Apparently winter and I need to have another chat about what constitutes appropriate seasonal behavior.

April last year:


April this year:


Once, at Vassar, when spring was once again letting winter walk all over it, one of my professors gleefully told my Dickens class how there was one summer in 1872 or something when winter went on and on and summer didn't come until the next year. That brief and harmless anecdote WILL HAUNT ME FOREVER.

Easter Festivities

My Little Broken Kitten

Gil has always been unusual. Terrified of humans, eats french fries, will play with raw penne pasta for hours... unusual. But nothing is less cat-like than his refusal to jump. Counters, tables, fridge-- all cat free because Gil won't tackle any leap exceeding twelve inches. I haven't pursued this phobia because I don't like cat hair in my food, but with The Window Issue I can no longer ignore it.

Before I moved my bed, there was a big open space under one of my windows, and there Gil would sit with a look of longing in his eyes-- sniffing the fresh air, dreaming of all the humans he could watch from behind protective glass. Life could be so good! And when I moved the bed under the window, I figured his dream would be realized. Barely a foot between the bed and his own portal to the world! Gil would be in the window all the time! And it turns out he is in the window all the time-- but he refuses to jump there. No, he balances his back legs on the bed, front legs on the sill, sinks his claws in to the ledge, lets go with the back legs leaving himself dangling in mid-air and then hoists himself up and over. I have never seen a less graceful cat in my whole entire life.



I think we're related.

When the Work to Sleep ratio isn't quite right

**apparently the fact that I am wearing two different shoes is not obvious. To be fair, I didn't notice either.

all it took was the proper motivation

A mere two months and twenty-six days after my first "I'm going to finish all my furniture and blog about it" post I can proudly tell you "I finished all my furniture!". I lost a little momentum after I dyed my fingers "hobo brown" and the whole thing didn't seem quite as romantic when the electric sander turned on me and took a chunk out of the table. The negative thoughts came pouring in after the second coat of polyurethane got a little tacky. And at my lowest point all I could think was "I will never be a master wood worker, why am I bothering?" I finished the table a week after posting and decided the rest of the furniture would function better as a fire hazard than additional seating. And then the call came. THE call. The one from my mother. "I'm coming to LA!" she says. and internally I went "oh shit, she's going to think I'm living in hole and I can't take care of myself and she's not going to love me anymore because mothers only love daughters with quality furniture and a decent sense of decoration!" She tends to bring out my rational side.

I hung up, unpackaged the bed and said "you're from IKEA, do you really need TWO coats of stain? Is that really necessary? Think about it." and the bed thought and thought and finally said "no". Then I said "SANDING BETWEEN COATS? Seriously?" And the bed said "You're right, your time is better spent wadding up tinfoil for the cat, or perhaps watching television." So with the bed's permission, I cut some corners and finished in about a day and a half. I was on a roll, time to tackle the chairs. I slapped on the coat of stain and returned fifteen minutes later to find the chair was still its original color. Same style, color, brand as the table, but it didn't want to turn brown. To this I said "Fuck It" and drove to the hardware store where I purchased the prettiest purple paint I could find. The chairs must have talked it over and decided they liked this color better because it took beautifully.


Then came the assembly. I highly recommend putting together IKEA furniture with TWO people, but if you're a hermit like me you can use a stack of books, four screwdrivers, a butter knife, packaging tape, a dime and a bottle or two of wine to achieve the same result.

So that's the story of my IKEA furniture. My mother arrived and said "Oh, how cute!" promptly followed by "You're going to need a rug..."

I refuse to purchase one at this time, but if I happen to find a "Do It Yourself Rug Kit" I'll be sure to post about it in a timely fashion.

Book Report

When I am not at work, not writing, not cooking or eating, and not watching Horatio Hornblower, I am reading. Here is what I have read lately, in chronological order:


Yes, I majored in English. Yes, this is a book about physics. It may seem that I have no business being interested in special relativity, but I don’t see why that should stop me. There is nothing quite like sitting in your kitchen eating Cheerios and discovering that all the geometry you did in high school, and there was a lot of it, years and years of it, was only ONE OF TWO kinds of geometry that have so far been invented. I remember teachers saying, “This is Euclidean geometry,” but they never said, “And the other kind is Gaussian geometry, which projects lines onto spheres instead of planes.”

Spheres! Not planes! That is amazing. That is really amazing.

Also amazing: apparently, if you made the attempt, every second for 15 billion years, to walk through a wall, you would actually go through it once, because probability says that is how often the atoms that make up you and the wall will align perfectly so as not to interfere with each other. I only make the attempt to do this once every several years, usually when half asleep, usually with doors, and never with any scientific agenda in mind, but it’s good to know these humiliating incidents can now be construed as research.

Also amazing: anti-matter. It’s so amazing I can’t understand it. All I know is that it blows my mind.

Last but not least, this is impressive: so far, no experiment has disproved a theory in quantum physics. And quantum physics involves some crazy stuff. So that’s pretty cool.

The Humbled Blue Orb, in spite of its title, has several very good qualities, the main one being that the author has the rather extraordinary ability to explain very confusing concepts in physics. I knew a physicist once. The only thing he ever explained to me that I understood was how to make orange gumdrop cookies. So I would say David Klein, though an enthusiast and not a Ph.D., has a rather rare talent. Unfortunately, the copyediting was virtually nonexistent and I can’t tell you how tired I got of reading about “the law of conversation of energy.” Nevertheless, for some breakfast-time physics reading, it doesn’t get better than this.


Unless you prefer to read about DISEASE when you eat. This book was lying around at work and I was encouraged to take it home. Whenever there are unwanted books lying around at work, they end up on my desk, because I am like that person who can’t turn away a stray animal, only with books. And when I saw this, I reacted to the creepy bird-faced plague doctor much as a normal person would react to being handed an adorable fuzzy kitten, which unnerved a number of my co-workers. Is the plague not universally fascinating? Am I the only one who thinks a disease that can kill you within hours is totally awesome? I just don’t understand how you can look at this cover and not want to read this book.

Here is something I did not know: 40,000 years ago, when homo sapiens were hunters and gatherers, they were taller than we are now. And because they were more or less nomadic, they did not often stick around long enough to pollute their own water supply, and therefore suffered from much less disease. Thus, the book argues that progress creates perfect conditions for disease. I do not find this to be a helpful statement, since we can hardly go back to hunting and gathering at this point, but the fact that I do not find the argument compelling does not diminish the satisfaction of knowing a whole lot more disgusting things than I did before. As cool as it is, septicemia was getting old, and now I’ve got loads of new material. I won’t go into it here, because it will put Megan off whatever meal she is always eating when I tell her gross things, but I would just like to say that schistosomiasis was almost too much even for me. Almost.


I’ve had kind of an E. M. Forster thing going since randomly picking up A Passage to India last summer. I never know quite what to expect from him. He is a little like Shakespeare in that you’re not sure whether it’s a tragedy or a comedy until the end. The Longest Journey is apparently Forster’s personal favorite of all his novels. It is also apparently his least popular. I think the problem is the title. Compared to A Passage to India and A Room with a View, the title is more appropriate for the content but less evocative in general. Rather like the novel itself. However, at the halfway mark, I am still very much enjoying it. There’s almost nothing I like more than a novel, and Forster writes very novelly novels, complete with the requisite peevish old lady:

“Stephen!”
“Yes.”
“I’m tired of you. Go and bathe in the sea.”
“All right.”

That’s quality.


This is another stray book. I am not reading it and probably won’t, but I am keeping it for its cover, which did not seem unusual to me until a co-worker picked it up and said, “Tolkien’s Tart?” I am still laughing about it.

Classic Simon

Anonymity protected by Heslington's Hat.

Philosophical Experiment for the Deranged: Probably the First of Many

Disclaimer: For years I thought it was cable and the internet that distracted me from writing, but in the absence of those it has become clear to me that in desperation I will turn to anything that seems like it might be easier than sustaining a narrative, and when I say "anything", I mean I really have absolutely no standards.

Over the lifetime of this blog, we have learned a great deal about differences.

We first had occasion to learn the difference between camels and llamas, which is that according to accepted methods of scientific classification, some of them are called camels and some of them are called llamas. As to which is which, you can just flip a coin.

There was then some confusion over Vikings and pirates. To review: neither of them ever wore horned helmets, and in both cases “the” was a popular middle name. You can flip a coin on this one, too, but make sure you keep an eye on it.

Even now, the difference (or lack thereof) between my dog and a Shetland pony remains in dispute, though I have pointed out a number of distinctions could be made. For example, while it is common knowledge that you can ride a Shetland pony, if you try to sit on my dog, she’ll sit down, too, and when you’ve fallen on the ground, she’ll get up, turn around, and sit on you. Nobody has ever heard of a Shetland pony doing that. No coin-flipping. My dog is not a Shetland pony.

Today, we are going to learn the difference between the examples above and the one I am about to mention, and the difference is that there is some basis for confusing llamas and camels and Vikings and pirates. And I SUPPOSE I can see how a parallel, THOUGH CLEARLY FACTUALLY INCORRECT, might be drawn between a golden retriever and a horse ONLY for purposes to do with EFFECTIVE RHETORIC as well as the VEXING of FRIENDS, which is an equally noble cause.

However.

Crickets and yams? What does Ivan mean to imply when she suggests that I am confusing yams with crickets?

Crickets are shiny; yams are dull. Crickets are loud; yams are quiet and unobtrusive. Crickets are annoying when they get in the house; if having yams in the house annoys you, that would appear to be a separate issue, don’t you think? Crickets are crunchy although you should never try to verify this; if your yam is crunchy, you cooked it wrong. Crickets are easily startled; yams are stoic. Crickets wear top hats and have been to Times Square; yams are down-to-earth. Crickets have brains; yams are, erm, vegetables.

A cricket could never be mistaken for a yam.

OR COULD IT?

I once read an article in Philosophy Now (this will eventually turn out to be pertinent) in which a philosopher proved that werewolves could exist by making a list of extenuating circumstances that, if they all occurred at once, against all odds, would make it possible to make a logical argument that a very particular sort of human (who has suffered much more than his or her fair share of personal misfortune) is in fact a werewolf.

I’m sorry to say the article struck me as a rawther deplorable misuse of the laws of logic, not to mention time and effort. And quite aside from it being a silly undertaking, where’s the challenge? You find a very hairy man suffering from various combinations of mental illnesses and suddenly BAM! he’s a proven werewolf. We probably share three quarters of our DNA with turnips; of course it isn’t hard to make the short jump from man to man-wolf. If you’re going to engage in this ridiculous brand of alchemy, why not give it a more difficult test? Why not try it out on the really tough questions? Why not ask yourself: can you prove a cricket is a yam?

Of course you can! And, for your convenience, I have already worked it all out in three easy steps. (Please stop here and re-read disclaimer.)

According to the standards established by our friend the (surely unemployed) philosopher, if Item A looks, acts, and thinks as Item B, then Item A is Item B. So all we must do is fulfill these requirements.

Step One: How to Dress a Yam

One’s first consideration when turning a cricket into a yam must be appearances. Richard Taylor could do it better, but you will greatly improve your chances of creating a convincing yam if you start with a rotund cricket. If you can possibly find one who is also sensitive and suggestible, those qualities will come in handy later.

Once you have chosen your cricket, apologize to him and tell him how the werewolf had it worse. Then dunk him in water and roll him in dirt and grit. This will create a yam-like flavor. I mean texture. Don’t worry about the legs; you can pass them off as sprouts. As a final touch, place the fat, dusty cricket on top of a bowl of actual yams, creating a sort of yam tableau. This will put viewers in a yam frame of mind, making them far less likely to suspect that one of the yams is a cricket. If for some reason the cricket doesn’t blend in, roll him in dirt again. Do not under any circumstances allow anyone to scrub him.

Step Two: Playing the Yam

Unfortunately, as the old saying goes, having hypertrichosis does not mean you’re a werewolf and a cricket dressed up as a yam does not a true yam make. As previously shown by our philosopher, in order to be a werewolf, one must not only look like a werewolf, but one must also behave as a werewolf. One can only assume the same goes for yams.

If this sounds intimidating, take a moment ask yourself: what do yams really do? That’s right. Nothing! Therefore it will not be difficult for the cricket to conduct himself as a yam. Simply tell him to sit and stay. If you have chosen a properly rotund cricket, he will be way ahead of you here. If you have chosen an emotionally receptive cricket, he will be better prepared to give a subtle and moving performance, but frankly, it will be hard to tell the difference.

Step Three: Inside the Mind of a Yam, Such As It Is

Again, step back and contemplate the yam in relation to the rest of the dynamic cosmos: it has got to be one of the most inert masses in the universe. Yams don’t even know they’re yams. And on account of them being not even stupid, this step is even easier than the last one. Rather than going through all the ridiculous effort of raising the cricket as a yam from birth, or hypnotizing it so that it thinks it’s a yam even though it does not understand what it truly means to be a yam and says irritatingly unyamlike things such as, “Hello, I am a yam,” you must merely sing the cricket a nice lullaby and put it to sleep.

Et voilà: you have a corpulent, dirty, immobile, catatonic cricket which you might be able to fool a couple of philosophers into thinking is a yam. In retrospect, it would have been more lucrative to prove that the cricket is gold so that you could sell it to the philosophers and use the money to pay for an internet connection so that you don’t have to perform strange experiments on innocent insects in order to procrastinate and can just check your e-mail like everyone else, but I suppose we all have a different idea of fun.

This Post Made Possible by Katie P.

Not long before I moved, A Lover of Trotsky and Other Dead Philosophers alerted me to a news story in which a young woman somehow managed to fall behind a bookcase and die and not be found for two solid weeks, even though she lived with her family. At the time I squawked at A Lover of Trotsky and Other Dead Philosophers because that is not a story you want to hear when you’re about to move away from the safety of home. (Not that the safety of home did that unfortunate lady any good, but it could have been worse. If she’d been living alone, she could have been behind that bookcase for years.) A Lover of Trotsky and Other Dead Philosophers insisted that there must have been something strange going on behind the scenes of that story because nobody could possibly be stupid enough to get stuck behind a bookcase and die there, and even if they did, nobody could possibly be stupid enough not to notice that there was, you know, this funny smell in the house.

That may be true. I hope for the sake of the human race that that is true.

Nevertheless, just as I suspected, that story was exactly what I thought of as I undertook to rearrange my living room by myself one evening. I thought, “This is a very bad idea. This bookcase is going to fall on me and even though it is empty it is going to crush me and I am going to die and that message that Harry leaves on Sally’s answering machine is going to take on new meaning for everyone who knows me and I will be responsible for ruining one of the best parts of that movie and therefore I should not be doing this.”

But I did anyway, and look how pretty!


The arrangement may not be in strict accordance with feng shui, but I didn’t die doing it, so I count it as a success. By these standards I have also succeeded in hanging curtain rods and using a gas stove. One of the curtain rods is hanging by half its screws, and I did have a lot of trouble baking that one stubborn yam, but I neither fell out the window nor blew myself up, which means victory is mine. Taking this paradigm of success to its natural end, I must conclude that my life has been one triumph after another since I was born. There is still a possibility that I will die trying to get my armchair up the stairs and through the door, but, happily, that possibility has been forestalled by the fact that the chair probably will never arrive. It is so delayed that it is now practically mythical. I’ve been complaining about this a lot but it might turn out to have been a close call.

Speaking of chairs: Yes, those are camping chairs in my living room. They are not comfortable in the least but the cupholders do double nicely as remote control holders. However, since it appears that Turner Classic Movies is (inexplicably) not considered a major television network, and anyway the rabbit ears get reception about as effectively as the plastic Viking longboat on top of the TV, the chairs and the TV are really just for show. My stereo does not get radio reception terribly well either, and my computer is not hooked up to the Internet yet, so the real center of the technological action in my apartment is . . . my ugly old clock radio, which travels frequently between my bedroom and the kitchen counter, which location it seems to like very much.


The clock radio is about sixteen years old. It gets the best reception of any radio I’ve ever had. It is quickly becoming one of my most prized possessions, partly because of its reliability, and partly because there is very little chance I could get stuck behind it and die. The single drawback is that on account of listening to at least six hours of NPR every day, I am very well-informed in the area of current events, and it is getting harder and harder not to give in to the urge to take refuge under my bed. This will not save me from North Korea’s nuclear weapons, or the results of global warming, or even the early lunacies of the 2008 presidential election, but it will be nice and cosy-warm until one of these three things brings about the end of the world. That, or my bed crushes me and I die.

These cheerful thoughts are brought to you through the kind generosity of Katie P., who has made made the first ever technological donation to the Simon and Ivan blog in the interest of at least one hedgehog posting something between mid-January and the end of the world (which, as we have seen, is coming right up). Katie P., a loyal and appreciative reader, stepped in to save the day with an adorable wee flash drive. Since the Internet will not come to me, I must take my posts to it, and this makes it a lot easier. Thanks, Katie P.! You are a true friend to hedgehogs everywhere, which is why when I get fired for posting at work, it is on your doorstep that I will show up. Don’t worry, though. I will bring my clock radio.

In Which the Vikings Relocate to a Room with a View and are Promptly Seduced to a Life of Crime

Due to overcrowding at home, the Vikings were recently forced to go a-viking and to pillage a new place to live. After spending many Sunday afternoons on the internet, and many Saturday afternoons looking at squalid hovels that by virtue of having brown shag carpeting and a curious odor did not recommend themselves, the Vikings at last came upon clean and humble living quarters that they all agreed were very pillageable, although in the end they did not so much pillage these living quarters as agree to pay rent for them. These days spears, berserkers, and heroic boasts hardly get you a candy bar, much less a homestead, so devalued has Viking currency become since the good times way back in the 830s AD.

The eminently habitable hovel is conveniently located at the four corners of town, allowing the Vikings to keep a finger on the pulsing nightlife of the village that never sleeps. (The laundromat, at least, seems to be open until all the way til nine.) There are so few sets of four corners in this town that when you say “the four corners” everybody knows what you mean. The Four Corners I refer to is lucky enough to be one of only two intersections that merit traffic lights, so you can see the Vikings are very fortunate to be so centrally located, even if this is the next-to-last town before civilization ends and corn starts. The corn does not stop until Pennsylvania. It may not even stop in Pennsylvania, but that is the point at which the Vikings usually fall asleep in the car.

The view out the Vikings’ best window effectively demonstrates to what degree this town truly is full of clamor and commotion. Thank goodness for those traffic lights or this intersection would be a nightmare.


That was a picture of the village on a Sunday at dusk. Here is a picture of the village during a nuclear winter:


In case you were wondering how it would look.

The view from the kitchen is also rather good:


Few things are more cheering than having a bookshop in sight at all times. The yellow sign says OPEN. How comforting.

Incidentally, it has been suggested by several people that the Vikings quit their job and engage in full-time reconnaissance, or, to speak plainly, spying. Although the crimes and injustices in a small town are usually invisible, stupidity is very often public. For example: it doesn’t matter how much snow has fallen recently; if the roads have been plowed, you aren’t going to get far down Main Street on your snowmobile. Or, if you are going to make a scene in a bar, don’t do it in a bar that is visible from the fire station, where the police like to park. Or, if you don’t want to have to drag your child’s exhausted carcass home in a sled, do not make the unfortunate creature walk across town to play in the snow. Or, if you are all going to roam the streets drunkenly singing an eighties ballad at four o’clock in the morning, at least pick one to which you know the lyrics.

There is certainly money to be made, or as some might call it, extorted, from what you might see out the Vikings’ windows, and goodness knows that without cable or the internet, there is not much else to watch, but unfortunately the Vikings are really just not that nosy. They also feel it would be unethical to misuse the advantage one has gained simply by virtue of happening to live in a place from which one can see the entire town. However, if it looked like they could actually make a living from blackmail, they might entertain the idea of negotiations. After all, it’s as easy to see in as out, and if people never look up, who can they blame but themselves for their underdeveloped sense of entrepeneurialism?

Life in the big city can really corrode a Viking’s innocent soul.

Side Effects of Bibliophilia

Acceptable reasons for moving away from home:

1) Extensive shelving no longer accomodates personal library

Otherwise, to move out of a place with fresh carpeting, a newly redone bathroom, heat, cable, internet, excellent catering, and a faithful canine companion would be folly. Jobs, spouses, education, ill health, witness protection – these alone are not good enough reasons to take up the arduous and inconceivably dusty task of packing, loading, transporting, unloading, unpacking, arranging, rearranging, and inevitably re-rearranging all of your earthly possessions.

I was not even halfway through this process when I began to think much better of the dowry chest concept. Then I began to admire Jack’s alter ego for blowing up his apartment. And I began to make mental notes on childrearing: do not under any circumstances encourage your child to frequent flea markets and buy forty-eight million gallons’-worth of pretty glass bottles of CALIFORNIA FIG SYRUP and PARISIAN SAGE HAIR TONIC and KILMER’S SWAMP ROOT KIDNEY LIVER AND BLADDER REMEDY. They look like pretty glass bottles, but here is what they really are: pretty glass shackles. Impossible to part with, but almost prohibitively risky to move. Such fragile objects are the enemy of the nomad, the pilgrim, the wayfarer. So is a personal library, come to that, but it can also be a stimulus to movement if the following conditions occur simultaneously:

1) You are a compulsive patron of the local used book store
2) You work at a publishing company and get damaged books for free
3) You like to own multiple translations in case one is unreliable
4) Your house is full of enablers
5) Your shelves are already full
6) You worked in the campus library for three years and know too much about damage inflicted by improper book storage
7) You are pretentous and refer to your books as your “personal library” and can’t bear to see them crammed into shelves, stifled, unable to “breathe”

So I moved.

But then I couldn’t afford the necessary forty feet of shelving.

Stacking books behind books on the paltry few shelves I could afford, I made a mental note to raise my children not only without bottle collections but also in an impenetrable nest of illiteracy so they would not know this pain.

Supplementary to the Previous Post: The Infamous Basket Weaving Incident

When people make light of basket weaving, it is because they have never tried it. Oh, the weaving, maybe they've done that, pshaw! Anybody can weave a basket, especially if you leave the term "basket" loosely-defined, as these instructions do:


So your basket looks like a hose that got tangled in barbed wire? That's okay! There's no wrong way to create your basket! It might take four hands, eighteen clothespins, scissors, twine, chewing gum, and dynamite, but there is no possibility of error. And if you end up having to soak the basket reed every two minutes just to be able to MOVE it, don't worry! No problem! There is no wrong way to bathe your basket!


Thanks to directions that do not take "baskets" seriously as a concept, weaving one is actually pretty easy. That's obviously why people compare easy things to basket weaving, rather than basket dying. Basket dying can cause personal injury. For example, the dye. They make you use your own blood. No, seriously. They do. I have proof:


If that basket isn't sitting in a bucket of blood, then what IS that stuff? But that isn't even the worst of it, no, dying your basket IN YOUR OWN BLOOD is not the worst of it. To compound the humiliation of the investment you have put into this basket, they give you faulty plastic gloves. They know the temptation to swirl your hand around in blood is just too much; how often are you given that opportunity? Assuming you're not a wanted criminal, probably not often at all. So they know you're going to end up doing this:


And when you step back to look at your beautiful pink basket that was supposed to be red but that's okay, you realize that not only has this basket cost you hours of your time, thousands of mangled clothespins, gallons of water, that last stick of dynamite that you were saving for something much cooler, and blood, sweat, and tears (blood more literally than sweat and tears, of course), BUT it has ALSO dyed your middle finger red. Most middle fingers say other things but this one says SACRIFICE.


We never made fun of basket weaving again.

Furniture Finishing: The Saga Continues

The staining of the table top is complete and if I've learned anything from this fine, flat piece of wood, it's that I don't know crap about finishing furniture and I should I ever quit my day job, I should not consider carpentry a viable career path. Or furniture rejuvenation. I'm not even sure furniture rejuvenation is a career path, but if it is, I certainly shouldn't be allowed to follow it.

I've been staining with a special "staining sponge" my father purchased and I love it. Something about dragging that little piece of terry cloth up and down the wood makes me so happy. It distributes smoothly, fluidly... languidly. As a staining accessory I feel it was worth every penny. Unlike the tack cloth which I feel should be renamed ATtack cloth, because it's very sticky and it latches on to your hand with a certain ferocity when you remove it from the package... but I digress. I love, love, love the staining sponge. Sadly, it turns into a rock when you leave it on the balcony over night.

Luckily there are two in every pack. Since I wasted the first one, I've been trying to conserve the second. This means washing it out in the sink every night. It may or may not be legal to pour stain down your sink, even in small amounts, but I forgot about the environmental impact when I saw what it was doing to my fingers.



This actually looks much better than the infamous basket weaving incident where my whole middle finger turned red, but I still look like a hobo with permanently grubby nails.

So, The table top is done leaving me with just four legs, four braces, two chairs and a bed to stain. I'm looking forward to the bed because it comes with this handy IKEA warning label:



I looked at these pictures for awhile and found two possible translations 1) "We know you're thrify (And we at IKEA appreciate your business!), so please use your own blood to grease this piece of metal" or 2) "If you keep washing your staining sponges in the sink, your fingers will eventually ooze black liquid. Good luck with that."

being handy

My father came to visit after Christmas and I took the opportunity to do several things:
1. Hear stories about my father from his sisters (He kept making Barbie have sex in my dream house. I was so mad I ripped his fingernail off.)
2. Wash my car (because apparently seven months is too long to go without washing your car).
and
3. Go shopping for furniture.

The furniture shopping had to happen for two reasons: because I am not strong enough to carry furniture to my car by myself and because I am too poor to actually afford furniture. The latter was why we ended up at IKEA. And I now have a bed, a table and two chairs. Awesome.




(IKEA dad, (anonymity protected by pigeon))



Now, I told a friend my father came to visit and he left me with a load of unfinished IKEA furniture and a rather suspicious electric sander he said "wow. your dad must really hate you." Not so! This is quality unfinished furniture! And Dad bought me all the tools I'll need to make it quality finished furniture. It was halfway through the Lowes shopping trip that I realized what guys spend the majority of their money on: crap from Lowes. Had I been there alone, I would have purchased some stain, some sand paper, and some of the clear stuff to put on it when it's done. And I would have had to ask what the clear stuff was. But with my father in tow I came home with the electric sander, two kinds of sand paper, stain, clear stuff, normal brushes, foam brushes, staining pads, a tack cloth (tack cloth?), a drop cloth and cleaning stuff (what, we're not just throwing it away when we're done?). So, for the next week I am going to chronicle "The Staining of The Furniture", in an attempt to motivate myself to actually walk to the balcony, open the door, sit down and stain the furniture. If this doesn't bring the readers in, I don't know what will.

A Little Too Much Merriment

This bleary-eyed trio of gingerbread secular humanists seem to have been overdoing it on the Christmas ale.

Silent Night

Graveyard shifts are creepy. You're working in a virtually abandoned office building, all alone, and all of a sudden everything becomes terrifying in its own "wow, you have an extremely over-active imagination" way. I'm jumpy by nature, but when you put me in an oh so quiet cubicle where the motion sensor lights seem to be triggered by everything but actual human motion and the computers make grumbling sounds when they receive email, it starts to make me nervous.

You do your best to suppress your fears: loud cheery music, raiding the cupboards, talking to yourself... It's like babysitting without kids to harass you about playing Monopoly Jr. every twelve seconds. But then you start thinking about babysitting, and about that story you heard where the girl was murdered, and that story about the man with the hook, and then you start to think about Scream, where everyone was murdered, and then you start thinking non-scary movies that could be scary if you applied the plot to your present situation... like Ghostbusters... maybe you shouldn't raid the fridge. Zoul might be in there... or Rick Moranis. Maybe you should put on headphones to block out the sounds... maybe not. If you do you won't hear the murderers approach. crap, maybe you should turn the music off all together. maybe you should hide quietly under a desk until daybreak!

But you eventually talk yourself off a ledge, get your work done as fast as humanly possible and get the hell out of the haunted office building.

It's always the same, and the job I'm working right now is following the graveyard shift formula to a T. Dark hallways, strange noises, fridge that could very well be growing the next Swamp Thing, but to give it it's own special set of terrifying characteristics, they've placed these life-sized gems in the hallway:





Now, those are illuminated by my flash, but in the dim natural light, they look like humans crouching outside the door waiting to either: A) beat me over the head with a guitar or B) smother me with a sheet. Every time I see them from the corner of my eye I jump about 50 feet.

So employers of the night shift I implore you, if we must work the vampire hours, could we at least do it without dead performers staring us down?

electroCUTEion

Its been a little dry here for the past month or so. Every time I get out of my car I'm administered an electric shock so powerful it leaves my fingers tingling long after I exit the garage-- and the shocks don't end with the car. It must be my electric personality because whatever I touch in the apartment seems to send out sparks as well.

Unfortunately, the first thing I usually lay my hands on when I come home is the kitten. The routine is as follows: Gil pokes his head out from under my bed covers, confirms it is me and not the "League of Evil Kitten Eaters" come to fry him up, and then he purrs and cuddles for approximately 32 seconds before attacking my feet and becoming the most annoying feline on the planet.

But since there is no moisture in the air, the routine has changed a bit: cat sees me, gains visual confirmation of non-kitten eater, starts to purr and **SHOCK**. You can see the betrayal in his eyes. The girl formerly known only as "the one who won't chew on my legs" as turned into "the girl who specializes in electro-shock treatments". What an unhappy cat. But this new superconductivity has its benefits. Gil loves to sit on my computer, there's nothing I can do about it, but with the dry air, it shocks him too. This is happening with such frequency he's now terrified to walk across the keys. Victory!

So cat leaves the computer alone for the most part. Sadly, one day, while going out of his way to walk AROUND the MacBook, he accidentally grazed a corner and **ZAP**. And that was the last straw. This little kitten reared up on his little kitten legs and took one of his little kitten paws and smacked the computer with all his little kitten strength. And the futility of the gesture was absolutely adorable.



Electrocution: hands down, the best way to bring out the personality in your pet.

Christmas Lessons

This was my first year of solo holiday baking. The Baking of the Christmas Cookies: definitely my #1 Holiday Spirit booster (not that the fake snow at the mall didn't transport me to a winter wonderland) but when you do anything for the first time by yourself, in your own apartment, without a wooden spoon or an electric mixer... or a rolling pin, you realize just how much work your mother was doing while you watched "A Muppet Christmas Carol" in the other room.

I called Mom for three recipes; our holiday favorites: Almond Crescents, Sugar Cookies and English Toffee and I found each cookie not only required some unanticipated extra work, but levels of creativity I wasn't initially prepared to devote to baked goods.

The Sugar Cookies were simple enough, even though I somehow managed to forget "Rolled Sugar Cookies" would require a rolling pin. Not to be deterred, I spent much of my time flouring a bottle of Perrier and hoping it wouldn't explode before I could cut out six dozen tiny pine trees.

The English Toffee: something should have clicked when I read the toffee needed to heat to 300 degrees. Nothing did, but if it had, it would have sounded like a morse code message and it would have said said: "Don't use that plastic spoon to stir, stupid". The next message would have said "no, dummy, the metal one is NOT a better choice."

The Almond Crescents I thought I had under control. The only difficult ingredient was "blanched almonds, finely chopped". They do not sell these at Trader Joe's. The closest thing I could find to "blanched almonds, finely chopped" was whole almonds: raw. Blanching is not a difficult process. You let the almonds sit in boiling water for 60 seconds and then peel the skin off. Though time consuming, it's very brainless. Then came the chopping part. I don't own a legitimate knife set-- my tried and true alternative, the butter knife, proved too dull and spoons were completely ineffective, so I resorted to the only thing in my apartment I was 100% confident could do the job: a hammer. And since I'm working nights, this meant I was hammering almonds at 3:30 in the morning. I bet my neighbors love me. Now that I think about it, I should probably send them some cookies.

The fourth and final recipe was not a mom recipe. I found it on the internet, and all I can say for this one is: Don't bake from an internet recipe without a reliable wireless connection.



Happy Holidays!

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