You're Doing It Wrong

Bob was due home late tonight so we made our own dinners. I thought I’d kick back with some leftovers and cheap wine and watch the Desperate Housewives I taped last night. Then I remembered that I promised myself I would get in gear for our lodging needs for the big Germany trip coming up.

O.MI.GOD.

You think filling out online forms is tough? Try it in German. I had my massive German Dictionary in my lap laboriously translating word by word until I remembered there are websites that translate paragraphs. Hallelujah! Except it comes out sounding like crazy people. I had one reservation service. The other ones I had to wing on my own. One hotel had a form but apparently I wasn’t doing it right because I kept getting a page that I understood just enough of to get that I was doing it wrong. What knummer did they want? I used the info email with my crazy people translation from babelfish. We’ll see how I do.

I considered clarifying that we’re from a blue state but not sure how much they care. An Euro is an Euro.

When I was in college I was a huge heavy metal freak. I use “heavy metal” here to refer to just about anything hard rock. Def Leppard is the band I was insane about. This was before I had ever been to the Strip or any of the Hollywood rock clubs. I guess I was in training and there was no less heavy metal place on the planet than UCSB.

I used to go to this record store in Goleta on Hollister and buy all kinds of crazy records I had read about. One time the guy at the store asked me if I was friends with the band (“Savage Thrust”) and friends was a stretch but I did exchange a snail mail with someone in the band named Eddie who responded to my fan letter with a postcard of a butcher surounded by floating steaks and holding a huge string of sausages. It said “You Just Can’t Beat My Meat.” He signed it, “Kill the wusses.”

I read CREEM and CREEM Metal and [holy crap! I just did an online search to see if there was anything about the magazine and guess what? They’re back. Wow, here’s a link to the best Replacements Interview ever.] This development has me totally off topic on this post. I’ll save the CREEM stuff for another time.

Back to the heavy metal fixation. I used every excuse for dressing up to dress like a rocker chick. At UCSB. I hope you can grasp just how bizarre this was. When I was president of the sorority (you know, the heavy metal sorority – ha ha!) I made up a theme dinner — instead of “everybody wear white” or “toga” I had a “ten year reunion” dinner and you were supposed to dress as what you thought you’d be in ten years. I dressed as a rocker chick. MJ and Rowland dressed up as dead people.

Man, I didn’t get to a lot of odds and ends I needed to get done today. I did get to the candle party.

My email comes to two main accounts and I have spam filters on both of them. One of the spam filters changes the subject line so that I can filter the messages directly to the trash. The other spam filter, at the address that gets more spam, changes the body of the message but that doesn’t help me filter it when I get my mail. I figured out I could filter the spam using this other method that I don’t completely understand and won’t even try to explain but I have to go log into this webpage to see it. I haven’t checked it for about 2 weeks and this morning I logged in and there were 82 spams. It took forever to figure out how to delete them, too. I wasn’t about to do it message by message.

I know, a thrilling entry.

Maybe you’d be more interested to hear that the bean store has expanded into a bigger store that also serves food. We got up early Saturday, drove across town, and had breakfast before we stocked up on beans and grains. Bob got an omelete with pancakes *and* biscuits. It’s a good place.

My mouse is possessed. It opens things that I don’t want to open when I click once and it makes me click a whole bunch of times to bring things to the front or to open things I want to open. I’m not sure what this means but I’m going to drop kick it into the catbox if I can’t get it to work properly.

Speaking of the catbox, the war is on with the cats. Yesterday I scooped another 5 pounds of cat shit out of the front — where I’d sprinkled the pepper flakes. So I figured I was too timid and applied a super-duper layer of pepper flakes and this morning the whole area is scratched up again and filled up with cat shit. Not like one corner — like the whole area. What is up with these stupid cats? My next humane approach is I’m going to turn it into mud. The spot is under the eaves and the only dry dirt around. Other ideas include ordering some of those prong things that you put in the dirt that they don’t like stepping on. I bet these cats would just move them out of the way.

On Thursday Bob and I both had the day off and I said we should make sure to take time out to do something fun and not just get involved with our usual projects. We slept in and read our books and then we went to lunch and took Bob’s car in for an oil change while we went to the Grocery Outlet (Bob calls it “weird foods”). I documented this all with my camera but I don’t feel like frickin with Photoshop with my mouse on the fritz.

We went to Frenchman’s Bar trail and walked to Vancouver Lake. The weather was perfect and the scenery gorgeous. The cows were getting fed and some of them were galloping from one field to where the feeding was going on. I’ve never seen a cow gallop before. Also a ton of birds, I think mostly Canada geese, were hanging around one field making bird racket. We saw some people picking some sort of small red fruit in the park — crab apples?

We did our grocery shopping and then I invented a great dinner. There was a recipe in the paper I wanted to try but I didn’t have half the stuff and I had other stuff in the fridge I wanted to use. I sliced a half tube of polenta into 9×11 dish and spread it with ricotta cheese. Meanwhile, I sauteed an onion and garlic with a can of tomatoes and scraped that on top of the ricotta, added the rest of the polenta loaf and then covered it with fresh mozzarella and then a sprinkle of Parmesan and baked until bubbly. It came out excellent. The only similarities between this and the recipe from the paper are the 9×11 dish, the mozzarella, onion and tomatoes. Bob said it was one of the best dinners I ever made.

I had a link to additional fall colors but I took those photos down. I’m not going to archive every photo. I can’t think of a reason why I should.

Here is a really great map that shows election results by county — shaded proportionally. Very interesting. Not all blue and red – a lot of blending going on.

Meanwhile, I picked up some documents across the river yesterday and decided to walk back since it was such a great day and damn! I didn’t have my camera. At one of the lightrail stops there are a bunch of trees with bright orangey-pink leaves next to a bunch of trees with bright yellow leaves – beautiful contrast. Later, as I walked down the stairs by the eastbank esplanade downtown sparkled under the sun with a light haze. A kayaker in a beautiful wooden kayak passed underneath the esplanade headed into the main part of the river. Missed opportunities.

Last week I was reading some cultural stuff about the Karuk tribe and I commented to Bob how interesting it is that the culture was primitive but very complex. He said, “Yeah, didn’t they take the acorn about as far as it could go?”

I fixed the stuff on Billy’s page today. I had gotten duplicate photos in there somehow and it took forever to figure out the correct dates where I screwed up. I asked him if he could possibly wear red pants or shave his head on photo days to help make a more dramatic difference. You have to spot the changing foilage out his window or his moving furniture to note the changes. Bob saw what I was doing and said he had no idea I had such “conceptual” projects going on.

Other things I did today:

I got up early and went to Fred Meyer and bought a few more bags of bark dust. I have put tons of bark dust on my major backyard plant bed in the hopes of making my life easier come spring. For some reason the grass loves to grow in the plant beds but only weeds grow in the actual lawn area. Also some sort of “fairie” (Bob’s word) weeds have taken over most of the rest of the backyard. I don’t know. If I spent another half day per week on the yard I bet I could make it look a lot better … there just seem to always be more interesting things to do.

In addition to yardwork I cleaned about 20 lbs of cat shit out of the front yard. Since the two cute cats across the street moved in the shit has multiplied dramatically. I sprinkled the area with a generous layer of pepper flakes which actually works although you have to re-apply often. Too bad cute little kitties. Shit elsewhere!

I also did a D- (D minus) job of cleaning out the shop. I broke down some boxes for recycling and re-stacked various boxes of crap so that we have lots of space for more junk. (Bring it on, Priscilla!) And I swept.

Then I watched the very last special feature on my last Angel disk (the best show ever!) which was the director’s commentary on the season 4 finale. It was completely awesome. Good thing I only have one more season to re-watch and then I can get on with my life b/c my obsession with this show is unhealthy. I think season 5 will be out in February. You can bet I’ll let you know when that happens.

This afternoon I went to the Clark College library and finished some research I’m working on and read a bunch of stuff. Now I’m roasting an “Amber Cup” squash and reheating leftover pizza for dinner. Yum.

There are only two seasons up here: hot and cold. The in-between parts are hardly worth mentioning except that they are generally less cold. Now that it’s cold again there’s a whole bunch of stuff I need to keep handy: umbrella, coat, lip stuff is critical. As soon as the air cooled my lips started chapping. I just bought a whole bunch of new lip supplies and Agatha Ruiz De La Prada is godhead. Also tissues, especially in the purse or on walks. I don’t like a runny nose with no tissues. I also always have a hat on outside. Head warmth means more to me than how my hair looks. Finally, hand salve. My hands get so dry and my skin so rough — I have some primo salve that Mom got me in Orleans and I slather that on before bed, put on some cotton gloves and voila! Soft hands in the morning. I take the gloves off in my sleep. In the morning I find them on the floor or under the pillow or kicked to the bottom of the bed. My sleeping self doesn’t like them.