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Spam Central
Happy New Year! It appears some spammer used my domain for a nice (s)pamfest. Thanks! Like I don’t have enough stupid sh*t to deal with.

I had a busy day dismantling all the Christmas decorations, any remaining boxes, wrapping and fluff from the actual xmas gifts, rearranging shelves and cupboards to fit in new stuff, another clear out of the fridge and related kitchen projects including turning my beautiful pumpkin into eating material and finalizing the turkey carcass broth into turkey noodle soup. I also caught up on all the laundry.

Things I didn’t get to? The list is much longer. *sigh* What is it? Does everything just take longer than you’d think? Do I poop out earlier than the average person? Am I slower or too detail oriented? My room is still a mess with gifts and books and papers strewn about and projects not even started. Short work week. There will be another weekend in no time. (And bluegrass next weekend, too.)

Like the eerie glow on the pumpkin photo? I have a vague recollection of a photo trick where you cover the flash with paper or something like that. I used my finger. This gives me lots of ideas.

While I undid the xmas tree and careful rewrapped all the ornaments and then did the advanced puzzle where you have to fit it all into the two boxes that go into the garage, I watched a movie I DVR’d earlier this month: Force Ten from Navarone.

I picked two movies, The Sting and Navarone.

I saw The Sting with my friend Julie, when it came out in 1973 which means I was about 10 and I liked it then. I’m not sure the last time I saw it but it’s been at least 20 years and I say this: it holds up well. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Newman and Redford both look fantastic.

I’ve never seen Navarone but I picked it because Harrison Ford is in it. Long story short: it’s a WWII movie and very fun to watch while doing xmas decorations plus there are numerous coincidences.

1 – Robert Shaw who played Doyle Lonnegan in The Sting, and is also well know as Quint from Jaws, which I also saw with my childhood friend, Julie. You might argue that his character in Navarone is the “Han Solo” character.

2 – Carl Weathers is in the movie. Last night Bob and I watched a half disk of Arrested Development and Carl Weathers appeared in one episode in a hilarious “as himself” role.

3 – Richard Kiel who played the unforgettable Jaws role in a James Bond movie appeared in Navarone as a bad guy.

4 – I liked Harrison Ford but you could see the Han Solo in this performance as well. This movie came out in 78 after Star Wars.

I’m sure there is more I could say but I’ve got a glass of wine and 2 more Arrested Developments waiting for me and I get to go to work tomorrow so must drop kick my big butt to bed early.

Too Tired for Even A Clever Title
Just wanted to send out a quick HAPPY NEW YEAR to everyone.

I finally finished the holiday newsletter and if you haven’t seen it yet, click away.

Today I accomplished the following:

I exercised. I did the holiday newsletter. It took all freaking day. OOF. I do it to myself because I end up geeking around with the photos and changing my mind what to use and then thinking I’ll change the format and geeking with that.

I am now so tired of sitting at the computer and I can hardly see straight. And tomorrow: the paper version. (That sound you hear is me screaming.)

I also made turkey tetrazzini. Can you imagine the expression on a child’s face if you told him he was going to have a candy buffet for dinner? This is how my husband looks when I tell him I’m making turkey tetrazzini. It’s like eating magical goodness cooked while unicorns dance around the kitchen. (For him.) For me it’s just delicious hot food with lots of leftovers.

After I staggered away from the keyboard this afternoon, I wasn’t really in the mood for the tetrazzini. The recipe is seriously yummy but also gets every dish in the kitchen dirty and most of the counterspace. But everything was ready to do so I threw it together and made a salad and also a brown betty with the mushy pears we didn’t get around to eating. Man, there’s a lot of stuff to eat during the holidays.

We’ve had an excellent holidays and birthday but to be honest, I’m ready for it to be over. We’re invited to another doo tomorrow but halfway through tetrazzini dishes I hit my breaking point. I told Bob: I need to stay home. I have things to do, puttering to putt, notes to jot, pictures to cut out, crap to put away, more crap to put in the trash. I’m not up for one more event right now.

Birthday
A couple years ago Bob bought me a Time and Newsweek from the week of my birthday. This morning I flipped through them to see if there was some fun thing I could share here.

I don’t know where to start.

The Newsweek cover story has to do with missionaries around the world. The cover price is .25¢.

Time has Painter Andrew Wyeth on the cover. The price is .30¢

Time is a bit nicer with more color ads. Well, more ads period. In Newsweek the big color ads are for alcoholic beverages or cigarettes.

I was born a little over a month after JFK was assassinated so both issues talk about President Johnson and domestic issues. Both include items on the marriage of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Both show a long line of West Berliners waiting to cross the wall to visit with East German relatives.

There’s a lot of forward-looking at technology in the realm of travel, planes and space. One ad predicts that by the early 1970’s we’ll be traveling in airplanes faster than 1500 MPH “probably much faster.”

It’s a amazing how a person can feel, not THAT old, yet all these things that have changed in my life time.

One favorite tidbit: an article on modern living reports that the bathroom was undergoing a renaissance. Even small homeowners wanted more and bigger bathrooms. Two particular trends: bigger bathtubs which “further threaten[] the national water table,” and “female emancipation” leading to a fad in twin installations. You know, two sinks.

My favorite birthday is dinner and a movie. This afternoon we’re going to Volver and then trying a new restaurant — well, new to us.

Foraging for Food
This morning I wanted to lay around in bed reading and drinking tea but Bob very persistently convinced me to go on a walk which was a good thing. I had to put on clothes and nothing like bracing cold air to clear your head. I did some yoga when I got home and then dug into the chores.

One of my main adventures for today was getting the food situation under control. There is a fridge full of leftovers and foods purchased with something special in mind that I never got around to. I had to check for funny smelling stuff, consolidate other stuff, chuck stuff past pull date. I bought a bunch of leeks to do something with. Then I bought some more. Some were sacrificed to the compost gods.

I intended to make a breakfast strata while we had the group here over Xmas but we had so much other food it seemed silly to make another thing. I checked the mushrooms and they were still a day or two away from bolting and I had 5 egg whites left from the pots de creme so I threw that together this morning including some leeks. It’s in the oven right now.

I still need to pick the turkey clean and get that carcass a-boiling for some soup but I actually made progress on the tardy holiday newsletter and didn’t want to step away from the computer while I had that going. This weekend, for sure.

Where is Everybody?
Before I start this post I just want to say that I drove southbound on Front Avenue this morning. YAY! It’s been under construction for ever and super inconvenient and it was a treat to make that right turnaround thing off the Morrison bridge and sail down the shiny new smooth blacktop. Another great reason to come downtown today.

Meanwhile: it’s hard to reconcile all the chaos and crowds of earlier in the month with the relative calm and unpeopledness that’s going on this week. I’ve driven to work at speed two mornings in a row. The streets have light traffic. We had a small group at yoga last night although that was the case the week before Xmas as well. Bet it’s packed next week.

Where are all those people now? Are most of them staying home? Has everyone gone off somewhere? Are there big crowds somewhere else? I’ll bet the malls are a nightmare. I hate shopping. Even when I have money I hate it. I get zero thrill from the hunt. If I need a pair of black pants, I will buy the first pair I find that fits me. This is why I do 99% of my shopping at Ann Taylor. The pants fit. I can be in and out of there in 20 minutes. I don’t love sales. I’d rather pay more money and not fight the crowds. Plus I’m about as generically sized as a person can be so sales are a waste of time because there’s never anything cute in my size.

Last year I took the week between Xmas and New Years off because it seemed like a good time to be off and Bob was off and then I burned through a bunch of vacation days and when summer came I was scrounging for days off.

This year I thought, screw it, save the vacation for later and work now when it’s slow and we can all sit around the lunch room and eat cookes.

HA HA HA HA HA

I can’t tell you how many things came up yesterday that needed attention right away. I thought I’d clear my desk off. Well, all these people are clearing off their desks too.

Happy Friggin Christmas
I’m at the office today and expected to have time for a nice update HOWEVER, we apparently lost power last night so no alarm-o. You know how it’s so dark in the morning and I heard Bob open the bedroom door and then glanced at the clock and saw it blinking and said, “Oh. We lost power.”

It was a little after 7am. I usually like to be out of bed by 5:45 at the very latest. I managed to be fast: brush hair, moisturize, go and since there was zero traffic, I was sitting at my desk at 8.

I have lots of work to do and errands to run.

Christmas was wonderful. Lots of fun. Excellent food. Delicious adult beverages. Yummy desserts. Fabulous gifts and prizes.

After gnashing my teeth over the Holiday Newsletter some more, I’ve got a start. I have a long weekend next weekend but if I don’t get it done then, I’m not doing it.

Stay tuned.

Happy Holidaze
Me and Shadow bright and early this morning. Like my morning face?

Family here. Busy but fun. Very little computer time.

Great meals and delicious wine. Saw The Good Shepard. We all enjoyed it.

Tomorrow should be more cooking and hanging out. I have some good stories for then.

How Computers Are Ruining The Reference Librarian
I hesitate to take on this topic given the large number of librarians and librarian fans in my life but, true story, my last several encounters with a reference librarian at a public library have been less than fabulous.

Several years ago I wanted an article from a magazine and went looking for the Readers’ Guide to Periodic Literature, a big green book with gold letters that I’d used often when I did research in middle and high school. I like looking things up in reference books.

I wandered around the reference section and finally asked, “Where is the Readers’ Guide?”

The librarian said, “What are you looking for?”

“The Readers’ Guide.”

She wanted me to look the thing up on the computer. I wanted to look it up in paper. I like browsing. I like flipping pages. I knew what I was doing. I wasn’t going to hurt anyone. Why steer me away from the books? I like possibly discovering something that I’d never heard of and didn’t even know I was looking for.

While I would agree that hyperlinks can take you on the same unexpected journey of discovery, basic database research does not. If you’re thinking about making a paper hat for an elf and your search query uses the words, paper, hat and elf, you’re not going to get anything without those words (and miss out on the felt hat articles) and probably a whole lot of items about a hat store on Elf Street in Paper, Pennsylvania which doesn’t help you with your question.

Yesterday, I had an equally frustrating experience trying to research a federal law thing which so as not to bore you, we’ll say it’s too old to be on the Internet.

I am guessing that a huge majority of the people who walk up to a reference desk at the public library have no idea what they are doing, however, I had barely explained what I was looking for before I was whisked off to a book which told all the basic information which I already had.

Wouldn’t it be worth 30 seconds to take the pulse of the patron? I was holding file folder full of paper covered with notes. I asked a pretty specific question about an 35 year old law so not like it was my first time in the library after my teacher told me to do a report on koala bears.

We went back to the desk and parked at the computer. This story is already getting too long so the readers’ guide version is that after trying really hard to answer my question using the computer (which I had already very thoroughly and completely done, believe me, I didn’t want to go traipse across downtown in the cold and spend the day in the public library with a pocketful of quarters), and finding the same stuff that I already had, they asked me what I wanted and I told them the same thing I told them when we started this whole rolling circus. Eventually there were 4 reference librarians running around and FINALLY dragging out the old books and we figured out what I need and I had to order it from come storage cave in the mines of Moria and I won’t be able to dig into the research until next week.

No one ever tried to explain to me what they were doing, they just let me stand there and assured me they were doing their best.

Come on, show me the reference tools, I could do it myself. Am I mixing up the school librarian with the public librarian? Wouldn’t good research skills benefit everyone? I think I’ve drifted from my original topic sentence and my computer time has expired so I’ll just end abruptly here.

At Least It’s Not Raining
I don’t know what the problem is but I’m completely incapable of getting my act together. Well, I’m getting out the door and to the office and getting work done. But everything else is adrift.

For some reason the city of Portland can’t seem to stop ripping up streets and taking forever and a day to repair them. Today’s special new treat was that one block, the block by our building that I need to get to the parking garage was blocked off. Large parts of Front Avenue are also blocked off. So I had to take Morrison Bridge to Stark. Stark to Front. Front to First. First to Madison to get back to Front. Front to Jefferson. Jefferson to 2nd. It was like a carnival ride, only not fun.

If I had time I could make a humorous map, but I have papers to file and research to do so this is it for today.

Update: Turns out there was a busted water main not some sort of personal “They’re Out To Get Me.” Our parking garage had mild flooding on the bottom floor. Also, I think I described the streets wrong but too lazy to correct.

Banner Prize
Yay, one more excuse to procrastinate on my holiday stuff: Jessica sent me the first pass on the banner design for winning NaBloPoMo. I love it.

I asked for goth pumpkin (my exact words) combining my pumpkin love with the cool end credits from Lemony Snicket. Those are my actual pumpkins that I grew.

She did a fantastic job with that. More Jessica designs here and again, Jessica, thanks so much for the fabulous prize.

I can feel the temptation to mess with the template but I’m going to resist the urge for now. Must get to that holiday stuff.