Monthly Archives: December 2008

This is my Pirates of the Caribbean wristband I got at the Super Biz Mart store this morning for a dollar. They have more and also red ones so if you want one, let me know and I’ll go back and buy you one. You can also see the purple spot on my thumb where I shut the shower door on it the other day.

Starting at Thanksgiving I suddenly randomly couldn’t pump gas into my car. The nozzle would keep shutting off. First I thought it was the pump I was using so I moved my car. But it wouldn’t work that one either. I asked Bob if he could try and he went to a different gas station and had the same problem.

You can get gas in the car but it’s a lot of work. Luckily I don’t drive much so it hasn’t been a huge issue.

Between weather and holidays we haven’t had time to deal with it so I thought I’d just get it over with today. I hate putting off car stuff. They gave me an early appointment so I thought, “Good I’ll get this over with and have the whole day.” I set my alarm and got up at dark-thirty and rushed out of the house. Bob picked me up and we went for breakfast and killed some time visiting a few shops because Toyota is completely across town from us. That’s why we were in Super Biz Mart (possibly not actual name).

Finally at about Noon I called to see what was up and they still hadn’t looked at it. Why the hell did they ask me to come in so early if they weren’t even going to look at it?

We went home and sort-of put our plans on hold not knowing when we’d have to go over and pick it up.

You know that thing I do when I always expect it to cost $600? Well, I didn’t do that this time. I just assumed this was going to take an hour or two, a hundred bucks and I’d be on my way.

Oops. They finally just called and the combobulator filter agitator trip-wire bungyuny is all fouled up and needs to be replaced and there is one part, somewhere in Portland and they think they can get it tomorrow and if all goes well I can pick up my car by this time tomorrow. For about $525.

Okay. It’s not $600 but farkity-fark-fark-fark.

I was mad but I got over it quickly. Lots of things to be grateful for right now. It’s just money. Besides my “If Dec 30 is your birthday” horoscope says that the year ahead will offer “many chances to get ahead.”

We are on our way to see Slumdog Millionaire and have a bite to eat.

Here’s the Christmas alien enjoying the teeny bit of snow left in the front yard. It all seems like a dream, now.

Here’s a terrible photo of the Lord of the Rings glowy mugs. Please, steal this image all you want.

I said I’d finish a certain writing project by the end of the year and today’s the day. Tomorrow I’m at the office and yoga for a full day. Tuesday I am the birthday queen. And the thirty-first I don’t want to be all stressed out about completing 2008 goals.

If I haven’t called you back or responded to your messages or otherwise have blown you off, don’t take it personally. I’m doing it to everyone. (My poor neglected husband.)

Not done yet. Back to work.

I bashed my thumb in the shower door while cleaning. I told it off with a number of really fabulous bad words. It’s already turning blue. Photos in the future, if it gets really ugly.

* * *

I spilled come candle wax on my clothes and thought I’d check the Internet to see if there were any great tips for removing it.

The first one I found said this: “The best way to avoid wax stains on clothing is to not get them in the first place.”

Wow. That’s genius. Let’s think of all the places we can extend that fabulous bit of thinking. “The best way to avoid overcoming brain damage is to not fly through that windshield in the first place.” “The best way to avoid a painful, lingering death is to not be born in the first place.”

What kind of person typed that first advice? I bet if s/he has kids, they hate him.

* * *

The thaw is on. Now we have flood warnings. Yay, us. At one point the awning over the back deck appeared to be caving in. Looks fine now. A guy is going to look at the gutters on Monday.

* * *

I cleaned house today and then mulled some wine to drink in my Lord of the Rings promotional goblet with the red glow. I’m too lazy to take a photo and I just cruised Flickr with some luck but no Creative Commons licensed photos. Please world, learn about Creative Commons. It could have used an orange slice but otherwise, pretty good.

Guess what happened yesterday?

It snowed some more. Snowiest Christmas in history. The snow on the garage took out that raingutter, too.

But it was was the kind of snow with huge pretty fluffy flakes and I could watch while I made dinner.

I made a bunch of delicious recipes from the Sunset magazine holiday recipe round-up like broccoli gorgonzola casserole and artichoke parmesan stuffing. I’d love to link to them for you but Sunset’s website sucks major ass. Sunset has been including quotes from blogs in their pages. I sure hope they get that one.

I also made their herb dinner rolls. The recipe calls for fresh herbs and I had bought a few herbs to supplement what I have in my yard. Except we couldn’t find the herbs we bought. Must have been left at the store somehow. And I didn’t feel like putting on boots and tromping across to the backyard and digging out my frozen garden herbs. So I used dried herbs and the rolls still came out good. I just ate a leftover one cold and it was delicious.

And we had turkey and mashed potatoes and some brown sauce that some might consider calling gravy, and I made a pumpkin pie from pumpkin I grew myself. It was good but a lot of work for one person. After we finished the last dishes I took a hot bath and then finished watching The Two Towers which is my favorite of the three. That was Christmas.

The day before yesterday I watched Attack of the Clones. I re-watch episodes IV-VI all the time but I haven’t seen any of the first three in awhile. There’s really no way of getting around how monumentally stupid that movie is. I enjoyed it in a dorky fangirl way but sitting there watching it again, I found myself cringing. That’s why I gave up on Jedi and switched to Hobbits.

Hello guest reader Joel. Sorry your flight got canceled and you can’t be in town to enjoy all this endless snowy mess.

*Note snow on roof. Will figure in later in this post.

This is our “cleared” driveway from yesterday. I had the front porch and walkway all cleared off, too. It felt like we were making progress.

Here’s our street. I thought I had the exact same photo from this fall but I can’t find it right now because I’m lame at organizing my photos and searching through a couple hundred of photos in a folder called “Around Our House” isn’t yielding much so you’ll have to image the golden autumn light and clear pavement in your head.

Here’s the Safeway parking lot. Doesn’t look too bad. The parking lot across the street was PERFECTLY clean. There’s a library annex there and we guessed they must have a private contract with some sort of do or die clause in it.

That was yesterday. Now on to today.

This is our driveway this morning after the latest round of snow.

I was sitting here at my desk, all buckled down to get some work done before I power down for 36 hours to do holiday cooking, cleaning, decorating and celebrating. We never got a tree so I’m going to hang a string of lights and a few ornaments on the Ficus. I’m not much of a decorator to begin with but this is awfully pathetic.

But back to my writing. I heard a huge clattering sound on the roof and since it’s way too early for Santa I figured the snow must be sliding off and I jumped up and ran to the window.

I was right. It was scary loud. I sort bent down and covered my head which I’m sure would have been very effective if the world was crashing through the roof of the house.

The snow completely filled in our nice shoveled walkway. Piled on our front porch.

And almost completely destroyed our rain gutter. Look at the way the icicles are pointed in. And the way the wood is all chunked off.

We’re not too upset. We stood around on the lawn gaping and laughing. One more thing to go on the list of things to fix. I broke the control string on the window shade in my room, too. And then there’s that car thing.

Here are some killer icicles in case we get the urge to stab each other.

I told myself I wasn’t going to sit at the computer beyond 1pm but the snow thing got me all distracted. Just two more things to finish before I log off.

Happy Holidays Everybody.

I am planning on doing a holiday newsletter but probably after Jan 1st. And it’s probably going to be shorter but I’ll offer a story for people who like stories. And it was going to be a Christmas story but since I’m running behind, maybe I’ll make it a winter story. I guess I shouldn’t worry about it. Not like there are Christmas story police.

This morning we cleared the walk and driveway and chained up and headed out and got groceries. It wasn’t as dreadful as I expected.

You could tell I haven’t been out of the house much since I tried to strike up a conversation with every single person in the store and parking lot. I’m not normally very friendly.

Best moment: when the music was the the Herb Alpert version of that Sleigh Ride song. We danced a little in the aisle.

I have photos of the adventure but I left the camera in Bob’s car and he is being a prince and looking in on his mother. He might also be trying to scrounge up some sort of Christmas present for me since he got out of school about fifteen minutes before all this weather happened and he’s had little opportunity to get out there and do his thing.

Christmas is mostly canceled. My family isn’t coming up. I’ll deal with shipping out their presents later. This morning I revised my menu and shopping list accordingly.

The Reading Pile

This isn’t a completely accurate image of the to read pile. I have tiers of piles.

Things are organized depending how badly I want to read them or how quickly I want to return them or how guilty I feel about how long they’ve been in the launch area contrasted those I’m intentionally avoiding but hang on so as to appear like I might read them someday. I did finally give back The Kite Runner.

I thought this would be a fun project and ran around trying to find everything I wanted to read. I pulled stuff from my bedside table, a lot of it already partially read, and from different parts of the bookshelves. I made that giant pile and then I felt sort of sick and despondent. When am I ever going to get to all that? Plus I resent anything longer than 300 pages. Well, unless it has angsty teen vampire romance.

Many of those I don’t intend to sit down and read cover to cover. And that’s not every single unread book in the house that I’d like to get to eventually. Bob has zillions of interesting books on his shelves, too.

Well, there are worse problems a girl can have.

My index card collection.

I have a thing about index cards. I have them in every color, lined, unlined and graphed. 3×5 and smaller ones from Germany. I don’t like the bigger ones except I use some 4×6 at the office.

I keep them all over the house. All over my desk and computer cart. By my bed. I was holding back on using the little ones and I found a whole stack behind some pillar candles when I was pulling them all out to take this photo.

The ones on the bottom are special deluxe colored ones. The lined side is one color and the unlined side a different color. I know, cool, huh? I don’t remember where I got them. I found a stack of regular white ones in the other room after I took this photo.

I have some that I bought recently that are not cardlike at all. They’re like construction paper. I believe this is a crime against nature and will submit a complaint to the appropriate authorities. That’s what happens when America outsources all its manufacturing. Terrible index cards.

Enough of this crap already. I’ve had a good attitude and now I’ve had enough.

That’s the driveway we cleared and the car we dug out yesterday do we could run around today and do errands.

HA!

For consolation I’m baking pumpkin scones.

This is our driveway

I’m very sorry I mocked the snow gods now. I shouldn’t have said or thought those things. The snow is pretty and fluffy and trapped under a nice layer of ice.

It made a satisfying crackle-kuh-crunch sound when we walked on it. Which grew old rather quickly.

We cleared a path from the street to the front door which is sort of hopeless because as soon as it gets warm enough, all the snow on the front side of the roof is going to slide off and right onto the front porch.

This is the backyard

I broke all the ice off my car and scraped all the snow off because it’s my plan that the freezing rain and snow that’s falling right now is the very tail end of it. Overnight the temperatures are going to blast to a non-freezy 40 degrees and I’m going to get out there and buy hundreds of dollars worth of groceries for the family this week. And I’m going to get to the store early so it’s not a living nightmare. I have a low tolerance for all things crowded but generally I opt to avoid those things. Food shopping I cannot avoid. I also can’t avoid if the weather has freezier plans.

Here is our highly accurate temperature measuring device with icicles.

A few cars have been back and forth on our street and I walked in some tire tracks to the closet main street to see if it was getting plowed and sanded. Do they even have sanding trucks in Vancouver? Probably on the east side. The plow went by as I watched but the road looked pretty sketchy. I’m glad I don’t have to go anywhere today.

Finally. After teasing us for a week, something that looks like real snow out there.

I heard a spoon clattering in a ceramic dish and I asked Bob what he was making.

“Flavored snow.”

I asked him what flavors.

“Orange Izze and cranberry. It’s really fresh. You should try it.”

Today I’m trying to act like a civilized person. I did an extended yoga practice because I’ve been spending lots of time with the butt in the writer’s chair which is great for the writer but terrible for the butt, not to mention the back, shoulders and neck. I’m really starting to understand why you don’t see a lot of writers with great abs.

This morning I did yoga first, then put on regular clothes. I’ve been wearing pajamas or sweat pants most of the past several days. I put on my jeans and was relieved to find I can still button them.

Bob likes honey roasted things and he likes nuts. I found these at Trader Joe’s and bought them for him.

He said they were really good and hard to quit eating. Then I had to try. After standing in the middle of the kitchen for several minutes shoveling nuts into our mouths we decided to hide them.

I threw them in a cupboard with the serving bowls.

A couple days later I found what was left of them in the closet in my room.

I just took them out to the kitchen and put them in a dish. “There aren’t enough left to hurt us,” I said.

This is the magazine pile.

It actually looks a lot better than it did a week ago. I finished an Asimov’s, a F&SF and 3 MacLifes.

Those digests are what’s killing me. When I was accepted into CW I thought I should be more familiar with the markets so I subscribed to Asimov’s and Fantasy & Science Fiction. Also Locus. But they each sent me an issue right before I left and at least two while I was gone and then another one while I was recovering so I was already so way behind.

And then my reading time has dwindled so I haven’t managed to catch up. I’m trying to skip stories I don’t like or skim them but I like a lot of them.

The New York Times Magazine I don’t keep up with much but those are the Annual Issues of Ideas. I like to go through them and makes notes of some of the more interesting ideas. I say issues plural because, uh, one of those is still from 2007. I’m trying!

The National Geographic was passed along because it has an article about the Klamath River. I belong to 2 historical societies, Siskiyou County and Humboldt County and I never seem to get to those. Siskiyou is only an annual but Humboldt comes out 4 x a year.

Cooks Illustrated I love. I also get Sunset which is good for recipes. I’m caught up on that one. There’s another local visitor’s magazine in there that has an article about an Indian exhibit I want to check out.

I was going to do the to read pile but I’ve got to get some work done so perhaps tomorrow.

Update: Two more magazines in today’s mail. Plus something from our mortgage company addressed only to my husband.

I got this as a gift when I left the firm and I totally forgot to take a picture of it. It lives in my office but I brought it home so we could put it on the tree. It’s from Diamonds of the Sea. Billy got the Indian.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve had my panties in a twist about NW Natural. I finally found the letter they sent so I called them this afternoon.

We switched to natural gas and we had to apply for our account. I haven’t applied for a utility in awhile but this application struck me as being somewhat hysterical. I applied as the co-applicant. If I made a copy of the application I can’t find it but as I recall I had to put down things like where I worked and for how long.

Bob handled the furnace installation so I didn’t talk to anyone at the utility. Meanwhile, I get a letter from NWN that says I’ve been listed as a co-applicant so I’m also responsible for the bills and if this is a mistake I need to let them know. And this kind of irritates me because, duh. And because I’m not a roommate. I’m a homeowner. It’s 2008 and I don’t have to have the same name as my husband.

But what really made me mad was that the rebate check we got as new customers was only made out to him. It has nothing to do with “him getting the money.” It’s all the same money. It just seems sort of rude to suggest that I only count if they need someone to pay the bill.

I phoned today to politely update them to the customs and ways of this crazy future we find ourselves in and ask that my status be upgraded to homeowner and apparently that’s not an option. I’m just a co-responsible for the bill.