Temp Work

I got to be a convenience store worker for five minutes this morning. Honest! Okay, maybe not really and truly, but sort of.

I got to be a convenience store worker for five minutes this morning. Honest! Okay, maybe not really and truly, but sort of. I walked down to the 7-11 this morning to buy a small box of cat food to tide the cats over until we can go tonight and buy the low-ash food they regularly eat, listened to the pop-psych show on the way there and mostly concentrated on not falling on the icy sidewalks. When I walked into the store it was empty except for the woman who worked there, who was standing in the middle of the store looking panicked. She said, “Can you do me a big favor?” and I was kind of startled but said, “Um, what?” and she said, “Are you in a hurry? Could you just stand here for a minute? I have to go to the bathroom,” and I said “Oh, okay, sure,” and then when I realized that it might be a really long wait I said, “Just a minute, right?” which meant, “You’re just peeing, right?” and she grinned and said yes, just for a minute and thanked me profusely and went into the back. So I stood there in the middle of the store right where she’d left me because I didn’t want her to think I was shoplifting and no one came into the store until she came back, and then three different people came into the store at once, it was very weird. Like movies where the sound stops for a minute and then starts up again when something interesting happens. So I picked out my cat food and a candy bar and she thanked me again and I smiled and said have a nice day, and walked on home.

When I got there I was sitting in front of the computer trying to decide what I wanted to do next and realized that I hadn’t talked to Sarah in forever and that she might want to come over, since she’s on vacation this week. I gave her a call and she said yup, she’d be over in a few minutes, and we had a bunch of fun looking at the web together (she knows the woman Auntie Lois is very meanly based on and so aside from the Feline Adventures it’s her favorite section) and hanging out with the cats. She had to run a video to the video store and call her sister, so she left and came back a few minutes later. We talked for awhile about Kitey, which was sort of helpful and sort of depressing, and made banana bread together, which sounds disgustingly domestic but really wasn’t.

Oh, but before that I was washing dishes so we’d have counter space, and no, I am not transmogrifying into Donna Reed, so quit snickering, and I had the water running on the rinse side of the sink while I was talking, and Sarah said in this excruciated way, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but that water is driving me nuts and I wish you would turn it off if you aren’t using it,” and I was surprised to find that I didn’t mind her saying it. I mean, from someone other than Sarah or Todd that would have been irritating and intrusive, but I didn’t mind at all. She said something about how lights being on when they’re not needed annoys her too and I told her about my great-grandmother, who would turn off the light in the living room even if you were reading in there and all you’d done was gotten up to go get a drink of water and were coming right back.

Soggy Toast

I’ve been reading Tam Lin, by Pamela Dean, which is a modern take on the fairy tale.

Sherlyn sent it to me and when I started reading it this morning I didn’t like it very much, admittedly because the book begins with a lot of different literary references that I didn’t recognize and I felt crabby with myself for not recognizing them. I kept reading, though, and it’s turning out to be a really excellent book that I like quite a lot. Anyway, the book takes place in a university in Minnesota (I’m beginning to think that all fiction written in the past ten years takes place in Minnesota) and I’m surprised that she’s captured the feel of being in college so well and have been remembering a lot of things about being in college myself which I’d forgotten completely. Most of the memories I have that are…oh, for lack of a better phrase, easily accessible, are about being in the computer lab talking on the computer to Marian or Todd, or two o’clock in the morning trips to the local family-style restaurant with Tina. For about two weeks we were largely nocturnal, you should have seen us walking out of the dim room into the sunlight, we were like vampires. Speaking of which, I’ve really got to call Tina back — we don’t have long distance so I have to go buy a phone card and everything, and our phone mail message doesn’t identify who you’re calling anymore (I thought making it clear to Ruth that I’d heard what she had to say on phone mail by changing the message people hear would be effective and it looks like it was, what a relief) so Tina wasn’t sure that she’d called the right number when she did call.

I’ve been thinking about the first year I was there, and the way that people banded together almost instantly, people with almost nothing in common. I ended up in a group that consisted of, I kid you not, Kirstin, Kristen, Tracey, and Tracie. Missouri is a sick, depraved place, don’t let anyone tell you different. We used to eat meals together, but it had nothing to do with enjoying each other’s company, it was just five people who didn’t want to eat alone. After about three weeks I realized that I far preferred eating alone to eating with people with whom the only thing I had in common was that we were all female human beings. This book also does a depressingly good job of describing university food — I remember going to visit Marian in Colorado where she was attending college and standing in line to eat and saying, “Marian, it looks like REAL FOOD, can I move in with you?” In Vermont, where Todd went to college, they had this bizarre food point system, where any given food cost you so many food points, and not only did they have extremely good general meals, you could buy Dove bars with your points too.

I was reading about a beginning lit. class in this book and found myself, very surprisingly, feeling wistful about being in a classroom. Or not even being in a classroom, really, but learning about fiction and what’s behind the words from someone who genuinely cares about what they’re teaching. I say this knowing that I am not fun at all to teach — I remember being in high school, my sophomore year, and actually reducing the teacher to shouting at me because I didn’t agree with the way she was teaching One Flew Over The Cukoo’s Nest. To begin with, I hated reading the book because I knew Kitey had been in the nuthouse and regardless of what Kesey knows or doesn’t know about what it’s like to be in the nuthouse it wasn’t exactly easy to keep an objective distance from anything that happens in the book. Most of it made me feel sick and horrified. And then the teacher started to make christian parallels, the protagonist was Jesus Christ, etc. Which really pissed me off.

I read the bible from start to finish when I was in fourth grade. I thought it was ridiculous, a sad comment on American society, and an ode to white men. It was the beginning of the end of my interest in any religion. So there I was, sitting at my desk with this teacher standing next to me, asking her if she’d ever heard of the separation of church and state, that she needed to remember that not everyone in the classroom was a christian, that she should be careful about what she tried to push on people, and this woman was standing over me actually shouting (she was an extremely quiet woman in her late sixties) and telling me how wrong I was. I lost, she won, I failed the test because I refused to answer any of the christian parallel questions.

I walked down to the deli that sells the french fries, listened to Ani Difranco on the way there (I can’t read when the sidewalks are icy) and was glad that I did, it was absolutely stunningly beautiful outside. Very blue blue blue sky and crisp cold air and just in general a lovely feeling of being alive. Nice.

Magic Decoder Ring

I’ve been thinking about Kitey a lot lately and feeling sad and worried that she hasn’t written. I haven’t written her, either, so I guess I shouldn’t be complaining.

Todd says that he thinks that when everything happened she backed off and is waiting for me to write, which is a possibility. There’s this whole really difficult to understand way that she goes through life that makes me extremely frustrated and I don’t know how to deal with it. Here’s a good example: 1. Kitey says, “Want to go for a walk?” 2. Sage says, “Sure, I’m ready to go when you are.” 3. Three hours later Kitey is upstairs working on her rug, crabby and scowling. (She and Claire have a lot in common.) 4. Sage says, “Hey, whatever happened to the walk?” 5. Kitey says, “I was ready to go two hours ago.” 6. Sage says, “Why didn’t you say anything?” 7. Kitey says, “You looked busy and involved in what you were doing. I didn’t want to bother you.” And so on and so forth. I get so confused and feel helpless in the face of her wanting something but not saying that she wants it and then things get gaggy and weird.

So there’s a possibility that she wants me to write first and is waiting, or there’s some secret signal that I’m supposed to be flashing with my magic decoder ring and the whole thing is so exasperating. It’s made even weirder by the fact that she’s also totally honest and open about what she’s feeling. I don’t understand how the two ways of being can exist side by side either, so don’t ask me. And then I think, well, she’s probably very involved in getting through the winter (her teepee is heated just like any teepee, with a fire in the center, and she spends a good part of her winter days gathering wood) and in being with Jill and…oh, I don’t know. I still feel a strong connection to her, though. I always can feel her near me, no matter what.

Had a great time yesterday in the afternoon talking to Laurel and — erm, someone who’s permission I haven’t asked about putting their name in here, a good friend of Laurel’s — on IRC. We were talking about what the point of cleaning your room is and I mentioned that one of the things I used to do when I lived with my father and Ruth was to run downstairs, make myself something quickly to eat, and then run back upstairs with it if Ruth was home. That way I didn’t have to see her or talk to her (you have no idea, saying “Hello, how are you?” to this woman has the potential to somehow obscurely offend her and piss her off) even though I wasn’t supposed to eat in my room. So after awhile I had a whole collection of dirty dishes underneath my bed and *grin* Laurel and her friend were both saying, “Ooo, charming, thanks for telling us about THAT, Sage,” and I said reflectively that I really cooked a lot as a kid just so I didn’t have to eat any meals with Ruth, and that it was ironic considering how much I hate to cook. And Laurel’s friend, who has been following my journal, said that he somehow got the impression that I liked to cook, and Laurel said that it was probably because Todd cooks a lot and loves cooking and I write about it. So I said we should come out with a cookbook called “The Galactic Web Empress’ Consort’s Handy Keep Your Pookie Happy And Fed CookBook, As Told By Todd To The Galactic Web Empress”, tee hee.

Diner-style Grilled Cheese Sandwiches

This morning I had a dream about Justin, of Justin’s Unauthorized Autobiography. It was one of those guilt dreams where I was doing something I shouldn’t have been doing. I dreamed that Todd and I were in college together, and he’d gone somewhere for a week or so. Justin came in to my dorm room to talk to me about something and…ahem. Very strange.

Sunday night after Todd woke up feeling much better we decided to go to the grocery store to buy some cat food. I was still thinking about making cinnamon rolls so milk was on our list too. We were really surprised by the number of people at the store, on the way over we were predicting what the demographics would be — I was voting for people over sixty five who were alone and Todd was voting for people young single people — we were both wrong, and weirdly enough it seemed to be mostly women in their forties with twenty-somethingish daughters and no one over fifty at all. We saw this display for (I kid you not) something revolting called a “velveeta cheese loaf” but the picture in the display was of a diner-style grilled cheese sandwich which made us both totally crave (short pause while I throw a toy mouse for Habanero, he’s playing fetch with it — yesterday when Todd was cleaning up he found this whole evil looking graveyard of decapitated and disemboweled toy mice underneath the armoire which is in the living room) diner-style grilled cheese sandwiches. So along with the cat food we ended up buying chocolate chip cookies, blueberry muffins, milk, half and half, wonder bread and that weird entity called “Processed American Cheese” which I’m not even completely sure is made out of anything that’s technically edible but turns so yummy when it’s put between two slices of wonder bread and grilled.

We made grilled cheese sandwiches together and then sat down to watch a movie that had looked similar to “Go Fish” on the box at the video store but we only got through about three minutes of it before looking completely disgusted and turning the vcr off. Yuck. Suffice it to say that had we been able to watch the movie the sleaziness of the wonder bread and processed cheese would have gone perfectly with the movie’s ambiance.

Monday morning we spent some time on IRC with Damon and Sherlyn, had a really good time talking to them. (Hope you’re feeling better, Damon, and I loved the poem you wrote for Sherlyn!). Then we went into the kitchen where there were so many dirty dishes stacked so neatly on the counter that they looked like the Dirty Dishes Militia, about to take over the house. Todd offered to read Tales of the City to me if I’d do the dishes and I said sure, so we had a terrific time and drank a lot of coffee together and interrupted the book every five minutes to talk about what we thought of what was happening during that particular chapter.

When the dishes were done, we warmed up the blueberry muffins. We were going to have butter with them, but didn’t have any butter and had cream cheese instead. Yum! Todd read to me while I ate and ate his muffins between chapters. It was so lovely that we’ve decided to make it a December 25th tradition. I sat down and re-designed my index page (If you have trouble reading it with your web browser, let me know, okay? Thanks.) while Todd cleaned the rest of the house and rearranged the living room. Oh, I forgot to say that I’d finished painting the ex-green room and Todd walked in and said, “Wow, it looks great!” and laughed and said, “In fact, the colors are so pretty and cheerful and so much like a sophisticated nursery that I feel like we should have a baby.” Tee hee. Actually, on that note, we talked quite a bit about children this weekend. Some things just seem so scary that they’re insurmountable. Like keeping a child safe — my god, sometimes I think the only way to do that is to drive them to school and back from kindergarten to their senior year. We also talked about the kind of dog we’ll adopt when we own our own house, and agree that an older, large dog is the best way to go. Older dogs have such a small chance at shelters of getting a home, which is completely incomprehensible to me — they’re so gentle and sweet and loving.

Todd finished cleaning and rearranging around three in the afternoon and then made dinner, amazing garlic, guyere cheese, and potato dish which I don’t even know the name of. We ate until we were completely stuffed and then read for awhile, Sean called and Todd talked to him and then Todd fell asleep, I stayed up reading until about a quarter to midnight and slept beautifully.

The Long Involved Version

Woke up yesterday and opened my eyes to see Habanero’s face a little less than an inch from mine.

He was lying on my pillow, purring hugely, peering into my face in a fascinated way, reaching out every once in awhile and patting my mouth with his paw. I tried and tried not to giggle but finally did and he stomped off, affronted. What a dingbat.

Friday night was great, we went over to Sarah’s and watched the X-Files. I started telling her this long involved story about something on the net that had happened, basically people are accusing me of being anti-women-in-business because I don’t link commercial pages on Web Weavers. I’m anti commercialism on the web, whether it’s by a woman, a man, or an alien who just popped off a spaceship. That’s the short version of the story, I was telling Sarah the long involved I’m-really-pissed-off version and whenever the tv ads came on I would tell her more of the story — by the time the show was over I’d finally finished telling her the whole story (you think I interrupt myself and digress frequently in my journal, in person I’m much, much worse) and Sarah’d yawned a couple of times when I was telling the story and laughed and assured me that it wasn’t me, she was just feeling sleepy. When we’d gotten all our stuff together and were saying our goodbyes I said, “Sleep well, if you have any trouble give me a call and I can come over and tell you that commercialism on the web story again.” Tee hee.

We came home to a message on the voice mail from Sean and another one from Svea — after two days of phone tag Svea finally got in touch with us and we were both able to talk to her. What a sweetheart she is! It was good to talk to her again. Sean’s off in another state, visiting with his father’s new wife’s family for christmas. When Todd and I were walking to 7-11 to get milk to make hot chocolate on Wednesday we were talking about Sean and realized how awful it must be, how frustrating, to not be able to spend time with the people you want to spend time with (Svea and her family) and instead spend time with people you barely know and certainly don’t like. When I talked to Sarah today she was just getting ready to go and spend christmas with her parents and sister and sister’s husband and said that it wasn’t that she felt like she didn’t want to do it, but more a “what’s the point, anyway?” kind of feeling. Interesting.

Yesterday was a very weird day, I felt extremely grumpy and out of sorts for no reason and then even grumpier and more out of sorts after we’d watched the movie “Bye Bye Love”, a movie about weekend fathers which was SO DEPRESSING I cannot tell you how crabby I felt by the time it was over, and really wondering about the film company that produced it and labeled it a “comedy”. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but in my opinion divorce + screwed up kids + fathers who don’t give a damn because they’re so busy with their 14 year old girlfriends does not equal funny entertainment. And then the moral of the story was “Ah well, everyone gets divorced, what can you do?” which made me want to kick the tv screen in. How about “marry someone you like at least as much as your dentist” for a moral? Oh, no, sorry, that’s not the American Way.

Ahem. Anyway.

So then Todd made salad with homemade scallion and garlic dressing (yum!) and veggie chili with cous-cous which was delicious and we both felt much better until one of the kids of the weekend father next door started throwing a temper tantrum. We decided to get out of the house before we ended up in the basement because at least then we couldn’t hear the kid banging on the walls, and saw a movie at the artsy theater, had an absolutely wonderful time and were very glad we’d gone. I dreamed over and over again that I met Ani Difranco and it turned out that her song “you had time” was about web pages (*grin* there’s a chance that that song could be farther from any connection to anything even vaguely connected with computers, but I doubt it).

Today’s been very quiet, Todd has a godawful headache as well as a bad cold and has spent most of the day sleeping. I’ve been working on my web pages and drinking a lot of tea.

Lifetime Victims

I was really horrified yesterday to learn on the pop-psych show that children have no choice in refusing to go on court ordered visitations with a divorced parent.

Doesn’t this strike anyone as a sick thing? I know that I used to freak out no matter which parent was taking me away from the other after a week or two of being in one place. That’s not what I’m talking about. I mean kids who are thirteen, fourteen years old, they don’t have any choice. That parent could be a screwed up drug-addict and if the court wasn’t in the mood to recognize that, the kid would have to go with them for the visit. Well, that’s what the pop-psychologist said, anyway. True to her pro-weekend-father stance, she thought it was great.

Speaking of that sort of thing, Todd and I were talking this morning about people who take one event in their life and draw it out through the rest of their existence, and revel in being a victim. Kitey’s very temporary girlfriend, the one she came here with the first time, is a wonderful example of this. She belongs to eighty million different groups — Vegetarian Lesbian Women Smokers Who Have One Outdoor Cat And No Dogs And Sometimes Eat Fish But Not Often — that sort of thing, and is by all accounts a very irritating person. Things got really weird when she was here (partly due to the fact that Todd and I had no idea that she was going to be staying here) and she ended up staying in New York City. We were sitting on the porch before she left and she told me she thought I had a problem with her because she was Jewish. Since I had no idea that she was Jewish (not to mention that the only religious affiliation that I have a problem with is any branch of Ye Olde Fundamentalist Rabid Fanatic Christian Church) this seemed like a ridiculous argument to me and I told her so. She persisted in believing that this was the case. Interestingly enough, Kitey told me when she was here this for this most recent visit that this woman had sat her down and said, “D’you know, I have to admit that part of what was so difficult for me about what happened at Sage’s was that for the first time I knew it was about me and not about being Jewish. So I had to look inward instead of poking my finger at everyone else.”

Anyway, so we were talking about the victim mentality, and I said that I truly didn’t understand the way that people run around wanting apologies from people who’ve hurt them. First of all, I’d probably die on the spot of shock if my father ever actually said he was sorry, and secondly, what does that change? Nothing. It doesn’t change a thing. People who hurt me aren’t given chance after chance to do it again, they’re simply not allowed back into my life. The end. So what does that make me? An unforgiving person, I guess. Marian, on the other hand, is amazingly forgiving — I did some incredibly shitty things to her in the name of Hurting You Before I Get Hurt and when I came crawling back to say I was sorry she was right there for me.

I was really sad to find out the reason that I haven’t heard from my English aunt in so long — her father passed away recently. I only met him once but he was a sweetheart and he and his wife seemed devoted to each other. Her family is extremely close and I know this must be terribly hard for her.

Spent some time yesterday updating the “questions people have (almost) never asked me” section of the Crunchier and Crabbier page, had quite a bit of fun doing it. When Todd got home we sat together and read the latest 90210 summary by Danny Drennan — he is one of my web heroes — and laughed ourselves off our chairs. Ate pizza for dinner and then went to sleep. I ended up having a terrible dream that my father and Ruth had decided to open a combination movie theater and family restaurant and Todd and I were standing in line to get in. Ruth’s sister (who in “real life” I actually got along with relatively well) had a baby with her who she was screaming at because it wouldn’t stop crying. Eventually I said, “Gee, maybe if you’d quit screaming at the baby it would stop crying,” and she gave the baby to me and shut up and so did the baby. Then just before I was going to walk into the restaurant I realized that I didn’t have any shoes on and was afraid that they’d kick me out. Dream analysis? Don’t eat yucky chain-pizza-place pizza just before you go to sleep.

Two Enormous Cookies

Tuesday afternoon I was painting the not-green-anymore-room and heard a couple of thumping noises but didn’t pay any attention because the troglodytes next door were using their brandynew snow blower and making a lot of noise doing it.

So I kept painting and listening to the radio and then I heard a much louder noise, not a thump but a crack, and I ran downstairs to see what it was. When I got to the back door Todd was outside with a big grin on his face making a snowball to lob at the ex-green-room window. I started laughing and stood there watching him, then tapped on the back door window to let him know I was there — he couldn’t get in because the…what do you call it, bar-lock thingie was locked and knew I was painting. He’d gotten home early because of the snow, hurrah!

We had an absolutely lovely night, I read more of Maupin’s Tales of the City — Marian sent us a copy of the PBS special for us last year and we watched some of it every night until we’d finished watching it, bought the book because we knew the books go a lot further than the (excellent!) PBS movie version. Marian said that was because they couldn’t get any more funding, the subject matter was “too controversial”. Oooo, we wouldn’t want little kids watching it on tv and learning how to be OPEN MINDED, or CARING, would we? *growl*

Anyway, so I read to Todd while he made a veggie stir-fry, we ate a little of it and then Todd said, “Ick, I think I put too much vinegar in it,” and I agreed and we went back to the kitchen in search of something sweet to make. I decided to make cinnamon rolls, but we didn’t have any milk, and then I was going to make cinnamon buns, but it takes a zillion years because you have to wait for the dough to rise and everything. So then I remembered about peanut butter cookies, and Todd read to me while I made them — *grin* it wasn’t until I had everything ready to be baked that I realized we don’t have a cookie sheet anymore. (We’re terrible with cooking utensils, we finally managed to get three different measuring cups but still have so little silverware that often forks and spoons and knives don’t even make it from the draining rack to the silverware drawer before we’re using them again. We’re always very impressed when we go to Sarah’s and the recipe says “use a metal mixing bowl” and she really has one. Every once in awhile we actually do buy something to use for cooking and bring it home but the cookie sheet got used for making frozen french fries and tater tots, accidentally forgotten and burned, so many times that it just wasn’t usable anymore.)

So Todd said, “Hey, we could use the cake tins and make Two Enormous Cookies,” and I agreed, and come to think of it, we’ve only actually used the cake tins once for an actual cake, and the biggest thing we use them for is to make french fries and tater tots. This is doubtless due to the fact that I’m the one who (occasionally) bakes things — this peanut butter cookie thing was a once-in-a-blue-moon sort of thing, I very rarely make anything more difficult than a cheese sandwich. So we did make Two Enormous Cookies, and they were absolutely delicious. So delicious that I’m going to include the recipe (and the vegan version as well, just for you, Damon, and no, I didn’t think you were ranting, I thought you were saying a bunch of very true stuff : ) ):

preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Cream together:
1/2 cup butter (or soy margarine)
1/2 cup peanut butter
Beat in:
1/2 cup white sugar (or sucanat)
1/2 cup brown sugar
Stir in:
1 egg (we used egg replacer, it worked perfectly)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup flour

put in two cake tins, press down so that the dough covers the bottom of the tins, bake about 20 minutes (check to see if they’re done before that, though)

When the cookies were done Todd asked if I wanted to walk down to 7-11 and buy milk so that we could have hot chocolate. I said that of course I did, and he checked voice mail before we went. There was a message from Sean, he said he’d been in New York City the night before and had tried to call us — we were crushed until Todd got ahold of Sean and he said that there hadn’t been any way for us to see him, he’d been with his father. Todd talked to Sean for awhile on the phone and then when he got off the phone we bundled up and walked to the 7-11 — it was still snowing and absolutely beautiful outside, a wonderful walk and I think that the 7-11 clerk was very weirded out that we had big smiles on our faces when we arrived. We walked back home, and Todd decided to take the snow shovel out front and shovel the sidewalk in front of the house, and when he was done we finished watching Lifeboat and ate some of the cookies.

He didn’t have to go to work yesterday, the roads were terrible, so we had the day together. We spent a large part of it being out of sorts, neither of us had gotten enough sleep and Todd had a sinus headache. Around four o’clock we found ourselves crabbing at each other about whether or not this potato recipe would still be good if we replaced the 1/2 and 1/2 with milk, and eventually just started to laugh, it was so silly. Todd had some advil and lay in bed feeling awful, I asked if he wanted tea and he said no, but thank you, and I asked if he wanted to take a bath and he said no, but thank you and within a half hour he was in the bathtub with a lovely cup of tea, looking a hundred times better and feeling it too. *grin* See? It pays to be the Galactic Web Empress. I may be short, but I can be fierce.

When he was done with his bath we went downstairs and had veggie burgers for dinner, Todd read to me and I made them, and then watched Creator, which had us both very teary by the end. So it was a good day after all, once we’d both gotten over ourselves.

This morning Todd said he was going to go out to the car and check his razor, see if it was charged enough for him to shave. So we hugged each other and he went out the back door and I lay down to go back to sleep. About ten minutes later he came in the front door, startled me and the cats — he said it was very funny to see the same crabby “where did YOU come from” look on my face and Habanero’s — he went upstairs and shaved and came back down and we hugged again and he left. About fifteen minutes later he came in the front door again, we were both giggling by that time, and he said that he’d forgotten his briefcase. So he got it and stood in front of the door doing a check on all the things he could possibly have forgotten and decided he had everything and went off to work. Traigic thing.

Pasta Pot

Boy, was I out of it yesterday. I decided to just drink half a cup of coffee and you can see the results in yesterday’s journal entry — zombie city — but at least I slept beautifully.

In fact, I had an awfully hard time crawling out of bed this morning. I spent all yesterday in Minnesota. Okay, not really. But I spent all yesterday reading Ellen Hart’s fantastic mysteries (finished one yesterday and read through 3/4 of another one — like I said, I’m a very fast reader) which are all set in Minnesota and they really suck the reader in.

By the time Todd got home I was taking a bath, almost finished with the second mystery. I washed my hair while he got the laundry together, and we went to the used bookstore together before the laundromat. I was quite amused to see that after I bought a few Ruth Rendell mysteries and took them to the used bookstore for credit the number of Rendell books has quadrupled. It all felt very sweet and friendly, and I wondered if, in buying so many Rendell books myself, I got other people who go to this used bookstore interested in her? That’s the only explanation I can think of, because when I first started buying Rendell books there were only three to choose from.

I’ve lived back east for over four years, and before that for two years in Missouri, but I still haven’t gotten the hang of dressing warmly in the winter. So I often have people clucking over me in restaurants and stores, saying, “Aren’t you cold, dear?” and I always tell them that I grew up in California — ergo, I’m not very good at remembering to bring coats, sweaters, mittens, etc. Mostly it works and they say to wear something warmer next time and go away. But last night one of the women who owns the used bookstore was tsking and asking me if I wasn’t cold and I gave her my standard line and she looked crabby and said, “Well, I grew up in California too, but I can’t just run around in a short-sleeved t-shirt because of it.” Tee hee. I told Todd on the way out to the car that I’d have to come up with a new line now.

Hm…I’m re-reading what I just typed and realizing for the first time that I must be bringing out the parent in all of these people — I mean, it’s not like they’re saying things like this to everyone they see, just me. I wonder if it has something to do with my high voice and the fact that I’m only 5′1″? (Okay, 5″1′ on a good day, mostly 5″.)

We also stopped at the video store to return the videos we’d rented over the weekend and decided to get Lifeboat. The whole idea of being stuck out at sea with only a tiny bit of wood between me and the water is absolutely, completely, utterly terrifying to me. I remember that when I was a kid I had a friend whose parents owned a huge boat and we used to go out on it. I spent the entire time below deck, scared as hell. I hate the thought of so much space between me and the ocean floor. Would you believe that even now I get creeped out when I see the cover of the book “Jaws”? So this movie is quite scary but interesting too and I’m glad that I’m finally watching it.

When we got to the laundromat to change the clothes from the washer to the dryer the washer wasn’t done yet, so we sat out in the car and played travel Yatzee until my headache was too awful (lack of caffeine headache — we were making pasta for dinner and Todd asked if I knew where the pasta pot was and I said “Yup, it’s in my head and someone’s beating on it with a wooden spoon”) and then Todd mentioned that his co-workers had been just horrified that he didn’t celebrate christmas. “Well,” he said, “horrified and envious.” He said that one person asked, “But what will you do when you have children in school who are hearing all kinds of stuff about christmas there, and are the only ones who don’t celebrate it?” and I laughed and said, “Oh no, you didn’t tell him we were probably going to do home schooling, did you?” and Todd said that he’d thought about it but they were already so beside themselves that he decided not to.

Well, for chrissakes. Hallmark really DOES have a card for every occasion. Just got one from Todd’s grandparents that says on the front, “To a Dear Grandson And His Wife” which is almost perfect — I should write Hallmark and say, “So, like, have you got one that says ‘To a Dear Estranged Grandson And His Wife’ ?” They addressed it to Mr. and Mrs. Todd Todd’sRealLastName and if I didn’t already know what creeps they were I’d hate them just for that. I don’t care if they’re 98 years old, my name is Sage RealLastName, and if they had any consideration at all they’d address it to “Ms. and Mr. Sage RealLastName.” Dammit. *laughing*

When we got back from getting the laundry from the dryer, Todd said he’d read to me if I put away the laundry, so I put it away and Todd read from Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. Nice. I love being able to experience books with someone else.

We were looking at the back of the book, which has a photo of Maupin on it, and Todd looked at it and said, “I know who that looks like.” I looked too and said, “Yup. The guy who wrote ‘The History of White People In America’.” (Martin Mull — not half as bad as it sounds, really) and I’d be willing to bet that we are the only two people on the planet who would think that, but we both did. It’s like when we were in Massachusetts and I saw a woman walk into the store and thought, “That woman looks exactly like one of the characters in the movie ‘Go Fish’.” and Todd said, “Yup. I think so too.” I figure this is only going to get worse when we have a kid — once in awhile she’ll just say apropos of nothing, “I agree, that’s really true.”

Natural Foods For Rent

Going up on a ladder in a closed up room and painting when you’re already feeling shaky is a Bad Idea.

Yesterday I wanted to finish up the last coat on the green room walls and ended up standing on the highest rung of the ladder, spilling paint all over the place, feeling shaky and not a little freaked out. I got down off of the ladder and went into the bathroom to wash the roller and brush and I guess the water must have woken Todd up — he’d been taking a nap — because he came upstairs and cuddled me and was sympathetic, he said it was probably the paint fumes. Since it’s winter the storm windows are already down, which means that with the door closed too (because of the cats) the paint fumes do get pretty bad.

Friday after I’d written my journal entry I went upstairs and started in on the green room, it’s white now with primer and we’d meant to buy pre-mixed gray but the gray is white after all. Ah well. When Todd got home we decided to go to an Indian restaurant that just recently opened downtown, so we drove down there.

When we first moved to this area, in the very first week we were here, two years ago, we decided to go to a restaurant that we’d seen in the phone book, they called themselves a “natural foods” restaurant. So we drove around trying to find it and couldn’t, finally we just stopped at a grocery store and called and asked for directions. It was in February, so the weather was really cold and snowy. The guy who answered the phone gave us directions and we drove downtown to the restaurant — in fact, come to think of it, that was the deciding factor in our deciding to be vegetarians. Todd hadn’t been sure if he wanted to because he didn’t feel like there was enough variety in a vegetarian’s diet (ironically, he has a zillion times more fun cooking vegetarian meals than he ever did cooking dead animals, and we eat a much wider variety of foods) and when we sat down to eat in this huge place — the ceilings are literally 25-30 feet high — Todd took one bite of his vegetarian chili and grinned at me and said, “Yes. Let’s stop eating meat. Tomorrow.”

We went there all the time, the people who owned it were huge sweethearts and it was one of the few places we could go in this area and hang out with liberal, open-minded people. One day we got the newsletter for a local group that does what it can to promote peace in Central American communities, and in the newsletter there was a small article about how the owner of this natural foods restaurant had died and how much she would be missed. About a month later we drove downtown to have dinner and there was a huge FOR RENT sign in the window of the restaurant. We were crushed.

So last night we were driving along that same street looking for the new Indian restaurant and instead of that same stupid sign that had been there forever, the “Natural Foods” sign had been painted out and it now says “The Green Cafe”! We parked and walked to the restaurant, and wow — not only has it been rented by people who wanted to open a restaurant, it’s been rented by this wonderfully interesting and kind family who are now running a largely vegetarian restaurant there. We had absolutely enormous dinners and talked to the owner for awhile about how long they’ve been open, etc. and asked if they had breakfast as well. She said that they did Sunday brunch, so we went again on Sunday morning. These people are so sweet and so lovely that it is almost like having an open invitation to come to someone’s house and eat whenever we want to.

Not Even a Week

Last night I was full of energy and anticipation, so to stop myself from just pacing around the house for hours and hours before Todd got home I sat down and redesigned the navigation for Coffee Shakes, adding new graphics and listening to Sunday in the Park With George for hours, singing while I did it (I have all the words to every song memorized).

He’d said he’d be home at seven, so at seven I started to watch for him. By eight I was a complete nervous wreck, sitting in front of the computer inserting the new graphics in every journal entry. By ten to nine I was absolutely frantic — luckily he came home then (his plane was late — he’d called from the airport but I hadn’t gotten the phone mail message) and when he walked in we stood there holding each other. Around eleven p.m. our feet were starting to hurt so we went to bed.

*grin* Okay, we didn’t really stand there holding each other for two hours, but it was an awfully long time. Todd kept saying, “Next time, you’re coming with me. I don’t care. I don’t care if we have to sell the car for the ticket money, you are coming with me.” For the rest of the night we followed each other around the house, around ten my cramps were terrible and Todd ran a hot bath for me and then sat next to the tub and held my hand and we both talked a mile a minute and I cannot believe how long five days felt and how miserable we both were. Last night we kept saying things like, “Oh, well I’m sure that it’s changed by now — after all those weeks –” and then realizing that it wasn’t weeks at all, it wasn’t even a week.

Todd read all of my journal entries and saw the new Auntie Lois answer, then I sat and read the journal he kept — I loved reading it, but felt left out too and crabby that we weren’t able to experience any of the trip together. I ordered a pizza that was supposed to be half tomato and half cheese, but I guess the pizza guy thought I meant half tomato sauce and half cheese, ’cause that’s what we got. Yuck. My favorite part of the journal was this paragraph:

Attendant was calling around looking for the pilot who was running late. Just as he hangs up the pilot shows up. His bags had a sticker on them that said: “God is my pilot — I’m just the co-pilot.”
I’m scared : ).

You have GOT to be kidding. I was just drinking my Dr. Pepper (went to the nearby deli today and got a sandwich) and looked at the label and it actually says: “WARNING contents under pressure. Cap may blow off causing eye or other serious injury. Point away from people, especially while opening.” Only in America.

We both slept beautifully last night and woke up feeling wonderful. I spent the majority of the day spell-checking and adding in new graphics to every journal entry, which *grin* those of you who have sat through my misspellings for months will be happy to know. I cleaned up the links as well, so they should all work just fine now. And what did I learn from this experience? It’s stupefied, not stupified. I must have misspelled it 47 times, how humiliating. It was quite a bizarre experience to read back through the last five months — I didn’t read the entries all the way through, but caught snatches from every one. And found myself thinking, surprisingly, that I liked reading the entries. Liked myself.

Broke the deli-owner’s heart, poor thing. I walked in and he asked what I was doing for christmas and I said that I didn’t celebrate it — he asked why not and instead of getting into a whole philosophical discussion about my opinion of holidays I simply said that I’d had some really terrible christmases growing up and didn’t celebrate it for that reason and boy, he was just crushed. Kept saying how sorry and sad he was that I didn’t celebrate it.

While it isn’t the entire reason that I don’t celebrate holidays, past experiences are certainly a part of it — holidays meant I had to be in the same room with family, who could barely be in the same house for an hour without having a screaming fight, not to mention the charming times that I had when we lived with Spring and Patricia. But in a wider sense I just feel like holidays are silly. The idea of setting aside a day when gifts are given, when people “come together as a family” is completely foreign to the way that I live my life — I give gifts when I want to, I get in touch with my family when I want to, and for me that means that the feelings behind the acts are genuine and truthful and not dependent on what the rest of the country happens to be doing on a certain day.

Hm…I was just sitting here thinking about Martie and what she’ll think of what I just wrote — my family is very big on christmas — and I was thinking about the traditions that have been passed on from my grandparents to my father and then to me. Things like being allowed to look at stockings but no presents until the parents are awake, reading the bible (I think this one may have been my father’s and not my grandparents’ — considering that I’ve been absolutely and completely non-religious from age eleven on it was a strange addition) and reading The Night Before Christmas on christmas eve. So I was sitting here thinking about all of that and then started to smile because I realized how funny it is that I can’t stand holidays and yet holidays are the most routine-oriented concept that this world has.