Pumpkins, ready to live outside.

It's Such A Magical Mysteria

Technology and me - why can't we just get along? I had all these great photos on my desktop that I was going to write a post about but then my computer tricked me into restarting it and they all folded up and returned to the magical land where they live before I click on them. I'm not in the mood to dig around for them again right now. I have another technology situation that I'm too embarrassed to write about but it's hard not understanding how to do things.

I spent a huge part of my weekend trying to wrangle this story that just can't figure out what it's going to be. I discard 500 words for every 1000 I write. I thought I knew exactly what I was doing today and I wrote about 1000 words that barely introduce the scene I thought I was going to zip through.

I'm going to keep flogging on it. I think if I could just get to the end I'd know how to do the middle better. Maybe next weekend I'll run off to a secret bunker with no Internet and see if that speeds up the process.

We got our furnace replaced last fall and for the last couple of days we've used the air conditioner with the new fan (or whatever, I don't know how it works). I like having a cool house but that thing will blow your hair back if you stand too close. I guess we did good with our purchase. Walker makes fun of me because I'm always cold but I had to put sweat pants on just so I could sit at my desk.

I love it with reservations.

Stand In The Place Where You Live



I wanted to do side-by-side photos last winter but I couldn't find my sunny photo. Yesterday I got my sunny photo.

Also yesterday I noticed the wasps are building a nest right next to the front door. Why do they do that? I realize wasps serve a purpose even though I don't like them. But they're always building something right by a door. Front door, back door, shed door. Bug spray is coming out.

Finally: NYT — I thought you were hurting for subscribers. At this point, we've had four telephone conversations and you're still DOING IT WRONG.

Portland Tram & Yipey Dogs

Photo courtesy of atul666. Thank you for CC licensed photos.

Over the weekend I mentioned the Portland tram and the group was having trouble with a visual so here is a photo.

One of our neighbors has a yipey dog. I am especially aware of this now that we can keep the windows open and I can lounge around outside. That dog yipes constantly without rest. I bet it yipes in its sleep.

Purely from an evolutionary perspective: how have these dogs managed to stay alive this long? Why would anyone want to keep something around that makes that much noise? After about 30 minutes I want to kill it and eat it. And I'm sure there are people with less patience than I have.

Madison's Happiest Corner

For the benefit of my three loyal readers who have no clue what I'm up to: I was in Madison, Wisconsin for Wiscon for the weekend. It was really just an excuse to reunite with a bunch of Clarion West friends.

I knew I was going to be getting home late last night so I took today off which was a good thing because I was so tired I would have been worthless.

But I'd expected to get all kinds of stuff done like unpacking and organizing photos and writing a kickass blog post and these things barely happened. What did happen is I had an epic two-hour, underneath-the-covers nap. Often when I nap I do it on the couch. When I do nap on the bed, it's only on top of the covers.

I'm not sure where these rules originated. I think at one point I had a theory about making sure my body didn't get confused between sleeping and napping. Regardless, I started dragging around 11:30am so I crawled back in bed and it was brilliant. If I was a hobbit, I'd write a song about it to sing when I went on long adventures.

I might do a better Wiscon post later. I have tons of photos. I waited too long and don't have time to do anything better than this tonight.

Garden Update


A moment of silence please, for the Early Girl that fled the building. I don't think this was my fault. I think Home Despot sells a faulty product. The tomatoes from the farmer's market look fantastic. I told Bob to pick up another one this weekend.



I checked my peas on Sunday and they showed signs of extensive snacking so I cursed the slugs and then sprinkled about a half a box of slug bait in the garden. Later, as I stood in my kitchen drying dishes I noticed a little bird perched on the cage picked at the leaves. Bad birds.



I'm sprouting my pumpkins on the windowsill right now. My favorite of all my crops.

In a side note, in 06 I read a book by Susanna Clarke called Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Book #2) that I loved. Later she had a book of short stories called The Ladies of Grace Adieu come out and after eyeing it for awhile I bought it. And I thought the stories were super boring.

I left it on the nightstand with the bookmark in the middle and never touched it again. Every time I was clearing out books to give away, I'd look at it and then think, well, I might give it one more try.

This has been going on at least a year. Last night I randomly picked it up and since I'd quit in the middle of a story I had to go back and start again. And I could barely put it down. I eventually had to because I didn't want to stay up too late. But I finished it this morning.

I'm trying to be okay with quitting reading things that aren't working for me and this little episode is not helping.

I'm off to Wisconsin tomorrow. I'll check in if I can.

Tip of the Day
Today's FoodDay has a tip for when you run out of baking powder. You mix baking soda, cream of tartar and cornstarch. Great! Now I know what I can do with all that cream of tartar. Whatever that is.

Bob and I live in a two person household with two of just about everything. We're not good at sharing. Well, since he can't defend himself, I'll say that he's not good at sharing. I would share just fine if I could be in charge of everything.

We do share kitchen and laundry facilities. We share a netflix queue (239 + 31 saved) and I keep my movies (23 at present) clumped together in the middle. We're on the 5 movie plan and since he watches way more movies than I do, he gets 4 and I get 1. I watch way more shows than he does which uses up most of my TV time.

I always feel weird that we hardly ever watch movies together. But we're rarely on the same schedule. If I'm going to watch a movie it's usually in the late afternoon on weekend day. Or I watch it in pieces over a few nights. Bob likes to watch movies at any time of day, often when he's doing other things: grading, reading, napping, internet-surfing, listening to music. Also if he's awake he goes downstairs and watches movies in the middle of the night.

A couple of weeks ago he had Frozen River and I had Let the Right One In. We watched them separately and then in an unusual move, traded.

All that long warm up was to say that I finally watched Frozen River last night and it was really good. It's about a woman in desperate financial straits who finds herself in the smuggling business on the Mohawk Indian Reservation. It's a knuckle-biter. Recommended for people who like independent movies.

Update: I wanted to make sure I had the reservation name right since I don't know much about Indians in that part of the country. I think the movie takes place on the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation and Akwesasne Reserve.

Weekend Wrap-Up

All weekend I kept thinking I'd have time later to write an excellent epic post. But that time never came.

So this is going to be a slap dash thematically unlinked post.



I went out to check the garden on Thursday night, excited to see how things were progressing.

These are my cucumbers. The book says not to rush out with your cucumbers. They don't like it when it's too cold.

Well, I guess there's a good argument for reading the book before putting the cucumbers into the garden. I'm going to buy some more seeds and try again.

One of the walls of water collapsed a little bit so I peeked in to see how the tomatoes were doing and they looked like they were desperate to join the cucumbers. I took two of walls down. The third looked fine so I left it alone.

I suck at gardening.



I'd like to get my hands on the guy who decided it was a good idea to make cars honk when the alarm is armed.

I thought the horn was invented as a warning device. When I'm driving through a parking lot and a car honks, I think something is wrong. Or else I'm startled because I'm tightly wound and get nervous when people honk at me.

One of our neighbor's cars beeps when it's locked and unlocked. I'd like to punch that inventor, too.



I've probably already written about this but I hate the sound of my doorbell. I can't believe I haven't pried it off the wall and drop-kicked it into the highway already.

On Saturday morning around 11am the doorbell went off and I was in the middle of something and not feeling like buying something, donating money or talking about Jesus so I ignored it.

Then it rang again.

I thought it might be a neighbor or friend or other person who knows I ignore my doorbell so I got up and pulled the door open. Two ladies with Bibles. Does anyone ever open their front door and say, "Oh goody, ladies with Bibles?"



I need to buy a new purse. I'm not one of those women with a million purses. I have one main purse and I have a couple tiny bags for when I just want to carry keys and money.

It usually takes me six to ten months of looking at every purse under creation before I choose one and then I use it until it disintegrates. I can't remember how long I've had my current one. At least four years. Probably longer.

My requirements are very strict. It has to be either backpack style or slung across the body so I can have both hands free when I wear it. It has to be big enough for my stuff but not too big. And it can't look too weird or trendy or be a weird color. My current bag has a big worn spot so the search begins.



I have some other topics but I think I'm going to clean off my desk. I've been meaning to do that for about six weeks. Who knows what's buried there?

Stingey Jello

Yesterday for Mother's Day we had tacos with crispy shells and Stingey Jello for dessert. It was really yummy.

This summer I'm going to be experimenting with molded foods.

I got the idea from this 1961 party cookbook I got at a book swap. I'm going to make some scans one of these days because this cookbook is all kinds of awesome.

There's a recipe in there for some sort of fish loaf that you mold and when I saw that, I couldn't wait to get into molding things to eat. I'm also going to come up with something else to call it because mold makes me thing of the blue hairy stuff that grows on bread. I'd rather find a spider in my kitchen than mold.

My mother-in-law gave me a ton of molds awhile back and most of them were sitting in a giant bag in the shop. I brought them all in and scrubbed and inventoried them and we are going to be eating things in all kinds of shapes.

For my first effort I used Blackberry Fusion Jello, a can of fruit cocktail and a can of Sprite. As you can see, it turned out a tad liquidy. My mother-in-law gave me my first tip: use a little less liquid than the recipe calls for.

This Just In: Drop everything you're doing and go to the Jello website right this second. I wanted to link to Blackberry Fusion to prove it's an actual flavor and I don't see it, but: you search the flavor finder by color. I'd like to kiss the genius who came up with that.

Future turnips and greens.

Tips for Filling Your Walls of Water

It's been a good weekend but as per always I didn't get around to half of the stuff I wanted to do. I've been so busy I still haven't had time to watch Lost.

You'd think I'd learn to live by my own advice and simply want to do less things. But I can't figure out how to implement that in a satisfying way.

The good news is I'm about 95% to where I want to be on the story I've been working on. It's much longer than my usual length but I think it's coming together.



My best pea crop ever, I hope.

On Friday I took care of some errands and then I zoomed home for a day in the garden.

I planted a bunch of flower seeds. I bought the same exact seeds last year but I planted them on a mild weekend and then we had this freak hot spell, I think it was in April, 90+ degrees two days in a row and that was the end of the flower seeds. I have high hopes for this year.

Then I did a bunch of weeding. Dug out the dead rosemary plant which was one unwieldy carcass who did not give up without a fight. And I put in a new one. I put in some berry starts and got the potato patch all ready to go.



And I planted my first two tomato plants and filled my wall of water. If you've never seen them before, it's a bunch of plastic tubes that you fill with water and make a little teepee for your tomato. It acts like a little greenhouse and helps them grow faster which is nice when you are desperate for homegrown tomatoes like I am.

I love the walls of water but they are miserable to fill and I usually have to wring myself out by the time I'm finished. I thought about checking youtube to see if there was a "wall of water filling tutorial" because they have everything on youtube. But then I thought of an idea myself.

I put the empty walls in one of those 5 gallon plastic buckets and then it stayed up while I filled it. Worked perfectly. So the walls are up. Bob brought me home some more tomato plants today. I dug up a strip of my lawn so I could fit more garden in this year. I am hoping for BUSHELs of tomatoes.

Watch in late August I'm going to be whining about how crazy I was to plant so many tomatoes.



The iris started blooming. I never appreciate them as much as the others because they are so easy to grow they are almost weeds. I dug up about 6 bulbs when we moved from our old apartment to this house. Now I have two giant patches.

I've got a short break before I start getting ready for Mother's Day dinner so I'm back in the yard.

Sideshow Bob

Didn't have time to get to my real post yet and I have a pretty full day planned.

Until then, here's a plant I bought last year to put in this neglected corner of the yard. I've decided to name it Sideshow Bob.

Let The Right One In

If you like foreign films and you like vampire movies, have I got a recommendation for you: Let The Right One In.

I wasn't going to write about it but I kept thinking about the movie yesterday and wanting to talk about it so I'm offering a brief spoiler free review.

I think I first heard about this from Roger Ebert who's in my feeds. Later the Oregonian reviewed it around the time Twilight was out and said this is the vampire movie everyone should go see.

What I like about it is that it has a lot of what you'd expect from a vampire movie but never how you would expect it. I also like that it doesn't hit you over the head with the soundtrack. This movie goes about unsettling the viewer very quietly.

It was made in Sweden and it's about a dweeby 12-year-old kid named Oskar who gets bullied. He gets a new neighbor who's a 12-year-oldish vampire and the two of them begin a strange friendship. I would love to talk about my favorite parts but don't want to be spoiler-y.

Bob is going to watch it next. We'll see what he thinks.

Conspiracy Theories
A couple of weeks ago I wrote an offhand remark about toothpaste and received an anonymous comment about toothpaste conspiracies. Since I love conspiracy theories and hadn't heard about this one I sat down and popped a few queries into my favorite search engine and was sadly disappointed.

I did see a lot of talk about how much sugar is added to major brand toothpastes and since this sounded odd to me I pulled up MajorBrandOfToothpaste.com to see what ingredients are in toothpaste. The site is ugly and giant and about four columns with line after line of informational links which turned out to be a giant exercise in clicking. There was nothing about ingredients. The search tool sucked.

At first I thought maybe it was a trade secret but aren't the ingredients on the box when you buy it?

During the course of this adventure in time-wasting a box popped up asking if I'd be interested in participating in a survey. "Of course," I said because I was anxious for the opportunity to tell someone how worthless I thought this website was.

Thirty-seven questions. (37!) For toothpaste. And you couldn't skip any questions. And some of the questions were like, "MajorBrandofToothpaste.com Has the Most Up-to-date Information on Oral Care" and there was no box to answer, "How the Hell Should I Know?"

Since my question wasn't answered I decided to try CompetitorBrandofToothpaste.Com and they also had an ugly website with things I had to wait to load, a sucky search tool, couldn't answer my question AND a survey. The first page said 1 of 12 so I skipped it.

Yesterday after dinner Bob said he wanted to show me something but he didn't want to tell me what it was because it would be a cool surprise. And we would have to get in the car and drive somewhere.



We drove over to the college and saw this. He was right.



Today was so productive I even cleaned my oven. I would take pictures but I didn't do such a great job. It looks a lot better but it's not museum ready.

I'm having trouble publishing with blogger and am now devoting three minutes to problem solving before I move on to do something else.

This is a test post to see if it's working.