You're Doing It Wrong

After Christmas I bought some Saranwrap on sale. It was “festive” holiday wrap and there were pictures of snowflakes on the box and I thought that meant there were snowflakes on the wrap so I was all excited and bought Saranwrap even though I normally use Reynolds wrap. Holy Crap. Saranwarp is garbage! It’s worthless. Mr. Saran ought to be ashamed of himself. And there are no snowflakes. It’s just plain red and not even particularly festive. It’s a pain to tear off. It’s a pain to wrap your stuff in. It is just plain wrong. At the market tonight I bought Reynolds Wrap in festive green and put the Saranwrap in the back cupboard for emergencies.

Bob and I spent the night in Olympia so we could cruise around downtown this morning before heading home. We didn’t have a place in mind for breakfast and were sure if we wandered around something great would pop up. Of course it’s never that easy and we tromped around finding interesting places that were closed and alterna-cafes with colorful awnings and dogs wearing hemp collars tied up out front. We went to the outdoor outfitters sale tent to see if someone could point us to something good and the guy said, “I’m not much of a breakfast person.” We decided to walk up one more block and passed an old van with Yoda on the dashboard. I said, “Look Yoda, it’s a sign.” At the next block we saw a guy leaving a restaurant with a styrofoam container. Bob said, “It was so good he took his extras with him.” The place is called The Urban Onion and we got a great booth in the corner and they poured a delicious cup of coffee. I got huevos and Bob got an omlette with smoked salmon and cream cheese and substituted the potatoes and toast with two pancakes the size of bus tires. After breakfast we went to Orcas books where I bought a large pile of books to go into the stack I’m already too busy to read. A perfect day.

We went to Tacoma for Wintergrass yesterday. We ate dinner at Over the Moon Cafe a place we found by accident at Wintergrass 2 years ago and have been looking forward to returning to ever since. We rushed in to catch Sam Bush followed by Barbed Wire Cutters at the church and then went back to the Sheraton and went up and down the stairs between the convention center and the ballroom plus caught Jimmy Gaudreau & Moondi Klein at the bar. As per our usual luck, we ended up sitting near obnoxious talking people in the convention center. Why go to a kickass bluegrass festival and then stand in the corner with your friends talking and being squirrely? Also the hot accessory this year was a tiny baby. There were tiny babies everywhere. I have a theory that if you have only 1 tiny baby, other than the sleep deprivation and large satchel of baby-shit you have to haul around, you can pretend that your life still hasn’t changed all that much and you can get out and do the things you used to do. In the ballroom they were trying something new and had the chairs cleared out for dancing. It was only partly successful. There was the requisite hippie guy with dreads wearing a skirt dancing away, the hippie chick doing interpretive dance, 1 or 2 couples doing organized couple dancing and a bunch of grown ups dancing with their kids. No large scale hippie mob groove.

X Files

I’ve been in the mood to watch X Files lately. I found some moldy tapes in the video closet and watched both Tooms episodes (season 1) a couple of weeks ago (still creepy). This week I rented an Episode 3 disc from netflix because I wanted to see “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” the one with Peter Boyle, which was just as good as I remembered. The whole disc was classic. Remember the first three seasons when XFiles was unbeatable TV?

The first two episodes on the disc were season openers which completed a 3 episode story that had aliens in train cars and Indians and stolen files and Krycek. I convinced Bob to watch the fourth episode, D.P.O., last night. Giovanni Ribisi and Jack Black are in it — GR plays this nutty guy who fries people with lightning while loud rock music blasts. JB gets fried in a shower of quarters. Awesome.

From the San Francisco Chronicle — finally, someone’s said it: Too Much Positive Reinforcement

“… Like everyone from Paris Hilton, whose attorneys confidently announced in the middle of her sex-tape fiasco that “Hilton is a model and actress (and) is at the beginning of what she had hoped would be a long and prosperous career,” to President Bush, who wears his below-average credentials like a badge of honor, Rea was suffering from what one might call Too Much Positive Reinforcement: the belief, against all available evidence, that one is meant for special things.

“TMPR has now reached epidemic proportions. How else to explain the legions of the talent-free who wait in line for days for a chance to show their stuff [on American Idol] — then are stunned to be told they don’t make the grade? After decades of upper-middle-class parenting designed to shield Junior from all possible failure, and from any honest judgment of his talents, it’s no wonder we need television shows like “American Idol” and its fellow showcase for TMPR victims, “The Apprentice.” These shows are delivering the spanking — sorry, the time-out — that our culture of bloated self- evaluation is subconsciously craving. Their success signals that we may be reaching the end of a long national delusion. There is simply not room enough at the top these days for everyone raised to believe they belong there — and, deep down, we all know it. …”

Here’s another computer thing. Now that I’m ancient and have no idea what the kids are up to these days, I didn’t know what song was OutKast Hey Ya! Didn’t it win song of the year or something? So I went to cdnow to listen to a clip but cdnow is now amazon (grrr) but I wasn’t buying, just listening to a clip and then I get there but I don’t have RealPlayer so I go to download it and do I understand correctly that there is no free Realplayer for OS X? So I said screw that, I’m not paying for software just to hear a clip. Bob told me that I could get the windoze media player for OS X which makes zero sense but I checked it out and it was true so I downloaded that and then I went back and found the clip and then I played it. What a hassle. I’m vaguely familiar with the song but it sounds like a commercial for gum or a car and not like something that I would put on the stereo on purpose.

Something unexpected happened which is: I’ve become a browser slut. I’ve pretty much always used Netscape although I sometimes used Exploder on the iMac for reasons I can’t remember. But the eMac booted up this thing called safari which I fell in love with after about 3 minutes. It’s superfast and easy to use and pretty much my only problem with it is that all my bookmarks are floating around somewhere other than in the bookmarks area. I need to find a URL manager. Meanwhile, liking safari made me start thinking about browsers and I found this article about browsers and later I heard about Firefox on a weblog and downloaded that at the office and then downloaded Camino back at home. So now sometimes I have 2 or 3 browsers going at once and bookmarks all over the place. I like safari a lot but this sidebar bookmark thing in Camino is brilliant.

I’m back in the writing project again and did some research yesterday. I can’t believe the sort of stuff I find when I’m not looking like Heartless Bitches International. They even have merchandise.

We had a successful eating weekend. We created fish soup from several recipes choosing what sounded good and what we had on hand. We put a bag of seafood medley from Trader Joes plus another pound of whitefish and a dozen leftover shrimp. Tasty treat. I also made chicken soup from the roast chicken. Now we have too much food.