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...

Around Town

Lately I have taken to walking around town at night. Kind of like Dickens used to walk through seedy parts of London at three in the morning. Only I do not have floofy hair, am not a man, and have not exhibited much literary genius since that mystery story with the oven cleaner, and this town isn’t big enough to have any habitually seedy parts, so it wasn’t actually like that at all.

On Monday the weather was cool and the air smelled like woodsmoke and flowers, and the pretty Victorian houses on Church Street shone yellow light from their windows onto their front gardens. Even the newer, boxier, uglier houses looked romantic, which is a sign I have been reading too much L. M. Montgomery.

True to my foolish human nature I thought it would be nice to keep it all, so on Tuesday I went out around 8:30 and tried to take pictures of it. Oh, what an awful idea.

First of all, I should no longer attempt to take pictures after dark without a tripod. It is not possible to stand still enough. Why I never think this will be a problem, I do not know.

Secondly, while this town may not have seedy parts, every picture I took has a distinctly creepy feel – the whole place is more or less empty at night and looks like a ghost town. An EVIL ghost town.

They suspected there was something living at the bottom of the falls, but it never came up to breathe.


Finally the townfolk passed a resolution to keep the road clear at night so they could carry their pitchforks to any house on Main Street unimpeded.


A portal to the underworld had opened somewhere in the girls’ A-wing locker room, but it went undiscovered because Kimmy always skipped gym.


Number 16 was the last thing he saw before the blow knocked him unconscious.


By the time the zombies reached West Main, they had learned how to climb over fences.


After two hours had passed and he hadn’t witnessed any crimes, he decided to commit one.


As a neighbor said recently, after hearing several unsavory stories about his other neighbors, "It ain't Mayberry anymore."

Around the House

My apartment has a bit of a slopey floor in some places. Namely, all of them. It’s a charming and characterful feature unless you have a chair with wheels. When I first arranged my apartment, I managed to do it in such a way that my desk chair ended up repeatedly rolling me into the bathroom when I was innocently sitting at my desk trying to write. I do not manufacture all of my distractions myself. That one came out of nowhere.

Since I have rearranged everything more wisely, hung some pictures, and acquired some chairs, including The Chair, I thought it might be time for updated pictures since some of you are too distant to be lured into visiting.

The Living Room


In the living room please note the following.

The Chair, featured in a photo I call The Effects of Illness.


This was taken soon after The Chair arrived, before I rearranged the living room. I was extremely happy to see it because, as the picture shows, I was miserably sick at the time, and had spent several days making do with a camping chair. Even a perfectly healthy person wouldn’t like to sit in one of those things for more than an hour, and I’m convinced that the arrival of The Chair saved my life, even if I did have to call later and ask if they could please also send the legs thank you very much.

Literary Action Figures: “Comes With Pen and Writing Desk!”

Jane Austen, a gift from my mother, and Charles Dickens, a gift from Megan, adorn the Victorian Literature shelf. Yes, I organized my fiction by time period. Shut up. Jane, interestingly, has a double-jointed elbow and can’t quite stand up straight. (She drinks.) Charles is very dapper and bends at the knee. They are fantastic and they can dance, although Charles, being sturdier, has to hold up tottering Jane.


The Kitchen


It has not really changed except that I hung up some pictures. Almost all of the pictures in my apartment are of England or France, and of those 100% were taken by Christine who has a very wistful eye and is a evidently a whiz with Hue and Saturation. That horse that is lying down is sleeping, not dead. If it were dead I wouldn’t have framed it.


Of note in the kitchen:

One Reason I Always Wanted to Have My Own Refrigerator

And the Other Reason

That is my father’s handiwork. It was in my stocking last Christmas. Before I decapitated it, it looked like this:


Next to it is my mother’s equally anthropomorphized oven mitt. I kept the reindeer around for months, but the day finally came when I really needed the spoon. Now its antlers are my trophy. I think they lend the place an aristocratic air, à la Glenbogle House. Of course I tell people I shot it myself.

I have no other rooms, so I will leave you with the answer to the burning question you’ve all been asking yourselves: Has the Change of Environment Affected Cordelia’s Delicate Complexion?


No. Cordelia had to have a new mug as a result of the move, because I wanted to use the other one, but she is taking to it nicely. However, I must remember to dust her head more often.

Memorial Day in a Small Town

My apartment overlooks Main Street, so I am witness to every foul-mouthed skateboarder, bad muffler, and thudding stereo that passes by. Having an excellent view of parades does not make up for this, but it does help.

Since my prime piece of real estate is so perfectly situated for parades, I was disappointed to discover that we don’t get them all; we are so far out in the sticks that all the nearby towns have to pool their fire trucks to get enough to make a parade, so they rotate. We get Memorial Day and Fall Weekend, and those other people get the Fourth of July and Labor Day. This is unfair because our town is very clearly the most aesthetically pleasing of all the choices, but I shall generously set that grievance aside, especially since the siren in the town hall went off two minutes before the parade, and half the trucks rushed off to save people anyway. This greatly disturbed the horses, and consequently me, as I waited for one of them to buck his policeman right off onto the pavement.

But nothing so interesting happened.

Some people went by in old, well-polished cars, the mayor walked by waving, Scouts of various persuasions wandered by with their lines badly out of form, and some volunteer firefighters and nine or ten veterans marched past. The remaining emergency vehicles followed, and then the crowd wandered up to the cemetery to hear a speech and some blanks fired.

Assuming nobody was going to deliver the Gettysburg Address of our time, I did not bother to go, so I was still around to notice that fifteen minutes later the main intersection was still blocked off, so I kept an eye on it, and pretty soon the veterans came marching back through and lined up across Main Street. I had no idea why they were doing that until the firemen reappeared, still in formation, and turned the corner saluting. Then the policeman who had been holding up traffic got on his motorcycle and drove off, a couple of passersby continued on their way, the firemen went inside the firehouse, and the veterans dispersed.

So much for the speech at the other end of the street. This was a moment of perfect eloquence.

The Sins of Kalamazoo

Some of you have commented on a lack of posts in the past couple of months. My excuse is that I’ve been writing. Ivan’s excuse is that she lives in California, which always explains everything. (Actually she beat me to it, so I have to take that back.) Anyway, here is one of the things I meant to post about...

Way back in May I went to Kalamazoo. My first encounter with Kalamazoo-as-a-concept was several years ago in Washington, D.C., where I met a girl named Emily. Emily told me this joke.

Emily: Why did the monkey fall out of the tree?
Me: I don’t know, why?
Emily: It was dead.

Emily was from Kalamazoo and had clearly developed her sense of humor as a survival instinct. I have been to Kalamazoo twice now. It looks like Western New York, but scrubbier. As far as I could tell, it has only one thing to recommend it, and that is a sub shop on, I think, Old Michigan Ave. Last year I walked two miles in heels for that sub, and it was absolutely worth it even considering that that particular adventure resulted in my supergluing myself to a desk eighteen months later – but that’s another story. If you are thinking of visiting Kalamazoo, I recommend that you sit down with Carl Sandburg’s poem on the subject (see the title of this post), consider yourself to have been there, and go to Paris instead. Or even Cleveland.

Fearing that the city would have the same effect on me as it did on the macabre little Emily, I would not have gone there voluntarily. When I found myself there eight years after hearing that joke, it was as an exhibitor at the Medieval Institute’s annual medieval conference. Exhibiting at the conference is exhausting and it doesn’t help that getting there is exhausting, too. Kalamazoo is one of those places you can never get to from wherever you currently are. Nobody wanted to drive twelve hours this year, so we flew into Chicago, stayed overnight, and drove a couple of hours around the bottom of Lake Michigan to Kalamazoo the next morning.

Taking off.

I had never been to Chicago before. I have still hardly been there, since I only stayed about twelve hours. However, in those twelve hours I formed the opinion that Chicago is clean and shiny, and the people there seem very friendly. For example, there was a positively effusive fellow on the train who was “the nicest guy you could meet” in spite of the fact that he worked for a loan shark and was at that moment on his way into the city to break some knuckles. I was comforted to know that “if anything happened” he would protect me. Since he was probably the most dangerous person on the train, and he was reading a Dean Koontz novel, I figured my chances of making it out alive were fair to middling. Fortunately by the time he got off I had put him “in such a good mood” that maybe he’d break fewer knuckles. I guess my silence and sullen expression really cheered him up. Thank goodness I was there to serve that cosmically vital purpose.

We arrived at Kalamazoo on Wednesday morning. Any academic bloggers who have been there will back up all the seemingly ludicrous claims I make about this conference. The first year I went, I wasn’t there two hours before I was drinking beer out of the back of a station wagon with a crowd of hairy medievalists. It’s the same sort of thing as when when all the moths converge in, you know, that place, in South America or the Mediterranean or wherever, to mate or something else to do with survival (you can tell I'm really informed on the subject of moths, or was it butterflies), except in this case it’s medievalists, and they go to Michigan, and they seem to be there mainly to drink. It certainly isn’t the luxury that draws them: Sir John Mandeville compares the dormatory accomodations to a Turkish prison, and although I’ve never been to a Turkish prison, I did put in nine months at Goodricke A Block and I can tell you anything that can’t meet to those low standards really isn’t fit for human habitation. Putting a door on the toilet stalls would just be a start.

Even the conference hall is hideous.

I’ve been told it’s supposed to resemble a forest, with the pillars disguised as trees, rivers running through the carpet, and grates representing sunshine hanging from the ceiling. I have never been able to see it, myself.

The conference goes for three and a half days, and they are long, long days. Between sessions we were mobbed by eager book-buyers, but during sessions, it was so boring I started reading our books. Fortunately we just published one on leprosy, which I sincerely and enthusiastically recommended to everyone who came by, and even talked a couple of skeptics into buying it. They won’t be sorry.

The leprosy book opens with magnificently grisly descriptions which, as my longstanding fondness for the plague and more recently schistosomiasis would rightly suggest, were simply delightful to me, and not only that, but useful. There were two of us manning the booth, and the other one, when she was not singing “K-A-L-A-M-A-Z-O-O what a gal! in Kalamazoo-zoo-zoo-zoo-zoo . . .” was singing the lyrics to a song she learned when she was little:

There goes my eyeball
Into your highball
Oh my god I’ve got leprosy

I had never had the pleasure of hearing this song before, and I suspect she received a much higher-class education than I did, because I didn’t know what a highball was until I read The Great Gatsby in high school. The truth is I think the song is genius artistically-speaking, but I was forced to inform my colleague that according to the leprosy book, the disease may cause you to go blind, but it will never make your eyes fall out. And later, when her foot was giving her great pain, I was able to assure her that whatever else it might be, the diagnosis could not possibly be leprosy, unless she had been born under the wrong star or was egregiously promiscuous. She was very grateful for my medical advice. I’m not sure why that pony she promised me hasn’t shown up yet.

At the end of the conference we drove back to Chicago and spent several hours at the airport wishing we were dead because we were so tired we might as well have been. I took my mind off my suffering by reading one of the books I picked up, J. J. Saunders’s The History of the Mongol Conquests, from which I learned that horses had to be specially bred to have a spine strong enough to hold a rider. I always thought they’d evolved that way. Amazing.

Ever since reading that sentence about horses in a random lounge in Chicago O’Hare, my brain has forged a connection between Kalamazoo, airports, and medieval Mongolia. While airports and Mongolia are almost universally agreed upon to be two very unpleasant places, maybe just below Limbo and Siberia, the association has actually improved my opinion of Kalamazoo. Really, don’t ever go there. Unless you go for the conference. They serve the wine at five.

plunder in style

There's never just one.

It watches. It waits.


It calls for reinforcements.

Evidence for why Louis the Whichever Roman Numeral it Was was right to call Western New York "a swamp"

Exhibit A: These conversations occured over the course of a week while house-sitting a year ago

Operator: This is 911.
Me: Hi . . . um . . . I’m not sure whether you’re the right person to call. . . . I’ve got, uh, kind of a raccoon running around my front yard. It looks pretty much rabid to me.
Operator: I’ll send an officer over. Will you be able to meet them at the door?
Me: Well, I’m kind of stuck in the back, locked out of the house, but I’m trying to break in, so hopefully yes.
Operator: Okay. Bye!

Me: Are there any poisonous snakes around here?
My dad: Not really. There are rattlesnakes in the Alleghenies, but not around here. Why?
Me: Well, one of my cats decided to lie down next to one.
My dad: What color is it?
Me: Green and brown.
My dad: Oh, sounds like a . . . Green-and-Brown Snake.
Me: Thank you so much for your help.

Me: Are you sure there are no poisonous snakes around here?
My dad: Pretty sure. Why?
Me: There’s one under the molding in the laundry room.
My dad: Oh?
Me: It’s as long as my arm. It’s looking at the cats.


Exhibit B: A current (and ongoing) series of equally upsetting conversations

Me: I have a problem.
Landlord: Yes?
Me: My walls . . . are squeaking.

Landlord: How are your little critters doing? Did the poison work?
Me: Yes.
Landlord: Are you sure?
Me: Oh, yes. I can smell it.
Landlord: The poison?
Me: No. The dead animal in my wall.

Neighbor: Did you hear that last night?
Me: Hear what?
Neighbor: THE RACCOONS IN THE CEILING OF COURSE WHAT ELSE?
Me: Are you kidding?
Neighbor: NO.

Parents: How are your mice?
Me: Dead. It’s raccoons now. And I could swear I heard meowing over the weekend.
Parents: (speechless)

Landlord: I don’t see how a raccoon could get into the ceiling. It’s got to be a squirrel or chipmunk or something.
Me: A chipmunk is not physically capable of making that much noise. It sounds like a grown man walking on the roof.
Landlord: Hmm, I wonder if someone’s living up there. (laughs)

Boss: Remember when you asked for a pony?
Me: Yes. But I believe I had been drinking when I said that.
Boss: Well, I’m getting you a pink one.
Me: Great. I’ll put it in my ZOO.

jogging my memory

Flipping through my notebook, I found the word "Schistosomiasis" scrawled on a blank page. What was this word, so hastily scribbled opposite "The Chastity Belt of Venezia"? Why was it standing there, lonely and afraid, without a definition or context?



And then with one Google search, I remembered.

Thank you, Simon, for ruining my breakfast not once, but twice.

The Inexplicably Much-Awaited Post on Hot Cross Buns

My mother used to make hot cross buns on Easter. Since I did not spend Easter with my mother this year, I thought I would make them myself. Being an atheist, it seemed like the least hypocritical way to observe the holiday, or whatever it is to me now. Heathen that I am, I always liked Easter. It's a good story, there are nice flowers, it involves a lot of chocolate, and comes at one end or the other of a school vacation, meaning we usually spent it in a more interesting place than home, such as . . . Missouri. Or Connecticut. But whenever we were home, my mother made hot cross buns.

Hot cross buns are not difficult to make unless you are a timid and paranoid baker, which I am. And with good reason. Recipes are full of trickery. They want you to fail. It's like I'm Deborah, and the recipe is Marie Barone. It hates me. The hot cross bun recipe in particular hated me via yeast. "1 package of yeast," it said. My mother does not have packaged yeast. Ever efficient, my mother keeps it in a jar in the fridge. Therefore I find myself wondering:

1) How much yeast is in a package?
2) Is this the same kind of yeast as packaged yeast?

Since I was at my parent's house, i.e. civilization, I was able to look it up on the internet. The internet told me that active yeast does not need to be "activated" before adding it to the dough. You can throw it in all at once.

The internet lied.

The first batch of dough I made did not rise. It sat there. And sat there. And sat there. It lurked. It mocked. It stuck out its tongue. It did not rise.

So I tried again, activating the yeast first, then adding it to the rest of the ingredients. The second batch rose. And rose. And rose. Like Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout's garbage. Perhaps someone misread "tablespoon" for "teaspoon"? I absolve myself of blame because it is totally unfair that the universe should expect me to know what to do with refrigerated yeast, and this is precisely the sort of cruel culinary curveball I am faced with every single time I cook. As a result, the hot cross buns tasted very much like yeast and not very much like hot cross buns. Matt lies when he says they were good. The frosting was good. Because I bought it.

In a related story, I made a cake for my mother's birthday over the weekend. It is The Birthday Cake, the cake we know and love, the cake I have myself successfully made two or three times in the past, and although I followed the recipe exactly and even remembered to whip the egg whites before the butter so the oil from the butter wouldn't make the egg whites fall, it wasn't quite right. It tasted fine, it was actually rather good, but it wasn't the same as usual.

It turned out that I hadn't put in enough chocolate. My recipe from The Joy of Cooking ("unchanged since 1931!" it boasts) called for two ounces of chocolate. My mother's recipe, the same recipe from a different edition of the same cookbook, says two-to-four ounces. My mother puts in three. I didn't know that was an option. Now you are all witnesses to the fact that it is the recipes that are incompetent, not me.

Nevertheless, I think it turned out handsomely . . .


. . . although in the interest of honesty I have to admit that it has numerous structural flaws and is being held together, no kidding, it is actually being held together by copious amounts of frosting. Because, of course, even though I greased and floured the pans, both layers stuck like glue. Why? Why? Why do these things happen?

Please note in the background the mammoth red KitchenAid, which is the most beautiful piece of machinery I have ever seen. It was a hand-me-down from my grandmother. No doubt it will be the scene of many angst-ridden experiments with yeast in the future. I can't wait.

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.