Please Read, Damnit!

There's a guy across the street who likes to play the piano, with his windows open; sometimes he sings, too. And he's absolutely wretched. No; really; he's just terrible. There are some nights when, after he's been flailing away for a couple of hours, I just want to go over and shut the piano on his hands. Or at least close his fucking windows. Dude, have whatever hobby you please; I don't care. But don't subject the rest of us to it.

Meanwhile, as the dearth of posting might suggest, I'm a bit fried. Work has been extremely stressful lately, though of course I can't help but be grateful I have a job. Some of it is just me being whiny, but a big chunk of it is that the people who are supposed to be assisting us . . . aren't. Two weeks ago, one of the other department heads and I sorted through a bill for a particular service. It's a quarterly bill, and s/he and I each had our own way of budgeting for it--which is fine, as the cost is split between our departments, and it's spread across our department in a way, and using a methodology, that I developed. So I created a little spreadsheet, passed it along to downtown, and wrote a cover email that said, you'll be getting this purchase order, here's how the costs are being allocated, please note that it's by dollar amount not by percentage.

Fine. Except the Very. First. Response. from the person who's supposed to assist us, says, "Okay, I'll adjust the percentages." Did you READ the fucking email? Apparently not. There were then a half a dozen clarifying emails. Okay, finally everyone signs off on it, the invoice and purchase order go downtown for payment.

A week later, it comes back to me. Why? Well, the other department head budgeted the dollars for this cost under the pencils account number, while I budgeted the dollars under the erasers account number. No matter; we each have our own funds. Or, rather, it shouldn't matter, but someone downtown apparently couldn't follow along, and said, oh, the other department doesn't have the dollars in his/her budget for this, because the person downtown was looking in the erasers line in both departments, despite having been instructed otherwise. So there is yet another round of clarifying.

And today, one of my fellow directors informs me that the grand plan of downtown is to have all bills sent to them, "because you already budgeted it, and you have to follow your budget." I about blew a gasket. They fuck up everything they touch, but they want to take the bill-paying out of our hands? It will be a fucking nightmare if that comes to pass. They simply do not realize that we must obey our funding agencies: as my old boss used to say, in this world you have to follow the golden rule: he who has the gold makes the rules.

More seriously, there simply isn't any way to align three major contracts (each of which has a different contract year), and three more minor contracts--none of which has the same contract year, and none of which has the same year as our fiscal year--so everything lines up perfectly. It cannot be done, at least not with human beings involved in the system.

On a similar note, in the middle of yet another dispute on Thursday, our controller says, surely not very much has changed in the month since the fiscal year budget went into effect. Well, actually, I pointed out, it has been THREE months since the FY budget was submitted, and since then there have been several changes, and here, again, is what they are. In other words, things change, and part of my job is to manage the contracts in ways that make sure we spend the dollars and spend them appropriately, and instead of assisting in that project, the people downtown create their own agendas that have nothing to do with this and don't bother to learn what the grants are. I do all of the budgeting and make the budgets available to them, but it's like reading poetry to fish.

One of the major sticking points is that the person who is supposed to be helping us most closely really isn't up to the job. S/he was hired to do Job A, and the (now-not-so-)new boss thinks s/he should be able to do Job A+++. And s/he simply cannot do that job. Thus, we are not getting the service we need, and we have someone who is actually getting in our way--this is the person who wanted to change the percentages, after being explicitly and specifically told we'd be using dollars rather than percentages. All of which adds yet another layer of crap on top of the processes. Everything thinks helperperson needs to go, and apparently s/he is on some kind of performance evaluation, but meanwhile, we're getting crap. And also also, helperperson dumps stuff in my lap without actually doing his/her homework first, in a frantic effort to show that s/he is doing the work and is getting stuff off his/her desk.

Can you tell it's getting on my last fucking frayed nerve?

Anyway.

This weekend will feature a lot of beer-drinking, preceded by maragaritas and great tex-mex food the night before, and succeeded by french bistro food for breakfast, and then possibly a cat will make its way back into Friend's house. We contemplated going away next weekend, too, and I took off several days to facilitate that, but Friend just had to dump a whole bunch of money into his (17-year-old) vehicle, which has nearly 260,000 miles on it. And he still needs new tires for it. But after that, he mostly needs to get through this next winter with it, and start shopping for a replacement in earnest. In any case, the other trip next weekend now looks less likely, which is okay with me, too--not least because I just got a substantial special assessment.

I apologize that my first post in awhile features a lot of complaints--back to food blogging soon, I promise! And furniture blogging, too, when my shelves get here.

Lazy Hazy

Tonight: No hockey, no Tour, no friends in the house. Ergo, it feels kinda strange. I had a fabulous time on my vacation; I must do that again sometime! Perhaps, soon! Given that I have more than three weeks' worth of time, I will in fact go ahead and do that.

M and I did a whole big bunch of nothing. We talked endlessly (and wonderfully); given that we have known each other for more than three decades and know each other's families and life stories, it wasn't as if we were going to run out of things to say. And we got to spend a bunch of time on the back porch and the sun porch, helping confirm just how wonderful those spaces are.

Saturday Friend and I took a friend to Madison so she (and we) could get a brewery tour, talk to a brewmaster, and drink beer. That was pretty good, too. We got back yesterday afternoon, and I couldn't help but think that a vacation from my vacation would have been a good thing. As it was, I had things in flames on my desk already, so that would have been a bad idea.

So, really, I don't have any profound thoughts tonight; I barely have any thoughts at all. Which is also fine. I'll put out a few more fires tomorrow, perhaps, and take it from there. This week is also full of social events, so I'm not sure where sleeping is going to fit in. Dinner tomorrow, possibly drinks with an old friend on Wednesday, and then concerts on Thursday through Saturday. Sunday will involve a great deal of nothing, I suspect.

Little of This, Little of That

Okay, let's see.

First and foremost, one of my best friends ever is coming to visit next week. You may remember her; she sang at the wedding. I met her my very first day of college, back in 1977, so I have known her for 33 years. Yes, well more than half of my life. I cannot wait to see her. I'm taking off the whole week (really only four days, because we get off on Monday for the holiday), which will give me time to clean on Tuesday, and then we have most of three days to hang out and sit on the sun porch and drink tea and just talk and talk and talk.

Second, Chuck and I had some intense email exchanges last week, which I hope cleared the air between us a bit and cleared the way for me to see CK again. I have to give him his props: he continues to try to do the right thing, which is all we can ever ask of anyone. I'm still not going to go into detail about any of it here, except to say that I'm glad.

Third, the Crossroads festival was, as expected, quite excellent. The day was very damn long (oh MY how long . . .) and I was about to tip over by the time it was over, but the music was really great. We also managed to stay out of the sun for most of the day, which, given that Friend and I are two of the palest people around, is helpful. Yes, we slather on the sunscreen, but still. We also managed to scam good seats over the course of the day; of the three places we sat, only one was the actual seats on the ticket. The last place--where we sat for the last three hours or so, when the music was even more fab--featured a lot of people with VIP tags as well as a lot of empty seats. The only sour note all day, really, was the fact that this venue had exactly one water fountain. Yes; one. You could BUY water, of course, for $5 a bottle, but can I say no fucking way? At first there was a very long line, but then I think people either gave up and started buying it or started filling their containers in the bathroom sinks (which I kinda doubt, because the water in there was hot--not warm, hot). We, however, being cheap in some ways, saved some plastic beer cups and just refilled those along with the one water bottle we'd snuck in.

Okay, on to the food.

This week's farm share had more garlic scapes, more kohlrabi (to bring the total to three), two beets with greens, a head of lettuce, three mini squash, a little russian kale (those last two, plus some scapes, went into Saturday morning's breakfast scramble), and . . . that might have been it. So yesterday I used up everything: sauteed a chopped onion, then added the garlic scapes (should have waited on those), then the peeled and sliced kohlrabi and a little water, then the sliced mini carrots that needed to be used up, then the sliced beets, and finally the beet greens and some frozen collards (a little bit left in a package). I tossed it with some whole wheat (mostly) pasta and some grated cheese, and we had some grilled wild turkey with it, and it was all good. I threw in a splash of balsamic vinegar, too, and salt and pepper, but that was it for the seasoning. I liked the way the flavors balanced and melded, and it was useful to basically use up all the scraps of vegetables sitting around. In principle I like fresh herbs, but, in practice, I find that it's really, really easy to overwhelm whatever you're cooking with them, so I tend to try to balance the flavors of the other ingredients.

So now I've eaten kohlrabi, and, eh. I mean, it was good and all, but it isn't so good or so distinctive that I would necessarily seek it out, and it doesn't have any special healthy properties, at least not any of which I am aware, and at least not any that, say, broccoli, cauliflower, or cabbage have. (I like the brassica/cruciferous stuff, quite a bit, but I didn't think the kohlrabi was better than any of those three.) I'd eat it again, and I'll likely get the chance with this week's share.

And this season's Top Chef has begun, and, even after two weeks, one person has emerged as a total gaming asshole. Why yes, Angelo, I'm talking about you. Basically, this guy is seriously cocky. He and Tracey won the Quickfire, which meant (a) they had immunity and (b) they could choose the other two people who were going to be on their team for the Elimination Challenge. (Which was that each four-person team had a budget of about $2.60 per kid and had to make a "healthy" lunch for 50 kids--the dollar amount is what most schools have to work with. Some viewers apparently thought it was too preachy, but I was glad to see that theme--and I was completely entertained that Tom's mom was a lunch lady.) Okay, so Angelo and Tracey pick Kenny and Somebody--Kenny being the strongest apparent competition for Angelo at this early stage of the game--to be on their team. This could have been Angelo's way of ensuring that his team won the challenge, but of course Angelo is trying to game the whole system: because he and his partner have immunity, that means if their team loses, the other two people have a greater chance of going home.

So what did Angelo make for his dish? Celery sticks with peanut butter mousse and some kind of tuile. Yes. Celery sticks with peanut butter and a cookie. As a vegetable. The thing is, I think the judges even figured this out, and I do hope this comes back to bite Angelo in the ass. On the Television Without Pity forums, a couple of people who hated various other contestants over the years pointed out that none of those guys would have pulled such a dick move. Seriously, dude; if you think you're all that and a bag of chips, then you should be able to beat anyone else on the show with your actual cooking rather than bullshit games like that.

The other thing that was sort of train-wrecky to watch was the team that had Amanda--the Leah clone--on it. One of the interstitials showed her saying something to the effect that being a team player or taking one for the team wasn't in her vocabulary. Honey, that shit will come back to haunt you at some point. But, more important, (1) one of her teammates was the one who went home, because she made a nasty-ass banana pudding with way too much sugar in it, which she did because there wasn't enough cash in the budget for her original recipe, which included chocolate, and (2) Amanda made chicken thighs with sherry jus. Yes. Alcohol for school children. And a food item that likely broke their fucking budget. (Why did she get to keep her sherry when they were over budget, but Banana Woman had to put back some of her ingredients?) That kind of blew me away. And if I were Amanda, I'd be sending a thank-you note to banana pudding person, because the nastiness of that dish saved Amanda's ass.

I was a little surprised that she went with the banana pudding after she had to change the original conception. And someone on a forum suggested that maybe the bananas weren't quite ripe, which would have explained the trouble she was having with taste and texture. But why stick with that? K and I thought that rice pudding, for example, could have been subbed: brown rice pudding with a swirl of blueberry compote, for example, would have worked just fine, probably been healthier, and surely would have tasted better.

The other thing that that whole thing raised was how the teams split up the budget. Seems to me that you divide the dollar amount in four and negotiate from there. ("Hey, my thing is only going to cost X dollars, leaving me with some extra; who needs it?") It also seems that, if you're going to do something that depends on the condition of the fruit or vegetable, you should have a backup plan. But, hey, it's easy to think these things from my couch, probably harder to do it at Restaurant Depot, when one of the people on your team insists on buying sherry. Still, look at the plate of the team that won: lots more food, and it looks lots more appetizing. I think I want them to make the lunches at my school.

Going Bananas

Such a long, long time to be gone
and a short time to be there

If my sister hadn't died, she would have turned 50 today. Instead, she's been gone for 26 years--more years than she lived, which means I've lived more years without her than with her. And, of course, that's the case for life in general--we're dead for more years than we were alive, and pretty quickly, in the scope of the world's time. At this point, it's not just missing her qua her; of course I miss the stupid jokes we shared, and the rest of our shared childhood and adolescence, but the sadness, at this point, has at least as much to do with not knowing what she would have become, what she would have done, how she would have transformed into an adult. Would she have gone on to become a force in the world of international development? Would her budding feminism have grown? Or maybe she would have come home from the Peace Corps, gotten married, had a few kids, and had a boring office job somewhere. I kinda doubt that, but I also recognize that the work she might have done is my fantasy about her; there's no way to know what she really would have done. It's like reading a really wonderful novel, one of those big juicy ones with lots of interesting characters, and having the author quit writing after only a third of the novel, and it's not in any library anywhere, so you'll never know what might have happened to the characters.

And, of course, Chuck's mother and the mother of a close friend from college both died this year, and I knew them both reasonably well--the latter for as long as I've known my friend, which is coming up on 32 years; and Sara committed suicide. (I can't bring myself to erase her number from my phone. It'll go away when I switch phones eventually, as will the last call I received from her, but she lingers electronically.) (I have known three people who committed suicide: a cousin, a friend/lover in Philadelphia, and Sara. Is that a lot? Because it seems like it to me.)

On the other hand, my parents' health, despite a variety of bumps (some of them literal, in the case of my dad's rash; Ron, my mom doesn't have a plant, so it seemed easiest to recommend a jar of the goop, and the steroids are doing their thing), continues to be pretty good, all things considered; my mom got a kidney; my brother and I both have jobs (and I even got a promotion and raise); I saw more events this year, between concerts and hockey, than any other year in my life; and I had good company to share while I did it.

I guess, when it comes down to it, I don't know how to sum it up and reach a single evaluation: "good" or "bad" year. I try to go along with as much equanimity (and even joy) as possible, and I try to share as much of that as I possibly can, but it's not as though we can take any of it with us--which, for me, is all the more reason for dancing along as best we can, when we're lucky enough to have the basics. Not needing to worry about food and shelter and meaningful work and so on really is priceless. Given a sufficiency of the basics, it's the little things that improve our lives and that really make a difference.

For example, when I talked to my mom this morning, she was about to have a banana, and I suggested she put peanut butter on it as well. She was absolutely delighted at the prospect of the banana, with or without the pb. Why is that significant? Because, for those of you who haven't dealt with kidney issues, things like peanut butter and bananas are too high in forbidden elements. For several years now, my mom, who loves bananas, has had to limit herself to a few bites, and definitely not every day. Being able to eat whatever she damn well pleases, not needing to soak potatos overnight, not needing to go to dialysis three days a seek, is a radical realignment of her world. Knowing my mom, she won't go crazy--for her, it basically means she can have fruits and vegetables again, without having to worry that it will wreak havoc on her potassium or phosphates or whateverthehell. I realize that the kidney itself is a huge thing, rather than a small thing, but my point here is that the effect of the kidney is in how it alters a lot of small things about her everyday life.

Anyway. I don't have any grand conclusions today. I did manage to do the laundry and make the banana bread and clean up a tiny bit, plus I shlepped north and got some good chocolates and some collard greens. Friend and I are going out to an early dinner tonight, then heading to the sweatpants and the couch. Tomorrow we'll make pork (to make the spirit of my grandmother happy); I found a recipe for collard greens stuffed with a mixture of rice, currants, tomatos, pine nuts, and some other stuff, all of which I had around (except the greens); and I have some sweet potatos I need to use. If any (or all) of y'all were around, I say hey, come on over! That not being possible, may your new year be full of sweetness and light and joy and love.

Whew

As you might imagine, it's been a rather eventful week. I talked to mom this morning--she came home from the hospital last night (!!), less than a week after she received the new kidney. She sounds pretty good, and the fact that they sent her home tells me that she's doing well; my brother told me she was sitting in a chair the day after the surgery, and I talked to her a little on Sunday as well. Meanwhile, my dad's full-body rash--a reaction to the chemo he had at the end of September--has returned, for the third time. He's already been through two courses of steroids (which helped each time, but steroids have their own risks, of course), and the doctors keep saying, oh, gee, they've never seen that reaction before. Well, be that as it may, it IS a listed side effect of the drug, and just look at his skin, ferchrissakes. The good news, though, is that Monday's exam of his bladder didn't show any spots, so that's a good thing.

So, no, I did not try to race to my parents' house. I asked my mom before she went into surgery when she wanted me to come out there, and she said, well, you were just here, so . . . so I'll probably go visit in February or March. If there had been some way for me to actually be useful, of course I would have done it,

I spent a few days with Friend's family, however, which was entertaining in its own ways. I'd met his siblings and their spouses before, so it wasn't as though I was meeting everyone for the first time. Mostly, I tried to be pleasant and helpful. I brought sticky buns, which came out WAY better than I'd hoped: I adapted my grandmother's recipe with some adjustments from a school recipe, and I made some other changes. In particular, I replaced some of the white flour with wheat flour, I added apples to the filling, because I needed to use them up, and I added some maple syrup to the sticky part of the recipe, and I will use all of those changes the next time I make this recipe.

On Saturday, I made crepes for everyone, which was fun, too; the fruit (raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries that Friend's sister and mother had in their freezers), a fruit compote I made with some of the berries, and powdered sugar were on the counter, and everyone assembled their crepe in whatever ways made them happy. Everyone had one, a few people had two, and there were a few left over (which made breakfast for a couple of people yesterday). The other nice thing about how it worked out was that, because the crepes were being made one at a time, people had to wander into the kitchen to get one, which kept people circulating, but there was no pressure for everyone to sit down together. And it was a way to make a contribution, so that was fun for me, especially because I hadn't brought presents for anyone. (Friend typically keeps people supplied with alcohol, including champagne and orange juice for mimosas on Christmas morning, and I contributed to that effort.)

Sweetly, Friend's sister got spice boxes (from Penzey's) for each of us--grilling spices for him, and baking spices for me--which was very thoughtful. I promised her she'd get them back, in a transformed state. I also told her that we'd make bread together at some point, either when we visited her or when she visited Friend--because she said she'd tried it but it didn't come out, so she's never tried again. And, really, if you've never done it, and never seen anyone else do it, you don't know what state you're trying to achieve; many baking (and probably cooking) things are easier to do if you've actually seen someone do it and have seen how each step along the way looks. Once you have a certain amount of experience, of course, you can extrapolate, but not everyone has had that.

Because of the sheer number of people milling around--16 plus a baby, at the max--it was easy to fade into the background a little. Well, okay, maybe not that, exactly, but I definitely did my best to stay somewhat inconspicuous, or, at least, as inconspicuous as I'm capable of being. Of course everyone--especially Friend's mother, who hadn't met me before and who was madly curious about me, given that his siblings had met me--was probably a bit curious, but, really, what am I going to do at this point in my life? It's not like there's much I can change about my personality. I try to be aware of what I'm saying and doing, but, realistically, life is an ad hoc exercise, not a considered performance.

So today was back to work, in an effort to finish the proposal that's due on Monday; I'm hopeful that I can finish it completely tomorrow. I may need to add some bits--our most recent audit--but if I can leave work tomorrow with everything done except that, I'll be happy.

Meanwhile, thank you to all of you who sent good wishes my mom's way; I'll be getting back to each of you over the next few days.

Waiting for . . .

If all has continued to go well overnight, my mom is getting ready to get a kidney.

Yeah; I know; wouldn't that be a great solstice present?

She called me yesterday morning and said she was second for a specific kidney and she couldn't eat or drink anything after noon. Last evening she said she was a match for it, and last I talked to her, about 10:30 last night, they were on their way to the hospital. The organ was coming from out of state and she was supposedly getting it this morning if all goes well. Obviously, there are any number of ways that things could fuck up--is it really truly a match for her? how will the surgery go if it is? will her body accept the kidney?--but in the several years she's been on the list, this is the closest she's ever gotten. And our grim sense of humor is intact--she was saying yesterday that they already had her blood, and I pointed out that they could have saved the sponges from cleaning up her hospital room a few weeks ago.

Friend and I took off on Monday to celebrate his 50th birthday--and by "celebrate" I mean we went out for breakfast, got the oil changed in his vehicle, got a couple of carpeting issues solved for him (a rug under his computer stuff, instead of the patchwork of throw rugs under various table legs and chairs, and a runner near the back door, rather than another patchwork of small rugs, and a couple of those draft-prevention thingies), took a long walk in the woods--at two different points, we were surrounded by about 15 deer, with the closest about ten yards away, and we easily saw 40 deer over the course of the walk--and then went out for a fabulous dinner at this little hole in the wall. Sunday we went to the hockey game, and Saturday night we went out to hear some live music. Last night we were out again--for the fourth night in a row, so how about a personal shout-out to my liver for hanging in there.

Tonight and tomorrow morning I have some baking to do, because we're heading up to his family (mom plus sister & family live there, and brother and family are coming in). I've met his siblings before, but not his mom, so no pressure there. He keeps telling me not to fuss too much trying to bake too many things, and I take his point, but I really cannot bring myself to show up to someone's holiday celebrations empty-handed. So tonight I'm going to make some kind of graham crackers--probably shaped as very small tart shells--that I can fill with chocolate ganache and top with some meringues, because who doesn't like little chocolatey snacky things. I'm also going to make a batch of "toast bread," as they called it in school, and probably do a loaf as cinnamon bread and part of it as pecan rolls, because the formula is close enough to my grandmother's sticky pecan rolls that I can adapt. The bread is a nice basic bread recipe and doesn't require any kind of preferment, so I can put it to multiple uses. I have a couple of apples I need to use up, so I could even use those as a filling for the rolls or something. We haven't decided whether we're going up tomorrow afternoon or Friday morning; that decision is weather-dependent, and, given that I'm not doing the driving, I'm also not the making the decision. Either way, I need to be prepared to head out tomorrow.

I'd really like to make the soft pretzels, but they're a Project, what with the boiling in baking-soda-infused water (because, no, I'm not going to be using lye at home, thanks so much). Maybe over new year's or something. And I want to make sure to bring the crepe recipe, in case I get an opportunity to whip up a batch for breakfast one morning. That's enough contribution to make me happy. If Friend and I get a chance to take over the cooking for a meal or two, hey, all the better, but showing up with a desserty thing and a couple of breakfasty things in hand will do.

I'm exhausted at the moment, however, not least because I woke up at 3:30 or so this morning, and my brain informed me that there would not be any more sleep. Work has been an annoying hassle: I have a few things that must be done in the next three work days (I'm taking off next Monday as well, and we get the Thursdays and Fridays off, so it's today, and next Tuesday/Wednesday), but of course actually getting to those things has been challenging, not least because our financial person is running around setting everyone's hair on fire--deficit! debt! problems!--but not providing any actual fucking detail for the panic, so I end up having to drop everything to deal with the fires s/he is setting. Whereas, you know, s/he could actually do some useful analyses, say, and determine just what the problem might be, if, in fact, there IS a problem, about which I have yet to be convinced. Because I actually review our financials, line by fucking line, and my hair has not combusted, spontaneously or otherwise. Also? This person does crap behind the scenes, doing accounting tricks, and then we're supposed to deal with them. Which, again, more pain in the ass for yours truly.

Not that I'm annoyed by this or anything.

So, today, I will try to get the proposal written, and I'll do the monetary things I need to do, and I'll carry my cell phone around, hoping that it rings and that the person on the other end is a family member telling me that mom has a new organ.

Listalicious

I had intended to meet friends tonight--one friend has a son who was playing in a jazz trio at a photography center opening of some kind--and then . . . I bailed. I cranked away at work today (including five hours putting together the monthly report for BB, not least because my coworkers are unfamiliar with outlines, no matter how much I create them and hold their hands and practically write their fucking pieces for them), because I don't see how else I'm going to get through the next few weeks. And then I thought about the very long list of chores I'd set for myself (work out each day; go to two different farmers' markets, for honey, dried fruit, fresh fruit, and perhaps some vegetables and bread; clean the disgusting pit of a bathroom; do the laundry; do some baking; clean up the mess and clutter; and crank through as much of the second editing job as possible (the other editing job still isn't quite ready)), and I realized that I would be much happier if I came home and did a couple of things on the list.

So: DMB. When we bought the tickets, we each ended up choosing seats with "obstructed views." The first night, that turned out to mean "sitting in the second row on the side-ish of the stage," which isn't exactly my idea of obstructed. We wandered down, checked out the seats, and, as the opening band finished up, trudged up the hill for a beer. We came back down as DMB came out, and discovered that the seat directly in front of me was occupied by a young man who was--no lie--at least 6'7" tall. And he was standing. And he showed no inclination to sit down. And I am short. I could see absolutely nothing except his back. I was bumming--it was like having been given a wonderful treat and then having it ripped out of my hands.

I sat down--because seeing his ass wasn't so different from seeing his back--and tried to figure out how to somehow enjoy myself. Friend then made me switch seats with him--it turned out that the row in front of us was angled and shorter, such that Friend's seat was actually a front-row seat (I could have reached out and touched the stage). And he could see around very-tall guy, so it all worked out. We were so close that we were effectively behind the speakers, which meant the sound was kind of muddy (especially for those of us who are not huge fans who know the words to every song), but it was very fun. It was especially interesting to turn around and see 40,000 people behind us. The second night, our seats were near the back, not far from the sound board. Sightlines were pretty good, too, so it was a fun contrast with the previous night, and the sound was much better.

The first night, as we walked through the parking field, someone yelled out, from a van, "Hey! It's an old guy! Hi old guy!" The second night, as we walked to our seats, someone yelled out, "Hey! It's a silver fox!" (meaning me; Friend's hair isn't very grey, but mine definitely is). We were amused that we were both identified as Old--which, compared to this crowd, we certainly were; we could have been the parents of about 95% of the crowd. But, hey, we've been doing this for more years than many in the crowd have been alive, we know how to pace ourselves, and I'd say we get a few points for the effort.

We had a hotel room Saturday and Sunday night, and we had lunch on Sunday with friends of his who live not too far away. We originally planned to take a day off and wander back slowly on Monday during the day, but then ended up making a mad dash early in the morning to get to work, which meant we both had fewer than the requisite number of brain cells to rub together at work. But it was nice to get out of town. Part of why I want to crank for the next two weeks is that we're going out of town in two weeks--again only for the weekend, though we both plan to take off on Friday--and I want to get several things out of the way before that.

And, really, I just have a ton of deadlines. The challenging part--or one of them, anyway--is that it involves a number of detailed, complicated things all piled on top of each other, the kind of things where I like to make outlines, and plans, and get other people involved with plenty of advance notice, and so on, and that's basically just not possible. Take two of the things that are due soon, and that I have had on my desk for at least a couple of weeks--i.e., I've had some lead time on them--but that I have not been able to get to because too many other things have been in the way. But there's no point in fussing about it; I'll just do what I can and power through. I suppose I should have turned down this weekend's editing job and, say, just relaxed, or possibly even gone in to the office, but whatthefuck.

I'm half-watching "Pride & Prejudice," which is on Oxygen tonight, and I could write a fucking dissertation about the ads, but I think sleep would be the wiser choice. I did manage to get about 2/3 of the clutter put away, and the bathroom is clean (!!!!), so I was, indeed, able to cross off a few things from the list. Long day tomorrow, though, even if I only do some of the things on the list.

Second Opinion

So every time my dad's doc went poking around in my dad's bladder, he was finding cancerous cells; the doc reassured my parents that it wasn't invasive or anything, but lately the doc had decided to go to chemo, because the spots kept recurring. My parents--partly at my urging--decided to head to Sloan Kettering for a second opinion. That doc had his pathologist read the results/slides, and, when he got that reading (in the middle of telling my parents that it was no big deal), changed horses immediately. Seems like the small-city pathologist was seeing nothing seriously problematic where the expert saw something possibly problematic. So there will be two more trips to MSK (MRI, blood work, the doc there wants to do his own scope of dad's bladder), and then, who knows. (I asked the google about this cancer, today, and found that a new chemo has been fast-tracked by the FDA--as of yesterday.)

This could get . . . interesting, as my dad previously has said that he'd just as soon not do without his bladder, thanks so much. (Not least because my mom's brother doesn't have his any more, and my dad saw that whole process going on.) Which, if the cancer is invasive, basically means dad would be choosing to die of cancer sooner rather than either later or of something else. I don't particularly want to say goodbye to him just yet, but it's his decision. The other question, though, is what happens with mom, and not just in the they've-been-married-for-53-years kind of way: my mom getting a kidney becomes a whole other proposition if my dad isn't around to help out.

Let's hope I'm getting ahead of myself, and also let's wait until all the tests are done.

At work, well, everything is due at once: the two big grants that fund the whole place are due in the next six weeks, along with several crucial interim reports of various sorts for those grants. Plus? I had to move my office today, while the construction is going on, and I'm sharing a smaller office with someone (whom I like--and I offered to share, even though I probably could have gotten away with having the space to myself) for the next three weeks. One of the editing jobs that I took a few weeks ago but which has been delayed is finally going to show up, and a second one has come available as well. I think I'm only going to take the second one if it's available for this weekend; otherwise, I don't think I can fit in everything and still sleep.

So, no stress there.

Friend and I spent the weekend in cheeseland, listening to Dave Matthews (I have a few stories about that expedition), and, two weeks from now, we'll be heading back to cheeseland for a beer-tasting festival. This weekend will feature chores for me, and maybe some editing, plus a day of racing on Sunday (Tour de France finale; Formula 1 in Hungary; Indy in Edmonton) pretty much back to back all day. Which is good for editing days, actually, as chunks of all of that racing can take place while I am listening but not watching, or watching while rowing.

So now you're sort of up to date; I've been missing the blogging thing lately, and I want to say more, but it's after 11 and I need sleep. Maybe this weekend . . .

The Advantage of Cranky

As the scarcity of posts might suggest, I have been occupied with extrablogular activities. Work, mostly, which has been time-consuming and difficult, but also some hockey (with more in the offing); okay, lots of hockey, because I'm watching on television what I'm not watching in person. Friend has been in a frenzy, as well, because he's going turkey-hunting two weeks in a row, and the preparations are extensive. (He fusses more than anyone I've ever met, except myself--his systems have systems. Of course, many of mine do, as well, so I understand. But back to that in a moment.)

Next week, for example, I have two hockey games and a concert, as well as major deadlines at work. The following week I have a concert and possibly a hockey game, depending on how the series is playing out, and dinner with a friend. I have promised to (and want to) hook up with at least one pastry school friend in the next two weeks--if we can figure out how to include the Brazen Tart (so i can hear more about this farm thing she's mentioning!), then we'll do that, too. Then there's Indy at the end of the month, and June will be consumed with preparing for a visit from our federal funders at the end of the month.

The last two weeks at work have been difficult--we're supposed to be using this new financial software to do our budget for the year, which, okay, whatever. Except, of course, it doesn't necessarily accommodate all of the quirks of federal funding and the program income (in the form of Medicaid and/or Medicare reimbursement) that is sometimes included in the federal budget and sometimes is not. And I've never done this before. And the person who was doing the budgets before me was an ass, in multiple dimensions, primarily in the form of not telling anyone what she was doing and making things unnecessarily complicated. On top of that, the controller for our organization keeps changing the bits we need to pay for and is less than clear about where, exactly, they're supposed to go in the context of this software.

So, of course, yesterday I had to spend the whole day at a management retreat with the management team, doing team things. The person who facilitated it was good at it, and it wasn't as completely heinous as it could have been, but the timing made it less worthwhile. I'm being pressured to have the budget done by close of business on Monday, so being forced to spend a whole day away from it was rather problematic. As a result, I'll do what I can on Monday, but that's it. And I have a concert to attend Monday night, and a hockey game Tuesday night. My feeling about the whole thing is that I'll do what I can do, but if the organization sees fit to drag me away from the budget for a "retreat," then I have no problem going to a concert on my own time, rather than, say, working through the weekend or something.

One of the interesting dynamics yesterday is that our manager self-identifies (according to one of the exercises) as a "feelings" person (or "informal" and "easygoing," to use the metric of the day)--he's the only one in that quadrant. Which means to me that he'd damn well better have some people who are "formal" (in the sense of write things down, have meetings with a purpose, be task-oriented) and "dominant." At first, I was the only one in that quadrant, and I was kind of pissy about being forced to put myself there, because I have adapted to so many different environments. Reasonably quickly, the new medical director--whom I like tremendously and with whom I really enjoy working--realized she belonged with me, and a third person (whom I actually don't think belongs with us) joined us. I pointed out to the medical director that she and I had more education than anyone else in the room, and that we had obtained it in male-dominated environments, which I think affects how one operates. it's also worth mentioning that, except for our boss, who is gaygaygay, everyone on the team is female. It's the most female environment in which I have ever worked in my whole life.

The funny thing about this, to me, is that you can only have these discussions in office world. Of course there are different personalities in other environments, but in a place like the bakery, we have to get a product out the damned door. Everyone had best be task-oriented. And, more to the point I'm trying to make, in many ways, in that environment, I was, by comparison, more "analytical" (i.e., formal and easygoing), when I was working with Bossman on a new product, and also the person who did a lot of smoothing things like a feeling person would do (e.g., the pizza on Saturdays). Yes, I was also organized and task-oriented and so on, but so was everyone else, so that became an irrelevant evaluative criterion. In office world, you can lose sight of this. Of course, one could argue that this is a typical task-oriented-person's assessment, and you might even be right.

The other thing that was interesting is that we nearly left without discussing the biggest challenge we all face: the boss's boss is demanding, doesn't respect boundaries, wants what she wants when she wants it, etc. (which sounds like addict behavior, if you ask me, though I have no reason to think that's true). But as we were discussing challenges and how we were going to meet them, etc., I finally said, "Are we going to discuss the elephant in the room?" And our boss said yes, we should, and the facilitator said, good, let's finish this other thing first and come back to it. What was amusing was that everyone knew what i was talking about; it was also amusing, to me, that I was the one who mentioned it. If I hadn't, it wouldn't have gotten said, and all of the fine suggestions the facilitator was throwing around would have been useless for 70% of the problems we face. (What happens is she decides something is a crisis, she fires off urgent emails to our boss, and he comes barging in to whatever we were doing and flails around about it. The underlying issue is that she does not realize that we cannot do the grand expansions she has in mind without getting the operational infrastructure in place--the infrastructure that either never existed or that crumbled under her watch.) So we actually talked about it, but what I've been saying to my boss for months is still true: he's going to have to suck it up and confront her on these things. At least other people thanked me for bringing it out in the open, and I could sense the relief everyone felt to be discussing it; as I said yesterday, I'm nothing if not blunt. Actually, the whole group became more animated during that discussion, despite it being the end of the day, than they had all the rest of the day, which means everyone wanted to talk about it, even if they were afraid to bring it up.

And I think that is yet another advantage of being a cranky old broad: it's clear to me that this is one of the main underlying issues, and we can do nothing if it isn't discussed. No one else was willing to bring that up, however, even though nothing would get solved if we don't discuss this and do something about it. But, really, I don't care: what's she going to do to me? And, frankly, I'd tell her to her face--diplomatically, of course, and acknowledging her needs and her position, but seriously. So, for once, my what-the-fuckityness came in handy for actually addressing an issue. We'll see what happens.

Blah Di Dah

I am monumentally boring these days. I keep slogging along at work, making headway on various things, but always always always with another mountain of crap to climb. I need time to stop for a month, so I can do everything that needs doing without getting behind on something else and without missing this or that deadline and without having to scramble and drop everything to do some bullshit thing or another. Failing the time-stops-for-a-month plan, I'll continue with the current approach, and I'll just turn to the bakery camera when I'm feeling overwhelmed. That continues to make me feel better, because I can look at it and know I don't have to get up tomorrow and sling dough for 10 or 11 hours.

I also have a freelance job at the moment, and it's one that has morphed into a somewhat bigger job than I think anyone thought it would be. I'm editing what are called "ancillaries"--tests, instructor outlines, powerpoints, etc.--and those usually go pretty quickly. However, this author is completely unclear on the concept of an "outline" in that s/he basically took the text of each chapter and turned it into bulleted sentences. A 25-page single-spaced outline isn't really an outline so much as it is a reformatted chapter.

It's been a time suck the past couple of weekends, and it will be next weekend, too. The thing that really is unfortunate is that it's my first job for this particular assistant (though I know the person with/for whom she's working) and I'm hoping it doesn't go too much over budget for them; I've given her enough warning about the state of things so they can alert everyone about it, and I've tried to scale my level of effort to a place that will work for everyone (i.e., they're getting at least some worthwhile copyediting out of it, but I'm not spending so much time as to make it exorbitant). And, hey, I'm glad to have the work, or, more accurately, the extra cash.

I did manage to get out a little, though; Friend and I went out to dinner Saturday night, and then yesterday marked the start of the outdoor grilling season. We picked up a piece of salmon, and I applied a paste to it that included salt, sugar, pepper, honey, balsamic vinegar, cumin, chili powder, paprika, oregano, and cocoa. It was supposed to be a dry rub, but I leaped ahead, thinking the "essence" from another recipe was a liquid instead of more dry ingredients, so I added the honey (subbing for some of the sugar), then threw in a splash of the balsamic, because I've been throwing it into everything. It was quite excellent, though I'd reduce the cumin by a bit next time.

I also have to add that I have been using my rowing machine. I was going to add a bunch of qualifiers there, about how it's not this or hasn't resulted in that or I'm not quite doing the other thing, but fuck it. I've been rowing 3 to 5 days a week, and I've been upping my distance/time a little such that I'm now rowing about 4000 meters (in about 28 minutes), and a couple of days a week I lift 5-pound weights for a (very) few minutes. I would like to get a heart monitor, and will probably do that soon, and I have not completely abandoned the idea of resuming my yoga practice. I find that viewing my Netflix selections, particularly the various television series (at the moment, it's "The Pallisers," based on the Trollope novels), works quite nicely as a distraction while I row; hockey works, too, because there aren't a lot of commercial breaks. Music doesn't work as well for me, though it has sufficed in the past; it's easier to lose myself in the viewing, and I don't have to choose from the crappy health-club viewing choices to do it. Not surprisingly, the exercise is helping my back pain quite a bit. It's not completely gone, and sitting too long in the wrong chair will cause it to flare up, but the rowing seems to be building core strength in ways that help. Baby steps, people--or any steps at all.

Home is Where?

Okay, I could go on about Top Chef some more, but no. I do have two other recommendations for you, though. I'm in the middle of Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods and I am really liking this book. On one hand, it reads very quickly, but on the other hand, it's got some deep implications in there, so it's a lot of fun. The other recommendation is a movie, Big Eden. It's about a successful gay NYC artist who "goes home" where he's not really out (or so he thinks) to the townspeople and his grandfather and so on. It's a romantic comedy, and it's very entertaining--on one hand, it's obvious what's going to happen and who's going to end up with whom, but it can't rely on gender tropes to get the lovers together. It's clever and amusing.

A central plotline--one that shows up in n romantic comedies--is the "going home and finding true love in the small town one left." This also made me think of one of kstyle's followup questions for me, i.e., where, exactly, "home" is for me. I've been ruminating on this for several days, and I have to confess that I don't really feel like anyplace is home, which kind of bums me out.

My home town is small and sad and worn out. It used to depend in part on industry--several of which have left town--and . . . I don't know. There were farms nearby, but they've all been paved and "Developed." The whole area has, with the completion of a major interstate, become a byway on the way to New York, and the farms and some of my town have become a suburb of NYC, albeit a VERY far-west-NJ suburb. Point is, there's not much there for me, and I'd have to drive everywhere, because it's not the kind of small town where people can or do walk anywhere. If I'd been able to be a professor, it might have worked, because there are a couple of colleges not too far away, but the must-drive-everywhere problem would still be in effect.

I did like Philadelphia, quite a bit. It's a city that's walkable, with lots of public transportation, etc., and it probably feels more like home than anywhere, but I only lived there for five years--less time than I've lived anywhere else--and it's not as though I have deep ties there. I used to feel at home there, but who knows if I still would; I'm sure things have changed in the 23 years since I moved away.

And here doesn't feel like home, either, despite the 23 years.

I guess I think of "home" as someplace where one has ties, and knows people, and feels welcome and embedded, but also where one can find worthwhile work to do. I have the work here, more or less, but not a whole lot else. I have been part of communities here--in grad school, and then when I played handball, and when I was married to Chuck--but all of those communities have disintegrated in one way or another. Grad school friends are dispersed, with one notable exception in the form of the administrator of the department, who has become one of my best friends. I'm only vaguely in touch with the handball players, in the sense of I hear from one of them every few months but not from any of the others. Obviously I'm no longer part of Chuck's community. When both Friend and my grad-school friend are out of town or busy, I can easily go two or three days without talking to anyone I know in this city. I could drop off the face of the earth and it would take people a few days to notice, which really doesn't sound like a characterization of "home" to me, and certainly not like the kind of "home" represented in media-world and romantic comedies (which yes, admittedly are not necessarily the best source for anything other than a hyperidealized version of the world).

Mostly, this doesn't bother me, mind you. Individual bits--e.g., the disintegration of my relationship with Chuck--might cause sadness or grief, but that's very specific to the relationship, not necessarily to the totality of my life in a place. So I don't know. I suppose I could try to rethink what could count as home, but part of the resonance of those concepts is how they vibrate some deep part of us, I think. (And, of course, there's the whole other unfathomable level of it that people who are truly homeless experience, which makes my situation rather trivial.)

Anyway. Must get to work.

Next Word

Well, yes, it appears that I have abandoned you, but I have not. I was busy Being Social the past few days, and working hard last week, so I have been slow getting to your other words. Events included a hockey game, a play, and, of course, much good food. (The play was "Desire Under the Elms," which, good lord, what a depressing piece. Also, of the two theater productions I've seen in the past two weeks, there were a total of ten characters, exactly one of whom was female. Also also, "Desire" is very very shouty; there's barely a word spoken that isn't in the form of yelling or some other kind of thrashing around. Entirely too much Drama for me, thanks so much. But I feel all Cultured and shit, so there you go.) So anyway; on to the words. I'll get through the ones I can tonight, but I'd rather take my time and ponder a few of these, so you may only get a few at a time.

Chicago Ah yes. I have lived here, let's see, 23 years, which is longer than I have lived anywhere else. Even though I know the city reasonably well--and I know quite a few bits of it, and I know some of it better than many residents, for reasons I'll elaborate in a minute--it still does not feel like home to me, and I doubt that it ever will. I'm not a midwesterner, for one thing, even though I don't know that I could tell you exactly what characterizes a midwesterner or a non-midwesterner.

The city comprises 77 neighborhood areas; the areas were originally delineated by sociologists in the 1920s, pretty much along ethnic lines. What's truly interesting is how much of that character has survived for nearly a century. There's still a south-side Irish parade; there's still a Polish neighborhood (where many people actually speak Polish, mind you, and the businesses advertise in Polish); the city still celebrates Pulaski Day. The city is also, still, profoundly Catholic, and specifically Irish- and Polish-Catholic, which have a different flavor than Italian or French or German Catholics. (People my age who grew up Catholic in this city will still ask people they've just met which parish they're from; someone I knew in grad school said it wasn't until she moved away from the city that she realized most people do not identify the place where they live by the parish they're from.)

Part of what this means is that people often grow up in and remain living in the same neighborhood, or near enough to it, for their whole lives. Chuck could tell those stories better than I, but many people regard "downtown" as a foreign country, and a suspiciously foreign one at that, despite the fact that the public transportation to and from downtown is actually pretty good for most parts of the city. (Except for the poor black sections, but that's a different story.)

The city also has a profoundly racist past: past mayors built housing projects in ways that were designed to segregate black people into overcrowded neighborhoods, and woe betide any black person who attempted to move to a white neighborhood. In the 1970s, whites basically fled to the suburbs, abandoning the city and the school system. This has not worked out well. One of the side effects is that many of the white suburbanites live in their outposts and possibly work there as well, sucking benefits from the fact that the city exists but not paying their fair share (see Myron Orfield's work on this). It is not uncommon for kids to grow up in the 'burbs and then live in Lincoln Park or Lakeview or downtown or Wrigleyville after graduation for a couple of years. (Some go to school in the city, thus expanding their years there.) Eventually they meet someone, marry, and then move back to the suburbs once they start procreating. They will have visited few other parts of the city and will have utilized public transportation for few of their ventures, and they will only rarely have interacted much with someone who is Not Like They Are, but they typically think they have lived in the city and Experienced it.

It is also still possible for people to arrange their lives so they rarely or never see someone of a different race--which, in a city that is slightly less than 40% black and slightly more than 40% white, is pretty amazing. I go out to dinner quite a bit, and I can tell you that most of the time, most places I'm eating, there are few or no black customers, which is only partly a comment about where I'm eating dinner. I can also tell you that vocal racism is alive and well: many is the time that someone has made a remark to me, assuming that I share their views because I share their skin color. The old ethnic white neighborhoods that haven't seen much development are particularly notable for this. (To Chuck's everlasting credit (and to the credit of his mom), although he has many of the markers to fit right into that mold, he profoundly does not.)

I'm unusual in a number of ways: I've lived in three very very different parts of the city, and have spent time in three or four others, including the neighborhoods in which I have worked. I take public transportation everywhere, pretty much (not having a car will do that to a person). At least two of the neighborhoods in which I've lived, including the one in which I now live, are racially much more mixed than the downtown neighborhood. I don't root for the Cubs OR the Sox.

So anyway.

There are things about the city I appreciate. There are things I enjoy. As anywhere else, there are many nice people. I live here, even though it's not Home, not least because I'm not even sure what would count as home for me these days.
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One last thing tonight: yes, I am peeved that Hosea won Top Chef. I'll elaborate at a later date, but let me say it had nothing to do with his supposed romance with Leah.

All About Me(me) x 5

Thanks to Jonquil (whom you really should be reading if you're not already): Comment to this post and, if requested, I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your blog and elaborate on the subjects given. Here are the five that Jonquil provided to me:

Baking My experience with this enterprise has led me to begin to believe that I really have to go back to school every now and again, in order to master some new body of knowledge. Of course, one could argue, quite easily, that I have not "mastered" baking in any serious, Brazen-Tart-Top-Chef sense of that word, and, if I'm going to be doing that going-back-to-school thing, I really must either win the lottery or find cheaper ways of going back to school. Caveats aside, I find that there is, in fact, a subtle but real sense that I'm Much Better at this than I used to be. I was always a pretty good baker--I wouldn't have come up with the idea to start a bakery if I hadn't had some notion that I already had a frame on which to hang subsequent knowledge--but I can do more, and do it better, than I used to be able to do, and I like that. The chefs in school said that they would expose us to everything, and, indeed, they did. The bakery enabled me to use quite a bit of it, at one point or another, which embedded it even more deeply. This doesn't prevent me from forgetting useful bits (today, while making a batch of nougat, I'm looking at the pan of sugar, water, honey and corn syrup and thinking, "Hmm, I wonder if that's going to boil over?" Answer: Yes; all over the stove), especially because, now that I'm back in Officeworld, I don't use the bits every day. Flip side, though, I enjoy using them a lot more.

Buddhism Sometimes I think of myself as the accidental buddhist. I've never studied it or practiced it, in the sense of belonging to a sangha; I (mostly) haven't read the texts (though at two different points in my life I had a lover who studies one or another of the schools of buddhist thought, and one of them read Sanskrit, IIRC); I don't meditate or even practice yoga at this point; and i suspect my grasp of some of the concepts is more on the order of misconstrued lyrics than anything else. I also don't find myself in search of a religion or in search of meaning in my life. What I find useful about buddhism is that it focuses on finding truth (and provides tools for doing so); it doesn't have any deities; and it advocates compassion at all times. I find the distinctions between engagement and attachment interesting (though I have no clue whether I think about this in "buddhist" ways). I find it interesting that enlightenment is (at least theoretically) available to all, not through the grace of a deity or other intercessor, but through one's own actions, and that each being is responsible for his or her own actions. I have to add that my own attempt to practice compassion as Chuck and I were splitting up ended up being one of the best things I have ever done.

Homekeeping One of win-the-lottery fantasies has to do with buying or building a home that is a model in some way, or a home that has a masonry bread oven in the back yard, or a home that runs on solar energy, or . . . something. Even though I have lived in a major city for nearly 30 years, I have this fantasy of living someplace that is not-city (and definitely not suburbs; I cannot do suburbs, at all). What the fantasy is about, i think, has as much to do with the various arts and sciences necessary to keeping a home, especially the arts and sciences centered around the kitchen and the hearth and the sewing space (and the writing space and the art studio, as long as we've won the lottery here). I think that's actually the fundamental truth that comes out of a Marxist analysis, that we most of us, perhaps all of us, need and want to be able to do multiple things. (This notion is explored to interesting effect in both Ursula LeGuin's "The Dispossessed" (and some other work) and Sheri Tepper's "The Gate to Women's Country," in both of which the residents of the imagined societies are expected to learn and practice multiple arts, crafts, sciences, etc. Much of our capitalist society doesn't think in terms of home "keeping": instead, we're expected to use, dispose of, buy new, in order to create a market. That seems so fundamentally wrong to me, and so at odds with homekeeping.

Friendship I have spent much of the last 30 years living by myself. Since 1981, Chuck and I lived together for about 5 years, and I had a roommate for less than a year in 1983 or so, but I have otherwise lived alone. Given that my family is about a thousand miles away, this has meant that I've built multiple networks of friends over the years, and I love them all. Some fade in and out of my life; some were friends in a specific time and place; some are closer to me than some of my family; some are more casual; and, thanks to modern technology, some I've never seen or met in person. Doesn't matter. We're all a part of these great webs of life and death. Sometimes our intimate (read: marital and familial) relationships and the way our society puts those at the center of everything makes friendship seem like an afterthought, but it isn't. I don't feel as though I have friendships "instead of" marital or familial relationships, because I have or have had all of those; I feel as though the fact that marital/familial relationships haven't occupied the center of my vision and my living space has enabled me to see how friendship is the thing that makes the other relationships possible in some important ways.

Starting over again Oy. Sometimes I feel as though I've lived several lifetimes in this particular lifetime. What I mostly feel is thankful that I have some ability to be resilient, and thankful I have the friends and family who can help me and support me through difficult times. As y'all know, I can also feel sad or angry or self-pitying, sometimes even for stretches of time. But what else can you do except . . . do the next thing? Well, yes, you can blog about it, ad nauseam, but sooner or later you must get the fuck ON with it. I could easily allow myself to be consumed with sorrow & regret, and some days/times that happens; I wish I could have been a professor, or owned a bakery, or been a programmer; some days I even wish I could have had a kid. it's not that my life is somehow incomplete without those things--the Brazen Tart once pointed out, correctly, that one cannot do everything. It's that I would really have liked to do those things (or the first two, for sure, anyway), and I think I might have been good at them, and I wish i could have found out whether I would have been, and I feel like I would have been able to offer more to people if I had been able to do those things (i.e., it's not a purely selfish wish to have done them). Instead, I slog along, writing reports and proposals that maybe four other people will ever read, and it feels like a waste. But it is what it is. And I still get a comma in every paycheck and I still don't have to lug 50-pound sacks of flour up a flight of stairs, so, hey, it could be a lot worse.

Sleepytime

I think I matched a personal best yesterday, for amount of time spent doing absolutely nothing. Saturday featured some running around--to get something framed, to pick up a few items at Trader Joe's, and to make tiramisu as a months-late birthday cake for Friend. Friend then fetched me and we hied back to his place to cook dinner (mahi mahi with lime butter; wild and brown rice; and a mix of slow-roasted tomatos, onions, black beans, and mango) and admire his "new" dining room. The room has been there all along, but it has housed computers and such for several years; he has been on a roll lately, rearranging stuff at his house, so he was very pleased to be able to have dinner in the dining room.

Yesterday, however, I sat on the couch in the sunny front room, with a fire in the fireplace and a cat on my lap. I had a book next to me, but I didn't exactly read a lot of it; I did spend a fair amount of time kind of staring into space, or into the fire. Friend continued to move crap around as part of his grand rearranging plan, and occasionally came in to put another log on the fire. I eventually got off my ass to take a shower, and, later, to start cooking dinner (more rice; cauliflower that was steamed and then baked in a cheddar sauce that curdled on me but still tasted good; cabbage that was steamed and then sauteed with onions in a little butter, with black pepper; chicken that marinated all day in lemon and ginger and was then basically poached/pan-fried in the marinade). Friend came in at the last minute to do the chicken, as the rest of the stuff was the time-consuming bit, and I did all that fussing so he could continue his operations. We ate in the dining room again, and then retired to sit in front of the fire for awhile. It was every bit as pleasant as it sounds, and I think he was pleased to be able to get more stuff done..

Today I wandered through Whole Paycheck on my way home, and once again bought more than I should have tried to carry (look! pistachios and cherries! I can make nougat . . . and almond paste--I could have used some of that the other day . . . and that fig and almond thing I like . . . Ginger-O's are on sale; must stock up). I managed to shlep it all home, and even did my laundry, which was the real task for the day. And I cut up the pineapple and the grapefruit and threw in the rest of the frozen cherries and blueberries, so I have fruit salad for the week. (I know; doesn't quite measure up to Brazen Tart's adventures in Kauai, does it . . .)

The tiramisu was tasty enough, though not exactly what I had in mind. First, I had decided to make a dacquoise instead of using ladyfingers, which worked reasonably well except it didn't rise enough and the almond flour wasn't fine enough (I suspect those two things are related). I also made a chocolate dacquoise, merely by dumping in some cocoa powder. I combined mascarpone with some "light" cream cheese and some heavy cream, in an effort to make it a teensy bit less heavy, and that worked okay, and I layered fruit in there, too (frozen raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries), to help cut the sweetness. I put a layer of regular dacquoise on the bottom, soaked it with coffee, smeared some of the cream/cheese mixture, and put on some berries; added the chocolate layer, did the same; and added the top layer of regular dacquoise. I had run out of the cheese mix, so I whipped the rest of my heavy cream and used that as a top layer. Remember those chocolate hazelnut cookies? I had crumbs from them in a bag and used them as a sprinkle on top instead of cocoa powder. I think for the next round I'll make ladyfingers or a spongier sponge cake instead of dacquoise, or possibly a combination.

Meanwhile, thanks to my responding to a stupid poll last week (on purpose, to fight the oh-we-christians-are-so-persecuted crowd), I've ended up on the email lists of the godbag asshats from the AFA and affiliated organizations. There's a part of me that wants to stay on the lists, just so I can keep track of their slimy shit, but I just cannot bear it. What a bunch of assholes. And, of course, what with the long weekend and such, I keep getting email, despite having sent multiple unsubscribe notices. If I'm still getting their shit by Wednesday, there will be problems.

I cannot abide them. They keep wanting to stick their noses into everyone else's underpants, for reasons that make no sense to me. Their views on homosexuality and their opposition to equal rights are offensive. More to the point of the shit they keep sending, they have this notion that somehow christians are being "silenced" and "persecuted." That is such a distortion of reality that it's difficult to take seriously. Are churches being burned? Are christians being sent to concentration camps? Are they being denied the right to vote? Are they forbidden to pray? Of course not; quite the opposite. Or, let's look at it this way: when is the last time the populace of the United States elected as their president someone who isn't at least an avowed christian? How many members of Congress aren't christian? (I suppose their answer to that would depend on whether they count catholics and mormons.) Then explain to me how one can even claim persecution with a straight fucking face.

Okay; that's as much energy as I can muster for the day. (It's a sorry state of affairs when I only have the energy to rant for two paragraphs . . . )

Randomosity

"Best" trumps "good," except for values of "good" that include "convenient." More specifically, I've found a bakery between work and home that makes decent bread. It's not as good as the bread where I used to work, but I mentioned the part about how it's between home and work. As a result, I walked home tonight, despite not really wanting to do so; I committed to walking to the bakery and getting some bread, and then I just-missed a bus, so ended up walking the rest of the way home as well. I didn't get up to my usual pace, however; it was more of a stroll. Still, it's something, and I had bread for dinner (with excellent cheese from the farmers' market). Speaking of the market, I did manage to go on Saturday, and, in addition to the Excellent Cheeses, scored some beets, onions, tomatos (which I'm probably going to roast), broccoli, apples, and honey. I made an apple cake yesterday at Friend's house, but was seriously unhappy with it, despite the ginger in it; it was WAY too sweet, for one thing, and the cake part didn't work at all. Yes, I modified the recipe, but I'm not convinced that the original would have been any better. I found a new one today, though, that will likely work.

Work is getting interesting. AP number two, the more recent one, will no longer be with us after this Friday; her position has been eliminated. Some of her responsibilities will come to me (along with additional dollars in my pay, supposedly, although no actual numbers have been bandied about just yet). One one hand, that's kind of exciting; I am getting the opportunity to do all kinds of work that I really enjoy (more on that in a second). On the other hand, in order to do any of these things well, I need a few days to just wallow in paper--reading it, filing it, making notes on it--and a few more days to figure some things out, and a few more after that to make some plans.

Every time I turn around, however, there's another damned crisis, so I end up lurching from one thing to the next. In addition, now that I'm a Manager, I have to go to all of these goddamned training sessions and meetings--a total of 3.5 days in October will be devoted to this crap, for example. I haven't been to any of them yet, but, based on the chirpy advice-to-managers emails I'm now getting, I seriously doubt that the meetings are going to be worth the 15% or so of my work time next month. It's not entirely clear to me how anyone who has seen "Office Space" can conduct these things with anything resembling a straight face. We'll see if my skepticism is warranted.

On top of it all, after this coming weekend, Friend is basically going to be gone all or most of every weekend between now and Christmas (and, hell, maybe then, too), what with football and hockey games up in Cheeseland, plus his annual two-week deer-hunting-and-Thanksgiving extravaganza. I am not looking forward to this. We'll still see each other, I hope, but there's something nice about waking up on a Saturday or Sunday morning without having to go anywhere, or do anything more strenuous than making breakfast and providing a lap for the cat and planning dinner, and that's basically out of the picture for three months or so.

On top of that, one of his hockey-playing mates has organized outings to eleven Hawks games--and they are (a) on nights or to games that Friend and I might have attended, and (b) organized specifically as "boy's nights," which, okay, whatever, those guys all play hockey together. They're spread throughout the whole season, though, rather than in the next three months. Still, given that Friend has committed to spending the time/money on those games, I fear it will cut into his willingness to attend additional games with me, which kinda sucks; I really enjoyed going to the games last season and was looking forward to this season. I may just go by myself, which isn't as much fun, and turns into a later night, what with public transportation and all. On top of that, Friend is also playing hockey once or twice a week or so. Yes, I did in fact notice that there's not a lot of room in that for me.

In an effort to make lemonade out of that, if I don't get any more editing work (I haven't heard a peep from anyone in nearly two months, and I haven't been offered anything in nearly three) it will give me an opportunity to work my way through my List of Big Chores. There are two closets that need to be excavated, seeing as how, when I moved in here, I basically crammed stuff into them and shut the doors, and my kitchen cabinets are in serious need of organization. One of them is now operating under the organizing principle of "open door; cram or toss something on top of the pile; close door quickly and hope nothing falls out." No, I am not exaggerating. And there's the needlepoint I wanted to start nearly two years ago--that could use some work, seeing as how I have completed approximately one square inch of it.

Still, chores, no matter how necessary or how satisfying when completed, aren't nearly as much fun. Also, among the other functions that Friend serves, he gets to be my cooking and baking guinea pig, which is important. I'm simply not getting enough exercise to eat much by way of baked goods--or anything else, it seems sometimes--and he's bigger than I am, as well, so leftovers that would go to waste at my house get consumed at his. Well, whatever. It would be nice to get this place organized, two-and-a-half years after moving in, and I do want to work on the needlepoint.

In good news, I paid off my pastry school loan last week, 17 or 18 years early. I have to focus on the fact that it is paid off, rather than the fact that it feels like I took nearly $20k and set fire to it, but I'm also happy to not have any debt right now. Of course, if I had a LOT of debt, maybe Congress would bail me out.

As for the "work I like" part (no, I didn't forget), I've realized that the kind of work I like to do is building structures or infrastructures; providing people with the tools they need to do their jobs; creating tools that make everyone's job easier, or that make reporting open and obvious; finding and solving new problems. (What I do not like, so much, is doing the same thing over and over.) My current organization needs infrastructure--oh, my, yes, it does; it would be difficult to overestimate how much it needs it. In addition, my current boss recognizes this need, and has hired me specifically because he thought I'd be able to build it. Thus, despite the anxieties and frustrations, this is the kind of work I like to do; now we'll see whether I can be any good at doing it in this organization and environment.

This opportunity differs significantly from others in my past, because I'll be working with many more people, more directly, than in other jobs. At the substance abuse treatment agency, for example, I worked closely with my boss; the only infrastructure work I did was building a contracts management database (the core of which I believe they still use, 10 years later), and I did that on a whim, not as part of my official job. I worked closely with the two people who would use it, to make sure I got it right, but I didn't supervise anyone, or even work closely with anyone other than my boss, and any infrastructure building I did was sub rosa rather than an explicit part of my responsibilities. So, we'll see. I admit to some nervousness about the whole thing, but sometimes you gotta say what the fuck.

In Which Narya Actually Goes to a Movie Theatre

I finally got around to seeing "The Dark Knight"--in Imax, no less--on Friday night; Friend had wanted to see it because much of it was filmed in and around the building in which he works (the Lamborghini was parked outside his building for a couple of days), and I thought it might be interesting. I hated it, however, to put it bluntly, for many of the same reasons that others have noted. In no particular order (and there are spoilers all over the place, if you haven't seen it and care about that):

It was way, way, too full of gratuitous violence. I cannot watch graphic violence because it gives me bad dreams (that's a whole other post), and gratuitous violence really puts me over the edge. I close my eyes when I sense it's coming (which means I pay a buttload of money to listen to a movie), but this movie really started to annoy the fuck out of me. There are people being blown up FOR REAL every goddamned day, so watching it happen for "entertainment" seems wrong in some important way. I tend not to mind violence that is part of a story quite as much (though I may still close my eyes), because then it is not gratuitous. Nearly every bit of violence in this movie was for the sake of watching things or people blow up or get hurt. Also, there were some seriously gross bits, like showing formerly-crusading-DA-what'shisname's half of a face. People, I hate to break the news for you, but that kind of damage, untreated, would lead to a staph or other infection that would kill you, in hours, possibly days. Also, the dehydration that would occur from a wound like that? Would also kill you. And, I'm sorry, the pain would also prevent any of the crap he was doing. So he should have been dead, thrice, instead of running around being psycho with half his face burned off. It was too unbelievable, as well as gross for the sake of gross. I didn't watch those bits, either.

Second, there were no real women in it. It did not pass the Alison Bechdel/"Dykes to Watch Out For" test--i.e., it did not (a) have at least two women in it, (b) who talk to each other, (c) about something other than a man. The women who had speaking roles were (a) Batman's ex-girlfriend--now boinking the new DA--who wore major cleavage to her work as an assistant DA or something like that and who of course had to die, in order to provide a Plot Point (i.e., half-face-DA-guy was going to marry her but heard her get blown up and went psycho) and (b) a cop, who merely provided another plot point (she betrayed the commissioner because the Joker bribed her because her mom's medical bills were piling up) and who actually didn't say very much at all, and (c) the ballerina Batman was dating for a couple of scenes and whose main purpose was as eye candy and/or a minor plot point. None of the women was actually driving the action in any way whatsoever; they provided some ostensible excuse for the men to act. And the women did not talk to each other at any point. Annoyed the everloving shit out of me.

Third, the movie is basically a defense of the political/philosophical stance of the current administration, particularly the "theorists" behind it. There's a bunch of blather in the movie, especially at the end, about whether Batman is a hero, and about whether the half-faced-now-dead-but-previously-reformer-DA is a hero, and the conclusion is that Batman and the commissioner decide that they won't tell anyone that the DA went nuts and killed a bunch of people, that they'll say that Batman did it, so the DA can still be a Hero, because the People need Heros, and on and on. The point was that The People were simple-minded sheep who couldn't handle the complicated truth, so the Elites would make the decisions for the good of the People. I cannot begin to tell you how much this annoyed me, and, though I cannot point you to other reviews, I know I saw more than a few who mentioned this (although perhaps not in exactly these quasi-Platonic terms).

Also, the movie was way too fucking long. It was (and I hadn't realized this) two-and-a-half hours long. And did I mention I hated it? After awhile it felt like I'd been there for a couple of days.

But, hey, now I've seen it.

The rest of the weekend was spent cooking some yummy (improvised) food, bailing out Friend's basement, and watching sports on television (F1 race in Italy and a bunch of football games), plus providing some lap time for the cat. We had a bunch of rain (the northern effects of Ike, basically), which resulted in flooding throughout parts of the city (there were people rowing down the street only a mile or two from Friend's house). Friend's basement drains were spewing water for a little while, which isn't really desireable, but it receded pretty quickly, and we were able to get it to drain pretty well. Plus, Friend had scored a couple of industrial-strength air conditioners/dehumidifiers (suitable for a server room; his company wanted to get rid of them so he snagged them), which turned out to work quite well in dehumidifying his basement. The whole thing made my trip to work this morning an adventure, too--a bus trip that normally takes about 45 minutes took nearly two hours, because all of the streets north of the bus street were blocked off from flooding--but I got off easy, so I am not really complaining at all.

As for the food, Saturday we made the last of Friend's wild turkey breast, along with wild and brown rice with a little onion, plus some cranberries and apple, and roasted green beans from Friend's garden. Sunday Friend had a pork tenderloin that he cooked on top of the stove, along with mashed potatos (from the family farm), and cabbage (also family farm) and a little broccoli (Friend's garden) that I sauteed with a little butter, plus salt and pepper. I also made a sauce for the pork from the fond from the pork, plus onion (garden), red wine, rosemary, and cherries. Earlier I'd made a cake from flour, butter, toasted oat bran, honey, cherries, a couple of eggs, and some chopped bittersweet chocolate. I had some frozen cherries I'd wanted to use up, and the cake and the sauce turned out to be excellent ways to do that. It was also kind of fun to just invent a cake. It was, as one of my chefs would say, "rustic," in that it didn't have a fine crumb and was heartier than one would normally think of a cake as being, but the flavor was quite nice, and it is sufficiently Healthy that it's a fine substitute for my breakfast muffins until I get around to making some. (That was supposed to happen tonight, but didn't.) I could have tarted it up for presentation with, say, some whipped cream, and/or a chocolate drizzle, or some kind of ice cream (perhaps even a savory ice cream, like rosemary), but it was just us and Friend has a physical next week, so adding fat would not have been a helpful idea.

You will notice that I have made no mention of the farmers' market. Despite the intentions stated in the last post, when Friend and I woke up Saturday morning and heard the pouring rain (which I had been hearing off and on for several hours), i decided to bag that idea, figuring many vendors might not even show up. The trip would have been complicated as it was (public transportation is going through infrastructure-rebuilding gyrations that occur mostly on weekends these days), and I had no intention of making the slog only to not get what I wanted. Once we got downstairs and discovered the flooding basement, it became even more unlikely, as helping Friend seemed like a better use of my time. I still want to get those items, however; maybe next Saturday? We'll see.

Also: remind me to tell you why I hated a book I read recently.

Get the Razor

Occam's razor, that is.

What are the possible reasons that the Republicans chose Sarah Palin?

1. McCain (or his handlers, which I think is more likely) want to make sure the rightwing nutcase base comes out to vote. That group is ambivalent about McCain, at best--mostly on the forced-pregnancy issues--because he has not always toed the line as thoroughly as they want him to. Palin doesn't believe in evolution; doesn't believe in sex education (except abstinence only); and doesn't believe women really should have choices about when or whether to bear children. She is, in other words, a rightwing nutcase herself. It also means, if there were ties in Senate votes, she could be relied upon to vote their way (in her role as president pro tem of the Senate). It's also worth pointing out that Lieberman and Casey (the other two names that were tossed around) would lose this vote, because of their positions on these issues.

2. McCain/his handlers believed their own rhetoric, i.e., believed that (a) there are a whole big bunch of Bitter Old Women who supported Clinton and who not only will not vote for Obama but might vote for McCain and (b) these women are only interested in voting for someone else with a vagina, i.e., they would not care about the head that is attached. (I have never believed that the so-called "puma" vote is anything except a bunch of rightwing nutcases trying to get face time on Faux news by ginning up this story; most--perhaps all--of the women they've profiled have a certain amount of republican-ness in their backgrounds, which makes it difficult for me to believe they were truly Clinton supporters to begin with; the hatred for anyone named Clinton is too overwhelming for that.)

3. McCain truly believed that Palin is the best person for the job of Vice President--her extensive experience in government, particularly her experience in some aspect of governance in which McCain is seen as weak, makes her the perfect complement to McCain, and makes her an ideal choice as a potential president.

4. They knew it would be a controversial choice--possibly even because of the family mess, especially insofar as the republicans have actually been the ones to do most of the publicizing of it, and they've been making things up, while they're at it--and figured it would be a way to distract everyone from her actual lack of qualifications, suck attention away from Obama, and, perhaps most important, suck attention away from the actual issues.

I think we can safely rule out 3. There's no possible way that anyone is going to claim that Palin is the most qualified Republican in the country. We can argue about whether Biden is the "most" qualified--because we can have different definitions of "most"--but we would be unlikely to say that he is UNqualified. Despite my carping, I would not regard Biden as unqualified. Palin is unqualified.

I think we can rule out 2, as well. While they may have hoped to pick up a few votes from vagina-Americans, I don't believe they really believe their own rhetoric on this matter. If that were their intent, there are plenty of other Republican women out there with more experience than Palin.

What's going on, then, is mostly 1, with a possible dash of 4 thrown in for excitement. Basically, Palin is a dogwhistle to the far-right, which is the group of voters that McCain absolutely must get to go vote but that was least enthusiastic about him. The dash of 4 is mostly an attempt to make lemonade, because it's clear that (a) the vetters did not do their job at all, or (b) the vetters were from the far-right, or (c) the vetters decided to listen to the far right. I find it difficult to believe that they looked specifically for an anti-choice candidate with very little governing experience AND a family Situation.

As for whether Palin's daughter is fair game, well, no, mostly not. I think it is relevant to point out that Palin reduced funding for a program that provided pregnant unmarried teens with a place to live; if that isn't an example of punishing women for having sex, even when they want to actually bear the child, then I don't know what the fuck is.

On another note, however, the weekend provided great barrels of fun. Friend and I had dinner last Thursday night. I bought a NYTimes and took myself out to breakfast Friday morning. Friday afternoon we went to the baseball game; Saturday morning we rose at the crack of dawn to drive to his friends' house, climb in their vehicle, and then tailgate and then go to see Bucky's season opener. We killed some time at the tailgate location after the game before going to the tex-mex place at which Friend and I ate a few weeks ago. After that, back to the friends' house for some beer and euchre, and some stargazing (it was clear, and their house is way out in the middle of nowhere, so there were many stars to be seen--and no sound at all, pretty much, except crickets). Sunday we hung out, then got in the pool, and eventually wandered to a local establishment for burgers and beer, then home for more beer and euchre. (We hadn't originally planned on staying Sunday night, I don't think, but once more alcohol came into play, driving two hours back here seemed unwise.) We left early Monday morning and were back here before noon; we also made a spectacular dinner Monday night that included grilled boar steaks and grilled vegetables, the latter tossed with pasta, and some cabbage and broccoli.

This weekend we do another set of excursions. Friday night we drive to the friends' house again, then go out for dinner and bowling (!), and, who knows, maybe more euchre. Saturday we go to a crafts fair/wine tasting, at which Friend purchased much good wine last year and probably will again this year (and I'll probably get some as well). Sunday we get up at the crack of dawn and drive to Joliet for the IRL race (from his friends' house), which means we have to pack for several different events this weekend. I had intended to do some laundry this week, but the weather has gotten cooler, and I've decided that with careful underwear management, I can make it through the weekend with clean underwear and without having to do laundry.

Slackaliciousness

*Insert ritual apologies for not posting here.*

I've been enjoying some serious slackitude for the past week, starting with a fab dinner with Friend and the Brazen Tart last Monday, continuing through this past weekend, which included more fresh tomatos, and beer school, and some fabulous food with Friend, and weeding his back (brick) patio (for which I am suffering today, in the form of scraped hands and sore muscles). Work has even been interesting, in the sense that I am basically going to have to build an infrastructure, nearly single-handedly, which should be interesting. Not easy, but definitely interesting.

Last week's go-round with Chuck has been occupying my mind during idle moments, but I think I'm going to keep that to myself for the time being.

I have nothing to watch on television at the moment (except the two Netflix movies sitting somewhere, except I got them for the express purpose, and in one case ("Dogma") at the express request, of sharing with Friend), because the Tour de France is long over, as are the Olympics (which I only watched in a half-assed fashion), and I do not care about the conventions. I realize that is sacrilege, especially for a supposed politics junkie like myself, but I really do not care. I can read the speeches, and even find them on YouTube if need be, and meanwhile I don't care. There's no way in hell I'd ever vote for John-did-I-mention-I-was-a-POW-McCain, and, as you all know, Barack and I are not BFF, so I'm kinda meh about the whole thing. (Joe Biden?? Really? Joe voted-for-a-hideous-bankruptcy-bill Biden? Glad to see you're out there supporting us working folk, Barack!) On the other hand, I am so very, very tired of the pumathing. Seriously, can't you tell that it's mostly the republicans who are stirring this pot? Christ on a cracker; didn't you learn anything from watching Nixon and his evil minions these past 50 years? And the idiots in the media--the so-called-left-wing-media, as they say--run after it, frothing, so that every other goddamned story is about Dissension & Division in the Ranks. Yeah, right; as though every other primary season has been an exercise in crowning the new candidate with rose petals strewn at his feet and not a hint of disagreement, but the Evil! Wimmins! just won't cooperate! Because they're old! & Bitter! It makes my eyes hurt from the rolling.

Thus, I have not turned the television on, though I may do so for The Daily Show. I did go to the library tonight, to pick up the two books on hold for me, and of course I left with three others, because I am unable to exercise any self control whatsoever when I am in a library, even when I have to carry the books home with me without crushing my strawberries, and even when walking is a little difficult because I have sore spots from the weeding. I kind of miss wandering the stacks, and I have not reestablished my Library Notebook, but the put-it-on-hold-and-have-it-delivered-to-the-library-
that-is-mere-blocks-from-work thing rocks my world. (The Library Notebook is a thing my dad started a couple of decades ago: a little notebook in which he'd write down books or authors he wanted to read, so he could remember when he went to the library. I had one, too, for years, and found it invaluable, especially when I was reading the NYT book review regularly, but then I stopped and now I don't read the NYT much, so I'm using post-it notes on my bulletin board at work. Which isn't as good as the Library Notebook.)

And, finally, I am back to baking regularly again, sort of. I have my breakfast muffin recipe nearly at the stage where I won't change it any more. I did not make chocolate chip cookies again this weekend, but I did make a banana cream pie (with a chocolate crust) for Friend, and I'm contemplating how I'll change it next time. I'm also wondering how I managed to gain a pound a day over the last three days, given the relative healthiness of my eating habits. It's too depressing, especially because I have not managed to get to the gym for interval workouts in more than a month (though I have been walking a couple of days a week). This whole exercise question is continuing to vex me, but I'll spare you my whining about it tonight. It'll keep.

Drink Me

Oh-my-yes, we did manage to have fun.

Friday we had dinner at this great tex-mex place, complete with margaritas. We followed that with live music on the terrace at the UW student union. Saturday morning we got up not-that-late, had a wonderful breakfast overlooking the lake at the Schmancy restaurant where Friend waited tables some 30 years ago (but at which he never ate), then meandered through the Madison farmers' market, where we scored tomatos, cheese curds, and sourdough bread for Sunday. We hung at the room for a little while, then walked to the park next to the hotel, where, after a short wait, we entered the beer festival (and met up with Friend's friend the Enchanter, whom Friend has known since they were 5 or so, and with Friend's brother-in-law). There were many, many beers; the four-ounce tasting glass was perfect, and, because you only pay an entry fee, if there was something you hated? You could dump it. I only dumped two, between 1:20 pm and about 6:00 pm. There were some truly impressive beers, and we didn't come close to tasting even half of them. We probably didn't even get to half the breweries, for that matter. We weren't the least bit systematic this year, because we were kind of just checking things out, and we still managed to taste a lot. We've already decided we'll be there next year, too, unless the Indy cars go to RoadAmerica that weekend. Afterwards, Friend's sister picked us all up (because we had all been drinking all day), we grabbed some dinner together, followed by ice cream at the student union, then she dropped off me and Friend, and we crashed nearly instantaneously, even though it wasn't even 10 pm.

Sunday we had another fab breakfast, at a little brasserie, then headed to a nude beach for awhile. We were only there for an hour or so, but it was perfect weather and a nice place to kill some time. Then we got back in our clothes and the vehicle and headed to Alpine, where we tailgaited (sourdough baguette, cheese curds, fresh tomatos, venison summer sausage, and a couple of beers) and then went to hear the Black Crows and the Dave Matthews Band. We had seats this year, thanks to Friend's diligence, which was a significant improvement over last year's escapades. Getting out of there was predictably slow, so we didn't get home until 3 am and were thus a little crispy at our respective jobs today, but that sure was a lot of fun packed into about 60 hours.

And now we're trying to decide whether to go to Burningman. Or, rather, Friend has to do the major deciding, because he'd have to do all the driving. It would cost money--at least a grand apiece, I'm thinking, and probably a little more--and it would cost all my vacation days, but it could be serious fun, plus another friend would have all of the infrastructure there for us, reducing what we'd have to bring by quite a bit. No telling yet which way we'll go on this.

Meanwhile, though, I must get some sleep. The four or so hours last night would have been a little longer, except Friend's cat was extremely pesky this morning, probably because she wanted some attention--having been deprived for several days--as well as because I normally feed her by 6:00 or so but slept until 7:30 or so this morning. She's not normally that pesky, and she had been alone all weekend (she's a pretty social cat, and, once she knows you and isn't hiding any more, will take advantage of any lap she can find), so I cut her some slack. And scratched her ears for her, too, while I was at it.