Monthly Archives: November 2004

I jumped on the computer about an hour ago to write you all a nice story about my Thanksgiving but first I decided to take care of a gift I needed to order and the farking corksmucker paypal order system wouldn’t work and kept telling me to try entering my information again. After the 4th time I felt like braining myself. I still feel like braining myself. Do computers really make our lives easier? By the way, I still haven’t straightened out my automatic billpay with verizon — another feature intended to make my life easier and it works if easier means spending 45 minutes on the computer trying to pay my bill, then calling to tell them I’m having a problem only to learn that if I have online billing, they can’t help me on the phone so I log back in and the computer tells me if I’m having problem with my online billing to please call. You can see why I’m a little agitated.

Enough about that.

Thanksgiving turned out excellent. We had the family here and had numerous fantastic meals, including the traditional Turkey Day chow. We did some Black Friday shopping — something I haven’t done in 100 years and it wasn’t as hideous as I’d imagined although we were already on our way back home by Noon. We had dinner and jazz at Salty’s, we went to the Portland Art Museum and we saw Sideways. Excellent time.

Bob was due home late tonight so we made our own dinners. I thought I’d kick back with some leftovers and cheap wine and watch the Desperate Housewives I taped last night. Then I remembered that I promised myself I would get in gear for our lodging needs for the big Germany trip coming up.

O.MI.GOD.

You think filling out online forms is tough? Try it in German. I had my massive German Dictionary in my lap laboriously translating word by word until I remembered there are websites that translate paragraphs. Hallelujah! Except it comes out sounding like crazy people. I had one reservation service. The other ones I had to wing on my own. One hotel had a form but apparently I wasn’t doing it right because I kept getting a page that I understood just enough of to get that I was doing it wrong. What knummer did they want? I used the info email with my crazy people translation from babelfish. We’ll see how I do.

I considered clarifying that we’re from a blue state but not sure how much they care. An Euro is an Euro.

When I was in college I was a huge heavy metal freak. I use “heavy metal” here to refer to just about anything hard rock. Def Leppard is the band I was insane about. This was before I had ever been to the Strip or any of the Hollywood rock clubs. I guess I was in training and there was no less heavy metal place on the planet than UCSB.

I used to go to this record store in Goleta on Hollister and buy all kinds of crazy records I had read about. One time the guy at the store asked me if I was friends with the band (“Savage Thrust”) and friends was a stretch but I did exchange a snail mail with someone in the band named Eddie who responded to my fan letter with a postcard of a butcher surounded by floating steaks and holding a huge string of sausages. It said “You Just Can’t Beat My Meat.” He signed it, “Kill the wusses.”

I read CREEM and CREEM Metal and [holy crap! I just did an online search to see if there was anything about the magazine and guess what? They’re back. Wow, here’s a link to the best Replacements Interview ever.] This development has me totally off topic on this post. I’ll save the CREEM stuff for another time.

Back to the heavy metal fixation. I used every excuse for dressing up to dress like a rocker chick. At UCSB. I hope you can grasp just how bizarre this was. When I was president of the sorority (you know, the heavy metal sorority – ha ha!) I made up a theme dinner — instead of “everybody wear white” or “toga” I had a “ten year reunion” dinner and you were supposed to dress as what you thought you’d be in ten years. I dressed as a rocker chick. MJ and Rowland dressed up as dead people.

Man, I didn’t get to a lot of odds and ends I needed to get done today. I did get to the candle party.

My email comes to two main accounts and I have spam filters on both of them. One of the spam filters changes the subject line so that I can filter the messages directly to the trash. The other spam filter, at the address that gets more spam, changes the body of the message but that doesn’t help me filter it when I get my mail. I figured out I could filter the spam using this other method that I don’t completely understand and won’t even try to explain but I have to go log into this webpage to see it. I haven’t checked it for about 2 weeks and this morning I logged in and there were 82 spams. It took forever to figure out how to delete them, too. I wasn’t about to do it message by message.

I know, a thrilling entry.

Maybe you’d be more interested to hear that the bean store has expanded into a bigger store that also serves food. We got up early Saturday, drove across town, and had breakfast before we stocked up on beans and grains. Bob got an omelete with pancakes *and* biscuits. It’s a good place.

My mouse is possessed. It opens things that I don’t want to open when I click once and it makes me click a whole bunch of times to bring things to the front or to open things I want to open. I’m not sure what this means but I’m going to drop kick it into the catbox if I can’t get it to work properly.

Speaking of the catbox, the war is on with the cats. Yesterday I scooped another 5 pounds of cat shit out of the front — where I’d sprinkled the pepper flakes. So I figured I was too timid and applied a super-duper layer of pepper flakes and this morning the whole area is scratched up again and filled up with cat shit. Not like one corner — like the whole area. What is up with these stupid cats? My next humane approach is I’m going to turn it into mud. The spot is under the eaves and the only dry dirt around. Other ideas include ordering some of those prong things that you put in the dirt that they don’t like stepping on. I bet these cats would just move them out of the way.

On Thursday Bob and I both had the day off and I said we should make sure to take time out to do something fun and not just get involved with our usual projects. We slept in and read our books and then we went to lunch and took Bob’s car in for an oil change while we went to the Grocery Outlet (Bob calls it “weird foods”). I documented this all with my camera but I don’t feel like frickin with Photoshop with my mouse on the fritz.

We went to Frenchman’s Bar trail and walked to Vancouver Lake. The weather was perfect and the scenery gorgeous. The cows were getting fed and some of them were galloping from one field to where the feeding was going on. I’ve never seen a cow gallop before. Also a ton of birds, I think mostly Canada geese, were hanging around one field making bird racket. We saw some people picking some sort of small red fruit in the park — crab apples?

We did our grocery shopping and then I invented a great dinner. There was a recipe in the paper I wanted to try but I didn’t have half the stuff and I had other stuff in the fridge I wanted to use. I sliced a half tube of polenta into 9×11 dish and spread it with ricotta cheese. Meanwhile, I sauteed an onion and garlic with a can of tomatoes and scraped that on top of the ricotta, added the rest of the polenta loaf and then covered it with fresh mozzarella and then a sprinkle of Parmesan and baked until bubbly. It came out excellent. The only similarities between this and the recipe from the paper are the 9×11 dish, the mozzarella, onion and tomatoes. Bob said it was one of the best dinners I ever made.

I had a link to additional fall colors but I took those photos down. I’m not going to archive every photo. I can’t think of a reason why I should.

Here is a really great map that shows election results by county — shaded proportionally. Very interesting. Not all blue and red – a lot of blending going on.

Meanwhile, I picked up some documents across the river yesterday and decided to walk back since it was such a great day and damn! I didn’t have my camera. At one of the lightrail stops there are a bunch of trees with bright orangey-pink leaves next to a bunch of trees with bright yellow leaves – beautiful contrast. Later, as I walked down the stairs by the eastbank esplanade downtown sparkled under the sun with a light haze. A kayaker in a beautiful wooden kayak passed underneath the esplanade headed into the main part of the river. Missed opportunities.