Category Archives: doing it wrong

Thanksgiving Security
I found this at boingboing.net. You can see the entire illustration here. The artist credited is Erik Johnson.

I think it’s a classic.

Adverb Reform School. STAT!
I’m reading Harry Potter #6. I’m not a diehard HP lover but I’ve enjoyed the books and movies.

So far, this book sucks ass. I read 225 pages and nothing happened. Nothing. It was the equivalent of reading about Harry flossing his teeth for 225 pages. I felt sorry for the kids who stayed up until midnight and paid $30 for a hardcover of this book. I’m now about halfway in (it’s about 800 pages) and a few things that might indicate some sort of plot have happened, so maybe the book will make up for it in the second half.

Along with the crime of writing pages and pages of plotless fiction, J.K. has never met an adverb she didn’t like. Bracingly. Quellingly. Warmingly. Are those even words? Are you allowed to put “ly” at the end of any word that you feel like? Another gem was when someone said something with a “significantly dark tone.” Marc said that he had to negotiate with his editor because he likes to invent verbs. (Just in case it’s not clear here, I know that bracingly isn’t a verb. I’m suggesting that Marc was inventing fun words and had to negotiate with his editor while J.K. makes up adverbs which any basic writing lesson will tell you to use sparingly.)(HA HA, I used an ingly word.) Yeah, yeah, I know if you sell a gabillion copies, you can do whatever you want. And at least people are reading.

And while I’m bitching about popular entertainment, I also watched Flightplan. I’ve been sitting on the DVD for two weeks. Kathy said she was disappointed with it, but I like Jodie Foster and thought it would be an entertaining thriller for a rainy afternoon. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s about a woman who goes on an overseas flight with her daughter and falls asleep. When she wakes up, her daughter is gone. There is no record of the daughter on the passenger list. Sound a bit intriguing? You’d think.

Turns out, it’s pretty stupid. Jodie’s character goes so completely batshit crazy, like climbing around in the ceiling of this plane which is the size of a cruise liner (I kept waiting to see the room with the pool) that it’s hard to sympathize with her. I’m not going to spoil it but the huge money shot at the very end is so completely contrived and ridiculous that I laughed, nay, I cackled while slapping my knee and stomping the floor. I can just see the writer at his writers group and creating this moment, the whole reason to have the movie, and the others chiming in, “Yeah, and she can emerge from the smoke. Yeah, and there can be emergency lights flashing in the background. Yeah, and … .”

Also the movie barely has 90 minutes worth of story so there’s some padding going on.

Final tidbit of the day, I made this epic casserole last night. I had to ask Bob to stop eating so we’d have some leftovers for this week. On Weds I bought a pound of roasted Poblanos at the farmers market. They have a guy there with a rig to roast them while you watch. For the casserole I took half that and diced them and stirred them with sour cream. I used a bunch of cooked rice and layered the rice with the sour cream mix, a diced Mexican style cheese that I can’t remember the name of, and diced cooked chicken. You do that for 2 layers and then top with rice and a sprinkle of cheese. Bake for about 30 minutes. Enjoy.

Be A Good Worker
This morning I procrastinated for a bit and then worked on the illustration for my project. I think I made it more complicated than it had to be but I felt like I was learning something so I stuck with it.

I finally decided I was fried and checked the clock and saw it was after 1pm and since the news is that it’s going to rain tomorrow, I thought I should try to put in a little more time in the yard. I cleaned up some general stuff and dug out the roots of this lavender thing I cut back to the nub since it looked bad. Then I cleaned up the rosebed and then, finally, after having it for eons, I took out the hedge master and went to town on the front hedge.

If I wasn’t so tired I’d tell a better story, but basically it’s this stupid box hedge that was randomly placed out front and a couple of years ago we had a bunch of snow on the roof and it all slid off at once and did some major damage to the hedge. We chopped it back and intended to pull it out but never did and it’s been growing and growing until it looked like a spiky space alien out there.

I finally took the hedge cutters to it and smoothed out the edges. I considered taking pictures but it doesn’t look that special now that it’s done and I could see you guys thinking: Why the hell did she put a photo of her hedge on her blog? It looks like it was trimmed by a blind person.

[Aside: don’t you hate when your software checks for updates all by itself and randomly interrupts you when you’re doing something to say, “Hey, I have an update, do you want it right now?” and I want to say, “No, do I interrupt you when you’re in the middle of doing something and say, “Hey, it’s my birthday, do you want to bake me a cake?”]

My confidence boosted by how easy it is to use that mother, I went to the side of the house to chop at that hedge. That’s another story I can’t get into right now, but basically I chopped until I felt like my arms were falling off and they still feel like they’re falling off and my forearms are throbbing and typing does not feel good.

Tomorrow I’m making something with those roasted Poblanos I bought and doing some serious couch surfing.

I Want My System Font Back
This morning I arrived at the office to find that the last person on my computer was an administrator and that my display settings were all screwed up. The system font is stupid and all my desktop icons are smaller and so on like that. The sad part is that this majorly aggravated me and I stomped into someone’s office to bitch about it.

I have become that woman in the office whose head spins around and who loudly whines about her system fonts. Get over it already.

Also in today’s ramblings, I just read my Wednesday NYT Dining Out and on the cover is a super interesting article about a guy who studies how outside influences affect how much a person eats. Try this link.

The article starts out saying people will swear they aren’t influenced by the size of the package or how much variety is on the buffet table, or fancy names on the label.

Nuh-uh. I’m TOTALLY influenced by portion sizes. I’m the queen of eating junk food just because it’s there on the table. I will run out a buy a goofy product because of advertising or pick the prettier label if deciding between two brands. This is exactly why I don’t like to buy a lot of chips or any food I know I will eat in absurd quantities. This is also why I don’t like for my husband to fix my plate because he loads it up with so much stuff and I’ll eat it because it’s there. My serving guideline for him is: “Think about how much you think I would eat. Then cut it in half.”

Finally, did you know rebates are a total scam? I’ve always thought they were an excuse to collect your personal data for direct mailing/telemarketing. Turns out it’s more insidious than that AND a company was recently granted a patent for their business practice that takes pride in denying you your rebate. Their mothers must be proud.

Crazy Man with Red Ponytail
This morning I walked down Main Street near a young guy smoking a cigarette and wearing green pants with a green bag slung over his shoulder and sporting a red ponytail. He looked like a character in Dazed and Confused but time does not permit me to find a photo. Sorry.

I stopped at the red light on 2nd. He continued across. There was no traffic. He made a production of looking to the left and then to the right and then looking back over his shoulder at me standing on the corner and giving me something between an irritated sigh and the stink-eye. (And it’s a one way street so the right glance was superfluous Mr. He-Who-Thinks-He’s-So-Great.)

So you chose to go, I chose to wait. Let’s agree not to judge each other.

Then my light turned green and I crossed and caught up with him at the next corner which was red and the intersection filled with cars. We stood waiting. Traffic thinned out. One car remained but paused in front of us so that the driver would not block the intersection.

Mr. Green Jeans opens his arms to the sides in a big impatient “what’s the matter with you lady” gesture and as she drives through the intersection he does a big high karate kick at the car.

I was terrified he was going to go into my building because there was no way I was getting on the elevator with that bundle of crazy. I suppose we should be grateful he wasn’t driving.

Three Unrelated Items
1 – On Saturday morning I went out to the kitchen to refill my tea. My husband sat at the kitchen table with his headphones on, eyes closed. The paper was spread-out before him and his head tilted forward as he gently snored.

He sat up a bit when I came in the room.

ME: Hey Hon, whatcha doing?

Him: Sleeping and reading the paper.

2 – This weekend I read three reviews of Cormac McCarthy’s new book The Road. (The URL takes you to the website of the Official Cormac McCarthy Society. Who knew that even existed? Also, they don’t have the new book on their site. For shame.) I like McCarthy’s writing a lot. However, one of the reviews I read characterized this as his bleakest book yet which doesn’t put me in a big hurry. If you recall, I read Suttree earlier this year (see book #9) and the words I used were grim and joyless.

3 – My text book for my Illustrator class starts each chapter with a section called, “Why Would I Do This?” Why, indeed.

A Conversation that took place on Tuesday evening, the day the cleaning person came, one minute after arriving home and putting my things on the kitchen counter.

Me: Omigod, the counter’s all sticky.
Bob: That’s where I made my lunch.
Me: You mean we paid someone to clean today and I don’t even get to enjoy it for 5 minutes?
Bob: I can wipe it off if you want.
Me: No. I want it sticky.

Real Electrician
Actual electricans came to our house to look at our problem and turns out, portions of our electrical system are totally mickey mouse. I had noticed, as early as shortly after we bought the house that there were signs of people without a clue doing projects on the house. And we’ve had other clues that things were a bit off so this wasn’t a huge surprise.

I suppose I can see why some people would cut corners and have a nephew do a shitty paint job OR reinstall only part of the kitchen floor OR wallpaper right over the old wallpaper.

But why would you mess with the electricity? Why would you do the cheapo, I have a friend who read a book about wires and breakers once and took shop in high school do the electrical work?

We’re still not clear what we’re in for but we’d like to get it right so some dollars will be going into electrical fixing. And here’s a shout out to LeRoy who mentioned when we bought the house that it was a good idea to set money aside every month for a house fund for just these types of situations.

Meanwhile, my class is taking up more of my free time than expected so the blog lags. I never told you about the food article that paired wine with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or FoodDay Martha on another bender about things in the east that are better than the west. She mentions this family farm where they get their better apples and how this farm has been in the same family since 1700-something when King George (or whatever) gave them the land and isn’t that cool? Yeah, sure if you conveniently forget that other people were using that land first.

Bitty Booties
I made these with a pattern from Heather Baily which you can find here. I wish I knew how to take better pictures of things and I’ll invest some time and energy into that at some point.

The star booties were the test pair and the heart booties I gave to Katie. The hearts are a picture of the cast of Beverly Hills 90210 and came from some earrings Katie’s mother gave me years ago.

The booties weren’t too hard to make but the test pair took forever. I’ve got two more pairs for gifts sitting by the TV about 50% finished. Just an hour or two of hand stitching and they’ll be done, too. They aren’t practical for wearing. At least not the way I made them. But they are cute and a fun little gift.

Groaning Shelf
I’ve been meaning to take a picture of the “to read” shelf to show you. At first I was going to make it more organized. Then I was going to leave exactly as it normally is. Then I moved stuff around just a little so you can see more books. You can click on the photo for a bigger version if you want to see the titles better.

This is by no means the complete stack of books to read. This is just the main stacking area and where I look first when I’m ready for a new book.

You can barely see The Grapes of Wrath behind the middle stack between the Argonath bookends that came with one of my DVD purchases. There’s another paperback in there called something like Fire in the Morning which I’ve been carrying around for years and have moved to the bedside table more than once but still haven’t managed to read. Wrath I bought a couple of years ago thinking I wanted to read it again to see how my perspective has changed after reading it 20 some odd years ago. Every time I pick it up it seems so hefty and the print so small I resolve to read it again later.

The Anne Rice is also ancient. Around the time I got it, I read about 3 stinkers of hers in a row and could never bring myself to start that one. But I can’t bring myself to chuck it without at least trying the first 20 pages just in case it isn’t another stinker.

On the left buried at the bottom is an Alice Munro collection of stories. I’m easily drawn to chubby short story collections but rarely seem to read them. I suppose I should drop in and out, reading a story here and there. But that upsets my yearning to approach a book as a single project to be read from beginning to end. Alice Munro writes wonderful stories.

Under Alice is a book you can’t see called Daughters are Forever by Lee Maracle, who I used to see at Wordcraft Circle events but haven’t seen in a number of years.

Hopefully I can finish a book today and get started on that pound of Potter.