Every evening I receive a preview of what will be on Wisconsin Public Radio the following day. Tomorrow is supposed to be a program in the morning with the following topic:
"A new survey suggests the economic recession has Americans redefining their necessities. Some say dishwashers, clothes dryers, and other appliances are now luxuries. After six, Joy Cardin and her guest invite you to share how the economic downturn has effected the way you consume.Guest: James Burroughs (BURR-ohs), Associate Professor of Commerce, McIntyre School of Commerce, University of Virginia."
Dishwasher? I never had a dishwasher. I never had a microwave. Guess I have always been in a recession. Now as for the clothes dryer? That depends on your perspective. I suppose the people saying that Clothes Dryers are luxuries have the luxury of living in a nice dry climate where you can hang your clothes out to dry on a clothesline. I assume they also have the luxury of having enough open yard space that affords them the room to have an outdoor clothesline that's not under trees and eaves where you get tree debris and bird poop on your clean clothes. And in inclement weather, I suppose these people also have the luxury of having a roomy basement or laundry room where they can hang their clothes inside. It seems that if you have the space and room and fortunate climate that affords you the ability to go without a Clothes Dryer, you are the one with the luxury.
I am very relieved that Kathleen Falk has won relection for Dane County Supervisor. It was a bit scary last night as the election results were coming in online, since Mistele was ahead pretty far. One of the local news stations was showing a Mistele supporter, a 20-something rural blonde, stating how she hopes Mistele wins because she doesn't want her taxes raised to support a commuter train since she'll never use it. I wanted to reach through my tv and slap her senseless.
I had to keep telling myself that the precincts reporting early at that time were rural, and sure enough, with each update the gap narrowed, until Falk was ahead. Then after about 33% reporting, the nightly news declared her a winner.
Last weekend Stan actually helped distribute campaign literature for Falk's campaign in conjunction with AFSCME, his union, and we got our very first political yard sign! It's odd how many people in the union at his old work place are Republicans (this was a non-partisan election, yet obviously, Falk is Dem and Mistele Rep). The disconnect is amazing. Put the Republicans in power in the county and they go for privatization and these people would face losing their jobs. I hear they did that they privatized either Milwaukee or some other county and now it's a mess, but it's too late. These coworkers just don't get it, biting the hands that feed them. Fortunately, that team of near-retirements are getting pretty powerless, and it's a good thing since Stan will be leaving the courthouse as a worksite and heading back to the "prairie" where these walking contradictions also work, where he worked since 1997 until 2006. Same job title, same employer, different worksite, different atmosphere. He's doing this to save his health. The courthouse had its advantages: Bike, walk, or bus to work, no hillbilly coworkers, a nice law library with WiFi to take a break in, when he got a break. But the disadvantages outweighed them. The kind of food preparation was extremely hard on his wrists. He has developed carpal tunnel, and he is the only one involved in cooking, so the burden is entirely on him. Sometimes he'd go from 6 am until 2 without a break due to the lack of coworkers. Although he'll have to drive to the prairie, the workload will be less. There are more people there to take over in the absence of coworkers. He'll actually be able to get breaks, and in the summer there's the prairie, which is beautiful and relaxing. He'll be able to run errands like post office runs on the way back from work which will save time having to make special trips. There's a post office down the street from "the prairie" in Verona, unlike downtown Madison, which believe it or not, does not have a full-service post office. I know, mind boggling. But the most important thing is his health. Since we both will have to work until the day we die, it's important to keep that.
Had (shudder the thought) Mistele won, this would have been a very different post. I probably would have been cursing Chief Niwot at making the prospect of returning all too real. I don't have to worry about that, at least for another 4 years or so. Job security for Stan, hopefully the commuter train will become a reality and he could potentially use it to commute to the prairie. Chief Niwot's curse still does not apply to us. Madison is where I live. And I want to keep it that way.
Last week I got really bad abdominal pain after eating Edamame. This past weekend, after eating Tofu, I got a lump on my tongue, and what felt like a lump in my throat, chills and diarrhea. I realized what is happening. I am allergic to Soy. Unfortunately, being a vegetarian/pescaterian was going really well. I'm actually someone who likes soy products...Edamame, Tofu, Bean Curd, etc. But I can't continue being a vegetarian/pescatarian without the Soy protein in my diet. I have to return to meat, so I get that protein.
Last night I ate half of a lamb shoulder cut, and for lunch I finished the rest of it. It was so delicious. I couldn't believe how good it tasted after all this time. While I had not been eating meat, I really had no desire to eat it, so I was fearing when I started again, the taste would make me sick. It didn't.
I can still eat other legumes, fortunately, green beans, lima beans, peas, peanuts, lentils, garbanzos. It's not all legumes, just soy. Stomach pains is bad enough, but getting bumps and lumps in my throat? That's scary. That could lead to swelling and anaphylactic shock.
I feel like no matter what I try to do for my diet, nothing works. I went off of meat because I wanted to eliminate the fat from my diet, because I thought *that* had made me sick. But it didn't work. Now, what is supposed to be "healthy" is making me sick too.
This is so strange, because I never would have known had I not found it accidentally by searching for something completely unrelated which caused me to bring up the Ft. Collins obituaries. Today's obituary. How odd is that? It was like I was supposed to know. Why? Dick was an Old Towne Fort Collins institution, like Barney. Stan and I knew it was a good trip if we happened to see Dick and Barney on the street while driving through Fort Collins on vacation. And I was just writing about those vacations in my previous post today. Odd.
Yesterday I took Stan to the Dentist, and afterward I was going to head off to the Cottage Grove Post Office as I always do when I take Stan to the Dentist...a errand driving consolidation type thing. It was hardly a consolidated trip.
As you approach the Dental Office/Fitness Center/Bank/Who Knows What Else building complex going east on Cottage Grove Road, you turn left, then another left to get into the parking lot. I guess I had been on auto pilot, so I knew I had to then turn right, then right again to get back out to the Cottage Grove Road intersection, where I would at that point turn left to head to Cottage Grove. I've done this several times before. I know how to get to the Cottage Grove Post office, it's the easiest trip in the world, just a straight shot down Cottage Grove Road. Except my mind was occupied. Earlier that day, an ebay customer, a Disney Witch who bought over $200 worth of merchandise from me and had not yet paid after 18 days, became NARU*, which meant, I was out that $200. Sure, I still had the merchandise, but I'm out the time initially organizing her stuff into neat little packages, I'm now out the time having to put her stuff back into the original packages they came from, I'm out the time contacting her asking her when she was going to pay, I'm out the time having to file to get my Final Value Fees back (she bought a lot of items) and I'm out the mental $200 that I had planned on using to pay bills. Bitch. Psychotic #&@*!%$ "My Bank is issuing me a new Credit Card and I haven't gotten it yet" Bitch. So that was on my mind. So when I exited out the back entrance of the parking lot, not the entrance I came in, my Autopilot turned right, then right, and then left. But since it was not the entrance I came in, I needed an extra right in there before the left. So I headed out toward Cottage Grove Post Office, but not on Cottage Grove Road...on Sprecher Road. *Not a Registered User
Stan and I had remarked as we were heading there how Cottage Grove Road was getting more and more built up. Years ago after you went over the I-90 Overpass, it was all country. Not any more. And as I headed out on Sprecher Road, which I thought was Cottage Grove Road, it seemed even more built up. It seemed weird. I didn't remember that median. And where was the 55 mph 2 lane country road? It was now 40 mph and a 4 lane. Everything looked different. And what was that interstate underpass? I didn't remember that before either. Things sure changed in the few months we were out last. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention before. Maybe they were always there. Maybe I just couldn't remember.
I drove quite a ways, thinking at any moment the scenery will start to look familiar. It never did. After about 3 miles I got a strange panicky feeling. I realized I had no idea where I was. I retraced my steps and realized my error of prematurely turning left and not getting on Cottage Grove. I figured out I was going north, not east (it was a cloudy day...there was no sun to guide). I then thought if I turn right, I'll be heading east at least, and then I could find another north/south connecting road to Cottage Grove. I turned at the first stop sign I found, Nelson Rd. I headed east about a mile, but I don't think I'd ever been out there before and didn't know where it would lead me. I decided to turn into a country residential neighborhood road that looped around. I then took Nelson back to Sprecher (which had turned into Reiner at some point...roads do that a lot around here), and then back to the Dentist office/Cottage Grove intersection, and then back out to Cottage Grove to get to the post office. By the time I finally made it back to the Dental Office, Stan was still waiting for his appointment. I was hoping that wasn't the case. I had hesitated calling him on our cells because I wouldn't want him to get the call while he had dental junk in his mouth. He had been worried why I had taken so long, fearing I'd been in an accident. No, the car was fine. But was I? It was all like some surreal dream. I have dreams where I find myself in the middle of some country area and I don't know how I got there. That's what this was like. I hope it wasn't some early senility. I'm hoping it was just a preoccupied mind. Stupid Manic Bipolar Disney Witches on Shopping Sprees.
As we drove home, I started thinking about the Homologous Streets of Madison and Fort Collins...you know, a street in Madison that reminds me of a street in Fort Collins. Then it hit me...they'd make great names for characters in novels or movies:
Monona Lemay. Elizabeth Milwaukee. The twin brothers, Winnebago and Williamson (Willy) Remington (very old west sounding, that). Mason Atwood. Stuart Buckeye. Sherman and Johnson Shields. Harmony Pflaum. Mr. Nesbitt Bingham Hill (proper English chap). Drake Midvale. Lesser Loftsgordon**. Sheldon Forster...Stan might not get that one...I had to look it up myself...Sheldon is the road by City Park where we fed the seagulls heart-shaped biscuits and Forster is the road that goes by Warner Park where we hear frogs in the spring. **I totally see Lesser Loftsgordon as a William H. Macy Fargo Jerry Lundegaard character type.
Some of the street combo names make better sounding places, like Washington College, or University College (Stan says it was just a college with no panache, so they named it "University College" to make it sound better.) Then there's the employment agency that all the graduates of University College end up going to, "First Prospect."
There are probably more homologous name possibilities, and I've exhausted my mental map of both cities. I used GoogleMaps to help me remember street names, and in doing so I found all these names of neighborhoods in Fort Collins that I didn't know existed when I lived there. If I look at a Madison map, neighborhood names appear...Tenney-Lapham, Greenbush, Old Market Place, Carpenter-Ridgeway, (oddly, my neighborhood, Schenks-Atwood, is not shown). But GoogleMaps shows a whole new side of Fort Collins that never existed to me before: Sinnard? What the heck is Sinnard? (just north of 14 on I-25) Black Hollow Junction? (between Sinnard and Andersonville...actually, I did hear of Andersonville when I lived there). Side Hill? (east of Parkwood). East Dale? (around Stover and Locust). And here's a shocker...Omega!!!!! (corner of College and Horsetooth). Back in high school, there was a spot called Omega that was behind an old Safeway store off Prospect and College. It was undeveloped near a creek. People went there to get stoned. That's all I'll say about it. Not really sure of the places I lived...my parents live between "Old Fort Collins HIgh School" and "University Acres," although I only heard them refer to it as the latter. When we lived on Grant Street, it was either "Mantz" or "University North." On Peterson, it was sort of triangulated between University Park, East Dale, and Old Fort Collins High School. Very weird sensation thinking about this stuff. Just last year, I was there. Visiting. I had fun. I love vacations. But I can't go every year. I guess it's part of the deal I made with Chief Niwot.
Ok, explain the logic in Starbuck's move to stop brewing decaf after noon. Isn't after noon the time when coffee drinkers start switching from regular to decaf? Who drinks decaf before noon? Before noon, in the morning, is when you need regular coffee with caffeine. The later in the day, the more you'll want less caffeine.
I'm confused.
Starbucks sucks anyway. Their coffee sucks, you have to pay for WiFi there, and their employees are snotty party college kids in the Greek system (except one sympathetic guy who told me about their competitor across the road...Panera--thanks non-frat boy Starbucks employee guy). Panera's WiFi is free, coffee is better (it tastes real...Starbucks tastes fake), and I love their little souflees. All Starbucks seems to have (at least last time I looked) is sweet junk...no mini souflees.
There's another thing I don't understand, unrelated to the above.
When I was a kid, almost every summer my mom and I would spend a few weeks at my grandmother's. This was a strange ritual in which my mom got her freedom away from my father which both of us enjoyed. We got to eat delicious steak and farmer's eggs and have real butter on wheat bread, and fresh-squeezed orange juice. We had wonderful vegetables grown by a local farmer, and I got to eat candy my mom would buy at a local grocery store. Food was delicious there, mostly because it was whole or partly financed by my grandmother. She was not rich, she was living on social security, but generous with whatever meager savings she had gotten from her deceased husband, my grandfather I don't remember. This was so unlike my father who had us eating the worst cheap frozen orange juice I simply couldn't drink, weiners and beans and ground beef, and margarine on cheap white bread because it was cheaper than butter. Not only did I get better food at my grandmother's, I got to live fairly stress-free and dad-free for two to three weeks.
My mom never learned to drive. She tried when she was young, then later when I was young, but she couldn't deal with it. Claimed it was her eyesight, her depth perception due to one extremely nearsighted eye and one farsighed one. Could be. I failed the depth perception question on my last driver's license test because my middle-aged sight is now doing the same thing...one very nearsighted eye and one eye getting increasingly farsighted. But they still renewed my license. And I wasn't always like that as she claimed to be. We didn't have "soccer moms" back when I was young, but whatever the equivalent was...moms to take us neighborhood kids on birthday party outings or whatever, I never had that. We'd always take public transit, or walk or I'd ride my bike. And being from east of the Mississippi makes a difference, as I found out when I moved to Wisconsin. There are more people here who learned how to drive as adults, not at 16 like I did as a teen in Colorado. Having grown up in southeastern Wisconsin with decent public transportation, my mom never felt not driving was an obstacle.
So because my mom didn't drive and because my dad didn't come with, when it came time to visit my grandmother, we took trains in the 1960s, and then in the 1970s we took planes. I don't remember the short trainride we took when I was still a little kid in Indiana. I do remember it was the Hiawatha Express that went from South Bend to Gary to Chicago and up to Kenosha and Racine. I have two odd memories of it, one was getting my pinky finger cut by inserting it in some air vent as a curious kid is apt to do. I also remember singing "Madamoiselle from Armentieres" (lyrics) or one of its many variations, outloud and loud, while my mom turned beet red and wanted to die of embarrassment, probably for teaching me the song in the first place. (The big question: Why would such prudish people such as my parents teach me a bawdy drinking song from WWI?) Another proud moment of punkish upsurpmanship from my younger days. I remember scratchy maroon velvet upholstery on the seats and maroon plastic on the walls...a maroon only slightly darker than the shade of red my embarrassed mom turned. The other trainride we only took once, and that was when we lived in Massachusetts. We had a sleeping car and our own private room. I slept on the top bunk and my mom on the bottom, but at night she let me come down to the bottom so I could look out the window and watch the night ride by. There was nothing more fun than riding a train across the country.
The plane rides were less memorable, probably because they were shorter and there were more of them, so they sort of ran together. I decided after my first one at 9 years old that I wanted to be a stewardess, (that is "flight attendant" in postmodernspeak) that and coupled with some swinging late 60s/early 70s TV show that featured stewardesses and their mod urban life that I watched, and the occasional stewardess girlfriend of one of the Odd Couple guys (A show that I only got to watch at my grandmothers for unknown reasons). Fortunately, we aren't held to our childhood ambitions. After we arrived in Racine, we made our way to my grandmother's house by bus. We'd start out at the airport and take a limo shuttle (filled with stubby, smelly, cigar-smoking businessmen) to the Milwaukee Bus Depot which contained an interesting collection of hippies, hare krishnas, sailors and pimps. The air was filled with unpleasant human odors and cheap food, and canned prerecorded sounds of "Wisconsin Coachlines Route Number blah blah blah is leaving for...Waukesha, Pewaukee, Oconomowoc..." The announcer pronounced these uniquely Wisconsin-sounding cities with a scratchy staccato enunciation..every single year the same recording, the same cities, the recording getting scratchier and less audible. I personally fixated on the word "Oconomowoc" and the way the announcer guy said it. I wondered what was in Oconomowoc...it sounded odd, foreign. It was part of the unknown, mysterious Wisconsin, not the recognizable southeast corridor between Milwaukee and Racine. Oconomowoc was further west, out where it was hillier like that mystery place Madison, where my mom went to school, and the place that was my accidental future. Years later, Stan and I made an emergency pit stop at a Culver's in Oconomowoc. Oconomowoc was nothing special.
We'd take the Badger or Wisconsin Coachline to Racine, which was never as nice as the Greyhounds we'd sometimes take to the Denver Airport. It was scratchy, cramped and smelly and looked like it was from the 50s. As the bus eased out of the depot, the trip back in time began, as we drove past the derelict buildings in Milwaukee with winos lying on the street, yes, this was still the 70s, but as we drove through the countryside, and at that time there was still countryside between the two cities, time slipped backwards. By the time we hit Oak Creek, it was the early 60s suburbia, and then by the outskirts of Racine it was before I was born. Everything I was seeing then was from the view of someone else's eyes. It was no longer my world. I was someone else. I no longer had a father in another state living in a suburban area, for I no longer had a father. My mom was single, widowed, divorced, raising me on her own. We got off the bus at the corner by my grandmother's, a small, plain bungalow in a row of bungalows built aproximately in 1910. There was an old business across the street that might have sold shoes. People lived above it. A family. A poor urban family. I imagined I was one of the urban poor, fatherless and living with my mom and grandmother. I had no bedroom, I slept in the living room. I would find strange clothes in drawers and closets and put them on and pretend this was all I had. I would imagine years of this, sleeping in the living room until finally my mom and grandma decide to give me my own room and reconvert the dining room...except that would never happen. My mom would never actually leave my dad, although she would mention it in a hypothetical context "we could convert the dining room so you could have your own bedroom." But it would never happen, and I'd be shocked back into reality when we'd return to New York or Colorado. But for the time being, we had to get my grandmother's house liveable for us for the next couple of weeks, and that included cleaning, and going grocery shopping.
There were two main grocery stores (not counting a little market a few blocks across the street), Kohl's and Piggly Wiggly. Kohl's was south of grandma's house about half a mile. We used to have several Kohls in Madison, now we have none. Piggly Wiggly was a few blocks north. Although my mom liked going to Kohl's because she'd occasionally see a distant cousin working there, and their selection was bigger, Piggly Wiggly was the first place we'd go to because it was a closer walk, and after a day of flying, one can get pretty burned out. The only thing I didn't like about going shopping was having to bring my grandmother's shopping cart with us (the kind that folds out that hunched over old ladies in kerchiefs and stockings rolled down around their ankles use...my grandmother was the model for that stereotype). But I liked the fact we could pick out food and my dad would have no say whatsoever that this or that was too expensive and he couldn't afford it. I was now an urban midwestern fatherless creature. I was not the person back home, back east or out west, punished and tortured and made to eat skeletal scrapings mixed with filler because they were inexpensive. We were buying steak. And popsicles. All the women working at Piggly Wiggly were older, older than my mom, even. And I'd even get to buy some candy, some carmel, walnut...I don't know what they were but I'd know them if I saw them.
Yesterday, Stan had to go to the dentist again, so while I took him out there, there being halfway to Cottage Grove, I ran some errands while he was being worked on. I went to the Cottage Grove post office, and to the Piggly Wiggly which is in a shopping center right next door to the post office. It's the only time I get to go to Piggly Wiggly as there is none in Madison. And I have to admit I feel an odd sort of nostalgia, considering my once yearly visits to the Racine Piggly. It makes me think of food unencumbered by my dad's strict financial policy. I thought I'd get myself some of those carmel, walnut...whatever they were...candies. Except I found none. So I pull up to a check out line that had its light on and and looked open. The young checkout clerk was cleaning off the glass scanner thing. She looked a bit inconvenienced that I was loading my groceries on the conveyor belt (well, she could've put up a "closed" sign) or told me she was closed if she wasn't ready). About 3/4 of the way through ringing up my items, she asked me if I had a Pig Card. That just sounded funny to me, and I told her I didn't. Then she really looked angry, angry because I didn't have a Pig Card. She hesitated a bit and then continued to ring my items up. I handed her my check, and she took it to someone else, who took it to someone else, who looked over at me and laughed and stared at my check and stared back at me, who took it to someone else. She came back and told me that they need to have a check approved if it's over $30 and the person doesn't have a Pig Card. I told her I don't shop there very often. Why would I have a Pig Card if I don't shop there very often, I wondered silently. Then we waited some more while someone else verified my check somehow and someone else asked me for my driver's license. There were about 3 grocery clerks there, all about half my age or younger, all nervously throwing darting glances my way at me as if I was a terrorist. All I wanted to do was buy some groceries, pay with my perfectly good check from a bank account I've had for a decade or more, and get back to Stan at the Dentist's. I asked her how can I get a Pig Card (notice they never volunteer any of the information...we always have to ask.) She explained, and so when I was finally able to be verified that my check and I were legitimate and I was not a terrorist or criminal, I stopped by the front desk and waited, and waited, and waited until finally the woman who had asked to see my driver's license earlier (who resembled a pig herself) appeared. It's like they were hiding, and didn't want to help me get the Damn Pig Card that they required I get! As I left, I felt all the clerks in the store were staring at me, a freak without a Pig Card! How DARE I buy groceries from them without a Pig Card!
Other grocery stores I go to in Madison have other ways of veryifying your checks...you don't have to be a card-carrying member of Pig Plastic in order to buy from them. I hate the card system...they're bulky in your wallet, they provide no discounts (although that's what they "supposedly" do) and all it does is gather your personal information and what you buy, so you can skew the demographics for direct marketers. They never required Pig Cards back in the day at the Racine Piggly Wiggly. I was going to that Piggly before they were born, hell, I'd venture to bet I was going to that Piggly before their parents were born.
Any half-hearted attempt to squeeze any remote sense of nostalgia out of a trip to Piggly Wiggly failed. You can't go home again, and you can't even go to your temporary summer home again. Go directly to customer service (Homeland Security) and pick up your temporary paper pig card. Do not pick up any candies you may have fond memories of. You can put new and improved lipstick on this pig, but it won't be the same pig. It's a whole other animal...a pack of cackling hyaenas perhaps?
I should be expecting my Pig Card in the mail in about 4 weeks, after which I should be a Happy Pig Camper.
No bike riding today...rainyish. Took some time to find frames for my new eyeglass prescription. I decided to bite the bullet: I'm getting progressive bifocals. Yup...this will be scary. I sure hope I can adjust. I also decided to get a new set of prescription sunglasses since my old ones are 3 years old and I don't think I can't see as well. Those aren't bifocals though as I won't be reading when I'm biking, passengering or driving. For the regular glasses I got some red wire/partially rimless frames with rhinestones on the side. I had a hard time deciding between the squarish purple plastic frames with a stripe of rhinestones on the front and the more upturned oval plastic ones with a tortiseshell pattern. I liked the color and rhinestones of the former and the shape and pattern of the latter. If only they made oval upturned purple tortiseshells with rhinestones. I decided to go for the purple rhinestone ones. They said I have 30 days to change my mind.
Well, not eBay the Entity...okay, scratch that, yes, eBay the Entity, eBay the Corporation *does* piss me off as a seller with their changing policies, higher fees, less exposure, yadda yadda, the usual storeowner gripes. But that's not what this is about.
I had a little problem the past couple days, not a big problem, just a little glitchy problem. Like most large Web 2.0 sites, ebay has a bunch of forums available to ask questions. I ask a question about it on one forum, no one is able to answer, so someone directs me to another forum. I ask there. One person replies and suggests I contact ebay directly by phone. I do that, turns out the problem is a permanent thing ebay has changed and there's no way to undo it...in other words, it's not a glitch, it's a feature. OK, that sucks, but not as much as the fact that only two people replied to my post, and it was with "go ask somewhere else" sort of responses. Not one "yeah, that's happening to me too, wish they didn't remove that feature." Nothing.
Ebay's boards are filled with FORMER store owners and sellers who have since abandoned shop and gone elsewhere, yet they still hang out on the ebay boards to gripe about ebay--not that there aren't things to complain about, but I sure as hell wouldn't hang out somewhere I don't do business at anymore just to complain. It's like people who graduate but never "leave" high school. These boards also contain racist anti-Obama postings. WTF? Why can't people just use the forums to ask questions about ebay issues? Granted, no one is paid to answer questions, and whoever does answer a question does so out of generosity, not as part of a paid or volunteer position, since they're just ebay members like myself. But still. There's no community feeling...just antagonism.
I suspect a couple reasons nobody replied...1) I'm not a "boardie" regular (in other words, I have a life, and only go there when there's a problem with ebay to see if other people are experiencing the same thing) so there's no name-recognition with my handle. and 2) People are too caught up with their Ebay Bashing and Democrat Bashing (which is a really odd couple of bedfellows) that they don't even notice when one of their ebay tools isn't functioning like it used to.
You know, despite the fact I only have a cellphone with minimal daytime minutes, next time something is wonky, I'm calling eBay directly. I was pleasantly surprised that I got a phone response quickly and didn't stay on hold long at all. To hell with the illiterate hillbilly board people. They're like union members who vote Republican...my equivalent of Stan's job. They can flag wave all they want and support right-wing agendas, but when a corporation changes their policies they get all up in arms. And who are you voting for again?
It's this silence. You post a question, intelligently written, explaining your problem as clearly as you can and it's met with silence. You picture them in your mind's eye, mouths gaping slack-jawed gum chewing daytime network tv watching, staring at their monitor and the question reads: "kei, sleis qwikdb s lsoe scnvk dkdirjcydkl ekto-zkscvd sl ?" They pop another WalMart brand bonbon in their mouth and move on to another question they can comprehend, something about their grandchildren, their mobile home, their SUV and ATVs and dirt bikes and how the Democrats are going to raise their taxes.
Last Sunday, due to hurricane Gustav, John McCain urges Republicans and Conventioneers to "take off our Republican hats and put on our American hats." OK...so does this mean that normally Republicans aren't Americans? Yes, yes, I believe that must be the case.
And they called Hillary "Shrill". Hillary has nothing on this nails-on-a-chalkboard squeaky mouse on steroids. Hillary's voice is like a smooth drink of warm velvet compared to this. Yes, I watched it...for the amusement value and to get my blood boiling (not that I really need that with high blood pressure and all). A "see how what the other half thinks" sort of thing.
OK, Gustav is HERE. Yes, here in the upper midwest up nort dere here. This really stinks for so many reasons, not that we don't need the calm steady rain or the cooler temperatures. Well, maybe it doesn't stink.. Maybe it's good. Maybe it's just for my own selfish reasons. Here's what happened:
Last Friday was the first time I could ride my bike since I was sick during the first part of that week. Things were looking good...it was Labor Day weekend and we had a three-day weekend to ride bikes. Friday, due to mega errands we had to do beforehand, we rode on a path closer to town (through Fitchburg, to be precise) than our usual excursions into the country on the State Trails. It was a paved ride, but very up and down hilly. Maybe about 4 miles round trip, between Syene road and Glacier View (a suburban road about a block from Fish Hatchery Road). It was part of the Capital City Trail. Very exhausting, very hot, pretty winding. We went through a nature preserve that was next to a public hunting ground. Odd. Pretty though. Parts of it reminded me of reoccurring dreams I would have where we drive into a natural area with grass and tall trees and water and there's lots of people all heading the same way. I think the dream is about dying. But anyway...
Then on Saturday mid morning, we went out past Mount Horeb to a place where we could park near the bike path close to Blue Mounds, and rode back to 78 where we ended the last Military Ridge Trail ride more than a week before. It was a quick ride to, but hell coming back. The sun was getting close to noon and it was a scorcher of a day, plus we were going uphill coming back. That's all we could ride...about 4 miles round trip again. We were hoping it would cool off for the rest of the weekend, but it didn't, each day getting hotter and hotter, until Tuesday, the hottest of them all. And Wednesday (yesterday) I had an eye doctor's appointment, so naturally I couldn't ride after that because my eyes were all anesthetized from the pressure test and dilated and wonky and I couldn't see (thank goodness Stan came with me...I surely wouldn't be able to drive home). And of course, on that day, the weather was PERFECT. Absolutely perfect. So we think, hey, it'll be even cooler today, Thursday, this will be a great day for a ride, even better weather. But no. This is when the remnants of Gustav decide to show up nort here. No bike rides for you. No, this isn't some west to east system passing through. Looking at a radar weather map online, this is a big swirling mass that's going to stick around all day. Not that I don't have lots of errands to do instead...But I feel like I've been cheated out of biking, either due to weather or doc appointments or being sick, or whatever. It's quite addicting. It's like the more you take these bike rides, the more you want to go. It will be very frustrating in the winter. I'm not one for riding in ice and snow. Never was.
I'm sitting in the Dentist's Office waiting for Stan...just in case I have to drive him home. They have a TV on. I never thought I'd say this, but gimme the traditional dentist office elevator muzak. This TV is provoking me to want to commit horrible crimes. It's on the food network or something. The happy homemaker suburban woman was bad enough (at least it wasn't Rachel Ray) but now they have a southern woman on cooking "ribs and kraut" (barf) speaking in a really thick southern accent and she keeps saying "y'aowl". I want to strangle her, but she's just a digitally projected image and sound. I hate her. I don't know her, but I hate her. I hate her. She is really irritating. Fortunately I brought my laptop along...I got some work done, but I have to do some creative copywriting and it is impossible to do that because I need to think and this is really interfering with my ability to do anything but very simple tasks. Anthony Bourdain would really hate these shows. Can someone switch this to MSNBC? I think the receptionists like this stuff. This is why I work at home.
So essentially the symptoms I usually get in the winter when I have a cold--sore throat, runny nose and muscle aches--are missing from this summer bug, but I have everything else. I've been staying in bed trying out software on my new MacBookPro. I bit the bullet and ordered an upgrade to Photoshop CS3 while I can...before they don't allow upgrades from version 7 anymore (like they did with Illustrator...the latest version I have is 9, and the cutoff for upgrades is 10...I have to buy a whole new damn CS3 version! Damn!!!!)
I felt really awful Tuesday night as we listened to the Democratic Convention on the radio in the bedroom. I haven't even felt like getting up and going to the living room and watching TV...OD'd on that during the Olympics. Yesterday I felt fairly good in the morning and got a lot done and thought we could go for a bike ride, but by the time Stan got home I was lying flat in bed again. So I used that time to download a demo of iWorks. iWorks has taken the place of Appleworks since about 2005 when they stopped supporting AW and have taken off all mention of it from their site, other than stating they don't support it.
Gone are the Paint and Draw modules that came w/AW. No big loss...they were like MacPaint and MacDraw from 1985 (which I used a lot during my free time at Kinko's)...I mean, it would be silly for me to use those apps now except to affect 80s computer art. Gone also is the Database module. Now *that* will be sorely missed. I used that every day as a checkbook transaction tracker and I kept track of all my sales and expenditures for tax records. iWork has no equivalent database program.
AW's Presentation module (which I never used) is now iWork's Keynote which looks a lot slicker, and from what I read, blows MS's PowerPoint out of the water. I don't know if I'd use it, but maybe I could figure out how to make SWFs of art or jewelry or something. I don't make presentations (images of polyester suited people with briefcases, pointers, and pie charts), but maybe something automatic and artistic for the web might be nice since I never really could figure out Flash much and never upgraded past version 4 (too technical).
AW's word processing module is now iWork's Pages, and AW's spreadsheet is now iWork's Numbers. I made use of AW's spreadsheet in a most unusual way. Visit any of my jewelry pages, either my main page or the pages on the left navigation bar (not the individual item pages). The listings of jewelry items with the thumbnails was all done with with AW's spreadsheet. It was so easy to organize jewelry listings that way, shuffle and sort items, alphabetize long lists, delete sold items and add new items. It would have been hell to do that in BBEdit (my HTML program of choice...yes, I raw code, can you believe it?), so I just constructed a sort of "container" page with Server Side Includes and have the included content in the spreadsheet. When it came time add the new content, I'd just make my changes on the spreadsheet and export it out as ASCII text. Unfortunately, I found out quickly that wasn't too clean as it put in tabs between columns. So after the export I had to open it up in BBEdit and clear out the tabs. I know, kind of cludgey, but it was the only way I knew to deal with it, and it was certainly much more efficient and error-free than if I would've created the whole list of items into one BBEdit HTML file. That would have been a nightmare trying to sort out. I know there's database (Filemaker?) programs out there that can probably do that automatically, but I have absolutely no idea how to run anything like that on my server, and no one to show me how either. I thought this was rather ingenious that I figured out as much using AppleWorks's Spreadsheet.
With System OS X 10.5 and our new Intel-based Macs, Appleworks is showing signs of breaking. Nothing major, but when I try to export an ASCII file as .txt, it won't add the .txt or it adds two periods, or something weird. Not as smooth a workflow as I'd like. That's why I wanted to check out iWorks. But iWorks' Numbers, despite many improvements, doesn't export TXT files. It doesn't even export RTF (Rich Text). Just PDF, CSV and XLS. PDF is worthless...it's graphical, not text. And either CSV or XLS put in a whole bunch of commas and quoted everything that cannot be removed with one quick search and replace in BBEdit. It does import my old AppleWorks spreadsheets nicely, however. Exporting is another matter. But I'll get to that later. Then I figured out that iWork's Pages *can* export plain text. I cobbled together a spreadsheet-like table setup in Pages that worked fairly well and exported clean text (except for tabs...face it, if you have tabular data, tabs are a fact of life in exported table text). But it wasn't...right. I kept having to adjust the height of the rows when I added and deleted data. It didn't look as neat and clean as a real spreadsheet.
Then I was playing around this morning with Numbers and found out I could have multiple spreadsheets in one document! I have a couple dozen spreadsheets for my jewelry content...that would be convenient to have them all in one file. Then I also figured out that I could select a spreadsheet and copy/paste it into BBEdit. It copies it clean (with tabs, of course...no getting around that) with none of that gunky comma quote CSV/XLS garbage. How sweet is that? I can already use pre-existing BBEdit text files...just delete the existing content and cut/paste from Numbers the new content...that way I don't have to create a new text file and accidentally misname it, search/replace tabs and voila! That even sounds BETTER than the individual spreadsheets with AppleWorks and the exporting. Fewer steps, fewer files.
Now as far as the checkbook register and income and expenditures tax info lists that we use AW's Database for...I downloaded a simple transaction tracker template that works in Numbers. Nothing fancy, but it WORKS, and I guess that's the point of the aptly named software, huh? $99 for a family pack so we can both use it on our laptops...not bad. Sure beats the price of a Photoshop Upgrade.
Maybe I'm stupid, but I just don't get baseball. I don't get the scoring. I find watching it on tv during the Olympics boring. I know it's this big loved all-American game, but I just don' get it. Maybe I just wasn't raised in baseball culture. My grandfather liked baseball...played on some team, either at his job or just for fun. He was a typical farmboy union worker Wisconsin guy who played poker and went to bars to talk to the guys and died of a stroke at 68. But I never knew my grandfather. Died when I was about 2 or 3. Had he lived, he would've taken me fishing. I never had anyone to take me fishing. I always wanted to go fishing as a kid.
I love watching the volleyball...team or beach. I hated playing it in school, but love watching it. I love watching the other sports, even though I can't do them. Ping pong, yeah, I can do that. I got pretty good when I was a teenager. Played against myself a lot with the table turned halfway up. I wish we had room for a ping pong table now. Our house is small and cramped.
Oh and synchronized swimming...what's up with that? Now although I personally don't understand baseball or the whole mystique surrounding it, I still don't think it should be *eliminated* from the Olympics. Synchronized Swimming looks like a throwback to the 1940s. Why isn't it being cut? Certainly more people the world over love Baseball than Synchronized Swimming. It's just one of those cringe-inducing sports to watch. It's sort of a drama queen girly girl thespian thing...but not my thing, and I don't think I'm in the minority on that.
Today we went from County Road Y outside of Johnson Creek to Switzke Rd. It was a very hot and humid day, and according to my calculations (find map in Mapquest, take Picture in Safari, Open it up in Photoshop, use the measuring tools to determine distance) it was about 1.9 miles one way. Stan thought it felt like over 4 miles. Both of us were pretty tired later in the day.
I have my new Macbook Pro. Except for the obvious (can't run Photoshop in Classic to use my favorite plugins and will need to run CS3--that is, when I do eventually upgrade--in Rosetta [Power PC emulation for the Intel processor] when I'm using it in "artistic mode" [i.e., when I'm making art as opposed to using it just to process photo files] in order to use even OS X compatible plugins) the computer is GREAT!
Well, that's not all. This computer is hot
What, stolen?
No, hot, really hot. We're sweating like pigs, man.
Maybe I better check the trunk for dead aliens from Roswell.
It also gets to be quite weighty on my legs, not because it's heavier (it actually seems lighter than my G4 iBook), but because of the weight distribution. All of the weight seems to be in the rear (see, it's the aliens in the trunk!) where it rests on my legs toward my knees.
They did a migration from my deceased G4 Desktop, so I have all my files, which I'm now filing away and will archive (I should've done that years ago), so all my email was set up already...none of that hassle.
I put my G4 ibook up in the retirement zone upstairs so I can use it with my 19" monitor. It works well that way.
...of Computers. Yup. 2001 G4 Quicksilver Desktop is dead. Yesterday the Apple guy opened it up, tried a few things, looked a little puzzled, asked me how old it was, entered a few things on his computer, looked up information, etc. He said it could be the logic board or the cpu, both of which I would've paid to fix, however because it's over 7 years old, they can't even get PARTS anymore. Planned obsolescence. So I decided to go for broke (literally) and invest in a 15-inch MacBook Pro. I'm not getting another desktop...too bulky, too stationary. I already have two extremely elderely "beige" computers lying around in the computer nursing home that I don't know what to do with since it costs money to recycle appliances and computers in this town, and I am just a little hesistant to give them up. I guess if I get desperate to use certain Photoshop filters I can still start up the 1998 model...oh the pain of slowness.
The laptop I'm currently using will either be used upstairs where my late G4 desktop used to be, and hook it up to its former monitor, or I'll use the new one upstairs. I haven't decided yet. I don't even have the new one yet because they were booked up this afternoon with appointments, and I can't go tomorrow (Stan has a doc visit) so it won't be until Thursday.
That poor old desktop...I had so many sad things associated with it. When I first got it early August 2001, OS X was still so new, I would just stare at the monitor and feel confused by it all. Then in June 2002, a few days before my birthday, I accidentally wiped the hard drive out by doing something stupid, installing software that I didn't understand would wipe my hard drive clean. I spent days in a deep depression after that since I was unable to salvage some files I hadn't backed up. I felt my life had been deleted. Then in January 2005 the hard drive started slipping, so I had to have the hard drive replaced, fortunately they were able to salvage the files. And then this.
So now I can slowly transition to Leopard and an Intel Mac. My obvious reluctance has been software-based which young people who don't use vintage Photoshop plug-ins that aren't available for Intel Macs don't comprehend.
Well, I could write more about this, but I'm pretty depressed.
I decided I'd keep a journal of all the bike rides I take for future reference. I sort of neglected to do that for much of the recent part of the Glacial Drumlin.
Today we went from "Popp Rd" which is SE of Lake Mills (near Aztalan), across County Rd N, underneath State Hwy 26, then it paralleled 26 for a while until it ended @ West Junction Rd. just outside of Jefferson. It was 4.5 miles round trip. Although it shows that on the official map, it doesn't show it ending abruptly like that on Mapquest, so we were really confused. I guess you can get back to it by riding on Junction Rd. and then taking Y, but that's a lot of rutty country roads with not much curb and no bike lane. So we'll skip that part and pick it up, maybe next weekend, where it begins again on Y as it heads toward Helenville, where I've never been before.
I'm really tired, probably from the Claritin I took yesterday and the Lorazepam I took last night so I could sleep from the Claritin.
Stan takes his bike in to be repaired tomorrow, my desktop computer died so I have to take it in after he gets home, and Stan has a doctor's appointment on Wednesday, so we might not get much riding in early this week. My poor computer. I have no clue what happened. It's depressing.
I know 4 and 5 mile treks may seem miniscule to many reading this, but keep in mind that I *never* rode that much even when I was in my teens and 20s and rode every day and depended on my bike as my ONLY form of transportation (other than city busses in bad weather, and of course, walking). Back then in the prehistoric ages, there weren't such things as recreational bike paths, so one just used city streets. Before starting to ride a year ago, I hadn't ridden for approx. 18 years or so. I owned no bike during that time. So it will take me quite a while, at 47, to get up to speed, as low as that speed may be.
Is it just me or are some of the Olympic athletes in certain sports overdressed? Case in point: In Women's Beach Volleyball they were wearing bikini bottoms (or whatever they were called) and matching sports bra top (sorry I'm really bad with fashion descriptions mostly because I really don't care about this stuff except when it comes to comfort). Now this seemed normal sportswear for the sport and the weather. However for the Men's Beach Volleyball, they had long baggy shorts and tops that just seemed waaaayyy too high up on the neck considering the temperatures outside. They looked very overheated in those clothes. I swear I've watched other Olympics where the Men's Beach Volleyball players were basically shirtless except for little loose whispy things that showed your team color, name and number. But full-length sport shirts with such high necklines? Why? I feel in pain watching them. Fortunately, the weather is nice here today, except my allergies and various Stan health problems are preventing us from biking today.
Also the swimmers...the men were wearing suits that went down the entire leg and covered their torsos. Why? And the women's tops on their suits had stranglingly high neckholes. Aaack. Now is there an aerodynamic explanation for this? It just seems a little overdressed to me, but then again, I'm thinking about comfort rather than the physics of sports performance.
I know if it was me there, I would've died of heatstroke just marching in on the opening ceremonies...but then again I'm not an athlete....and I would've had heatstroke as a pre-teen at 60 pounds as well as at 47 at 160 pounds....would make no difference as to my age or weight.
I rode the furthest today, from Riley to Klevenville on the Military Ridge State Trail. And back. Five miles total. Most days I've been hovering around 1-2 miles one way...I don't know what got into me today. It was uphill most of the way to Klevenville, and fortunately, downhill back toward Riley. It's so strange to first see these towns on a bike, rather than having discovered them first via car. Actually, they're not really towns...they're not even incorporated.
In June, I think, I rode the MRST from the trailhead outside Verona, through Fitchburg and up to Madison, and then back to the trailhead. That was about 4 miles, but that was paved. The path I rode today was all limestone gravel except for an unexplained paved part that was maybe 1/6 of a mile or so. We've been taking the MRST on weekdays after Stan gets off work because it's shorter to get there, and saving Glacial Drumlin for the weekends, since we've progressed a lot further down that one and need to drive quite a ways now to pick up where we leave off. On the second leg of our MRST trip we went west from the MRST trailhead through Verona and turned around at (Ninemound?). Day 3 we went from Ninemound Rd. to the hwy 151 tunnel, which was flooded, so we turned around and went back. Then Stan's tooth thing happened so we lost a couple weeks of biking...no fun. MRST Day 4 we parked in some pullout close to the Epic Center (giant borg that will swallow Verona...they make healthcare software) and biked back to 151, then back northwest up to Whitecrossing road, then back to our car. Saw a frog sitting in my path, but it hopped away before I could see what kind. That was a long ride for me. Then yesterday, Day 5, we went from Whitecrossing Rd. to the ?town? of Riley. We saw a pair of large cranes (Sandhill Cranes?) coming down for a landing on the Sugar River's wetlands which runs along the bike trail. At first it was so surreal, I thought it was people out in the field flying kites. They were incredible. There was also a little pull-off boardwalk on the trail where you could watch fresh spring water bubble up through the sand/mud. Today, there was another boardwalk with a guide to the various wildlife species found in the area. Lots of frogs...we'll have to come back in the spring.
It's been really nice weather for the past couple days and it should continue into the weekend, when we'll head back to Glacial Drumlin and pick up somewhere southeast of Lake Mills. The past weekends have been hot, so haven't been able to progress too far there. Next week when we go back on the MRST we'll be heading toward Mt. Horeb. I don't think I can make Klevenville to Mt. Horeb in one day. Well, I could, but it'd be a bitch going back, and the 5 miles today made me really tired and my hands were tingling from what Stan says is carpal tunnel...wonderful. It's not the actual riding which makes me tired, but my butt that really starts to hurt the last couple miles. And I'm worried the most about the sun...worried that I'll have a sunstroke. Yesterday we forgot our helmets at home, so we rode without, and although that means I got more sun on my head, I also wasn't turning as many colors as when I wear a helmet. The helmet heats up my head so much, and that's what worries me the most about trying to go really long distances. Plus I'm supposed to avoid the sun because birth control and hydrochlorothiazide meds cause photosensitivity. And I have rosacea (controlled by topical meds...no, I don't look scary). So essentially I have like 3 strikes against me. Plus I'm very light skinned. 4 strikes. I'm glad we're at a low sea elevation at least. I'd probably have collapsed from heatstroke if I was back in Colorado doing what I did today.
Update: OK, you know how I said I would miss the taste of bacon? So I googled to see if Bac'Os have cholesterol. NO CHOLESTEROL!!!! We are totally getting Bac-O flavoured bits at the grocer ASAP!!!
I also noted in a Betty Crocker ad for BacOs is that they're now Kosher. This makes me laugh, because if you are raised in a tradition that practices Kosher food preparation, why would you have the craving for that delicious bacon flavor in the first place? Must be for converts.
It's ok to eat fish 'cause they don't have any feelings
So here's the story...
I'm not lazy, just really busy, so the first part of this entry I'm cut and pasting part of an email I wrote to a friend describing my past couple weeks at the time. By now it would be nearly my past three weeks:
"It's been a strange past couple weeks here. To make a long story extremely short, Stan was in a lot of pain, had a toothache, got a molar pulled last week, now he has to have an implant put in (fortunately it was a back tooth so the gaping hole can't be seen).
"During this time my life was a living hell...I'm sure his was worse, but I was so worried because he kept putting off seeing a dentist not because he was terrified of seeing a dentist (like I am) but because he didn't want to call in sick to work because they're short staffed. Ugh. Then last Wednesday (the 16th) he came home in excruciating pain, all he was doing was putting ice on it and he wouldn't/couldn't talk and I said "that's it, we're taking you to the emergency clinic." I was a frazzled mess. He wanted me to stop by a local grocer and get some ice before we went because we don't have enough at home. When I came back to the car, he said, "hear me out, the pain is subsiding, I think I can go home now." I said "yeah right!" and proceeded to drive him to the emergency clinic. He's so glad I didn't listen to him now.
"Men can be so bloody stubborn and play that whole macho "I'll be ok!" thing! My dad is the same way.
"He got some pain meds and penicillin from the doctor. I could barely sleep those nights. I kept checking on him to make sure he was alive! Abscesses can kill if not properly treated, and I have no idea how long this had been going on because he told me Monday (the 15th) that he had been having pain "for a couple of weeks." Who knows how long that is in man-years. Fortunately the following day Thursday 17th the 2nd dentist he called (we don't have dental insurance or regular dentists) had an opening the following morning (last Friday) and he got it pulled. He said he felt instant relief. The weird thing was is that the tooth didn't look abnormal, neither did the gums. But according to the dentist he had a crack in the tooth that went all the way down through it to the bone. Stan liked to chew on ice as a kid, so they figured out that's how the crack happened. Who knows how long he's had it before he started feeling the pain. He's been back at work now for a few days (after the extraction he still felt sick and weak as the penicillin was still working on killing the infection). Now his gums are itching, which is a good sign...means the gaping bloody hole is healing.
"Implants are expensive. This sucks. They advised against just getting a crown unless he was 80 years old because the implant will retain integrity in the gum/bone for years to come."
-------------- end copied email
So back on July 14th when this all started when Stan told me that he had a toothache and it hurt a lot, it started me on a worry streak, which made my stomach do somersaults. I go through this whenever a pet gets sick (BTW, it's Apollo-the-demonspawn-kitten's 1st birthday today). Then I started hurting really bad that was far beyond any pain any nervous reaction to a loved one's health condition could ever do. This has happened a couple times before, and the only trigger I could figure out could be possible food poisoning or maybe a reaction to fatty food. It's like a really bad stomach ache that feels like I swallowed a brick lodged in my ribs. There's no nausea (I wish there was so I could throw up), just pain. Pain that won't go away for hours, pain that won't subside by taking antacids or drinking coke or anything. I stayed up all night long because I could not sleep for the pain. It finally subsided by morning. Then when Stan's toothache got much worse a couple days later, I stopped eating altogether due to nerves. I noticed that once I stopped eating, I felt much better. I mean I felt weak and all, but at least my stomach didn't bother me anymore.
Now I don't think this is a gallbladder thing, even though Stan suspected it might be. Certain symptoms didn't fit at all. I wasn't jaundiced, I wasn't nauseated, I didn't have diarrhea (I wish I did...to rid myself of the pain), I didn't have a fever, the pain wasn't only confined to my right side, it didn't hurt worse when I inhaled (actually, it made me feel better, if only for a slight moment), yadda yadda yadda. And it relieved me to find out my mom doesn't have gallbladder problems. But as I was staying up that one night, I was doing research on gallbladders and I know one thing for damn sure: I don't want to have it taken out!
So I decided I'm going to start a preventative measure, and that is to eliminate land animals from my diet because they are the major source of cholesterol which causes gallstones (which I don't want). I originally thought I'd eliminate animals with legs, but crabs and lobsters and crawfish have legs, and they are definitely staying on my menu. Pork? won't miss it. I don't even like pork at all except for ham cold cuts and the taste of bacon. Fowl? won't miss it. Beef? won't miss it, unless it's a really good Black Angus steak from Colorado. Wisconsin's elderly retired dairy cow used shoe leather "beef" is nothing to miss. Lamb? Yeah, I'll miss lamb. Gyros...yumm...Oh well. Animal products? Stan really wants me to eat eggs, but whenever I do, it's not pretty. I like eggs, and the "Egg Beaters" I tried are like eating...uh...I'd rather eat raw tofu. But I just can't eat more than one egg at a time or else problems will ensue. I still use lowfat milk on cereal and in coffee and tea. But I've done a major cut back on cheese. I'll eat as much yogurt as I want. I'll eat a little ice cream now and then in the summer. Rice milk? As much as I want...it's not really "milk," it's a vegetarian product. Fish? Scallops? Mussels? Clams? Sea Urchin? Octopus? Squid? Snails? Cuttlefish? Cockles? No limits, well, the pocketbook is the only limit. And I also won't eat it deep-fried, only broiled, boiled or raw (in the case of prepared sushi). There is no way I could give up sushi, ever, and there's no reason to. Seafood and fish is on a whole different level than land animal. Also, with the price of grain going up, it will start to effect the price of grain eaters, i.e., chickens, turkeys, cows, pigs, sheep, etc..
There is probably a name for the type of "vegeterian" I am...let's google it to see...
OK, here it is, according to About.com: I'm a "Pescaterian." Definition: "Occasionally used to describe those who abstain from eating all meat and animal flesh with the exception of fish. Although the word is not commonly used and a pescatarian is not technically a vegetarian, more and more people are adopting this kind of diet, usually for health reasons or as a stepping stone to a fully vegetarian diet." No stepping stone to me, I have no plans on being totally vegetarian. I tried being vegetarian about 11 years ago and didn't take well to it. I became very depressed. I can't remember if I cut fish/seafood out at the time. But I think keeping fish and seafood in the mix is good.
Found this in my inbox this morning from a local newsgroup that I guess forages for info from other cities: Bloody Hell! If I saw something like that in the road, I'd come to a screeching halt for fear of ruining the undercarriage of my car! Um...last time I encountered one, a speed bump was kinda *rounded* and *smooth* on top, and not as steep. Looks like this would cause accidents, not prevent them. And what about the cry wolf effect? Pretty soon residents of that area will come to think all images like that are illusions, until three pointy dangerous triangles actually fall off the Pyramid Delivery Truck...
The previous post made me think of some other clothing I had as a child.
In first and second grade in Massachusetts we had both our individual photograph portraits taken as well as a group ensemble class photo outside on the steps of the old school. These were done on different days. My mom, who liked to sew and thought she was saving Mr. Scrooge money by handmaking clothing, sewed me a fairly awful dress when I was six. It was made out of bluish grey cotton and was extremely plain looking. I couldn't complain because I feared I would be murdered, due to past experiences of complaining and being lectured to and yelled at. Pretty much, I had no say and no objections to anything as child--at least I didn't VOICE the objections much--for fear of being murdered.
I wore this homely dress to my first class portrait in first grade. I can't remember what dress I should have been wearing to the second grade class portrait. See, something happened with the photographer's film. It got exposed, or ruined somehow. So no one ever saw those photos. Instead, we had to have our pictures taken a second time. And somehow, no one knew--at least *I* didn't know--when that second time was going to be.
Because I lived under a Scroogian dictatorship at home, I didn't have a lot of clothes to choose from. Shatters your preconceived notions of an only child, huh? Dresses I wore one year had the hem taken out for the following year. And when there was no hem left, there could be an extra row of fabric to sew on. That plain blue-grey dress that my mom made had that happen to it. An extra row of fabric with some brick-a-brack was sewn on. I hated brick-a-brack. It's so cheap and peasant. Who on earth ever thought that was attractive? So one day in second grade I was wearing that altered ugly dress that I had worn for my first-grade group photo, and SURPRISE! The photographer was there to take our second grade class photo! I had on the same bloody dress I wore to the first grade class photo!
Who on earth in this country--in the 1960s, mind you, not during the Great Depression--has two class photos wearing the same clothes two years in a row? It's not that my parents were so evil that I only had one dress to my name, or that they knowingly made me wear the same dress on group photo day. It was just that I had so few clothes that the odds were so favorable of being caught wearing the same dress on two different days.
But it wasn't all bad. My parents bought me, off the rack, not special ordered with lots of money invested, just off the rack, a new dress for First Communion (thank GOODNESS my mother didn't attempt to sew it). Here is some of the foreshadowing of my Atheism. All of the other Catholic girls I went to the dreaded Sunday School with wore white dresses to their First Communion. These dresses of theirs were intended for one purpose only, and that was THE dress they wore one day only, the day they would become the virgin child-bride of Christ. Maybe an older sister or cousin wore it to her Communion, and maybe she would hand it down to a younger sister, but those dresses saw no light of day other than on the Holy Child Wedding Day. And the tradition would continue down through the ages of virginal white child brides of Jesus. But not me. My dress was pink. There was no tradition there. My mom didn't go to church when she was young--how I envied that and wished I could've enjoyed that privilege. There was no one to inherit a white Communion dress from, and no one to hand it down to. My Pink Communion Dress saw secular days as well, birthday parties and other times when I felt like dressing up. My Pink dress said screw tradition, screw virginal child brides, screw white. It was what marked me in a crowd of colorlessness and shocked the other Catholic parents with their matching white child brides. It said, "she walks among you, but she is not one of you." It said, "in a crowd of blank canvases on which to paint your Dogma, here's an artist who is already painted, painted with a Pink Scarlet Letter, painted with her own Stigmata...you can't touch this, you can't touch it, so don't even try 'cause she tries to spin around and snatch her Guardian Angel to kill it. She doesn't want her Guardian Angel, she'll have none of that White, she's Pretty in Pink."
I don't think my parents realized what a radical thing they were doing. It wasn't a specially ordered dress for that "special day" nor was it a hand-me-down dress that was steeped in a tradition of other Communions from older sisters before. It was just an off the rack dress. It was secular. That dress had no faith and no tradition. And best of all, it was PINK. They innocently thought a pastel pink dress was a nice change from all the white. Although their naivete about other things has driven me up a wall--how could they be so clueless about so much--this was a fortunate sort of cluelessness. Although none of my peers made fun of me because I wasn't wearing white, deep down I knew my dress was different. And I liked it.
When two things happen at the same time, you have to take notice.
When I was a kid growing up in Massachusetts for a couple years, my parents would sometimes get some ice cream that came three flavors to a container. No, it wasn't the usual Chocolate, Vanilla and Strawberry. It was Coffee, Vanilla and Orange. Not only did this flavor combo stick in my mind forever, but the colors did too. There was pale brown coffee which was not at all like the medium pinkish brown of chocolate. There was the off-white of the vanilla, which seemed to have more flavor than the vanilla of the more popular trio. And then there was the orange, a pale orange like a dreamsickle. I'm not sure if this was orange sherbet or if it was orange flavored ice cream. I guess it really doesn't matter.
Now as an only child of two only children, I had no source to get hand-me-downs. But since this was Massachusetts, the area my Dad grew up, he had an aunt (my Great Aunt Helen). One time we went to visit her in Rhode Island and she had some visitors who I assume were related to me very distantly. Either Aunt Helen or someone else gave my parents a few dresses that used to belong to a girl. They seemed rather old in style because these relatives probably wore them quite a while ago, but one I liked because it had the same exact colors of that Coffee, Vanilla and Orange ice cream. It had a vanilla top, coffee bottom, and orange trim and sash.
One time I was wearing that exact dress when my parents took me to a store. I had long blond hair, and a store clerk told me I looked like Alice in Wonderland. I was too young to read the book myself, but I did have the book and was familiar with John Tenniel's illustrations. Yes, I did look like Alice.
Although I outgrew the dress by the time we moved to New York, I think we were still able to find the ice cream. But by the time we moved to Colorado, it had disappeared off the shelf. Was it a regional specialty like Moxie? Or was it something from that era that disappeared at the dawning of the age of Aquarius?
I was playing around with essential oils today and realized I have those exact components...Coffee, Vanilla and Orange. So I created a blend...very gourmand. Yum. When I get to the point of offering scents commercially, that will definitely be one of the first.
IRL I woke up in the middle of the night at an hour I usually don't wake up at. I was breathing erratically and crying from a bad dream. I don't know if that's what woke me up, or it was the storm. I got up anyway because the storm was loud and I wouldn't be able to sleep anyway. And I recorded this dream.
It was one of those horrible feelings like I was still in school, not even college, but school...like junior high especially the way the people treated me. I was looking at a map because Stan and I were driving up to LaCrosse for dinner. It was winter, and it was a similar feeling like driving up to Appleton to be part of an art opening (which happened IRL years ago). The route on the map looked like it went up north to Appleton, not northwest to LaCrosse. Why would we drive to LaCrosse...or Appleton just to eat dinner? Weird. It was also like those dreams where we drive NW of Fort Collins and it's snowing...that reoccurring dream. Anyway, I'm not sure if we arrived at our destination or not, but we're in a restaurant and we come across a friend (who IRL has been the cause of a grief for me in the past few week...although I don't think *he* knows that). In the dream *he* was acting extremely stuck up to me. He was in the restaurant with a hetro couple...like they were the new Ann and Stan, except younger and more fun and not as serious as the real A&S are now. And with shorter brunette hair. I could not engage *him* in conversation. *He* would not talk to me. There was something about a scarf in the dream, but I can't remember what. Stan was able to talk to *him* a little. I asked Stan what was wrong with *him* and he said that *he* wanted to not be bothered by me, like I was soooo bothersome. *He* was sitting at a big booth with this couple and there was plenty of room for Stan and I to join *him,* but *he* didn't want us there (it was soooo 6th grade), so Stan and I got a booth by ourselves. I was really upset because *he* was being so non-communicative, but really upset because it was something about ME and I didn't know what I had done! I told Stan that if I were in his shoes, I would be defending me in front of *him*, but Stan was pretty indifferent about it, which made me feel even worse because he was supposed to be chivalrous and defend and support his woman. It's not that Stan was on *his* side, it's just that Stan didn't care.
This whole dream is really symbolic for stuff happening IRL. Substitute the het couple for a boyfriend perhaps, substitute the junior high attitude for prescription drug addiction and a deteriorating mental condition, substitute adolescent immaturity for premature senility. Who knows, I woke up just bursting in tears.
I don't know why I'm so upset, but it pisses me off. *He* says *he's* afraid we're drifting apart, but we're not the ones who are drifting, *he* is. We're always here, where is *he*? We're not the ones not answering our phone. We're the ones who take initiative, we're the ones who called on *his* birthday, not *him* on mine. Is it the drugs? Is it the child who never became a man but who is instead becoming an old man? Why do I torture myself over this? It's late, I should be asleep. It's still storming. I'm watching the weather channel. I don't know how Stan can sleep through this. I wish I was more like Stan.
OK, I'm going to document this because I know Stan won't (I asked him to, he didn't want to). This isn't the exact conversation as I wasn't there. It's just a recounting of what Stan recounted to me. It's just the gist:
Stan is assembling the bikes/bike rack on the back of the van.
Durhey: Wutcha doin' with that bike rack?
Stan: We're going for a bike ride.
Durhey (confused): There's places to bike in town...where are you going?
Stan: There's bike trails in the country that we use, like the one outside of Cottage Grove and one outside of Verona.
Durhey: Oh, you mean the snowmobile trails!
-----
If I wasn't there I would've explained to Durhey that snowmobiles or motorized vehicles of any kind aren't allowed on the bike trails. It's just that ya-hey kind of culture, whether it's ATVs or snowmobiles or dirt bikes that are as foreign to bicycles as I am to them.
I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a proficient bicyclist. Even when I was young and thin I couldn't go more than a couple miles in town without becoming extremely fatigued, and things haven't changed much. I sold my bike when I moved to Madison and didn't find any reason to get a bike for in-town use (streets are too busy and narrow and there were no bike paths when we moved here). Years ago we found a bike trail outside of town that looked intriguing. It was The Glacial Drumlin Trail, a converted railroad bed. Last year I finally bought a bicycle. It's been hard getting acclimated to it, and even though people led me to think that I'd be biking longer and longer distances, I simply can't. Last week we biked about 5 miles and it debilitated me for the rest of the week. Each time after I bike my face turns red and purple and green and yellow...yes, seriously. I know lots of peoples' faces turn red when they exercise, but mine turns into abstract art. The center of my face is red. The sides of my jaw are purple. And a swatch between my purple jawline and my red cheeks is a greenish-yellow-white stripe. Actually, that area is probably my regular normal skin tone--it just looks greenish-yellow-white because that's what a lighter color will do when placed next to purple and red (go read some color theory). The first time it happened to me was when I was 10, and outside the whole day during a class field trip on 1972 Earth Day. Classmates kept commenting on my red and white striped face. If I had blue eyes with stars in them, I would've looked like the American flag.
So we've been going for small bike rides every other day or three, a mile or two one direction, and then back. Also, there's not that much time to go much further, even if I had the stamina. Plus, even though Stan isn't exhausted like me after the bike ride, later during the day he complains how tired he is, so it's a good thing I'm his governor. We're taking the Glacial Drumlin trail in short increments. I think because it's a gravel trail it's harder for me than if it was paved. We took it from Cambridge to Ridge Rd. Then another day Ridge Rd. to Dvorak Rd. Then Dvorak Rd. almost to Deerfield (that's the ride that almost killed me). Then from Deerfield back to the spot we turned around before, then back through Deerfield to London Rd. Then today we took London Rd. to London. The next day we'll go to back to London and go the other direction.
On the first day we found a little toad on the road, fortunately I didn't run it over. Last week there were lots of wonderful smells coming from unknown wildflowers. Today we saw wild irises growing by the path. Last week we saw lots and lots of flooded fields, a lake where farmland used to be.
Durhey doesn't care about the flooded fields or the wild irises. As long as he can ride his snowmobile and whoop and hollar and shoot off his 'tater gun, life's good for Durhey.
This morning as I was taking the dogs out, there was a squirrel, one squirrel, rattling around on our clematis trellis. No big deal. I heard a strange noise close by, and looked across the alley to see the neighbor's oak tree trunk virtually covered with squirrels. I have never seen so many squirrels in such a concentrated area, ever. There must have been over one to two dozen squirrels chasing each other around the tree trunk, and there were other squirrels running down the alley. Imagine Hitchcock's "The Birds" with the bush-tailed rodent instead. It freaked me a bit. It was not a cute squirrel munching a peanut on your steps anymore, or even one squirrel deviously digging up your tulip bulb. It was a squirrel mob.
It was evocative of memories of tent caterpillars as a kid. You'd find one caterpillar, which for a bug-loving kid was rather cool. It was soft, although not furry, and colored brown and blue with intricate body patterning like some exotic fabric. It was very "friendly" and never bit. You'd find a couple more and put them in a jar. But then you'd discover the motherload...the 'pillar hive. It was a web in tree branches, crawling with 'pillars, catching 'pillar residue like 'pillar poop and the occasional dead 'pillar.
After that, those caterpillars were no longer that cute and lovable. It was no longer that lone gem, semi-anthropormorphised in your young mind that you found happily chewing on a leaf. It was part of a colony of destructive robotic clones.
I had an experience like that several years ago. We found some small caterpillars alongside the Monarch caterpillars we would raise. Unlike the Monarchs which exist independently of eachother (Eggs are laid singly, usually one per leaf), these caterpillars seemed to act like one organism, all raising their bodies in unison when "it" felt threatened. It gave me one big freakout, and although we were attempting to raise them too, we aborted that mission. These caterpillars of the Tussock moth are destructive defoliators. We drowned them. I felt guilty about that, but maybe we saved a tree. It was that unitary organism response that the Tussock moth caterpillars had that was a red flag to me that they were up to no good.
As I watched the squirrel spectacle this morning, it got me thinking that concentrated colonies of animals, be they caterpillars, birds, squirrels, maggots, mice or whatever, elicit the "huzzzzzzz" freakout response from most humans, whereas one of those--with the exception of the maggot-- might even elicit a "cute!" response. We are hardwired to be repulsed by groupings.
But why should our own kind not elicit the same response? I know in my case it does. I see a large gathering of people and I know I don't want to go there. I am drawn to quiet, human-less places. I do like big cities, but only for the architecture, not for the large population. When I used to go to parties, I'd opt to be alone with my friends in a room away from others. I shop at Shopko now because it's always empty instead of Target which has quadrupled its customer base within the last two years, even though I prefer Target's offerings. I never go to malls, except for one that has a bead store, and that mall is not very busy, and I head directly to the bead store (or the restroom if need be) and then immediately leave after beads are purchased, not wander around the rest of the place. I won't go to the Boerner gardens in Milwaukee anymore not just because they charge too much and they took away any food source, but because of the constant stream of obnoxious wedding parties. I don't go to theatres or arenas or fests (unless forced to by people you're visiting) or events. I really don't like concentrated humanity. Remember when humans started flying in planes and all the cliches about how they looked like ants from above? Why would you want to be among a bunch of ants? Don't hives freak you out?
I'll leave with something I said a few years ago which is Stan's favorite quote of mine:
"We're going where? Down there? Where all those people are?"
Cat Owners: This Ever Happen to You? Potential Gross-out Factor...use Caution.
It's early in the morning, dark, and you're half asleep. You feel a cat next to you so you reach over to pet and tickle it. You're coochying its underbelly and you come across something that doesn't feel right. The fur has some crusty substance around a place that seems to be without fur. Since this cat had a mast cell tumor three years ago, you worry it might be another one, although you wonder why you didn't notice this on your cat sooner since it feels rather large. You continue to feel this area trying to figure out whether the crusty substance is dried blood and pus from an infected area or tumor or if the cat got into some dirty substance like messy human food or just what is going on. And then you realize...for the last minute you've been feeling the cat's anus.
GAAAAH!!!!!
You're no longer half asleep but frantically washing your hands in the bathroom.
Stan and I were discussing a situation out of our past in the early 90s. I couldn't remember it at all. As he discussed it more and more, I had a vague, but only vague notion that it had happened, but couldn't remember one of the people involved, whom I had only met that one time. Lately this has been a fairly common occurrence regarding that time in my life. Although I unfortunately remember too much of it, much of it is also completely gone from my memory as if it never occurred.
We framed it in a LOST philosophy context. Perhaps the universe course-corrected itself, and those things never did happen. Of course if that were the case, why would Stan still remember them?
A couple people I met back then I/we became friends with. They seemed familiar to me, like I'd known them from somewhere else before (I never told them this). I did not stay friends with them for different reasons. Looking back on it now, Stan and I were never supposed to befriend these people. Maybe the reason why they seemed familiar back in 1990 is because I'd become unstuck in time and was able to access being friends with them in my future, yet I wasn't able to access the reasons not to remain friends at that point. Maybe in 1990 I was only able to access 1992, not 1995.
When I was 6 I knew certain things about the man I would marry. I knew he'd be blond and Jewish. I told this to my mom, that I had a blond Jewish (imaginary) boyfriend. She said he's not Jewish. There was confusion about this, just as there was confusion about Stan having a Jewish biological father which was put on his birth certificate (this is a crazy story that I won't go into right now). Stan went for about 17 years in his life, from the time he was around 23 or so until 40 until he actually found his biological father, thinking he was Jewish. My 6-year-old imaginary boyfriend's name was Bobby. Bobby is the name of Stan's half-brother, his biological mother's first son after Stan (She gave up Stan for adoption).
How did I know this as a 6-year-old unless I had become unstuck in time and could access certain things from my future?
I've been thinking a lot about time, the 4th dimension, and how we "parse" the 4th dimension as linear time in the same way those in 2D "flatland" parse a 3D object entering their 2D world as a series of changing line thicknesses. Further clicking: Nova, The Elegant Universe and Carl Sagan explains Flatland (You Tube Video)
Everything that we have knowingly "yet" to experience has already happened, we just haven't parsed it yet. It all happens in an instant, and some have the ability to perceive it more instantaneously than others, which may appear to be psychic ability in seeing the future, but it's just an ability to "see" in 4 dimensions.
For the life of me I wouldn't be able to understand this based on mathematical equations, yet I can grasp it intuitively. It's not like it's from a previous life, it's happening, now. It's happened, it's yet to happen. There is no past or future. There's just the present. And it's all happening NOW. Like a movie recorded on film. Each film frame is one instance--play them in sequence and you have a time sequence, a timeline. But if you were to take the film reel and slice it up into individual frames and stack them like papers in a filing cabinet, then compress them to lose any artificial thickness the celluloid has, you would have a 2D representation of the movie, where all the events happen simultaneously. Then compress the artificial height to give you just 1 dimension, a line, and then compress the line to give you 0 dimensions, a point. That is where everything that ever is, was, and will be is. That's it. It's all there. There's nothing else. Don't worry about missing it. It's already done.
I saw the oddest bird at our birdfeeder today. It had a white body with black head, black wings and black tail. It sort of looked like it had a skunk stripe down its back, but it was just because the body was white and the wings were black. On the black wings and tail were a few random white spots. It had a gold beak and was eating sunflower seeds from our feeder. I've never seen anything like it. I tried to shoot it (with a camera, that is) from the bedroom window, but it flew away, of course. Maybe it's a migratory bird. It returned again this afternoon and I noticed it also had a reddish-orange breast. I tried to shoot it again, but could only get the picture below which I had to crank up the brightness and contrast on. I couldn't get any closer to it, and shooting it through a window without it seeing you is a little difficult.
Mourning doves have to be the stupidest birds in the world. A few days ago I saw one land on top of our feeder. It's one of those feeders that hangs from a fishing wire and is supposedly squirrel-proof. It has a bottom part where the seeds go in, and a top covering that deflects rain and jumping squirrels. The dove was standing on this top part, making those jerky head strutting pigeon movements, looking around, wondering where the food was. Well, at the time, there might not have been food in the feeder, but if there was, it wouldn't have been on top. But it happened again today, shortly after the mystery bird sighting. It landed on top of the feeder, wondering how to get at the food which was in the level below. The stupid bird could not figure out how to get to the food. All our backyard birds, from large crows to baby sparrows learning to fly figure out how to fly into the bottom level, except the Mourning Dove. Such a stupid bird. They have such small heads in comparison to their body size. If a chickadee had a body the size of a Mourning Dove's, it would have a head the size of a tennis ball. Wisconsin recently passed a law that allows people to shoot Mourning Doves. I guess they are overpopulated, yet I thought it was a stupid law. But considering the skyrocketing price of food, our doves might look pretty good when gas is $60/gallon and bread is $15/loaf and chicken is $30/lb. Actually, we have an overpopulation of Allium in our backyard which started from a few bulbs. Each year there's more and more and they're taking over the tulips and everything else in our yard. Allium are from the onion/garlic family, so we can cook the doves with the allium bulbs.
I don't know if I could actually kill a warm-blooded creature. We caught our own crawfish and carp and ate them once (Stan caught the fish with his bare hands). But a bird? You can't catch a bird with your bare hands. You might be able to ambush them with a net...they're pretty slow and tame...and stupid. But I refuse to have any sort of gun.
What will we be willing to do when the food crisis gets bad?
Hey, addictionary word submitters: Would it kill you to use your word in an example sentence? Or can't you think beyond just the definition of your brainchild? I mean, it's *your* word, FFS, use it! I subscribe to addictionary, and it bugs me to see a fairly decent "werd" w/definition arrive in my inbox...but there's no example, no context. How hard is it to frame your "werd?"
Reminds me of Freshman Art History at CSU when we only had to remember the artist, the name of the work and the year it was produced. No, nothing about the context in which the work was created or the culture of the country and the era. The first test was a total shocker. I think I got a D. It would've been a boon for Rainman and Aspies who get off on that trivia date stuff. This is probably one of the underlying roots of all my anxiety dreams about not studying for tests. I pulled my grade up to an A for the second semester, but only after cramming to remember useless and irrelevant trivia that I soon forgot after the test. That's what fact- and data-based tests do, make you forget after you no longer need the data--unless you have Asperger's and you thrive on that--but for us Neurotypes we want to go beyond: "32. Artist: Max Benkelman; Title: "Sunflowers in Evening with Farmhand"; Country: Germany; Year: 1927; Genre: German Expressionism. In fact, I don't even think in my class we had the Genre or Country. The instructor didn't care that you studied--as well as a freshman could study given the reading material that was given for the course--about German Expressionism, or Max himself and that he soon emigrated from Germany to the United States, Southwestern Nebraska, specifically, where he set up the Sunflower Institute that was sort of like a Van Gogh cult for suicidal artists. No one cared that Max's fixation on Sunflowers was obsessive to the point that he painted nothing else, not even starry nights. No one cared about how colorless Max's paintings became throughout his years until finally his canvasses were nothing but thick black paint. No, there was no context back in Freshman Art History.
(Sound of current and former art and art history students Googling Max Benkelman because they can't remember studying him in class).
I didn't think about it then, but now I realize it was probably so that the TAs could grade the papers easier since there were hundreds of people in these classes. Wouldn't want a TA to have to mull over essay answers and different TAs give different marks for similar responses.
Why not simply give multiple choice, for that matter? That'd make it even easier and the university could forgo employing TAs as test graders altogether and implement the tests with the number 2 pencil where you fill in the circles and have a computer read it?
I never met a TA that didn't feel a sense of entitlement. Grrr.
So, if I say the work was created in 1788 but the work was actually created in 1787, does that make me every bit as wrong as the bozo who said it was created in 1632? Yup, according to the way Art History 101 is graded.
So this is my first post since I've been back (and I've been back for a week now), and it's not even about the trip. No, it's about porn spam.
I got the stupidest porn spam today--yes, I know, they're ALL stupid so how can I qualify one as stupidest--I guess it's just stupid in terms of porn marketing. It wasn't your typical porn spam with your 4-letter word in the subject title in reference to some body part. No, this sender was somewhat more advanced than that, at least maybe advanced in years--they used a 6-letter word in the subject title.
Bosoms.
Who uses the term "bosoms" anymore? Especially for porn spam? I mean if I was the kind of guy--and I'm not even a kind of guy--looking for internet pictures of breasts, "bosoms" is about the last word I would think of that would describe what I want to find. It conjures up images of very clothed breasts, albeit large breasts, encased in a heavily armoured multi-panelled white brassiere forming them into a torpedo shape like headlights on some classic 1950s car. Grandmothers have bosoms. Pictures of pin-up women from the 1940s had bosoms. Contemporary girlies posing on the skinternet have breasts known by other raunchier names that I need not mention...but they don't have "bosoms."
Well, I guess it goes along with the demographic that is consuming the other thing I get spam for all the time--Viagra (not only do spammers think I'm male, they think I'm an OLD male).
Grandpa got his Viagra and now he's googling "bosoms." It's the next big thing.
Things to do in Denver When You're Dead to the World
Not the most comfortable accommodations, I don't have anywhere to sit comfortably and use my laptop, except on this twin futon if I prop pillows up against the uncomfortable arms and lie crosswise on it. I can't access the internet while I'm doing this because the phone line doesn't reach, but it's dialup anyway and there's only one line and Montgomery Burns (the doghating version) will yell if he can't call to check the weather.
It is like a prison here, literally. I am in an approx. 10x12 room with two windows that I can't see out of because it's in a basement and there's those stupid plastic bubbles over them. The irony is that this is an improvement over what it was prior to 2004. Back then, I had to sleep on a mattress on the floor in the living/dining room, no privacy. And before I figured out that the mattress on the floor was actually more comfortable, I was sleeping on a rollaway cot that squeaked and was lumpy. The things I will endure just to see friends.
We almost got a motel for the rest of what would have been an extremely abbreviated stay, because the hot water heater broke. Had I not complained very loudly about the tepidly cold shower, they would've continued to use as is, rationalizing (if you can call it that) "the water is cold because it's cold outside", each shower becoming progressively colder and colder, and shorter and shorter, until finally they took no more showers and just washed in the sink and boiled hot water on the stove.
The above paragraph is supposed to be read in a Garrison Keilor voice. A Scary Home Companion.
So here's what went down so far.
Monday, March 24: Left Madison and went to Galena, IL. Disappointment. The rock shop in town has closed forever. I wanted mass quantities of Fluorite and Galena mined from this town, but instead will have to buy it in Colorado and elsewhere that imports rocks and minerals mined from Galena, IL. The irony. I like hills, but Galena is too hilly. Would not want to live there. Old mining towns are creepy. It reminded me a bit of Bisbee, AZ, but creepier. Since we didn't stay long there, we headed down the road and stayed in Lincoln, NE for the night. Not at our usual haunts because that one was going downhill the last time we passed through (coming back from Arizona a year ago), but this time at a Super 8 so I could take advantage of my Trip Rewards (which I should've signed up for over a year ago). It was near the stairwell over the lobby so it was loud, and although it was a non-smoking room, the room across wasn't and the occupants kept the door open and it stunk. Not a lot of sleep.
Tuesday, March 25: Got coffee at the best coffee shop in the world. Stan felt lousy...he was coming down with a cold. We both felt dessicated and were drinking mass quantities of fluids. I was about to come down with a cold, so I didn't feel my best either. Lots of interstate rest stops. Nebraska. Boring. Eastern Colorado. Boring. Hot. Dry. When I arrived in Fort Collins, my mom had found a Coty Sweet Earth Woods perfume compact for me. This was possibly a rosebud. I don't know if this was THE one I had, or one she had. If it was mine, where were the other two? The smells instantly brought back memories, and now I know why I thought they all smelled alike. In my final analysis, I think the Vermont Country Store's version actually has more distinction between the scents than the originals did.
Wednesday, March 26: Can't remember what happened that day other than buying a cactus at Fossil Creek Nursery. shopping at Sunflower Market. and going into a Mexican grocery to get some juices (Jumex...my favorite). We also went downtown to see if I could find some scents at the Tibetan store, but ended up buying blue coffee mugs that said "Namaste" (LOST reference) because there are no coffee cups at the Burns residence that are of a normal size. Every utensil, every cup is miniature in size, so in order to eat with a normal size spoon, one has to use their version of a tablespoon. It's like some sort of weird Alice in Wonderland through the looking glass alternative world where everything has shrunk in size. Went to Mellow Yellow in search of Frangipani. Found nothing. Went out to eat with Bill at El Burrito that night.
Thursday, March 27: I was sick. I felt awful. I stayed in the prison practically the entire day until I got bored out of my freaking mind (no tv, no radio, that's pretty unbearable when you're sick) and Stan took me for a ride in the evening.
Friday, March 28: This was the morning of the cold shower. At first I thought it was one of Montgomery Burns' money-saving methods of setting the hot water heater down so low that one can't take a shower for more than a minute without being frozen. But Stan checked the heater and it was set pretty high. I convinced them it was a problem with the hot water heater, and that it was old and needed to be replaced. They amazingly got someone over here to fix it...on a Friday afternoon. No way that could have been accomplished in Madison. Earlier in the day, Stan and I went to Bath, Fort Collins Nursery, and Gulley Greenhouse to get some cactuses. After that we came back to deal with the hot water heater guy and meddling Mr. Burns. After that I seriously had to have a Margarita with Bill at El Burrito. I don't drink much anymore because of the pain in my jaw it causes me, plus it makes me unproductive. But when I'm on vacation, productivity is not an issue.
Saturday, March 29: I was not exactly hung over (I only had one margarita the night before), but not exactly well-rested either. Went to the Longmont/Boulder area to see our friends Russ and Lamya and their two kids. On the way stopped at a greenhouse outside of Loveland to get cactus. We ate at a nice restaurant in Boulder that serves South American cuisine, like Cerviche. (sp?) I had a Mojito to drink which was delicious. Stan had a Margarita. We drove back to Fort Colins about 9:30 pm, but when we got back, we were dead. We used to do this all the time, and much later in the night. What has become of us? We are getting old. Unfortunately, this would have been *the* day to go for a bike ride had we not been out of town, unfortunately we couldn't have the nice weather on Saturday come later the next week.
Sunday, March 30: Dead to the world after the Mojito and the long night (up until all of 10:30, well, 11:30 Madison time) before. Went to Avo's to check our email on their free hi-speed internet. Had an absolutely delicious Creamation omelette. Went to East West Imports and found a Persian Attar scent, plus some Asian rice crackers to munch on for road tripping. I also broke down and went to the place in town I swore I'd never go to again, ever. The dreaded Whole Foods. I just wanted to see if they had more Kuumba Made scents available than they do in Madison. Bought some Tunisian Amber and Black Copium, plus some Vetiver essential oil and Jojoba oil to use as a carrier oil, and an empty roll-on vial so I can make my own Vetiver perfume. This might be the "smokier" more molassesy Vetiver that I'm not used to as much as the other kind I got as crystal resin from Eden Botanicals. I felt pretty dead the whole day. We got drive-thru food that night and drove around a lot. Nights are pretty much spent driving around until we're tired of it or have exhausted all the places to see, and then we come back here and hole up in the prison while the TV blares upstairs. If they would just turn the tv off and have conversations with us, that would be fine (non-judgmental, non-worrywart, non-persnickety conversations, that is), but no, the TV is all important. And loud tv too. Just shoot me if I ever get that way. I know I have my favorites like LOST and No Reservations, but if I had guests, the guests would take priority. But maybe that's just me.
Monday, March 31: Met my friend Barb for lunch and got to see where she worked, which ironically is in the same building where I had Driver's Ed in high school. Her boss had someone over that day who came from Baraboo, WI and knew Madison quite well. Coincidences and Ironies. We went with Barb and her sister, Nancy, to the Ethiopian restaurant we ate at with Bill last time we were out. It is so delicious there. We took some food "home" with us to eat for dinner, and even cold, it was still delicious. In the afternoon and evening we drove to Waverly, Wellington (scary), Owl Canyon, Bellevue, Masonville and back through Loveland. Anything to get us out of the house and Monty Burns and the LOUD TV.
Tuesday, April 1: Apollo's 8-month birthday. We took off and went to Denver in search of Dardano's Flowerland and Isis Books. We couldn't find Evans, where Dardano's is located. It's been ages. We found Isis's former location on East Colfax, but they have now moved to South Broadway. On the way to their new location, we came across Evans, fortunately. At Isis I got Heliotrope, Cypress and Wisteria essential oils, and Frangipani, one of my rosebud scents from ages ago that I have since stupidly lost. What an idiot I am. Stan only found one cactus at Dardano's. I remember them having so much more when I went there in the 80s. Maybe it's the time of year. After Dardano's it was still fairly early in the day, so I got the crazy idea to go to Casa Bonita. We haven't been there since the 80s either. Now back in the 70s when I was first introduced to CB, probably in the company of Barb's family and later with Stan, I thought it was delicious. People would say "Casa Bonita, the food's not very good, but you go there for the experience." I didn't understand what was wrong with the food...compared what I was used to, it was quite a treat! Now I know why they say the food wasn't very good. It's not. You can't compare it to any family-run Mexican restaurant. But when you don't know anything better and your family never takes you out to eat good food, what have you got to go by? But yes, the experience is fun, even if it's just in a cheesey "oh, I remember that!" way. I feel so sorry for the "performers." I had no idea what was going on...some Black Bart and a She-Sherrif... really stupid act and horrible PA system that's probably not been fixed since the 70s. After that, Stan drove by his Grandmother's old homestead which looked nothing like how we remembered it, and we took the dogs for a walk on a bike path. We have to take the dogs with us on these long day excursions. Monty Burns and Co. are completely incapable of dealing with dogs in their house while we're gone longer than a couple hours. Of course we always have to kennel them in the basement, hell forbid we have them LOOSE in the house. On the way back, we found a greenhouse in Lafayette and Stan got some things there. After I got back to the prison, I added the essential oils to jojoba in empty vials. I used medicine droppers and rinsed the droppers out in a little water and that water smelled so good. Who would've thought the combo of those four oils would smell so great? Now I really want to try my hand at perfumery when I get home.
Wednesday, April 2: We'll go up to Bill's later. Thursday we'll see Stan's sister, and Friday, I think we'll split the scene. Not only does the weather look the best for Friday as far as travelling across the mountains on I-70, but I'm going stark-raving loonie here. Even though the TV will be loud in Montrose, and sometimes I really feel like an outsider there, at least there'll be a beautiful window I can gaze out of with a beautiful scene of the San Juans. Bill said he's fixing up a room downstairs, so maybe in the future Stan and I can stay here instead of at our cell at the Montgomery Burns State Penn. I guess we could chip in for propane, as Bill keeps the place very cold.
We are so lucky we took our Route 66 trip last spring and not this one. There is much flooding in Missouri that would have effected us. We got lost around St. Louis as it was. I'll never forget all the Redbud trees blooming throughout the beautiful hillsides.
I was craving a Creamation today, and then I realized, in a week, I can have one. I think Avo's and I will be friends a lot during this trip...they have WiFi and there's just only so much of my parent's single phone line dialup I can handle.
A message from ebay on their General Announcements page
"I'd like to address a common question we hear - How do scammers get a bidder's email address? Unfortunately, a high percentage of eBay members have registered an email address that is very close or identical to their User ID. Fraudsters attempt to send emails to the bidders they are targeting by using the User ID, plus several of the most common domain names – i.e. userid@yahoo.com , userid@gmail.com, userid@hotmail.com, userid@aol.com. This combination yields a very high success rate for them. Subsequently, too many eBay bidders get fooled – and lose their money - as an unfortunate result."
Oh that is so laughable. Neither my buying nor selling ids are anything CLOSE to the corresponding email names I use for them, neither do I use "common" domain names for the email accounts. Yet I am bombarded with phake phishes.
Fortunately, I'm pretty experienced with this stuff, so 99% of the time I know when something is phake, and the other 1% when I'm confused I always go to my ebay messages to see if I got a legitimate message there too.
So if I am using an uncommon domain name for my email accounts, and my email names are nothing like my ebay member names, how do you suppose phishers got ahold of my email addresses then, unless they KNOW what they are, like they sold me something, or they bought something from me. However if THAT were the case, then wouldn't I get different phishing emails to my buying account and my selling account? No, I get DUPLICATE phishy messages to both accounts. meaning, it's not from someone I did business with because I sell to different people than I buy from.
Makes me think it's an inside job, someone who has access to all ebay accounts with their corresponding email addresses. I mean, how carefully can you screen your disgruntled, low-paid employees?
Well, I got my ibook back today. Seemed fine in the store. What they were supposed to fixed got fixed. Of course weirdness never shows up right away. Now there's another user account, "apple". I can't seem to delete it because it's an admin account. Also, somehow my HP printer driver disappeared, and my Alien Skin filters wouldn't work. I'll have to look into reinstalling the printer stuff tomorrow. I Installed the Alien Skins and they seem fine now, but in the process I realized I had no record of my Human Software plugins serial numbers (that has nothing to do with the apple repair problem, that was just my own negligence). Then I couldn't find the disks they came on. This sent me into a panic, which explains why I am up at 11:30 at night.
Oh yeah, and Stan is sick, which means guess who's next in line?
I really wish I had a secretary and a maid. Hell, I wish I had STAFF. Put a geek on the payroll as well.
My static speakers was not a speaker problem, but a mic problem. And it wasn't even a hardware issue, it was software weirdness, some firmware causing a feedback loop. Well, I'll be. A big old WTF. Didn't see that coming.
A computer malfunction is just as stressful and evokes the same nauseous response from me as does one of my pets getting sick. I know it's not the same, I would never compare a pet to a computer, but it still makes me ill when I cannot get one to work right. We got Stan's "new used" computer back form the shop, and to make a long story short, things aren't working right, I mean we can't even get it to start sometimes. I'm hoping it's something they can diagnose, so we have to take it back again. It's driving me crazy. I just want our computer situation to be back to normal. It keeps costing us $ to fix these things too.
On a lighter side, and I do need to cheer myself up because of this computer crisis right now, my mind is wandering when it comes to the Clinton v. Obama fight and ends up in Seinfeldville. Warning: This is for hardcore Seinfeld fans only...it won't make sense unless you're extremely familiar with all the episodes:
First, there's the episode "The Cartoon" where comedian Kathy Griffin plays starting-out comedian Sally Weaver who accuses Jerry of ruining her life, goes on to have a one-woman show where she has a hand-held tape recorder dressed up with little red devil horns and a tail that is playing Jerry's voice. Sally is truly demented and is taking anything Jerry does/says and twists it for the purpose of her comedy act. I'm seeing Hilary Clinton as Sally, one woman show, with a little bedeviled tape recorder with Barack Obama's voice talking about how the Republicans had ideas (he didn't say "good" ideas, but Sally Weaver/Hilary Clinton would twist his words).
Then on the news last night, they were talking about how Clinton and Obama had to get along, possibly even run on the same ticket to save the Democratic party. This immediately brings to mind the episode "The Mango":
Elaine Hilary: Jerry Barack, we have to have sexrun on the same ticket to save the friendshipParty. Jerry Barack: SexRunning together to SAVE the friendshipParty. Well if we have to, we have to.
Someone with video mash up skills really should do this. Don't look at me, I just have the daydreams.
It's very cold here. We went to "Pugapalooza" on the coldest day of the year (last Saturday). Lucifer Sam had fun. He had a yearly exam this Tuesday and everything looks great...no new growths. The vet said the thing on his back last fall was probably a cyst since it has now disappeared.
The week before that, we took Caligula and Plato to the vet's. Caligula has a slight heart murmur, and we got some new diet food for him....hopefully this stuff will work.
Plato also has a slight heart murmur, which is slightly higher than Caligula's, but they said it's nothing too much to be concerned about unless it gets worse. He also has a cataract in his (left?) eye, but they say they rarely operate on that if he can still see to get around. His blood tests also came back slightly elevated (just a little higher than normal) in the liver function and some gall bladder enzyme, which could be the precursor of "Cushing's disease" (which manifests itself differently in dogs than humans). Evidently it's very common. We will need to retest in the spring to see if it is continuing to rise or not. It's nothing out of the normal in dogs his age. It's just a matter to prepare ourselves that he is getting old and will start to have problems. He's 11...almost 11.5. He sleeps almost all day in this weather. I want to too.
Apollo is still half sweetness and light, and half demonspawn. During "normal" weather we keep the bedroom door closed as it helps alleviate Stan's snore problem to not have cat fur on the bed. But in this subarctic cold, we keep it open, otherwise that room is just too cold when it's shut. Last night Apollo crawled under the covers. I was afraid he was going to suffocate, so I couldn't sleep the whole time he was under there because I was worrying about waking up to a dead kitten. Finally, he started to bite my legs, so I squeezed him out the bottom of the bed. It was so cold, Stan even welcomed Caligula, the biggest furmaker of them all, on the bed. Bed's too high for the dogs...they sleep in their kennel bunkies. So it's not really a three dog night, just a two cat night.
The thing is, watching a movie in a cold, uncomfortable, smelly theatre with noisy jackasses kicking the back of your seat and a basketball team in front of you while you have to pee badly but you can't pause the movie isn't any fun either.
But I get what Lynch is passionately saying.
The thing is, where does one draw the line? I think only the dimmest witted among us would completely disagree with Lynch and say that watching a movie on an iPhone is the best way to do it. But what about watching a movie in a home theatre with surround sound (not that I've ever experienced anything like this), is this better or worse than a theatre with much larger screen? Is it better because you don't have tards in the audience, just your close friends who are civilized with washed bodies and quiet chewing habits? Or worse because it's not purist, i.e., a bona fide theatre? What about watching it at home on a good-size flatscreen tv? A small flatscreen tv (like mine?)? An old fashioned CRT display tv like my parents'? A small tv like the one I used to have that is smaller than my desktop computer monitor? What about watching it on a laptop? See the shades of grey? At what point does one say, "your movie viewing experience is not legitimate." For the record, I watched both seasons of Twin Peaks and reruns of it recorded off of the television on video tape for several years on a 13 inch CRT tv, and no one could've loved that show more! I've since upgraded my tv sizes twice, not for status but for failing eyesight reasons. For some of us, the best we have is when a movie comes to DVD...or Sundance or IFC...or even, for some people like my parents who don't have cable, to Network... on our small tv set at home. Can someone say that we didn't experience it correctly because it wasn't under optimal theatrical conditions with surround sound and a large screen during its first run? See, to me, that's just plain snobby, like the rich college kid with the tricked out stereo in the dorm room making fun of your pitiful portable picnic player, claiming you're not a real music fan otherwise you'd have a better stereo. Who's to say you can't love the music just as much, even if you can't afford a better system? By that justification, am I not as much a human as people with money living in new houses with insulated walls and home security systems with the best health care, latest gadgets and holidays in the sun? Is a child growing up in poverty in Africa not as much as a human as me? Of course that child is just as human as me and I'm just as human as a rich person--only the most hardcore economic-Darwinism racists would question that (and I don't think *they're* human so they don't count, but that's a whole other can-o-worms). But see the slippery slope we can get into when claiming one's "experience" is superior? Obviously, if you have an iphone, you're not viewing a movie on it because that's all you can afford. But you see how it could lead down that path, if for example, you're viewing a movie on a small tv, which is all you have?
As a visual artist I am completely frustrated with trying to translate my mediums cross different platforms. Works I create onscreen never fully translate with the glow and depth onto a printed surface. Likewise, my paintings which involve so much texture and metallics and iridescence cannot be experienced in a JPEG file or a flat printed reproduction. Some platforms are best used for one medium and completely inappropriate for another. Invert the movie-on-an-iPhone scenario and imagine having to go to a theatre to make a phone call...completely inappropriate (not that some boors don't do this already, but they're the kind that enjoy watching movies on their iPhones too, probably).
All I'm saying is that although I cheered when I watched the Lynch clip, it also brings up a whole host of issues, and the inevitable slippery slope of snobbery and classism.
Somehow, after trying to search for something online, I managed to end up on a message board for perfume (they've got a message board for everything...everything except what I wish I could find *free* message boards for...but more on that later...maybe...sorry for the early digression).
Thinking this might be fairly interesting, a discussion of making your own perfume, a discussion of what kinds of fragrance oils and ingredients to use or something more heady, I looked at one of the forums and found a topic that caught my interest. It was about having one's scent pirated. I naively thought it was about perfume designers (there's probably a term for this, but I don't know it) who have had people steal their original creation, either by someone simulating it, or by someone buying it, diluting it or selling it cheap. No, it was about *wearers* and *consumers* of perfume who seem to think an expensive yet mass-produced scent readily available for public purchase is somehow their "own signature scent." How alpha bitch! I'm sorry, but how on earth can someone claim something as "theirs" when anyone in the world willing to shell out the $$ for it can, and is entitled to, wear it. Look, I've had my original art work and web design copied and pirated, a legitimate complaint. The perfume designer who has had his/her scent copied and pirated would also have a legitimate complaint. But complaining about someone else starting to wear Opium after "you wore it first" is like me complaining that other people are purchasing Photoshop! It's just absurd.
Sorry, honey, if a scent follower (I cannot use the term "scent copier" ... copier implies copyright, and you have no dominion over a scent that you did not create) chaps your hide, you must have a really cushy life.
This is why I do not hang out with women (plural).
Speaking of scent...
A few days ago I was at the post office, and boy did it stink! I didn't know if it was the young man in front of me or the old man behind me (there's something very philosophical about that statement or image, but I don't know what it is, really). It was that horrible alchemy of really bad B.O. combined with cigarettes which creates a demonic entity all its own. Fortunately, I was freshly-scented with Cassini, one of my most favorite scents. I started sniffing my wrist, where the perfume was the most concentrated and easily accessible to my nose. I probably looked odd, standing in line, wrist stuck to my nose, but I didn't care--life's too short to breathe bad air.
And that is why I do not hang out with men (plural).
One of the first things we got Apollo was a kitty bed. It's like a bag with soft plush material inside, really snuggly. I don't think he liked it much at first, I think he preferred the towels we piled up on the floor for him to sleep on because he had gotten used to those. But after a while I noticed that the interior of the bed was darker, discolored. It was moist, but not malodorous. Then I had my suspicions...he was nursing it.
Natasha, our first cat, did the same thing, except she did it on ME when I was wearing black clothing. We suspected her mother was black or dark-colored. She was a black and rusty semi-long hair tortie. This kitty snuggle bed that Apollo has is cream-colored, so we suspect his mother was light-colored like him.
When he's in his nursey mode (they say it's from having been weaned too young...none of our grey-cats did/do it) he's practically hypnotized. He can snap out of it very quickly and become demonspawn from hell.
Yesterday and today Lucifer Sam stared at him when he was nursing, sort of puzzled by it. It's really the only time the Pug can get up close to him and look at him without Demonspawn attacking him. Yes, this cat attacks the dogs. I think it's playful. He wants them to play. But Lucifer Sam doesn't really understand playful kittens. We got him when the other cats, even Caligula, were really past their playful stages. Plato understands playful kittens better beacuse when he was two, we got Caligula. I am amazed at how well Plato does with this little guy--they really get along quite well.
Apollo is now integrated into the house with the rest of the animals. He sleeps with Caligula a short ways away on the futon.
I want one of those kitty bag beds for myself, except human-sized. Why don't they make them? Blankets aren't the same thing. You sit on a couch and put a blanket on you, but it's only on the top of you. Your legs dangle over the side and the underside of them get cold. Not with a superplush human-sized kitty bag bed! You crawl in it, and it's sort of like a sleeping bag, but without the uncomfortable zippers and plaid flannel lumpy interior. It conforms more to your body, it's not as stiff and bulky as a sleeping bag.
Can someone please manufacture this? I really need one for nights like these.
Sometimes I wish I sewed just so I could make my own cat toys and the superplush human-sized kitty bag bed. However I absolutely HATE sewing. I got a sewing machine to use with art once (sewing paper together) but don't use it anymore because even in the production of art I found sewing to be one of the worst activities ever.
I've been sick for almost a week now with a really bad sore throat. I got it from Stan. He's better now, and it progresses every day (today it's not as sore as it was, but my ears feel like they've been stuffed with cotton), so I know it's nothing serious, just some obnoxious virus.
Each day Caligula hisses less at Apollo, but they're far from snuggle lovers. That might take years. Apollo actually gets along with Plato the best, probably because they're both Alphas and they've worked it out (meaning little kitty bites Plato, Plato puts little kitten in his place). Apollo likes to lovebite Lucifer Sam, but the bites are getting less annoying and Lucifer Sam is tolerating him more.
Watched a really enjoyable show last night on Sundance channel called "Nimrod Nation." The Nimrods is the school mascot for Watersmeet, Michigan. It's a documentary that revolves around the high school basketball team, the Nimrods, but it also shows a lot of the small town life and local characters. The setting is very Fargo-esque, and a good thing to watch on a cold night because it makes you feel glad you're in balmier climes. No really, the best line I've heard from any documentary came from "Nimrods" when a teenage girl is complaining about living in the Upper Peninsula and says "I don't like living in Michigan, it's too cold. I want to move to Wisconsin." Stan and I went through Watersmeet a couple times. We spent the night there once in a grungey little hunters' motel/cabin to see the Paulding lights back in 1997. We refused to stay in the casino, the only other lodging in town. That was mid-September and the weather was nice, and the pond by our cabin was idyllic. But this documentary is shot in winter, not as welcoming.
I have this horrible reocurring dream that is always the same theme: I haven't graduated from either under-grad or graduate school, I haven't scheduled my final show yet, or taken an outside credit, or even figured out which semester I'm going to graduate. I had one of those dreams last night. And at the end I'm always thinking, "maybe I can put off graduating another semester, it doesn't really matter anyway." Ugh. I'm so glad that part of my life is over and completed. I don't know why I keep having these dreams.
This weekend was a rollercoaster of emotions. I sold a painting...a large one, which really helps since this past month or two has been dead dead dead for the online sales. The family who bought it saw it at Sundance Cinema a few months ago. Sundance, by the way, called me back for a return showing a few weeks ago since the people/gallery/organization they had scheduled pulled out at the last minute because they thought Sundance's exposure would "dilute" their "image"--ok, whatever...I'm really glad I showed there, not just because it resulted in a sale of a large piece, but just because it's good exposure. At first I thought the people who pulled out were maybe some kind of snooty artschool conceptual theory types, but when I found their gallery online, I was really amazed that they had the nerve to pull out of a classy venue like Sundance. Well, their loss is my gain.
Anyway, I'm digressing. I was feeling a bit melancholy missing Letha and how her magenta rainbows will never embrace our wall again. And then Stan found a new lump on Lucifer Sam. This one is on his back.
The rest of the night I spent puking and endlessly voiding myself. I stayed up all night in a delirium, like a bad drunken reaction or a horrible flu. I simply cannot take another episode of these pet disasters. I hate to play favorites, but Lucifer Sam is my favorite pet. And this happening to him again is too much for me.
I suspect I have a panic disorder. But all the triggers are known, they don't happen out of the blue. Recently, it has been pet health issues, like when I thought the little kitten was horribly ill because he had diarrhea and vomited...all it was was too much running and a change of food. But the lump...a couple months after his other cancer...this is just too much.
I couldn't eat anything yesterday, but towards the middle of the day I had Stan get me some donuts. That was the only thing I had a taste for. Why donuts? Who knows. These situations give me weird cravings, usually for food I normally don't eat. We seldom ever eat donuts. We probably average one donut a year. Except this year sort of blew that average because of yesterday.
We take Lucifer Sam in today to get checked. I am so fearful.
I get these attacks when something is messing with my life, either with pet health issues, or when people mess with me interpersonally. This last one with the Pug was the worst yet. Stan said I looked really weak and pale. I looked up panic disorder online, but it seems those are more spontaneous in occurrence. This is not spontaneous or an unknown trigger. I know exactly what causes it. I'd be just fine if there was no lump on my Pug. I'd have been just fine in the past if people weren't being assholes. I'm not talking run-of-the-mill difficult customers, I'm talking people who have it in for you through no fault of your own, because they're mentally unstable or petty or bullies, or whatever, and they act like 10-year-olds even though they're adults.
Last night I had an embarrassing dream that I was making love to Johnny Depp. His hair was too short, though, pity. I kept wondering in the dream "what does he want with ME?"
I had the extensive test for Glaucoma this afternoon and although there are certain issues that need to be watched that may possibly be a precursor to Glaucoma, I do not presently have it. Who knows, maybe by the time I would get it, I'll already be dead, especially considering the political state of the world. So there's no need to get out the razor blades tonight.
Friday Stan and I took a drive down to southern Wisconsin to go to a greenhouse and see some scenery. Coming back on a two-lane highway, a rock was flicked from an oncoming pickup onto our (newly replaced this past spring) windshield, making one of the loudest rock hits I've ever heard. We've gotten dings before, but this one was loud. When we got home, we examined the damage. The vertical crack was a little more than an inch long. I felt it, and could feel the crack penetrate the windshield. Stan contacted Auto Glass Specialists (they're the guys in the little red truck...if you've got one in your area) and they said they can repair cracks up to 6 inches long. After Stan came home from work yesterday, he took the car in. I stayed home because I was busy. Shortly thereafter, much more shortly than one could possibly imagine a windshield even being looked at, let alone repaired, Stan returned. Thinking that perhaps they couldn't repair our hopeless ding, or that they were too busy to work on it, Stan said that they looked and looked and neither he nor the repair guy could find a crack. Thinking "typical male incompetence" (sorry, Stan, but you'd do the same), I went outside to examine it.
OK, I got comment spam in the entry below this morning, not an offensive spam for p*rn or predatory lending (although the spam did mention the name Ad*m Sm*th which, if one could extrapolate, one could assume he certainly wouldn't be *against* predatory lending, being the father of the free market and all that capitalist libertarian BS...yet I digress--I'm not an economic historian so I don't know what he really would've thought of such a thing.
No, this spam was from some bloody clueless guy promoting his site and authorship, and his soon-to-be famous name. Did it have anything to do with my dog or my pet situation? Or a story about his dog? No. It was just blatant self-promotion and completely off topic. But it was so cluelessly off topic that it was rather amusing. I thought for a short while, I'll just leave it, with my own snarky comment about spam.
But then I realized this guy isn't quite as clueless as I thought. This is the whole point behind comment spam: it doesn't matter if the comment doesn't fit the subject...comment spam isn't supposed to be sneaky...finding people's blogs on a similar subject as your own and then slyly infiltrating them with your URL on relevant on topic discussions so actual interested parties will visit your site. No, comment spam is war...spam as much anywhere and everywhere because sooner or later, search engines will pick up the keywords in your comment and your URL and then you'll get hits...except he didn't really leave a URL. The only link was to his Blogger ID, so you had to go there to find his blog. Not exactly "direct" marketing.
I mean if you're gonna spam, SPAM!!!
So I deleted it. despite the humor involved (yes, admittedly, humor laughing at someone else's cluelessness), I still don't want my blog being used as a podium to promote spamming, or someone's site that has nothing to do with the subjects I discuss here.
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This weekend we went to some pet shops to look for a kitty condo, and half-heartedly look at kittens. We bought the kitty condo for Caligula (and future kitten). He liked it, but he is too fat to jump up on the first ledge (we feed that cat the absolute bare minimum prescribed by the vet and we never give treats...it must be genetic). So then we had to get a shorter condo so he could jump up on that first. He now loves his condo, and I feel incredibly guilty for not having gotten one sooner. We've had cats for what...22 years? Yes, they are expensive, and yes, we live in a small house with not much room for such things. We have to keep it in the hallway where it hides some of our nice staircase because there is no room elsewhere.
Up until this weekend, I honestly didn't even feel ready to get a kitten. Having seen kittens at the various pet stores (and Stan, Animart's kittens are rescues...I looked it up), I feel I am now ready emotionally. Financially (especially after the kitty condo purchase) is another thing. Timewise is another thing as well, which is why we probably won't do anything until Stan's vacation time when he can help with this.
I don't know if Noah's Ark (pet store in town) kittens are rescues, but they are the best socialized. I assume they are unwanted kittens from litters, as opposed to "bred" kittens. They aren't kept in cages, they are free-range (a good word for everything except human children) so they are well-socialized. Noah's Ark is where we got Persephone 16 years ago.
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This morning I was heating up some hot water and the tea kettle made a squeak that sounded like when Persephone was in the back room and would scratch on the door to tell us she wanted out. For a millisecond, that's what I thought it was.
Lucifer Sam had his lump removed today, and now he is very sad. He gets that way whenever he's anaesthetized. He also had his teeth cleaned and a loose molar pulled. We won't know the status of the lump for several days or so.
Stan and I are planning on getting a kitten after he has healed. We will not be going to Colorado. There have been too many expenses with trying to save Persephone, her euthanasia and cremation, and now with Lucifer Sam's operation. So what we'll do instead is use Stan's vacation time to stay home, work on the house, and introduce a kitten to the household. Maybe take some short trips around Wisconsin. We've wanted a chance to see Wisconsin in the fall and it seems like we're always gone when the colors are the best.
Under normal circumstances, I would really want to travel. I love to road trip. Had it only been just Persephone's passing, I think we would've done it. But now with Lucifer Sam problem, it's just put me over the edge.
I've cried every day since Persephone went away. I haven't cried yet today, probably because the pug has my emotions consumed right now.
LOST DVD Season 3 won't be out until 12/11. I thought it was yesterday. WTH?
I simply cannot work on what I had planned on today, so here's an update on my life and thoughts as of late.
I had an eye exam last week, and to make a long story short, they suspect I *might* have glaucoma. They did a visual field test and got baseline photos of my eyes and I need to schedule another appointment in a couple months. Of course, I could just have a large optic nerve, which could resemble glaucoma. The only other indicators I have is somewhat high blood pressure, but I take medication for that. I am not dark skinned (I'm as visually white as they come), I'm not over 60, no family history, and I'm not extremely nearsighted (the eye doctor even said so...my main problem is my astigmatism), and the numbers from the pressure check are normal. I'm not explaining any of the technical aspects of this, so if this medspeak is baffling, google it. Life sucks.
Persephone is dying. I spent $400 at the vet's the other day on exam, blood tests, and subcutaneous fluids that we have to administer (no fun) to prevent her from totally dehydrating because she is eating less and less. Stan accidentally poked a muscle this morning, and she seems even more uncomfortable now, but I don't know if it's that as much as she really just wants to go. She's refusing food, and hiding in a difficult spot under the couch/futon. She will be missed, and we will have only 1 cat, Caligula, after she passes. It's been 22 years since I only had 1 cat. Persephone did make it past 16, however. Plato is now 11 and Caligula is 9. They are all Virgos, however we don't know Caligula's exact birthdate as he was a rescued stray.
I was very undecided as to whether we'd make it to Colorado this year or not. Even last night, as Persephone did seem to be responding a little better to food and the rehydration, I thought maybe she'd stabilize a bit, but it would involve having to stay home to take care of her and certainly not leaving her to be fed by our neighbors. But as I watch her now, I don't think she'll last the day.
I've been riding my bike as much as the weather and time permit, and that I do enjoy. I like finding new places to explore, but we usually have to drive to an interesting bike path and take our bikes with us. It's hard getting up to speed as I haven't ridden for nearly 20 years. They say exercise will make you feel better and less depressed. Well, physically, yes I do feel better. I feel like I have more energy, but almost too much. I'm having problems sleeping, and this happened before my diagnosis and before Persephone taking a sharp downturn. If I exercise one day, I won't be able to sleep that night. I'll be able to sleep the following night if I don't exercise. I also feel more depressed, especially on the days I exercise. I guess that's to be expected, as I seem to be a reverse reactor. If a drug or procedure or whatever is supposed to make you feel one way, it does the opposite to me...allergy medication gives me hives, marijuana makes me anything but mellow.
I'm looking forward to LOST Season 3 coming out on DVD on 9/11. It's the only thing I am looking forward to lately, and I'm not looking forward to it nearly as much as I was a few months ago before all this shit happened.
Most women when they are depressed go shopping for clothes. I buy Yankee Candles.
I watched a 20-year old Charles Manson interview on MSNBC, and now I'm convinced he is the chimp that George W. Bush was separated from at birth. The similarity in their speach patterns: cadence, phrasing, accent, is simply amazing. Close your eyes and listen to either of them and it's hard to tell them apart. I don't know what it is, it's not simply a Texan accent otherwise all Texans would sound that way and they don't. Manson didn't live in Texas that long, in fact, I can't find much about how long he was in Texas other than he was arrested there in 1960. There's something else, perhaps a messianic complex, a savior of the world, holy crusade and apocalyptic vision they both share, plus those beady little simian eyes. I just can't get over the similarities. Dan Abrams (MSNBC 8pm CDT) is showing snippets of the interview, and MSNBC may show the full hour-long interview again at some point. Watch it if you can, it's simply amazing to think about Bush while watching and listening to Manson babble. The main difference other than Manson is over a decade older and more than half a foot shorter, is he is responsible for fewer deaths. The irony of that.
Two people were ahead of me at the post office. One was a young woman with an affected 1970s hippie free lovin' Daisy Mae veneer with messy braids and ratty jeans with tears in the rear. She didn't look old enough to have even been born in the 70s. The other was a generic short shorn guy with a head and face as interesting as a potato. I have no idea how old he was, he looked like he could've been my age, he looked like he could've been half my age. It's so hard to tell with the potatoboy look. Potatoboy was wearing a red t-shirt that said "JGB World Tour 1980" on the back. Daisy Mae was wearing a yellow t-shirt, however I couldn't see what was on the front. Potatoboy was quite fascinated by it, however, and he stared and asked her, "What does your t-shirt say?"
Affecting a wide-eyed innocent yet skanky attitude, she responded, "Love at first sight."
Potatoboy smiled and asked, "Do you believe in it?"
"Doesn't everybody?" she asked.
Potatoboy smiled back, a bit mesmerized. I think I heard him mutter, "I guess so."
A bit nauseated by the whole exchange, it suddenly hit me, Ms. Rock 'n' Roll Trivia: JGB = J. Geils Band.
Didn't The J. Geils Band have a hit, somewhere around 1980 or shortly thereafter called "Love Stinks?"
Things that are pissing me off right now, August Edition
I just realized it's the thirteenth, and a month ago I wrote an entry called "Things that are pissing me off right now", so, what the hey, I'll make it a monthly thing. So without further ado, here's the August version of:
Things that are pissing me off right now
My Healthcare organization/HMO that keeps canceling appointments at my inconvenience.
The republicans in my state's legislature who want to cut all sorts of funding, namely, ALL funding to Wisconsin Public Broadcasting. Evil effing bastards.
When my mom says those little passive-aggressive things like "I'm glad I don't remember all the things MY parents did that made me mad" when I bring up some bad thing my dad did to me back when I was young.
The fact I didn't think of responding back with: "Oh, don't worry mom, I don't remember ALL the things you and dad did that made me mad--and you should be glad of that" until just now.
Republicans.
SPAM that is not filtered out.
Legitimate email that gets labeled as SPAM and that takes me several days to find since I don't always weed out my junk filters regularly.
Republicans.
People with the "I have a great life and I don't want to have to pay taxes so those less fortunate can have a decent life too" attitude. Seriously, I heard someone call in to a radio talk show today and they said they have a great job and great health care and they don't want to have their taxes raised and have universal health care because that will mess *their* health care up. I wanted to reach through the radio and strangle this guy. Selfish selfish selfish.
I had my bicycle in storage for 18 years and bring it out to ride I find that I own some sort of cult classic bicycle? My bicycle is a Univega Gran Premio and to my surprise people are still racing with these frames and I soon found this on my Univega web search - "Women's World Cup - 5th Gran Premio Castilla y Leon Nicole Cooke wins in Spain." People are racing with these things and I learned that there are people watching places like E-Bay to bid for these bicycles as if they are looking for collectors items. I watched a Univega auction and the bicycle sold for nearly as much as I payed for mine new in 1982, but that one was in a lot better condition than mine.
When I was a sophomore in undergraduate school I owned a bright red Schwinn Letour that I bought as a sophomore in high school. I loved that bicycle, but it weighed almost 40 pounds and it made me feel like a little boy. I traded in my beautiful red Schwinn for a blue 21 pound road bicycle and soon discovered this new Univega was a thrill to ride. It was almost like a racing bicycle, less expensive than the European racing bicycles I was wishing to buy, and my new Univega was made in Japan. I think the Univega was much more affordable than any of the 21 pound European racing choices because they were new and the company probably wanted to promote interest in them. I didn't have a credit card as a sophomore in college, so having to pay cash the Univega Gran Premio was the best I could afford in 1982. I used this bicycle for transportation until 1989, when it went into storage as Ann and I moved to Wisconsin, and remained ignored until 2007.
The rear derailleur fell to pieces within a year after I first bought the bicycle and I replaced it with a Campagnolo Nuovo Record rear derailleur. This is probably as close as I will ever come to owning a European racing bicycle. Mostly, the Univega had been a very good ride, and this summer when Ann and I decided to start riding bicycles again I thought I should see if my old bicycle was worth fixing up for the road.
I thought my old Univega would be a forgotten make and that the Univega company was probably long gone. I understand they were reabsorbed by Raleigh and stopped making bicycles in the late 1990s. I was almost hoping that no one cared about these bicycles anymore so I could ride my old bicycle without having to worry about it or attracting any attention. This is not the case and because people are still racing with these frames I decided to spend a lot more money on a bicycle lock than I would have if these things were a forgotten make.
I guess spending more for a lock it's not that big of a deal. When I use to ride in my 20s I never had a helmet and took off all of my reflectors to make my bicycle lighter. I now have all of the reflectors back on, and the only thing I won't put back on is the kick stand. Bicycling now in my 40s I have a helmet, reflectors, 3 lights, and 2 locks, so there is a lot more equipment involved. I don't like having all of this equipment and weight, but still it is a joy to ride my old Univega Gran Premio.
Today while I was waiting at a stoplight I caught a young woman looking at my Univega with longing interest in her eyes - I guess I unknowingly bought a classic when I was 25 years younger. I smiled very briefly at her and went on my way as soon as the light changed. Whether other riders are interested or shun my Univega I'm very happy I still have this one to ride to work and for fun.
Ann bought a new Trek bicycle when I took mine in to be repaired and I'm excited that we can go for bicycle ridding together again.
Typical University of Wisconsin cancellation of schedules, Typical United States Health Care, Typical Bullshit.
Stan and I had to switch healthcare providers at the beginning of the year because his job changed it for union employees. I had to schedule two yearly exams, one for eyes, one for...the other thing. On the day of my eye appointment, they called in the morning to reschedule because the doctor had a meeting to go to. Today, they called to reschedule my...other...appointment, which was more than a month away. While they were on the phone, I told them that I thought they only had to do the pap smear every three years or so if you're over 40 and had a negative result history. After all, I had just recently received something in the mail from them that stated that. Unfortunately, I threw the info away. They STRONGLY denied that and said I had to have one every year. My previous healthcare provider had switched to doing it every 3 years, but no, not UW healthcare.
AGE 40 - 65 • Women should have a yearly pelvic exam and Pap smear done to check for cervical cancer and other disorders. If your Pap smears are negative for 3 years in a row, have your Pap smear done every 2 - 3 years.
Well, mine's been negative for freakin-ever.
Typical administration not telling the doctors or nurses or receptionists or whoever is in charge of telling ME what their correct procedures are.
I'm printing out that sheet and bringing it in with me whenever I see them. I'll probably have to cancel and reschedule a few times before then, and by then, it will be three years anyway. Typical bullshit.
I hate the UW. My and Stan's experiences there as grad students don't bode well for my future experiences there with their health care system.
There's this building not too far from where I live that has gone through different ownership recently. I think it used to be a shoe repair shop, then maybe it sold guitars, and then it was vacant...I can't really remember. Or maybe I'm confusing it with something else. Who knows, I didn't really NOTICE it until recently because as of late it's acquired new ownership and a new business and a graffiti-art sign. I think it says "Uptown Grillz" or "Urban Grillz". I don't know which, I really wasn't paying attention. At first I thought it is a new bar...grilled food, even though it seemed really small. Maybe it was takeout food. Then I thought maybe they sell custom grills, you know, for your car. Then I saw something on the news about how some 7-year-old sprog swallowed some rhinestone grillz (almost a Darwin award for this sprog who got his genes from his mommee who bought him such a brilliant gift (at a freakin' FLEA MARKET no less....ewwww...used...yelch)). So I decided to Google "Grillz" and now I know what they sell there.
Holy Crap. Fashion has hit an all time low in beauty and comfort. For someone who had to wear braces for over two years as a teenager and a retainer for even more years after that, why the hell would anyone want to have that crap in their mouth? Metal in your mouth is the most unpleasant feeling. But what the hell is wrong with a culture that on one hand cannot tolerate natural discoloration/yellowing or any slight imperfection that no one would give a second thought to in other Western civilized cultures ("English Teeth" simply do not phase me one way or another...they're just natural teeth), and on the other hand creates this sort of fashion abomination?
Having to put my Pug away in his kennel because he can't stop barking at the loud moving van and the influx of new people and movers next door
The new politically correct "bottled water is bad" people who don't understand those of us who live in a third world part of town that had a contaminated well with all kinds of bacterial shit, carbon tet, manganese and probably ray-o-vac battery acid, among other things. Yes, life would be great if we all start drinking water right out of our taps. Maybe for those with new wells in suburbia, not those of us in the city with century old wells. Drink my tap water, you nazis, before you start accusing me of being bad on the environment for drinking it in bottles. We recycle our bottles.
People who badmouth all Americans in a blanket statement, as if collectively, *all* Americans are responsible for every evil in this world, not realizing how little power the poor and disenfranchised Americans do have.
People who refer to the disenfranchised as if it is their own personal fault, i.e., "He just behaves that way because he's disenfranchised." Wrong, no, he behaves that way because he's an asshole, not because he's disenfranchised, if anything, he's a spoiled rotten upper middle class suburbanite, not someone who's disenfranchised.
The whole princess syndrome. Some females seem to think they're entitled to princess treatment. Grow up and get out of your fairytale books. There is no Prince Charming. Face it, all men are smelly and fart and if they don't, they're either fastidiously gay or they're a psycho and are disguising it from you and will murder you at some point (that's not to say that smelly farty men don't murder women either). Stop talking about how you want macho men and disparage the not-so-macho men while you have two black eyes and bruises on your legs.
The smell of this idling diesel moving van next door.
People who would say "why don't you close your windows if the smell is bothering you?"
People who don't realize not everyone has central air or likes to have windows closed shut.
Large box stores that are three stories high but only utilize one story.
People who are on the latest politically correct green kick of the moment, and are the same people who probably made fun of me in grade school because I would have to take my brown paper lunch bag home with me and not toss it out.
I could go on, and probably will at some point, but I have a lot to do now.
Ann and I love to watch butterflies and about 10 years ago we started planting the kinds of flowers in our gardens that might attract them. We had lots of butterfly bushes for a while, but winters are hard on them and one year they all were killed. We gave up on the zone 5 butterfly bushes after that. We planted some milkweed and after a decade they have started to take over our whole yard. We have to pull them out to keep some areas open for other plants. I've been planning to pull out even more of them this week until today.
Today our yard was filled with more butterflies than we've ever seen before and most of the flower they were landing on were the milkweeds. I haven't seen this many butterflies in one space for years.
As soon as the roadworkers finished working on the intersecting street across from our house, as soon as they blacktop that and I think the noise in the neighborhood is over...guess what? Stan discovers a pile of shingles in the driveway in the house next door...the house that can't keep owners for more than a few years. It finally sold after being vacant since the beginning of the year.
Yes, the roofers are here. As I was fixing coffee this morning, I see one looking at the ladder on the side of our house (NOT the side of the house next to the house they should be working on, mind you, the other side, the far side) where Stan is fixing paint. There was a whole crew of them on that side, looking at the house. I yell out the window, "what are you doing?!?" several times, and then go outside and tell them, gesturing (I should have said, pardon my poor Spanish...it's been ages... "El Otro Casa!" but I wasn't thinking) "It's the other house! The OTHER HOUSE!"
The house they're working on is about 4 feet from our house, and naturally, my bedroom on the first floor and my office on the second floor are on that side of the house. Both those rooms are air conditioned, and it's really the only places I can work when it's this hot.
It's a tear-off job too, not just a putting a new layer on.
A kid who looked no more than 12, who I assume is part of the crew, rang the doorbell. I didn't go to the door because the dogs were in the way and barking, so I yelled out the window, "What do you want?"
"Can I use your bathroom?" he asked. WTF?
"Why do you want to use MY bathroom?" I asked him.
"Because there's no one home over there."
"Well, that's not my problem."
Yeah, right. And if you let the kid in, then the whole crew will want to use it. OK, so if YOU were having your roof done, wouldn't you want to have someone around who could be there to supervise stuff, like, "no, not the neighbor's house!" Or "The bathroom is upstairs on your left?" I mean, not being there when the crew you contracted arrives? What is this? Oh, this is not looking good.
Welcome to a week of hell. And it's not even the roofing noises that is concerning me at this point. It's the absentee neighbors. I can see not wanting to move in before the job is done, that makes sense, but why can't they have someone there at least initially when the job is starting? They almost tore off my f-ing roof! If I wasn't home and awake, they would've!
I can't remember my dreams, even though I know I had them.
I was thrown for a loop the past couple days. I can't talk about it...here. It's something that most people wouldn't understand or have much sympathy for anyway. It's just that certain things can be such a disappointment at most, or an unfathomable conundrum and contradiction at least. It's as if someone turned on the surrealize filter in my life, and I'll never be able to go back to thinking things were the way they were before anymore.
Either someone is messing with my head, or they're serious, in which case I guess I just don't understand at all. It's like having a gourmet chef tell you they like Dorritos.
Growing up we are all very keen on the generation gap between us and the generation before us, and the differences we have appear to be often painfully conspicuous. Looking at the generation gap between ourselves and the younger generation is often harder to recognize and often takes us by surprise. I was surprised today by things a younger coworker of mine said about Sting - of all people.
A woman, closer to my age, told my young so-worker that he looked like Sting, and perhaps he does only a little bit. This was suppose to be a compliment and when someone tells us we look like a famous person it is almost always met as a compliment. My coworker insisted that he didn't look like Sting and said things that implied that the comparison was a brutal insult. I tried to tell my coworker that he was being given a compliment and he even turned my words away as being wrong.
Sting? What could possibly be so wrong with being compared to Sting? The man did some interesting - not fantastic - but good music. He was excellent as an actor and now is helping to save the rain forests. Sure he's lost a little hair, but haven't we all?
I try to put myself in my coworkers place and remember myself as being 26 years old. I imagine someone telling me that I look a little like - say - Tony Bennett. I have to emphasize that I don't look like Tony or Ann will write 5 paragraphs only about that point. So.... at the age of 26 I would have found Tony to be an image of an earlier generation and would have not wanted to be compared.... I think i wouldn't have taken a comparison as hard as my coworker did, but I think I can see how I would have had some misgivings about being compared to anyone not so admired by my generation.
I think when we are younger we want to be recognized by things that seem important to our own generation. I guess it took me by surprise that younger people would find someone like Sting too irrelevant to be associated with in any way.
I think Sting is only a few years older than I am.
We wanted one of these and tried to buy it this spring, but the company was out. We forgot we planted one last year and it wanted us to know it was here with us by making a flower even while the vine is still very small.
About 10-12 years ago, I thought the Onion was funny...how could I not? It was one of Madison's own. But I soon got very tired of the humour. It seemed way too obvious. Smile-worthy, but not laughable. Then they relocated to New York City, got better known, and they're even less funny. I don't know, I read their stuff, and think, 'Yeah, intellectually I see where this is supposed to be funny, but I can't get an honest laugh out of it.' Don't get me wrong...I love satire, I love dry wit, and I can understand how extremely difficult it would be to consistently come up with and write this way, day after day. That doesn't mean I can't say I don't think it's funny. And it's not that I don't get it. I get it. But it's like a been there done that sort of get it. Let's move on to something that will really make me blow coffee on my monitor.
They have a recent story on recalled Pugs; several posts have been made to a Pug group I subscribe to. Again, I should think it's funny, but I don't. In fact, when I saw one pug on the slide show in the right hand corner who "suffers from internal and external bleeding", it immediately made me think of our poor Hieronymus and how he died.
In case you're interested, the URL is www.theonion.com/content/news/dog_breeders_issue_massive_recall. Cut and paste it in your browsers, but there'll be no links from me here.
As I was trying to wake up this morning (and failing miserably as I fell back to sleep), the radio had on a program about the current gas prices. Somewhere into the show, I heard something mentioned about the decline of the minivan, and how American car companies are not developing them as hybrid vehicles, or somesuch. Not that we personally could afford a new hybrid vehicle, not that we could even afford a used one in a few years. But why not make hybrid minivans?
More importantly, why are they so detested? Is it the soccer mom image? Yes, the van-o-sprogs with the mom catering to Princess and Junior's every whim and overscheduled and micromanaged extracurricular activity is one of the more hideous abominations of parenthood in this postmodern era. Walking or biking to the local park, pond or open field is an absurdist notion from a bygone era (yeah, mine!), and parents who would allow Precious to play by themselves or with friends in an unorganized fashion without the aid of an automobile to take them to the proper sports activity spot are just, well, bad parents (not according to me, but I don't count since I'm not a parent). But isn't this an attitudinal problem based on a larger societal problem? Why blame the vehicle? It's like shooting the messenger.
I am the furthest thing from a soccer mom...don't have kids, don't want 'em. My husband and I drive a minivan. I am a visual artist, and with seats removed, it allows me to haul lots of large paintings for shows. We garden a lot and are always loading lots of plants, big bags of peat moss and tons of rocks. It also has enough room for two dog kennels, which we take with us on a yearly vacation to see friends and family (that we might not take this year due to those gas prices, but that's for another entry). When we travel, we also bring back loads of cactii for Stan's side-business. This cannot be done with a sedan...there would be no room.
Our van gets high 20s (MPG) on the highway, which is infinitely better than the oh-so-loved SUVs. We only drive it during the weekday if we need to run errands, which usually includes a trip to the post office several times a week as part of my and Stan's business. Hey, I'd walk to a local post office if there was one in my neighborhood, but there isn't, however that's another topic entirely (contract stations with illegible receipts and crack addict employees don't count). Stan takes a bus to his current job. Since I'm self-employed, I do not commute anywhere. As far as our current employment commuting conditions, we're probably some of the greenest DINKs in Madison. But it's not a contest. I'm not competing with anyone. I do what works for me. If that means not driving to a job, or using a vehicle to go to the post office as part of my self employment, that's what I do.
And the comfort! Now this is just a personal thing and your mileage may vary, but the comfort of a minivan (compared to any kind of car including a station wagon) is incomparable. I can breathe in a minivan, but the times we've been forced into various kinds of loaner cars when our van has been in the shop has been an exercise in claustrophobia. I feel my knees are up by my chin, I can't move my legs and feet, and I feel the dashboard wants to headbang me. I'm a relatively small person...I can't imagine what it would be like for a linebacker.
A while ago I saw some young hip urban types driving a small import car with a bumpersticker that said "Minivans Suck." I wanted to yell out, "You suck, idiot," but I silenced my inner angry punk. What totally misguided hostility toward a vehicle that has such an unwarranted bad rap. If they really want to chastise an auto, shouldn't it be the SUV? I'd like to see one of those get mileage in the high 20s (I think we even got 30 MPG once, when the wind was on our side). I'd also like to see an SUV actually HAULING stuff or passengers. Usually there's just one driver--usually a very INCONSIDERATE driver. I've often found Minivan drivers, be they what I would guess would be a soccer mom, or not, to be more considerate on the whole than SUV drivers on the whole. Plus, it's common knowledge that an SUV is a male growth enhancement substitute. I've never heard of someone getting a minivan as a breast enlargement substitute. I think people get them because they're, um...practical. Oooh, did I say a dirty word? Practical? How uncool. No, no one wants to be practical. You either have to get an enormous gas guzzling SUV that proves your manhood or a PC soy-sipping sub-sub-sub compact econo vehicle that proves your greenhood. Not that the latter wouldn't be desirable for some of our uses, however, not everyone can afford a 2nd car or the insurance. And that's one thing that bothers me about the Left is that they think everyone is in the financial situation to get a vegetable-burner or a hybrid or some other non-fossil fuel consumer, and those who don't switch are poor Earthizens. Yet I digress.
Here's an article I found by a musician who used (and loved) his minivan that would haul his band's gear. I'm glad I'm not the only unsoccer mom that lauds the praises of the Minivan. I just wish Detroit would understand.
Haven't felt good the past few days or so. Ate some Ramen with a bad spice and it gave me bad heartburn. Haven't been able to sleep much at night, tired during the day. No time for anything.
Had a dream the other night that I was talking to a man with the same last name as mine. I was trying to find out if he lived in England (which is most likely where any relative on that side would be, but I'd have to go back many generations since my granddad's brother didn't have kids), but I must have woken up before I got an answer.
I uploaded a video Stan took of our amazing blooming orchid cactus to YouTube. I posted it over at Stan's blog. Now that I know how YouTube works, I'll have to start making movies of our animals to bore everyone with, like in the old days when people showed you slide shows after dinner of their trips out west.
A Fistful of Pastels or For a Few Pastels More or Fine Art Drifter
The Good: Although I wasn't anticipating finding anything at Artist and Display other than some Pearl-Ex dry pigments, I found the holy grail: SENNELIER OIL PASTELS INTERFERENCE COLORS! They looked like they had been there a long time, beating around, mingling with other pastels, getting dingy, tested, used up. They weren't the cleanest, newest looking pastels, but they were what I wanted, and I was desperate. I didn't exactly buy them out, but I bought at least three of the ones I could find, some 4 each, maybe even more of some colors. Let's just say if you plan on buying Blue and Green Interference Sennelier Oil Pastels at Milwaukee's Artist and Display, you're out of luck now. There might be some Reds left.
The Bad: Some store called Art Supply Products or something similar. Found it through a Google Search, complete with address, Google map put us in the middle of suburbia. Tried to call them. Got an answer phone. Guy probably runs it out of his basement. Oh well. Yet another miss: Sax Arts and Crafts used to be a good store when it was close to downtown in the lower level of an old building. Now they've moved out to suburbia in an office building, are closed Saturdays and of course Sundays with 8-4:30 hours during the week. Boo Hiss.
The Ugly: I thought when Boerner Gardens got a makeover earlier this milennium, it was a nice improvement...newer restrooms and a nice cafe/cafeteria where one could get a yummy bite before setting off to see the gardens. Since we'd driven all around the greater Milwaukee area in search of art supplies before going to the gardens today, I knew I would need that snack because we were both famished. But the girls at the front desk said it's been gone for two years. No, now if you want to eat at the gardens, you have to be part of a catered wedding party. I could go on about the benefits of Public Spaces and Services and Social Programs and the benefit to Humanity and the evils of privatization and the privatizing of once former Public areas and services and the evils of increasing user fees and lowering of taxes (that is only noticeable if you're wealthy anyway) that fund organizations and parks and recreation, but Stan's already heard my rant over a late lunch today, and, well, you probably get my drift and where I stand politically anyway.
We decided not to see the gardens. Their fee was high, there was no place to eat, so we went to a restaurant instead before heading back home. We almost ran over a wedding party on our way out. The outside gardens at Olbrich here in Madison are still free. The Arboretum is still free. The Rotary Gardens in Janesville is free. I don't want to pay large prices only to get sideswiped by a bunch of pompous giggling women in froofy wedding garb who think they have the right of way. I find it really cool that there's no room in the Tucson Botanical Gardens for wedding parties (and they had a wonderfully delicious little cafe there), although I do get a perverse pleasure of imagining someone's over-the-top wedding dress getting caught on cactus spines.
What should have been a simple art application process turned out to be a daylong activity...and that doesn't even count fine tuning the photos and writing the biography (I hate doing stuff like that). No, that was already done. All I had to do now was send the jpeg photos off to them along with the image list and biography. Since they so competently decided not to tell me what the dimensions of the photos needed to be, I kept the images as large as possible. After all, they wanted 300 dpi. That totalled about 45 megabytes. My email client has some limit on it of 20 megs. So I had to go back and resize the images so that they'd be less than 20 megs. I tried sending it through my gmail account online since all the recipients had gmail addresses, but that took forever, so I cancelled out of that and used one of my domain emails. I sent a followup to acknowledge receipt, and one person responded that they did not receive it. I resized again, this time I decided I would only use gmail and let it chug away at it until it was complete, regardless of how long it took. Then gmail gives me a message that my attachments are over the 10 meg limit.
You know, you'd think that before they decide they're not going to accept any hard copies (which is a bit unusual when they're asking for 300 dpi images...most applications like this ask for 300 dpi images on CD because of their size), they'd make some provision of having email accounts that can accept more than 10 megs of an attachment. Or, they should've put limits on the application, i.e., "size your images to be no more than 7" in any dimension" or "compress your files so that no file should be over 1.5 megs" or whatever. But no. Just "send 300 dpi images". Yeah,, but what size? What file size? That's involves too much effort when you already know who you want to use for the exhibits. So it was back to the drawing board, resizing the jpegs some more so that the cumulative amount would be less than 10 megs. This time I added some compression. I sent them off through gmail again, and sent a followup for an acknowledgment as well. I bet I don't hear from them one way or another whether they received them or not. I suspect this is a total Terry Mattheson operation styled after the Bush administration, i.e., "Loyalty over Competence".
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Most pretentious woman at the grocery store today. She was going through the checkout when she got a cell call. She had one of those earphone things permanently attached to her phone and ear so that she could use both hands to do stuff while her brain was engaged elsewhere (like drive...oh joy). As she's paying the cashier she's answering a call "oh hi julie, yes I got your email blah blah blah" all the while she's trying to interact with the cashier. If it was me, I wouldn't answer the call while I'm interacting with another person. I just wouldn't do it. No call is that important that it should take priority over the people you're dealing with face to face. Or at least answer it and tell them you'll call them back. It's just so rude. And she just had that air about her that she was so bloody special.
I'll take the White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Toothpaste, please
Our dogs' toothpaste is chicken flavored. This is to lure dogs into letting their humans swivel a prickly thing around in their mouths without them putting up too much of a fuss while they try and savor the chickeny goodness from this foreign object. Of course this is assuming that your dog likes chicken flavor. I've seen other dog breath products with minty flavoring, but dogs probably don't like that too much, unlike us humans who prefer minty, mentholy, cooling brisk mints, wash, and paste. The thing is, dogs eat "chicken" flavored, and beef and lamb flavored, and possibly other barnyard beast-flavored dog chow pretty much as a main staple like in the way we'd eat potatoes, bread, lettuce, tomatoes, or rice, what have you. But we don't have bread flavored toothpaste. Or rice flavored. Granted, that would be bland. But we don't even flavor our toothpastes with our favorite tasty flavors. There is no Cool Ranch flavored toothpaste. Or Chocolate. Neither is there Spicy Mexican, Cookie Dough, Sharp White Cheddar, Zesty Italian nor Peanutbutter and Jelly. Yet those are just some of the common favorite flavors we Americans like to eat. But spearmint? peppermint? cool cinnamint? I can't remember when I ate a food with those flavors, not even a small candy. Weird that we should think our dogs would like their teeth brushed with food-flavored paste, yet we wouldn't tolerate the flavor of mashed potatoes being swished around in our mouths to keep our teeth clean.
Update: I just received a call from Company ABC in reply to my phone message (which, in case you are wondering, was very professional, serious, and nothing like this bitchy journal post...this is why I have this journal, so I can VENT in a way I can't do in business). The young man on the other end was VERY nice and professional and friendly and nothing at all like their snippy-sounding voice message gal (they really should change that--instead of "Just a minute!" they should change it to "one moment please" or something calmer). He explained that some server of theirs was down, which is why they didn't even receive my order, and apologized for it. He also charged me for only one plugin upgrade (although I did order two) as a courtesy. He was very pleasant, as was I back.
Let me take this time to talk about freebie apologies. When someone messes up my order, apologizes, and then sends me freebies, I think it's super. All they really owe me is an apology and then a correction to the order. They owe me nothing else, but when they go beyond the call of duty and give me more stuff, that is just icing on the cake. One time someone forgot a widget I ordered in the package, so they not only send me the widget they forgot, but a bonus widget instead! I thanked them profusely, and, when I'm in the market for that kind of widget again, will definitely check them out first! So I messed up on a customer order the other day, and when the customer called me on it (this was a bonafide mistake on my part, not a hallucinogenic perceived mistake by the customer as what happened a couple weeks ago), I apologized and sent them some bonus widgets in addition to the widgets I forgot. Never heard back from them. Had it been me, I would've thanked profusely. Some people are just ungrateful.
The Consumer End: Monday night ordered an upgrade to some Photoshop Plugins made by (Company ABC--not its real name) that I only had for Classic mode and I wanted it to run native in Photoshop 7 for OS X. I couldn't download the upgrade (Company policy), I had to order them on CD. Fine, no problem. But then it seemed to take forever to hear from them with my order status. I went to their homepage and tried to lookup my order status. It said to enter my order number. Herein lies part of the problem. They never emailed me with an order number, just an order confirmation, but no number. OK, so I tried one of their alternatives, using my email and last 5 digits of my CC. That search turned up nothing. It's as if they never even processed my order. I tried emailing them. Heard nothing, in fact that email was RETURNED to me undeliverable. I tried using their web form. Still nothing. I checked my credit card. Nothing has been charged by them. This AM I went to their site and looked up a phone I could call. A pre-recorded message with a somewhat unfriendly-sounding woman came on telling me there was no one there to take my call.
What the hell kind of business is this? I mean they have been in business for a long time (I bought their original Plugins back in the late 90s or 2000 or so) and have been aware of their products since I first purchased my computer in 1995. They brag about all their important companies who are using their products. But they can't be reached for a simple question! What the hell is going on here? This is bullshit. I am only one person and I always reply to my customers and send off their merchandise in a timely manner. This is a bigassed California-based tech company that can't even process one damn order for $40.
You know what sucks? I get it on both ends. Here's some gripes from being on the other side of the equation:
The Producing/Supplying End: - Customer wants to know if I have any more of a certain kind of widget. I always hate this. I mean, I have less than 200 items in my ebay widget store...that's about 5 pages to look through. Easy. Can't they find it themselves? Anyway, I check for myself. Sure enough, I have more of them, so I send them the url to the ebay page where they can buy some. Then they email me asking me how much they are and how many can they buy? WHAT-THE-BLOODY-HELL? It says so right on the page...They are $X.XX each and I have 20 available!!!! Why do they have to ask me? Do they want me to bottle feed them their formula too? Not only that, I check my ebay store, and THAT IS THE FIRST ITEM SHOWN ON THE PAGE!!!! How fucking lazy is that? The irony is, is that the item listing has now expired, so they can't buy it now. Lazy asses.
- On a similar note, I've been getting a lot of "can you recommend a certain kind of widget?" questions. I mean, I'm not dealing in high tech complicated things here. Pretty much, you look at it, if you like it, you get it, if you don't, you don't. It's up to the customer to decide. Not me. I'm not a paid consultant. If you don't like it, don't get it! And I have recommended things and then I never hear back from them. WTF is up with that! Why even contact me in the first place...certainly you are capable of going to my site, looking at the stuff, and deciding whether to buy something or not. How can I help you? I can't.
- Customer requests I send him an invoice for a widget. I'm confused about what widget he wants because I don't have any widgets by the name Widget Q, so I ask him if it is widget D he actually wants (because it's the only one that halfway fits the description), and naturally he doesn't include a URL for me to verify what widget he wants. No, that's wrong, he says. He wants Widget Q, not Widget D, and he thinks the name is "Butterfly." Sounds familiar, so I do a search on my site to see what "Butterfly" brings up, and sure enough, it's been sold. I check the page online just to make sure it says "Sold" and it does...in BIG BOLD LETTERS. Why does he want an invoice for something that's been sold? This doesn't even make sense to me. Naturally, he wants me to recommend other Widgets for him...like he can't look himself (well, obviously not, because he can't read if they're sold or not!)
- Customer buys one widget. One. Usually these kind of widgets are sold in pairs. Not unheard of to buy an odd amount, but rare. I contact them, just as a courtesy (damn, I've gotta stop being so damn courteous, seems like Company ABC from the top paragraph doesn't know what that is, and they're probably a big-assed company who can pay their employees to take time off not to answer phones or email) I email them to remind them that they only bought one--which is fine--but usually people buy them in pairs. So I get an email today saying that he'll take two, and to invoice him. Um...doesn't work that way. He has to BUY the widget first. Then I invoice him. Damn lazy people, I tell ya.
I really need to change my approach to this. From now on, if someone asks me a really stupid lazy-assed question, I'm not going to respond. Yes, there are such things as dumb questions, and those questions are when the information is right there on the page, or if the question is asking you to do something for them that is not up to you to do (like decide for them). It's not like my responses to these people has made me money. When I do recommend something, or give them a little extra help finding something, they don't then buy the item. So what's the point?
We have four printers in our house. It's embarrassing, but true. Here's the story: I got my first printer in 1995 when I got my first computer (Apple Power PC 7200) and all the firsts that come with first time computer ownership. It's an Apple Laserwriter 4/600. And I still use it. It's a damn good printer. It only prints in black, but for what I use it for now (mostly receipts and invoices), that's all that's necessary...and it's really economical--I go through a cartridge about once a year or two, and I usually print out several invoices a day. For the longest time, about 7 years, I only had it hooked up to that first computer because it only connects via one Local Talk cable. So as I got newer computers, I had to sneakernet my files over on zip disks to print them on the old computer which I seldom used, except for printing. But get rid of the Laserwriter? Never! It was and still is, the most I ever paid for a printer. Why didn't I just attach my Laserwriter to my new computers? I'll explain why.
I got a better, faster computer in 1998 (Apple Power PC G3). I also realized I needed a color printer to create CD covers for my graphic CDs. So I got an Epson Photo Stylus 700 (or something like that). Its prints look like photos...perfect color quality. I paid a couple hundred bucks for it or so. It did get its heads plugged up once (as is typical of Epsons) so I had to have it repaired for about $50. Since that computer took up the printer port on my then new computer, I couldn't use my Laserwriter on it. I did have some sort of switcher hub thing that I bought for a different purpose, and I tried it with the printers unsuccessfully. So I had two computers, each with a printer for different purposes.
Then three years later I needed a faster computer, more space, etc., so I got a Quicksilver G4.I couldn't attach either printer to it because this new computer used USB and Firewire ports, not the 9-pin or whatever printer ports that the old Macs did. Plus, I was so overwhelmed with the new technology and OS X, that I couldn't even think about adapting the Laserwriter for several years still. The Epson Inkjet was stuck in 1998, however. There was no support for it on Mac OS X. So it will forever stay attached to the Mac G3, forever stuck in 1998.
In 2002, Stan bought his own computer, A 12" Apple iBook. He wanted something he could take to work with him to work on during his breaks (this was back in the days when he actually had breaks). He wanted a printer, so he bought an inexpensive Epson, not as photoquality as mine, but it worked for what he used it for. It's not like he could use either of my printers, as like with my G4, the printer ports were not compatible.
In another three years I started doing business on ebay and felt the need to print out invoices on a daily basis. By now my main computer and my Tangerine Apple iBook (got that one in 1999) were networked. (I didn't network my two oldest computers...I tried...too difficult, too frustrating...techie I am not). I bought a device by Assante which is a Localtalk to Ethernet adapter. With only some initial minor frustration (and some major frustration after every thunderstorm outage), I hooked up my Laserwriter to our Ethernetwork, which networks my Quicksilver G4 Desktop, Stan's Laptop, and my Laptop. Now Stan doesn't need his printer anymore...he just uses my Laserwriter, which is much more economical.
Despite the great photo-quality output of my stuck-in-1998 Epson, the dyes aren't archivable. I have wanted an archivable-ink quality printer for years now, but they've been running in the area of over $1000. I basically put that on the backburner, but early this year I started thinking about it again, did some research and bought my HP Photosmart Pro B9180. I set it up weeks ago, but didn't try printing anything seriously until yesterday (don't want to waste expensive ink and paper). I was met with major frustration when trying a manual feed. I was so used to asking my computer to print FIRST, and then feeding the paper, that I just didn't even notice in the instructions (and yes, I did read them, but it didn't sink in) that you're supposed to feed the paper *first* and *then* print from your computer. I was so frustrated, I was crying. Technology makes me cry, it really does. So many times I'll have power outage or a cable problem or worse, lose all my data (this happened in 2002 and I was literally a basketcase for days and seriously wanted to die). I feel so ineffective...if I can't figure it out, who can help me? It's not like I have a job where there's tech support. I am all alone. Fortunately, Stan and I were able to put our heads together and figure this one out. If not, I'd be a basketcase and I wouldn't be writing this boring little piece of trivia right now for you to read.
I'm having a hard time remembering the dream I had earlier in the night because too much time has lapsed since writing it down. But I do still remember the final part of the dream right before I woke up.
I was with Stan and we were in some kind of building/warehouse waiting for a shipment to arrive. Someone we haven't heard from for ages, Brian, was supposedly the one with the shipment. It was of his art. It was all packaged in elaborate crates, like crates that carry musician's equipment. Supposedly he had constructed the crates himself, and they had windows so that the art could see out. (?!?!?!) I looked in one of them, and the art was some sort of weird windowbox construction framing a soft, plush Frankenstein doll, a roll of masking tape*, and something else but I forgot what. Brian was really gloating over his art and his shipping job. I just thought it all a bit weird.
*OK, here's a masking tape story which might've inspired its appearance in this dream. A couple weeks ago, I went to an art supply store in Madison to get some Rives BFK and Arches Cover paper. I also picked up some liquid calligraphy inks (that I use in acrylic painting) and a roll of masking tape (so I didn't have to make a separate trip somewhere else to get tape). Since I was busy at the counter filling out a tax-exempt form, I wasn't aware of what the prices on the items were...I mean, I knew the paper would be several dollars a sheet, as would be the bottles of ink, and well, tape's tape. Later that week, I bought a printer that has archival inks and can print on high quality 100% rag acid free paper so that I can start selling my digital prints. I was comparing the prices of the paper made for use especially for the printer with the prices of the Rives and Arches paper I bought. I checked the receipt and saw a charge of $5.15. I couldn't figure out what that item, the most expensive individual item on the receipt, was. It wasn't paper, it wasn't ink...it was...MASKING TAPE! Yes, I bought a roll of masking tape that was over $5!!!! Not any masking tape, no, this was DRAFTING tape. Oooh, excuse me for confusing the two. I felt so stupid. I bought a $5 roll of tape. It better be damn good tape.
Dawn tagged me, and so I went to her blog to see what the meme was. I was hoping it was the first one, but no. Well, I'll do it anyway. ;-) (Just for the record, I don't keep up with blogs much anymore--including my own--so I feel a bit awkward participating in this...like going to a dance naked except for tennies).
So without further hesitation, here's the meme I was tagged for:
6 strange facts about me:
1. I have no brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles or cousins. Never did...it's not like some died or something. 2. My dad's parents were to become my "godparents" (yeah, a lot of good that did), but because they were poor and old and my granddad couldn't walk and lived 1000 miles away or so, they couldn't make my baptism, so I had "Stand In" godparents at my baptism. How fucked is that? As it is, I turned out an atheist. Heh. 3. Some of my grey hair is reverting back to light brown. I swear and Stan as my witness that this is true. 4. If I had the room, time, and money, I would have one of each: Pug, Boston Terrier, English Bulldog, French Bulldog, and Boxer. (can you tell I love shorthaired push-faced dogs?) 5. I've never been overseas. 6. I hate shopping and abhor malls, even though they pop up in my dreams once in a while, and are quite pleasureable because I'm usually one of the few persons there.
I don't know, those facts don't seem that strange, except maybe the top two about my birth family.
Because I want to do the other meme, here it goes:
Things you may not have known about me
1.Four jobs I have had in my life: mac graphic artist, chemistry stockroom worker, typist, babysitter 2. Four Movies I have watched over and over: Pulp Fiction, Fargo, Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me, Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii 3. Four places I have lived: Wisconsin, Colorado, New York, Massachusetts 4. Four TV shows I love to watch: LOST, Anthony Bourdain No Reservations, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Dirty Jobs 5. Four places I have been on vacation: The Grand Canyon, Arches National Park, Yellowstone, Roswell NM 6. Four of my favorite foods: Uni (sea urchin gonads), Oysters on the Half Shell, Ikura (salmon roe), and a really good Chile Relleno. 7. Four places I would rather be right now: considering it is arctic conditions here now: Bali (although I've never been there), Arizona desert, Redwood Forest CA, White Sands NM
Not sure about tagging someone back...like I said, I don't participate in the blogosphere other than my own writing (I actually don't consider this a blog...it's more like a journal) But if you do, I guess you can consider yourself tagged.
Last night on "No Reservations" in Namibia, Anthony ate a pig's anus, and part of the pig's head that was cooked in the ground. He said it was the worse meal he's ever had, ever. I don't know, I still think when he was in Iceland, the fermented shark that smelled like ammonia would still win out as "worst food ever" in my book. But then, maybe it's because a long time ago, Stan and I bought a shark steak and when we went to cook it, it smelled like ammonia (we didn't eat it). That was most disturbing. And I've never had an experience with a pig's anus, so I wouldn't be able to comment. Stan has eaten chitlins...he says they smell awful, but they taste good.
The best meal Anthony had in Namibia was roasted beetles. That's how desperate the food situation was there. But when you think about it, what are insects, but land shrimp? And who doesn't love shrimp?
Despite this, I still got hungry during the show. But maybe it was the oyster farming bit at the beginning that set it off. Mmmmm....oysters. The perfect food.
Why is it so hard to find wood scents anymore? Like with candles? I got a gift card from Tim to World Market, so I bought a Teak Candle with it. It smells great, and it seems like scents like that are really hard to find anymore. Everything smells like sweet food and fruit. And although I love Yankee Candle (got their catalog today with scented pages...much fun), they're really lacking in the musky, spicy wood scent department.
When I was in Junior High I got some perfume at Walgreens that came in little compacts. It was waxy and you rubbed it on. I had three different sets, each with three different scents....the lemony flower scents, the grass scents and the wood scents, which I liked the best. It had patchouli, sandalwood and amberwood... or something.
I have this reoccurring dream that I'm walking "home" and pass a drug store in midtown Fort Collins (I know exactly where this is, and there's no drugstore there). I go inside and there's all these costume jewelry rings, nothing expensive, so I buy some. It's this weird liberating feeling, like I wanted to do it a long time ago when I was young, but wasn't able to. This probably explains why I have a ring collection. Things once denied are now a source of indulgence, like food.
From now on, we will have a supply of sushi from the grocery store on hand for emergency monday night sushi cravings while watching Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations. I get so damn hungry watching that show because he's always eating something exotic and intriguing, and usually seafood oriented which reminds me of sushi (I thought I heard him say Sea Urchin when asked what his favorite fish was, but maybe I just thought I heard that because that's what I wanted to hear). Last night he was eating geoduck (which looks like an overgrown schlong in a shell...literally) and both Stan and I got so hungry (and this was after eating a dinner of yummy scallops!) that we raided a bag of Cheetos. How pathetic is that? Fortunately, the week before I had some left over mussels so I was able to eat those while watching. Next week, we have to be prepared ahead of time.
I woke up way too early this morning with a cough that wouldn't stop and I couldn't get back to sleep too easily. I had to endure a frivolous first hour of WPR with an interview with someone who wrote a book on "Comfort Food." Callers would call in with their own personal comfort food, one of which was sauerkraut. Sauerkraut? I don't know about you, but that's my idea of Discomfort Food. Not much in the world is more disgusting than Sauerkraut, unless there's an even more disgusting dried out pork chop served alongside it. One odd comment was that no one thinks of salad as comfort food. Huh? Well, yeah, if there's grated carrots and raisins in orange jello over lettuce, yeah, that's not exactly comforting. But what about a big salad with crunchy iceberg lettuce (I know, iceberg lettuce is not "healthy" lettuce, and I love leaf lettuce too, but we're talking *comfort food* here), tomato slices, hard boiled eggs and cheese topped with a hugely generous serving of zesty ranch dressing? Tell me that's not comforting! Sure beats what one guy called in with: a grilled bologna sandwich pressed real thin. Grossssssss!!!!!
IRL Yesterday we had to take the van in to get a bunch of work done to it. Stan turned on the CD player to make sure we weren't leaving a CD in the player. Expecting to hear Pink Floyd if he heard anything, a very blurry "See Emily Play" warbled distantly. We realized this was no CD of ours, but a radio station...a distant, low-end of the FM dial radio station. But "See Emily Play?" "Wish You Were Here", ABITWII, Comfy Numb, "Money," yeah, ok, but Emily? Since when did radio start playing Emily? Since Syd died, oh, yeah, right, now it's popular. Grr.
So I had a dream that I turned on the TV and I saw very early Pink Floyd (post-Syd, but not by far)...they were so young...'68 or '69 at the latest. Of course I was watching Roger the whole time.
Well, yesterday was quite the bizarre day. Ever since I got back from vacation I was not able to shoot any of my jewelry I created while on vacation, what with getting started with an eBay store (I do not sell my jewelry on eBay, BTW...it's just for Bali beads) and all that post-vacation resettling. But yesterday was the day I would *finally* have time to shoot. I layed all my jewelry out on the bed, shot about 6 sets (12 shots) and then the card was full. Huh? I should have 32 shots on my card. Then I realized I still had Stan's 16-shot card in the camera and it was full of some plant shots. Naturally, I couldn't find my card, so I had to annoy Stan at work about it. So I put the new card in, and before I could shoot the next set of jewelry, I dropped the camera. It was only about a 2-foot drop, and I know I've dropped it before I'm pretty sure. But that was it. Each time I'd turn it to a shooting mode, the lens would come out and then retract, giving me an error "E14." A bit panicked, I tried to look for the camera manual. Naturally, I couldn't find it, although among further digging I found it in the computer bag we took with us on the trip. In the meantime, I scrounged up something about a Canon and an E14 error online, but it was in Polish. The response to it was in German (?!?), which I could translate online. And the pronouncement wasn't good. You don't want to get an E14 error. Another site in English referred to "the dreaded E14 error" but didn't elaborate on what it was. I called the place where I bought my camera. They said I'd probably have to send it in to Canon. I went to a branch of the place I bought it closer to where we live. The manager said that it wouldn't be worth it to have it repaired, and that Canon probably won't even be able to repair it because it was so old (I bought it the fall of 2000). Technology gets outdated so fast now.
I knew this day would come some time, but I thought we could put the Canon S20 into a graceful retirement, shooting pictures on trips and at Pug parties, but not for the more precision work of shooting a 4mm Bali bead or down the throat of a cactus flower which would be the job of a better, more expensive camera with a powerful macro feature.
To make an already long story short, we, er, I should say *I* bought a new camera (I broke it, I buy a new one...Stan got off easy on this one)...a "Lumix" Panasonic FZ7. Supposed to have a great lens. We tried it in the store, loading pics I took (using Stan's rings as test subjects) into my laptop. Seems like a nice camera. So I got a 2 GB card to go with it. Naturally, all the Canon cards and batteries are not usable.
The weird thing...with all the accessories taken into account for both cameras, I spent about half of what I paid for the Canon 6 years ago. I guess if you're going to outdate technology so quickly, you damn well better make it cheaper!
There's a big learning curve.
But a great new feature...it also makes MOVIES!!!!
I hate taking Claritin, but I had to. They were insufferable.
I just don't feel like doing anything when they're this bad, so I've just been *trying* to work on my jewelry website pages, but mostly just watching news coverage on the 9/11 anniversary. How sick is that?
I need a vacation really bad. Whenever I can't concentrate on anything, I need to take a vacation.
I haven't been having a good past few days due to a multitude of things (bad customers, crappy rainy weather and allergies mostly).
I don't feel like writing much. I'm thinking a lot, but I haven't figured a way to transfer it to a digital format yet.
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