November 2007 Archives
After being home for three days, I'm actually at work today. Being at home for three days has really increased my appreciation for work. I'm still feeling a bit sick, but I'm getting by. I do like my cats, but it's nice to be among society today.
Today, of course, is the first day of November, which means it's the start of NaBloPoMo, which means I'll be around here more than usual. I'm also starting, today, to work on getting myself back into a steady routine. It's something I'm really bad at, but recently I've learned that it's crucial for my physical and mental health.
One of the things I've let slide is my sleep habits. Several months ago, I read and took the advice in this article about how to become an early riser. I couldn't believe how well it worked and how much better I slept after changing my routine. Being someone with a history of multiple sleep disorders (don't get me started on how terrifying sleep paralysis* can be, or the nightmares/anxious dreams that have me waking up in a cold sweat almost every night), I never realized how much better I would feel if I just got better quality sleep.
But ever since Brad's injury kind of upset the natural order of things in our household, I've let my sleep habits slide more and more. And I haven't been exercising, which makes it worse. I'm sure that my lack of routine has made my current malaise that much worse. So today I'm trying to get back into the healthy routines it's taken me so long to figure out. Let's hope it helps.
* There's a dearth of information on the internet about sleep paralysis, and on the whole, I've found it to be self-contradictory. There's a short article on Wikipedia , if you want a basic idea of what it is. There's a pretty good article here that describes some of the sensations accompanied by the experience. The experience was so terrible for me at first that until I learned what it was, I really thought I was going crazy.
I'm lazy enough that a wireless memory card for my camera really appeals to me. Even though it's really not that hard to connect my camera to the computer, or to stick the memory card in the memory card reader. I'm just that lazy.
It also interfaces with photo-sharing websites like Flickr and can automatically upload your photos. In theory I like this feature, but in practice, no one wants to see the ten different versions of each photo I take. If it automatically uploads everything, I would not use that feature.
I'm not sure I'm so lazy that I'd actually buy this, but I like that more and more things are going wireless.
(Spotted on Apartment Therapy Home Tech)
If you know me in person, you may not be terribly surprised to learn that up until I was about 18 years old, I was rather painfully shy. I was social enough around people I was used to and comfortable with, but if anyone I didn't know ever tried to talk to me, the blush that would bloom on my face in an instant would be powerful enough to heat a room. I have the sort of complexion that's made to blush and, like me at that age, my blush was an overachiever.
I'm still not the most outgoing person ever (big surprise), but I wouldn't call myself shy or easily embarrassed these days. But there were two moments last night when I was surprised to feel embarrassed. The first has to do with this website.
I suppose my natural reservedness is one of the reasons I have never made a big deal about this website to anyone I know in person. I haven't kept it a secret, and I think it's great when people I know show up and make comments and such, but I don't really tend to talk about it much (or at all) in person. I can't remember how the topic came up, but all of a sudden, we were talking about my website. Several of the people Brad and I were out with last night didn't know about it, so there were some questions about it and I felt surprisingly awkward. I really have to get over that.
The second embarrassing thing pretty much has to be written about, because after it happened, there were several comments about how I would have to blog about it today. And so I will.
So last night, we went out with a group of eight (including us). I was ravenously hungry, having barely been able to eat a thing in the past four days and finally gotten my appetite back. We were at Davanni's, where you place your order and then sit down and wait for your name to be called eventually when it's ready. But Brad and I showed up last, and therefore everyone else was getting their food way before we were.
I was ready to chew off a limb, but waited very patiently. (What? I totally waited patiently! I may have compared my stomach to a star imploding in upon itself and becoming a black hole, but I did so in a very patient manner.) Name after name that wasn't mine was being called and meanwhile, our friends were finishing up their food.
Finally, after many agonizing minutes during which I was becoming more and more lightheaded, I heard the sweet sound of my name. And that's when the other seven people at the table spontaneously erupted in loud cheering and clapping. I felt a breeze as everyone in the whole restaurant swiveled their heads in our direction.
After the clapping died down, I was pretty much rendered immobile with embarrassment, so Brad went up to get the food and I think it was Tracy who said, "now you have something to blog about tomorrow!" So of course, in the event that these four people who've never seen this website before decide to show up here, I kinda have to write about this.
Pizza. Mmm, good.
So last night I learned that my blush still works, but it's not nearly as potent as it used to be. And I learned if I'm going to have a website on the internet where anyone in the world can read whatever I'm writing, I've really got to get used the idea that people I actually know might be curious about what goes on here.
HOT DAMN, I GOT MY RAVELRY INVITE TODAY.
Will probably be glued to the computer for the rest of the day.
This is one of the main reasons I love Flickr so. You people are hilarious.
I knew Ravelry would appeal to every last shred of geekiness in me and so far it hasn't disappointed. It's one of those things that I wish I would have had some part in inventing. It combines my love of knitting with my professional appreciation for a well-designed and well-executed website. And the obsessive-compulsive part of me that loves the ability to catalog, record and cross-reference anything and everything. It's sick, really.
I had a good amount of time to mess around with Ravelry because Brad and I pretty much shucked off all responsibility and prior commitments for this weekend. I feel like I should feel bad about that but, to be honest, I really don't. Brad came down with the stomach flu that I had (not as badly as I had it, luckily). We both had rather stressful weeks and more than anything else, I think we just needed some time to not really do anything. So that's what we did. Lots of knitting and watching movies and making brownies.
And I took lots of pictures of Tibu draping herself upon Brad in different ways all day. She was engaged in some sort of cuteness marathon today. It was a little over the top, if you ask me. She's currently winning the Overachiever title in this household.
This picture is begging for a caption.
When I was a little kid, my Dad used to have fun with my siblings and me by challenging us to say tongue twisters. We did okay with Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers, She Sells Sea Shells by the Seashore, and Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled Peppers.
Then one day my Dad introduced us to the lesser-known She Slit a Sheet, A Sheet She Slit, Upon the Slitted Sheet She Sits. Try it. I dare you.
I believe that was the first time in my life I uttered a swear word. I still remember the shock. And the fear! I was going to get in trouble for swearing! Oh, did my Dad get a laugh out of that.
And I was so mortified by it I think I didn't swear again until I was 20. And not in front of my parents till oh, I don't know, sometime last year.
Chili is one of the few recipes I'm comfortable experimenting with and making up without a recipe. Tonight I stumbled upon a chili that was particularly good AND incredibly easy, so I thought I'd share it. This is a really thick chili, good for prematurely wintry days like today.
Black Bean and Bulgur Chili Recipe:
Continue reading "Recipe: Black bean and bulgur chili" »
What is this now? A food blog? A knitting blog? An overly personal blog? Who knows. It's a different thing every day. That's the beauty of NaBloPoMo, right?
Vegan Yum Yum wrote a great post all about a topic dear to my heart, oats. She explains the difference between rolled oats and steel cut oats, and offers up a recipe for apple cinnamon steel cut oats. It looks really good, especially the part about toasting the oats. I might try her recipe out sometime if I want an especially good batch of oatmeal on the weekend.
I have steel cut oats every morning for breakfast, and have experimented endlessly with flavor combinations. These days, I'm having apple cinnamon steel cut oats every day, but my version is so much simpler than Vegan Yum Yum's. Probably not as tasty, but simple and good for every day.
Recipe: Apple Cinnamon Steel Cut Oats - (2-3 servings)
(plus a few variations)
Continue reading "Recipe: Apple Cinnamon Steel Cut Oats" »
I just had a moment of prejudice. I'm sure we all have moments of prejudice all the time, but I was surprised by how instantly this one took effect and how quickly I realized it.
I e-mailed a company I've never worked with about a print job I'm working on - filled out one of those "request a quote" forms on their website. I got an e-mail response pretty quickly, and read through it. The instant I got to the bottom, and saw it was signed by a person named Tracy, I instantly felt like I should trust this person.
Obviously this is because I've known more than one Tracy in my life and they've all been good people. So I clearly associate this name with trustworthiness. But it was funny and disconcerting to me to have such a strong response to something as arbitrary as a name.
I am such a name-ist.
Let's just take a moment to reflect on that image.
...
Okay. That's probably enough reflection.
So. I'm working on this side project and I'm setting up a blog for someone and I'm asking myself if I should branch out and try something other than Movable Type. I do a little research, I look into WordPress. I convince myself that Movable Type still offers the most functionality and flexibility to design whatever I want. I read about the new Movable Type 4 and get curious about some of the new features, some of which sound ideal for an environment where multiple authors will be contributing and managing uploads and other assets. So I install it, the install goes beautifully. A good start.
Continue reading "Eyeballs liquifying and running down my face" »
Brad and I were just finishing up an animated hour-long conversation about the different ways men think versus women. We talked about why it is that women think they're just trying to impart helpful information, but men feel like they're being criticized and/or nagged. We talked about how I like to learn by having someone tell me what to do while I try to do it, versus he likes to learn by having someone show him what to do and then leave him to try it for himself. His theory was that most of these differences come from the basic difference in the way men tend to think versus how women tend to think. Men tend to think in a linear mode, and women tend to multitask.
As the conversation started to die down, and we were laughing and getting ready to leave the restaurant, I looked down and realized I'd been making a paper airplane out of the little paper that comes wrapped around the napkin and silverware.
"Here, I made you a paper airplane," I said and offered it to him.
We both just looked at each other for a second and then burst into laughter. "I guess we should probably end this conversation on this note, now that I just proved your point without even realizing it."
If you're looking to do any Sunday baking, you should really consider making these Old-Fashioned Soft Pumpkin cookies. We made them today without the icing and they were fantastic. Slightly crispy on the outside and fluffy and soft on the inside.
I promise I will talk about something other than food or knitting. I'm just really tired and haven't had time to post all day and I don't want to lose NaBloPoMo quite yet.
My sister is in town this week (yay!) and I got to spend some quality time picking on her today. At dinner, my dad was raving about this comet he got a chance to spot last night. He said it appeared to be about a quarter the size of a full moon and was like nothing he'd ever seen in the sky before.
When I was a kid, he'd sometimes take us out into the backyard (or even better, my grandma's house in middle-of-nowhere, Minnesota, where city lights weren't an issue) when there were astronomical events like comets or meteor showers, and we'd pass the binoculars amongst ourselves. Mostly, it was fun to be outside in the dark, sometimes later at night than we were usually allowed to stay up. I remember that more than I remember anything we ever saw in the sky.
File this one under "seemed like a good idea at the time". On Saturday, Tracy and I attempted this recipe found on the bag for the candy corn flavored Hershey Kisses. It's basically a peanut butter and oatmeal cookie, but after baking, you drizzle melted candy corn Hershey Kisses on top and then stick one of the Kisses on to each cookie as it's still warm from the oven.
We decided that we'd make them like peanut butter blossoms, skip the drizzle and just stick the Kisses into each dough-blob before baking. Like so:
Two things went wrong with these cookies. 1) Organic peanut butter. Had the wrong consistency or oil content or something, because these cookies were so dry, they turned to sand in your mouth. 2) I can see why the recipe didn't call for putting the Kisses on the cookies before baking, because the top white part of the Kisses got burned. They ended up looking like shriveled little orange pumpkins with brown stems.
The flavor was great, but the cookies were way too dry. We choked down a couple and then threw the rest of the batch away. I think if we'd used the right kind of peanut butter, these would have been pretty great. I liked the combination of peanut butter and oatmeal.
As for the candy corn flavored Hershey Kisses themselves, there seems to be widely varying opinions on what these even taste like. Candy Addict has two different reviews; one compares the taste to black licorice, and the other says they taste just like candy corn. Candy Blog compares the flavor to artificial butter flavor.
As for me, they were a little too sweet for mass consumption, but I thought they mimicked the flavor of candy corn pretty well, with a slightly buttery taste and texture. I'd still take regular candy corn over these, as the texture of candy corn is its main appeal to me.
Due to several disasters of varying degrees in our lives lately, Brad and I have had the pleasure of dealing with not one, not two or even three, but FOUR types of insurance simultaneously (car, health, homeowner's and hazard insurance).
For someone like me who has such a strong aversion to the phone that it could almost be considered a phobia, this is a real test of my mettle. There was one day a couple of weeks ago when I was so frazzled and so unable to deal with one more stranger on the phone that I made Brad arrange to have our car's bumper fixed. Even though I'm the one that drives the car and I'm the one who got into the accident. I was able to call in and submit the accident claim, and talk to three different insurance adjusters and all sorts of hoopla, but I just couldn't take one more thing and I called Brad almost in tears and made him set up the car repairs.
One of the most frustrating aspects of all this is how slow it is to take care of all these things, and how many variables we have to keep track of. And I seem to have a talent for being able to simultaneously envision all the different possible outcomes of a situation. If I'm having a good day, that's not a bad thing because I can see exactly how everything might work to our favor. But there's always that worse-case scenario lying in the back of my head, whispering unpleasant things into my ear.
Here's a worst-case scenario:
- The other guy's insurance will refuse to accept fault for when he rear-ended my car, and I will be out the $500 deductible. (This shouldn't be likely, in theory, but we're dealing with a sort of shady insurance company here and they've been dragging their feet for the last three weeks.)
- Neither our homeowner's insurance nor the association's hazard insurance will cover repairing the water damage to our house, and we will be out a couple thousand dollars. (I'd say this is fairly unlikely, but we won't know for quite a while because the process is taking FOREVER.)
- Health insurance will not cover all of Brad's clavicle injury costs and we'd be out about three thousand dollars. (We have a "probably" right now on whether that chunk of it will be covered. I wish I could be more comfortable with "probably".)
- Brad will need to have surgery for his non-healing clavicle, a lovely surgery which involves a bone graft taken from his hip. This will no doubt be covered by insurance but will result in pain, suffering, and more missed work - he's already completely used up his personal time. Plus this will probably have to be done next year, which will negatively impact our insurance situation (without going into too much boring detail, it's because we have an HSA, which has a deductible that's reset at the calendar year). We won't know for about another month how likely this is.
I bring all this up because we're finally getting our car fixed today. I was trying to wait until everything was resolved so I wouldn't have to pay $500 out of pocket, but we finally decided to just get the damn car fixed. So I'm driving a Kia Optima for two days while it gets fixed. Last time we rented a Kia, we killed a large dog with it and messed up the front end of the car.
Let's hope we're not living in the land of worst-case scenarios.
Now that I opened my mouth (as it were) and complained publicly about all my woes, two nice things happen within a couple of hours:
1. I get a call from The Other Guy's insurance people saying that a check is on its way to pay the full amount of my car repairs.
2. I get two $50 Barnes & Noble gift cards in the mail, a gift from my company for my work-anniversary.
Lesson learned. I will totally start complaining all the time.
I can't tell if I'm in a bad mood because I was complaining or if I feel like complaining simply because I'm in a bad mood.
I have a ton of photos from the fiber dyeing party my mom, sister and I had last night, but haven't gotten around to posting them. I also have some choice words to say about holiday knitting and the fact that it stresses me out and ceases to be fun. But I won't go into it because that would just be more complaining.
The Kia Optima is flimsy and has absolutely no pick-up, but still has a smoother feel than my 2006 Honda Civic. How sad is that?
Al Gore (yes, the actual Al Gore) was on 30 Rock last week and I finally got a chance to catch up on that episode. He didn't get much screen time, but he had one absolutely laugh out loud line that made the whole episode worth watching. I will not say what it was, in case you want to watch it.
I should probably have saved these bits for tomorrow (NaBloWhatever and all that).
It's past my bedtime.
It's slow at work today so I'm taking the opportunity to try to organize and deal with a lot of loose ends. Cleaning my desk! Backing up my computer! Going through old e-mails! How exciting!
It's so sparsely populated here that I'm actually playing music on my computer's speakers instead of using the ear-killing iPod earbuds (they're the only sort of headphones I have right now because Indy ate my other ones). For some reason, iTunes has decided to include all sorts of random sounds in my music library - sounds I have on my computer from making various Flash animations. So every once in a while it will shuffle to a crowd cheering or a shower spraying water. I try to set them to "ship when shuffling" but I've obviously missed a few. It's always a bit jarring.
Next five songs on my Party Shuffle:
- Pas Si Simple - Amelie Soundtrack
- Get Up - Katie Todd
- Closing Time - Tom Waits
- Can't We Be Friends - Ella Fitzgerald
- All Neon Like - Bjork
What are you listening to?
I can't remember where I heard about this, but for a few weeks now, I've been getting the Dover sampler. Dover makes those little activity and clip art books; you've probably seen them in places like art museum stores.
Anyway, a few weeks ago, one of the items in their sampler was this work of genius:
The Dalai Lama paper doll set. Of course, I had to print it out on cardstock, cut it up, and place it lovingly next to our Buddha statue. I love how he looks so... jaunty. Just in case you were worried, he does have boxers on under the robe.
Brad was looking a bit on the scruffy side.
"You should grow a beard."
"What? I thought you didn't like it. That's why I keep shaving it off."
"Nah."
"It would be uneven."
"It would fill in after a while. It would make your chin look more defined."
... pause ...
... glare ...
"Lumpybutt!"
...
"If there's one thing I've always loved about you, it's your maturity."
I may have mentioned once or twice that I was working on a web design project, but I didn't mention what it was.
I had gotten to the point where I really wanted to post knitgeeky stuff here, a LOT. I was resisting the urge to do it too much, knowing that the vast majority of readers here aren't all that interested in which style of left-leaning decreases looks the smoothest, or the relative merits of top-down versus toe-up socks.
I had one attempt at a knitting blog, a few years ago. I had some fun with it, posted a tutorial on making beaded stitch markers which got linked by some of the big knitbloggers (and even Not Martha), and saw my traffic skyrocket. But things happened in my life, I took a long hiatus from knitting, and stopped doing the website. I had a feeling that if I couldn't even keep that successful website going, I wasn't going to be destined to have any kind of knitting blog. I am just too sporadic with my knitting. So I have resisted the urge to try it again.
But. My mom and I got to talking one day and we found out we both had an interest in having a website. We decided that with two of us participating, we were much more likely to keep the momentum. And of all the people in my life, she's the one person I share my interest in knitting with the most. She's the one who taught me to knit and who geeks out with me at least once a week talking about knitting projects, spinning, dyeing, or who knows what. And someday when my sister's not too busy getting all educated and stuff, maybe she'll join us too.
So. If you have any interest in fiber arts, Pink Argyle is where the fiber action will be. Not here.
My family is having Thanksgiving tomorrow, as my sister will be back in Boston for the real Thanksgiving. I'm looking forward to it very much - especially since the always risky business of baking bread seems to have turned out unprecedentedly well. My bread is bigger and better looking than ever before, even though I've used the same recipe every time. This could be due to using Cooper's Best Stout from Australia (Hey! They have a recipe on their website for Stout Chocolate Cake!) in the reciepe instead of the Guinness I usually use. Or it could just be that I'm getting better at baking bread.
People often ask me how I can deal with Thanksgiving, as a vegetarian. This always cracks me up. Even before I was a vegetarian, the turkey was not at all the highlight of the day for me. My ideal Thanksgiving plate is filled with mashed potatoes with butter, lefse, and lots of stuffing. And pumpkin pie with whipped cream for dessert. That was my ideal Thanksgiving meal way before I ever thought of vegetarianism. This is why I really have no interest in things like the Tofurkey feast, which is basically a log of dry, bland overly processed soy protein with not-very-tasty stuffing piped into the center of it. Not my form of choice for processed fake meat products (I am particularly fond of fake Buffalo wings, and did you know that fake corn dogs taste exactly like real corn dogs? At least, how I remember corn dogs tasting. It's been almost 10 years now.)
If only I knew where to look for the photos of that turkey my mom and grandma constructed out of vegetables one year. That was a good vegetarian turkey.
I had a lovely early Thanksgiving with my family today, and it might be that I'm tired from all the overeating, the wine, and the general merriment, but I have nothing to say. I just want to go to sleep. Posting even though I have nothing to say is not really my style.
See you tomorrow.
I've been working on backing up my files lately, but I hate the thought of backing up my photos and then removing them from my computer. You know, just in case I might want to look at some random photo from three years ago.
So I picked out my very favorites of all the photos I have in my pre-Flickr life, since 2004. I have more digital photos going back several years before that, but they're on CDs and I haven't gotten to them yet. I figured I'd upload them a few at a time until eventually they're all on Flickr. You know, just in case I might want to look at some random photo from three years ago.
Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.
These were from a trip I took to Cancun in January of 2004. For the last six years, I've gone to company meetings in warm places every January. It's always been something to look forward to, getting a small break from the drudgery of a Minnesota winter. That's not going to happen this year. I suspect it'll make the winter feel even longer.
This might just get me to finally make the trek out to the new Trader Joes in our area. Dark Chocolate Sea Salt Caramels. Excuse me while I wipe up the drool. I've also heard they have decent wine for cheap, which could be a good thing.
I'm afraid to go either right before or right after Thanksgiving (shopping is scary this time of year). But soon, oh yes.
On a related note, I saw an ad for Kohl's announcing their after-Thanksgiving sale, which starts at FOUR IN THE MORNING. You couldn't pay me to go shopping the day after Thanksgiving. I'd rather spend all day waiting at the DMV, or getting cavities filled, or reorganizing my sock drawer. Or cleaning grout.
I should not be surprised that this week is going by excruciatingly slowly, because Thanksgiving week is always this way. Almost everyone takes the week off and the office is quiet and completely lacking in any sense of urgency. My synapses actually start to fire less often, my eyelids get heavy, my IQ plummets and I start slurring my words.
With my remaining brain cells, I think about the upcoming holiday weekend and how much I'm looking forward to it. Tomorrow we're driving to beautiful Pepin, Wisconsin, to see Brad's grandparents and other relatives on his mom's side of the family. It should be a pretty low-key Thanksgiving. Usually I'm used to going to two Thanksgiving dinners in one day, so this will be a luxury.
I plan on being pretty much a shut-in during this four-day weekend. I've got the first two discs of Doctor Who season 3 on their way from Netflix, and a whole bunch of podcasts downloaded (I hit up a lot of the public radio podcasts this week - NPR Book Tour, Fresh Air, Science Friday and This American Life). I've got lots of food stockpiled and no real plans on the horizon. I have no desire to go anywhere near a store, as I mentioned in my previous post, and no errands I have to run. It will be FANTASTIC.
(In reality, this will probably be fantastic for all of Friday, and then I will start to crawl out of my own skin - I am not good at relaxing; that's why I spend all my free time making things. This will probably be accomplished by spending hours upon hours at Barnes and Noble despite the inevitable crowds, and/or taking on some elaborate and ill-advised project like organizing the closet or making some complicated food I've never made before and have no idea how to make.)
Happy Thanksgiving!
I just learned that Minnesota produces more Thanksgiving turkeys than any other state. We also have lots of wild turkeys roaming around, a phenomenon of which I wasn't all that aware until I moved into the suburbs. We often have a bunch of turkeys milling around on our lawn. I think they're kind of cute.
And now, I'm off to Wisconsin!
So far, my weekend plans of slothfulness and incessant consumption of media have proceeded swimmingly.
Today I've listened to five podcasts, watched one episode of Heroes, the 10 Battlestar Galactica "webisodes" (sorry, I just can't bring myself to type that word seriously - those are to be read as air quotes, thank you very much) and am currently 2/3 of the way through the audiobook for Stephen Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You!).
The one downside to doing a lot of knitting is the inability to read at the same time. Audiobooks are an expensive but viable way to keep the book withdrawal at bay. I will probably be hitting Librivox up for some more books after this one is done (it's not a very long audiobook. No wonder it was so cheap).
Apparently I've turned into an old lady well before my time, and an antisocial one at that. I'm spending my entire Friday off knitting by myself (unless you count the cats that have glued themselves to me all day. I think it's not because they like me but because they consider me their own personal electric blanket). Brad and I went out to eat at 5:00 in the afternoon and the majority of the people eating in the restaurant were families with small children and old people. The nail in the coffin of oldness was when I ordered a beer and didn't get carded. I think the light must have been glinting off the large crop of white hairs I've been cultivating toward the back of my head.
The strangest thing is that I have no real problem with my premature fuddy-dudditude. I'm perfectly content being the most boring homebody on the face of the planet. There's a very quiet voice in the back of my mind that wonders about this, but I just feed it some hot chocolate and it shuts up. Then I pick up my knitting needles, unpause the audiobook and proceed to age a little bit more in my own satisfying way.
Today, Brad and I went to check out a new coffeeshop in our neighborhood. This was a big occasion, because the five or so miles around us are basically a cultural wasteland. We each brought multiple books, and I brought a knitting project. I had high hopes for this particular coffeeshop. We only have one other in the neighborhood and it's a local chain that just really rubs me the wrong way, so I avoid it. We were hoping to discover a new hangout.
The new coffeeshop is located in a little strip mall. As we parked our car, Brad pointed out a pizza place across the street, creatively named Pizza Man. It dawned on me that from where I was sitting, I could see FOUR different pizza places.
Four pizza places! And nary a decent coffeeshop to be found. Because we found out the new coffeeshop is sort of a bust. It's really tiny, was filled with teenagers, and played shrill Christmas music nonstop. It was the second or third Bing Crosby song that finally drove us screaming from the place.
Chalk this up to yet another bit of suburban culture shock. The area is filled to bursting with pizza places. There is also an overabundance of Ace Hardware stores, and small dentist and chiropractic practices. Beyond that, there is nothing to be found.
(Note: I am not saying that all suburbs are like this or that suburbs in general are necessarily intolerable. I just know that my particular one is.)
Dear Red Cross and Memorial Blood Centers,
I get that my wonderful overachieving blood type (A+) is needed. I get that donating blood is a good thing. I've done it lots of times and I plan to do it again sometime in the future. But I wish you would understand that your incessant calls do nothing to make me want to come in and donate blood. I can't keep track of how many times you both call me every week. I got one message from each of you around dinnertime today. On a Sunday, of all days. You both call me at any time of any day. I've learned your phone numbers by heart and in case you hadn't noticed, I'm not answering them.
At first I was putting off answering the calls because I wasn't sure when it would be a good time to donate and I didn't want to be put on the spot trying to figure it out while I was on the phone with you. Then, when the calls began to come more and more often, annoyance started to creep in. The phone calls have become more and more frantic. And this weekend I even got mail from both of you. Now you're killing trees on my account! It's like you two organizations are fighting over my blood and, frankly, it's getting to be a bit macabre. I've been meaning to set up an appointment, but with each passing day and each new message left on my voice mail, I am less and less inclined to donate blood.
Think of all the people out there that need blood, and they're not getting it because YOU WON'T LEAVE ME ALONE.
Love,
Andrea
P.S. Memorial Blood Centers, I totally told you months ago to stop calling me because I donate at the Red Cross now. Stop calling me!
P.P.S. I know I should probably actually answer the phone one of these days and tell you to stop calling me, shouldn't I? But the thing is, I'm not so sure I want to reward your insistence by actually answering the phone. If I want to make an appointment. I don't need you to call me and nag me to do it. It's becoming a perverse challenge for me to see how long and to what lengths you're willing to go to in order to get my blood. I blame you.
I liked Tina's post wondering why we blog. I've been thinking about this lately, I guess because of NaBloPoMo. There have been days when I've really had nothing to say, and I've forced myself to come up with something. And there have been days when the only things I've had to say are things that fall outside the boundaries of what I'm comfortable writing here. So I've forced myself to come up with something else. Normally, I wouldn't force myself; I would either have something to say, or not have something to say.
Although it seems like I haven't blogged for long, the truth is that I haven't blogged here for that long. I started my very first blog in 2000 and blogged for a year or two. During that time, I went through an incredibly difficult breakup and some depression and talked very openly about all of it on the blog. I learned that the more you're willing to share (and, often, the more dramatic/crappy your life is), the more people want to read your blog. In the end, I became too uncomfortable about how much I'd shared, and down went the blog. I started a couple of others since then, and they always fizzled out because I either shared too much, or so little that I wondered what the point was of continuing.
This blog is my experiment in trying to find the happy medium. This is the first blog I've actually been willing to talk about with people I know in person. I actually have friends and family who read this (hi!). I've set myself some ground rules about what is okay and what's not okay to write about here (which is why I very rarely talk about work and, if I do, it's always in the most vague of terms). The downside is that I think I've only shared the tiniest tip of the iceberg about myself. But I'm learning slowly about the happy medium. And it's something I'm trying to learn in my life, not just on this blog. So that in itself is a good reason to keep doing this blog, I think.
I haven't slept well the past few nights, but I had high hopes for last night. I was exhausted and we had fresh flannel sheets on the bed and when I got into bed I experienced that wonderful whole-body feeling of relief just to be laying down, which seems to happen on those days when I'm really tired and destined to sleep like a baby.
And then the wind began to howl. Every time I drifted off, the wind would rattle the windows and I thought the house was going to be blown down. I'd heard that really cold weather was on its way and I imagined it arriving with the wind, so the already-cold air in our room felt even colder to me and I huddled under the blankets and tried to block out the sound and just fall asleep.
It reminded me of my first nights after moving out of my parents' house. My dorm building was constructed in a way that caused the wind to whistle and howl in an eerie way. Sometimes when it snowed, the air currents just outside my window made the snow blow upwards. My roommate, far away from her family for the first time in her life, was so homesick the loneliness came off her in waves. On the way back to the building one day in late fall, we both noticed at the same time that we could see our breath for the first time that season. We stood there under the streetlight breathing clouds at each other and giggling. I think that was the moment when we both realized it was going to be okay.
Hey! Did you know November is Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month? I probably should have said something earlier in the month, but I didn't.
Pancreatic cancer is one of the more rare forms of cancer. Thankfully this is the case, as it's also one of the deadliest. There's currently no standard screening method for detecting pancreatic cancer in its early stages, so it usually goes undetected until it's too late. I'm not going to throw around a lot of statistics because there are so many different ways to slice and dice the numbers. In a nutshell, the survival rate for those diagnosed with pancreatic cancer is very, very low. Even in cases where the cancer is operable (the minority of cases), the survival rate is very, very low.
I feel like I need to harp about this issue once in a while because it seems like the vast majority of people really know next to nothing about this disease. Research into pancreatic cancer doesn't get a lot of funding next to a lot of other more high profile diseases; according to PanCan, it gets the least amount of funding of any cancer. You'll never see a store full of purple PanCan branded items, from vacuum cleaners to packets of yeast.
Brad's father (an otherwise incredibly healthy, active, ex-smoker 57-year old with no other health issues) was diagnosed with operable stage 1 pancreatic cancer in October of 2004. Despite a successful surgery, chemo, radiation, and the whole nine yards, he only lived for nine months. Even someone with a good prognosis has very little chance, when it comes to this disease. Someday maybe I'll be able to talk here about what it was like to live through that, to be there for every stage, and to even be there the night he died, but I still can't do that. All I can do is try to draw attention to this issue once or twice a year in the hope that every little bit of awareness will slowly build up to help find ways of detecting and treating this cancer so that other people will be able to have more hope.
Donation form for PanCan, an organization dedicated to raising awareness and funding for pancreatic cancer research (see How will my donation be spent?)
Make sure you have your sound turned up, as the sound is pretty much the best part.
So I managed to post every day for a month. Do I feel a sense of accomplishment, or like I've learned anything? No, not really. It's nice to know I can actually accomplish something I decide to do (all those attempts at NaNoWriMo notwithstanding). I guess you can say that the strongest feeling I can muster up about NaBloPoMo is ambivalence. Unless I happen to win a prize. Then it'll be a different story.
Next year we need to up the ante. NaBloPoHo. One blog post an hour, or you're fed to the wolves. First person to make the internet explode gets all the prizes.
