30 May 2009

Happy Caturday

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Lucky had oral surgery* this week and held a grudge against me for like 5 days because I was the one who dropped him off and picked him up from the vet. I think he's forgiven me now though.


*The cost for the op came in under $1000. What a bargain! It's almost like I saved money. Except that it still cost about nine hundred dollars.

29 May 2009

The Lazy Woman's Way to Blog

... reposting a Facebook meme. So sue me. It's Friday and I'm on the couch in my jammies and just realized I forgot about a friend's birthday. I feel bad, but not bad enough to get dressed again and go out out to a crowded bar. (Sorry, dude. I'll buy you a beer soon, okay?)

Fifteen books that stayed with me.

1)The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies. It's funny, it's perceptive about what makes people tick, it's learned, it's well-plotted and the devil shows up in a bunch of cameo roles.
2) Hamlet - Shakespeare. I re-read Hamlet periodically, mostly when I'm feeling really sorry for myself, because no one knows more about self-pity than Hamlet.
3) Bleak House by Charles Dickens. It's kind of fashionable to despise Dickens as a schlocky wordbag, but unpalatable as that kind of saccharine is to the modern reader, he was usually using those moments to make a larger point about a social injustice. Once he was rich and famous he used his writing as a platform to call for social reforms, which rocks. Plus he is capable of some genuinely gorgeous passages and can create as complex a character as any in literature.
4) All the Calvin & Hobbes books - Bill Watterson. I learned a lot from watching Watterson toe the fine line between funny and bleak, and I respect the hell out of him for stopping at the top of his game.
5) The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken. McCracken's prose is simple and beautiful, and she navigates the weighty themes of love, death and the frailty of the human condition without ever breaking a sweat.
6) The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter. I have a weakness for re-told fairy tales and Carter's lush, dark writing.
7) Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones. Another fairy tale re-telling. The plot reads as though it grew organically but she's got layers and layers of classical references in there. I think it is technically brilliant as well as a sympathetic portrait of the extent to which children are disenfranchised.
8) Portrait of a Lady - Henry James. I really think it was James's work that first got me interested in psychology.
9) The Chronicles of Barchester - Anthony Trollope. What can I say? I have a thing for 19th century drawing room stories. Plus the man can plot.
10) Everything Jane Austen wrote. There is nothing new I can say about her.
11) The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot. I have loved this since I first read it at 15 and now that I'm 31 I still love it. It is just so beautiful.
12) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson - a hundred years later, this is STILL a creepy story as well as, you know, a discussion of good vs. evil and a virtuoso example of literary showmanship. I always think Hitchcock must have learned a lot from this book.
13) The Imitation of Christ by Thomas A Kempis (pretend I put the accent over the a.) Admittedly strange reading for an atheist, but this got me through a lot of long, hard nights in my late teens and early twenties. Pain is pain, yo, whether it's religious or secular.
14) The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. I'm not normally a short story person but oh my god, these were so wonderfully written.
15) From Hell by Alan Moore. This was the book that made me finally understand what the big deal was about graphic novels.

What are y'all's 15 big books? I had a hard time narrowing it down and probably if I did it again tomorrow, I'd have 15 different books, but still fun.

28 May 2009

A Day In the Life

Things I have done tonight since getting home:

Dropped Dave off at a bandmate's house
Fed and medicated the cats (this is a much bigger pain in the ass than you'd think.)
Petted the cats
Practiced smiling at myself in the mirror to prepare for the new license picture I will get tomorrow, god willing and the crick don't rise
Noodled around on the internet

Things I still need to do:
clean litterboxes
make dinner and clean up
laundry
go to bed early so can actually get into work at eight like I've been meaning to do all week

How can such boring stuff keep me so busy? WTF?

25 May 2009

Up to

The trip to Barbados for our first anniversary was fantastic.
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We hung out with old friends from our last trip and made a few new ones.
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clearly that ten pounds hasn't budged since the last time I posted about it.

We went ziplining in the rainforest.
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We went sailing on the catamaran and snorkled over coral reefs and a sunken ship. We swam with enormous, friendly sea turtles. (We'll see if any of my pictures from the disposable underwater camera actually come out. I petted one. Its back was surprisingly mossy.) The view was gorgeous.
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And the boat had an open bar for the whole trip.
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What ten pounds?

We had many romantic dinners.
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Isn't the decor just awesome?
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I chased reluctant crabs with my camera.
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We did plenty of lounging around, too.
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The cats were happy to see us when we came home.
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Since we've been home, I have done approximately one thousand loads of laundry, made meringues and puttered around with the container "garden", aka a couple of tomatoes and a few hanging baskets on the porch that I'm desperately trying to keep alive. Also I dyed my hair blond.

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And that's all the news I've got for now.

11 May 2009

the usual brain dump

Katharine was right (she usually is) and I do need to post something to push the toenails further down on the page. Here’s the Beta Band.




This song has been on my mind because of the awesome ending (starts at about 4:15). We are going to Barbados later this week (yay!), basically for an extended long weekend. I am a little stressed out about it, which is stupid – who gets worked up about a fucking vacation? But I have been having anxiety dreams since Friday night (usually these involve me being back at school. I won’t elaborate more because I have not been blessed with the gift of making my dreams interesting to others. That is probably because NO ONE ELSE’S DREAMS ARE INTERESTING, unless you are like the star of someone else’s dream and then it’s only interesting to hear about in a self-gratifying way.)

The anxiety is extra strange since I just finished a big work project last week and it’s usually work that prompts stress dreams. But this time I am anxious about packing, or something. Like it’s SO HARD to throw small bottles of conditioner and a bathing suit into my suitcase. (Although typing this, I just realized we are going to have to check luggage if we want to bring sunblock with us, since that comes in larger-than-3-ounce containers. Dilemma: check luggage and deal with lines/lost baggage/fees, or carry on and get fleeced when we buy sunblock at the resort? Man, do I have first world problems, or what?)

And the cats. Leaving the cats makes me anxious. They aren’t frail or anything but with 4 of them, we see the vet about twice a month for one thing or another. Fat Simone currently has some kind of skin condition on her forehead which she has been scratching at, so now it’s scabby and oozing, and obviously we want to get that taken care of before we leave. Dave made an appointment at the vet to take her in on Wed and was fairly surly about being the one who always has to take the cats in, but he shut up when I reminded him that he’s only been doing it since last September, and before that I took care of all the cats-during-the-week stuff, because my job was closer and more flexible and I had the car. Now my job is not close, not particularly flexible and costs $20 to park for a day*, so it makes more sense for him to do the cat shuttling. I could work from home in mornings or evenings and take the cats that way, though. I just hate working from home because I’m not as productive.

Ooops, that was kind of a long detour. So, anyway, going to Barbados. In a few days. Yay! And not much else to report otherwise.

* This seems like an outrageous amount to me, but according to Forbes recently, Boston is tied for #19 on the top 20 list of Highest Cost of Living Cities, so maybe 20 bucks to put my car onto 275 square feet of concrete 8 stories up is actually a good deal and I just don't realize it. Because I am blinded by my first world priviledge and all.

01 May 2009

Blowing my tiny mind




















Check out this guy's blog entry about his collection of nail clippings. My brain totally blew a gasket. God, I love the internet so much. Absolutely the best part of the blog entry is the comments posted to it from fellow savers.

"I thought I was strange for saving ribbons and skin from my girl/friend."

You ARE strange.

"I once had a friend who ate a toenail clipping we found for 5 dollars. "

Wow. Just wow.

"I'm glad not everyone finds it disgusting , I have been known to keep full toe nails , where they have fallen off after being stamped on, and once kept a finger nail in a matchbox from a girl I fancied. Sick me ? no ! Its a shame I didn't keep them longer , but there was a strange smell that accompanied them . "

*Blink* *blink blink blink*



Enjoy the rest of your friday, children. Props to Erin for alerting me to the existence of this piece of internet arcana.