I meant to write about my trip to Germany, but my computer didn't make it out in one piece and I didn't think anyone would believe the post about grown men and women dressed as garden patches, wearing overalls made of astro turf and butterfly headbands, drinking on the rainy streets in 34 degree weather without some photographic evidence. Or that time they marched a stuffed doll through the city in the dead of night carrying torches and whispering "wooo, wooo" while wearing green wigs and furry elephant costumes and then set the doll on fire. I'm not sure I believe it.

And I meant to start writing regularly once my job slowed down and I officially had nothing better to do, but the job never slowed down and I am consistently having to remind myself "DON'T PANIC, this will all be over soon. Soon you will remember what a weekend is like". But that's still four weeks away, so in the meantime I have been distracting myself with semi-complicated art projects. Behold: The Chalkboard Wall.



I even took the time to bribe Gilbert P. Kitten into posing in front of The Chalkboard Wall. It only took six cans of unopened cat food to get him to sit on that table.



I use the chalkboard wall to keep track of my workouts. This is why it says "GO SWIM" in giant letters. I wake up in the morning and I think "seriously? I should get out of bed NOW? This seems like a bad idea" and I see the "GO SWIM" and I think, "well maybe". And then I go back to sleep, because the kind of person who thinks a chalkboard wall will motivate her to get in the pool, is not the kind of person who actually drags herself out of bed for laps. She is the kind of person who doodles in the columns later so they don't look so empty.

Hedgehog Politics

This is my desk at work. The post it note in the corner was balled up and thrown at me from an adjoining cubicle. It reads "The guy behind me just called Ryan Seacrest a genius. Where did my life go so wrong?"

Up Too Early

Driving to the airport. 4:30 am.

Me: Wow, the moon is even BIGGER now!
Dad: I keep telling you, it's because we're getting closer.
Mom: It's dented though.
Me: What a piece of junk.
Dad (sadly): Should have hung it up with a screw, not a nail.

And That's the Day He Started to Refer to Her as Iron Fist in His Head

In the library.

Father: Go tell your sister two minutes.
Little brother: Dad says two minutes.
Big sister: You may be quiet now, thank you.

Worst Case Scenario

Last Christmas we had Secret Santas at work, and my secret santa noticed that my 2007 desk calendar was going to run out soon. This 2007 calendar was the best desk calendar I have ever had, as it gave me 365 archaic words to use at the rate of one a day, which is really the limit in terms of how quickly a person can absorb new vocabulary. My favorite word arrived on January 17th and I never did find anything better.

snoodle v. To rub and scratch and attend assiduously to pigs

This year's calendar is not quite of the same persuasion, unless I happen to be in a scenario in which someone steals my pig, because thanks to W. H. Long's Dictionary of the Isle of Wight Dialect, I now know that having snoodled it is a reasonably good way to prove that it is in fact mine. But I do not have a pig. So let's move on.

The 2008 calendar is a Worse Case Scenario calendar.

So far, some have been quite helpful. HOW TO SPOT A RABID ANIMAL. Having had some experience with this, I learned nothing new, but I thought it was at least practical, as was HOW TO LOSE SOMEONE WHO IS FOLLOWING YOU ON FOOT. Occasionally one does find oneself on a dark street. You never know.

But then there was the one called HOW TO FALL DOWN A FLIGHT OF STAIRS and I thought, "Well that's just silly. Jump!" Naturally I am taking this too literally, but since their advice involves the sentence "concentrate on rolling on major muscle groups" I have to ask myself whether my response doesn't actually make more sense. Most people, when they're falling down the stairs, hardly know they're falling until they've stopped, but the calendar wants you to have the presence of mind to "reduce speed and maximize control." Well, of course. And that would be easy if, say, you were driving a car. But when you're falling down stairs, you're pretty busy . . . falling down stairs.

For a while this one was my favorite: On the weekend of January 19-20th I am informed of four steps to take in order to "outwit a pack of wolves." That's what it's entitled: HOW TO OUTWIT A PACK OF WOLVES. Not how to escape them or scare them or injure them or hide from them; how to outwit them. I was envisioning sitting down with them on a hillside and tricking them into drinking iocane powder, but what you are actually supposed to do is not get chased into a lake. That seems self-evident to me in any scenario, but I'm no expert.

And then they just got weird. HOW TO SURVIVE A HOSTAGE SITUATION. Where am I that I'm going to be taken hostage?

The very next day: HOW TO ESCAPE IF TRAPPED IN A LION CAGE. Why am I in a lion cage? How did I get there? Did I go into it voluntarily? Because in that case, considering how much effort it would probably take to put myself in such a dangerous situation, I deserve to be eaten. Or, did someone drug me and dump my body there? If so, it would be better to know HOW TO TELL WHETHER ANYONE HAS IT IN FOR YOU. Or at the very least HOW NOT TO END UP IN A LION CAGE.

I assumed it couldn't get more unlikely than me being in a lion cage but I think they're working their way into absurdity as the year progresses because today it says HOW TO BAIL OUT OF A STREET LUGE.

1. What is a street luge?
2. No really, what is a street luge?
3. Who the hell has a street luge?
4. Is street-luging a recognized sport?
5. Is the picture, which shows a person basically flying out of a gutter (there's even a drainage grate), in any way accurate?
6. Why would you get into a hobby that involved literally being in the gutter?
7. Is not the very name of a street luge a sign of its being dangerous?
8. If your street luge goes out of control, is this not in fact an example of natural selection at work?

The best part is that tomorrow says HOW TO SURVIVE NUCLEAR FALLOUT, as if having to bail out of your street luge and being in the vicinity of a nuclear bomb explosion are in any way on the same level of worst cases. I guess maybe the detonation might blow you off your street luge, but if that happened, breaking your leg or getting run over by a car probably won't matter that much.

I will bet $10 that before the year is out there's going to be one about alien life forms landing on earth. Oh, I hope there is.

Easter Candy for the Unbeliever

This comes in second only to the Easter Cell Phone: Ostermix.

On Ivan's recent trip to Germany (concerning which she has so far failed to post HINT HINT) she picked up a bag of possibly the best Easter candy ever. I haven't actually eaten any of it yet, but I am prepared to say it's the best ever because it could not be more unabashedly pagan, and boy do I heart the pagans!

It's not the bunnies and the other bunnies and the strange cartoonish chicks that are so unreligious, although they definitely lean towards pre- rather than post-Christian traditions. It's the fried eggs.

Behold:


Whether fried eggs are more appropriate to Easter than, say, a chocolate Jesus, I'm not sure. Then again, I don't know that they are even particularly connected to pre-Christian fertility rituals. If you eat the egg, it is obviously not going to hatch. So it seems to me that this is basically a religiously neutral candy, like maybe something the Easter Beagle would deliver. Christianity has inspired a whole lot of incredible music and some excellent art and literature, and I'm sure Jesus, from his seat on the right hand of God the Father Almighty, is very pleased that it has now also inspired fried-egg-shaped gummies.

I leave you with close-ups. If anyone knows what the ones that look like luridly-colored caviar are, please tell me.

And it's All Thanks to Alexander Hamilton's Sister-in-Law

The Southern Tier is officially defined (by Wikipedia) as counties in New York State that border Pennsylvania, west of the Catskills. I have been there so infrequently that I have to admit it took some hard thinking before I could remember how to get on 390 going south. I already live half an hour south of the Thruway, which is essentially half an hour south of civilization; why would I want to go FARTHER that direction? I'll tell you why: pancakes.

Man, I love pancakes. So when I heard there was a family of maple producers in the Southern Tier who open a restaurant for three months in the spring in order to serve all-you-can-eat buckwheat pancakes to fellow maple syrup enthusiasts, I immediately enlisted the company of my trusty friend Sheilah, and away we went into the wilds of New York.

This family describes their restaurant as having a "somewhat out of the way" location. They are correct. They are a solid hour and a half away from just Rochester, and Rochester is about two and a half light years away from the rest of the world. So these are people for whom being nine hours from New York City wasn't good enough. They didn't even want to be near the Erie Canal. They don't even have a Finger Lake. They do have Keaney Swamp State Forest, but it is (a) a swamp, and (b) a swamp so unremarkable I can't even verify its name on the internet because, amazingly, there is no website detailing the state-protected swamps in Allegany County, so I can't imagine that it is any kind of natural wonder.

This isn't to say that the Southern Tier, in spite of obviously suffering from some longstanding economic woes, has no draws. It has a kind of lonely, dramatic landscape that is a cross between the mountains of Vermont and the hills of Prince Edward Island. If it hadn't been the epitome of a dull, colorless, depressing March day, I can see it being the subject of a National Geographic article, featuring pictures of neglected homes, abandoned homes, cat-eyed barns that are waiting for a good gust of wind or a lightning strike to finish them off, rusted schoolbuses that must date back to 1965 at least, and, naturally, peculiar local businesses. Such as maple farmers.

I say peculiar because this is not a maple farm from Tasha Tudor's New England. This isn't to impugn their maple syrup, which was marvelous. And perhaps I have become too focused on marketing. But I must say, there is great potential for a place like that to be really, really cool, and they missed almost every opportunity to educate people on how maple syrup is made, as well as to commercialize on their own cuteness, because there was not much cuteness.

In the basement of the building there is a display, I guess, of old equipment, I think, and a kind of reproduction, as far as I could tell, of the maple-sugaring life about a hundred years ago. I am unsure because normally in such a situation there would be some kind of placard telling you what you are looking at. Not so here:


Sheilah: What does it do?
Me: I have no idea.
Sheilah: It looks like you could cremate a body in it.
Me: Sheilah!
Sheilah: Is it not the perfect size and shape? IS IT NOT?
Me: I have to admit . . . it IS.

A nice placard could have spared us that exchange.

Also, I have something to say about this:


Someone saw me taking a picture of this and asked why I was taking a picture. What I said was, "Why not?" but what I thought was, "Are you kidding? This is the funniest thing I've seen in three months except for the RON PAUL RLOVEUTION sign that we passed as we drove down here, and that was mostly scary."

And in the back, where by all rights there ought to have been a nice path through the maple trees down which you could take a guided tour and learn the history of sapping, there was only this:


I won't hold the mud and snow against them because they can't control the horribleness of March, but the rotting logs, the rusted frame, and whatever that yellow thing is that looks like it might have contained as explosive gas of some kind? That could be somewhere else. When I go to a place like this, I want to be fooled into thinking these people lead wholesome, rustic lives, grow all their own food, take good care of their grandmothers, and play the fiddle for entertainment. And a horse or two in a nearby pasture wouldn't go amiss. Even just a horse statue! I can be flexible.

While we were adventuring in the area, Sheilah and I thought we might as well stop by Angelica, which Sheilah's mom said was cute and had some shops. Sheilah's mom was right. It was cute, and it did have some shops. And we were possibly the only people there. We were actually recognized by the owner of one shop because she had just spent half an hour talking to the owner of the shop we'd just been to. However, here's an interesting fact: the village I live in has a population of about 2,500, while Angelica has a population of 903 (that's 95 people fewer than in 1830), and yet Angelica can support a number of antiques stores, a sweet shop, a hotel AND an inn, and three restaurants, whereas my village can barely keep a single coffee shop in business.

Something is wrong with the place I live.

Side note on Angelica: The village of Angelica is named after Angelica Schuyler Church, daughter of General Philip John Schuyler and Catherine van Rensselaer (from Albany. Surprise!). The General was a member of the Continental Congress. Angelica corresponded with not only the Marquis de Lafayette and the Marquis de Talleyrand, but also Thomas Jefferson. She was painted by John Trumbull, and eloped in 1777 with an Englishman who fled to American after a duel. He may possibly have been using an assumed name at the time, and appears to have been something of a gambler. THe Englishman, Church, duelled with Aaron Burr (both survived) and when Aaron Burr later duelled with Alexander Hamilton, who was married to Angelica's sister, they used Church's pistols. Who named the village Angelica and why is a mystery to me, but I would just like to say on an unrelated note that it is a strange period in history when the thing to do is to settle arguments according to who has better aim. That is barely one step up from drowning suspected witches. Come on. Lame.

Whether or not Angelica Church married a gambling addict or Thomas Jefferson wanted to have an affair with her or she wanted to have an affair with Alexander Hamilton, the place that was named after her sure is darn cute. It might be kind of hard to tell from this picture, because unfortunately it was still March by the time we got there, but Main Street is a wide, tree-lined avenue with some lovely architecture, nicely-restored houses, and colorful shops.


More importantly than this, they knew just how to fool me into thinking they lead wholesome and rustic lives. It's not a horse. It's even better. It's a cow statue!


Neat.

At the end of Main Street, there is a nice traffic circle with a pretty big park in the center of it. There are no less than four churches around this circle, one of which is pictured here:


And this is the extremely charming town hall. I am a sucker for red-white-and-blue hangings on official buildings in small northeastern towns.


And, just in case you were in doubt, this is Angelica, New York:


A Town Where History Lives Except In March When History Moves To Her Condo In Florida And Takes The Entire Population With Her.

As a day-trip destination, I give the Southern Tier three out of five stars, but if you are thinking of visiting, please bear in mind that I awarded one of those stars solely because Angelica Schuyler Church seems like she was pretty awesome. And I awarded the second one on the strength of the orange truffle I got from Angelica's sweet shop. And the third one was for the doll peeking out of the basket in the basement of the maple place. My definitions of "interesting" and "a good time" might not match up with everyone else's; in fact, at this very moment I'm considering bumping it up to four stars because I just remembered that the directions MapQuest gave us for the route home included a dirt road -- a dirt road that in any other place on earth probably would have been closed at this time of year, considering that it was not so much dirt as mud. I guess the MapQuest people thought, "If they're in the Southern Tier, 99 to 1 they're in a truck, so go ahead and put that dirt road in there as a valid route."

Yes. Definitely four stars.

Winter Garden

Greens

Having not posted in more than two months, I feel I need to ease my way back into the routine. With vegetables.

Deck the Fire Truck with Boughs of Holly

In Sweden they dress up as martyrs at Christmas and wear flaming crowns, in the Netherlands they eat candy out of unfashionable shoes, and in small town America, they decorate fire engines. I have two comments:

1. Small town America is no weirder than anywhere else.
2. Small town America WINS. Fire trucks are AWESOME and they are even more AWESOME when they are decorated with Christmas lights and electronic moving reindeer and REAL LIVESTOCK!

Having never lived in the center of town before, and my parents having apparently kept this a secret because it is too good to share, I had no idea that every year, a couple of weeks before Christmas, the fire departments from various surrounding towns compete to see who can decorate their fire truck the AWESOMEST and then they drive them through town so that we village folk can be mightily impressed by their decorative skills and/or total lack of subtlety. Which we were. Fa la la la la la la la la!

But I am not here to make fun of them. Because I honestly thought this was the best parade I have seen in a long time. Look! Fire trucks! With lights!


And! There's more! Firemen dressed up in lights! You might ask yourself, isn't that a fire hazard? But no! It isn't! Because there are fifteen firetrucks within a half-mile!


And here's one of them! And it's so pretty! Just imagine if your house was burning down and this showed up! You'd be so happy, you'd forget that all your worldly possession were in ashes!


However. There is a line. And if I were having a heart attack and my rescuers arrived in this, I think, if I could manage it, I would say, "I will not allow you to take me to the hospital unless you take those ridiculous animals off the roof of your vehicle. This is not a Wagnerian opera!"


When the parade was over, there were a vast number of fire trucks lining Monroe Street, and a vast number of people who were annoyed because they wanted to use Monroe Street, and there was a very immobile fire truck parked across the end of it blocking it off. It was like having royalty in town. Royalty that could plug themselves in and light up like toys!

Happily, a nice fireman let me out of the street because I needed to go grocery shopping because this:


was due to arrive imminently, and in fact snow began to fall at almost the exact moment that the parade ended. It was not the deadly horror that newscasters gleefully predicted, but it was cold enough and windy enough and snowy enough that I only took two pictures before going back inside to have another can of soup. Here is the other picture:


Isn't that lovely? And just twelve hours earlier, there were firetrucks rolling through town like vehicular Christmas trees. This is a great place to live.

Pastry Warfare

Z: I have about 500 mini muffins, do you want one for breakfast?
N: nah, Fred's got a rival faction of scones in his room, I'm going with them.
Z: Pastry warfare... I don't know how to handle this.
L: Just wait until the crumpets show up.

editorial decisions

A: We need to replace this shot of downtown LA with a shot of Vegas.
I: ok
::scans through Vegas tape::
A: We should probably go with that aerial of the city...
I: Really? I was going to use the shot of the tiger combined with the fountain of fire...
A: You really want to be an editor?

I just shook George Carlin's hand.

how cool is that?

when it's gray in LA

all I wanted to do this morning was walk to the Boston Public Library, rent multiple episodes of NOVA and go home and watch them in bed. This is how the holidays affect me. Some people overeat, some people become emotionally abusive to family members, but hedgehogs, hedgehogs turn to PBS.

A Really Inspired Post

So I was going to post about something else, but I realized I'm missing one of the pictures. So then I thought I would post the other thing I've been meaning to post for, oh, a month. But even though I edited the pictures for that very recently and then told myself not to forget to put them on my flash drive, I went right ahead and forgot. Therefore, because I feel guilty and need to post something, and all I have are three pictures from August, I'm posting those. Here we go.

Usually when I'm house-sitting, I end up posting twenty-nine pictures of Rosie. Rosie sitting, Rosie walking, Rosie playing with string, Rosie glaring at me, Rosie on a chair, Rosie outside, Rosie sleeping. And no one ever comments on those posts because there is nothing to say except that Rosie is edibly cute, the end. But this time I have shocking images of the life Rosie really lives, a life of terror, a life of justified paranoia, a life of waiting for Rhubarb to pounce on her head. She may spend twenty-three hours of the day sleeping, but the fact is, sleeping is serious business and she's constantly having to make up for time lost to pseudo-jungle-cat attacks. And now there's proof.

Exhibit A:
The predator lies in wait.
He is thinking, "Ah, there is Rosie. I shall pretend she is a giant mouse and try to eat her. She'll never spot me."

Exhibit B:
The predator goes in for the kill.
Here he is thinking, "She spotted me! Damn you, Rosie! You are a mouse, and I am an enormous jungle cat!"

Exhibit C:
The predator magnanimously fails to rip out Rosie's throat.
Her initial panic over, Rosie wonders whether this is going to go on all day because she has several more places to nap in today and the afternoon is already half over.

unhealthy

I took a trip to Joshua Tree National Park this weekend and spent most of Saturday commenting on how clear it was, and how nice it was to breathe fresh air and how different it smells once you get away from LA. When you hike in LA you get to the top and see something cool like viewing tubes--



what an awesome idea, even better than those giant binoculars-- no quarters necessary, they work for free! And you peer through the awesome viewing tubes and you see this:



breathtaking, yes? Breathtaking in an "I really shouldn't be out here breathing this" sort of way...

exhibit 2: I've had a Yosemite bumper sticker on the back of my car for about two years. A tasteful sketch of halfdome in a beautiful blue sky and fluffy white clouds behind it. And the clouds have turned brown. Air pollution is actually affecting my bumper sticker.



So being in Joshua Tree really did feel like a breath of fresh air. I think that's why we were so shocked by this sign:



Simon commented that I probably should not have been out in those conditions, but I'm fairly certain if they had that on the LA city limit it would read "Air Quality: Asthma Attack" right next to one that says "Welcome to Los Angeles-- Lung Donors Welcome!"

hedgehogs rejoice!

for it is the day we celebrate the birth of Simon! Happy 25th, Simon! Many fantastic returns of the day.

Were I living a bit closer, I would treat you to a meal much like this one...



but perhaps with better booze than a sparkletini...

Someone who would probably appreciate a plant named Hugh

a coworker walks into my bay in plugs in a fire wire drive. it shows up on the desktop with the name "Tree".
Ivan: do you name all your drives with a nature theme?
Coworker: No, I like to name them after simple things that I enjoy. I have one named "Ring" and one named "King" and
Ivan: let me stop you right there-- do you name all your drives after vague Lord of the Rings references?
Coworker: (laughs) not always-- I used to have one named Warp Drive and
Ivan: let me stop you again, because I need a moment to contemplate the AWESOMENESS of that statement.

Theory of Wedding Updo Relativity

It took two hours to put these in my hair, but I was drinking champagne at the time, so it seemed more like twenty minutes. However, while it only took twenty minutes to take them all out again, it seemed a lot more like two hours because at the time I was stumbling with exhaustion and suffering from formal-dress oxygen deprivation, which is a proven medical condition. This is the wedding updo theory of relativity: the amount of time it appears to take to have your hair done when you have not yet eaten too much, walked around in heels too much, or gotten too nervous about delivering your toast in front of a roomful of people without throwing up on the bride, is inversely related to the amount of time it SEEMS to take to remove all the bobby pins at the end of the night when you are suffering physically in a lot of ways Spanish inquisitors never even thought of. Then add thirty minutes, which is how long it takes to wash an entire bottle of hairspray out of your hair. Then forget about your hair completely and just go to sleep for Pete's sake.

Inexplicable

Overheard:

Person 1: So it's your half-birthday.
Person 2: Yeah.
Person 1: Front half or back half?
Person 3: Just say yes.
Person 2: Only because it's Tuesday.
Person 3: It's not raining; it's Thursday.
Person 2: I'm walking away.

Nostalgia

You know a package has promise when someone tapes this to the front:



and it did not disappoint! I could certainly kill someone with the genuine PEI Lobster fork (made in China!) wrapped inside that striped paper. But rather than inspiring me to stab someone, this lobster fork serves as a reminder of what I like to call "The Best Meal in the History of Meals" or "The New Glasgow Lobster Supper". Oh, to be back on Prince Edward Island where the mussels are a plenty and the seafood chowder is unlimited...

I have no photos of this event as the only person not drunk on clarified butter was Simon and she has not released them to the public (most likely because I am coated in grease and seafood refuge with a crazed look in my eye), but I wanted to say thank you to Simon, for the glorious reminder of "The Best Meal in the History of Meals" ...and for the murder weapon.

Interesting Fact!

The sound of a someone cutting down a tree outside with a chainsaw is completely interchangeable with the sound of someone playing Bob Dylan on the floor below you.

Two conversations you never want to have with people who live anywhere near you.

Conversation One:

Hi. Um. Are those your propane cylinders downstairs?

What?

Propane. Downstairs.

Oh, yeah, they're my buddy's. He was supposed to pick them up.

Okay, well, you may not want to store them in the laundry room, near, you know, heat sources?

Oh. Okay. I'll move them.

Conversation Two:

Hey, listen, I think we kind of miscommunicated about those propane things. When I said "heat sources" I really meant the hot water heaters, not the dryer.

Huh?

The hot water heaters are powered by gas, so you probably don't want to move the propane closer to them. There's an open flame right there.

Oh. Yeah. That's probably not a good idea.

No. There could definitely be an explosion.

Okay. I'll put them in my car.

Bonus conversation with my Dad:

Dad: Do you have renter's insurance?

Me: No, but it's becoming a greater priority EVERY DAY.

Thinking of You

I thought of Ivan today when I went to a restaurant and saw a sign that said, "While there's tea, there's hope." I was going to e-mail her to tell her how simply adorable it was, but then I found a message from her in my inbox. "Right up your alley" it said in the subject line. Last time I got an e-mail like this it concerned a mug that helped you tell when your tea was done, so I thought, "Oh, we are so totally in tune." But this time... it was a link to a McSweeney's list: Thirty Illnesses, Sorted According to Whether or Not You Can Eat the Victims.

Prince Edward Island in Good Weather and Bad . . . Very, Very Bad

Along the Confederation Trail. Please note the astonishingly red sand.


Also along the Confederation Trail. There's nothing like a PEI sand dune.


We drove into this storm cloud for half an hour not knowing that when Michael said, "Are you sure you want to go out in that?" what he meant was, "It was nice knowing you."


I did get to take some dramatic rain pictures through the car window when we pulled off the road, but immediately afterwards we were swept into the Gulf of St. Lawrence and tragically drowned.

"It's worth five dollars to me that you came back alive"

a bold statement considering the strength of the Canadian dollar...