Fraaaaank says, "I plaaan zis parfet wadding vur yew!"

My dear friend, Brad, has decided to help Rose and I out a little by advising us on our "something old/something new/something borrowed/something blue" wedding traditions. He's a doll, and a good sport when I do something dykey and don't quite reach the FABulous mark. Rose is always thoroughly fabulous, but she has an alter-ego to help her with that. I have to muddle through with neither a gay man's sensibility for fabulousness nor a straight woman's aplomb for aesthetics. So, basically, I'm a dude.

Anyway, in his spirit of helpfulness, Brad photochopped us all into a scene from Father of the Bride to help us all get into character. Anyone remember that movie? I'm afraid it may have set unreasonably high expectations in my parents' minds for what their daughters' weddings would be like. One out of three ain't bad? (My apologies to Mr. Meatloaf...)

P.S.: Mom & Dad, if you read this, I'm kidding about the movie.

she of the abnormally long legs...

Rose and I went by the local army surplus store this week to pick up extra camo pants for our upcoming roadtrip. I used to be in the Air Force, and I fell in love with the camo uniforms while I was there. I found them to be the sexiest uniform item, like, EVAR!!!1!

Ok, not really, but they're so damn functional I forgive them for being unsexy. If you're looking for sexy, you might think about flight suits. I know they don't look like much at first glance, but they're a short zipper away from being silk boxers and combat boots - silk scarf optional. What's not to love?

So these camo pants have giant pockets, the fabric breathes WAY better than denim, and they're reinforced through the butt and the knees, should you ever find yourself in contact with the ground. Hopefully you won't, but even if you did, the cargo pockets are so big you could probably store a trauma team in them to get you back on the road before the next day's breakfast. Why the next day's breakfast? Well, most bikers seem to have this crazed 'kickstands up at first light' philosophy that, had I known about it ahead of time, might've kept me from pursuing the pastime. See ANY of my posts tagged coffee for an explanation.

In short, they make perfect riding pants. We had ordered some extra-long pants for me because the merely long pants were, as you can see below, about three inches shy of being long enough, even when i wore the waist around my hips (which actually does a lot to improve the sex appeal of the pants). I was walking out of the dressing room holding the special order pair of extra-longs when the manager spied me for the first time and said, "You must be the Extra-Long Pants I ordered!" Yep, that's me, Giant Amazon!




Unfortunately, the Extra-Long pants were only available in a waist size that is... skinnier than your resident Giant Amazon. So the next time I post some decadent food item that I've cooked or eaten, feel free to leave me a comment reminding me to go jog that off. Until then, I'll be wearing slightly short, but hip-skimmingly sexy pants in the larger waist size. Maybe I could stuff a personal trainer in one of those cargo pockets?

CALIFORNIA, HERE I COME!!!

... okay, maybe i'm not going to california. but i really like that song lyric and i bellow it at the top of my lungs whenever i can. making it a nice big, bold post topic counts as bellowing. you can blame my mother, who taught me that if i couldn't sing it well or remember all the words, i should make up for it by singing the parts i knew VERY LOUDLY.

so, california legalized gay marriage today! great news. when you get the press release from Equality Texas (which is where the above clicky takes you) you also get the following interesting factoids...

According to a January, 2008 study by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, approximately 50,000 same-sex couples were living in Texas in 2005. About 20% of these couples are raising an estimated 17,444 children. They deserve the same opportunity to legally protect their family relationships as all California couples now have.



Equality Texas will continue its ongoing efforts to help build strong Texas families, including those with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender family members.

I had no idea there were so many. Some days, it feels like Rose and I are the only ones. Of course, percentagewise, that's only about 0.5% of the state population, but it doesn't take into account the unattached ones. To look at it another way, it's half the population of the city of Plano - which is 9th in the state, for those of you not familiar with the outliers of the DFW metroplex. That's quite a lot of people.

*crosses fingers* someday, right?

it is good to be my dog.

This is my dog, in the pose colloquially known as 'tits up'. She will sleep like this for hours on end. Shortly after we took this picture, she went to the vet and got her rabies vaccination, where she proceeded to pretend she was shy. Then we went to the park, where she and her cousin-dog went swimming, and she proved what a liar she'd been at the vet's by making friends with every human being and waterfowl within a 3 mile radius. Even the ducklings and cygnets like my dog. What is up with that?

Here's the thing that's weird about taking my dogs swimming at the park: we attract a LOT of attention. I have labs. They swim -- this is elementary. All the dogs I've owned in recent memory have been swimmers, actually. Even my reluctant rottweiler, Duchess, was a swimmer once she figured out how to not imitate a rock. I don't understand why dogs swimming are so fascinating to people at the park, but by all evidence, they are. People stop what they are doing, bring their children over, pull out cameras and gawk for 15 minutes or more. Oh, yeah, they also talk to me.

I've said this before: I'm slightly unapproachable. Nobody stops me in the grocery store to ask directions (which, honestly, is in their own best interest. i hate shopping and i'm grumpy and bewildered when i do it.) or approaches me for anything other than the classic panhandle. I know that conventional wisdom says dogs are supposed to make you more approachable, but kids who would RUN THE OTHER WAY if I said "hi" because OHMYGAWD A STRANGER TALKED TO ME! will stand next to me while I play with the dogs and tell me their life stories. Today, for example, I learned all about some kid's Pekingese, how he taught it to stand up, and how a cat bit him once just for eating French Fries, and ... well, I'll stop before you get bored. Kids have short lives, but that doesn't mean their life stories are short. They can be incredibly detailed.

So here's to my dog(s) and their incredibly short but intensely good lives. Maybe their willingness to get this vulnerable is what lets people around them do the same?

scramble

rose's grandma just passed away. i think the technical reason was respiratory distress secondary to a lung infection, but she was 94 and had been in declining health for a while - so it's no surprise. we got the phone call a little before 1. now there's a mad scramble to buy an airline ticket, pack suitcases, fill out FMLA paperwork, and get her dad to the airport before the 3:30 PM flight to newark. because if he misses that 3:30 flight, he won't make the 10:50 overseas flight, and if he misses that, the next flight leaving for israel is at 4 tomorrow afternoon. and if he leaves that late, he'll miss the funeral. those crazy jews - 24 hours from moment of death to moment of burial. that's the max. i understand, historically speaking, the reasons for it. they believe in the resurrection of the body so they don't embalm (incidentally, that's why you can't tattoo yourself, and if you lose a body part you're supposed to preserve it and bury it with the rest of yourself) and that means that you have a very short window to get the buryin done. sucks for rose's dad. he was just there for passover and has only been home about a week. the silver lining in all this is that he did get to see her and say goodbye while she was lucid. i know that occasionally jews delay funerals for family members who must travel long distances, but rose's aunt ester is a SUPAH-STRICT orthodox jew who didn't come to her mother's bedside when she was hospitalized recently (we heard it was for "water on the brain" but it turned out to be "fluid in her lungs") because she had to stay home and prepare her kitchen for passover. ester does not bend the rules, even in situations when it is allowed by the tradition.

so, in honor of rose's grandma - sister, wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, concentration camp survivor, a romanian jew who settled outside of tel aviv after the horror of ww2 was over - זיכרונה לברכה (may her memory be a blessing).

[ed. note: 2:39 pm and p just called me as she was leaving the airport. they got it all done, and dad will make his flight. so i'm glad that p's dad got on that plane.]

things

things which are underneath the driver's seat of my truck:

• cds of bands that a certain guitarist i know used to be in
• paperback novel by andrew greeley
• audiobook by maya angelou
• softball bat
• sun shade to go in the windshield on those hot texas days
• dog hair
• a bag of scooper bags to remove the waste of aforementioned dogs from public property
• a diaper (not from my nieces, so i don't know where it came from!)
• clip-on sunglasses for my girlfriend's prescription eyeglasses
• mapsco book for the dfw metroplex
• bungee cords
• air fresheners (the reasons for which should be obvious by now)

things which are not under the driver's seat of my truck:

• my cell phone
• a sackful of $100 bills
• jimmy hoffa
• the cheat codes for guitar hero 3
• any cell phones at all, for that matter...
  

ridin' the spyder...

rose had to drop her bike off today to get new tires, and a 40k service. the woman has had her bike only 3 years; she rides a LOT. i hopped in the truck wearing cut-offs and flip-flops, loaded up my dogs and followed her to the dealership... where they were having a "test-drive the spyder" event for anyone in closed-toed shoes and long pants. *le sigh* rose immediately signed up, of course. i hemmed and hawed and stalled and held her helmet while she filled out paperwork and watched the familiarization video, but i realized that i'd spend the rest of the year kicking myself if i passed up the opportunity try one of the little beasts. i blazed home and got geared up to ride and guiltily tossed my dogs a couple of kongs stuffed with milkbones to keep them entertained.

the video was full of french canadians with very sexy accents talking about how much fun it was to design and build a 3-wheeled sport vehicle that was not quite a motorcycle, not quite an ATV, and not anything like a car. they kept talking about the "paradigm shift" involved and how the whole time they were developing it they weren't sure whether they were the triumphant inventors or the crackpot mad scientists, but either way, they were having fun.

then was the familiarization briefing. i'll give you the highlights:

• like a motorcycle, except you can get it with automatic transmission
• like the beetle, it has a trunk in front
• unlike the beetle, the trunk can double as an ice chest
• unlike either a motorcycle or a beetle, it has... um... THREE wheels

then there was the closed course. if you didn't have a motorcycle endorsement on your driver's license, this was all you could do on the vehicle. it was just a circle of cones with a couple of stop signs. still, it was nice to get to tool around in a parking lot and get a feel for it before the road ride.

then there was the road ride!!!! they let rose join our group because it was small, so she got TWO road rides on the spyder today. (jealous!) ummm... first off, it's ZIPPY. that's very common for a v-twin, they're very torque-y engines, generally. i'm used to great torque on my valk, but this was crazy. the acceleration on this thing was HAWT. like pull your arms out of their sockets and leave your helmet a block behind you hawt. even, (dare i say it?) like a bacon bikini hawt.

also, it was stable. this isn't terribly surprising, since it has (i may have mentioned this) THREE wheels. but 3-wheelers can be tipped, especially in corners, especially if you're going fast. the beauty of the Y-arrangement on the spyder is that the drive wheel is the single back wheel, so it's much harder to flip than a 3-wheel ATV. there's a lengthy explanation of the stability control system available on the website, but the basics are that it's monitoring all the wheels all the time and adjusts traction by occasionally braking one or more of the wheels so as to keep them all on the pavement. it's also smart enough to know if you have a passenger on back, and adjusts differently for that than when you're riding solo.

it's a neato machine and was very fun to ride. i think it'd be a helluva lot better in nasty traffic than a motorcycle, simply because you don't have to keep putting your feet down to stay vertical. of course, if i had the huevos to try lane-sharing in texas, a motorcycle would be better. with that wide-front stance the spyder is just as wide as a small car and you definitely could NOT lane-split with it. you could still get two into a single parking space, though, especially if you parked them yin-and-yang style. rose and i are thinking about getting one if either of us ends up in a work-from-the-office job anytime in the near future. for now... it's not in the cards, but it was fun to have it in my hands for half an hour!

looking for the mouse...

HERE is a neat article by author Clay Shirky on the topic of where our society, as consumers of media, are going. His theories are fascinating, and I particularly like the way he makes parallels between modern sitcoms and gin pushcarts from the early industrial revolution. here's a snippet of one of his punchier points, for the link averse:

So [watching less television is] the answer to the question, "Where do they find the time?" Or, rather, that's the numerical answer. But beneath that question was another thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: "Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves."


At least they're doing something.


Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

the title refers to the fact that a friend of his has a 4-year old who sprung up in the middle of a dvd to root around in the cables behind their entertainment center to "look for the mouse". because children today think that if their entertainment isn't interactive, it's probably not worth sitting through. as someone who hasn't sat down to watch tv on anything approaching a regular basis in three years, i heartily agree with the kid.

GUM. BO.

yesterday dawned uncharacteristically cloudy and cold for a texas spring. from a low of 50 to a high of 65? this is our winter weather, not our april weather! so, i did the only thing a right-thinking person could do to console herself in such cold temperatures. i made gumbo. i made yummy, dark brown roux, added andouille sausage (because bratwurst does not a good gumbo make!), peppers, onions, okra, mushrooms, and - at the very last possible minute - sweet texas gulf shrimp. yum!!!

the last time i did this, i left it all in my big soup pot and heated the whole mess up whenever i wanted leftovers. this had the unfortunate consequence of overcooking the delicate okra and shrimp and so it was a bit ... mushy ... after a few days. this time, i packed it up in small tubs and froze it. of course, we ate it for dinner last night, but as anyone who's made stew or casserole or sauce knows, the best time to eat it is the day after cooking. after all those lovely ingredients have had time to really SOCIALIZE, get to know each other, converse, buy each other a drink, make out, mingle themselves inextricably, smoke a cigarette... the next morning when they're all putting their socks back on and promising to call each other is really when you should be setting out your bowl and spoon. i'm looking forward to dinner tonight in ways i'm afraid i cannot put into words. forgive me if i drool.

thanks to rose for the lovely suggestion... and for shopping for all the bits with me ... and for not murdering me when i interjected, "crap! i have no celery!" while standing before a nearly-done roux at the stove last night.

hairdos

i got my hair cut today. i love my stylist; he's an atrociously cute gay boy who can give me a men's business cut or a modern girly cut with equal aplomb. today his hair was EXACTLY the same color as his skin, only about three shades darker. it gave him a weirdly monochromatic look, so he said he was going to get some lowlights to break it up and make it more interesting. he sorta looked like a ken doll, really, but after "don't ask. don't tell." was repealed and ken could just come on out of the closet and tell barbie how badly she needed that lip wax all along.

now, last week, i had an amusing conversation with a fairly buttoned-down and well-groomed sort of lesbian i am acquainted with. she and i were with a group of friends at a play in phoenix. the play is a whole other post in itself, but i'll summarize it with the blurb they used in the publicity "lesbian erotic fiction dramatized and set to music." now, i ask you, aware readers - do you think any lesbian story EVER needs to be dramatized? i mean, further than it already is by virtue of the fact that it's a lesbian story, whether fiction or non-fiction? anyway, we were sitting in our seats waiting for the show to start, and the two rows in front of us were reserved. just a few minutes before the show, a gaggle of fashionably mussed and well-dressed lesbians came in and filled up those reserved seats. and the lady next to me leaned over and whispered, "doesn't anybody comb their hair anymore?" she had a point. these ladies were pushing the bed-head look to its fashionable limits. being the straight-shooter i am, i leaned over and whispered back that they had stopped issuing combs to lesbians born after 1980, because of the budget cuts. of course, by the time that had wended its way telephone-game-style down the row of friends, it came out something like "they stopped making combs in the 80s because of the petroleum crisis." whatever.

then i walked out of my hair appointment looking like one of those uncombed gals from the play last week... my stylist gave me a modern girly cut today, and bless his heart if he didn't try to iron it flat so it would lay down against my noggin. curls just don't do that, but if he pastes 'em down with gel and i put my motorcycle helmet on right afterward while the gel sets, i can kinda make 'em behave for a few hours. i can't wait to see what the wedding planner and the photographer have to say about that...

screaming babies

THIS IS AWESOME!

It's totally safe for work, just a serial from the comic strip Non Sequitur on the subject of small children on commercial aircraft. Really, as much as I travel, I've been stunningly (*crossing my fingers, toes, and a few hairs for good measure*) lucky on this score. Yesterday, I was on a plane with a small child and his mother, and they were both very well behaved. He was somewhere between 2 and 3 years old and I base this guess on what I know about language development in kids. At that age, tykes have enough word-sounds at their disposal to communicate pretty much exclusively with their caregivers. I offer you a hypothetical: I'm standing in the kitchen at my sister's house (okay, maybe this isn't entirely hypothetical) and my niece comes in there and says, "muh!" So as I stand there, I start running through all the things that this could signify - Mom, More, Movie, Mickey and the Motorcars, Marvelous Mel's Monster Movie Marathon... I'm at a loss. I don't know what the kid wants. My sister passes by and sees her daughter plaintively trying "MUH!" louder and more insistently at the idiot grownup who is alliterating in the kitchen. "Oh," she says. "You want more milk, honey? Ok. Bring me your cup." Whereupon, my niece toddles off and comes back with a purple plastic elephant, I think; whatever it was did not look like anything I would describe as a 'cup'. My sister performs some ancient Indonesian massage ritual on the elephant that looks like something Indiana Jones does when disarming booby traps in the Temple of Doom and when she finishes, there is a hollow space inside the elephant that she pours milk into. She performs the ritual in reverse, hands the elephant to my niece, and the kiddo toddles off happily, sucking on the elephant's trunk. I think.

Anyway, that's about where this particular flying kid was in his stage of vocabulary development. He made sounds that only his mother could possibly have interpreted as words, but he had no trouble parsing her instructions regarding sitting up and keeping his seat belt buckled. She did a good job keeping him quietly entertained, fed, watered, and calm throughout the flight. So, if you flew to Tucson yesterday with a little boy who likes his Thomas the Tank engine and were sitting next to a gigantic amazon who was working a crossword -- kudos to you and your kid for flying well. Not everyone manages it so gracefully.

rollin'...

this weekend, rose and i got out together for some much-needed road therapy. we rode down to college station to visit my godsons and took the mobile dog unit with us. it's amazing how cars that are BLAZING up the lane to our left will suddenly slow down when confronted with a dog kennel on wheels. i find it hysterically amusing. i imagine that guys who drive old police cruisers get the same sort of giggle when they come up behind someone who suddenly starts driving a lot more lawfully after they catch that shape in the rearview mirror. we seem to create waves wherever we go, and i'm part exhibitionist, so i like it.

there is something kinda magical about driving a motorcycle. people NEVER stop to talk to me at gas stations when i'm in my truck. i've been told in various contexts that i'm not really approachable. sometimes that's a compliment, and sometimes it's not, but for one reason or another... i'm not approachable. unless i'm on a motorcycle. then people want to know "how far you ride that thing" and "what kinda bike is it" and "are you a real girl" and all those sorts of questions. it's TEN TIMES WORSE when i have the dogs with me. this is actually fine with me, because i really am a pretty friendly sort and i love talking about projects i've worked on and, as i said, i'm part exhibitionist. rose and i built that trailer two christmases ago, and it's fun to explain to people how we got the idea and how we engineered it and put it together. it's not complicated, but it is unusual.

rose's dad had a great story for us recently: he works at a deli and this couple pulled up to the store on motorcycles with a trailer just like ours in tow. he got to chatting with them about it, because he thought we were daft to build ours in the first place and he wanted to know what madness had possessed them. it turns out they had seen one on the highway a few years before and had been so intrigued they turned their truck around and followed it for a few miles to snap a picture and study it. he asked what the bikes and trailer they had seen looked like... sure enough it was us. he said he felt proud to tell them that it was his daughter's trailer they'd seen. winning converts over left and right, we are!

of course, we ourselves got the idea from seeing someone else pulling a trailer like this behind their motorcycle. in fact, i nearly flipped rose's bike trying to get a better look at it, because i was still riding on the back of hers at that point. anyway, it's been fun to have it out every time and the dogs sure seem to enjoy it. it beats the heck outta tying them to my pillion with a bungee net. they'd probably sit still if i got them some little doggles to wear over their eyes, but i don't think i could teach them how to counter-lean in the slow turns...

pusher

i hurt my neck last week by sleeping "wrong" on a plane to denver. i had a couple of very bad days and took a lot of advil and did a bunch of stretching and it mostly chilled itself out. yea! then i came home and slept "wrong" on a plane and played a rugby game. why? well, because i'm firmly convinced that people think i'm brighter than i really am and i occasionally have to prove that point. ok, i might be lying about that last part. but have you ever fantasized about how much better volleyball would be if they'd allow tackling? if you have, then you probably understand why i can't give up rugby in any permanent sense.

so i spent an hour or so saturday putting my head and neck into tight corners that really weren't conducive to recuperating the erstwhile injury. meaning: i re-injured it. and then i came home and cried about it until rose offered to go get me a muscle relaxer. sometimes, i wonder if "muscle relaxer" isn't her personal secret code for "pillow over your face" but whatever. i injured myself a while back so i had a couple of pills left over from those prescriptions and she dug one out and gave it to me. and it worked! my muscles relaxed and i drifted off to sleep after muttering some particularly choice nonsense that popped into my head in the twilight of consciousness. this is how rose gets her revenge. she records these silly mutterings in her brain and reminds me of them the next morning after i've had some coffee. i am always properly contrite after being reminded how odd the dark corners of my nigh-sleeping brain are.

i awoke in the middle of the night and i needed to get up and go to the bathroom. you would be AMAZED at how heavy muscle relaxers make you. i was three times my normal bodyweight as i moved across the room. or, at the very least, it was three times harder to move myself across the room.

the next day, i chewed down advil all day long and kept my tender knee on ice and stretched a lot and my neck was JUST FINE. that was great! alas, all the scrapes and bruises that i'd been able to ignore the night before due to the adrenaline of having played a great game of rugby started catching up with me. further, this was when i started to notice that every muscle i owned (except my uterus, really) was in pain. ouch.

sunday night we're settling in to bed and i start crying about how sore i am and rose growls: "do you want a muscle relaxer?!?!" (emphasis mine) i think she was about ready to kill me. instead, i asked for just a painkiller and another round of anti-inflammatories.

monday night... lather, rinse, repeat. this time, when rose suggested i take a muscle relaxer i suggested that she bring ME a painkiller but get a muscle relaxer for herself. it won't shut me up, but it'll certainly make me easier to tolerate.

dear the universe:

please to stop immediately with the stealing of my stuff. in the past week you have robbed me of my bluetooth earpiece (in Houston), my etymotics headphones (in Denver), my ethernet cable (in Huntington Beach), and a copious supply of advil. ok, i probably ate the advil. but i only did so because you keep stealin mah shitz! so cut it out.

yours truly,
thalassa

Holy Crossdressing Chinese Princess, Batman!

Find Out Which Disney Girl You Are! created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Mulan A free spirit, a beautiful soul, all things that most people would tag on a lovely girly girl - but you're more boy than anything! Sometimes you're considered a 'nerd' or 'dork', but that just comes with the package - you even embrace your inner nerd. Go you! Mulan 79% Pocahontas 75% Esmerelda 67% Aurora (Sleeping Beauty) 67% Snow White 67% Belle 63% Jane 63% Ariel 50% Jasmine 46% Megara 46% Cinderella 38% Tinkerbell 29% Violet 21% Alice 21%

mission drift...

for those of you who observe easter: Happy Easter! He is Risen!

now, onto the topic at hand: mission drift

yesterday rose and i went off to help out at my sister's house. they recently replaced their carpet with wood flooring in deference to their highly allergic and now crawling youngest daughter. since the floor went in, their garage has been storage/workshop space. we went, ostensibly to help replace baseboards, but because the garage space had to be reclaimed first, we ended up minding the babies while my brother-in-law hauled trash and returned unused floor bits, etc. we left just as b-i-l's mom came over to dye easter eggs with the kids. (a narrow escape! i liked the clothes i was wearing!)

on our way home, we received a TOP SEEKRIT COMMUNIQUÉ from our commanding general, i.e.: the lady who had invited us over for dinner. our mission was to procure a cheesecake for the consumption and delight of the troops -- under cover of broad daylight. not just any cheesecake would satisfy the general, however. this particular cheesecake had to be unfrozen and ready in the next 15 minutes. after consulting all relevant sources of clandestine intelligence, namely rose's sister and her encyclopedic knowledge of all things procurement-related, we agreed upon a mission plan. we would approach the nearest greengrocer's establishment and attempt to procure a cheesecake in full view of everyone, without even the most rudimentary groucho-marx-style disguise. obviously, it is always best to procure cheesecake components, bivouac in the vicinity of an enclosed heating device and construct it yourself, but the 15-minute constraint prevented this course of action.

when we arrived at the greengrocer's, our driver and our gunner engaged in an evasive maneuver designed to sow confusion and doubt in the minds of the enemy, and to accommodate the gunner's busted leg. (the gunner busted her leg in utah on another mission and is in intensive therapy to recover the use of it before bike weather descends fully upon us). the gunner bravely took over the driver's post while the driver penetrated the perimeter at the greengrocer's in order to recon the location of the cheesecake and attempt to procure it. she had ALMOST made it safely inside when she was accosted by a member of a youth paramilitary organization, an all-volunteer brigade of the fiercest young women American society has to offer. these young women are known collectively as "The Girl Scouts", although intelligence indicates that they break themselves into age-based brigades of "Brownies", "Juniors" and "Cadets". the young scout was, according to the driver's debriefing report, likely a "Brownie". the youthful scout spotted our driver quite easily, assailing her directly but from behind the safety of a paperboard shield which bore her troop insignia and a piece of propaganda about cookies. the driver deflected the attack and kept moving, putting off the assault with a clever line about "buy[ing] some on my way out."

safely inside the perimeter, in the very heart of the greengrocer's base, the driver attempted to ferret out the location of the cheesecake. along the way, in order to maintain camouflage, she was forced to pick up some sugar-covered marshmallows in the shape of a rabbit. the locals use these items to celebrate the annual spring holiday of 'Easter' and refer to the candies simply as "Peeps". intel cannot uncover the reason for naming rabbit candies after bird sounds, and recommend further investigation into these so-called "Peeps". shortly after being forced to grab some "Peeps" for camouflage, the driver spied a bottle of very expensive wine on a very good sale price, and realized it would make an ideal club weapon in case she found herself further accosted by more of the paramilitary youth scouts. failing that, she could drink the wine later and realizing the value-added proposition this presented to her troop morale, she gathered the wine up and proceeded to her mission objective.

at last, when freed of the crowds of locals bearing "Peeps" and "Cadbury Eggs", the driver spied the bakery sign and made straight for it. there, in an unguarded case, she found three cheesecakes from which to choose. selecting the most lovely of the three for presentation to the general, the driver proceeded to the scanning devices en route to the exit. the driver found, with no small measure of luck, an unmanned station and was able to clear her purchases without being spied or noticed unduly by enemy forces. she began to make her exit out a door other than the one by which she entered, so as to avoid the "Brownie" troops. unfortunately, the "Brownie" had anticipated this course of action and had positioned reinforcements at the exit door. the driver considered using her improvised club, but these scouts had a large armored chest with them which was likely their weapons locker. they also had an assault vehicle parked nearby with trained drivers inside. feeling her chances of making a quick assault and good escape were nil at this point, the driver succumbed to the crowd of "Brownies", and emerged a few minutes later with only a slightly thinned wallet and a few boxes of Thin Mints and Samoas weighing down her step.

The ultimate lesson here: Mission Drift is a terrible thing. "Peeps", good wine, and Girl Scout Cookies are the price you pay for failing to stick to the core cheesecake procurement directive. Don't let this happen to you!

i'm headed out to do battle...

i'm off to do battle with the bike. i hit an algae-covered low water crossing the wrong way about a year ago and my bike slid on its left side up the opposing bank after dumping me in a creek and ripping my jeans off my right cheek. the good news was, thanks to my atgatt policy (All The Gear, All The Time!) toward protective gear, i stood up completely unscathed. head intact, skin intact, bones intact, pride... well, my pride was damp but otherwise unharmed. unfortunately, the bike did take some damage. the clutch handle and rearview mirror needed some work. the left foglight was all cattywompus, but still working. i ended up replacing both mirrors with prettier ones, since the left one was past saving at that point. the clutch handle was repaired with a lot of grunting and a little bit of wrenching. the foglight, however, has been doing its best to demonstrate "walleyed" ever since. walleyed (for the non-southern among my readers) is a compound word, pronounced WAWL-ide, and refers to a person whose two eyes point at opposing walls simultaneously. i've tweaked that light, i've wrenched it, i've beaten on it with a hammer... it just won't line up right and then stay that way. so, today it gets replaced. i've had the replacement lamp for about 6 months now, but it's been too damn cold out to work on the bike, let alone ride it much...
so today i'm taking advantage of the fine springy weather and replacing my left foglight. with a nod to my late granny tootsie, who averred that it ALWAYS storms on good friday, but not until the afternoon. so i'm gonna get to it and be done before the storm.

coffee... must have... coffee...

you've seen, i trust, those cartoon sequences in which a character crawls across the hot burning sands of the sahara chasing a mirage that looks like water? and then all the infinite commercial variations in which they bump into something completely improbable in the sahara, like a coke machine? improbable, but utterly satisfying.

i would be utterly satisfied if i could go crawling down to my kitchen and find a mug of hot coffee waiting for me. rose had a meeting this morning, and she had to jump up and run to it without making coffee first. she's a lot smarter before her first cup than i am and therefore infinitely more qualified to operate complex machinery like a coffee pot. although i'd LOVE to have a coffee pot like the one below, i fear i'd only be awake enough to use it after my 3rd cup. and then only when i wasn't on some cold medicine that warns you not to drive or operate heavy machinery under its influence...



EDIT: i ventured down there to make coffee, rationalizing that if i was smart enough to write this, i was also smart enough to make coffee. i spilled grounds all over the counter and i poured brewed coffee on my yellow dog. i made coffee, but with absolutely ZERO points awarded for style.

the new regime begins

HappyBox has met her demise. the were-cricket did her in and it was time for a new thang. so i bought a mac. above, you can see the new queen, ShinyBox, looking down from her cardboard throne on the bones of her fallen predecessor. true to reputation, i've been able to just plug in and run with all my existing hardware on ShinyBox. my keyboard, trackball, printer, external drives, GPS, and coffee cup warmer (thanks, sissie!). it all just works. i'm thrilled!

i got my WoW setup all squared away but of course i'm having to miss wow tonight because i'm traveling. so... i'm blogging from the admiral's club again.

i had some friends in from out of town this weekend and we went out to see the sights in the gayborhood. it was fun, i got to scoot a boot, and then we went for breakfast afterward. y'know, there are some people who really shouldn't drink alcohol... we were sitting next to one of them at breakfast this morning. he arrived late and loud with suspicious stains down the front of his shirt. he'd either spilled a red drink all over himself, or he'd puked on himself. either way, he was sloppy drunk. he spent the entire meal embarrassing his friends and attempting to get our attention as we noshed at the next table over. his name was curtis merillo, and he was from central missouri, originally. he wanted everyone to think he was from the FBI or CIA or somehow affiliated with secret agency of some kind... but mostly he was a jackass. the best part of the meal was when we were leaving. he reached out to try to high-five me, as though we'd shared some victorious experience, his surviving a meal without me stuffing my fist down his loud, stupid throat. so i grabbed his hand, shook it, and in the most pleasant tone i'm capable of using, i told him he was obnoxious and embarrassing and should have a good night. and i skipped off home to get my short night of sleep.

nothing beats the build-your-own crepes at cafe brazil for putting me in a good mood at 4 am. i damn sure wasn't going to let curtis merillo kill it for me.

congrats, lady!

my baby sister got married on leap day. she eloped! i'm proud of her and happy for her, and i just wanted to congratulate her and wish her all the best and many happy years.

It came from the swamp...

I took my dead computer off to my friends' house this weekend. There was going to be an exceptionally high concentration of geekery there, and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to use my friends for free tech support. Or for a source of expendable RAM that we could feed to my motherboard, however you want to view it. The good news is, they have a server with the same RAID controller that my dead motherboard sported so we were able to simply plug my drives in and watch them work. Yea! In addition to that, there was some griping and whining about the configuration of the case and how the video card was in the way of getting the drives out and blah blah blah cry cry cry whine whine whine blah blah blah. The hysterical bit about that is that the guy doing the crying was the one who PICKED THAT CASE IN THE FIRST PLACE. He spec'ed the computer for me three years ago, and my dear friend jaasper was the one who got stuck building it. I made stew and kept jaasper fed and watched him do all the crazy kit-bashing. I'd never done it before and while I'm certainly capable of reading the documentation and putting a kit together from scratch, it is far better to do such things with an advisor on hand. If the advisor is further willing to twist the tiny screwdriver himself in exchange for dinner, so much the better. Anyway, in the process of yanking the drives out of the box so they could be hooked up to the server, we discovered the most likely cause of the fried RAM. It was a WERE-CRICKET!!! (and it came from the swamp...)

A scary, hairy, desiccated, fried cricket slid out of the case when we pulled the cover off the backside. The hair was mostly dog-looking, but the way it was fused to the exoskeleton (I guess by the electricity?) the carcass quite seriously resembled a were-cricket. I had a computer bug!

Many, many thanks go to my friends for getting my hard drives back up and running so I could get all my data off them! Now I must merely bide my time, grow my patience, and refresh my web browser every 30 minutes until I see that my new Mac has shipped.

wow.

i don't know what to say about this but that it's just so pretty it makes my heart ache... i shiver listening to it, and not because it's 40 and raining in "hot"lanta. i've always loved this song, i've just never loved a recording of it before.


for laura h: The song is "Hallelujah" by Lenoard Cohen.
swiped from the youtube poster:
Canadian indie singer-songwriter Allison Crowe's uniquely potent interpretation is heard on her album, "Tidings".

woe.

MY MOTHERBOARD ATE MY RAM!!!!

on friday. *sob* happybox is dead.

i was trying to run a long, computationally heavy process on my home PC (which i had dubbed happybox) because my work computer was occupied with deadline-based work. i thought it was taking too long, so i popped into task manager to see how much RAM it was using, and discovered it was using much less than i expected. weird. i checked to make sure i had the right target total in my head and the computer only reported 1GB available. now... i could've SWORN i put 2 x 1GB sticks of RAM in the case, but y'know it's been a couple of years and i have no head for these sorts of hardware details. it's why i've never been a good gearhead. you can't describe a car as having "one of those 2.something litre V-whatever thingies" and expect to be taken seriously. so the total ram available was half what i expected, which meant it was time to troubleshoot.

so i shut 'er down, cracked open the case, looked into happybox and found 2 x 1GB sticks hanging out of the motherboard. right, then. that meant either one stick was not seated properly (and had never been?) or i had some bad ram. so i put rose to work on it, because i was frantically trying to finish that aforementioned deadline work. she swapped the sticks to other slots, but it still only reported 1GB, which meant that either one pair of slots (a channel) or one stick of RAM was bad, but we didn't know which. we tried swapping the sticks into opposite channels to narrow it down, and then the computer wouldn't boot. this meant the RAM in the primary slot was bad, and i assumed that because of this it wasn't reading the (nominally good) RAM in the secondary slot.

i didn't think it through because if i had, i'd have recognized at this point that my bad slot had fried the RAM in it and putting more RAM in the computer would be a waste of money. instead, i went to Fry's and bought more RAM. but when i got home, reason took hold of my brain before i even unwrapped the new stuff... which meant i tried to ID the bad slot before putting the new RAM in, just in case it was what had fried the old stick. either that first round of swapping sticks into opposing channels or something in this later troubleshooting step exposed my poor old good ram to a bad slot on the motherboard. i'll never really know. all i know for sure is that i have at least one bad slot on my motherboard, and by "bad slot" i mean "vicious ram-eating slot." it munched down 2 1GB sticks of ram on friday, and i'll be darned if i'm feeding it any more.

so, in light of this woe and tragedy, i'm buying myself a mac. because if i'm going to use MacOS, it's not going to be windows' bloated, big-brother-like version of MacOS (aka: Vista) it's going to be the real gosh-darned thing. and, well, mac runs wow in addition to VMWare, so all the fun stuff i want runs natively and anything i absolutely must have windows for, i can have on a Virtual Machine. color me silver. :)

happy birthday, sis!

to my beloved younger sister, a wish for a happy day with many happy returns!

rock on, boss...

my boss kinda rocks. actually, he rocks a lot. we recently had an exchange where i told him i was considering transferring off his team to a job that entailed less travel. i ended up staying where i am, because i like my job better than i'd have liked the other one, but it put him on notice. and that was good. so he said he'd take some steps to get me less travel and more variety.

i guess i still don't think that talking about things is really going to change them, because i expected my life to carry on just as it has and eventually by mid-summer i'd see the results of a gradual shift in my assignments. not so. he just told the people who've been borrowing my time that they have advanced all the time they're going to get until the end of june with what they have on my calendar now. color me thrilled and pleasantly surprised.

and to keep this post from being a complete snoozer for those of you who don't care what i do to earn my filthy lucre, i'll share that the carolina pizza & pasta works makes a TASTY shrimp etouffe in honor of the impending Mardi Gras holiday. ayeee! and they make GREAT crab cakes, too. *wink*

it's finally happened...

i've been recognized by the staff of my local starbucks. they know who i am and make conversation with me and recommend drinks i might like based on the variety of drinks i've ordered before. not being a creature of habit, i never order the same thing twice. well, unless it's early in the morning. early in the morning, i just stumble in clutching my travel mug and ask them to fill it up with whatever is on tap and has the most caffeine. that in itself probably ingrains me in the memories of the morning shift, but i'm not much for making conversation at that point in my day.

this recognition was by the night shift. this whole event probably has been delayed by the fact that i travel as much as i do, but i had hoped to avoid becoming a "regular" at starbucks. i suppose it was inevitable, though, given how much i love coffee. and the internet. and coffee.

i'm a nooyawkuh.

i spent last week in the vicinity of philadelphia for work. i was teaching a class at the corporate mothership and it was nice to get to walk around and shake hands with people i only know via e-mail. there used to be a lot of confusion about me and another woman with my name who worked in that office. she would occasionally get my travel itineraries or expense checks, i would get help requests that were directed to her, sometimes my flight schedules would return me "home" to the philly airport. she recently left the company, so the confusion is much reduced, but i still took the opportunity to introduce myself in person to the folks who keep my work rolling along.

then, rose came up to spend the weekend with me. she has a dear friend who lives near philly, the one we visited at halloween. i had been staying with him all week instead of in a hotel near the office, so she came up and joined me.

friday night we spent painting the kitchen. rose has an amazing and fantastic skill (which is for rent, if you make appropriate arrangements with me...) at home renovation: she can "cut-in" paint freehand. that's right... NO BLUE TAPE required. she just stands on top of a ladder with her tongue sticking out one corner of her mouth, paintbrush in one hand, paint cup in the other, and makes PERFECTLY straight lines along the wall/ceiling boundary. i'm pretty good at stringing up painter's tape and working the edge, but by the time i can get a room taped, rose can already be done cutting in so it's ready for paint rollers. i'm seriously in awe. so the homeowner rolled paint on the walls, rose cut the walls in ahead of him, and i? i did the perfect job for a very patient, slightly anal retentive engineer in a kitchen renovation being run by artist-types: i removed all the nasty old pink contact paper from the cabinets. it was foul. and you'd think after all these years the glue would've lost some of its hold, right? not so. apparently, those 50's contact paper manufacturers had not yet glommed onto the disposable world mentality. that stuff was stuck on so tightly, i started theorizing that it'd formed a symbiotic life form with the wood paneling of the cabinets. i fantasized that i was peeling up entire civilizations of some very sticky higher life form, cutting them into strips with a razor and harvesting them so they could go to the landfill, convert more of our household garbage, and someday take over the world! muahahahahahahaha!!! or maybe it was just really late at night and something in the sushi was getting to me.

the next day, we got up and drove to new york city to see Avenue Q on broadway. and by "we got up and drove," i really mean that we all piled into my rent car and i had to do urban battle from behind the wheel of a rented saturn. i survived without too many country-mouse-in-the-big-city moments, and even earned the hoots and applause of all my passengers when i flipped off and honked at some ignorant redneck in a land rover with alabama plates when he cut me off. i got us where we were going, used lola's navigational skills to find us good parking, and did all of that in time to pre-order us some wine for the intermission. w00t!

after the show, we walked down to the empire state building, where we were turned into mice, lured with stale limburger through a maze of passages, elevators, snaked lines, gift shops, hawkers, vampires, and cranky tourists, and finally got out onto the observation deck. it was pretty up there, the view was beautiful, and a bit overwhelming. you know, at one level, in your head that there really are that many people in the city. but until you stand up there and look out at all the twinkling lights, it doesn't really hit you JUST HOW MANY people are in the city. rose showed me all her favorite haunts from her college days, as far as you can see them from the top of the empire state building at night anyway, and then we headed back down for dinner.

we taxi'd to little italy, found a likely-looking spot, and settled in for a truly delicious meal. i had lobster fra diavolo, the red version, and it was served in a bowl approximately the size of a tire. from a semi. f'real. we had to move EVERYTHING on the table just so they could wedge this bowl in before me. the funny thing about shellfish, though, is that it's like 80's hair: lots of hard shell, little actual content. by the time i'd shelled the lobster, the clams, and the mussels i had a manageable-sized meal and didn't feel overstuffed. but i did feel richly and extravagantly treated. so it worked. yum! the fra diavolo red sauce was spicy and tangy and just what i wanted.

i made it home in time to play my geeky game where we wiped out three times attempting an assault on karazhan - a big, difficult dungeon - with a pick-up group of people who weren't really prepared. only a few of us knew what we were doing. it was good learning, but i look forward to trying it again sometime in a group that survives the whole experience. :)

oh, and i got my first official philly cheesesteak. and, yeah, it really is that much better than what you get out here in the hinterlands. i'll have to go back!

Training this week...

in an interesting turn of events, this week i'm a student. and i've been reminded of all sorts of teaching technique things that i think i do well, but will be doubly certain that i do correctly in future. little things like: giving path names two or three times when pointing students to deeply buried files, going slowly in my demonstrations, explaining in plain english...

also, i am reminded of all the horrifying experiences i've had in the past with software that almost, but didn't, work. i feel really badly for the guy whose class fell apart yesterday afternoon, but it was an awful thing to sit through from our end. some of it was his fault, some of it wasn't.

today is a good day, though. by this time yesterday, i wanted to close my laptop in disgust and go play Warcrack. today, i still want to close my laptop and play Warcrack, but without the disgust. i'm just an addict...

contagion

i got an earworm from a guy who got an earworm, so have an earworm... it's a neat song and a good video. if those old microsoft office commercials (you know, the ones where people danced around their offices because they were so happy about their latest excel-created success?) had used something like this, i might've believed them.

not smart enough without my coffee

i often joke when i go refill my coffee cup, that i'm "off to get another cup of brains." and people laugh, because it's kinda silly to think of a person's intelligence coming out of a cup.

today, we have proof that i'm not COMPLETELY joking when i say these things. i started to pour my first cup of coffee this morning and got halfway into it when i realized i was pouring it onto my oatmeal instead of into my mug! i had coffee and brown sugar oatmeal this morning, which was not half bad.

merry christmas!

nothing puts you in the christmas spirit quite like watching kids experience christmas for the first time. their wonder, innocence, and inquisitiveness are a beautiful sight to behold and good for the soul. so, thanks to my nieces for reminding me of how much PURE FUN christmas can be. i've never been scrooge-y about christmas. i've always enjoyed it, although i sometimes give in to the stressful feelings of having too much to do and not enough time to do it in.

it's a blessing to be here at my parents' house, watching 2 year olds "decorate" the christmas tree by (literally) throwing bows at it. the redhead throws with purpose and makes them stick. the blonde tends to throw (goddess forgive me for saying this) like a girl, so hers fall off and her sister has to reapply them. we've taken all the bows off and thrown them at the tree three or four times now, because it's fun. "nana" has strong memories of how frustrating childhood is when all you want is to explore and play, and all the grown-ups keep doing is telling you "no-no, that's [dangerous, breakable, hot, not-for-kids, etc.]" she has done her best to make her house a totally explorable, kid-friendly zone. all the breakable, heirloom decorations are either on high shelves or still in storage. everything that's out is either dollar-store quality and won't be missed if they break it, or tough enough to survive their exploration activities. the kids are loving it, and so are we.

and now, back to it. i'm in charge of the cooking. technical challenge of the weekend: making popcorn in a pan on the stove. my sister is on an allergen-free diet, and there are no microwave popcorns that conform. she showed me how to do it, and aside from a few burned kernels, i think i did alright. it certainly had a down-home taste to it that i don't think i was imagining.

signs...

...that you really need to go to a holiday party and behave irresponsibly and indulge with excess until you forget that you have a dayjob, number 1:

Your Friend says, "Hey, let's stop at the store on the way to the party and get something to drink." Whereupon you reply, "Yes, we need to leverage the opportunity to work through the process and procure some supplies." And when your friend's jaw drops to the floor and asks if you did, or did not, just assault her with meaningless buzzwords you reply, "What did I say?"

That's right, kids. If you find yourself inadvertently spewing business buzzwords to your friends, on your weekends, and you DON'T EVEN REALIZE YOU'VE DONE IT, you need to have a large frosty glass of holiday cheer, or a meat mallet to the head. Take whichever you prefer, but take it soon.

hearsay...

i heard this story about my niece recently, and i've been telling it to anyone who will listen. so here it is...
(setting)
my sister is walking past the bedroom of her two year old twin girls, with her 6 month old baby on her hip. she notices one of them fast asleep, and the other one lying in bed talking to herself. she decides to check in to make sure the talker doesn't need a diaper change or juice or something only moms can give.

SISTER: *walks in and lays baby on foot of bed* Honey, are you ok?
TALKY TWIN: I love Jesus.
SISTER: I love Jesus, too, honey. And he loves us, like his children.
TALKY TWIN: *gives her mother a you're-not-getting-it look* No, I love BABYJESUS! *points, for emphasis, at her sister at the foot of the bed*
SISTER: *ROFL*

apparently, the toddlers have been learning about babyjesus at school, as is the way this time of year. and somehow, in the brain of a toddler, Baby Sister and Baby Jesus have conflated into one thing. so right now, sister is babyjesus, and sometimes just Jesus.

oh, and while i'm at it...

happiest of happy birthday wishes to Squirt, Fluffy, and Trouble. all three of you are in my heart and in my thoughts today. for the brief, feverish moments that i was awake yesterday, i thought of you then, too. :) but that might have just been the fever dreams...

Did anybody get the number of that truck... ?

It hit me like a truck, it did. I thought at first it had to be bacterial, simply because my throat was so sore and my fever was so persistent. It turned out to be a virus, after q-tips up the nose, lights down the throat, and a blood donation were all tested and reviewed. Either that, or I'm allergic to snow. It might be both, come to think of it. Michigan last week gave me plenty of opportunity to be exposed to both. After having slept for 40 of the last 48 hours, I can now say that I'm feeling fine. So, the truck loses, and I win. And, for the sake of irony, I would like to report that Saginaw airport loads and unloads their aircraft in much better STYLE than O'Hare in Chicago does. When you have checked a bag planeside because the aircraft is too small to accommodate your standard roll-aboard overnight suitcase, and you have to STAND OUTSIDE IN THE HORIZONTAL SLEET to recover said bag, you know you've arrived in travel hell. And I'll tell ya, ladies and gents, Chicago has a lot to learn from Saginaw on that score.

This week, I'm off to Knoxville, TN. If I return without my hair glowing green or anything, I'll be pleasantly surprised. Apparently the facility I'm visiting has enough hazardous areas to warrant an online safety training that is required for all visitors. So now I know not to cross the magenta ropes that are marked "RADIOACTIVE HAZARD AREA". Thanks to the training, I'm safely prepared. :P

want.

wow, do i want this clock.

Free Rice Vocabulary Game

Free Rice is a website in the vein of The Hunger Site, The Breast Cancer Site, etc. Visitors to the website click on a link, view a couple of advertisements, and the revenue generated goes to a charitable cause. This one is affiliated with the United Nations and is set up as one of my personal favorite activities of all time - a word game! yea! So, if you go visit the site and answer a vocabulary question correctly, you donate 10 grains of rice. The game keeps a running total, with special counters for 100-grain and 1000-grain piles, while the latest grains go into your "bowl".

My high for today was a vocabulary level of 47, but most of the time i was around 44 or 45. I donated about 1500 grains doing that. I shot right up to 45 quickly, but then knocked around the 43-46 range for a good long time. Once I made it to 47, I came over here to write it up. :)

writer's block

lately i'm suffering a bit of writer's block. i simply don't have anything to say. i've tried to fight through it with a couple of half-assed memes, but that's not really working. so today, i'm going to tell you about the outstanding dinner i made for rose's birthday last night. alas, i'm not nerdy enough to have taken photos, so you'll have to imagine what it looked like.

the main course was buffalo steak in a tart cherry sauce; the sides were butternut squash and wilted spinach with caramelized onion. the cherry sauce was a huge experiment, and i'm pleased to say that all reporters either enjoyed it or lied convincingly. it was the first time in a very long time that i cooked without tasting the dish all through the process, so even i was pleasantly surprised. however, we did start all three dishes with the 2 crucial steps of melting 2 tbsp butter and pouring 2 oz wine into the cook, so it was hard to go wrong from there.

i sent rose to the store for all the odd ingredients that i don't keep in my kitchen, like sun-dried oregon cherries. i have maraschino cherries, but those aren't quite the same and could never be classed as 'tart'. unless maybe they were in a beverage called a 'tart' because of its umm... effect on chicks who drink fruity things with cherries in them and umbrellas on top. rose had to call me three or four times from the store for direction and substitution options because Whole Foods doesn't prominently display plum wine or sun-dried cherries. as a result, we ended up with some Organic Tibetan Goji Berries, which i thought was a hoot. according to wiki, the "tibetan" part is probably a big fat lie marketing strategy because the tibetan plateau is remarkably unsuitable for commercial fruit production, even if it were organic production. the goji berries were very close to the cherries, and were quite prominently displayed, according to rose. for those who wonder, they are quite tasty little boogers, kinda like a dried cranberry, but with just a hint of savory about them and not so fruity-sweet. think of an early strawberry that's ripe enough to be red, but not ripe enough to be particularly sweet yet.

the squash was tasty and uber-simple. i halved it and scraped out the seeds and pulp (which are remarkably pumpkin-like) and then scored the flesh deeply with a knife. i smeared it with butter, dropped a tablespoon of extra butter into the hollow, sprinkled it liberally with nutmeg, covered each half with foil and set it foil side down on a cookie sheet to bake at 350 for an hour. yum! i love me some winter squash. rose had never eaten it before, so she now has a new seasonal food addiction. plus, it's a nice carrot-free source of beta carotene. have any of you noticed how grocery store carrots taste these days? they pretty much taste like dirt. bleh.

for the spinach, i minced some garlic and slivered some onion into about 2 tbsp of olive oil in my honkin' weapons-grade cast iron skillet. then i tossed in a bag of baby spinach until the whole mass was about halved in size. i pulled it off the fire and put it into a bowl where i drizzled it with balsamic vinegar and LOTS of lemon juice. probably about the juice of half a lemon, if i were one of those nutty cooks-from-scratch types. but i'm not, so the juice came out of those darling plastic lemon-shaped bottles with the long pour spout. i guess that's there just so you don't inadvertently grab the unnaturally shiny yellow bottle thinking it's an actual lemon. as far as i can tell, the spout serves only to make it look like a lemon with a strange protuberance that might be a tumor...

the buffalo steaks were marinated in equal parts balsamic vinegar and worcestershire sauce, with a generous addition of lemon juice, black pepper, pickled ginger, and bavarian herb mix. for the cherry sauce, i used 1/2 a medium sized sweet onion, sauteed in butter, about a cup of apple juice, cup of cranberry juice, 3 tbsp sweet red wine (i used a beaujolais nouveau because we couldn't find plum), a cup of dried cherries, and a half cup of Genuine Organic Tibetan Goji Berries. then i made a sachet out of cheesecloth and into it i put a bay leaf, 4 black peppercorns, 3 whole cloves, 1 clove garlic and all the pickled ginger i could fish out of the marinade. i simmered the whole lot for about 20 or 30 minutes. i removed about 1/2 cup of the cherries from the sauce and set them aside. i pulled out the sachet, as well. then i put the sauce into a blender and made it smooth. i topped each steak with the sauce and a few of the whole cherries.

nom nom nom!

rose was in charge of cooking the meat, which i assume she did on the grill outside. she ran off with the marinating dish when i told her she had about 10 minutes left, and when she came back, there was a plate of medium-rare buffalo steaks in her hand. it is good to have a sous chef, no?

happy birthday, love!

meme sheep says baaaaaaa!

You Are 68% Open Minded

You are a very open minded person, but you're also well grounded. Tolerant and flexible, you appreciate most lifestyles and viewpoints. But you also know where you stand firm, and you can draw that line. You're open to considering every possibility - but in the end, you stand true to yourself.

How Open Minded Are You?

i'm not quite dead yet...

i'm not dead. but in the last two weeks, if this is any indication of how things are going here, i've crossed into diamond status with Hilton's loyalty club and gold with American Airlines. and that's AFTER redeeming miles for a leisure trip.

it's good, because it means that i'll get better treatment when i'm traveling. and since i'm not going to stop traveling any time soon, i might as well be treated nicely.

i'm home until 4 this afternoon, and then i'm off to huntsville, al for the rest of the week and the weekend. hopefully, i'll get a chance to get online and post pictures of my fabulous halloween costume sometime soon.

oh, yeah. the leisure trip was to haverford, pa (dangerously close to philly) where rose and i attended a halloween party hosted by some dear friends. it was quite a hoot, but i never did wrap my lips around a cheesesteak. i'll have to try harder next time.

bathroom curtains?

in my ongoing quest to keep my faithful readers informed about the state of women's rest rooms around the country, i present to you the latest weird thing i have observed in my travels: paper stall curtains!

so what is a paper stall curtain? well, you know how the standard stall divider is separated from the wall or the next panel over by a short gap? the size of the gap varies due to the mounting hardware used to attach the thing to the wall, but it averages about 3/4 inch. well, at the facility i'm teaching in this week, someone decided that gap was large enough to threaten her privacy, i guess. i wandered in, put down my paper ass gasket, and prepared to do what it is we do in a toilet stall when i noticed this long streamer of toilet paper dangling from the stall divider just in my peripheral vision. someone had hung a makeshift paper curtain to block the view through the gap between the stall divider and the wall. and this raises the question: did the previous occupant of my stall erect her paper-thin veil of modesty because she herself has viewed something objectionable through the gap between stall panel and wall? or did she catch someone peeping at her? my curiosity is piqued!

it is completely beyond my ken that someone might actually attempt to observe a stall occupant in her disadvantaged state, but i am assured by an ex-girlfriend of mine that this did occur to her, and not in the larry craig way. and this story, i think, is REALLY REALLY weird. let me know if you agree...

my ex fell ill at work one day and found herself in the women's room, doing what one does when one's gastric system is in distress. she heard some foot-shuffling and other traffic outside her stall, but she was in her own special world of misery and paid no particular attention to it. upon exiting the "necessary room" and returning to her desk, she heard strange titters from her coworkers (say it with me: cow orkers) and felt her spidey-senses tingling. she had the strange feeling that she (and maybe her unfortunate lack of intestinal fortitude) were the subject of office gossip. as she was telling me this, i interrupted her story to interject, "Surely," says i, "nobody came out of the restroom and discussed what she saw in there! To do that, she'd have had to bend over and peer under the divider and identify you by your shoes, and that's just ridiculous! No grown person does that!" surely, she assured me, this was exactly what had happened. on the one hand, i was stunned at the puerility and the crassness. on the other hand, this woman's propensity for stirring up drama was well known to me by this time, and it just fit.

still, i ask you, gentle readers... if you came out of the toilet and found yourself the subject of gossip for solo activity conducted in the privacy of your stall, would you be embarrassed for yourself? or for the harpies who were sitting in the cube farm discussing you? seriously. i thought this was a one-off thing, just one crazy pot-stirrer's crazy behavior in a crazy office. is this stall-spying problem more widespread than naive little me would like to think? do i need to start hanging paper stall curtains, too?

camping!

it's been two weeks, and i haven't written about camping yet! i'm a slacker!

rose and i went on our annual camping adventure to Rainbow Ranch with our friends. it was an absolute blast. the weather was gorgeous, the sunsets were incredible, the beer was cold, and the marshmallows were hot. i couldn't have asked for more.



as usual, i took my dog, who is a hyperspastic labrador retriever. she is six years old, and most people still think she's a puppy because she's just so... juvenile. i also had my sister's yellow lab, orenda, with me. when we were in the planning stages of this outing, rose asked me how orenda did at camping... which caused me to laugh until dr pepper came out my nose. then i referred rose to my sister to ask how well orenda handled camping, and my sister laughed until caffeine-free diet coke came out her nose. she gently explained the situation, orenda had never gone camping because my sister is not the sort of woman who goes camping. seriously, the only camping my sister has done since she was about 10 is the kind where your parents send you off to a college campus to play basketball for a week over the summer. so, in spite of the fact that she had to sleep outside for, like, the first time in her whole life, orenda seemed to enjoy the camping, too.

we played in the lake with the dogs most of the day saturday. because we are the place where stereotypes come from, our little lesbian tent town had as many canine residents as it had humans. there were dogs everywhere, and they all splashed in the lake, chasing each other and playing fetch. even the pug! the dogs were so tired after two solid days of swimming that they slept for two solid days once we got them home. it was bliss! orenda somehow managed to lose her collar in the lake so we faked a leash and a collar out of some rope that i had in my truck. she looked like a real redneck dog for the rest of the weekend. :)

speaking of pugs, did you know that if you squeeze a pug's head its eyeballs will pop out? yeah, i think that's an urban legend, but the girl who brought the pug was just dog-sitting and she had a long and ridiculous list of instructions to follow regarding the dog's care. basically, it boiled down to this: DON'T TAKE A PUG CAMPING! but the pug had fun and probably felt more like a real dog that weekend than it ever has in its life. we started discussing all the things pugs can't do one night around the campfire, and with the assistance of a little creativity and some BEvERages, we came up with a photo essay. from this photo to shot 35 from that album, we illustrate all the things one should NOT do with a pug. also, you should not do this or anything on any of the next 14 or so shots with a pug. there's a lot of overlap between those two galleries. if you're only going to look at one picture, it should be because at this point, i think the pug was a little tired of the traveling gnome game we'd been playing with it. if i knew how to LOLCATS that thing, it would say "we are not amused."

and that was my rainbow ranch camping adventure. thanks to sylwester and julie for the photos!

quote of the weekend, which actually came after the weekend was all over:

Why do we turn into circus seals around you?

i dunno. maybe it's because i laugh real hard and throw sardines when i'm amused?

Vermont!!!

I'm working in Vermont this week, and... maybe I'm slow on the uptick... but did any of the rest of you know that Vermont has a BUNCH of COWS?!?!? Yeah, it had plumb evaded me, this bit of knowledge. I know I had to know this in the back of my mind somewhere, because I've had Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream and I'm a compulsive reader, and I know they buy their milk from a local co-op of dairy farmers who don't squirt rBGH into the cows. And I've had Vermont Cheddar cheese, I'm sure. Still, nobody was more stunned than I was to walk into my suite at the Comfort Inn and find a bucolic landscape photo featuring COWS on the wall of my room. I associate that sort of stuff with home, and well, Vermont is about as far from "just like home" as I can imagine, at least east of San Francisco.

So while I'm in Vermont, I took the factory tour at Ben & Jerry's up in Stowe and drove up the mountain to Smuggler's Notch for some scenery. I ate ice cream for supper and enjoyed the gnarly road immensely. It is debatable whether I'd have enjoyed the road up the mountain more on my bike. I think I would have, except that tonight the fog had fallen on the valleys and the air itself was wet in a singularly rain foresty way. That meant the asphalt was wet, and with the foliage turning and dropping here, that would have made for a slick and scary road to ride in the dark on a motorcycle. I'd just concluded that even with all the negative factors I'd still rather be riding when the road got so narrow there was no center stripe and the turns got so tight that cars from opposite directions couldn't navigate them at the same time. That made me very glad for the rented cage I was driving, even in light of a glorious near-full moon.

Yeah. Fall foliage, fog in the valley, full moon, view from the mountain, belly full of (free) ice cream. Travel sucks, don't it?

In conclusion, I leave you with a picture from the Ben & Jerry's flavor graveyard. Something I did NOT know is that Ben & Jerry debut about 10 new flavors a year, meaning that 10 old flavors get the boot. Flavors that were really dismal sellers and have no hope of resurrection get a bad epitaph and go in the flavor graveyard. Others are simply put in the deep freeze. People can vote on the website to resurrect them, but so far none of the resurrected flavors have passed the test of the open market and they've all been re-retired. Here was my favorite "gravestone"


i also bought my new little niece a tie-dyed onesie, because i'm a hippie freak and i think every kid needs tie-dye in their closet. it has "ben and jerry's" printed across the chest which is a whopping big irony, because the kid is so lactose intolerant that her sisters can't touch her until they wash all milk/cheese residue from their hands and faces with hot, soapy water. still, this has introduced her mother (my sister) to the goodness that is sorbet. poor thing. fruit ice cream was never her thing. we used to go to the ice cream shop down the way when we were wee kids, and she ALWAYS got some uber-creamy chocolate-enhanced flavor. me? the sherbet. so tonight, in her honor, i ate TWO SCOOPS of Half-Baked, which is itself a blend of Chocolate Chip Cooke Dough and Brownie Batter Ice Cream. because she's back home eating my piece of the world's sorbet allotment.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor

THIS is the reason for Coming Out. When gay people have the courage to explain their orientation to those near and dear to them, the dear ones see the human face of gay people. We are not monsters. We are not depraved beasts intent on destroying the moral fabric of or the family unit in America. My gay agenda mostly consists of getting paid for doing my job, spending my free time with family and friends, and remembering to pour out the milk when it goes sour, y'know?

The quick summary for the link averse: Jerry Sanders, the mayor of San Diego has tearfully confirmed that he will support gay marriage, as opposed to civil union, in San Diego. Part of his decision was based on his recognition that he couldn't sanction unequal treatment for his gay daughter.

Dallas Pride Parade 2007

Dallas has their gay pride celebration in September. Most cities have theirs in June, to commemorate the Stonewall Riots of 1969. But in Dallas, nominally to honor the first reversal of the Texas sodomy statutes by Judge Barefoot Sanders (I am not making this up! That's his name!) and realistically in deference to the blistering heat of June weather in Texas, we hold our parade in September. Even then, it's pretty doggone hot. The good thing about this is that I was able to attend San Francisco Pride this year in cool, comfortable temperatures in June, and then Dallas Pride in relatively comfortable (relative to June in Dallas) temperatures in September. Double my fun!

Hot or not, we were out with our Big Girl Britches on, braving the crowds and the drama and the deadly strings of flying Mardi Gras beads, and having fun. Here are some pictures! The black bike in the foreground is the next evolution of design for my bike. It's called a Valkyrie Rune. It's not my idea of a replacement for the fantastic tourer I ride, primarily because it doesn't have a stock passenger seat or saddlebags. Mine is the red one behind, with the Texas flag hanging from it. Rose's is just behind mine with the US flag on hers. We mount flagpoles on our luggage racks for this parade and it looks pretty sharp, if I do say so. You can see for yourself... It's not that I'm a queer aesthetic snob or anything, but I really like the appurtenances to my bike to look nice and DUCT TAPING a 1x2 to my passenger seat doesn't fit my snobby queer aesthetic standards. :) That said, the overall effect was very nice from a distance, as you can see. A long line of open-minded motorcyclists stretching off to the horizon! Muahahahaha! My gay agenda plan for world domination is nearly complete!



The girl on the back of my bike is Rose's ex. The girl on the back of Rose's bike is said ex's current girlfriend. They found us along the parade route and hopped on board. In accordance with the age-old adage that 'nobody rides for free', they bought us a beer after the ride was over. It was great fun! I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a little weird, but either they're as drama free as we are, or they were on their best behavior. Either way, it was All Good and we had fun hanging out. Here's another photo of me with my passenger. It has been suggested that Rose has a "thing" for tall brunettes, but I'll let you be the judge of that.

Once the parade was over, we pulled in near the park and sat in the shade to hear the fabulous Anton Shaw sing us some tunes. Pretty soon, I couldn't sit still any more, and I got up to play catch with the Diablos who were out tossing the rugby ball around. No, they're not actual demons. Just a bunch of guys who are mostly gay and play rugby. Thanks for letting me play, boys! And let me close by saying that there is absolutely nothing in my long years playing women's rugby that prepared me for seeing a drag queen in silver lamé miniskirt, bolero jacket and knee-high boots running down the field to receive a pass. Just nothing. I don't even know if a picture could adequately express how weird that was.

And that's the Alan Ross Texas Freedom Parade 2007. Weird, but good. But for all the sights of the parade, nothing was as weird as seeing myself from behind, playing rugby in jeans.