welcome marshall

Check it out, Tall L got a dog. And if the pictures do not lie, he is way cute. And she's blogging about him! Woo!!

cake

Tonight I went to E.Be's and N.Hu's for dinner. It was a lovely meal and was followed by this German chocolate cake:


Bold statement by Safeway, huh? I mean, they're really throwing down.

I'm not going to swear it was the most moist cake I've ever had, but it was pretty moist. And it was tasty. Sure, a Safeway cake has a lot of ingredients that aren't found in nature, but the food engineers know what they're doing. The final product tastes good.

knit, then, wherever you may be

Like I said, yarn is expensive. A few weeks ago I found a sweater pattern that I wanted to make. Patterns are usually written for a particular yarn. You can substitute, of course, but it happens that the store up the street from me sells the yarn. I checked, and the yarn for this sweater would've cost $64. Uh, I could buy a better sweater for a lot less. Also, I just got laid off.

I asked my facebook friends how to get cheap yarn. One suggested a cheap brand but said, also, it feels cheap and it wears cheap. Then another said: buy thrift store sweaters and unravel them. I'd read about this online before but hadn't actually heard of anyone who'd tried it. So I read some tutorials and hit the thrift store.

Next thing I knew, I had 800-ish yards of baby blue cashmere and Swallowed My Flea had a new baby boy. I found a pattern online and knit for basically a week straight. I used circular needles so it didn't take up much space and carried my work in a little cloth bag so I could hide it in corners backstage during the Christmas show. I took it to the hospital (my dad was in the hospital - he's fine now) and knitted for hours. I knitted at restaurants. I knitted on the metro. And behold:

Totally cute cashmere baby blanket for less than $5 of materials. Aww yeah.

careful lawyering

I'm editing the program for the Christmas show and have worked a lot with T.Win, an excellent retired lawyer type who is kind of a slow talker. Everything he says, he thinks about carefully and says just the way he wants. I love this guy. Look at this series of e-mails:

artistic director: [asks if this one French word should be in italics.]
me: It's not italicized right now - the copy editor and I will decide, I think, unless someone has a very strong opinion.
T.Win: [paragraph on why it shouldn't be italicized.]
me: Strong opinions: I like it.
T.Win: But you see that I expressed it as a modestly strong opinion so as to not trigger your "very strong opinion" proviso.
me: Ah, interesting. Very subtle, T.Win.
T.Win: Careful lawyering combined with pedantry.
me: You should get a t-shirt with that phrase across the front.

layoffs

Yesterday we got a message from the editor-in-chief announcing a mandatory staff meeting this morning at 11:30. Rumors started flying. My section is so small, we figured they couldn't lay anyone off. And I heard they were telling people before the meeting, so when I hadn't heard by 11 this morning, I figured I was safe. I told Miss Shirley by IM that it looked like I wasn't getting laid off. Actual excerpt of conversation:

11:03 AM me: I was halfway hoping I would be. :) make up my mind for me.
Miss Shirley: oh no! that puts someone else in charge of your life
it sucks but you should make those choices
11:04 AM me: yeah, whatever. :)
Miss Shirley: lol

About 15 minutes later I got a phone call, went down to HR, and learned from my boss's boss that my position was being eliminated. I came home, put on pajamas, and made many, many phone calls. Also I took a walk and went to lunch with She Gre. And S.Ball came over to hang out in the evening.

I'm really pretty cheerful. Something will work out. I have a good cushion of savings. I'm sure there are times of abject panic up ahead, but I hope they are few.

feet by request

Ok, J.Bro, since you asked:


The only picture of Kay Ray's and my feet from the maze is this action shot. (That's me on the right.)

friends and phones

With the problems I've had lately, I have been spending *way* more time on the phone than usual. Saturday Chatty and I had planned to go for a walk. It turned into this hour-long comedy of IM, where I'd be like, ok, let's go! and then she would IM "on phone." Then she'd IM me that she was ready to go and I'd IM "on phone." Again and again and again. I talked to my parents, Grrrbear, my parents again, and possibly a few other people.

Finally she wrote and said, ok, come on over! Then as I was walking the two minutes to her apartment (which included a brief call from Ogram), she got a call from a friend on her cell, followed closely by a very important call she'd been waiting for all day on her land line.

So I sat in her living room and read Mostly Harmless for 30 or 40 minutes and, really, found it very relaxing. (I sent a text to her in the bedroom to reassure her that I was perfectly happy.)

I've realized in the last few months what an awesome network of friends I have. For these particular problems it's mainly been my professional friends, like Chatty and N.Lu and Platyhelminthes, who've been helping me out, and yknow, they've just turned out to be amazingly supportive and sympathetic and encouraging and awesome. Yesterday I asked N.Lu if she could be on emotional call for the day. She took a half-hour walk with me before a really scary thing I had to do this noon, then she and Chatty went to lunch with me afterward and watched me drink soup and try to keep down various white foods (nerves go straight to my stomach).

Anyway. I'm wandering. Yay, networks! Yay, friends! Yay!

four square

You know how a while ago my work wasn't going that well? I thought it was getting better, but then it got worse. I know you were waiting with bated breath for my next installment of Chicago pictures, but, well, you're just going to have to wait a bit longer while I freak out.

This week I finally started exercising, in a very small way - after-work walks with friends. Today Chatty and I took a walk that included the playground of my elementary school! We came at it from another direction and I didn't realize where we were until we were halfway across the field. I hadn't been there since June 1987.


Still the same four square court, although it's probably been repainted in the last 21 years. Wasn't four square the best game? Now I kind of want to buy a red playground ball.

chicago: the strawberry lemonade

I got to Chicago around noon on Friday. Grrrbear works close to the airport, so he and a work friend picked me up and took me to lunch at some kind of suburban steakhouse thing.

It had really, really big drinks.

darts

Last night I went to a birthday party. I was so not in the mood. I even considered calling in "sick" - I did feel a bit feverish but I think that was just because it was so hot out. The party was for my coworker Barkley, and I knew it was going to mostly be her friends from college, and making conversation in a noisy bar is one of my least favorite things in the world. But I like Barkley, and I'd RSVP'd yes, and you never know, I could suddenly decide I like bars, noise, and strangers.

It turned out to be awesome! Someone else I work with was there with a friend of hers, and she suggested darts. Turns out, none of the three of us who were playing knew how to keep score. In the beginning, we weren't even all that good at hitting the board. So we came up with our own scoring, which I will record here because I think it's funny.

Hit the wall: 1 point.
Hit the board: 2 points. (There are three darts, so by far the most common score was 6.)
Hit the red middle of the bullseye: 1500.

At some point one of the guys playing on the middle board explained the scoring, and we smiled and nodded and had no idea what he was talking about.

We kept adding rules as we thought of them. (Ok, it was mostly me.)
Green outer part of the bullseye: 500.
Red elsewhere on the board: 100.
Green elsewhere on the board: 50.
Two of your darts end up touching: double your score.
Hit one of the letters on the board: its value in Scrabble.
Hit inside a closed loop of one of the numbers: the value of the number.
Get a dart to stick straight up in the floor: 5.
Hit outside the metal circle but still on the board: 10.

It's possible that this is the most fun I've ever had in a bar. When I left home I told myself I only had to go for an hour and I'd make it home in time for Saturday Night Live. I got there at 8:45 and didn't leave til after 11:30. (So I had to watch this online today.)

Also: There were cupcakes.

today in feet

Grrrbear's in town! Woo! So it's time for blogcon '08 feet pictures! Today he and I met Spice at the train station and set off to see the sights. We were blessed? anointed? with the tail end of tropical storm Hanna, which was frankly pretty anemic. Well, I mean, I got wet, but I've been wetter.

Because there was a ton of rain, nobody was crazy enough to stand in line outside the Archives, so we pretty much marched right in and looked at the Constitution and whatnot. If you follow Spice's blog, you know she's got a foot injury and a boot. Here's how she protects it (she'd just re-wrapped it before venturing out of the Archives into a pretty major downpour):


That's Spice on the left, me at the bottom, and Grrrbear at right. He's wearing a pair of my flip-flops because of the rain. (And because I have huge feet.) I went for tevas and a skirt, which turned out to be a good combination. I don't think jeans would have dried out all day.

After the Archives we went to the Natural History Museum, the Jim Henson exhibit which is AWESOME but doesn't allow photographs - sad - and then the Air and Space Museum. Here's some kind of seal at the Air & Space:


While Grrrbear read the displays that go with the Wright Brothers' plane, Spice and I sat and compared feet (by now she was just leaving the plastic bag on the boot inside the museums, too):


And then we took perhaps the best foot picture of them all, in a metro station! Check out those snazzy red tiles!


It had stopped raining, so Spice didn't need her plastic bag anymore. Ah, what a fine day of sightseeing. With our feet!

house, warmed

Bet you thought I was done blogging my trip to New England. HAHAHA. Like I would be done with a four-day trip a mere three weeks after it started.

The inspiration for this trip was sometime in July, when I was at a Norwegian dance party in my neighborhood complaining to a friend who's moved away about the trouble I was having at work. (Note to everyone I know: sorry about all the complaining. It might be getting better.) And she said the obvious remedy to that was to come to her housewarming in Vermont in August. So here's the inside of her beautiful house:


We warmed it well - the fiddler from here flew up, there was dancing, it was great.

The best thing was the food. This party was full of the kind of people who make their own venison sausage (mmm). I tried pie made from wild blueberries picked that morning, a beautiful, beautiful ham, and lots of salads involving cucumbers. I met a teenager who's into revolutionary war reenactments (he "carries a musket" for some group or other) and someone who runs a Swedish-style weaving school in Massachusetts. Good times.

science journalism

Instant-message conversation (through gtalk) this afternoon:

N.Lu: I've got 40 minutes to finish a story.
I have no second source, nor do I want one
me: heh
here, I'll be your second source
"I suppose it's possible that they're right, but more work is needed. Only time will tell."
N.Lu: Oh!
PURRRfect
me: you're welcome.
I have two degrees in science, you know.

the evening hangs beneath the moon

Where was Miss Shirley while I was at the museum, you ask?


Miss Shirley knows how to do vacation. No getting up at the crack of 9 a.m. to eat breakfast and race off to a museum. Nuh-uh. Instead, send your friend to the museum while you sleep until 1:00, then get the friend to tell you about the exciting parts over lunch.

She was coming down with a cold, so spending 18-20 of every 24 hours in bed was not a bad idea at all, but this was her plan even pre-illness. It's vacation genius.

fateful day

Nnnooooooooooo!!!!

I guess I could add the new official Scrabble application. Seems kinda disloyal, though. And I had about 10 games in progress!! Dang it. If Hasbro really loved me, it would let me import them. Also, here's a stupid fact I just collected from the internet: The official Scrabble application is only available in North America. So I can't play S.Ev (my Berlin host) anymore.

UPDATE, evening: Actually I think there is also an official Scrabble game for people outside North America, but they can't talk to each other. Or something. Whatever. This I know: It's stupid.

what a day what a day for an auto-da-fé

Right, so, I sang Candide on Sunday. I think it went really well. I certainly felt like I was singing well. And the conductor cooled his bat-out-of-hell tempos a bit for the performance, so we got out more of the words than in the other rehearsals with him.

An unfortunate fact of the hall is that you can't hear a dang thing when you're seated at the back of the stage. So the soloists and narrator were chatting away and it sounded like mush. Completely unintelligible. It was kind of sad not to get to appreciate this performance that was, judging by the audience's reaction, hilarious.

E.C. took pictures of us at rehearsal on Saturday, so she got two free tickets and took Miss Shirley. N.Lu and S.Vix came, too, but left at intermission because their butts were wet. (There was a lot of rain during the day and I gather the lawn was not very hospitable.) Everyone said they liked it, so, yay!

I love when people come to my performances. I know I'm just one completely indistinguishable voice in a big mass of performers, but it means a lot to me when people come to see me.

That's it for my series of random choir concerts - no more performing til...probably December! Crazy!

Blog posts about the show: Someone at the park got to party with Jason Alexander. (Also, a bit about rehearsal.) An audience member. Another one. (Nobody mentions the chorus. Sigh.) And another. (Which mentions the chorus, but inaccurately - we were amplified, too.) And here are some official photos. (You can see me in one of them, if you're looking really closely and know what the woman standing next to me looks like.) Another official post, mostly about Jason Alexander.

memories

Google maps is so fun! Here's a satellite view of one of the most obnoxiously beautiful places I've ever been. It's just ridiculous how pretty it is. (Am I right, J.Po?)

eva?

Pixar. Can. Do. No. Wrong. I just got back from Wall*E and, wow, it's awesome. Chatty and I may actually have been glowing when we left the theater. It took us about half the 30-minute walk home to stop excitedly recounting parts of the movie to each other.

center for excellence

This morning Kay Ray and I were IMing while listening to a phone-in press conference about this news (in fact, the guy who wrote that story asked a lot of questions). Probably neither Kay Ray nor I will actually write about this news, but hey, it was something to do on a Thursday morning, and it's good to keep up on climate and ecology research.

One of the scientists' affiliations included some center for excellence on something-or-other.

Kay Ray: man, i need to be a member of a center of excellence

me: I'm creating one now. You're a member.

Kay Ray: awesome.

We added S.Vix to the roster later in the day. Anyone else want to join? It's called "The Center For Excellence In My Office." Kay Ray is excellent at knitting baby blankets, I am excellent at sleeping, and I haven't checked with S.Vix yet on her particular brand of excellence, but I bet it'll be good.

where did I find these people?

The other day Miss Shirley put a photograph on facebook of her, G-dog, and me the night of this party. (December 2005) We've been discussing the picture in comments - my freaky long left arm, our various hair lengths.

Miss S's last comment, about whose headgear she's sporting: "I know those were not my devil horns because mine don't have sequins."