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Digging out

No work today. The public transportation system is completely shut down in my area. The residential streets in my neighborhood are mostly covered with packed snow and ice, though the main streets are clear.

I saw a small city truck with a plow driving along with the blade set so high that it only shoved aside a few loose chunks of snow which had fallen off passing cars. The truck was not big and powerful enough to effectively clear the street, but still. The object of plowing is to remove the snow, not to plane it smooth.

I walked to the little Giant this morning and found apples. The gaps in the produce section are not surprising: lots of cauliflower and Brussels sprouts, no bell peppers or mushrooms. I did find fresh jalapenos for my chili dinner. The egg section was completely empty except for egg substitute products. The dairy section was almost entirely clear of shredded cheese, but there was plenty of block cheese. I'll know when folks are getting desperate: they'll be shredding their own cheese for egg substitute omelettes.

My landlady and I moved the supercan into a better location; now we can take out our trash without plunging through the snow or wrestling with tree branches. I remembered where I last saw her bag of ice melt and dug it out from under the snow. I must remember to place it in a protected spot so I won't have to repeat the operation after the projected additional foot of snow arriving tomorrow and Wednesday.

Still low on Parmesan, I walked over to the cheese boutique and they were closed! (Just like my employer.) The ice cream store was open, the Mexican restaurant was open, the coffee shop was open … What's with the cheesemongers? They expect us to weather the storm without fancy cheese? Which we'll have to shred ourselves?

Tomorrow my employer is closed again, but there will be limited service on my bus line. I may go visit my car in the office parking deck. It won't be coming home any time soon. I would have to shift a car-sized volume of snow to have somewhere to park and there's nowhere to put the snow.

I wish I were snowbound down in Richmond, where I would be snowbound with Oz, the cats, and much less snow.

Buried

"Two feet of snow" is an abstract concept until you try to move it around.

I did a little shoveling today with my landlady's ergonomic snow shovel, which is harder on every joint in your body than a plain old-fashioned snow shovel. I suppose it might be good for pushing small quantities of snow around, but the curved handle makes it murder for heaving mass quantities of snow out of your way.

I nibbled a couple paths clear: my entrance to the gate, my landlady's front steps (drifted thigh deep) to the sidewalk which had already been shoveled out by some saintly soul. I then took a break and waited for the guy with the shovel whom my landlady had engaged to do the shoveling.

A few hours a later, a kid with a shovel accompanied by his mom, also with a shovel, turned up and shoveled the path from my gate to the sidewalk. Like me, my landlady hadn't expected all that much snow and had selected her shoveler accordingly. So often in Virginia the winter storms never live up to the hype and we adjust our expectations accordingly. Our adjusted estimates of accumulation are usually pretty close. Not this time.

In the afternoon I used my Swiffer to knock the snow off Southern Lady's station wagon. Her car is now embedded in a waist-deep snowbank. (Where could I put the snow except beside the car?) Better beside it than on it. At least it's clean snow and will provide some protection if a salt truck comes through.

Tomorrow, seeing as how the Office is closed, I can do more shoveling. Maybe a little path back to the supercan so that we can take out the trash. (If I'd been thinking, I would have moved the supercan closer to the front of the house so we wouldn't have as far to shovel.) Maybe I'll start shoveling out a space for my car, which is still tucked away in the parking deck at work. I've got plenty of time to work on that. I can't even get to my car until the buses start running again.

Yes, my clever plan to avoid the vacuum cleaner continues apace. Shoveling is ever so much less work.

Snowbound

Today I saw a few neighbors digging out their vehicles, but most of them only got about halfway through before they gave up. A few people shoveled their walks while the snow was still falling. Futility: at least it's something to do.

Last night it didn't look like the storm would measure up to the hype.

By morning it was another story. And by afternoon it was looking pretty Snowpocalyptic.

My landlady's holly trees lost their tops and then some, but the junipers just took a bow.

Of course, I live in the basement, so I have a ground level view of the situation.

I hope the guy with the shovel shows up tomorrow. The snow is deeper than my boots are tall and while I'd like to get out, I don't think it would be worth the freezing of my knees. In the meantime I am keeping amused, but getting low on trashy novels and Parmesan cheese. A slog through the snow to the cheese boutique and the drugstore might be just the thing to make me appreciate the great indoors even more. A slog through the snow to the sidewalk might be more than sufficient.

Monkeypants

Well, we didn't get a whole snow day, but we got four hours early dismissal. That news prompted me to cancel this afternoon's hair appointment because it would have put me on the beltway in early Snowpocalypse rush hour.

I'm now back at the apartment, not doing chores and watching the snow fall. Wearing my flannel monkeypants because I'm certainly not going out. I'm doing laundry. What with the exodus of the rest of the house, I have the laundry machines to myself till Sunday. It's too bad I don't have more laundry to do. Maybe I should dirty up some stuff.

It's a good thing I left my car at work, because otherwise I'd be tempted to go out and buy Nutella now that I've been informed that it's World Nutella Day. (I should put Nutella on my list of real true snow emergency supplies.)

So far this Snowpocalypse has been desultory, to say the least. The forecast three to five inches by sundown was more like one or two inches. The weather report as of 6:00 had the snowfall estimate revised downward by a factor of four. That's the reliable weather report. The radio people are still freaking out and the National Weather Service all-caps warnings and "Special Weather Statements" (BLIZZARD WARNING! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!11!!) are still up.

It's a few hours later now and it's looking a little more Snowpocalyptic outside. My reliable weather source has revised their accumulation estimates back up. Drat. I'm running out of ways to avoid running the vacuum and cleaning the bathroom.

Snowpocalypse!

Northern Virginia is in the path of the biggest winter storm ever. It is so virtually fearsome that the city of Alexandria announced that schools would be closed tomorrow. Closed even before the snow is due to fall! The teenagers at the physical therapy place all said, "Woot!" when that was announced on TV this afternoon. Or maybe they said, "Yeah!" or "Score!" I wasn't paying such close attention because I was listening for announcements that might relate to me.

My employer is on the "you can use vacation time to make up for missed hours without prior approval from your supervisor" schedule which means that I am going to work tomorrow. My clever plan is to leave my car in the parking deck and take the bus home so that I won't have to dig my car out from under the twenty inches of snow they are forecasting.

After I left the physical therapy place, I figured I'd swing by a supermarket. All I wanted was a half gallon of milk and a few apples. I've got plenty of food in the house, but I'm low on milk and out of apples. I'm low on Parmesan too.

The parking lot of the big Giant was filled with cars, both parked and circling like vultures. I swung up one row, down the next, and decided to try the little Giant closer to home. At the little Giant, same thing. I parked across the street in the empty parking lot for the dog run and baseball field. Looking in the front window of the market, I saw the lines ten or twelve deep, laughed, and walked back to my car. The lines are long, the shelves will be bare. Very Soviet Union and all, but I didn't feel like investing the time.

Back at home, my landlady came down to tell me that her employer would be putting her and her coworkers all up in hotels downtown so they wouldn't have to send out commando teams to collect staff. The dog is going to puppy camp for the weekend. She's arranged to have someone shovel out the front walk and the walk back to my entrance (which I hadn't even thought about). Her housemate left today to spend a week in New Orleans. The real Southern lady has excellent timing. (I will be sure to knock the snow off her car, thereby returning the favor she did me after the last snowpocalypse.)

We exchanged supermarket stories and she offered to let me raid her housemate's milk carton.

I told Oz about the coming snowpocalypse and we discussed which of the four horsemen comes for a snowpocalypse. He said Famine and that's why everyone runs to the store. I think it's Santa Claus picking up a little extra work after the holidays.

I still wanted to get some apples, so later I went for the full pre-snowpocalypse experience by making a fruitless (literally) trip to the organic market. Sure enough, the parking lot had a couple orders of magnitude more cars than usual and I saw people loading a week's worth of groceries into their SUVs. Under normal weather conditions people rarely get more than a couple bags of groceries at the organic market.

Inside, the produce section was bare except for ginger (quite a lot of ginger, actually) and a few other things. They did have citrus fruit (I'm mildly allergic), coconuts (hard to eat out of hand at the office), and red delicious apples (why bother?). The milk section, also bare. Not even buttermilk, which I figured I'd get a quart and do some baking this weekend, but that was not to be.

I found this really entertaining, but some people did not.

One woman was pacing around the frozen case, saying, "I'm really stressed. There's nothing left but fake shit."

"That stuff's okay." Her husband pointed to the shelves of soymilk and kefir.

"So it's organic fake shit. I don't want fake shit!"

Tomorrow I plan to walk over to the Whole Foods near the office and check out their empty dairy section (and the frazzled shoppers freaking out over the prospect of soymilk).

A look inside

Tonight I saw a fox bounding across Braddock Road, a block or two west of Russell. Fox in the city!

I was driving home after an MRI of my knee. $420 after insurance. It's only the second week of the year and, with this and a few appointments last week, I've met my deductible a couple times over.

The actual injury to my knee occurred about 15 years ago. I did see a doctor at the time, but he wasn't interested in doing more than poking at it and saying, "Oh, you probably have a tear there." I quote.

The injury might not have merited much in the way of treatment at the time, but some guidance on how to avoid making it worse would have been nice. Fast forward 15 years and a few incidents which wouldn't have bothered a non-torn knee in the slightest, I can't wear shoes with arch support or padding without my fibula feeling like it's coming loose at my knee.

You might say, "Don't wear shoes with arch support or padding, problem solved." And I would say, "You are funny. Ha. You must have taken the same comedy class that all the orthopedists take in med school." I am also developing some compensatory problems, the big one is osteoarthritis in my left ankle, from favoring the knee, and avoiding padded shoes isn't going to do anything for that.

I'm hoping that this doctor will do more than point at the MRI and say, "Oh, you have a tear there."

Anyway, the new new thing in the MRI experience is satellite radio. When I've had MRIs before, it was just earplugs because the machines are so damn noisy. This time I brought my own earplugs, but the technician pointed to a pair of crummy headphones and said, "We have satellite radio now. What channel do you want to listen to?" I thought, what the heck, and picked 80s (because I was a teenager back then).

Big mistake.

The sound quality is so bad (now that I think of it, the headphones must be metal-free and so the sound would have to be transmitted through a vinyl tube) and the machine is so loud that you won't be able to hear the music anyway. Well, unless you pick heavy metal or some other genre with a lot of distortion which would only be enhanced by the sound of the Magnetron.

I guess trying to figure out what the song is over the noise of the machine does offer some distraction. I got to hear Blondie (yay), Sammy Hagar (well, that was the 80s too), and some song by the Fixx which I hadn't heard before and still haven't.

Don't let this happen to you. Go for the earplugs.

Knowing

I do not have what it takes to be a real Southern lady.

I already figured on this, but it's official now. My landlady's housemate, who is from Mississippi, has brought the point home by walking around being a real Southern lady. The contrast is shockingly stark.

First of all, she dresses like a grownup for work. She wears suits and dresses. And high heels every day. She probably remembers to take stuff to the dry cleaners.

I wear jeans and Chucks. Then again, I am in a room by myself with the door closed while she has to interact with other humans daily. I try to remember to wear a collared shirt on those rare days when I have to deal with humans from outside the Office. I have a small bag of dry cleaning sitting by the door that I really need to remember to carry down to the cleaners. It's been there a month.

Secondly, she has a purse dog which sometimes travels in an actual purse. The purse dog has little outfits. She walks the purse dog while she's wearing her suits and heels. On such occasions the purse dog often wears a little topknot bow which matches the suit. Picture perfect for a Savannah square.

I have two cats, each of which outweighs the purse dog by a factor of two or three. If I tried to put the cats in outfits, the outfits would end up shredded, eaten, and barfed up on my bed. Or the cats might just sigh and fall asleep. You never know.

These items are more lady-specific than Southern-specific, but I'm getting there. It's a food thing: pecan pralines. (She says "prah-leen", I say "pray-leen".)

She makes them. She got up at 5:00 am on Christmas Eve to make a batch so she could hand me two pounds of pralines in an Ann Taylor bag on my way out at 7:00. ("Oh, I like to get up early," she said, "I'm just a morning person." "Oh?" I nodded, still stunned from rapid ingestion of cappuccino.)

They were great, by the way, like mainlining butter and brown sugar. I ate one at work that day. Anymore, refined sugar makes me kind of grouchy and I needed to get a good grouch going for something I was writing, so a praline was perfect. Most of the rest disappeared down the maws of my family.

So anyway, whatever it is that gives a lady the drive to get up before dawn and make candy for a bunch of people she doesn't even know … that is something I lack. As long as I stay out of the deep South (it must be in the water? the humidity?), I don't see myself developing it either.

Winter

Winter is the time of year when you get brain freeze drinking water straight out of the cold tap. You think, how can water be that cold and not be solid?

Are laws of physics being broken by the municipal water utility? Or being followed …

It doesn't have to be -75 °C to be cold enough for me. After watching me operate my camera barehanded in the snow, Oz took pity on me and gave me an early Christmas present: silk glove liners! They are thin but add much needed insulation to my (windproof and waterproof, but insufficiently insulated) gloves. I need a little more time to get the gloves on and off now, but it's worth it, except when I need to work my iPhone which demands bare fingers.

Today the phone rang when I was walking home from the bus stop. Eek! Must get the call because it's probably the phone company calling about the missing dial tone on our landline and they never call from a number you can call back at. No time to pull off the gloves, so I operate the "Slide to answer" with the tip of my nose.

It worked! Who knew there was an advantage to my long pointy nose? I just used my nose to punch out a number on the keypad without making too many mistakes. If I do that on the train platform people will edge away and give me lots of space.

I can make this work for me in so many ways.

Snow days

When my train rolled into Richmond Friday night, the snow had only just started to fall and I wasn't believing all the fuss and expectations of accumulation. (This happens every time there's even a hint of snow in the forecast.)

We watched (from indoors) as the snow kept falling and piling up. The air was still enough that several inches accumulated on the telephone wires.

It was still falling in the morning, with occasional breaks for sleet (it sounded like someone throwing beads against the windows). It fell for most of the day, though not all that heavily most of the time. Oz cleared the front walk and dug out his car. We went and did a little advance grocery shopping for our holiday menu plan. The stores were open but strangely empty.

My satellite dish was too clogged with snow to pull down a signal all day. No schmaltzy Japanese dramas or travelogues to keep me company while I wrapped presents. The satellite signal didn't come back till Sunday afternoon, just in time for the hours-long broadcasts of Kyoto high school relay races. That's entertainment: cold-looking wiry teenagers in tanks and shorts jogging interminably past bundled up spectators. To judge from the number of relay race broadcasts on TV Japan, you would bet that the Japanese people are absolutely fascinated by long distance urban running, but my money's on the programming being way cheap.

We went out again in the evening for a holiday card photo fail. Still snowing and I brought a little hat to protect the camera, but neglected to consider how I would not then be able to attach a flash. Next time: plastic bag!

"Or a cambrella," says Oz.
"We don't have one."
"We have umbrellas and duct tape."

But the elements were the least of it.

The view up the hill of the Capitol and the state Christmas tree are now obstructed by bleachers in the process of being assembled (probably) for the swearing in of the new governor. Peachy! We now have some photos of ourselves standing directly in front of the Capitol, getting snowed on. We managed to position ourselves so it doesn't look like the state Christmas tree is growing out of our heads, but that's the best you could say about these shots.

So that was Saturday.

Sunday was sunny and bright and I spent the morning trying to make arrangements to get back to Alexandria. My Sunday evening train was cancelled, not that Amtrak actually said that on their website, oh no, they just had some noncommittal verbiage about a "service disruption" and no further information. I called though, and once I finally got through to a human, she was really forthcoming. Most Sunday trains were cancelled as fallout from Saturday disruptions. She said that Somewhere between Richmond and Alexandria, a passenger train got stuck behind a disabled freight train. Literally stuck: it froze to the tracks for twelve hours before the train was able to back up to the previous station and release the passengers from that little hell on wheels.

I was able to switch my reservation to a Monday morning train originating in Richmond and its timeliness therefore not dependent on the train not freezing to the track in North Carolina. By the time my office decided to be closed on Monday, all the later trains were sold out. Ah well, getting up to Alexandria in the morning meant that I'd be able to dig my car out of a snow bank in daylight.

Sunday afternoon we tried for more holiday pictures in the helpful sunshine. We went down to Libby Hill Park and watched sledders trudge around trying all the different slopes to find the best ride. Some people with lots of excess energy were flinging snow around with garden spades and building a snow fort. The park is also decorated for Christmas. It's much easier to find decorations and stand in front of them than it is to decorate for yourself. I don't know how many years it's been since I decorated. The snowman standing on my mantelpiece (year round) could probably tell me. Anyway, holiday card win!

Today, the first day of winter, I rode a train through Virginia woods filled up with snow, getting deeper as we went north. The 20 inches of snow in Alexandria makes our foot in Richmond look really not so bad. I hear they got 19 inches where the Princess lives. I need to ask if her husband went out in flip-flops to clear the front walk with a dustpan (that being how he handled the little snowfall a couple weeks ago).

The cab driver who drove me from the station kept pointing out buried cars. "Now that one is going to take hours to dig out!" The side streets in my neighborhood were (are) so deep in packed snow and slush that I had him drop me off on Mount Vernon rather than slither the last three blocks in the cab. I slithered the rest of the way on foot (not a bad walk, really).

Back at the house, my landlady and her friends had been busy digging out the sidewalks and the path back to my entrance (thank you!). They even shoved the snow off my car so I only had to dig out around it.

While I was digging, people kept asking me if I needed to go somewhere and did I need help? Or a ride? "No, I only have to do this every ten years or so, so I don't mind doing it myself." "No, I'm not going anywhere. I just like to have the car dug out in case I need to." (Considering that I'll have to parallel park between two snow banks, I'm a little more concerned about putting the car back if I try and drive anywhere.

I'm glad the buses are running more or less normally again. My office will be open tomorrow. Business as usual. Our snow day is over now, but this winter will probably bring us a few more.

When does the sitting down and goofing off part of the evening begin?

Now, I guess, at least until the dryer stops and I have to go do things with linens.

Oh, and the dryer just kicked off.

And I have the hiccups.

[Time passes.]

Okay, I'm back, minus the hiccups. I have dealt with laundry, packed up lunches, washed dishes, showered, and now the sitting down can begin. At least until I get up and finish packing my bag for my trip home to Richmond.

I'm not sure how I'll get everything in, and that's without Christmas presents (I've been shopping online and having everything shipped to Oz's work address). It's the bread that is taking up all the space: a little loaf of home-baked for Oz and two mini panettones for my mother. The camera bag is a bit on the bulky side too, but I need the stuff that's in it if Oz and I are to freeze our bottoms off taking a Christmas card picture this weekend.

A friend of mine at work was asking why I even take a bag back and forth, considering that I have a whole house of stuff in Richmond and a whole apartment of stuff in Alexandria. She has a point. But it's not like I'm carrying shampoo and clothes, it's just that once I pick up the camera and whatever accessories I think I might want, plus my boring toxic medicines (which do have to go back and forth), plus the stuff I regularly carry to work (breakfast, lunch, and snack), plus my calendar (I have a lot to keep track of), then I might as well put it all in a rolling carryon so I don't throw out my back from having a half dozen smaller bags hanging off me. Also, there is just not enough of me to hang that many bags on.

Ah, the fascinating logistics of the dual domicile life. It's like having another job.

Mind those manners

The buses have these signs up to remind people to keep their electronics to themselves (no speakerphone mode, no music players without earphones, etc.). The signs are illustrated with an ass. Or possibly a burro. The courtesy policy is reasonable.

People are generally pretty good, though sometimes you get treated to a revealing half of a conversation. One sometimes wants to say, "Do you believe your own bullshit?" Because one does truly wonder.

Today we had a cellphone-related altercation. A kid was on the phone and a man sitting near him told him to shut up.

Events unfolded:

"No, you shut up."

"No, you shut up. Fuck you!"

They both hop up and do some male posturing. Some passengers glance back at them.

"Fuck you!"

"I'm gonna cut you, motherfucker!"

"Hey, is that a razor? Dude, I gotta hang up and call the cops."

At this point everybody turns around to watch. Even the fussy toddler hushes up to listen and work on that budding vocabulary.

The kid reports to the bus driver what's going on. The bus driver is the only one who didn't turn around. The bus driver is rather unresponsive, but then he's busy driving the bus.

The kid calls the cops and starts reporting: what happened, which bus, where the bus is, a very detailed description of what the guy's wearing. "And he's got no teeth!"

The guy pulls the cord and hops off at the next stop.

"Oh, he's running away now. Look at him run!"

The bus proceeds without further event.

In trouble with the law

Every day, I take public transportation to work. I have my car up here in Alexandria, but I only use it to run errands. Most of the time it sits in front of my landlady's house. Parking is a bit tight around here (narrow streets, little driveways that only accommodate one car), so I leave it in almost exactly the same spot. If you didn't happen to look at the place where my car sits during the brief intervals when it is at the grocery store, you might imagine that it never moves at all.

Alexandria has a parking ordinance that cars cannot be left in the same spot for over 72 hours continuously, except on weekends and holidays. If you see a car left in the same spot, you can call the police and have them leave a Vehicle Check Notice threatening to impound the car if it isn't moved in three days.

I know this because I confirmed it with Parking Enforcement when I called about the Vehicle Check Notice I found on my car this morning. "Someone has been complaining on your car."

Well, if the neighbor objects to my leaving my car in front of the house where I live, I sure hope they don't mind my leaving my car in front of the houses where other people live. I figure that if I leave it in front of a different house every day, I will avoid having my car impounded, and I will annoy all the neighbors equally, except possibly the one who complained about my car in the first place, who will be extra annoyed at finding my car in front of their house (you take your chances with the law of unintended consequences). I really needed something else to do. A community spirit building activity. Who says community spirit has to be positive?

Anyway, I can see the neighbor's point. Also, a sizable colony of mushrooms was growing underneath my car.

Secret twins, everywhere

Last week I had my watch battery changed by my brother's secret twin (separated at birth—by about twenty years). Same haircut and hair color, same facial structure, same fashion sense (my brother has that same shirt), similar crummy job at the same mall … Even down to the ne'er-do-well friend hanging around. I tried not to stare and managed not to say, "You're my little brother's twin!"

I have found secret twins among my old friends. Oz downloaded Picasa and started playing with the face matching feature in his photo archive. When he was browsing through the extracted faces I kept mistaking one of my friends for me (pointy nose, pointy chin, similar haircuts), except that I'd never had cool red glasses like hers.

Oz was going on about how accurate the face recognition was, except when it wasn't. Then he found that Picasa was confusing red-glasses-girl with another college friend (silver-glasses-guy), but only when both were in profile. "Huh. Round forehead, pointy nose, pointy chin, glasses."

"Think that's why we were all friends? We looked the same?"

Wheels of the bus

Today's fail: I was gazing out the window as the bus drove up Mount Vernon Avenue, looking at all there is to see on a not-quite-autumn afternoon, and forgot to pull the cord to signal the driver for my stop. In my defense: a baby ballet class was just letting out and the sidewalk was filled with moms, those gigantic yuppie-baby strollers, dogs, and angelic three-year-olds in pink leotards. I didn't even notice how far along the bus was until we were passing my stop.

Today's win: The next stop is actually no further from my house than my usual stop and the walk is a bit shadier too.

Light games

I took a walk around sundown. The light was about gone, so I didn't take my camera. The light there was would probably not have played well with the camera anyway.

Wild clouds in the sky blew around and bounced what was left of the sunlight all over. Lurid pink light, greenish grays, and blues. Nothing had a shadow except right below.

Pink things were pinker. I am pink anyway and was wearing a fuschia shirt. Lurid!

The grass was greener than green, sort of a glowing, radiating, somebody went a little too far with the saturation slider, ultra-green.

I mostly walked around staring at the grass and thinking, "Wow. Green. That is really green, that is." (It was a long day. I was tired. I'd spent the day writing "No, dummy! Get a clue already!" in the nicest, most professional sort of way, which can be much more wearing than you'd think.)

Then it began to rain a little.

Then I saw a giant squash vine taking over a yard. These end of summer gardens are going a little nuts with the squash. In this particular garden, the giant variegated (the leaves were dark green with a symmetrical lighter green pattern, very fractal) squash vine had taken over an entire bed. It was climbing into a crape myrtle and lurching over a picket fence, probably in an effort to snare parked cars. Even end of summer squash vines are not quite fast enough to catch anything moving, and it's a good thing too, or the neighborhood gardens would be filled with struggling dogs and babies in strollers getting raised aloft as the vines phototrope into the sky.

So I stopped and stared at the very, very green vine twining its way up the very green and very pink crape myrtle.

Then it started to rain a little more and the light got less interesting. Time to go home!

Squirrel crash

Last fall I heard on NPR that their was an acorn crash throughout the eastern United States (this was discussed elsewhere at the time). I did notice that, compared to the year before, there weren't as many acorns lying under the oak tree by my apartment entrance and I was almost never startled by the crack of an acorn landing on the tin roof over my doorway (not actually a bad thing—acorns are loud). I also noticed that the osage orange tree a few blocks down only gave up a couple measly hedgeapples all season instead of the more normal 10-15 a day smashed in the road.

Where it really showed though, was in the squirrels. Del Ray's squirrels are (or were) really assertive. And plentiful. Unlike Richmond squirrels, which coyly scamper up tree trunks and peep out at passersby, or Boston squirrels which waddle along behind you and demand popcorn (fattest squirrels I've ever seen, the size of cats), Del Ray squirrels would sit in the middle of the sidewalk and play chicken with you as you walked up, and were just generally maddening. One day my landlady would smooth out the mulch in her flowerbeds and by the next morning the mulch would be full of divots from squirrel activity.

I figured that the acorn shortage would take care of some of that, and I was right. The squirrel population thinned considerably. My aunt in Pennsylvania noticed it too. Usually taking her fox terriers for a walk was an adventure in staying vertical because the dogs were always dashing off after squirrels. Not a problem this year. And my landlady's flowerbeds were relatively undisturbed (at least until her giant puppy got to them).

I've noticed much less squirrel attitude in Del Ray too … up until a few weeks ago when the acorns started dropping. The squirrels who survived the Great Acorn Famine of '08 are getting pretty damn cocky already. Sitting on the chain link fences and watching me with their beady little eyes as I walk by, instead of running away like prey animals are supposed to.

I would have thought that the survivor squirrels would have been the members of the gene pool with the best capacity for laying on and retaining fat, breaking into birdfeeders, and remembering where the goodies are buried. I was wrong. Another neighborhood resident enlightened me when she told me about how she dropped peanuts out her window every week to attract squirrels for the entertainment of her (indoor) cat. I told her, "You've upset natural selection! You've gone and selected for the bold squirrels!"

So things are pretty much back to normal, squirrel-wise.

Resilient little buggers.

Sign of the times

In the first year that I lived in Alexandria (2007-2008), three home decor places opened in a three block stretch of the commercial street near my apartment.

Bad timing, no?

Two were new, one went into a small space, one into quite a large space. The third place moved from a location several blocks down the same street.

The place which moved, the space is now empty and for lease.

The small new place hasn't run through its capital yet and is still open.

The large new place is gone. The space is now occupied by a tarot card place.

There is only so much market for rugs, lamps, and ceramic roosters, after all, but everyone wants to know what the future holds.

The last fare

I take Amtrak when I travel between Richmond and Alexandria on the weekends. Oz picks me up (and drives me around) in Richmond. Transportation in Alexandria is a little more involved. I walk from the office over to the Amtrak station on Fridays to catch a train home. Very convenient. Sunday evenings, since the bus to my apartment stops running at six o'clock and my car is at my apartment, I get a cab at the train station or, if there are no cabs there, then I can usually find one in front of the King Street metro station right around the corner.

Tonight there were no cabs at the train station, but there were a few by the metro.

I mentioned this to the cabbie and asked if a train had come through right before mine (dropping off passengers who took all the cabs).

"No, it's Ramadan. Everyone's gone home. You're my last fare," the cabbie told me. "I'm going home once I drop you off." Most of the cab drivers around here are from South/Central Asia or the Middle East.

I looked out the window, marking the pink clouds and long shadows. "Home by sundown?"

I hope my Sunday evening train runs on time for the next few weeks. Even so, it'll be a near thing in a few weeks (the sun sets a minute or two earlier each day). And now I'm thinking, if you can never get a cab in the rain, imagine how much worse it would be on a rainy evening during Ramadan.

Units of measure

I told a girl at my work how my friend's new baby is gaining two ounces a day. She said, "But that's just two shots!"

"Yeah, but when you're only eight pounds, it a significant percentage of your body weight."

I did catch some rainbows:

Rainbow over Del Ray

I am still employed.

I sliced up some peppers tonight, which I didn't realized were hot peppers, and ended up with a burning hand. I googled up some remedies. The one that worked for me was whiskey, taken internally. (I think the only remedy is to wash off with a degreaser as best you can, then wait out the pain. Disrupting the nerve endings by touching things (though oddly enough, washing the dishes made it hurt worse) helps too. But a good stiff drink is pretty much the way to go.

Last month, I got to take steroids for my lupus. Wow! It's too bad steroids will kill you, because they gave me a two week vacation from lupus. I was walking around without all my assorted joint pains and thinking, "Hey, 40 doesn't suck after all. Is this how my friends feel all the time? Lucky bastards, they don't know how good they have it."

I read a book on photography and figured out how to use the light meter which is built into my camera:

Gladiolas in Simpson Park, Del Ray, Alexandria VA

I thought about writing, but didn't.

It's all a plot, really

My musing on the Reesey cup issue did not end with the last post. Oh, no, Reader. All language comes from somewhere and inquiring minds want to know exactly where that is.

So I bought a bag of mini Reesey cups and put them up by the white board at work. On the board I drew a little table of different pronunciations and started filling it in with my sample set. I got a few more data points, but everyone was too weirded out to fill in their data (though that didn't stop them getting into the candy). At some point during the day our trainer erased the chart and that was it for my linguistics survey.

The non-statistically significant results have the "Reesey cup" pronunciation in the southeast and the "Reese's" pronunciation in Michigan and the northeast.

Today our trainer asked, "Who brought in the Reese's?" We explained the nature of the experiment. He just looked at me and said, "Reesey cups, of course. What else would you call them?" But then, he's from Virginia.

One of the infants (about a third of the people in my group are fresh out of college) prairie-dogged up from his cubicle and made an interesting point. "But what about Reese's Pieces? Going by that, then you'd assume the other candy is called 'Reese's cups'."

The trainer and I both said, "Ugh. Reese's Pieces are nasty."

Then I realized, all these bright young things have never known a world without Reese's Pieces. No one born before 1980 would ever regard Reese's Pieces as the starting point. Perhaps there is an age divide as well as a geographical divide.

I need more data.

Naturally and artificially flavored

I got some new Chucks for spring. So cute! So red! Oz said, "Maybe too red for work." But if I'm going to violate the No Sneakers rule, I might as well do it in style. My work also has a No Pajamas rule. I love that they had to make a rule for that, because it means that people were actually wearing pajamas at work. I haven't violated that rule. Yet.

We're having a nippy Easter, but yesterday was lovely as you can see. Warm enough to drive around with the windows down, anyway. I picked up some Reese's fudge peanut butter eggs when we were out on our errands and ended up licking one off the wrapper as I sat on the back porch and surveyed my winter-ravaged garden. I would have thought the artificial ingredients and stabilizers were more than capable of standing up to the weak March sunshine, but I guess not.

If I were motivated, I'd install a polling plug-in and run a poll to find out what proportion of people say "Reesey cup" verses "Reese's cup". Not that I'd get a statistically significant result, but it would probably be better than just asking around or pouncing on people to extract information. (How do you say it? Where are you from? Where are your parents from? Do you think there's a regional variation? Would you ever say "Reesey Pieces"?)

Oz has driven me out of the kitchen, where he's Doing Things to peppers, tomatoes, and beans. I suppose I should go out and Do Things with my camera, or maybe Clean Things around the house, but I've only got a couple hours of weekend left before I have to get on the train back to Alexandria.

"D" is for doughnut

Way back at the rehearsal dinner for the Princess's wedding, we met the Goddess, a friend of hers from high school. The Princess and the Goddess used to work at a bakery together in St. Paul, Minnesota. The Goddess had been at the bakery for some time before the Princess came to work there. The Princess was mystified at how all these people would come into the bakery and ask for the Goddess specifically to handle their order. When the Minnesota Twins placed their doughnut orders, they would request that the Goddess, and only the Goddess, pack the doughnuts.

The Princess was like, "It's not rocket science. It's doughnuts. You put them in a box. Gah!"

The Goddess said, "Well, the Princess didn't really like that job so much."

We sort of agreed with the Princess. Then yesterday we got doughnuts from our regular place, but the regular lady didn't pack them. And when I opened the box and saw how the non-frosted doughnuts were stuck to the frosted doughnuts, I said, "Man! The regular lady is a much better doughnut packer!"

In other news, "O" is for orchid

Oz came up to Northern Virginia a couple weeks ago and we went to the orchid show at the US Botanical Gardens: An Alphabet Garden of Orchids. Lots of pretty orchids! Lots of color! Like a preview of spring and summer, so delightful to eyes accustomed to bare trees and gray skies.

Will it ever get warm?

March is so cruel. How much longer till I can turn off the furnace and fling aside the heavy overcoat?

Hillbilly luggage

"What? No update?" Oz looks over from his computer, where he's just made his daily visit to this blog.

"Hah."

I haven't dropped off the face of the earth. I've been shopping.

Actually, that's rather like descending to one of the outer circles of hell, so maybe I have.

We carried a load of stuff up to the apartment in Alexandria yesterday. I've been unpacking and cleaning. Oz has been helping. Through the magic of random button-pushing, he even washed a load of dishes (the apartment has a dishwasher other than me). The cats have been … not actively destroying anything, so that's like helping. For them.

Moving without moving is still moving. There's just more shopping involved and the list grows ever longer. For example, I took our old coffee grinder up to the apartment. This morning when I ground up some coffee, I heard the gears slipping. "Oh, that's why we replaced this machine." So now I need to get another coffee grinder, lest I be reduced some morning to chewing on the whole beans in an attempt to get my RDA of caffeine. That would probably be more efficient than drinking coffee, but the time savings would be eaten up by picking black bits from my teeth.

But even with all the stress, we still like the apartment and the neighborhood. We walked the two blocks over to the commercial area for lunch (walking down the middle of the street and saying "Hi" to the people we passed, marking ourselves as obviously from somewhere else). At the café bakery where we ate, the lady asked if it was our first time there. Oz said, "Yes, we're just moving into the neighborhood." And she gave us a loaf of ciabatta as a welcome gift.

Amazingly enough, Del Ray manages to be a densely populated residential area with commercial development down a principal street, including several restaurants which do not have parking lots. And yet, there is no parking problem. Richmond city council, take note. In Del Ray, I can walk two blocks to a Cuban sandwich. In Church Hill, I cannot. Please explain.

Operation baby shower

If you're going to a baby shower, I highly recommend taking some LED ducks. They were a huge hit with the under-four set and the adults too. Definitely worth the drive out to Short Pump. After the unwrapping, the little kids latched on to the ducks (which stayed in their container in order for easy recovery after the party) and either poked their fingers through the holes to activate the ducks, or gnawed on the container if they weren't quite old enough to grasp the concept.

This baby, of the duckies and all the shower gift buying, is Oz's son's baby. Oz still shudders whenever he hears the word "Grandpa" and he heard it plenty today. Anyway, I'm just the baby-daddy's daddy's girlfriend. Nothing like a Grandma, and I'm only eleven years older than Oz's son anyway. Still, I heard "Grandma" in reference to myself rather more than I expected. As in "Who's this gift from? Oh, Grandma and Grandpa." And "Well, if you get an extra car seat, you can put it in Grandma and Grandpa's car."

The shower was held at the mother-to-be's father's house. When Oz told me where it was, I figured it was a big house. I hadn't figured on the pool, hot tub, and driveway on steroids (parking lot) filled with really big trucks. There was a Porsche too. Obviously going into computers and technology was a waste of time. We should have become hair stylists, like the other Grandpa.

Everyone at the shower had really good hair. The women all had serious hair, cleavage, and high heels. Except me. The mother-to-be does hair too. Now that she's in charge of Oz's son's hair, he's looking downright presentable. She also took charge of naming the baby, which is going to save them a fortune in therapy down the road.

This was a full on traditional baby shower, with games and favors, and also a big family party with lots of men, boys, Swedish meatballs and booze. I realized this was a different kind of shower when the mother-to-be teetered by on her high wedge sandals carrying a blue jello shot. "They told me this one was non-alcoholic." The baby is a boy, so of course the jello shots would be blue.

Having arrived a bit late, we missed most of the shower games, so I was left wondering why everyone was decorated with brightly painted clothespins and beaded diaper pins with plastic baby-themed charms. We did participate in making birthday cards for every year of the kid's life. I got year eleven and wished the kid "Happy Birthday" in three languages. We cut pieces of (baby blue) yarn for a game to estimate the girth of the mother-to-be. The winner of that game was a little girl who had the advantage of being at eye-level with the tummy. As many-feet-too-long pieces of yarn were wrapped around her, the mother-to-be said, "Didn't anybody guess too short?" We watched the grand opening of the huge pile of gifts. I took lots of pictures (Ish. That was kind of Grandma-like, wasn't it?) and wore down the batteries in my speedlight.

We are now partied out. I could never have kids. The ritual alone would kill me.

Buttons and bows

Now it's time to wrap the baby stuff we bought. We don't have any baby paper, which means more shopping. As we dither around in the occasion-specific wrapping paper aisle, another confused shopper wanders through with a cart full of toys.

"You see any Dora paper?" he asks.

"No. Would that be in a little girl's birthday section?" I see they have a section for everything else. Why not little girls' birthdays?

He looks around blankly. "Do they have that here?"

"I don't know. Hey, there's some monkey paper." I point it out to Oz, who has taken one look at the baby paper and shuddered away. The monkey paper is rather horrible, with kicklines of photoshopped chimps in birthday hats.

The guy looks at the monkey paper with us. "Huh. Kind of like her mother." From this I construe that the toys are for his daughter's daughter. Because he wouldn't say that about his wife. Would he?

"Those are chimps. Chimps aren't monkeys, they are apes," Oz points out.

"There's a bag with a picture of a monkey photocopying his butt." It's even more horrible than the monkey paper. Also, it is a chimp, which is an ape.

"Now that would be like her mother."

We don't touch that. The guy wanders off in search of the elusive Dora wrapping. Oz grabs a baby gift bag large enough to hold his baby presents. A blue bow is selected. And some paper with ducks. Our gifts, at least, will be presentable at the baby shower tomorrow.

I didn't wear my blue suede shoes today

I do in fact have some. They need some serious breaking in and I'm not sure my feet are up for it.

That's about the extent of my commentary on the thirtieth anniversary of the Death of Elvis. (Does that sound like a Terry Pratchett character or what? Death of Rats, Death of Elvis. Death of Elvis wouldn't have too much to do except hang around the bar and comb his hair, because of course Death of Elvis wouldn't have a bare skull.) Way back on the day it happened, my reaction was basically "Who?" because my musical education had been pretty much limited to the Top 40 stylings of WLEE.

My childhood was tragic in the insidious way of water wearing away a stone drip by soul-poisoning drip.

Speaking of drips, a massive line of thunderstorms has been rolling through town for the last five hours. The thunder shakes the house. Water pounds on the roof. There is a damp smell.

I'll try not to think about the smell.

It's probably nothing.

Lost

As we were finishing up our lunch in our favorite East End eatery, a guy with a family reunion T-shirt came in and asked for directions to Byrd Park.

"Uh, do you mean Dorey Park?" the waitress asked. Dorey Park is just up the road from the restaurant.

"No? Byrd Park?"

Oz and I know where Byrd Park is. It's way back in town. The poor guy is suddenly deluged with directions, from Oz who doesn't ever remember street names and from the waitress who can at least tell the guy how to get to Main Street. Still, the directions are along the lines of "then you turn at the stop sign, but it's a traffic light now and it used to be a stop sign."

In the meantime, the waitress brings me a pen and a sheet of notebook paper. I say, "It's not hard to get there, but it's more than seven steps so you'll never remember if we don't write it down." Out loud and in pen, I methodically start to list the directions, starting with the road outside, while Oz and the waitress continue with the local color fountain of extra helpful information.

Some other family reunion people wander in to see what's going on and ask about funnel cake, there being a sign near the eatery.

I'm still working on the directions. Oz is listing all the places they'll pass on the way to the park. "Shockoe Bottom and the farmer's market. Then downtown and … "

The guy says, "That sounds like what we passed on the way out here." He's been looking confused, what with the directions involving a lot of roads turning into one-way wrong way streets and roads veering off and changing their names. It doesn't help that both Oz and the waitress are getting street names confused, so he's hearing way more street names than are warranted by the actual number of streets he'll be driving on. At least he'll see some familiar stuff along the way.

"It's a lot easier than it sounds," I assure him. In fact, once he gets to Main Street, he will only have to make one other turn. It's getting out to Main Street from the East End backroads that makes no sense.

When we finish, the guy takes the directions outside and suddenly more reunion people (easily identified by their T-shirts) come in and start buying cookies and bottled drinks to sustain themselves till they get to the picnic. When we leave the restaurant, we find a whole family reunion convoy out in the parking lot and the guy is going from car to car to explain what's going on. Probably something along the lines of "um, just follow me."

I hope they made it. Now I'm wishing we'd driven over to the park later to see.

101.8 ° in the shade

I keep checking the weather site for better news, but the story doesn't change. Boiling hot till Saturday. Even now, it's 11:30 pm and it's still 92 °.

Today was all about hiding from the heat. And fretting over things I can't control, but that's nothing to write about here. I've been lying low and reading a lot. Nothing, sadly, that I fell compelled either to recommend or deliver warnings against. I did laundry and folded it up. I researched financial instruments. I learned what a put is. In theory, I'll have a steady source of income soon and I will be investing. It doesn't hurt to be prepared. Once I start working, I probably won't have time to noodle around and learn this stuff.

Tomorrow will also be about hiding from the heat, but I have some midday appointments which will add a certain level of challenge.

Are these doldrums? I think so.

Heavy thoughts

We don't have any scales in the house, except for a little postal scale, but that doesn't really count since it can't handle weights of more than a pound.

I'm pretty good with only knowing my weight when I go to the doctor's office. The fit of my clothes lets me know when to lay off the high calorie stuff and get a little more exercise.

Since last fall, when I knew I was going to have to sashay around in a red satin evening gown for that wedding in January, I started keeping track more carefully by using the scale at the gym. That scale was telling me the same thing as the doctor's office scale and it indicated a downward trend over time, which was the information I really wanted.

Then I started a course of physical therapy which took so much time that I stopped going to the gym. Fast forward quite a lot of months, and I've started going again. The scale says I've lost seven pounds.

I know that isn't true. My jeans say that isn't true and they would never lie to me.

The scale has to have been recalibrated.

What do I really weigh? I guess I'll find out in a couple weeks when I go to the doctor's office.

This reminds me of a girl I worked with on a summer job, way back when I was in college. One day, out of the blue and with perfect deadpan delivery, she said, "I was disappointed that I wasn't losing weight. So last night I tried the scale in the other bathroom. I lost five pounds in an hour."

Things that turn up in my dreams

My to-do list includes the item "acquire business casual clothing." I have in my head a picture of a few collared shirts, a couple pairs of slacks, and a better looking pair of shoes than what I have now. This isn't rocket science, after all, and I ought to be able to put together a few outfits fairly easily.

My subconscious thinks otherwise.

I'm dreaming along last night and suddenly I'm in a fashion discussion with the Princess. She's waving around a black cashmere suit with a Louis Vuitton label and saying, "Oh no! This is business casual! I love this suit! These trousers are the greatest."

I'm thinking Does Louis Vuitton even make clothes? (Yes, they do.) and protesting, "No. I was thinking more like what I have on now. Only with better shoes!"

Also, the suit was lined with black leather.

How does my brain come up with this stuff?

Under the rainbow

Yes, we did have a rainbow tonight as the thunderstorm moved east and the setting sun came out for a last showing. And our neighbor gave us (beautiful, purple, sweet, ripe) plums from the tree in her yard.

I've finally struck treasures in my closet cleaning endeavor. Old children's books with beautiful illustrations and some with not so beautiful illustrations. Yes, the copy of Little Black Sambo inscribed "Christmas 1969" from my grandparents. I would have been two-and-a-half. Very big on reading, these grandparents. My copy, "the only authorized American edition", has the original 1899 illustrations. Though I always like the idea of outwitting tigers and eating lots of pancakes with tiger butter, I never did like the pictures, even as a child. How odd that I keep the book because of the awful pictures.

The rest of the books are wonderful: Children of Many Lands, beautifully illustrated, a 1903 edition of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm inscribed in perfect copperplate penmanship back in 1912 to people I don't know. Books for little boys (which I never ever read) with my grandfather's bookplate on the inside cover.

As an aside, you publishing people who only publish books about little boys because little boys will only read about other little boys, but little girls will read anything? You need to talk to some actual little girls. This little girl found books about little boys anathema. I mean, yuck! Why would I want to read books about nasty creatures like my brothers? I read books to escape from boys! My elementary school library had a complete set of "Childhood of Famous Americans" biographies and I searched carefully through them and read only biographies of girls. I read all the biographies of the girls twice each before I finally broke down and decided that boys of color were almost as good as girls and started reading the biographies of black boys and Indian boys. Only when I ran out of them did I deign to read biographies of white boys.

But anyway, I have these beautiful books. I seem to have hit the wall with my getting rid of stuff project. On discovering that I was missing book three from a well-loved series, I went and ordered a copy. (But I'll totally give the complete series away to my friend's kid. Eventually. Before she outgrows it.)

Yep. I'm losing ground here.

Journaling should be illegal

So should using the word "journal" as a verb.

I'm still working on cleaning out closets. Today I pulled a bunch of packaging boxes off the top shelf of the laundry closet. I don't need the original packaging for three telephones, a knife set, a blender, and a CD player I no longer have. Really. I can let these things go.

Then I got to the boxes at the bottom of the pile. The boxes placed on that shelf when I first moved into this house and never opened since. One box is still unopened. (I know what's in there. It can stay in there.) Two boxes are books and too heavy for me to get down on my own. I'll have Oz get them down tonight and I'll sort through them tomorrow. The last box contained one pair of wooden shoes, one pair of carved wooden mules from the Philippines, two Star Wars figures (Yoda and R2D2), a box of crayons, a pair of pink maracas from Mexico, a stamp album … You get the picture. I also found a folder of newspaper clippings, comic strips, and cards and letters from college. I think my mother sent me the newspaper clippings, they're kind of on the chirpy side. The folder also held a poem, in my handwriting, which was a spoof of a greeting card poem and would seem really clever to an eighteen-year-old. I shall say no more! But I did scan it and email it to my friends who would have been complicit in its creation.

Then I pulled some boxes out from under my bed and found my old journals. No one should be allowed to journal between the ages of 11 and 19. I'm just saying.

No, I'm not "saying." I'm blogging it. Online. In public. Ish. I am never ever reading my archives.

So, yeah, there was some cringing, some throwing out of notes, some throwing out of "Why did I save this?" items. More cringing. Lots of cringing. I think I put my back out.

The journals have not been burned.

Yet.

Young readers, take comfort in this: It may be the end of the world now, but when you're 40 and you find journals in which you are angsting all over the place about some "he" (or "she"), you will wonder (1) Why was I getting so worked up? And (2) Who the hell is "he" (or "she")?

Now with (marginally) less crap

The other night, Oz wiped the hard drives on the old computers and the very next day he carried them and the two monitors off to Goodwill. Then he put all the packaging for his new machine into the trash and recycling. No one would say that the office looks streamlined, but it does look less like a junkyard.

Still on a closet-cleaning roll, I cleared out the brimming cabinet in the bathroom and tossed everything which was past its expiration date. Two grocery bags of nasty old bottles of unguents and what-all ended up in the supercan. The coupons with the 2006 expiration dates which have been sitting on the windowsill for the past year? Also in the trash.

But still …

Last night Oz came into the sitting room and said, "We have less crap in the house. But we still have a lot of crap."

"Yes, we are by no means crap-free. We are nowhere near to having a crap shortage." In fact, since I have been focusing my efforts on closets, the crap reduction is mostly not apparent at all.

I'm going to tackle another closet today. In the meantime, my office mocks me. All my decluttering efforts are mere procrastination in the face of the office's foot-high stacks of paper and shelves jammed with notebooks.

If, like me, you're interested in things too small to clutter your house, the Washington Post Arts Beat column visits a teeny tiny gallery at VCU.

Birthday week ends with a bang!

We had a glorious and (nearly) personal fireworks show, thanks to the James River Adventure Games.

Round about nine o'clock, we moseyed down to Libby Hill Park where we found one other person sitting on the bluff and looking west towards downtown. The fireworks started popping a minute after we got there and a few other people trickled into the park. Church Hill is a bit removed from Brown's Island, the actual venue for the show, but it's pretty cool to watch the fireworks over the skyline with the Lucky Strike smokestack in the foreground.

Somebody at the fireworks factory figured out how to make the shell explode the lighty-up bits in the form of a cube, so the spark-defined box made a frequent appearance in the display. That was the only new (to me) design. They had plenty of the sparkly kind which I quite like too. Also dramatic was the smoke plume spreading out over the skyline and below the crescent moon.

Who needs candles when you've got fireworks?

Old media

Today, for some reason, I thought it would be a good idea to clear out my closet so I could actually store clothes in it.

Back in 1995, when I moved into this house, I was one person (still am) in a 1600 square foot house with three huge closets. One closet was my attic and storage, one was attic overflow and off-season item storage, and the third closet was my clothes. Now we are two people here, with two people's worth of stuff in the closets which have additionally accumulated a fair amount of crap and dust over the past twelve years. There has also been some room juggling and now "my" room is the one with the attic closet.

I'm not sure what I thought was going to happen when I started the purge. I certainly didn't think it would take all day (yes, I'm still seriously underemployed). I found more books, a box of embroidery stuff and extremely grubby cross-stitches I did as a kid, a box of old dolls and doll things, helpfully labeled "C—'s stuff", very old shoes including a pair of my mother's black leather boots from the 1970's with three-inch wedge heels, a box of letters and photos (this I kept), two boxes of cassette tapes, and more.

The cassette tapes, wow! I haven't listened to any of them since I moved. Or my LPs, which I still have and have not listened to for even longer. The LPs are in a different closet. I used to tape my records so I wouldn't wear them out and also because I didn't have a record player at college and tapes were my only option. When I look at the titles, I can feel my dorm room springing up around me. My musical taste was so eighties, but that's when I was in high school and college. It's not like I had a choice. Cyndi Lauper, Tears for Fears, Howard Jones, The Police, U2, Yaz, Simple Minds, Kate Bush … And a fair number of Broadway recordings. There must have been a gay man inside me trying to bust out.

I also found the Georgetown University School of Languages and Linguistics language tapes which were doled out to every language major at the beginning of every semester. We were supposed to take our tapes to the language lab every week to get the week's audio lesson recorded onto them, and then listen to them for homework. We were regularly reprimanded by our professor: "I checked in the language lab! No one has been getting their tapes! You must get your tapes!" No one ever got the tapes. We recorded music onto them.

I found the tapes my grandfather recorded for me. Classical music from CD (he was an early adopter of new technology), carefully labeled in his engineer's handwriting. Back in the thirties and on into the eighties, engineers were taught to write properly and my grandfather's writing never lost its precision. Nowadays, the drafting is all done on computers and engineers have the worst penmanship. Engineering school just about did for my nice handwriting.

So I culled through my stuff and saved out the things most special to me. I have room in the closet for clothes now, partly because I moved some items to another closet. Obviously I have a ways to go with this stuff-reduction process.

Angle of repose

What is the angle of repose of a pile of books, mostly paperback? About ten degrees if they are in a random heap, much more if the heap has several stacks at its base.

How high can you stack mass market paperbacks, which have been read, before they tumble over with or without feline assistance? About ten books high.

How many paper grocery bags did I fill with books from the piles on the floor? Eight.

How many of those am I planning to get rid of? Two.

Another two are full of Oz's books. The other four are books I'd like to keep.

How much free space do I have on my bookshelves? None, unless you count the spots where the books aren't double deep.

How many Terry Pratchett books do we have? Not quite all of them. Yet.

Oz was resistant to Pratchett at first, but after the initial seduction by the Wee Free Men and immediate exposure to Guards! Guards! and Thief of Time, he realized that resistance was futile more or less. He's thanking me for this now. I think.

Do I still have a stack of books on the floor? Yes.

DMV

I renewed my driver's license today. The last time or two I was able to renew by mail and they kept using the same old picture from 1993. You'd think that wouldn't fly, but at the resolution they use, it's accurate enough. This time I had to take the eye test and get a new picture. This photo came out pretty cute except for the color. They seriously need to adjust the hue calibration on their camera. In the image I just about look like myself, except for a touch of pink and white raccoon to my look. My face came up really red, but the skin around my eyes came up really white. Oh well. I guess I can live with it till 2012. I wonder if they'll want to use the same picture till 2027.

(We have some really impressive lightning outside right now. The satellite signal is gone and the DSL is on the fritz. So much for high tech entertainment. At least we still have our DVDs and books.)

Out for a spin

This weekend the handyman dropped by to see about some repairs (which I don't want to go into right now, because ARGH!). He told me before he came over that he was going to be taking his car out, because it hadn't been driven in a while. Usually he drives an old ambulance which has been modified for handyman use (out with the medical stuff, in with the piles of tools), and I just thought, "oh, whatever" and didn't consider the implications.

So on Sunday afternoon, I heard the roar of an engine out front. I stepped outside to see … the handyman, in his best bib overalls, a fine straw hat, and a two-tone 1929 Mercedes roadster. Oz had left the house a few minutes before, and a good thing too, because he'd have turned green and melted onto the bricks in a big puddle of envy. He likes a good straw hat and he would probably have liked the car too.

And, apropos of nothing: a dramatic moment at the monkey-cam.

My hair is not green

I finally received my new passport.

It is not chipped! The office that processed my renewal was not yet equipped to issue the new RFID passports. If you want a non-hackable passport, it seems that you can still get them. Also, the old passport design is much classier. Check out the State Department's flash animation of the new "e-Passport" and see if you agree. The NASA image inside the back cover is okay though.

After all that effort to get a good passport photo, I was kind of disappointed to see what they did to it. Nowadays, instead of laminating your photo to the cover, they scan your photo and print it directly on the cover. Or, rather, they scan your photo, shade it green, and then print it on the cover. Then they laminate everything with holographically watermarked plastic so that you have an arrow fletching on your nose.

Oh well. It's not the worst ID I've ever had.

But wait, there's more

Just so you don't think I have to drug my cats to find a little cheer, here are some more cheerful things.

One of the suck things that happened earlier this week was my car springing a coolant leak. Such a lack of consideration, especially since I bought it a new radiator last month. I took it back to the shop and they discovered that the leak was from a clamp which had worked loose. They tightened it up, did a pressure check, and today they delivered my car to my house, saving me a walk down to Shockoe Bottom, where the shop is. Also, no charge (they're the ones who did the radiator). Island Import Service is now officially our favorite garage.

Today I finished my allotted work before lunchtime. Since I have no need to get ahead on this assignment, I took the afternoon off. I did no chores.

Tonight at the bookstore we found a marked down book on cemetery iconography. Very handy for when you just have to know why they put chipmunks on tombstones. I looked through the section on animals and found that all the cute furry creatures we like best are symbols of Satan! I had no idea we were aligned with the dark powers.

On Wednesday, a day with more than its share of suckage, we had wildly scattered showers which gave us fabulous and varied thunderheads, many of which had my favorite bunny shape.

Sticker shock

I finally talked to a real live roof guy, who looked at my roof and gave me a ballpark number for the cost of a new metal roof with rebuilt cornices to correct the rotting boards and spots in the gutters where the water pools.

It's, oh, about twice what I was expecting. But that's for a proper hundred year roof, not a ten or twenty year roof which (I hope) would be a better match for my saving account. What to do?

I think I'll rescind my New Year's resolution to get a new roof and replace it with a resolution to keep saving up for a new roof, keep dithering about what roof to get, and keep obsessing about the gutters. Yeah, that's a plan. I'm really good at all those things too, seeing as how I've got years of practice.

One thing I'm not good at? Standing on one foot with my eyes closed and without falling over. I am offended by this and therefore I shall practice until I stop falling over. See, I started doing a walking tai chi form to strengthen my legs and improve my balance. Easy peasy. Then I tried doing it with my eyes closed and nearly fell over. How can that be? Are my inner ears lazy or defective? Why do I need visual cues for verticality when there's all that gravity around to tell me which way is down? Regardless, I'm going to work on my blind balance. I have noticed that I'm wobbly when I walk around in the dark (I didn't used to be), so this is a worthy project for safety reasons. It's not that I'm weird. Or not just that I'm weird.

Lastly, Hell. I'm in roof hell, but that may very well be better than …

Hello Kitty Hell. (via)

Somebody had to be living it.

Beautiful days

The roller girl restored, at the Dream Roller Rink, on Chincoteague Rd, New Church, Virginia

(Okay, that picture's a couple weeks old, but that was a beautiful day too.)

We are getting one last reprieve from the summer heat. Saturday was cool, cloudy with drizzle. I hope the weather was clearer in Kentucky, where they took Queen Elizabeth II for the Kentucky Derby rather than keeping her here for the NASCAR races in Richmond.

Even with the rain, Sparky insisted on going outside to nibble on the grass and muddy his paws. I hung out with him, nibbling on spearmint leaves (as close as I got to a mint julep). From now till October, the sun is too strong for me to spend many midday hours outside, but in the drizzle I am safe from the sun. We need to consider moving north.

Still, we didn't work in the yard. We ran errands: kitty litter, toilet paper, laundry detergent. We went to the bookstore and got fluff to read. Not all of the fluff made it into the bag at the store! We found a book missing when we unloaded our catch at home. Naturally it was the trashiest looking book of a very trashy lot. We went back to the bookstore today to ask for a copy of the book we bought. Oz pointed out that the worst part of the process was having to admit to picking that trashy book. Twice.

But the sympathetic clerk I spoke with only said, "Oh, no! That always happens to me at the grocery store." The bookstore has a system for dealing with this situation. They bag and tag all the books this happens to, and keep them behind the counter. My book was at the top of a very large pile, not one day's worth, I hope. You'd think getting the books into the bags would be the easy part of the job.

Somehow over the course of the errands and other activities, Oz started rhapsodizing about chicken gizzards and the rhapsody turned into a quest for gizzards and gizzard stew. The market didn't have gizzards for sale, but they did have chicken livers and other chicken parts. Oz spent this afternoon dismembering vegetables and chicken organs and made a chicken liver stew, quite tasty, if you like liver. After I don't know how many bowls, Oz declared, "I am a soup genius."

I have a hunch that Gizzard Quest 2007 will continue.

Fit for a queen

Around here, we get our excitement where we can.

I am therefore excited to report that it rained! And the new drainage pipe did its thing! I actually went out into the deluge to watch water drip out the end of the pipe. Moreover, since the water was being carried away from the house, the interior humidity was about five percentage points lower than it usually during a rainstorm. I need to collect a little more data before I can be sure that we'll have a consistent reduction in humidity. Our next water-related project will be a proper downspout for the porch roof.

My other thrill was receiving the new locks I ordered. The evening before we left for Chincoteague, the deadbolt on the front door failed. Fortunately it held together long enough for me to get it unlocked one final time, so we didn't have to call a locksmith to get into the house. We did have to immediately run over to the home supply store and get a new deadbolt, at which point Oz's car failed to start, boding really well for our trip. After we came home from the Eastern Shore (with no further mishaps, oddly enough), I decided that it would be nice to have all the exterior locks keyed the same. My house has two exterior doors, each with a locking entry doorknob and a deadbolt, each of which requires a different key. (This is doubtless the work of the same chucklehead who set up the roof to drain under the porch.) The home store sells other locks and doorknobs keyed to match the lock we just bought, but they didn't have the kind I wanted. But the Internet did!

So now we have shiny new locks. When I signed for the package, the UPS man asked if I was going to see the queen. (Queen Elizabeth II is in Virginia this week to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown and to cause traffic problems for commuters.) Hah. No. I was working today and I'm not enough of a Queen-o-phile to brave the crowds and the drizzle.

I called Oz and said, "Yay! The locks came! Isn't that exciting?"

He said, "Oh. That's excitement, huh?"

Yes. It is, especially in comparison to the hairball I found on the couch this morning.

I need to get out more.

A few hours later …

Well, we did get out. When Oz went to install the new deadbolt on the back door, he found that the old deadbolt was held in with hex screws, not Philips head like all the other locks. I said, "Don't you have a hex set? Isn't that, like, a requirement of manhood?" He said, "No, I got rid of a houseful of stuff when I moved in here. Argh. All my tools …" Oh, honey.

So, back to the home store we went. That's like going out, right? I mean, Tool World! El mundo de las herramientas! (I love the bilingual signage.) Now he has two pocket hex sets, metric and English, and we have the new locks installed on the back door. Darkness fell before he could replace the front doorknob, but by tomorrow evening we'll be a single key household.

Nice

For the past I don't know how long, a helicopter has been transecting the sky over my neighborhood. I assume it's a search helicopter, but the searchlight isn't on, so I don't know if they're accomplishing anything besides rattling my windows. [It's not the police, it's military exercises. I wouldn't go so far as to call it the "sound of freedom." [via]]

Another of life's little victories: The new package of cat food announces "Great new flavor!" and the cats actually agree.

I spent the morning filling out tax forms and writing checks to the US Treasury. Yes, it's quarterly tax time. It's too bad it comes just two weeks after I have to write the really big checks. On the bright side, I got a beer with brunch afterwards and took a nap this afternoon.

This weekend was absolutely beautiful. The air was crisp, clear, and that perfect temperature that people with really overpriced properties and earthquakes get all year. The rosebush is ramping up to its first glorious blooming of the season and is covered with palm-sized pink blossoms. The azalea is blooming better than ever this year (also pink) and Oz is taking all the credit because he put fertilizer on it last year.

So. What else could we do but have Oz dig a ditch across the backyard and trample on the lilies of the valley?

Last winter, when I had my porch floor replaced, I discovered the source of all our moisture issues or, at least, all the moisture issues relating to the house. The chucklehead who put the porch on the house routed the roof's rear downspout to a small, brick-lined hole under the porch, about four feet from the foundation. In one of my intro to engineering classes, we had to convert inches of rainfall and square footage to gallons. Even in a light rainfall, the roof is going to shed a lot more than ten gallons of water, which is about the capacity of that hole. I had assumed, based on some suggestive old photographs, that they had routed the downspout out into the garden where the water might do some good. Alas, no.

Water, while necessary for life and all that, is kind of bad for houses, which is why we use our drainage piping to carry the water away from the house. Unless we are chuckleheads who use a little drainage piping to deposit the water right at our foundation, and then stuff the remaining drainage piping (exactly enough to wrap around the house and carry the water out to the sidewalk) under the porch. Wimpy chuckleheads. They knew what they were supposed to do.

Well, it's done now and I documented the process with pictures that do not lie. The next owner of my house will be so pleased, I'm sure. Oz dug a trench from the downspout and around the front of the porch to where we could run the pipe above ground under a deck and through the alley. He got royally smeared with multicolored dirt in the process. My yard has red clay and rich black dirt in the flower beds, one of which the pipe now runs under.

Me, pointing at the nice flower-bed dirt: "Hey, that's good dirt. I really like that dirt."

Oz, glowering: "It's just dirt."

Now I'm looking forward to the next rain. I want to watch the water coming out of that pipe and flowing away, away, away from my house. I'm also going to get some impatiens and coleus to plant in my nice, black dirt. That flower bed's been fallow for too long. Before Oz dug it up, I rescued some sweet woodruff and transplanted it to another bed. The sweet woodruff is a volunteer, descended from one of the first plants I put in my garden the first spring I lived here. I could maybe spin that into a full circle sort of thing, except that it's not. It's just time to get back out in the garden.

Life's little victories

I have to go to a May wedding. (Another wedding! This is going to be one of those years.) What to wear! It's being held at a farm in Ohio. I'm not sure what the dress code is, but if they're getting married barefoot in the grass, I'm sure as hell not wearing pantyhose.

However, this is a family wedding and the family is a bit on the traditional side. The future is hazy, but through the mists and soft focus, I'm pretty sure I'm seeing a spring dress, pantyhose, and sensible pumps. I fear this means I must face the horror of shopping.

I've been gearing myself up for the shopping. It might not be so bad. I might be able to find something suitable for a lady who is neither a bimbo nor ninety.

Then, this evening I recall that I have a spring dress, with matching lingerie, pantyhose, shoes, and handbag. I got it at the Gap, back when they didn't suck, in 1997 perhaps. The shoes and handbag date back to 1989. I only wore the dress once, for a wedding (what else?) in 1999 or so.

I pull it out of the closet, still in the dry cleaning bag. I slip the dress over my head and button a few buttons.

It fits! It's got a timeless cut so it doesn't look dated! It's cute!

Did I mention that it fits? The cut is also quite forgiving, though since I regularly wear other clothes that old, I shouldn't be too surprised that it still fits.

Oz says, "Oh, darn, you don't get to go shopping."

"No. That's 'Yay! I don't have to go shopping!'"

Chilly spring

Well, what a week it's been here in Virginia! The mass murder at Tech has been getting a fair amount of coverage on the Japanese news, though the gangland murder (shot twice in the back) of the mayor of Nagasaki, being a little closer to home, has been getting a lot of press. The people of Nagasaki are weeping all over the TV cameras. They seem to have been very attached to their mayor. And that's about all the news analysis I can offer, but asahi.com has more.

But closer to home it's been alternately hiding from the news and trying to find out what happened at Tech. I can't bear to listen to survivor interviews on the radio. Someone down the street lost her brother. My heart just breaks when I look at the pictures of the people who were killed. Having been in school recently, I can't help thinking of my great classmates and professors and what I would have lost if this had happened at VCU, assuming I lived through it. I'm weepy enough at this remove. I keep thinking of how the windows in VCU's engineering building are sealed (No way out there), but at least the doors are very heavy and solid. Still, the rooms are not very defensible because of the interior windows beside many of the doors. I'm used to thinking about security for my house, steel doors and so on, but a public place like a classroom building is simply supposed to be safe.

It's so so sad.

Clutter and dust

I hope some translation work gets here soon. This housework is going to kill me.

Today was one of those days of Brownian cleaning and tidying. Every time I thought, Ah, now I'll sit down and read for a while, I would immediately get up and either throw something out or clean it. And yet, after all that work, the house does not look appreciably better or cleaner.

Tomorrow I get to do it all over again, plus laundry.

I'll be glad when the cold snap is over and Oz can put all his potted plants outside and give me the illusion of decluttering. When he moved his plants over last spring, they all went out in the yard for the summer. I had no idea the sheer volume of vegetation until he brought them inside in the fall. Pot after pot, plant after plant, this never-ending alien parade took over every horizontal surface in the house. The cats were excited ("Woo! Salad Bar!" *nibble* *nibble* *barf*), but me? Not so much. A few houseplants under someone else's care are lovely, as well as more likely to live than if I'm expected to water them. Jungles, however, belong outside.

I think I can speed up the cleaning and tidying process if, instead of cleaning things and putting them away, I simply throw them out. Does that sound threatening? I doubt my keepsakes are quaking in their boots. They know me too well.

Lady of Leisure

More like "Lady of Chores."

No work in the in-box (Oh wait, is "in box" one word now? A brief digression says, No, it's hyphenated.) and I'm keeping busy by getting all the things done that I've let slide.

This is exhausting. I'll be glad when more work arrives and I can be a slacker again.

I have even more to do than I thought. When I called the Princess this week, she said she and her new husband would like to come down to Richmond sometime this month for a visit. Suddenly the mess that is my house became much more obviously messy. Things are cramped enough that they will have to stay at one of the B&Bs in the neighborhood, but I still need to be able to offer them a clean place to sit down and non-scary sanitary facilities.

(I think the point of the visit is so she can show him the house where she lived as a child, the community center pool where we had swim team, her schools and stomping grounds, etc. Seeing as how he's already done the same thing to her, it's time to get some of her own back.)

Pictures that have been leaning up against the wall need to be hung. A towel rod needs to be replaced. Things which have suffered feline depredations need to be de-depredated.

Ugh. (On the other hand, we do need to get things fixed up around here. So what if the incentive isn't because we live here and should make it nice for ourselves?)

At least I can stake the cats out for the buzzards and cut down on their damage. I got two new purple leads, a tie-out stake, and a new purple harness for Sparky who had outgrown his old one. Monte Alban still fits into his. The purple matches the violets which are in bloom right now. Years ago I used to tether the cats out in the yard years. I stopped because they picked up fleas from the grass and I was concerned about them interacting with the alley cats who came into the yard. But we have flea stuff and the alley cats don't come around so much anymore. Amazingly enough, the cats still accept the harnesses.

They are liking the yard. They stalk bugs, nibble on grass, and bask in the sun. Some things startle them, though. When I was weeding today, I moved one of the big black drainage pipes which have been lying on the grass and Sparky flipped. Literally. He did backflips at the end of his tether, hissed, and hid behind a flowerpot. A bit later I moved my bag of weeds at the same moment a bee buzzed over his head and—freak! He ran and hid behind another flowerpot. He is, by the way, rather bigger than those flowerpots.

Hmph. Ferocious jungle cats indeed!

It's supposed to snow tonight, with a few inches accumulation. I'm looking forward to putting them out in it tomorrow. Maybe they're really ferocious Arctic cats.

Yes, snow in April! It's been a long time since that happened. On Japanese news tonight, they had a piece about the weird weather they've been having lately, including April snow. I thought, Yes, when I was an exchange student in Tokyo, there was snow on the cherry blossoms. Yuki-zakura. Then today's newscaster observed that it had been 19 years since the last April snow. That was 1988, my year in Japan. Could it have been that long ago?

No potatoes

We are so not Irish and it shows in our St. Patrick's Day. Korean food for dinner, and then we stayed off the roads because it doesn't make sense to be driving around on holidays that involve a lot of alcohol consumption.

I didn't wear green. Oz wore an olive sweater, but that's as close as he got.

For entertainment we watched sumo. The novel I finished was set in England, the novel I started was set in Scotland. I imbibed a wee dram of Scotch whisky.

Yep, St. Patrick's Day is not a big thing for us. It's not like we're Irish anyway, though I suspect a few of Oz's ancestors were run out of Ireland at some point in the distant past. That's about as close as we can get, and his ancestors were run out of a lot of places.

As of this evening and after a quiet weekend of doing chores and goofing off, Oz has spring fever. After dinner, he laid down in bed and asked for a thermometer (after looking for the thermometer on his own and giving up, which is fine because it was in no place he'd ever look). I didn't think his forehead felt hot, but it turned out he's about one degree above normal. Poor baby! He must have overdone today when he was running the vacuum. Then he wanted some Tylenol. "There's some *dainty invalid cough* over on the vanity." I should note that I started the dainty cough thing, with the back of one hand pressed to my forehead, of course.

Probably a deficiency of beer and potatoes.

Eclipse

We got to see the lunar eclipse Saturday night. No photographs, though someone else in town got a great shot. We were making a trip to the grocery store and Oz was under the weather, so standing out in some cold place wouldn't have done. Even so, we had a great view of the moon on the drive home and I even managed to keep the car on the road. The moon looks cool under weird light. It's only then that I get the sense of the moon as a three dimensional object. Sunlight flattens the moon to a disk, but reflected light from earth or the penumbra gives us spooky moon.

Oz is feeling better, by the way. He did call in sick today, but this morning found him curled up in bed with a Flashman book which he dug out of my library book pile and spent the day reading like an avid little beast. I think this was a Flashman day. Sticking a bookmark in the historical endnotes, Oz said, "That Fraser! He writes this like it's trash, but it's all, like, true."

And, lastly, I'm wondering if the city parks department follows my photostream. On 27 February, I expressed disgust at the appearance of the new parking deck at Rockett's Landing, as viewed from Libby Hill Park. Two days later, some parks department guys planted a shrubbery, as pictured below.

Now the unattractive parking deck is almost completely hidden … at least to people sitting in that bench.

No more clouds

Of smoke!

As of tomorrow, O'Toole's is smoke free. That's something I'd never thought I'd see, what with cigarette smoke being integral to the structure of the building. Did the world end when we weren't looking?

We had no idea they were considering any change in the smoking policy till we saw the sign on the door this evening. I asked the hostess if she was pleased. She did a little dance step and said, "Oh yes! I'm tickled pink. This is the last night I'll ever have to say 'Smoking or Non?'" I asked if she thought they could ever get the smoke smell out. "No, it's going to have to be painted over with, like, twelve coats of primer. Or something special."

The non-smoking section, where we always sit and which was pretty much just a polite fiction, was full of smiles. People were pointing to the little "Smoke free as of March 1" signs on the tables and asking the waitresses, "Is this for real?" The couple at the next table was saying, "Woo! Smoke-free St. Patrick's Day!" Me? I'm looking forward to enjoying a Guinness and not having to change out of smoke-reeking clothes after.

Meanwhile, the smoking section was full of frowns. The smokers were all smoking extra.

As we left, we saw a TV news team outside getting ready to cover the story. Yeah, the nation's at war and we're looking at a banana republic-style currency crisis if the Chinese get financially itchier* and cash in their US bonds.** But, hey, local bar goes smoke-free! Film at eleven!

*Yes, the week after I make my 2006 retirement contribution, we get a stock market crashlet. Shanghai sneezes and I catch a cold. Hey, it's a buying opportunity … at least if you didn't buy last week.

**Through their purchase of US Treasury bonds, the Chinese are financing our mushrooming government expenditures (courtesy of the far right wing radicals who say they want to shrink government and drown it in a bathtub. A bathtub full of what? Credit card statements? Also, it would have to be a damn big bathtub.) and the war (courtesy of the same far right wing radicals who happen to own a lot of stock in munitions companies, oil companies, and Halliburton).

And speaking of catching a cold, a little Norwegian bird told me that Norway is the place to go if you want to get a job. With 100% employment, they are short of all kinds of technicians, skilled workers, and engineers, so they're importing people from all over on their generous guest worker program. It sounds strangely appealing.

Let's hear it for …

Minimal nursemaid duties! My mom is doing fine after her foot surgery, plus she is one of the happy few who has minimal pain after this operation. She's still been downing her pain meds, but, well, enough about that. I only have to go over to her place for a couple hours every day and help with errands or chores, like taking out the trash. She's got one of those hi-tech walkers, with wheels, hand-brakes, and a basket, and she's zipping around with much independence. We're going to start calling her "Scooter."

I told Oz that if he has foot surgery again, he should get one of those walkers instead of suffering with crutches. He said, "No! Walkers are for old people." Yeah, and crutches are for people who like to fall over.

All that scooting means more time for me. I haven't had any more work come in, except for some of the deadline-free articles, so I've been a slacker or catching-up-on-stuffer. Today I paid a stack of bills and did some accounting. Before I can file my W-3 and W-2 which are due at the end of February, I have to make my 2006 retirement contribution and adjust all my 2006 paycheck entries to reflect the contributions (In case you're wondering, this isn't illegal, according to my accountant). That was my task for the day, that and write the check to the mutual fund company that handles my SIMPLE. It was sort of refreshing to get it all over with, but now I am rather less liquid. Not so refreshing. I can't wait to find out what my 2006 taxes will be (one of the joys of self-employment: wondering what April will bring) and see how much money I'll have left for a new roof.

This sounds awfully constructive for slack time. I'll be sure to goof off more tomorrow.

Hey there, Valentines!

My Valentine's roses and household clutter

Now that I look at this picture more carefully, I'm thinking I should re-shoot it. All that clutter around the edges. And the big gap in the middle of the bouquet is from where Monte Alban yanked out a spray of baby's breath to eat. I caught him at it this morning. He was under the dining table, hunched over his victim, looking furtively over his shoulder while he bit the flowers off their stems. His technique has improved over the years. When he was a mere youth, one of my funniest help desk calls was "Oh my god! My cat dumped a whole vase of water into my keyboard! The touchpad isn't working! What shall I do?" The help desk guy was amused. I must have made his day. I dried out the keyboard as instructed and I'm still using it. I haven't put a vase of flowers on my desk since.

I had a brownie for breakfast. The brownie I ate last night was a total sugar bomb and I couldn't get to sleep till some ungodly hour. Naturally I needed a brownie jump-start this morning. Brownie plus coffee. What was I thinking? I could feel my heart thumping around in my chest, but I did wake up while I waited to see just how high my blood pressure could go. Be warned! These brownies are awesome, but approach them as you would a controlled substance.

I had a very awake, very productive Valentine's Day. I will put the finishing touches on the big job tomorrow, and then be a big slacker for a while. I will also be shipping brownies off to people who won't know what's hit them. Hah.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Running up that road, running up that hill

I started my day by picking dry cat barf out of the rug in my office. No! Actually, my day began a few hours before that when I shut Monte Alban out of my bedroom so I could catch a little more sleep. At 5:30 a.m. he decided it was time for me to get up (maybe to clean the rug?) and proceeded to pick at the blankets and walk all over me. I decided it was too early and tossed him gently out of the room.

My poor, formerly fractured hip has been killing me this week. There is no pain-free position when I'm lying in bed and I haven't been sleeping well. Between that and the cats, I can only (day)dream of having four hours uninterrupted sleep. On the bright side, my caffeine consumption is up and I'm feeling really creative. Plotting and worldbuilding something completely different.

Languishing manuscripts? Not thinking about them, oddly enough. Those stories are written.

If only I didn't have to do this "earning money" nonsense, I could maybe do something worthwhile.

That was my plan for this week, not the writing, but non-monetary pursuits. I was going to turn in a mindbending computer science article and then in the slack week before the next packet of such arrived, I was going to do my taxes, renew my passport, call roofers, goof off, take pictures, work on my resume, cook food … all that good stuff. True to form, I end up with a 19,000 word patent for some semiconductor tool which the client needs, like, now, but, by the way, they're still revising the claims. I'm working like a drone and looking at a weekend of full-on dronehood. I did negotiate an extra high rate. New roof, here I come!

With any luck, today will have been the worst of it. I worked a lot. This working will kill you, that's what I say. It's no good for the photographer's eye either. I went for a Thursday walk and the only thing I saw to shoot was a roofer's truck so I could get the phone number. I had cold feet and a sore hip from sitting still for hours on end. The cats stayed in the warm and cozy upstairs till it was about suppertime, when they came down to stare at me and nibble on my monitor. While they were waiting, Sparky went into the litter box, scratched around for a while, then came out and hissed in my general direction before going back in and scratching around some more. Hmm. Guess it's time for fresh litter?

The chores, they keep me grounded.

We are looking forward to something tomorrow evening. A neighborhood photographer is having the opening of her very first show.

Objects in mirror are closer than they appear

Oz says I need to re-title this blog to "100 words whenever I feel like it."

Well. Nothing much is going on. Why write a daily boring entry when I can write an occasional less boring entry? A daily dose of boredom is more likely to drive people away than intermittence. What I really need is to get out more. Other people are the best material and I never see any. The human contact alone would almost make it worth going to grad school, except for the hell, nervous breakdown, and financial ruin.

I did find a little material on my own this weekend.

I recently joined Utata and started participating in their photography projects. It's fun and I tried a little light painting and it was good. Then this weekend's project was to get a shot of a creature, human or non, jumping. This requires people who don't mind having their picture on the internet, or cats who have no opinion on the matter. Another requirement for the cat is the ability to launch his fat butt into the air on demand. My sleek and mysterious gray cat jumps all the time, but he's hard to catch. That leaves me with El Gordo, who used to do some fabulous leaping back in the long gone days of his svelte and bouncy youth. Now when offered the dangle toy, he lies on the floor and bats at it. With the laser pointer, we used to make him leap five feet in the air, chasing the red dot up the wall. Now? The one shot I got where he looks like he might be jumping, his hind feet are firmly on the ground.

I had to admit defeat. I need to put this cat on a fitness program.

Also, the side mirror fell off my car today. And broke. And then I ran over it.

Not the housing, just the mirror bit. The adhesive that holds the mirror on the back plate must have given out from the cold, which makes you wonder, because you'd think a Volvo would be able to take these 20 °F temperatures. It's not like we're in Sweden.

This happened right as I was pulling away from the curb in front of my house. I heard the thunk, clink! My first reaction to seeing the smashed mirror on the road was to grab my camera out of the car and take pictures of it. Oz got a sheet of paper and a brush to sweep up the glass.

"Wait, no! This is art," I said, crouching over the broken mirror.

"It's not art! It's the middle of the road!" he said.

We were both wrong. None of the pictures is worth looking at (next time I'll do better) and it was only halfway out to the middle of the road.

I am full of beer and sushi

The place we go has a special Christmas roll, still on the menu. It's amazing what the chef can do with bright red caviar and nori flakes.

For your mindless entertainment, try this. OMG! [via, I think]

This week I've been working on a patent relating to photography-related chemicals. It seems so obsolete (not really, I know, so film geeks can just back off). I take breaks from the exciting world of patent translation to work on post-processing wedding snapshots. They are noisy and blurry because I'm reluctant to flash people. In every way. I will have to be more willing to annoy people if I want to get good pictures of them.

The pictures aren't bad for what they are. When you're participating in an event, it's basically impossible to focus on photography as art, so snaps it is. And the soft focus look is okay, except that I know how sharp my lenses really are. Who will see these anyway? I mean, really look at them?

Besides me.

What else?

I'm sleeping quite well since the wedding. Am I feeling better in general? Or was much of that sleep disruption really wedding stress? For a wedding where I'm not even getting married. Ridiculous! Another sign that I worry too much. I have nothing to worry about at the moment though, and I'm enjoying it. Maybe I'll start cracking on those not-quite-resolutions.

Post Processing

The princess is wed! She was gorgeous, the wedding went perfectly. It was uncanny. She even had a good time.

I had a good time too. My dress stayed up and everything.

Right now I'm sorting through pictures and posting them up (private, sorry). I have a surprising number of good shots. The camera loves the princess. Most of the pictures are pure mom-fodder. I have to get contact information for her mother and send her the adorable pictures of the princess in her pajamas on the morning of her wedding day. The princess is not a morning person, but she was just luminous.

For your entirely non-bridal amusement, enjoy the gummi bear rug (via). I'm not particularly fond of gummi bears, so I think this is an ideal use for them.

I should write

a blog entry.

But I spent the day in Bridesmaid Dress Hell. The best I can do is an incoherent list of reasons why bridesmaid's dresses suck even when you have what should be a good dress.

Reason 1: The evil, exploitative wedding industry won't let you shop. The way this works, you go to a bridal shop and try on samples of the dresses. They only have size 12 samples of a small fraction of the dresses in the collection. The samples are in random colors, so you have to imagine what the dress might look on you, if it were your size, and if it were the color that the bride has selected. The dress you end up with doesn't even exist until you order it. All sales final, 12 weeks to delivery.

Reason 2: If you're not a size 12, you have no way to determine what size you actually are. You measure yourself and go by the size chart provided by the manufacturer. The size chart lies. The dresses are bigger than the chart lets on, but you have no way of knowing that, because you don't have enough data to work with. Then, after you make a stab at picking your size and depending on how your measurements match up with the size chart, the bride may go ahead and further upsize your dress to be absolutely certain that it will be big enough. The theory is, a dress can be taken in, but it can't be let out. This theory is actually wrong in the case of these dresses: See Reason 3.

Reason 3: The material fucking stretches. The dress lets its own damn self out an inch or more in every direction.

Here's the blog entry part:

My tale of woe

When my upsized dress arrived back in December, I took it to a seamstress to get taken in. She could only take in the bodice because the structure of the dress around the hips was too complicated to screw with. Okay, so baggy butt, but with the fitted bodice, the strapless dress should at least stay up and sort of fit. It's the fit at the waist that actually holds the dress up.

Over the several weeks that she had the dress, we had Christmas and New Year's. Also, my therapist assigned me some new exercises which help my bad hip and also happen to provide excellent upper body toning. I tried to stay the same size by not indulging in too much pie over the holidays and making sure to do all my exercises. As a result, actual laws of nature have been broken. Despite the holidays and attendant treats, I became trimmer through the waist and larger through the bust, probably from building up muscle around my ribcage.

Go, me! I will look slightly more hot!

Except that when I picked up the dress, it was loose in the waist and really tight around the top, giving me the attractive flabby bulge/falling down dress combo. The dress came with a little optional security strap upon which must now hold up the dress.

But remember, the fabric stretches. Since I've had the dress, I've put it on several times to check the fit and work on creating a bustle for the train. (Another wild Dress Hell adventure, which was amazingly resolved with Scotch. Note to self: Scotch is key. Glenfiddich.) The top has loosened up, so the flabby bulge problem is resolved. Yay.

However, the strap is stretching out. I've already shortened it once. I'm going to have to shorten it another two inches. And, while I'm glad to be spared the flabby bulge, the top of the dress has loosened up enough that the dress slides down pretty far, pulling my strapless bra down in front and revealing the bra band in back.

That problem also has a solution. We made another trip to the fabric store where I picked up some bra cups to sew into the dress. (I should have done that to begin with. The bra cups were $5, the very nice strapless bra was $50.) Today I sewed a hook and eye on the back for the train bustle, during which process the decorative brooch on the back came off (great workmanship!) and had to be sewn back on. Crooked. Damn. Then I sewed in the bra cups. Not crooked, oddly enough. Since I rarely sew, this all took a very long time and required multiple dress try-ons and boob checks. To my credit, I did not spill coffee on the dress, tear the dress, throw the dress on the floor and stamp on it, or call up the bride to vent.

What do I have to show for it?

Assuming the little strap holds, the dress will stay in position and look somewhat lumpy and ill fitting. It will also be too long, because the fabric in the skirt is stretching. Thanks, gravity.

I still have to shorten the strap. I should probably sew the strap into the dress rather than relying on the hook/loop and snap combination that holds it in place. I may have another go at straightening the decorative brooch.

This dress has it in for me.

I'm taking my sewing kit to the wedding.

The red and the pink

I talked to the Princess today for a couple hours, over the course of which I discovered the time of the rehearsal, general plans for the days before the wedding, favorite colors and flowers, and more! Lots more. For example: "Well, if you want to save money, you can start by NOT getting a male stripper. Because … gross."

The information has been distributed to all the bridesmaids. Now that we know what's going on, to about the same extent that the bride does anyway, we can coordinate. Thus far we've been doing okay via email, but seeing as how we mostly don't even live in the same time zone, the potential for confusion is quite high. As it was, we were planning redundant teas! We were thinking about surprising the Princess with a fancy tea on Thursday, while she was planning all along to have the exact same fancy tea the very next day (which she hadn't mentioned yet).

The bridesmaid adventure continues.

Of more local interest: Bottoms Up Pizza has been knocking exactly two inches off the diameters of pizza ordered for delivery (the last two times we've ordered, so that's three pizzas, each too small by the exact same amount). For shame! That's about 30% less pizza. And it's really obvious too, because they're using the same size boxes. The first time it happened, Oz complained to the manager, who said, "Well, you know they're all handmade." Yeah, and if they were inconsistently wrong-sized, we might buy that.

Another balmy day

… Another cat pee event. This time they hit something we were going to throw away. Go, them!

It was pleasant enough to have the windows and the back door open almost all day, so at least the place is aired out.

I have a migraine with bonus nausea. My usual treatment is Tylenol, coffee, and donuts. Alas, the good donut place is closed for vacation till 9 January. Oz kindly ran over to another place to get some stopgap donuts, but they're just not as tasty. The worst of it should be over tomorrow.

Today we went to a fabric store and I picked up a spool of pink ribbon to use in creating a French bustle for my bridesmaid's dress. I did not need to buy thread! I found a perfect match for the dress in my old collection of embroidery floss. (I used to do counted thread cross stitch when I was a kid, then later in my early twenties. I have a UFO (unfinished object) in the form of a half-embroidered Christmas stocking.) Now all I need is for the seamstress to finish up the alterations. Once I get the dress back, I can obsess over it much more productively.

Two more weeks until this wedding.

I'm calling the Princess tomorrow to see how she's holding up.

New Year's Eve

We're staying in and watching the Kohaku. Which, yes, is ghastly, but we're watching it for the over-the-top, whole alternate class of weird that we had to invent new terminology, production numbers. So far, the opening number was pretty bland, but—

At the moment the cross-dressing enka singer is doing his thing and he does not disappoint. There must be 50 pounds of beadwork on his headdress. He has a huge skirt of parachute cloth which is also being rippled (and worn!) by a dozen girl dancers. Priscilla Queen of the Desert can barely dream of aspiring to this, and that's on her best days. For the first time, I wish I had a digital video recorder so I could YouTube some of these. Words fail.

Still, we're going to have to break out the champagne soon if we're going to get through this. There are a lot of enka singers between the big showstoppers. Oz has already accused BoA of "totally Milli Vanilli-ing." I said, "No! Not on the Kohaku! NHK would never have lip-synching."

We also came up with an idea for an Internet quiz: What Japanese folkloric creature are you? Tengu? Fox lady? Tanuki? Kappa? Too bad we have no follow through.

Shut-eye

Last night I got a good night's sleep. It happens so rarely anymore that it's exciting to wake up and find that (1) the clock reads a post seven a.m. time and (2) I feel like I've actually slept. Yay for sleep! I still woke up a couple times, but that's much less than usual.

Oz put the new carpet pad under the sitting room rug so it's all cushy. This carpet has never in all the ten or more years it's lived on my floor had a proper pad, just a thin rubber non-skid pad and a few old scraps of felt carpet pad. Now both my big rugs have thick, downright sybaritic felt pads. The cats will miss having those comfy rolls of carpet lying on the couch like a kitty-cat playground and napping platform (the pads arrived just before Christmas), but they'll adjust.

At physical therapy yesterday, I picked up a hard foam roller so I can get therapist-grade pain at home. In theory, as my muscle tissue softens up, this will hurt less. Another benefit to having a roller at home is that Oz can use it too. When I was rolling out my IT band (ow!), he came into the room and said, "So, do they make one of those with spikes and extra hard spots?" "Yeah, that's the advanced version. Ow!" Once he was rolling on it, he said, "Owie! Maybe I'm not ready for the spiked version."

Other excitement for the day included buying hippie milk. I picked up a quart at the natural foods store the other night because my inorganic milk from the hormone-injected cows was about to reach the sell-by date. This morning I had some and I have to say, the organic milk is much better tasting than the inorganic milk. Much fresher. You'd think the industrial stuff would get onto the shelves faster, but no, the hippie milk I got today has a sell-by date in February. Maybe that's why it costs twice as much? I suppose we should vote with our dollars and keep buying it. Increasing demand will eventually lead to increased supply and lower prices. I think. I haven't cracked an econ book since I had to take econ.

Wow, this entry has taken a long time to write. I need to get ready for bed and find out if I can get two nights in a row of good sleep.

Various odd things, juxtaposed

At the place where I go to physical therapy, they have satellite radio and they listen to different channels depending on their mood. Sometimes it's all eighties, sometimes it's "lite" mix, and sometimes it's the station with strange commercials. Last week they were doing all Christmas songs, all the time. I don't know whose idea it was, but my therapist wasn't thrilled. She sort of hissed through her teeth whenever she mentioned the music. Today I forgot to ask her how she held up, but since she hadn't gone all wall-eyed, I guess she did okay.

Anyway, today it was the station with strange commercials. This one commercial was for breast enlargement cream. "Guaranteed to increase your bust by two cup sizes without the pain and risk of surgery." Immediately up after that commercial? "She likes me for me."

In that vein (or maybe we should just open one), the TV at the pizza joint was running MSNBC the other night. The promo for a news story about eating disorders was immediately followed by a commercial for a diet plan.

So, I guess the message is, as usual, for ladies to be busty and thin, but not too thin, and to like their men for themselves, not for any superficial reasons like their BMI or the size of their man parts.

This is a stupid message.

Something less stupid and much cooler is my neighbor's Christmas yard art. She does yard art all year round, but she's really outdone herself this holiday season. I haven't been able to get a satisfactory photo because there's just so much of it: lights of many colors, tinsel garlands, evergreen garlands, glowing plastic nativity scene, glowing black Santa, black Santa heads (I just made a brief digression to see what I could turn up about the ethnicity of Saint Nicholas. He was from what is now Turkey.), a penguin, all in addition to the other stuff she has up all the time. The crowning glory is an animatronic deer head, draped with a silver tinsel garland, attached to the wall on her porch.

It sings.

It does not sing Christmas carols either. The other day when I walked past on my way to the post office, it was singing "Rawhide." Today (another trip to the post office), it was singing "Proud Mary." It also tells bad deer jokes.

I'm wondering if the deer is going to be a permanent part of the installation.

I don't know how many words

I wrote my thank-you notes today and (late) Christmas cards, which I bought today. Half off! That's one benefit to being a holiday slacker. I'm glad my friends and family are tolerant, or if they're not, they're inured and accepting.

I'm not done yet, either. I have to acquire and ship off just a few more things. That's the least of my to-do list which is kind of heavy on the cleaning because my house is kind of heavy on the dust. Also, we had another cat pee event today, not too long after I had to clean up a little dab of cat barf from the living room rug (just back from the cleaners, of course). The glamour! How can I stand it?

I need to get back to work so I can relax a little.

Still here

Still not dead. Or on hiatus. Really, this is not a hiatus!

I'm still doing physical therapy, to the tune of 40 minutes of abdominal exercises and stretchy-type things every evening, plus trying to get regular cardio type exercise every day. My abs are really strong now. I was getting less and less enthusiastic about PT (it makes me feel better, but it's really boring), then I measured my waist and it was smaller than it was back in September, which is my baseline for my measurements because that's when we ordered the bridesmaid's dresses. Now I'm more enthusiastic about the PT. Less pain should be enough to keep my interest in the therapy, but you can't measure less pain with a tape measure.

The Princess is still getting married in January. The bridesmaid's dresses came in last week and mine is at the seamstress now, getting taken in. The dress is pretty good. The Princess chose the designer (Bill Levkoff), the color (European Satin Red), and the length (full), but we bridesmaids got to chose our own dresses. I picked this one, number 403. 403 looks not very exciting in the front, but is bustled up all fancy in the back (that's the official picture from the designer's website, not a picture of me in the dress)(pictures of me in the dress are more comical). The train is rather longer than you'd think based on the picture, so I'm going to have to figure out how to add a little bustling to keep it out from underfoot at the reception. I just know that if I don't, someone (maybe even me) will step on the train and the dress will get yanked down and wouldn't that make a great addition to the wedding album? I'll have to get right on that, as soon as the dress gets back from the seamstress, a mere week before the wedding.

Right now on Cooking for Today, the guest chef is doing something atrocious to shrimp in the name of traditional Japanese New Year's treats. They pureed raw, peeled shrimp with potato and some other kind of starch, now they're patting the resultant paste into a rectangular pan. It looks rather gray and pasty.

In other cooking news, we made a Guinness chocolate pie. It is too bitter. We may give up on the pie and stick to cake.

Still not writing

This is the Internet, the most advanced cat photograph delivery system known to humankind.

Here is a photograph of my cat:

He loves that heating pad, and the plush throw runs a close second. I think it's hilarious that all of the photographs on Flickr tagged "heating pad" feature cats (except for a few of a Siberian husky).

I may have been slack about writing, although I have been writing to people. The Princess's wedding plans are proceeding apace. We bridesmaids have our dresses picked out and now we're exchanging emails about foundation garments and shoes. Can it get any girlier than that?

Presently my main bridesmaid-related concern is the silver shoe problem. I've found the shoe I want, now I just have to find it in my size. For backup, I decided to "make" some silver shoes or, rather, make some shoes silver. All along, Oz has been saying to just spray-paint some shoes with chrome bumper paint. Then, this past week one of our friends told us how his mom likes to spray-paint her shoes and accessories to match, and it totally works.

So I had to try it just to see.

If you've ever wanted to spray-paint your shoes, but weren't sure how to go about it, my illustrated, step-by-step instructions start here.

My turn

Now that my friend, the Princess, has taken her plunge, it's the bridesmaids' turn. The Princess has been a bridesmaid and seen enough weddings to know about the horror that is a bridesmaid's dress and she's setting things up so that we will have no complaints. Or at least very few. Or at least, any complaints we have will be our own fault, so there.

We get to pick our own dresses.

We don't have complete freedom of choice. She went dress shopping with a couple bridesmaids and they narrowed down the selection to one designer and one fabric and color. We can have any dress we want, as long as it's from this guy, red satin and floor length.

Now I have to find a dress shop in town which carries this designer and try on some dresses. I told Oz he might have to come along and take pictures of me in the dresses so I can see what I look like. That also gives me the option of consulting with the Princess (unless her schedule and mine will accommodate a day of shopping in the next two weeks—and we live a two-hour drive apart). He groaned and made horrified sounds, but, hey, it's not like he has to try on the dresses.

Or buy special underwear.

Special dresses call for special foundation garments. Today I about threw my back out trying to get into a longline bra. Six hours later, muscles are still in spasm, even after some massage, a hot shower, and whiskey. Yes, this garment is definitely not of the wireless variety: it's got wires, padding, pushup pads, lines of silicone rubber to help it stick to my skin and stay up … Pretty much everything, like four bras in one. It's very "Hello, I'm C___ and these are my boobs." Oz suggested I get it bronzed so I could be a superhero.

I could be Bridesmaidion, flying around the world to rescue bridesmaids from bad dresses.

Point of view

The one really silly thing from today was at dinner, when Oz was arguing that our dinner was in fact healthy and referred to the French fries as "sautéed vegetables."

I said, "Who do you think you are? Captain Vimes?"

"Huh? How is that Vimesy?"

"You didn't read that book yet."

"Oh. Thud!"

You had to be there.

This afternoon I opened up that web cam, but didn't set it up yet. I didn't crack open the software yet, so I could still return it. Yeah, okay, I'm not going to return it. I'm going to point it at the cats' food dishes or something dull and it'll be secured so you people can't watch my cats eat (one of them doesn't like to be watched eating and I should respect his neurosis) or, more importantly, see how often we access the refrigerator, which is right in the line of sight there.

Bonus day

I can enjoy a day of no work when I know there's work on the way.

I didn't have anything today, so I … went shopping.

For soap! and other useful things, though I did make a detour to the mall to look at crystal. Oz recently discovered port and I thought it would be nice to have a sherry glass in the house. I only found one such glass, however, and I didn't buy it. The impulse buy of the day ended up being a Swiffer Sweep+Vac because I have lately been thinking that a dustbuster on a stick would be darned useful. The cashier said, "Hey, I've been seeing the advertised on TV. You'll have to tell me if it actually works." I will too, but if she changes her highly sculpted hairdo I might not recognize her. There were … funnel-type shapes held in place by thread …

I also did the phoning while shopping thing to ask Oz if he wanted a set of yoga balls. (We've had a lot of balls-related, juvenile humor this evening, especially after he found the set included a little bag for the balls.)

And then, because it was a lovely day, I relaxed and read an engineering magazine.

Road kill café

We saw a huge buzzard down on Government Road this morning. He (or she?) was snacking on a smushed varmint, possibly a possum, judging by the size of the, er, chunks. The buzzard was about the size of two chickens and really blasé about the oncoming traffic. "Hey, y'all've got a whole lane, just let me work on the possum here."

Today I goofed off, proofing pictures and looking around online for camera gear. The lens I want is $760, but since it's also not available anywhere, it's kind of a non-issue. It's just as well. It would be more sensible for me to put that money towards redoing the bathrooms. Or replacing the porch flooring. Or getting the Handyman of Choice back to look at the gutters again. Or …

The neighborhood is almost back to normal after Tropical Depression Ernesto. The tree that was blocking 28th Street was cleared today and more (though not all) houses have power again. Yesterday evening when I walked through the park, there were lots of people out on their porches, or heading out to dinner, and the air was filled with the sounds of generators and the smell of charcoal grill cookouts. Tonight a few houses were still dark, but there was no one out on the porches and the generators were quiet.

In my not doing much today, I did finally put up pictures from the Back-to-School Parade. Click along through the set to see all five. The parade was tiny, probably because of the city canceling it two days before it was to be held, then un-canceling it the following week, so what you see here is pretty much what there was. I didn't put up pictures of all the classic cars, the local politicians, and the police van, but I did put up about all the pictures with cute children.

Beautiful day

As always, the day after the storm is lovely. It's even lovelier if you have electricity and can begin the day with the usual coffee ritual, as opposed to trying to locate a coffee source with power. This is even harder when the phone is out, I should add.

The morning after Hurricane Isabel knocked out power to most of the city, I went down the hill to the supermarket where they had power to part of the store. I had the choice of waiting in a long line for a free cup of coffee from a little ten cup coffee maker (which is not so little, but damn dinky when you've got a line of twenty hollow-eyed people clutching Styrofoam cups) or buying a not so cold six pack of Pepsi. I chose the Pepsi and wandered around the neighborhood taking pictures of storm damage, including my telephone pole which was snapped off about ten feet up and lying on the ground, hence my inability to locate an effective source of coffee.

Today, however, we had coffee and got on the handy Internet and ordered more coffee. Ha! Take that, weather gods! But, weather gods, we really appreciated the soft cloudy skies, the bell-like clarity of the air, and the beautiful poofy clouds. We drove to scenic spots along the river and admired the fast water. I took pictures of the railroad bridge, kayakers, and a blue tailed skink basking in the sun. I grumbled about not having my zoom lens, because the really cool shots were somewhat out of reach. I think the railroad bridge is my new obsession.

I haven't pulled the pictures off the camera yet, but anyway. I had fun taking them.

We also ran errands. I have new socks, but am confounded that Target was almost completely sold out of underwear in my size. Oz thinks it was all the back to school shoppers.

Storm day

Tropical Depression Ernesto takes out a tree (or ten) in the neighborhood

It's just a lot of rain and wind. You wouldn't think it would cause such a stir. The rain didn't really seem to be coming down all that hard, either, probably because it had been whipped to mist by the winds on high.

Well, actually, the rain seemed pretty heavy when I was out driving in it all morning. Then when I came home, the power sags and the wind blowing stuff around (sticks make a bonging sound when they hit the bars on the windows) were distracting enough that I bailed on translating The Article That Saps My Will to Exist and hung out upstairs reading. I kept hearing this banging sound. I assumed it was something related to the work being done on a neighbor's house, like Tyvek flapping around, but no. It was the sound of buckling metal from where the wind was attempting to peel the roof off a house across the street.

Eventually I got tired of that and went downstairs to try and work. After about twenty minutes of ["You think, therefore you are." Oh, god, no. Do I have to?], the power went out and didn't come back on again. Fun. The phone kept chirping and sometimes had a dial tone and sometimes did not. I finally decided to go for a walk with my decrepit umbrella and my weatherproof camera. I found trees down and I could hear the sounds of generators, house alarms (which go off when their backup batteries run down), and sirens from all over the neighborhood. I also found lots of other people walking around. We compared notes on the power outage and the contents of our freezers.

Back home I peeled out of my wet clothes and did the chores which would be difficult to do after darkness fell, like throwing the pill down Sparky's gullet. Oz got back from work and we hung out on the front steps to watch the storm. A power company truck drove by, the guys were staring intently up at the power lines and asked us what time we lost power. They drove back and forth a few times. We chatted with some neighbors about the burglar being captured.

This hanging out on the front steps and saying hey to people passing by is really nice. We'd do it more often if it weren't that for most of the summer it's the equivalent of sitting in a frying pan.

The telephone pole emitted a pfft! sound around six o'clock and we had power! Then it emitted a shower of sparks and we still had power, but we also moved our cars out from under it.

And now I think the excitement is about over. I'll check the river for flooding tomorrow.

Guttering gutters

It's been a dry summer, but that hasn't stopped my gutters from driving me mad. The patch job the guys did last February didn't hold at all and every time it's rained, the leaking of the gutters has driven me mad. I hear it, the dripping on the downstairs window flashing, the dripping on the oven vent.

So finally I called the Handyman of Choice, who I should have had work on the roof in the first place, except that I'd thought he'd retired. Turns out, he's planning to retire next year, at which point he'll cut back to working only forty hours a week.

He came last week and did something to the gutters. He scraped them out, lined them with Peel-N-Seal, and slapped more patching cement around. Then he collected his check and disappeared.

I've been wondering whether he did a good job, but it hasn't rained. I figure it's just as well. Any day I don't hear my gutters leak is a good day, rain or shine.

It finally started raining this evening, and I couldn't even tell till I went into the kitchen and could hear it pounding on the tin porch roof. Yay for the HoC!

Now we are alarmed

There was another break-in around the corner last night. Great! The police are starting to take this neverending crime wave personally. We see them driving by at all hours, they are patrolling the alleys on their bicycles, and they even flew around over the neighborhood in a helicopter last night.

But now when the burglars come, my house will make a loud noise and call the police. Hah! I'm still thinking about the web cam.

In other 'hood news, the city decided to hold the Back-to-School Parade after all. This Saturday morning at 10:00, I'll run down to Broad Street and cover it again this year.

Also, what's up with the robots? I have some lounge pants with robots on them. In today's laundry, the drawstring of the robot pants unraveled and attacked some other pants. When I was folding, I had to get some scissors from Oz to cut the pants free.

He said, "The robot revolution begins with the pants."

"Well, now we know."

"There will be no other pants before me."

And, finally, I have something to do with all those eggs. I bought a dozen and then neglected to use them. Today was the "best by" date, but oddly enough tonight's episode of Tameshite Gatten is featuring how to make tamago-yaki (Japanese fried egg) like a pro. It's not easy, and I really enjoyed the section of the show featuring non-pros making the most godawful tamago-yaki, because now I don't feel so stupid that I can't make it even though I have the special rectangular pan and everything. I'm taping the pro's demonstration and I'll distress some eggs tomorrow.

Beep

There's a burglar in the neighborhood and a couple houses on my block got hit this past weekend. The burglar steals underwear and ransacks the kitchen for snacks. The burglar is not deterred by much, either, he's even broken in to some houses when people were home. Of course, if he keeps that up he's going to get shot. Not that I have a gun, but I'm just sayin' …

The burglar may also come back for the more expensive stuff he passed over on his first visit. My mom says there are similar burglaries taking place in her Northside neighborhood.

We are all extra paranoid now. My neighbors are getting an alarm system. I am getting an alarm system. (I already had one, but it doesn't work anymore.) We are talking about setting up wireless web cams and surveilling our kitchens and backyards.

Now that's what the Internet really needs: pictures of me stumbling around and making coffee in the morning, or Oz futilely watering the dirt and grass seed. Not that these would be public, mind you.

The alarm system guy came tonight to sell us the system. The tech is coming tomorrow to set it up. Oz is saying, "Yes! I don't want no burglar messing around in my underwear!"

Biblioshoque

I finished up today's job a little bit early and decided to make a library run with my extra free time. There are a few out of print books I want to read and the library has them. (Actually, I just checked and they don't have one that's on my list, so I have now ordered it. The internet, it can be a dangerous thing for the budget.)

I parked at the back the library, the main branch, on Main Street and noticed that there were rather more people than usual sitting in the garden behind the building. But, it's a nice day and shady in the garden, so I didn't think too much of it. Then when I walked around the building I noticed a suspicious amount of available street parking.

I rounded the corner and saw a large number of people standing around in front of the building. So at that point the bad feeling which started to develop when I passed a woman on the sidewalk muttering, "Library closed" really takes off. I find notices, all in magic marker, taped to the front door saying "Library closed until further notice."

I can see staff milling around inside and there's a stonefaced security lady sitting inside the front doors. The lights are all on, but there's a power company truck parked out front. Maybe it's a power thing?

Considering that the city cancelled the Back to School Parade two days before the actual parade, I'm wondering if they've cancelled the libraries too. Like in Salinas a couple years ago?

Another would-be library patron walked up and flipped out. He'd just applied for a job there. He scurried over to the power company guys and got a little information. Yes, some weird electrical issue and the library may reopen tomorrow. I am relieved. I may even have time to go the library tomorrow.

Also, does my city have an adorable skyline, or what?

Chewy postal goodness

Of late the post office seems to have been getting my mail to my house. We've had the same carrier for the past few months and he has demonstrated his excellent capacity for reading street names. Since the problems from the beginning of the year have been solved (for now), I can once again order used books online and have some confidence that they'll make it to my house. I still wonder what happened to that book on the seventeenth-century British civil service …

But the post office is doing their best to keep me from developing a false sense of security.

Back in April, I got an email from a client about an invoice I sent through the mail which was so damaged that she could neither read it nor reconstruct it. I sent in another copy of the invoice and forgot about it.

Till yesterday, when I received the other half of it from the Undeliverable Mail Office. My business envelope had been torn lengthwise, right down the center. My client must have received the half with the mailing address in April, and I received the half with the return address and the stamp. The post office kindly included a postage paid envelope with their "oops" note, dated 16 August.

Four months? The Undeliverable Mail Office, which is at the central post office maybe a ten minute drive from my house so it's not like my half envelope has been wending its way around the country because the stamp wasn't even cancelled so it must have been torn right there at the central post office, has a four month backup of undeliverable mail?

I wonder what else they've got lurking around in Undeliverables. Maybe they've got my history book.

Lava Love

On a trip to Target for kitty litter, Oz found another lava lamp for his collection. He didn't have black wax with clear liquid yet, but he does now. When the light is on and the wax is bobbing, the color is more of a dark, environmental-disaster brown. He claims to have seen in a science catalog some lava lamps which appeared to have metallic wax. I just wandered over to Mathmos and their very interesting offerings didn't include anything like that. Too bad they use Flash. What is it with design wonks?

Other than that? When we went out for dinner, we saw the local Mullet Police mobile. We think, yes, maybe that is a good thing. I suppose they scurry around with hair trimmers to protect society from mulletry. Some Mullet Police in the UK use internet shaming instead. If you like mullets, you can get the T-shirt.

A couple things I saw today, before I forget

I went to the grocery store where I saw a punk mom and her two little boys. One had a standard little-boy haircut, but the other had a Mohawk. The cutest, blond, little-boy Mohawk I ever did see, with bangs hanging into his eyes and a fuzzy head, and the most perfect little cowlick on the crown of his head, like a pinwheel right in the middle of the Mohawk area.

This evening we went to the Tan-A market to pick up some rice. They were out of the kind I wanted. (I'm so spoiled, I simply must have koshihikari!) While I was whinging about the rice, some of the personal care products on the nearby shelves caught our eyes: Darkie Toothpaste (yeah, they call it "Darlie" now, but we know what it really is) and Snake Brand Prickly Heat Powder. If the line had been shorter, I would have got them, just for the packaging. I'm still wondering why the Snake Brand snake has an arrow through his head. It doesn't give one an impression of non-prickly comfort.

In my daily dose of Wonderland, Alice went to Tarina Tarantino's shop, where they have a Barbie collection, a Hello Kitty collection, and a bridal collection. The princess simply is their demographic and she hasn't got a tiara yet, so I sent her the link. She's all, "Oooh, Barbie tiara? Hello Kitty tiara?"

Snooze

This lady of leisure stuff is time-consuming. Work arrived on Monday afternoon but with no fixed deadline. I already mentally gave myself this week off, so it's been easy to take it.

I've mostly been running errands.

I played with my camera for awhile. I can make myself look very tall (I'm not) with a wide angle lens, a narrow hallway, and a tripod set up to hold the camera a foot off the floor. The effect is very spooky, especially when the only light is from the flash. I recommend the process.

I pulled some pictures off my little camera. I was pleased with how they came out, the light was perfect. It just goes to show, the best camera is the one you have with you. I carry my little Stylus when I'm too tired to lug the D50 around, or when the weather precludes using the D50.

I cooked food two nights in a row. Can I make it three? Or will Oz insist on draft beer and French fries tomorrow?

I swam laps. I read magazines.

Tonight we scouted out some of the interesting neon and signage along Broad Street. We don't have much here in town, and some of the most interesting signs are in sad shape. My goal is to shoot some shortly after sunset, when there's enough light in the sky that you can see the city, but not so much that you can't see the light. Neon lobsters may be coming your way soon.

Up late

Today I went into the donut place, because there's nothing like donuts for a headache, and discovered that the No Smoking sign actually meant that no smoking would be taking place inside. There were even codgers sitting at the counter and they weren't smoking. That's a first for me, although only because I have been sending Oz out for donuts.

I wonder if they're the same codgers, or if the original ones have been replaced with new tobacco-free codgers.

Also today I wore my French soccer jersey out on my walk through the neighborhood and ended up in conversation with a random French teacher. In English, because my French is very bad.

I looked at the pictures I took on Sunday and I should maybe post some of them. The shots taken from the moving car were fairly sharp, considering. The ones I really wish had come out didn't. As we were driving along the Great Dismal Swamp, the rain stopped, the sun burst out briefly, and a pale rainbow formed in the mist rising from the peanut fields. A little too pale to be caught by a CCD, alas. In the images I can barely make out a slightly pinkish yellow area in the mist, and only because I know it's there.

Slug

It's been a busy few days and what with grumpiness, headaches, and having no words to speak of (so to speak), I've written nothing. Now I have lots of words, but not so much time.

Yesterday we drove to North Carolina entirely by accident. We took a road trip down State Route 460, the peanut highway, for some drive-by photography but, oddly enough, no peanuts. I haven't proofed the pictures yet. I expect the ones shot from the car moving at speed will be kind of blurry, but we actually did stop the car and get out in a few places. If we'd stopped at every interesting spot, we'd still be out there.

By the time we got to Suffolk, it wasn't much further to the Great Dismal Swamp. Oz kept saying, "There is no swamp. It's just like what we've been driving through." We stopped at the Suffolk Visitor Center for directions and the girl working there said, "Ha ha. It's over eleven thousand acres of no swamp." "And bears too," I added, pointing to the snarling stuffed bear in the corner. Which I posed with for pictures. That and the giant peanut. I don't think I'll be posting those pictures.

I did finally add some shots of West Hospital to my Disappearing MCV set on Flickr. If you enjoy big, brick, art deco monstrosities—and who doesn't?—take a look.

Happy accidents

Well, Flickr is down right now, so I can't inflict yet another photo of the 'hood on you tonight. I'll have to write.

A nice thing to happen today: I made another variant of the pasta salad that we basically live on during the summers. I had a few hardboiled eggs, which I had made for another recipe that we're dragging our heels on actually preparing, sitting in the fridge. I chopped them up and threw them in the pasta salad and that magical emulsification thing happened with the egg yolks, the balsamic vinegar, and the olive oil. So delicious we had no leftovers.

A funny thing: I was watching Kyou no ryouri (Today's Cooking) while I was doing my therapy exercises. The ladies were preparing a few tofu dishes. Because tofu is healthy! The "Japanese" word for "healthy" is "herushii" and they kept repeating "herushii" over and over while they prepared deep fried tofu fritters ("Go great with beer!") and scrambled curried tofu. The curried tofu was hilarious. They start out with sautéing a little minced ginger and garlic, then they throw in some minced vegetables and three slices of minced bacon. "Because tofu doesn't have a lot of flavor, so we add the bacon for flavor." Then they mash in the tofu, and add some curry powder. Next comes a quarter cup of Japanese curry roux, which is basically a cake of lard mixed with curry powder. "So it has that nice curry flavor." "And it's so healthy, because it's tofu!" They stir it for awhile, add some more vegetables, and white wine and soy sauce, and then a big pat of butter. "Because tofu doesn't have a lot of flavor. But it's really healthy." Just when I think they're going to tip the skillet over a plate of rice and be done with it, they throw in a quarter pound of diced processed cheese food. "For flavor, because the tofu doesn't have a lot of flavor. Even though it's so healthy." By this time I'm laughing my head off, because, yeah, tofu doesn't have a lot of flavor, but last time I checked processed cheese food didn't either. Tofu has a fair amount of fat, and when you add a cup or so of animal fat to it, you end up with a dish that is not healthy. It looked pretty good though. I can probably whip up a version that is not redolent of heart attack on a plate.

Another thing: I have new sneakers now. Oz forced me to go to a shoe store and torture the staff. The arch supports feel like little fingers poking up at my arches. When I was wearing them around the house, Monte Alban sat in the shoebox and looked extremely cute. Then he rested his neck on the edge of the box and made a little choking noise.

A better thing: I have a new tripod. Oz ordered me one, because the tripods we have are old and flimsy, and he likes shopping. This one is big, not flimsy, and has a quick release ball head. He ordered extra mounting plates too, for his camera. Long exposure photographs, here I come!

A thing to try: On a whim I am working up a recipe for ricotta cheesecake. Did you know that store-bought pie crusts come in more flavors than graham? You can get Oreo and Nilla wafer too. How can one not play with cheesecake variations?

That is enough things for now.

Efficacious

There's nothing like a little physical exertion to clear the brain. Today I was smarter. I ran my errands in the morning when the temperature was but a chilly 89 °F and one of those errands was a trip to the Y for a swim. I feel so much better. That business of exercise working out the toxins isn't half wrong. And when I was leaving the Y, I saw a little old lady attempting to parallel park her Beetle into a huge handicapped space, which she could have headed into. It took her three tries and she backed into the car behind her like five times. I will never park by that space. Ever. The car she banged into looked undamaged, so I didn't get the license number and march her in to the front desk, but I probably should have.

I drove by where they're drilling for the buried train. There is nothing going on and Marshall Street has been reopened because, get this, the mayor's office issued a stop work order. Yes! Somebody else thought it might not be such a smart idea to drain the water out of the tunnel. More impact studies must be done before they can proceed. With any luck, they won't be able to afford it since they only had $15,000 for this feasibility study.

I also drove by a ghost sign which was buried under a layer of green paint today. Another one I always meant to get a proper picture of, but didn't.

Then I came home, removed a layer of chlorine, and goofed off, alternately reading Hornblower and doing a little online shopping. I found a wallet which met my exacting specifications, bought an extra memory card for my camera, that sort of thing. Tomorrow I'm really going to have to pay for all that by knuckling down and getting some work done.

But that will be a snap, now that my head is feeling much clearer and less zombie-like thanks to the lady of leisure treatment.

Cicada

Yes, add me to the chorus of people moaning about the heat. I am shuttered inside my centrally air-conditioned house, peeking out the windows and watching the sun blister the paint on my car. It's supposed to cool off a little on Wednesday.

I'm turning into a pale flabby zombie from lack of exercise. Even as darkness falls, the temperature doesn't and I shrink from going for a walk. (I used to be tough and tromp merrily around, sweating, on summer afternoons, but no more.) The air conditioner in my car ceased working sometime between last fall and this summer and the idea of driving around in an oven is so unappealing that I don't even go (drive) to the Y for a swim. I let my daytime errands pile up and wait for Oz to come home and chauffeur me about in his super-cooled Subaru.

Even though it's nice and cool in the house, I lie around as if it weren't, as if the outside heat were reaching inside, into my brain, and tangling up my neurotransmitters. I do the bare minimum of paying work, then sprawl on the floor at the lowest point in the house and read about Hornblower patrolling the waters off Brest.

I am such a wimp.

Hey!

"Hey, honey! I look just like Zidane. Only smaller, female, with more hair, and less likely to headbutt people."

I am on the phone to Oz. Back towards the beginning of the World Cup, he became very taken with the French away jersey and ordered some for us. His arrived right away ("Oh, honey, you look just like Zidane!" "Ha."), but mine was backordered. It arrived today. He selected plain jerseys without a player's name or number. I bet if he'd placed the order after July 9th, he'd have picked Zidane jerseys. He's been playing the Zidane game. He's even still reading soccer gossip. ("Well, you know what Zidane's mom had to say about it?")

And, of course, when Oz got home, I headbutted him.

Another fun moment today. As we drove past the East End Junior High School (now Franklin Military Academy), I saw someone get out of a car and start taking pictures of the building. Did he decide to come shoot it after seeing the picture I posted a couple days ago? Or did he find it by accident like we did?

Drilling for trains

Jefferson Park, North 20th and East Marshall Streets

This is our drama for the week. It even made NPR! Some individuals decided that it would be cool to dig up the work train, and maybe find some incidental corpses, buried in the collapse of the Church Hill tunnel back in 1925. Here they are, drilling a hole to stick a camera down. According to the newspaper, they've struck water. They say they'll pump the water out and try again with the camera. If it's a lot of water, I don't know. There's always water oozing out the wall sealing the western end of the tunnel. Oozing out the upper part of the seal, I might add. I am not a civil engineer, but I wonder if removing the water will maybe destabilize the tunnel. The water is exerting outward pressure on the walls, the walls press back against it. If you remove the water, will the walls cave in?

The earth around the tunnel is rather unstable, hence the catastrophic cave-in and C&O Railroad giving up on the tunnel. Jefferson Park, which is over the tunnel and the train, is also one of the areas which slumped in Tropical Storm Gaston back in 2004. Even though they say the park will be stabilized as part of the train extraction project, I wonder. Opening up a hole in the hill big enough to get a train out through will probably be dangerous and invite quite a lot of instability. As it is, they've peeled back the turf which holds that part of the hill in place, just in time for the summer erosion season.

Here in the neighborhood, there are a lot of different opinions on whether this is a good idea and what to do with the train. Should it be displayed at the Historical Society? Should they put it in the park? I particularly like the suggestion of a glass-walled building set into the hillside so we can see the train in situ (like an ant farm of a disaster), but that sounds really expensive and impractical, given the propensity of the hillside to collapse.

I think the excavation of the train is a bad idea. First of all, a doomed train buried in the ground beneath our feet is simply more interesting to me than a doomed train at the Historical Society. Of course, if I had a dead relative under the hill with the train I might feel differently about getting the bodies out, but I don't. Second, Marshall Street, and maybe Cedar Street, would probably be closed for however long the project took. A year? That would be really inconvenient. Third, I wonder whether the risks and cost (supposedly the funding will not be coming from the city, so this costs me, personally, nothing) are really worth the benefit, especially since I see no benefit to the neighborhood in having our mystery removed. So that's my opinion.

Also, pretty pictures, since I was wandering around with the camera anyway: the whimsical gate of Tricycle Gardens, a community organic gardening project which is pouring flowers out through its fence. I walked up to 25th and M to shoot the restored Bromo Seltzer walldog, but I think I like this picture from a few weeks ago better. I spoke with the owner (?) of the building. He's putting in a Cuban restaurant. When I stepped inside to look around, they were even playing Buena Vista Social Club on the stereo. The interior looks really nice. I hope the food is good.

Just like the other

Today was a day pretty much like yesterday. The quest for shoes continues. Oz's quest for soccer gossip continues. The cats' quest for extra food continues, and is basically successful. Lucky cats. I should send them out for shoes. And candy. My brief quest for candy today was also unsuccessful. I went to the chocolate specialty store and found they'd moved! Without telling me! There was no notice up at the old location, but the paper taped over the windows claimed that a "Tokyo Market" would be coming soon. After I got home I found out where the chocolate store went. It seems that at their new location, they will only carry chocolate and not other kinds of candy. This is really too bad, because they had some non-chocolate things, like very aggressive black licorice, that you couldn't find anywhere else. They are also where I discovered the deliciousness that is pistachio brittle.

Different today: I had a haircut and inadvertently ended up with one of the official lesbian haircuts. It seems to have calmed down a bit since I washed out the product put in by the stylist. (For a while they had "hair engineer" on their business cards, but they aren't doing that anymore. ABET would not have approved.) For a while there, I looked really dykey. I was trying to describe it to Oz. He said, "Oh, so you looked like Sting? Or like that country-western singer?"

"No, not like Sting. You mean k.d. lang? I wouldn't mind looking like k.d. lang. She has good hair."

We ate at the Full Kee and they gave us fresh lychees for an after-dinner treat. A friend of ours who lives in the tropics has a lychee in his backyard. He posted pictures of the ripening fruit online and made me envious. Now the envy is somewhat assuaged. Oz took the seeds and we will try to grow our own lychee, though I don't hold out much hope for success. Lychee propagation is a little more complicated than shoving seeds into dirt.

Quest for shoes

I have one simple and entirely reasonable requirement of sneakers: that they not hurt my feet.

The soles of my old sneakers have split and, since these are the air-filled kind, my sneakers have started wheezing. New sneakers are obviously in order and tonight we went out to get some. This process usually takes five minutes. I go to the store, try on the new version of my old sneakers, and buy them.

So we go to the store. I try on the new version of my old sneakers, and they hurt my feet! For some reason, Reebok moved the arch supports to someplace other than my arches. I tried on lots of sneakers. They all hurt my feet. I finally tried on a pair (that Oz liked because they were the same brand he wears) and they felt okay, but my right foot was hurting from all the bad shoes it had been thrust into. I bought them anyway. When I tried them on again at home, my right foot started hurting again because. These too were the shoes that were hurting my feet. It seems my right foot is wider than my left foot and these shoes weren't quite wide enough for my right foot.

Thus the shoe acquisition ordeal is not yet over. Oz, aka Imelda, likes shopping for shoes. I guess I'm glad one of us does.

Meanwhile, Oz obsesses over soccer.

Not only did he stay up last night to see Zidane's foul of Materazzi again, but he's been googling World Cup news for all the gossip. Oh, that's "sports commentary." He hit YouTube as well, and dug up all kinds of comic digital manipulations of the foul. Maybe he'll post a few links in a comment?

Meanwhile, my cat is drugged.

It's really weird. He's pretty groggy, but I think he's developing a little tolerance. The expression on his face is so … Sometimes he looks like a completely different cat. But not a biting cat.

Meanwhile, we got a photo-printer.

I've only printed out a few shots so far. It's kind of odd to see my photos on paper. I haven't seen a picture not on a computer screen since I last had a roll of film developed in 2000. I have a couple undeveloped rolls sitting on my desk that date back to then.

More reruns

A. D. Williams Memorial Clinic and Laboratories
North 12th and East Marshall Streets

This is really a rerun, I covered this particular doorway before. I just like how this new shot came out. Also, the art deco transom shows up much better. This time I had a wider angle lens and got a shot of the building it's attached to. The Williams Clinic is another building slated to be razed. They do salvage things like the sandstone carvings and the deco metal. They even salvage a lot of the brick, which sounds like more work than it's worth, but since bricks are no longer made in the same size they were a long time ago, there's a market for old bricks among restoration builders.

Oz is sort of watching the Japanese rebroadcast of the World Cup final for the great moments in Italian malingering. "Oh, that guy was clearly offside!" He will probably go to bed before the famous foul. I offered to tape it, but I'm sure we can find it on YouTube if we really want to see it again.

And speaking of soccer, a Japanese news broadcast today featured a Japanese sportswriter live (sort of) from the Berlin press room. He delivered an analysis of the Japanese team and how they need to improve. He had visual aids too, these hand drawn, magic marker graphs on letter paper which he held up to the camera. "So you see, the Japanese team falls here on the scale of running ability and technical skill. The good runners don't have the technical skills and the skilled players aren't good runners. Japan needs to work on improving the technical skill of the runners, and on getting the technical players to run better … "

I think the Japanese team needs to work on coordination. Whenever a player got the ball, there was no other player in place for him to pass to. Well, there were plenty of Brazilian players in place to pass to, but that's not quite what they're going for.

I'm starting to sound like a sports fan. I think the World Cup ended just in time.

There's no headbutting in soccer!

Even the French announcers agree. "Inexcusable! Impardonnable!" And out went Zidane.

Anyway, Les Bleus had to play in white today. The announcers grumbled about having to say Allez, les blancs!. Otherwise, today's commentary was really fannish. They yelled "Woo!" and "Ai-yi-yi!" and "Oy-yoy-yoy!" and "Oh-la-la!" They admired the pretty French girls at the stadium. They mercilessly noted each and every foul committed by the Italian players. On occasion, they broke into spontaneous song.

I still haven't figured that out.

Then, during lulls in the action, they read their fan mail. It seems I'm not the only one watching the games in French purely for the wacky commentary. One viewer in Charleston (in French, that's pronounced Shar-les-tohn) even wrote in to tell them how much she liked the Oh-la-la's.

And now it's all over for another four years. Oz is saying, "You know, we could follow soccer when it's not the World Cup."

Playing to kiss your sister

What will we do with ourselves when the World Cup is over and we're not watching soccer every other day or so?

Oh, the Nagoya Basho starts today. I guess we'll watch sumo.

Today's French soccer commentary, on the Germany vs. Portugal match for third place, was again about soccer. I almost thought these announcers were going to come through with the sports commentary that has nothing to do with sports. At the beginning of the match, one of the guys was expounding on his theory of soccer performance, "It's all about the hair!" (I'm not making this up.) Then something interesting happened on the field and they started talking about the match instead. During a lull in the action, the announcers began to talk about tomorrow's match, that being the only one that matters, and what color jerseys would the French team get to wear. (Again, not making this up.)

Both France and Italy have blue home jerseys, and obviously one of the teams will have to wear an away jersey. Although having all the players out there in blue would add a certain element of chaos to the play … and the refereeing.

The French announcers often refer to the French team as Les Bleus (The Blues). Unsurprisingly, they came down strongly in favor of having the French team wear their blue jerseys. "It's only right that The Blues should wear blue!"

Will the French turn out in blue? We'll find out tomorrow at 2:00.

Also, the Germany vs. Portugal match was really good. Germany won, scoring some lovely goals.

Reruns

We're watching the Japanese rebroadcast of France vs. Portugal, which we saw live on French TV.

Because it's on.

Besides, I missed the first half the first time around.

I have to say, France's strong showing this World Cup as been great for France, but hasn't done much for the entertainment value of the French commentary. The announcers are taking this entirely too seriously. Instead of snotty remarks about players' hairstyles and gossip, we're getting actual sports commentary. Even when France isn't playing, they're talking about which team will win, and whether they'll be up against France next.

Also, this makes for less of the "Oh-la-la!"

In cat news, Sparky is still taking the pills okay and is really mellow. Today when Oz sat down beside him on the couch, he didn't hiss and run away. (My cats only like me. They run away from everyone else.) Oz said, "Maybe you need to cut back his dose?"

In house news, my gutters are still leaking. Oz is doing nice things to the garden. Plumbing problems developed on the day before the holiday as they always do. And I have to figure out how to start getting the bathrooms redone.

Could life get more exciting?

(Yes, any day now …)

And today we watched soccer

Portugal vs. England (Portugal, by playing dirty) in the morning and Brazil vs. France (France, by playing amazingly well) in the afternoon. That pretty much took the whole day. Last night Oz had pull an all-nighter for work, so today he had to fight to stay awake. He did okay till after the last match.

That was pretty much our whole day.

This evening I went out for a walk (alone) with my camera and my new monopod. I was playing with my big zoom lens. I've found that when you're all zoomed in, any little wobble—like from your heart beating—blurs your picture, and the monopod helps with that. It sure did this evening. All the monopod pictures are nice and clear, but the pictures I took without it are pathetic. Too bad. This little squirrel in the park was posing so nicely. I shot some pictures of her without bothering to set the camera on the monopod and now I have five blurry squirrel pictures.

I'm having better luck, in terms of clarity anyway, with my optical illusion pictures. When you walk through Libby Hill Park towards the river, Rockett's Landing hoves (hives? heaves?) into view beneath the spreading branches of an oak tree. The water tower and the brick warehouses look to be within arm's reach, but they retreat when you pass the oak tree. In pictures taken from both vantage points, the Rockett's Landing buildings are the same size. Huh. I'll have to run them by Oz when he regains consciousness.

Bad brain day

The article I'm translating has caused my brain to shut down. It's not me, it's the horribly written article. There's sort of this exponential decay thing that happens as the number of authors increases and this article has way too many authors. This has put me a day behind in my work which means that the some part of the two-day weekend and July Fourth holiday is going to be not a day off. As usual.

Also, much is going wrong. Car stuff, house stuff, work stuff, health stuff, and Murphy's Law poking into everything that happens. Like a power outage resulting in a need to reinstall the OS on the computer Oz uses at home. Little things like that.

Really, everything will be okay. We just have much to be grumpy about right now.

But, Basil!

This afternoon Oz cut out of work early to catch some of the France vs. Spain match. He was rooting for France. He said, "I don't know why a jersey design makes me so partial, but there it is."

The French team does have excellent jerseys. Japan also.

This was a great match. Both teams had a good style of play, so it was fun to watch. In the end, experience won out over hotness (the old—younger than me, but still—French guys beat the cute young Spanish boys).

Our commentary was provided by a pair of Frenchmen who were not so effusive with the Oh-la-la-la-la's but they were really effusive about everything else. One of them is named Basil. We know this because he kept commentating so effusively that the other one, to get a word in, had to shout and preface every remark with "But, Basil!"

Yesterday Basil and the other guy were also on for Switzerland vs. Ukraine (which I kept mis-speaking and calling "Ukrania"). "J'aime les joueurs ukraniens!" Basil cried, and whenever the camera pointed at pretty girls in the crowd, he sighed, "Ah, une jolie suissesse! Elle est très blonde!" They actually talked about the match too, until the camera picked more girls out of the crowd and Basil sighed, "Ah, les suisses!" (Yes, French people mess up their gendered words too.) And the other guy said, "Non, non, Basil! Les suissesses!"

That match had me wondering about German stadium culture. They played Doris Day singing Que sera, sera over the PA during the break between the last over time period and the penalty kickoff.

But anyway, today France was playing, so the commentators took this match a tad more seriously. They lost it at the end, though, when France was ahead by one in the last few minutes (with that one being from a penalty that I didn't think was fair), and then Zidane scored another goal. Then the commentary devolved into "Woo! France is the greatest! Yeah, the French people will be partying all up and down the Champs-Elysées tonight!" (I have to translate, I don't remember exactly how they said all that.) They managed to intersperse their effusions with "Oh, but it isn't over yet!" I think we heard that twenty times in the last two minutes. Then it was over and Basil cried, "Yes! France is awesome. We beat Spain again, like we did in [list of years]!"

These guys are very much about the exclamation points.

Out in the yard

I have to practically put on hazmat gear to work in my garden. It's not that my garden is toxic (the neighbor's poison ivy, trying to creep through the fence, is being kept at bay), but what with the mosquitoes (West! Nile! Virus!) and the sun, which burns me in no time flat, I have to wear a long sleeve shirt and long pants to go out and pull weeds. It makes summer gardening so much fun, especially with the extra sweat for the dirt to stick in.

Today was a weeding day. I seem to have mostly sweet clover, which isn't hard to pull up, but there's just so much of it. Anymore, though, I only have to clear half my beds since the groundcover took over the rest while I was in engineering school. When I was done and shoveled a layer of peat moss around everything, I had Oz come out and move the peat moss onto the porch where it wouldn't get rained on.

I thought that would take two minutes and then we'd go out for breakfast, but when I looked out the window, I saw him cutting the grass/wild strawberry/violet mix (no un-ecological monoculture for us, oh no!). So I took a shower. A half hour later I looked out and he was wrangling potted plants. He went into a repotting frenzy, scattering potting mix and oxalis rhizomes every which way. Then he watered everything. Then swept. Then got out his electric leaf-blower.

That coffee that I talked about yesterday? With the extra caffeine? He drank a pint and a half of it this morning. He claims he didn't make it quite as strong as I did.

And after we had breakfast, he took a nap.

Big bunny in the sky

Evening clouds over Richmond
Little bunny Foo Foo strikes again!

But today's story is about caffeine.

The market where we buy coffee stopped carrying the kind we like. This came as a big shock, especially because the coffee they carry now is nasty. I got a little bit to try and we were not happy. So we tried some other coffee and it was nasty too. Then we used our big, clever brains and figured out that we could find Jim's Organic online. And so we did, and ordered coffee and all was well once more. Oz did a little extra coffee shopping and found some Kona too.

The Kona packs a little surprise. Like, I don't know, five times as much caffeine as normal coffee? It tastes great, but I haven't been drinking it because I need to be able to sit still and work during the week. I made a half pot today though, since it's Saturday and I figured Oz would drink most of it.

I sipped away at my cup, and couldn't get through more than half, while Oz slurped down a pint of it in ten minutes. Then we went out. Oz drove, pinging around the inside of the car, and said, "So today we should go to the gym. Not do a big workout, but I don't know, maybe. Yeah. Go to the gym and get that musculoskeletal thing going and a good stretch. And take a steam and a shower. And shave. Well, some of us will shave, but others of us won't. Yeah, the gym. That running without going anywhere and—"

"That coffee has too much caffeine! It has made me grumpy!"

"Oh."

He actually did end up going to the gym. I grumpily watched soccer and tried to figure out why Bloglines seems to think my RSS feed has disappeared. I don't know what their problem is, but the feed is fine. I added more feeds too, so if you like that kind of thing, scroll down the front page to the bottom of the sidebar and enjoy.

Full time

And then in the second half, Brazil proceeded to flatten Japan.

4-1.

Ouch.

Yesterday, the Japanese news had a little story about the JAL "Two days/Zero nights" package (Go to Germany, see the match, don't sleep, come back). We saw the Japanese fans in their soccer jerseys at Narita and the big JAL plane with a giant picture of Team Nippon on the side taking off. I wonder if tonight they'll show the fans trooping back home, bloody but unbowed and all that. (In truth, the Japanese team played pretty well.)

Half time

I finished my latest job early today. When I emailed it to the client, I mentioned that since I beat the deadline I would watch Japan vs. Brazil this afternoon.

Then I felt silly, because a client who's dumping tons of work onto me right now would probably want to hear that I was working.

But in her reply, she only said she was jealous that I got to watch the match live, and how she'd been losing sleep over the fate of the Japanese team (she's Japanese).

So it's half time now and Japan is holding up okay. They scored the first goal of the match 36 minutes into the first half, at which point the Brazilian play took on a distinct sense of urgency. The Japanese defense stayed strong enough to withstand them until the last 13 seconds of the period, when Brazil got their first goal. The French commentators cried, "Ah, the Japanese, they are too naive! They always watch the ball and never the players!"

And now the second half begins.

It's raining.

Sartorial content

It's boiling hot now, not as hot as it's going to get, but still.

Last week, though, it was cool enough that I pulled a sweater on over my T-shirt when I went out. I have some shirts that I only wear inside, and this was one of them. It's a Border Patrol recruiting shirt which was given to me by a friend of ours back when he worked for INS. In fact, I forgot that this was the shirt I had on, until that evening when I walked into our regular, family-run Mexican restaurant, where it was kind of warm. I was thinking I'd peel off the sweater, then I remembered.

I whispered to Oz, "Ah! I can't take off my sweater, I have on that Border Patrol shirt."

Loudly, he said, "Oh, go ahead and take it off!"

"No!"

Some of the wait staff asked him what was up with that. He told them and then said to me, "Show them."

Fine. So when we're seated, I pull the front bit of my shirt out of the neck of my sweater, and show the Border Patrol logo to one of the waiters.

His eyes got really round. "That looks real."

"It is real."

He said, "You shouldn't wear that here. Everyone will run away."

"Right, we don't want that! We want our beer and dinner! Oz."

Later, when we were finishing up, the waiter came back and asked me if I was a Border Patrol agent. No, I explained, and how I got the shirt from someone who wasn't a Border Patrol agent either. So, okay? We are not la migra.

Clothes make the man

NPR had a story on tonight, about Dutch soccer fans having their shorts confiscated at the stadium because the shorts had a brewery logo which was not Budweiser, the company with pouring rights at the Word Cup. I didn't see that match, I'm sure I would have noticed crowd shots of people in their underpants.

Actually, I did see one guy in his underpants. The crowd shots at the opening of the Italy vs. US match (Un match complètement fou! according to the commentators) included a shirtless young man in blue underpants singing along with the Italian national anthem. I had assumed he was just showing off his muscles, but now I wonder whether his shirt and shorts were confiscated for having brand logos from companies which were not World Cup sponsors.

What I'm really wondering about was the (French) guy at the France vs. Korea match, waving a live chicken around during the Marseilles.

Yeah, that makes total sense. Your orange Bavaria lederhosen, no good. Hot Italian guy, depants yourself immediately. But the dude with the poultry gets waved on through.

Where there's smoke

A while back, like a year ago, maybe more, Oz was being helpful. He was vacuuming the upstairs and decided to dust off the smoke detector by vacuuming it too. Ever since then, the smoke detector has been dangling by the wires that connect it to the house current.

This morning I decided to fix it. I was getting the stepladder out to change the light bulb at the top of the stairs, and the smoke detector is right there, so why not?

Well, I'll tell you why not. The little screws that the smoke detector is supposed to fit onto were just loosely clinging to the drywall instead of being firmly screwed into the electrical box or a metal plate. When I tried to fit the smoke detector onto the screws, they wobbled pathetically and worked their way even further out of the ceiling. Oz came up and helped me with it.

I said, "I think we need to get a new smoke detector." There was no place to reattach the screws. Besides, the old smoke detector is all nasty and putty-colored and we don't even know if it actually works.

He got up on the ladder and fiddled with it for a while. A long while. Eventually, he said, "I think we need to get a new smoke detector. Is Lowe's open yet?" He took the old one down. I went and put on my shoes.

When I came downstairs I found him digging at the smoke detector with a screwdriver. "I'm ready."

"I'm busy with this. I want to see how to get the front off it." Dig. Dig. Change to new screwdriver.

"Oh. We're just going to throw it away."

"I know. But I want to see."

"Okay." I got myself a slice of cheesecake. Yeah, it's 10:30 am, but we haven't had breakfast and I'm going to need something in my stomach. "You know, the label says there's radioactive material in there."

"You think Homeland Security will get after us?" Oz popped the top off and looked inside. It consists of odd components stuck to putty colored plastic. There's a place for a battery backup, but no batteries. Not that they'd still work, it's been well over ten years since anyone looked in there. "Okay, let's go."

I've barely started on the cheesecake. "No."

At Lowe's it only takes a minute to find the smoke detectors, but the process of finding screws takes much longer. And here's where the fundamental difference in our natures comes out. I approach the mind-numbing boredom of the fastener aisle in a business-like manner. Oz likes to shop. I hold up packets of various types of screws. He rejects them as too pointy, not the right size, not the right shape head, and browses among the drawers of specialty fasteners. He ended up selecting some of my finds (Hah!), but after all that, along with some sorting through the detritus of the hardware drawer at home, we ended up using the screws that were already in the electrical box holding up a metal plate which had the sole purpose of obstructing the installation of a smoke detector.

Am I conveying all the frustration of this process? I don't think I could. The damn thing kept beeping at us too, after we pressed the Test button, prompting cries of "Augh! Check the instructions! What does this mean?" From start to finish, this took two and a half hours, though that included time spent shopping for mulch while we were at Lowe's.

I now have a dainty white smoke detector, properly installed, and yet another weird thing done by the previous owner of my house has been undone.

Oranje

Yesterday I was lying around in the middle of the day, with warm compresses on my leg to draw the poison out of the fang wounds, and watching Holland vs. Ivory Coast. Because I'm really ignorant about soccer, my main impression of the match was: Orange!

Holland's uniform is bright, traffic-cone orange, right down to the socks. All the Holland fans in the stadium were wearing the team jersey and their section of the stadium was like a solid wall of orange. Occasionally the camera angle would drop down and you'd see a Holland player silhouetted against the spectators and he looked like a disembodied head in a field of orange. I thought that the color couldn't possibly be that bright, that my TV must be having trouble with the color (the Holland players were all blurry, but the Ivory Coast team were clear), but Oz said that it looked supersaturated on the TV at the barbershop when he dropped in for a haircut on his lunch break.

The color in this cute shot of some Holland fans just doesn't do it justice.

Also, the French commentators are starting to loosen up now that they've been at it for a solid week. I'm hearing a high rate of "Oh-la la-la-la-la-la." I'm expecting them to be primed for some serious snottiness for this afternoon's match: Italy vs. United States.

Fan Care

Today my fax machine started ringing off the hook.

Usually the only calls to that number which I'm not expecting are junk faxes, so I just reach over and hit the cancel button. When the first call came in, I reached over and hit the cancel button. Then another call came in. I hit the cancel button again. Then another call .

The junk fax people are rarely so persistent. Figuring that actual humans might be calling, I started answering the phone. It was old people wanting free fans. They got my number off the television.

Lots of old people want free fans.

I disconnected my fax machine and did a little research. Turns out, there's a "Fan Care" program which provides free fans to low income senior citizens. Detailed information is not available online, at least that I could find, because low income senior citizens who can't afford electric fans are not likely to have internet access. In between the incoming calls to my fax machine (did I mention I was trying to finish up a big job on a tight deadline?), I made a couple desperate calls to the voice-jails of the state Department on Aging and any other agency that might have something, anything to do with Fan Care. Much as I want these people to get their free fans, I don't want them calling me!

One of the state people called me back. Turns out that the phone numbers at Senior Connections, who administer the Fan Care program locally, are only one digit different than my fax number. She said she'd seen the announcement on Channel 6 and since she knew the pertinent people at the TV station and Senior Connections, she'd call and make sure the correct phone number was being broadcast.

After that the phone calls stopped coming. Either the announcement wasn't repeated, or they got the number right.

Phew.

The Fan Care program runs through September. If I get accidental calls from people missing a digit, that's just life. But I don't want to get all the calls. I think tomorrow I'll call Senior Connections and get the proper Fan Care number so I can pass it on to my next batch of fans.

Work-ity work

The sun is too bright. The air conditioner is running. The unseasonably pretty spring is over, just in time for hurricane season, and it's boiling hot.

What else is there to do but work?

That seems to be my clients' assumption, anyway. I have got so much work piling up (Hurray for patent litigation!), I could work every day, including weekends, from now to mid-July. But I won't.

We are also slouching towards unpacking now that all of Oz's stuff is here. What little he kept. I asked him, "So, do you feel light as a feather or plucked like a chicken?"

Tonight he brought over the last of it, his plants and the terracotta pots to which he is particularly attached. Alas, the six foot tall Norfolk pine and the eight foot tall corn plant remained behind. We just have no room here, unless they could survive outdoors all year round.

The stacks of boxes in the middle of the floor are not all that scary, really. And at least his lava lamps are already set up in a row on a bookcase in the living room. Classy. I have them in a switched power strip too.

I'm beginning to think we've got room for everything. Besides, the man brought his own closets with him. How often does that happen?

Moving in place

Oz spent the weekend packing up his house (giving most of the contents to Goodwill) and I spent the weekend throwing stuff out (mostly to Goodwill) to make room for his stuff in my house. Moving without moving is exhausting, though much less hard than really moving.

I went through my spare closet and got rid of all my professional type clothes from the 80s: suits, some really nice skirts with sewn down pleats, nice lined wool slacks. Lots of pink. I'm so proud of myself.I didn't even stop to try things on. I went through a mostly empty trunk and found all the old shoulder pads which I snipped out of my clothes from way back when. (I have really square shoulders and shoulder pads look ridiculous on me.) I also found some big, chunky clip earrings (Purple! Gold!) which I don't remember wearing, but the sight of them induced earlobe pain, so I must have worn them at least once.

I have to get rid of more stuff. I have boxes for appliances I no longer own. I have enough clothes I never wear to clothe a village (a small, unlikely village of people my size, but a village nonetheless). I have a box, used in my family's move to Richmond in 1975, filled with doll clothes and dolls. I have a net bag filled with the stuffed animals which made the cut after my last move.

One person does not need all this much.

And, in a completely unrelated note: Thanks, readers, regular and ir-, for giving me such exciting webstats this month. You've numbered 3495 unique visitors this month (a 34% jump from last month, when you set your last record) and used nearly 2 GB of bandwidth, which is pretty impressive considering that all the pictures I've been posting are hosted on Flickr now. Makes me want to keep writing, not that I'd stop …

Bigger day

I am in the throes of consumer joy today. I received my new bag from Queen Bee and it is So Cute. I can hardly contain myself.

My client who proofreads my work and calls me if they find something wrong did not call me today, because they found nothing wrong with my last job! My error rate, by the way, is some tiny fraction of a percent, so even when they do call, they don't have too many questions for me. But zero percent is even better. I rock.

It is going to be hot and sweaty this weekend. The perfect weekend for Oz to move stuff from his house into my house. The giant Czech wardrobes, scaled for a castle which my house is not, are going to be interesting. My plan is to hide with my cats while the actual moving takes place and then see whether they've knocked holes in my walls. On the bright side, he brings bookcases into which the stacks of books on the floor shall magically be transported, unless his tchotchkes get there first.

And there are a couple more pictures up.

Small day

As of this writing, nothing in my day has involved cat pee. I've been walking around the house sniffing a lot, but that doesn't count.

Also today, I got carded. I'm 38 and I was buying a fifth of single malt. I started laughing when the guy asked for my ID. He said, "Normally I wouldn't ask, because of the purchase, but you never know these days." People born in 1985 are legal now. Sheesh, that's the year I graduated from high school.

I baked cheesecake, and oh, but it is good. I have a feeling it will taste even better tomorrow.

I was planning to take a long weekend, like everyone with a normal job, but then a client called with 14,500 words on semiconductor fabrication . I'm still taking a short weekend.

When I and my camera were out walking, we were exhorted (by one of the owners) to go through the big hole into the East End theater. I took pictures, of course (more may be posted on further consideration).

Everybody knows Little Bunny Foo Foo

Or not.

Oz doesn't, I discovered the other day. "How is that possible? You did scouting. It's a camp song. Everybody knows Little Bunny Foo Foo." I sang it a couple times, but it didn't ring any bells.

Back at me, he sang "The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out ."

This precipitated googling once we got home. I found lots of pages with the Little Bunny Foo Foo lyrics, even Wikipedia has Little Bunny Foo Foo. Cool, though I'll have to verify their statement that the tune is from Verdi's Messa da Requiem. If it is, hey, forewarned is forearmed. If I ever heard that in concert and the Little Bunny Foo Foo tune popped up all surprising, I'd probably start laughing and say, "Omigod, it's Little Bunny Foo Foo!" And get run out by the ushers.

Oz googled the worms and found a site (I don't have the link) with a huge collection of children's doggerel. He didn't recognize a lot of those either, but started cackling when I could recognize the song from a couple words and sing the whole thing.

"They got that one wrong. It's 'Comet, it tastes like gasoline' not Listerine. How do you not know that one? Oh, that's right. You were an altar boy. You were in the choir. You only sang hymns. But you were in scouting."

"Yeah, and we chopped down trees and built fires. We didn't sing about abusing field mice like you evil Girl Scouts."

How lucky are you?

When I was out on my walk yesterday, I found several.four, I think.four leafed clovers. This time I didn't pick them. I have so many already. As I've mentioned before, I'm one of those people who finds them and once you have a couple dozen pressed between the pages of your concise encyclopedia of science and technology, you really don't need more. Lately whenever I've found them, I've given them away to some random person. People are always happy to get a four leafed clover and I figure this is my way to pay it forward.

Anyway, yesterday evening I didn't pick the clovers. This evening, since my route took me by the same clover patch, I decided to photograph them instead. And I found even more, in different patches on different blocks.

While I was shooting, some people and a dog walked up. Since it's kind of odd to be crouched on the sidewalk photographing weeds, I explained what I was doing and asked if they wanted some four leafed clovers.

"Oh yes! But we don't want to mess up your shot."

"No, I'm all done, so please take them. Here." I pointed out the clovers and they each took one.

"Ooh, a real four leaf clover. Look." One showed it to the dog. Dog was not terribly interested. Hence, dog did not get a clover of his own.

Another said, "I've never seen a real four leaf clover before."

"Really?" I am amazed. Never ever? I see this was meant to be my accomplishment for the day.

We have now seen all of Buffy.

It's been working through the Netflix queue for, oh, a year plus a few months now?

The kicker.when I hit the open button on the DVD player remote? The DVD player jammed.

"Augh! Buffy broke the DVD player! Hit the button. No, not that button. The."

We watch the "OPEN" leds flash for a while. I hit the power button on the remote. Oz reaches over to press more buttons on the player. He shoves the DVD player further back on the shelf, then tries to pull it out again.

"No, not that button! Wait . No."

He's waving his fingers over all the buttons and I just know he's going to start randomly hitting them. He says, "I'm not hitting any buttons." (Yeah, not this instant, but we know that's going to change.)

Finally, "OFF" stops blinking and the damn thing is all the way off.

"Okay, now hit the open button."

He does. We wait. He starts reaching for the buttons again, but before he can poke anything, the drawer slides out. He pops Buffy back into the envelope and seals it.

We are done.

Reporting

Headache: Not so bad today, but has flared up in the past couple hours. Will take more Tylenol soon.

Humidity: Got up to 70% in the house today. We wimped out and turned on the air conditioner.

Cheesecake: That cheesecake tastes even better the day after. Have been happily considering various permutations of cookie crusts and flavors. Probably remembering Year of the Pie, Oz says, "And how you can make tons of cheesecake and gain 500 pounds?" I say, "No. Just thinking about flavors." If I made all the cheesecakes I can imagine, I'd probably get really tired of cheesecake and never make it again.

Cat: I am getting the Look of Cat Hate from Sparky. He's on a diet, so when the other cat gets an evening snack, I carry Sparky upstairs and shut him in a room with me in order to prevent snacking on his part. Hence the Look of Cat Hate. Oh, now he forgot already and is washing his feet. This cat can't hold a single thought for five minutes (unlike the other one, who can hold a grudge for months).

Internet: My connection is crawling. Must call ISP tomorrow and demand to know why.

Life: Today is the first anniversary of my last final in engineering school. Over the past year I've translated 350,000 words and written two novels. I've done no engineering. Hm.

Writing: Today I figured out how my cyberpunk novel will end. Now I need to figure out how to get there.

Tuesday night at the woodchuck races

In the parking lot behind the gas station at North 26th and East Main Streets

(Sorry about the image size.I should have reduced it.and the blur, but the little buggers were moving fast.)

It's lovely to go for walks in the evening this time of year, the scent of honeysuckle fills the air, the sun bathes everything with gold, and the rodents are engaging in turf wars. These guys burst out of the woods on the hillside as I walked up the steps to the upper parking lot. I took a bunch of shots and was amazed to discover on viewing them that they catch serious air for dumpy, vegetarian ground-dwellers.

I didn't end up getting much of a walk in. I chatted with someone about woodchucks, and the discussion wound on to cover the new building going up over there, the energy crisis, the odd plastic bags on the roof of the Lucky Strike building, the fact that woodchucks eat mums in the autumn, interest rates, and . you get the picture.

Also, Sloan's Liniment and more on the photostream:

North 19th and East Broad Streets

Part of the lovely gateway to my neighborhood.

Toon time

Aside from avoiding chores and sleeping in, we haven't done too much this weekend. Well, grocery shopping. Errands. We did go out and take pictures in the drizzle this afternoon. I guess we haven't been total pigs.

But we watched a movie about one: Porco Rosso, a film by Hayao Miyazaki about an Italian WWI seaplane pilot/bounty hunter who's been transformed into a partial pig. Sounds odd, I know, but it works. The story line is reminiscent of a mid-twentieth century (post-)war film and the art is wonderful, of course. We'd recommend it to our friends, and by extension to you, so why not see it?

(The Wikipedia article on Porco Rosso has some fun trivia, but you'll see spoilers if you scroll up, so scroll at your own risk.)

Seeing the Studio Ghibli logo at the opening of the film, I was reminded of mehan's story of visiting the Ghibli Museum, which sounds as delightful as the films, so you should go read it right now.

Buddha nature

The people in the car ahead of me are driving too slow. Five miles under the speed limit, but since I'm getting off this road soon, I put up with it, maintain following distance, grit my teeth at how they keep tapping on the brake for no reason. Of course, this means they take the same turn I do and I end up behind them in the acceleration lane onto the interstate. Naturally they don't understand the concept of acceleration too well and tootle along at 45 mph.

"These people are poo-poo-heads," I say. (I realize that "poo-poo-head" sounds really juvenile, but it's fun to say. Say it out loud a few times and you'll see what I mean.)

"Oh, you don't need to go that fast, you're getting off in two seconds," Oz says.

"That is not the point. They are poo-poo-heads. They are a hazard!"

"But it doesn't matter, " he says.

"I know that. But they're still poo-poo-heads!" I figure out what's going on. "Okay. So when you're driving and there are idiots around you, and you start cursing at them, I'm right there being supportive and saying 'Yes, honey, they are poo-poo-heads.' But when I'm driving, you're all, 'Just be zen about it. Om.'"

"Well, yeah. They're not in my way." He finds this very amusing.

Can we please, please, please go back to the ghetto?

We went to a garden center in southside today. We used to go to the garden center a lot, back before engineering school took over my life. I had a cute little garden with herb beds filled with the herbs I used for cooking (I used to cook too). Even after school sucked up every bit of free time, the garden didn't look that bad, because I had a selection of well established, drought tolerant plants. Then, in the spring of 2004, it rained every day for months and pretty much capped everything but the groundcover and the rosebush. Oh, and the lemon balm, which could probably withstand a nuclear blast.

The garden center moved in the intervening years, a little bit further out of town, into an old strip mall with a revamped parking lot. Instead of long straight rows of cars, it has short curving rows of SUVs, which makes getting out of your great parking place an exercise in nail-biting terror. When I was backing out, poo-poo-heads in SUVs were whipping around behind me to zip into spaces which had become vacant a half second before. No sense in waiting. After all, someone might get that space before you. Except that the minivan at the other end of the row is waiting for a space and blocking traffic, so no one else can get by to steal "your" space.

We used the word "poo-poo-head" a lot today.

I think our days of going out to the garden center and browsing around are over. We can't hack the suburbs.

For all that, we got three kinds of lavender, two kinds of rosemary, sage, English thyme, sweet basil, Italian parsley, pennyroyal, and an interesting spearmint varietal Oz found, which is ideal for "beverages." I set up the beds in the old arrangement that worked so well. Oz put the mint near the lemon balm of doom so they can do battle. (I'm hoping they don't hybridize and make some invincible herb which tastes like kitchen cleanser.)

He then ran over the lemon balm with the reel mower.

As the shredded lemon balm leaves flew into the air, I said, "You know, everywhere a speck of lemon balm lands, we get a whole new plant."

"That's okay. We'll just keep knocking it down."

I think that's the evolutionary strategy of lemon balm.

Overexposure

I got a new camera this week. I've been obsessively taking pictures and fiddling with it. Because the pictures should look better, dammit! Direct sunlight is a challenge. Even with the white balance adjusted properly, things are still looking overexposed, so I'm experimenting with the exposure compensation.

Oz says he's going to wake me up tomorrow at 6:00 to take pictures in the good morning light. He said that last night too.

This morning I woke up at eight-thirty and thought, Oh yeah, get me up at six, I knew you were lying. When we were drinking coffee, he told me, "I woke up at 5:30 and it was really dark, so I didn't get you up. And then at six I was asleep."

Yeah.

What are the odds of a six a.m. photo excursion tomorrow?

In other news: Taxes are paid. The problematic neighbors are moving out.

Repo Man

First thing this morning, when I was still groping around for my glasses, I heard the sound of a big diesel engine out front. I put my glasses on and took a look.

It was the repo man, come for the neighbors' car. Yes, those neighbors. I guess they haven't been making payments on that Crown Vic either. And the repo man was hooking it up to his truck to tow it away in all its glory, what with the bullet holes in the driver's door and the window smashed out.

I've never seen a repo man before. We actually have a repo yard within spitting distance right over on Marshall with weekly auctions in season, but that's not the same thing as an actual repossession happening right outside. He had a big black tow truck with the name of the company on the side in gold. Also, a skull and crossbones. Twice. Seriously big dude. This was not a friendly towing company: "Skiptracing, Bounty Hunter, Repossession." The reassuring company motto was "Don't Call Us, We'll Call On You."

The neighbors came out to talk with him before he drove away, but I missed it because I was brushing my teeth.

What's next? Maybe Rent-A-Center will come by and repossess their ginormous television. If this keeps up, by the time they get evicted, they won't have any stuff left to move.

Extra, extra

Read all about it.

Washington Post reporters visit Richmond, drink alcohol.

Occasionally the Post sends reporters down here to remark upon our quaint ways. The last time they sent someone, he didn't want to come and the tone of his article was all "so we went here, and ate this, and it didn't totally suck." The reporters on this most recent visit have a much better attitude, even if it is mostly "Woo! Alcohol is so much cheaper here!"

Baby's first drive-by

Things I learned today:

Guns are very, very loud. (Okay, I knew this, but it's always a shock.)
The police do come very quickly when you call. Lots of them.
I have no tolerance for bullets being fired in my general direction.

So, yeah, some of my neighbors' associates delivered them a warning in the form of lead today. At lunchtime, a green car (I saw it from my window. Where I was sitting. Yes, I could see the open window of the drive-by car from where I was sitting. Excuse me while I freak out again.) pulls up in front of the neighbors' house and five or so shots are fired at the neighbors' cars. Here is a picture.

I called 911. (The neighbors whose car got shot didn't. Hmm.) Then I called the neighbors' landlord, who said he's been told what's going on with his property, but when he confronted his tenants about how everyone says they're drug dealers, they swore they weren't involved in nothing like that. Yeah, and he seems to have believed them. However, they are behind on their rent, so he'll tell them to pay up or get out. Everyone else on the block will do the happy dance when they get evicted. Or if. It had better be "when."

All afternoon people kept driving by to look, which did wonders for my nerves. (Were they there to look? Or to shoot guns?) Cars would slow down and people would hang out the window. One car went around the block a couple times to take extra looks. A couple guys came to ride their bikes in circles by the cars while they talked and laughed on their cell phones (because this is so entertaining).

Nobody is parking anywhere near their cars.

Many things

The other night when we drove home from the grocery store, a big, fat, butter-yellow moon was hanging low over the city. Astronomy, up close and personal.

Art Boy across the street finally got a new tire for his truck. (Several art students live across the street, we refer to each of them individually as Art Boy since we don't know their names.) For weeks he's had this flat tire that he's had to pump up every time he wants to drive somewhere. Up and down the block, black smudges on the pavement show where he's run his compressor. We were just starting to formulate a plan to offer a new tire in exchange for some art.

I crossed the 40,000 word mark on Unmentionable Things last night. This is what I've been writing instead of journal entries. I haven't been able to recycle as many scenes from the earlier version of the story as I'd hoped. Whenever I do get to use one, it feels like Christmas: Free Words! Now I'm in the final stretch of this novel, the last 10,000 words or so when the plot all comes together and the writing is easy as riding a bicycle downhill with the wind at one's back. It makes the first stage, when the words have to be yanked out one by one from . wherever, worthwhile.

After being disappointed by photographs ruined by sunshine glare, I finally figured out that the "Auto" white balance setting does not, in fact, automatically give me the best white balance. I tested out the other white balance settings by photographing the same sunlight object with each different settings and discovered that the sunshine setting is best for sunlight things. Whaddya know? I guess the I'm going to have to be the smart one in this human-camera relationship.

I need to get junk cleared off the back porch. Then I have to find a contractor to replace the bad boards in the porch. Then I have to find a painter to paint the house and porch. I should get started on that today. Or maybe write.

Implements

The crape myrtle is not entirely pruned. There are some remaining bits which are too fat for the loppers that we have. We are in Lowes.

"Okay, so we need the aisle for things to cut up other things," I say.

"They have an aisle marked that?" Oz asks.

I make for the lawnmower display and we walk down the aisle of lawnmowers, weed whackers, and accessories thereof. I say, "No. But that's what we need. What we really need is a chainsaw on a stick. Ha ha! Oh, look. They have one."

For a moment we contemplate the pole saw hanging above the chainsaws.

Oz says, "Sounded like a joke, didn't it?"

"Should we get it?"

"It looks like a really bad idea."

Incriminating paw marks

I am waiting for work right now. Some may be arriving any day from New Jersey and a client in California is waiting on a go-ahead from her client, who is dragging her heels on reviewing our quote for her patents. I've already mentally given myself the week off. I'll be out of sorts if that California job comes through, but I'll be able to console myself with all that money.

To amuse myself I'm procrastinating on some of the household chores which have been piling up around here. Basically, I'm doing the exact same thing I do when I have work, except for the work part. I do the little chores that take a few minutes and then pretend I've been productive.

Yesterday I made clean spots on the walls. I got these Scotch Brite Easy Erasing Pads last week and finally broke one out. To my great surprise, they work as advertised. I wiped the handprints off the walls by the stairs, did a little dance when the walls came clean, and then proceeded to attack the large smudgy paw-printed areas below the windows. My lazy cats, who have no problem jumping onto a bed which is thirty inches off the floor, feel the need to kick off the wall below the window when jumping onto a windowsill of the same height.

Now I have large clean areas below the windows, which serve to highlight how dirty the rest of the wall is.

Great.

When Oz came home last night, I was all "Woo! Look at the clean spots!" He was not terrifically enthused, so I kept talking about the clean spots. He started talking about how he went to the gym in the morning, before my not-employed ass was even awake (okay, he didn't say that exactly), worked out, steamed, and got a really good shave. He insisted that I rub his cheek.

I did and said, "Yeah, yeah, nice. But about the walls."

"You don't sound really interested in my shave."

"So now we're even, okay?"

Books!

We didn't prune the crape myrtle this weekend. It was snowy on Saturday and on Sunday it was just too damn cold. Instead of lying around the house, we drove up to Fredericksburg to browse in the antique shops and visit our favorite (my favorite, anyway) used book store.

I had this idea that I wanted a new glass for drinking whiskey out of. I have a nice crystal tumbler, but I'd like to have another with a different pattern. Well, they don't have those kind of glasses at the antique stores, we found. Decanters and cordial sets, lots of china teacups, depression glass, all that girly-foo-foo stuff, but no crystal tumblers. I guess people don't part with those. I did find one set of Czech crystal tumblers, but the pattern didn't do anything for me.

Also, I found an adorable glass candy dish shaped like a rabbit in a basket, but I didn't get it because I have no place for tchotchkes. Another discovery was some neat Chinese, Japanese, and Korean items, now that one of the places in the big antiques mall has an Asian source. They had bean cake molds, baskets, apothecary cabinets, and these iron crosses with Buddhas on. We didn't buy any of those things either.

We bought books!

We went to the bookstore first thing. We haven't been up to Fredericksburg in a few years, what with engineering school preempting fun little daytrips, and we were surprised to find that Riverby Books had taken over the whole building at 805 Caroline Street. The first floor had formerly been occupied by a gift shop which sold smelly candles. In the past, we always held our breath and ran through the gift shop up the stairs to the bookstore. This time we walked in and saw books! And smelled books!

I found a scholarly work on netsuke which Oz decided didn't have enough pictures for him. For me, I found Charles II, The Weaker Vessel, and The English Revolution 1600-1660 (to which someone had taken a hole punch, but only through the margin). For me, Oz found Artificial Intelligence (2nd edition), a textbook on the edge of which the original owner had neatly lettered his name and phone number, but which otherwise showed no evidence of having ever been opened. He also found a boxed 1968 Heritage Press edition of A Journal of the Plague Year. This book has a leaflet from the publisher about the special features of this edition, including how the cover looks like burlap to reflect the winding sheets of the plague dead (conveniently overlooking how at the height of the epidemic the dead were flung into mass graves without any such wrappings) (But a cover that looks like dirt wouldn't be very appealing).

I'd better get reading.

Is that a shrimp in your pocket?

I offered Oz the shrimp off my pad thai. He picked them up and put them on the edge of his plate. The waitress came to our table and, since it looked like we were done, she offered to take our dishes.

"Oh, but he didn't eat those shrimp yet," I said.

"That's okay. I'm going to put them in my pocket," Oz said.

The waitress and I laughed. She asked, "What? Do you have a dog in the car or something?"

"There's a cat," Oz said. He picked up the shrimp and put them in the pocket of his rain coat. (The cat in question is actually back on our block, hanging out by the neighbor's house and waiting for handouts.)

"You.Hey!"

"Did you want something to put them in?" the waitress asked.

"He put them in his pocket!"

"He did?"

Oz sat there and grinned while I sputtered, "Shrimp? In your pocket? You put them in your pocket?"

As we left the restaurant, I told him, "I'm blogging this."

Now it's a few hours later and I am. The shrimp were delivered to Phoebus the cat upon our arrival back home. Oz is standing around saying, "So, you've blogged the shrimp in the pocket?"

"Yes. If you're going to do quirky, eccentric things, you have to expect it."

"I didn't think it was that quirky," he says.

"Well, you just have no perspective."

Still sniffling

Why is it that, although I drink whiskey on a regular basis, I cannot develop a whiskey voice? (Obvious answer: I don't drink enough.) But all it takes is weeklong head cold, during which I haven't even coughed all that much, and I'm purring in your ear like Lauren Hutton. Well, not your ear, obviously, but you see what I mean.

It is snowing here and we have prepared by running out for Thai food and to the grocery store. We stocked up on raisin bread, pasta, broccoli, fruit, juice, seltzer water, pie crust, frozen strawberries and rhubarb, Belgian chocolate, and kind of a lot of Ben & Jerry's. I got carried away with the ice cream, yes. I don't know what came over me.

I'm on the mend. Despite all the upper respiratory misery, I was able to deliver this week's translation job early. The incentive: not working this weekend. So far this year I've only worked one half of a weekend day. Here's to sort of keeping one of this year's resolutions.

Jinxed

Just a couple weeks ago I said to Oz, "Isn't it great how I haven't gotten sick since I got out of school. No more hanging around those germy computer science students has done wonders for my health."

So now I have a sinus infection.

I'm sucking down decongestants and chamomile tea. Since I have deadlines and no sick time, I'm working through the grogginess. On the bright side, when I reached my target for the day early at, oh, 12:30 or so, I got to stop working. Instead of getting ahead, I went upstairs and crawled under a blanket with a box of tissues and a Georgette Heyer novel. I also drank berry tea and nibbled on Belgian chocolate.

I'm sure you're all really sympathetic now.

Happy Setsubun

You'd think that what with having a groundhog frequenting the back yard and all, we'd see some groundhog action around this time of year, but no. Over in Japan it's setsubun, which I mentioned last year around this time. Here we didn't throw beans at demons, or even eat beans to wish for good health. Go see what mehan did for his setsubun in Aomori.

As long as I'm being self-referential, I'll talk about the hand-slapping-forehead moment (that's my hand I'm talking about, by the way) I had last week. I was lying around watching Tensai Terebikun Max, as I often do, and remarking again on the Steam Knights vs. Jokey Mahorns dichotomy, when, duh, I got it. Finally. The Japanese word for steam is jouki (蒸気). Oh, the bilingual puns! The brain, it is to hurt!

And in gutter news, which I'm sure that everyone finds so fascinating, it seems that my gutters are not quite patched. It rained last night, so I ran outside this morning, all in my fuzzy pink bathrobe and flannel flamingo pants (oh, way to make a good impression on the neighbors), to see how the newly "fixed" gutters handled themselves. A couple of the leaks seem to be fixed, but some others do not. Particularly one right over the front door. Duh, guys! I called the roof people and theoretically they will send some people back to patch those leaks, seeing as how they haven't been paid yet or anything. It's supposed to rain more tomorrow. I'll be out on leak patrol.

You'll hear some beating

The roof guys came today.

I have a standing-seam tin roof and built-in gutters. The roof periodically needs to have its coating scraped and replaced, the gutters periodically need patching. What with the whole engineering school/not working much/stretching the savings thing I've had going on for the last several years, roof maintenance has basically involved a lot of hiding. Whenever it rains I go upstairs so I won't have to listen to the water rattling through the gutters and banging on the oven vent and the flashing over the downstairs windows.

"La la la la, I can't hear you."

Oh, I wish.

The last guy who worked on the roof slathered it with asphalt primer and aluminum fiber coating. I went up there a couple years after he worked on it and, damn, but there were twigs and small animals plastered to the roof. My own La Brea in the sky.

Now I'm getting the roof done and the gutters patched. No more hiding! But the coating needs to be removed. Scrapers will not do the job. The roof guys are beating the roof with hammers. The whole house is shaking. The upstairs light fixtures are rattling. Chips of asphalt and aluminum fiber coating are pattering to the sidewalk.

When I was seven

I was in the second grade in Harpursville, New York. It was 1974. On her desk, our teacher had some books, set up on edge between bookends, I suppose, though I don't remember what they looked like. One of the books was large and black, a hardback maybe three quarters of an inch thick. It was huge by my standards at the time, probably coffee table book-sized. I was fascinated with the book and asked my teacher if I could read it. She said yes, so I took the book to my little desk and read it for the rest of the school year. Over and over. I kept it shoved inside the desk with all my wrinkled homework and pads and pencils. This was probably pretty hard on the book, now that I think of it. At the end of the school year, I pulled the book out, dusted it off, and gave it back to my teacher.

This was a book of fairy tales and folk tales. Chinese stories, though I didn't make the connection at the time. I'm sure I had heard of China by the time I was seven. The book had heavy, glossy pages. Each story had a full-page, rather abstract illustration that I couldn't really connect with the story, but I spent a lot of time looking at them. I can't remember the title of the book, I don't think I even noticed it. The story I remember best was one about a woman who traveled in search of her husband who'd been impressed to work on the Great Wall. It was all very mysterious to me. Why the wall? What was the deal with cotton-padded clothes? A less abstract picture would definitely have been worth a thousand words.

When I tried googling around to see if I could track down the book, I found a page of Chinese folktales. It's not the same thing as finding the book, but I'm sure these are the stories.

Embarrassment of riches

I don't need to work this weekend. Really.

Another client, with whom I haven't worked for a while, wanted me to fit in an article about hard drive read heads. Oh, it's so cute, it's from the eighties! Remember? Like, back when a 5 MB hard drive was a big deal, so the tone of the article is all "Microfabrication is nifty!" Whereas nowadays, Microfabrication is an undergraduate level course.

I can meet their deadline without working this weekend as long as there is less of the goofing off while I'm supposed to be working. I will work hard tomorrow for a day off today .

In other not surprising news, Oz is still a fanboy.

"I noticed when I looked at the Netflix queue that all the Buffys have been moved up." Our Netflix queue is huge. I just keep adding stuff at the bottom and Oz rearranges it during the day when he's goofing off at work.

"Oh, well, I didn't move the Buffys up. I rearranged the queue," he says.

"By putting the Buffys at the top? I noticed that Pride and Prejudice hasn't moved up at all. I guess if it were called Pride and Prejudice and Really Big Guns, we'd have seen it by now."

"Or, Pride and Prejudice and Vampires. Or Pride and Prejudice and Cyborgs."

Yeah, I see how that goes.

Monsters of the deep

On our way home from Millie's, I said, "Let's go look at the river." We were headed down Pear Street and the car was pointed in that direction anyway. We drove the rest of the way down the hill, across Dock Street, and into the Great Ship Lock Park. This park holds the eastern end of the Kanawha Canal and the lock to raise and lower barges between the river and the canal. The lock still works, but the canal can't accommodate big vessels anymore.

Today wasn't the best day for admiring the river and the canal from the park. The canal had been drained so it stank. Amazingly enough, there were a couple people dangling fishing lines in the dank, slimy puddle in the bottom of the canal. Why they'd want to hang around breathing the air, much less eat anything from that stinky puddle, I don't know.

The water level in the lock was low too. We stood on the edge and looked down at the water, green and oddly swirling. The drizzle dropped little rings in the water, the occasional fish flopped, but neither phenomenon could account for the strong eddies on the surface of the water. Oz's theory is that there's some current through there and some object underneath the surface causing the eddies. Boring. A Lock Ness Monster would be cooler. Imagine, a Richmond ichthyosaur!

Mmm, cheese

We just had a Wallace & Gromit-a-thon. After we watched everything on the DVD, we tried to watch some of the things in French, but they only gave us subtitles, even though the menu said French! Nothing cracks me up more than cartoons in French. Especially talking animals. Because they're speaking French! That's, like, so weird. English, okay. Japanese, okay. But French is the language of . French people (among others), not fluffy woodland creatures. At least in my twisted mind.

But before the two and a half hours of claymation, I did other things, like getting that disk mostly defragged even without adjusting the partitions. I cooked food. I went for a walk. I got my work done. I made necessary phone calls.

Not so exciting. But I'm starting to obsess over another writing project. The excitement, she is in my skull.

Winter camping

Oz rhapsodizes, "Oh, the cold! That's the great thing about winter camping. You get that fire going and then you rotate yourself in front of it trying to stay warm ."

I'm not buying any of that. I'm not terribly fond of camping in pleasant weather. "You know what's really great? Like when I went up to Northern Virginia last month and I walked into the hotel room and the heat was going full blast. And then I took a nice hot shower and washed my hair. And then I put on the food channel and watched Iron Chef. Now that was great."

Mystery of the disappearing toffee

Actually, not such a mystery at all, seeing as how there's only one of us likely to place a bag of candy that has been emptied of its last piece (and by "last piece" read "all the rest of the pieces, of which there was definitely a plurality") back into its holding location. Also, that one is not me. Me being the one without toffee. I'm so glad we've cleared this up.

Small victory today at the car wash. All the slots were full when we pulled in, so I pulled off to the side to wait. Two guys each pulled in after me and cut ahead. One of them even decided that the guy in the slot where he pulled up was taking too long and moved to another slot. The other guy ended up waiting behind someone who was ignoring the "no buckets or hand washing while other customers are waiting" signs. But my patience was rewarded! I saw a guy rinsing off a minivan in one of the slots where the line jumpers didn't go. When he pulled his floor mats from the clips on the wall and threw them into the back of the minivan, I pulled in behind him and we ended up getting the car washed before either of the line jumpers.

Documentarians can't go wrong with kids and animals. We just watched The Story of the Weeping Camel. Bactrian camels are the coolest, all shaggy and blaséhen the kids ride around on them. Also portrayed are kids who live in the Gobi Desert. At one point they play store. Much of the merchandise in the play store consists of sand.

Following directions

Last night I'm pestering Oz, making up for all that pestering he missed over the last couple months. "So, what should I write next?"

"God, anything! A blog entry!"

I just worked today, so I don't have that much to write about. Three things.

The morning started with watching my neighbor's guest's minivan get towed by the street sweepers. Then I pretty much worked and tried to apply myself to not reading stuff on the internet. I would be a lot more efficient if I didn't do that.

I watched TV. The human interest section of the Japanese morning news showed a bunch of ladies in a Niigata community center, marching along on little trampolines as they participated in a most unfortunately named exercise: Trampobics! They claim that this form of exercise was invented in Japan and they have their own sports organization, according to this list.

We got a Chinese restaurant calendar dropped off outside the front door. This one is rather frightening. Instead of a dog, it has a Jesus! Technicolor Jesus in 3D! Surrounded by little angels comprising only heads and wings. The calendar is printed on a sheet of flexible plastic which is poofed out where Jesus is.

Baby, ain't I good to you?

I cooked today. Minestrone! So when Oz walked in the door, we had cheese and crackers, then fresh, homemade soup and the New Year's beer. While we were eating, the Red Rocker candy order was delivered and he was presented with a whole pound of pistachio brittle for, ah, Christmas. But he was too full of soup and fancy cheese and beer to eat any right then. I guess we.ahem.he will have some later. Actually, I ordered so much candy that they threw in a free sample of the one kind I didn't order. I have an embarrassment of riches.

Yesterday, the embarrassment of geek riches. I expanded my wireless network.

When I got the new PC, I set up the old one on another table in my office to use as an archive and also for Oz to play with. Of course, the playing he wants to do involves reading comics online and thus networking was required. He wanted to run a cable across my office, right across the path that I take to get to my desk. I took issue with that, but he seemed to think that just shoving the cable under a rug should resolve any issues with tripping. Ha! Cables! So I went shopping and picked up a USB wireless network adapter. On sale, no less.

When Oz walked in the door yesterday, he got to read comics. On the internet, over my high speed connection. Wirelessly. The prime beneficiary of this upgraded home computer situation is his employer, because he won't have to spend extra time on Mondays catching up with his weekend comics.

Red is the opposite of white

The Kohaku Uta Gassen (Red and White Singing Festival) is a four hour and forty-five minute Japanese musical extravaganza. It's wholesome family entertainment, broadcast every year for New Year's on NHK: a big stage show with all the pop singers, enka singers, and novelty acts who hit it big over the year, featuring lots of production numbers, in which nothing stands in the way of spectacle. Certainly not the bounds of good taste. The more horrific the production numbers, the better, as far as I'm concerned. The show is framed as a song contest between the red team (girls) and the white team (boys). The drag queens and drag kings get to pick which team they want to be on.

This year I noticed that whenever the song featured the word "baby" in English, that was the cue to send out the NHK children's dance troupe. Which led to some incongruous things, like the pop singer dressed in black netting singing "Take me, baby" (in English) surrounded by ten-year-old girls in pink and blue tissue lamédancing with heart-shaped balloons, and big plush cartoon characters from NHK children's programs.

Taken in context, this was not too bad.

There's another group, sort of a novelty act. They do costumes: long black coats, huge poofy rockabilly hair, black sunglasses. For their production number, they started out with a boxing theme. The group came out on stage in their usual costumes, but accompanied by boxers: on one side, a group of Japanese dancers in white fat suits, satin shorts, and boxing gloves, and on the other side, black guys (Actual black people, from what I could tell, as opposed to painted Japanese people. In this setting, would Japanese people in blackface be worse?), also in boxer drag, but with special goggles of big, round, white eyeballs, so they looked like cartoon black people. Then a boxing ring set piece, beneath a looming, ten-foot-high golden hand, is slid forward and some Japanese guys with the poofy rockabilly hair, but wearing American flag wrestling singlets (Because boxing is American?), dance around on it and sing backup. This continues for a while and I'm not really paying attention to the song, which is secondary to the spectacle anyway. I'm still processing the eyeball goggles.

Suddenly the camera pulls back to a view of the side stages that extend along the walls of NHK Hall and into the audience. Swarms of tiny people in black suits come running down the side stages and—"Oh! Are those children?"

Yes. And the inevitable English lines with the word "baby" followed:

"Can you master baby? Can't you master baby? Master master baby."

(All the lyrics are subtitled. This is what was on the subtitles, bad punctuation and all.) (I'm not making this up.)

So the children launch into their dance number amid the boxers and the singers, and the song continues. The lead singer picks up a kid and holds him while he continues to sing. On cue, the kid yanks off the fake hair, so the singer is left with the other part of the wig standing up all around the edge of his bald head. The child is replaced on the floor, the song continues. The children start tossing the fake hair back and forth over their heads and when it hits the floor, they stomp on it. All this while, the boxers and wrestlers are still shaking booty in the background. Eventually the song ends (Thank God!), the hairpiece is retrieved and the lead singer is carried off by his compatriots.

At this point there's still nearly three hours to go.

In the next hour: Darth Vader and the Dance of the Sugarplum Stormtroopers.

So fusion

Work: I'm having a devil of a time trying to get back to work after nearly a week off. Of course, part of that week was spent in messing with the new machine and getting it set up so I could work on it, so I guess it wasn't quite so much time off as it sounds. But here I am, in the habit of staying up till one in the morning, not waking up till after eight, then dragging around for another hour or so, drinking coffee and reading junk online. Then I may fiddle with the novel for a while if I have a dictated file I need to clean up before adding to the neverending stream of words that tell this silly story.

Then it's lunchtime.

Then I really have to try and work. I make a half-assed effort and do a little. (Damn this client for not having fixed deadlines!) On the other hand, I also paid a stack of bills this week. Christmas is already about paid for and I paid off the credit card which carried the balance of the debt I accrued over the last year of school (the zero interest period was going to run out). Cheers to starting off the year without credit card debt. Also, there is nothing quite like a big hemorrhage of cash to make one appreciate paying work. The article I'm translating right now is even interesting, so it's time to get a little more motivated, yes?

Fun: But the novel is much more interesting! I'm at that last bit, all the action that leads up to the final image that I've been carrying around in my head for the last two years since I conceived the plot. It's unreeling like a movie (a cheesy movie) in my head and I only have to write down what I see. I'm not getting stuck, this is like that final stage of piecing a jigsaw puzzle when you can fit the pieces together faster and faster. (Have I totally jinxed myself here? Yes, I think I have.)

Holidays: Oz roasted a turkey breast and turned my cat Sparky into a turkey junkie. Now when we go into the kitchen, Sparky not only follows, but he meows and hisses at us when the turkey either does not appear or is (mis)directed to someone else's mouth. Then when he does get some turkey, he gobbles it up and passes out in a tryptophan stupor. He's not the only one overeating. Between the pumpkin pie and sweet potato souffléwe non-feline members of the household have consumed a year's supply of beta carotene. And it's not over yet.

Oops: (requires backstory: some members of my family I haven't seen for years) I was at the bank and the teller saw my name on the deposit slip and asked me if I was related to [sister's name]. I automatically responded "No" because I'm never related to people about whom I'm asked if I'm related. Then I realized that the answer should be "Yes" but I couldn't see making an about face on the subject because it would sound really dumb and require more explanation than was really appropriate for the setting. And meanwhile, the teller is saying, "Really? How weird! Because you have the same last name and you look exactly alike." So anyway, little sister, if your surfer dude friend from the bank tells you his half of this story (and if you read this, which you probably don't), please know that it was a dork on autopilot thing, not a biblical denial three times before cockcrow thing. Besides, it was in the afternoon. Do we really look alike?

Heh: Certain predictions are coming to pass. I can say no more.

Like a present: I ordered some used books online, as I have done before. One arrived. I opened the envelope and found a book wrapped up in newspaper. Crisp folded corners, neatly taped. I unwrapped the newspaper and found a book wrapped in white printer paper. Crisp folded corners, neatly taped. I unwrapped that and found a book. Finally.

Eggnog

Enchanted Reindeer Forest at the James Center
(The autofocus didn't, but I like the effect.)

I've tried to get out of the habit of, when I first wake up, listing in my head all the things I need to do that day. Usually it just leaves me feeling overwhelmed and not wanting to get out of bed. Today, the list was something like: wrap presents, online shopping, make pumpkin pie, roast sweet potatoes for the souffléomorrow. And for once, getting out of bed was not an effort. I even got everything on my list done.

I like roasting the sweet potatoes. They ooze this syrupy juice which makes me think of Japan. When I stayed in Kagoshima for a couple weeks, once upon a time (1988!), my host family had this thick syrup made of yams. I would put it on buttered toast. Ah, divine! And I've never had it since. But the scent of roasting sweet potatoes is the taste of that syrup. I'm not certain I could make the syrup myself. On a Japanese cooking show I learned how to make barley syrup. Basically, you render down barley for several weeks and filter between the various stages of preparation. To get a saucepan size quantity of syrup, you start out with an industrial vat of barley. I have a feeling that the sweet potato syrup process would be similar and therefore impossible for me to attempt.

I have eggnog in my refrigerator. When I was a kid, we would have it for a treat at the holidays, but of course my parents never put liquor in it. Heh. They probably should have if they wanted to sleep past five on Christmas. I have hardly had eggnog at all as an adult, but I picked up a quart on our last trip to the grocery store. I had some today for snack. This time I added a little bit of Amaretto. Mm.

And what would the holidays be without plumbing problems? One of my toilets has developed a slow leak from the back of the base. This is a water on the floor kind of thing and with such the timing. I think that the plumbing in my house is sentient. Sentient and evil.

Old bones

The hidden computer graveyard is now in my living room. We've got boxes from the new machine, two old computers, a monitor as well as the usual detritus (books, shopping bags, other boxes, more books) piled up. It's a cat playground now. They weave around among the boxes and peek out at passing humans from behind tower cases.

After the holiday I'm going to load the old machines in my car and haul them down to the recycling center. The machine I just replaced has been moved over to the side table in my office, where it will be Oz's playstation (for checking his comics on the weekends) and an archive of old files and email addresses which I will mine as needed.

Christmas never ends. I sort of did shopping, but I have more to do. I think I'm going to make it easy on myself and do all the rest of my shopping at Red Rocker. Yeah, so everything will be late, but people are used to that with me. I was telling Oz about how I couldn't find pistachio brittle at the candy store, but that I'd used my fabulous internet skills to find it online.

He says, "Oh, yeah? You mean you googled 'pistachio brittle'."

"Well, yeah. But I found it. You want some?"

"It's fattening."

"So what? You want some? I know you do. Just say the word, and I'll order some, but you have to say the word."

"Word."

Heh. I may get an extra bag for myself.

Take a deep breath

Today I finished up a translation job and I don't think I'll do any more before the holiday. Unless, of course, a client asks me really nicely and offers me a high rate. I know what my price is.

Tomorrow I get to pick up my new computer. Instead of the work I get paid for, I've decided to play with the machine and get it set up with all my tools, so that once my brain recovers from its most recent frying, I can get right to work. I checked my records and found that I haven.t upgraded my work computer since 2000. My monitor's even older than that. This time I'm splurging and upgrading the computer and the monitor at the same time. I'll be able to see what I'm translating (work is much easier that way) and the cats will be so pleased with all the desk real estate that will be freed up by the CRT to TFT transition. Maybe I need to get another cat to lounge around on all that extra space. Or another monitor.

Also, I must remind myself that Christmas shopping is not rocket science! It's been several years since I really did any shopping at all. In theory, one goes to the store, finds some stuff, and buys it. Right? Tomorrow, a little theory into practice. I can do it.

Yes, I can.

Moore's Law

Today I ordered a new computer, a desktop PC system for my home office. It amazes me how every five years or so when I get a new machine, I pay basically the same price, but the machine is exponentially faster and more powerful. This time I even saved about US$100 by waiting a month or two, because the shop dropped the prices on all their systems and component upgrades. So that's Merry Christmas and Happy Tax Deduction for my business.

I saw a possum in my backyard. I walked out on the back porch and he (she?) was hanging around in my dormant lily bed. He panicked and ran under my porch in that bouncy possum trot. Possums are not built for speed.

We cleaned! Oz vacuumed the house and I cleaned the kitchen floor and one of the bathroom floors. Little cotton throw rugs are banging around in the dryer as I type. All is lemon fresh. Except, I guess, for the dusty stuff. Which I'll get to. Eventually.

I'm so glad to be back from Northern Virginia. I had fun, because I got to visit with old friends, but it was otherwise pretty stressful. Interesting, though. Even better: the ice storm turned into rain, so I didn't get stranded up there. I was too stressed out to work on the novel in the evenings, but I did manage to figure out how to get to the ending. Now I need to review the notes I made to see if that is, in fact, the case. My estimate to finish in mid-December was overly optimistic. What a surprise.

Happy Year of the Dog! We had dinner at the Full Kee and it's the time of year when they hand out their promotional calendars for the coming year. We were hoping for ours to have a picture of Pekinese dogs playing mah johng and smoking opium, but instead we got demented fluffy puppies with glowing yellow eyes.

Space

I saw a meteor tonight, burning out over I-95. Big, long trail. Blue edge. Headed west. Didn't get too far.

Cat displaces laptop

When it's cold in the house, the cats are extra friendly. They do not yet regard the laptop as a heat source, which is a good thing because they would break it if they sat on it.

Today I finished up the last of a 33,000 word lot of patents! I'm so glad to be done. I get a little bit of time off now, which will make up for the last couple of weekends I had to work. Now I'm looking around the house, which is about ready for the X-treme dirt and cat hair competition. I will hold off on cleaning till next weekend, I think, because I'm going out of town tomorrow night (leaving Oz to hold down the fort) and if I clean tomorrow, it'll be all dirty again before I get back.

(Oz reads this.)

I only have boring stuff to write about, so I'll spare you.

The novel is still not ending. I'm at over 70,000 words and I can sort of see how I'll get to the end. I think that some of this wordiness will disappear from the later drafts and the novel won't actually be as long as the first draft.

Pants!

(If you're one of those people who equates "pants" with "underpants", substitute the word "trousers" hereinafter. Or don't, and then giggle your head off because, obviously, you are twelve.)

What does business casual actually mean for women? I just don't get it. Then, just to make my brain hurt, I have to factor in seasonal clothing requirements, unknown indoor climate (requires layers in case it's too hot or too cold), and the total lack of standard sizing. (Even within lines the sizing is pure lies: once I tried on a pair of jeans, they were too snug, so I tried a pair marked the next size up and they were the same size as the smaller pair! Hate!)

I could go on, and on, and on, but everyone's heard these complaints before. Never mind.

I hate shopping.

I went shopping today because I needed pants. I found two pairs of black pants, both too long, that actually fit. So I guess that means they don't actually fit, since I had to take them right to the tailor to be shortened.

Black is probably too formal. Or is it? I don't really know.

At this point, I don't care. I don't want to go shopping again.

Enough with the whining!

The snow-hoper is all cackling because we're supposed to get another winter storm tomorrow. Wintry mix. Doesn't that sound like a snack food? What would be in it? Popcorn, definitely, and something chocolate.

We are watching $1 DVDs from Target. Dragnet. They are trying to bust a porn ring operated by a seventeen-year-old boy. They are taking the porn a lot more seriously than they took the drug ring in the first episode, also operated by a seventeen-year-old boy. Oh, what's the matter with kids today!

The novel that will not end is at about 65,000 words.

Snow-hoper

On Saturday, Oz was saying, "I hope it snows. Just a few inches a day for like ten weeks. I like snow." His car has all wheel drive.

And I said, "You go right ahead and hope. Hope for snow all you want." My car doesn't have all wheel drive.

On Sunday it was warm. I opened up a few windows and we enjoyed fresh air in the house. The furnace never kicked on. The weather report was really incongruous, because they were calling for snow Sunday night and Monday. Oz didn't hear the report, but I told him about it. "See what you did!"

This morning I woke up and looked out a window at the neighbor's snow-covered sheet. And I said, "You snow-hoper! Look what you did."

And it hasn't stopped snowing all day. It's even sticking to the roads. Schools are closing. The temperature is dropping. It's only 57 °F in my downstairs. The snow is supposed to taper off, but I bet it won't if the snow-hoper has his way.

Mistaken identity

Because I want to tell a story that will take fewer than 100,000 words.

I used to have a 1984 Toyota Tercel station wagon. Light blue, one of the boxy, odd looking ones. Nice things about it: reliability, good mileage, easy to find in a parking lot. The latter, in particular, was enhanced by its rarity, due to its ugliness.

One day, I had a doctor's appointment at MCV, where I parked in the parking deck. When I left, grouchy (as visits to the doctor often leave me), I marched right down to my car and.even grouchier! Someone had stuck a political sticker on it for some candidate I'd never heard of. Cursing, I peeled off the sticker and tossed it over the side of the parking deck. I felt kind of guilty about littering, but I did it anyway, because whoever stuck that sticker on my car was kind of littering, right?

I still kind of feel guilty about that.

Especially because, when I went to stick my key in the door, I realized that this was not my car.

Triple snit

Are the people at DMV asleep? Or just really ignorant of Germanic languages like, say, English. Because we saw this vanity plate last night:

SHLONG

For real.

Also, what is a triple snit? We got this measuring glass the other night which has gradations for different liquid measures: cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, etc. The ounce gradation also includes bar measures. Three ounces is a triple snit. Or a triple and also a snit. Then a triple snit would be nine ounces. I'm glad to see my math skills aren't going to waste.

The woman who cuts my hair has dumped her husband. She didn't come right out and say that, but she was talking about how it's just her and her daughter for Thanksgiving and then I noticed that the wedding picture she usually has out by her chair was gone. Then she started talking about how nice it is to live alone (except for that daughter, of course), "like if there's a mess, then it's my mess and I will clean it up when I feel like it. And if I want to lie on the couch and do nothing for a while, then no one is going to come around and say nasty stuff. And if I don't feel like doing the dishes right then …"

I'm at 29,772 words. My characters are ambling through the plot as required, but are developing unplanned romantic attractions. What next, kissing? There wasn't supposed to be any kissing!

So much

It's good to have work, it's certainly much better than not having work. Right now I have a little more than I like—just in time for the holidays. Money is good, but working over Thanksgiving is not so good. I had to argue (gently argue) with a client that I could not turn in 5000 words on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and then another 4000 words the day after Thanksgiving. "Because I have to make pie!" I don't think he understood. But pie I shall make: buttermilk pie and sweet potato pie. We need to get a second pie dish so I can make more than one pie at a time.

In other news, I'm just past 26,000 words on this silly novel. As long as I don't go mad from all this translation work, I should breeze through (Hah! "Breeze"! "Stagger" is more like it.) the 50,000 word mark by the end of the month. Novel writing cuts into other writing something fierce, hence the lack of posting this month. Anyway, this story is going to take more than 50,000 words to tell, but I should be done with this draft in mid-December. That's my goal.

Also, Oz has turned into a total Joss Whedon fanboy. He's already fretting about the lack of canon. I told him he'd have to start reading Buffy fanfic.

Isn't it nice that I'm saving all my narrative coherence for the novel?

菊 (Kiku: Chrysanthemum)

'Tis the season in Japan for chrysanthemum festivals. When I was an exchange student, I cut class and hung out in Hibiya Park to check out the flowers. They had the works: the hundreds of flowers from a single plant, the bonsai'd chrysanthemums, and the flocks of little old men. Chrysanthemum geeks who hung around, telling flower stories and drinking beer. I took lots of pictures (too bad I don't have a scanner), including some of their regiments of dead soldiers nestled in the fallen leaves.

On the weekend news of late, the human interest stories have touched on these festivals. One they mentioned last week featured animatronic samurai dolls dressed in kimono made of chrysanthemum. Floral mannequins of Yoshitsune and Benkei act out five different scenes, a la this year's NHK epic drama. When I stopped laughing, I tried to find some pictures online but the best I could do was another flower festival where they have the flower kimono thing happening.

The coast is clear

Happy Halloween!

We are scrooges, so we celebrated by turning out the porch light and cringing whenever we heard the voices of children, young and old, demanding candy. Some of them sound bigger than I am. Usually we don't get many trick-or-treaters on my block. Maybe it only seems like there are more this year because the windows are open and we can hear them better.

One Halloweeny thing I did today was look at my bones. Yes, my bones, the ones in my body. I don't have any bones outside of my body. Oh wait, I do. I just remembered. I have two bones from the wrist of a sea turtle skeleton that I found on the beach a few years back. I think I had three of the wrist bones, but I suspect that a cat knocked one off the shelf and into some never-cleaned corner of the house.

But back to my bones. I went to the doctor today and got some X-rays relating to the injuries I sustained in an accident in July 2004. The hospital has all the images in electronic format. I should have tried to download them when the doctor was out of the exam room. So. Spooky bones. And the image of one's flesh around the bones is very ghostly. How seasonal.

Dehumanizing technology

I watched Metropolis this evening. It was boys' night out and the perfect opportunity for me to catch up on the laundry and watch the proletariat get fed into the maw of the machine.

Silent film actors sure clutch at their chests a lot. Looks a little too autoerotic when the ladies do it, just not very expressive of fear or worry or indigestion. Vast quantities of eyeliner too, the men totally load up on it. Also, the clawed hands? Kind of scary.

But the special effects are impressive and I want the curved bookshelves in the mad scientist's lair. There's a little touch of the Japonisme too: the red light district of Metropolis is called Yoshiwara.

Still sleepy

What do you expect for a Sunday?

There's been a lot of napping around here today, but not by me. I stayed away from the chamomile tea.

We didn't make it to the Highland Games, but that's okay. We got other stuff done. No cleaning, mind you, but I revised my short story and that's the main thing, right? It's a couple hundred words longer, but they're good words.

Oz fixed my footrest that I use under my desk. The little pegs for adjusting the height broke on one side and my packing tape fixes just weren't holding anymore. The solution: new pegs. The footrest is important because I have this borg-like work environment. Seriously, it looks like something out of Brazil, especially with the swing-arm magnifying glass. I'm not complete without all the pieces in place. At least I'm only One of One.

Sleepy time

It's sleepy time here in the House of Word Counts. Oz had to work all night. He came home late this morning, bearing donuts, and went to sleep shortly thereafter. I worked a little this morning, paid a stack of bills, took a walk, then amused myself quietly. I could hardly vacuum up all the grit we tracked in yesterday, too noisy. I drank a big mug of chamomile tea, which isn't detracting from the general sleepiness in any way, let me tell you.

I think that the local gonzo squirrel has bred. Every time I look outside anymore I see a squirrel diving from the willow oak and barreling across the street on a slack, swinging power line. Tail pinwheeling, squirrel growling squirrel profanity, sometimes scampering on top of the line, sometimes suspended from it. These are, I'm sure, the same squirrels that dance on my roof in the mornings.

Yesterday I checked my referral logs and got annoyed with hotlinkers (over at MySpace—note how it's not called "MyBandwidth"). I went and hid the pictures they were stealing. Then, this morning when I was checking bandwidth usage on my site's control panel, I found a hotlink protection button I didn't know I had. Hotlink protection is now enabled. We'll see how effective it is. I haven't had many problems with hotlinking in the past, except for the idiot who hotlinked one of my photographs as the wallpaper for his forum site.

Yawn. Still sleepy.

Surprise!

Somebody bashed on the doorknocker at eight o'clock this morning.

This was not expected.

I'd been up for a full five minutes and was just scooping the first coffee beans of the day into the grinder. But even my poor un-caffeinated brain was able to determine that it could only be the telephone man or the accountant, both of whom were supposed to visit yesterday and neither of whom had. Leaving the coffee with understandable regret, I went to the door and considered my garment situation on the way. I hadn't got to the dressing part of the morning yet, but I was covered in flannel pajamas. I guess this is the sort of situation that these screwball pajamas were designed for.

It was the telephone man, who didn't laugh at me and hijinks did not ensue.

He only wanted to see my NID.

Candy

I decided when I got up this morning that I wasn't going to get any work done today, so why even try, especially since I have work but no looming deadlines.

I did chores instead. I tidied up some of the reams of papers and magazines and trashy books that have collected on the dining table. I set up a new architect's lamp on my desk. I did a little laundry and went to the post office. Today is Columbus Day, so I couldn't go in and instead dropped my outgoing mail (it's really extroverted) into the box on the curb.

I watched The Red Pony, which I'd put on the Netflix queue when I realized that, though I'm very familiar with Aaron Copeland's score, I'd never seen the film. Well, I still like the score, but goodness! It's a really bad idea to teach your pony how to unlatch the barn door. Also, the youthful Robert Mitchum draping himself delectably over the fences makes up for the sad bits.

I ran the vacuum and pondered why I spend more time coming up with excuses not to vacuum than it actually takes me to run the vacuum. Although the new, not-so-unexcusable excuse is that the set of vacuum-running motions really hurts my hip where it got fractured last year.

I went for a walk.

And then I sat on the couch, reading Josephine Tey and eating candy. First, a piece of Belgian chocolate cut into chunks. Then a piece of Men's Pocky. Then a piece of Chinese candy, ostensibly almond flavor, although all the "flavors" taste mostly like peanuts and sugar. Then a piece of salt water taffy from Chincoteague, actually made on the island by grouchy Christians with a sign on the door of their store about how this is a "family" store so you'd better have your body properly covered. Then more Chinese candy. And so on.

Finally Oz came home and we had dinner. He tried to convince me that I should work off all that candy by going to the gym this evening. This was very amusing. We discussed things to do with all the piles of not very good books (sometimes Oz buys novels based on video games). Now he is napping and I am writing all about me.

It was a dark and stormy day

Suddenly, a shot rang out!

Actually, no.

It was just gloomy and rainy and I proofread a patent. My land line kept losing its dial tone, but my DSL never went out. I went for a walk in the rain and met the new neighbor's pit bull.

I got email from the all-powerful departmental secretary of the electrical and computer engineering department at school, requesting my presence at a meeting with the ABET accreditation people. I'm in the class of record for the brand, spanking new computer engineering program and if we don't get accredited it's totally my fault. I should probably go. The school will also give me pizza.

The universe resides in a little cloth bag

Oz has been going to physical therapy for his foot. One of the exercises that the mean therapist makes him do is pick up marbles with his toes. Oz wanted to be able to practice at home, so we went on a fruitless quest for marbles, which it seems you can only get in sets of Chinese Checkers anymore. Locally, anyway, but we were rescued by the Internet, where one can find The Land of Marbles. Little planets, even. The Earth marbles are really pretty, but the ones Oz bought are lacking a north polar ice cap. Scary. I hope they're not getting ahead of themselves. The Mars marble has two polar ice caps and isn't quite spherical, but I couldn't find Olympus Mons! I'll have to compare the marble with my Mars map.

On this planet, I visited Dr. Smith today. He says that the Hamsters are working well (Dr. Science was asking after me just the other day) and that he'll keep throwing my resume at NASA till it sticks somewhere. It was kind of nice to go back to school and smell the familiar smells and hear the familiar voices, and then leave without dragging a load of homework behind me.

Fireworks

When we left O'Toole's after dinner and a discussion of the heraldic emblems hanging on the walls, we heard a low thumping in the distance. Fireworks. It was too arrhythmic to be drums or a boom car. Fireworks and miles from July, but we didn't know where they were or why. We just got in the car and headed home, but from where Forest Hill turns into Semmes, we could see them. We watched them (I'm glad I wasn't driving) all the way down Semmes and caught the grand finale and the huge bat-like cloud of smoke left hovering over the river and lit from below by the city lights.

Very cool.

Our discussion of heraldry was more prosaic. I noticed the number of shields that have pigs on them. Yeah, so they're probably supposed to be boars, but they look an awful lot like piggies.

Oz observed, "A lion rampant on a field of red, with a piggy on top!"

Oz being half of British Isles extraction, I asked, "Do you think your family's shield, if they had one, would have a piggy on it?"

"We wouldn't have a coat of arms. But if we did, it would have a piggy, and it would be tucked under someone's arm who's running over a hill. Or maybe a dead pig hanging from a rail being carried off by a bunch of poachers."

Clear and present warning

"I am really grumpy today." I am. I have to work and the article I'm translating, while really interesting and closely related to the projects I worked on in engineering school, is poorly written. There're paragraphs that go on for a whole column. The author doesn't have a good understanding of the comma. And the place holder on my copy stand won't stay up, it just slides to the bottom of the page.

So when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping. Being tough, Oz goes out to run some of the errands we were going to do together and stays out. He returns with chocolate.

Oz is really smart too.

He doesn't usually buy chocolate, so I have to ask. "What inspired you to get chocolate?"

"Oh, I was just walking around the mall after I left Sears and there it was."

"And so you asked yourself, what would Susan Sto Helit do?"

"And I walked in and said, 'Where are your chocolate covered cherries?'"

Things that happen

I worked today, but at least some other stuff happened.

My mother locked herself out of her house. She called me from a neighbor's and I drove over to let her in. She also took the opportunity to redeem a Christmas gift (a homemade origami coupon "Good for a gift certificate at a retailer of your choice") that I gave her back in 2001. She was so excited about it ("Do you remember this? Did I ever redeem this?") that I could barely get her to tell me what retailer.

Oz and I had dim sum for lunch. We drove by our usual Saturday place, but we when we saw that the line was out the door, we just headed over to the Full Kee. They had turnip cakes (Our Favorite) today. When Oz asked for oyster sauce to go with them, the waitress gave him a hard time. "What you want? No. No oyster sauce. What you want that for? We have plum sauce for turnip cakes. You want I get you some plum sauce?"

I tried my hand at jewelry photography today and was not successful, or else I'd have a picture to post. It's harder than you'd think. You can't just drop your bracelet on some black velvet and snap away. Even with the tripod, the remote (so I wouldn't jiggle the camera by pressing the button), and natural light, it came out overexposed. I'm going to have to mess with it some more, and brush the cat hair off my black velvet scarf, before I can show off my little silver elephants.

Yam pudding. TV Japan had a "show off your favorite American recipe" feature on their TV Japan Club show today. And they picked the sweet potato casserole that everybody, just about, makes for Thanksgiving and Christmas. The one with the mashed sweet potatoes, eggs, butter, sugar, cream, liquor (they used brandy, but I usually use bourbon), and topping of pecans, brown sugar, and more butter. I can't blame them for featuring this recipe, because it's really good and something that a Japanese person living in the US would only find out about if they had a holiday meal at someone's home. Still, I'm not used to seeing stuff that I make showcased on TV. I didn't start laughing out loud until they explained "and you can enjoy it hot or even cold!" They neglected to mention how it can also be eaten straight from the refrigerator.

More words about nothing

I didn't even do any chores today, except for washing the dishes, so I can't write about chores. Summer still hasn't unclenched its sweaty grip on Virginia, so I stayed indoors all day. It is really self-indulgent to complain about perfectly acceptable, seasonal, non-lethal weather when the gulf coast is getting pounded again, but self-indulgence is the whole point of this online self-publishing exercise, so here goes.

What is it with the nice weather being always two days away? I check the weather every day and ever since the teaser nice days in August, it's been, okay, hang on for two more days and then you'll have a nice day. Then the day before the nice day, I check the weather report and it's back to "two more days of yuck before the nice weather ." (I wasn't quoting the actual weather report there, but I'm sure you figured that out.)

What I did do today, aside from checking the weather, was work and pay bills. And I finished up my work early, so then I read a book from one of the piles that accumulate around Oz whenever he stops moving for more than a few minutes. Well, that and washing the dishes. I ate chocolate too.

Shopping

On our way home from dinner (no cooking at my house, yet again), we dropped in at the CVS so Oz could buy more giant band-aids for his foot. He is mostly healed up from his surgery, but the incision is still in the itchy, not entirely scab-free stage. The store, of course, has all their Halloween stuff out, they started putting it up a few weeks ago.

Halloween accessories get more involved by the year. The drug store doesn't just sell candy, they also have decorations for your house and a pretty good selection of costumes for all ages. As we were passing through the Halloween section on our way to the cash register, and manfully resisting impulse buys, I spotted some magic stretch gloves, Halloween-style. These are the little knit gloves that look child-sized, but which stretch to fit adults, or at least adults with small hands. Usually you see them all winter and they're in bright colors, but these were black and had either glow-in-the-dark phalanges printed on them or had orange felt claws glued on.

Woo! Phalanges! That goes right beyond the 80's "underwear as outerwear" to the far more radical "inner parts as outer parts."

An impulse buy was made and I now have these nifty little gloves that I won't just save for Halloween.

Lots of words about nothing

Working from home is a lot like being a shut-in, except that I can go out. But I don't really go out. This was one of the reasons why I went to engineering school, so I could get a regular grown-up job and get out of the house more. At the very least, I figured, I'd get a job with benefits and more material to write about.

But even a day of not much happening would be of interest to historians of the future. I know it's really hard to find out about everyday things from centuries ago because nobody writes about it at the time, mostly because it's not that interesting to the writer. Except for Samuel Pepys, who didn't have issues with minutiae. There's a reason why so many of the historical novels set in the mid-seventeenth century take place in the years between 1660 and 1670, and that reason is the Diary.

So here's a little slice of life in the early twenty-first century (in such an ephemeral format that I can't imagine it will be read an appreciable number of years hence):

Cleaning out the refrigerator.

I developed lots of bad dietary habits in engineering school when I didn't have time to cook. I have a little more time now, so I manage to get to the grocery store and buy food, but then some of it doesn't get cooked before it turns bad.

Tomorrow is trash collection day, so today is a good day to clean out the nasty stuff from the fridge since it won't sit out in the trash can for too long. If it sits out there too long in this heat then it gets stinky and attracts flies. The flies attract giant spiders that build webs beside the trash can. Really big spiders have their place in the web of life, but that place should not be anywhere they can surprise me.

Here's what I threw out: 3/4 of a cabbage and a bunch of parsley which had turned brown, a lime which got all dried out and hard, some cooked rice that was also beyond recovery, leftovers from a dinner out at the Full Kee, and a container of salsa that came with some nachos we had delivered over a week ago.

It's bad to let food go to waste. I need to make my food purchases compatible with my cooking habits, i.e. I need to stop buying food.

What is left in the fridge: onions, carrots, potatoes, fresh pasta, some cheeses, seltzer water, beer, sake, a bottle of white wine, condiments, fresh eggs, cream cheese, celery, eleven cans of Diet Pepsi that I am not going to drink, butter, apple juice, pineapple juice, guava juice, half a fruitcake from last Christmas (well aged now!), pesto, milk, shredded coconut, and leftover pizza that we brought home tonight.

I tend to have less in my refrigerator than other people whose refrigerators I've seen, even when I cooked regularly and would have had more food around. Whenever I'm at my friends' houses or my mother's, I'm always surprised at how the refrigerators are so full you can barely fit anything else in them. Getting food in and out of my mother's refrigerator is like working on a jigsaw puzzle.

And that is the story of cleaning out the fridge. Maybe next time I'll wipe down the shelves and write about that too.

Hometown treasures

TV Japan recently started running a show called "Hometown Treasures," which might better be called "Small Town Oddities."

This week's episode profiled a little town in Hokkaido which had some kind of town-wide project in which they made musical instruments out of cardboard: slide whistles and pan flutes made out of cardboard tubes, a cello, some percussion instruments, and a couple didgeridoos. I don't know if the whole town was involved, but they sure had a representative cross-section of the population there in the grand finale of the profile, in which everyone joined in to play the most hesitant, whistle-y version of "When the Saints Go Marching in" that I've ever heard. I didn't catch the name of the town or else I'd have dug around for a link.

I started paying closer attention and got more details on the next town, Momoishi in Aomori Prefecture, which is distinguished by having a Statue of Liberty (they have other stuff too, even a theme song, but it was Lady Liberty that they featured on this show). Their story was how they were looking to erect a statue of a feminine deity and they weren't satisfied with any of the design proposals or with a Kannon image like in Takasaki. Then someone noticed that, hey, Momoishi is on the same latitude as New York City! So why not have a Statue of Liberty? The rest, as they say, is history and their park is graced with a 20.8 meter tall (including the pedestal) quarter-scale Statue of Liberty who is affectionately known to the townspeople as Momo-chan, which translates as "Peachy" if you're going phonetically or "Miss Hundred" if you go by the "momo" in Momoishi. The American werewolf of the town has written about the park. He's right about the manly features on Momo-chan. I think that the sculptor may have modeled his statue after a Japanese cartoon of the Statue of Liberty.

Japanese crime

Yesterday morning's news featured a drive-by powdering.

I thought, What next? Drive-by makeovers?

It had only just happened, so they didn't have much more information than that. People in a car flung powder on a bunch of kids on their way to school.

The authorities were on the case right away and today's news had more details.

The powder was some kind of fire-extinguisher powder. Sixty-six junior high school students, the powderees, are being treated for irritated eyes and breathing passages. The powderers include a girl from the same school, rumored to have been cutting class that day, and an older boy who was a graduate of the school.

So. Even though it sounded funny, it was an actual crime.

Write some words

I've been translating and translating for days. My hands are aching because I have to type. My dictation software conflicts with the translation memory software that this client wants me to use. When I finish up my ten pages for the day (the quota I set myself so that I can beat the deadline), I have to stop and then I don't feel much like writing. I'm not complaining, mind you, I'm just saying that I'm not physically comfortable. (Nothing to compare to the discomfort of the hurricane refugees and the people in Darfur and the people in the areas hit by the tsunami who are still living in tents…)

Between the aching hands and the extra stress from following hurricane news (with outrage àa carte), I haven't been sleeping well either. I've been soothing myself to sleep by making trouble for my fictional characters. I'm not writing anything for them at present, I just set up scenes in my head and give them room to act out. This isn't merely daydreaming, it's a surprisingly productive way to let the characters develop without having to invest in a lot of plot development. Most of these scenes are only head stories and are never going to be written down, but they let me indulge in the most stupid plot devices and clichéwithout feeling the least bit compelled to write unless I come up with something really good, which actually fits the context (which is so not likely it isn't worth mentioning except to add to my word count here).

Lest it be thought that I am withholding juicy story bits which are far more entertaining than the preceding mention of the story bits, please accept my assurances that it's simply not so. It's, like, one character hits another character in the head with a rolling pin and they have a big dramatic argument which sounds great in my head, but would be the absolute worst drivel if written down. Really, it's that bad, but entertaining enough when you're falling asleep, especially once you get into motivation, why the rolling pin, and all the consequent fallout.

After I started thinking about stories I tell myself to fall asleep, I had to ask Oz about his. He has mentioned that he designs boats in his head. I was so sure there had to be more to it, a pirate element or some other kind of costume drama.

"No. Just a boat. Sometimes I design a house."

I won't give up. "Would that be a 'castle' kind of house?"

"No. Sometimes there's a turret."

"Arrow slits?"

He shakes his head.

"Okay, so what kind of a boat do you design?"

"A catamaran. Double-ended pea pod."

"Oh." Knowing it's hopeless, I ask, "Are you ever the pirate king?"

"No."

"What about when you were a kid? What did you imagine then?"

"I was a forest ranger."

"What did you do?"

"I had a tower. I looked for fires. I ranged the forest."

"That was your daydream? To sit in a tower and look for smoke? To walk around in the woods? Did you at least have a talking bear friend?"

"No. I had a hat though."

"Did you even daydream in color?"

"Green and brown."

Survivor guilt

I've been busy translating and taking occasional breaks to check the news and be appalled by the images from New Orleans. Every time I feel the least bit whiny about being stuck at my desk (my hip aches from where it was fractured last year and I have to meet a deadline), I remember that I have nothing to complain about. I have a house, electricity, running water, food, money…

Most of the disaster-related news I see on an everyday basis is out of Japan, where they have a lot of disasters and where every school is a shelter stocked with supplies like rations, water, and cots. For example, for several weeks at the height of the massive earthquakes in Niigata last winter, over a quarter million people were living in shelters or in their cars in parking lots by shelters. While they were miserable and scared and uncomfortable until they could return home or get placed in temporary housing, it was a first-world level of misery.

In fact, September 1st was Disaster Prevention Day in Japan. This is like a holiday, except for the nationwide disaster preparedness exercises and training (in which the U.S. military has been known to participate). It's kind of cute how they call it "Prevention," as if you could prevent an earthquake or typhoon, but what they're preventing is poor disaster preparedness and the consequent problems thereof.

So this is what seems like a normal level of preparedness to me, despite the hurricane and storm warnings we get in my area from the National Weather Service that end with "If you can't get indoors, lie down in a ditch and cover your head with your hands." It would never have occurred to me that a disaster preparedness plan for a city which lies at or below sea level would not include an evacuation plan for people who need transportation assistance. Something like "go to the neighborhood school, from which you will be bussed…"

Did I have a point here? Oh, if you are concerned about disaster relief, contact your local Red Cross. You can get trained to provide disaster relief in the future and in the meantime, you can provide support to the efforts of the trained relief workers who are headed for the Gulf coast. Disaster relief starts with disaster preparedness, which starts at home.

(Oz is so going to make fun of me for saying all that, because my preparedness efforts are pathetic. When Hurricane Isabel blew through town two years ago, my disaster plan was "don't worry, Oz has batteries, cash, and a full tank of gas." I ended up having no power or phone service for a week. The city said we should boil the water before drinking it, but since I have an electric stove, that wasn't an option. I drank the water anyway.)

Altered states

I had a gin and tonic, and then I had another. Now I want a snack, because my present, self-indulgent, first-world concerns revolve around myself.

Anyway, let me add to the chatter on the Internet about the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. As a former Red Cross employee who was faced with the unfortunate job of turning away non-monetary donations after Hurricane Andrew and catching the resultant flack, I'd like to say a few words in favor of organizations that ask for money. Money is good. Unlike donations of food, water, and clothing, money can be transferred at effectively no cost to the area where it's needed. The really great thing about money is that it can be used to buy exactly what is needed. Money can be given directly to disaster victims in the form of vouchers which the people can then use to buy what they want, at least where there are functioning stores. You can solve some problems by throwing money at them.

In other news, I may actually be able to donate some money soon (putting my money where my mouth is, as it were), because I have been translating a lot and the money is finally starting to come in, much to my relief. It sucks to have to work like crazy for several months before you see anything like a steady income. And I just agreed to do way too much work in the next few weeks. I wish I had a normal, grown-up job where you get paid every two weeks and get weekends off. And health benefits. They still have jobs like that, don't they?

I'm sort of working now, even in my slightly inebriated state. I am googling around and confirming the English terminology for this arcane text analysis method being referenced in the paper that I'm translating this week. Lucky for me, there are whole entire websites devoted to Latent Semantic Analysis. This paper is amazing: in order to understand it, I'm dusting off my antique linguistics minor, all my computer science classes, and everything I've learned about voice recognition software over the past decade of using it.

These are my problems. I am lucky.

Our Atlantis

Doesn't everyone have a New Orleans story?

I went to New Orleans in March, 1986. It was my freshman year of college, the first time through, and my friends and I escaped cold, gray Washington, DC, for the glories of Louisiana. Sunny, balmy Louisiana where everything is blooming in March that doesn't bloom in Virginia till May, and everything blooms in Virginia in May.

We stayed across the lake in a condo we got through my parents' time share. Our first night there we got lost, caught in a speed trap, and discovered that you can buy bourbon at the grocery store. In that order.

Really.

We were there for a week and drove into the city to do tourist things on several days, but I don't remember how many. I remember seeing, from the highway, the gray cemeteries with all the graves built above ground. In the picture I have in my head, it's always cloudy over the cemeteries even though the sun shone all week long.

Being ignorant of the city, we mostly hung out in the French Quarter and in the daytime too. On Bourbon Street we saw a woman walking down the street in stiletto heels and a leopard print dress with shoulder pads up to her ears and whispered to each other, "You think she's a hooker?" We wandered around, just looking at things and listening to the live music that spills out of the bars, all day long.

The Catholic boys insisted on attending a mass at the cathedral on Jackson Square. A couple years ago I started quoting the sermon at one of them and he said, "You remember the sermon?" I said, "Of course, don't you? Ha! I only have to go to church once a decade or so because it sticks, but you have to go to church every week."

But what I was thinking about most today, when I heard a news anchor say how Canal Street was now an actual canal, was walking along the streetcar tracks down the median in the center of that same street. Or was it St. Charles Avenue? I remember flowers and talking with my friends, a thousand miles away from our imaginary troubles. I wore a purple flowered sundress and walked barefoot on the tracks, with my disintegrating slippers dangling from one hand. Our shoulders were dappled with sun and shade and the streetcars came up behind us so quietly that the drivers had to call out to us and warn us off the tracks.

More "research"

Still (Still! Forever!) researching mid-seventeenth century England. Said research having devolved into reading trashy novels set in the period—and I'm reading just about the trashiest yet—I should probably stop calling this research. Today I was going to write something really scathing about the novel I'm on right now, especially about how this one character can live in a London slum and have all kinds of spectacular clothes (she's a courtesan) without her lodgings getting robbed while she's out on the town, and then I got sidetracked with costuming. I've noticed that many writers avoid the difficulties of describing period clothing simply by never telling you what people are wearing. Some writers might mention that a character dresses herself, without giving any details, before running outside to meet her fancy man, while other writers skip the topic entirely. For all you've been told, their characters are running around butt-naked.

Admittedly, really detailed descriptions of clothes don't move the plot along and are likely to provoke critical letters from historical re-enactors. But I find it difficult to step into a character's shoes unless I know how high the heels are and whether they're tied with ribbons.

So while I was looking up periwigs this evening, I wandered into the lair of the Salacious Historian and I haven't managed to extricate myself yet. Look at the pictures! I've been examining collars, sleeves, and the cuts of coats for the last hour. The Dutch pages are particularly useful because they depict more middle and working class people in everyday situations.

I'm so easily sidetracked. I loved playing dress-up as a child (despite my nearly complete deprivation of suitable princess outfits—I had to be creative) and that impulse transfers seamlessly to dressing up my imaginary friends.

Fusion sports

This I saw in a yard across the street. This family has a basketball goal set up in their backyard, which I can see because they have a side yard (where a house used to be) and thus a clear line of sight to the back from my upstairs window. They also have a plum tree and share the fruit with their neighbors.

But anyway, today some enterprising member of the household had set up a big trampoline under the backboard. Three boys were jumping up and down on the trampoline and shooting baskets with a basketball and a volleyball. The trampoline was high enough off the ground that the rim was hardly higher than their heads. I think the difficulty was supposed to be introduced by the bouncing, but I could only watch for a few minutes before I was convinced that they were going to bash their heads on the rim or the backboard. Thank goodness for short attention spans! When I looked again a short time later, they were sitting on the trampoline and talking.

Headaches

Today I had a migraine with bonus nausea. So, not a whole lot else on my mind, so to speak. I didn't weed the yard because it was drizzly, but it was cool enough to have the house open for the first time in a couple months.

I did do laundry and go to the grocery store. I looked at satellite pictures of Chincoteague Island. The image for Wallops Island looks pretty cool too. Vacation thoughts make a good distraction from the headache. Doesn't the Eastern Shore look treacherous from space? The wetlands look all wormy. Maybe these aren't such good pictures for a migraine-ridden, seasick-prone person to be looking at. I'm rapidly becoming a Mapper of Doom addict. I just learned that one of my neighbors has a blog (using the GeoURL overlay) and that there are four Superfund sites within a few miles of my house.

Anyway, I'd just decided that I would do the weeding tomorrow and, with perfect timing, thus arrived a little one-day translation job, to be completed by tomorrow afternoon. This is eerie, no?

Incidentals

I signed the paperwork to refinance my house today. The mortgage company sent a notary to my house so I didn't have to inconvenience myself at all. The notary was of the same person-type as Office Extrovert with whom I worked last summer. For the rest of the afternoon, I proceeded to have mild anxiety attacks about whether there was a catch amongst all those papers (which I reviewed and compared with the papers from the last refinance).

I vacuumed the upstairs for the first time in longer than I care to admit and found some weird white stuff underneath the rubber-bottomed carpet that lies on the landing. I initially suspected it was some kind of cat pee derivative, but since it's totally lacking in cat pee smell, I have to let the cats off the hook. Since the ventilation ducts lie under the floor of the landing, I have shifted my suspicions to condensation-induced mildew. But I could be totally wrong.

The weather is starting to break. This evening I drove around with the sunroof open until we got off I-95 downtown, where the huge flock of starlings was twirling around before settling into their roosting trees. When I approached their drop zone, I pressed the switch to close the sunroof and Oz started laughing at my timing. I doubt he would have been nearly so amused with bird poo on his head.

We are going to take a trip in September. Oz has a little time off and today we made a reservation to stay in Chincoteague. Neither of us has ever been, and we haven't had even a mini-vacation in a couple years. Besides, wild ponies! "I couldn't care less about the ponies," Oz said. I protested, "But, ponies! I will not be denied."

My eyes!

I read a book all day long and now my eyes are feeling the strain. I don't think that playing with my computer really counts as a rest, but I ought to write some words. I'm watching television too. The Japanese epic drama is on and this episode has a lot in the way of unlikely fight choreography. They cast the most improbable people as badasses. We're supposed to believe that Matsu Ken, as Benkei, can fling the bad guys over the gate with one swipe of his naginata. I have to admit, it was pretty eerie when he was battling his doppelganger.

We've had the bibliophile's ideal weekend: we've mostly been lying around and reading. It's been too hot to go outside. If no translation work comes in (hah!), then I'll weed the yard this week when it's supposed to be cooler. And read more books.

Scary fish

What did I do today?

I got a haircut. The salon was having work done to convert the upper floor of their building to an apartment. The flooring guys were making so much in the way of sudden loud noises that the woman who cuts my hair, who is profoundly deaf, would jump and say, "Wow, that was loud! It popped my eardrum."

I went to the grocery store and bought milk. I went to the natural foods store to get coffee and they only had a quarter pound of the kind I wanted! I went home and worked on the water filter translation. Hoping for something good, I waited for the mail to arrive, but the mail arrived without goodness. I cooked something good for lunch and worked more. This evening I took a walk while a thunderstorm impended in the distance.

Now I'm watching a nature special about the Amazon. They are featuring these meter-long jumping fish. Fish spies bug sitting on leaf high above the river, shoots straight up out of the water and bites bug with gaping maw, flops back into river with much splashing. The cinematography is amazing, they're using a high speed camera and showing it in fabulous, crystal clear slow motion. You can see the water sliding off the sides of the fish.

Now we're on to a huge, butt-ugly fish. Again with the gaping maw. This one glides along and sucks smaller, unsuspecting fish into its huge, gaping maw. It does not appear to chew. The camera captures a fantastic air bubble fanout from the gills when the fish sucks up a victim that is near the surface of the river.

Now we've moved onto a fish that eats nuts. At least the nuts don't have that innocent, "just swimming along here, yes indeedy" look of the victims of the previous fish.

Now: the amazing, jumping slug-fish that mate on leaves!

Overheard

Local architecture

The East End theater isn't the only building expressing its preferences. Nebe's Inn would like to be a restaurant.

Etymology

First girl, rummaging around in her bag: "I've never liked the word 'purse'. I don't know why."

Second girl: "What do you call it then?"

First girl: "It depends. I guess a handbag is a bag that I carry in my hand and this isn't that bag. And what is a pocketbook, anyway? Isn't that kind of an old word? It's like, is it a pocket, or is it a book?"

Second girl: "Maybe some kind of notepad? That you carry around?"

She reads so I don't have to

My research into mid-seventeenth century England continues. One reason why my historical mystery is a pile of unpublishable carp (I meant to type "crap" but I think I prefer the image of a heap of big goldfish, because the novel is not exactly crappy, more shiny, damp and out of place) is my ignorance of the period, which I've been continuing to rectify for a while now. Believe it or not, I started rectifying the ignorance before I wrote the novel.

On my latest trip to the university library I turned up a neat book: The English Civil War Through the Restoration in Fiction: An Annotated Bibliography, 1625.1991. I got it to use as a resource and hadn't expected to find it entertaining in and of itself. This book is basically a list of other works related to the period in question and includes a short synopsis of each. I learned pretty quick to skip ahead to the last sentence of each to get a real sense of whether the book was worth reading.

"The book is written in the author's usual plodding style…"

"The story is told in gushing, rather childish prose…"

"The novel has a few incidents masquerading as a plot…"

I didn't just find out what to avoid, I also found a batch of books that I do want to read, including some of the less ghastly sounding historical romances which are out of print. "Out of print" does not, however, mean "not available." I discovered that you can order them online from people who must have stacks of them lying around. I'm really wondering about their business model, because they are selling the books for a penny. No fooling. $0.01 plus shipping. I can't imagine that they make enough off shipping to make it worth their while.

Miscellaneous things

Thing the first:

This morning when I was taking out the recycling, one of the guys working on remodeling the house on the corner came over to me. He introduced himself and held up a piece of wood, saying, "I'm doing some measuring, but I don't have a pencil. I don't think I even own a pencil. Could I please borrow a pencil?"

"Sure." I went into the house and grabbed a mechanical pencil from my desk. Borrow, ha! I gave it to him.

"But that one looks really nice…" He was probably thinking, hey, lady, that is overkill, I only need to make one little mark on this board here.

I explained that this was one of the big, fat mechanical pencils that I never use, so he was welcome to it. And, really, do all the people designing mechanical pencils these days have huge stumpy fingers? Because lately I haven't been able to find the nice slender pencils that I like.

Thing the second:

Items that broke in the past week include the following: the battery in Oz's car which had to be replaced, the metal distractor in Oz's foot came apart and the doctor had to put it back together, the leg on the shower chair that Oz has been using cracked, the transformer on the light pole outside my house leaked mineral oil all over the cars and I had to call the power company to come and mess with it, and the neck on the soap dispenser by my kitchen sink broke off this morning.

Thing the third:

I got my golden doodad this week. I can now wear the badge of my smartypants engineer-hood on a chain around my neck. One of the neat things that my academic achievement got for me was membership in an honor society for engineers. I never was an honor society person before, but I always had the feeling that I ought to be—I just never worked quite hard enough, or took the right classes. One reason why this was a big deal for me was that Phi Beta Kappa was a big deal for my father. His parents set out three goals for him: get a medical degree, run in the Olympics, and make Phi Beta Kappa. Just a little pressure there, eh? He made two out of three. No one ever put that kind of pressure on me, but me. And up until this straight-A business of the last several years, I was pretty reasonable when it came to pushing myself. So that would make the golden doodad an indication of unreasonable pressure if I don't stop overthinking this.

Thing the fourth:

What is it with the stairs in the university library? I go up and down stairs all day long here at home, and up the Church Hill staircases regularly, but one trip up to the fourth floor of the university library leaves my legs aching for days.

We go to work

This is the way life gets back to normal. Oz goes back to the office to work a half day. A client calls me with a little rush job that turns out to be twice as long as she thinks it is. Nothing on my to-do list gets done because I need to meet that deadline. Nothing breaks, although I manage to scuff a tire on the curb because my parallel parking skills have improved enough that I'm getting a little too close. I fax an invoice query to a client who needs to pay me. I make plans for tomorrow: grocery store, library, clean something. If I have enough to do, then a translation job will come through.

A spy in the house of luxe

Well, children, come the revolution, you might just want to take refuge in the waiting room at a Volvo dealership.

All these economy car years, I've been going to correspondingly cheap garages, where the waiting rooms are furnished with hard chairs whose vinyl seats are patched with electrical tape and reek of old cigarette smoke and burned coffee from a neglected coffeemaker hunching in the corner. An old television blares hour after hour of the People's Court and gradually loses its grip on vertical hold. Little tables hold stacks of picked over newspapers and automotive magazines with dates going back to the past millennium.

Since we got the Volvo last fall, I've continued to go to these places, but for some repairs I go to the dealer. This morning was one such occasion and so at 7:30 I found myself sitting in a cushy, electrical tape-free, vinyl chair in a waiting room from another planet.

This waiting room smelled like it was cleaned regularly, with cleaning products.

This waiting room had a row of carrels with telephones and computers with free internet access. (I neglected to check for wireless.)

This waiting room had a plasma television hanging on the wall and showing CNN.

This waiting room had the current day's Wall Street Journal and the local paper. The magazines didn't have that ruffled look that magazines tend to get after a couple years.

This waiting room had a snack counter with two coffee pod machines, a full selection of coffees and teas, a refrigerator full of soft drinks and bottled water, and a wicker basket of Pop Tarts.

When I got home (they have drivers take you to your office or home), I told Oz all about it. He suggested that we go there and hang out for a while. Next time we're at that end of town and we want to take a little break, we may just do that.

Again with the plumbing

Yesterday I got a little cocky about the showerhead installation and lack of leaks.

Today I got payback.

I was minding my own business, collecting towels for the laundry, when I saw rusty spots—the rusty spots of doom—behind one of the toilets. Okay, those bolts holding the tank in place have been rusted out for years. Why do they have to give up the ghost today? Why not last week when the plumber was here? Obviously, I had to be lulled into a false sense of security in order for the universe to tick-tock along and preserve the nature of reality.

I'm beginning to think I need to create a category for plumbing incidents.

The leaks are slow enough that they can be accommodated with plastic cups until the plumber comes back tomorrow. Removing the tank and replacing the bolts is simple in theory, but is just beyond the HODI (have Oz do it) limits: after the last time he took the tank off that toilet to replace a gasket, lo these many years ago, I promised that he'd never have to work on it again. (Except that he replaced the tank fill valve last year.) (Oh, and he also put sealant around the water inlet last winter.) (He's really good-natured about the crummy plumbing in this house.)

More plumbing

This is the kind of plumbing I like.

Oz has a big wad of gauze on his foot and we were told that this gauze must stay dry. No baths, no showers, but he still needs to get clean somehow. The necessity for a water delivery means which can be precisely directed provides a great excuse for me to install a handheld showerhead in the second bathroom.

I got a "Rainmaker" from Lowe's and pulled out my ten inch wrench and a roll of Teflon tape. The old showerhead came right off. I put Teflon tape on all the connections for the new showerhead, screwed everything together, and turned on the water. No leaks!

Oz helped too, by dismembering the packaging (I find those bubble packs downright painful to get into) and shoving gaskets into the ends of the hose.

I can't remember the last time, if ever, a home maintenance project took only one trip to the hardware store and five minutes of work thereafter. This may never happen again either, so it's worth recording for posterity if only for that reason.

Not my disaster

Well, nothing broke today. Inside the house.

Except for a vacuum cleaner bag—this was actually not a disaster because the bag separated from the cardboard collar when I was putting it into the vacuum cleaner. Still, this was annoying because it was from a new batch of bags that I had to order online, what with my vacuum being so old that Target no longer carries this type. Anyway, these new bags are the microfiltration kind and, hey, they really do work (to the extent that they can maintain their structural integrity). The house didn't smell all dusty after I ran the vacuum.

For the first time since Tuesday, Oz managed to get down the stairs to dinner. He didn't even break any part of himself or balusters or anything. If he's going to be more mobile, I'm not going to get such a great workout anymore. We started negotiating tomorrow's breakfast: toasted coconut donuts downstairs vs. dry toast upstairs. (This was my idea. His idea involved a lot of cinnamon, raisins, and butter.)

So what broke?

A sewage line (maybe a gas line?) about a block away from my house. I knew something was up when the city buses started running on my street; they'd been rerouted from the next street over. The city blocked the streets off with police tape for a block in either direction. The Public Works guys only need to set out cones for water main work. I'm guessing this was sewage because of how the DPW guys didn't want to get anywhere near it either.

This line break doesn't seem to have affected my plumbing at all.

Maybe things are looking up around here.

…but it pours

"Shit! What did you do to the sink?" I run to the laundry closet and grab a handful of washcloths to mop up the mess under the bathroom sink. Overnight, the slow drip that started a year ago February has become way too fast for the "shove a cup under it and worry about it later" method of dealing with plumbing problems.

"Huh?" Oz is still asleep.

I've been awake for all of five minutes, I haven't even got my glasses on. "That leak! Water's pouring out of the pipe. What did you do?" I crawl around on the floor and try to get all the water up, but it's impossible to see.

"Nothing. Huh? What?"

"That leak! Under the sink where the U-bend thing goes into the wall that's been dripping really slowly for, like, a year. It's dumping water all over the place. I can't get the cup in the right spot to catch it. Augh!" I turn on the faucet experimentally and try to position the cup, but I can't get it close enough to the wall because of the baseboards.

"I didn't do anything."

"It was fine last night and you're the only one who came in here till I did just now. Did you shove the sink or something?" This is a pedestal sink, installed by the previous owner of the house, and is therefore poorly installed. It isn't bolted to the floor or anything and will shift if you lean on it. The drainpipe is not flexible, so guess what happens.

Oz goes back to sleep. I get some coffee in me and call a plumber. They are busy today, so it's afternoon before a surfer dude plumber shows up to make comments like: "Cool. This thing is, like, all rust." And, when he sees Sparky: "That cat just don't look real." I have to mentally insert the "Dude!" that should punctuate everything he says. He does manage to replace the trap and seal everything up in thirty minutes.

Not bad, I think as I tidy up after he leaves. I pull open a cabinet and the knob comes off in my hand.

I am the Stair Master

Today was not dramatic. I finished translating a patent for an organic chemical which is used to make other chemicals. I went up and down the stairs many times. Oz won't be doing stairs for longer than he thinks (I think). I delivered ice water, coffee, lunch, rice with shiso furikake (salty purple sprinkles made of beefsteak plant), fresh cold packs for the foot, and more coffee. I also visited a little while taking breaks from work. I brought the plastic shower chair into the master bathroom so he could have a place to sit while he brushed his teeth and shaved. It's a good thing I didn't find a real job, I can't imagine what we'd do for all this home care.

We had conversations like this:

Me: "My dental appointment conflicts with your doctor's appointment on Monday. I'll have to reschedule."

Oz: "No, you don't. I can drive myself."

Me: "You can't bear weight on your right foot. You can't drive."

Oz: "I can use my left foot to brake."

Me: "Well, as long as you only brake. You can scoot on down the stairs and go sit in your car and brake to your heart's content."

There're several yards of gauze wrapped around his right foot. I have my doubts that it would even fit into the space around the accelerator, which would have the advantage of precluding any misguided attempts at driving.

Drama! Excitement! Mildew!

Friday morning I woke up and wondered, "What's that noise? It sounds like running water." I checked both bathrooms before I realized that, no, it wasn't a toilet with an attitude, but something downstairs. When I got down there, I found the utility closet awash with the water that was cascading out the bottom of the water heater.

The floor of the utility closet is about a half inch below the living room floor, so no major damage and the water just leaked out through the subflooring into the foot or so of space below the house. I assume. It had to go somewhere and down was the logical place. Of course, gravity is only a theory. I then discovered that the cutoff valve to the water heater was old and cruddy and didn't shut off the water all the way. On the bright side, the gas valve worked correctly and damp is more easily rectified that explosions any day.

Mop! Bucket! Telephone! "Oz, the bottom fell out of the water heater!" I also called the plumbing guys. "Help! The bottom fell out of my water heater!" I love Southern plumbers. If you sound female and slightly hysterical, they drawl, "Well, ma'am, don't you worry—" and ride to the rescue all chivalrous. Tommy was here in under an hour.

But the fun didn't stop there. Water heater removal, replacement, and cleanup took over three hours, during which I had to pack up for our trip to Northern Virginia. I'm glad I hadn't planned on getting any translation done that morning anyway. We actually got on the road on time and up to the Dulles Hilton where we were meeting the Witchmama and her clan for a short visit before their return to Tokyo Saturday morning.

Our afternoon and evening saw more drama. Wandering through the hotel with a Cosmo (her first ever), Witchmama did her Carrie Bradshaw impression. Siegfried and Roy joined us all for dinner, but got lost in the hotel first and had to leave voice mails pleading for rescue: "Where are you?" Little children scaled Oz, who is a baby magnet. Oz and I split a pint of Guinness, with assistance from the five-year-old who, whenever I took a sip, would take the glass from me, carry it to Oz, and say, "Okay, drink." At dinner, the toddler took a header off a dining room chair because accidents happen, and mass confusion ensued. Another guest called an ambulance on his Blackberry, an ambulance and fire truck both came to the hotel to check the toddler for head injuries. We learned that you don't have to wake up someone every two hours to make sure they aren't in a coma (it will just make them cranky).

The toddler is fine.

The rest of us survived. We actually had a nice dinner once we all calmed down.

When we took our leave, my car refused to shift out of Park. It's still refusing, so I now have to press the magic shiftlock override button to get the car going. I think the shiftlock solenoid needs to be replaced. What great timing! (See above, where I had to purchase a new water heater.)

Saturday and Sunday with Siegfried and Roy and the pugs were relatively undramatic. We ate Middle Eastern pastries, made almost an entire meal of crackers and toppings: cheese, fruit preserves, hot mango chutney, and hot lime pickle. With sassafras root beer. The boys took us house hunting so we could work on our sticker shock, because your $300K gets you a stinky, damp basement apartment in Vienna. No Alps either.

Sunday night, we get back in town. The house smells musty from the damp in the utility closet. I find email from a client: "Where's that job we assigned you? That was due last week?" That they neglected to assign me, but I can squeeze it in this week.

Monday: Uneventful. We have beer and onion rings. House still rather musty.

Today, Oz had surgery on one of the joints in his foot. He had to check in to the hospital at 6:00 a.m. and I spent the morning in the waiting room, working on that surprise translation job. He now has a very dramatic Borg foot with a metal distractor sticking out of his big toe.

I wonder what will happen tomorrow.

Folk medicine

A guy in the supermarket parking lot is doing a little self-doctoring. He's leaning out the open door of his convertible and pouring what looks like a beer over the palm of his hand. Then he dabs at it with a napkin.

Now, there's not enough alcohol in beer to provide much of an antiseptic effect. He'd be better off getting some Neosporin and band-aids at the drugstore across the parking lot. Or even letting a dog lick it off. Or—this is really radical—going back into the supermarket and washing up with soap and water at the restroom sink.

On the other hand, the beer-wash method means he gets to drink any excess beer.

Coincidence? Or confusion?

After finding out that my library account will expire in two days and steps must be taken to retain my online access to the OED, I'm walking into the university library, past the usual cluster of smokers and cellphone talkers by the entrance. The non-smoking cellphone talkers lurk around inside the entrance, in the no-person's land inside the outer doors and outside the inner doors.

One of the outside guys is saying, "No, I'm in Richmond today for my son's orientation."

I walk into the exterior lobby, where one of the inside guys is saying, "You're in Richmond?"

So, what are the odds they're talking to each other?

And you are there!

Two and a half centuries late, maybe, but you're there.

More news from times past. I'm reading along in Town and Gown, all about the centuries-long conflict between Cambridge University and the town of Cambridge, and you'd think what with living in Richmond surrounded by historical markers I'd be used to this, but I got all squealy when I stumbled on an incident that occurred at a place where I'd been.

A friend of mine did her PhD at Cambridge and when she got married in the chapel of her college, I got to be one of her bridesmaids. The wedding was quite extravagantly attended: the guest list included people from every continent except Antarctica. Someone even came from as far away as outer Mongolia where she was doing her research, although admittedly she didn't come back to Cambridge only for the wedding.

Anyway, I'm reading my book and make a little squeal every time I see a little reference to Emmanuel College. Then I see a big reference, so you can make your own estimate of squeal magnitude.

In 1732, some students procure a corpse, for their anatomy lab, from a churchyard in another town. The townspeople are not pleased with this and, in an effort to get the corpse back (no mention of who the corpse was), get a warrant to search Emmanuel where the corpse was being stored, doubtless in some very dignified and respectful manner.

Right.

So the students don't let them in. Then the Vice-Chancellor and Heads of the university get a warrant too, with similar results. Various bystanders involve themselves and break down part of the college wall, but the students barricade themselves in the inner court, which may (or not) be the same thing as the Front Court where the chapel is. That my friend got married in. And the pretty green that only professors, or doctorate-holders, or whatever are allowed to walk on, but they made an exception for the wedding party so we could walk straight across the courtyard to the chapel, designed by Christopher Wren, by the way, and therefore extant at the time of this incident.

Now with various university and non-university people laying siege to the inner court and the students therein and who knows what damage being done (these being the people who pulled down part of a stone wall), the Town Clerk gets called out to read the Riot Act, this being a literal reading of the Act, basically to the effect of "You people get out of here or you're going to prison." At which point dispersion happens.

After all this, you'd think that the students would really knuckle down to their Anatomy, considering what it probably cost them in beatings and what-all, but the next day the corpse is found floating in the garden pond, where nowadays the famed ducks of Emmanuel paddle about. At the wedding, one of the porters used ducky chow to lure the ducks out for a photo-op with the bride and the flower girl.

To think there was once a stolen corpse floating in that very same pond by where we took all the wedding pictures! How cool! If you like that sort of thing. Which, evidently, I do.

Where's Maude?

"That guy does not belong here," Oz says as we walk towards the entrance to Target.

"That guy?" I see a guy dressed all in black, with long black hair walking into the parking lot. "You mean he doesn't belong at Target?"

"Anywhere. He's got glam boots, glam hair. He looks like a refugee from a hair band."

We progress a little further and I can see the guy's car. "It's a hearse! He drives a hearse! He's Harold!"

Well, not quite. The hearse has an antique plate, but (not being a converted Jaguar) is otherwise just an old vehicle in need of a polish.

Plus çchange

I've been studying early modern English history, mid-seventeenth century specifically, but also a century or so to either side for context. The further into the details I get, the more I see how little humans have changed in the past four hundred years. Especially as regards bad behavior.

Today's new obsolete word: jetting.

Jetting is when bored teenagers roam around at night in groups engaging in vandalism and generalized mayhem. It was a problem in fifteenth century Cambridge. Consider: minimally supervised teenage males crammed into rental housing. Studying Latin. This was before serious math was developed. Maybe if they'd had to learn Fourier transforms and semiconductor physics they'd have been too tired to run around town at night, attacking townspeople and students from other colleges. This was enough of a problem that in 1469, "the university authorities enacted a statute forbidding masters and scholars to carry, in the open, bows and arrows, or crossbows and bolts," although they could get licenses to carry such weaponry for peaceable purposes.

My university experiences seem so tame.

And this begs the question as to what constitutes peaceable use of a crossbow.

In parallel

In one of those instances (rare enough to be pure coincidence), my brother and I are doing the same thing at about the same time on opposite sides of the planet. Shopping for home theater gear. Which, let's face it, my brother does often enough that such a coincidence is barely coincidental.

We spent less time and money than he did, but that goes without saying.

I was getting tired of unplugging and switching cables around to run the sound from the various components through my stereo, so we went out to an electronics store. I had in mind a switchbox. Oz was thinking about A/V receivers, with speakers and various other doodads. At the electronics store, we zip past the games, where a mother is trying to detach her sons from a bongo drum game controller on a shelf so high that they can barely reach it, even standing on the lowest shelf and using their chins to hook onto an upper shelf while they bang randomly on the drums.

Back in the TV labyrinth, Oz surveys the A/V receivers, which—I have to say—I've never even heard of because I haven't been shopping in years. I find a switchbox and then find Oz, who says, "These receivers are all ugly. They are big and black, they don't have any nice little silver ones."

I say, "This switchbox is only $40." Actually, that's probably a pretty steep markup considering how simple the electronics inside are. I could probably build one. Oz is still after me to build a stereo, now that I'm an engineer and all.

So anyway, we have an overpriced switchbox now.

Oops

I seem to have left the power adapter for my iBook in the lab. I guess this means a computer-free evening.

For the Pavlovian consumer

In today's peregrinations, I passed through the condiment aisle of the grocery store and stopped to pick up a bottle of ketchup. While I was examining the unit pricing and trying to figure out why differently shaped bottles of the same quantity of the same brand cost do not cost the same, I noticed some other bottles down on the bottom shelf (where they totally belonged). These were the "Celebrity Talking Labels" editions, imprinted with quotes from celebrities to raise money for charity. Presumably that's why the unit price was double that of other same-sized bottles without "Limited Edition" labels. That extra money goes to charity. The featured celebrities include William Shatner, the living brand himself. In addition to the celebrity quotes ("Fixes burgers at warp speed."), the labeling included an exhortation to "Collect all four."

Collect? Seriously, these were big bottles. Like, if your family consumes enough ketchup that you might go through more than one of these bottles before this promotion is over? You need to review the nutrition pyramid and forget what Ronald Regan tried to tell you back in the eighties about ketchup being a vegetable, because, natural mellowing agents or no, that is too damn much ketchup.

It's a good thing my brother isn't around. He'll buy any shiny plastic thing with a command to collect or a limited edition sticker on it.

Oh no!

Words one doesn't want to hear when one's boyfriend has returned from a (very short) bike ride:

"Uh, hon? I'm going to go to the emergency room now."

Oz fell off his bike and took a handlebar in a very uncomfortable spot. He did spend a few hours in the emergency room, but they let him go once they found that nothing important was ruptured. He's now suffering with great nobility and icepacks.

I'm going to have to get more icepacks. The little first-aid packs being exhausted and back in the freezer, we are now using my festive plastic ice. Since I rarely use ice, water ice tends to sublimate in my freezer. Instead, I keep the kind consisting of water sealed in brightly colored plastic sea creatures because it has the courtesy not to disappear. The current icepack contains blue dolphins, fuchsia seahorses, orange starfish, and something pink. It's not very manly, but I figure it'll give him incentive to heal.

Morning call

I've been up for a couple hours, had a couple cups of coffee, and I'm ready to interact with another human being. I call Oz. "Good morning. How are you?"

"I am the same." A keyboard clicks underneath his voice.

"How can that be? I thought the only constant was change."

"The only constants are change and Oz." More clicking. If I thought he had a Geiger counter, I'd be worried.

"It's nice to know there's something I can depend on."

"And how are you?"

"I am doing homework." I tap my pencil on my notebook.

"Oh, there's another constant."

You say to-MAY-to

Giving in to the desire for fresh fruits and vegetables (I swear I'm getting scurvy), I drop by the supermarket. I find a customer and a produce manager talking by the broccoli.

"Is this broc-CO-li?" she's trying to find out.

"No, ma'am, it's broccoli. We have crowns that have less stalk if you'd like that instead."

"Oh, I'm just not sure from the signs. But my recipe calls for broc-CO-li, it has a peppery flavor. I don't want broccoli. Is that broc-CO-li?" She points to the basket of broccolini.

"No, ma'am. That's broccolini. We have broccoli and broccolini. I don't think I've ever heard of 'broc-CO-li.' Are you sure—"

"Oh, yes. My cookbook calls for broc-CO-li, it's definitely not broccoli. It has a different taste, peppery, that's not the same as the broccoli I've been eating for seventy years." (Now here I think she's exaggerating her age in a brazen attempt to get little old lady treatment.) She indicates the sign for the broccoli crowns. "So is this broc-CO-li?"

"No, ma'am. That's broccoli crowns."

"Oh, well, it's spelled the same, that's why I asked."

Little victories

I think I finally found the right setting on my iron for my interview blouse (goes with the interview suit).

I made it up to northern Virginia and back without hitting more than one traffic jam. Also, the commuter lanes were open to all traffic on my way home.

I did not seem to be a blithering idiot during the job interview. (I was during the last one. They dragged me through a huge factory for over an hour to soften me up before the team interrogation.)

I got back into town early enough that my team were still in the lab. Under Mountain Girl's watchful eye, the guys were actually working on the Hamsters. They even made appreciable progress while I was there. I answered a few of their questions and then, my presence being a hindrance because like baby ducks they look to me, took off, saying, "So. You guys can do this in fifteen minutes." I think they can too.

Unusual spellings

When I was in the seventh grade, our English teacher had us work on twenty-five cent words. She assigned everyone a word and we had to make a poster with a sentence using the word and an illustration for the sentence.

I had "vivacious." So I wrote a sentence about a vivacious old lady and illustrated it with a picture of a gray-haired lady jumping in the air and clicking her heels together. I never could draw very well and these poster-type assignments were always painful for me. My teacher actually liked it though and wrote a nice comment on it, about the only time I ever got positive feedback on a poster.

Maybe because it's Sunday, but today I thought of this assignment and the poster of one of the other students. (The memory of my poster was an afterthought.) One of the other kids was assigned the word "hypocrite."

Their sentence was "Parents who send their kids to church but stay home on Sunday are hypocrites." The illustration showed some kids leaving home and walking towards a church while their parents stood at the front door of their house and waved them off.

So anyway, this was about twenty-six years ago, but today I started wondering about the home life of this other student (I never knew who it was). Was that a typical Sunday for this kid?

Mathematical possibilities

Whenever I see my accountant anymore, he's always shaking his head at me. I drop by his office today to see what's up and get the head shake.

"I don't think you need to file, you didn't make any money," he says. "I even ran your numbers to see and your taxable income is negative twenty thousand dollars." He starts prodding his computer as if I could read the numbers from the far side of his heaping desk.

I lean forward anyway. "Really?"

"I don't get it. You've got deductions, you've got your mortgage and your health insurance and your property tax. But no income, except for, like, two dollars of interest. This shouldn't be possible!"

We decide that I'll file anyway, just because.

The interview before the interview

Surprise!

So tonight I had dinner with some folks from the place where I'm interviewing tomorrow.

It's sort of like having an extra three hours of interview, but with food and the option of liquor. As the company was picking up the tab, they all sucked down cocktails, but I stuck with ginger ale because this wasn't exactly a social occasion for me. Excuse offered: "I have to write my resume up in Japanese this evening." (I'm trying, as I write this, to work up some warm fuzzies for wire harnesses as requested by the staffing company.)

I did learn a lot about the plant where I'd be working (smells, noise, interesting work) and what the prospective job would involve. Also, I learned not to order the pasta, even if it's what I want.

Now. Wire harnesses.

Good reception

"The reason why the remote doesn't work is that there's no batteries in it," the service person at the dealership tells me.

"What?" The people who sold me the car told me that the sensor for the remote door locks had failed and knocked $150 off the blue book price to cover a new one. We had thought of checking the battery in the remote, but we had assumed that the previous owner would have done that. Since we needed to take the car to the dealership for some other service, we decided to go ahead and get the remote door locks fixed too. But it seems we won't have to.

We get batteries instead and test out the remote when we pick up the car. It works!

As I fiddle with it throughout the day, however, I find that the range on the remote is quite limited. It works great as long as I'm standing by the driver's door with the key practically in the lock. With new batteries, it's probably not a problem with the remotes, which both have about the same range, but the sensor not working well.

I try the trick of improving the signal by pressing the remote against my chin when I press the buttons. This extends the range by a factor of ten. Also, when I do this, I stand on one foot with one arm extended and sort of pirouette.

"That's what improves the range, you know," says Oz.

"Really? Should I try sticking it up my nose too?"

"No, just flare your nostrils." He demonstrates.

"I know: when I point the thing at my chin, I'll tilt my head back and focus the rays out through my nose!"

Useful tools

Oz is trying to put his roof racks on his car, which involves actually finding the various pieces from where they've dispersed throughout the lower story of his house. He finds many more things in the process too. When he arrives at my house he is roof-rack-less, but he's fiddling with a little multi-tool.

"What is it?" I get hold of it. There's a screwdriver and multiple wrenches. From one end, I withdraw a T-shaped tool which looks like a little ball peen hammer. "And this is what? A little hammer to tap the pope on the head to see if he's dead? In case you see any dead popes lying around?"

"It's a hex key."

"I knew that. You'd think they'd use a gold hammer instead of a silver one, because silver tarnishes and it's not like the church doesn't have plenty of gold."

"Uh huh. That they had mined in South America by little children, whipped by Jesuits." Oz rolls his eyes and retrieves most of the tool kit. "Give me my pope hammer back."

Daylight savings

Tonight, when I get home from class at seven o'clock, the sky is still light and gorgeous. I've been inside all day, doing homework, in class, in the lab, and haven't been able to enjoy it. But this evening I can go for a walk down to the park, where people are walking dogs, babies, grandparents, and the sun shines sideways through the grass. The park glows, I can see it ahead from where I walk beneath ghostly cherry blossoms. The city's been cutting grass somewhere and everything smells green.

Being in school is like being sealed in a cave.

Heathen caught flat-footed by Easter holiday

Holidays can be very disruptive to those who don't celebrate them. I managed to jiggle my homeworkload so that I'd have free time today, but then everything was closed! We found Asian restaurants to eat at. (Our big holiday meals are basically in the Chinese style anymore. Maybe when school is over with I'll have time to cook again. I miss my own cooking, what I can remember of it.) After that, though, our options for stuff to do were limited by everything being closed and the weather being too cold and dreary for outdoor fun. And we didn't even get any Easter candy. I just know that all the Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs are going to be gone by the time I can get to the discounted candy bins.

Happy Pagan/Christian Amalgam to all.

Two girls walk into a bar

They are underage, but O'Toole's is a family bar. In a little corner booth, they order iced tea and sandwiches and talk about shopping for prom dresses.

One says, "So I bought this green one and then? I went to like another store and I tried on this other one. It's like pink? And so, it's like strapless? And there's this band of like fabric that starts here and loops around to the back and it's like braided?"

I lean over to Oz and say, "Those two girls over there? They're like total uptalkers? They like end every sentence with a question mark?"

Jabbing a fork at his plate, he says, "Huh? You mean, like, 'So I ordered like corned beef and cabbage? And I like put mustard on the cabbage, but it like still needs a little acid for the flavor?'"

"Shh!"

"They can't hear me!"

Spring Break

I'm on Spring Break this week.

I'm not actually taking a break.

I've had some translation work come in, a little legal job and then a big fat patent, so it's a regular work week (plus the weekend). I have a pile of school stuff on top of that and I'm surrounded by piles of cat hair that I was meaning to vacuum up…

I'm surrounded by cats too, who are taking advantage of my being at home. They stomp around on my desk while I'm working and chase each other around the office and up and down the stairs. They probably do this when I'm not here, but there's an extra food begging aspect to it when I'm around. Every time I get up to go to the kitchen (to get something for myself because I'm selfish that way), they tear in ahead of me and dance beside their empty food dish, which only gets filled at certain times of the day, but hope springs eternal in the kitty breast.

There will be a quiz

I'm at a job fair and the people I want to talk with are finally back from lunch. I've seen their job announcements on the IEEE site and I was delighted to see their table at this fair. Even better, they have circuit boards lying on their table—circuit boards with FPGAs on! So while I've been hitting the other employers (the avionics people are nice and looking for computer engineers as well), I've been drifting by this table and ogling the circuit boards.

But now the recruiters are back and surprise me by actually reading my resume. They flip it over and see the list of academic projects I stuck on there to provide tantalizing keywords for automated resume crawlers. They proceed to grill me on each one. "So, what kind of filter was that?" "What all have you done with VHDL?" "Did you put that microprocessor you implemented on an FPGA?" "Do you have experience with DSP?" And on. And on. I dredge up details about stuff I did semesters ago.

This goes on for some time.

One of them (I check his card later and find that he's the vice president who deals with hardware design) smiles and says how he's glad to find someone who's actually learned in school.

This has me wondering about my competition. Because how can anyone even survive engineering school without learning?

They also tell me all about their circuit boards and the cool things they design. I make a mental note to retrieve my DSP book from the guy who borrowed it, especially after they tell me that one of their HR people will be calling me.

More Japanese crime

The fifteen minute "News at Noon" break features a mini crime log. After mentioning the captured serial killer, they talk about an ATM heist.

Footage: They cut to a parking lot and a backhoe, painted baby blue with clouds, froggies, birdies, and bunnies. The camera pans over to an ATM enclosure which was successfully smashed with the backhoe (or "shovel car" as it's called in Japanese). These criminals tried to steal the whole ATM, which has been done before with more success. The camera cuts to a picture of a mangled ATM lying in the back of a truck. According to the announcer, the ATM contained 30 million yen (US$285K) which, if I understand correctly (my mind was busy boggling at the paint job on the backhoe), was safe.

Police are investigating.

Heh. Bunnies.

Japanese crime

The morning news runs through a crime log. Counterfeiting on what seems to be a relatively small scale has been a problem since New Year's. But now we have several incidents of people using 100 won coins (not proper Japanese 100 yen coins) in vending machines! The horror! This has happened a few times in Kanagawa prefecture. Other regions have yet to be affected.

They show footage of a 100 won coin being measured with calipers. It's a half millimeter thinner than a 100 yen coin.

Footage of vending machines appears on screen.

Footage of more vending machines appears on screen.

The camera zooms in for a close-up on the coin slot, then pans down to the coin return.

The anchor lists police measures being undertaken to catch these vile spenders of foreign money. Extra patrolling of vending machines! Special note to be taken of people spending a lot of time in front of the vending machines! (They seem unaware of how it doesn't take any longer to use a 100 won coin than it does to use a 100 yen coin.) And profiling of odd, foreign-looking people using vending machines.

Yeah, that's right: racial profiling at the vending machines. They're looking for Asian people.

I am not making this up.

Truth will out

My internet connection went down, so I wrote this dull little thing about nothing, basically, because I figured that I would write something better tomorrow and then backdate it. Then my connection came back up again. And the world shall know my dullness.

Today was a study day, although we did go out and shop around for a new video card. The video card on my PC is giving out. More and more frequently, I get horizontal cyan streaks spreading rightwards from each bit of black on the screen. Imagine how difficult that makes reading text. There is also an odd pulsating pattern of broad, vertical light and dark streaks. It doesn't help that my monitor is eight years old either. It would be really nice to get a whole new machine, but that's not an option right now.

So we go to the consumer electronics stores (I ran into a member of my lab group working at one of them) and check out the lame video card selection. You can buy a whole computer for what one of these fancy video cards costs! So I did not buy a video card. I don't use my PC all that much right now and I can probably get a cheaper card from the chop-shop sort of store where I bought the computer in the first place. Some other day when I'm not dazed with antihistamines.

In which we are disease vectors

Because if your nose is running like a faucet, why not run some errands? Besides, we're running out of Kleenex. Oz is sick too. If we were responsible we'd stay home and quarantine ourselves, but instead we go shopping and to restaurants where we eat food so spicy that even our muffled taste buds can sense it. Hey, this virus is going around anyway, it doesn't matter who's spreading it.

I feel like we should be spritzing everything we touch with sanitizer. Now that I think about it—I touched all those mugs on the rack at the coffee shop! They were hand-painted with piggies. I'm sure lots of other people will pick them up to admire the piggies and, like me, not buy the mugs because, although cute, they are not big enough for the hardcore caffeine addict, pig-lover though she be. Then they will touch their mucous membranes and the Upper Respiratory Infection shall spread. Geometrically.

In which I spend the whole day blowing my nose

I also do homework. I run over to campus for class, in which we have a pop quiz that is very easy, but I still manage to give the professor a look when he hands one to me. I have to blow my nose constantly during class. I'm suspecting this is not a cold, but an allergic reaction. On the other hand, if that were the case then I would dry up when I left the Source of All Allergens (my cats and my very dusty house which is so dusty that the cats are sneezing). Even so, I do a bunch of laundry to eliminate some of the cat dander in my immediate environment. This doesn't help, but at least I have clean stuff.

I don't think I've suddenly become allergic to cats. But I notice that the sneezing gets worse when I open up my Microfabrication notebook. This is bad timing—I have a midterm in that class on Monday.

News Flash

Snow!

I'm watching the News at Noon on TV Japan and they're reporting all these figures of people injured because of slipping and falling in the surprise snowstorm, while showing footage of hapless pedestrians and close-ups of trampled slush. The report goes on to cover transportation disruptions and they cut to the airport to show footage of iced up planes.

Pokemon airplanes.

I kid you not. ANA has 747s tarted up with a Pokemon theme. Here's a report from someone who rode in one. Looking at the dates on his report, I can see that I'm way behind the curve on this one, but it's news to me. TV Japan shows parked airplanes all the time, I don't understand why I haven't caught the Pokemon ones before.

Overheard

We are out at dinner.

At the next table, a little girl says with authority, "Six is the new five." And launches into a treatise on shoes.

Homework-free!

I am ahead with my homework. I was working on it till late Friday night in order to get to that point, but as my reward I get a homework-free weekend. This may be the only one I get all semester, so I'm going to enjoy it by, ah, not doing homework. And then not doing homework some more. This wasn't something I could plan for, or else we might have been able to arrange to take a small road trip or think of something to do besides bake cookies, which we're doing tomorrow. But this is nice. I'm really looking forward to a homework-free existence.

Buffy Studies

I've never claimed to have my finger on the pulse of pop culture. I tend to avoid touching it because you never know what you might catch. But after enduring all the hype that surrounded The End of Buffy, whenever that was, and seeing TV shows come out on DVD, it seemed, if not exactly inevitable, but, well, if it sucks we just send it back. This DVD-thingy is a good way to watch TV shows, although we tend to yell "Commercial!" at every fade to black.

Oh, and it's addictive, like brain candy.

Oz points out, "The episodes are only 45 minutes long."

"Yeah, but you can't watch just one."

Thanks to lo the many hours of indoctrination in my youth, I really like the Young Adult (YA) story structure as it works in novels. (I was the girl whose parents limited the number of books she could check out of the library at once by refusing to help carry them. I went through fifteen or sixteen books a week.) They utilized the YA genre fiction structure perfectly for this show. If you don't know what I mean, read something by Diana Wynne Jones and you will. Anyway, all through engineering school I've been resting my brain with YA novels and now it seems that I can partake in video form.

I'll still get all my homework done. I can stop watching any time.

Opened eyes

Saturday night, really Sunday morning, and hours after I finish my discrete mathematics assignment, I lie in bed and prepare to drift off.

I'm having a little trouble drifting. Suddenly, homework—

"Oh. Is that what I did wrong? Did I misread the directions? Noooo." For one problem I got a different answer than what was in the back of the book and I didn't see how they got what they did. Now I do. Maybe.

"How tricky! Assuming that I'm remembering it right. Am I?" I scroll through the scrap of code in my mind. We were supposed to determine the Order of a looped structure. I did that problem several times before I got it "right" and then I was still wrong.

"No, maybe it was a different one. But, hmm. That's how they got an Order of 1. You enter the loop once and then leave without looping. Sheesh. And I spent so much time on it. Unless—"

Oz asks me if I need to get up and make notes.

"No, I'll remember this."

My subconscious never takes a holiday.

Oz makes a hat

I have homework. I can't procrastinate any more, so there's nothing for it but to sit indoors on this springlike (Setsubun strikes!) sunny day and work on discrete mathematics. Big O notation—so much fun and I'm sure it will be really useful. Now that I've committed those words to electrons, I'm sure they'll be haunting me shortly.

Oz amuses himself. Of late he has been disappointed with the fleece hats on offer at Target or wherever. He decided to venture into millinery and thus acquired navy blue fleece, needle, thread. Today is hat day since he ends up having a few hours (my hoped for two minute problems are liberally interspersed with the 45 minute kind). He cuts a strip of fleece, sews the ends together, sews closed one end of the resultant tube, and sews together the two corners of the sewn together end. He turns it inside out and, voila, hat.

"How do you like my hat?" The hat looks okay. Dark blue, hat-like, trapezoidal at the top.

"It's nice. You look, uh, Canadian. All you need is a beer, a string going through a hole in the ice, and an opinion on hockey. Eh?"

Relatively painless

Our mission: Acquire interview suit and appropriate accessories.

Mission accomplished, but I'm now having pangs of the "does it make my butt look big?" variety. I'll try it on again tomorrow and see if I still like it. Not that there's too much selection out there. Who thought that low rise pants were such a good idea that nothing else should be sold for years and years? That evil cabal must be stopped.

Then it was shoes. Amazingly enough, I found two pair that were the right size, shape, and general conformation to go with the suit and not hurt my feet. Needless to say, they looked nearly identical, but I bought them both because it's sensible to have a spare.

Next mission: Get to a tailor and have the assorted hems adjusted.

All this is just way too girly.

On names

Since I'm looking for a job and have been posting my resume around, I've been thinking about names and bias in America. As found in a study by economists at MIT and the University of Chicago, referenced in this Washington Post article about the Implicit Association Test (via John Scalzi), job candidates with stereotypically "white" names get 50% more calls than candidates with stereotypically "black" names. And this study was done with identical resumes, the only difference was the names. When I first heard about this study a few years ago, I felt like I'd been punched in the stomach.

What does this have to do with me?

My name is stereotypically more common among black people. I say "stereotypically" because I don't know if that is actually the case. The three people that I've known personally with my same name are all white, as am I. The two local newscasters with my same name are not. On the two or three occasions when I've introduced myself to someone who's told me that their wife/aunt/cousin has the same name as I do, those folks have been black. So based on this small sample, I'd have to say that my name is probably as likely to belong to a white person as a black person. But will a recruiter have the same perspective? Or will I have to settle for getting fewer calls than a less qualified person with the benefit of a "whiter" name?

I've probably been affected by this type of discrimination for years without even realizing it. All my work as a freelancer is handled over the phone, with clients whose recruiters have pulled my resume out of a pile and called me in spite of my name, and perhaps even because of my qualifications. Maybe the response rate would have been higher if I had a different name. If you want a Japanese semiconductor patent translated, who do you call first? A white guy or a black chick? (Actually, I think they call the lowest bidder. Think about that next time you complain about the bad translation of the instructions for your home electronics. The massive conglomerate couldn't be bothered to pony up the extra US$0.05 per word to have the job done right.)

Now that I'm making a career change to a very white-male-dominated field, I might consider using my middle name, which is gender-neutral and about as lily-white as it gets. But my name is my name. Besides, I'd rather work in an organization that hires on the basis of more than the supposed "race" of the name at the top of the resume.

My life as white sale

Oh goody! More shopping.

The flannel sheets I've been using for the past few years are wearing out. The fitted sheet is worn to the consistency of Kleenex and will probably dissociate into its component fibers if stretched over the mattress another time. The flat sheet and pillow cases are in sturdier condition, but totally denuded of fuzz and, a fuzzy surface being the very essence of flannel, are therefore candidates for replacement as well.

Today we brave the icy roads and head out to a large chain store. Well, an inch or two of ice overlays my block, but the rest of the roads are clear. Minimal bravery required.

In the bizarre world of American retail, however, it's already spring. A few ice scrapers and sleds stand at the entrance to the store, but inside April holds sway over the stock. This works to my advantage to a small degree, because flannel sheet sets are half price. The selection, however, is minimal. My choices are black or red (dark colors don't seem right for bedding), beige plaid (what is the point of that? If you're going plaid, it ought to be Royal Stewart or Black Watch), or granny flowers. The selection is a little better for queen size because it includes a print of little dogs wearing sweaters. Dogs with sweaters! Almost as good as monkeys. Alas, I must settle for the granny flowers.

We find a little more ice to drive over on the way home. We observe the chunks of blackened ice dropping off the SUVs on the interstate, as if the trucks are pooping. Outside the chain stores, winter is still in charge.

New Blankie

I have a headache. The muscles on the back of my head and neck were knotted tight when I woke this morning. I'm not used to tension headaches and I don't know what's causing this one. Tense? Atashi? I've got a couple weeks before the semester really starts grinding me down. (By evening my headache settles into its usual migraine form. Lucky me.)

We dither by the blankets. As a lap robe, I've been using a large piece of fleece I cut from an old robe and Oz thinks that's silly because it's just not big enough. So here we are at Target to get another throw to add to the pile of pillows and blankets on the futon I use as a sofa (soon there will be no room left for me). Our choices are a plain little down throw or a little fake suede and fake fur throw which looks mildly barbaric.

Oz compares them and holds up the down throw. "You probably like this one?"

"So you don't think I look like a Viking princess?" I am blonde and square-jawed after all.

He replaces the down throw and reaches for the fake animal products throw. "I guess the cats will like this one, do you think?"

"So I don't look like a Viking princess?"

"Ha."

I do now, at least when draped with this polyester hide.

Falling snow (excellent snow)

This is the picture.

We were supposed to have a half inch of accumulation, but the snow starts while I eat lunch and the half inch is soon buried under another half inch. People in the northerly climes will laugh, but the radio station started announcing school closings immediately. The mercury hovers around 20 °F and the snow fluffs around like powder instead of settling into a slushy mess.

Oz calls. "It's really slick outside. Be careful. Give yourself lots of extra time to get to class. And if you get stuck on campus tonight, call me."

"Yeah, okay." I'm checking my university's website to see if they've closed yet. Nope.

I head out, giving myself thirty-five minutes to make what is normally a ten minute drive. I brush the snow off the car and drive away, observing that the very dry snow gives the effect of driving on ball bearings. The car slithers around on the road and the ABS does its thing. Noting odd little traffic backups here and there, I creep very slowly down the hill (my neighborhood is on top of a hill). The car still slithers. I'm used to driving small, front-wheel-drive vehicles and the Volvo, being a very large, rear-wheel-drive vehicle, handles much differently in the snow. Really badly, in fact, no matter how slowly I go. What do Swedish people drive when there's an inch of snow on the ground?

Okay. So I'm still recovering from my last automotive brush with death. I start to shake and suddenly it seems like a very good idea to go back home. I don't see the point in risking my car, my relatively low auto insurance premiums, and my already damaged neck to attend classes, the main focus of which will be to go over a syllabus. I still feel guilty because I never miss class.

I creep along Franklin to 25th Street and turn left on 25th to head back up the hill. The front end of the car tries to go up the hill as instructed, but the back end keeps heading straight on up Franklin (also up the hill, but much steeper than 25th). Now I'm sort of crookedly sitting in the middle of the intersection.

The guilt over cutting class quickly fades. I might be able to drive up the hill backwards, but I'm not up for the challenge and navigating the hill in any orientation or direction suddenly seems like a terrible idea when I see a truck, driving slowly down 25th, slide into a parked car. I gingerly maneuver the car around and park it on a nice flat stretch of Franklin in the middle of a block where it should be safe from persons taking corners too fast.

And I walk home in the snow. Up hill. Both ways. Well, only one way. Full disclosure: it's only eight blocks and I can look forward to hot cocoa, novels, and the internet to play with when I get there. I'm not expecting sympathy here.

Utensils

Remember how the side rail of the four poster bed broke? And Oz fixed it up? And then I made up the bed all nice and cleaned the room of all evidence of woodworking and handyman type activities? Probably not, because I didn't write about all that. But it did happen and we were very pleased about it, until yesterday, when we noticed a serious twist on the footboard.

The unbroken part of the side rail is heading towards the broken end of the side rail spectrum. Rather than wait for it to break before we do anything, we decide to deal with it like grownups. "Besides," Oz points out, "I still have all the clamps and glue in my car."

This afternoon he gets to work. I help unmake the bed and then retire to my office where I stay out of his way and write a user manual for the Hamster system. Mostly out of his way. I do go up and visit a few times.

I find Oz prying away at the end of the side rail.

"Is that my nail file?" I ask.

"Yes. I have to get the metal pegs out somehow."

"Oh. Well, I guess that isn't the only nail file in the world."

"I'm using your tweezers too." He pauses to hold up my good pink tweezers.

"Oh." I'm less blasébout the tweezer abuse, but in the interests of getting the bed fixed, I'll deal. (Later, I find them back in the medicine cabinet, apparently none the worse except for being less pink where the paint chipped off.)

Right now the side rail is all clamps and glue. Tomorrow we'll reassemble the bed, make it up, and clean up the room. Again. I'm hoping that nothing else is going to break right away, but that's silly of me, isn't it?

Catwalk

South 21st between East Main and Cary Streets
Catwalk between two tobacco factory buildings in Shockoe Bottom.

This picture dates back to last February. The catwalk is still there, but the buildings are being worked on, so who knows for how much longer? I like the velvety greens, but not the glare so much. I took the picture standing with my back to an abandoned safe and this courtyard.

Can you tell nothing happened today? That's why you get a picture.

Or maybe not.

I got the car an oil change, did more office cleaning and shredding, got calendars. One thing I like about January is when I set up my calendar for the year. I page through last year's calendar, reading the notes I wrote about what happened when, and mark important things from it into the new calendar: dates when tax forms are due, friends' birthdays and anniversaries, friends' kids' birthdays, etc. I mystify people by my ability to remember birthdays, but there's no magic to it. I even mark the birthday of my first novel, the day when I finished it. The novel turns three this November. Alas, it needs to be rewritten. It's novel #2 that's sitting in a slush pile. I did figure out how to fix up this first one. If I cut out half the characters (way too many characters) and break apart the plot lines (way too many plot lines) and rewrite it as two novellas, it'll work. If I only had more time, but when the time is right I'll write. All right?

Confetti

I'm a fairly organized person with a certain amount of tolerance for clutter. Over the past few years, that tolerance has turned to blindness and denial. When I stop doing school for the day, I basically collapse with my iBook, some Scotch, and whatever banal drama is running on TV Japan. Filing bills, tidying up the office, picking up books and putting them—where? I've got no more room in the bookcases. I guess I'll just stack them here on the floor in the pile with the binders of notes for my sad, neglected writing projects and the magazines that I'm going to read as soon as I finish up this YA novel.

However, the leaning tower of unfiled bills, bank statements, and unopened statements from the mutual fund people has gotten too unstable. It's been growing since the filing cabinet became too stuffed to accommodate any more paper and is over eight inches high now. The filing cabinet (obviously the culprit here) contains filed bills, bank statements, and opened statements from the mutual fund people going back to 1998 when I last purged the files of ancient and unwieldy quantities of paper.

In the spirit of New Year's Cleaning, I decide that today is the day to do some filing. Purging the filing cabinet is kind of fun. I find the receipt from a luxurious weekend at The Homestead (1998, back when we were making money and BES (Before Engineering School)), some papers relating to a court case that I never did contract to translate (Small World Alert: the plaintiff turned out to be the father of the girl who sat beside me in my first calculus class at Reynolds), and various "Why did I even file this?" sorts of papers. Some stuff goes into the trash, but anything with a credit card number or account number goes into a bag to be shredded. This bag gets rather full.

Then I sort the stack of unfiled papers. I even open my mutual fund statements and find that things aren't as bad as I feared. Then I file things and take out the trash. It's actually rather satisfying to have brought order to a corner of my office.

I sit down and push paper through the shredder till it jams. I fix the shredder. I think, "Given that I broke my washing machine this morning, maybe it's time to quit for the day." I now have a grocery bag half full of white confetti and I wish that credit card companies and banks were more exuberant in their choice of paper colors.

Fair trade coffee. Must it suck?

The answer is no. We're pleased enough with the Ethiopian Yirgacheffe from The Righteous Bean. We are, however, less pleased with another brand we tried today. Mocha Java should have flavor, no? Oz even tried melting a piece of Belgian chocolate into his cup, to the betterment of neither. Although it was interesting to see how it melted, the chocolate deserved a better fate. The coffee is going to Oz's house, where it will be left in the path of his son and the son's female companion who haven't got quite the sophisticated palates that Oz and I do. There was plenty of caffeine, though, so I'm going to be up for a while.

You'd think that with all this stimulation I could come up with more to write about, but you'd be wrong. Blah, blah. What else happened today? The side rail of the bed broke and fell off while Oz was in bed. Very dramatic. One of the finials popped off its post and was thrown across the room. This was not a big surprise, for me, anyway. (Oz might say something else, like "Help!") The bed had been telegraphing its intent via the steadily increasing torque on the head and foot boards. It's a four-poster and while the posts on the right side were mostly vertical (| |), the posts on the left side were not (/ \). Our errands today included a trip to the hardware store for assorted adhesives, brass screws, and fittings to be used for repairs. We also bought cat food and coffee (see above). At the cat food store, we paused to look at the hamsters running in their little wheels. Two Chinese Dwarf Hamsters were trying to run in the same small wheel at the same time, alternately falling out and hopping back in. The wheel kept on turning. That's, like, metaphorical or something.

New Year's Day

Today I did the following.

Out loud, I said, "I survived 2004!" I was thinking these words last week when the tsunami happened, causing 140,000 (and counting) people not to live out the year. I thought I had better keep quiet till I was certain that I had made it.

I had a headache. Where did that come from? I only had two glasses of champagne last night.

I cleaned the telephones. Lots of crud collects in the handset rests, especially in the case of the phone that sits near a window. I cleaned up some cat barf too. Nothing says "Happy New Year" like cat barf. Thanks, kitties!

I donated money to Mécins Sans Frontiès for tsunami relief.

I applied for a job at Apple, because they've got a cool job for which I am (or may be able to make them think I am) qualified, and I love my iBook. Wouldn't my brother be envious if I got it?

I didn't make any resolutions. I've got enough on my plate as it is: finish the last semester of engineering school, get a job, relocate if necessary (involves getting my house ready to sell, etc.), continue trying to sell my novel, continue dealing with the medical fallout from the accident, negotiate an insurance settlement for the accident. Who knows what else is going to pop up? I would like to get my life settled down enough that I could write more.

I went for a drive with Oz on this pretty, warm day. We drove east on Route 5 into the sunshine and saw lots of mistletoe hanging green in the oak trees, hunters' trucks pulled off by the side of the road, a "hunter" beagle with bright orange tape on his collar, and lots of folks taking their Harleys or boats out for a spin.

I ordered a new bag that is big enough to hold all the stuff I want to carry around all the time.

I ate good chocolate and drank delicious coffee.

All in all, this was a pretty good way to start the year. Hello, 2005!

Shut-in

I've forgotten much about what my life was like before engineering school took over. While engineering students have to go to school and interact with each other, highly introverted freelance translators don't tend to get out much. School being out for the holidays, today was a typical translator day.

I struggle out of bed, consume caffeine, and read my morning junk on the internet. When I run out of junk (this can happen, believe it or not), I make more coffee and start translating. I take a break for lunch, translate some more, take a break to ice down my shoulder (a new part of my routine), finish up the job, step outside to get the mail, ice down the shoulder again… Not all that interesting to write about.

Yes, that's a day in the life of a translator. Thinking back, I recall that this is partly why I started going to engineering school. The lack of human interaction was getting to me. Admittedly, I'm so introverted that it took ten years before it started getting to me, but even introverts can get lonely and weird from being alone all the time. The beauty of the Engineering School Solution is that I keep company mostly with other introverts, who are generally less annoying than that other type of human.

(News highlights of 2004 are on TV. It's one horrific tragedy after another.)

Fingers crossed

I woke up this morning to find a fax from my client in Tokyo. They had a job for me (maybe) and wanted to see if I was available.

Pure patent heaven: 17,000 words on a packet-switching system. Plenty of money and something much more fun than leases for storage closets. The deadline was pretty far out, so I'd be able to juggle my medical appointments, Hamster work, and the job without breaking a sweat. And with the money I'd be able to get through the next semester without further depleting my savings.

Or so I chanted to myself all day as I paid bills, ran errands, went to the doctor and got to see my MRI again.

And then, having thoroughly jinxed myself by wanting it too much, I checked my email at the start of business (Tokyo time) to find that the job had been cancelled.

Maybe a better job will come in, but I wanted this one. What self-indulgent angst, I think as I watch on TV the disaster unfolding on the edges of the Indian Ocean. Things could be oh so much worse, and are, but not for me.

Christmas Eve

For my cats, I cut apart an old fleece robe into big sheets of fleece. Fleece is a cat magnet, judging by how the cats glom onto any horizontal fleece surface, and by how the fleece locks the cat hair on and never lets it go. I spread the fleece out on the bed and that's where the cats spent the day. Oz thinks I should have left the cuffs on the sleeves and used them for cat sweaters.

I baked a sweet potato cheesecake, not quite a tradition since I haven't made one in a couple years. The cheesecake has a topping made of sour cream, sugar, and vanilla extract and the cheesecake has to cool for several hours before you put it in the fridge. My evil cat Sparky is not interested in dairy products, so I wasn't concerned about leaving the cheesecake unattended. I forgot about how he likes to vandalize baked goods. When I went back into the kitchen to check on the cheesecake, I found that it had been licked!

"You can just scrape off that bit," Oz points out and reaches for the spoon lying in the sink.

"Yes, but you can't use the cat food spoon!" With a clean spoon from the drawer, I scrape a layer of sour cream off the licked area and wave it in front of him. "So you want this?"

"Sure! Cat spit makes it good."

Solstice eve

Very dark, so what better time to look at Christmas lights, especially what with snow on the ground?

We drive down Monument Avenue and see trees dripping with colored tube lights, clouds of white lights hovering in the porticos, and tentacles of color oozing up the Doric columns. Not much in the way of gaudy, vulgar excess because this is not that kind of street. The only really bizarre display is at St. Mary's Hospital, sort of a "clear cut Christmas." The fringe of trees that shades the hospital from the street is decorated, after a fashion: each trunk is wound with strings of white lights up to about the height of a stepladder. (Ya think?) In the dark, the overall effect is of a lot of brightly lit stumps, the enchanted forest after the loggers have come through.

Chance of snow

RAIN SHOWERS LIKELY THIS EVENING...THEN A CHANCE OF SNOW SHOWERS. LITTLE OR NO ACCUMULATION. LOWS AROUND 20. NORTHWEST WINDS 15 TO 20 MPH. CHANCE OF PRECIPITATION 60 PERCENT.

Or so they say, anyway. They've been forecasting flurries for late tonight, but right now we've got clumps of snow being flung around with considerable vigor by these winds. There's already an inch on the ground. It's fluffy and damp, so I doubt it'll shut down the city completely [Check back tomorrow to see if I'm eating my words]. No school tomorrow, but then school's out for the semester.

This morning we were joking about the flurries, in an "Oh yeah, three flakes and they call it a flurry" sort of way, then we started getting ahead of ourselves, daydreaming about all the things we could do once I get out of school.

Oz said, "So if we can ever take mini-vacations again, we should go out into the mountains and get a place, a condo or something, with a big picture window and a view of the mountains and the snow. And soft chairs and a fireplace. And a big pile of books. We can just read and watch the snow."

Is it any wonder that I love this man?

Clear blue sky

I know the sound of an eagle's cry, because I used to watch Northern Exposure. I've heard that eagles live along the James River now. I even saw one once, from the car when we were driving back from Tidewater on Route 5. I was looking up in the trees for mistletoe and there he was, doing that Sam the Eagle pose. Other than that, though, I haven't seen any. Till today.

I was walking out on Libby Hill Park, out on the bluff near the fountain, and I heard that cry. Eagle? Here? Looking up, I saw an eagle, soaring not too high above, cream and gold. He circled over me and two cyclists who stopped to point up into the sky, at him, then drifted off towards Bloody Run.

Sacrifice to the root of all evil

As I'm finishing up my last assignment of the semester, a technical report on the Hamsters, I get a phone call from a client. They have a translation job, thirty some pages with a tight deadline.

So much for my day off, I think and accept the job because it's a mortgage payment. I'd be a little more excited if (1) I wouldn't have to work this weekend and (2) it were a patent or something else technical.

I'm translating leases. Leases for storage closets. Some company is renting three storage closets in the Tokyo office building where they also rent office space and each storage closet gets its own lease. A ten page lease, I might add. Not only that, the leases are not identical (although the closets are) and one even has a cosigner, necessitating the inclusion of a few extra clauses.

I'd rather be engineering.

Santé!

Trashy fiction in hand, we're leaving the Barnes & Noble. This bookstore shares a strip mall with a Pet Smart and a few other stores. A Target rises in the distance across a broad swath of parking lot.

Another couple is standing outside the doors and having a discussion.

"Let's walk," he says pointing towards the Target. "It'll be healthy for us."

"No. We're driving."

"Oh, come on. It's not far. It'll be healthy."

"No," she repeats. "I'm going to buy stuff. We're taking the car."

"Walking is good for us. It's healthy," he says. It's also 25 °F, but I guess one burns more calories when one is walking in the cold, making it extra healthy.

"You can walk. Give me the keys." Her patience is running out.

"Let's go together. It's a walk. It's healthy."

"We can go together. In the car. Give me the keys."

By now, Oz and I have moved out of earshot, but we're giggling. Oz is whispering, "'Come on! Give me the fucking keys!'" Behind us, some conclusion is reached. She follows us out into the parking lot in front of the bookstore, presumably with keys in hand. He troops out eastward, across the other parking lot, towards Target, alone for his constitutional.

Luck o' the mutant

Upon reaching a study saturation point this afternoon, I go for a walk. Down on Main Street, out the corner of my eye, I see a four leaf clover as I walk by. Two steps back. Was that a four leaf clover? Usually when I think I see one, there is a four leaf clover there. There. I reach down to pick it (because one can never have too many) and brush away a three-leafed neighbor that doesn't quite brush. Away. Because, I see, this is not a neighbor after all. My four leaf clover has three more leaves springing from its stem a finger's width below the four. Is this lucky?

Sidewalk surfing

So if you had a big Siberian husky and a skateboard, and you wanted to make walking the dog more interesting, or at least faster, wouldn't you combine the two?

A guy in my neighborhood has been trying to do that. We first saw him a week or so ago. He was skating along with the dog trailing behind, looking rather bemused. Occasionally the dog would dart off to the side, man and skateboard would part, man and dog would negotiate, and the process would start over again.

Tonight as I was coming downstairs I saw them again through the transom window over my front door. This time the dog was trotting along in front, straight ahead, with the man in tow on the skateboard. Solidly on the skateboard, knees flexed, one hand holding the lead and the other stretched out for balance.

Field of vision

I like tests I can pass.

Today I had to get a vision field test to establish a baseline for my vision. I am taking this medicine that has the potential to damage my vision, although the risk is rather low relative to the benefit of the drug.

For a vision field test, you look into a blank field, essentially the inside of a hemisphere painted white and click a button every time you see a red dot appear at some random location. The test machine is rather high tech, a servo moves around and beams a little red light onto a lens. The servo actuates audibly every time right before the red light appears. With difficulty, I restrain myself from clicking the button every time I hear the servo.

Afterwards, the doctor goes over the results with me. As fortune would have it, my eye doctor's wife has been on the same medicine for fourteen years, so he knows all about it. He tells me about the risks involved and peers into my eyes, before clearing me to keep on taking the medicine. "You can go ahead and put your contacts back in while I finish marking your chart," he says, adding "If you need a mirror we can get you one."

"No, I don't need it. I been wearing contacts since I was fourteen," I tell him.

"Yeah, I know, you can flip it in the air and catch it in your eye. I don't want to hear that," he says, leaning over the paperwork.

Silly things

Introducing my classmates to otaku snacking: Pocky! I brought in boxes of Men's Pocky and Pocky G for them to try. Mountain Girl was singing the Pocky jingle, sort of, for the rest of the day. "Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na Pocky!" (Her take on Anata-mo, watashi-mo, Pocky!)

The sign outside a local doc-in-a-box: "Thanksgiving Special: We'll check out your giblets." This is what the US healthcare system is coming to?

What is it with the squirrels in my neighborhood? Today I saw one run across the sidewalk and up a phone pole carrying a corn cob, about half the length of his body. Probably not too heavy for him, but awkward enough that when he tossed his head back to get a better grip on it, he nearly peeled backwards off the pole and took a header on the sidewalk.

Not that I'm complaining, but today I got an email from student accounting, informing me of a $200 refund on my tuition as "need-based aid." After I've been denied scholarships for years, on account of I already have a degree, depleted my savings, and racked up over twenty grand in student loan debt in pursuit of this engineering degree. Gee, thanks!

A professor, on seeing my grades, saying, "God, you're like a Stepford student. You even…You got an A in 302?"

The Bopst Show, in which Bopst ascribed mysterious booming noises on Northside to an atmospheric manifestation of the collective horror of 49 million Americans at the prospect of another four years of the current administration.

Cookie cwumbs!

Old in-jokes never die. They just end up requiring backstory.

Today, I noodle around on the computer upstairs, Oz sits downstairs at the table reading Wired and absent-mindedly eating lemon wafer cookies. The whole bag. Without even noticing. When I go downstairs later, I find leaf bits from his shoes and cookie crumbs mashed into the rug beside his chair.

"What's this? Cookie cwumbs!" I cry. ("Cookie cwumbs" dates back to college. It's not even my in-joke, I just like saying "cookie cwumbs!")

"Sparky did it!" Oz claims, without even looking at the mess. (Sparky is a cat.)

"Sparky doesn't eat citrus-flavored stuff," I point out. (Of course, Sparky doesn't drink beer either, but we don't let that stop us from blaming him when we run out of beer.)

"Yeah, but you know what a mess he makes." Maintaining his innocence, he vacuums the rug for me.

Trick or treat

On Friday I went for a walk.

Halloween decorations are still up around the neighborhood. Every Victorian mansion should be festooned with green spooky webs for several months out of the year. It's a few days after Halloween, though, so I'm sure the webs will soon be replaced with sparkly lights.

Carrying something bright and red, a squirrel darts across the sidewalk and partway up a scruffy maple. What kind of a nut is that? I look at the squirrel and he, a foil-wrapped Hershey Kiss gripped securely in his teeth, looks back at me.

"Hey, squirrel, that'll make you sick. You'll get heart failure if you eat that."

Squirrel just looks at me. If a squirrel chatters with a Hershey kiss in his mouth and I'm there, it still makes no sound. Squirrel heads on up the tree and straight for death by chocolate.

So this is what it takes?

I guess I kind of wondered what it would take to knock Virginia's non-Republican voters out of their apathy and to the polls to make protest votes.

I live in a heavily Democratic (or, at least, non-Republican) neighborhood. Usually I'm in and out of the polling place in five minutes. In 2000, I had to wait fifteen minutes. My precinct only has four voting machines, the old lever kind, more than enough to cope with the usual low turnout.

Today I arrived at 9:00 and the line went out the door and halfway down the block. I waited one hour and forty-five minutes. Admittedly, this was due as much to the poor throughput of the election officials handling the A-J voters (the K-Z team's throughput was seven times theirs—I was waiting more than long enough to make the calculations) as it was to the number of people showing up. One of the campaign people told me that when he arrived at 6:00 am, the line went all the way down the block and around the corner.

Yay for the Seventh Precinct! I knew we had it in us.

Pink

At the auto parts store, they sell cashews for cheap. We are only there for a gas cap, however, so cashews remain unpurchased.

"But what about pistachios?" I ask Oz. "I remember when I was a kid, every gas station we ever stopped at had one bright pink pistachio shell on the asphalt. You never see that anymore." It was always one half of a pink pistachio shell, actually, synthetic in color, but not in form, like some miniature alien tortoise. The strange thing is that one never saw two halves.

Next stop: Vanessa's to pick up some coffee.

Oz tucks a couple bucks in the tip jar marked "Help the starving students" and observes aloud that the staff really look like they're starving.

One barista runs a hand along his very not emaciated arm and agrees.

"And the starvation is turning your hair colors not found in nature?" Oz says loudly and pointedly at the other barista.

The barista with the hot pink hair looks over and grins. "It grows out of my head this color, actually."

"Yeah? From all that cotton candy your parents fed you? And pistachios?" says Oz.

"Yeah. I was one wired kid, let me tell you."

Ghost town

Today we drove down to Petersburg and walked around the Old Town area for a little while. Poor Petersburg. Despite Mother Nature's occasional tantrums (tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, the odd fire now and then), the old commercial district has a large number of very nice structures. Most of them are unoccupied. A few antique stores cling to life, restaurants come and go. We went into a tiny bookstore that didn't stock any more books than I have at my house. On the bright side, the city has tons of free public parking because no one goes there. So few cars were even passing through that we were able to jaywalk indiscriminately.

Slightly to the east of the oldest part of the district stood an old, twentieth century, light industrial building with no roof. A sign reading "Quality" was set in the above the doorway (no door). And spray-painted on the wall beside the doorway: "Yes, we are still open." Yeah, open to the elements.

We saw lots of ghost signs too. My favorite was for Heretick Feed & Seed. (Actually the building seemed to be still occupied.) It makes me think of infidels who sound like windup alarm clocks.

Why we couldn't watch The Lord of the Rings in the theater

"Wow. So. When are we moving to New Zealand?"

"Yeah. Look at the Eye of Sauron. Go on, snitch it from Gandalf. He'll never notice."

"Oh, not more weeping!"

"'No French horns were spared in the making of this film.'"

"Wow. So. When are we moving to New Zealand? And now that they've lit the beacons and called for help across like—"
"Fifteen mountain ranges and twelve steppes—"
"They'll get to Minas Tirith in six months."

"Let's pause this a second. I need to run downstairs and feed the cats. Then we can watch the, ah, second half without all this meowing."
"The second half? But we've been watching this movie for five hours already. When will it end?"

"Look, elf chips."
"'Oh, Master Frodo!' 'Oh, Sam!' C'mon, kiss him! You know you want to."
"Yeah. 'We'll talk about what a rotter you were later.'"

"Hey, those cobwebs just pulled the dirt right off 'em. See how clean they look now?"

"That Faramir looks pretty pink to be a corpse."
"And they do such a good job about color coding all the characters. You can always tell when someone's dead or cursed what with all that white makeup."

"The geography of Middle Earth is characterized by very high precipices that people are apt to fall off suddenly and without warning."

"What? No arterial spurt?"

"Army of the Dead. Cool!"

"'Oh, Merry!' 'Oh, Pippin!' C'mon, kiss him! You know you want to."
"Male hobbits pair-bond for life, you know."

"What I don't get are these huge citadels that pretty much crumble the second a trolls spits on them. They must have taken centuries to build. Why did they bother?"

"Does lava really flow that fast?"
"Only when it's propelled by the powers of evil."

"The only people that really made sense here were the orcs. Once they heard the boss say 'Oh I'm fucked', they just walked. 'No pension plan? I'm outta here.'"

Hope springs eternal

On Saturday the latest (second) rejection slip for my novel arrived. This was not unexpected, but what surprised me was that the slush reader was moved to write a few words on the slip to let me know why he didn't want my novel. And by "few" I mean "five," but as one was the word "Excellent" and it was underlined, I'm actually rather encouraged. However, since I don't presently have time to rewrite the novel to suit him better, I'll try to find another publisher who buys books more like mine.

This means I need to find a publisher of girlie books (not naughties, I mean books that appeal to girls). Today Oz and I drop by the bookstore to do a little research on books with curly pink lettering, unicorns, or psychic dragons. Not that my novel has unicorns or psychic dragons, but the girls who read those books—I was one of them myself, back in the day—are my prospective market.

"I need to see who publishes Anne McCaffrey. I think it's Del Rey," I say.

"Yeah, and what about that Marion Zimmer Bradley and that one with all the psi storms," Oz says.

"Andre Norton?"

"Yeah. They've got to be, like, a hundred years old now. The publishers must be looking to replace them. Or maybe they already have! Yeah, with computers. 'Input a few plot parameters. Bunny rabbits, yeah, psychic vorpal bunny rabbits from Mars. With teeth!'"

Hey, I could work with that…

Surface streets

I've found a way to cut two miles off the commute, reducing it to seventy-five miles, by getting off the interstate early and driving past one of the scarier housing projects in town. I'm not actually scared of the housing project, though. What worries me is that in thirty seconds I go from driving eighty miles per hour, as I have for over an hour, to driving twenty-five through a residential area with a lot of pedestrians and folks in cars who have a creative approach to driving. It's hard to change my driving reflexes that quickly. My eyes still want to focus a mile ahead, making it difficult to perceive the men walking their bicycles along the double yellow lines in the center of the road. And the guys on the sidewalk talking with them and who tend to step into the street without checking for oncoming cars. The sudden influx of ice cream trucks to the neighborhood (we've never had them before, and now there are like five that drive around constantly). Kids eating ice creams. And shouldn't that girl have more clothes on? It's just not that hot out. Yet.

Other distractions abound. For its grand opening, the new Food Market had hand-stenciled signs reading "GIT YO GRUB ON" which they only had out that one day. Now I constantly check for them because I still can't quite believe they were real. Spray-painted on the metal roll-up doors of another store is "RIP LO" (probably not a Nabokov reference). So who's Lo? And what happened?

Ocean Grocery, US Beauty, the police precinct. Walking in the street, a girl pushes a baby in a stroller and talks to the men sitting on the curb.

I roll across M Street and I'm almost home.

Holiday?

After an evening of visiting with old friends and crashing at their house, I wake up Sunday morning rather late. Oh! Bad houseguest! When I go downstairs I find Siegfried and Roy watching CNN.

They say, "Good morning! We're glad you got some sleep. Reagan died."

"Really?"

"Yeah. We might get a day off!" They are awfully cheery.

"Why?" I ask.

"Well, when Nixon died they closed the federal government on the day of his funeral. For mourning," Roy explains. Both of them are federal employees, I should add.

"Oh yeah, like you guys mourned for Nixon. You probably mourned that he couldn't die twice so you'd get a second day off."

"Hey, you might get a day off too since you're interning with a federal agency."

Now that gets my attention. The boys spend the rest of the day obsessively checking their civil servant "What's New" site to see when this hypothetical day off will occur and reminding themselves that the site won't be updated till Monday.

I hear on the news this morning that Bush has declared a federal day of mourning. Unsatisfied with one day off, the Congress decides to spend the rest of the week "eulogizing Reagan," which I take to mean "blowing off work except to show up for a couple hours and make a speech." But at least Siegfried and Roy get their day off and it is announced during the internship orientation that even we lowly microbes in the federal system get a paid day off too.

Your tax dollars at work. Only not.

Jazz

Envelopes (bills) in my hand, I am walking to the post office. At the corner I see a girl in a flowered dress talking and laughing with a man standing astride a motorcycle. They say goodbye and he rides off while she walks ahead of me down the street. She is slender, her hair close-cropped against a perfect skull, and the full skirt of her dress (between the flowers it is brown, a shade darker than her skin) scoops and sways around her in the evening breeze. On her feet are flat shoes that make no sound on the road. She walks along singing snatches of a song I've never heard, maybe she hasn't either and she's only playing with notes and words. Not hardly trying, sounding so pretty just in her head voice, but you can hear a power to ring your ears if she decides to belt it out instead. She walks along singing and reaching up and out, ending a line of her song with a slap on a branch of a willow oak.

"Hey, Mo," she calls to a man sitting on a porch. "Hey. Did you see that man on the motorcycle I was talking to? That was my dad." She draws out the last word into almost two disapproving syllables.

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. That motorcycle, he just got it yesterday. You know how much he paid? Three thousand dollars. Can you believe that? He ain't got the love."

Bits of the obvious

"You're breathing." Oz is half glaring, half laughing. He's sitting at the table with his textbook open before him. For the first time ever, he has homework and I do not. He's taking a C# class this summer, while I have no classes and no homework.

"Huh?" I look up from where I'm squatting on the kitchen floor. I've been carrying on a conversation with my cat Sparky. One of those conversations in which I vocalize both parts in different voices. "You are an evil cat." Yes, I am. So you should feed me. "No, I shall rub your tummy instead." I hate this. Oh! A little more over here. He rolls over and presents another part of his tummy for rubbing. "See that's not so bad." Yes, it is. Such indignity up with which I must put! ad nauseum.

"You're breathing."

"So? I do that all day long."

"No. You don't get it. Remember all semester long? When you're sitting there and I'm sitting here," he says, pointing to the chairs we typically occupy, "and you can't concentrate. So I go in the living room and you still can't concentrate because I'm breathing?"

"Ha ha! Am I keeping you from studying?" I leave off with the cat to pat Oz instead. "Poor thing. You have homework and I don't. Shall I go in the living room and be quiet?"

He sighs and rolls his eyes. "It was so perfect. And you didn't get it!"

"Have you been waiting to say that for lo these many years?"

Rearranging the furniture

Bang! Bam! Something shakes my bed. I wake up halfway and wonder if it's the cats wrestling beneath the bed, except the noise came from outside. Another roll of thunder rolls across the sky and wakes me up the rest of the way. And then another, just to make sure I'm fully awake. I roll over and consider how the thunder makes my house vibrate like a drum. Then—ah!—a low and constant roar sweeps in from the west and rain engulfs the house. All the windows are open, but with no wind to blow the rain in, I don't need to close them. Only the rain stirs the air. A cloud of moisture puffs through the window by my head and carries with it the smell of wet earth and trees. Going only by my nose, I can imagine I am in the middle of the woods.

Hydrangea, spider

花が咲く
アジサイ、蜘蛛も
青いだな

Hana ga saku
Ajisai, kumo mo
Aoi da na

"Oops." Oz is out in the backyard trimming my overgrown hydrangea. I never cut it back last fall and puffy, brown heads of dead flowers poke out beyond this year's new growth. The hydrangea looks even more like some botanical mutant than usual.

"What happened?" I walk over to the screen door to check and make sure he didn't prune his finger off or anything.

"I cut off a flower. Oh well. It was bound to happen."

"Bring it to me. I can put it in a vase."

He reaches into the pile of dead twigs and ratty flower heads and pulls out a green-leafed stalk with a small puff of flowers at the end. The flowers aren't fully formed: some are half-unfolded and green, some are butter-colored, only the flowers on the edge of the cluster are wide and blue. Taking it into the kitchen, I pull the lower leaves off the stalk and shake it over the sink. A spider falls from the leaves and tries to run up the side of the sink, but it's too slick and he slides back two inches for every inch he climbs. At a blast of water from yours truly, he rolls into the drain basket with the bits of parsley and a few stray noodles, and maybe on down the drain, but I can't tell. I drop the flower into a vase and fill it with water.

Later, when I go back into the kitchen for a glass of water, I see that the spider has escaped the sink and set up a temporary residence suspended between my soap dispensers. Hanging in midair and lit from above by a fluorescent work light, he is far prettier than he was in the sink. The light picks up touches of gold on his translucent green legs and his abdomen is chased with black and gold stripes, like cloisonnéoo delicate to have been made by any entity less dexterous than nature. Anything that pretty has to be poisonous, I think, and he's surely pissed.

He's still there, last I checked.

al fresco

The weather fairy is not paying attention. Here it is, the Saturday of the first holiday weekend of summer she forgot to throw a wet wooly blanket of heat and humidity over the city. Instead we had showers last night to wash everything off, and today we've got clear blue skies, that drenching sunshine that bangs the edges of everything into preternatural sharpness, and cool dry breezes.

Porch weather. All the windows open. One of the neighbors is vacuuming his sitting room and blasting Frank Sinatra. Bright white t-shirts glowing in the shade, young men hang out by the elementary school across from the Clay Street Market. Ladies are getting their hair done outside. I see one group of women doing beauty shop on a deep porch. Another woman has moved a kitchen chair out to a shady spot on the sidewalk. Her friend stands behind her and weaves her hair into tiny braids. Little girls watch and play, flitting around them like dragonflies.

Wise-ass rodent

We are in Washington, visiting friends and making a side trip to the Folger Shakespeare Library to see the Trevelyon Miscellany. The friends don't come to the exhibition with us; they are too busy making arrangements to move to Bangor, Maine. We attempt to hide our disappointment that they'll be so far away and make remarks about the lovely, mild Virginia winters. We are sent on our way to the Folger.

After admiring seventeenth century manuscripts for an hour or so, we head back to the metro station. In the shade of some federal building of the gray, stone cube variety stand raised beds of English ivy and magnolias not yet in bloom. A rustling sound catches my ear and I glimpse animal activity in the ivy. Something white? I stop and look. "Is that a squirrel?"

Oz stops to look too. As if swimming, the squirrel bobs up from the ivy, like some Loch Ness monster in furry miniature, and makes serpentine curves through the leaves. He's too gray to be albino, but too white to be a strictly normal gray squirrel. The squirrel hops onto the granite coping and shakes his tail at us.

"Will you look at the nuts on that squirrel?" Oz says and pulls out his camera, but before it's powered up, the squirrel—really Fark-worthy—has jumped down to the sidewalk and walked under a car parked at the curb. He lowers his camera when the squirrel vanishes. "So much for that."

"Do you think he's albino or just old?" I ask.

The squirrel reappears on the far side of the car and crosses the street. He doesn't scamper with squirrelly fluidity, he seems a little stiff.

"I think he's old," I say.

The squirrel pauses. "Fark you. I'm worn out from impregnating squirrel babes all spring. A straight squirrel in DC scores big time. Heh."

We are put in our place. In no hurry, the squirrel continues on up a tree.

Service interruption

Due to technical difficulties, the entry that was written for today cannot be posted till tomorrow evening. I'm at my friends' house and their machine—running Windows ME (how stone age!)— won't talk to my USB mass storage key so I can't transfer the file to paste in here. I realize there are work-arounds for this, I just don't feel like dealing with them right now because it's late and I can go play with pug dogs instead of computers. And this machine is so damn slow! I don't know how they can stand it. They need to clean their keyboard too; it makes the ones in the computer lab at school look sterile.

Far side

Apart from the intermittent hiccups and the Math Structures exam, this has been a pretty good day. Hic. I feel like I'm five. At least the exam went okay.

A side benefit of having an exam in the absolute last time slot was that I got to see all the kids moving out of their dorms. So we're talking total chaos on Main Street between the engineering building where I parked and the business building where my exam was. In Monroe Park, which lies across Main and is bordered by three dorms (or four? I don't know what all those buildings are), the lanes which are normally off limits to traffic are filled with family vehicles. People running around with armloads of comforters and garbage bags full of laundry. (Note: Clear plastic bags are a poor choice for the transport of unclean laundry.) Kids looking tired and relieved, parents looking suspiciously resigned, as if they'd tried to talk the kids into summer school and failed. No actual inter-parent fist-fighting over handtrucks, that I saw anyway.

Some genius scheduled a children's ballet recital at the Mosque (I mean, "Landmark Theater" and it's located right on the park with all those dorms) today, so young mothers are shepherding tiny girls in tutus through the midst of all the college stuff. One little girl is a kitten in a white tutu with pink sparkly trim, a cat ear hairband, and a little fluffy tail made out of a feather boa. I'm so jealous! I was in a recital when I was that age and I had to be a poodle in a plain white tutu with floppy puppy years. The kitten costume was way cooler. Another girl is in a golden brown tutu—a monkey? Also terribly cute. A third girl, carried by her mom and probably in a sulk, was in a yellow ballet-looking rain slicker with yellow boots. I'd have sulked too once I saw what the other little girls had. Boots and slickers vs. sparkly tutus, slippers, and animal ears? With whiskers drawn on? No contest.

After the exam I went straight to the public library to pick up an armload of books with no literary or informational value whatsoever, then to the grocery store where I picked up a pint of Uncanny Cashew (I found it okay, but Pistachio Pistachio is better). At home I proceeded to mainline butterfat, sugar, and the literary equivalent thereof for, oh, about a half hour. Then I had to get started cleaning my filth-encrusted house, because the squalor sure does build up over the semester.

I don't have to do homework this weekend. That is just so cool.

Candy

A brilliant pink stamen waits vainly for bees within a cloud of narrow petals. Cut from my mother's garden, the single peony stands in a vase and fills my sitting room with its rosewater candy scent. Though a few hours in a closed car left the blossom limp, water at the stem and the hospitable environment of my house have restored it to upstanding glory. Two green buds sharing the stem give little hope of flowers, but the pink one may yet bloom. That knob of petals, tight as a baby's fist this afternoon, now unfurls a hitchhiker's thumb to the air.

Potholes ahead

Three young men stand at the intersection of Marshall and Nineteenth. Jeans, saggy cargo shorts, ancient gray t-shirts dragging past their hips, they face the cross street. One unwinds black duct tape from a thick roll. Another shades his eyes with a hand and points up the hill.

As we drive by on Marshall, I see they are taping block letters onto Nineteenth. Black duct tape on faded gray asphalt to spell out P-O-T-H-O-L-E-S. "Potholes? What is that? Some kind of performance art?"

Oz says, "Maybe they're protesting poor road maintenance."

On our way home, we pass them, still messing with tape. Now they have completed their message: POTHOLES AHEAD. Ten yards beyond the lettering, squares of black tape surround spots in the asphalt where the blond gravel of an older surface peeks through.

"Potholes ahead. Like that's a surprise or something."

"You'd think that white or yellow tape would show up better. Or that yellow green."

Later on, we see several downtown streets closed off and lots of bicyclists tooling around. We figure maybe there's a race and the route will take the cyclists up Church Hill. Poor sods. The potholes will be the least of their worries.

Good housekeeping

First school-free day since 20 January, 2004.

I sleep in. The cats attempt to thwart me with their six-thirty meowing, but I am more stubborn than they are.

I wipe down the kitchen counters. They have gotten nasty with sprinkles of coffee grounds, dripped water, and bits of stuff that can't be food as I've hardly cooked at all in the last fifteen weeks. Do ants like 409? Because they totally swarm the kitchen after I clean.

I go for a walk. Damn, but it's beautiful: one of those crystalline spring days with dark, leafy shady spots, blossoming catalpas (I think that's what they are, but the seed pods are wrong, so maybe these are some other kind of tree), and Libby Hill knee deep in blooming clover and buttercups.

I compromise the school-free nature of the day and go to school. I borrow an antique C++ compiler from Dr. Smith, then poke around and see that the seniors aren't around for me to bother about their project. I visit with Origami Girl who's watching her dude, Chevy Nova, and his friends work on his Chevy Nova out in the parking lot.

I tell them how the Nova is legend in the translation industry because Chevrolet tried to sell them in Latin America without changing the name. The guys hadn't heard that. Origami Girl helpfully observes that No va pretty well describes this one. Someone has put in a "performance" engine which is all silver and purple. She and I admire the pretty colors. The guys ignore us.

Origami Girl was also in the Electronic Devices class. She says, "So. That final. Do you think he hates us? Or was it just me?"

"I think that was just a 'separate the goats from the sheep' kind of final," I say reassuringly. "A lot of people didn't even finish, so if you were able to get through it, you probably did okay."

"He says he's not going to grade them till Friday," she tells me. "I think he hates us."

Sunday morning dreaming

Except for an afternoon trip to a bookstore, the high point of my day happened before I woke up. Most of the day was spent with a notebook in my lap or sitting in front of the computer, working on a take-home test or preparing for an in-class test tomorrow, but my morning dreams took me to more exotic locales. This dream was one of my favorite kinds, with an actual, if incoherent, plot and time travel too. Half the time I was involved in a financial swindle, which worked great up until the point that the FBI caught up with me and my associates, and the other half I was in nineteenth century Edinburgh as a time-traveling assistant to a scientist of the day named C. W. Fisher (which I know because that name was stamped on one of the credit cards used in the contemporary swindle part of the story). Why? I don't know. And for weird dreaminess, you can't beat my Victorian morning commute on a granite curb punted along a shallow canal. All of this was far more interesting than the studying, so I've been distracted all day by daydreaming up a plot for the time travel part. I could write a story if I had time. I'd better make notes before it all fades away.