You're Doing It Wrong

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.

This is a really old picture of snow in Orleans at the Grandparents

I have something that I’d set aside to give to people at Christmas and I can’t find it. I keep thinking I’m going to find it but it wasn’t in the Christmas wrapping paper stash and it wasn’t in the Christmas ornament/doodad boxes. It seems like I would have put it in a place I was likely to look at this time of year.

It’s not stashed on the bookshelves or in any of the little boxes I have in the closet where I stash things. I’m not sure where else to look and not really in the mood to take on a more major search effort. The world doesn’t end if I don’t find it but now it’s bugging me.

Is there some rule that news reporters who stand outside to talk about the weather must be clinically stupid? I thought getting on television was a competitive job and you had to have some sort of skills or brains or something. There was a woman today who was so awful, I couldn’t stop watching. My conclusion was that she must be excellent at something else which I won’t mention on a family blog.

The weather people keep promising all this snow and ice and accumulations and we must be living in a special bubble because it’s been just fine here. Cold and frosty. I’ve been sticking close to home for nothing. I’m planning on running out and taking care of errands tomorrow.

Yesterday I ran around downtown doing some xmas shopping. My list is pretty boring off-the-shelf type stuff and I had a hard time finding anything that I was looking for and if I did, it came in one color. I’m trying to help the economy but I need better choices.

It’s already the 17th and I have no interest in starting the annual newsletter. This doesn’t happen very often. Maybe this weekend I’ll find a surge of energy.

This morning I turned on the TV to see if there was anything traffic related I should know about. The ruddy-faced weatherman announced that there was some cabin-fever in Stumptown. The roads were crowded but all the schools were shut down.

I penned him a polite note when I got in, informing him that teleportation hadn’t been invented yet and that people use cars to go to work, too.

I’m wearing what I consider to be my most heavy-duty wool pants. They’re also my vintage wool pants. My mom gave them to me a long time ago. When she first gave them to me, I still lived in California and didn’t understand how wonderful wool pants are.

But then for a long time I couldn’t fit into them. Now I can fit into them and I love wool.

The only thing is that they are the most high waisted pants on the planet. The waistband is bumping against the bottom of my ribcage right now. I didn’t like the low waistband thing for a long time. But now that I’m used to it, the high waistband is uncomfortable and for reasons I’m guessing are juvenile flashbacks, feels super dorky.

I went to Pendleton a couple months ago to look for new heavy-duty wool pants, assuming they’d updated the cut since these ancients ones I’m wearing were made. Nope. Up-to-my-armpits waistband. Maybe I should pen them a polite note.

This is how I took it and now I’m wondering if I should flip it. No, too lazy.

Bob and I are both home today. It’s sunny outside and according to our highly accurate backyard temperature measuring device, it’s 28 degrees. It’s also really windy. We don’t want to turn into winter lumps so we decided to go for a walk. We piled on layers of clothes, hats and mittens and headed out into the bright coldness.

What do you think this thing is for? It’s a retired tea kettle on a stick. It’s lined up with a couple of other bird feeders so I guess it’s a birdfeeder but not sure how that would work. Maybe it’s just outdoor art.

We originally thought we’d take this long route by Burnt Bridge Creek but we started heading east into the wind and our noses turned blue and it was so ugly we almost turned around right then.

But we thought we’d at least hang in for a couple of blocks and once we got around the first corner it wasn’t so bad. But we never made it to the creek.

The holiday load has been manageable so far. I’ve got a few errands left but nothing to freak out about. It’s the rest of my load that I can’t seem to catch up on. My email box is stacked and I owe from way back at the beginning of November. Every day I try to go through at least ten but by the end of the day at least twelve more have come in. I unsubscribed from every company email list I’m on because they were all sending me things every single day. Too much crap.

And I have a million of those little things you have to do that probably won’t take that long but you never seem to get to them. I need to find my camera book and figure out what magical combination of buttons I pressed that makes the display screen all wonky. I need to find all the stuff for our natural gas account and put it in the same folder. I need to update the family address list and distribute. I need to clean out this drawer in my bathroom where hair product spilled. I should probably go look for the lens cap to my camera. I’m 99% sure I lost it at home but I’m afraid it fell off when I went outside and walked around the yard and don’t really feel like bundling up and looking right now. I was hoping it would be on my desk but no luck.

I know, don’t you wish I’d go on?

This is Mt. St. Helens with an old farm that’s still in the neighborhood. There was a chainlink fence and I lifted my camera up over the top to take the picture and when downloaded it from the camera I was surprised by how well I aimed.

Yesterday the weatherman said we could expect 1-3 inch accumulations overnight. You can imagine my disappointment when I ripped the windowshade open this morning and saw this. It looks like someone shook a bag of flour out of an open car window as they drove by.

It picked up again later but there was never enough to cover anything.

I don’t know how Laura Ingalls survived that Long Winter. I ran out to the backyard to see how things were progressing. It’s windy and 30 degrees. I ran back inside and stood on the heating vent in the living room until I stopped shivering. Laura Ingalls probably wasn’t stupid enough to run outside in her pajamas.

Now I’ve also revealed that I never changed out of my pajamas today. Well, at 3:30 I took them off and put on sweatpants. But I’m wearing the sweatpants to bed so it wasn’t like I traded up.

Every time I plan to have a lazy day, the opposite happens. I guess there are worse problems.

I wrote most of the morning. Then I Bob and I had a hot lunch. Then I decided to bake a loaf of bread so I could make fresh bread Nutella toast when I felt like a snack while being inside on a snow day.

By the time I had the kitchen all cleaned up it was 3:30. So I changed into my sweatpants, as mentioned earlier, and then fired up a crackle log and sat down and watched a Firefly. It was the one where there’s a fancy ball and Kaylee wears this crazy pink dress and Mal has to swordfight this guy who wanted to make Inara his personal companion.

Now I’m cleaning off my desk while I wait for the bread to come out of the oven.

I think after dinner we might watch Iron Man from Netflix or we still have a million Life on Mars on the DVR. I guess it’s a half lazy day.