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Quote of the Day
“Forgive others their transgressions. The simple fact is, if we want to reduce road rage, it has to stop somewhere. Our advice? Keep your hand off the horn, and keep your fingers in perfect alignment. Not convinced? Remember this: He could have a gun.” ~ Car Talk gurus, Click and Clack, via Jon Carroll Dedicated to Scarlett and Viaggiatore and their cardinal rules…
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Saturday 9
I found this little meme over at A Gentleman’s Domain, and it looked so summery, I had to give it a try. He found it at One Gal’s Musings, and it was invented by Crazy Sam at Saturday 9.   1. What is your favorite summer drink? Lemonaid, I guess. I don’t drink it often, but I’m much more likely to want it in the summer than in the winter. 2. What is the best summer sport to play? Swimming. Probably the only summer sport I enjoy, because I don’t enjoy getting hot and sticky. 3. What’s the best summer sport to watch? Equestrian. So pretty. I’m hoping to catch some of the Equestrian…
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08.08.08
(image found here, and no, this isn’t Dorothy’s wedding invite, though it is a beautiful invitation designed by Daniel Larsson) Today we go up to Nevada City to witness the coming together of two families in marriage. My dear friend Dorothy is marrying her beloved J, and their 5 children will become brothers and sisters, though it seems that they feel that way already. I was thinking about marriage, or more specifically, about weddings, yesterday. I love weddings. I almost always cry at weddings. (I say almost, because I didn’t cry at our wedding. But I think every other wedding I’ve ever been at, I’ve cried.) And while I say,…
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Quote of the Day
(image found here) “Atheism has its uses, but don’t let it get in your way.” ~Dad Context is an email conversation about missing my mom horribly, and what an ideal afterlife would be for her. Dad said she would: Be pain free Know all the answers, to EVERYTHING! Be able to walk, run, FLY Have no financial worries Have no food issues Be in Alaska, California, and someplace exotic, all at the same time Know that her children and darling Maya are OK Know that we all love her I added that in addition to knowing all of the answers, she would be able to share that wisdom with others.…
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Public Service Message
Yesterday’s mail included the new Ikea catalog, and started me thinking about the crap that shows up in our mailbox, and how there should be a ‘do not send’ registry for catalogs, like the ‘do not call’ registry for sales calls. Well, there isn’t one registry that you can blithely say, “Please don’t let anyone send any catalogs to me anymore”, and that’s that, but there is a service you can use, Catalog Choice, to opt out one by one. This seemed like a good time to do something like that, rather than waiting until November or December, when it will almost surely be too late, and my mailbox will…
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Some goodish news amongst the painful crap…
There’s been so much pain lately. Mostly the pain of missing my mom and realizing, yet again, that she’ll never give me a big ol’ hug. That hurts a lot. Then there’s the job search for Ted, where he finds some really promising leads, jobs that sound like a really good match, but they.just.don’t. call. Asshats. Then there’s the homeowners crap, which is almost enough to make me wish we lived in a little cabin out in Nebraska somewhere, rather than a condo/townhouse in the Bay Area, because the finances SUCK right now. Did I mention that Ted’s on the board, so he has to hear about it from everyone? …
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Yesterday
Yesterday I went to Sacramento, to go through mom’s things. Thankfully, Richard and Kathy had gone through her things up in Alaska already, and only packed what they thought she would really want or need down here.  It’s so expensive to move things from Alaska, that it didn’t make sense to ship furniture and so on…so it’s just personal stuff and books. It was nice going through her things, seeing familiar items that I grew up with. I found her photo albums, which was the thing I most wanted to have. I found her kaleidoscope collection, which I also wanted. I didn’t get through everything, though, because it was HOT…
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Birthdays…
Traditionally, I am very punctual when it comes to birthdays. If you’re going to get a card or a gift from me (and not everyone does, don’t be hurt…remember, I’m poor), you’ll get it on time. For some reason, I have a weird gift for remembering birthdays, and it’s important to me that people know that I love them and was thinking of them. I would like to brag about this gift and be especially proud of it, but that’s like being proud of having green/brown eyes, or long fingers, or moles. It’s just how I’m made. I don’t have to work at it. At all. However, it seems like…
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Thursday Lion Blogging
Maya just showed me this video, Christian the Lion, and then I went and looked it up online to see if it were real. It’s real. I dare you to watch it and not get at least a little choked up. I full out cried. Which Maya found totally hilarious, and proceeded to tell the world via her Neopets chat. So what, I’m a softy. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adYbFQFXG0U[/youtube]
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Thursday 13
I saw this Thursday 13 last week at A Gentleman’s Domain, and he got it from his friend, Di. Looks like a cute TT, so I decided to give it a shot. Thirteen Firsts First Job – I’ve told you about my first real job, at Mr. Steak. But I had a couple of odd jobs before that. The first was probably when my friend Jennifer and I would go to Pizza Hut and offer to fold boxes for take out, and in exchange, we would get pizza and soda to take home for dinner. Awesome. Another barter type job I had was cleaning out the horse stalls at a…
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Wanna See My Plumber’s Crack?
(image found here) Remember back in the early 80s, the painter pants? Any idea where a girl could get some plumber pants? Oh, that’s right, any low-rise jeans will show my butt-crack quite nicely. Well, get ready to see my ass, world (not a pretty sight, btw), because guess what I did yesterday? I fixed the toilet. That’s right, me. I’m disproportionately proud of myself. Why is my pride disproportionate? Because it was a really simple fix. The stupid toilet has had a slow leak for a long time now, where the tank drains a bit, then fills, drains, fills, on and on and on, I think about a hundred…
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I am my body
I wrote a post last week about yoga, and (un)relaxeddad made a comment that included this: “It never ceases to amaze me how much our bodies know about where we are and what we need (and how separate we hold ourselves from them except in situations of extremis). ” That comment really stuck with me, and it reminded me of my mom in a lot of ways. She was working pretty hard to try to come to terms with her body, to accept and love it, and to not judge herself because she was fat. She was working with a program called Overcoming Overeating, and I think she was doing…
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Immigration
(photo found here) Every so often, in the argument about illegal immigrants in America, and more specifically here in California, we hear that we need these workers to come to America, legally or illegally, because Americans aren’t willing to take these jobs. The jobs that immigrants take in America, mostly agricultural, are jobs that Americans aren’t willing to take. Well, I stopped awhile ago to think about that, the last time I heard about coal miners getting trapped underground for days, weeks, until they die…I thought, if people are willing to go into the bowels of the Earth to bring out fuel, at the risk of becoming crushed and losing…
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Why?
Why does there have to be a TV wherever you go? There’s a nice spa down the street from our house, where we sometimes go for a massage. They have a stupid TV in the changing room, set to a horrid show, talking about some guy who murdered his children. Not the news, either, some sensationalist channel. So you come out after having a wonderful massage, and you’re confronted with that crap. They also have a changing room for after you work out, and I can understand having a TV there, since some people like to watch the news in the morning, and they go to the gym in the…
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Torture…
[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=PtS45bh_INY[/youtube] I wrote last year about waterboarding, and how it’s clearly torture, no matter what the dickwads in Washington think. Well, I was walking Genevieve the other day, and listening to Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me on my beloved iPod, and what should I discover? (I swear, you get better news from this show and Comedy Central than 99.9% of what else is out there.) The U.S. government is being sued for copyright infringement, because they tortured inmates at Guantanamo by playing crappy music over and over again, and they never paid the artists any sort of royalties. Kind of an ingenious way to stop torture, I guess, but I…