Dailyish Musings: May 2008 Archives

Oh my goodness! Oh my goodness! Check it out. This time I think it is for real. I reloaded and reloaded the page like, twenty times. I rank FOUR MILLION, NINE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY EIGHT THOUSAND, FOUR HUNDRED AND SEVENTY FIRST on Technorati. I'm legitimately up by over five million! My ranking still sucks overall, but look at the improvement!

Not that I actually believe it. I'll check it again tomorrow and I'm sure it will be back at ten million.

--Update - 7:34 pm May 31st --
Back to ten million. But for like four days I was five million better. I knew it was too good to be true. I'm officially not caring any more.

Last night, Chris' main mode of transportation, his motorcycle, sprung a leak in the oil line. Being a wife in shining armor, I knocked on Kyna's door and told her to put Spinny back in his cage and get her shoes on, we had to go rescue Dad. A few minutes later she removed the towel that we wedge under the door to seal up the rather large gap when she's playing with her mice to prevent them escaping into the rest of the house and particularly the kittens stomachs, and opened the door with her shoes on. We picked Chris up from the motorcycle shop and came home, made dinner, did homework, and read stories until it was bedtime.

When I came in to say goodnight the first thing I noticed was that the door to Spinny's cage was open, a little wire ramp resting on the floor. And there he was happily sitting on it like it was his front porch. I tried very hard to do all the freaking out that was necessary for that moment internally. I calmly shooed him back indoors and then closed the door to his cage.

"So, Kyna. It looks like you didn't close the door to Spinny's cage."

"Ohhhh. I guess I forgot."

"Uh huh. You forgot. That means that Spinny has been hanging out with his door open and nothing to stop him from roaming around the house until he meets the kittens for FOUR HOURS."

"Well, I'm just forgetful. When you tell me to brush my hair, and the hairbrush is sitting right next to me, sometimes I just forget. You can't blame me. It's my brain."

"Well, when you find out, I'd really like to meet who is in control of your brain. Ok?"

I'm half way through the Portrait Photographer's Handbook and have come across conclusive evidence that this is the hobby for me. Did you know there is a piece of equipment called a 'snoot'? I'm serious. In my pursuance of this craft I will get to say things like: 'Be a dear and hand me my snoot' and 'No, no, that's not  right, my snoot is all wrong'.

It's going to be awesome!

I am waiting for the UPS guy/gal. I ordered two books from Amazon.com on portraiture lighting and I can barely contain myself. They are currently on a truck driving around San Diego right now! I don't know how anyone can live with this primitive tracking notification system. It is so vague. I think all UPS trucks should have GPS locators so that we can actually watch the truck-blip driving through the neighborhoods. That way we, the citizens whose precious cargo is trusted into their hopefully capable hands, can keep track of things like any unnecessary stops or extra long lunch hours.

"Yes ma'am, I'd like to speak to your manager. Truck number eighty-six just had a thirty-four minute lunch break! And three extra bathroom stops! Ever heard of adult diapers? For crying out loud, I ordered these books yesterday!"

I have to read something I've written for the first time tonight with my read and critique group. I'm terribly nervous. I don't have anything polished so it will be in first draft shape. Which is also what everything on this website is. I'd really love to hone everything to perfection, but then, quite frankly, I wouldn't have a website.

So, back to my freaking out.

I have the very beginning of a short story I would eventually like to have published in a literary journal. I was inspired by the words of Jerdine Nolen, author of the children's book Thunder Rose. Jerdine wrote that she had always wanted to contribute to American folklore by writing a tall tale set in the Old West. This got me thinking about genre.  Wouldn't it be fun to write a mad scientist story? Bubbling solutions frothing through a maze of entwined glass tubes, changing color and hissing through stopcocks, a frazzle haired, bespectacled psycho in a lab coat, playing god over some macabre creation, can't you just see it?

So, not only will I be reading for the first time, but I will be reading about a frizzy haired medical professional who tries to reconstruct various parts of old pets into one slightly Frankensteinish cat. It will have a limp, because the legs will all come from different animals, and the head comes from a staunchly non-lap cat, while the body comes from a lap cat of gigantic proportions. Can you feel the literary tension? Sense the vision? Or do you think this might be some sickening autobiographical wishful thinking.

We have a little debt. Just here and there tucked safely away where we can ignore it when confronted with a tempting purchase. Although if you saw our house you'd realize that these aren't big ticket items we're purchasing, we still have single pane windows and a forty year old furnace. And if we have more than one guest over they have to sit on the floor. However, slowly the debt has been creeping into our psyches and eating away at our brains and finally we took the first step to dealing with it head on. I entered all our spending details since January into Quickbooks (really you should use Quicken, that is the home version, but I'm used to the business version) so we could analyze what we spend. Chris developed a detailed payoff plan, which is eleven pages long, with graphs. Most of our communal friends have agreed that Chris is a breed unto himself, a whole new race unrelated to any others on Earth, and I concur.  He could even be an alien. We also created a monthly budget, wherein there are two sections for 'personal entertainment'. One for Chris and one for me.  The goal will be to see how much we have left over in this section every month. Obviously, the one with more wins.

What exactly they win is somewhat vague however. Possibly they get to sit around the house more, lording over their stockpiled cash. I could get into that.

Or, maybe they get to save up, build a spaceship and travel back to report to the home planet.

I recently interviewed the hair artist Linh Nguyen (some of his portfolio pictures include nudity or suggestive scenes, and if that doesn't make you automatically check it out, I promise his hair work is totally worth the shock you might receive from any nudity). I suppose the technical term would be hair stylist, but he does such creative work that I think artist is more appropriate. I monitor a make-up artist site, www.allmakeupartists.com and mainly I  just run the monthly contest and check in every once in awhile to make sure everyone is being civil.  I apologize that it is  a member only site, ordinarily I wouldn't post a link to a closed community. Nothing sucks more than following a link, only to have to come up with a user name and password to see anything.

Back to my point. Occasionally I do interviews for the site. Linh was charming, a real delight to talk to. His personal philosophy includes being nice to people, which always garners a huge amount of respect from me. So many people fail to realize what an incredible social tool being nice is. It sounds benign, but really, who would you rather work with? Someone who is nice and socially adept or an argumentative, defensive prick? 

But I digress.

So in order to get his interview online, I have to listen to the recording. That means I have to listen to all the great things that Linh said, and everything that I said. And poke out my eyes with a voice recorder if I didn't sound like a complete idiot. I had this whole fake cheery demeanor going and said a number of really horrendous 'Mmmmmhmmmm's' like I was some sort of school marm. All I can say is thank  god that I am writing this interview, so I can try and make myself sound vaguely intelligent after the fact.

When we first got our kittens, we were warned by the woman selling them that one of them was insane. This particular kitty was the first to scale the bed (could you climb ten times your hight by your fingernails when you were four weeks old?), ate all the food and never slept, but ran endlessly throughout the house terrorizing shoes, carpets, chair legs, etc...

Well, we definitely wanted two girls and there were no others aside from her and the little runt, so we hoped for the best and took them both home. Pico, as we have called her, has proven herself every bit as insanely destructive as the previous owner claimed. She has been responsible for breaking my vase, bowl, picture and one of my Polaroid cameras. She can scale doors, balance on top of the shower stall and ricochet around the furniture like a ping-pong ball.

She has also taken a shine to Pink Sparkle. I know this picture isn't the best, but it does document the evidence. Like most tough characters, she has a softer side, she loves Pink Sparkle and carries her around everywhere (never mind Pink Sparkle is one and half times her size). I find Pink Sparkle on beds, chairs, dragged into the pantry and lounging by the litter box. Thank goodness Pico is an indoor kitty, because I'd hate to see the melt down if she ever left Pink Sparkle overnight in the neighbor's yard.

 

Chris took Kyna to see his mother for the weekend and I had the house to myself. You know those times when you are going and going and rushing and doing, and then suddenly everything is over?  In that moment of sudden calm you take a huge breath and realize how insanely stressed out you were? It was a lot like that. There I was taking long breaths of quiet air and reveling in the freedom. Angels parted the clouds and sunlight streamed down from the heavens and I experienced fantastic, abundant joy. My time was mine and I could do whatever I wanted for three whole glorious days. I wept tears of gratitude as the house stayed clean when I put something away. I slept in until noon, hogged the covers, had an afternoon nap, surfed, read an entire novel, then went out for drinks with friends and had appetizers and beer for supper. It was paradise found.

Then, just as I was trying to work out some plausible reason that Chris and Kyna should fly up to Canada and visit his mom every weekend, the phone rang. It was Kyna. Her impossibly cute, high-pitched little voice reached into my chest and tore out my heart.

"Hi!" She said.

And wouldn't you know it, those hypocritical, two-timing angels flew down, blew their trumpets and sunshine streamed into my soul and I wondered how I could possibly last another two days without her.

Speaking of primal fears, today the cleaning woman came. This is an indulgence Chris and I feel is actually a necessity. This woman has singlehandedly saved our marriage on multiple occasions. I have previously admitted my aversion to cleaning, so every two weeks this pillar of cleanliness, this goddess of sparkling calm comes for four hours to do all the things I completely suck at. To show my immense gratitude I spend the day picking up all the toys and clothes that have become piled all over the floor. I go room by room, one step ahead of her, so that she can actually do her job. I also do the laundry. All day. Because there is usually twenty loads pending by that time, and I do the dishes, because while I'll totally let her do the toilets, I think it's  just wrong for her to have to do my dishes.  Then I kiss her feet and pay her copious amounts of cash to ensure that she comes back next time.

Anyway, the most entertaining thing about her visits is the sheer, abject terror she instills in the kittens. When she calls out her cheery 'Hola!' they literally race for the bedroom, where they proceed to bury themselves under the covers. All that is visible is a little lump in the middle of the bedspread. Then they stay that way. FOR FOUR HOURS. I kid you not.  Today I tried to coax them out and as I drew back the covers they both army crawled backwards until they ran out of bed. Such is the power of the woman who wields a vacuum cleaner.

Gone surfing... back later.

We had a disaster of small proportions. The little runt of the litter managed to climb up a steep tube and then couldn't get down. At the top of the tube was an enclosed wheel that Cheddar was really fond of. I think it got stuck in the wheel when Cheddar was using it and got banged up pretty bad. I found it yesterday morning right before I had to take Kyna to school and then go to an interview. It was splayed out, bedraggled and very dead looking at the bottom of the running wheel. I separated the two plastic halves and seeing some movement, put the little thing down with it's siblings. When I got home it had managed to walk across the cage to the other side, but still looked in rough shape. I moved it back into the pile with it's sleeping siblings hoping the warmth and chance to nurse might bring it back.

I also did an emergency run to the pharmacy and bought an electrolyte solution to feed it. When I got home it looked a little worse, off by itself and very still. I picked it up and put it in my makeshift mouse rescue home, cotton balls on a warm hot water bottle:

Kyna very sweetly woke me up at six this morning to sing me a happy mother's day song and to give me the obligatory pasta jewelry.  I received a fabulous gold penne necklace and two multicolored beaded bracelets. She also brought me  half a mug of sugar with two tablespoons of cold tea mixed in. It was a thick sort of sludge. I could just feel the love.

Even more so because I had been out the night before until somewhat late. Chris and I had had what I consider the perfect evening out. We ate urban comfort food, followed by a walk through San Diego's one block of art galleries and topped the evening off with a kung fu movie; Forbidden Kingdom with Jackie Chan AND Jet Li. Does it get any better?

The movie was as cheesy as any of the other Jackie Chan movies, and nowhere near as artistic as Jet Li's Hero. So if you're a Jackie Chan fan, enjoy, and if you're a Jet Li fan, well expect a Jackie Chan movie. Luckily I love cheese. And the extremely beautiful kung fu witch played by Li Bingbing. I always love the evil women.

When we arrived home our babysitter proceeded to give us dire warnings about  the diabolical cookies Kyna concocted for my Mother's day breakfast the next morning.

"No really. She put salmon in them. And peanut butter, and I don't know , like chives or something. I didn't let her cook them. Seriously. Don't eat them."

"Ahh, I see."

"She said, 'don't worry I get to do this all the time'," the babysitter  said in a dead ringer imitation of Kyna's cavalier 'I'm totally lying but you won't find out until it's too late' tone.

Petrifyingly, Chris has just cooked up the salmon peanut butter cookies and I think I may have to actually taste one.  Maybe I can run away to Argentina right now.

Two days ago I came across a picture in the Onion that I found endlessly hilarious. However, I felt that it was potentially a tad too dark to post. That all changed this morning when suddenly  it seemed like a really great idea.

It started on the toilet. I couldn't find the toilet paper anywhere. Thank god for children, Kyna fetched a spare roll from the hall bathroom and the day could go on. As I rounded the corner to the kitchen the mystery was solved:

When I first added comments to this site and felt like I had at least some content, I submitted it to a variety of blog lists including Technorati, which is sort of the big momma of blog sites. I didn't do it for any reason other than I read somewhere that you were supposed to. Knowing that there are at least a million blogs out there I wasn't really hoping for anything to come of it. However, it was still very humbling to create my profile and link up my blog and then see that my existing rank was 10,457,823.  There are a lot of blogs out there. Even more discouraging, my rank stayed that way, somewhere around the ten millionth mark for the past four months.

Then, inexplicably, when I logged on today to Technorati (out of procrastination), I found that I miraculously ranked 4,978,471. I moved up by five million! Woo hoo!

Unfortunately, when I refreshed the page I was back to somewhere in the ten millions again. Damn! I was so proud to be ranked four million nine hundred seventy eight thousand four hundred and seventy first, for like, fifteen seconds.

I recently purchased two prints from a bay area artist named Justine Ashbee. She draws these amorphous brain like shapes oozing tentacles with a Sharpie marker, which automatically makes her incredibly cool. I have purchased this print and this one. One will likely be a gift but I haven't decided which yet. I promise to take a picture when they arrive and I've got one up. In my dream world I'd put it on the wall over my white leather Knoll Barcelona chairs, which would be sitting behind a very realistic faux leopard rug.

I love the Far Side by Gary Larson and recently I had a moment when I empathized completely with the parents in his Hopeful Parents cartoon as seen here. It didn't actually have anything to do with video games, because we don't have any. Neither Chris nor I are very keen on them, so until Kyna's brain is fully taken over by her friends she won't know what she's missing. No, what triggered my Far Side moment was a rather inexplicable complex creation by her and her playdate, that made me wonder just what I am in for when she grows up. This was the creation:



Interestingly both little girls had a completely different explanation of what it was. Kyna said it was a trap and her friend said it was a house. Being a mother, I can see how those could be one and the same, but I don't think the girls did.

At first I thought maybe I had spawned an engineering genius. I mean this seems to show some nice logic to it, a ringing bell to let you know if anyone is invading your purse:



But then aspects definitely pointed towards a more avant garde artist type:





Finally, I was forced to face the fact that dominatrix was a very real possibility. I mean that is a pretty darn short leash, and what exactly are those scissors for?

On Friday I chaperoned a school trip to an organic strawberry farm.  Although, it was so much more than just a strawberry farm, there were pony rides, train rides, flower mazes, a petting zoo, and two huge bouncy castles.  The kids went insane with the sheer magnitude of things on which they could injure themselves. As for us chaperones, we hung out under the misters wishing that they had an organic brewery too.

At the end of the day they finally rounded the kids up for the educational lecture about strawberries and how to pick them without squishing them, then turned them loose on the fields.

One particularly interesting fact lodged in my brain from the lecture. Did you know that strawberries absorb comparatively huge quantities of pesticides? I'm not exactly sure what the 'comparatively' referred to, blueberries? Turnips? Partridge?  But I did notice that they just happened to sell flats of strawberry plants and the large terra cotta planters to put them in. What a fantastic coincidence! I bought twelve plants and a ginormous planter. This is my child's health we're talking about.

All right, in one day the baby mice went from fetal to quite adorable. I can now truthfully swoon with Kyna. Overnight they sprouted hair and their eyes now actually look like they're closed, not somehow buried with skin alien fashion. They also have itty-bitty whiskers and you can tell what kind of spots they'll have. My personal favorite, because I'm shallow that way, is the one that is almost all one big black spot. I'm thinking of calling it Lady Macbeth. I think that small things need names with ginormous (that will be in the dictionary in another year, mark my words) amounts of historical baggage, mainly because their lives are often so short. With only two years to live, you have to pile on the experience pretty early to reach the same state of jaded prejudice that someone who lives to be seventy gets to acquire.

Sorry, it's Lady Macbeth. She brings out my black humor. Out damn spot!