rash now. It's not where the old one was. Regardless, it hurts and itches.

It does bring to mind the overwrought heartache of young summers. They seem very long ago indeed.

I ran into a former student of mine last night, who immediately began asking if the things she knew about me from before were still true. She twice asked if we had gone to any Angel games recently. I said no both times and refrained from launching into my lament about the unused and guilt-inducing "Angel Bucks" we have sitting in a drawer. I said that sometimes we have to move on from the things we loved. I liked baseball a lot once. Now, less so.

Things change.

The heat rash made me think about the past, but did not make me want to return to it.

One more quote:

"The tendency, according to Ong, of a literate culture is to emphasize the individual, to have linear plot structure in a story, an to view fixed text as the norm."

If heat rashes aren't fixed, then how can plots be linear?

Somebody pass the cortizone.

The iPad, the girl out the window, and my future

2010-07-03T15:38:00.000-07:00

So, for some time I've been wanting, but resisting, the latest piece of kit from M. Jobs and co. I even ordered the new iPhone to keep me from buying an iPad. I justified the iPhone purchase by telling myself that work would pay for it, so it was "needed." (I should note that though it has not yet arrived, I have secured one of the hard to find "bumpers" for it).

Now, I will take a slight detour. I currently have a job that I like and am good at. I also really like the people I work with. I don't want to do my current job forever--indeed it is one of those jobs that I should not do forever lest I be viewed as "stuck." At any rate a job has opened up that I don't think I want, but there are people who want me to apply for it. I am even led to believe that if I did apply, I would probably get it. It's more money, more responsibility, more pressure. It also takes me--I think--in the wrong direction. So, I decided not to apply. Then I got a call. My boss got a call. I was asked to rethink. I am supposed to be rethinking as I write.

So, being me, I cried a little and I processed a lot. And then I decide to buy an iPad after all. Do you follow that? I'm not sure I do either, but there was the compulsion. Being compelling.

So I stop by Best Buy and ask. Nope. They only have 3G ones. Don't want 3G. One data plan with AT&T is enough, thanks. So, this morning, I commence to calling.

Apple Store #1: get on the waiting list

Best Buy #2: we don't carry ipads

Apple store #2: how about a 3G?

Best Buy #2: How about a 3G?

...some time later...

Apple Store #5: we have a 64mb wifi

So, without much thinking (or any crying), I head out to points east and emerge with the biggest wifi iPad there is.

Honey goes off to the gym to let me play with it. I start to lose myself in app land. The worries of the moment recede.

Then the dogs begin to bark. I look up from Honey's desk (where iTunes lives) and see two kids walking in front of the house heading to our front door. I say (through the window), "I'm sorry, but I don't want to buy anything from you."

The older one immediately responds, "you are a racist."

I said something in protest, but she was gone. It burst my iPad bubble to be sure. And it made me mad. I did refrain from walking outside and giving her a piece of my mind. I don't have to take the lies in. But they do deflate.

What will I do next, job-wise? I don't know, though I suspect I'll stay where I am.

In the meantime, in case you're wondering, the iPad works fine for first draft blogging. (Final edits requires the MacBook Pro. I did mention my official Apple fangirl status, right?)

The iPad may save me from something. I just don't know what yet.

Moving back

2010-06-26T10:29:00.001-07:00

Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in those capes that were so popular,
the one with unicorns and pomegranates in the needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called "Find the Cow."
Everything was hand lettered then, not like today.

So here I am, back at the old digs. They look a little different. Good for you, Blogger, for making things a little less the same. Still, the familiar is so familiar.

Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent, a badly broken code.

2006 I started this thing. Four plus years and lots of changes.

Two jobs come and one gone for me. One gone for Honey. New trajectories for us both, to be sure.

The 1790s will never come again., Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

I moved the blog to its own domain late summer of 2007. We were over at treecup's house. She and sly were together then and they helped us both buy domains, set up blogs on them. They both worked generously well into the night. By the end of it we had our own websites, our own virtual spaces.

Now, they're both gone from the place I call my own. The sprawl in which I have lived more of my life than any other.

Sly doesn't need sporksforall.com on his server. I don't need it there either, I realized. Still, thinking about that night makes me sad. Best to let the website go. The past doesn't come back, or so I understand. Sometimes it also doesn't go away.

I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through the afternoons in a canoe.

I don't reread this blog much. There was a period when the blog had community. Reading it reminds me of that, too.

More recently, I write when I feel moved. Curling, it seems, was the last thing that moved me.

Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.

So, I'm back. And determined to post more. We'll see what happens. Using the blog to move forward rather than look back seems an ambitious goal. I'll count it as one at which I might succeed.

As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine
a dance whose names we can only guess.

I'll see how it goes. But moving back is not necessarily about moving backwards. It's just about moving.

No chickens this time, which is fine. The next thing is always just a guess.

The poem is by Billy Collins and is called "Nostalgia."

If you don't know Collins (even if you think you hate poetry), check him out. You won't be sorry.

Look, a link to buy the book:

Wow.

Oh, and welcome back to whatever (on fire).

Canada curling, my brief fandom thereof

2010-02-27T02:25:00.000-08:00

Recently I've been listening to Slate's really good sports podcast, "Hang Up and Listen." I came to it because I've liked Stefan Fatsis on NPR and in print (Word Freak and A Few Seconds of Panic are both terrific books.)

They've done a couple of nice segments on the Winter Olympics and one of them (I think it was Josh Levin) mentioned that lots of the sports shown by NBC on the Olympics just aren't shown very well. The sliding sports (luge, bobsled er, bobsleigh, skeleton) are simply a series of cameras at different parts of the track. You see pieces, but not the whole. They do a better job with the big ticket sports like figure skating and alpine skiing and even manage to turn biathlon into something of a story.

I have, as some of you probably (don't) remember, been an every-four-years fan of curling for a little bit now. I really like watching it. NBC did figure out, bless its corporate heart, that curling couldn't be highlighted and it couldn't be narrativized. What it could be was shown in its entirety with experienced curling commentators. On CNBC and USA. Ok, so I have to live with no primetime curling. But I've got dish and a dvr. Dish always gives you CNBC and USA. It's like a woman I know says about grits in South Carolina. You don't have to ask for them, they just come.

Anyway, there's a lot of curling on, actually. Several hours every day. Since I don't actually have several hours to turn over to the sliding granite stones every day, I had to figure out my own approach to watching. By the by, I love that I got to do that. That's what's wrong with NBC's coverage on primetime. I've got to take what they give me. That's all well and fine the night the show the women's long program, but less so during ski jump after ski jump or, heaven forfend, ice dancing. For curling though, I make my own rules. I set my own schedule. How to do that, though?

Don Duguid and Colleen Jones (the curling commentators) are enthusiastic about the sport to such a degree that it's hard to sort out what to be excited about and not, so, at first, they weren't much help.

I happen to be an American who finds the Olympic American hometown rah rah thing a little annoying. I also suspected that the American curling teams weren't very good. (Quelle Suprise! I was right).

I first came across curling during the Salt Lake City Olympics (sorry, Olympic Winter Games) where I watched the Great Britain women's team take gold. I toyed with rooting for them. I guess I should acknowledge the given that I'd be focusing my watching on women's curling.

Then, I hear (from Colleen--who was ready to guide me after all) about Cheryl Bernard and her Canadian team.

It seems that Canada lets its best club teams compete against one another to represent the country in the Olympics.

Cheryl and company (Susan O'Connor, Carolyn Darbyshire, and Cori Bartel) were good enough to make the trials, but no one expected them to win. They were, by all accounts, the 4th best performing team in Canada.

They did win the "Roar of the Rings." Thus were they Team Canada.

Then there was all this drama about their not having enough international experience and should Canada change the system and blah blah blah.

Cheryl and her team came to Vancouver (their club is in Calgary) and beat pretty much everybody in the preliminary rounds (they lost once to China) and then won their semi final against Switzerland by which time everyone had stopped talking about whether they should have won and whether to change the rules.

I watched most of their games. I read up on curling and how to make the stones (a complicated process) and even looked to see if there were SoCal curling clubs (yes, but in Orange County, which isn't close enough). Still I'd like to touch a curling stone. And wear those cool slidy shoes.

Cheryl and her team were, in a fundamental way, my Olympics. Honey and I have watched lots of primetime. It was curling I looked forward to. I rooted for them. I imagined them singing "O Canada." (Side note: Canada has a MUCH better national anthem than we do. It's rousing, it's singable. I'd take "God Save the Queen," too. I can't hit that high note in ours and neither can you, so don't act like you can).

I followed the controversy over the supposed swimsuit photos she took. Worried about her cold.

I wasn't the only one. Canada went a little curling mad. They wore those curling hats. People stopped Cheryl on the street and asked for her autograph. Guys held up signs asking to marry her. Her husband borrowed one of them. They were in the gold medal game.

Then Friday afternoon they faced Sweden. The Prime Minister of Canada was there. So was the King of Sweden. I was too. It was a state mandated furlough day for me. Curling and furloughs go great together.

There, too, was the all the international and Olympic experience the people of Canada had worried about in the person of Anette Norberg, Sweden skip.

It was a tense match. Colleen even said so. Sweden looked like they would win and then Canada came back and stole two ends. (Basically they won points they shouldn't have). It looked set for my girls. Cheryl needed to make one shot in the 10th (and last end). She missed it and Norberg tied the game.

Then, in the (extra) 11th end, Norberg made a spectacular shot at the end and Cheryl couldn't match her.

I was heartbroken. Not as much, I'm sure, as Cheryl was.

You can look around the web and you will find lots about how she messed up and lost the gold. There are Canada fan sites and curling sites. Newspapers and blogs. There's a lot of talk about choking.

For me, it wasn't about any of that. She was an underdog who got everyone on her side. When she lost she walked (ok slid) over to her team and they embraced. Most of the pictures of them on the podium with the silver medals around their necks show their dissapointment more than anything else. She seemed to handle it all with class.

As I watched her Friday afternoon, I remembered why I still like sports sometimes. I remembered that sports should always be about winning and losing and heartbreak and triumph. (Not money or contracts or steroids or whatever.)

Cheryl Bernard broke my heart today. Two weeks ago I didn't know her name.

Cheryl did manage a smile over the silver medal at the end of a lovely two weeks of curling. Thanks for letting me follow along.

Alone in a downtown

2010-02-21T03:06:00.000-08:00

Pre-entry note: I've been thinking some lately about this blog and how much I was engaged with it during the last Winter Olympics. It was a different time in my life, to be sure. Four years seems both quickly gone and very recent. I'm not going to feel badly that the blog has lain fallow. But I found myself (with only my iphone at hand--no laptop) thinking about an entry while on a trip this week. So I wrote it down (pen and paper!) and submit it to the the blog maw for anyone's consideration.

What is it like to be alone in an unfamiliar downtown?

It depends on the city, really, doesn't it.

Some (most) have the obvious thing to do. To wit:

Denver--The Mint

Louisville--The Bats

Seattle--The Needle

Don't read this as pejorative in some way. I'm usually up for the obvious. The more factual and historical, the better. So picture me, then, bereft outside The Mint, unable to get a ticket and learn about all those coins.

Two Nevada coin asides:

1) Honey and I go to the site of the Carson City Mint after a breakfast of pancakes, after a truly hellish night in Virginia City. Unless it's the Irma in Cody, WY, give 19th century hotels--however quaint you think they'll be--a pass. They will be hot or cold or startlingly both. They will be loud. You will not sleep. All of what I have said is especially true of The Silver Queen in Virgina City, NV. Virginia City MAY be worth a drive-through look at the Bucket O'Blood casino and saloon, but not more. Not even a little bit more.

I wanted more from Carson City, mint wise, but I was tired and perhaps compensatingly over-carbed.

2) During the early days of the Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas was in a period where high-end properties were all about museums as part of the experience. Museums make thing high class, don't you know. The Bellagio had Steve Wynn's own art collection. Not to be outdone, Mandalay Bay opened with a featured museum to money. Appropriate? You bet. (Ha!).

So, Honey and I dutifully paid our admission and were given those hand held recorder sticks. Wands. Whatever. You push the number of the display and a deep voice intones from the stick about the coin in front of you. There was a coin set off by itself in a glass case. When we approached we discovered it was a nickel. The stick then began what seemed like 90 minutes of narration about the nickel.

We both gave up on the nickel before it was done. It was a rare and important nickel. It was also--there's just no getting around this--a nickel.

(Ok, I just looked it up--because being snotty about a nickel doesn't mean it's not important. It was a 1913 Liberty Head Nickel, one of only 5 known in the world. They were not supposed to be in circulation, but somehow 5 of them got into collector's hand. Liberty Head nickels were regular nickels from 1882 to 1912. In 1913 a rouge Mint employee stuck five 1913 Liberty Heads. One of the five most recently sold (2007) for $5 million. It's quite the nickel).

To rejoin me alone in downtowns...

A few years ago, I had a trip to Denver. The Mint Tour was full. I "replaced" it with a tour of Molly Brown's house (she of the unsinkable) which I left halfway through. My trip to the Louisville Slugger bat factory paled next to the massage at the spa Treecup found that trip.

I try, you see, to be a good conference attendee. I really do, but somehow I am compelled to wander away sometimes.

So, Thursday I wandered Seattle.

I had high hopes. No rain. A cool Pacific Northwest City.

And then, well, there's the Space Needle Dream™. I've had it for years. Not every night. But once or twice a year.

Here's how it goes. I'm in Seattle. How do I know? I just do. It looks like my brain thinks Seattle should look.

When I touched down at SeaTac on Thursday, it was my first moment in Washington State. Why have I been dreaming of a place I'd never been? I'll leave that to the symbolgists and psychologists.

Anyway, in the Space Needle Dream™, I need to get to the top of the Space Needle. I can't get there. I try and try and can't even get close. There's something important up there. A Space Needle Dream™ secret.

So Thursday afternoon, I landed and took a cab with a colleague to the hotel. She left to meet her sister for dinner, so I feel ok about missing the opening talk and head off to the Needle. I take the mid-60s monorail to get there.

I paid my $17 and rode the elevator (41 seconds) to the top. The sun was setting behind the Puget Sound. I circumnavigated the outside deck, the inside deck and stared off into every direction I could.

I then called Honey.

"Will I know the secret message when I see it?"

"Maybe it's in the needle part"

"Well, that's problematic, because I'm in the round part and can't get there."

I do like modernist architecture. I enjoyed the monorail ride back, where I looked at the Needle from below.

I then walked several hundred vertical miles (ok, 12 blocks) up a mountain (ok, up Capitol Hill) to buy some good coffee. (Victrola, Stumptown (a Portland import), and Vivace) for enjoyment back in the blessedly flat San Fernando Valley.

I enjoyed my beer and burger for dinner and wrote this blog in my moleskine with a blue gel pen. (How quaint).

It was a tiring afternoon (no lunch didn't help), but the people seemed nice and everything was open. (Take that, Denver!)

The next day I went to Pike Place market and to REI mothership.

The secret is still out there somewhere. Problem is that now I don't even know where to look. But I'm sure I'll find myself in another downtown at some point and I'll wander.

As for the Space Needle Dream™, maybe I was wrong. Maybe it wasn't Seattle after all. Could the secret be in Brussels at the Atomium? Do you think they have any conferences there?

The time for trucks has passed

2009-10-03T12:10:00.000-07:00

More on this soon, I guess.

I might call him Wolf, with the German "v" sound.

Golf balls, National Parks, Memory, and the Newspaper

2009-09-19T05:11:00.000-07:00

I grew up in a newspaper reading family. Even as a child, I liked reading the newspaper. We got the afternoon paper most of my childhood and then switched to the morning paper when I was a teenager. Let's pause for a moment and think about that. Morning paper. Afternoon paper.

Yep.

I grew up in Atlanta and the two papers were co-owned in my lifetime. Of course, they had been separate newspapers once upon a time. Though co-owned, they maintained separate newsrooms through 1982 and maintained separate editorial boards through 2001. The Journal was liberal. The Constitution was not.

Now the combined Atlanta Journal-Constitution, according to my Dad, who reads it every day, is "terrible." It's delivered once a day (morning) and focuses on local news. My parents get the New York Times every day as well. They're newspaper readers and getting the Times means they still get a real newspaper.

I went through a period of not reading the paper much. I read Salon and Slate, checked the Los Angeles Times web site when there are wildfires, watched Rachel Maddow with Teresa sometimes, and listened to NPR most of the time. I figured I was getting my news. I never gave up the Sunday paper thing, though. I always read the Sunday paper, even as it got gutted. No more Book Review, no more Opinion, no more Magazine.

I've been lucky, in my adult life, to live in cities with decent papers. The Washington Post does pretty well. The Los Angeles Times has something to say most days. I moved away from Washington before the decline of the newspaper. I am certainly not qualified to speak on the newspapers' decline in any expert way. There are those far more in the know who I have asked about the situation (folks who teach or taught journalism at my University, for example) who just shake theirs heads when I ask about the future.

And, of course, the future looks bleak. The LA Times runs large number of corrections every day because they've fired their fact checkers and copy editors. One day last year, their Calendar briefs had stand-in headlines that read "sub head here" printed instead of the actual sub head.

For a while I was getting the Thursday-Saturday papers for free and paying $1.25 a week for the Sunday paper because every time I tried to cancel, they'd offer me a better deal to keep me as a single number on the subscriber list.

Lately, though, I'm glad to get the LA Times. It may not be the great paper it was even ten years ago, but they employ a number of writers and critics I really like. I would read anything Dan Neil writes about anything. Mr. Neil, here's a box of hair, please write about it and I will read it.

I even sent Neil an e-mail some years ago praising his review of a car Chevrolet (the SSR) put out that was supposed to look like it had been chopped and altered. Neil's take on the difference between mass-manufacture and art was one of the best things I've ever read about folklore. I told him so by e-mail and have used the piece in my class. He, in turn, worried in his e-mail response to me about what happens when a writer's writing makes it into a college class. Does he lose his edge? Even recounting the incident here now makes me happy.

I always read Susan Carpenter (who they should let review motorcycles again). I like Robert Lloyd and Ken Turan. Mary McNamara and Sandy Banks. Steve Lopez.

The paper may have had the great short-sightedness to fire its copy editors and fact checkers (surely a necessary group of folks). I am glad they kept some of the people they did. And so I read it Thursday through Sunday. I'm not looking to it for the latest news any more. I'm looking for in-depth reporting. Good writing. Stuff I didn't know.

I guess an aside is worth making about the other daily Los Angeles paper, The Daily News. I don't read it, but one of the reporters calls me a lot to be a quoted expert. I'm sure it says something about the self-absorption of the city and time in which I live when I say I always look those articles up online to see if I sound good in the quotes.

All this lead-up brings me to the piece they ran on page A3 in yesterday's (9/18/09) Los Angeles Times Valley edition by David Kelly. I won't hotlink, since at some point it won't be available any more, but here's the first paragraph:

"A man claiming he was paying tribute to dead golfers tossed up to 3,000 golf balls into the biggest sand trap he could find: Joshua National Park."

Yes, indeed. That right there is why the paper is worth reading. This item didn't go viral on the internet (maybe because it didn't involved Kanye West). It didn't get picked up by NPR because it's a little too long for a quip and doesn't have the pathos needed for a feature. Rachel Maddow didn't mention it. Salon and Slate didn't cover it. I read about it in the newspaper. The same daily print newspaper that had a very interesting piece from Neil about Diesel/Electric hybrids (want!), an hilarious panning of the Matthew Modine play making its world premiere at the Taper, a good review of both The Burning Plain and Bright Star, as well as a bad one of The Informant! (Very helpful--I now will not go see it).

I also read an interesting piece about why the NFL is helping the Washington football team keep its racist name and an obituary of Frank Coghlan, Jr. who played Billy Batson in the Captain Marvel serial. (Shazam!) Just so you know, Southerners read the obits. Every day. There was also a well-done (and scary) feature by Richard Fausett on the Oath Keepers.

To get back to the golf balls, I read every word of the story. Twice. Thought I should tell Teresa about it. Thought I should say something on Facebook about it. Then, I decided to blog about it. Because, of course, my connection to and fascination with the story was about more than the golf balls in the National Park. It was about why newspapers should still matter. Do still matter. It's good to slow down, read the paper. Think about it. Talk about it. It's also good to listen to NPR, read the web, follow blogs, tweet (I suppose, though I'm not yet convinced). None of these things have to be either/or zero sum things.

Quoting again from Kelly's piece, wherein park rangers noted that the golf balls had some tennis balls mixed in, he writes: "Rangers also found cans of fruit and vegetables left in the desert along with park literature tossed around."

According to Ranger Joe Zarki, Jones [the accused] spread the golf balls around the park, "'to honor all the golfers who had died.'"

"Contrary to what rangers originally though, Jones wasn't chipping golf balls into the desert with a club. He was hurling them from his car." Mr. Kelly, you've got me hooked. Tell me more, please.

"Jones was unavailable for comment Thursday. He lives with his 84-year-old father, Douglas, who didn't know about the incident until a reporter called him. 'It certainly sounds strange,' said his father. 'He hikes out in Joshua Tree every three months or so, and he golfs maybe once a week. But I don't know where he got that many golf balls.' He did, however, say that his son works at a local golf course."

Well done Mr. Kelly. Well done LA Times.

Support your local newspaper. It may be dying, it's certainly flawed, but it's still worth having around.

Now, about afternoon delivery...

Serial carogamous

2009-09-13T09:55:00.000-07:00

"Am I obsessed with justifying this decision?" I asked Honey.

"Every human want to justify her decisions. It's what makes us human," was her reply.

I had noted that I would be glad not to have to worry about the size of open parking places in the really impacted Whole Foods parking lot. This was after saying early this very afternoon, that I would be glad:

1) Not to have to worry about the enormous blind spots on the FJ

2) Not to get 18 mpg

3) Not to have my car mistaken for a Hummer ever again

I may have come up with another thing or two or three. Or eleven.

You see, friends and blogreaders, it's a mere three years after procuring my Toyota FJ Cruiser and enduring the summer of 08, where filling it up was a $65-75 endeavor that had to be done every 300 miles (or fewer). Usually fewer. And my time with the FJ is drawing to a close. Not because I leased it. Not because there's anything wrong with it. But because I just can't deal with it any more. I've got other reasons. I'll throw some around now:

I've been furloughed from work two days a months with an accompanying 10% pay cut. I would like my car to be cheaper.

It has faux-suicide doors and very few adults want to get into its back seat.

It will need new tires in the next six months and that will cost $1000 or more and I still won't be able to change them by myself, given how large they are.

Gas is back up over $3.00 a gallon.

Americans still want "cute" SUVs and the FJ is cute. And newish. And retro. Someone will want it. It still has value.

I don't like having to hoist up into it.

I would like to make less impact on the environment. It qualified for Cash for Clunkers. A 2007 vehicle. Seriously.

I know, by the by, that someone else will buy it and use it and they will make an impact on the environment with it. That will be partially my fault. I'm ok with that.

Ok, see what I mean about justifying what I want to do? A lizard brained serial carogamous, I am.

Anyway, all of which is to say, I put a deposit down on a 2010 VW Golf TDI. Clean Diesel. 40mpg. German made, just like my Passat of yore. $1300 tax break.

It won't be here until December or January. In the meantime, though, I'm a little obsessed. In a good way. Want to see what it will look like?!

That one is British, but it's the color I ordered.

We had our usual terrible time with car dealers trying to get one ordered. We went to test drive the Jetta TDI (same engine) to make sure I liked it and to order one. It's not even worth going into much detail about how much both dealers we visited did sucketh. Van Nuys VW and Livingston VW both refused to take my order, had marked up the TDI cars above MSRP, and said that the dealers who would take orders were "lying." Commonwealth VW has my business in buying the car for sure. Some car advice:

1) Do your research on the interwebs before you go

2) Walk away from people who call you "ma'am" in a condescending way and

3) Always always always always bring Teresa.

Then you'll be fine.

More details to come, I'm sure. Vroom (in a clean diesel way).

License to Carbonate

2009-08-22T06:17:00.000-07:00

The name is Sporks, the license is Alco2jet 220579. That is all I can say or I might have to kill you.

Or not. But that is my license number. I'm a licensed carbonator. Yeppers.

A week or so ago, Teresa sent me a link to a product I didn't know existed.

The SodaStream Fountain Jet.

Behold:

I've always had a thing for old seltzer bottles. We have some Teresa bought at a yard sale in the garage.

Ours are not this pretty but you get the idea. William Powell could make you a drink from them. Especially if you were Myrna Loy.

I also have been trying to be more green. I ride my scooter when I can. I would like someone to buy me this:

Audi A3 TDI. 45 mpg. Thank you very much.

I'd buy it for myself, but I've recently taken a "state budget" furlough pay cut. (Don't ask).

The SodaStream hits exactly the right marks. I can have (really, really slight) thoughts of Powell and Loy while making carbonated beverages. It saves me from buying and discarding plastic bottle containing fizzy water every week (my average was 3 bottles per week). It fits my newly "dehanced" salary. (Thanks California economy!)

So, how does it work, you ask? I'm so glad you did. So, so glad.

First, you need to secure your license for the Alco2jets. I have two licenses and two jets. I am special.

That's the spare.

That's the one currently in use. See just how special I am?

License 220579. That special.

Ok, so here's how it works. You fill your specially provided SodaStream bottles from your handy Britta picther.

Please note that two bottles full is more than the (*cough*stupid*cough*) Britta pitcher can hold. No offense to Britta stockholders.

This will mean filling and waiting for the Britta to take its sweet time draining itself through the (probably only mildly useful) filter. Now, I could just skip this step and use tap water. But what if L.A. tap water isn't pure and clear as the driven snow? What if, indeed. So, once the Britta has finished its "job," here's what I've got:

Yep, still water, two plastic bottle. Awesome.

Now I secure one bottle on the machine.

Then I push the magic button.

And watch the bubbles fill the bottle.

If you try this at home, you will probably be joined at this point by one or more dogs. They do not like the sound. Especially the loud burping sound it makes indicating a certain level of carbonation.

I manage to ignore the dogs and persist.

4 burps for plain or flavor enhanced water.

How about orange?

Just a drop.

Now, let's get fancy and have some Diet Pink Grapefruit--"compare to Fresca!" I'll want five burps on this, dog concern be dammed.

Measure the syrup.

Pour in bottle and gently shake. I register slight alarm at the pinkness.

Pour into juice glass. Serve to spouse.

Seems ok.

Secure made soda in fridge.

Put soda maker in it's place (on floor, away from flammables, near wine and drinks)

Pour self a (slightly larger) juice glass of pink drink and sit down to blog.

Generally I'm only slightly excited by kitchen gadgets. This one, though, is beyond fab. No electricity, less plastic. A source of creativity.

Burp burp burp burp burp.

Shoe Musings

2009-08-16T08:08:00.000-07:00

On Friday I rode my scooter to work.

That's not me on Friday, but I know people like visuals. It is me, and it is my scooter, it's just not Friday.

Anyway, I had on "nice" jeans, a white shirt, and boots. It was Friday, I had no meetings, it's summer. I looked fine (for me).

These were the boots I had on:

Ok, if any people who ride two wheeled vehicles would like to have an internal dialogue about how safe these are, go ahead. I'll wait. I've been having some foot soreness lately and these are the most comfortable boots I own.

Anyway, I was walking down the stairs mid-afternoon as two women were walking up them. Both women had on high heeled sandals that were (and this really is the only word for it) bejeweled.

Something like that. I was admittedly clumping a little--as I was trotting down the stairs. They, on the other hand, were walking slowly and carefully, undoubtedly not to trip and fall as they ascended. They were undergrads going to class. Trust me when I say I know that's who they were.

Both of them glanced at my feet and then at each other and shared a moment (I saw it, no ambiguity) of disapproval. I simply kept going but have been thinking about them and their shoes and me an my shoes ever since.

Yesterday, I asked Teresa, "when did women start wearing such stupid shoes?"

She replied, "oh, they always have."

That's Claudette Colbert "walking" her dog in 1938. Those shoes wouldn't work for me. Seem fine for Ms. Colbert, though.

Here's the thing, though, even if women have always worn shoes that make them less, um, functional than men, they didn't use to ALWAYS do so. By which I mean, they may have had the less functional shoes, but they only wore them sometimes.

For example, when I was in college, women didn't wear those kinds of shoes to class. They wore comfortable shoes. Or flats. This trend of comfort predated my college years, of course. Behold:

You don't even need to see these two women's shoes to know that they have no resemblance whatever to the bejeweled numbers above. I would like to see the bejeweled numbers over thick socks. I really would.

The judging of shoes--I might add--was prompted herein not by me, but the bejeweled folks ascending. I wonder if their feet hurt. I expect they did. Maybe still do, here two days later.

I was thinking about that today as I surveyed my shoes. I cannot say that they reflect any particular trend but my own sensibilities, size 11 feet (which constrains choice, of course), and some practicalities. I've selected a few for a brief tour.

Shall we begin? Do make sure your seat belt is tightened before we depart.

First, let's start with the "special interest" shoes. Those that must serve a particular function (and may not serve another). Representing this category are:

Shimano's fine M160 shoes. Clip in to my fine SPD pedals and be off.

They're certainly my shiniest shoes. Truth told, I keep platform pedals on all three bikes most of the time, but sometimes, I like to clip in. The M160s are ready when I do.

Special interest shoes #2 are also related to two wheeling, though motorized this time. Behold the Sidi Slash.

Pretty, fancy, no? Those are motorcycle boots for when you want to ride your 250cc scooter HARD (and safely).

On the casual end of things, I have what we use to call "tennis shoes."

They're Go Lite Trail Fly shoes. Meant for running on scree. I wear them for tennis shoe occasions. I have worn them on scree. In Hawaii. More often I wear them on pavement. In Los Angeles.

When I first moved to California, I insisted that one of the best things about it was the ability to wear sandals year-round. I have had sandal love affairs (Birkenstocks, Doc Martens, Keens), but my true sandal love has always been and will always be...

Teva. Tee to the vah. My only pair at the moment, but I've another one on order. There's also a pair in the "going to Goodwill" bag that Halo chewed on. I may rescue them and try again to compensate in some way for the cat chew marks. (Update: I did rescue them and they may not be the chewed upon pair, as I am currently wearing them and there is no pain. No pics, you'll have the trust me).

Six pounds of calico hellion right there.

As some people may have heard, my old friends at Crocs are in trouble. They may go under. Belly-up. Bankrupt. I let all my Croc clogs go some time ago, as I was getting rashes from the rubber on the tops of my feet. I did acquire some Crocs flip flops recently. Every time, I wear them, I think "last running of the Crocs." Or last flipping of the Crocs. Or last flopping of the Crocs.

For work, I tend to practical, brown or black and loafer-esque. Thus:

Those are Earth Compasses. The next ones are on the "fancier" end for me. The last time I wore them, I got a blister which got infected.

Some kind of Merrell slide. I have them in black and brown. Teresa and I refer to them as my "Associate Dean" shoes. I got them as I was starting my new(ish) job and associate (ha!) them with it. Right now, they're not in circulation... Infected blisters, you know.

I have a deep appreciation for Nike's Considered line. Launched in 2005, it lasted two years and produced several shoes that I adore. They're now all wearing out. Here are the Gems from that line:

And there is no finer shoe in my life than the last-gasp Considered offering:

I have tan ones, too. Both pairs are on the worn side of new. I'll miss them when they go. I look through Nike's current offerings every once in a while. Then I sigh. I'm out of the demographic, you see.

I expect I'd have gotten less of a look from the bejeweled crowd had I had these on:

My Earth Scenic boots. I've even been known to polish them. More hippie than clunky.

Whatever that theoretical outcome on the stairs might have been, there still seems to have been a meeting of women that I missed. A meeting where it was decided that comfortable shoes were banished. I'm good about keeping my calendar up-to-date, so it may be that I wasn't invited to (or wanted at) the meeting.

Just as well I guess. Clunk clunk, flip flip.

Where have you gone baseball?

2009-05-19T15:49:00.000-07:00

When I was growing up, baseball (and a few other sports) was something my family could do together. It wasn't a perfect context by any means. But, we could usually watch the Braves and be ok for a few hours.

I've always held onto baseball. I lived in DC pre-Nationals, so I didn't adopt a second team in my time there. When I moved to L.A., I adopted Honey's Angels (after I met Honey, that is) and continued to root for the Braves.

When I was in graduate school, I had a hard time my first summer finding a job. I finally landed one with a company that did SAT tutoring in high school students' homes. I have never before (or since) had such an up-close view of affluent L.A. Before I started the tutoring (which was mostly a late summer/fall activity, scheduled around the SAT test dates), this company hired me to answer the phone in the office. The office was in one of the owners' apartments down in a cool part of the city. I wasn't allowed to do much, just take messages. The owner, in fact, laid me out when he heard me giving a parent a little information about what they did. I had repeated a little bit of his spiel verbatim. I had, after all, heard it a thousand times by that point.

He was an arrogant prick. Very impressed with his own masculinity and Ivy League degree. He was also a rabid fantasy baseball player. He dismissed my curiosity about it. Women couldn't possibly be interested in baseball at the level fantasy required. Certainly not mid-Atlantic educated ones, who weren't admitted to an Ivy. Or a seven sister. Or...

I worked for them for one SAT season. Never once did I ever see or experience them backing up one of their employees. They were perfectly happy to let us line up passively in front of the bus that was angry parents of lazy student's SAT scores. It was a wretched experience. If anyone wants the name of the company (they sold out to a national company, but still have the same set-up), do let me know. I know, given the current economic situation in the U.S., there are lots of people who need jobs. If you'd like one that will make you feel like shit, let me know and I'll hook you up.

I left the bad company and went to work for a much more pleasant one (who did the same thing(ish) in a mini-mall east of downtown). Company II was owned by and catered exclusively to Taiwanese immigrants. Laying the weird meat buns I would sometimes get as gifts aside (but not those lovely red envelopes with money), it was a nice thing to do for the rest of my graduate school summers.

I held onto baseball past that. I hoped with the Braves every year. Felt very sad the summer of 1994. Got back my joy with the Braves World Series of 1995. Teresa and I went to Angels games, mixed in a Braves/Dodgers game here and there. We also took time out to go to minor league ball in the Cal League.

My favorite experience was attending a game at the home of the Stockton Ports (now the Mudville Nine) and winning a six pack of pickled peppers. What was not to like?

The 2002 series was unbelievable. We breathed in and out with each pitch. We named our new cat Halo.

Then, a few years ago, Ivy-jerk notwithstanding, I started playing fantasy baseball. First, I played for free (with strangers) on Yahoo. Then I joined a money league, ran the blog league and enjoyed myself (mostly).

Last year baseball started to change for me. The money in the game has been out of control for a while. Add the drugs. What have I watched? The game itself is fine. MLB far from it.

Was Mark Lemke the last clean player? Maybe Tim Salmon? Bob Horner? Bib Gibson? Did Bart Giamatti's untimely death ruin it for good?

When I think about my sadness around baseball--and it is surely there--some of it is tied up in fantasy. The baseball blog league (which was terrifically fun) never attracted enough people to keep it going (unlike it's much healthier sister blogleague football--coming soon for 09!). The pay league, into which I was invited by my brother, has gone like this:

Year 1: My dad and I agree to have a team. He does nothing except pick the team name (with which I am still saddled). I finish dead dog last. It cost me real money.

Year 2: I invite a blog-friend in. I finish tied for third. It costs me less money. Somehow, my dad gets talked into taking a team of his own. I try to help him on the phone. I try to help him in person, while we're on vacation. It's really frustrating. He finishes last.

Year 3: For some subconsciously masochistic reason, I agree to be the commissioner. I like being the commissioner in the blogleagues. This is not also true of the pay league. I also switch jobs mid-summer. Result: I finish out of the money by 1 point, I spend a lot of time I don't have entering changes for the league. Mostly though, I have my integrity questioned, am accused of using my commissioner "powers" to cheat and then have a huge fight with my brother. He tells me in the course of the fight that the guy who said I had cheated had done more for the people in the league than I would ever know. I decide to quit.

Year 4: I don't quit. I think (at the time) that I might get some love of the game back. Be easy, enjoy yourself. Today, again, my integrity is questioned because of a lopsided trade I agreed to. It was lopsided trade designed to help me next year.

But today, I keep thinking about baseball. And feeling sad. And wondering whether I should play or watch at all next year. Or the rest of this.

I can think of a few things that might help me feel better--the Ken Burns doc, some Roger Angell, some Stephen J. Gould. I'd say that I could go to a Rancho Cucamonga Quakes game, but we've had two actual earthquakes in the last three days and somehow I don't want to go to a stadium called the epicenter. Plus there's that whole--I don't like the Inland Empire much problem. My university's team is done for the year, so the *pling* of the aluminum bats can be no comfort now.

That's Bronson Arroyo, one of the guys I got in the lopsided trade. He's curently 6-5 with an ERA of 6.56. He's 6'5" and goes 195. I don't think he uses steroids. That's good, at least.

It's a beautiful game, baseball. I need to find out how to get back to its beauty.

The dirt's pretty. So's the ball. It's everything around it that's suspect.

Cue outro...

"Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio [or insert alt player, as needed]...?" I'd like some of the joy in Mudville back but am afraid there are too many strikes now.

The Bean in the Seat

2009-05-10T11:48:00.000-07:00

When I was little, my parents had a succession of cars with which they were largely unsatisfied. There was much lamentation about the sold VW Beetle--replaced by the unsatisfying AMC Rambler. They replaced the Beetle because I was born. The purchase of the Rambler was my fault. So was the collapse of AMC. You heard it here first.

The Rambler, in turn, was replaced by a VW 412 which overheated a lot. The VW was replaced by a Buick Electra Limited, a behemoth whose soft steering was my comfort as I was I learning to drive. Its landau top was forever the source of family drama because of the sparkler thrown onto it by my brother after an explicit warning not to throw sparklers.

I should note that this car lament/blame had a parallel in a story about the cat who died, because she was let out onto the busy street and run over. As I was weeks old at the time, it was not I (in the Electra) who ran her down. It was, nonetheless, my fault. I was said to be the source of her "freedom" because the African-American woman who helped my mother care for me as an infant had warned that cats will "suck the life out of babies." Thus, cat outside on busy road, and a bad end.

Anyway, back to the cars.

Got the sequence?

Gave way (because of me) to:

Which wasn't a good car, caused the downfall of AMC (my fault), and was replaced by:

Which overheated a lot. Did I mention that my brother and I didn't get along as children? Thusly, one of us had to ride in the "way back" over the overheating engine one summer on a trip from Atlanta to New England. I can still remember how hot I was. Hotbox was replaced by:

There were more cars later, including the unfortunate car that became my first (handed down from my mom) and therefore the subject of my early driver accidents...

Have you ever noticed that certain cars never make people wistful for the past? No one longs to have a fully restored 1980 Chevrolet Citation. And that is why GM is failing. You heard it here first.

Anyway...

Between the 412 and the Electra, my dad bought a used car, which he drove for six or nine months. My excellent internets-based sleuthing has led me to the conclusion that it was a mid-70s Toyota Corona. (I knew it was a Toyota, I knew approximately when we had it, and then I recognized it while looking at google images of mid-70s Toyotas. See how clever I am?!)

That Toyota--while otherwise an ordinary car--had one extraordinary feature to my school-age mind. The headrests of the front seats had openings into which the poles slid. They functioned fine and the headrests were firmly attached. Nevertheless, into one of these very small holes, someone had placed a dried bean.

Like that one in the middle there. I saw very clearly how the bean could have been inserted. Getting it out was another matter.

I could not, for the life of me, sort out how it might be extracted. I spent hours contemplating. I really wanted to figure it out. Then, my dad sold the car and the bean was gone from my life. I still thought of it occasionally for years. The problem I could not solve. The void filled with bean.

I thought about that bean today.

We spent yesterday with Teresa's parents and their three dogs and our two dogs. They have a small dog along with whom Biscuit does not get. (Did you follow that?) Anyway, Biscuit got into a fight with that dog and as a result, she smelled a little like the pee that dog emitted as a result of the fight. I should note that non-Biscuit dog started the fight and I later said, "Lulu wrote a check she couldn't cash." As a result of Lulu's check, Biscuit smelled like Lulu pee. Oh and chocolate chip cookies. She smelled like pee and chocolate chip cookies. We had a fresh chocolate chip cookie in the car on the way home (a result of a coupon at Black Angus. Don't ask). So my car smelled of dog, urine, and cookie.

I was taking Biscuit to get groomed this morning. I was traveling to a part of SoCal I generally avoid. Biscuit's groomer had moved from a store in the valley in which I live to another north of here. I programmed my Garmin Nüvi with the address and set out. When I arrived in far northern valley, I discovered that the store was on a new bit of road that wasn't known to the Nüvi. I got lost. I found myself staring at the Nüvi, which was showing my car in a blank space on the map.

It looked like that except there were no roads. I stopped the car and looked at it. The Nüvi said I was nowhere. And yet, I was somewhere.

The where was new space--not in a good sense, mind you. There I was driving down a new road lined with faux-Spanish facade built around all the expected national chain stores. Ex-urbs have no soul and may well be the reason for the bad economy. You heard that here first.

But Biscuit likes Harvey and Biscuit doesn't like many people and Harvey had moved to the PetSmart at the place unknown to the Nüvi.

All of a sudden, staring at my virtual car in a virtual wasteland, I thought of the bean. I also thought of my nine year old self staring at the bean, trying to get it out of the void.

Then I looked up. Away from the blank, away from the bean.

I found the store and took Biscuit inside.

(Why does Biscuit's hair cut cost twice as much as mine? Never mind, I know. It's because I don't nip and my hairdresser doesn't brush my teeth).

Normally, when I defy the Nüvi's directions, she says "recalculating" in a way I find judgmental. Today, as she tried to find her way through the blank space, I found her recalculations less judgmental and more bereft. She seemed (not that I'm anthropomorphizing AT ALL) relieved when I headed home.

When left to pick up Biscuit, I turned the Nüvi back on and directed her back to the blank space. Biscuit didn't smell like pee anymore. The blank space is now filled in my mind by the exubry stuff that's actually there.

I was listening to Carrie Newcomer as I descended back to the valley that is my home.

I'm the fool whose life's been spent.
Between what's said and what is meant

Or so she sang.

That bean is surely gone now. Dessicated enough to dry up and blow up and away from its void. Maybe it's still there. It's not a problem I need to solve.

So I will wander without fail
In circles that grow ever wide
The sky expands and then exhales...

When I arrived home, the Nüvi said, "arriving at home, on right." We both felt glad.

(Lyrics from The Geography of Light by Carrie Newcomer, "There is a Tree")

Two wheels (motorized division)

2009-03-01T02:35:00.000-08:00

For those of you who have read and still read my homages to randomness, you know that occasionally I lapse into discussion of bicycles. I am aware that no one but me wants to read these lapses. Yet I persist. It's a little like my current occasional behavior of defying the Garmin Nüvi. I just can't help myself.

See? My Gunnar Rockhound. Don't tell me to turn on Roscoe. I just won't do it.

Today, though, I am coming clean about a new two wheeled addition to my life.

Here it is surrounded by its non-motorized friends...

Introductions all around, shall we? In the back top, we have my newest bicycle, the Kona Dew Deluxe. It's not REALLY a hybrid if it has disc wheels, right? Underneath it (and mostly obscured) is Honey's Gary Fisher Tassajara. To the right on top it my (now sold) Surly Cross Check. We never quite got along. Below the Surly is my Gunnar. And in the center is my Kymco People 250. (Honey's Orbea Onix was inside at the time the picture was taken and her Honda Magna was in the shop--see explanation below).

There it is...

Let's go back a few years shall we?

When I was in graduate school, I decided to get a motorcycle. Why did I decide to do this? Well there were a few reasons. UCLA let you park one for free. UCLA didn't let you breathe for free. They also didn't let you park a car at all unless you lived in Amarillo and could prove your commute was too long by bus. So, parking a motorcycle in any number of highly convenient motorcycle lots (including one right behind the building my program was in) seemed fab.

Also Honey had one. I like doing what Honey does. She's my honey, after all.

Honey, being the independent sort that she is, had learned to ride her bike on her own, taken the DMV test on her own, and was all set. I'm not that adventurous. Instead, I decided to take the Motorcycle Foundation Safety course. It consisted of two in-class session that were a little like High School driving class. Taught by an older guy who said he never drove a car, they were a little boring, but ok otherwise.

The class also had two riding days. We rode little motorcycles in the parking lot of Pasadena Community College. I was the only woman and the instructor thought me pretty much incapable. Those two days were among the most stressful in my life. I can, right now, conjure my late 20s self standing at the trunk of my car, on a break, my legs trembling, eating some string cheese and a nutri-grain bar.

Somehow, despite his dislike of me, I passed. He wasn't done, though. His parting shot was, "do some of what you're doing out on the road and you'll get yourself killed."

Pedagogically, a very weak approach, I must say. I don't know WHAT I did wrong that was going to put me in danger, but I do remember the fear and humiliation.

Anyway, I got myself one of these:

It's an 84 Honda Nighthawk. I bought it in 95 or so. I rode it to UCLA for several years. Didn't get myself killed, obviously.

I sold it in 99 or so. I needed the money. I had stopped riding it once I finished my degree. I must say that I never quite got over the MSF guy's warning. I was relieved when a nice Air Force officer bought it from me.

I always regretted that Honey and I didn't ride more together. We did a long ride once and I was barely able to get through Malibu Canyon because of fear. She was fine. I'm scarred.

Honey kept her motorcycle and it sat in our garage for a long time, inoperable. Last summer, with gas at almost $5 a gallon in California, she decided to get it fixed. That's her story. My story, typically, is to follow along with Honey's enthusiasms. No motorcycle, though. Not this time.

I wanted a scooter. Cute, fun, feet flat. Automatic. A Vespa. I'd wanted a scooter for years. I remember checking the alternative weekly in Washington when I lived there for one to buy. Didn't have to be a Vespa. Any decent scooter would do. It was going to be different this time. I was going to be different this time.

So, I investigated. Discovered that there were, essentially, four types of scooter manufacturers:

Italian: Vespa, Piaggio, Aprilia. Uber-cool, super-expensive, and probably out of my league.

Japanese: Some of the usual suspects, Honda, Kawasaki, etc. Moderately priced. Not a lot of choices.

Taiwanese: Lots of choices, decent reputations, brands I hadn't heard of: Kymco, Sym, Genuine

Chinese: I gather to be avoided.

I ran into a problem. I wasn't the only one who thought to buy a scooter last summer with gas the way it was. Quelle surprise. Finding a scooter in a showroom was hard. Verging on impossible.

What you could get was a 50cc.

That Nighthawk? It was a 700cc.

50s are great for gas mileage. They'll get 80-100mpg. They also only get up to about 30 miles per hour. I test rode one. I really liked its looks.

I was a total freak about riding it. Nervous and tense. Once I got going, though, I remembered. What to do. Where to look. How to use my hands and feet.

I might have bought it right on the spot, but for the 50cc thing. And Teresa calming me down. Bless her heart.

Most scooter manufacturers make a 150cc. Yamaha 150s would be available in October (this was July/August). Vespas could be sooner, but they cost $5000+. Genuine Buddies were too small. The world seemed to be tilting toward a Kymco. The Kymco dealer was getting some Agility 125s in.

I haunted craigslist and ebay. The same scooter popped up on both down in Orange County. It was a 250cc, which seemed better for hauling my ass around. I talked to the guy and made arrangements to come see it. I even bought a helmet. I brought some mountain bike gloves. I got out cash. Carrying around a lot of cash makes me nervous. So does buying motor vehicles.

Teresa and I agreed that it would be better not to take it on the freeway. Getting from Orange County to Los Angeles County without using the freeway is not easy. I think it took about three hours.

By the time we pulled into the scooter dealer (it needed service), I was exhausted. I was also pretty sure I had made a good decision. It ran well, fit me nicely, and it was fun.

I ride it a couple of times a week, at least.

Sometimes, I act like a goober and stick my knee out when I turn. Mostly, though, I just ride it. Sitting up straight. Following all the laws. I never split lanes. I always wear the gear (jacket, full-face helmet, armored gloves). Gas costs $2 a gallon just now. It cost me $3.11 to fill up the People last week.

Honey and I have ridden a couple of times together. We'll ride some more, I'm sure. Maybe not Malibu Canyon. Maybe to the movies again.

Vroom.

"Saved" from a seed

2009-02-16T05:04:00.000-08:00

So, Treecup has got herself a new passion. It's great for her. She looks good, feels good, has normal blood sugar. Sly describes himself as "raw adjacent" and I feel adjacent to the adjacent. On Saturday they were kind enough to invite us to their club, which I heart. After working out we went to a large chain restaurant, and Treecup had cooked vegan food to be social. It's perfectly normal to go work out and then go eat chain restaurant food, right?

Once we reconvened at their house, I wandered into the kitchen to explore the raw zone she's created. I was being my usual forward self and smelling tubs of stuff and being perhaps more disparaging than I ought. Treecup offered up "cheese" on a "cracker." Sly says that her food has entirely too many quotes. The "cheese" was made of cashews and was a rough approximation of cheese. Like, if we were in the cheese ballpark and cheddar was playing first base, this was in an obstructed view seat in the upper upper deck. Take me out to the ball game, take me out with the crowd, buy me some (raw) peanuts and cracker flax...

Anyway, if the cheese was in the cheese bleachers, the "cracker" was maybe standing on the street waiting outside cracker stadium to catch a long ball hit by a saltine. When Teresa asked how the seeds could be made to form a "cracker" Treecup informed us that, when soaked, flax seeds exude a semi gelatinous substance and then can be made into cracker shapes. Handy. (See, there I go again being more disparaging than I ought. Still, I have anti-flax seed feelings just at the moment).

We departed soon after our raw experience. (I should note that I demurred for us when Treecup offered up a viewing of her new raw dvd). She claims it very inspirational and I think we may need to watch it next time.

Anyway, I kept pulling flax seeds out from my teeth with my tongue. One of them got lodged in my windpipe just as I was steering the FJ onto the 10. (Non-SoCal note: Socalies use the definate article when referring to freeways. I've lived here long enough that I do it too. "The 10" = "Interstate 10" which stretches from Santa Monica to Jacksonville, Florida. It's 2460 miles long, which makes it longer by 270 miles or so than my high school distance. I can code-switch well enough that when I go to Atlanta I switch back to "I-75"). So, there I was getting on the freeway and needing to merge onto "the 57" (aka California 57, which runs from Glendora to the Orange Crush for a distance of almost 24 miles) and I'm choking on this flax seed. Coughing with watering eyes choking. It persists all the way up the 57 until I merged onto "the 210" (aka California 210/I-210 which runs from San Fernando to Redlands for a distance of 86 miles, it swiches from I-210 to CA-210 at the 57). Choking and coughing so hard, I'm hoping not to vomit choking.

Honey was very supportive during my coughing episode. She offered my some tepid lemonade and offered to drive. She also refrained from saying disparaging things about my Garmin nüvi, which was telling me to do things vis à vis the freeways. Teresa vacillates between thinking the Nüvi is rude and thinking it might lose the will to live. She doesn't like that it interrupts her (which it does) or that I defy it (which I thoroughly enjoy doing ). I agree wholeheartedly with my co-worker who says that all Nüvis (she has one, too) are "judgemental" when they say "recalculating" after you've defied their direction.

As I merged onto the 210, I finally stopped coughing. I noticed at that very moment a Dodge station wagon (of the modern magnum/charger variety) that had a brown body and bright orange expensive looking rims. It also had sepia tinted pictures painted across its sides. Of Jesus. Both sides. Sepia Jesus on a Chrysler product.

WHY I stopped coughing is up to debate. Some possibilities:

Chance?

The 210?

The biological dislodging of the flax seed from my windpipe?

The shock of the sight of the car?

Divine intervention?

Very hard to say. Maybe if I had watched the raw dvd I'd know better.

Cracker flax, know thine enemy.

Mallomars

2009-02-02T14:04:00.000-08:00

Essentially lifted from Facebook...

I was doing one of those 25 things things. I never do memes on the blog, why I did one on Facebook, well, I dunno. I have NOT done any of the follow-up memes. 48 things, etc.

Anyway, here was things #23: I once got "stranded" on a rock in the former Yugoslavia (when it was still Yugoslavia). My friends and I made our way into town and I bought and ate some mallomars. They tasted better than any cookie ever had before or since.

___________________________________________________________________________________

A friend asked for more info on what had happened. Here's my response. I should note that I have now corrected my spelling of the cookie in question. It's Mallomar. I'm going to maintain that it should have a w, but acknowledge that it doesn't.

My response:

In the late 1980s, I traveled with friends from Italy, up through Austria, and down into Yugoslavia. The train to Zagreb was fine, the train from Zagreb to Split was not.

Once we arrived in Split, we explored the city and decided to take a ferry one day to Hvar, an island off the coast. We were the only Americans, probably the only English speakers, and certainly the youngest people of the ferry. The ferry arrived at a rock. It opened itself up and we got off. Everyone else drove off in cars or was picked up. The ferry closed and started back to Split. There we were standing on the rock.

There was NOTHING there. Alone.

Off in what looked like an impossible distance to travel was a town. We climbed up the road and down into the town (it wasn't actually very far). It turned out to be a pleasant resort town, largely closed for the winter (it was March). We wandered around, found a small grocery store. I bought the best Mallomars ever. When we saw the ferry headed back toward us, we walked back to the rock.

In our exploration of the town, we found a path along the harbor that got us back to the rock without having the climb the road/hill. We arrived as the ferry did and boarded it back to Split.

That night we had goulash, and the following night we took the overnight ferry to Bari.

It was that moment on the rock. I wanted to jump in the Adriatic and swim down the ferry.

That and the Mallomars.

2191 miles

2009-01-30T12:53:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday afternoon I asked my boss if I could take my half-day of "informal time off" the governor gave us on Christmas Eve. She readily agreed, as the beginning of the semester can be stressful. I didn't actually extract myself until almost 3pm, so I later got an e-mail from her ordering me to take another half day off soon. Have I mentioned how much I like working for her? I do, indeed.

Anyway, I was chilling (really heating) at the spa after my "service" and got to thinking about Facebook.

Honey and I had been to this self-same spa the previous Saturday. (No treatment, just soaking--should I mention we got gift certificates for Christmas? I'm all for keeping the economy going, but this is a lot of spa time). Anyway, Honey noticed that a woman was sitting behind us on a rather hard uncomfortable bench while eating a banana. We were changing. Not ten feet away was a padded bench next to a fountain. Honey decided (and I think she's right) that this woman had achieved true spa mindstate. Eating her banana on a hard bench while people changed clothes. Directly behind their butts. One might also use the word fugue.

I am never able to achieve that mindstate.

Which is why I was thinking about Facebook at the spa. Given some of the other stuff that has been going on in my life, I was actually doing pretty well thinking about Facebook.

I was also thinking about how much my steam rooom skill has increased.

First encounter with a steamroom=pretty much total I'm drowning in eucalyptus water panic. Now--I can be in there for a long time. Not as long as Treecup can get beaten up by jacuzzi jets, but a long time for me. Growth comes how it does.

I had resisted Facebook. My brother likes it. He has a lot of friends on it. It seemed like something he did.

Then, last spring I was standing around on REALLY hard marble at my dissertation advisor's retirement party. Why does marble hurt to stand on so much? Anyway, a bunch of people were talking about Facebook and how they had a Facebook group and and and.

So I signed up. Which was fine. I was friended by some people from grad school. Then Honey signed up. Then a couple of blog friends who know my name found me. Ok. I also friended my brother and sister-in-law. See how enlightened I can be?

Ok, so some colleagues from work found me. Also fine/good. One of them suggests a lot of things to me. Also ok. He's like that and he's a good guy. I don't have to TAKE his suggestions, if I don't want to. Plus, he also friended T, despite never having met her and he sends her almost as many suggestions. In that sense, I confirm that it's his approach to Facebook and I don't feel either special or put upon.

Anyway, then I found a high school friend. We had been in and out of touch, but I figured I'd poke her. All of a sudden (and it was probably not a result of my friending her), a BUNCH of H.S. people started friending me and each other. I agreed to all requests, but didn't initiate any. Recently, I looked over my friend list (which isn't long) and my "people you may know" list and it's 75% high school.

I live 2191 miles from my high school (and yes, I did just look it up). I didn't like high school very much. I have exactly ONE person on my Facebook friend list from college. I loved college.

The presence of people from more recent periods in my life is more easily explained. But the high school to college ratio is puzzling to me.

The thing is, the high school folks mostly seem like the kind of people I might like now. Funny, down-to-earth, liberal, interesting and engaged with the kinds of things I care about.

I am going to "unfriend" one of them--though I haven't decided how confrontational to be about it--who affiliated himself with the American Family Association yesterday.

It's odd, actually, to think so much about high school now. It's more than 2191 miles away in time. I'm glad to be through and past it. Don't much want to look at pictures of myself from it.

Having a good relationship to my past self is not always easy for me. Hell, having a good relationship to my present self isn't all that easy, either...

I was also thinking this week about a friend I used to have right after college. He called me a few months ago and assumed that I had caller id on my home phone. I didn't and cannot find him. I've tried and recently got an e-mail about him as a result of my search that suggested his life has been very hard. It brought me no closer to him and has made me very sad.

I can only do the best I can. Sometimes that means looking at pictures of myself in ugly shorts and thinking about high school without being freaked out. Sometimes it means staying a little longer in the steam room.

2191 miles traveled. Or more. A lot more.

(BTW, is any blog readers want to "friend me," send me an e-mail sporksforall at gmail dot com and I'll friend you up, yo).

Business Balloon Sunday Pinch Hitter

2009-01-24T08:00:00.000-08:00

Business Balloon note: The ephemeral nature of business balloon will out. eb took her blog down and with it all the balloons. I've removed the links, but trust and believe that the baloons were there once, both interneterally and corporeally. Where there once were links and, therefore, balloons, I've italicized. Feel the loss with every italics.

The guvment of Houston Texas has let the people of America down. eb brought me such joy. Almost every week.

eb paid tribute to our wedding

Teresa and I even helped out

Then there was the 40th birthday tribute (complete with Elizabeth Mitchell--contented sigh)

2008 was a good year. It had lots of business balloons. (Other things happened, too, of course).

Then Houston went and messed things up

Here's the thing though, what Texas does wrong, Hawaii can help fix. See we just got rid of the semi-Texas doofus in the White House. Got ourselves a nice Hawaiian fellow in return. Aloha and mahalo.

So, here's my contribution, straight out of Hilo.

Did I mention that this balloon was clean and accessible up close? It sure was.

I love me some Hawaii. Happy ballooning my blog-ohana.

Sporks and Sporksforall--A Conversation

2008-12-30T08:56:00.000-08:00

Sporks: Hey blog, how are you?

Sporksforall: Sporks! WTF, woman? Where've you been? I'm good.

Sporks: Oh, really sorry about the inattention, blog. Thanks for just hanging out. Been kinda busy, you know. New job.

Sporksforall: Wow, Sporks. You're a Dean?

Sporks: Actually, no. See that sentence toward the middle: "Most have several assistant or associate deans as well (such as an associate dean of academics or an associate dean of students)." That's me. Associate Dean Sporks.

Sporksforall: Pretty cool. Takes up a lot of time, does it?

Sporks: Yep. What have you been up to?

Sporksforall: Oh, mostly handling random searches on rancid oil. One cool thing you know about, though. You know our picture of the nene foot? It's going to be exhibited at the University of Hawai'i, Manoa. Best nene foot picture ever. It's also the top hit when you search nene foot on Google. Pretty awesome.

Sporks: Yep that is superveryawesome. I'm going to get to see it. Teresa and I are back to Hawai'i later this week.

Sporksforall: Which islands?

Sporks: Same as last time, Hawai'i and O'ahu. Going to miss the Obamas, though. Fine with me actually, as I'm mighty irritated (ok, royally pissed) about the Rick Warren thing.

Sporksforall: Yep, pretty awful. Hey, so with all this going on--the Associate Deaning and the trip to Hawai'i--what are you doing chatting with me?

Sporks: Oh, well, I have a few days between a trip to Atlanta and the one to Hawai'i where the Uni is closed. First downtime in months. Figured I'd just check in.

Sporksforall: Ah. You been up to anything in the downtime?

Sporks: Organizing, actually. I know, I know, not usually my forté. The new job has made me appreciate a little organization, though.

Sporksforall: I see. What did you organize, then?

Sporks: Glad you asked. First up (yesterday) was the bathroom. See, I had gone to L'Occitane for a little hand lotion and on the way home, it occurred to me that I should survey my ablutions. I couldn't survey my ablutions without also going through the other items in the nightmare that was the bathroom cabinet. Want to see the results?

Sporksforall: Sure.

That's the L'Occitane lotion in the silver tube. Here's a close-up of the lotion/hair/tooth shelf.

Pretty nice, huh?

Sporksforall: Yes, because I saw the before on that, and whew.

Sporks: I know. Emboldened by my success, when Teresa and I went out last night to Target, I bought two shoes hanging things for my closet. They're AMAZING!

Sporksforall: Really, you're going to talk about hanging shoe things as if no one ever used or thought of them before? Really? Look on ebay. They have ones from before you were born.

Sporks: Whatever. You want to look? Seriously, look!

Sporksforall: I admit it looks nice, but come on, it's not like you're the first to discover closet organization. I mean, The Container Store has been around for a while, now. Remember when you went to it before going off to college? That was a WHILE ago.

Sporks: Ok, ok, I know. But it's like the woman I heard on NPR the other day talking about how she had discovered how centrifugal force works. Just because someone else discovered it before she did, doesn't mean she didn't also discover it. Do you see how happy that woman on the main page of the Container Store website looks? She's feeling what I'm feeling.

Sporksforall: Ya huh.

Sporks: Oh, hey, you know what I got at REI last night? It's not organization-related...

Sporksforall: What?

Sporks: A new spork! It's made of aircraft alloy and has a darling little carabiner.

Sporksforall: Nice. Hey--what's the red spot on the package?

Sporks: Blood. I cut my hand trying to get the cute little carabiner off the package. But, guess what? I managed to fix myself up really quickly and efficiently. Wanna see how?

The first aid shelf!

Sporksforall: Ok, ok, good for you. You got yourself all set up.

Sporks: Well, not really. The worst job I saved for last.

Sporksforall: That's pretty horrifying. Maybe you should get back to work.

Sporks: In due time, in due time. I should probably go now--there's something productive to be done.

Sporksforall: Ok, thanks for checking in. Hope to see you soon.

Sporks: 2009 will be a better blogging year, I think. Now that my shoes have slots of their own, I'll have all kinds of time. Take care.

Sporksforall: You too. Hey, want to talk more about rancid oil?

Sporks: Probably not.

Sporksforall: Oh well, just trying to work from strength to strength.

Sporks: Yep. Let's work on nene feet more then.

Sporksforall: Sounds like a plan.

____________________________________________________________________

Sporks: Psst, Sporksforall--want to see the after?

Sporksforall: (Sigh) Sure.

Hey, that is pretty good.

Sporks: Thanks. Oh, and a tip (we should all channel our inner-weese every so often...) keep your extra bicycle tubes inside (lower left). They'll last longer if the temperature is more controlled.

Sporksforall: I'd care about that if I had the ability to ride a bicycle.

Really? A grocery store? Yep.

2008-11-02T15:34:00.000-08:00

So, it's been a bit. And I got married. And I have a new job which is interim and I'm hoping will be permanent in a couple of months. It's really hard and I work a lot and am tired a lot.

Also, We got our yard done and lots of work on the interior of the house. Did I mention we got married? Oh, and then there's that whole election bidness in a couple of days. No on 8, k?

But, friends, I'm here for a short while today to speak about a grocery store. Yes sir. Yes ma'am. All those other things, they take time and thought and care. This is just about happy in the 'hood.

I'm not the first to notice. Sandra Tsing Loh, who I would probably follow into the fiery pits of hell should she ask, noticed. Twice.

I don't know where Loh lives in the part of the Valley she refers to as "The Nuys" to give it new cache. But I'm close to Fresh and Easy. Remarkably close.

Today, my spouse slash wife (of two weeks) slash partner (of fourteen years) and I went there. Oh it is a bright place. With Jam. And chips that taste like Doritos. Except, and here is the clincher, they're SPINACH and ARTICHOKE kinda-Doritos. Maybe I should have told you to sit down before I told you that.

It occupies a space that used to be a Ralphs. Not a good Ralphs. just a ralphs. It's not any longer. Soy milk. Fresh fruit. Teeny pies.

It may not be love, but color me intrigued.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...

Fresh and Easy

It's a neighborhood market. In my neighborhood. My my.

Hugs and kisses and lots of foons,

Sporks.

The Elusiveness of Invincibility

2008-07-22T14:13:00.000-07:00

As I sat down to write this post Biscuit threw up in the other room. It was the yellow frothy kind of dog vomit. Many years ago, when I had just taken "companionship" of my first dog (as an adult) an older friend assured me that, "yellow frothy dog vomit wasn't anything to worry about." While that may be true in the abstract, I could have lived without it tonight.

I've been away from the blog for a while, though my sporks-based Wall-E review has kept sporksforall humming along. Very much like Wall-E himself.

I don't know if I'll return to faithful blogging through aught eight. I want to, but life gets in the way of sporks.

I've started a new (interim-again!) job as of two days ago. Four years ago when my boss hired me to be the interim thing that I'm now the permanent thing, I got sick. So sick that during the networking event with the University President, I stayed in my hotel room at the Marriott with fever and chills.

This year we did our slog/sling through the South early. I came back and have managed to get a massive cold (including fever and chills) and a nice case of laryngitis. Did I mention that my new job requires talking? It does. And I just don't sound right

I mentioned to my boss that I had been sick the last time she gave me an interim job. She said, "I remember. Maybe this job change thing is more stressful than you think." Could be, indeed. Also stressful is travel. And bombardment.

My favorite day of the "sling" is always the day Honey and I escape to the closest Spanish Moss draped city. Our usual escape is Charleston, but this year we went to Savannah.

As my few (and loyal!) readers know, I like me a National Park and will take a National Monument in a pinch. Thus, did I drag Honey to Fort Pulaski on Tybee Island.

Not brushed up on the Civil War of late? Here's what happened. Fort Pulaski was started in 1829 to protect Savannah. (Tybee Island is 15 miles from Savannah). Savannah has always been an important port/city to Georgia and is one of the oldest cities in the Southeast. Note, please, that its importance is in no way related to Paula Dean.

Anyway, this being the 19th century and engineering being what it was, not to mention it's bloody hot in the South in the summer, they didn't so much finish the damn thing by 1860. South Carolina (a mere fifty miles away) seceded from the Union in January of 1861. Georgia followed suit and the governor ordered the occupation of the fort. The state then gave it the Confederacy. How kind. Lessee--"we'll take this from the gumment (that's how you say it) and give it to this other gumment. Yep."

Righto, so in April of 1861, the War starts in earnest (you knew that right? April 1861 to April 1865) and the Naval blockade of Southern ports began.

Here's the thing about Pulaski. The folks who built it: they thought it was invincible.

By November 1861, the Federals were encamped at Hilton Head and the Confederates got worried about that and abandoned land forces on Tybee EXCEPT for those at Pulaski. Whoopsie.

The Federals marched onto Tybee. The Confederates in Pulaski though they were safe. The guns of the day only went a mile and Pulaski is more than a mile from Tybee. The Union fellows, though, they had this new gun. Those Federals, always with the new guns. Must have been that industry infrastructure. They shot up the fort. Seemed like they might get to the powder magazine. 30 hours into the siege of the invincible fort, the Confederates surrendered.

The National Park Service notes, "Today the fort serves not only as a memorial to the valor and dedication of those connected with its construction, bombardment, and defense, but in a larger sense as a history lesson on the elusiveness of invincibility."

I hope you can see that I get it. Not invincible.

I did survive that week and may yet survive my cold, my laryngitis, my new job, and my own vulnerabilities. I am certain, though, as certain as I can be, that invincibility eludes me. And I've never run very fast. Mofo needs to slow down and shows no sign of it.

Spork review: Wall-E

2008-06-29T15:33:00.000-07:00

Ok, I won't effuse too much, but the first 30-45 minutes of Wall-E (and I think this despite the-really-full-of-kids-who-didn't-get-that-they-were-watching-a-silent-film theater) was some of the best filmmaking I've ever seen. So, go see the movie.

I need to take a moment to do a special shout-out. The movie featured one of the best EVER scenes featuring a spork:

Wall-E collects things he finds interesting and takes them back to his "house." He finds a spork. When he goes to put it away, he has a collection of spoons on the right and a collection of forks on the left. After puzzling for a second, he places the spork between the forks and the spoons with great reverence.

Sporks deserve their own place and it should be special.

This maxim is NOT true of foons.

Mapping the void

2008-06-15T02:52:00.000-07:00

It's been such a long time since I wrote a post that my browser didn't autofill my blog address. I guess it can be said that sporksforall exists on its own without care from me, but my Google Analytics reports seem to suggest that it exists in such a state as to prompt a series of empty-answered philosophical question about whether something that doesn't get looked at has any meaning at all.

Word to the visitor from Midvale, Utah who spent .56 of a second on the site. I don't think my mouse clicks that fast.

Actually, to be fair, that seems to be the minimum unit of time Google Analytics calculates, so my Midvale, UT readership exactly matches my Decorah, IA and Fayetteville, NC readership. Also Arlington, VT. S'up y'all?

I shouldn't complain, I suppose. Someone from Riga, Latvia has spent more than four minutes learning about sporks or nene or something. And I'm hoping the one minute nineteen second someone from Male in the Maldives was deeply meaningful to them. Sporksforall--perhaps now meaningful in the Maldives!

The map on Google Analytics is my favorite feature. The numbers are depressing and what I get hits on focuses more than I want it to on elephant seals and their Latin name. The map, though, gives these nice green emphases to people in their offices or on their laptops coming my way.

I heard recently about this thing the new iphone does called "document cloud" wherein one floats documents in the ether to be retrieved as needed. I pictured (as I think I was supposed to) floating excel spreadsheets--transparent and ephemeral--gently bouncing along at chest height.

The Google Map, on the other hand, makes me think of all those people in real space finding their way to me. California is dark green. I'm most "popular" there. Some states that are medium green I can explain (I have blog friends there, I said nice things about Miss Washington, etc.) Others puzzle me. I might explain away Nevada's darker green color by physical proximity, but New Mexico is pure white (meaning no folks from Truth or Consequences--or anywhere else in our 47th state--have visited my blog at all). I should note, by the by, that I typed in New Mexico's 47th place in their joining of the union and then confirmed I was right (which I was). January 16, 1912 was when it became a state.

Anyway, my lack of readership MIGHT be explained by New Mexicans still being mad because I didn't initially understand that I actually had to surrender the hideous chili pepper wreath at the agricultural station. I had bought it in a moment of irony, I swear. I also gave it up willingly, and am still glad I did. Irony stops being ironic at a certain point, after all.

Hey Germany, how is it that Google thinks you are UNDER 0 seconds as an average time on the site? Negative time visits seem so, well, contrary, not to mention improbable. I took "German for Graduate Students" while I was doing my PhD. What more do you want from me. Bring it UP to 0, ok?

Anyway, wherever I go, you'll find me here.

Yoqua

2008-05-31T13:28:00.000-07:00

Ok, so more than one person has recommended yoga to me.

My buddy Shannon even has gone and gotten herself certified and everything to teach it. Dallas readers? Look her up, yo.

Anyway, Associate Professor (with tenure!) Treecup and her family belong this fabulous place out where they live that's kind of half spa half really nice gym.

Honey and I went with Treecup and child a few weeks ago and as we were walking out, we picked up the fitness class schedule and noticed that Saturday morning they offered a class called "yoqua." We all assumed it was yoga in the water and talked about our coming out to try it out one weekend. Treecup and family live about 45 miles away from us, which is no small jaunt when you're trying to get to a 9am Saturday morning class.

We had plans to go this morning that looked in danger of getting derailed because Honey has a cold. Treecup suggested that she and I go and check it out sans partners.

I got up really early this morning and picked her up in time to make it to "yoqua." I'm working up to feeling comfortable enough to try actual yoga and I figured I would try it in the water first. I'm fairly buoyant.

It turned out that the yoqua instructor had quit and not taught anyone how to teach it before she did so. We got "aqua fit" instead. We were the youngest people in the class and neither one of knew that the default fashion accessory was a visor and very large sunglasses.

For an hour we sort of jumped around in the water. It was fun and I liked our chatty instructor, though her chattiness was, to me at least, an indication of how not aerobically challenging this class was. I should also note that there was no yoga centering or anything what with the Katrina and the Waves we were jogging in the water to. "Heels down, ladies!"

Afterwards we spent some time in the jacuzzi. I am a little sunburned, so maybe I shouldn't be so quick to judge the bevisored.

We did some cardio, had nice spa-like showers, and then went to lunch. In other words, a very nice day, but I'm no closer than I was yesterday to yo/qu/ga.

Om.

Woo hoo

2008-05-24T05:20:00.000-07:00

I got tenure.

What you get

2008-05-12T15:35:00.000-07:00

I've lately been hankering for an iPhone. My current cell contract is up July 19th, not that I've got it down to the day or anything. I'd like to keep my number and not pay an early termination fee, so I have not yet gotten an iPhone. Still, I keep saying things to Honey like, "an iPhone will save my life." A colleague at work has one and today I was sitting next to her in a meeting just staring at it. I think it winked at me.

Yesterday, Honey wanted to shop for clothes. I do not like shopping for clothes. At all. Not even a little. Even for clothes for someone else. While she was shopping for clothes, I tried to occupy myself. I first went to the Sharper Image going out of business sale. To say that they were picked over three days from the end of their existence is an understatement. Fixtures and gift boxes and Star Wars poker sets and some REALLY large binoculars sat around in a store that was filled with despondent looking retail clerks for whom I felt sorry.

I then wandered into Body Shop, where I discovered that they have again decided to break my heart and discontinue the bath gel I love the scent of. The world of retail has littered my life with products that I can't live without only to then require me to live without them. Oceanus joins Coke Blak and original Fresca and Nike Long Ball Slip Ons and...

I bought some Ocean Lilly and can say definitively that it is not the same.

Finally, rather than shuffle into Old Navy and act despondent while Honey tried on clothes (though that would certainly come later), I walked into the Apple store. Oh, it is a bright and shiny place. Not in the Hemingway sense. In the bright and shiny and lovely sense. I looked at the MacBook Air. I wished (yet again) I had waited to buy my iMac until after the silver ones came out.

Finally, as if pulled by some unseen force, I found myself playing with an iPhone. Then, feeling strong and brave, I put it down and walked away. As I walked back over to the iMacs, I thought I'd mess with them a little. And, lo, there was a new product about which I did not know. It was a new Apple keyboard. It was silver and had no tiny crevasses in which bagel crumbs might lurk or lodge. It has pleasing slightly offwhite keys. And they clacked satisfyingly as I typed. I turned without another thought and picked one up. As I headed to the counter to pay, a bright and shiny Apple employee asked if I needed anything else. Did I ask him about an iPhone? I may have. Was I a little relieved when he said that they were sold out? I may have been.

As I finally shuffled (perhaps a little less despondently) into Old Navy to find Honey, I clutched my new keyboard in my hand like a beacon. And tonight, as I type on it, I can say that sometimes what you get is ok. July 19th will come. In the meantime, I have clacking. It's unlikely to save my life, but it's still pleasing.

Those dark mirrors

2008-05-08T10:40:00.000-07:00

I've never been a big fan of Paul. You know Paul, right? The guy who wrote all those letters. The ones in the Bible? That Paul.

Despite my general distrust of him, I always liked this painting depicting him.

That's Caravaggio's The Conversion of St. Paul which hangs in a small chapel in the back of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome. I'm a little bit of a freaky fan of Caravaggio. He's always seemed, well, funny to me. Don't you just get the sense the the horse is looking at Paul like, "What the hell are you doing on the ground? You know I poop down there, right?"

I spent a semester in college in Rome and wandered around from church to church with my very worn Michelin guide to the city. Always a bit of a completest, I saw every Caravaggio in the city. It wasn't a singular obsession, I also saw every Borromini church in the city.

That's St. Ivo della Sapienza. I like how wavy it is.

Anyway, back to Paul. I don't much like to say what he has to say about women, among other things. I should note that I come by my dislike of him perhaps somewhat organically. An ancestor of mine was so enraged (relatively late in his life) about the Pauline perspective that he resigned his ordination to the ministry and began writing books trying to debunk the various epistles written by Paul as heretical. The demand to publish these tracts was rather small, as you might expect. So, he opened up a vanity press to publish them himself and kept it going with others' projects of the same type.

Despite my dislike of Paul, I've always liked one verse. Really, half of one verse.

"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face." That's 1st Corinthians 13:12, if you want to know.

That was the King James version. Here's the New International version:

"Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face."

Same basic idea, though the "through a glass darkly" is the bit I like the best.

I've always connected it to the Platonic allegory of the cave.

"Behold! human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets."

The difference, really, is that Paul makes promises. He suggests that at some point, we will see clearly. Which gets me back to not liking Paul--how can I believe in the clarity when the rest of it seems so suspect?

So, art, ancestors, philosophy, and religion aside, what's my point?

I don't like how what sometimes goes on in my head seems disconnected from reality. I keep trying to turn my head to see what's reflected, but it's always just out of view.

The consequences of rancid oil

2008-05-04T01:26:00.000-07:00

Last night I made us dinner while Honey vacuumed. There is a freedom in the detached ranch that we never had in the apartment. Vacuum anytime, night or day. It's not a freedom I treasure or think about much, but it is a freedom.

I made us chicken curry and rice. For some reason, the smell of the curry didn't appeal to me. Honey tasted it and pronounced it fine, but I decided to doctor up mine with some soy souce and chili oil.

I was munching on my warmed up flatbread, which was tasty, and began to eat the rice and pieces of the chicken. The chicken still tasted off to me and then it dawned on me that the chili oil was rancid.

Rancid is a very unappealing word. Also an unappealing oil condition.

I stopped eating and for the rest of the evening felt a little (as my grandmother would have said), "puny."

I went to bed early. When I woke up this morning, I felt compelled to brush my teeth again immediately.

I sleep with ear plugs in to keep dog noises out of my head when I sleep. I don't like ear plugs, but there they were, all blue and squishy and shoved in my ear. I started to brush my teeth.

Brushing my teeth with an electric toothbrush and ear plugs rates as one of the oddest sensations I have ever experienced. So odd I had to come blog about it. It made my head feel as if it were vibrating independently of my body and might just float away.

The magical head vibration was a totally unexpected consequence of eating rancid oil. Who knew? Not that I'm going to repeat the chain of events, but I may just brush my teeth with ear plugs in on occasion when I need to slightly realign how my head and body fit together.

What's left over

2008-04-27T11:42:00.000-07:00

OK, fair warning...

This post is about poop and pee. Really. So, if that's going to gross you out, may I suggest pineapples or nene? Those posts don't involve poop at all and are escapist besides. Imagine yourself in Hawaii. See, isn't that nice?

For those of you who are ready for poop, here we go:

As I have pointed out on more occasions than most people would ever want to hear, we have too many pets. It's not that any one of them makes for "too much." Rather, all sixteen paws add up to more paws than our four feet can manage.

Let's have a roll call, ok?

Calif?

Ah, there she is. 14 years of fussy but sweet kitty.

Halo?

Oh, look Halo brought her meerkat lovah, in somewhat the same way that Dawn Denbo brought her lover Cindy everywhere on The L Word this season. Actually, it's not really the same. Halo and the Meerkat only had the one tryst and it was documented on my trusty Rebel. Halo is going on six and is a svelte six pounds.

Biscuit? Scout?

We've been calling Biscuit "cockerdome" recently because the last time I got her groomed (really, shaved down, but it makes me feel better to have spent $50 on something called grooming than on something called shaving), I asked that the groomer to leave the top of her head alone. I wanted it left alone because it sometimes can be formed into a forelock that makes Biscuit look like a member of Spandau Ballet. We may have sung (in her "voice") "True" a few times.

Doesn't she kind of look like the guy on the left?

Anyway, the groomer said, "oh, you want me to leave the cocker dome." Thus, Biscuit has become "cockerdome." We may have noted on an occasion or two that she is "beyond cockerdome." Ok, that was my only Mel Gibson reference, I promise. Biscuit is four.

Scout, the most junior member of the quadrapeds, is going on two. He still has a touch of puppy mange and is one of the sweetest dogs I've ever been around.

So everyone is accounted for. Lovely.

Lately Calif has cemented her status as "pet most likely to put waste in inappropriate places." We have one rug that gets washed with so much frequency that the washer must really feel bonded to it. Whether this plot loss is a function of senility, spite, or some combination of both can only be known by the Calif litterbox committee of one.

A few weeks ago I was wearing my slippers and Biscuit came up and started to gently remove something from the bottom of the sole. When I jerked my foot away from her, I noticed a dried piece of cat poop. I had cleaned some up earlier in the day, but must have missed this one (by conveniently stepping on it and fusing it to my slipper). I immediately threw those slippers away. It wasn't a great loss. Still.

Biscuit manages to absent herself appropriately, but her devotion to cat poop as a snack may exceed her devotion to the squeaky football. We call it almond roca. Did I ruin almond roca for you just now? Sorry.

Halo mostly does as she should litterbox-wise, her destructive tendencies are more claw than waste based, so I need to give her some props. Ha-lo. Ha-lo.

All of this brings us to Scout. We were out-of-town last week and Scout and Biscuit went to "dog camp." When Honey brought them home last Saturday, he ran into the house and lifted his leg and peed on the side of the couch. Since then he's peed on the kitchen trashcan twice, my bathroom rug once, and I stopped him from peeing on one of the chairs in the living room. All this from a dog we got housebroken in two days. We've got theories (adolescent male dogness, a bladder infection, kennel-based psychosis, and inaccessibility of preferred backyard pee spots because of yard overgrowth). Whatever the cause, he's making me unhappy.

Last weekend, while doing yard work in the aforementioned overgrown backyard, I found poopland. I shoveled and shoveled. There were hundreds of poops that had previously been obscured by the overgrowth.

All of these pet waste issues compound my frustration over the continued, but not catastrophic, malfunction of our champion toilet.

It won't stop running. When your champion toilet isn't functioning like a champion, it may be emblematic of a larger problem.

There are no simple solutions to managing waste. Therefore, I suppose that my wish for everyone is that your waste management goes smoothly. In the meantime, if you're looking for me, I'm probably washing rugs, coaxing a toilet into stopping, or frolicking in poopland with my poop slippers.

Thus endeth the poop post, appropriately enough, in poopland.

Thoughts on two city traveling

2008-04-21T04:11:00.000-07:00

I'm back from my travels. Here are some thoughts of a Monday morning in reference to the U.S. cities I visited.

#The Atlanta airport has too many words in its name. (Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport)

#Delta is still the best mainstream air carrier. I heart me some Lance crackers.

#Captain's wafers with cream cheese and scallions eastbound. Whole wheat with cheddar westbound. Mmm.

#My dad's classic car is cool, but the gas fumes made me a little sick. Did people stay a little sick from gas fumes all the time prior to catalytic converters?

#It's weird that one of the best Philly cheese steaks I've ever had (and yes, I've had them in Philadelphia) is made by people from the Indian subcontinent at a strip mall in Atlanta.

#Getting from Atlanta to San Diego by way of LAX is a pain in the ass, but my Honey made it seem easy.

#Should you have occasion to stay at the Sheraton Marina in San Diego and the front desk person says, "we'll put you in the Bay Tower," please know that you will be in an entirely different hotel. And it will sucketh.

#Downtown San Diego looks a lot like Waikiki. Too much like it, really, only cleaner, less crowded, reachable by car, and with fewer one-way streets. There are fewer street performers, unless you want to count drunk people.

#Petco Park is a great place to watch a ballgame. There are no pets there. The food was good for ballpark food. None of it was kibble.

#People should not be preparing to be stupidly drunk at 8pm. The Gaslamp district was full of people whose paths were clearly about drinking a lot then getting arrested.

#Boring conferences are boring.

#Hard cider at a cool Irish pub will help make the boring conference go away. Leave early, though. (cf. drunk people)

#There are a lot of places that sell fancy cheese in San Diego.

#Most of them also have fancy jam. The jam will probably be more fancy than you want, if your jam tastes are anything like mine. The jars will be pretty, though.

#Did all the cheese stores used to be book and record stores? What will happen to the cheese stores when someone figures out how to internet market fancy cheese?

#I'm glad to be home.

Travel details

2008-04-13T02:59:00.000-07:00

It's easy enough to get lost in the details. Is my airplane seat where I want it to be? Is my ipod charged and loaded with things I'll like? Do they have my Starwood Preferred number? Which suitcase should I take? Can I deal with how stupid the van for Parking Spot is?

Without descending into another "travel used to be better" reverie, my fixation on the details has made me wonder about what it was like when the details didn't matter.

I think sometimes about what it was like in those long sweaty summers where I had to go the Baptist "day camp." There was little to look forward to, really, given the Baptist (at least the ones who ran the camp) tendency toward, "go play in the creek and catch crawdads if you can." These Baptists were not so much into structured day camps. Trapped by the creek for days on end, the very idea of traveling seemed better than Christmas. We'd get in the car and drive to the beach. I looked forward to it, despite strong evidence that it wouldn't be as fun as I hoped. Because my brother and I couldn't get along in the car, one of us would often be banished to the "way back" of our VW station wagon, underneath which was the engine. In the South. In the summer. Without air conditioning. Still, a trip was a trip was a trip and at least I didn't have to go hang out with the Baptists for a week.

Next week, as you might guess, I travel. I travel from one coast to another and back and then down this one some away from where I live. I've worked the details. Somehow, I can't access those feelings of anticipation I used to have. I try to comfort myself that this trip will involve no time on top of the engine of a mid-1970s Volkswagen 412 station wagon.

Still I can't help wishing it felt a little less like staring into green water looking for the crawdads I could never catch.

A tale of flames and boxing

2008-04-09T12:37:00.000-07:00

When I first started my current job, I took on a fight. I meant to take it on, but I didn't have any idea how outmatched I was. I got beaten up, knocked around, threatened, and told I was ruining civilization itself. In sum, I lost. Badly.

Recently, I encountered a problem to which I offered a simple solution. Here's the rub; the problem occurred in the same arena as my lost fight. I knew I was stepping close to the edges of that fight, but I had allies now, knew where the punches were likely to come from, and really wasn't starting up the fight again.

Last night, I found out that the old opponents, unbeknown to me, had stepped into the ring and started punching me. To say I was angry was an understatement.

Sigh. I miss Madeline Kahn.

Anyway, I was furious. Flames on the side of my face furious.

There is nothing, and I do mean nothing, I hate more than having my integrity questioned. Nothing.

It was being questioned. Beaten up, really.

I thought about what to do. I backed up and looked at what I wanted to have happen. The problem is not solved yet, but I pushed it out of the boxing ring and sent it down another road. I have back-up. I have firepower. I haven't yet used my fists or my guns, but they're loaded and ready. (Am I taking this metaphor too far? It's all rather martial, admittedly.)

Four years and a lost fight can make a difference in perspective, but I also think I've gotten pretty good at what I do. Late this afternoon, in another context entirely, a guy I'd been having a little trouble with of late, came up to me and said something really nice just because it occurred to him. I know external validation is fleeting. In that moment though, with this other issue on the road I prepared, I felt good.

Sometimes, if you're lucky, you figure out what you're good at and somebody lets you do it. Still and all, if someone can tell me how to protect my integrity from attacks, I'd be grateful. Bubble wrap? Plastic couch covers? Maybe it needs boxing gloves?

It's real--my integrity--even if not everyone can see it. That is also true of my invisible friend.

Vines

2008-04-06T09:52:00.000-07:00

A couple of summers ago, as is my wont, I traveled to the beach with books I had carefully selected over the course of several months. As is also my wont, I didn't find any of them satisfying as beach reading. The level of my restlessness at our annual beach trip with my family would rank high on any machine designed to measure such things. I'd love a machine of that type for myself. I could tune it on on various people and see how tense/restless/about to flay their skin off they were. It would be much easier that reading the tension in the corners of people's eyes.

Anyway, the place where we usually go to the beach has just the one bookstore and prominently features authors from the South Carolina lowcountry. (It drives my copy editor Honey wild that there is no consistency in how one "styles" (as she would say) those two words referring to the swampy beachy part of the more southern of the Carolinas). I'm not a big fan of most Southern writing, post, say, Yoknapatawpha, so the lowcountry fare wasn't going to do much for me. I chose, instead, a book called The Ruins. I didn't like it, which was a pleasant serendipity for Honey, who promptly started it and then recounted the plot to me when she was done.

I liked her telling of it much better than the 30 pages or so that I read of the book itself. Now, if you pay any attention to the current movie releases, you'll know that it has just been released as a film. The LA Times review described it as: "depressingly inert and blithely gruesome." The basic story of the The Ruins centers around killer ivy that eats you inside out.

Killer ivy should not be confused with Poison Ivy.

That's Poison Ivy.

That's killer ivy that eats you from the inside out.

I think I ended up reading a Spanish novel whose name escapes me right at the moment at the beach that summer.

Flash forward to this morning. I sometimes read the Sunday paper in what we call "the middle room."

Aside: does everyone have these kinds of labels for rooms? When I was growing up we referred to one room in our house as the "green room" even though it wasn't. I do understand it had been at one point.

Anyway, Honey and I are two people with many more pets than we need. We also have more bedrooms than we need. The "middle room" is a very small bedroom that we've turned into a sort of denette. I like to use it sometimes to escape the various technologies in my life. So, this morning, I retreated into it to read the paper. I was finishing the travel section (always my last section--paper section preference sorting is important to me) and I rolled my head around on my neck as I sometimes do.

As I did so, I noticed a vine. A vine. IN THE HOUSE. Poking out from under the blinds. Killer ivy. In the retreat room. It had grown THROUGH the window. Ok, really, it had grown through the gap in our 50 year old windowsill, but still.

Ten minutes of mild effort and I pulled all the ivy off the side of the house and Honey got the inside ivy into the trash can.

I'm not sure what lesson to take from all of this Sunday drama. One, lesson to be learned certainly focuses on using the middle/retreat room more and scouting it for unauthorized plant life more often. Another is that neither Honey nor I should really be allowed to own a home if we can't control our ivy.

Finally, for those of you who see me IRL, could you keep an eye out? If I start looking like that girl in The Ruins, help me somehow. Calling me "depressingly inert" might be a place to start.

Hands

2008-04-03T10:31:00.000-07:00

I feel as if all I'm doing lately is complaining on my blog. Might as well continue the theme...

Can anyone explain to me why I keep getting little cuts on my hands?

I've eliminated the glass-shards in my soap dispenser theory.

I moisturize regularly.

Are little cuts on hands also a function of turning 40?

I'm not going to start wearing gloves.

I band-aid and disinfect them.

Some cut causes are known.

Others cuts simply appear.

My hands are less than pretty, what with the cuts, the band-aids and the little teeny scars.

I have not started a new job in a razor blade factory.

Ok, maybe gloves.

Any other ideas?

What I asked...

2008-03-29T00:44:00.000-07:00

Versus what she heard...

Thursday morning, I put on a new shirt. I woke Honey up and asked if the shirt was too sheer. I handed her her glasses and turned on the light behind me.

She thought I asked if the shirt was too short.

Confident in her answer, she said no.

At no point did I think the shirt was too short.

It was, however, too sheer.

I spent half the day with my jean jacket on (despite the 78 degree SoCal spring day). The other half I spent with my office lights off.

Sleep, on not getting enough

2008-03-25T04:50:00.000-07:00

It may be a sign of getting old, but I find myself increasingly unable to sleep through the night. Honey has always maintained that I am truly amazing in my ability to get to sleep in the first place.

Lately, I've been waking up in the middle of the night. For a while, I wrote it off to pee needs. Go ahead, I'd tell myself, pee and the you'll drop right back off to sleep.

I really don't want to get too reliant on non prescription sleeping pills. Drugs are bad. Nancy Reagan said so.

Truth is, though, when I wake up in the middle of the night, I become acutely aware of discomfort. My ears hurt from the ear plugs I wear because of the dogs. My arms hurt because I tend to fall asleep with them underneath me. My brain comes alive with it's weird loopy patterns. Song lyrics have dominated lately. I rarely get back to sleep.

I still haven't solved the sleep number crevasse problem. (And before anyone asks, no I didn't call them back, despite their offer to help. I don't have the information she asked for and can't really get it--given that we have the "cheap ass sleep number" (or CASN).

So, for now, it's going to have to be Advil PM or Simply Sleep. I'd blame this all on my recent transition to my fifth decade, but since it predates that, I'll just assume it's some kind of karmic punishment for, well, bad karma.

Point of post, for those who like such summations:

WHINE

Thank you, that is all.

Substances

2008-03-21T04:49:00.000-07:00

Last week, I took our extra microwave out to the garage. We had acquired it through abandonment, along with an immovable hutch from the estate of the previous owner of our house. We didn't actually need two microwaves. This one had begun to make odd noises and it needed to be abandoned by us. (Shouldn't twice abandoned appliances simply vaporize?)

It's former space is now occupied by two coffee burr grinders and Honey's coffee pot. We're such coffee geeks. She's been drinking decaf since her brain went a little jazzy on her in our visit to the fiftieth state. I acquired a second burr grinder for us, so our coffee consumption can continue unabated. To be clear, in addition to the burr grinders, we also have a filtered water drip coffee maker (for her) and a espresso pot and the magical wonder that is the aerolatte for me.

I thought about our coffee as substance this morning, when I received from the fine institution I work for the updated campus guide to a drug free workplace. I dutifully clicked through and was greeted by our policy and a list of the substances in question that might be abused. They also provided, quite handily, a chart of their nom de narcotics. For example:

COCAINE/CRACK (Blow, bump, C, candy, Charlie, flake, rock, snow)

or

ALCOHOL (Beer, wine, liquor, malt liquor, booze, juice, sauce, hooch)

They also listed the effects of these substances on the user. Back to cocaine, or as I now think of it, bump:

Irritability and depression

Impaired decision-making

Insomnia

I excerpted but have all three of those things. Hmm.

On Wednesday, I was home a little early, impaired, apparently, by my use of Charlie, though I don't recall actually encountering it. I heard a ruckus outside. I went out to find that some kids had been playing with some safety glass that had been left deposited outside our fence. Sigh. I love our neighbors so. Anyway, the kids had moved the safety glass into our driveway. However "safe" it was, I didn't want to leave it there for my Honey to drive over when she got home. I fetched our broom and dustpan and began to sweep it up. Seemingly out of nowhere a woman appeared.

She seemed pleasant and said she had seen the kids playing with the glass. I mumbled something about the joys of our neighborhood. She offered to hold the dustpan for me. I tried to demur, but was unsuccessful. When I looked up at her, I noticed she was crying.

It turned out that she was on her first day as a door to door salesperson for a cleaning product. "No one cares," she said to me.

She wanted very badly to demo the product for me, which she claimed to "clean anything" including our picket fence. Why in the world would I want to clean our picket fence? Answer: I wouldn't.

I have a long history of feeling bad for people like this and she was throwing the works at me. She said something about how tired she was, how lonely she was, that she had tried to quit at lunch, and then there was that "no one cares" mantra. The product, she said, was environmentally friendly. I asked what was in it. She didn't know, but said it was biodegradable.

I tried valiantly to extract myself. She said her supervisor was picking her up at 7pm. She would just wait for him and smoke a cigarette. If I wanted to check out the ingredients of the product online, I could decide what I wanted to do. She asked for a match or a lighter. When I said I didn't have one, she cried a little more and said she wouldn't smoke the cigarette after all.

I went inside. Let the dogs into the house. I looked up the product. No ingredients listed on their website either. It had SUCH a generic name, it was practically ungoogleable. My choices? Stay inside and feel bad for her. Go back outside, give her a check for $64 for a gallon of crap I didn't want, need, or know the make-up of. (Did I mention that the product was SIXTY FOUR DOLLARS?!) I thought some more. When faced with either/or choices, I like to try to think if there is another choice. I remembered that we had been given a lighter in our Advocate 40th Anniversary gift bag. I had proposed throwing it away. Honey, in her wisdom, had urged keeping it. I found it (it was gift boxed!) and went outside. I gave it to the saleswoman and wished her luck.

So, despite my current seeming abuse of some substance or another (if symptoms are any indicator), I was pleased to have a moment of clarity. Now, if I can just figure out what drugs to take to counter-act all these other symptoms...

Um, eww

2008-03-18T04:15:00.000-07:00

Teresa told me yesterday about a friend and colleague of hers who used to be subjected to his mother's one and only dessert recipe which involved bananas and Miracle Whip (and water and sugar).

All day, while trying to make some sense of the mess that is my office, my brain loop (and my brain is VERY loop-rific right now) keeps slinging by the banana/Miracle Whip combo. Brain loops drive me crazy. They seem to have gotten worse as I've gotten older. I worry sometimes that in 20 years or so I'll only be able to think about one thing. Corn Flakes. An episode of Cheers. Poppies. While I'm not focused on any of those things right now, if you had told me 24 hours ago that one (of several) of my current obsessive brain loops would be bananas and Miracle Whip, I'd have laughed. I never know what road signs my brain will think to linger by.

I just Googled bananas and Miracle Whip and came up with a large hit total. 244,000 hits. Many of which recipe.

I loathe Miracle Whip, by the way, so I'm doubly horrified at the idea of two hundred thousand web sites that concern themselves with it vis a vis bananas.

The additional problem with this loop pattern is that it inevitably leads me down food free association roads best not traveled.

Peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches (which I have been offered on multiple occasions).

Pimento cheese.

Mushrooms.

Tomato mucus.

Goose grease French toast.

I could go on. Given the current state of my brain, I probably will internally.

Shudder

Lost goodness

2008-03-14T04:09:00.000-07:00

Ok, a quick Friday thought...

I heart Lost. Really really heart it. Need to watch it again from the beginning heart it.

Also, I heart Elizabeth Mitchell. She's so dreamy.

She's my tv girlfriend. Teresa said it's ok to have a tv girlfriend and she's mine.

(To be clear, I have now claimed both Elizabeth Mitchell and Sequoia National Park. Entitlements that are meaningless=fun.)

Six words

2008-03-12T13:03:00.000-07:00

The Misanthrope over at Toner Mishap, bless his heart, tagged me. I feel so, well, touched. In a good way.

Herewith the rules:

1. Write your own six word memoir

2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like

3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere

4 Tag five more blogs with links

5. And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

Herewith the picture:

What kind of secret could Halo tell the stuffed meerkat?

Herewith the bio:

Paddled canoe early. Map still evolving.

Herewith the tags:

Everyone. I really can't think of anyone who has a blog I read whose six words I don't want to read.

Pineapple phun

2008-03-02T03:40:00.000-08:00

"Pineapple princess", he calls me pineapple princess all day
As he plays his ukulele on the hill above the bay
"Pineapple princess, I love you, you're the sweetest girl I've seen"
"Some day we're gonna marry and you'll be my pineapple queen"

So sang Annette Funicello some time ago. My honey channeled Ms. Funicello as we approached the Dole Pineapple Plantation.

O'ahu was not, to be real for a moment, my favorite of Hawai'i's islands. We only visited the two. It came in second and I suspect would continue to sink down the rankings had we visited more. Do you remember how Casey Kasem used to disparage songs as they slipped down the chart? Really, he was criticizing us, his listeners, for letting it happen to the songs. I always found it off-putting. How was there room on the chart for "Leader of the Band" if "Heat of the Moment" didn't slip off? Hmm? Didn't think you had an answer.

I can just hear Mr. Kasem saying, "last week this island was at number 2, but now that Kaua'i has surged, O'ahu drops to number 3."

At any rate, with O'ahu holding steady at #2, Honey and I explored its offerings. In the middle of the island, we discovered (the maps and signs helped quite a lot) something that NO ONE else knows about. They have pineapples on O'ahu. Dole does. Pineapples. Can you imagine?

They've had pineapples there for over one hundred years.

Ok, seriously, the Dole Plantation was cheesy in just the right way.

It featured the above shown pineappletunities. Notice that my level of excitement was such I could not keep my hand still enough for my point and shoot camera to focus.

Beyond the maze, train, and garden, there was a ginormous retail facility. They even had "Dole Radio" (on which Mr. Kasem was not featured). Dole Radio kept promising pineapple cutting demonstrations and Honey and I kept going to try to find them. It was all for naught. There was no cutting of pineapple. What there was was a tremendously long line at the end of which one could purchase pineapple ice cream and the like.

We confined our pineapple shopping to pineapple memorabilia.

(Sample only, not an actual purchase).

I was thrilled at the level of pineapple crap. It was really beyond measure. It certainly outstripped the macadamia nut people in terms of square footage and variety.

Actually, to be fair, we bought plenty at both nutland and pineappleland. Honey has been sporting a nightshirt that I bought her that says, "I got totally nuts on the Big Island of Hawaii" and I may have some mac nut socks. Nutland wins over pineappleland in the crucial sampling area, too. They'll give you nuts at Mauna Loa. At Dole, they keep announcing the aforementioned phantom pineapple demo and sampling. We stood under the sign that said "Pineapple Demonstration" alone and unwanted.

All was not despair, though. There were pineapple "costumes" to try on!

Notice, please, that I purchased a Dole hat and immediately put it on. Shame did not walk with me in O'ahu. Pineapple fun walked with me instead.

My excitement over the Pineapple Express can only be described as extreme. A small train. Pineapples. I channeled my inner six year old, that is if my inner six year old had $15.50 extra to spend on a 20 minute train ride. She didn't, so my outer 39 year old had to pony up.

I'm sure you're dying to know what happens on the Pineapple Express. You see pineapples!

Also pineapple topiary.

Plus, there's pineapple narration on the Pineapple Express, wherein we learned that James Dole's real claim to fame (besides buying the whole island of Lana'i and turning it into a big pineapple plantation) was canning pineapples.

Good to know that some genius at Dole thought that pineapple should be artificially sweetened. Pineapples aren't sweet on their own. Not even a little bit.

Interspersed with the narration, we were treated to musical interludes. Guess what one of the songs was?

"Pineapple princess", I love you, you're the sweetest girl I've seen
"Some day we're gonna marry and you'll be my pineapple queen"

We may have sung along.

Getting off the train, we were given our only pineapple sample. It may have been the best pineapple I've ever tasted.

We toured the pineapple garden. The way they grow is amazing. They're heavy, you know.

This one had grown itself a nice head of pineapple leaves.

There were some regrets. We discovered a two-for-one Pineapple Maze coupon in our car rental map after we had forgone that attraction. You already know about the pineapple demo lie. We didn't see Pineapple Pete.

We also didn't see the lady with him.

The truth is, though, it was a rockin' pineapple time. So good that since we've been back I've worn my hat, Honey has worn her pineapple shirt. Our Pineapple Pete magnet is featured on our refrigerator between the lava magnet and the Nene magnet. We've bought two pineapples. We've sung "Pineapple Princess."

O'ahu is holding steady at #2 because of the wondrous pineapplepertunities.

As [I] plays [my] ukulele on the hill above the bay...

A moment about states and their flags

2008-02-26T09:54:00.000-08:00

A co-worker of mine has a t-shirt on today. The banner on it says Hawaii (no apostrophe).

Below is this image:

Um, no. Na-uh. Nope.

T-shirt people, you're going to need to try harder. My co-worker, to her credit, seemed sanguine about the state mix-up on her shirt, when I pointed it out. (She was, no doubt, thrilled to have me, her boss, point out the error on her shirt. Thrilled all day long.)

Had I not just gotten back from Hawai'i, I wouldn't have known what the Hawai'i state flag looks like. I still would have known that the image was all kinds of wrong. Last time I checked tweren't any palmetto trees to be found in our fiftieth state.

How colonial of you, Hawai'i.

The palmetto one is South Carolina. There are palmettos there. It's a thing.

It all reminded me of the moment on Miss America: Reality Check where Miss Pennsylvania couldn't find her state flag.

Look! I found it for her. (To be fair, she did have the good grace to be chagrined afterward).

The Hawai'i/South Carolina t-shirt is what we get for outsourcing. How is someone in a third world country to know that the palm looking tree is a palmetto and has nothing to do with Hawai'i? Maybe it's because of how my mind works, but I like knowing random stuff. Not all the random stuff. Just enough that the world makes a little sense sometimes.

Knowing my state flag and noting the ones of states I visit seems the least I can do.

My honey, as a child, participated in a school performance in which a piece called "Fifty Nifty United States" was featured.

A lyrical interlude...

50 Nifty United States
from the 13 original colonies
50 nifty stars on the flag
that billow so beautifully in the breeze

Each individual state
contributes a quality that is great!
Each individual state
deserves a bow
Let's salute them now!

In alphabetical order, the kids were to shout the name of the state whose flag they were holding and raise the flag in the air. She was to be holding New Jersey. She left the flag in the cloakroom. Quoting Honey directly, "...[W]hen New Jersey's turn came, I remained quiet rather than drawing attention to the fact that I had no flag, hoping no one would notice the omission." In other words, they just went straight from New Hampshire to New Mexico. Here's my compensatory raising of the New Jersey flag:

In case you're interested, and even if you're not, here are the states I have not yet visited. My criteria for a visit? I must have at least stopped to see something somewhere in the state other than the airport. I'm on a roll, having gotten to Colorado in '07 and Hawai'i in 08.

The missing ones are: Idaho (scheduled for '09--Gem State, here I come!), Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and Washington. I should note about that last one, that in addition to my strong support of this year's Miss Washington, I regularly have dreams (like while asleep, not figurative "I-wish-I-had-been-an-astronaut" kind of aspirations) about going to the top of the Space Needle. I have NO idea why. Feel free to share out in comments how many missing states you have and/or your interpretation of my Space Needle dream.

I'll be learning the flags as I go.

The Geese of Hawai'i

2008-02-21T07:57:00.000-08:00

I went to Hawai'i to look for geese. Truth be told, I did not know when I departed that this would be a goal. Goals sometimes come when you don't expect them to.

Many people go to Hawai'i for many reasons. Scuba. Snuba. Pineapples. Macadamia Nuts. Volcanoes. Coffee.

I experienced several of these activities. I bet you didn't know pineapple could be an activity. It sure can. Details to follow.

But, oh, the geese.

They were MY thing. I am not a birder in the classic sense. I have bird books and binoculars. I own mutliple bird feeders. But, I can't recognize bird songs from the tree, have to look twice at small brown birds to determine if they're house finches or house sparrows. Bottom line, I guess, I like birds and like looking at them.

Upon our arrival to Hawai'i--I know it's confusing, but I'm talking about the island (as in "the big") not the state (as in all of the islands)--I discovered that we would be near to an area where we might see Nene. Nene are Hawai'ian geese.

Ok, let's get a something straightened out before I continue. Despite, my initial inclination, as a native speaker of English from the southeastern part of these here United States, the name of the bird is pronounced "neh neh" not "neen." I still kind of want to call them neens, but I am being all Hawai'ian and shit (notice my use of the apostrophe!) and know it's "neh neh."

There were lots of signs about Nenes. Don't feed them, don't hit them with your rental car, don't let your dog chase them. Nenes themselves are rare. At one point there were there were tens of thousands of Nene and then humans did lots of stupid things and they died out to the brink of extinction. Fortunately, there has been an concerted effort to bring them back and there are now between five hundred and three thousand Nene on three of the Hawai'ian islands (Maui, Hawai'i, and Kaua'i). Most are there as a result of captive breeding programs, though the ones on Hawai'i are often the offspring of wild pairs.

I have a soft spot for geese. I tend to prefer water birds to other kinds of birds and geese are, to me at least, the Goldilocks kind of bird. Not too big, not too small. Just right. I have complicated animal aesthetics, which often involve statements like "a good amount of white" (which accurately describes our cat Halo and none of our other pets). Geese are right in the animal aesthetic wheelhouse. So, when you tell me there's a kind of goose that almost died out, has specially adapted feet for walking on lava, and has a name as good as Nene, I'm going to be goose seeking. With abandon. Aplomb even.

We asked the helpful people at our B&B where Nene might be seen. They suggested the golf course. I then asked the ranger at Volcanoes National Park where to see some and she suggested the Hilo zoo. Um, no, I don't think so. I want "wild" Nene, thanks very much. So, off to the golf course we went.

There were four pairs of them hanging out on the 18th hole. Honey and I laughed at first, thinking this was a sign of how easy it was to see them. They were nibbling on grass and having a Nene good time. One even showed off his lava foot for me. Yes, it was for me. I was the only Nene picture taker there. Other people were using sticks to hit little white balls around. I know who had the true Nene love; the person who got shown the Nene foot.

Nenes mate for life, by the way.

I was in Nene bliss. I figured we go back to the golf course a few (dozen) more times and I commune with these eight Nene and all their friends. We did go back to the golf course several times. No more Nenes.

I was feeling a little Nene bereft as we headed off to go coffee tasting. Honey had promised that one of the coffee places had geese, which she and I both assumed were Nenes. What other geese are there in Hawai'i? Nenes are the Hawai'i state bird, by the way. Do you know what your state bird is? I'll wait while you go look it up. See, you're learning LOTS of bird facts today. (In case you're wondering, my state birds have been: Brown Thrasher, Baltimore Oriole, and California Quail). At any rate, we get to the coffee place in question, Mountain Thunder, to discover that they have two kinds of geese on the farm, neither of which Nene. Still, geese are geese and I'm ready for my close up. One kind of goose hangs out down in the coffee tree area and the other wanders more. The nice folks inform me that they may come by to be fed. We're enjoying our coffee sample and watching Mountain Thunder on Dirty Jobs when the wandering goose family presented itself (minus one, who is incubating eggs).

The owner told me that a visitor had told her they were Toulouse geese, but I'm pretty sure they're Greylag geese. At any rate, they were really fun. They honked some and threatened me when I stood near them for a picture. The threat was the large male sticking his neck out and opening his beak a little. They also got into a goose fight. How many times have you seen a goose fight while sipping really good Kona coffee? I didn't think so.

We interacted with the geese for a while, bought coffee and descended thunder mountain with the rental car shuddering from the strain of the descent and Honey and I jittering a little from all the coffee and goose goodness. It was probably more coffee than goose.

I had read in my Hawai'i (the state) bird book, that there were no Nene to be found on O'ahu, our next destination. I wanted another Nene fix. The next day, we were headed out for turtle viewing and I saw a sign that said "Nene 750 yards." I immediately began mumbling about all the bullshit Nene signs that promise more Nene than they can deliver. Then, I saw...

Nene on the side of the road. I pulled over quickly (not dangerously). Honey and I circled the Nene so I could get more pictures. This caused the Nene to moan. Really. They don't honk so much as moan. Watch this video for the sound. The effect was, "leave me alone, you stupid mainlander."

I persisted in taking pictures, though. Finally (from their perspective, not mine), we left them alone.

I tried a few more times to see Nene. None were in evidence. Still, if there really are only 500 Nene, my ten Nene worth was 1/50 of the total. This seems like a pretty high proportion, given that I certainly didn't make up 1/50 of the visitors to Hawai'i (either the island or the state) last week.

My advice when traveling? Get your goose on.

Nene up.

How to pronounce mirounga angustirostris

2008-02-05T12:23:00.000-08:00

Honey and I sometimes amuse ourselves with the better Google hits we get on our blogs. She gets better hits than I do, given her propensity to talk about her boobs. I get more, shall we say, esoteric, hits. Are there Celtic origins for "They Call the Wind Maria?" Someone thought that, typed it into Google and got to me. I'm the third hit on that, if you quote the song title. Short answer: I have no idea and neither does the person looking for the information if my site was their source.

Lots of hits lately on Miss Washington, her gay dads, and other related things and lots of hits on Sleep Number beds. I call things I don't like the taste of "wangy" and I've used it in a post and thusly I get hits on it.

By far the thing people seek me out most for from Google is the title of this post. I've had dozens of hits on variations of how to pronounce mirounga angustirostris (which is the Latin name of elephant seals). It hits my blog because I referenced elephant seals (and their Latin name, as I like a semi-formal blog) in a post last winter and in a separate post said something about Brett Favre not pronouncing his name right. Both of those posts are in my "trips" category. The average time on my blog for people searching for this guidance is over eight minutes. These folks WANT to know. For all I know, it's one person who really wants to know and keeps trying to find out.

So, in the spirit of Mardi Gras, rather than showing my boobs or throwing beads, I thought why not give something away of value? I took Latin in high school. I DO know the answer. Can I get a little help?

It's pronounced:

meer•onga ahn•goo•steer•oh•stris

or, you could just go with

ell•ee•fant seel

They're ok either way. I'd say that I hope things go well for your candidate today, but since everyone can't win, I'll simply say that now you know something new and that way everyone wins.

A bit more on Miss Washington

2008-02-02T09:14:00.000-08:00

I'm not going to write just now about having had a really nice lunch today with The Misanthrope and Bitch, PhD, which was very cool on lots of levels.

I'm not going to do that because I have little zingy feelings right now. Why? Glad you asked.

My previous post got a comment while I was at the aformentioned lunch from one of Miss Washington's gay dads. I didn't write much about her in my post, mostly because I don't know enough about pageants to work up the right level of outrage over her not winning. But I'm going to go for it now.

One week on, I have to say I haven't gotten less irritated about the outcome. Let's start with some objective facts...

Miss Washington, Elyse Umemoto, and Miss Indiana, Nicole Rash, made the top three on both Miss America Reality Check and Miss America proper. (I should not that I just went to the Miss Indiana pageant site and had a hard time finding Ms. Rash's last name. She's not just "Nicole," folks). At any rate, this suggests to me that if TLC and the Miss America people were really interested in a new kind of Miss America, that those two women should have been numbers one and two.

I don't see much point in bashing the other contestants. Rather, I want to focus on why Ms. Umemoto should have won. Let's go positive on this, shall we? Ok, I may have a negative moment or two. We'll see. Stay tuned.

The notion that Miss America should be the new "it" girl seems perfect for Ms. Umemoto.

Why do I say that?

Well let's start with her ethnic heritage. She's Japanese, oh, and German, also she's Latino and Yakama Native American. Got that? I like to think of America as an interesting place where people come together and influence one another in all sort of ways. Someone with a complex and rich heritage seems ideal for our new "it girl" don't you think? We've done blond before. We've done Midwest before. How about Pacific Rim? Word to Seattle. Thanks for the coffee thing. Also, thanks for two Miss America posts.

Ok, next criteria--what does she stand for? Two things. Embracing diversity. Seems right. (Would someone tell Bill Clinton to shut about about race, by the way?) The other thing? Empowering women. The it girl gets it.

I thought she was funny and charming throughout the reality show. Then came the red carpet moment. She spoke out about her gay dads and called herself liberal. Word to your mom, dad, dad, and dad. You're stunning.

As I said, I'm no pageant expert, so I can only say that she seemed fine in the various walks (swimsuit, evening wear). Her rendition of the Robbie Williams tune seemed way more, oh I don't know, connected to the aughts than tap dancing or Judy Garland songs. She stayed in tune too, which I more than my ear said about the winner. (Yes, my ear can talk and yes that was a little negativity).

I have no doubt that Ms. Umemoto will succeed in whatever she decides to take on. (I gather from reading around that she won Miss Seattle in her first attempt at the pageant thing. Pretty impressive, if you think about it. A lot of the women she was up against have been competing in pageants their whole lives. Trust me, there are women in the South who have entire worlds revolving around the pageant circuit). I wish her nothing but the best as she embarks on her post-Miss America chapter. Still, I can't help thinking that a Miss America with gay dads, a feminist bent, a rich and diverse heritage, and liberal politics would have been awfully nice. I know I would have paid attention beyond last Saturday.

Thanks, Gary, for prompting me to write this. All the best to you, your partner, and your daughter.

To quote Elyse (I hope it's ok to call her that once), "how do you like them apples?" Quite a lot from what I can tell.

Woe unto the television

2008-01-28T07:55:00.000-08:00

Despite The Onion's recent headline and the general, shall we say, over-attention to the last season of The Wire on sites that I read frequently (Salon, Slate, etc.), I am going to write about it anyway. Don't read if'n you don't want to.

There is a trope in television that send me into little fits of apoplexy. An episode is devoted to a character. I spend that hour thinking about how much I love that character, how television can be really good, how it transforms itself from banality into, well, something a little more. Then the character dies and I feel really sad. I'm a sucker for it every time.

I first noticed it when they shot Tara on Buffy The Vampire Slayer. There's plenty written on that death as well, so I'll leave it there.

The Wire really likes to play me this way. The nexus of the problem is twofold. First, I find the "bad guy" characters on The Wire deeply appealing because they are complete characters, nuanced and complex. I could not shut up about how great Idris Elba was as Stringer Bell and when he died his clearly inevitable death, I was really sad and mad. Idris Elba didn't die. The show ends in six episodes. Still, writing about it even now makes me cranky. The second part of the problem lies in their very identity. They're bad guys. Bad guys die because they're criminals and shoot each other. I really like Snoop for example, who's long term health as a character I have no real confidence in. Ditto Omar. Killing people as a profession is not high on the actuarial tables.

Last night, they did it to me again. Honey and I watch this fabulous episode and I keep talking about how much I've come to like Prop Joe. Could I have seen his death at the end of the episode coming? Sure. Did I? Nope.

"Woe to them that call evil good and good evil." So said Prop Joe last night (on a flower card for a dead man). I've always thought of Bunk Moreland as the character most likely to tell the truth about the totality of what happens in the Baltimore of The Wire. Joe's quote from Isaiah comes as close to the worldview as anything. Marlo's unwillingness to see anything as evil does not bode well for the happiness quotient as the series comes to a close.

I can be suckered in by television on several levels. On Saturday, I watched the Miss America pageant. Yes, indeed, you read that right? Why? Well, I had watched a couple of episodes of Miss America Reality Check and was rooting for Miss Washington, Elyse Umemoto, she of the gay dads and the liberal politics. She came in third to a woman who sang one of the cheesiest rendition of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" I've heard. That's saying something, too because that song will cheese up without much help. Two hours of my life I don't get back, that pageant.

So, David Simon, et. al. didn't need to do much to lure me in. I guess I should also feel grateful that they didn't kill Kima Greggs when they could have in season 1.

Speaking of Sunday night television...if someone wants to kill Jenny Schecter, feel free.

In the meantime, just a little sporks shout-out to Robert Chew as Proposition Joe Stewart.

Sometimes you see it coming. Usually I don't. The good news is that it's just tv and if the writers don't come back soon, I can just watch sports. But then, that doesn't always go like I want it to, either. Ok, never mind, I'll just stop watching.

Or not.

Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are (warble) blue...

Hole punched me

2008-01-21T04:57:00.000-08:00

I cried more than usual last week. I'm not a big crier, but sometimes things get to a stress level that my usual calm exterior breaks down.

Stress? Me stressed?

My tenure file was due on Friday. This event can cause stress for even the most sanguine academics. My effort was made more complicated by a number of factors.

To wit:

+This was my first file of this type. Normally people submit what's called a "retention file" first. I didn't have to because I just got my job permanently summer before last and because you don't have to submit a file your first year.

+My file qualifies as weird. Most faculty teach. I do too, but my day-to-day effort focuses more on administration.

+If I don't get tenure, I lose my job.

No pressure. None at all.

The mofo required a 5 inch notebook. Priced one of those lately? They're not cheap. $30 not cheap.

Also, Avery needs to try a lot harder. Don't sell 12-tab dividers when the template doesn't work with Word for Mac. I managed to find some 5-tab dividers in the office. Someone had left a sheet in the box that had all the labels pulled off. I formatted carefully, printed and discovered that I had printed on a used, no-label sheet. Um-Hmm. Would you put a used-up sheet back into the label box? Neither would I. Did we have any more 5-tab labels? Nope. Did I need to reformat for 8-tab labels? Yep. Total time making, printing and applying the labels? Well over two hours.

If Avery lodged itself firmly on my office product shit list, Swingline became my office product hero. How? Well, they make this wondrous thing:

Behold the bit of magnificence, friends and neighbors, that is Swingline's electric three hole punch. A friend secreted it away from a neighboring department. After using it to punch for a while (and having several co-workers come by to try it), I asked our office folks to order us one. I heart Swingline. Honey asked, when I was raving about it, "who punches holes any more?" I do and think my office deserves the brilliance and efficiency of the Swingline 525.

Here's the completed product:

Thick, huh?

Look at those labels. They look nice, despite Avery's stupidity, inanity.

My normal bag didn't seem even close to capable of holding the five inches of hole-punched me for delivery to the dean's office. Fortunately, I had gotten a bag for travel that was up to the task.

My green bean machine was ready to carry me for the delivery.

I won't know anything until the end of the semester.

The thing is called a PIF. That's sort of how I feel now that it lives in the dean's office. Like all the air's been released.

piffffffff

The crying, thankfully, has subsided somewhat.

Biscuit accounting

2008-01-15T10:05:00.000-08:00

Biscuit built a track in the back yard.

She built it to chase off planes. You may find yourself asking, "Sporks, how is it that a 35 pound cocker mix can chase off airplanes?" Good question, good question.

We live on the flight path of the Burbank airport. Planes pass over our yard. Biscuit has discovered that if she obsessively runs in circles, the planes will leave. See how that works in the spanhead mind?

"Um, I run in circles and the planes leave. Therefore, I have chased off the planes."

Now, you and I might know that "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" (after this, therefore because of this) is a classical logical fallacy. If anyone has an idea HOW I can explain this to Biscuit, share out.

My tenure file is due this Friday and to say I have been a little bit, well, tense, is an understatement. Last Friday I returned home.

I heard Scout, but Biscuit seemed less present than she usually is. When I opened the door to let them in, Scout came in first. In alpha-bitch Biscuit land this is normally not allowed. She came in a few seconds later and retreated to the front entryway. I noticed her licking her leg and went over to discover that she had cut it open.

How did she do this? Probably by chasing off the planes.

I decided the cut looked bad enough to take her to the vet. Scout ~~hearts Biscuit~~. Scout ~~can't live without her~~. Scout is pathologically attached to Biscuit. So, as I left with her, he began to howl in total panic.

Honey and I had noticed that Biscuit's eye was red a day or so before the leg cut.

When the vet examined Biscuit, he said she had something lodged in her cornea. He also wouldn't remove it because, and this disturbed me, if it had punctured the cornea and he removed it...ALL THE FLUID WOULD DRAIN OUT OF HER EYE. Um, ok, yuck. Anyway, he referred us to a dog ophthalmologist. Um Hmm. A dog eye doctor.

How did she get a pebble stuck in her eye? Probably by chasing off planes.

He stitched up her leg and sent me home with her. He suggested she wear a cone to keep her from chewing the bandage.

Here's the Biscuit accounting:

Cost of leg cut: $350

Potential cost of eye exam: $150

Number of pages I filled out at dog eye doctor: 8

Number of things still stuck in Biscuit's eye when I looked at it after filling out the 8 pages: 0

Time of departure from potential $150 visit: Immediately thereafter

Cost of visit: 25 cents (for meter)

Number of times we put the cone on Biscuit: 3

Number of times this resulted in near paralysis of dog from stress: 3

Amount of movement she was capable of when we were not home while coned: normal

Amount of movement she was capable of when we were home while she was coned: negligible

Number of bandages she chewed off her foot: all

My relief when told she didn't need a bandage today on the "wound check" visit: high

Number of times she set off my car's seatbelt alarm: 8

How: By stepping on center console and then back on the seat, making the car think I had a small adult moving on and off the seat

Time elapse after returning home she chased a plane: 5 minutes

Time lost to Biscuit maladies this week when I could otherwise be obsessing about the future of my career: 7 hours (including this post)

Regrets about giving that time to my sweet Biscuit dog: none

Endorse this

2008-01-10T08:25:00.000-08:00

I got an e-mail from John Kerry this morning. I've subscribed to his e-mails since his ill-fated run for president in 2004. He endorsed Barack Obama via this morning's e-mail.

I immediately unsubscribed from his listserv.

Honey and I discussed what Democrat we'd less like be influenced by than John Kerry right now. Paul Tsongas, maybe. And he's dead. The fact that Kerry could not defeat worst-president-ever as he was descending into a weaker and weaker position makes me put little stock in what he says. Plus which, he's the second person this week who told me why I should support Obama. Jep. Thanks for your thoughts. I'll make up my own mind, thanks.

As soon as I unsubscribed, I donated $50 to Hillary Clinton. I won't tell you why you should vote for her. Make up your own mind. Here's my endorsement. Seems about as influential as John Kerry's.

The White Elephant is Knocking

2007-12-28T02:09:00.000-08:00

...On your door! Won't you answer? She's friendly. See her early efforts here and here and here. Somebody take the unclaimed stuff!

Anyway, the elephant is big, she's white, and she made it to sporksforall.

For your consideration today, I offer a trio of pet themed frames. I love all four of our pets and have pictures of them in my office. Full disclosure: I only have pictures of Halo and Biscuit in my office. Scout feels slighted, I'm sure, especially given his legal troubles. Calif couldn't be reached for comment. Anyway, well-meaning people see my animal pictures, especially my rather large one of the late Red dog. These folks know I love my pets. And what self-respecting ~~pet-owner~~ companion to animals would not ~~want desire~~ heart with all her soul animal-themed frames?

Animal-themed frames almost inevitably feature paws. I like paws as a theme. We have a paw-themed door mat that I like. For some reason, though, I can't get my head around paw-themed frames.

Herewith, therefore, on offer...

Paw frames.

We have two of dog and one of cat. One of the dog ones and the cat one are a matched set, though I suppose I should mention, should you have regifting on your brain, only the cat frame includes a box. Cats are like that.

If you don't have a pug or a somewhat power-hungry looking white cat, never fear, these function as regular frames and the sample pictures above can be replaced with your own pictures of your own pets!

The most extraordinary of the trio is the "Doggie" frame. What's not to like about a bejeweled frame? Despite the jewels (or perhaps because of them?!), the effect is what can only be called "classy."

Nice, huh?

Now, I'm sure some of you are speciesist in your households. Cats but no dogs, dogs but no cats. I will consider splitting the frames up on that basis and that basis alone. Let me be clear, though...if you take one dog frame, you get both. If you want one dog and one cat, you have to take all three.

As with the fugly clock, feel free to insult these and not claim them. Someone, however, should feel moved to take them. Think how paw-rific your house/apartment can be!

The rules for white elephant are simple...claim the frames and I'll send them to you. All that's asked in return is that you offer something up on your blog (or Teresa can host it for you, should you be blog free) and be willing to ship it off to whosoever requests it. Full rules can be found here!

Paws paws paws paws, paws paws paws paws...

Tiki room (and related) thoughts

2007-12-20T09:40:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday, Honey and I decided to play hooky. There simply isn't a better place for playing hooky than Disneyland. Imagine your eight year old self. You want a day off. You want to do something superveryfun. What could be more superveryfun than Disneyland? Sex. But you're supposed to be imagining your EIGHT year old self. If you thought about sex a lot then, I don't want to know about it.

Theoretical fingers in theoretical ears... Lalalalalalalalalalalalalala Done with eight year old sex thoughts.

Ok, I won't give you a whole travelogue, but here's a highlight/thought list.

*They can dress it up all they want, but Innovations (in Tomorrowland)=superverylame.

*The redo of Space Mountain is awesome. It seems faster and you can't see the track any more. It's like a roller coaster in space. Wait, it IS a roller coaster in space.

*Disneyland rides with pictures they take and then try to sell you do NOT take flattering pictures of me. Nope.

*This image is funny and is on almost every ride. I kept trying to be these people. My body won't do the things it suggests.

*Cynthia, who was having a birthday and brought her coffee onto Thunder Mountain in the pouring rain, reminded me of how great people can be. I don't even know her and we rode behind her on the ride for all of three minutes. Still, she and her friend Susan rocked.

*As a child, I was DEEPLY disappointed to have spent one of my E-tickets on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (aka the submarines). The 35 minute wait we experienced on Tuesday did not improve my liking of it a lot. It was ok, but it was the longest wait of the day.

*I kind of loved (actually really loved) the Tiki Room. I'd never been there before. Full props to Disneyland for not tearing it out. It would not have been worth an E-Ticket, though.

*Fewer full props to them for tearing out the gallery above New Orleans Square for the new luxo-suite. I did like the Disney employee at the "Disneyana" store who described the gallery space as "having moved on to its next life." She did this all why I dripped onto the rug, having gotten soaked in the rain on Big Thunder.

*We didn't bottom out our Small World boat! I'm also pleased to report that Small World is less annoying at the holidays, because they intersperse Christmas songs with the eponymous song. I'm not a fan of either, but less of both overall makes it more bearable.

*I was pleased to do Tomorrowland first. Why we always do Adventureland first is beyond me. I'm a big T-land fan, Innovations notwithstanding.

*Bring back the People Mover.

*Indiana Jones has gotten more jerky. Panic attack inducing jerky.

* I know, I know, SOMETHING has to make you want to go to California Adventure, but why oh why can't Tower of Terror be in D-land? I heart it but not enough to pay $20 more to ride it.

*I wish we had parked on the Daisy level instead of the Mickey level. I've never much cared for the mice. The ducks, I like.

*La Casa Garcia has really good albondigas. Really good albondigas tastes especially good when you're wet.

*I would say I need a rain coat, but I live in Southern California.

*The best part of the day? All of it, of course. What's not to like? A day with my Honey at Disneyland.

I like my inner eight year old sometimes. She has good ideas. Besides, my outer 39 year old can afford to buy her extra E-Tickets.

At the tiki, tiki, tiki, tiki room...

Select Comfort/Sleep Number cares!

2007-12-12T04:18:00.000-08:00

I just got this comment on my blog post about my back:

"My name is Catherine, and I am a customer service representative with Select Comfort. I am so sorry to hear that you are having issues rolling to the middle of your bed. The good news is- we are here to help! There are several low-cost or no-cost things we can try to alleviate this annoyance for you. If you are interested in working through the issue with us, please give us a call at 1-800-472-7185. Please be ready with you and your name and address, you and your sleep partner’s (if you have one) preferred Sleep Number, your approximate heights and weights, and whether or not you feel like the sides of the bed are higher than the air chambers.

We are looking forward to helping you out!

Sincerely,
Catherine

My Sleep Number is 35"

She included her sleep number!

I probably will call them. There's just one little problem...we have the cheapest Sleep Number which comes with the "Non-Digital Firmer/Softer Remote." So, I don't know my sleep number. Still, the promise of low-cost and no-cost solutions to ANY problem seems worth a toll-free call, don't you think?

Thanks Sleep Number!

Foam

2007-12-07T08:26:00.000-08:00

I usually drink lattes when I seek Starbucks in the morning. I've been seeking Starbucks in the morning more often than I should, what with the demise of Coke Blak. My stash lasted until Monday. I toasted Coca-Cola with my last one and have been in mourning since.

I'm also a little bored with my Starbucks patterns. Order latte in tall or grande, add shot to number Starbucks think is appropriate. Drink. Feel a little guilty about spending $4 on coffee.

This morning I ordered a cappuccino. It was tasty. It still cost $3.25. At the end of it, I looked into the bottom of the cup and there was a lot of really pretty foam. I looked at it a while. I tipped the cup up to try to get it to come to me. Then, I looked around, a little like that shifty eyed dog in the cartoons.

I stuck my hand down in the cup and scooped out the foam. I licked each finger and my palm.

Then, as if I had done nothing untoward, I arose from my chair, went to the office kitchen, threw away the cup and washed my hands.

On the wall

2007-12-05T04:20:00.000-08:00

When I was younger, I would often go into my mother's office. She has always kept Hershey's Kisses in a jar and I'd have one or two. Because of what she does, I had occasion to spend a lot of time at her workplace as a child and teenager. Occasionally, I would also go to my father's office. He didn't have kisses, but inevitably had a better view. Hers was always a ground floor office and his was a high rise office. Sweeping vistas are ingrained in the American consciousness, even if the vista in question is of other high-rise buildings.

I always admired their degrees on the wall. I read them and then re-read them. They went to the same college, so the bachelors' degrees looked the same, but their advanced degrees differed and I found their language and appearance very appealing. There was a deep commitment to education as an idea in my family, but the material culture of education also appealed deeply to me. The degrees themselves, the regalia, the places. The verdant landscapes in otherwise normal contexts.

Really, I wanted those pieces of paper. I have some of them now. Four, if you want to know. One of them has a typo. Two of them are framed. I really have no idea where the fourth one is. The "highest" one, as they say, had been sitting in its frame in a closet. I had never put it on a wall anywhere. I had it on top of a bookshelf at home for a while, but then our roof leaked and our office ceiling collapsed and, as I hauled ceiling and insulation out to the trash can, I put it away in the closet to keep it from forming some undeniable bond with the wet insulation.

This weekend, we cleaned out that closet so the house can be re-floored. I found that highest degree in the closet.

This morning, I brought it in to work. The frame had some smudges on it, so I cleaned it a little. I took down a picture I had taken some years ago of a cyclist whose name I don't know and hung the degree on my wall. I like the language on it more than any of the ones my parents have, "The Regents of the University of California on the recommendation of the Graduate Council of the Academic Senate, Los Angeles Division have conferred upon [insert name here]" Isn't that great? So florid.

It continues, "...who, by conducting original research has demonstrated thorough knowledge of [insert field here]" So, original research demonstrates thorough knowledge. Good to know. Now, with all of that, you still don't know what degree it is. Way to bury the lead, UC. Good things come to those who bother to read the whole thing. The degree comes next.

..."The Degree of Doctor of Philosophy." There it is. Whew. Took a while. "with all the rights and privileges thereto pertaining." I'm not sure what rights it gives me, but it is a privilege (most of the time) to be an Associate Professor for the same state the issued the piece of paper I'm currently discussing.

"Given at Los Angeles This Twenty Sixth Day of March in the Year Nineteen Hundred and Ninety Nine." Note the lack of "of our Lord" language. Secularity is SO rampant in, well, secular institutions. Rightly so. It's signed, by among others, the ousted former governor of the state. There's also a gold seal.

It looks nice on the wall, I have to say. It perches right above a picture of a starling eating watermelon and next to my Union Pacific Las Vegas poster. I don't know why I didn't hang it there before. I wanted it for so long and then I got it. It belongs in my office with its first floor view. Come by and read it, if you want.

Avoiding the crevasse

2007-12-03T10:23:00.000-08:00

I spend a lot of time pretending my body doesn't exist. Oh, sure, I know it does. I glance at on occasion. I can see parts of it as I type. As a whole, though, I'd just as soon let it travel through a slightly parallel universe. I especially hate having my attention drawn to it by forces external.

Most nights I sleep by myself in our Select Comfort bed. My honey sleeps next to me in a device that protects her very badly arthritic spinal column. The Select Comfort bed was not made for one...

The upper arrow pointing to what they're calling "support foam" is actually pointing to something I call "the crevasse" which is an indentation between the two air chambers. When I sleep alone in the bed, I roll into the crevasse. I stay in the crevasse. The crevasse was not meant for sleeping in. And yet, night after night, I hear its siren call and into it I roll.

Saturday night I must have ensconced myself into it fundamentally because Sunday morning my lower back felt as if it had been slammed with a cricket bat.

See how flat those mofos are? Sleeping in the crevasse=getting hit by a cricket bat in the lower back. So what did we decide to do yesterday? Glad you asked; we decided to buy large things at Ikea. Large things that had to be loaded in the FJ and then unloaded in the garage.

Honey had this lovely massage thing from Brookstone I didn't know about and we took turns spending time with it.

Meanwhile, I was riding my bike around campus today and did something to my bad knee. I'm fine sitting. But walking, no so much.

The coporeal and kinesthetic is part of my life, whether I like it or not. Still, right this minute, I might start hitting people and things with a cricket bat if something else goes wrong. Those mofos hurt. Don't say I didn't warn you.

One MILLION Dollars

2007-11-27T11:10:00.000-08:00

So, this guy, who's from my home state, tried to deposit a one million dollar bill in a local bank. When the teller refused to open an account for him, he became abusive and they called the cops.

The United States has never issued a one million dollar bill, just for the blog record.

The two largest bills ever offered by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing were the hundred thousand dollar bill and the ten thousand dollar bill. The B.E.P. should not, by the by, not be confused with the Mint. The Mint does the coins. And has a lame gift shop.

Here's a picture of the 10K bill:

Know who's on that bill? What, you don't recognize him? Come on! Salmon P. Chase is a household name. Still not ringing a bell? He was one of the leaders of the Free Soil movement, Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury, and later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. While I'm sure you're now all thinking, "oh, right HIM" here's another factoid. Chase Bank. Hokay.

You may do better with the 100K:

Wilson. As in Woodrow. It wasn't really a circulating bill, so much as it was a gold certificate, though William Jennings Bryan would have me note that it was issued (in 1934) after the gold standard was repealed. It was used for interagency exchanges of money and was orange on the reverse. Roosevelt (as in Franklin) was the man behind the 100K bill.

The 10k, really, was the biggest bill ever in circulation and featured pilgrims disembarking from the Mayflower on the reverse. The 5K bill featured James Madison and Washington resigning his Army commission. History on the money!

Nixon did away with all bills larger that $100 in 1969 to try to better control organized crime. That worked out really well for him (and us). I've long been a proponent of doing away with the $1 bill. We should use $1 coins. Oh and we should also eliminate the penny. I should stop mixing Mint issues and Engraving and Printing issues. Still, those are my money opinions and I'm standing by them. Also, we should go back to the silver standard.

Ok, maybe not, but I do like the idea of being able to go and demand silver somewhere. Hey--here's a five, gimme some silver!

When I was in college, I was friends with a number of economics majors. They contended, usually when a little drunk, that the great tragedy of my life would be not taking economics in college. (My dad sometimes contends I should have taken HOME economics in middle school. I wish I had taken typing.) My usual counter argument to the econ majors was that the tragedy of their lives was not taking philosophy. I still think I'm right, but I do wish I knew a little more about economics. Oh and there have been other tragedies more significant than my lack of economic understanding. Plus, I've read Marx and Engels. Doesn't that count for something?

I'll settle, for the moment, I guess, with knowing that there is no such thing as a million dollar bill. I wish I had a real one so I could but people I love the things they want. Lately, I've been wanting to exchange bills for another metal. Why wasn't there ever a titanium standard? I'd love to trade a slip of paper for two of these (one for me and one for my honey):

The problem is, people who sell the above want those plastic card things. I learned about that once, but have forgotten most of what I know. I seem to recall you have to use the regular money to pay back what you spent on the plastic dohickeys at some point. Like in graduate school, when I took out student loans, and was required to go to a meeting wherein the main message was "YOU HAVE TO PAY BACK YOUR LOANS." I sometimes misunderstand messages. For example, Honey and I went to see No Country for Old Men this weekend. As we were walking out of the theater, she said, "so the message of that movie is that everything is going to be ok." It was not the message I got. Maybe my college friends were right. I just reread the "Cross of Gold" speech and Bryan says nothing about titanium. I'm going to have to think on this. In the meantime, if anyone has any deep thoughts on economics or moving toward a titanium standard, please let me know.

Bear Aware

2007-11-19T08:13:00.000-08:00

The woman at the front desk handed me a sheet to initial and sign in various places. I wasn't buying a house, a car, or even a bicycle. No indeed. I was checking into a hotel. Why all the initialing? Most notably, I was certifying that everyone in my party was "bear aware." We had taken a trip for my Honey's transition into her next stage by traveling to our National Park. We've visited Sequoia on a number of occasions in our life together and have a deep affinity for the place. As we were walking around the "Big Trees Trail" yesterday, Honey said, "this is why California is so wonderful." Truth: spoken out loud.

Tree Aside:

That's the Grant tree. It was declared the "nation's Christmas tree" by Calvin Coolidge. Eh. Honey and I walked around the back side of it first. It's big, but not as pretty as I'd like. I prefer the Sentinel with its "average" size.

Back to the Bears:

My family wasn't much of a National Park kind of family. We visited a few, but the best ones are in the West. (You can deny the previous statement all you want, but denial has therapeutic value--discuss as needed with your therapist). My family did visit the Great Smoky Mountains National Park a couple of times. I recall very vividly that both times we saw bears.

Black bears (ursus americanus) are found in most of the large National Parks, including Great Smoky Mountain NP and Sequoia and Kings Canyon NP(s). They're not particularly aggressive bears, and rarely attack humans. Grizzly bears (ursus arctos horribilis), their larger cousins, are typically only found in four National Parks. And, no, the St. Louis Arch is not one of them. OK, fine, the arch (properly the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial) is not an actual National Park. I just liked the idea of grizzly bears riding in that weird conveyance you use to get to the top of it.

The four Parks with grizzly bears are: Glacier, Yellowstone, Katmai, and Denali. Montana, Wyoming, and Alaska (2), for those of you keeping state score. Grizzly Bears will kill people. Black Bears can hurt people, if the people are stupid.

That's a black bear next to the trash can, by the way. They can be brown. Confusing, I admit. The real problem for the black bears, as it is with so much of modern life, is trash. Both times I saw bears in GSMNP as a child it was near a tumped over trash can.

Bears like human food trash. It doesn't distinguish them very much from dogs, now that I think about it. Until recently, many bears in many parks had learned that humans had food. Smart animals that they are; they figured that begging might get them some.

Yogi didn't help matters. Who wouldn't want to share a picnic with Yogi? Ok, I wouldn't, but some folks would.

Then Smokey was always hanging around telling us to prevent fires. He's a nice spokesanimal. Friendly bear spokesanimals are likely to produce friendly feelings about bears by park visitors.

Smokey isn't my favorite spokesanimal, though. As a person of a certain age, I feel more connection to his anti-litter buddy, Woodsy Owl. Recently redesigned (2006), Woodsy first appeared in the early 1970s. While he now urges, "Lend a Hand, Care for the Land," his original exhortation, "Give a hoot don't pollute" should bring a song about "dirty bird(s)" to the minds of many.

There are currently some licensed Woodsy pants available on ebay. It could be a new fashion trend. Think how good you'd look in Woodsy pants. The belt buckle, the weird length. Sigh.

Being bear aware dominates a lot of thinking and efforting at our National Park. The new movement at the National Parks is anti-Yogi, anti-cubs begging at woodie station wagons.

Not only did I have to certify that I was bear aware and that Honey was bear aware, we also had to remove things that might cause bear break-ins from our car. Food? Yep. Drinks? Yep. Also lotion, chapstick, lipstick, Purell. Really, anything with a scent had to be secreted away to our room. I can find no evidence that a bear ever tore apart a car for chapstick. They have torn apart cars for food. But chapstick? I'm not so sure.

Really, day visitors get left off the hook. They're told to keep "food out of sight." Staying overnight? Get that chapstick out of the car! Now.

I saw these signs all over the park. I don't want to be responsible for a dead bear. Not me. Nope. Nuh uh. I do like some of the advice the sign offers.

"Gather together and make noise by banging pots and pans."

Damn, we forgot to bring pots and pans. Are they required even when we don't camp?

"NEVER try to get items back from a bear."

Do you really mean that I shouldn't use my soft hand to hit the big bear on the head to get my chapstick back? It's MY chapstick. Who's going to buy me another stick? Also, if he takes my L'Occitane lotion, somebody is going to pay. I'm just saying.

"If you are afraid, back away and contact a ranger for help."

Mmm Kay. So, there will be a ranger nearby? Not just the pretty one in the booth an hour back where I paid my $20? That's super handy. Each bear has an assigned ranger. Thanks!

"You may see rangers using hazing techniques to chase bears away."

That is especially awesome. Do they shave their heads? Make them drink lots of beer? I do hope they get to join the fraternity afterwards.

Ok, snarky aside done. I do love the picture of the people.

Clearly one thing you should certainly do is make an "o" with your mouth. Honey and I practiced that all weekend. The problem for us, really, was who wanted which role. We had no pots or spoons, so neither could of us be the dad. I decided the best thing to do was consult the bear's ranger about what to do beyond the "o" mouth.

As we descended into the San Joaquin Valley and headed home yesterday, I thought about what I had learned. I learned a lot about sequoias, but not much about bears, really. I realize that the sequoias aren't going to break into my car, but think about if one of them fell on me. I'd be way more dead than if a bear took my lotion. It's unlikely that a sequoia would fall on me, I admit. Still I should have asked the pretty ranger how to protect myself from the unlikely. With all those sequoias, they're probably not able to have enough rangers to assign one to every tree. Standing near them, then, is a risk I must be willing to take. I'm nothing if not brave. And bear aware. I'm also very bear aware. So is Honey. I certified us.

Part of the story: Happy Birthday!

2007-11-15T03:43:00.000-08:00

This is how this story begins:

I was a newish graduate student at a fine university in Southern California. Not the one with the good football team. The one with the good basketball team. I was helping a woman with her senior thesis. I met her through the lesbian rap group on campus. I encouraged her to present her senior thesis at a regional conference I was also going to attend. Academics present papers at conferences. It's a thing. And this woman thought she might want to go to graduate school.

I rode up to the conference with this woman and her girlfriend. I was a little intimidated by her girlfriend. She was sexy, had a shaved head, and rode a motorcycle. The girlfriend had a two door SUV and I, as the non couple person, rode in the back on the way to Davis, where the conference was to be held. On the way up, I bought a small packet of bite-sized Pecan Sandies. I dropped one and stepped on it. I didn't mean to. When the girlfriend saw this, she teased me. I thought she was mad. She wasn't.

This is part of the story too:

The senior thesis woman broke up with her girlfriend. The (now ex) girlfriend stopped by and left a note on my office door. Later that summer she gave me a large lemon that looked like a breast.

It looked more like a breast than that one does. I loved that lemon because I loved the woman who gave it to me. I didn't know that when she gave me the lemon. I suspected, but I didn't know.

Later on this becomes part of the story:

The (now ex) girlfriend becomes my girlfriend. Because she knows I can, she often asks as we go to sleep at night, "will you tell me a story?" And I do tell her stories until she falls asleep.

Sometimes, when I say something innocuous (because I talk too much and say too much), she says to me, "that wasn't a very good story." She's right, when she says that. Not all stories can be good, but I should try harder to give her good stories.

So here's another piece of the story:

My honey starts a new chapter of her story today.

Here's the last part of the story for today:

When the former graduate student, now sometimes professor, often administrator woke up this morning, she saw her love asleep. She made up a stupid song that she sang to her love in celebration of 40 years of life. It was a silly song, that got sort of squeaky at the end. She thought it was ok, though, because sometimes the story is about breast lemons and squeaky songs.

_________

So, happy birthday, sweeties. I can't wait to see how your story moves on from here.

Born to (and a Shakespeare game)

2007-11-12T03:54:00.000-08:00

Honey and I were watching "Everest: Beyond the Limit" the other night. The narrator noted that the Nepalese were born to climb the great mountains of their country. Their hearts are bigger. Their lungs are bigger. It reminded me (and I said out loud) of the piece that I read in the L.A. Times last week about Disneyland redesigning the "It's a Small World" ride. It seems that the boats keep bottoming out. Disneyland, not wanting to alienate its visitors, has refused to blame the expanding American (and non-American) waistlines on the problem. Instead they argue that years of fiberglass build-up on the boats and water channel have made the ride less functional. The problem, apparently, is so acute, that they've built a platform near the Canadian Mounties to help people out of the boats so the ride doesn't get held up too long. Listening to that song a few MORE times than the ride normally requires may be too much for people.

At any rate, I remarked, upon hearing the narration about the Nepalese, that Americans are born to bottom-out Small World boats. My Honey laughed. I like making my Honey laugh.

I liked this Shakespeare thing. It has nothing to do with what we're born to do. Still. Macbeth would have been way different with sporks.

Is this a spork which I see before me,
Its handle toward my hand?

Which work of Shakespeare was the original quote from?

Workin' (or not)

2007-11-08T08:49:00.000-08:00

I'm at home today because a nice fellow is outside working on our house. I'm also expecting another nice fellow to come by and talk about floors. The latter fellow has eight minutes left in the window he gave us. Contractors should say 9 when they mean 9, not "between 7 and 8" when they mean 9. That's true of everyone, really. I'm capable of showing up at 7pm when my class starts then. Should I choose to show up at 8:30, I should not be shocked by the absence of everyone else.

I brought work home with me to do, but, as yet, haven't done much with it. I know there are people who work well at home. I'm not one of them. Oh sure, I've checked e-mail and read a little. Only a little.

I also know people who do their own home improvement work. I admire them from afar. If I get to close, they might poke out my eye with a saw or something.

I admire the fortitude these folks have in doing their things. I also always find myself feeling odd about the circumstance of having work done on my house while I wile away the day dog-sitting the two canine-type freaks Honey and I brought into our lives.

I keep telling myself that since I'll be at home tomorrow, too, I'll get some of what I brought home done then.

It's a funny thing, this lack of motivation. I have lamented, in the past, my lack of time at home since I took on an administrative (rather than teaching) job at my fine institution of higher education. Honestly, though, I don't know what I got done once upon a time. Instead, as the day has gone on, I remember some connected moments. They have not been moments of great production. Eating some pasta, reading the paper. It's nice, I suppose. I find myself feeling at odds. Restless really.

My heart may be more restless than it used to be. I find that quite plausible. The problem, though, is how to calm the restless heart. Or at least how to get it to not beat up on itself for being restless.
The good news is that the work should be done tomorrow or Monday and we'll have two layers of dog gates, more patio next to our side door, and functional locks on all our exterior doors and the garage. Honey has suggested we invite our handyman to move in, which I'm inclined to do, as we're also in negotiation to have him rip out our carpeting, lay some tile, and fix us up with some fine faux wood laminate. "Only [we] will know it isn't wood!"

As for my restless heart, I just checked in with Newton (or Ike, as I like to call him), and he reports that it's likely to stay moving. At least for now. So wave if you see it run by.

A small SkyMall thought

2007-11-03T04:47:00.000-07:00

I am well aware that the SkyMall catalog is simply a distraction that the airlines provide me with on the plane. The companies that populate it are hoping I'll buy something.

Treecup and I once played a game on the way to a conference where we opened the SkyMall catalog. Here's how it worked. I'd open the book to a particular page and pick out the item I most thought she would want, even if it was a page full of NFL pool balls. There couldn't be anything less suited to Treecup than NFL pool balls. Then she picked out the thing she would buy on that page. Then we'd switch and she'd try to guess my preferences. (The answer couldn't be "nothing." In our imaginary SkyMall world, you had to buy something on every page. Delta and Hammacher Schlemmer would be so pleased. Them and the NFL pool ball people.) It was an amusing and interesting exercise in how well we knew one another.

My father travels a lot and when I ask him for gift suggestions, he is likely as not to come up with something from the SkyMall like a shower squeegee. I don't feel compelled to buy him the actual shower squeegee from the catalog, nor is he hoping for it. He just liked the idea of the shower squeegee. Thusly, he is now able to squeegee his shower at will.

Anyway, when I flew home on Wednesday, I noticed a product that made me sad in the SkyMall. Not sad like the anti-gay freaks protesting at soldiers funerals. Not that sad. Still.

Here it is:

It's described as:

"Safe laser beam toy keeps your cat entertained for hours on end, so you can do other things."

Ok, I will admit that our four (how did that happen?) pets ~~always often~~ sometimes drive me crazy. But they're our pets. I brought them (or helped bring them) into our home. I should play with them. If the cats like laser pointers (and boy, do they), I should wield said pointer and move it around for them. Really. With my own hands. Even though I hurt my shoulder the other day bench pressing my honey. I have a left hand. It has a wrist that works.

The "you don't have to play with you cat" laser thingy is yet another example of our continuing slide into desperation.

I should note that, as I wrote this, Biscuit had cornered Halo under my desk. Biscuit is now outside and I have tried to coax Halo out of her lair. I'm not sure where my laser pointer is, though. So she'll have to make do with my petting her should I be successful in the extraction.

A few Denver thoughts

2007-10-29T13:26:00.000-07:00

I find myself in Denver, a city to which I have never ventured before. Seems nice enough and the weather is good, I gather, for October in Colorado.

Some preliminary thoughts:

1) People smoke here more than they do in L.A. Seems ill-advised given the thin air. They'll need their lungs.

2) The Mint should have a nicer gift shop, especially since they didn't have any space left on their tour today. They make a profit on those state quarters. Cycle it back such that the gift shop doesn't seem like a trailer time forgot. There are just the two Mints, really. They could try harder. Does anyone know if they try harder in Philadelphia mint-wise?

3) If I wanted Rockies World Series gear, my timing could not be better. It's all 50% off. Now that I know the Rockies actively recruit born-again Christian players, I don't so much want Rockies gear.

4) I'm in the hotel the BoSox stayed in last night. To hear tell, we're lucky to get rooms, as the celebrated rather, um, vigorously and didn't leave when they were supposed to.

5) I also hear tell that the Packers are staying here tonight. For fantasy football reasons, I'm hoping they have no real reason to celebrate. Brett Favre especially. Plus he doesn't pronounce his name right. Ok, he does, given that he's from the South, where Ponce De Leon is pronounced "Ponse Dee Leeeon" and Cairo, GA is pronounced "Kay-roh." Still.

6) The Rockies (mountains, this time) are really pretty.

7) Ok, I'm off to dinner with my boss. I'm going to try not to say anything stupid.

Costing more

2007-10-22T04:51:00.000-07:00

So Honey mentioned to me yesterday that our faithful laptop was conking out a few times a day. I named the laptop "pretty" when I got it. Shall we take a brief tour of my computers? Sure. Why not? It's my blog after all.

My first computer was a PC. Not a real IBM one, but an Epson with a Hercules paperwhite monitor. It served me fairly well. I upgraded it at some point and it functioned like DOS based PCs did. Well. Then Windows cam along and I lost faith.

In graduate school, I had a class that introduced me to the wonders of that magical place called Cupertino. Hypercard prefigured and guessed at the beginnings of the web. I used the internet then--e-mail and netnews--but hadn't yet seen a graphical interface. Hypercard changed that. I promptly got myself a Mac. A laptop.

Color and everything! It weighed a ton, but I was delighted to have a system that worked.

Taking a page from my Honey... to keep you going. There are baby animals here!

Anyway, we entered into the bright phase when Apple did. An original bondi iMac was complemented by the famous (from Sex and the City) iBook. We called the iBook "clam."

Swivelhead came next. I sent him packing this summer when his disc drive went out. That and he wouldn't play Sims2.

Need another baby animal picture? Honey uses them to help deal with tough stuff. I'm compensating for boring stuff. Not the same thing, really.

Pretty and Swivelhead lived together. Pretty has served us well. Even when Biscuit broke her powercord input, she bravely went to the Apple store and got fixed.

She welcomed Flathead when he came home this summer to replace Swivelhead. She chirped merrily along, all the while communicating with the spaceship (our Airport wireless router).

When Honey told me about Pretty's problems, I was worried. Pretty was nearing the end of her life, it seemed. Was it her screen? Was it her motherboard? Either way, she isn't worth fixing. She's a G4 Mac in an Intel CoreDuo world.

Honey and I discussed, looked online, and talked some about it. She's very careful, my Honey. I am a rushing-in kind of fool. Here's one thing we agreed on, though. Apple needed to stop introducing white computers and then making the non-white ones cost more. Flathead was purchased JUST before the new silver and black iMacs came out. Flathead costs $200 less than his silver and black brethern do now. $200. Remember that number.

The new MacBooks are available in white and black.

Here's the thing, though... The white ones are cheaper.

$200 cheaper.

Oh, sure the black one gets you a better hard drive. But it's so little better that it's not worth talking about.

At one point, Honey said exactly what I was feeling, "I don't want to spend $1000 on something that LOOKS exactly like what we already have." Look again, gentle reader. See the resemblance? The current MacBook and Pretty are so closely related in looks that they shouldn't be allowed to marry. They'd produce warped little white plastic babies. What? Oh, ok, fine. More baby animals...

The dolphin isn't white or deformed or anything. Happy?

Apple knows us. We both REALLY wanted the black one. It was matte black, it was smaller than Pretty. It was faster than Pretty or Flathead. I have a big presentation next week for a major nonprofit in a faraway city. Ok, it's Denver, so it's not that far away, but it is a major nonprofit. Dating back to the 19th century major.

Both of our iPods are black. It costs more. We really liked it better. It had a bigger hard drive. It costs more. $200 more. Apple knows us. $300 more? We'd have a white one. $200, we stand in the Apple Store and discuss.

It was hard to justify. We did it, though. We made it work in our brains and now own "Jelly."

Call us shallow. Go ahead. Here's the thing about Apple. They're gotten 100% on the Human Rights Campaign survey of good places for GLBT folks to work for six years. $200. 6 years of good GLBT relations. Black. $200. White.

They know us.

Jelly is a fine looking machine.

And thus endeth the story. Can I get an amen?

Thanks.

Leaning

2007-10-19T07:49:00.000-07:00

So I was in my vehicle yesterday waiting to turn left. I glanced over at the cars turning right onto the street I was on. It's a normal Valley street. Big intersections, plenty of room. There are advantages to living in the quintessential post-War environment. 1950s car were big and so our streets are wide.

This 1953 Studebaker, for example, was 20 feet long. And it's a coupe. My FJ, just for comparison, is about 15 feet long. A Prius is about 14 feet. Big cars of the 50s meant big streets. Frank Lloyd Wright said we needed it, you know.

Anyway, I was watching these folks turn right and I noticed they were all leaning over as the turned. How odd, I thought. Then I turned left and realized that I, too, had leaned. Not as much as the people I was watching, but I still leaned.

Now, while I'm sure we all like to keep our equilibrium, it got me to thinking...how important is it to stay upright at all times? It's not like you're going to fall over in the car. And, really, if you are going to fall over in the car, you have a lot more to worry about the simple uprightness.

So, here's the question--are you a car leaner? If so, why? Be honest and share out in comments.

Quiet!

2007-10-15T05:12:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Honey and I were done with our lunch. We had stopped at a restaurant in Ventura on the way back from a nice weekend away up the Central Coast. I had bidness at the branch of the system of which my university is a part at which I most covet a job. Did you follow that? I would like to work where we went.

One of my students asked me last week, in reference to the midterm, whether I would "write the question in really hard professor language." Another said, rather quickly, "don't give her any ideas!"

Anyway, nice weekend to be ended with lunch in Ventura.

We had good sandwiches but were both struck by how loud the place we had chosen was. They had four teevees going. Two with football and two with bull-riding. They were also playing music rather loudly. Our waiter was taking a bit getting us the check and I heard Honey singing "Help Me Rhonda" along with the music. I should note, quickly and vigorously, that Honey isn't a big Beach Boys fan. She can articulate this better than I. Indeed, she did so as we drove back to the freeway, explaining that, while she liked some Brian Wilson songs, the popular one were ubiquitous and not appealing to her. That's a paraphrase, but I think I got the gist.

I have other reasons for not liking that particular song. The good news is that I see my therapist tonight and "Help Me Rhonda" could well come up. Once I've processed, I may share out.

Honey and I agreed, and, indeed, have discussed and agreed on this before, that music in restaurants, well, sucks. It's loud. It interrupts both conversation and contemplative silence. It panders to the worst in music. It's either noise (pablum pop stripped of lyrics) or intrusive (Beach Boys). Either way, I'd like modern America a wee bit quieter. Ok, a lot quieter.

I know that there are undoubtedly studies that show that people are happier when they have music while they eat. It fills lulls in conversations and give those (theoretically) poor souls eating alone something to think about. But I think focus groups of this type have caused more harm than good. I like the sound of people talking and of dishes being moved around. I like these sounds whether alone or with people. I also like to be able to hear my dinner companion(s). And to read when alone.

I'm sure there are people who want to be the bringee in a world that is far too loud. Count me as not among that group.

Somebody turn down the damn music. I'm never, ever, going to help Brian Wilson or Rhonda, so no need to implore me to do so.