thanks

Thanksgiving. I ate too much, not just turkey and sweet potato puff and mashed potatoes and apple almond stuffing but also pies, more pies, birthday cake, and french toast casserole the next day. This practice continued for most of the weekend. Ah...food, I love you but my gut does not. The price started this morning with a wicked stomach ache which has continued all damned day.



Food and my gut aside, it was overall pretty nice. Family stuff, but this is a constant so we can factor it out for now. A___ and I went to Provincetown on Cape Cod (MA) to spend it with my brother and my sister.

The traffic didn't suck too much and it was a good day for a drive. A___ had never been to the Cape. PTown is on the very tip of Cape Cod and getting to it kind of screws with your sense of direction (if you have one). So although you're on the east coast, you can watch the sun set over the water on account of having spiraled around to face the mainland. It's a nice place to visit in the off season - a bit chilly but still not outright cold and quiet in that nearly spooky but mostly contemplative way.








So I am thankful for having had nice long weekend before my last week at The Job. I hope you all (those of you in the U.S.) had a nice holiday.

Pumpkin past

This was a quick jack o'lantern from last year. This year's been so busy we haven't had a chance to make one, A___ was out of town last weekend and now it's work work work...I'm guessing it'll be another last minute pumpkin this year. Man, I really want to carve me a pumpkin! Maybe they wouldn't mind if I did it on my lunch break at work, K-cop be damned.

halloween fun

I found this uproariously funny.

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To me, halloween has never been about the sexy costume. Not ever. Ok, sure I didn't necessarily want to look unattractive, but I have not once done the sexy kitten or the naughty nurse - I was a nurse one year when in college and working evening shift at the hospital because I had no costume and had a party to go to after work. That nurse costume was about as close to real nurse as you could get...with the addition of a nursing hat with glitter, combat boots, and a syringe (sans needle) for doing "shots" with. If you feel comfortable in a pantsless/sexy costume, then more power to ya. But for the rest of us, enjoy the fun and know that yes, you can do it with your pants up.

Eye catching

When I log into my yahoo mail account, I get a screen that has a little news blurb box in it. I usually glance at them so passingly I actually have to click back if something catches my eye.

This one sure did.

pictures!

I'm not uploading a lot of them because they have other folks who I'm not sure would want to be making an appearance on my blog. But here are a few...

A____ and I getting married in our living room.













My sister brought us ring pops.










My siblings showed up with a florist bucket full of flowers...












...which when you split them up don't look anywhere near like as many as there were.

bomb

Today is the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.

"As the bomb fell over Hiroshima and exploded, we saw an entire city disappear. I wrote in my log the words: My God, what have we done?"
- Capt Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the U.S. Air Force bomber Enola Gay that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug 6, 1945. At least 117,000 people were killed. (Reuters)

not-bot

In a comment on another post*, AM asked where a recent ad commentary I had posted went. It was up for a few days, and then I took it down. It's back up, but will be down again in the future. The reason for all this is that the post got a hit from a corporate data miner. Here's some info about the program that hit my blog:
"...through the monitoring of blogs and other online public forums, we have the most information about online consumer sentiment and behavior, allowing our clients to make more informed business decisions." Yes, one of those "business decisions" could be whether or not to sue someone who is commenting on how the business is conducted if that commentary includes examples of images or other proprietary elements. Think I'm paranoid? Consider the following, from the data mining program's website:
"Organizations are...realizing that monitoring and protecting brand and copyright usage has become....harder with the rise of the Internet. Phishing, spoofing sites, phony links, misleading photos – there are literally thousands of ways a brand or copyrighted images can be misused. The rise of blogging and recent amendments to fair-use laws in the United States that allow journalistic use of copyrighted material without permission, have made it even more challenging."

Thus, this commentary may move around.

*I deleted the comment since it included a word which would greatly enable future searches.

cat on a bike

Here's my first attempt at making an animated image. I think it came out good, lots of fun too. I made it for my sister - A, the one I sent you has a background image. This is just Rosie. And bike.

Boo-boo kitty

Max is recovering well. His biopsy results are back and it's all good. (Huge sighs of relief!)
He's stuck with his lovely blue poncho for a while, at least until the sutures come out next week.














Although I know he dislikes being shaved, his wrist shave makes it look like he's wearing a mitten, or maybe one Ug boot. And that's kinda cute.

(Un)easy bake

Oh this brings back memories....

Easy Bake toy ovens recalled for second time this year
WASHINGTON --The Easy Bake oven, an iconic toy with a four-decade history, has been recalled for the second time in less than a year, government safety advocates announced on Thursday.

In February Easy Bake's parent company, Hasbro Inc., recalled 985,000 of the toys because children were getting their hands and fingers trapped in the front opening, and some were burned.

I had some such toy as a child. I think it was a Betty Crocker Easy-Bake Oven.

My nineteen seventy something model cooked the...er... food with light bulbs as opposed to the plutonium which is apparently used as a heating source in the modern versions of the oven. (Actually, it's an "electric heating element" - ultimately a lightbulb could be called an electric heating element too but this is a matter of deeper semantics than is justified here I think)

As they do now, my oven came with cake mix packets. I recall they tasted a bit fucked up, as if sweet plastic were a key ingredient. But we mixed them all up anyhow (I believe they were all of the "just add water!" variety).

Then we ran out of mixes. So my sister and I experimented with our own mixes. No clue where the 'rents were for this fiasco. Absorbed in some martini fueled drama no doubt (these were the gin years).

It must have been winter since although I think we started when there was still light coming in from the kitchen windows, I have this sense it got dark fast and early. Most of my memory of the easy bake disaster took place in an increasingly dark kitchen. By the time we put the cakes in the oven, the only light in the room, in fact the only light on that floor of our house, was what seeped out of the little "smoked glass"-like plastic windowed casing enclosing the super hot 60 watt bulbs - which were slowly cooking our itty bitty cakes.

I recall the cakes smelled pretty good until the batter rose high enough in the pans to engulf the bulbs. Then it smelled less good.

My recollection is that we did not repeat this experiment. I don't know if we were simply unable to clean all off the cake which had been well past overcooked on to the insides of my easy-bake. My sister has the better memory for this sort of thing.

AM, what happened to the oven?

Happy Birthday!!!!

We celebrated my sister's birthday on her actual birthday this year, July 4. Since I haven't been very travelworthy the last few years, she's had to make the trip down here from Boston. It was good to see her, and my brother too.

Here's a picture of little brother lighting candles on our sister's birthday cake.

ahhhh...

cups of cake (III)

The much debated liners arrived Friday. It seems Max has new snack cups.

Here he is enjoying exactly the same dry food he has in his bowl.










It's so much more special in a cupcake liner.

who's on?

My favorite search recent search term: "My ex got married too soon"
I hear ya. I really do.

Since so many pet people are passing through the blog at the moment, I thought I'd put up some pictures of pets near and dear to me.

This is Smokey, A____'s cat. Smokey's doing that low walk where he can flip over and roll around at any moment. It's the the super-loving-kitty approach.














Max does drag. He also enjoys being combed, especially around the face. I should've named him Zsa zsa.













Rolling Flo. I pet sit for Flo sometimes. She's very sweet but I'm a little shy with her since her owners let her out and I've found dog ticks on her. Where there are dog ticks, I reason, there may be deer ticks.









My sister's cat Rose. This is Rosie enjoying some turkey. Rose is normally rather shy about doing things like standing up for me, but a little sliced turkey is a great motivator.













Max on my scanner. No cats or humans were harmed in the making of this image.

lost and found

"did you ever find my digital camera?" my ex asked me numerous times after our breakup. To which I invariably responded "NO".

Sometimes I responded testily. Sometimes I was even very nasty about it. I was annoyed that he persisted in thinking I knew where his camera was. I had been very good about not trashing his shit, about not hanging onto trophies or whathaveyou. As much as it sucked, I made the effort to maturely and discretely return all of his crap as I found it. Maturely and discretely mean I grouped stuff together and left it for him in the department, rather than using each new find as an excuse to call him with harassing requests to come over to pick them up, or with screeching psycho threats to set fire to it all on his family's lawn.

Admittedly, a few things remain in a box in the trunk of my car, mostly stuff he gave to me or pictures of him and/or his family that I have no need for. I hadn't seen his camera during the miserable months long process of finding his shit mixed in with mine. Moreover, I was quite sure there was no reason it would have ever been at the apartment I moved to after we split up in June of 05. The breakup had been coming all spring of 05, at least that long. As I recalled, we hadn't exactly been filling up the hard drives with snapshots of this happy time, (although it turns out there were a few, some of which at this point count as nearly amusingly horrid).

Further, he was barely around once we moved apart in June of 05 - him to rush off months in advance to move closer to his 30 miles from campus crappy nontenure track one year lecturer appointment at a satellite campus while he finished his dissertation and me to move into the shitty but what counted for affordable near campus little rat trap apartment while I tried to get this last chapter of grad school underway.

So why the fuck would his camera be at my place? And more to the point, why the fuck should I know where he dropped all the things that were important to him in his rush to get his dissertation hand stamp which he believed would give him unfettered access to fully competent adulthood-world?

"It's probably in some family member's car" I had snapped at him the last time he asked. In July, we had that last big fight. You know the one, the one you've had over and over but this time you see just how far apart you are and you are so TIRED of trying to fix it that you are crying just from sheer exhaustion. We decided to give it "a break", at least while he worked on his latest draft of his dissertation. During that time, he took off for the beach with his family. Had he come back, finished up, and had anything remotely eloquent to say to me on his return, things might have gone differently. He didn't. He did happen to mention he had gone to Boston to visit the art museum with "a friend" (whom he later exchanged promise rings with - that's right, during our "break" for him to work on his dissertation he was instead taking trips with his family and hanging out with "ass like an ibook" friend).

That pretty much cemented the breakup.

So here we are, well over a year later, and what has turned up in my most recent move? That's right. It's his camera. I found it the last day of my move.

The battery was dead but it turns out my lovely new laptop has a reader for the memory card. Presto, there they were. Some quite nice pictures I had taken with his camera during the Spring of 2005, before the move, before the breakup.

I took off all the pictures I wanted and left him with the pretty nature pictures he can tell his family he took (he'd done this in the past) and pictures of himself, since that will be important to him, to ibook ass lady, and to his family. I also left on this one of me since I do of course plan to return the camera.

In the air

There was something in the air today. Preseasonal promos on the radio. The house near the mall flashing out a cheerfully bright message - that in just 52 days, the christmas consumerism marathon will culminate in one week of too much family, too much booze, and slipper socks. Ah christmas. It's not a day. It's a fucking ideology.

It wasn't upon me yet. I was aware of the christmas items encroaching on the halloween aisle around October 26, however it seems I had been even more self absorbed than usual with my midsemester move. I think this inward attention had saved me from noticing these christmasy things on too acute a level. That or my mother and brother tag team calling me throughout my move to give me updates on my brother's most recent, disasterous meth-moment. It ended with the hospital, I was told by phone as I was cleaning the toilet at my new place.

On my way home tonight, I stopped for movies and food. The guy at the counter in the video store mentioned that he was on CNN today. "Really?" I said, genuinely pleased to be interacting with people again but torn about displaying too much interest which might encourage a full conversation. Mostly I was worried about the mood of the growing line of people behind me. Friday at 5 PM in the video store involves a lot of people who are no doubt hoping to get this done fast before getting home. The impatience was palpable but since this is CT, the people behind me merely shifted around, stepped up a little closer to me, and pressed their already overly thin lips together more tightly when the kid added "it was a crowd shot but I was totally on CNN for like 5 seconds!" Someone behind me snapped at her children "Asia! You get over here now. Where's your brother?"

After escaping with only a few more huffs and exasperated puffs from the uptight citizens of NE CT, I went to the supermarket next door.

About 10 paces into the supermarket it hit me. The stench of christmas. It took a few unfortunate passed through that area for me to realize where it was coming from - a big bin of bags of scented pine cones. The "scent" was like cinnamon but cinnamon on steroids and wearing an entire bottle of some horrid 1970s cologne (like "big game rhino").

I'm not antiperfume or scent. But I am one of those people who is rather sensitive to smell though. Chemically stinking shit like the reek emanating from a vat of big game cinnamon scented pine cones puts me into some kind of overdrive nauseated brain scramble.

I worked my way through the supermarket taking too long on account of being brain scrambled, forgetting most of what I came for and abandoning several items in order to avoid having to cut back past the cones once I had identified them as the source of the holly jolly stink.

The nearly inescabable smell assault made me realize something though. I'm totally fucked this christmas. See, several months ago, I started having sort of intrusive music issues. This has not ever been the case with me. I'm not one of those people who go around humming things, who gets song after song stuck in her head. Or at least I didn't used to be. Sure, the occasional "ear worm" would make it's way in now and then. But not ever to this constant level. The nice thing has been that I found I can usually "reprogram" it when I want to by thinking of another song. But that assumes I am not being subjected to nonstop external stimuli of the musical variety. This year, with the constant stream of christmas music just around the corner, I fear my mental ipod will be permanently stuck on a wretched yuletide shuffle, prompted by too frequent sensory collisions with bells and chimes, blaring horns and hurried strings, and other seasonal musical slop.

Bing-bong bing-bong!
Hurry up and start buying some SHIT for christmas!
It's just around the corner...
...through there, down the hall, and around the next corner.
The lightswitch is on your right.

omMFg

A___ and I saw the coolest apartment today. It's a little pricey although still cheaper than us living separately and certainly normal for the market here in fuckville nowhere CT. The biggest con is that it's far from campus, about 18 miles, which translates into probably about a half hour of mostly country road commute. This will be difficult to adjust to since I've been living only 5 miles from campus for over a year. Being closer to campus means more independence for me. I'm a little squirrely about that since, well, it's been an issue with the health stuff.

However, the amount of time I have lost due to home disaster related stress and mishaps has been considerable since I moved into the 5 miles from campus rat trap where I currently reside. A___ and I knew that looking further out to try to find a nicer place to live would mean a longer commute. I can't say the prospect doesn't give me a little pause, but I've really deliberated on this for a while.

The apartment is on the first floor of a converted mansion. It is just great. 3 fire places, two big bedrooms, a big kitchen with a fucking pantry (yes, a pantry...I haven't had one of those since I lived in my parents' house), wood floors, wood paneling in the living room, did I mention the fucking fireplaces? And the porch? The private entrance on the first floor (no more rickety open wooden steps to climb with groceries)? The washer and dryer in the basement? The heat and hot water included? The fireplaces? Cats are ok, smoking wasn't even raised as an issue, it's walking distance to a downtown (a real town) and a short drive to things which count as urban here in buttfuck nowhere. Contrast this with a picture of a place A___ and I looked at during our last housing hunt a few weeks ago:


The place that we were being shown (the crappy one from a few weeks ago in the picture above, not the cool mansion apartment from tonight) is the lower level "unit" off to the right. It was $1200, no utilities included, and situated under two sets of "bachelors" (the landlord's word for it, not mine). It took about four calls to the landlord to get him to call me back and set up an appointment. When we did finally get there, he was late. When he showed up, it turned out he had the wrong key. A___ and I waited, swarmed by bugs from the farm pond out back, while the landlord went home to get the right key. Except it turned out that was the wrong key too.

The landlord then showed us the apartment, a converted two car garage, from the outside, pointing out key interior features we could see through the big sliding glass doors which were the only means of egress. We had plenty of time to note some of the more remarkable exterior features as well. For example, we noticed the collection of discarded lawn mowing devices lined up near the house, clearly an homage to a bygone time of giving even a sliver of a shit about the redneck jungle that was threatening to engulf the house, shack, and lower portion of the driveway. We saw several garabage cans with packed trash bags not far from them. The top driveway/front yard had a wrecked car parked in one of the two occupied spots. The side driveway, where A___ and I were told we would park, had a huge truck and another wrecked car. Presumably these vehicles were courtesy of the bachelors.

So, I wondered to myself as I looked around the beautiful, well maintained and cheaper but further away mansion apartment this evening, do I pay more than I would to live in a fucking mansion with three fire places, a porch, beautiful woodwork, and room enough for me, A___, the cat, and heat and hot water included in order to live 10 miles closer to campus?

I think the answer is a big fat no.

Now, will we get the place? Having spent all that time teaching my students about mimicry and behavioral convergence, I was going to try to imitate the landlord a bit to foster a sense of happy-good-people like me-ness. It turns out I didn't have to. I was amused and happy to note that the potential landlord kept adopting my posture while we were talking and touring the apartment. Depending on what he finds in A___ and my credit records and bank accounts (you know, the usual checks and shit), I think it's a go. I hope so at least.

We had gone to the mansion place on a sort of whim, but we went with checkbooks. We left a deposit with the applications and hoped all thirteen miles back to our local rat traps with mold encrusted holes in the ceilings, broken windows, and a convicted sex offender neighbor whose entire family communicates through only screams, yells, and hollers.

We reached the rat trap around 8:30. It was dark. It was Something or Another Booze Special Night at the bar on the other side of our driveway. The bar used to be cool, a nice little local bar and restaurant with outside eating and casual charm, but then it was bought by a dickhead (who happens to also live in my current apartment building). The dickhead parties with teens on a regular basis. He's my age, playing beer pong with kids and trying to pick up girls who still talk squeeky voice even when they are buying from their drug dealer (who lived downstairs from me). Since the dickhead acquired it, the bar now caters to undergrads and bikers. Wow. Fun.

As I walked up the driveway, listening to the sounds of drunk idiots misparking their cars and bikes in the bar parking lot behind me, I saw the landlord had left up several of his ladders from today, the latest round of playing "Ropes and ladders" (aka fixing the roof) which involved ropes outside my bathroom window this morning while I was showering and the sound of my landlord not quite breaking through the ceiling.

"Look...his ladders are still up. Maybe he's still up there," A___ and I joked to one another.
"Maybe he fell off."
"Yeah maybe he's around back."
"Fuck. I hope we get that place."
"Me too."

Fall

Fall is taunting me with it's prettiness. Pretty Fall days make me feel like Max looks

I had (have) so much work to do this weekend and it is utterly gorgeously Fall outside. I know I shouldn't have, but I couldn't resist blowing off a little work to make a stop at the herb farm. I took some pictures.

Herb farm

Aaron and Agate at the herb farm

Agate saying goodbye

you have chosen

I think it is possible that my having included a picture of Curious George about to be eaten by leopards in my powerpoint for today's lecture might have a WEE tiny bit to do with my shitty mood about the gendercidal fuckwads who've turned over a new leaf in fuckwaddery.

In my defense, I have to say that at 2:00 AM, it seemed like a fun graphic to illustrate the benefits of primates living in groups (as opposed to living alone).

If there were a "choose your destroyer" web game out there, I think I know who mine would be. The classic - Mr. StayPuft. He's big, fat, strangely childish, white, and male and he's storming around in a violent apocalyptic rage for really no apparent reason.

3 things

Three things that made me laugh today:

- Reading "Naked" by David Sedaris. I laughed so hard and so long that tears were streaming down my face, even after I put down the book. My god that man is FUNNY.

- The pad ad I saw on TV while waiting for over an hour in my doctor's office today. According to the comforting female voice over, this is the only pad that "soaks up worry". A____ suggested we get some and wear them on our heads.

- The blue puffy paper shorts I had to wear for my exam, and the face I am making in this picture (a mix between damned amused and impatience with the digital camera flash which delayed what had been a regal looking poofed out crotch pose I struck just before this one).