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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 burglar