The Misplaced Hoosier

Movin' On Up

2010-07-21T15:06:00.000-07:00

After two years of living with practically no water pressure in the kitchen, a large bump in the living room wall, and horribly, expensively cold winters, the Husband and I decided that it was time to move. I've talked before about the difficulties of renting a dog-friendly apartment in a college town, so I won't rehash this year's adventures in slumminess. Suffice it to say that photos can lie and that slumlords with memorable phone numbers can trick you into visiting their rentals by using a second phone line.

Let's focus on the positive, though, shall we? We are moving to a Lustron home. In case you're not in a link-following mood, I'll summarize. These were houses thought up after WWII as a way of taking advantage of all the surplus steel. They are made of steel, inside and out. Even the walls are steel. We are basically moving into a filing cabinet. But it's a cute little filing cabinet! It's got all these little built-in (steel) shelves and a big backyard and, best of all, a functioning kitchen sink. It's carpeted, which is kind of a downer after years of living with hardwood floors, but the carpeting is new. It is within walking distance of the farmer's market and the library and a park that rents out garden plots.

All of that is why we start moving tomorrow. Our current lease ends at the end of the month. The Husband kept saying how great it would be if we could move in a week early, but then decided not to bother our current landlord about it. But then the current landlord called us, and asked if we'd be willing or able to move out early. At that point, we had already arranged to have all of our utilities transferred and made a reservation on a van, not to mention the fact that I had arranged to visit Melinda for this weekend. But, oh my lord, the water. The slow-dripping water from our kitchen tap, it drives us mad. And moving early would save us money. So we agreed. We get our keys and move a few boxes tomorrow, and the big move is Saturday. And despite the fact that I spent nearly an hour on the phone with AT&T changing our move date - and the fact that rather than holding Melinda's baby and playing with her Wii, I will be crying (literally!) because our couch is really heavy and awkward and we have too much stuff - I am glad that we're moving. Because I am tired of living in a moldy house and would very much like to move into my file cabinet now.

Dear Catastrophe Server

2010-07-04T09:10:00.000-07:00

We have friends here who own a food business, one aspect of which is catering. They don't do a lot of large events, so when they were getting ready for a wedding, they asked the Husband and me if we'd be interested in being servers. We agreed, but I was terrified. There is a reason that I was never a waitress. I have no grace or coordination. Waitresses balance large trays of food and drink (much of it hot!), and walk through crowded rooms, and remove the items from the tray one by one, all without spilling anything. I can barely walk through a crowded room empty-handed without hurting myself or those around me. The meal at this wedding was to be served family style, so I would just be carrying out the platters of food and putting them on the table for the people to deal with. That only meant that when I dumped something on someone, it would be a whole platterful. It was official: I was going to ruin a wedding reception.

Fast forward to yesterday, which was the big day. I'll give away the ending here, and say that I did not actually ruin the reception. My height, or lack thereof, worked against me, since it was hard to reach to get the platters to the middle of the table. I had to sort of shove myself between people to get my arms far enough in, but I don't think it bothered anyone too much. I was kind of slow, too, but overall, I did well enough. (The Husband did fine too, but he didn't have any anxieties about it, and he thought I was weird for being worried.)

On the other hand, I learned the actual reason that I was never a waitress: I am a wimp. We were on our feet for nine hours, and except for a few lulls, we were busy the whole time. By the end of the night, my knees and back were throbbing. There was a point while clearing the tables, that the utterly Sisyphean nature of the task occurred to me (so. many. plates.) and I felt close to tears. (Bear in mind that this was late, and I am a fragile flower who is used to five-hour shifts.) There were aspects of it that were a refreshing change from my job. I really liked how the time flew by and the sense that I was constantly doing useful things. Overall, though I am glad to go back to my day job, where there are far more snot-covered children, but where I rarely stay longer than 7 and a half hours.

Really, though, nine hours was nothing. Maybe what I really am is too wimpy to be a caterer. Our friends who own the business had already been at it for a while when we got there - one of them had gotten up at 4am to start the cooking for the day - and they're going back tomorrow to finish clearing out their stuff. That's not even factoring in the fact that they cooked several of the items in advance. Or the fact that they have two young children who have probably been up since 5am today.

So kudos to all of you working in the service industry. May you have supportive shoes and a glass of something comforting to come home to. And may you never be forced to work alongside me.

Strawberry Picking

2010-06-07T20:05:00.000-07:00

Have I told you about how the Husband is officially a farmhand? I honestly don't remember if I ever mentioned it last year, and if I go look, I'll spend the rest of the night reading my old posts and marveling at my ability to blithely ignore typos in my own writing despite years of work as a copy editor. At any rate, last summer he worked part-time at a farm in the same town where my library of employ is located. This summer, he started working there before his semester was over, and he's now working upwards of 30 hours a week there.

I'm sure you'd guess this, but it's really hard work. For the past two weeks, he has spent significant portions of time driving metal stakes into the ground so that they can be strung with twine to serve as trellises. This in the kind of heat that renders me a wilted, whiny heap of sweat. He's on his way to being totally ripped, and I've taken to calling him Farm Boy and asking him to fetch me pitchers.

One of the jobs that he totally dreaded by the end of June last year was picking strawberries. He claimed that he would close his eyes at night and see red dots. I totally believed him. Why wouldn't I? I hadn't been strawberry picking since I was about 7 years old, when I basically wandered around complaining about bugs while my mom and grandma did all the work. So I should have been suspicious last week when he was all "Wouldn't it be fun to go strawberry picking on Sunday? We'll pick a ton, and make lots of jam!" He swore that it's only back-breaking for him because he has to do it quickly, and that we would be leisurely, and besides, didn't I end up loving blueberry picking last year?

Strawberries, however, are not like other berries. They don't grow in giant bushes, for one. They grow really near to the ground so that you have to hunch and stoop to reach them. Actually that's pretty much the major difference - other than the fact that, technically speaking, they aren't true berries, but science is for nerds - but that one difference is enough. The Husband wanted to pick through an entire 100-yard row, so as to be helpful to the farm even while picking casually, so we picked for several hours. That's a lot of hunching and stooping

Before we left, I realized that I didn't cover the back of my shoulders well enough with sunscreen and that I had sunburn patches. When we had been home for about an hour, I scratched my back, and realized that I had a fairly bad sunburn on the spot between where my pants had slipped down and my shirt had ridden up while hunching. On the bright side, I can say with certainty that my buttcrack was securely covered, since it was still as pale as, well, a fair-skinned Polish lady's butt. On the downside, in order to keep my buttcrack securely covered, I had to keep putting clothing over my poor, throbbing, lobster skin. Aloe can only do so much.

When we had been home for about two hours, I realized that we should probably do something with 30-plus pints of berries, if only so that we could see the table again. Some we froze. Some were made into jam fairly quickly. Some were reserved to be eaten fresh. Some are still sitting in the refrigerator, where I am half hoping that they will mysteriously disappear in the night.

I know it doesn't sound like it, but I genuinely did have fun. Next time, I may suggest that we not do a picking marathon, or at least I will make sure all my skin is covered and/or slathered in sunscreen. But I don't doubt there will be a next time (though maybe not till next year, since strawberries are peaking early here.)

So why am I sharing this with you? First, I want to share my suspicion that the Husband thought that I thought he was wimpy for complaining about strawberries. If I ever did think that, even for a second, I apologize sincerely. Anyone who picks them for many hours in the hot sun, particularly after putting in some stake-pounding time, is truly mighty. Second, I want to state for the record that the next person I hear at the farmer's market talking about how expensive the strawberries are is going to get smacked upside the head. Possibly with a metal stake.

Hair

2010-04-19T13:12:00.000-07:00

My hair and I have not always gotten along with each other. For most of my adult life (and indeed, for most of my childhood too) I have had a hair stylist - someone to serve as mediator between me and my hair. I got my first perm in fourth grade. Eventually (which is to say a decade later) I realized that rather than giving me thick, wavy hair, perms made me look like a poodle. A poodle with fine, thin hair. In college, I switched my focus to hair dye. I wanted to be a red-head. Eventually (which is to say five years later) I realized that red hair dye fades so much that my roots never looked much different from the dyed parts. I was paying more money than I care to think about to dye my shower water. When we moved to the Chicago area, I still had a stylist, because I couldn't quite shake the notion that my hair was unusually bad and needed really expensive attention to make it acceptable. But when that stylist tried to convince me that highlights and lowlights were just what I needed to make my hair seem thicker, I stood firm and refused.

Moving to CollegeTown was the tipping point. We cancelled Netflix, found the cheapest internet plan possible, got rid of our cell phones. We were making all of these changes for financial reasons that turned out not to be that hard to live with. How could I possibly justify a $40 haircut? So I went to Great Clips. And overall, it's been good. Some of my cuts have just been serviceable, but one of my haircuts there ranked among my best haircuts ever.

Which brings me to last Sunday, when the only angst I felt about heading to Great Clips was over the fact that I never have anything to talk about with the 20-year-olds who work there. I dropped in without an appointment, like I always do, and I told the first-available stylist the same thing I always do: "I'd like a bob, about jaw-length. A little bit of layering to add some volume." She asked, "Do you want it to be shorter in the back and get longer as you reach the front?" Other stylists there had done a little bit of that kind of shaping, with no ill effects, so I said, "Maybe a little, but honestly, I just want a bob that I can comb in the morning and not worry about."

By the time I could sense how short she was making the layers in the back, it was too late. I told her one more time, "I really just want a bob," but the damage was done. The back of my head was way, way layered. The front came to two sharp points. Staring in the mirror once I got home (she didn't give me a hand mirror to look at the back the way they usually do), I figured out who it was that she was trying to make me look like:
People, that's Posh Spice. If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, and especially if you've met me in real life, you know that I am not Posh Spice. I am nothing like Posh Spice. The Husband? Nothing like David Beckham. And yes, I do consider that a good thing.

I absolutely couldn't deal with the long pieces by my face, so I cut them. From the front, it looks like I got the plain old bob that I asked for. Looking in the mirror, with pieces of fine, thin, dishwater blonde hair in the sink in front of me, I realized who it is that my hair is actually capable of resembling:
I am self-aware enough to know that in most areas of life, I am way more like Beezus than Ramona. But hair-wise, I'm Ramona all the way. And honestly? In pretty much all areas of life, I'd much rather be a Quimby than a Spice Girl.

How many have you read?

2010-04-16T18:56:00.000-07:00

So Betsy Bird, who writes one of the awesomest children's literature blogs on the interwebs, did this insane project wherein she invited everyone who wanted to to contribute their top 10 list of children's novels. She then compiled all the results - assigning each books points so that if a book was #1 on someone's list it got 10 points, #2 got 9 points, etc. - and posted them bit by bit until she had listed the top 100 children's chapter books. This is, of course, already an insane amount of effort, which she compounded by providing an absolutely fascinating amount of quotes and history and book covers for each of the books. (There is still time, by the way, to participate in the poll for top 100 YA novels being compiled by a different blogger with whom I am less familiar, but who is clearly also awesome.)

At any rate, I am not one to waste the prodigious efforts put forth by others. (Nor am I one to be completely creative with their efforts - I "borrowed" this post idea from the blog A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy, who in turn copied the list from TeacherNinja.) So here is the full 100. The ones in bold are the ones I've read. I added annotations to the ones about which I felt strongly.

I've read 79. How 'bout you?

100. The Egypt Game - Snyder (1967)

99. The Indian in the Cupboard - Banks (1980)

98. Children of Green Knowe - Boston (1954)

97. The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane - DiCamillo (2006)

96. The Witches - Dahl (1983)

95. Pippi Longstocking - Lindgren (1950)

94. Swallows and Amazons - Ransome (1930)

93. Caddie Woodlawn - Brink (1935)

92. Ella Enchanted - Levine (1997)

91. Sideways Stories from Wayside School - Sachar (1978)

Not only did I read this one and More Sideways Stories, but I also read (and absolutely freaking loved) Sideways Math from Wayside School. I heart logic puzzles. I blame that book for my strange desire to get a math minor to go with my English major.

90. Sarah, Plain and Tall - MacLachlan (1985)

89. Ramona and Her Father - Cleary (1977)

In which Ramona's dad loses his job, and 6(?)-year-old Ramona's awareness of the situation is wonderfully presented. Beverly Cleary is pretty much a genius.
88. The High King - Alexander (1968)

87. The View from Saturday - Konigsburg (1996)

86. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - Rowling (1999)

85. On the Banks of Plum Creek - Wilder (1937)
The only thing I remember about this book is the fact that they lived in a house that was dug into the ground. That blew my mind. Still does, in fact.

84. The Little White Horse - Goudge (1946)

83. The Thief - Turner (1997)
Full disclosure: this is one of two books that I read specifically because they appeared on the list.

82. The Book of Three - Alexander (1964)

81. Where the Mountain Meets the Moon - Lin (2009)

80. The Graveyard Book - Gaiman (2008)

79. All-of-a-Kind-Family - Taylor (1951)

78. Johnny Tremain - Forbes (1943)

Had to read in 5th grade. Yuck.
77. The City of Ember - DuPrau (2003)

76. Out of the Dust - Hesse (1997)

75. Love That Dog - Creech (2001)

This book made me weep in the break room of the library where I was working at the time. I am not a public weeper. Definitely worth the humiliation.
74. The Borrowers - Norton (1953)

I had totally forgotten about this book, but I absolutely adored it as a kid.
73. My Side of the Mountain - George (1959)

72. My Father's Dragon - Gannett (1948)

71. The Bad Beginning - Snicket (1999)

70. Betsy-Tacy - Lovelae (1940)

69. The Mysterious Benedict Society - Stewart ( 2007)

I'm not convinced this belongs on this list. Time will tell, I suppose.
68. Walk Two Moons - Creech (1994)

67. Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher - Coville (1991)

66. Henry Huggins - Cleary (1950)

I know for a fact that I read this, but I remember none of it.
65. Ballet Shoes - Stratfeild (1936)

64. A Long Way from Chicago - Peck (1998)

63. Gone-Away Lake - Enright (1957)

62. The Secret of the Old Clock - Keene (1959)

The book was included in the list as a representative for the whole Nancy Drew series. I must say that while I read Nancy Drew, if I were going to include a series not for literary merit, but for sentimental impact on one's life, it would totally be the Baby-Sitter's Club. Nancy Drew has the whole longevity thing going for her though.
61. Stargirl - Spinelli (2000)

60. The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle - Avi (1990)

I bought this book at a Scholastic Book Fair at my school, and tried many times to read it, but never made it very far. Sorry, Avi.
59. Inkheart - Funke (2003)

58. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase - Aiken (1962)

57. Ramona Quimby, Age 8 - Cleary (1981)

56. Number the Stars - Lowry (1989)

55. The Great Gilly Hopkins - Paterson (1978)

54. The BFG - Dahl (1982)

53. Wind in the Willows - Grahame (1908)

52. The Invention of Hugo Cabret - Selznick (2007)

51. The Saturdays - Enright (1941)

50. Island of the Blue Dolphins - O'Dell (1960)

Had to read this in 5th grade. Blech.
49. Frindle - Clements (1996)

48. The Penderwicks - Birdsall (2005)

47. Bud, Not Buddy - Curtis (1999)

46. Where the Red Fern Grows - Rawls (1961)

45. The Golden Compass - Pullman (1995)

44. Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing - Blume (1972)

43. Ramona the Pest - Cleary (1968)

Do you remember that Ramona had a doll named Chevrolet, because she thought it was a beautiful name? Ramona is the best.
42. Little House on the Prairie - Wilder (1935)

41. The Witch of Blackbird Pond - Speare (1958)

40. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - Baum (1900)

39. When You Reach Me - Stead (2009)

Amazingly high on the list for such a new book. I loved it pretty intensely, but it will be interesting to see whether it remains beloved.
38. HP and the Order of the Phoenix - Rowling (2003)

37. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry - Taylor (1976)

36. Are You there, God? It's Me, Margaret - Blume (1970)

We must, we must, we must increase our bust! Also, menstruation was way more complicated before they invented the concept of sticky back pads.
35. HP and the Goblet of Fire - Rowling (2000)

34. The Watson's Go to Birmingham - Curtis (1995)

33. James and the Giant Peach - Dahl (1961)

32. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH - O'Brian (1971)

31. Half Magic - Eager (1954)

This is the other one I read because of this list, and I've got to say that I highly recommend it. I would have adored it even more when I was 9.

30. Winnie-the-Pooh - Milne (1926)
29. The Dark Is Rising - Cooper (1973)

28. A Little Princess - Burnett (1905)

27. Alice I and II - Carroll (1865/72)

26. Hatchet - Paulsen (1989)
25. Little Women - Alcott (1868/9)

24. HP and the Deathly Hallows - Rowling (2007)

23. Little House in the Big Woods - Wilder (1932)

22. The Tale of Despereaux - DiCamillo (2003)

21. The Lightning Thief - Riordan (2005)

20. Tuck Everlasting - Babbitt (1975)

19. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Dahl (1964)

18. Matilda - Dahl (1988)
17. Maniac Magee - Spinelli (1990)

16. Harriet the Spy - Fitzhugh (1964)

15. Because of Winn-Dixie - DiCamillo (2000)

14. HP and the Prisoner of Azkaban - Rowling (1999)

13. Bridge to Terabithia - Paterson (1977)

Perhaps the only book that we read in 5th grade that I enjoyed. It made me weep in public, too, though. Then again, the Muppets Take Manhattan made me weep in school as well, so maybe the whole "I'm not a public weeper" is something of a self-deception.
12. The Hobbit - Tolkien (1938)

11. The Westing Game - Raskin (1978)

10. The Phantom Tollbooth - Juster (1961)
The other book that may have contributed to my eventual math major. Word play, number play, excellent plot. Plus, did you know that Norton Juster is an accomplished architect? Kind of makes you feel like a loser, no?

9. Anne of Green Gables - Montgomery (1908)

I loved this book the way Melinda loved Little House on the Prairie. Megan Follows as Anne in the movies was my Half-Pint. I knew who Colleen Dewhurst was because she played Marilla Cuthbert, and I was excited when she guest-starred on Murphy Brown. Yes, I was 8 or 9 at the time. Yes, I was kind of a weird kid.
8. The Secret Garden - Burnett (1911)

7. The Giver -Lowry (1993)

6. Holes - Sachar (1998)

5. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler - Koningsburg (1967)

Can you believe that at the library where I work, this book hasn't been checked out since 2005? It's in tip-top shape. And yet I refuse to weed it. You just don't weed the Koningsburg.
4. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - Lewis (1950)

3. Harry Potter #1 - Rowling (1997)

2. A Wrinkle in Time - L'Engle (1962)

1. Charlotte's Web - White (1952)
I didn't think I was emotionally invested in this list until it was down to the top 5, and I realized that if this didn't top the list, a piece of my soul would die. This is probably my favorite book ever, and so well-written. E.B. White's essays for grown-ups are also amazing.

Looming in the home

2010-04-04T14:12:00.000-07:00

If you got here because you searched for "Spears Weaving Loom" (and even if you didn't), let me state for the record that this post is light on the nitty-gritty of my experience with the loom. There seems to be a shortage of practical info about it, though, so feel free to leave a comment if you'd like me to elaborate on that side of things.

I first tried weaving when we were still living in the Chicago area. I have knit for 8 years or so now, and I love it and find it soothing, but somehow weaving was different. For whatever reason, I connected with on a deeper level. Maybe it was because I learned how to weave from a woman, in a room full of women, whereas I learned how to knit from the internet. Whatever the reason, I had a sense of doing something that women have been doing for centuries and of being connected to those women. It was all very Womyn Power, in a way that I hadn't ever experienced before.

Fast forward last Thanksgiving weekend, at a gas station in northwest Indiana, where I arranged to meet a woman from Craigslist. For the sweet price of $30, I got a Spears Weaving Loom, Size 4. It's vintage, from the 60's or so, made in England, and it even came with an instruction manual. Here it is:

I'm not going to get into the problems with tension, yarn breakage, and the like that I experienced. ("The like" being a phrase which here means "brief periods of white hot rage and hatred for that stupid loom and stupid yarn and stupid me, followed by longer periods of drinking and crying, followed by moments of joyous self-satisfaction at my genius in problem-solving".) I am just going to say that while I quite like the yarn I picked, it probably wasn't the best for what I wanted. There was at least one point at which I was sure I wasn't going to finish the (damned, stupid, evil, wretched) scarf.

One difference between weaving projects and my other crafty pursuits, though, is put-away-ability. The loom does break down to fit in a box about the size a board game, but not until either the project is finished or I've decide that I'm not going to finish the project. I can stuff a frustrating piece of knitting in the back of my closet for years, but the loom, she taunts me. And since I have more than enough things dwelling in my head to make me feel bad about myself, I decide to prioritize finishing up one of the things dwelling in the physical realm.

All of which is to say, "Ta-da....."

For the record, there will be a next time for the loom and me. With luck, it will involve less cursing than last time.

Music to Keep Your Car on the Road

2010-03-10T18:12:00.000-08:00

The husband and I traveled up to our homeland last weekend to take care of some things to do with the Condo That Would Not Die (or Be Sold). Usually, the husband does all of the driving when we travel to Chicagoland. At some point, I entirely lost my stomach for city driving. Even the Indiana side of things makes me nervous, but making the drive on the interstate through the city is downright excruciating for both of us. I spend the ride flinching and deep-breathing, and generally acting like people with normal anxieties do on planes. And while I am totally fine driving back to CollegeTown (nothing scary there but soybeans and corn), the husband usually offers to do it.

The end result of this is that the husband pretty much has free reign on which cds to bring along with us. Which is usually fine, except for those rare occasions when he actually takes me up on my offer to drive us home, and I am stuck with his choices.

The thing about the husband is that he has good musical taste; he just sucks at figuring out what to play when. In the car, he likes music like The Books (quiet atmospheric music with random sound samples), Stereolab (quiet atmospheric electronica) and Fourtet (quiet modern melodic jazz). He has confused his "Music to listen to while driving" list with what should be a "Music to listen to while writing a paper or getting ready for sleep" list.

I should state for the record that he has his reasons. He says that he likes driving music to be like the musical score moving him through his journey. I couldn't agree more; I just don't think we're driving through the same movie. Proper driving music, as I'm sure you clever people know, should be singable or danceable. Not that I dance in the car, or anyone else for that matter - except, of course, in front of large groups of impressionable children (though I doubt the Hokey Pokey counts). Nevertheless, a good car song should make you regret the fact that you are securely buckled, even as you feel grateful that you don't have to do the shoulder-shaking head bop that passes for dance in your sad, repressed, white girl mind. (Or maybe that's just me.)

Anyway, for your edification (or at least for the husband's), here is my list of top musical choices for a long drive. Please note that many of these rely on singing loudly, and thus being in the car alone. Perhaps that's the problem; perhaps the husband totally belts out pop songs in the car when I am not around to hear. Or perhaps the husband is driving to the score of our life's journey, while I am driving to the pop-heavy soundtrack.

1. London Calling, by the Clash. It is something of a tradition for me to play this on the first day nice enough to drive with the windows down. Oh, Joe Strummer, you are gone, but not forgotten.

2. Cabaret (the one with Alan Cumming as the Emcee). Oh, shut up. A girl can be totally punk rock and totally music theater. It just so happens that I am neither. Whatever; I can replicate Natasha Richardson's English accent to perfection when no one is around to hear. This cd caused me to feel a totally imaginary kinship with her, and I was very sad when she died.

3. Anything by Belle and Sebastian and Fountains of Wayne. It is pretty much a scientific fact that hand claps and perfectly crafted pop songs make cars run more fuel-efficiently.

4. Anything that happens to be on the radio and was popular during the second half of the 90s, when I was in high school. There is absolutely nothing wrong with singing all of the lyrics to Oasis's "Wonder Wall", even if the Gallagher brothers are total tools. Absolutely nothing.

5. Anything by Queen or Fiona Apple. Freddie and Fiona both have a much larger vocal range than me. This does not stop me from attempting to sing with them, or from imagining that I could totally rock their songs at karaoke.

Those are my favorites. What are yours?

Doing My Duty

2009-12-13T13:08:00.000-08:00

Last week, I got to perform that most dreaded of civic responsibilities: jury duty. I say "dreaded", and when people expressed excessive amounts of sympathy, I smiled and nodded and didn't exactly disagree. But honestly? When I saw the envelope in the pile of mail, I was downright excited. They even sent me a notice several months in advance asking when I'd like to serve, and then they accommodated me. My doctor is barely willing to do that.

In the days leading up to my time at the courthouse, though, I started to get less sure. As I pointed out to the husband, the whole concept of a jury of your peers sounds great until you consider the unfortunate reality that is your peers. You know those people? The annoying people who ignore the traffic rules you hold most dear, never turn their cell phones off before the movie, and help keep Fox News on the air? Those are your peers. Should you find yourself in legal trouble, there is a good chance they will decide your fate. It's a bit worrying, really. So on my first day, I was still excited, but a little bit wary.

By 9:30 on the first day, I understood the actual reason that some people dread jury duty. It's not necessarily because of the part where you serve on a jury; it could be the part where you wait around for hours in a freezing cold room only to be told that you don't have to serve on a jury today. I couldn't even bring my current knitting project, because it is on skinny, pointy, metal needles and would render me a threat. On Day 2, I finished the book that I was in the middle of, and started my back-up, only to find that I didn't actually want to read a whole book's worth of Michael Chabon's reflections on manhood. (Perhaps to some of you this conclusion would be obvious, but I actually enjoyed it for about 50 pages. I like Michael Chabon; I just don't want to hang out with his family for 300 pages.) This left me bookless. Bookless! If I have one piece of advice for anyone who might be headed for their own stint in jury duty, it's this: don't let yourself be caught bookless (or entertainment-less, if you're not into the whole "books for pleasure" thing). They may provide you with magazines, but trust me, they suck. Perhaps they put out good ones, but if so, they get stolen immediately. It would be a sad irony to be brought before a jury for stealing the jury duty magazines, so just be on the safe side and pack as though you were going on a trans-Atlantic flight.

On the first day, there was an orientation, where we got to watch a video of a judge standing in the same room we were sitting in and giving a presentation about what to expect. The projected image of the light switch was just a few inches below the actual light switch. It was almost as though they wanted us to think she was a hologram, but weren't willing to invest the time and money into completing the illusion. Anyway, a little while after that, they called a bunch of numbers, and since my number wasn't called I got to go home.

That's pretty much how it went. Someone would call a bunch of numbers. I was #102, so the anticipation would build as I waited to hear if I would be called. I was called twice. The first time, I was part of a large jury pool, but even though a lot of people got dismissed for reasons I couldn't see, my number never came up, and I went home. (Once you're in the jury pool, they call twelve numbers. After the judge goes through some basic questions, the lawyers get to ask questions and dismiss people for undisclosed reasons. As jurors get dismissed, new ones are called to replace them.) The second time, I wasn't part of the initial twelve, but when one was dismissed, I got called to replace her. So I got to be a juror.

And here's the cool part: as a juror, I freed a man! It was a traffic case - basically the person was accused of not pulling over when a cop was signalling to do so. And while there is a pretty decent chance the person actually did it, it was not proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. And ultimately, that's what I want to share. I had my doubts when we were put into recess in the jury room. You're not supposed to deliberate until the trial is over, but people started to ignore that and then say that they hadn't been told. People talked about matters that bordered on the political, and they clearly didn't share or respect some of my opinions. Some of them were just people I didn't really like. But once we were in there actually deliberating, it's like we all snapped to attention. If someone started to speculate about things that were off-topic, someone else would remind them, and they'd stop. Everyone genuinely wanted to be a fair and unbiased juror. It was actually kind of beautiful.

So that's it. Jury duty = not so bad. If my job didn't pay me for my jury duty, I might have a slightly different opinion, but as it stands, I would still be kind of excited if I got another summons in the mail. If it does happen, this time I'll be equipped with plenty of books and a little more faith in the power of peers.

TIBDIOB #1: I Killed the Chicken

2009-12-02T18:30:00.000-08:00

This is part 1 of a potential series: TIBDIOB, or Things I've Been Doing Instead of Blogging. I'm going somewhat chronologically here. Today's topic actually occurred two weeks before Thanksgiving.

So, I've talked before about my proposed Beautiful Life. For those of you not following along at home, my Beautiful Life would consist of a homestead farm filled with various farm animals, particularly sheep and other fiber animals, but also chickens. The husband and I feel perfectly capable of taking care of laying chickens. Chickens, in general, are far less demanding than dogs, and Beckett seems to be doing okay. We were less sure of our ability to raise meat chickens. After all, Beckett is basically our son, and we wouldn't even think of eating him. Besides, as of yet, we have not found any recipes for Fox Terrier au Vin.

But we are meat-eaters, and we both feel very strongly about our decision to be conscientious carnivores. We only eat meat raised by farmers we know and trust, which basically means that outside of our home, we are functionally vegetarians. We have thought a lot about whether we would eventually be able to go to the next level and raise (and thus, kill) our own meat once we reach our Beautiful Life. So when our local co-op offered a chicken processing class at a member's house, we were pathetically - some might say bizarrely - excited.

The class was about the whole process of raising meat chickens. In September, we met the chicks. In October, we met the chickens. And then, in November, we killed them. I won't go into the details of the whole process. I will say that as I watched our instructor do the first bird, I wasn't completely sure I'd be able to do any of it. The whole thing was set up in his yard. In Illinois at least, if you live in a town where you can raise certain livestock within town limits, you can also butcher the animals, as long as you aren't selling them or doing enough to qualify as an agricultural enterprise. (That's an oversimplification of the rules, so don't go processing any chickens without checking your local ordinances, okay?) He had it set up as a four-step process, with a station for each step, and of course, with step 1 being the drawing of the knife. I ended up doing every step at least once, with varying degrees of success.

It wasn't what I'd call a fun time. It was hard, emotionally and physically. But I felt that if I couldn't handle it, I was going to have to reconsider my stance as a meat-eater. Eating other creatures means enacting violence against them, indirectly at least. When we were buying our meat shrink-wrapped in the grocery store, we didn't think about that too much. I'm not going to go into the politics or ethics or morals behind the decisions that the husband and I have made about food. I'll just say that whether or not we end up raising our own meat birds, we do know now that we would be capable of doing so.

I'm going to close with a warning. Kids, be careful what you read. If you had told me when I picked up Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma or Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable Miracle that I'd end up holding a freshly killed chicken by the feet, I'd have told you that you were crazy. Don't even try to tell me that books can't change lives. The husband and I have chicken blood on our hands (metaphorically, at this point), and little but books to blame.

The Case of the Mustachioed Fireman

2009-10-22T19:23:00.000-07:00

Occasionally in my role as a children's librarian, I have the opportunity to contemplate some of life's deep questions. Recently, I had one of those opportunities. While preparing for a firefighter storytime, this question came to me: why are there so many male firefighters with mustaches in children's literature? I assure you that nearly every children's book featuring human firefighters has at least one guy with a mustache but no beard. (Oddly, most grown-up books featuring firefighters features a shirtless man on the cover.) I could leave it to you to find proof of this, but what am I here for if not to save you from needless internet browsing?

First up, a characteristic example.

Often, the mustachioed fireman gets to drive the firetruck. Occasionally, he also gets to wield the axe with which to chop down your door.

See? Even in real life, the mustachioed fireman is an axe-wielder.

In this example, note the mustachioed fireman's joy at the dragon's inability to properly hold the hose.

Does he even want the house to be saved? Are mustachioed firemen agents of evil? Well, maybe not, because here's a Sesame Street example, and, with the possible exception of Elmo, Sesame Street is no place for agents of evil.

This is what I'm talking about, though. Sesame Street taught the world that two guys can live together in an apartment without corrupting anyone, that angry creatures live in the garbage, and that vibrating giggling monsters make good toys for 3-year-olds. Clearly they're open to outside-the-box thinking, and yet they bought into the mustachioed fireman trope.

One last literary example:

Okay, I might have doctored the last one. But still! They're everywhere. And in fact, lest you think the phenomenon is limited to literature, I bring you:

We had this guy sitting on our Fire Shelf at my last library in the Chicago area. His jacket is closed by velcro, and at said library, the velcro had been destroyed by years of use. Most evenings he could be found sprawled on the floor with his coat hanging open, looking like he just finished a bender. I will state for the record that this is the only evidence I've seen that mustachioed firemen drink too much.

So what should we conclude about the mustachioed fireman? Is it a coincidence? A conspiracy? Maybe it's just real life. I know only one actual firefighter, and he does, in fact, have a mustache. And given that he is my father-in-law, I won't say here that he is involved in any mustache conspiracy. On the other hand, I'm not going to say he's not.

I See You, Internet Browsers!

2009-10-14T18:10:00.000-07:00

Until recently, I have not had a stat counter on my blog. A couple of years ago, I designed the husband's professional website (now defunct). At that time, I looked around for one and they all cost money. If I wasn't willing to pay money to see who wanted to look at the husband's art, I certainly wasn't going to pay money to confirm the small size of my readership. But when I accidentally encountered a free stat counter, I downloaded it, and to no one's surprise, I immediately became obsessed with my stats. But it's only because they're totally fascinating.

For example, do you know what brings more people to my blog than anything else? Two words: naughty vegetables. People, why didn't you tell me? Every week I go to the farmer's market and troll for the most entertaining vegetables I can find. Last week, there was a potato that looked like a nipple (not a breast, just a nipple) and a carrot with two legs, one of which was shorter than the other (I dubbed it "Pegleg the Pirate Carrot". Pegleg was delicious in a stew.) The husband and I have a theory that many people actually avoid these delightful quirks of nature. Apparently, the combination of cuisine and hilarity is more than they can bear. I weep for their poor shriveled souls.

Now, I can already hear the cynics among you. You're interrupting me to say, "Hey there, lady. You've been hanging out with four-year-olds for too long. These people aren't looking for your goofy vegetables. They are looking for people using vegetables for naughty purposes." Well, as I've told you many times, I'm a librarian. I am, by nature, a researchy sort of nerd. And I have already seen much of the sleazier side of life on the other side of the information desk. So I took the plunge and Googled "naughty vegetables". I learned two things. 1.) I am the second hit!!! This post may propel me to number 1!! Holy crap, that's amazing! 2.) At least on the first page or two, the hits aren't dirty. Even if you search Google Images, one or two of the images are a bit dicey, but nothing NC-17, at least when I looked.

This means one of two things. Either there is a largely unfulfilled demand for veggie porn, in which case, my visitors are sorely disappointed, or there is a largely unfulfilled demand for hilarious vegetables, in which case, I am at the pulse point of the American sense of humor. You tell me, strangers on the Interweb: which is it?

An open letter to NPR

2009-09-24T17:21:00.000-07:00

Dear NPR,

NPR, I'm going to be right up front here: I love you. I love This American Life and Fresh Air. I double-love Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. I even (and I realize that I am very nearly alone among the under-60 set here) love Prairie Home Companion. My local NPR affiliate is absolutely the bomb, with interviews with Simon Winchester and Glen David Gold and Tracy Kidder, and all sorts of people that make my little intellectual heart go all a-flutter. And while I'm not sure that I love All Things Considered in quite the same way as I love the aforementioned shows, I rely on it. Robert Siegel and Melissa Block keep me company on the days when it is my turn to prepare dinner. And that's definitely something.

And so it is with great sadness that I have to write this. You see, NPR, on the weekends, All Things Considered kind of sucks. And I get that. Things don't happen on the weekends as much as they do on the weekdays. Fewer people listen, so you don't want to waste your big stories. But last Sunday, you hit a new low. A Ron Paul-style low.

Ron Paul has, apparently, written a book. It is all about how the Federal Reserve is stupid and should go away. Fair enough. Any crackpot with a computer can get published these days; why not Ron Paul? But NPR? Just because someone writes a book, doesn't mean you have to interview them about it, even if that someone is an elected official. And it certainly doesn't mean you have to ask for their idiotic opinions about anything, let alone healthcare. And yet, you asked him about just that topic. And what do you know?! He has idiotic opinions! He stated that he doesn't think healthcare is a right, that he thinks we as a nation are confusing 'rights' with 'wants' and 'needs'. Substitute "not dying from completely curable and preventable illnesses" for healthcare in that last sentence, and it'll give a better sense of the implication of that sentence, but whatever. That's bad enough, but here's the real kicker: he goes on to compare people who want health insurance despite pre-existing conditions to people who wait until their house is on fire to seek out fire insurance. This statement went unchallenged.

The problem with not challenging that statement is that it's ridiculous and completely ignores the actual concerns of the uninsured, the underinsured, and everyone else who is angry about our nation's complete failure in the world of healthcare. For Ron Paul's hypothetical to be actually analogous to the health insurance situation as it stands, it would need to be about people who try to buy fire insurance only to be told that the fact that they had a car accident once 7 years ago means they're ineligible. Or even more to the point, people who successfully buy fire insurance, have a house fire, and are then told that they won't be paid anything because they forgot to disclose that they own candles, and that while the company is aware that candles were not the cause of the fire, they are still going to retrospectively cancel the policy.

NPR, I have a feeling that your giving a platform to Ron Paul is an effort to counter the suggestion that you have a liberal bias. But here's the thing: you can interview anybody you want, and conservatives are still going to call you liberal. You're not going to change their minds any more than Fox News would win me over by interviewing Dennis Kucinich. If those of us who choose to listen to you wanted to hear far-right/libertarian points of view, most of us could call certain members of our extended families. The fact is that we don't want to, particularly not when making Sunday dinner. And if you absolutely must interview Ron Paul, we would like you to at least pretend to have a spine, and challenge him when he says stupid things!

Health insurance has long been a special concern of mine. I have blogged and blogged and blogged about it. I have read the heartfelt writings of good friends about it. I have researched it. Despite all that, my health insurance still sort of sucks. So when you play stories like that, and it makes my blood pressure rise, you should be careful, NPR. I just might send you my doctor's bill; heaven knows my insurance company won't cover it.

From Naughty Vegetables to Dirty Tricks

2009-08-27T19:08:00.000-07:00

I already shared about the scandalous vegetables to be found at the CollegeTown farmer's market. Today, I bring you a quick post to show you the further shocking things to be found when you commit to local eating: dead presidents.

That's right, folks. Richard Nixon, jowls and all, is alive and well and living in CollegeTown. Or at least he was until I baked him into a delicious eggplant parmesan.

Buggin' out

2009-08-10T18:05:00.000-07:00

If you're a long-time follower of this blog, you may remember the time we had the termites. It was a dark time, and up to that point, it was pretty much my most traumatic bug encounter. And, really, it still is. There's nothing quite as traumatizing as the combination of thousands of winged insects in your house with the thought of potentially thousands of dollars spent getting rid of them. (They were in a very limited area, so it ended up not being that expensive and was covered by the condo association, but we didn't know that when we were staring at them in horror.) Just because they're not traumatizing, though, doesn't mean I'm happy about our newest roomies here in CollegeTown: ants.

We actually first got the ants at the beginning of summer. At first it was just seeing several of them in various places in the house. We had heard, though, that ants were more plentiful than usual this year, and we just figured it was a coincidence. Then they got into our honey. And honestly, people, even at that point, we were upset, but we didn't want to kill them. What can I say; we're cheap-ass hippies. Ain't no way we're spending money on toxic chemicals. Anyway, ants don't spread disease or do any property damage. A friend suggested putting the honey jar in a bowl of water (a sort of honey moat), it seemed to work, so live and let live, right? Except. They were everywhere. Everywhere! Not in our food, mind you - we protected all the food and they couldn't get to it. But everywhere else. And it started to wear on us.

So I turned to my friend the Interweb, who suggested that we make a bait out of honey, water, and Borax. It wasn't supposed to work overnight (they have to take it back to the nest, which was in our walls, which is so gross), but it really didn't seem like it was working at all. Quite the contrary; it seemed like we were running an ant soup kitchen. But then, finally, after a couple of weeks, it did. They were gone. It was great.

Then, literally the same day that I thought to myself that perhaps we could take the honey out of its moat, there were more. These ants are smaller, and this was after a break of a few weeks, so we think it's a new colony. As I said, we started from a position of being willing to co-exist with the ants. Now, if I could put something in the bait to make the ants explode when they ate it, I totally would. And with each and every little explosion I would chuckle the maniacal chuckle of someone who has been pushed to the end of her rope.

Summer Summaries, Part 2: Summer Reading

2009-07-26T18:31:00.000-07:00

Originally, I planned to write this entry about the library's Summer Reading Program. For those of you not in the know, that is a thing where children keep track of their reading in exchange for prizes. In the past, I have worked at libraries where the whole staff was expected to lose all sense of sanity and dignity in an effort to promote summer reading. At my current library, summer reading is still a Big Deal, but I am the only one planning and implementing it. While I've been insanely busy at times, I haven't been able to force anyone to dress up in silly costumes or engage the children in elaborate games of chance. So, my sanity and everyone's dignity are intact, which is cool, but yet again my awesome job has denied me a good story. (Good stories are one of the very few perks of soul-killingly bad work environments.) Instead, I'm going to tell you about my own personal summer reading. Is that a good story? Maybe not, but it's potentially more interesting than "...and then I made a Reading Log with some really neat clip art!"

It all started when, at some point in the past year, I seem to have decided that I wasn't quite nerdy enough. I don't know exactly how or why this happened. It wasn't a conscious decision. Clearly, being a former academic decathlete who completes logic puzzles for fun and is a librarian is more than enough nerdiness for most people, but I am not most people. I needed a project. A nerdtastic project.

So at the end of last year, the husband and I decided to read biographies of all the presidents. Which is a super way to increase one's nerd quotient, really, except that I accidentally upped it exponentially by getting excited about reading about some of the other people of the era as well. As it turns out, I read a George Washington bio and a Benjamin Franklin bio. Then while I was reading a summary of the events of 1776, I pulled out a replica of a map drawn by General Howe, and my nerd meter exploded. It was too much for me, and while I haven't given up on the concept, neither have I quite committed to taking home a book about president #2.

Then I figured out the problem. Yes, reading presidential biographies is nerdy, but it's not English major nerdy. I was too far out of my comfort zone. And that is why I started a quest to read all of the National Book Award winners. I started with The Man with the Golden Arm, which was the first winner in 1950. (I am a little bit ashamed to admit that I genuinely thought that book was about baseball. For the record, it is so not about baseball.) Then, in an act of craziness that I am still not entirely okay with, I skipped to the 2006 winner, The Echo Maker. I had been planning to read it before I started the project, and the Husband convinced me it would be dumb to wait the two years it will take me to get to this decade. But I have Book Chronology OCD from way back; believe me when I say that I did not discover The Truth About Stacey before learning about Kristy's Great Idea.

This project isn't a super-strict thing. I'm reading other things along the way. Already, though, I can feel my Nerd Power growing. Don't feel too threatened though; 1951's winner is The Complete Short Stories of William Faulkner. It's over 900 pages. Given that it's Faulkner, those 900 pages may contain 20 sentences total.

I may be writing about a new nerd project soon.

Summer Summaries, Part 1: In which I am insured

2009-07-25T19:45:00.001-07:00

This summer has been an extended effort to fight off inertia and general blahs. There has been a steady stream of things that have made me go, "I should blog about that... but then I'd have to get off the couch. Maybe tomorrow." In an effort to make up for my laziness and mild depression, I am introducing a new Misplaced Hoosier Special Feature: Summer Summaries. Join me as I recount the victories and defeats of a summer in CollegeTown. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll long for the days when I fought the urge to blog by taking another nap!

Today's installment: insurance. When last I shared about the Great Insurance Battle of '09, I had been rejected by Insurance Company #2, based on incorrect information. This is going to blow your mind, people, but the insurance company was reluctant to admit that they made a mistake. My doctor's office was extraordinarily helpful, sending off all of my test results and notes and not charging me a dime for all the faxes and phone calls. The exchanges would basically go like this:
Insurance Company: We'll insure her once she gets that follow-up test you recommended.
Doctor's Office: But she got all the tests we recommended.
IC: Okay, but once she's finished with the follow-up, then we'll reconsider.
DO: But there is no follow-up!
IC: Oh wow, that's great! So just call up when the tests are done.

I kept re-submitting appeals, though, and after many tears, several phone calls filled with barely controlled rage, and a few very strongly worded letters, I was finally accepted, with an exclusionary rider on my fibroadenomas. This is ridiculous and kind of scary, actually, but at least now I can get my annual exam.

You want to know the worst part? After they accepted my appeal (read: 3 1/2 months after I first applied), they basically re-submitted my application, which meant that my monthly premium had went up (inflation, dontcha know). It also meant that I had been uninsured for over 60 days. They kept telling me it would have no effect on any preexisting conditions since they'd go with the date that I actually applied, but there is nothing in our shared history to make me think they're honest. And given that I had to call three times before someone figured out that the reason my application wouldn't go through was that I also needed to re-submit my payment info, I have no evidence to believe they're competent. I suppose it doesn't really matter, since my only real preexisting condition isn't covered anyway.

Of course, that's not the actual worst part. The actual worst part is that rather than working to fix the problem and reform the system, Congress is sitting around with their thumbs up their asses while making out with lobbyists from Big Pharma. Meanwhile, most Americans are one major accident or disease away from bankruptcy.

Oy vey. Now do you see why I haven't been blogging? Don't worry; things will get better in the next installment of Summer Summaries: Summer Reading!

Out of hibernation

2009-04-27T18:50:00.000-07:00

Is anybody still there? My, but I have neglected the poor blog. Sorry about that. It's been a rough few months. I've had the "paid-for-a-roof-on-an-unsellable-condo, ants-crawling-in-the-current-home's-kitchen, oh-my-God-I'm-still-uninsured" blues.

But now it's spring! Except for one dark day of snow in April (on which I had difficulty in forcing myself out of the bed, let alone the house), it's been fairly nice, at least by the standards of the Midwest. The husband and I have taken advantage of the weather by starting a vegetable garden. We were hesitant at first. We rent, and we go back and forth about whether we want to move this summer. Finally, though, we decided that there is always an excuse not to do it, and besides, even if we do move it won't be till August.

You may recall that last year at this time, we were still bandying about the idea of buying a farm. I have a confession to make about that. I was never quite as excited about the plant side of things as I was about animals. I am in love with the idea of owning farm animals. I want sheep and chickens and a goat. Maybe even a cow one day. I have read books about livestock, in particular sheep, with accounts of what to do if a sheep expells her uterus during birth (basically, push it back in) and illustrations of swinging a lamb over your head to expel birthing fluids if it's born not breathing, and I still want to experience sheep birth. (Which is particularly odd given that even reading about heartburn during human pregnancy makes me want to pop an extra birth control pill.)

Plants, though? I don't know. They just didn't seem that interesting. They just, like, sprout and then... I don't know, grow some more, right? So I'm a little surprised to say that I have been totally loving it. We started some seedlings inside, along with some garlic and peas that we started in containers outside. The husband has done most of the work of getting the beds ready, and I am in charge of the compost pile. I never thought I could love a pile of rotting vegetable matter quite so much. I still can't bring myself to go near the Spider Corners of our basement and centipedes still make me scream, but I love poking the pile and watching the spiders and beetles and worms scatter. The neighbors probably think I'm insane. They may have a point.

I was not an outdoorsy kind of child. I did not have outdoor chores or play outdoor games. I certainly did not dig in the dirt for fun. But I kind of wish that at some point I had been forced to do some dirt-digging. Maybe I would have found my green thumb sooner.

Again with the insurance?

2009-02-19T17:52:00.000-08:00

So much of the insurance-getting process has felt like the college application process. The interminable form with "optional" essay portions, the sense that one's destiny is being handed over to nameless, faceless, soul-less beasts, and finally the constant checking of the mail.

Two days ago, I got my envelope from insurance company #2. And just as if it were from a college, I looked at it, and could tell by the fact that it was a thin letter envelope, and not a thick 9x12 one, that the news wasn't good. People, they rejected me. What's worse, they rejected me based on incorrect information. They said that I have "a history of removal of left breast fibroadenoma and no followup tests". Now come on, soul-less beasts, info about my follow-up tests is freely available on the interweb. (Also, soul-less beasts, it's 'follow-up', not 'followup'; when providing your reasons for ruining someone's dreams of an affordable Pap smear, don't be afraid to crack open a dictionary, mmm-kay?)

I have two favorite parts of the letter, other than the spelling error. One is the phrase "history of removal of left breast fibroadenoma", like I drop into the surgeon's office every few months and get someone to slice open my left boob and hunt up some lumps. Second is this sentence: "As you may already be aware, we are unable to offer you coverage." They didn't call me about this, and in fact, refuse to discuss it over the phone (even to tell me what, specifically, the doctor's office needs to provide to refute this). My status online didn't change. There is no way that I would have known, unless of course, they mean that clearly I am too disease-ridden to expect any sane company to insure me.

On what is most likely a related note, I had a dream the night before last in which I was trying to plan a storytime on death and dying, but was getting frustrated because I couldn't find the fun ones. I'm sure there's an opportunity for analysis there, but without insurance, how will I ever find out?

Pick myself up, dust myself off...

2009-02-03T17:49:00.000-08:00

After all the analysis, all the tearing of hair, all the frustration, I finally got accepted by the insurance company that I chose – but, get this, I screwed it up. I chose a decent plan with a major company. I knew from the way that their doctor search engine was set up that different plans had different networks. But I had searched a few times, and I did a dumb thing: I assumed. I know that to assume makes an ass out of me (I’ll leave you out of this), but I did it. I assumed that since my other searches had found two hospitals in CollegeTown in the plans, there would be at least one in the plan I ended up with.

In my defense, the assuming happened on a sub-conscious level. It wasn’t until I got the policy in the mail and looked at the brochure of network hospitals that my stomach dropped out and I realized that I had never looked up this specific plan’s network. Regardless, though, I had to start over again. There are a few doctors in the network here, but no hospital and no gynecologists. Out-of-network visits have a much higher deductible and only 50% coverage after the deductible. After I got done crying, I would occasionally wail to the husband “I am soooo stupid!” until he finally got tired of it, pointed out that I kept pointing out that the whole thing is slanted in favor of the companies, and asked, “Do you really think you’re that much smarter than everyone else?” To which I say: well, no, not exactly, except that yes, kind of. It’s not really that I thought I was smarter; it’s that I worked so hard on it. Working part-time left me able to focus a great deal of time and attention on this decision. It’s sort of pathetic that after all that I still screwed it up.

I’m trying to stop thinking that way though. I am focusing on being angry again. Fortunately, I have 30 days to cancel the plan without charges, as long as I don’t make any claims. I’m using that to get reinsured. I picked a different company, filled out another app, and this time got a call from the company minutes after clicking the “Submit to our will” button. (They only write the first word; the rest is implied.) The very nice woman who called transferred me to a surly woman in underwriting, who tried to give me fibrocystic breast disorder in my computer file, and if I had it in the file, I may as well have it in my boobs. Other than that though, things seemed to go smoothly, though I did get that question about whether there is a lump in my breast again. I am hoping to hear back soon, and with luck, I’ll be properly insured by next week. Cross your fingers that I stay healthy and unharmed between now and then.

I work hard(?) for the money

2009-01-29T18:30:00.000-08:00

I have gotten completely spoiled by my part-time job. Generally speaking, I work 4 5-hour shifts each week. Often, at least one of those shifts is worked from home. This is awesome, and I know it. If I didn’t know it before, I do after yesterday. Yesterday, I worked a full day – 7 hours, 45 minutes. That is a whole fifteen minutes longer than a full day at my last job. Big whoop, right? But it damn near wiped me out.

I started off the day with storytime. Wednesday is my big storytime day. First comes Toddler Time. This went enormously well. The toddler group has finally started to blossom into something I can work with and be happy about. During the fall session, I never got more than 4 toddlers and their caregivers, which made it very difficult to get the kids to come out of their shells. Yesterday, I had 11 toddlers. Everybody was happy, and they knew it, and their faces surely showed it. They all danced during the shaker egg songs. They all colored during coloring time. Best of all, they all listened to the stories. Call me crazy, but Toddler Time was, by far, the highlight of both my previous jobs. The lack of toddler enthusiasm at SmallTown Library was seeping away my job satisfaction, so I am extremely psyched to see the crowd grow.

Immediately after the toddlers come the preschoolers. This went well, except for one child who, during the Hello Song, said, “Okay, okay, I get it. Let’s just do the story now.” Which, honestly, is kind of funny, and is also how I sometimes feel about the Hello Song, but this is the second week in a row that he has said it, so I had to tell him to please be polite. (A wrinkled brow, a shake of the head, and a “Please be polite,” are the equivalent, when I am in 'Miss Rachel' mode, of “Shut the hell up right now.” I would tell you what I do when I want to say "No, really, shut the hell up. Right. Now." but so far things have never gone that far. )

Once storytime was done and the craft table was clean, I had a few hours to prepare for a Gross Out program for school-age kids. There were a few scary moments when I thought that the slime recipe (which I have used before) wasn’t working, which would have served me right for not testing it sooner. I finally did get it to work, but then there were a few scarier moments when I realized that I didn’t have enough glue for all the children to make slime. This turned okay when I realized that it would be less messy for us to make one big batch together anyway.

Only six kids came to the program, but they had just gotten out of school and some of them had been served cupcakes at the end of the school day. They were good-natured though, and excited to make slime and talk about poop. We also made a film canister explode using Alka-Seltzer and water, as a slightly scientific illustration of what would happen to us if we didn’t burp or fart. Good times.

And that was my day. Now, three programs is more than average for one day, and school-age programs always wipe me out, but yesterday was ridiculous. I am still in my 20s. I have no children at home. I eat healthy foods. There is no reason for me to seriously consider going to bed at 7:30. The only conclusion to draw is that I am totally, completely spoiled by my five-hour days. I have never felt so lucky in my life.

In which I fight the urge to quote "My Humps"

2009-01-16T18:47:00.000-08:00

I am not going to write about how freaking cold it is, not because I don’t think it’s noteworthy, but because the only sentiments I’m capable of are “Duuuuuuude! It is SOOOO COLD! Oh my god! SOOOOOOO COLD!” The descriptive portion of my brain has been closed due to extreme conditions. I hope you understand.

Instead of inarticulate moaning about the weather, I will bring you further tales of insurance skeeziness. First, some history. I’ll warn you now, if you don’t like lady parts, avert your eyes. Still there? Then here goes.

I have one ongoing medical problem, if you can call it that. When I was 17, I found a lump in my breast. I went to the doctor who said it was probably a fibroadenoma, which is totally harmless, but that it should be removed. It was removed, biopsied, found to be a fibroadenoma and thus totally benign. End of story.

Except that about three years ago, I found another one. I went back to the doctor (a different doctor, who I must say, thought it was weird that the first doctor had me get the first fibroadenoma removed). She had me get an ultrasound, then another in six months, and another six months after that. No change, so no problem.

Cut to this month, when I applied for individual health insurance. Yesterday, I got a call from the company saying that there was “missing information”. They then proceeded to ask me, in about 10 different ways, “Hey, what’s up with your boobs?” Specifically, I was asked at least twice, though in different ways, whether I had actually been told I needed no ongoing treatment. I was asked whether I had ever been biopsied. I had to explain the situation twice. And finally, I was asked the question that scares me: “Do you currently have a lump in your breast?” It isn’t the lump that’s scary. Quite the contrary, it’s the fact that I know the lump is harmless, but that the only answer to that question is yes, and I have no idea what the implications to that are, premium-wise.

The really frustrating thing is that I did not share one thing with the woman on the phone that I hadn’t already written on the application. The scary question was there in black and white, and I already answered it with the scary true answer. And, as I shared with you before, they have access to a document with my entire medical history, which I'm sure contains the same information in convenient doctor-speak.

It upsets me because I think it’s pretty clear they were hoping to catch me. I am relatively well-spoken, completely understand the scope of my condition, and am less scared of the insurance company and its minions than pissed off by them. But if I weren’t as well-spoken, or had a doctor who didn’t explain things well, or didn’t react to anything out of the ordinary by reading every article ever posted to the internet about it, I might have said something, on the record, that could have been used against me. I get that they want to make sure that I don’t have cancer. (Because clearly, a cancer patient doesn’t deserve insurance. Helping people who need it is no way to run a business.) But it seems to me that they also want to make sure that they don't miss an opportunity to squeeze extra money out of me every month.

Maybe I'm getting paranoid. Maybe the cold is getting to me. Maybe it's the effort not to insert "lovely" or "lady" (or both!) in front of the many tempting occurrences of "lump" in this post. But I feel more and more like I'm fighting a losing battle here. It's enough to make a girl move her family to Canada.

Medicate Me

2009-01-07T19:23:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I applied for health insurance. Last semester, I was covered under the plan through the husband’s school. It is a decent plan, and for him, it is an excellent option, but as the wife of a grad student, I was paying quite a bit more money than makes sense. Frankly, though, it didn’t occur to me that I could apply for my own insurance until a couple of months ago. The husband and I have always had the same insurance plan, either because only one of us had coverage through a job, or because one of us had a plan that was clearly better. But even a quick glance at premiums showed that I could be paying a lot less.

Me being a researchy kind of nerd, I did some intense googling, browsed library shelves, and even used library databases to find all of the information about shopping for health insurance that I could. While this did little to help me find a plan, it did leave me pretty freaking pissed off. Did you know that you have a file, held at a single agency called MIB, that is basically like your credit report, only about your health? And that if a health insurance company ever rejects you, or chooses to give you a higher premium than originally quoted, that fact is noted on your record and will stay there forever, impacting all future decisions that health insurance companies will make about you? (You’re entitled to one free copy a year, by the way, which I am totally getting, unless I forget, which is, of course, what they want to have happen. The bastards.)

So now I’m worried. One of the books talked about some companies assigning higher premiums based on seemingly small problems such as seasonal allergies. It’s been a while since I watched Michael Moore’s Sicko, but I remember that it featured a woman who, after being diagnosed with some sort of problem with her reproductive system, was retrospectively kicked off her plan for not declaring that she had went to the doctor about a yeast infection several years back. I don’t have any major medical problems, and none at all that require ongoing treatment, so I would be surprised if I was rejected outright. But I am worried, perhaps to a paranoid degree, that I’m going to get my premium bumped up above the quoted rate, and it’s going to be reflected in my permanent record just like in high school, only unlike in high school, someone other than the principal actually cares.

Not to mention the fact that, on principle, I hate the idea of shopping for what should be a basic right. I hate that I’m gambling with deductibles and premiums and maximum out-of-pocket expenses, balancing the slow but constant money leak of premiums against the potential giant money explosion of an accident or serious illness. And it’s all skewed in favor of the insurance companies.

All of this is to say that I’m very stressed out right now, and if you see me twitching or exhibiting other odd behaviors, please – PLEASE! – don’t call a doctor. At least not until I get my application results

Naughty vegetables

2009-01-06T19:35:00.000-08:00

Generally speaking, I think I run a fairly family-friendly blog. Sure, I use the occasional curse word, but in general I keep things pretty PG.

Which is why I feel ever so slightly dirty about what I'm about to share with you. If this were to get into the hands of the Fox News Corporation, we would soon be hearing about the stunning expose about the depravity to be found at the local farmer's market. Parents, you may want to cover your children's eyes.

We have to forgive the poor carrot. Times are tough. What's a carrot to do with the rent to pay? So he comes to the market, props himself against a wall, and offers to give someone a little company through the night.

But, oh, carrot, there's no need to be crude.

By the way, one of the many reasons I love my husband is that he not only remembered to save this carrot for the two weeks it took for me to get motivated to pull out the camera, he also took the camera away from me and did the photo shoot himself. And I must say, he did a stellar job, particularly since the camera is dying a slow painful death.

Note the bookshelf behind the carrot. It's obscured, but there's some Beowulf there. Because when the husband is not chronicling the depravity of the farmer's market, he likes to rock it Old English style.

Where have all the crazies gone?

2008-12-28T19:33:00.000-08:00

I have been having trouble coming up with interesting posts lately. My life is kind of boring. The job is all right, our house is all right, we still have a condo, and we’re pretty poor. Not much to talk about there. You know what the big difference is, though? I don’t have any time on the reference desk at my job. This is largely because there is no reference desk. It’s just the circulation desk, and they pay me too much to let me do that. If you had told me last year that I would be at all sad about that, I’d have told you that you’re nuts. But I kind of am. A reference desk shift breaks up the day. It’s a good time to do busy work. It lets you talk to people, which, surprisingly, I usually enjoy. And best of all, it gives you good stories.

There are far fewer good stories at my small little library. This is a library where people eat the food that patrons bring in without any worry. At my old libraries, patron food was met with suspicion. “Mary brought this? Is that Friendly Grandma Mary or Crazy Talks-to-Herself Mary? Did we make her pay fines recently? Let’s have one of the pages try some first.” Here, they know the names of just about everyone, and certainly everyone who cares enough about us to bring food. And they know them because they like them, not because they felt obligated to learn them in order to file a better police report.

It makes life simpler and probably safer, but also a bit more boring. Nobody tells me not to worry if there are any disturbances because “I used to be a cop, and I always carry.” (We soon found out that in crazy-speak, “used to be a cop” means “used to be a parking attendant”, and “I always carry” means “this is why your desk has a panic button that calls the police for you”.) Nobody wearing a large dragon pendant asks me to help them set up an email account in the name of “KungFuPinkFloydLennon742” (not the real name, but close). Nobody even asks me for the book that they read once that was blue, or maybe red, and had a cat on the cover, but not in the story.

The hardest part of no desk time, blog-wise, is that I would do some of my best thinking on the reference desk. There were times, such as science fair season, when the desk was crazy busy and I wouldn’t have a second to pause. In general, though, the desk is just intermittently busy. And I find it nearly impossible to get any work done while sitting at a desk in the middle of the room, trying to look approachable. Sure, sometimes I’d be on the desk with someone and we’d talk the whole time, or sometimes I would actually get work done. But a lot of the time, I’d stare into space counting down the 20 minutes until my shift was over and I could go to lunch, and then I would have an idea, and by the time I got home, a post was sitting in my brain, waiting to be put to screen. Not so much now. I’ll have to find a new source of inspiration.

Ho Ho Ho

2008-12-15T20:07:00.000-08:00

At this point, I am two weeks past it, but I’ve got to share the details of the library’s second biggest program (after Summer Reading Program), if only so that I remember. The program is an ornament workshop. It was mentioned on my first day of work as an upcoming thing that is a Big Deal. At the end of September, it was mentioned again as something I should get started on, a suggestion which I pretended to seriously consider and then promptly dismissed. Christmas? In the fall? Ten weeks before the program in question? I’m so sure.

I started to do a little planning in October, but it was November before I really started to get cracking on it. Which probably would have been fine except that what with my other job responsibilities, I wasn’t spending the amount of time I should have. It wasn’t until about two weeks before the big day that the enormity of the thing really hit me. The program is set up so that the kids have 5 or 6 ornaments to pick from. There should be a variety of skill levels, a variety of types of things (i.e., one Santa, one reindeer, etc.) and I felt there should be a variety of materials that the ornaments would be made of. I couldn’t repeat anything done in the last 4 or 5 years. And there needed to be about 75 of each type of ornament. People, that is 375 to 450 ornaments, each with at least one thing that needs to be cut, even if it’s just the ties to hang the ornament

What this ended up meaning was that the last two weeks of November were spent furiously cutting out felt triangles and counting beads and tracing gingerbread men onto cork, and on and on. I developed a callus on my finger where the scissor handle rested. I developed a constant burning sensation in my stomach. And I developed a sense that this was karmic payback for my deep-seated reluctance to help with ornaments as a child. I’ve never particularly liked Christmas decorations, and I was known to get sulky when forced to help out with that aspect of the Christmas production that my family goes through each year. Every time I remembered something I had left to cut, or realized that something I thought was going to be quick was going to take an hour, I pictured my mom rubbing her hands together and cackling.

In the end, it turned out fine. I had been planning six ornaments, but one got cut at the last minute, not that anyone knew, or would have cared if they did. I genuinely feel a bit ambivalent about this much of the library’s resources being spent on a program celebrating a religious holiday, even if we do just focus on the secular. (My predecessor would occasionally do angel ornaments, and while I respect most of her choices, I kind of think if you’re going to do that, you may as well do a baby Jesus.) But the program brings in tons of people who would never come to the library otherwise, and it’s clearly labeled as a Christmas event, so for this year, at least, I turned off my inner alarm bells and rolled with the Christmas cheer. Next year, maybe I’ll be organized enough to plan a winter celebration storytime that features all of the many winter celebrations. Above all else, next year, when my boss brings up the program in September, I promise not to laugh.

Yes We Can!

2008-11-05T18:02:00.000-08:00

I am so completely happy today. We're nearing the end of 8 dark years. I spent my day at work fighting the urge to hug people. I kept reminding myself that if I hugged a McCain supporter, it might come off as gloaty, but it's hard to believe that there are people (the majority of my blood relations, in fact) who aren't swept up in the hope and the excitement. I spent my drives to and from work listening to NPR, basking in the glow of being a teeny part of something huge, getting all teary-eyed every time they talked about how momentous Obama's victory is.

The thing that excites me most is that he refused to run a smear campaign. He insisted on responding to assaults on his character with even-keeled discussion of facts and issues. When he said McCain's name at a rally and heard boos, he didn't smirk or egg them on, he said "Don't boo, just register." So freaking classy. Our president is going to be classy!

Also, oh my god! Indiana went Democrat! Not since 1964 has that happened. The husband and I kept saying that we would weep if it did. Neither of us expected to live to see the day. In the end, we didn't weep, since we were sleeping when it finally got called. But as an undergrad, it was always hard to muster up enthusiasm to vote, knowing that there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell of changing Indiana's stripes. But now it matters! Go Lake County!

Now Obama's just got to stay safe and alive. I have heard several people comment on his safety today. I was in the shower when the husband said he was going to give his first speech as president elect (which was beautiful, by the way - our president is going to be eloquent!), and my stomach lurched. It feels like we're about to enter another FDR era. I so hope that's the case, and I'm so excited to get to see it, but I've gotta say I'm scared shitless that it's going to be more like JFK.

But now is not the time to dwell on negativity. Now is the time to be positive! And on second thought, the thing that makes me most excited is that once again, I am truly proud to be an American. I can reclaim my patriotism without reclaiming an ideology based on fear, hatred, and intolerance of those who aren't like me. So in that spirit, maybe tomorrow I will hug a McCain supporter. Or at least smile and nod. Because, like it or not, we're all in this together, and the rift-healing has to start somewhere.

What's the opposite of phallic?

2008-10-26T17:46:00.000-07:00

I would like to offer kudos to the US Postal Service for its beautiful salute to female anatomy. Oh, they can call it tropical fruit if they'd like. And if it was just the breast-ish kiwi, or the papaya that looks a bit uterine, I could maybe roll with that. And I'll grant that the star fruit just looks floral, and the only womanly link I can think of for the pomegranate is that it looks like it is infested with ladybugs. (Get it? 'Lady' bugs? Ha ha? No? Well, you can't say I didn't try.)

But that guava? I swear that when I saw it on a postcard in the mail, my first thought was "Why is my dentist sending me vaginas*?" (My second thought, in case you're wondering, was "It has to be too soon for another cleaning," but it totally isn't. Yuck.) (I meant my teeth. A cleaning of my teeth, not... never mind.)

*On later reflection, I realized that, technically speaking, it looks like a vulva, but I'm trying to keep the authenticity of the moment.

Settling in

2008-10-22T19:28:00.000-07:00

I have my first program for school-age children at my new-ish job tomorrow, and I've gotta tell you, I'm nervous. I have been working at the library in Jobville (conveniently located in the general vicinity of CollegeTown) for nearly two months, and I was starting to feel like a slacker for not offering any programs for the school-age crowd. But Story Time is a gaping maw that must be fed before all others. When Story Time sessions are delayed by a week because Miss Rachel is new, dammit, and doesn't even know where they keep the shaker eggs, the Story Time moms and grandmas howl. Once you have awoken the Story Time Beast, the children will show up four times a week whether you're prepared for them or not, and they will be left in the room with you, and woe be to the children's librarian who does not have an enticing fingerplay to lead them through.

Oh, and at this library, the Story Time Beast has a sidekick, and it is the Craft Monster. The Craft Monster is present at EVERY Story Time. I had escaped the Craft Monster at all three of my previous children's services positions, but the Craft Monster is wily and doesn't show itself until you have officially accepted a position. The guiding of 10-15 preschoolers through the completion of the craft isn't the hard part, it's finding a series of crafts that fit in with the weeks' themes, aren't too hard to be done without constant assistance, can be completed in 10-15 minutes, and don't require too much prep work on my part. The Craft Monster consumes a lot of glue sticks.

Now that I've got the Story Time Beast and the Craft Monster pretty much under control, however, I've turned my attention to the school-age kids. They are easier to ignore and harder to please. For my first go-round here, I figured I'd go with something I had done before, and planned a Magic Tree House Party. That's a series of books about a brother and sister who travel through time via a magical tree house owned by Morgan Le Fay. (Yes, from Camelot. No, I don't understand it either.) It is quite popular, and has been for years. The program, which is tomorrow, filled up last week, so I added a second session which will happen next week. I got an email tonight telling me that that session is full now. I don't even know what to say about that.

I've got a number of irrational fears that I'll enumerate for your viewing pleasure:

1.) The children who come to the first one will be so bored that they will tell all the children signed up for the second one not to come.

2.) None of the children will come.

3.) Only two of the children will come, and they will stare at each other and blink and not want to do anything.

4.) Most of the children will come, but they won't want to throw paper towel rolls through a hula hoop that is dangling from the ceiling (it's a javelin throw because once Jack and Annie went to the Olympics in ancient Greece), nor will they want to make a toilet paper roll mummy (they also went to ancient Egypt once).

5.) All of the children will show up plus they'll bring friends, and when I explain that registration was required and that I don't have enough toilet paper rolls for them, they will get angry and rebel, and then tell everyone at school that I have a weird obsession with cardboard tubes.

6.) I will forget to buy snacks.

I don't know why I'm nervous. I've done this type of thing many times before. I think it's partly that I am the one and only children's librarian in a small town with a teeny library. If the children decide they don't like me, they may never come back. Also, I get the feeling that they don't usually get this kind of turn-out for this kind of program. Oh, and the person who had this job before me only worked five hours a week, and I worry that I'm not doing four times as much work as she did, and that my boss and co-workers are secretly judging me, and if this program fails, it will confirm what they've been thinking all along. It's totally paranoid (or at least I hope it is), but I think it all boils down to one thing: I really, really like this job, and I don't want to screw it up. So here's hoping the kids like playing with toilet paper as much as I do.

Babies and Obama!

2008-10-07T20:33:00.000-07:00

Substantive posts? Bah, that's for "bloggers" with "something to say". Or people with cameras that "function" so they can take pictures of the beautiful shopping bag they knit in just one week. (That is a record for me. My previous record for finished knitted object was something like three months, so it's worth mentioning.)

Instead of substance, I bring you: Obama holding babies! If you won't vote for him because McCain is teetering on the edge of death and/or totally losing his shit, or because Sarah Palin is almost as informed about the pertinent issues as my dog is, or even just because it is the other side's turn to be filled with rage while listening to our nation's leader, then vote for him because he looks hot holding a baby. Please?

The Telltale Sump Pump

2008-09-15T19:32:00.000-07:00

So it rained in Illinois. Nothing to compare with the hurricanes, mind you, or even the rain that the Chicago area got, but rain all the same. A consequence of the rain is that our basement flooded. The good news is that the house we're renting has a sump pump, so it only flooded a little. The bad news is that it's been pumping its little heart out since yesterday morning.

Have you ever lived with a sump pump before? I don't think I have. In all honesty, I didn't even know what exactly a sump pump did until we moved here. It turns out that what it does is pump. All. Day. Long. Squish-chug. Squish-chug. It's like a really loud, really persistent washing machine. Squish-chug. The exact same rhythm. Over and over and over again. And in a relatively small one-floor house, there is no escaping its noise.

At various times today I have found myself tapping my leg, petting the dog, and washing myself in the shower to the rhythm of the sump pump. When I was contemplating the writing of this, I checked my pulse, half-convinced that it would be beating in time to the rhythm of the sump pump. If the water doesn't go away, I will soon be in a padded room, rocking and twitching to the rhythm of the sump pump.

That may be a possibility. Along with the fact that it's still drizzling occasionally, the problem is that our basement water is seepage from the ground being so saturated. When the sump pump pumps, the water goes out through a long pipe back into our yard, where it goes back into the ground, and eventually back toward the house and through the wall, starting the cycle again. Over and over and over again. Squish-chug.

I am sorry to sound ungrateful, particularly if you're dealing with rain or, heaven forbid, hurricane aftermath right now. I know that the sump pump noise is a small price to avoid flood damage. I'm just wondering if we should check our renter's insurance policy to see if it covers emotional damage.

Everyone poops (but, dude, only dogs eat it)

2008-09-14T17:43:00.001-07:00

Hi everybody! No, I'm not dead. I've been putting off posting for a host of reasons, not least of which is that I was having problems writing an interesting "Here's the story of our move and our new life" type post. And I was whining to the husband (as I am wont to do), and he said, "Um, so don't?" (Actually he said, "Dear god in heaven, stop talking about it and right about something else then," but paraphrasing is everybody's friend.) So, suffice it to say that we're moved, and I'm employed, and more on that another time. Today, though, I want to talk about poop.

Specifically, I want to talk about bunny poop, and its effect on my dog. (I should probably have warned you two sentences ago to stop now if discussions of gross dog habits bother you.) Our little piece of Midwestern heaven is Happy Bunny Land. There is lots of grass and very little traffic, and oh, how the bunnies love it. In our first weeks here, we noticed that the dog, when released into the yard, would sniff around very intently as if on the trail of something. "Oh, how cute," we said to ourselves. "The boy's hunting instincts have been awoken. He's on the trail of something, ha ha."

Then one day, I was out with him when I noticed an errant piece of dog poop. Next to it was a little pile of bunny poop. I went to get something with which to correct the situation, and when I came back, the rabbit poop was gone. The dog had been sniffing there, and the only reasonable conclusion to draw is that the dog ate the rabbit poop.

I fully realize that asking the bunnies of the neighborhood not to poop in our yard is like asking the kindergarten teacher not to bring in paste. The fact that my dog is not the brightest crayon in the box is not the fault of the rabbits (or the squirrels, or the raccoons, or whatever else may be providing my dog with mid-day snacks). And it doesn't seem to make him sick or anything. I just wish that he wasn't so intent about the whole process. If he thinks there's some in the vicinity he will ignore everything (with the notable exceptions of his tennis ball and the word "treat"), until he tracks it down. We feed him, play with him, allow him to share our home, and yet we lose out to rabbit crap. It's enough to make me weep. Or gag. Or, I don't know, fix the gap in the fence that lets the bunnies in.

On reflection, I think I'll stick to weeping and gagging.

Choose Your Own Damn Adventure

2008-08-05T19:10:00.000-07:00

First off, a rare bit of good news: we found a home in College Town. It has a yard, and no weird smells. We are cautiously pleased. Now, on with your regularly scheduled blog installment.

When I was about 8 or so, I became enamored with the Choose Your Own Adventure series. You know the ones - you would read a few pages and be presented with a scenario, such as "Suddenly the lion rushes toward you. If you wield your backpack as a weapon and charge toward it, turn to p. 48. If you turn around and run as fast as you can, turn to p. 15." (If you still don't know the series that I mean, you can stop by your local library which, depending on your property tax base, is likely to either have the shiny new reissues of the series or extremely tattered copies of the originals. )

Here's a childhood confession for you all: when I would read these books, I would carry around a little spiral notebook - at least one of which was a pink Lisa Frank notebook of the sort most girls used to write about unicorns or draw Luke Perry's hair. Whenever I would come to a decision point, I would make note of the page it was on, and the decision I made. So in the above scenario, I would write "Page 5 (or whatever) - p. 15" (Even in my imagination, rushing a lion was not going to be my first choice.) I would proceed in this manner through various choices until I reached an ending ("The lion quickly overtakes you and swallows you in a single gulp. You died. The End."; there was no sugar-coating in these books, at least according to my memory.) At that point, I would go back to the last choice in my notebook, and try the one I didn't pick. Once I had attempted all of the options in a given scenario, I'd cross off the entry in the notebook, and go to the one before it on the list. In this way, I would progress through each and every scenario.

I share this with you not just to let you marvel at my nerdiness, though it truly was (and is) spectacular. No, I want to illustrate that from a relatively early age, I was not comfortable with the idea of the path not taken. In case you were wondering, the husband and I have not sold the condo. Early on in this process, the husband would begin to say, "If only we had kept renting" and I would say, "Hush, you. Nobody knew what would happen to the housing market." But lately I am finding myself wondering if, perhaps, we should have turned to the page that involved running far, far away from this place.

The thing about those books, though, was that there were a very limited number of endings, and there were always multiple configurations that led to the same end. And looking back, there were things in our scenario that are easy to conveniently overlook. Like the roach that we saw as we were moving out of our last apartment, in which we had never before seen a roach. And the fact that we really really love this place, and we are letting our stress make us forget that. I have a feeling that if our life was a Choose Your Own Adventure book, there would be a page that went: "You and your husband sit in a room filled with boxes, thinking about the disaster that was your last few weeks in this home. You are also sad because moving sucks! THE END" And no matter what choice we made, we would keep coming back to that.

Or maybe it would go, "You and your husband stand in your new CollegeTown home, surrounded by boxes. Tired and sweaty, you push your couch into the perfect location and think that whatever else happened, it is okay, because it brought you here." Here's hoping we're just a few page flips away from that one.

The Impossible Dream

2008-07-29T14:59:00.000-07:00

In the past two weeks, the husband and I have been to CollegeTown four times. We have clocked well over 24 hours in the car, and heaven only knows how many miles. We have seen trailers on blocks currently rented by "collectors of things" (i.e., people who live with piles of garbage stacked around their beds). This taught us to always ask for pictures or drive by the property before going to showings. Driving by a different property, we saw a couple actually brawling in the street. This taught us that CollegeTown neighborhoods are not uniformly nice, and prompted the following conversation:
Husband: Oh my god, he knocked her down, didn't he?
Me: No, she threw herself at him and fell.
H: Is that why they [the person or people who lived in the place we had an appointment to see] had swords on the wall?
Me: Sssh, don't talk while I'm cancelling appointments.

We have planned ways to scrimp and allow us to pay more rent, only to open the door to CollegeTown's larger slummy apartments. Frankly, we are at the end of our ropes.

Some of you may not have gone apartment-hunting recently, or at least not in a college town. When you are a dog-owner, you tend to see the world of apartments in three tiers. Tier One is for those of you ~~without a soul~~ who choose to live without a furry ball of love. Sadly for us, you have access to the nicest apartments. I get this. I really do. My first off-campus apartment smelled like dog pee from the previous occupants the entire time I lived there, and honestly, I was probably lucky that that was the worst of the damage. College students often don't properly care for their pets. A pet who isn't properly cared for can ruin a place right-quick. So fine, no Tier One for our little family.

Here's the one that throws me though. Tier Two is the world of cats-only apartments. And that I don't get. I just don't. I like cats. Were the husband not opposed, I would own at least one cat, and it would be named after a poet (Auden if it's gray, Yeats if it's ginger, and I could go on but I won't), and I would be a crazy librarian with a variety of pets named after literary figures, and that would be grand. (By the way, Beckett is named after Samuel, the playwright, because you just don't name a dog after a poet.) So I am not against the concept of a cat in an apartment, but cats only? The fact of the matter is that dog waste is no worse than cat spray - one might argue the contrary, in fact. Even if you have a cat who does not spray, cats have an in-born instinct to scratch. It marks their territory and files their nails. It's a damn fact people; Wikipedia says so. At any rate, there are many nice apartments in Tier Two. But not for us.

Then there's Tier Three. If you are a landlord with more than a couple of rental properties, apparently your thinking goes like this: "Complex A is a shitbox. May as well allow dogs." I can see that hardwood floors and a 50-lb dog might be a bad combination. But if you have carpeted the place anyway, why not allow pets? Please, for the love of all that's holy, allow pets. If you're renting to undergrads, there's a good chance there's going to be an irremovable puke stain on the floor, and you'll have to change the carpet anyway. (Or promise to change it, hoping that your unsuspecting future tenant won't make you write it in the contract.) To be fair, Tier Three also includes places rented by landlords who only own a small number of properties. They don't have to turn over 100 units in August, and thus they feel they can take the risk on pets. Our hopes rest on these types of landlords, or on people trying to back out of a lease they signed in April. But those types of places get snapped up fast and are often expensive. Or else you get there, and you see exactly how much a camera can lie and exactly why a moderately priced place near downtown is still available.

So that's where we are. Looking at shitboxes, while trying not to weep openly. There are nice places, but our budget only stretches so far and we are searching from over two hours away. You will notice the complete lack of discussion on the topic of buying. I look at what we wanted a few short months ago, and smile fondly at how cute we were. We have not given up on sheep and chickens, but we are trying to be realistic. We have allowed our dreams for the future to be put on hold and our expectations for the present to shrink. We know we missed the prime time to find rentals. All we want for this year is a clean place, where we can let the dog out at night without investing in pepper spray and, come spring, we can begin to search for our dream home for next year. Please, Tier Three, won't you come through for us?

Hanging on the Telephone

2008-07-13T10:20:00.000-07:00

The husband and I just spent a few days at his parents’ house. One of the things that always amazes me when I’m there is just how often their phone rings - at least 20 times a day. I can't imagine having that many conversations, mostly with different people, every day. Somewhere along the way, I have become a phone-phobe. I don’t know why. When I was in high school, other than family-enforced breaks for meals, I would pretty much spend all of my non-school waking hours on the phone with my best friend. Stephanie went to the same school as I did. We would see each other at lunchtime and in several classes. Somehow, though, it didn’t seem at all weird to spend nearly every waking minute with a phone attached to my ear, listening to her breathe as we watched Friends or The Real World or whatever godforsaken form of entertainment appealed to us at that moment.

Then we went to college and I spent a year or two working for my university’s survey research center. I would call up randomly generated phone numbers, and ask questions designed by various government, academic, and other non-profit organizations. Working there, I learned that a certain brand of citizen assumes that any information gathered about their life would be recorded and entered into a national database accessed by the liberals, and they have no problem shouting at you to make sure you know that they're onto you. While doing a survey designed by the admissions department of the school, I also learned that one gentleman thought that my school was populated by lesbian witches. He knew it was true because he saw a sign for a lesbian witch meeting on a bulletin board during his one visit there. As much as I wanted to find out where and when those meetings were (my hermaphrodite drug-user meetings were getting a little dull), I couldn’t ask him because I had to keep to a carefully worded script.

I still enjoy giving and receiving calls from friends and family, but I think the job conditioned me to associate most phone calls with hostility and anxiety. Which makes it especially painful that I am basically tied to the phone at the moment. I applied for a job in CollegeTown, and got an initial interview. It was a panel interview over the phone. Combine their speakerphone with my crappy cell phone reception (we don't have a landline here, a mistake I don't intend to duplicate), and you get a recipe for frustration. I am waiting to hear if they heard and/or liked enough of my answers to grant me a second interview. I am also constantly waiting for a call from the real estate office requesting a showing. So my cell phone is usually in my pocket, and I find myself visiting it if I leave it alone in a room for too long. And that, perhaps even more than the fact that I want to be able to afford to buy food once we've moved, is making me really wish we could sell this place and that someone will just hire me already.

Stop and Smell the Smoke

2008-07-06T13:44:00.000-07:00

Dear fellow residents of my over privileged suburban neighborhood,

Hello! How are you? I wanted to take a moment to congratulate you on your financial windfall! No, I don't know you, at least not those of you who don't live in my building. But I know you must be really really rich because you spent six solid hours basically blowing up paychecks in a cloud of noisy smoke on Friday night.

I have to admit, I don't understand the point of fireworks. Well, professional fireworks I get. They can be quite pretty and impressive. But the ones you set off at home? They're expensive - more so in Illinois, since you have to drive to Indiana to buy them. And they're really not very pretty. And they leave smoke-scented garbage littered all over the street. Not to mention the potential for maiming.

To be completely honest, I never really cared one way or the other about them before we had the dog. I have to make a confession. Originally the dog didn't care about fireworks either. And then one year, we thought we'd see our town's fireworks display and since the dog had heard fireworks before without caring, we figured we'd bring him with. But apparently, the combination of the loud noise with being able to see the explosion caused something in him to snap. We went home feeling like the worst pet owners ever, and since then he has been terrified of fireworks.

Which kind of makes sense, when you think about it. Friday night was surreal. I am fortunate enough to say that I have never been in an actual war zone, but I have to imagine that our neighborhood sounded like one, with explosions literally every few seconds. I just don't get why this is how we celebrate our nation's birthday. To remind us of past wars? Frankly, who needs a war to take off limbs, when the combination of beer and explosives can do it right in your own backyard?

But I forgot about you, neighbors. I just have one question. If you honestly believe that midnight is a super time to grab another bottle of beer and blow some more stuff up, then why not do it in front of your house? Why come to the playground, which is, coincidentally, right in front of my house? The dog was already huddled in our closet, shivering violently. Did you really have to make him pee on my husband's shirt?

Also, while walking through the town's downtown yesterday, a woman in a cocktail dress burned me with her cigarette as I was walking by. It was an accident, but she didn't even know it happened, and I was so taken aback that I didn't even say anything until she had passed. It's just further proof that you all need to learn a lesson. So, neighbors, I'm taking away your lighter privileges. I don't care if you spent this month's mortgage payments on fireworks and cigarettes. You can spend the time cleaning up that mess you made. And if I hear any lip from you, I'm going to make you pay the dog's therapy bills.

Peaches come from a can...

2008-06-27T12:46:00.000-07:00

Getting ready to move does funny things to your mind. We haven't even got to the point where we're deep in the throes of packing (which are less sexy than the throes of passion, but feature just as many noises), and we're already starting to think of things in terms of boxes. As in, that dictionary is like a third of a box; why don't we sell it?

Selling books is something we haven't done before, but this move, we were determined to cull the collection a bit. We have made over $200 selling books. This is really cool and exciting until you stop to think about how much we paid for them initially. We have decided not to do that, and so we're still excited. We are down to two bookshelves, the books in our built-in cabinets, and our cookbook collection, which for us is downright paltry.

The alternative to selling is, of course, donating, and we've done an awful lot of that lately too. Everything is up for grabs. The bigger an item is and the closer it gets to go time, the more tempting it is to get rid of. The ice cream maker was even considered. It's got to be about a quarter of a box, especially since it's an awkward shape and nothing can be put inside of it. In the end, it got to stay because it provides sweet, delicious, homemade ice cream, and what other appliance does anything that cool? (Immersion blender, I'm looking at you.)

Ultimately it doesn't matter. We have so much stuff, and we are people who try to keep our lives as simple as possible. We don't have knick knacks. But we do have a couch, and three chairs, and a loveseat, and two desk chairs, and two bookshelves, and a bed, and a mattress, and box springs, and a dresser, and a night stand, and, well you get the idea. The husband was telling me about a guy at Columbia College who was doing some sort of project documenting his efforts to only have 100 things. Food didn't count, I don't think, nor did things built into his home (the toilet, for example). But just think of all the things you need just to eat a meal: silverware, plate, clothing. If you count each thing as a single item, it adds up fast. I'm sure it must be a freeing way to live. I know we've been trying to move in that direction, but I don't think we'll ever get that far. Although I might change my tune on moving day. I bet you fit all 100 things in, like, 5 boxes.

By the way, do any of you remember the band The Presidents of the United States of America? Their big hit was "Lump" but they also had a minor hit in "Peaches". Every time the husband and I talk about moving to the country, in my head I have to add "Gonna eat me a lot of peaches." This isn't doing good things to my psyche. Just thought I'd share.

Things I Have Been Doing Instead of Blogging

2008-06-18T13:17:00.000-07:00

1.) Making peace with the overwhelming presence of termites. They are confined to our back stairway, completely external to the actual unit. Thanks to them, we might get a nicer, less moldy and horrifying back stairway. So yay termites? Well, maybe not, but at least they're not eating the floor beneath me. (Knock on non-termitey wood.)

2.) Revising my novel. Back when the husband and I were not getting lucky in Kentucky (we had sex, mind you, but that was about the only positive thing we had), we did this thing called National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo to the cool kids). We did not do it in the official month of November, but we did it, and both produced a novel. The husband hated his, said it wasn't cohesive, and used certain plot elements in the jottings that he does when he is in a writing mood. Mine was pretty cohesive, actually. And not altogether bad.

The thing about NaNoWriMo, though, is that you have to write a certain number of words (1,500, I believe) every day for a month. Every. Single. Day. So towards the end, I started to get a little bit punchy and just throw in elements of my own life. I have been meaning to go back to it for a while now, and this period of intentional unemployment seemed as good a time as any. Honestly, it's not awful. If all goes according to plan, I'll finish revising it in the next few weeks, and maybe, possibly, hopefully send query letters to agents. I hesitated to share this one, but a little peer pressure wouldn't hurt here, so don't be afraid to nag me.

3.) Knitting far overdue socks.

I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out, but they took absolutely forever. I went for weeks without working on them because they pissed me off so much. But now they're done, and they're pretty, so yay. Onto the next pair. These are starting off late, so we'll see when they actually get done.

4.) Losing all sense of time management. When I started, I had lists every day, and I got shit done. Somehow I lost that in the past two weeks or so. I am much like the children whom I used to lead in storytime. I need structure. I need someone to say, "Hey, just a few more minutes of cover letter time, and then we'll do a story!"

5.) Not getting employed or selling a condo. I am trying to stay upbeat and positive, so I'll say no more there.

Why I Can't Stop Crying

2008-05-21T13:28:00.000-07:00

I don't usually blog while crying. This isn't my diary; it's a public forum, even if my public is somewhat limited. People don't want to read about whatever spat the husband and I just had, at least not until the point when I gain some perspective and see a little bit of humor. Today, I am making an exception. If I waited till I stopped crying, it might be a very long time indeed before I posted.

You may remember that we're selling our condo. On Sunday, we had an open house. Only two or three people came, but that's not why I'm crying. We found out that our buzzer is broken, but that's not why I'm crying either. That evening, while I was finishing dinner and the husband was talking on the phone to a friend, he started noticing little bugs with big wings. They were all in the vicinity of the south wall of our living room. They looked a bit like ants, so we were a bit worried, but we killed all the ones we saw, and didn't find any more. All was right with the world.

Until today. In the past hour, I have killed at least 15 of these little bugs with big wings. And now they are along the north wall of our office. I put some rubbing alcohol in a bowl and dropped a few in, and googled "ants big wings". And guess what? Our ants? Not ants at all. In fact, it looks very likely that our ants are termites. Termites, you see, have big wings when they go out to seek love and shelter. They will shed the wings after mating, and then settle down to lead a happy of life of destroying the lives of wood-owning humans. I have already found two with no wings, and am hopeful that they are genetic freaks and not freshly sated lovers. Yes, that's right, I am at a point where I am just hoping that the swarming insects in my house haven't gone all the way yet.

They may or may not have been brought in through the cocoa shell mulch that our slovenly neighbors purchased and left in the main entryway. They may or may not be the kind of termites that eat houses. (Apparently there are kinds that don't). Does it really matter? Would you buy a condo with termites crawling in it, if the owners promised that the termites were just visiting and totally didn't want to eat the beautiful vintage wooden hutch or the gorgeous hardwood floors? Oh, and by the way, your visitors will have to throw rocks at your windows to let you know they want to come in. But really, the place is cute!

I am trying to stay calm. The internet has led me astray before. The husband is still at work, and there is a chance he will come home and convince me that I'm loony. But I've killed five of these things while typing this, so I think we might have some kind of problem regardless. So I'm sorry to blog while crying, but you know what? It's my decaying condo, and I'll cry if I want to.

Weirdest thing ever? You decide.

2008-05-16T15:02:00.001-07:00

People, I just saw something so weird, I just learned how to embed YouTube videos so that I could share. Check this shit out.

So that's Mark Bittman (the ever so awesome food columnist from the New York Times), Mario Batali (the red-faced, Crocs-wearing, Iron Chef-competing TV chef), Claudia Bassols (the, well, I don't know what she is, but she's pretty and seems to be foreign), and Gwyneth freaking Paltrow (dude, if I need to tell you, you should probably not be wasting your time on my plebeian ass). On PBS. On a reality show. That takes place in Spain.

The preview (in case you don't watch the whole weird thing) features Michael Stipe and an architect who the husband would have recognized immediately but I didn't. Am I alone in wishing that this was on right now so that I could stare at it in joyous wonder? It's just so weird!

Full blog post in the works, by the way. I was out of commission with a really bad cold for the first part of my first week of freedom. When my sinuses get pissed off, they pin me to the couch.

The Unemployment Chronicles, part 1

2008-05-15T14:59:00.000-07:00

As of last Friday, I am officially unemployed. Yay? Yes, yay! Unemployment, when it is voluntary, is awesome.

My last days were great. Really, for the most part, I liked everyone I worked with. There was an exception, but why dwell? I got a very kind letter of reference from a co-worker who also brought her kids to storytime. I got three gift cards, two potted plants, a box of chocolates, several photos, and several cards, handmade and otherwise. I had a very nice party, at which I was given a duck puppet (a very nice, expensive Folkmanis puppet - hey, it's a professional resource, people) and a few other sundries. I won't even dwell on the fact that they made me take the balloon arrangement home, causing me a very stressful drive home, as I am inordinately afraid of the sound of balloons popping. It's a lovely balloon arrangement, and it is still decorating my car, because I was really hoping the balloons would die out there while I'm safe in here. (I don't know if it's happened yet. Unemployment means never having to use the car.)

Now I'm done, which has been great, except for the fact that my first three days of unemployment would have been sick days regardless. It's lucky for the husband that he's still working, because I am terrible to be around when I'm sick. (I know that it is not at all lucky for the husband that he's still working, but I am trying to Stay Positive.) I become obsessed with my symptoms, checking on their progress at disturbingly short intervals and updating anyone stupid enough to fake a small bit of interest. I looked at my throat with a flashlight about a thousand times last week. I even looked up my nose to see if I could figure out if my sinuses were swollen. (They were, I think.) I could write a dissertation on the progress of my mucus. Don't worry though; I won't. I feel better now, and my obsession with my vital signs dwindles with the symptoms of illness.

Anyway, I had a week of blissful unemployment. This week is the beginning of more industrious unemployment. If we want to continue eating when we move to CollegeTown, I'll need to find employment. And if we want to have shelter from the elements, we'll need to start exploring housing options. So that's my job now. But I still get to do it in pajamas.

One Condo For Sale! (Do I hear a dollar? A nickel? A penny?)

2008-05-03T07:51:00.000-07:00

All right, people. Just so you don't think I have both neglected and forgotten this blog, here is a list of post ideas I began writing in my head, but never got around to typing:

- The plumber seems confident that our bathroom fix-up will be super quick! Maybe we won't need a hole in the wall!

- There is a hole in our wall, and the kitchen cabinets are on the floor.

- How hot is it that the husband knows how to use dry-wall, and did so, rather than heeding my suggestion to call a hole-fixer-person?

- Please buy our condo!

- No, really, please buy our condo! There are no holes in its walls any more, I promise.

So you see, I have only neglected the blog, not forgotten it.

To bring you all up to speed, the condo is on the market, my last day of work is next Friday, and we don't know anything about where we will live or where I will work in the summer or beyond.

The thing that is stressing us out and taking over our lives is the condo. We have re-caulked the tub, re-grouted the kitchen tiles, re-dry-walled the giant hole in the wall left by the plumber, and re-painted the kitchen to be less salmon and more limey-lemon. We have learned that selling your home is a process designed to make you feel that everything about your day-to-day life is abject and worth hiding. "You hang your clean laundry to dry in your bathroom? Gross!" You leave your dishes in a plastic rack to air-dry? Ew!" "You own a knife block? Don't let anyone see!" And, best of all, "Half of your windows are exposed to the outdoors? Oh my god, you guys, what's wrong with you?"

Before this, the concept of cleaning windows was an abstract one. I thought of it a bit like I think of bikini waxes - I understand that there are people who do that type of thing, and I have nothing but respect for their desire to keep a tidy appearance, but I never thought I would be someone who would spend my time in that particular manner. Our realtor had other plans. The windows were pretty much the first thing she mentioned. (My bikini area has yet to be commented on, but I wouldn't be too surprised if it was on her list somewhere.) And since the husband did all of the kitchen-painting, I got to clean windows.

We are lucky to have windows that you can pull forward out of the frame to clean the outside, so it really wasn't that bad. In fact, the worst part is that since there is no screen on the top half of the window, when you pull that top half into the room, there is nothing between you and the outdoors. I spent my cleaning time humming loudly, talking to myself and occasionally yelling to try to scare off any birds who might be contemplating a visit to our condo. In the process, I think I managed to scare off any neighbors who might be contemplating a polite greeting the next time I walk by their home, but really, I didn't want to talk to them anyway.

So that's where we stand. Now that we are leaving it, our home is cleaner than it has ever been before. Every day before we leave, we hide anything that might cause a potential buyer to think we are dirty people. We also hide the knife block, which, in fairness to the realtor, I will admit is done so that weirdos can't use its knives as weapons. I would say that that's a sad commentary on our times, but let's face it, there were probably people in the '50s who would jump at the chance to attack a realtor. It's probably better that it's hidden anyway. If the realtor asks us to clean or fix one more thing, I might be tempted to do some (non-fatal) attacking - of myself, if nothing else.

A Heartfelt Plea

2008-04-11T22:42:00.000-07:00

I hate to use my public forum to take care of a personal problem, but I need to take a minute to straighten something out with Johnny Depp. Allow me to explain. Last week, the husband and I were on vacation to celebrate our anniversary. I use the terms 'vacation' and 'celebrate' lightly - we spent most of the time doing things to ready the condo for sale, looking for houses in CollegeTown, and hanging out with family. These things had left us more stressed out than we were before the vacation. So when Melinda emailed to see if I could come watch Sweeney Todd, I declined. The husband and I were going to be all couple-y. In the email, I uttered (typed, really) the following ominous sentence, or something like it: "Perhaps Johnny and I are not meant to be." That was a mistake, and I realize it now.

Before I get too far ahead of myself, I should explain what I had in mind for the remainder of the vacation. I thought perhaps we would find a beach and walk along it hand-in-hand. (Yes, this is the Midwest in early April, but dream with me, people.) I thought we would find a coffeehouse and engage in spirited but intellectual debate before lapsing into silence and staring lovingly into each other's eyes. I did not think we would get a lesson in plumbing, Murphy's Law, and why you shouldn't live in a building from 1911.

On Friday, while I was in the shower, the husband noticed that our desk lamp was acting weird. When he examined further, the bulb exploded, and popped the circuit breaker. The husband went downstairs to fix it. And thus our adventure began. Rather than finishing my shower in peace and sitting down to a relaxing evening, I watched as the bathroom light went off and on and off and on again. (Our breakers aren't labelled.) Then I heard an "oh crap." While the husband was downstairs he had seen water dripping. After a lengthy series of tests involving taping over drains and turning on and off various configurations of faucets, we determined that it's the shower. The shower pipes are ensconced behind the wall. To fix this problem, we will either have to remove the bathroom tile and put a hole in the shower wall or take down the kitchen cabinets and put a hole in that wall. Bear in mind that we figured this out over the course of our last two days of vacation, and that solving this problem will require either the spending of $1,000+ dollars or an entire day of the husband working closely with his father. Neither appeals to anyone involved.

Now, Johnny, I haven't forgotten about you. We need to talk. My husband says that the paint being worn away near the drip probably means it's been happening for a while, but I know that you are behind this. You were, after all, in Crown Point, IN shooting a movie recently. That is right over the state line, and very near to where my parents and siblings live (parents and siblings who could tell you my address, I might add). And your exposure to movie set design and special effects would make it relatively easy to fake some eroded paint.

Look, I know that it must have hurt when I said we weren't meant for each other. But Johnny, here's the thing. I'm married now. And you've got a little thing going with that nice woman from France, right? You just can't spend your free time shimmying up my shower pipes and committing vandalism any more. Plus, Johnny, you were never really mine, were you? You belong to all of the people of the world who like men (and especially the aforementioned French woman). I belong to the husband, and that's for the best, since he also belongs to me. We've got the papers and everything.

Johnny, you'll always have a special place in my heart. I'm sorry to have hurt your feelings, and I forgive you for causing us a giant headache. But you need to leave the husband and me in peace. It's really what's best for everyone.

Actually, Johnny, wait a moment. If you want to make it up to us - and I'm sure that you do - I know of a beautiful 2-bedroom condo for sale. It's in need of some small repairs, but what's a little plumbing between former soulmates? Call me; we'll work it out.

Major Life Changes

2008-04-02T18:37:00.000-07:00

Goodness, but I've been a horribly negligent blogger. I apologize for that. In my defense though, Major Life Changes are afoot.

The husband has gotten accepted into graduate school with a tuition waiver and a stipend. This is super exciting, of course. For too long, we have come home after hellish commutes, tired from our jobs - of which mine is frustrating and his is soul-crushing - to a dog who is sad because he's been alone for nearly 10 hours. But no more! Now we will live in CollegeTown in the central part of the state. We will own a house! We will not deal with traffic! We will own chickens!

Have I shared about the evolution of our dreams? Remember alpaca? That was so four months ago. We moved on to thinking we wanted a few acres with some sheep. (They are more affordable, among other things. I'd be happy to elaborate, but I doubt that you care.) And while we always wanted plants and chickens, those things became more important. So we visited CollegeTown to look at land, and the thing that we realized is that to buy an affordable plot of less than 10 acres, we are probably going to need to be a bit too far from campus. So we talked and drove around and eventually decided that a house in the vicinity of campus with a relatively large yard for a vegetable garden would be fine, so long as we could have chickens. Shortly after resolving to Google "CollegeTown chicken ordinances" when we got back, we drove by a house and saw two chickens, strutting and pecking and generally looking chicken-y. Sure enough, Google confirmed that chickens are allowed in CollegeTown.

So we're pretty excited. We will be more excited if someone buys our condo and/or I get a job. In my weaker moments, I get entrenched in the more negative, anxiety-ridden aspects of it all. But life is about risk, right? And someone will buy the condo and someone else will hire me. It will work out. And when it does, we will be much closer to our Beautiful Life, in which we are hipster hippies who buy nothing from the Man but implements with which to screw him.

Can You Fire a Dentist?

2008-03-07T16:17:00.000-08:00

Why am I posting the horrible tooth photo again? I'm glad you asked. Let me tell you all about it.

On Saturday, my temporary crown fell out again. That is not a huge deal in and of itself; I would abandon my mouth if I could and I don't expect dental implants to show more loyalty than I do. So I called the dental office's emergency line on Saturday evening and left a message, but no one called back. That was strike 1. I called back again and sent a page. No one called back, not that evening and not Sunday. Strike 2. It wasn't causing any pain as long as I kept it from the cold, so I figured I'd wait till Monday. On Monday when I called, which was after the office had been open for 90 minutes (I was in programs most of the morning), no one was even aware that I had called the emrgency line at all. Strike 3 - you're out a patient.

Actually I was upset, but I would have been somewhat mollified if someone had explained or at least apologized when I came in to get it fixed on Tuesday, but no such luck. I am getting my permanent crowns put in there - they're already paid for - but after that I'm done with that office. Of course, that would be a greater statement if certain Major Life Changes weren't going to force me to find a new dentist anyway, but I can say no more about that right now. (I will say that I almost changed that "force me" to a "force us", but screw the husband and his stupid mouth. Mr. 'You Do Have a Cavity But It's So Small We'll Just Fill It Today Without Novocaine' can tag along to whatever dentist I pick.)

Anyway, my mouth is better for the moment, but my mood seems to have been damaged for the week. Probably not the best condition to enter the annual ritual known as Staff Institute Day, but what can you do? At least this library has the decency to close for the whole day, unlike some other libraries I've worked for. Today was all about self-improvement, as we learned about recycling and did yoga. Actually, it wasn't so bad. The absence of mostacholi nearly gave me a heart attack. I was afraid the midwestern food police were going to burst in and give us a citation. Perhaps we got a pizza exemption. Actually the administration's efforts to force us to interact with people who we don't normally see meant that I only had to bite my tongue a few times around the one person at my workplace who drives me batshit crazy. And really, that's a very good thing - until I get my permanent crown, I am trying to avoid biting anything.

Dear god! Is that a tooth in your hand?

2008-02-29T18:46:00.000-08:00

Why no, it's not a tooth, but that's an excellent guess. Not even I have reached the level where my teeth just randomly fall out of my mouth. It is, however, a crown. And while I was told that the crown was temporary - never meant to stay in my head for more than a few weeks - I was also told that it would stay in my head until the next time that I went to the dentist. And friends, as you can tell from the picture, I was lied to.

The crown in question is a temporary that had been in my mouth for three weeks when I went to the dentist on Tuesday. Its time with me was supposed to be coming to an end, but there was a problem with the permanent one, so back went the temp. Also entering my mouth on Tuesday was a filling and another temporary crown. I was told not to eat sticky things and not to floss the temporaries, and then I was sent on my merry way after a mere three hours of dental hijinks. (Yes, you read that right -three freaking hours. Also, the hygienist said I have fat cheeks, leaving me with the opening to say "They were a hell of a lot thinner before your incompetent ass stuck the suction thingie to them for an hour and a half," though I didn't. But I digress.) So Wednesday morning, while I was eating oatmeal (oatmeal, a food safe for infants and the elderly, but apparently not for me), my tooth hit something, and it was my crown.

After I spent a moment feeling with my tongue to see which of my many dental implants I had lost and establishing that I was not in pain, and after crying the type of hysterical weeping that comes naturally upon realizing that somebody up there really does hate you, I finished my breakfast and called the dentist's office. And after another hour spent there (that makes four hours there this week, for those of you keeping score), all of my teeth, real and fake, are back where they belong. But seriously. Do any of you out there have anywhere near this degree of tooth problems? Because at this point, when I tell people at work, they just say (or at least I can see them thinking), "You had to go to the dentist again? Do you ever brush your teeth?" And even though I know for a fact that I brush and floss twice a day, and even though I have cried plenty of real, honest-to-goodness tears about the genetic curse that is my mouth, it makes me want to cry some more.

Lighting the corners of my mind...

2008-02-21T21:21:00.000-08:00

Children today all seem to have their television rationed, and as good of an idea as that is, I kind of pity them. As a child, my television consumption wasn't really limited all that much (or at all, really). A co-worker and I were comparing notes on our childhood viewing though, and we realized exactly how weird and disturbing these shows were. It also made me realize that I have always had the sense that nobody else watched these shows. Clearly that's not the case. So here we go. Do you remember the 80s?

Pinwheel Honestly, I don't remember much about this show except that it was like Sesame Street, only instead of an American street, it took place in a Canadian house (most of Nickelodeon was recycled Canadian tv at that point). More important is the fact that, in my head at least, it's the first show I watched when my grandma introduced me to cable. Ah, memories.

Today's Special A mannequin (Jeff, I think his name was) would come to life every night (I think his hat was somehow involved) and engage in hijinks with a store employee, who was human; Sam the night watchman, who was a puppet made to look like a human; and Muffy, a puppet mouse who, I think, talked largely in rhyme. What was the fascination with living mannequins in the 80s? Mannequin was weird enough, but I feel that the addition of creepy humanoid puppets takes it to an entirely new level of disturbing.

Zoobilee Zoo Technically, I was too old for this show when it was aired on PBS, but my brother was right at its target age. It starred Ben Vereen (I think - but if I googled each of these shows, I'd end up on a downward spiral of nostalgia-induced marathon YouTube viewing) and other humans dressed as animals. My brother, showing remarkable insight for one so young, was absolutely terrified of this show. The mere sight of the credits would bring him to tears. In fact, if I did it right, I could sing a bit of the theme song ("Zoobilee Zoo, Zoobilee Zoo. Magic and wonder are waiting for you") and he would cry like a baby. And this, friends, is why siblings should really never be left alone together.

Clarissa Explains It All Technically from the early 90s, but oh my God, I still think this is one of the best shows ever (based solely on my disturbingly detailed memory of it). Remember how Clarissa loved Johnny Depp? Remember Sam and Ferguson? Remember how she would create computer games? Remember when she and Sam wrote their school song ("Thomas Tupper Hii-igh" - why oh why do my brain cells cling to these stupid songs?). I loved this show so much that I was willing to believe for at least the first season or two that Sabrina the Teenage Witch was a good show for a 15-year old to watch.

You Can't Do That on Television This show was so twisted. It was one of the few kid shows that my parents enjoyed as much as I did. There was one episode where communists took over and the green slime was turned red. (The slime was dumped on anyone who said 'I don't know'. Why? I don't know, but why question greatness?) The intro credits referenced Pink Floyd's The Wall. Crazy shit, people. And yeah, yeah, everyone talks about how Alanis Morissette was on it, but that show was all about Lisa and Christine. (On a weird note, at about the same time, Dave Coulier, supposed inspiration for the song "You Oughtta Know" was on a show called Out of Control, in which he was already in his late 20s, at least. Both were originally produced for the small world of Canadian children's television. Do you think that's how they met? Ew! In my own remarkable show of insight, I thought he was a total tool when they showed the reruns on Nickelodeon.)

As you can see, once my parents got cable, I embraced it wholeheartedly and never looked back. And there is my childhood in a nutshell. Probably I also spent some time outside or socializing with family and friends, but sometimes the brain has to prioritize and decide what to let go. Apparently Clarissa and Ferguson acting like babies because they think their mother is pregnant outranks the first time I rode a bike. Go figure.

Ode to a Weiner-Licking Dog

2008-02-14T20:12:00.000-08:00

Valentine's Day is just not that big of a day in this house. The husband is all "I don't need to be told what day to tell you I love you." That's fairly valid, since he's pretty good about being sweet and romantic, and also he is in the process of preparing a vegetable lasagne for tomorrow, the noodles of which he made with his own hands, which pretty much excuses anything. However, it means that much as I love him, he is not my valentine. You want to know who is? Here's a hint:

That's right, my valentine is Beckett the dog. Beckett, also known as Mr. Puppy and The Boy, was given to me by my parents when I got my undergraduate degree. Little did they know they were buying their only grandchild. Though the now-husband, then boyfriend, did not approve of him at first (he thought he only liked big dogs, but we showed him), he soon realized that Beckett is the son he didn't know he wanted.

Beckett is the weiner-licking dog mentioned in my profile. I know what you're going to say - aren't all dogs, or half of them anyway, weiner-licking dogs? That's true, but my dog licks his weiner on command. It's his own fault, really, that he was taught to do this. He learned that oftentimes when we would say 'oops,' it meant there was food on the floor, and now whenever he hears the word, he comes running. This caused us to realize that it is relatively easy to get him to do on command those things that he already wants to do anyway. So, the husband had an idea, and a week later, if you said "Lick your weiner," the dog would obey. The husband's only regret is that he didn't teach him to do it on the command "Go to town".

This is not his only talent. He can identify and retrieve most of his toys by name (as in, "Get your moose.") He lets us know when there are people in our yard. (We've chosen not to tell him that the "yard" is actually the softball field for the elementary school across the street.) He protects us from such dangers as the paper shredder and any and all other dogs that we happen to encounter as we tred life's path. He does an awesome Princess Di impression:

And he is skilled at camouflage:

And finally, thanks to his dislocating his shoulder when he was 2, he can, when forced, poop while balanced on three legs. (Think of that as you view his pain):

So happy Valentine's Day, Beckett. You are the best dog we could ask for.

Pissing in the wind

2008-02-10T20:07:00.000-08:00

So I lied about telling about the dog. That will happen (with pictures and everything - you'll even get to see his Princess Di impression!) but today I want to talk about the elections. You see, I've got something to tell you. I'm feeling guilty for hiding things from you, my invisible blog friends, and I've decided to share my dirty little secret. So here goes... in a primary year where I had a choice between a woman and an African-American, I really wanted to vote for a white male. Dennis Kucinich won my heart in college, and even though I'm a different person than I was back then, he still has it.

You see, I want to vote for a candidate who isn't afraid to say that gay marriage is okay. I want to vote for a candidate who talks with candor about poverty and the hellish mess that is our education system. In short, I want to vote for a candidate who says what he thinks - and, let's face it, who thinks what I do. I am fully aware that the only reason Kucinich's ideas get any respect whatsoever is that he's a white male. (Not that anyone in the mainstream will publicly admit to him being anything more than a crackpot, but he would most likely not have any voice at all were he female or a minority.)

So that's what I think of when I'm in my happy place. In practice, I think that my prime wish is for a president who can say what s/he thinks without dividing the country. And that is why Obama was my candidate. He did vote against invading Iraq, way back when it was a political risk to be against taking immediate, albeit poorly thought out, action. He gives speeches that make people excited about hope and change. Most of the high school students who registered at the library last month were talking about him. I want that kind of integrity and inspiration in the White House. Unfortunately, the reality of his campaign has left a lot to be desired. All that idealism needs to have some ideas to back it up. More ideas than "Hilary is so totally establishment".

Actually, after all that, you know what I really want? I want not to be pissed off every single time I listen to the news. I'm not sure that anyone could really provide that (I have some anger management issues to work through), but I don't know that anyone could be much worse than Bush. So that's really all I'm asking. (Oh, and please, please, please, no Huckabee!)

Blame it on the Plague

2008-01-27T21:29:00.000-08:00

It's no excuse for my extended blog absence, but I have been struck down for most of this week with a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad cold. The type of cold where on the first day, when I came home from work after a drive home spent shivering violently with what I later found to be a 103.3 fever, I was pretty sure I had the flu. The real flu, not the thing that people call the flu but is really just some random virus. But then the next day I was able to get off the couch and eat something, which does not happen when you have the real flu, as I know from when the husband had it two years ago. I did, however, run a borderline fever for so long that I became convinced that the thermometer was broken, but no. Apparently my bronchial tubes and sinuses were under attack, and I was burning from the heat of battle. I am feeling better, though - good enough to go to work tomorrow and face the toddlers, at any rate. Even though it was probably one of them that got me sick. And even though this is the second time I've been sick this winter, and I should really get some extra days, because that's not fair.

Anyway, onto other things. I am knitting socks for someone. Never fear, non-knitting friends, I am not about to turn all knitting-blog on your asses, mostly because I knit so slowly that I would post even more rarely than I do now. But I want to say that this has been the most frustrating project I have worked on since I started knitting. Perhaps it's because I still had a high temperature yesterday when I started on them, but I have had to backtrack over and over and over again. They are a present for someone, and the husband suggested that when they're finished (he was being optimistic), I should present them along with a soundtrack of me making them so they could identify the techniques. ("Oh, so that's a goddamn stupid motherfucking short row. How lovely.") They are toe-up, which is the trickier way to knit socks, for me at least, since you have to use a weird cast-on. And then, I was online double-checking something about the stitch pattern I was using, and saw someone refer to it as a pretty easy four-row pattern. Which was a problem, because what I was doing only had three rows. So I had to undo the whole thing.

And if that whole paragraph sounded like "And then I had to put flibbety-flabber in the diddly-doo," then I'm sorry. Join me next time, when I'll share the Tale of the Weiner-Licking Dog. And unless they cause me a great deal more hardship, I won't mention the socks again except to maybe post a picture of them when they are finally all done.

People let me tell you 'bout my best friend...

2008-01-13T20:56:00.000-08:00

If one determines one's best friends based on the amount of time spent with them, then surely my dentist ranks right after the husband and the dog. Last year, I got a crown, two onlays, two fillings and a root canal. There would have been more, but at a certain point even the generous benefits plan from the husband's soul-sucking job begins to buckle at the seams.

The problems began... well, at my conception, really. Sometimes I feel cursed genetically. If there is a medical issue on either side of my family, I seem to have gotten it. I have a sneaking suspicion that somewhere within me lurks a renegade prostate, waiting to cause bewildering problems in my middle age.

One of my genetic blessings was apparently crappy teeth. My husband will attest that I take good care of my teeth. I floss regularly. Yes, I have a sweet tooth, but I also have mouthwash in my desk at work, so shouldn't the two balance out? Apparently not - just ask my dentists, of which there are many.

The absolute worst was the first dentist that I picked out myself, in the town where we currently reside. The husband and I had moved for my job, and he was still unemployed. I stupidly thought that since I had no mouth pain, I must have no mouth problems, and I didn't sign up for the expensive dental insurance I was offered. But this dentist not only informed me that I was on the verge of a mouth apocalypse, but would also tell me that any pain she inflicted on me was "good for getting ready for childbirth" or "nothing compared to childbirth". I got some fillings and one very expensive crown from her, and vowed never to say no to dental and never to go to a dentist who was openly thinking about my womb.

After her came my current dentist, the aforementioned best friend. I feel confident about his ongoing plans for fixing all my mouth problems, though I will say that he insanely slow. And he seems to think that I see him so often because I want to be there, like he works at the corner pub or something. He'll tell me about new equipment that the office gets, or talk to me about the town library, or whatever, when honestly, stepping into the door of that place makes me grumpy and irrational and generally unfit for conversation. They have tvs in each of the dental cubicles, and my usual appointment time is during the Gilmore Girls on ABC Family. And all I want to do is seethe silently about how I never remember to put lip chap on even though I always need it after the first hour of holding my mouth open and how lame all of Rory's boyfriends are, and he's all "So what percentage of the town library's budget do you think comes from fines?"

But he hasn't mentioned childbirth once, so my teeth and I will continue our visits until the benefits run dry or my mouth is fixed, whichever comes first.

And I'm proud to be an American...

2008-01-08T21:58:00.000-08:00

So I was going to talk about my dental adventures, but then I spent an hour trying to figure out what's wrong with the dog (either nothing that a little honey couldn't fix or HE'S GOING TO DIE!!!! depending on which crazy internet person I choose to listen to) and then I spent another hour looking at shoes on Zappos, and then ordering the ones I had put in my cart yesterday. So you are spared for today.

Anyway, I'm actually more inspired to talk about the wonders of being a voting registrar anyway. (Choosing something positive over useless kvetching?!?! Weird, I know.)

I am a registrar for the county I work in, and today was the last day to register to vote before the Illinois primaries, as well as the day of my evening shift. I was a little worried going in, given that my training consisted of this exchange with the head of adult services (HAS):

HAS: Hey, Rachel, are you a registrar?

Me: No.

HAS: You wanna be one?

Me: Sure.

HAS: Sign this.

Me: Okay.

HAS: Read this sacred oath out loud.

Me: Okay.

HAS: Congratulations! You're a registrar.

And that was a year ago. But it turned out well. It turns out that all it takes to be a good registrar is decent penmanship and an ability to fill in forms. And it was so exciting! All these high school kids came in, and several people who had been naturalized recently. It made me all teary-eyed on the way home. I heard on the radio that several New Hampshire polling places ran out of ballots and had to rush to get more, and that record numbers were expected. And apparently we had to get more registration forms today, because we were taken by surprise by the onslaught. So as divided and angry as the country feels politically right now, at least it has brought forth this desire for involvement and participation, and a desire to get off our asses and do something. It's really a beautiful thing. Even if it is sprung from a collected desire to cancel out the votes of everyone we disagree with. So, for today at least, I am very proud to be an American.

(So proud that I'm not even going to discuss how irritated I was by the media discussion of Hilary's 'display of emotion'. She's not my candidate, but for the love of all that's holy, are we still at a point as a nation when a single unfallen tear from an established female politician can get us all talking about women and their hormones being dangerous for international affairs? It's enough to... no, wait, I'm not discussing this.)

And I'm sorry if that song is in your head, but it's in mine too, so there.

Happy New Year!

2008-01-01T09:24:00.000-08:00

One of the best things about the end of the year is the constant stream of top ten and top 100 lists. In that spirit, here is a link to the 10 Best Animated Movies for (Traumatizing) Kids. Now, I read the whole list, because I am a dork from the 80s, but all I ask of you is that you read #1.

http://www.cracked.com/article_15070_10-best-animated-movies-traumatizing-kids.html

Crazy disturbing, right? But the little blurb doesn't even tell you how disturbing it is. My friend Jessie lived in Japan for a few years, and is currently working in the anime industry. I told her about this, thinking she would say, "Oh yes, what an odd little bit of cultural flotsam." Instead she said, "Oh yeah, the tanuki. Those are real animals. Raccoon dogs. They really do have giant testicles, and supposedly they fight with them." (And if you didn't follow the link before, you totally are now, aren't you?) So apparently, they are a wild animal that has a whole mythology behind them in Japanese culture largely because of their giant testicles. And if all of that isn't testicle-tastic enough for you, check this it out from the Wikipedia article about tanuki:

A common schoolyard song in Japan (the tune of which can be heard in the
arcade game Ponpoko and a variation of which
is sung in the Studio Ghibli film Pom Poko) makes explicit
reference to the tanuki's anatomy:
Tan Tan Tanuki no kintama wa,
Kaze mo
nai no ni,
Bura bura
(Roughly translated, this means
"Tan-tan-tanuki's/Raccoon-raccoon-raccoon dog's testicles, there isn't even any wind but still go swing-swing-swing".[1] It then proceeds to continue for several verses, with many regional variations. It is sung to the melody of an American Baptist hymn called Shall We Gather At The River?.[2])

They sing about tanuki testicles to the tune of Shall We Gather at the River!!!! My childhood was empty!

On that note, happy new year! This is a crap holiday, if you ask me, but enjoy it anyway. Especially if you like football, a character flaw for which I will forgive you, just this once.

The Mental Meanderings of a Sleep-Deprived Sicky

2007-12-13T15:10:00.001-08:00

Do you know what I love? I love movies where actors with no previous singing careers sing. I love them! I fully plan to see Sweeney Todd, not just because it is a Tim Burton movie, but because I want to swoon when Johnny Depp and Alan Rickman sing. And Sasha Baron Cohen, too, I guess, although not so much for swooning really, but the other half of the fascination is the whole "Wow, look at that famous person sing in public. Neat!" thing, so yes, Sacha Baron Cohen too. And Helena Bonham Carter, for that matter.

The main point, though, is Johnny Depp! And Alan Rickman! The Husband pointed out to me once that in Love Actually - which is a bloody brilliant movie and I don't want to hear opinions to the contrary - Mr. Rickman wears glasses that cause him to bear an unfortunate resemblance to Sally Jessy Raphael. This is sadly, but hilariously, true, and has been a sticking point in my appreciation. But the singing! It will cure me! (In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I was already cured, and if you want to know how, follow the chain of links to Alan Rickman reading my favorite Shakespearean sonnet. Although, in all honesty, it's my favorite sonnet because it's kind of funny, and he's probably reading it a bit too seriously, but oh my god, just listen. Seriously. I'll wait here.) So anyway, all that is to say that I'm looking forward to Sweeney Todd.

Do I seem weird today? I feel like I seem weird. I'm using a lot of exclamation points, and I normally try to keep my fangirliness hidden away where it can't embarrass anyone. I have been home sick for the past two days, though, and I am getting a bit stir crazy, I think. I am genuinely sick, but not the type of sick where you can't get up from the couch. It's the kind of sick that is nice for a day or two, because I feel sick enough that I don't feel guilty about skipping out on work, but not so sick that I am praying for death. But it's getting old. As much as I love the husband (and I do, even more than Johnny Depp), I think I need outside human contact. One of the things I like about my job is getting to talk to a wide range of people. So while it has been lovely sitting on the couch knitting and listening to the This American Life cds that a co-worker lent me, I am ready to get out of the house. I am also ready to get a decent night's sleep after two nights in a row of practically no sleep, thanks to a horrible, dry, hacking cough. Nyquil wasn't working, so I tried a homeopathic cough syrup called Chestal today. I don't trust homeopathy, really, but then I don't trust the drug companies either. Still, though, I am half-afraid that this syrup will kill me, or at least make me throw up, which I hate.

By the way, why do all the cough syrups promise to thin out your phlegm to ease congestion while also suppressing coughs? Personally, I just want my cough suppressed for the night, and I promise I will fight phlegm tomorrow. But assuming that my phlegm is thinned, shouldn't it be removed somehow, before it thickens again? And wouldn't my body's instinct be to cough it out? Isn't this counter-productive? Won't someone please think of the phlegm?

Storytime Improprieties

2007-11-29T18:40:00.000-08:00

On the way out of toddler storytime, most of the grown-ups (who are mostly moms, but there are exceptions, including some nannies, so grown-ups is what I go with) will have their child attempt to say good-bye and thank you. This is fine. It garners me hugs, gives me a chance to have one-on-one time with some of the less forward kids, and shows that I know their names (or helps me learn them). And generally, we all understand each other's boundaries.

This week, though, a mom asked her child to tell me he loves me. Parents who read my blog (or if we're being frank here, parent who reads my blog): please, please don't ever try to force your child to tell the librarian, or any other provider of childcare/entertainment, 'I love you'. It's one thing when your child says it on his/her own. Kids don't know what it means, and in their innocent ways, they probably do love me, much as they love the ice cream man, Dora the Explorer, and anyone else who never tells them no. Grown-ups do know what love is. I think I can speak for the profession here when I say we do not want to sit with your child and say that while we really, really like him, and we think things are going great between us, we just don't think we're ready for love. It's not him, it's us. No, actually, it's you, weirdo mommy.

While I don't love that child in particular, I do love storytime. I love the children as a collective whole. So I'm sad that next week is our last week before storytime break. When storytime goes away, so does my job satisfaction. And it doesn't pick back up again until late January. Blech.

On a different note, you know those inflatable lawn ornaments that are lightweight fabric with a fan blowing them into the shape of a holiday symbol such as Santa or the Easter Bunny, or a Hanukkah bear? The husband and I have a theory about them. (In all honesty, it was his theory but one of the benefits of marriage is that what's his is mine, intellectual property laws be damned.) The theory is that these were cooked up by the energy companies, who realized that leaving extra lights on all night wasn't driving electricity bills up anywhere near high enough. So they found a way for people to run a small motor day in, day out, thus showing their holiday spirit while making the earth die just a little more quickly. Is that grinchy? Maybe so, but a co-worker told me that she's heard of children being traumatized when their parents turned the thing off because they think that Mommy and Daddy killed Santa (or the Easter Bunny or the Hanukkah bear). And you can't tell me that even if the energy companies didn't come up with that, their CEOs aren't at least a little bit happy that that happened. So grinch that, bitches. Also, a Hanukkah bear? What the hell, people? The husband said it's a gray area of Talmudic law, but I think it's probably pretty sacrilegious to put a yarmulke on a bear.

Dispatch from the homefront

2007-11-23T08:33:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, an older, male member of the husband's extended family poked me in my back and asked me if I'm ticklish. What does one say when one is asked that question by a 50-something male that one is sort of related to?

The horror! The horror!

2007-11-22T09:50:00.000-08:00

So I was planning to write a nice post about how thankful I am for different wonderful things in my life: the husband, the dog, my family, my in-laws, my health, the fact that I have a job that let me afford my rock and roll lifestyle, etc. It was going to be happy and gooey, and I was going to get all teary-eyed while I wrote it. But then tragedy, in the form of job-related mental torture, struck.

Do you know what DDR is? Officially known as Dance Dance Revolution, it's a video game in which players dance along to horrible music (good music is available - but the kids today don't like good music) in order to earn points. For your edification, here is a link to a person in a lion suit playing DDR. Libraries use DDR and similar video games as an attempt to remain relevant in the lives of today's youth.

Apparently it works, because I spent an hour and a half yesterday with one of my fellow employees trapped in a room with 15 tweens and a few younger kids playing DDR. Our programming room does not have windows that can be opened and the kids were dressed for blustery winter weather, so within 20 minutes, the place smelled like a gym. And to be fair, they did play many songs that really aren't too bad. It's just that there are four songs that they really really like. These songs get played over and over and over and over. One of them is "Hey Mama" by the Black Eyed Peas, which I used to like, until I heard a 2-minute portion of it 20 times. There's one called "Butterfly" in which the woman sings in a very high-pitched voice, and the majority of the song is "aaahh-eee-aaahh-eee-iiiii" repeated over and over again to a techno beat.

For some reason, I am always the one to sit in on DDR. Always. Two adults have to be in the room due to village ordinance, and usually my partner in pain is a very nice woman who is in her 70s, and thus should really be exempt from this particular form of library fun. Today, it was someone close to my age, with twin toddlers at home. At one point, she turned to me and said, "I will never complain about the Wiggles again." So maybe that's how I'll tie this back into Thanksgiving: I am grateful for my lot in life. Because no matter what else happens, nothing in my home life is set to a pulsing techno beat.

Alpaca-riffic!

2007-11-19T19:49:00.000-08:00

The husband and I travelled home this weekend to drop off the turkey for the Thanksgiving celebration with his family. While there, we also visited an alpaca farm in the general vicinity of his parents' house. We've been looking at a lot of alpaca farms online.

Do you even know what an alpaca is? I wouldn't, if I didn't knit. This is an alpaca:

Our long-term life plans at the moment revolve largely around this creature. We want to eventually move out to the country and buy alpaca (and maybe chickens and various seedlings to grow food from, but mostly alpaca). I am going to take a handspinning class, so that I can shear the alpaca and then turn their fleece into yarn. Then maybe I'll knit products out of the yarn, and then sell them for profit. Look at that sentence structure. An alpaca future turns me into a 3-year-old, syntax-wise.

I do fully realize that the husband and I are turning weird. Seriously, we don't plan to have kids anyway, but if we did, they would totally be the awkward kids who wear handmade clothes and bring their own weird lunches. ("It's a tofu sandwich. My mom made the bread and my dad made the tofu. The little chunks are spelt!") But knowing that you're weird offsets some of the weirdness, right? If the library has taught me anything, it's that people who are weird to the point of making you uncomfortable never have an inkling that they're uncomfortably weird. At least that's what I'm telling myself. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to harvest the dog's hair to make my first yarn. (Not really, but I totally could.)

Regarding Book Donations

2007-11-08T20:05:00.000-08:00

Dear potential library donor:

We at the Suburban Chicagoland Public Library would like to thank you for thinking of us as a possible recipient of your generosity. While we would highly value a financial donation that could be used to purchase items that the library may actually need, we are also very excited by the possibility of receiving our fourth donated copy of the book version of The Prince of Egypt. But before you present us with the nearly forgotten contents of your basement, we would like you to consider the following list of questions whose answers may have an impact on our ability to use (and perhaps even to touch) your donation.

Are there pages or other parts missing that will affect other people's ability to enjoy the item? Even if you can figure out the plot of a book without those missing 20 pages, most people would prefer to read rather than infer their books. Also, if your child has torn off all the flaps in their lift-the-flap book, this will impede the other children's ability to enjoy the book.

Are there questionable stains anywhere on or in the item? While you can look at the brown smear on the cover of that well-loved copy of Hop on Pop, and remember the hilarious time that little Johnny's ice cream bar melted all over his hands and clothing, we at the library are not privy to that fond memory. In fact, we at the library are concerned that said smear is feces.

Are there bodily fluids anywhere on or in the item? Though technically speaking feces is usually not a fluid, it does count when answering this question.

Are there unusual smells emanating from the item? Actually, considering the fact that the smell of human urine is not really 'unusual', per se, we would like to restate the question to read Are there any smells emanating from the item?

Did you write the book yourself? While we are sure that your 600-page science fiction novel is a heart-breaking work of staggering genius, perhaps you should submit it to agents and publishers before attempting to take the library world by storm.

Did you pay someone else to write the book? Truly, it is wonderful that someone loves your child enough to have had a story about a woodland fairy altered to include her name on every page. But perhaps that is a treasure that will be most valued by you and yours in the years to come.

Look inside the bag or box in which you will be putting the items. Are there droppings from rodents or other animals (including humans) in said bag or box? We at the library really, really do not want to deal with feces.

Again, we are very grateful that our library is the first institution you think of as you clean your basement. We are also very grateful that we are not Goodwill, as we can only imagine the types of things that you stuff into garbage bags and leave on their doorsteps. However, it is a much more efficient use of your tax dollars for you to place these items in your own garbage rather than having a library professional do so.

Thank you for your time,

A Disgruntled Librarian

The sound of my indie cred dying

2007-10-27T22:25:00.000-07:00

It's Saturday night, and in Rachelville (Rachelstan? Racheltopia?), that means it's time to try to go through my RSS feeds. (Does anybody else feel a tiny sense of quiet desperation at having over 600 items? Or a bizarre sense of guilt at not at least skimming the titles of said items? Just me? Okay.)

Anyway, the highlight so far (aside from a picture of a chipmunk holding a flower on Cute Overload) has been Chicagoist's link to a great 80s video. Is it wrong that I know all the lyrics to a Huey Lewis song? Or that I was genuinely delighted to follow the link and find that it was this? Did you know that you could see Huey Lewis's schlong in the Robert Altman movie Short Cuts? It's true. Everyone talks about Julianne Moore's below-the-belt frontal, but the real news is Huey Lewis. (Ha! That was unintentionally a pun. Sort of. Hey-o!)

On to other things. While watching my new favorite show, Pushing Daisies, I saw an ad for Tonka. In the ad, the voiceover tells us how boys are just built different. They then describe the toy, which contains a shape-sorter (obviously girls won't like this - shapes are closely related to math, and math is hard), a push toy (girls don't like to push things around - except the men in their lives!) and a free-wheeling riding toy (even at 2 years old, a woman driver is a woman driver - and you don't want that in your home). The ad then reminds us that boys are built different. It would be bad enough if there were two versions one yellow and construction-y, and one pink and thus girly, or if they just only showed boys playing with it, but to suggest that the toy is not made for girls is stupid. Not to mention that about half of the babies in the country are girls. Why would they cut out that market share? It made me angry, and I don't want to be angry during Pushing Daisies. (Really, it's awesome, if you're into quirk. Also, there's a male knitter in it, which makes it even more frustrating that the Tonka ad was so egregious.)

That's all for now. By the way, if anyone has found my blog from a search for Huey Lewis's schlong, I'm sorry to disappoint. But keep searching, tiger!

The gift that keeps on giving

2007-10-22T18:07:00.000-07:00

The little storytime darlings have given me a cold. At least I think so - my allergies have been weirdly intense since September. But I went home early today with that groggy-headed cold feeling. There is a certain degree of tragedy in coming down with something on the first week of my two-week storytime break. But when you work with kids, particularly babies and toddlers, you have to accept the gift of their viruses, right along with the scribbled drawings and and the unabashed adoration. Some of them are more egregious in their germ-sharing then others, though. One of the toddlers used to come to my baby storytime, and during the quieter moments he would toddle up to me and put his head on my lap (which, in all honesty, was a little weird in and of itself). Since he was teething, when he got up he would leave a puddle of drool big enough to soak through my pant leg. It's a little like a college party, dealing with wee ones.

Actually, until around the time that they turn 3, kids really are like little drunk people. Lurching around, grabbing things for balance that aren't stable enough to withstand their weight, falling on their heads without getting hurt, spitting up without warning, babbling incoherently, crying for no reason, lifting their shirts to show you what they've got, coming out of nowhere to hug you without asking - my storytime mornings are one big frat party. But with more puppets. Unless you went to kinkier parties than I did.

76 trombones? Very nearly.

2007-10-15T18:56:00.000-07:00

This weekend, the husband and I travelled home to watch my sister compete in a marching band competition. It was actually pretty fun, and her school was one of the five to move on to the state competition, which is a Big Deal.

I have never seen a marching band competition before, let alone an intense and important one. I went to a small high school, whose marching band performed at football games and that's it. Apparently Indiana is known for its intense marching band competitions, but I had never even heard of the concept until my sister joined up at her school. (My parents moved after I graduated, and my siblings go to a giant high school.) Here are some things that I found surprising about competitive marching band:

There is interpretive dance. Okay, as I said, I went to a small high school. Our "color guard" carried a flag or two and sometimes threw batons. Apparently, they were supposed to be symbolizing the movement of a butterfly while wearing an outfit that looks like Madonna's Like a Virgin outfit if she had decided to incorporate a playing card color scheme. But a joker tutu will look silly without accessories, which brings me to...
There are props. Each of the bands divides their performances into four (or so) movements, during which the color guard uses different banners or other props. One school had big umbrella-ish things with dangly parts - they looked like cat toys. Another had things that looked like hamster balls which they danced within. Another band had big wrenches to go with their car racing theme. They also had banners with the faces of famous racers, including, of course, Dale Earnhardt. This is Indiana, after all.
The fans get into it. Obviously the parents get into it. (One mom, whose daughter was in color guard, not band, would ring a cow bell every time the girl did something impressive. A cow bell. During a band competition.) But there were also peers of the band members who were very into it. There were shirtless teenage boys with their chests painted representing a school that is 120 miles away. Of course, during my own geeky high school years, there were shirtless teenage boys with painted chests at the state Academic Decathlon competition (for reals, people), so maybe teenage boys just like to take off their shirts and paint their chests.

It is hard, and my little sister is very good at it. All sarcasm aside, I am pretty proud of my sister. She has spent hours and hours practicing throughout the summer. The weekend before last, when it was in the high 80s outside, she was marching with her clarinet. She has worked her ass off. (Literally - the girl's a healthy eater and a size 2. We are not a family of size 2s.) And while I can not walk in a straight line while well-rested and concentrating, she walks in intricate patterns, often sideways, while playing a musical instrument. And she is a high school girl who regularly appears in public wearing a hat with a giant plume. If that doesn't show guts and determination, I don't know what does.

Just a Region Rat without a home

2007-10-14T17:22:00.000-07:00

Look, everybody! I did a blog!

I've been feeling the need for a blog for quite some time now, but haven't been able to come up with a name for it. It's an interesting soul search, finding a blog name. It's also a challenge of one's cleverness and wit. Oh, how I wish I could have a cleverly named blog. But unfortunately, the ability to come up with a clever, not too punny name that would stand the test of time was excluded from my gene pool, along with normal height and thick chestnut-colored hair. (To be honest, I don't know what color a chestnut is. But doesn't chestnut color hair sound wonderful? Better than dishwater blonde, at least?)

So clever wit was out. Instead, I turned to descriptiveness. I am a Hoosier. Growing up, that didn't mean much to me. I was born and bred in Hammond, which is in a part of Indiana known within the state as The Region. It's in Indiana physically, but not ideologically. It's highly industrialized, highly polluted and filled with steel mills, factories, and blue-collar liberals. No one I knew enjoyed watching racing, and everybody cheered for Chicago sports teams, even though we claimed to hate FIPs (fucking Illinois people - see also FIBs (f'ing IL bastards) and FIDs (f'ing IL drivers)). But now that I am a FIP, and it's been three years since the husband and I lived in Indiana, and now that we're gearing up for a move next year, most likely out of the area, I'm finding myself identifying more strongly with my Hoosier heritage. And I'm a little sad that I will most likely never live in Indiana again.