Cat's eyes, pilot programs

Sophie's had something funky going on with her eyes, some sort of infection. I took her to the vet today to see what it is and what they can do about it. The vet says she has conjunctivitis. He gave me some ointment with erythromycin in it that I have to apply to her eyes three times daily for two weeks.

It's gonna be a fun two weeks, but her eyes will thank me for it when we're done. I have no idea how she caught this. Maybe it's leftover from being out in the Big Bad World before we met? I don't know. Delilah never had it.

That presentation I mentioned yesterday went really well. A lot of people were interested, which was a nice surprise. I was expecting screams of rage. We did get some people who didn't like the idea we had, but about 90% of the room agreed that now that we've seen whether this thing we're attempting can be done, it's time to test it out. That way we can decide whether it should be done. The task force is now going to design and run a pilot program with a few interested campuses. Part of me is excited. Part of me is saying, "Oh great, more work."

Favorite part of the whole day: calling the taxi to take me to the vet's. The dispatch operator asked how many were going and I replied,

"Just me. And a cat in a carrier."

"Okay," he said. Then to himself, in that voice people use when they're writing things down (I pictured a clipboard): "One person, one boxed cat."

A little nervous

I got named to a task force earlier this year whose charge was to look into doing something very different with regard to our libraries' collections. We met all spring and summer, took the fall to write our report, and tomorrow we are making a presentation at a yearly two-day retreat for all the librarians from the satellite campuses.

When we're done we're going to be greeted with either be applause or pitchforks and torches. Or maybe stunned silence. In any event, I'm a wee bit nervous and preoccupied right now, so I can't think of anything to write. So here, look at some pretty pictures I took of the garden this summer:



My big purchase this year, garden-wise: a climbing rose called "Joseph's Coat."



The lone sunflower to make it to adulthood. Everyone else either died off or failed to thrive.



Bought a morning glory seedling at a craft fair. I had no idea what color I was going to get. Happy that it's deep purple.

Cat. Bag. Out of.

So my Mom saw the online pictures of the gansey in progress and got all excited. She can't wait to get here for Thanksgiving so she can touch it. Exactly what she said. Myself, I'm hoping that I'm done by Thanksgiving so that I can wear it. Though, knowing my propensity to wear my dinner on my chest, perhaps that's not such a good idea.

A few hours later Mom emailed me to say she'd been looking on Amazon for copies of "Knitting Ganseys," quoted me a price she saw advertised for a used one, and wanted to know if the one I got was at a similar price.

I said yes, and then went on to explain the whole used book/higher price/better condition thing. Then I wrote:

Uhm. Having said all that, can I just say please don't buy the book because...well...Christmas is coming...and...yeah. I've started my shopping early. :)

Hint received, rejoicing commenced. Oh well. She's getting more than just this, so I guess it's okay that she knows about it. I'm not saying what else I'm giving her, though, 'cause she swings by the blog from time to time (Hi Mom! [waves]).

Folks, please try to remember that Christmas is if not right around the corner at least in the same county by now. Don't buy stuff for yourselves. Point out what you like and then walk a discreet distance away so we can get it for you. Wouldja? Please?

In Thanksgiving prep news, I've taste-tested the wild rice dressing recipe (thumbs up), the sweet potato recipe (thumbs way up), and the apricot relish (thumbs sideways). I think I'm going to buy some mango chutney or something for this year and substitute that for the cranberries. The taste of the apricot stuff was good, but the texture was unappetizing. Mushy. I have an idea what's wrong--the recipe calls for canned apricots. I think fresh (or even dried but soaked in something like orange juice) would be better. I'm going to play around with this over the summer and see if I can't fine-tune it into something usable.

Snapshot Sunday: The Gansey

So here are some pictures of the sweater I'm working on:

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

I'm pretty pleased with it so far.

Success on the horizon

As soon as my battery charges up, I'm taking a picture of the sweater-in-progress and posting it here. I just joined the front to the back and tried it on. It fits! Huzzah! Next I work on the sleeves and the collar.

I'm so pleased with myself. I think this is something I would actually be happy to wear in public.

Of course, since I want to take a picture before I do anything else to it, that means I have to hold off on starting the sleeves. Well, maybe I'll work on another project for a while tonight.

#12, you are in my sights. I should have you crossed off before Thanksgiving!

In a bit of a rut at the moment

So here's the kind of day I've been having lately:

• I wake up on time but take about 45 minutes to talk myself out of bed.
• I turn on the coffee pot and then run back upstairs to take a shower.
• By the time I'm out of the shower I realize I have just enough time to do any three of these things: eat breakfast, drink coffee, get dressed, brush teeth, catch bus that gets me to work on time. The bus usually loses.
• I spend my work day feverishly trying to catch up with all the work I should have been doing over the past three months but didn't because I got press-ganged onto a project for another department. It started by doing something for them as a favor and rapidly turned into the Beast That Would Not Stay Fed. Now that it's over they at least have the decency to be grateful about it, but I still want to stab them all repeatedly with a dull pencil.
  
• While working, I hum softly to myself in an attempt to keep the running commentary in my head from leaking out of my mouth. No one would want to hear what's going on up there right now.
• Lunch is had hunched over my desk. I then either read my non-work email or do a few rows on the gansey I'm trying to knit (if I remembered to grab the bag it's in on my way out the door that morning). I shave about ten minutes off of my lunch to make up for not getting to work on time.
• At some point during the day I catch sight of myself in the ladies room mirror and wonder what the hell happened. When I left the house, I looked fine. By the time I see myself in the mirror, I look like someone dragged me through a hedge backwards. The hair in particular looks ridiculous.
  
• I come home to a cat who is absolutely thrilled to see me. While I change into pajamas, she rolls around on the bed and meows at me, no doubt telling me how many skeins of yarn she subdued that day.
• Dinner is usually something so unremarkable I can't remember what it is ten minutes after I put the plate in the dishwasher.
• After an hour of surfing, I admit there's nothing on TV. I go to bed obscenely early. Like, old-people early. I drift off to sleep only to wake with a jolt about half an hour later, realizing I haven't blogged yet and that I'd better get on that if I'm serious about NaBloPoMo.
• I get up and write.

I just realized, writing that, that while I can't get myself out of bed to go to work I practically leap out of it to write a blog post. What's up with that?

Here's hoping my behind drags a little less after we turn the clocks back. I do better in the morning when it's light out. And now I'm going to bed.

Turkey Day for 4

My sister just emailed me this morning to tell me the Lancaster contingent will be just her this year. Hubby has to work Thanksgiving Day (he works at a lab. They can't shut down for a day, they have delicate procedures going on that can't but put on hold. I think holiday time off rotates. I'm betting he's off next year, 'cause he was off last year), so his parents are staying there and the three of them will be having their own Thanksgiving. Ditter's coming to my place.

My parents are coming Tuesday evening so Mom can help me do some prep on Wednesday. Though you know what? Prepping for four doesn't sound nearly as difficult as prepping for seven. I'd better not get too relaxed, here, or I'll be a maniac on the day itself. Who am I kidding? Of course I'm going to be insane on that say. Ditter's coming Wednesday evening, after work, I think. I don't know how long everyone is staying. It'd be nice if they could stay until Saturday or something. There's a football game here on Saturday, though, and they might want to get outta Dodge before all that madness starts.

It'll be like old times. Except that instead of at Mom's (where it used to be while I was growing up) it's at my house. Which is still a horrible, horrible mess right now but hey! I have three weeks. Oh, crappydoodle. I only have three weeks. Exactly three weeks. If you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to go clean something now.

Oscillate Wildly

I have a new musical crush. Janice Whaley is working her way through the Smiths' catalog, hoping to record covers of the whole thing by December 31, 2010. She uses only her voice and some software. She calls this scheme (and her blog) The Smiths Project

Her latest offering made me want to make out with my headphones:



I need to go lie down.

P.S. To hear the music, just hit the little "play" button. You don't have to buy anything. I think I'm going to be buying some stuff to download to my iPod, but that's mainly to make sure she has funds to continue.

Election Day 2010

I voted. And all I really have to say is thank heavens that's over with for another year.

I am so sick of the sniping, the back-stabbing, the name-calling, the out-and-out lies candidates tell about each other.

"He's an out-of-town transplant!"

"She wants to raise your taxes!"

"He did raise your taxes!"

"He wants to make all guns illegal!"

"He wants to make your kids pray in school!"

Next campaign season I fully expect one candidate showing pictures of the other one in kicking puppies or passing out crack pipes to small children. And then the other guy will retaliate by showing a video of his opponent having a kitten for breakfast. On toast.

I think what bothered me most this season were all the computerized campaign phone calls I received. Didn't they used to do these in person? Are people not volunteering like they used to? It's a weird mixed message I'm getting: "Look, we want you to vote for our guy but we're tired of saying it. So here, listen to this recorded message from the candidate's wife/mother/imaginary staffer named Dave."

It is so unsatisfying to scream "F--- off and leave me alone!" at a computer. You know? But I guess it's an even trade. I wouldn't hear their message, they didn't hear mine.

Ow

I woke up a couple hours ago with a vicious headache that nothing has been able to tame. Aspirin? It caught the aspirin one-handed and tossed it aside. Caffeine? It swatted that away and kept coming. Allergy medicine (because maybe it's sinus pressure)? It blew a raspberry at my Allegra. Multivitamin (maybe it's lack of iron)? "Nice try," it said with a sneer, lunging at me with both hands.

I've called in sick to work and plan to sit here bundled up on the sofa with a cup of mint tea for a while. I have some sort of brand X excedrin that I'm going to try later. Can't use it until this aspirin I took wears off. There's aspirin in the brand X stuff. Don't want to thin my blood so much that my ears start to ring. (Yes, I did do that once. Not my idea of a good time). Meanwhile I'll just sit here and pinch the area between my thumb and index finger with my other thumb and index finger (old acupressure trick Mom taught me. Sometimes it works) and wish this beast with my head in its fist would just go away.

Deep breath before the plunge

Well, tomorrow is November first, which means the start of National Blog Posting Month. This will be my third time through. Expect it to be heavy on Thanksgiving angst, as I'm once again having six people and two dogs over for dinner and my house is once again a total mess. In fact, I should be cleaning it now. I'll try to keep the online fretting to a minimum.

Tasks I've assigned myself to get done before this Turkey Day include:

• sorting out the craft room
• rearranging the living room
• cleaning out the freezer
• shampooing my sofa as well as a perfectly good (but a little grubby) La-Z-Boy rocking recliner that I rescued from the trash this summer. It wasn't in the trash, mind you, just right next to it. I noticed it one day on my way to the bus stop. Bunch of boys who moved out of the end unit the night before trash day had set it by the dumpster with a "free to a good home" sign on it.
  
• shampooing the area rug in the living room. Or maybe I should just replace it with something that doesn't look so haphazardly installed. This thing is a remnant the last owners bought and hacked down to a size that almost covers all the living room floor. It was tacked down at the doorways with clear packing tape. Classy, no? Maybe when I'm out getting a strap clamp and some wood glue I'll start pricing area rugs.
• repairing a kitchen chair -- hence the need for a strap clamp and wood glue. I broke a kitchen chair last winter with my big toe. Don't know my own strength, apparently. I was sitting in it, feet tucked under, and when I got up I must have hit the piece that connects the front and back legs together in a weak spot with my toe, 'cause it went "crack!" And I said, "Are you kidding me?!?" Then I went online to look up how to fix it. According to the webpage I need: wax paper, cord, wood glue, and a strap clamp. Looks simple enough, I just haven't gotten around to doing it yet.
• refurbishing two old kitchen chairs that now live in my craft room. They are part of a second-hand three-piece dinette set that I used to use in my apartment at as a kitchen table. Years of abuse from the various cats in my life had left them tattered and without stuffing in the seats. Now that I have a cat who can't shred things (but she tries! Boy does she ever.), I might as well put new cushions on them. This is one reason to sort out the craft room. The supplies to do this are buried in there somewhere.
• testing some Thanksgiving recipes. Dad can't eat cranberries because he's on coumadin for his heart, so I looked up some alternatives for cranberry sauce and emailed them to Mom for her opinion. We're trying one that made with apricots, an orange, ginger, cilantro, dry mustard and turmeric. I'm gonna test it first. If it tastes nasty, I'll look for something else. Actually, I'm testing it today, if I ever get my rear end in gear. I'm also testing a crockpot stuffing recipe with wild rice in it, some corn dish with fresh sage, and a sweet potato recipe. I'm going to use a rotisserie chicken from the local grocery store to eat with all this stuff instead of trying to cook another turkey. We'll save the turkey-roasting for Thanksgiving Day. I'm crazy, not stupid.
• trimming back the tree in my flowerbed. Again. I'm this close (imagine a finger and thumb held very close together) to asking a male family member to bring a chainsaw with them at Thanksgiving and take that tree down. I don't know whether it was planned to be in the flowerbed or if it's a volunteer that someone decided to keep, but either way it was a bad idea. It's too close to the house. It's always pushing on the windows. I cut away the bothersome bits, they grow right back. The only thing that's kept me from doing it sooner is that robins come nest there in May. It's not the only tree in the neighborhood. They'll find somewhere else.

So anyway, NaBloPoMo. Posting everyday for a whole month. The annual experiment to see how long it takes me to get sick of the sound of my own voice. Wish me luck. Just in case I get stuck, there's a Twitter feed I'm going to follow that supplies daily writing suggestions.

Anyone want to join me? Misery loves company, after all.

Better late than never

By the time I got around to uploading by pictures from 10/1o/1o, they'd closed the group on Flick'r to new entries. Ah well.

Here they are anyway:

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

Number 12, and where I've been

I'm trying to tackle #12 on the life list -- knitting a sweater. I wasn't terribly specific on the list, but what I really want is to knit a sweater I am willing to wear in public. I've decided to knit gansey, because hey, why start easy?

Ganseys (also called guernseys) are sweaters that were traditionally knit by the wives/mothers/sisters/daughters of the fishermen of the Channel Islands (most notably Guernsey, hence the name) and worn by said fishermen. They were usually dark blue. I don't know why that color in particular, unless it's because it was the most practical one. These sweaters were all about practicality. They were knit in all in one piece from the bottom up, had a section at the bottom that could be torn out and reworked if it wore out, had gussets under the arms to save wear and tear on sleeve joints (thereby prolonging the life of the sweater), usually had the initials of the wearer knit into it somewhere (I'm thinking that was to ID sweaters and match them back up to owners on washing day--you have 4 men in the family all with similar blue sweaters, you're going to have a hard time telling them apart otherwise) and had some fancy knit/purl designs and simple cables in them. The plainer ones were work sweaters, the fancier ones were for dress. Wikipedia does a much better job of explaining this, if you want to know more.

I got interested in ganseys when my Mom mentioned she was looking for a good, free pattern for one. Being a library employee, I put my little research cap on and started digging around on Ravelry and coming up with some good book titles. I mentioned them to her and suggested she take some of them for a test-drive through interlibrary loan before she decided to buy some. And then I started to ILL them, myself. Borrowed one called "Knitting Ganseys" and after reading it decided that yes, I could probably do this.

Wish me luck. I've been thinking that knitting a sweater in the round might be easier than knitting it in pieces and then sewing it together. I've tried the piece-it-together way before and was disgusted with the results. Let's see if this works better.

Thing is, I can't knit and type at the same time. This is why things are quiet right now. Though I can't use that excuse next month--I'm going to do NaBloPoMo again.

And I just realized, I crossed off making a pie from my list but never wrote it up. So I need to do that. Maybe I can write the post in my head while I'm knitting.

Edited on 10/18/10 to add: Just found this in my drafts. So far the sweater is going well. I've gotten about 1/2 way up, and am now working solely on the back. It looks pretty good so far, if I do say so myself. (And I do...)

As soon as I get home (provided I remember) I'll post my 10/10/10 pictures and at some point this week I'll talk about making the pie. Maybe. Well, the pictures definitely, but I'd rather knit than write right now.

Oh! And the opera was really good. They used this interesting set design, called it "The Machine" -- a bunch of planks that could be raised, lowered, tilted -- with them they got the Rhinemaidens to swim by suspending them on cables, made the gods look like they were flying, made a staircase to Niebelheim, all sorts of things. It was almost like the set was another cast member. It reminded me a little of the way they used a rotating stage in Les Miserables. There are so many more things you can do with a stage like that than a traditional set of flies and curtains.

Now I'm all excited for Die Walküre in May.

Das Rheingold

When I was in sixth grade I somehow got lumped into the same class with the Gifted kids. They were called “AT” in our school system (for “academically talented”). The AT program had its own special teacher, one per school, who would teach us things that had nothing to do with the regular curriculum. The man attached to my middle school was Mr. Mason.

For reasons I’ve yet to figure out, Mr. Mason would regularly preempt our classes, take us all to his little class room, and talk opera at us. Specifically, he would lecture on Wagner’s Ring Cycle. He had a little stage and paper dolls to act out scenes of the various operas and everything. After he’d gone through the whole cycle he grouped us into pairs, assigned us another opera (ours was Aida), and made us do the same sort of thing for that opera that he had just done for the Ring Cycle.

My partner was a very serious girl , 1st generation American, the only child of very serious Polish parents. On top of being wicked smart she was a virtuoso on the piano. I never saw her after 8th grade. I don’t know if her family moved or if she got admitted to the Philly performing arts school or what. If she’s not a concert pianist now, she’s probably off trying to cure cancer or working for a Supreme Court judge.

Ours was not a happy marriage. She would get irritated with me on a regular basis. I can’t remember the reasons. Perhaps my artwork wasn’t up to par. She was a perfectionist, and I had not yet discovered that yes, I could indeed draw. (I didn’t figure that out until I was in my 30s). Perhaps I wasn’t serious enough--did I mention she was serious? Almost to the point of humorless. It was Very Important that she do well at whatever she attempted. If she hasn’t become a concert pianist, a lawyer, or a research scientist it’s probably because her head exploded sometime in college.

The upshot of all this opera hooey is that my mother demanded I get taken out of the AT class. The school fought her on it, but she told them to test me: if I didn’t meet the criteria for “AT” (I was skating right on the edge), she wanted me in a new class the next year. I didn’t know about this at the time. Maybe they asked her not to tell me about it so that they could get accurate results. Probably a good thing. If I’d known, I might have thrown the test. I was so unhappy with those AT people. I was not so much fish-out-of-water as goldfish trying to live in a tank full of clownfish.

I got called to the guidance office, sat down, and asked a bunch of questions. I think it was an IQ test. I guess my score was again right on the edge, but (thankfully) just low enough to put me with the normal kids.

Sixth grade has left some lasting marks:

1. Grammar mystifies me. Not usage--I know the rules instinctively (I hope) but I have never been able to articulate what those rules are. Past participle? Gerund? No idea. I use them, I suppose, but I wouldn’t know one if it bit me in the behind. I blame sixth grade and Mr. Mason for that, because it was the English classes he kept poaching for his little operatic tutorials. I have a very clear memory of sitting on the stairs at home, watching Mom cook dinner and grumble, “Going to be standing in the unemployment line, not knowing what a linking verb is. But she’ll know the plot to Aida!”
2. I do actually know the plot to Aida. I threw back my head and howled when I heard Elton John was making it into a musical. Two protests there: ever since he and his writing partner split up decades ago, every single song he sings sounds exactly like the one before it—bland; and? Musicals generally have happy endings, unless you’re talking about Camelot. Operas do not. I haven’t checked to see if they messed with the ending. I don’t want to know.
3. I vaguely remember the plots to the Ring Cycle. This only comes in handy when watching an episode of “Morse” or “Lewis.” And I can recognize “The Ride of the Valkyrie” when I hear it after one measure is played.

Still, when the local theatre sent out an email about the Metropolitan Opera’s season a few weeks ago (which they stream live and in HD into the theatre downtown) listing Das Rheingold, the first part of the Ring Cycle, as the opening performance of the year, I was interested. After a little bit of dithering I decided I was going. It’s today. Homecoming weekend. Town is going to be nuts. The performance is at 1 pm. The game starts at noon. That means I should be able to get to town just fine (we turn into a ghost town during the actual playing of the game), but coming back afterward is going to be an absolute nightmare.

I sure hope there are subtitles ‘cause otherwise I’m going to be a little lost. Sixth grade was an awfully long time ago, and Wagner’s stuff didn’t stick in my head the way Aida did.

Farewell Latte

I've been starting to pay more attention to how much money I spend regularly on "unnecessities." I know that's not a word, but I don't know what to call it. What I mean are things that I don't need but have come to spend money on as a matter of course--things that I used to consider luxuries, back when I had less money and more sense.

For example: it hit me this week that every morning I spend around $3 (maybe a little more) on a latte I buy in my workplace's basement cafe. That's at least $15 a week, $60 a month, just on coffee. A lot of the time (but not always) I buy myself a pastry as well. That's another $2. Not sure how much that is a week, since I don't do that everyday, every week, but it adds up. So today as they were making my latte I said to myself that this is the last one. The Farewell Latte.

This isn't the last one I'll ever have, mind you. I may upon occasion decide to go out for coffee. But I'm relegating them (elevating them?) to the status of Treat, the way I did when I just got out of college and didn't have much money. My roommate and I would occasionally go out after work for "yuppie coffee," as we called it, and wind up at a local cafe with big cups of coffee, pieces of biscotti, jazz music, and conversation. It was an event, because neither of us could afford to do it more than once a month.

I'm going to learn how to make them at home. Maybe I'll switch to cafe au lait, since that doesn't require espresso or a thing to make the milk all foamy. We'll see. Maybe I can find a cheap espresso machine somewhere.

I just took a sip of my Farewell Latte, and you know what? Knowing that it was the last one I'll have for a while has made it taste better somehow.

Yarn junkie

The cat is starting to make herself at home, finally. I'm pleased. I think.

It started last week. I got up (after deciding I could not hit the snooze button any more and still expect to have time to take a shower) and shuffled across the room, aiming for the light switch. On the way my foot stepped on something fuzzy and unresponsive. And large.

"The hell?"

I flipped on the switch to find I was standing on a skein of blue and red alpaca yarn that I bought last year and still haven't done anything with. It should have been in a box in the craft room, not in the middle of my bedroom floor. I turned to the cat.

"Why is there a skein of very expensive alpaca in the middle of the bedroom?"

She sat on the edge of the bed, gazing at me in wide-eyed innocence. If she could talk I'm sure she would have said, "What is this 'alpaca' of which you speak?"

I picked it up, put it back where it belongs, and went on with my morning routine.

That evening I came home from work to find: a skein of red wool on the stairs, the alpaca skein in the kitchen, a square from an unfinished afghan in the bathroom, and a skein of Noro (a Japanese wool/silk blend) by the nightstand. It's been a couple skeins a day ever since, and not always the same ones. I think she goes box-diving and then plays with what she fishes out (I noticed early on that she really likes boxes). Last night there was a skein of Zauberball sock yarn (wool) and a ball of kid mohair on the bed, pushed up right against the pillows. She must have dragged them up there to sleep on them. I'll say this for her, she has good taste. She never touches the cheap acryclic stuff I use to practice stitches with. The other stuff must smell a little like the animals they came from.

Well, if she's gonna go crazy over yarn, she'd definitely in the right house.

Side note: "kid mohair." Doesn't that sound like the name of a rapper? Can't you just see him in low-slung jeans, cock-eyed hat, loud jewelry, and an argyle cardigan? Of course, he'd probably spell it Kid Mo' Hair.

This sounds like fun

Found this through Ry and Arts and Dafts. On the 10th of October this year, take a picture and upload it to the 10/10/10 Flickr group.  Then take a look at what everyone else posted.  The idea and the Flickr group belong to Heather Champ, a really good photographer that I just got introduced to when I clicked the 10/10/10 link on Ry’s blog. 

You can take the picture at any time on the tenth.  But…would it be overkill, do you think, to take it at 10:10 on 10/10/10?

Fruits of my labor (day)

I have this memory of my Mom and Grandmom making jelly in Fall. It’s a compound memory, I think, because I only remember one instance and Mom says this happened every year. I was far too little to help. I sat at the kitchen table, probably with a coloring book and some crayons, while they moved back and forth between the sink and the stove. The kitchen was full of the smell of jelly cooking. That’s mostly what I remember, the smell. Like bottled grape juice, only much more intense. They got the grapes from an arbor my Grandpop built behind the garage.

“Do you remember that time the yellow jackets got drunk?” Mom asks. “We’d picked grapes the night before and left them in plastic bags on the porch. Next morning, the bags were buzzing and moving. Full of yellow jackets, but they were so drunk from grapes left in the sun, they couldn’t even sting us.”

I remember hearing about it. I must have been there. I can see it in my head, but I don’t know if I remember the event or the story.

It’s been a while since I had a Concord grape. I pop one in my mouth as we're washing them. Sweet first, then sour. The sweet seems to come from close to the skin, which is tough. The flesh is green, sour, and chewy. Definitely not a table grape. Mom puts a grape in her mouth too, and the taste of it triggers a memory about her great grandmother (who was very old when Mom was very young. She walked with a cane). She thinks maybe she used to watch her mother, grandmother, and great grandmother make jelly. So we're carrying the tradition from farther back than I thought.

“Maybe we should save some of these seeds, make an arbor here,” I suggest.

Mom says arbors are generally done from cuttings. Growing from seed takes far too long. Grandpop got the cuttings for his arbor from the people who lived across the street from Mom's aunt. These folks had a couple of outbuildings, one of them a barn (always a horse or a cow or some livestock living over there), and along the side of one of the outbuildings was a grape arbor.

Mom and I grew up in the same area, 20 years apart. As she’s telling me where Grandpop got his grapes, I’m silently comparing the Trevose/Langhorne of the 1950s and ‘60s with the one of the 1970s and ‘80s. Livestock, farming, as a matter of course? There was only one working farm left in the area when we moved away in 1986. Then I put both of these towns next to the very, very citified version that exists today. It’s a place I had a hard time recognizing when we were down there for my cousin's wedding.

"When seeing a Jaguar in the parking lot of the Shop 'n' Bag becomes commonplace," my aunt once said, "it's time to move." She lives in Virginia now.

"I think I'm getting a little too enthusiastic with the mashing, here." I say. "There are purple flecks on the sink. And the drainboard. And the wall. Oop! And on my shirt."

"Oh, that's all right. It washes off the sink and the drainboard, and the wall's getting tiled eventually. That's just a primer coat. Your shirt, though..."
"Ah, it's not an important shirt." Now it's the Grape Jelly Making Shirt.

Because I'm the one who wants to learn how to do this, Mom is hanging back, giving directions. She'll demonstrate something, then hand it over to me. This was, after all, my idea.

There it is, the smell I remember. It happens shortly after the grapes start cooking. It fills the house.
"Man, I wish I could take a picture of that smell," I say. Best I can do is take pictures of the grapes.

As we're setting up to strain the grapes, something pops into my head--a strainer made of cheesecloth suspended from the legs of an upside-down chair. But that wasn't for grapes. Apples?

"That was for apple jelly," Mom says. "I used to use cheesecloth until I broke down and bought jelly bags. They wear like iron, and they're reusable."

For making the grape juice we use this big wooden shillelagh-looking pestle in a big jelly bag-lined sieve. It take a little while, but I eventually get a nice rolling rhythm going. It ends up being what Mom thinks is a little over a gallon of juice.

Mom describes jelly-making as a really good activity for the working woman. You don't have to go straight from grape vine to jars in one headlong rush. After we make the juice and cover it, we're done for the day.

The next morning after breakfast, we get serious. All the jars, lids, and rings get washed. The jars get put in a big kettle full of water on the back burner, to be boiled and thereby sanitized.

Time to break out the pectin. While the pot on the stove talks to itself, Mom has me read the pectin packet's recipe for grape jelly, as well as all the steps I'm to go through to get this stuff in jars and processed. There are instructions in the Ball canning book too.

Thank goodness they both say the same thing. The last thing I need right now is conflicting information. And, according to the chart in the canning book, since we're on a mountaintop somewhere over 2000 feet we have to add five more minutes to how long we boil the jelly once it's been jarred.

"So what would they do in New Orleans?" I ask Mom. "They're below sea-level." The chart makes no mention of low altitude cooking.

"I have no idea." She admits.

My Dad comes through the kitchen, dog right at his heel with a toy in her mouth.

"Getting started? Sure hope this batch doesn't make our teeth turn blue."

Mom made a batch a few years ago, her first since moving upstate (I think) and it did indeed turn your teeth blue if you ate it.

"That was the weirdest thing!" Mom says. "I still don't know why it did that." I silently hope it's not something to do with the grapes grown in this region.

Mind you, the threat of blue teeth didn't stop anyone from eating that jelly. You just had to be extra vigorous with the toothbrush afterward. And no peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for school or work lunches, unless you wanted people to stare at your mouth all afternoon.

Once the water starts to boil, the timer gets set for 20 minutes, and we start to make the jelly. The idea is to have the jelly and the jars ready for each other at the same time. Another smaller pot of water has been set to boil for the lids. Must remember next time I do this, even though the jars get boiled, the lids do not. That weakens the rubber seal. You just want them hot and loose. After the water gets boiled and turned off, that's when the lids go in the pot.

As before, Mom directs the cooking from over my shoulder. I keep thinking of that mantra they recite on so many of the home improvement shows: "Learn one, make one, teach one." I guess by then you know it really well.

The timer goes off just in time for me to set it again for the jelly. It has to do a hard boil for a solid minute. The foam is starting to form. The recipe says to skim that off at the end, right before jarring starts.

Actually, the recipe calls it "scum," like it's pond algae or something. Mom says it's just air bubbles.

"It's still jelly, it's just not as pretty," she says. We skim the foam off and put it in a custard cup. I see a couple slices of bread in that foam's immediate future.

Now comes the part of this whole procedure that made me nervous to think about. Processing the jelly. Jars get taken out of the big pot -- we start with two, so that there's an assembly line going. After that, one jar gets removed at a time. It's to retain sterility.

The big-mouthed funnel goes into an empty jar, jelly fills the jar to about the start of the threads on the lip. Funnel gets moved to the waiting jar, lid comes out of hot water and onto full jar, screw on lid. Put full jar out of the way, take another jar from the pot. Now fill the jar that has the funnel in it. Keep on going until you're out of jelly or out of jars.

We manage to get 8 full jars of jelly from this batch, plus some extra that we put in a jar with the "scum." We decide it's time to stop for a taste test. We call Dad in to the kitchen so he can have some too.

Ohhh. This beats the heck out of store-bought jelly. The first bite brings back another memory from when I was little, of Mom making me a cream cheese and grape jelly sandwich. It must have been with homemade jelly, because I haven't thought of it in years.

"My mother used to do something when I was little," Mom said. "She'd make me a cream cheese and jelly sandwich..."

"I was just thinking of that! You used to do the same for me."

By this point, I'm starting to feel indignant for the slighted cloudy bits of perfectly good jelly, and decide to rename it "skim." Mom concurs.

After the taste test (thumbs up all around), it's time to process. Mom assures me I have no reason to worry.

"Now, if we were using a pressure canner, that would be a different story. Though they've made some improvements in them over the years. Getting jelly on the ceiling used to be a common occurrence with pressure canners in my mother's day."

"I'd rather not use one of them," I say.

"Me neither," Mom agrees.

But this procedure is pretty tame. Six jars in the hot water bath is all that will fit in the pot without the jars touching. After the water comes to a full boil, it needs to stay in there for 15 minutes (10 minutes normally plus five more for high altitude). Then take those out and boil the rest. Leave the rings on until they're sealed.

I spend the 20 minutes after the jars come out of the water listening for the "sssspop!" that let me know they have sealed. They all do just fine.

Mom does the next batch, herself. We still have 3 quart jars full of juice after the second batch, and Mom decides to process them so that I can use them later. I should get 2 more batches of jelly out of them, plus another 2 cups of grape juice that I could probably use in cooking or something. She sends me home with a dozen jars -- the 8 I processed, 1 to replace the skim jelly in the fridge, and 3 more. I'd bought 12 jars from Wal-Mart, and guess she wanted them all filled for me.

You're not supposed to store them with the rings on, because sometimes the rings rust shut. I keep them on for travel, though. Not really interested in having a jar come unsealed on the bus.

For some reason, probably because I was little when I first saw Mom and Grandmom do it, I thought making jelly was really hard. It isn't. Which makes sense, really. If it were that difficult, so many people wouldn't be able to do it. But to a little kid it seemed like magic--take grapes from the back yard and turn them into something that doesn't look at all like a grape? Amazing.

Learn one, make one, teach one. I guess this means I have to make more jelly soon.

And, no, there were no blue teeth this time around.

Snicker

Still piddling about with that post. I'm trying to make it less of a blow-by-blow description of how to make jelly (bo-ring! Though I will be doing that with the photos on Flickr. Mainly for me, so I don't forget what we did) and more about the conversations we had around the whole jelly-making thing. Was a big bonding moment, I think. Which is great, 'cause that's what I was hoping would happen.

But in the meantime, an LOL cat that had me snickering. Love the expression on the panther's face:


see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Snapdragon

You may be noticing a significant lack of the post I said I was going to put up yesterday. Yeah. Instead of the writing I planned to do, I spent the weekend goofing off. One of the things I did? Bought yarn I don't need with money I don't have, and am now trying to figure out what to do with it. I wonder if I have enough for a sweater?

But anyway, here's another picture from Labor Day weekend:



It's a volunteer snapdragon that's decided to take up residence in my Mom's ground pine. I liked the way all the needles around it seemed to be pointing at it.

Conversation I keep having with the cat

Sophie: Mrrrrowwww? Mrrrrrow! [Rubs her face on my arm/knee/foot/whatever body part is available] *
Me: [petting cat] Y'know, you live here now. There's no probationary period. You're in. You can relax. You don't need to be on your best behavior. Go on, release your inner diva. Be the little princess I know you want to be.
Sophie: Mrrrrowwww? Mrrrrrow! [Rubs up against me again]
Me: [sighing] Okay. Maybe tomorrow.

*Translation: "You're my best friend."

Foxglove

I'm writing a post about my weekend that I might actually publish before the end of this weekend. But in the meantime, here's a picture of the foxglove in my Mom's garden.

Scenes from the chair, or, The dentist makes me thirsty

“Uhm,” I say to the dental tech as she covers me with a lead apron, “I just want to warn you. This might take a while.”

“Oh?” She asks. She is hooking this H-U-G-E thing to a little bracket and approaching me with it. It looks nothing like the bitewings they’d used at the office I used to go to. Is she planning on putting that in my mouth?

“Yeah. I have a really strong gag reflex. I mean really strong.”

“Oh, that’s all OK.”

“No, seriously. I’ve had techs get mad at me because of it.”

“Really?” She is sympathetic. “That’s not right. Okay, open up.” Yes indeed. She thinks that thing is going in my mouth.

“What’s this?” I ask, cocking my head at The Great Big Thing.

“Oh, it’s digital. The picture will show up over there.” She shrugs to the open laptop behind her as she tries to position this piece of equipment in my mouth.

“Arggggggarrrrrggle, bleah!”

“Hm.” She steps away, the Great Big Thing still in her hand, now much wetter.

“Yeah.”

She tries again. I gag again.

“Let me try something else.” She disappears and comes back with Something Else on the bracket.

“The film is a little smaller than the digital device,” she explains while fitting it in my mouth.

“Sorry,” I say after gagging and spitting it out.

She leaves again, and comes back with this blue foam thing she wraps around the bottom edges of the plate. I guess she’s thinking maybe the sharp edges are the problem.

Place, gag, spit out, repeat. This happens three times before I manage to hang onto it long enough (chanting dontchokedontchokedontchoke in my head, punctuated by the occasional no! when my mouth tries to get rid of this foreign object) for her to set up the machine and sprint out of the room to hit the button.

“There, that wasn’t so bad,” she says as she comes back in the room.

“Pwaaaah.”

She catches the thing as it leaves my mouth and goes to develop the film. She returns a few minutes later as I’m telling the dentist what’s up with my teeth, a look somewhere between dread and apology on her face.

“It didn’t come out. We’re going to have to take another X-ray.”

-----One week later-----

Back in the chair again. The problem I originally came in for has been fixed, now we’re doing some sort of general inventory of my teeth. My last dentist has sent over my records, including every single X-ray they ever took. The entire office is impressed with me because of this—that particular dentist is famous for not giving complete records. They want to know what I said to make him give them everything. I'd love to oblige them, but I can't remember the actual exchange.

Before the dentist gets started, they have to take panoramic X-rays of my mouth. I’m not fussed.

“Those don’t bother me,” I tell the tech. “It’s the bitewings that give me grief.”

She looks at me oddly.

“But that thing where you stand up, put your chin in the bracket, bite down on something, and the machine just kinda wraps round you and takes pictures? No problem.”

“Yeah, those are great….but we don’t have one of those.”

Oh, God. We gaze solemnly into each other’s eyes.

“Bitewings?”

She nods.

“I hope you don’t have anything else to do this afternoon,” I sigh.

The procedure goes like this: Set-up, gag, remove, set-up, bite-and-concentrate-while-she-sprints-for-the-button, buzz, gag, spit, repeat. About a third of the way through, she calls the dentist in.

“Could you help us out, please? Hit the button the second I clear the door?”

“Did you try numbing her tongue?” He asks.

“Yes. Doesn’t work.”

“What about salt?”

“Salt!” She leaves my field of vision. “I forgot about salt!”

Salt?

She hands him a Q-tip. He rubs it on my tongue. It tastes like plain table salt. He places the film, then sets up the machine. And the clouds part, the light shines down, and the angels sing. I feel like he could take all day to set up if he needed to. There’s no gagging, not even a hint of it. This feels perfectly fine. They both leave the room, she takes the picture and they come back. I’m still holding it in my mouth, marveling at how not bad this feels. He takes the film out of my mouth.

“That’s amazing! Salt did that?”

“Yep. Or maybe I’m just that good.” He winks, smiles, leaves the room, and the tech continues taking pictures of my mouth. She has to salt my tongue before every X-ray or I choke--we experiment with salting every other X-ray and the results are not good.

When I finally leave the dentist’s office, I am extraordinarily thirsty. I stay thirsty until about Saturday. Four days later.

-----One week later-----

I am back in the chair for a cleaning and the filling of a cavity in between two of my upper back teeth. The cleaning takes a while because I haven’t been to the dentist in a few years (lost faith in the other guy, teeth didn’t hurt until the middle of August of this year, so I never got around to finding another one). At one point I think they’re done with the scraping part and are about to move on to the brushes.

“Done with the metal hook?” I ask.

The dentist leans over me with another, smaller hook.

“Oh,” I say.

“You know what this metal hook is called?” he asks, waving it at me. “A sickle.”

“Awesome,” I squeak.

“Though in my hands, it’s a gentle sickle.” He winks from behind the mask.

After the cleaning it's time to fill the tooth. It’s waaaaay back there in the upper part of my mouth. I’m tilted back in the chair so far I feel like I’m hanging upside-down. There’s a drill, a hose, some kind of padding, another hose, all in my mouth. I’m okay with it until he puts a metal band around the tooth and starts to pack in gauze. Oh, here we go.

“Uh-oh.” He says. He starts taking gauze out. It’s not helping. I make some sort of inarticulate noise, an attempt to speak.

“Hang on!” He takes out more gauze.

“Thawngkt?” I say. Then, more clearly, “Thalt!”

“Salt!” The tech dashes into another room and comes back with a little cup of salt and a Q-tip.

Rest of the filling goes fine. Gauze, metal whosit, equipment…hell, they could have put everything in the room into my mouth and I wouldn’t have gagged.

I think they’re going to have to make a notation on my chart to have salt nearby for every visit. And I’m going to need to remember to carry a great big bottle of water with me to the dentist’s office.

Well, that didn’t happen, did it?

Sorry.  Still haven’t finished that other post.  And it doesn’t look like it’ll get posted any time this weekend, either.

I’m headed to my parents’ place in a few hours.  They have dial-up, and I finally remembered to deactivate my AOL account last April so now I have no way to sign on up there with my laptop.  Their computer is very slow and uncooperative.  I don’t know if it’s the machine or the server.  In any event, it’s going to be a low-tech weekend.

That suits me just fine.  I need some time just chillin’ on the porch with my folks, some knitting, and the dog.  I’ve been having a bit of a Time at work lately.  The projects I’m working on have me getting a bit bored and grumpy—there’s a lot of repetitive processes—and something just got dropped in my lap because a) it’s a lot like what I’m already doing, and b) it started out as a small favor but has morphed into a Beast That Will Not Stay Fed, and c) I’m kind of a pushover when someone runs to me in a panic with a deadline they don’t think they can meet.  I am starting to wonder if when all these projects wind up I’m going to even remember how to do my actual job.

Sophie hasn’t been around me long enough to be suspicious when she sees me do laundry then pack it into a duffel.  She’s asleep on some brown paper at the moment.  That cat.  I buy her toys, she’d rather play with the ring from the milk bottle.  I buy her a cat bed, she’d rather sleep on a towel, or on packing material from some box or other that came in the mail. 

She’s a cutie.  We had a game for a while, called Shoot the Mousie under the Entertainment Center and Cry ‘Til the Human Fishes It Out with a Bamboo Knitting Needle.  Guess how it’s played?  When I got sick of doing that, I found that the phone book fits perfectly under the TV stand, and that’s where it lives now.  It acts as a backstop, so now the mousie bounces back out when she bats it under there.

I have a pictures of her now.  I’ll upload some when I find the thing that lets me do that.

Off I go to pack.  I think the dryer’s finally done.  Have a good Labor Day, everybody.

There's one coming, I promise

My mom said she was gonna stop reading my and my sister's blogs because she thought she was an inhibiting influence. We had to tell her no, go ahead and read them, it was fine. And then I had to 'splain that I get creative spurts. Cited May through July as proof that sometimes I just don't write much.

I am working on a post at the moment. I hope to publish it tonight.

I found a down-side the the Windows Live software -- while it will pull a draft post down from the blog and let me work on it, when I save the draft after some editing, it doesn't then replace the old draft with the new draft in Blogger. That means I can't work on it over my lunch break, save it, download it onto my laptop, save it, and then work on it some more at lunch...unless I bring my laptop to work. I don't want to start doing that. After the incident last October where $60 walked out of my purse while it was here in my cubicle, I don't bring anything valuable to work. Definitely don't want the laptop growing legs.

Sartorial complaint

To the young man walking down the sidewalk in front of me this morning on my way to work: Son, I'm prepared to take on faith that you're wearing underwear. I don't need to see it. Pull your damn pants up.

Thank you.

Aigh! The dentist!

This an email I just sent to my team:

Hi gang,

I have to go back to the dentist this afternoon to check on last week's boo-boo tooth. I'm leaving at 2:30, and I think I'll be back by 3:30, but I don't know what other adventures he has planned for me besides this follow-up visit. Here's hoping I don't leave there with a numb mouth. Again.
--V

Please send happy thoughts towards Central Pennsylvania, would you? I'm hoping he'll just look at the Tooth in Question and let me go, but there's always a possibility that he has car payment coming up sees something else that needs attention.

Everybody try to act natural

I called my mother this evening to thank her for my birthday present, which got here today. Rosewater perfume from Crabtree & Evelyn. Yum.

During the course of conversation she let it slip that since my sister and I started all this BlogHer talk, she's been reading our blogs.

My reaction:

• Uh-oh. My mom reads my blog?
• Quick! Is there was anything on here I'd be embarrassed to have her see?
• You know what? I'm fine with it.
  

Hi Mom! (waving) Look, everyone, it's my mother!

Better living through chemistry

Scene: The library where I work. It's my morning break, and I'm using it to return a book that's due today. No more renewals allowed, so I managed to do what I normally can't and finished the book the night before (I have trouble reading books I don't own. But that's a story of another time). I come up to the lending desk, smiling and humming.

Woman behind Desk Who I Know Slightly: Good morning.
Me (singing out): Morning!
WbDWIKS: You are entirely too cheerful for 10 AM on a Monday.
Me: Oh, that's caffeine. Nothing natural about this. All caffeine. (pausing for a second to think) And sugar.
WbDWIKS (laughs): Well, that's all right then.

We(e) little fish

There was a session at BlogHer ’10 on Saturday that I am kicking myself for not going to.  It was called “Little Fish in a Big Pond – Understanding and Loving Your Small Blog.”  I wound up not going partly because of time mismanagement (again. That plagued me all weekend.  Not like I have clock on my cell phone or anything), and partly because I felt  I didn’t need help understanding or loving my small blog. 

But now after reading this post about the session I’m really wishing I attended, and not only because one of the people running it was Celeste, whose blog I read and comment on and who comments here once in a while.  Found her blog through NaBloPoMo a couple years back, met her in person for the first time at the People’s Party on Thursday night. 

Luckily BlogHer has transcripts of the sessions, and after a quick search I found the one for “Little Fish…”.  I started skimming through it and berated myself for not keeping better track of time, and for deciding not to show up late to the session even though lateness appears to have been totally acceptable.  There was a lot of stuff in here that I guess I needed to hear.  I’m having a lot of “me too” reactions for things like:

• Why I don’t have a counter. Numbers don’t interest me. If I go by the people who’ve commented on a regular basis, I think I have an audience of about ten, give or take.  And I’m happy with that.  If I somehow managed to attract a readership as large as Maggie Mason’s or Jenny Lawson’s or Eden Kennedy’s, I think I’d be paralyzed by stage fright.
• Why I don’t want to “monetize” this.  Turning this into a paying gig would suck all the joy out of it.  Sponsors would have expectations.  The only reason I’d ever contemplate allowing advertisements is if the site that serves my blog started to charge me for the space I use.  Even then I might not.  There are worse things to spend my money on.
• Why I’m ambivalent about the whole “giveaway” thing.  I occasionally toy with the idea of giveaways, but not to generate traffic.  I just wanna be able to give my friends free stuff.  I realize there’s probably a trade-off, there.  One can’t give away things like KitchenAid appliances or Nooks or whatever else people hand out without there being some sort of business arrangement in the background.  It would depend upon the arrangement, I guess.
• Who I write for.  I write for me.  If other people like it, great!  So far no one’s left me a comment that reads, “You suck!” (oop!  Tempting fate there) so I assume I’m entertaining.  But really?  I’m happy just talking to myself.  Sometimes I write posts just to jot down things I need to remember—like the one on fixing my faucet.  When I finally need to do that again, I’ll find the post that says I need key grease and which direction the cartridge has to go, ‘cause I’m sure I’ll forget by then.

Well, now I’m going to go back and read the transcript in-depth.  I guess things I need to add to the “do” and “don’t” list for next year’s conference are: “Do keep track of time. Don’t worry about walking into a session late.”

Because it's never too early to stress out about Thanksgiving

I just spent part of my lunch break writing a preliminary to-do list of things I need to get done before Thanksgiving, complete with parenthesized notes and commentary:

• Fix downstairs commode (parts already purchased).
  
• Fix kitchen chair that you broke with your toe, for pity's sake (need wood glue, twine, brown paper).
• Refinish craft room chairs (supplies hiding in craft room).
  
• Compose and distribute Thanksgiving menu (consult your shiny new copy of The Joy of Cooking).
• Test some recipes for Thanksgiving (use up that frozen turkey breast that's been hanging around for a year; try the apricot whosit you want to make for Dad because he can't eat cranberries. Need cumin).
• Shampoo sofa and "freecycled" recliner (rent upholstery cleaner).
• Either shampoo or replace living room rug (Resolve and a long-handled scrub brush might do for this year. But really, it should be replaced with something that looks more like an area rug and less like the jagged-edged remnant it is. Something that isn't packing-taped down in the doorways by the previous owners might spruce the room up a bit, you know?).
• Rearrange furniture in living room (because now you have some, and it's all huddled together in one corner like a group of people sharing an umbrella. In other words, get rid of the boxes!).
• Is there time to sort out and arrange the craft room? (Probably, but what does this have to do with Thanksgiving?)
  
• Fix cracked, spackled bit under window (need spackling tape).
• Buy a new roasting pan & rack (preferably one where the finish from the rack doesn't rub off on the food. Gross. And possibly dangerous).

Yes, I really do write myself notes like I'm writing to someone else. It helps. And it amuses me when I look at them later.

BlogHer ‘10, continued (sort of)

You know what?  I just read a post by ThreeSeven that makes anything I have to say about BlogHer ‘10 seem trite and a bit frivolous.  Please do go read it.

I would like to say, though, that the Keynote for the International Activist Blogger Scholarship Recipients was particularly moving and thought-provoking.  I tend to take my own freedom for granted, and these women’s stories put my little piques into sharp relief.  These women?  They have difficult lives, they live in difficult situations, and they are doing something to change it.  And because what they’re doing is so dangerous, there was an embargo on taking their photos during the keynote.

Attend a BlogHer Conference. Check.

I came, I saw, I wanna go again next year.

Things I’m going to do next time:

• Make and bring business cards. Everyone had them. I wound up using my phone to email myself a list of people’s Twitter handles and/or blog names.
• Wear more comfortable shoes to the dress-up events. The ones I bought were killing me. While walking back to the hotel from happies at the Volstead (a few blocks away) I was tempted to kick them off and walk stocking-foot down the sidewalks of Manhattan.
• Take more pictures. I took some with my phone, but I could have (should have) taken more.

Things I’m not going to do next time:

• Be so shy. Oy. I could write a book on this one bullet point alone. I need to remember that everyone is there for similar reasons—to get away from the keyboard, get out from behind the screen, to meet fellow bloggers face-to-face. We all want to talk to each other.
• Leave my camera in the hotel room. It does me absolutely no good when it’s sitting in its case. Though I did get some good shots from the window of room, like the one below. I don’t think I could handle a terrace 20-30 stories above street level, could you? I think I’d be clinging to the walls.

• Leave the badge on the kitchen table! Granted, they did have a kiosk called “Reprints” just for people like me. And I did meet nice people in the line. We had 45 minutes or so to get to know each other. Still. They went to the trouble to print the thing ahead of time so we wouldn’t have a 45-minute wait in line.
• Bring something to do during "down time." I brought an embroidery project I started last month. Didn't touch it once, except to move it out of the way to get at other stuff in my suitcase. Down time? That's when you sleep.
  

The sessions were great. I’ve already started putting into practice some of the things I learned – like that picture above. The original picture was a little cock-eyed, because the building in question was down the street and the terraces were a few floors below me. Here, let me show you:

Unsettling, isn’t it? Like all the furniture’s about to tumble over the edge of the railings and into the street below. And everything looks kind of faded, too. Not quite the way I remember it. I know how to fix the color, but I thought I was stuck with that tilt. Until someone mentioned Windows Live at one of the Geek Lab sessions on photography, that is. Then they demonstrated it. It does cool stuff. One of its features? It straightens pictures. I clicked one button and went from the picture immediately above to one that had the building straight up and down!

Better still? I don’t even have to download this. It’s been hanging out on my laptop for over a year, waiting to be noticed.

I’m going to introduce an Ideas Jar in my house--an idea from another one of the sessions. I will put words and phrases into it—cut-outs from magazines, quotations from books I’ve read, stray thoughts I have that I manage to write down before they leave, things like that—and when I get stuck for material I’m going to take something from the jar and work with it. I may grab the camera and work it out that way. I may write. Dunno.

I also had an idea for a joint blog I’d like to do with my sister. I don’t know if it’ll pan out. More on that later when (if) it develops.

I met lots of great people. You might notice some new blogs in the blogroll to the right of this post. Arts and Dafts is an art blog by Ry, an artist from Brooklyn. She takes great photographs, among other things. And then there’s Feast After Famine, by Dana in Washington D.C. She used to be a journalist, struggled with infertility for a while and beat it into submission. She has four children now. And then there’s Amiee of mamieknits. She lives in Los Angeles, is a knitter, a mother of twins, and an absolute maniac on the dance floor—I’ve seen that last part with my own eyes. She reminds me an awful lot of one of my best friends from high school (who is now an Air Force wife living in New Jersey. Are you out there, lurking?).

I met these three at a BlogHer meet-up at the Volstead. I’ll write about that tomorrow, because it’s quarter after ten now and I really should go to bed.

In an unrelated note, I put eggs on to boil before I started this post and forgot about them until I heard something go “click” in the next room about 20 minutes ago. All the water had boiled away. I’m lucky I didn’t set the house on fire. Can you burn hard-boiled eggs? I guess I’ll find out when I can touch them without losing my fingerprints.

Home again

My mind is reeling from this past weekend. What an amazing time! I am going to blog about it, but not today. I'm still processing the whole thing.

I know this much, though. If I can swing it, I'm going next year! San Diego next time.

Better start saving my pennies now.

Day 2 starting soon

In the morning, after a breakfast for people new to the conference, my sister and I went to a really good session on how to stoke your creativity. There I sat at a social media conference with my laptop in my tote, taking notes with pen and paper. I am hopelessly old-school in some respects.

After lunch I wandered around the exhibits halls for a bit. Favorite booths so far: the Honey Board and Playskool. Playskool gave me Weebles. Remember Weebles? I begged for them for Christmas and got some weird wooden toy people instead--not Fisher-Price people, something else. All I remember is that they were a family, the mother was red, and they had some sort of van they all fit in. I thought Santa misunderstood, or didn't watch TV (Sing it with me, folks, "Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down!"), and that's why I got these. Being a fairly easy child to please most of the time, I shrugged and played with those things instead.

They also gave me a canister of black Play-Doh, and -- one of the weirdest giveaway items yet -- Play-Doh scented perfume. And you know what? It smells great.

Back to another session in the afternoon about taking better pictures. Most of the women in there had DSLR cameras. Mine's a point-and-shoot, but they said you can do most of this with a point-and-shoot camera as well. It was mainly about the "rules" of photography -- composition, ISO, aperture, shutter speed, Dutch angles, lines. Someone had told me some of these things before, but since I hadn't been taking notes then everything except the Rule of Thirds fell out of my head. The Rule of Thirds, incidentally, is that the most interesting thing in the picture should take up 1/3 of the picture. Centering things makes them less interesting.

The Voices of the Year keynote was great. They do this every year. People nominate bloggers for a particular post they've written over the past year, a committee chooses the best, and then those people get up on stage and read their posts aloud. I mismanaged my time a little, so I only caught about 2/3 of the program. They were all very good. There was one about a woman meeting Holocaust survivors in an airport, and introducing them to her friend's grandmother, who had been in the same camp at the same time. That one made me reach over and hug my sister.

That night there was a gala in the ballroom, an art display (for an auction that's going to start online on Sept. 15), all sorts of stuff to make and do. We got to the make/do part after everything was over, but that gave us as much time as we wanted to look at all the art. All the proceeds of this auction are going to benefit Gulf coast clean-up.

This morning we have a presentation by/for the International Activist Blogger Scholarship recipients, and then I'm going to a session on how to improve my photos through editing. After lunch I'm going to troll through the expo hall I didn't get to yesterday, and maybe visit the sponsor suites. Someone came up to me and invited me to one of them. Said something about giveaways for readers (all four of you), so I'm gonna look into it.

One thing that really surprised me was how friendly everyone is. Strangers walk right up to you, say hi, want to know what you write about, where you're from. They hand out cards with their blog info on them (I keep kicking myself for not doing that. I'll have them next year). There's a very egalitarian atmosphere.

And then I wonder why I'm surprised. This is what we're here for, to connect, to talk to each other, to find like-minded folks, to grow and learn.

Yesterday after breakfast they announced where next year's conference is. San Diego. Time to start saving my pennies. I want to do this again.

We're here!

Ditter and I checked into the hotel around 3, into the conference by about 5:30. Ditter's conference check-in took about 2 minutes. Mine took for-freaking-ever, but that's my own fault. BlogHer mailed out the badges months ago. I have a manila envelope with all my conference stuff in it. As I was packing I'd say things like, "Need to remember to put that badge in here," every time I saw the envelope. And every time I saw the badge I'd say, "Need to get that in the envelope." I never managed to do that. Badge is still sitting on the kitchen table. Luckily there was a line for doofuses (doofi? Spellcheck doesn't like either word) like me, but since it was the "badge problem" line it took forever to get to the front.

While in line, I met an interesting woman from Germany named Nicole. She's trying to put together a blogroll of everyone who's here. Which reminds me, I need to email her my blog's URL just as soon as I'm done here.

We went to the People's Party last night, which was fun. Met some nice people that I'll probably see again this morning: Abi, who's running a session today, Heather, who's one of the organizers, Casey, a grad student and fellow blogger, a couple more people whose names have fallen out of my head. The Bloggess was holding court in the ladies' room outside the party, so we stopped in to say hello. She surprised my sister when she read her nametag and said, "Oh! I know you!" and gave her a hug. Then she turned to me, read my tag, and said, "Oh! I know you too!" and hugged me as well. Perhaps it's silly, but I feel like I spoke with a celebrity. She looms large in my mind as part of The Blogosphere.

Average Jane was there as well. She started out at another party, and we started tweeting back and forth about where this party was. When she got here, I tried to find her on my own but wasn't having much luck--I only had a vague idea of what she looks like, and since I don't put pictures of myself on my blog, she wouldn't recognize me if I was standing right in front of her. And it turns out I was. I broke down and tweeted her, and turns out she was sitting about 10 feet away. Nice to see someone in person that I've been reading for almost 2 years now.

This morning is the newbie breakfast, speed-dating blogher-style, and a morning session. This afternoon, lunch, more sessions, and a keynote. Tonight? Voices of the Year reception, gala, and art auction.

Oh, and all the people who talk about how much "swag" you get at BlogHer conferences? They are not kidding. I think right before I leave I'm going to have to take a picture of all the stuff I got. Some guy came around last night around 11 and left us presents. One of them is a Mr. Potato Head, Toy Story 3 edition.

And now I must get a shower. Ditter's already up, showered, dressed, and outside at the Smoker's Oasis by the front door. Hotel is completely smoke-free, so any time she needs a cig break she has to go all the way down to this bench by the entrance. We're on the 36th floor. Later today I'll post pictures I took from my window. Gawd, I'm such a tourist.

Birthweek vacay

I'm on vacation. Again. This one is a combination birthday week/going to BlogHer vacation. I turn 42 tomorrow. I think. Hang on, I need to do math...2010 minus 1968....yes. 42. I can never remember how old I am. Well, why bother committing the number to memory? It's only going to change again in a year.

So anyway. Tomorrow's my birthday. I'll be on a bus for part of it, then at my sister's. We're probably going to do a little clothes-shopping because we both need some party clothes for BlogHer -- me because I gave away or threw out a lot of my fancy stuff when I moved because I didn't think I'd be using it any time soon, and my sister because she's lost 35 pounds (!) and none of her party clothes fit.

Since I'm going to be on the road tomorrow, I took myself out for my birthday breakfast today at The Waffle Shop downtown. I usually go to the movies after that. Instead, I watched Julie & Julia, which I'd DVR'd yesterday.

I have a friend stopping in a couple of times this weekend to check on Sophie. Friday she's going to give the cat the 2nd dose of worm medicine and then she's coming Sunday to make sure she's still OK. I bought a feeder so that Sophie'll have plenty to eat, and after I hit "publish" I'm going to take apart Delilah's fountain, clean it thoroughly, put in a new filter, fill it, and start it running. Here's hoping she'll drink from it.

After I do that I'm going to try to sort out what among all the stuff I just laundered I'm going to take with me to BlogHer. Then I need to tidy this place up a bit, so I'm not embarrassed to have someone come in while I'm not here. Nothing major, just a lot of put-this-away, throw-this-out stuff.

Next post will probably be from my sister's house. Or maybe from the train, if it has wifi.

Summer vacay

I took this video with my phone when I was on vacation, and have been trying to find the cable that lets me put it onto my laptop (and then on to Flick'r) ever since. Just found it this evening. I went to my parents' house in the mountains for the first week of July.



Not sure it came through on the phone, but there was birdsong constantly.

Ready or not

I've had people ask me various times over the past 7 months when I'm going to get another cat. The first inquiry was only about a month after Lolly died, and I'm really glad it was asked through email so that I had a chance to temper my response. I keep telling people I'm not ready yet. I was thinking I'd start looking into it in about a year, maybe more.

The universe had other plans.

A week ago Thursday evening I was sitting in my living room goofing around on my laptop when I heard the cries of a cat in distress. I got up, looked out my window, and found a little gray cat in my flower bed. She was staring up at the window, and when she saw me started meowing directly to me. I went outside to get a better look, and when I started talking to her ("Well who are you? Where did you come from?") my neighbor came out too. She said this little cat showed up that morning and no one knew where she came from. As we were talking, a neighborhood cat came stalking up -- he lives farther down the road, but I guess he considers this place part of his territory -- and the little stranger ran right up to him like she was expecting to be greeted. She was very surprised at the hissing, spitting response she got.

"That's it," I said, "you don't know danger when you see it. In you go." And I picked her up and put her in my house. I still have Lolly's old litter box (I meant to throw it out, but never got around to it) and some catbox filler (ditto), but I had no food. My neighbor has a cat, and she gave me some food. She said not to worry about replacing the food. Her cat is FIV positive, so not only she can not ever touch another cat, she has problems finding food he's not allergic to. This was perfectly good food that he couldn't eat, and she was happy someone could use it.

I started looking in the papers and online (Craig's list) to see if anyone was looking for a little gray declawed female. Yes. Declawed. Out there for who knows how long with no weapons up front. She has her back claws, though, so she's not completely unarmed. One of the reasons I thought someone might be missing her is because she's declawed. I also looked around the neighborhood for flyers about her. Nothing.

Saturday morning I took her to the vet's to see if she was microchipped. No luck there. I asked the tech I talked to if he could give me an idea as to her age. He said she was an adult, but very young--probably 1 year, maybe 2. He based that on her teeth. He also said that if she's declawed she's probably been spayed as well. Those two things are generally done together, if they're both going to be done. She's not a purebred, so I was pretty sure they hadn't declawed her and left her intact.

I wanted this info for the ad. I put an ad in the local paper, both print and online editions. The print one read:

FOUND CAT Small gray declawed female.

and then my cell number. They only give three free lines for Found ads, and they center-justify the type so that it's very hard to get much info into those 3 lines. Fourth line costs $7.77. What a racket. I had to keep rearranging the words to get them to fit into the free space, but I made it. The online ad was much more generous, space-wise. I added her approximate age, when and where she was found, and my email address. I held back the info on being spayed, thinking it might be something they could tell me to ID their cat, along with eye color, specific coat coloring, etc.

This cat is a funny shade of gray. Kind of a gunmetal gray. Her undercoat is white. In certain light, she looks like she has brown in her coat. In other light, I can see stripes.

I only got one response to the ad, and that was from someone looking for a cat who was 4-5 years old, with a white throat and white front paws. I decided that if I didn't hear anything by Monday (tomorrow) she's living with me. By last Monday I'd already named her Sophie. That woman called Wednesday morning, but I didn't get the voicemail until late that night. Accidentally left my cell phone on my nightstand. Freudian slip? Really upset me that I might not have her around, and I noticed after I talked to the woman Thursday that I hadn't been referring to the cat as "Sophie" when I spoke about her or even thought about her from the time I got the message to the time I found out she was still unclaimed. She went back to being The Cat for about 12 hours. I'm now fairly certain that no one's going to claim her by tomorrow.

I took her back to the vet on Friday afternoon for a "new pet" exam. Poor kitty. She got poked and prodded and shaved on her belly (to look for the spay scar. And it was there.) blood drawn (for FIV/Feline leukemia/heartworm tests, all negative), and her temperature taken 'cause the litterbox has been...well...abnormal. She's been prescribed wormer (they're not sure worms are causing this, but it can't hurt to be careful. Who knows what she picked up out there) and an antibiotic to combat all the bacteria in her gut (I brought in a stool sample. Thank goodness I went to scoopable litter there with Delilah towards the end and had one of those scoopy-strainy-rake things. Yuk). I also have prescribed food for her for now. It's supposed to be very easy to digest. The vet called it the cat food version of tea and toast. I'm supposed to get a call when they get lab results back, though I think I know now what happened. She got sick briefly yesterday morning. Coughed up a hairball and a large chunk of undigested cooked meat. I have not given her anything but cat food since she's been with me. I think someone "out there" took pity on her and gave her some of their leftover dinner, and she was so hungry she swallowed it whole. Her poor little belly was doing its best to take this apart, and ramped up on production of the bacteria needed to digest things. I guess Saturday, after 2 applications of the antibiotic, the stomach gave up and kicked it out the way it came in.

Whoa. Too much information there, huh?

I'll show you a picture of her once she settles down a bit. Right now she follows me around and is very interested in everything I do. She'll start doing something cute, I'll go get the camera or my cell phone, and when I turn around she's right behind me looking to see what I'm doing. When I point the camera at her she either puts her nose to it or rolls around on the floor. So I get either extreme close-ups or gray furry blurs.

She's a very affectionate, sweet-natured little girl. I don't know why no one's looking for her. Of course, it is the start of move-out season. One of the things I really, really hate about living in a college town is the number of people who adopt animals while they're here and then just leave them behind when they move away. I think that might be what happened. They couldn't find a place that would allow pets, no one could take her, or maybe they didn't try very hard to place her, the no-kill shelters are full, so she just got pushed out the door and wished good luck. Especially cruel, since she's young, doesn't know who not to trust, and is declawed, for pity's sake. I hope karma catches up with whoever did that and bites them in the butt. Hard.

Only thing that bugs me a little bit is that I feel I'm being disloyal to Delilah by adopting another cat so quickly, and liking her so much already. I hope that wherever she is, Lolly understands.

Prepping for vacation

I'm going on vacation tomorrow. Today I am dashing about like a crazy woman trying to clear my desk and my task list so that I don't leave the building at 5 feeling guilty for having left things undone. Also, being a supervisor going on vacation makes me feel a lot like a new mother about to hand her infant off to a babysitter.

Y'know what? Making sure everybody who depends upon you for work

• has a week's worth of everything they need to do his/her job;
  
• knows who to contact to answer questions; and
  
• does what you ask them to prior to your departure

is a right royal pain in the tushie. Particularly the third item in the list.

Today is the day I have to OK everyone's time cards so that they get paid on time two weeks from now. It's all electronic. If they don't hit the "finalize" button on their accounts, I can't hit the "OK" button on mine, and then the bursar doesn't get the message that the university owes them money. There's a small grace period -- technically I have until Monday morning to get everyone OK'd. But I'm not going to be here Monday, and I can't access the program from off-campus (it's a security thing). I sent my folks an email at the beginning of the week telling them all this, and asking them to please, please, PLEASE finalize their time cards ASAP on Friday to ensure they get paid on time. One girl complied. She wasn't the one I was worried about. She's always the first one done. I just finished chasing after another one and getting her to do it, and as soon as I see the third employee I'm grabbing him by the shoulders and sitting him down at my computer to click. the. blasted. button. What, do they not want their money?

I am at the moment also trying to find my desk under all the junk. I told them if they didn't want to ask questions of strangers they could leave their problems on my desk with a note. Then I took a look at my desk and said, "Yeah. And where are they supposed to do that?"

Well, that's enough goofing off. Back to excavating my desk. Just wanted to stop in for a quick rant.