August 2007 Archives
I just can't believe this has happened. http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/08/01/bridge.collapse/index.html.
This bridge is right by where I work. I drive across it all the time, as does my family, many of my friends and coworkers. So far I think everyone I know is okay.
I'm sitting here in a hotel room in Indiana watching the news and feeling sick to my stomach.
Back home from my trip. I got home on Wednesday night, but I still haven't uploaded any more pictures from my trip than I needed in order to choose a photo-of-the-day for each one. I'm having trouble getting back into the swing of things. I just feel weird these days, sort of in a daze. Don't know if I've simply overstretched myself, or if I'm on the cusp of something unknown.
I did emerge from my daze long enough tonight to see the movie Stardust. If you haven't yet, go and see this movie immediately. Now. What are you waiting for?
Today I scraped this horrendous wallpaper border off our bedroom walls.
Once we're finished cleaning it all up, we're going to paint the room, I think a light green.
A lot of people have told me they like the way this room was painted/wallpapered when we moved in, and I suppose I can accept that some people might not think it's too terrible ... until you have to live it in and look at it every day. I feel like I live in a cardboard box. And I swear there are evil faces in that wallpaper. I just can't believe it's taken us two and a half years to get around to beautifying this room. That's just sad.
I'm still recovering from the Road Trip of Exhaustion™. It's not that it wasn't enjoyable or well worth doing. It was just so exhausting. I could go into gory detail into all the things we tried to pack into such a short period of time, but nobody wants to read about that. Trust me on this one.
You'd think I'd be back to normal; it's been a week since I've gotten back. But the road trip took me so completely out of my normal routines, that I'm having a very hard time getting back to my usual self. I've lost five pounds in the last seven days, which is verging on scary. And yes, I know I've been exercising, but not any more than usual - in fact, a bit less. It's just how my body tends to respond to unusual circumstances. My appetite plummets and it's all I can do to choke down three meals a day.
But I've been keeping busy as well - working on the bedroom redecorating (all the wallpaper is gone now and I've begun taping off the ceiling/trim so we can paint the walls), planning a baby shower, getting all those photos from the trip packaged in a way that I can share them with my sister and the rest of my family, trying to keep up with the biking so that our 50-mile ride on September 15 doesn't completely murder us. So maybe I'm just burning calories like I've never burned calories before.
If I stop posting completely, though, it's probably because I've simply disappeared.
It just occurred to me that I often e-mail articles or other things to people I think would be interested in them, but I never really post them up on this website.
Three recent, totally unrelated, things I've e-mailed to various people lately:
- How to know when it's time to fire your doctor.
- 48 minute Richard Dawkins video entitled "The Enemies of Reason".
- BLT scented candles.
I really should try to post this sort of thing here more often, if only so I can go back and find them again later.
I just love this headline: Party Thrown for World's Oldest Person. This sort of headline comes up once in a while... oh, I suppose every time the world's oldest person dies, thus creating a new world's oldest person? But this one is especially macabre, if you think about it. It's not like it's a birthday party - no, it's a Yone-Mnagawa(the-last-really-old-lady((from-Japan))-keeled-over party. I can just image those other 113 or 114-year-olds out there just waiting for poor Edna Parker to bite it, so they can make the headlines and eat some cake.
From the Pioneer Press:
Formidable Flossie
Hurricane Flossie
A she-storm so saucy
Would make the Pacific tossy
And hard to crossy
When Hurricane Flossie
Turned gentle and glossy
The weather service posse
Downgraded Flossie
So former 'cane Flossie
Aimed her waning velocee
At the weather service bossy
Causing total lossie
Interview with William Gibson in the New York Times:
If I had gone into a publisher in New York in 1981 and told them I wanted to write a novel that is set in a world where the climate is out of whack and Mideast terrorists have hijacked airplanes and in response the U.S. has invaded the wrong country — it's too much. Contemporary reality is like an overlapping set of dire science-fictional scenarios.
I will probably have to read his new book.
29 years later, my mom informs me that I was an ugly baby. I'm glad I dodged the deep trauma and the psychological damage this knowledge surely would have inflicted on me if I'd learned of it during my formative years. Instead, I had to learn of it from my mother in front of an entire baby shower. Which I'm not sure was any better.
While she didn't come out and say that she thought I was an ugly baby, she didn't deny it, either. The story goes like this: mom sends baby picture to grandma; grandma shows baby picture to aunt; aunt says, "and you decided to keep her?" And at this point, instead of defending the beauty of her baby, mom says, "well, she was long and thin... really skinny... she had these beautiful long fingers, though."
Great. So now I'm a scrawny, disproportionate baby.
Now I need to find some baby pictures of myself and scan them in and let you be the judges. Trust me, nothing you say could be worse than hearing from your own mother that you were an ugly baby.
(A related news item, a bit old, but still relevant: study shows that ugly children are less loved.)
I always feel like jerk taking time off work because of a bad headache. It seems like such a flimsy excuse, entirely unprovable, and the sort of thing that people are just supposed to work through. I left a couple of hours early today, but I will go back tomorrow even though I can tell this one's going to last a while and I will probably be useless for at least another day. The good news is that we are unexpectedly getting our new front door installed tomorrow morning, so I can work from home for a while until that's finished. And then we'll have a new, non-ugly, much better insulated front door. So it's not all bad.
We didn't get our new door this morning because at the last minute, the door installation people suddenly realized it might rain today.
No shit. It's been raining steadily for A WHOLE WEEK without a break. You'd think they might have seen it coming and not scheduled a door installation for the next day. All those news stories about flooding and such, not to mention the gray skies, the fog and let's not forget the water everywhere, maybe that should have tipped them off.
However, while I was sitting around at home trying to get some work done, wondering if the door people were ever going to show up, I was treated to some high entertainment. Apparently last night when we were making dinner, we dropped a whole (uncooked) green bean on the floor. Indy found it this morning and decided it was his new favorite toy. He gingerly grasped the tip of it in his teeth and carried it around the house, dropping it here and there to bat at it. He had no interest in it whatsoever as a food. The strangest thing is that he had no interest in it as a chew toy. Probably because it wasn't expensive, dangerous, inedible, or hard to replace.
Just found a new favorite website today: Minneapolis fucking rocks, which led me to find some videos by my new boyfriend (as I like to call him), Andrew Bird.
Andrew Bird - Imitosis
Add to My Profile | More Videos
This video is so odd, I'm not sure what to say about it. But Andrew Bird's music is stunning. It really appeals to the part of me that wishes I'd never quit those violin lessons.
I'm looking through fonts at Veer this morning, and it's impossible for me to look at them without saying "jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz" over and over in my head because I can't just see words, I have to actually read them, and so my font-searching is becoming this incessant chant of "jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz" and I begin imagining a big sphinx of quartz, and asking myself what a jackdaw is, and trying NOT to interpret this sentence in some kind of 12-year-old dirty-mind sort of way.
And I understand that "jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz" is a pangram that's shorter than the more traditional "the quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog", and more unexpected, but still, it isn't the shortest pangram out there. They could have used, "how quickly daft jumping zebras vex" or "two driven jocks help fax my big quiz", which are both one letter shorter.
Personally, I'd go with, "waltz, bad nymph, for quick jigs vex"!
They're installing the new door right now and it's taking every ounce of my willpower not to hover and fret as they do so. I'm hearing a lot of banging and clanking and muttering-under-breaths. I just heard one of them mutter, "oh, man!"
The cats are currently sequestered in the bedroom having little kitty heart attacks.
I'm almost missing those endless days of heat in the 90s and no rain, brown grass crackling under my feet. The sky is gray, gray, gray, lately, nothing but a sickly pallor like the world itself just saw something horrible and all the blood has drained from its face. And I feel like I'm not getting enough oxygen, light-headed, like the air is too thin. All I do is I just keep drinking more water. Can't hurt.
