Tag Archives: revisiting old things

Floor Model

I guess I never wrote about our mattress buying adventure. There were signs in the neighborhood that said the local arts school was selling mattresses as a fundraiser.

We’ve needed new mattresses for a long time. I convinced Bob we should go look. If it seemed sketchy we didn’t have to buy anything.

It was not sketchy and we bought replacement mattresses for the upstairs and the downstairs mattress. (I’ve had the downstairs mattress since I graduated from college. I know — it was OLD.)

I wanted to use the opportunity to pull the carpet up in our bedroom. I started that corner in the first photo and there were so many staples it took me half an hour just to clear that little bit. I was very demoralized.

The mattress delivery also wanted us to move our old mattresses. They would haul them off but wanted the beds stripped and the mattresses ready to go.

We could not move the king by ourselves so we got some help. And they helped pull up the carpet, too.

Here’s what the floor looked like — no treatment other than Murphy’s Oil Soap. Can you believe that’s been under ugly yellow carpet for 20+ years? So beautiful. We love it but are still getting used to it.

The beds are here and we are happy with those too.

If all has gone as planned I was in Orleans last week to help Mom. I scheduled these posts and hopefully will have some Orleans shots for next time.

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Fix It Yourself Project 1: Zafu

I have had this cushion forever. I want to say since at least 2002 because I have a vague memory of watching a World Cup match taking place in S. Korea while sitting on it and wearing a tiara.

Meanwhile, it flattened out to the point where it was almost worthless.

This project has been on my list for years — one of those, “I should figure out how to puff up my zafu, how hard can it be?” but it never rose to the top of the pile.

Last year I finally did some research and ordered new buckwheat hulls from giant online retailer. This was going to be one of my holiday break projects except then dear ol’ Dad had a huge health crisis and he was my holiday break project.

This year was the year and I began by searching “fix and clean your zafu tips” and the first site I found told me to use the zipper to remove the inner pouch.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. If I had a zipper and an inner pouch, I wouldn’t be here searching for help, would I?

I cut the seam, emptied the zafu and HOLY BUTTERBEANS. Look at how much came out. The zafu is like the Tardis, bigger on the inside than the outside.

Look at the replacement hulls I bought. Is that going to fill my zafu?

I briefly hesitated but went ahead and threw the empty zafu in the laundry. It occurred to me that it could disintegrate and then I’d have to buy a new zafu.

But it came out fine.

I filled it with all the new buckwheat hulls and of course it wasn’t full. I did not want to order more new buckwheat hulls — I’d set aside the time for the project. The project was getting done.

I then finished filling it with the old buckwheat hulls. I stitched it up — not pretty but holds the buckwheat hulls in.

And, success!

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Pastoral

Does anyone remember the Battle of the Network Stars?

It was this TV show in the 70s where they had the stars of all the big TV shows like Love Boat and Charlie’s Angels, organized by network and competing against each other for, I don’t know, glory? They must have paid them. I know there was more than one version and I watched them all.

Can you imagine that now? Getting the Modern Family stars to race against the NCIS cast — taking turns getting in a raft and paddling back and forth across a swimming pool at UCLA? And since it’s 2018 they could bring in the Game of Thrones cast and Downton Abbey.

I just did a search to check the dates and guess what? They made a version of this show in 2017 and it looks like the same old stars from Love Boat and that lifeguard show and other mature stars you haven’t heard about in decades were on it. I’m at a loss for words.

13635 / 50000 words. 27% done!

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Hair and Other Concerns

If in all my endless methods of flogging and self-promotion, if you didn’t hear, Book #2 of Crooked Rock is out in the world. All the details and links are here.

Today I’m going to write about a somewhat recent re-watch of the movie: Bull Durham. It came out in 1988 and starred Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon, if you’re scratching your head and trying to remember.

This movie did not hold up as well as I expected. I thought Sarandon was kinda shrill and didn’t think they had as much chemistry as they were trying to sell us on. Tim Robbins was good. I had other thoughts, too, and I remember taking notes. Except the only note I can find says “hair on chest.”

There’s a locker room scene and I was struck by all the chest hair. Remember the days when it was totally okay to grow hair below the neck? I am not onboard for all this depilatorization. Is that a word? Well it should be. If impactful gets to be a word than depilatorization can be a word, too.

So, back when I watched the movie I researched when this idea that men had to have hairless chests started and the google blamed it on Marky Mark when he was doing those Calvin Klien ads. Then I found articles where men complained about what a pain it was to do all this hair removal.

Tell me about it.

I think the moment has passed because I’ve seen men with chest hair again — on Supernatural and probably something else I can’t remember right now.

In other news, Comcast made us upgrade all our gear which was a large pain in the ass that Bob bore the brunt of. (Thank you, dear!) But while we’re still tweaking everything, something is wrong so it kicks me off the wireless once every 24 hours so I have to enter passwords on everything I own and/or use, every day. I’m tired of passwords. And PIN numbers. And secret words. And special questions. I don’t really want anyone to scan my retina but it that will save me all this other crapola, I will reluctantly sign up.

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The Queen of All Over Achievers

Look, here I am with the Portland Timbers, standing in a place that makes no sense.

HA! I posted today. Bet you didn’t think I would.

Just wanted to say that I found my bus pass! It *was* in my backpack only all tangled up with foil-wrapped wet wipes and tissues in a pocket I don’t normally use.

I also did a ton of things today, like writing and xmas shopping and working on my giant book to learn about iTunes. I’m only on page 34 and I’ve already learned a ton. I was doing pretty much everything wrong.

But now I’m tired of looking at the computer my eyeballs are two hardened lumps, perfect since I’m going to the eye doctor tomorrow.

Here is a terrific photo essay of the world in 1963. The countdown continues.

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30 Day Countdown to 50

I’m going to guess that this photo is from 2000 on this trip at Filmpark Babelsberg.

When I was looking for an image to use today I found a ginormous folder filled with more folders of random scanned images. Of the items that are labeled, they are called things like: “family scans” “more family scans” and “miscellaneous scans” and it goes on forever. I have no idea how I managed to hide this from myself.

I’m equally itching to start organizing and wanting to drag the whole thing to the trash.

I mentioned before I have a major birthday this year and today the final countdown begins. In the waning days of my 40’s I will be drinking hot cocoa, watching mystery shows and going to bed early. Don’t worry, I’m not going to post about it.

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Cranky Doodle

I’ve had this exact expression on my face all week.

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Sixteen Years!

Here Bob is pretending to drop cake in my face. He didn’t really. And there was no cake smushing.

Guess what I’m doing for my wedding anniversary?

Going to a Timbers game. My honey gets to sit in general admission while I sit in my reserved seats with ticket partner. Romantic, huh? This is a huge game against our rivals the Vancouver Whitecaps.

You might be wondering why I haven’t been talking about the Timbers as much as I used to. You might have thought I’d grown bored with it or moved on to other interests.

Nope. I’ve got a post in draft talking all about the Timbers. You’ll know it all soon.

Last night we went through our photo album and guestbook. Lots of terrific memories but we’ve lost a lot of people. Every time we turned a page we were reminded of someone else. Here we are with our Grandmas. Both gone.

Here’s how I found my car when we left the wedding site. As I recall I went back to work that week and then we left for our honeymoon at Labor Day. We went to Bumbershoot and then to the San Juan Islands and Victoria, BC.

This is the guestbook. For the inside we took Polaroids of all the guests and had them sign.

My cousin Jennifer (she’s the one in this photo) was very persistent and walked around during the reception to make sure she got everyone in there.

This is us on the first page.

It fun was fun to go through it. People we don’t see very often. Little kids who are in college now. All our favorite people together.

Great day. Now let’s go Timbers!

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Pump It Up

This guy called. Strong accent. He had Bob’s name and tacked a Mrs. on it for me and then told me he was calling because of our Windows computer system. He sounded like he was phoning from a cafeteria in Outer Mongolia using a tin can and a long piece of string. I could barely understand him.

He said since we were authorized users and he could see that we’d being going online he knew we had a virus.

Normally I would have shut this call down before we even got this far except I was curious where he was going with this. I knew he wanted to rip me off but how was he going to do it?

But he just kept reading off his card with long pauses and this terrible connection. I finally asked him what exactly he was going to do and said he was going to walk me through a check for viruses.

I’m not filled with patience today and that was enough for me so I told him we don’t have even have a Windows machine in this house and buh-bye.

So I guess he wanted to get usernames and passwords? It’s hard to imagine this would be successful.

* * *

Last weekend I made a Sweet Potato Pie for Easter dessert. I haven’t made one in a long time and I thought I’d used this recipe before but maybe not. It’s from Cook’s Illustrated. As per always I was trying to do 1000 things at once and I started my pie late and then I had to hurry so rather than mashing my potatoes by hand, I tossed it all in the food processor so that filling was smooth.

When we ate it after dinner it was still warm and it was very good. But the next day after it was completely chilled it was AMAZING.

Ten stars for this recipe.

We’re going to see Elvis Costello. The last time we saw him was in 1996 in Seattle during our honeymoon. You can find the setlist here. (The Internet is so awesome when it isn’t awful.) I remember that. 4 encores. I was like, OMG, another encore?

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2000! 2000! 2000!

This is a Karuk-style basket start that’s on the wall at basket class. I should probably put a photo of a finished basket up so you can see where this is going. Try this.

Hey! Great news. This is my 2000th post since I started blogger which was February 2001 if my archives are to be believed. This is going to be a rambling post filled with history and random tidbits that I have scrawled on little pieces of paper and post-its all over my desk. I was going to wait until I had time to write a really good 2000th post, but then we’ll never get to it because my entire life is on hold until I have time to do it better and who knows when that will be?

I started a website in April 1996 (check out the Wayback machine) and some of that stuff survives in the ancient archives and some of it is stashed in a folder on my harddrive.

I’ve always wanted to bring back the Delta Sucks post and the responses including the one from the crazy lady who told me: “Your stupid!”

If I ever have money to burn I’m going to hire an assistant and that person’s job is going to be to surf the Internet and visit comment threads and any time a person posts some version of “your stupid” or “your a moron” my assistant will reply with: I think you mean “you’re stupid.”

But I’m getting away from my planned rambling. I actually have a huge page of notes for a different post to be titled “The Internet is Ruined” which I thought would be perfect as a 2000th post but I’m not in the mood today. Someday.

Last weekend I went to California to hang out with the family. This is Minky.

Does anyone ever intentionally set out to get a cat or are cats something that people just end up with? It seems like every person I’ve ever known with a cat(s) ended up with them.

Minky’s original name was Wink and Wink lived at the house next door where they already had bigger cats and also dogs. Wink was small and timid and a little overwhelmed trying to get a good meal with these other critters around. So Wink wandered the neighborhood and found my parents house. I’m not sure if she was nibbling on Shy Boy’s food or what but Dad fed her and that was the beginning of the end.

The owner retrieved her cat from my parents’ house several times but she always snuck back in. One night my Mom got up in the middle of the night and there was Wink hanging out in the hallway. She found the cat door. When the owner moved, she left Wink to live with Mom and Dad.

Wink became Winky and because she has such soft fur: Minky. But it’s a great name. You can say: inky, stinky, rinky dinky, finky, pinky, drinky. I made up some limericks for her but she just gave me this same bug-eyed stare so I stopped.

In this photo she has made a nice nest in my big warm coat. She was able to spread her fur around to all of my clothes. She’s a very sweet kitty.

I have a follow up to the Verizon story. They sent me a response to my customer service email that starts off by saying that they’d call me to walk me through my problem except that they received my email too late and due to industry regulations they can’t call me.

Because it would be a shame if any of this wasn’t all my fault. Why not have your workers on the job during the time that industry regulations allow you to call?

But that doesn’t matter because I already fixed the problem myself by doing the simple steps of canceling my autopay and then restarting it with the new credit card number. They also mailed me a notice thanking me for enrolling in autopay and welcoming me.

Your welcome. (intentional mistake because I think its funny)(that was intentional to)(that too).

I had another milestone last week — it was 20 years since I started working as a paralegal in Indian Affairs. I don’t know what to say except its nice to feel competent at a job. I did not feel that way for a very long time. I remember reading legal cases and it would take all day and then I’d read them again and again. It’s like you have to train your brain how to think a certain way and I was not a natural. 20 more years and I can retire! (sigh, geez)

Watercress harvesting. I’m sure my family is thrilled that their butts are on my website. That was the angle I had.

I have one of those dinky iPods that’s as big as a postage stamp. I have a gadget so I can listen to it in the car but I’ve only used it a couple of times because normally the only places I drive are the park-n-ride or the grocery store and those trips aren’t worth plugging in the iPod.

If you’ve ever used one of those tiny ones, you know that you can’t work it while you drive. Well, you could but you’d probably crash into something. So I had it all set up with mega-long playlists and I would get it set up and then pause and then once I got going I could listen. I had a 100 favorite song playlist that I could shuffle and an audio course and a bunch of podcasts.

The ride down worked great. I’m not sure what I did on the way home but somehow I managed to make it so it would repeat the item. After I heard the same song 3 times I realized there was a problem. I had a pitstop and I fiddled with it and thought I fixed it but I did not so it was completely aggravating. Then I tried tapping on it a bunch of times so then I was skipping all around which made the audio course a bit confusing. I’ve got it sitting here so I can figure it out when I’m feeling frisky.

Another funny technology story is that I always forget some cable that I wish I had so this trip I put every single cable and charger that I have into a plastic bag and threw it in with my stuff.

Then I forgot my laptop.

I very carefully made sure it was charged and I use Dropbox and I made sure it was synced. Bob said I left it on the couch which is pretty random because why would I put it on the couch? I think it was all subconscious. But, I had my notebook with me and wrote longhand every day so the streak (which has been going since Oct 31 2011) lives!

Goodness, are you still reading? That’s enough of that. Signing off Post 2000!

Get excited because Monday starts Timbers pre-season!

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