Vehicle

Someone once told me the only reason people eat escargot is it makes an excellent vehicle for drawn butter. I feel many foods exist only as a vehicle for their condiment counterpart... Tortilla chips would have no purpose without salsa. French fries would be obsolete without Ketchup. Last night was Cinco de Mayo and I bought a fresh Cholula for the occasion. Tacos, chips, guacamole, rice and beans were our feast, and within an hour, two girls managed to consume a third of a bottle of hot sauce. It was only later I realized this food could also be categorized as a vehicle for stomach ulcers.

Gravel Pit

I'm way behind on things here, so we're having a flashback to mid-April, when I was dog-sitting. The weather was rather nice, so the dog and I took a walk down to the gravel pit. You may remember the gravel pit from this 2005 post. The one about how there were hyenas living in it. Or coyotes. Or a chupacabra. And my mother tried to feed me to them. Or something like that, I don't remember exactly how it goes. Anyway, the scary Brotherhood-of-the-Wolf creature(s) have apparently moved on, and now the gravel pit makes me think not of a gory death but an alien planet.
Obviously this alien planet would look a lot like earth, and would have speed limits, and they would be represented in Arabic numerals, but it's still a weird place. There is something fundamentally wrong about an enormous hole in the ground. It feels like a drained lake.
Or maybe it's just that I've never actually witnessed anyone working there. For most of my childhood a lot of crashing and beeping and Caterpillar noises came out of there, but whenever we walked down to look at it, there were no people, only enormous piles of gravel in peculiar formations. I imagine it feels about the same to wander around an ancient stone circle: it's manmade, but it doesn't really make sense.
Maybe what creeps me out the most is that it seems like it might spontaneously fill in at any moment. Obviously that's ridiculous, but a good many things that are ridiculous happen anyway. I'm just saying, the dog and I kept our wits about us.
Well I did, anyway.

Light My Fire

R.I.P spork.
I wish you had died doing something heroic, like digging through the stone walls of a prison. There's nothing romantic about breaking on a piece of tofu.

Ready, Set, Go

The number one rule of blogging is never blog about your job.

Eh, well.

When I am not at work, my mental image of the physical place-of-working is this:
I did not buy the plant, the Mardi Gras beads are from before my time there, and I have no idea where that picture came from, but it glows in the sun, and I must have looked at it about four thousand times and thought, "That's pretty," followed immediately by, "I wish I were outside."

Now that I am no longer an employee, my mental image of working will probably focus on this:
That's three years and eight months of to-do lists. Otto (hi Otto, if you're still reading this, I'm sorry I left you) suggested that I bind it and save it so that I can look at it on days that writing is going badly, sort of as a deterrent.

I considered that carefully.

But in the end this was more satisfying:That's three years and eight months of to-do lists in the recycling bin.

This is my workplace now.I have an appointment there on Monday at 6am. My new boss is real stickler.

Freedom

I long ago realized having a California drivers license meant being able to wear flip flops year-round. This is one of the few benefits I saw in a So Cal residency, so I did my best to wear open toed shoes every single day. All day. Without fail. I met my cousin for dinner in Santa Monica one night and my teeth started chattering and he was like "why the hell are you wearing FLIP FLOPS, it's cold out?!" and I was like "::chatter:: my right ::chatter:: as a Californian ::chatter::". But today I forgot my sandals and my feet feel so confined-- so bound to these things they call sneakers. How does the rest of the world do it? I won't miss much about LA, but foot freedom... I'll miss that.

On the Classification of Spiders

There was a daddy longlegs in my shower yesterday morning. It was the third species of spider I found in my apartment in three days. The first two were tiny and easy to kill.

Let me stop here. Normally I don’t kill bugs, I transport them. I am very soft-hearted, and since none of these bugs hurt me aside from psychologically, I try not to murder them without provocation. However, when your apartment is the spider capital of the northeast, you learn quickly that you must kill anything you have the stomach to kill, or you will be overrun. Spiders that are smaller than a pencil eraser fall within this category.

Category one: Pencil-Eraser Spiders
Size as expressed by what comes out of your mouth when you see it: “Oh, hello. You are going to die. Sorry.”
Action: Heartless kill mode.

Tiny spiders are not a problem. But a daddy longlegs is a problem. Especially if it is huge. A mother of a daddy longlegs, if you will. The chance of accidental contact is too great to attempt murder. Also, they have a plaintive, harmless look to them. They belong to category two.

Category two: Pitiable Spiders
Size: “Great, now I’m going to be late for work.”
Action: Transport.

Also, they have a great name. Daddy longlegs. The harvestman. Points in their favor. So I got my handy bug-catcher (an old frosting container and cardboard from a box of Cheerios - a winning combination I should probably patent and sell to people who have no common sense) and I caught him and put him outside.

Then I thought, maybe I should spray my windows with spider-cide RIGHT NOW before this becomes a real issue, because I know from experience that it will be as soon as summer hits. So I spray one window. Success. I spray another window. Success. I spray a third window.

Category three: Fat Orange Spiders with Striped Legs that are on the Wrong Side of the Window Screen
Size: “Ohmygodohmygodohmygod YOUARESOBIG ohmygodohmygod WHYAREYOUSOBIG? ohmygodwhy.” [multiply times ten]
Action: Panic. Transport while whimpering. Recover with head between knees.

I would Google this monster that came scuttling out from the window jamb, so I could tell you what it was, but I can’t stand to look at the pictures. I was able to employ my Insect Removal System (yours for three easy payments of $19.95) only because I felt bad about having sprayed it with a substance specifically designed to kill it. Had it not been in distress, I would have stood there saying “oh my god” until one of us died of old age.

You may think this is the highest category of spider. It happens to be the highest category residing in my home as of this morning, but it’s nothing compared to the fourth category. I met a category-four spider during my sophomore year of college. Stop me if I’ve told you this story already.

In the fall of my sophomore year I lived next to a charming fellow who I shall refer to as Hartford, because he was from there, and he loved Hartford like other people love New York or Paris. I have never been there, but apparently it’s quite the place. Anyway, one evening as I walked by Hartford’s door, I saw that he had written something peculiar on his message board:


When I saw this, what did I do? Did I immediately run to Hartford’s aid? No. I took a picture of his hilarious message. Check out the smiley face on the body of the scary, scary spider. I laughed for a while, then I found Hartford and persuaded him that he could not sleep in the lounge for the rest of the semester. The spider had to be dealt with.

When I uttered those comforting words, I didn’t realize that his drawing of the spider was life-sized.

Category four: Stuart.
Size: This is the kind of spider you invent new expletives for.
Action: Get someone else to deal with it.

Hartford had, hiding somewhere in his room, the biggest, fastest, hairiest, nastiest spider I have seen to this day. It was so big it could have enrolled in classes. It could have gotten an A. In biochemistry. It could have gone on all the rides at Six Flags. It was so big, we could read its lips, and it was saying, “I’m big enough to wrap you up Frodo-style and scarf you down like a burrito.” Okay, that movie hadn’t come out yet, but retrospectively I believe that’s the general idea of what he meant.

When we finally found him, and when we were done screaming, we named him Stuart and tried to make ourselves feel sorry for him. Stuart was really down on his luck. Stuart had lost his job. Stuart had no family (we hoped). Stuart was on the brink of psychological meltdown. We had to save Stuart. Hartford wanted to overcome his fear of spiders, which meant transporting Stuart to the outdoors rather than killing him. I was not interested in overcoming any fears, I think some fears are there for a reason, but I felt that Stuart was so big, smushing him would have been like smushing a small child. So we saved him.

We fashioned what else but an Insect Removal System, literally duct-taped it shut, and learned the number one most important thing about an Insect Removal System: do not use the clear bottom part of a sandwich container. When you turn it over, and you clearly see a primeval arachnid scurrying frantically beneath your fingers, gnashing its teeth, trash-talking you, you may scream like a girl and barely be able to resist the urge to throw it as far from yourself as possible. Because that is a blar-garving durm-jurpling crodding big spider. (Yes, my new expletives would be poetry to Vogons.)

Probably half an hour after the drama began, Hartford and I watched Stuart gallop on his stallionesque legs into the dark, wet graveyard across the road from the dorm. We hoped he would find employment other than scaring arachnophobes half to death when they wanted to be sleeping. We were glad we had not killed him. We did not wanted to be haunted by a category-four spider.

So there you have it. Kingdom: Animalia. Phylum: Arthropoda. Subphylum: Chelicerata. Class: Crodding Big Spider.

The Proof is in the Padding

Tomorrow I will be visiting the vet to pick up a signed piece of paper that says Gilbert P. Kitten is in good health and that he is over eight weeks old. I understand the airline's need for proof of immunization, but I'm traveling with an alternate light-weight carrier just in case the bigger one puts him over the "less than 20lbs" requirement-- proof he's over eight weeks old? They don't get to be 16lbs over night.

Tulips and Cherry Blossoms

Kitten Chaser

A pack of kitten stickers came in the mail yesterday and I have decided to decorate my edit bay with them. The constant stream of ESPN and low quality YouTube rap has made this the least feminine place on earth, and I have decided to reinforce gender stereotypes by combating sports with kitten stickers. If I could think over all the basketball I could probably come up with something more subversive and less passive aggressive, but I cannot. Game on.

Serious Business

In May 2003 I was studying abroad in England. England may be a first-world country but in 2003 most students couldn't get the internet in their rooms, and if they could, they had to pay for it themselves. I lived in Goodricke A Block, where we were lucky to have an algae-ridden electric teakettle bolted to the wall of our criminally undersized kitchen; I did not have the internet. To get the internet, I had to go over to the math building to use their computer lab. One lovely spring morning I went to check my e-mail and found copies of this scattered all over the tables.


Some politician was capitalizing on high levels of anti-American sentiment to get people to vote for him so that he could get the UK troops sent home, or something to that effect. Kind of a cheap tactic, and an argument with no nuance whatsoever, but nevertheless, when I saw it, it was impossible to feel patriotic outrage. I thought, "Yup, we deserve that." And then I went back to my room and wrote a fairly scathing poem. O what a radical.

I didn't fully understand at the time what that photo actually meant. Not the photoshopped one, but the actual photo of the prisoner on the box who's been told he'll be electrocuted if he falls off. Things seemed so hopeless in 2004 (and in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008) that it was sort of just one more horrible thing no one would ever have to answer for. I assumed three things: (1) This had always been happening. (2) After mild liberal outrage, these practices would be accepted. (3) Once they were accepted, there was no going back.

Happily, I was wrong on all counts. Unhappily, Bush and everyone working for him turned out to be worse people than I thought, and I was already convinced that they were inconceivably horrible. It's like I had been measuring them on the Celcius scale and someone just introduced me to the concept of Kelvin. What I thought was freezing is actually lukewarm in this new context. People should not be able to survive at the temperatures that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld operate at.

I am going to stop writing now and refer you to this clip of Rachel Maddow from two days ago. I hate it when blogs link to other stuff but I feel this is justified because until I had all these "torture memos" explained to me, I didn't understand, and if I hadn't happened to catch this episode I wouldn't have put all this together on my own.

The first six and a half minutes of this clip provide the clearest explanation I've heard of what all this information means.

Then watch this, which explains why torture doesn't even work, which you would think would be reason enough not to do it. (Assuming you are a practicing member of the human race.)

All the other clips are good, too, although I use "good" here to mean "deeply upsetting, provoking feelings of revulsion, and creating an unpleasant turning of the stomach." If you have just eaten, wait half an hour.

Next time I'll try to post something uproarious involving kittens and rainbows.

The Soundtrack to My Ride

This is what I was humming as I caught the curb and did a face plant into the sidewalk somewhere around Pico and Prosser. End result: actually reaching the corner of Pico and Sepulveda felt like crossing the finish line of the Tour de France. Tomorrow I will try not bleeding on the way to work.

Things My Parents Have That I Do Not

Dog.
She wanders the house at night going clicky-clicky-clicky with her nails on the hardwood, and makes me think of Samuel Beckett's mother. I do not sleep.

James Bond's iron.
I have not yet discovered the button that shoots bullets, but I know it's there. I iron carefully.

Doctor Who with good reception.
I have a new theory about the Doctor's hair. It goes like this: they sculpt it upwards for hero shots, and downwards for underdog shots.
The Doctor's level of concern changes little in either case. Sometimes I want Daleks to show up just so he'll make his Death-eater face.

Cable.
[Picture not available. There was nothing on.]
Every ten months or so I spend a few days here to verify that there still isn't anything good on. Conclusion this time: Same. Thought: TBS would go under if Sandra Bullock stopped making movies. Thought: I wish Sandra Bullock had a Death-eater face. Thought: 72 hours of cable exposure; brain already rotting.

*&#Y%(*&

My Botflies are getting WORSE and though I've experienced some very, very satisfying itch sessions, I am perplexed. How is it still appearing? Is it on my clothes? In my car? Is Gil coated in poison oak? Is this really from my initial exposure two weeks ago? What a wretched, wretched plant. I wish nothing but the worst on you, Poison Oak. May you be plagued by drought and then eaten by an alpaca.

Summer in the City

Carolyn took this picture at the beer garden and titled it "this is what summer looks like" and I am inclined to agree. Summer does indeed look like sunshine and beer on a back patio by the beach.

He Was Not Actually a Governor, That's Just His Name

Ivan told me I could post a really old picture and it would still count as blogging, so I picked this picture from a trip to Gettysburg with Christi and her dad in 2003. The gentleman above in the great hat is Gouverneur Warren, overlooking Little Round Top. Gouverneur Warren was a Union general in the Civil War. I find maps of battles for some reason nearly impossible to understand, but I gather he basically saved the Battle of Little Round Top before it even started. This battle is described as both "dramatic" and "irrelevant"; not being very well-informed on battle tactics, I have no idea how important it really was. However, I am going to take a wild guess and say that when Warren spotted Confederate bayonets at the bottom of the hill, it probably seemed pretty important that he hold his ground.

Unfortunately, later in the war, he came to be seen as unfit to serve and was demoted by General Sheridan. Sheridan got the OK to do this from General Grant, who later noted Warren's grave deficiences as a commander:

"He could see every danger at a glance before he had encountered it. He would not only make preparations to meet the danger which might occur, but he would inform his commanding officer what others should do while he was executing his move."

Myself, I see his point. The last thing you want in a war is a person who continually insists on planning ahead. Warren later asked for an inquiry regarding this whole matter, but Grant was too busy being one of the worst presidents ever to get it going. Meanwhile Sheridan, having burned down much of the South, moved on to destroy the Native American population by killing four million bison for that express purpose. Warren was not exonerated until after his death.

This all merely goes to show that I'm absolutely one of those people who thinks that touring Civil War battlegrounds would be a really fun way to spend a summer.

The Realm of Possibility

I have blisters, itchy, itchy, blisters on my arm. I have a strong suspicion it is poison oak, but it could be schistosomiasis or botflies. Reasons I think it is Poison Oak: I walked through a lot of it while I was hiking. Reasons it could be schistosomiasis or botflies: It is not outside the realm of possibility.

Candy Canes and Inexpressibly Bad Jacket Design

Today we're having another flashback to December, but this one isn't because I'm lazy, it's because I'm not sure the topic on which I'm posting is quite done yet. Here's the thing: the Christmas before last, my aforementioned deranged friends and I tried out this cookie recipe that involved ruining a perfectly nice chocolate cookie with what essentially looked like candy cane puke. We quickly decided the mint topping was a bad idea and did not use the remainder of the the candy canes -- which then resurfaced this past Christmas much to everyone's surprise and general disinterest. No one wants a year-old candy cane.

Somehow, and I'm not sure how this happened, I left the room for five minutes and when I came back, I discovered that my dear friends had hidden the candy canes all over my apartment as a kind of fun Christmas prank, so that I would find them in the days/weeks/months to come. Reconstruction of the conversation that immediately followed:

Me: Ha ha ha ha! Oh, you're all too funny!
Friends: Ha ha ha ha! Aren't we though?

Pause.

Me: Hey, does anyone remember how many there were?

Pause.

Friends: Ha ha ha ha! You should blog about this!

There's really nothing to do but blog about it. I have found four so far.

This one took about four minutes to find:


This one about four hours:


This took a few weeks and was genuinely surprising:

Incidentally, yes, I do keep those books in a desk drawer. I'm all for sunlight but not when it will fade precious items. That copy of The Princess Bride, it will interest you to know, actually switches to RED TYPEFACE during the parts where William Goldman interrupts S. Morgenstern. Needless to say most paperback versions do not possess this excellent feature. While we're here, shall we have an interlude in which we look at Simon's Princess Bride memorabilia? Yes, I think we shall. Check out these super-awesome buttons that Adam picked up for me. (Adam gives me super-awesome things. The Guinness bread was also from Adam, although in the excitement I forgot to mention it at the time.)
My favorite part (excluding the buttons themselves), is the high-contrast picture of Westley and Buttercup on the packaging. Stylish! Unfortunately there is one button missing, but I have dutifully reconstructed it for you here:
I'm not sure why this one was left out. I think it shows her lovely teeth to great advantage.

I also have a rather adorable keychain, as well as a letter from the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich telling me how it would violate Westley and Buttercup's privacy if they sent me the reunion scene as directed by the author in the middle of chapter five, but it's getting late so I'm skipping those in favor of dwelling at length on the monstrosity below. This is a 1974 paperback edition of a book that bears the correct title and what can only be described as the incorrect cover illustration:
I'll give you a moment to recover.

I have examined this closely, but I can't figure out how it's supposed to relate to the book. I'm guessing it's some kind of dark-arts interpretation of the Zoo of Death. It's hard to see from the photo, but along with several tiny faces, some larger upside-down faces, a few skulls, a castle, and the naked lady, there are a number of snakes -- those snakes are my sole evidence for the Zoo of Death theory. And also that unmissable bird on the naked lady's head. Oh, and in case you missed him, the single identifiable character, of all the characters in the book, is the guy on the right with the rosary beads. That's got to be the "mawwaige" chap. Strangely, he is also mirrored in less detail on the left. Why him? Why not Noreena-with-no-hair or the stepmother, or for that matter the actual main characters? If you're going to ask that, you might as well also ask, why all the boobs? And that is a question no one can ever answer to anyone else's satisfaction.

Not only does the illustration not match the fairy-tale quality of the title (not to mention the story), it does not look like the kind of thing you'd find at a library booksale, where I saw it, and where I was urged by my sister to buy it on the grounds that you can never have too many copies of this book, especially one as bizarre as this. Needless to say, there is no cover credit.

Another amusing feature of this cover is the synopsis on the back:

Thank goodness they changed it to "Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles..." because I would not read the book described above. I conclude that the cover designer either (1) thought they had a sense of humor but were tragically mistaken, or (2) had a sense of humor that was ahead of its time. I can't tell whether the person who made it was incredibly earnest, or whether it is yet another brilliant fake-out.

Well. I've been saving that for ages, just waiting to spring it on you all, and I must say it's a big weight off my shoulders. It's been hard to bear the brunt of that poor marketing (or unrecognized genius) all alone.

Anyway. Back to the candy canes. This one was hiding on top of my bookcase in plain view...
...for three months.

There may be more. Maybe two. Maybe three. Or maybe none. I have no idea. I only have two rooms, so there can't be all that many. RIGHT, GUYS?

I Swear, He's Just Big Boned

A long, long time ago I adopted a kitten. Gilbert P. Kitten. He was tiny and fuzzy and utterly adorable. And then I fed him and he grew (as cats often do). But you know your cat has surpassed an acceptable weight when your french vet opens the animal carrier and exclaims "ooooo! I looooove zee fat kitties!" and runs off to find a picture of his 23-pounder. Gilbert P. Kitten only weighs in at 16, but some would argue that's large.

And now that I have to get Gil to New York I realize he's not easily transportable. Delta's guidelines for cat carriers involve a lot of math and measuring (the length of the animal from nose to root of tail divided by half the height from ground to elbow joint, the width across the shoulders times 2) and I went to a university with an optional math requirement (yet an exceptional hockey team!), but I think I'm going to have a problem passing him off as carry-on baggage.

I tried to put him on my bike to show you how much he's grown, but the bike fell over. This doesn't mean he's fat... just that bike seats aren't build for big-boned kitties.

Cute as Buttons

These are the ginger cookies I made from the recipe Simon P. sent me which I demanded from her after eating the ones she sent me at Christmas. They are both adorable and delicious.
Considering who we're dealing with here, I feel I must add that no bacon was involved at all--yet they're still good!

And because yesterday was Easter, I shall share this story: a couple of days ago I was watching some clips from The Vicar of Dibley because sometimes I'm just in the mood for that guy who always says no no no no no no no no yes, and because of that, I had the beginning theme song of the show stuck in my head. It's the choral version of the 23rd psalm, and it was going round and round like a broken record: The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want he maketh me to lie down in green pastures the Lord is my shepherd I shall not want he maketh me to lie down in green pastures, etc. etc., because that was all I could remember. And while I was thinking about that infinitive, "to lie", and whether just "lie" would be incorrect, and about the fact that the music does not reflect the pause you would normally take after a semi-colon, suddenly I remembered what I used to think that song meant: "I do not want the Lord to be my shepherd because he makes me sleep outside." In my defense, growing up in a place where it might well snow on Easter really made that a reasonable concern.

A Slightly Itchy Easter

It's Easter Weekend which means nothing to me aside from dying eggs with my cousin-- and really, it's not so much the egg dying as seeing how much food coloring we can absorb into our skin. If you ever wanted to know how you'd look with a horrific skin discoloration, stop by the Inland Valley tonight! While achieving that "moldy hands" look is first and foremost on our list of things to do, my interest in the food dye is two fold. With any luck it will also act as a salve for my poor poison oak covered arms. Fun fact: Poison Ivy doesn't exist on the west coast. Fun Fact number 2: This just leaves more room for the poison oak. So yes, Happy Easter-- and here's hoping that my blisters will blend well with my Easter dress.