You're Doing It Wrong

Early To Bed
I was ready for bed at 7:30p last night but I didn’t actually crawl in until 8p and didn’t turn out the light until 8:30p. Bob was already asleep. I had to move his laptop and turn off the movie he was “watching.”

On the occasions where we go to bed that early I’m always worried someone is going to phone. What are they going to think if they wake us up before 9pm?

A couple of weeks ago our thermostat acted strangely. It seems like we’ve had long stretches of weather this summer that were at the threshold. Not really warm enough to kick on the air but almost.

One night I noticed the air kicked on after 7pm when I had all the windows opened. I figured it was warmer than I thought and closed everything up. A half hour later the air was still blasting and the thermostat said it was 80 degrees in the house. When it went to 82 I turned off everything and reopened the windows and wondered how serious this problem was. I noticed a weird display on the screen and part of it said “batt.” The other part said something like “6|o9b” but I guessed it was the battery.

I found the user book and read what it said about batteries but I couldn’t figure out how to get the unit open. I pulled, pushed, squeezed and slid but everything seemed like it was going to break it. The user book offered no clues of how to do this.

I checked the website. In fact, numerous sites would let me download the same user book I already had. No one said how to get the thing open.

I jotted off an email to the contact at the website that I needed a new battery and didn’t know how to do it and they responded to open the unit and replace the old one. I realize my question was poorly worded but it would seem that anyone smart enough to walk upright would know where the battery went, the thermostat is about as big as a pack of cigarettes.

I sent another note, explaining that I couldn’t get the unit open and a guy named Woody sent me instructions: you need to insert the tip of a screwdriver into the seam and twist. Worked perfect. I think they should put that in the book.

Finally, one of my favorite online quotes of all time at my new fave guilty pleasure website Jezebel.

She’s interviewing this guy on the phone (backstory omitted) and in response to his question of whether she’s hot:

Um, not right now. I fix up okay. But "hot" isn't, like, my selling point. I'm more of a "fun" type person. Like, I am really hungover right now, and probably not looking so good, but it's because I was "fun" last night. Anyway I'm not sure why I'm telling you this.

Def Leppard and Styx at the Clark County Amphitheater September 12, 2007

Subtitle: Bringing On the Hottie

Last night was the big rock and roll girls night out starring Def Leppard and Styx at the Amphitheater in Clark County. I’ve never been to this venue before but I’ve heard a lot about it because there was a huge contingent of locals who weren’t too happy about it being built. Also, Clark College graduation is there so Bob gets to visit every June.

Rock and roll is tiring when you’re old. My eyeballs feel like they spent the night in a dust bowl. I was too wound up to sleep when I got home and then I woke up at 4:45am. By 5am this morning, I was dorkily fixing the photos, wondering if this outing was worthy of a Flickr stream. Given the time constraints and upon closer inspection of the photos, I decided, not.

I finally got lithium batteries for my camera and it works a million times better. They should tell you that in the user guide. Last night I accidentally hit the “scene” button which is where the camera helps you take a portrait or landscape or whatever. I never use it so I don’t know how it works but it kept making a smiley face that was creeping me out. I’d have the camera pointed at the blanket and there would be a giant smiley face on the screen.

Here we are, ready to rock. That’s me, Jenny, Meredith, and Cousin Kathy. The last concert Kathy and I went to together was Spinal Tap sometime in the 90’s. It’s been too long.

We headed out at 7pm raring to go. Before we were 3 miles down the road we all agreed that we were game to head home early, if we were ready. I wish I could go back and visit my 23 year old self and tell her how tired her 43 year old self will be. But then, why go and depress her. How excited would I be if some old lady hobbled up to me and said she was my 63 year old self and I had no idea what tired was at 43? Well, if she had lottery, horse-racing and stock tips, I would be happy.

One of the local issues was with traffic flow and wow, this place is set up like a well-oiled machine. There were blinking signs, orange cones, flashing Washington Patrol lights and Officers waving at us from every direction. We had 4 people in our car so we qualified for Y.E.S. (your enhancement of service) Parking and I had printed out our pass and we taped it to our windshield.

As we were finding our lot, I told the ladies about

Styx was already rocking when we returned, the lights low, the smell of Otto’s jacket wafting over the grass and the keyboard pounding Blue Collar Man (Long Nights). Doesn’t get any better than that.

Last year I wrote about my teenage infatuation with Styx here. Kathy said she and Jennifer (another cousin) had a big crush on Tommy Shaw back in the day and used to fight over him. I said: “Jennifer’s not here. He’s all yours.” Kathy knew the words to all the songs and laughed at the keyboard player who had a rig where he could run around in circles and I think he was contractually obligated to do 50 circles per song.

Styx did a very Las Vegas super exaggerated show with every rock and roll cliché in the book including synchronized guitar swinging and hair flipping, and they were FABULOUS. And they played all the songs we wanted to hear.

At the break we zoomed to the bathroom which was like: Toilet Barn. I kept saying they had about 60 stalls but they had two sides so it was more like 120 stalls – no waiting! The person(s) responsible for that should have a statue at the entrance and possibly a legal holiday in their honor.

Crowd watching was fun. About as diverse as they come. Well no hipster types with distinctive eyewear. The mullet watch was a wee bit disappointing. Old. Young. People with kids. There was a group of teenagers sitting in front of us that weren’t even alive when I listened to Pyromania 10 times a day for a year.

Can you believe it? Almost 24 years to the day, I saw Def Leppard for the first time on the Pyromania tour. That is a story in itself but this post is already 10 times too long. It’s impossible to convey how insane I was over this band.

I even wrote a sort-of record review of Hysteria (which, initially, I was disappointed with) in the form of a letter to the editor of Creem magazine which was printed and reappears here.

These shots of the stage are an intentional joke because how can you get a decent shot of a stage from 5 miles back with a cheapo camera? That’s Joe Elliot in the lower left corner. See him?

I’m sad to tell you that Def Leppard was pretty much doodoo. As we returned from the bathroom (me for the 3rd visit because apparently if 1 beer goes in, 10 must come out) I said, “I’m disappointed with the sound” and Meredith said, “I’m disappointed with the setlist.” And she was right. Except for Foolin’ and a few songs off High N’Dry, they didn’t play songs that you wanted to hear.

This particular potty break took place at the end of the guitar solo-bass solo sequence leading in to cover of Rock On. Guys, I don’t care how tired you are of playing the hits, you’re playing a short set and that’s what we came for.

Shortly after we got back to our seats, the band played an acoustic version of Bringing on the Heartbreak.

Meredith says: “More unplugged? That’s enough.”

Moments later we were out in the parking lot, still empty, hearing the classic Photograph riff, the one song we wanted to hear, drifting over the barrier.

“We can listen to it at home,” I said.

It was still fun and we zoomed out of the parking lot and I was in bed by 10:45pm.

Here’s my new notepad. I can wear it around my neck for easy note taking. A couple years ago Bob gave me that pen which is also a teeny flashlight – perfect for note taking in the dark. The left side says, “Or is he [referring to Styx’s keyboard guy] original? Big lighter moment-I used my pen!” and the right side says, “wow synch guitar swing hair flipping AWESOME!”

When Styx played Come Sail Away it was the lighter in the air moment and I waved around my flashlight pen. Remember the big Come Sail Away moment on Freaks and Geeks?

Here’s a link to Meredith’s review of the show.

I hate to hit the publish button because I’m sure this is filled with errors and grammar nightmares but I’m tired and have to work for a living so this is what you get. If you’re still reading.

Butter Bar
I thought about making a list of 10 things I would never write about here and then writing about each one. But the only things I could think of I would never write about.

Several decades ago when I was in college I ate buckets and buckets of air popped popcorn on a daily basis. At the time I was a major binge eater and calorie-wise 10 cups of popcorn was a better choice than a loaf of bread with peanut butter. It was also cheap and tasty and had an enjoyable crunch to it. And when I say better choice, I was a poor college student and couldn’t afford a new pair of fat pants every 2 weeks.

My popcorn eating dropped off dramatically after college, but I owned an air popper for a long time and made popcorn now and then.

About 10 years ago I had a popcorn ordeal where shortly after eating popcorn my gum became inflamed. I vigorously brush and flossed and had swelling and terrible pain for my troubles.

I finally did an emergency trip to the best dentist on the planet, Saint Shoneen Sendelback, who moved so I can’t see her any longer. It’s been years and I’m still not over it. Dr. Sendelback with a touch like angel breath, very carefully examined my poor tooth and gum and couldn’t find anything. She decided to give it a good cleaning and give me some rinse and we’d have to wait and see.

During the cleaning she found, deep in my gum, a tiny piece of popcorn kernel the size of a pencil tip. That tiny thing was what was making me so miserable. My mouth was tender but back to normal and I quit eating popcorn.

I will eat kettle corn but I prefer not to have it in the house because it’s one of those foods that I eat 10 pounds of in 5 minutes, shoving it in my mouth faster than I can chew. I’m the black widow of kettle corn.

A couple of years ago my office merged with a larger law firm (start at Feb 23). These people microwave popcorn every single day. What is up with offices and microwave popcorn? I wish I invented it.

The Future’s Open Wide
Last night I gave blood at yoga. I bet you thought it was just a bunch of women with ponytails stretching on mats and not a blood sport. I don’t have time to find a photo for you (try this) but it’s a pose where you balance on your forearms, Pincha Mayurasana. A couple of weeks ago I was trying a variation using the wall for balance so I was up there for awhile wiggling around and ended up wearing a raw spot on both elbows.

The raw spots turned into scabs and the scabs rubbed off a little last week and one totally came off last night. For the first time in my yoga career I have to scrub blood off my mat.

In other news, one of my very favorite songs of all time is I Melt With You by Modern English. It’s one of those songs that I can listen to over and over, I can hear it anytime and it always sounds good. One of my favorite movie moments is the end of Valley Girl when that song starts.

You can imagine my horror when last night I heard my favorite song pimping some new product in a commercial for Taco Hell. The wiki says it’s been used in a number of other commercials but I guess I never noticed. I was so distraught, I had to go to bed early.

My Latest Disaster

It’s hard to believe that I can be so consistently lame at something I do so often. Another pie crust disaster, possibly my worst disaster of all time. I have a folder filled with “no fail” crust recipes and for some reason I decided to try a different one yesterday which is a half butter, half shortening and turned out this pile of crumbs. Thanks a lot, Sunset.

As soon as I saw what a mess it was I took the recipe out of the folder and tossed it into recycling. Then after I “rolled out” the bottom crust I took the recipe out of recycling, violently crumpled it up and threw it on the floor and stomped on it and then I put it back in recycling.

If you’ve ever made a graham cracker crust, you know how you mix the crumbs with butter and then smush them into the pie pan? That was more or less my method. At the end of the day all we need are yummy peaches mixed with a delicious baked crumble. I just kept the pie pan shape to humor myself.

The top crust went equally bad and I scraped up crumbs and flattened them with my fingers and then lay the resulting crumb blob onto bare peaches. Then I took this picture.

Every time I see one of my photos like this I think: I need to spring for a better camera. And then I think how little sense it makes to have a fancy camera to photograph baking mayhem. You can guess the punchline: it tasted fabulous.

Also, Children of Men is an excellent movie.

Another Productive Weekend in Paradise

Photo: Until very recently a working farm in Vancouver. No doubt soon to be 5 trillion giant houses on tiny lots and a Walmart.

After my epic day of errands on Friday morning, my weekend productivity took a dive. I’ll reprint my most recent book review here to give you an idea why.

27. Twilight (498 pp.) by Stephenie Meyer (Sep 8). I did a foolish thing. If you’re a regular reader, you know I’ve been having a problem reading anything resembling serious fiction. Maybe I should call it challenging fiction. The book I’m really reading right now is called Snow and the author won the Nobel Prize and it’s really good and I’m halfway through it but it isn’t something that I’ve wanted to curl up with for a few hours. On Friday I used a bookstore giftcard I had and grabbed this book with a couple of others and came home and set them in the immediate “to read” area which is right next to the bed. (Different from the “to read” shelves which are in my room.) I knew better but I decided to peek at this book, just read a few pages to see what I thought. I read some young adult reviewers who were swooning about it. I told Bob it was vampires in high school and it the most overwrought star-crossed lovers romantic teenage wishfulfillment story of all time and I could not put it down until it was finished. And I just ordered the next two in the series, in hardcover, so they will be here by the end of the week.

I did manage to make the risotto last night which turned out A+. Bob said it was like a $15 entree. And this morning I made a loaf of No-Knead bread for a get together and later I will make a peach pie. We also hacked back some berry vines in the backyard that live in the middle of our hedge. I wanted to cut out the big long pieces that were draped into our yard. This is a tall person’s job and I got the ladder and whatever radar people have that goes off when their children are about to hurt themselves went off for Bob because he doesn’t have any children to use his radar on. He was outside in a flash asking me what I was doing.

I was already putting the ladder away by then because any place I could get the ladder stable was too far away to reach the berry vines. He took over and shortly thereafter we had ladders and long clippers and short clippers and rakes and electric hedge trimmers strewn all about and a big gash hacked out of the middle of our hedge. Cross that project off the list.

I saw in the paper that Women’s World Cup Soccer is starting this week and I don’t think I can manage a sports event right now. I can barely find the time to keep up with the 2 or 3 hours of shows per week I have that are on right now. And I’ve had a netflix (Children of Men) sitting next to the TV for a week now. Maybe I’ll catch up after the group play.

This is a busy week. Tomorrow is yoga night. Tuesday is get together night. Wednesday is Def Leppard night. I’m predicting Thursday will be crabby, tired, just give me a bottle of wine and a piece of pizza and leave me alone night.

This morning as I got on Highway 14 from Interstate 5 I passed a man standing on the other side of the divider wearing a big fur hat with a gallon jug of milk balanced on the divider and he was writing notes on a piece of paper. What do you think that was all about?

I’ve lived in Vancouver 12 years next March and I finally figured out how to drive from Trader Joes to the Mall from the freeway. I think I’ve taken every single exit in the vicinity and made oodles of u-turns in my quest to find the right path. I like to think the signage was updated because now there’s a sign for the mall that tells you what exit to take. But I can’t be sure I just wasn’t always doing it wrong before.

I think Trader Joes should hire me as a wine consultant. Every time I’m there I find myself recommending wine or giving feedback to other customers. I’m the expert on the $7 or less bottles of red.

I did a huge bunch of errands this morning. The only thing I missed was the credit union. I tried to find this branch I haven’t been to in a long time and it took me awhile to figure it out and then when I finally found it and it wasn’t there I remembered that I haven’t been there in a long time because it’s closed. By the time I would have gotten to my regular branch it would be Noon and everyone knows what a bad idea it is to do banking at Noon. That item will have to wait.

I tried a new product. I’m not a major makeup wearer but I throw a bit on every day. I don’t know what I thought I was buying, some sort of light foundation type thing. This morning I put it on as I’d put on my regular and found myself smearing on a heavy layer of clown make up. I looked into the mirror and said, “Obviously, too much.” So I went to wash it off and found that it had bonded to my skin like a rubber mask or something. Water was rolling off my skin. I totally panicked thinking this was going to be my face for the next 3 months and I was going to have to go around and be laughed at by strangers and explain to my co-workers that I’d applied a 3 week supply of make up to my face by mistake and now it was a permanent bond, please get used to it. Two cleansers and some raw red skin later: success.

Also this morning I was parked in the garage at our house. Normally I’m parked in the driveway. I’m so locked in to my habits, I got in the car, reached over for the garage door opener, hit the button and closed the garage door. While I was sitting in my car in the garage.

Fall Bulb-Tacular
When I was at Mom’s I grabbed her Breck’s catalog. It’s always been my intention to throw some more bulbs in the yard because when Spring finally comes, few things make me happier than to see bright colored flowers out in the yard.

My major bulb energy goes into my dahlias which reminds me, I haven’t taken any dahlia photos for several weeks. Or pumpkins. I need to get up to speed here. (The photo is an old one from Flickr.)

Dahlias are summer bulbs and I have more than I need already. I’m going to dig up a bunch of red ones (maybe) and see if any neighbors want them or perhaps engage in some creative vandalism and toss them into some dirt somewhere. The Breck’s catalog is spring bulbs and I’ve got a decent supply of daffodils and a few tulips and miscellaneous but could use improvement.

I’ve gone through the catalog twice with my ultimate wish list and then cutting back to be more realistic and then cutting back to my budget. Now I have to be practical about what I will actually be willing to put into the ground. This is my problem with spring bulbs is that usually in the fall I’m done with the garden. I want to pull everything up and then sit in the house and drink hot cocoa and watch my shows or read books.

Right now, sitting here in my office with my tea, looking at photos of beautiful flowers, I’m totally optimistic about how much work I’ll want to do. Think of the payoff. But I know myself well enough that I can see myself cursing at my giant box of bulbs and making one big hole in the middle of the yard and dumping them in and being done with it.

The current list is 108 bulbs. I’ll decide tomorrow whether to cut it back or not.

More Notes

It turns out my bank doesn’t take rolled coins. Actually she said it depends on the branch. But the downtown Wells Fargo at 5th and Jefferson will take your big bag of coins and throw it in the coin counter. No need to spend the afternoon rolling your coins. Wouldn’t that information have been handy a few days earlier?

===

I watched Marie Antoinette on Monday night. I loved Lost in Translation (and reading about it online is making me want to see it again) and had been looking forward to this movie, even though the reviews were doodoo. And I thought the movie was doodoo. I liked parts of it and the eye candy was fun but after awhile I got bored watching people in fancy clothes walking through the garden with trendy music playing.

===

Another thing I’ve been meaning to ask related to my “miracles of white vinegar” post was that my dishwasher instructions suggest running vinegar through the machine once or twice a year. How do you do this? Do you just pour it in the bottom? Do you do it with the dishwasher full or empty? This seems like something that requires more information.

===

When the season changes I like to have some goals for kitchen skills. Like one winter it was bread. And bread continues because I’m a slow learner at bread. This winter my kitchen project is going to be paella and risotto.

Time for a Cover: One Tin Soldier

I only have one friend from high school that I keep in touch with on a regular basis. Or even on an irregular basis when you get right down to it. We went to the same college and remain close with a group of college friends that keep in touch thanks to the magic of the Internet.

Last week she sent a note to the group with a photo of her daughter on her way to her first day as a freshman in high school.

We exchanged a couple of notes trying to remember something about our freshman year and between the two of us, the memories are mighty skimpy.

I found my freshman yearbook yesterday because I was cleaning out shelves and cupboards doing some amateur level de-cluttering. I flipped through it and in the very beginning found a picture of her husband, who also went to high school with us, so I had to scan that. Then I found our picture on a page that said Symphonic Band.

We were in band in high school?

I have zero memory of this and I scanned those, too and sent them off to her and I got this reply: “We weren’t in band in high school.”

Yet, there is photographic evidence. How can this be? I’m sure there’s a good reason we’ve forgotten.