What do you think? Doppelganger?
My office is right next to her house. When I'm moderately dressed up I get quite a few double-takes when I walk across campus. If they look closer, they might think I'm her scruffy cousin. So, how can I use this power for my own good?
Thoughts for today:
I challenge you to find better 8 a.m. grocery store music than Barry White. Specifically "Can't Get Enough of Your Love, Babe."
Dear peanut-butter- and caramel-filled Hershey's Kisses: You make me proud to be a Pennsylvanian. (I've lived here 5 years now. Am I a Pennsylvanian? Maybe a Philadelphian? This is bouncing around in my head as its own post. We'll see I ever get around to it.)
To JDS, aka Mr. Isoglossia - no, I haven't joined Twitter. Am resisting that and Facebook, thinking that they would become black holes for my scant spare time.
Cat hair is threatening to take over our house. Oh, did I mention that we took in a fourth cat? [Orange] Pekoe, formerly known as Sherbet, Mr. Sherbs, or Peaches and Sherb. He had been living in a box on our front porch. We resisted taking him in: He's neutered, see, so we thought he belonged to somebody. But then it got really cold, so we let him stay in our entryway for a few days. Now that he's been inside (for more than a month), he has shown absolutely no interest in going back out. He's the sweetest thing ever. So if any of you would like a cat, we have a couple to spare.
I have been able to search through flickr for my job for the last two days. Trying to find a good image of Cloud Gate to use for the Sept. 2008 cover of our journal. There are lots of great images, but it needs to work with our vertical format and have people in it, preferably people of diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Lorilea, I may be in touch.
Yesterday I brewed a cup of Trader Joe's Sencha Green Tea. Upon first sip I thought:
This tastes like soap. Why would it taste like soap? Did the dishwasher not rinse well? Did a dollop of dish soap land in my mug as I was filling it?
Then it dawned on me. Oh.
They'd better not start making whisky-scented hand lotion, is all I'm sayin.
I can feel my brain leaking out each time I feed the baby. Ah well, at least my kids will be smart.
I won't have finished Catch-22 by month's end. I just finished reading chapter 19 of 42. I will finish it, however, even though I don't like it. As I have mentioned, I recall abandoning only 2 books without finishing them. It took me more than a year to read A Hundred Years of Solitude (felt like longer), but finish it I did! My goal will be to finish Catch-22 before its library due date. And I'll try NaNoReMo again next year.
I would blame my dislike for Catch-22 on postpartum hormones (yes, of course I'd rather be weeping at The Namesake or The Whole World Over), but honestly, I don't think I'd like it under normal circumstances. The "who's on first" style and circuitous logic are cute for about 1.5 chapters; after that, it just seems dumb. The style might not be so annoying if the characters and plot were more engaging. But, at nearly the halfway point, I haven't learned much more than War is crazy. Yossarian wants out. Here are some profiles of his zany sidekicks. If Joseph Heller wrote a blog, it would not be in my feed reader.
One good thing about Catch-22 is it's not a book that requires a lot of brainwidth. As I read, I will have realized that my mind has wandered for the past page and a half, yet I find that I haven't missed anything. I went back and reread a passage that I was going to excerpt here—one that I found rather clever—and realized that as I glossed over it at first read, I had altered the meaning. The actual passage wasn't as clever as the version my addled brain had filled in.
The book I finished just prior to picking up Catch-22 was the fantastic Sweet Land. (Thanks Pam!) Will Weaver manages to flesh out his disparate characters so well in these short stories. Heller's, by comparison, are flat and cartoony.
The one chapter I really liked was 9, "Major Major Major Major." Matthew Baldwin discusses it here.
I do like the way Catch-22 makes fun of the military. And I suppose it was pretty radical at the time it was written (1950s). I would write a longer review, but ultimately I'd rather catch 22 winks than devote any more time to this book.
Aaannd "publish."
I nearly shared a message at Quaker Meeting this past Sunday. It didn't make the cut because I wasn't convinced it was divinely inspired. Also, I wasn't sure whether I should say "ass" (the best translation) at Meeting or go with a more benign term. A blog seems to be the perfect medium for messages that don't quite make the cut on Sunday. And saying the word "ass." So here it is:
HPR told me a joke in Bulgarian. It's a play on words, so I'll have to do some explaining. First, the joke.
Novelist Ivan Vasov and painter Nenko Balkanski are hiking. They reach a scenic spot with views of mountains, forests, and a lake. Vasov looks around, inhales deeply, and says "Gusti gori, Balkanski!" Immediately Balkanski jumps in the lake.
Here's the explanation. Whereas Vasov said "A tangle of woods, the mountains!" the same words, spoken, can mean "Your ass is on fire, Balkanski!"
It's a silly joke, but as I thought about it, it occurred to me that it's a nice yin and yang for environmental activism, and beyond that, how we might conduct our everyday lives. Appreciate your surroundings and get your butt in gear - take action. Action without focus can be futile busywork, and appreciation of beauty without action gets nothing done.
Happy Thanksgiving!
So I have excellent health insurance. Seriously. Our hospital bill from Shmooie's delivery? $0. It will be the same for Polly-roo's, I believe. (We got one of those panic-inducing "explanation of benefits" saying we're responsible in full for the $47,000 6-day NICU bill, but that's being resolved.) So I know I'm lucky.
But the primary-care, referral stuff is bureaucratic bullshit. My 6-week postpartum OB appointment is tomorrow, and I got it in my head that I might be able to get an IUD inserted at the same time. So I called the OB clinic. They told me my insurance doesn't cover IUDs and that it would be $700ish. (And I think to myself: would my insurance company rather I get pregnant again? I don't think so.) I shelved that idea, but then was perusing my coverage paperwork, which said IUDs are covered, but under the prescription drug plan. So I called the prescription drug plan folks. The customer service woman asked me for the "name of the medication" and whether I'd ever been on it before. I went round and round to get her to understand what an IUD is. She then told me that it's covered, but that I'd have to check with the pharmacy for specific coverage and to see which ones are available.
So I called the OB office again and the billing woman told me that I will have to get the IUD at the pharmacy, bring it to the appointment, and then pay a $213 insertion fee. None of this sounded right to me, but I went ahead and called the pharmacy.
Sure enough, the pharmacy said they don't do it that way. That the doctor's office arranges for it. I briefly considered calling the OB office again, but I doubt I'd be able to get a straight answer over the phone. So I'll just have to go to the appointment tomorrow, talk to the doctor, probably set up another appointment (after getting a referral from my primary care physician), and pay $213 (which is not so bad since the IUD is effective for 10 years).
Thank god I'm on leave and have copious free time for phone calls. All this has me feeling a bit nostalgic for the Bulgarian medical system.
On a related note, I'm reading Catch-22 for NaNoReMo 2007.
(You know the rest of the quote. If you don't, I'm sure someone [Steve?] will be happy to leave it in the comments :)
I'm trying to come up with a descriptive phrase for our neighbor's band's music. Surf metal on speed? Power punk wah-wah metal? Give it a listen and tell me how you'd classify it. Either way, it makes for a rad blend with my milquetoast* classical background music when Stinking Lizaveta rehearses on the days I work from home. Polly likes it, too.
This article from JamBase declares that the band members themselves call it "doom jazz," which is kind of fun, but to me doesn't quite tell the whole story (leaving out, for example, the maniacal pulse of most of the songs). There are a lot of good descriptors in this paragraph:
Their newest long player, Scream of the Iron Iconoclast is their most exhilarating smorgasbord of heavy jazz transgressions and psychedelic wipeouts yet, with raids of metal menace, jagged post rock, mutated blues riffs and drummer Cheshire Agusta's esoterically woven, technically crunchy drum patterns that signal a sonic clutter in the middle of a black hole. Joined by Yanni's brother Alexi Papadopoulos - whose rapid fire upright electric bass lines force out the soul of Stinking Lizaveta's rhythmic bedlam - their live shows induce a lumbering hypnosis to the eyes, ears and minds of the crowd, especially when Yanni howls into his pickups and grinds his teeth against them.
*HPR's description of WRTI's classical playlist. We love the station and are members, but it's mostly for the evening jazz.
I am still riding my bike to and from work. It makes me feel like such a hardcore pregnant mutha: 5+ months along, cycling through the gritty urban neighborhood in my sassy maternity garb.
I fear the actual picture is somewhat more akin to a behelmeted manatee in a mu mu.
Ms. kilowatthour has tagged me for a meme. Thank you, k, for the welcome distraction.
The first rule of the game is to post the rules of the game. [This makes it sound so complex. When it's just 8 things about me. Am I missing something?]
Here they are:
* Each player starts with eight random facts/habits.
* People who are tagged need to write posts on their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
* At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
OK, I already did the five things meme [and I added a bonus sixth], so after reading this you'll know 14 bits of trivia about me!
1. I can operate a motorcycle. Haven't for years, but I'm happy to know how, just in case I have to make a quick getaway and a motorcycle is the only option. This need is bound to come up a lot in my life, you know.
2. I tear my fabric softener sheets in half before I throw them in the dryer, a tip I learned from my mother. Although I recall rather than tear them she cut them neatly with a scissor. She may have hemmed them, too.
3. Another tip from my mother is to save the wrappers from butter: Fold them in half and store them in the fridge. When you need to grease a pan for baking, pull one out and rub it all over the pan/cookie sheet/muffin tin. When we first moved in together, HPR loved this habit. Made him think of my mom as a Caroline Ingalls of sorts, finding a purpose for every usable scrap in the fight for her family's survival on the austere North Dakota plains. Not sure how he feels about it now that our fridge is cluttered with used butter wrappers.
(I purge them routinely.)
4. A household tip from Shmooie: use goldfish crackers in lieu of dishwasher detergent.
5. I bloom where I'm planted, although I think credit can also be given to my excellent choice in flowerbed location and potting soil. I also fertilize well and drink a lot of water. Could stand to be pruned a bit more, I suppose. Let's see, can I push this metaphor any further?
6. When I first returned from Bulgaria I felt a strong calling to teach junior high school. Inertia kept me in the editing business, and I love my job (inertia pays better and requires no additional schooling or certification, as it turns out). But I feel I should continue to remind myself of that calling and make it happen sometime in the next 5-10 years.
7. I save almost all of HPR's voice mails as they come in, even if they're just a "hi, I'm heading home now" sort of message. That way, in case anything happens to him, I will have his voice on my machine. Wow, I didn't think I was obsessed with morbid what-ifs, but between this one and the motorcycle escape one, I'm starting to wonder.
8. I am trying to decide whether it's worth a multi-city, crazy-scheduled $600 flight to attend my 20-year HS reunion in Minot ND. HPR and Shmoo will depart the same weekend to our Outer Banks vacation, so my other option is to scrap it and drive down with the boys. (The reunion plan would have me flying from Minot to Norfolk VA to connect with them.) The drive down is one of my favorite of our traditions. We leave when HPR finishes work on Saturday, stop for the night at the Eastern Shore of VA, eat breakfast at the restaurant on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel (where Shmooie had his first grits 2 years ago), then continue on. Back to ND, I'd mostly go to see 2 friends who are planning to be there, but it might be cheaper and less complicated to visit them in Dallas and Denver, respectively. Then again, I'm quite curious to see whether the big hair of 10 years ago is still in full force with my ND classmates. Want to weigh in and help me decide?
Tagging: Who would like to do this? No pressure, any of you, but let's start with the Night Editor / Night Writer combo. Jen and Erin and el-e-e seem to tolerate tagging. Niki? Lori? Xiobhan?
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