Phone Messages, Books and Penis Fungus

I got a deservedly somewhat snarky email from my brother that started off, "You never return my phone calls" (which I don't, but it's nothing personal: basically I don't return anyone's phone calls) and my daughter A, sitting at the computer, saw the subject line. I was outside reading a book and she came out to find me. "Are you not listening to your messages again?" she said sternly.
"No." I said, withering under her penetrating glare, "But I'm sure they're not important!" I'm afraid of my messages because so often they're either a) computers saying Call this number immediately, which is a bill collector, or b) people asking me to do stuff.
A sighed, which is something she's very good at. This was officious sigh number 12, and then I gave her my phone and told her to listen to them. She likes doing this because she's nosy and also it makes her feel superior to me. Whatever, I think. As long as I don't have to listen to them. This one was particularly bad, though.
"Mom! You have SIXTEEN messages on here!" Yes, it was bad. AB Tech apparently did tell me that the class was cancelled, one of my best friends is coming to visit in June and, uh, I'm sorry about all the stuff I missed. Gulp.

I read two absolutely fantastic books this weekend: Connie Willis' Doomsday Book and Iain Banks The Player of Games. Very different, but both brilliant. Doomsday Book is set in the relatively near future, but with time travel, so that historians can go back into the past. To Say Nothing of the Dog is another book of hers in the same world, but where it's hilarious and lighthearted, Doomsday Book is dark. A young historian goes back to the middle ages, planning to arrive about 25 years before the Black Death - of course, something goes wrong and she ends up there right before the Plague begins. Meanwhile, back in contemporary England, there's another plague, a terrible flu epidemic. Plagues make for chilling, heartbreaking reading and, of course, they're horribly relevant these days, when dire warnings of bird flu and pandemics, ebola and that strange awful thing in Texas fill the news reports. The Player of Games is set in the far distant future, when we will all be watched over, to steal from Bradbury, by machines of loving grace. In the Culture, Banks' universe, pretty much all problems have been solved, spaceships and orbiting semi planetary living spaces and small flying drones are all sentient, people change sex as casually as they change their shoes and so on. Banks' protagonist is an obsessed, brilliant game player who ends up being sent to another Empire, younger than the Culture and reminiscent of our own time, to play a game. The whole thing is an interesting riff on ideas of hierarchy and government, free will, law, restrictions and the notion of ownership. I love Banks' work and I want to go live in the Culture, but I always wonder, how the hell, if there is no money and no need to do anything, do they get humans or drones to tend bar, wait tables or do any of those boring annoying yet necessary jobs?

Yesterday I worked in the garden most of the afternoon. The pumpkins are planted and I spent a lot of time crawling around under the roses pulling up wild strawberry, annoying little viney thing that it is. While I was down there I found these fungi, and because they are so peculiar and creepy looking, I took a macro photo (yay! New camera! Yay!) of them which is when I discovered that they look like tiny blue penises. My friend Zen says they are actually called Dead Man's Fingers, which is just a charming name, and they won't hurt the roses, so I share them now with you. Dead Man's Penises. Or possibly Dead Gnome's Penises, because they're really, really small.

Some Cool Stuff

I can't get this song (video link) out of my head. Ignore the beginning of that video! Fast forward until you get to the song (music only) ! I know, it's made its way around the blogosphere but once I started listening to it I couldn't stop, and even A agrees that it is the cutest song ever. It's just so adorable. I can't help it; it makes me come over all weak at the knees. Big warm fuzzy secret heart! Oh god! I can't stand it!

These are some extraordinarily cool pictures which demonstrate that dropping your $800 digital camera into a river is not always a bad thing. I saw these years ago but I just came across them again and was blown away yet again.

And finally, yet another addictive little game I've been playing for several frustrating weeks. Pick up as many green bubbles as you can and deliver them to the clear bubbles to get points; don't touch the purple bubbles or you'll die.

Bah AB Tech

As you may have noticed, I have recently reinvented myself and become a student. Today, I was signed up for the first of two intensive Saturday all day Photoshop workshops - yes, me, I signed myself up, not even under duress, to spend two Saturdays in a row beginning at the ungodly hour of 9:00 a.m. in a computer lab adding to my knowledge of Photoshop. To which end I woke up this morning at about 7:15 and got out of bed begrudgingly at around 8:00 and fed the animals and took a shower and ate breakfast and even had time to smoke a cigarette and take a couple of bad pictures of the back yard in this unfamilar early morning light and still be only about 3 minutes late to class.

Except when I got to Enka, I noticed in a sort of anthropological way that there were hardly any cars in the parking lots and, actually, they were all trucks, and, oddly, the building was all locked up except for one door, which was annoying but I figured it was just one of those things. Seeing as how I am a regular AB Tech student now, I know their little tricks. I know, for example, that all the paperwork says that classes are held in Haynes 135 when, in fact, Haynes 135 is the vending machine room. It's just a test - you have to figure out on your own where classes are. I was prepared for that. I know where all the computer labs in that building are now, so I didn't even bother with the vending machines, I went straight to the labs on the third floor. Which were locked. All of them were locked and dark and silent. I began to get a little worried. On my way through the building I had passed one open room; a class full of uneasy burly men preparing for their contractor's exam. The rest of the building was completely deserted.

I got in the elevator, which closed behind me, and pressed 1. Nothing happened. Nothing happened when I pressed door open. Oh god, I thought, I'm stuck and I'll have to push the alarm button and there's nobody here to hear it and also, god, this is going to be so embarrassing. But anti-climax: the elevator finally worked and I gave up and went on home, after checking the vending machines to see if, perchance, a small sad photoshop class might be gathered around a bottle of Coke. It wasn't.

I guess the class was cancelled, which makes sense; really, who gives up two consecutive May Saturdays to take Photoshop? Besides me, that is? It was nice of them to tell me though: in fact, I assumed I must have missed it, but when I got home I went through all my old mail and there was nothing. There's noone in any office to call and here it is 10:00 in the morning and I'm all clean and showered and dressed and I've been up for almost three goddamn hours, which is ridiculous. So I'm going over to my mother's, since she's the only person I know who is awake.

Garden Toddling Right Along

This is it; I am not, not, absolutely not going to spend one more thin dime on the garden or the plants on the front porch this year. Well, except perhaps for some more wave petunias. One can always use more wave petunias, and when the pansies give out in the front container by the mailbox, something else, besides weeds, will have to go in there. Still, it's over. I've spent a fortune, again, after swearing I wouldn't do that this year. My mother was telling me about a book she just read called the $64 tomato and damn if that's not probably about right. I bet I could eat fresh organic produce for a year on what I spend on the garden every spring. And I'm not even charging for my labor. Except I wouldn't be able to buy flowers too, so it all evens out in the end.

Actually, the vegetable garden is being peculiar this year. Either nothing has sprouted in the top half of it or I forgot to plant that half. Both explanations are mystifying and I am puzzled. I could have sworn I put in half a row of zucchini, and you know that zucchini is not shy, or difficult to grow, but there's only one kind of sad looking sprout. So I stuck a few squash seedlings from Lowes in there tonight and half heartedly planted some beet seeds; now watch, the squash and cucumbers and melons and pumpkins will all cross pollinate and produce mutant inedible fruits, like that wild yellow orb last year. Squash is promiscuous and slutty at heart and thinks nothing of intra varietal romance. And the beets? The beets won't make it. Even though for years I've been tilling and digging and adding compost & peat moss & manure & ashes &, well, just about everything short of chemicals to that soil, it's still basically the same stuff you make terra cotta pots out of, and root vegetables don't have room to form. Yet again I'm in awe at the pioneers: how the ever living fuck did they manage to scrape out a living in these here hills? This soil really only wants to grow morning glories and honeysuckle, and nobody can live on that but fairies - not the big Elven faeries with swords, either, the twee Victorian flitty variety. Even the fairies get stunted in this red clay.

Gross & Terrible Thing to Come Home To

DO NOT LOOK AT THIS POST IF YOU GET GROSSED OUT EASILY OR IF YOU CRY AT DEAD ANIMALS OR, YOU KNOW, IF YOU'RE SENSITIVE AT ALL. OKAY? DON'T LOOK DOWN NOW. DO NOT EVEN GLANCE.

Look (or don't, I understand) what was in my living room when I got home tonight. Aren't you glad I got this new camera so I can document terrible stuff like this? I knew this spring had been too easy on the dead and dying animal front, but jesus, just the head? Bleargh! Glaaah! Eeeeeewwwwwwww!! And I had to pick up that head, that terrible decapitated accusatory head, in a bunch of paper towels and throw it away. I feel like Henry VIII or something, even though I didn't cut it's iddle head off. No, I guess that this whole tableau is by way of being a feline art project, courtesy of Mr. Bill.

Aaaaaaauuuuuugggghhhhh!!

Later, after the shock had worn off: I don't think I can call it a decapitated head, can I? Because decapitated implies head, therefore that should refer only to the body. But there just doesn't seem to be as good a word - decorpusified? - for the head only. Hmmmm. It is a linguistic quandary.

New Camera!

I have a new camera! I am extremely excited and I wish the weather would cooperate so I could go take a whole bunch of pictures, but alas, it keeps on threatening rain and/or actually raining, and, since this is my new camera, I'm terrified of getting it wet. Or dusty, or hot, because I've been reading the manual and it says those are conditions to avoid, which is going to be a problem in another month, when my entire house will be dusty, moist and hot. You're also not supposed to go along swinging it from the strap and banging it into things, which I had kind of figured out by myself, but then the people who write manuals have so much fun with all their dire warnings about the dangers of AA batteries and so on that somehow I just can't begrudge them telling me not to swing the camera hard into a brick wall.





This is a serious camera, yo. It came with tons and tons of accoutrements and several manuals in English and Spanish and large fold out charts, again in English and Spanish, telling me how to make it work. The manual is complex and written in tiny print, and right at this very moment I'm sitting on it, since I stuck it in my back pocket when we went to the park an hour ago to take pictures, just in case I needed to whip it out and consult it. I should have, too, but then I would have needed my magnifying librarian glasses and it was windy and also A was with me, and she gets horrified whenever I do anything particularly geeky, like read a camera manual in public. I need the manual though, since this camera has a bazillion buttons and menus and it's heavy and a little intimidating, which is all good. I want a camera that says "I am a Photographer" instead of one that says "I am Silly" which is kind of how I always felt when I was messing around with my old point & shoot. Not that I don't still love my old camera - it is an awesome little camera that has taken many wonderful pictures & I've learned a lot - but this new camera, now, this is a Camera. I have wanted a Camera my whole life, or, well, since I was about 12 or 13 and I've never had one before. This is awesome. I took it to my room with me last night so it wouldn't get stolen or mysteriously poltergeistilly bumped or spirited away and I haven't let it out of my sight since I woke up this morning. I am in love. At last, I am in love.

School!

I went to class last night to learn CSS and PHP and XHTML and all kind of other exciting whooo whee kinda things that are going to make me into one of them hot shot web designers like you read about on the tee vee. And, actually, it was cool; I like my teacher - he's a million light years away from my last AB Tech "I will read the book aloud to you in this class even when it doesn't make sense because I am ditzy as all hell" flash teacher. I haven't sat in a classroom and learned really new things in, oh, about twenty years and I was surprised at how exciting it was. I could kind of feel my brain clicking on again, and it's about time for that to happen. I took four pages of notes and my right wrist hurts like hell today, but who cares, for as you may have noticed, I have already applied some of my new knowledge and that's why there is now a lovely pattern of leaves up at the top there instead of just the boring old blogger template. So I'm enthused and really hoping this leads to something, which it will, even if something is just more leaves all over my blog.

Now my friend J and I are talking about starting a design business and I think we probably will do that - I'll do web, she'll do print. Between the two of us, we really have everything we need (she has Illustrator, I have Dreamweaver - it's like that song about the roller skates, isn't it?) to get a nice little business going so keep your fingers crossed that that happens. We just need a name. I suggested Basket Case Design and she suggested Design One Step Short of Nervous Collapse and while we both kind of like Please We Have to Make Money in Asheville Before We Starve To Death Design it's just possible that these aren't quite catchy enough. So help us name our fledgling business!

Zen and the Art of Mowing the Lawn

I mowed the lawn today. I keep trying to achieve pure Buddhist satori no mind while mowing the grass, but stuff keeps getting in the way of that. I mean, what did the zen master say when all the grass hit him in the face? I personally curse a lot and in particular I curse the day I decided to disable the safety guard on the lawnmower so it would work more efficiently and I wouldn't have to keep leaning over with a stick and pulling grass out of the discharge thingie while balancing on one foot (the other one, you see, has to keep the guard open) and also holding the safety bar by the handle with the hand that isn't poking the moving blades with a stick. Since then, lawnmowing has been less acrobatic but more hazardous; the likelihood of going blind when a stick or part of a dog toy (or, as happened one horrific and memorable day a couple years ago, half a rather large copperhead snake) flies out of the mower and slams into my eye (okay, the half snake didn't hit me in the eye. It flew out near me and I screamed for a surprisingly long time - from several hundred yards away, in fact, from more or less under my bed, where I had teleported myself pretty much instantaneously) is incrementally higher. What's life without risk? Mowing the lawn: a life or death experience.

I also mow the lawn in concentric counterclockwise, or widdershins for all you Wiccans, spirals. This is the most efficient method, I believe, since it lessens the amount of old caked grass the mower has to suck up and then either get clogged in it's innards or spit out into my eyes to blind me. Also, I like to think it keeps ghosts, demons and aliens at bay because, as we know, interlocked spirals confuse the hell out of the supernatural. That is, if the supernatural beings in question aren't really the sharpest tools in the shed, and I, personally, live in hope that, if I'm ever being psychically attacked by creatures from another dimension, they're kind of clueless. That way I can just shout "Look, over there!" and speedily make my getaway. Or divert them from ever attacking in the first place and instead come outside one morning to find them plodding around and around my yard, fascinated by the crop circles therein. That would rock, because then, after quickly whipping up some spiffy uniforms, I can make them my minions, at which point, look out world: I'll be a very happy camper. I absolutely know that my life would be exponentially better if, in many given situations, I could just say, "Minions, attack."

So My Therapist Told Me To Paint

ancestorspainting
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry.

And I did. I turned out a terrible landscape with a cow in it and then, frustrated yet again by an attempt at semi realism, I did this one, straight outta the depths of my subconscious, which is apparently kind of a freaky place. Like I didn't know that. I know, this painting sucks too, but I kind of like it. For one thing, the faces turned out okay. . . oh hell, I don't know. I used to be an artist.

Well, I don't care. I'm getting kind of fond of this thing. I'm not sure, and I'm really not sure I want to know, what it says about me, but I think it's kind of cool, in it's own awful way, anyhow.

Weekend Recap & Etc.

Thanks again in multitudes to my friend J for hosting such a great birthday party for me on Saturday night. It was huge fun and I also got presents, which made it even better, since I am a greedy pig. My friend E gave me a giant stuffed lobster and my friend J gave me a Ganesha and my friend H gave me a scarf she knitted herself, which is beyond gorgeous. And I also got tons of lovely smelly things: soaps & shampoos & scented oils & beer, too, which I guess counts as a smelly thing. It was big fun.

Saturday was gorgeous; I took A to the airport first and then went to the herb fair, where I was more careful than usual but still came home with some pineapple sage and some other sage and some woad, of all peculiar plants, but M has always wanted to be a Pict and paint himself blue, and now, if the woad takes off, he'll be able to. Right now there's only enough woad to possibly do one finger blue, but hopefully it will grow and then, you know, he can paint himself blue, take up his sword and pike and go terrorize some Roman legions. Everyone needs a hobby.

All of these plants are still sitting in their little pots, unplanted, because it's been grisly cold and damp and miserable ever since Saturday. After the herb fair my friend E & I & Theo the dog went on a long hike up at Bent Creek, which was beautiful, full of butterflies and curiously devoid of mountain bikers, which seemed strange until we remembered that this was the weekend of the Mountain Sports Festival so all the bikers were, no doubt, downtown jumping over ramps in the City/County Building parking lot. Then I zipped around like a madwoman getting ready for the party and then, of course, I partied like a madwoman, or, well, like a fairly calm and mellow madwoman. Yesterday, being Sunday, I did nothing, as God commanded (I just love it when my wishes and God's coincide. Pretty much we only agree on this resting on Sunday thing and sometimes his idea of rest and mine differ a bit, but, you know, we have to work around these little issues.)

Now it is Monday and I spent most of it over at my friend J's, who has Adobe Illustrator, which she kindly used to fix up some icons for a website I work on. Then we had lunch at Burgermeister & drove around for a bit & looked at cameras, which brings me to the big news: I ordered a camera just now off Amazon and it should be here by Wednesday. Woooooo!! I am so excited. And, if you missed it in the comments, I did win $65 on the Derby, which will apparently take like a month to extract from the online betting site, but I still won it and I will eventually have it, yes. So all this is good and now I have to go and do a painting for my therapist, which is going to be interesting as hell, and by interesting I mean painful. Or I could watch the end of King Kong - that's an option too.

The Ponies

In which our heroine discovers the wild world of online betting. . .

So my older brother gave me $50 for my birthday, with the caveat that this money must be used to bet on a horse for the Derby - either that or returned to him. Since gambling seems to be about the only vice on the planet that I can't get addicted to, I tried to wiggle out of this stipulation, but he called me from Louisiana or Texas or wherever he is at the moment to give me shit until I hunkered down in front of the computer and figured out how to bet on a horse online. Also, my mother called and told me that Barbaro was going to win and I had, by god, better bet that money on him. So I did. It took ages. For some reason I have absolutely no problem blithely entering my credit card and all personal information into websites that are promising to send me books or T-shirts or computer things or whatever, but entering that same information into gambling websites wakes up the latent paranoid Puritan in my soul and I'm sure they're going to drain my bank account, highjack my identity and leave me penniless in the gutter. Even more penniless in a deeper gutter than usual, I mean. Also, it's just not that simple.

You would think - I did - in this day and age, that it would be perfectly easy to bet any amount of money on anything using a credit card and a couple clicks of the mouse. You would be wrong, as I was. Betting on a horse for the Kentucky Derby is a complex, multi step process involving a lot of cross cultural diplomacy. It turns out that you have to register with the betting site first and by register I mean give them every bit of personal information that you possess. I did this over the phone, with someone named Diego. Diego's English, while undoubtedly better than my Spanish, was still not really up to the whole spelling things out task that phone information processing requires. Part of that was my fault; I can never remember what you're supposed to use as examples. I mean, normal people, when forced to spell things out over the phone, say A as in apple, S as in Sam, etc. I can't remember those nice normal things and instead my brain presents me with L as in lizard, V as in vampire, P as in psychoanalysis and so on, and I don't think Diego had a clue what the hell I was talking about. Eventually, though, with many mutual apologies, we figured it out and then I asked if I could bet now. No, no, I couldn't bet: I had to deposit money in my account first. Great, could I use a credit card for that? No, no I couldn't; that would be much too simple.

There are many different ways you can deposit money into your online betting account. None of them are simple. Some of them, as I discovered after a confusing 15 minute chat session with someone named "Billy" won't work for people who don't have a landline phone. Time was running short. I called the betting place again and, desperate, handed over all my financial information: bank account number, routing number and so on. Then I went back to the computer to actually bet my money. No go - and it was 20 minutes to post time. I called back and got Juanita. I said excitedly, "I want to put $20 on Barbaro to win, place or show, $20 on Sinister Minister and $10 on Steppenwolfer because I like his name!"
"You can't do that," said Juanita impatiently, "You only have $50."
"But that is $50."
"No, no. Those bets total $120 just for the first two."
I became completely confused. Have I mentioned that math is not my strong suit? "Help." I said plaintively, "I've never done this before and I don't know what you're talking about."
Juanita was very patient and she walked me through it. You can't just bet money to win, place or show - that's three separate bets, and they have to be filed, or whatever it is they do with them, individually.

So I ended up betting $8 to win, $8 to place and $8 to show on both Barbaro and Sinister Minister and forgot about Steppenwolfer altogether. I thought I was being smart, hedging my bets and being canny. I am clever, I thought. I can't lose. All my money won't just evaporate now. And it didn't, but shit. The one time in my life I'm prudent and yet again it is proved that I should listen to my mother, because if I'd just bet the whole damn $50 on Barbaro I'd be rich as hell right now and in the process of buying a digital SLR like I want. Alas, though, because I was cautious, and because I went with Sinister Minister, who came in 18th or 75th or something, I only won $65 - but that's way better than nothing and I am all enthused. Perhaps I can find an addictive pathways center in my brain for gambling after all. Meanwhile, I have to call Juanita & Diego back - I want my money and I can't figure out how to get it out of the computer.

Yeah Birthday

Well, the lexapro is finally kicking in and I'm starting to feel better. This is awesome; praise lexapro! Yeah antidepressants! Antidepressants are a Good Thing! Or, then, it's possible that it was just having such a nice birthday that has made me more cheerful. It was a really lovely day & night & thank you to all my various friends who made it that way. I'm sorry I've been such an unholy pain lately, but I swear I'm getting better now.

Yesterday I went to the arboretum with my mother. I hadn't been there in ages and so I had never seen the huge bonsai exhibition they have. I'm ambivalent on bonsai; the process is so paintstaking and then it looks so sculpturally cool that it invokes my inner 10 year old (never far from the surface) who thinks wow! I would like to play with troll dolls around that bonsai tree! But then something in me recoils from, what is, let's face it, basically torturing trees. I barely have the heart to prune the roses; there is no way I could cut tree roots and wire limbs to force them here and there. They did have a bonsai made out of wisteria though and I could wrap my mind around that - I wonder if I could do it with honeysuckle. Torturing honeysuckle bothers me not at all; I actually find it quite a soothing and meditative practice.

Then, in the evening, the kids and I went and had a festive dinner at Sunny Point, which I always thought was about the best restaurant in Asheville. I still think that - for breakfast/lunch/brunch. Dinner was not as all fired incredible as I had hoped it would be. It was good, but it wasn't great. I had the stuffed trout special, which came with mashed potatos. The whole thing was sitting in a stone cold sauce (so cold, in fact, that I am assuming it was meant to be cold) and honestly it was kind of gluey and all of it was white. Some lemon, something lighter, something with some zing would have been a good addition. M had a chicken breast with kalamata olives over risotto and while that was delicious, it was way too rich and not really as good as the chicken/olive/artichoke thing that I make from time to time. The risotto itself was really really good though, and you can't fake a risotto. A had a Cobb salad which was huge and, bonus, cheap. Go for the salad.

So after dinner, stuffed and logey, I went on over to Drinking Liberally and had a fantastic awesome time, even though, or possibly because, Screwy Hoolie stood up in the middle of it and announced that it was my birthday in a loud voice which carried across all of Jack of the Wood and then the entire bar sang Happy Birthday to me while I stood there and turned extremely bright red. Then people bought me drinks; my awesome astrologer friend J brought me a copy of my birth chart and we talked for a long time; my other friend J showed up, which she hardly ever does; I ran into yet another one of my friends J who I hardly ever see, along with a bunch of the old bluegrass jam people I also hardly ever see anymore; my friend C recited poetry at me and while I was sitting talking to my friend M I met a guy with the same birthday as me. So it was really fun, big fun and when I got home M and I watched The Lost World (he was incredulous at first at the simple beautiful badness of it, but he's hooked now too) and then I went to sleep. Ah birthdays.

And now, what is almost the best part, I am looking for a digital camera, because I also got some birthday money, hooray, hooray, and instead of being sensible and saving it to spend on bills and food and boring shit like that, I am going to blow it on myself and buy a nice camera. I've just been researching and while what I really want is an SLR, I don't think I can afford even a used one, damn damn, but oh well. So please, help me out here. I want the closest thing to an SLR I can get for under $400; I want to take awesome incredible photos that are much better than my usual photos. I would really like the ability to do macros, as well as a good zoom and I think I need at least 5 megapixels, since I really want to start doing a lot more high res, print quality stuff instead of all the mostly web things I usually do. Recommendations? Thoughts? Comments? Speak to me! Help me get the camera that I will have forever and love!

This is It

The day I've been dreading. In 24 hours it will all be over, except for the party, that's what I keep telling myself, it doesn't mean anything, it's just a day, and yet it's only 9:15 am and I already had to apologize to my mother, my daughter and my dog for not being a satisfactory birthday girl. But I did get a card from my cigarettes, which was thoughtful of them. A few weeks ago they gave me a tote bag too, made of recycled soda bottles and alarmingly ugly. My cigarettes are my true friends, apparently, either that or they can't believe I'm still alive, despite their best efforts to kill me off.

I got an email from the one old friend who always, always remembers my birthday. He said, "Where have the years gone? In my mind's eye I can still see the wafty bo-ho
artist fumbling around downtown charleston" and you know, so can I, and I really wonder where the hell she's gone too. Thanks, R.

theo the magnificent

theo the magnificent
Originally uploaded by zen♫.

Courtesy of Zen the magnificent, photographer extraordinaire, here's Theo looking oh so incredibly good that you just know there's a half chewed shoe carefully stashed under a bush somewhere.

Ah Asheville

I went to see my new therapist again today and I really like him, although my brain has this tendency to swerve wildly between believing in things "new age" and not believing in them at ALL, and he definitely tends towards things of a newish age nature. Only in Asheville, I believe, does your therapist think you should a) get your chart done, b) go to a sweat lodge and c) do some kind of ritual to invoke the spirits of your ancestors for guidance. That's actually not a bad idea, because it turns out I'm afraid of my ancestors, which is something I didn't know until I considered having them all over for dinner and drinks as it were. I think he wants me to face my fears, which is going to take a while, but I suppose it must be done, and I guess we might as well start with the family. I know it seems weird to fear your ancestors, but I do have a lot of them, and the ones for which photographic evidence exists tend towards long beards and stern expressions. Even the women don't really look, you know, jolly, and the children are all completely serious, even when they're shoved into pony carts or standing there with dogs. And then something about 100 year old photographs of dogs really gets to me, somehow, and I have been known to sniffle.

In other depression news, I put myself back on Lexapro, since I have about 5 weeks worth stashed away, even discounting the one pill Theo ate a while back (didn't affect him at all. Dogs don't need anti depressants - I wish I could get that enthused about a milkbone myself.) The only problem is that my stash expired in October 2005. Of course I took one first and then started to worry that I'd poisoned myself and that terrible hallucinations, shock and death would soon follow. Fortunately, though, I have all these friends who work in mental health (yeah, I know, I know) and one of them found out for me that Lexapro doesn't really turn into LSD or arsenic or anything when it's out of date, it just gets, possibly, less potent. So we shall see whether my brain chemicals get sufficiently altered to turn me into less of whatever it is I am right now and more of a sort of cheerful (not too cheerful, never that) human type being.

My mother says that depression is a completely rational reaction to the state of the world today and all smart people should be depressed. Of course she also says that there's never been any kind of mental illness or depression in our family at all, ever, and when I point out that both my grandmothers were hospitalized for depression or madness or, actually, since I have no idea what they were put away for, who knows, maybe that convenient female complaint of nerves, she says that people were always locking women up in those days for no reason at all. This has always evoked a picture in my head of a guy with a big butterfly net lurking around a city street, just waiting to nab a passing woman and haul her off for electro shock therapy - and then that's that, for as my aunt, famously, once said "Mother was never the same after the shock treatment."

Depression & Parties

Ah, being kind of down and yet having parties - two great tastes that taste great together. Anyway, I'm not having this party. My friend J is, on Saturday, and I am co-hosting it, because it is kind of for my, uh, birthday, about which the less said the better, because I am just not in the birthday mood, unless the birthday mood is fairly blue. Why am I so down? I think it is the birthday thing, combined, you know, with the broke thing and the fat thing and the dateless thing. Not to worry though, because no matter how awful & gloomy I get, I am totally capable of cheering up for a good party, therefore, if you want me to cheer up, you will come to this party.

I just went to send out some email invites & realized I don't have everyone's email and I'm too lazy to try to dig all over the place and find them, so if you didn't get an invitation and you would like to come, drop me a line (you can get to my email by clicking on my avatar up there in the upper right hand corner, or, as I discovered today, for you poor IE users, way down in the lower right hand corner) and I'll send you directions and stuff. Saturday night. This Saturday. May 6. It's in West Asheville. She is threatening, or promising, depending on your outlook, croquet. And it's also a Kentucky Derby party. Did I mention that? Yes, the Derby, traditionally run on or near my birthday and on which I have never, yet, won one thin dime. Such is life and horseracing.

Unsolved Mysteries

There are portents and omens abounding, oh yes. There are peculiarities and metasynchronicities; there are rips in the space time continuum and general weirdness is at an all time high.

The remote control for my TV/DVD player has reappeared after being, apparently, on vacation for almost 10 months. Not only that, but it heralded it's reappearance in this plane by causing not one but two substitute "universal" remotes that had been procured to replace it to break down. To backtrack a bit, the original remote that came with the TV vanished completely and utterly sometime early last fall. We searched and searched and turned the house upside down; there was wailing and gnashing of teeth, and one sibling was driven to accuse the other sibling of absconding with it and taking it to school for nefarious purposes or maybe just because sibling #2 is notoriously absentminded about what exactly is in said siblings backpack at any given time. Finally it was assumed that the demon hound had eaten it whole, although it was unlike him not to leave shredded remnants around. So we bought a universal remote, which more or less worked.

Then, in the last week or two, this universal remote suddenly died and couldn't be resurrected and I bought another one. It absolutely refused to work at all, so, using my vast resources of arcane technical knowledge, I decided that the electric eye type answering gremlin thingy in the TV that responds to the invisible ultra ionic magic zapper beam from the remote was, clearly, broken and the TV would, thus, either have to be replaced or taken into the TV repair shop. I suspected that the cost of both options would be roughly equivalent, so, naturally, I didn't do anything except stop watching The Lost World, which has left my evenings empty and bereft. I hate not being able to watch people fight dinosaurs and giant bees; it's just so. . so. . lonely. Then the other day when I was cleaning up for the party, I found the original magical remote. Sitting in plain view on the end table in the living room. Just sitting there innocently as if it had never been lost. Now, I am not Martha Stewart or my mother, we all know this, and yes, a fairly thick level of dust has been known to establish itself on my household surfaces, but even I dust more than once every 10 months, and I swear to you on the proverbial stack of bibles that that damn thing was not sitting there last week, or, indeed, at any time since it vanished. It's a big clunky hideous brown remote, for one thing, not a sleek black fashionable remote like all the others in the house, and it has toothmarks at one end from an encounter with the demon hound. But there it was; here it is again, and, more to the point, it works like a charm, so it must have disabled the other remotes when it snapped back into existence from the 9th dimension. There's no other explanation.

In more unsettling omen news, on Saturday, as I was cleaning up party detritus (it was a fabulous party, by the way, and the cleanup wasn't even all that bad, yay) I kept walking past a stick in my path. Every time I saw it I kind of jumped, because this was one of those snake appearing sticks that at first glance looks distinctly serpentine. Finally I got fed up with jumping and then saying, oh, that's just that stick, so I picked it up (after, okay, poking it several times with another stick to make sure it was, in fact, a stick and not a snake, not that I have any major problems with snakes, but I do like to be forewarned before I actually handle them) and threw it towards the weeds/trees/bushes/jungle that make up the back end of my yard. Where it caught on a branch and somehow became supple and draped itself over the branch, just as a snake would have done. I just added a picture, so you can see I am not kidding. It's still there. I think it kind of broke itself in two but not quite, and managed to hang itself up on that branch that way, but I am here to tell you that there are few things in this world more deeply creepiness inducing than picking up a stick that looks like a snake but feels like a stick and throwing it - only to have it behave like a snake. Cold shivers ran up and down my back and I heard the distant clanging footsteps of the gods as they moved, impenetrable and obscure, through their fabled halls. Well, no, actually, that didn't happen. What happened was I said, Holy Shit, and stood there staring at the stick/snake for a while and then shook myself and came inside and did my level best to forget the whole thing while simultaneously wondering what, if anything, this Meant.

So you see, weird shit is going down and magic is afoot, or whatever that annoying pagan bumpersticker says. Be on guard. Carry a rowan twig, or an amulet, or perhaps a .22. And if you know what my remote has been doing on another planet for the last ten months, I'd love to hear about it.

Sad Things

Yesterday I went over to the Cathedral of All Souls who are hosting, this weekend, the North Carolina incarnation of Eyes Wide Open, the exhibition put together by the AFSC on the terrible costs of the Iraq war. I volunteered for two hours: I sat there and talked to a few people, sold a couple of T-shirts and shivered a bit, since the weather has gone from unseasonably hot to unseasonably cold. The exhibition is heartwrenchingly sad and people's reactions to it were interesting, from the man who told us that the next war would be about oil (like, what exactly is this one about?) and that oil was worth fighting for, since without it the American way of life would end. I have about 10 million problems with this attitude, starting with 1) it's not our oil to fight over and going on to 2) war is never worth it and if we don't come up with a better way to resolve our differences than war than we are all doomed, which leads me to 3) the problem with the end of the American way of life would be what, exactly? We create something infinitely more sustainable, more community oriented, more peaceful, less gluttonous, less competitive, less driven?

But that conversation, which I've after all had before, and will have again, wasn't what really hit me. During the two hours I sat there two bus tours full of mostly older tourists pulled up to go through the cathedral. I find bus tours totally baffling as a phenomenon; I can't imagine any circumstances in the world that would end up with me willingly getting onto a bus full of polyester wearing camera toting strangers to sit for hours and then get out with these same strangers to look dutifully at a "sight" for 15 minutes and then get back on the bus. But I am in the minority, clearly: I am from Mars and these people are from Earth and Asheville is clogged with them all spring and summer and fall, so whatever. They got out and went into and around the Cathedral, keeping, for the most part, a wide berth around the attached chapter house with its Eyes Wide Open banner and people in War is Costly t-shirts. Two ladies did come over; they stopped below the two steps up onto the porch and asked us what was going on. S, one of the local AFSC people, told them what it was and they recoiled. "Oh," said one of them, "It sounds sad." "Well," said S, "War is sad." "Oh, I don't want to see anything sad." said the lady, and they beat a hasty retreat.

No, she didn't want to see anything sad, and you know, that's perfectly natural. I don't want to see anything sad either; nobody does. Sad things are awful; they're sad, they hurt, they lead you down into sad places in your own soul. But I sat there and thought about it and it occurs to me that the next rational step, after recognizing that nobody wants to see sad things, is to do what one can to make sure that there aren't any sad things for people to see. In other words, if we don't want to see sad, then we must work to ensure that there isn't any sad to see. War is sad; you don't want to see it. So working to get rid of war is what we must do, for ourselves and for the ladies who don't want to see war.

Granted my own work along these lines is pretty lame; consisting as it does mostly of drinking too much every Thursday and then sitting, mildly hungover, at a table on a cold day in front of an exhibition of heart breakingly sad things. It's small, but it's something, maybe, even if it's only something in my own soul and my own small life. It's acknowledgement, perhaps, recognizing the existence of this sadness, standing witness to it and trying, in the very act of not looking away, to make the source of sorrow end.

Par-Tay!

I am having a party tonight, which I kind of refused to grasp until this morning, but now I am in a whirlwind of activity and my house is immaculately clean. I think I'll forbid people from entering. I have to go out now and mow the lawn & set up the yard for party proceedings, woo woo. I hope it's a fun party and not a complete drag; it's a blogger get together. If you are reading this, can tolerate the company of geeks & are within driving range, stop on by. 6:30.

Meanwhile, I will leave you with the only wisdom I have so far garnered from my advanced age: when you get old enough, drinking a Coke feels equally, if not more, as sinful and guilt inducing as a couple of shots of whiskey. Such are the joys of age and avoirdupois.

Oh, and yeah, I'm still freaking out, but I'm subsuming all my depressed anxiety by being too busy preparing for this party to get all anxious and depressed. Remember the fight or flight reflex? I'm doing both right now and so my primitive stem brain is pleased with me. Also, my stomach finally stopped hurting, and that does tend to improve one's mood.

Things Are Kind of Sucking Again

I'm starting to think that the Asheville vortex has dedicated it's otherworldly intelligence to kicking me the hell out of this town. Since Monday I have:
1. Lost primarly money making job #1.
2. Realized that I am hovering on the verge of losing job #2.
3. Found out from my landlord that he's raising my rent by $50, effective July 1 AND he wants to clean out the basement and the shed, which makes me suspect he's actually planning to sell the place, since he's never considered doing this before. The place needs some major work now; he told me he's in a cash bind; I bet he puts it on the market and then, then oh my readers, I am so fucking screwed it is not funny, not funny at all. You try finding a rental with a dog, a cat, an adolescent boy, no job and an utterly abysmal credit rating.

I've been having weird unearthly intuitive intimations for a couple of months that I may not be living here by next fall and they would appear to have been based in reality. I'm terrified and freaking out although I know it's too early to freak out, but if he does sell this place I am in so much trouble. And, I have to decide, even if he doesn't sell, if I can afford an extra $50 a month (no, of course not, but can I find anything else for less?) and not only that, can I afford another winter like last winter, where I nearly froze to death and it still cost me around $500 to keep the house just warm enough to stop the pipes from freezing? Or should I try to find somewhere smaller, cheaper, better insulated? Now? After I've been putting in hours and hours on the garden and it's just starting to look good? Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck.

Also, I have to find another job, pronto, something I'm obviously not very good at. Meanwhile, my mother has diverticulitis, which is better than what we thought and she has forgiven me for going over her head and forcing her to go to the doctor. I went out drinking with my brother and he was really mean to me, which, combined with job loss, sent me into a depression tailspin that I'm still in. And I started therapy. I like my therapist and he wants me to take fish oil, which I'm doing, because I have anxiety (which I knew) and am depressed (which I suspected) and have to completely redefine myself and my space (which is the kind of thing Asheville therapists say and I hope to god he has more of a clue on what exactly that means and how to do it than I do.)

On My Dining Room Table Right Now

1 finished gourd bowl
1 almost finished gourd bowl, awaiting only a final coat of shellac
1 plastic box full of cheap acrylic paint and glitter
1 metal box containing sandpaper, notecards, wood markers, a misplaced sharpie and 2 paper packets of seeds, sunflower and pumpkin
1 round portable CD player
1 empty plastic container for a wrist brace
1 broken toilet flush lever
1 working toilet flush lever that nonetheless does not fit in the toilet
1 dishtowel
1 lipstick, missing top
1 small ceramic vase
1 empty shoebox
1 large 3 ring binder full of collected recipes
1 page from a photo album, depicting the owner of the table between 1977 and 1981
1 pamphlet from a local PR agency
1 plastic envelope of savings account documents
1 sheet of paper with World of Warcraft hints on it, scrawled in blue ink
1 pencil
1 empty CD case
1 cel phone charger
1 section of newspaper from 2 Sundays ago
2 jigsaw puzzles, in boxes
2 halves of 1 broken dowel
2 boxes of oil pastels
2 half empty bags of plastic army men accoutrements: tanks, helicopters, fences
2 sketchbooks
2 notebooks: 1 spiral, 1 marble
3 cassette tapes
3 books: T. Coraghessan Boyle, World's End; Alices Restaurant Cookbook; North American Birds
4 candles on 1 red glass plate
5 copies of Cooking Light
5 ceramic tiles
6 sheets of tax instructions
7 cleaned gourds, more or less in progress

Upside Down

I planted a cherry tomato upside down today. It looks delightfully bizarre and I am pleased with it and considering planting more things upside down. I would never have thought of this on my own; no, my friend T told me last summer about this woman who had upside down cherry tomato bushes hanging all over her porch. The theory is that you get one of those hanging baskets with the coconut matting, slit a hole in the matting, plant the tomato upside down and then as it grows it comes up around the outside of the hanging basket and you have this funky psychedelic surreal mindblowing upside down cherry tomato bush. T's friend had them on her porch, which I would love, but unfortunately that would demand a porch with sun, unlike mine, which has not felt a ray of direct sunlight since it was built 80 years ago and so instead it's hanging from a metal stake with a glass sun in the middle of it out by the vegetable garden. The stake is a cool thing but I gave up on hanging baskets out there a while back because they're too much work: you have to water them every day, which is beyond me. But I'm going to manage it this year. I really am. Mmm hmm. Monday morning update: Check out the picture I just took! It would appear to already be working; overnight, the tomato has started to wrap itself up and around. Last night it was just hanging there looking pitiful.

This year, yet again, despite my terrible track record, I am determined to take extraordinary care of the garden and be rewarded with something that will look like it came out of the beatnik version of Southern Living, Southern Freak Living. I need more groovy and bizarre yard art to really make it into Southern Freak Living - the car bumper and bed headboard that make up part of the vegetable garden fence, the mysterious gun sight straightening metal thingie and the bathtub are not really enough. They kind of lean towards Southern Trash Living, if the truth be told. I have to create something much more stylish, but unfortunately my artistic skills lean heavily in the trash direction; c'est la vie. It's okay, because I have also decided I'm going to take a picture of the garden every single day from the same place and then in the fall I'm going to make a time lapse flash slide presentation which will cause people to weep with joy for the sheer beauty of it all. At least that's the plan.

You see, I am planning a big party for a bunch of my net friends in the beginning of August and I'm already worrying about the house & yard, which are never at their best in August, historically known as the month that Fliss says Fuck It and walks away from gardening. Last year August was actually the month after the month that Fliss said Fuck It and walked away from the garden, so by last August the garden was, essentially, just one huge gourd vine. I can't let that happen this year; people are going to see it. Also, it's easier to worry and do something about the house and garden than it is to worry and do something about my giant fatness, although my giant fatness is very discouraging and I need to stop eating, start exercising and otherwise make myself miserable until I fit into my jeans again, which will take months. I can't stand it, but I'm going to have to, because I can't afford new clothes and also my mother is starting to make catty remarks, which is easy for anyone who has never gained a pound in her life. Genetics are so brutally unfair sometimes.

Be Careful What You Wish For

It is raining. It rained all day yesterday too, and all last night. We desperately need this rain, but, you know, on the weekend? Not that weekends, per se, mean anything to me, who sits here in her pajamas in front of a screen all day every day, until the days blur together and time has no meaning. Still, I was going to plant roses for my mother today and now that plan is foiled. Curses.

It's good to know that if I am suddenly rendered deaf, dumb and blind I will still know that it's raining. I figured this out last night when I went to bed, because when I lay down to sleep a pungent and familiar aroma came drifting towards my nose from the comforter: wet Theo. I'm sure that Theo, being so well trained and all, would never get on my bed. He swears up and down that he never, ever gets up there. Although I have noticed that when I'm gone for a while, as I was yesterday, that if, when I get home, Theo is not in his accustomed position (flat on his back with legs up in the air on the couch) then there are usually somewhat suspicious thump crash and scurry noises coming from my bedroom. Theo then comes to the door gleaming with innocence, despite the fact that my bed is disarranged and covered with long golden collie hair.

Dog trainers all say that you can never punish a dog unless you actually catch them in the middle of the act, because they have no memory and are purely zen creatures of the moment: embodiments of buddha nature, except of course for that pesky worldly desire for food, the grosser the better. I say to this, bullshit. If dogs have no memory, than why am I expected to hand over a milk bone every single night after the last foray outside? If he's living purely in the moment, how does he know what shoes I wear for walking him and why does he get wildly excited whenever I put them on? Ha. I am more logical than dog trainers, but on the other hand I am also far too soft hearted and pretty much never punish my dogs for anything, relying instead on positive reinforcement and the kind of long tedious monologues on the nature of karma, the unfairness of life in the world and the necessity of everyone in this house cooperating lovingly with one another that have worked such wonders with my children, who will do more or less anything up to and including washing the dishes to avoid one.

Back to School With Wal Mart

Tomorrow I'm going to spend the entire day at AB Tech learning Flash. Yes! That's right! Soon, I too will join the rest of the internet in creating annoying pop up flash animations! Perhaps I will do line drawings with extremely funny soundtracks! (p.s. the official weebl & bob page is here but it's down at the moment and so I can't link to it in good conscience. But it will be back up and you will laugh.) Or perhaps I will gape in horror at all the terribly technological information and absorb nothing. But probably not. Hopefully I will learn, and then I will create, like, the worlds' greatest website right before both my hands finally fall off with the carpal tunnel.

The carpal tunnel has been bad lately, which is one of the reasons why this blog isn't being updated quite as obsessively as it used to be. I went to Wal Mart (forgive me, mea culpa) and bought some wrist braces, which I wear when I'm doing this data entry job. It's funny, god knows I spent all my unemployment time mindlessly surfing the web with my mouth and brain gaping open like a clam, but the minute I actually start doing real work that makes money on this very same computer, my wrists, both of them, lock up and hurt like hell. I look stylin', let me tell you, in my martini slippers, sweat pants, giant purple T-shirt and one of my dad's antique flannels that is big enough to wrap around me twice and falls to my knees AND my black wrist guards, which are about four inches wide, attach with velcro and apparently are keeping my hands attached. I am the queen of slacker chic; it's really terrible. Today I was eating cottage cheese for lunch as I typed in country allocations for major financial databases (Singapore, in all it's totalitarian glory, is an investment favorite) and I spilled it on my giant T-shirt; I didn't really notice until the dog got much friendlier than is his usual wont.

But I will be more fashionable soon, because they put amenable-to-buying-crap drugs in the air handlers at Wal Mart. I only went in there to buy shellac (which they didn't have), a wrist brace (I got three) and army men (long story), but I walked out with a jigsaw puzzle that is actually a 3 D picture of "space" (the kind of cool futuristic space where there are lots of colorful planets crowded around, also rocketships and attacking asteroids and, dude, comets) and, the piece de resistance, a pale green shiny faux satin lingerie looking top. It's not at all the kind of thing I usually wear but for some reason I fell for it. Which would all be fine and good, it cost $10, which is right in my budget, but as I was leaving I walked by the in-mart McDonalds. I was thinking about getting an Egg McMuffin, for I am fond of the occasional McMuffin, but standing in front of the McDonalds counter were two hugely obese teenage girls and I decided that that was a message from God and I would go home and have some diet cornflakes instead. One of the girls turned around then and I realized, with a jolt of horror, that she was wearing my shirt, and, lord, it did not become her well. The same shirt I had just purchased at that very Wal Mart, there on the rather, uh, overly large body of a girl probably 20 years my junior, and it was not good, no, no, not good at all. This is just not what you want to see when you have just bought something strange that you think might be sexy, albeit in a terrible Wal Mart kind of way.

Not knowing what else to do and reluctant to step back into the bowels of Wal Mart to try to return the thing, I brought it home anyway. A tried it on, and I tried it on, and we decided that shiny faux satin is really not the fashion statement that we (or anyone who is still sporting that attractive accessory, a brain) ever want to make, because honestly it looks like a) you forgot your shirt and b) you have terrible taste in lingerie, which is not a winning combination. And also, that pale satiny green, when combined with winter Irish skin, which is, essentially, also pale green in a kind of fascinating day glow way, creates a really unhealthy color mix: kind of the thing you might see in illustrated medical journals. So the shirt is now hanging in my closet; I'm just masochistic enough where I feel I should get my $10 worth and wear it to one of the several parties I have coming up, because, you know, it's awful and why the hell not? It's sexy in that Wal Mart, deathly pallor, post apocalyptic fungus glowing algae kind of way, and what man could resist that?

The Rich Get Richer

Over the last ten days my life has gotten increasingly focused around the placing of small pieces of numerical data in various odd places around these here internets. People are paying me money for this peculiar activity; I am now an Independent Contractor doing Data Entry. It's kind of fun in a really strange way and I get to sit here all day, just like I did when I was unemployed, wearing pajamas or their equivalent, with Theo under my feet getting in the way.

Yesterday I opened a savings account, because I can't be trusted not to spend all of last years tax refund money that's in my checking account and I need to save money for a) Christmas, b) heating oil and c) taxes. I have been warned by many people to put away about 1/3 of my income for taxes, which is depressing, since between my two "jobs" I am now making before taxes about what I made at the museum - after taxes. People say encouragingly, "Hey, that's great money for Asheville!" and they're right. It is good money for Asheville - nowhere near enough to live on in Asheville, but why quibble? I'm quibbling, a bit, because I'm funny like that and I'd like to be able to work full time and make enough money to live on with a little left over, even, for Christmas and heating oil. But you know, that just seems, more and more, to be asking too much and yet, it's one of those conversations that never makes it into the national media, where everyone is rich. There are lots and lots of rich people. I see them all the time and I'm astonished; I don't understand how they got rich, how they stay that way, what they do, here in Asheville, where anything over $8 an hour is considered really good money and the housing is the most expensive in the state.

I am working hard; putting this data here and there isn't easy and because I'm not in an office I'm actually working much harder & more consistently than I used to. There's nobody coming in and out to chat, no phone ringing, no decisions to make, no politics and noone to have lunch with, so I just work, solidly. As a general rule in America, the less money you make the harder you work. People who make lots and lots of money are not usually paid by the hour, so they aren't tempted to work lots and lots of extra hours; they don't do manual labor, so they're not out in the sun and the cold and the rain digging up other people's gardens and risking their lives making houses; and, something I thought about yesterday, they don't have people hovering over them making sure that they are actually working, god damn it, I'm not paying you to go to the bathroom. The further down the income scale you go, the more ridiculous the restrictions on you get, like the call center job I turned down a few months ago, where I was told that my personal belongings had to be left in a locker, I was allowed 2 bathroom breaks per 8 hour shift and 1 lunch break, I had to be on the phone at all times and so on and so on, ad nauseum. Nobody told me shit like that when I was a middle manager - it was assumed that I was an adult capable of managing my own time and my own deadlines, and I did.

So I went to the bank and I opened a savings account and I thought about buying a CD but I'm afraid that I might need that money before a CD would be up. The savings account rate of interest is somewhere in the neighborhood of 2% and the CD was 4.14%, which was tempting, until I realized that that meant I would be making approximately $18 for not touching my money for 6 months, and even I can probably sell a birdhouse or two to make $18. Then I came home and started entering data and suddenly the data kind of clicked and I realized that what I was looking at was, essentially, interest. Rates of return. Now, if you have half a million or more to invest, let me tell you, you can do considerably better than 4.14% and I bet you can get your money out anytime you want, but if you're not so rich, than your investment opportunities are, essentially, nil. I wouldn't even begin to know how to invest money, and I have a sneaking suspicion that my carefully garnered and saved $500 isn't enough to take to an investment firm. My mother told me the other day about a local investment firm who won't take you as a client unless you have at least $5 million. Once you have your $5 million, even 4.14% looks a lot more appetizing, and if you do it right, your rates are going to be closer to 11%. If I could get 11% interest I'd happily bid farewell to my money for 6 months. So the rich get richer, and the poor hope they have enough money for heat next winter. And this is okay, this is the natural order of things and here in the United States I always feel like it's a dirty little secret, that we just won't mention the fact that, you know, as James McMurtry has so memorably said and I keep telling you about, We Can't Make It Here Anymore.

Out of Shellac, Damn It

Because the TV is still not fixed (A came home briefly, pressed the channel up button on the remote an additional 400 times and pronounced it broken, then left) and because my carpal tunnel is kind of dire at the moment (I need to stay the hell away from the computer when I am not actually working, particularly away from games that require repeated use of the mouse) I worked on some gourds tonight, and I am pleased. I am also, clearly, clinically insane, because I just spent an hour and a half or so drawing a happy family of cartoon bluebirds, including a lovely flustered mother, two children and a jovial Papa bird (he's on the left,) on a gourd. That is going to be, wait for it, a birdhouse. That hangs outside in a tree. Because I judged the spacing wrong, there's even a white framed window with a pretty much invisible pot of geraniums on it. These pictures are terrible, by the way, and the colors are very off - there is barely any light in the dining room.

I also painted a gourd bowl; one side of it is a Japanese flowering cherry (not a very convincing or good Japanese flowering cherry, but there you have it) and the rest of it is a vaguely Native American looking abstract/landscape design. Funny, the combination doesn't really work so well. I didn't plan for the landscape to look Native American but you know, it's hard to paint anything on a gourd that doesn't end up looking vaguely Native American.

That is why I need the shellac: so I can coat these lovelys with a nice layer of glossy finish, which will have the wonderful dual effect of making them look all shiny and sort of finished, and rendering them if not impervious than certainly much less pervious to the environment. Which is helpful if you're planning to hang them in a tree. Actually, the birdhouse one, unpainted, looked very much like a penis. I thought about painting it as a penis, but then I thought that while it would be hilarious and a great conversation starter (with who exactly did you think? I ask myself? The Marquis de Sade?) to have a penis birdhouse hanging in the tree, the placement of the hole for the birds to go in and out right there on the tender underside of the balls and the necessity of drilling a hole near the top of the penis to hang it might unnerve people and even, god forbid, render my chances of an actual male coming over even slimmer. So, because I am so weird, I painted a happy family of anthropomorphic bluebirds on it instead.

I turned the house upside down looking for the damn shellac but it is gone. I used it last around midnight the night before I left for Charleston, when I was making gourd birdhouses to give to my gracious South Carolina hosts. I know, I know, most people bring a bottle of wine, but most people don't have twenty odd gourds hanging around their dining room either. I, of course, do. They've only been there most of a year; maybe now I will actually start to turn them into "art."

Squirrels!

I actually got up and went to Meeting this morning. It's only been about 9 years since I was a fairly regular attender at Homewood Friends Meeting in Baltimore - and it was nice to be back at Meeting. And I was filled with the spirit and was going to write this great post about theology and Buddhism and the seasons and all kinda good crap like that which would probably have bored you to tears, not to mention cutting into my party girl image rather severely, but fuck that, because when I came home my front porch was under siege by squirrels, and for the last two hours or so I think I've been in a National Geographic special.

It all started because I had this idea that I would sit on the newly cleaned front porch and drink coffee, smoke a cigarette and read the paper. As I think I have mentioned before, a family of squirrels took up residence in one of my porch columns (columns is a rather grandiloquent term; it sounds like I live in Tara or something. Pillars? Square brick porch supports? Trust me, I don't live in Tara, but let's just keep on calling them columns anyway.) at some point this winter. Well, so far we had managed to successfully more or less ignore each other, but this morning they were having none of me being out there. There were three of them climbing up and down the column and they made menacing noises at me when I went out. I am, it is widely known, uncomfortable in the presence of rodents. Squirrels are rodents, but it's my porch. I said as much. They kind of snarled at me and made threatening twitching moments as if to say, "At any moment I could spring and rip off your face, human." I tried more calming reasonable conversation while backing towards the door. I even offered to build them a new house, but they met my kind offer with scorn. So I retreated to the living room and started watching them.

It was definitely a mother squirrel and two semi adolescent kid squirrels. You can see the two kids in this picture - you can click on it, by the way, and make it larger and really see their blurry squirrely faces. It took me a while to realize what I had was a family group, but there was one large squirrel and two 3/4 sized ones, who were, even though I don't like squirrels: cute, okay, yes, they were definitely cute. The largest squirrel kept on biting the smaller ones around the haunch, and they didn't seem to object much at all; in fact, they kind of went limp and allowed themselves to be herded back up the column. That rang a bell. As a mother of two myself, I'm completely familiar with that particular form of limpness - it's the "gravity has suddenly become much much stronger around my body and you will have to carry me Mom if you expect me to move at all" attitude. All this was fascinating, but it wasn't solving my immediate problem, which was access to my front porch. I wondered why they hadn't bothered me yesterday when I was cleaning said porch and thought, aha, music. Yesterday I had music blaring out of the open window, and they must not share my taste. It worked for General Noriega and the bats in my house in Maryland, perhaps rock n' roll will yet again save me.

So I turned on XTC, who I adore but squirrels apparently do not, and Mom Squirrel, a mother of the old school, decided that her children should absolutely not be exposed to this kind of evil music. I realized what she was doing, summoned up my bravery and ran through the front door with my camera. The pictures are horribly blurry because I was afraid to get too close - Mom Squirrel made it quite clear what might happen if I did that - but here's the whole set if you're interested.

She carried first the one child and then the other across the street. She carried them by one haunch, which looked ridiculous, but I guess squirrels, having those tails and all, counterbalance badly if you (and by you I mean a busily parenting squirrel) try to carry them by the more traditional mammal method: the nape of the neck that works so admirably on kittens and small boys. She took the one squirrel child over to one of the big oaks across the street. I don't know why she bothered crossing the street, since there's a perfectly wonderful big oak right there in my front yard, but she was clear on her destination. She shooed the first youngun part way up the tree and came back for the second, who had been sitting on the top of the column the whole time watching nervously. He didn't want to leave. She got him down twice and twice he broke free and hauled ass back up to the hole at the top of the column. Mom Squirrel was ticked off by this and on the third try she had him in a seriously secure hold, as you can kind of see in this picture, which is blurry because they came down rather quickly and kind of fell a little and, since I am a coward, I thought they were coming for me and I had to make a kind of squirrel like leap myself in through the safety of the front door. She carried him all the way across the street and to the tree; she'd let the first kid walk himself on the last bit but she carried the second one right up to the tree and put him on it. Then mother and children scampered up to the top.

I, on the other hand, ran to the basement, got some steel wool and another brick, and tried to block up the hole. I feel kind of guilty about this, but not, you know, too guilty. It is, after all, my house, and squirrels barricading my front porch poses kind of a severe threat to my peace of mind, since that's the only sensible way in and out of the house. My mother says to throw mothballs down there, or pour ammonia, and I guess I will do that as well. I yelled down the hole and made clonking noises, because I was worried that there might be younger siblings still at home, but I don't think there are. I think that family of three was it and I hope they find a nice new house.

Personal DNA and More

Dig, I'm a Considerate Artist and you can find out more about ME here. Also, you can take your own test. It takes about 20 minutes but the graphics are all very nifty, with fun little sliders and graphs, so what the hell. You might, just conceivably, be as bored as I am tonight, although I doubt it.

I was all settled in to watch The Lost World and knit when the remote died. The original remote, you may recall, was apparently swallowed whole last summer by the Hell Hound, and, since the DVD player does not work at all without a remote, we replaced it with El Cheapo "Universal" Remote which randomly breaks for no apparent reason. When this happens, the kids fix it. Until tonight, when the kids aren't here. I called A and got instructions for how to make it work. "Push the select code button," she said, "and then push channel up until the channel changes. Then push menu. It takes a long time; you have to push channel up like 250 times." Yeah. Well. I pushed channel up 400 frickin times. I counted. Actually, it was probably more like 600 times, since about a little less than halfway through this process I replaced the batteries and started over. The second time I counted. Nothing happened. Nothing happened except that I looked at the white noise on the TV set and looked at the little light that lit up red when I pushed the channel up button and then looked hurriedly back at the TV in case I had missed the blessed event of the channel changing, and every fifty or so pushes I switched hands, since my carpal tunnel is in high horrible gear lately. Nothing, other than that, ever happened; the channel never changed and so I gave up on my plans to watch TV & knit, which was exactly what I wanted to do tonight and instead, here I am with my carpal tunnel, stumping Pandora by asking them to play music like XTC, which is, I admit, difficult, and playing Bookworm & taking dumb internet personality quizzes. Best laid plans of mice & men and all that shit. Grrrrrrrr.

Oh, and here's a picture of a tulip, because I can. Although it's a good thing that the tulips are beginning to fade and soon I will be forced to stop taking pictures of them, because it's getting a little creepy and I think I'm turning into one of those flower fixated old ladies who goes around cooing at plants, except it's even worse, since I take pictures of them. All hope will be lost if I start doing, you know, paintings of the photos.

More On Talking To Animals

This is going to be one of those confusing posts where I think it's Friday night and y'all - and Blogger - think it's Saturday. Just so you know.

I had a lovely evening tonight: I met one of my many friends named J (this one has a blog) at the Westville and we drank beer & ate good pub food and meanwhile, queen of multitasking that I am, my clothes washed themselves across the street at the laundromat. Then we discovered that it was Walk In Theatre night, which is one of those Friday evenings through the summer when the cars get shooed out of the back parking lot, dedicated people erect a large "screen" that looks uncannily like a sail made of unbleached organic linen (this is Asheville, after all) many people, often with small dirty hippie children, filter in with chairs and blankets and a movie begins as it gets dark. Tonight was Time Bandits, which just so happens to be one of my favorites of all time, so we pulled the blanket out of my car - things like this are why I always, but always, have a blanket in my car - and settled in to watch. It was brilliant. I love that movie so, and watching any movie at all outside on a screen that ripples and sways a bit, surrounded by happy people drinking beer, is far and away the best way to see pretty much any movie.

Then I came home, and while I was having a small fit about where the hell I'd left my cigarettes and thus searching my car with the tiny useless flashlight on my keys, the front yard erupted into cat fight. Usually I ignore these things but tonight, fueled by beer and Time Bandits, I marched directly at it. "What the hell?" I asked the cats, "Do you think you're doing?" The cat next door, a sweet tortoiseshell, ran off. "You aren't even near your house." I said sternly, "and who are you fighting?" Of course, it was Orange Cat, and he was unashamed. He headed for home and I followed him along, lecturing him aloud like any mom in the neighborhood. "You need to stop causing trouble," I said, "You are always starting fights, and that's not cool. You go on home and you think about why you don't want the other cats to like you." He looked up at me and said Meow and I realized that I was, at 11:15 pm, chasing after an orange tom cat and scolding him aloud like a 2nd grade teacher.

It is just vaguely possible that I am spending too much time alone.

Loss: Michael McGauhey

I just came back from the memorial service for Michael McGauhey, who was the building manager for Pack Place and by way of being a good friend of mine the almost five years I worked there. It was a nice service: packed, since Michael had the great gift of making friends among everyone. People stood up and spoke about him; somebody played an Emmylou Harris song (Michael loved him some Emmylou) and all his many, many biking buddies showed up in full lycra regalia and, at the end, rode off all together to make a loop around downtown with a police escort. It was lovely. Except that I wish it hadn't happened. That's the problem with memorials: you see a lot of old friends, it's nice, but given the choice you'd definitely prefer the event never to have happened.

There were sheets of paper for people to write memories on but I couldn't do it there, so I'll do it here. I keep thinking about an article I read not long ago on the Tzaddikim, the thirty six righteous men (actually, let's hope they're men AND women, for god's sake) who, unknown even to themselves, keep the world from ending simply by being, well, good. I wouldn't be a bit surprised to find out that Michael was one of them. He was one of the few truly good people I think I've ever known, and I'll include his often satirical, biting and hilarious wit in his many good qualities. I've seen Michael roll his eyes; I've heard him say mean and funny things - but I never knew him, ever, to be truly mean or judgmental or cruel, in any way. Even about politics.

We made up a religion, once, Michael and Angie and I, bored and standing outside Pack Place one afternoon. The religion focused around Babe, the Giant Ox at the Mountain State Fair, who I said encapsulated all the mystical qualities of the Buddha. Michael liked the idea of having a freakishly large farm animal as a deity and we ran with it, cracking jokes that I don't remember and discussing the necessary qualities of gods, in which standing still for long periods of time was key.

We made dark jokes about events and event planners; we would go back in his office and quietly curse the follies of fools and I knew I could rely on him in any circumstance. He gave me mild, gentle shit about smoking and drinking; we agreed that Republicans were demons. On one First Night when I, cranky & fed up, was drinking pungent whiskey out of a coffee cup behind the desk of the art museum, he came by to laugh at me and tell me he could smell my coffee across Pack Place. Oh hell. It never occurred to me that he wouldn't beat the cancer that finally got him. I told him of course he'd be fine, and he thought so too. When I got to the service today I thought immediately, "It's too crowded; Michael's going to pitch a fit," and then I thought, "It's too crowded; I think I'll sneak in back and hang out with Michael in his office." I can't imagine that he isn't there. I asked myself, as I was leaving the service, why the assholes seem to stay with us, while the angels go away, and then I thought, "You know, that's the kind of conversation I should have with Michael, he likes conversations like that." And so do I, and I mourn the loss of the friend I used to have them with.

The Witch and Good Food

I seem to have achieved one of my life goals without even realizing it; without, in fact, even realizing that I had any life goals. No, life goals have just never been the kind of thing that I have. I tend to have things more like life drifts, or life just happens, or holy shit, what the fuck have I done now life altering decisions. But not goals, per se. However. I was out messing around in the garden this morning, watering the flowers, when I realized that there was a squirrel living in the porch. Yes, in, not on; a brick has fallen out of one of the porch columns and the squirrel, and probably his/her entire family plus some extra friends and maybe a couple of servants, have moved in. The squirrel was angry at me for trying to tidy up the porch a bit and for watering the hostas that have just begun to sprout, which probably means that there are baby squirrels down in the column. "Shut up," I told the squirrel, "I lived here first. And I could block that hole up." The squirrel glared at me from his hole and I thought, oh god, I have turned into one of those women I used to admire in children's books, the eccentric, possibly magical woman who lives in a kind of falling down house who says peculiar off center things to herself that might just mean something to a passing 11 year old. Mmmm hmm.

I always wanted to be that woman and live in a tumbledown cottage in the woods, and I seem to have managed it. I guess a somewhat tumbledown brick bungalow in semi urbia is the best 21st century American equivalent, that I can stand anyway, since I have to be within 5 miles of several drinking establishments or my soul will wither and die. The squirrel on the porch, the collie dog, the crazy fearful cat - it's all pointing to honorary Witchdom. I went out to the back garden where the newly resurrected Fish did a back flip out of the water at my approach (god knows why; it's not like he associates me with food or anything) and I looked at the oregano growing in the pond. Yes, it's true: I have aquatic oregano. It's very happy underwater, too, and when I went to look at it a little closer I realized that there are now big old frog eggs floating about on the surface of the pond as well.

I told the bees about it. The bees have been extremely busy with the redbud tree and I've been trying to help them by thinning out the demon honeysuckle (honeysuckle is Satan incarnate of the vegetable kingdom.) The bees don't like this much because it shakes the redbud, so I stop every so often and explain to them in a kind and reasonable voice that what I am doing will ensure more flowers for them in the future. So far they haven't stung me and what strikes me most about this is that until I decided to write about it, talking calmly to the bees in full English sentences didn't seem at all weird to me. Although, okay, yeah, it is. And there you have it: squirrel, fish, frog spawn, bees, and me, who talks to all of them.

In other news I fired up the little grill, the cheap anthropomorphic Asian grill I fell in love with at CVS a couple summers ago and bought when it went on sale. I grilled two chicken breasts (marinated in tamari, lime juice, fresh grated ginger & fresh smushed up garlic) a bunch of asparagus (cut the tough end off. Put the asparagus on a big piece of tin foil. Put about half a stick of butter, in pats on the asparagus. Liberally salt & pepper & squeeze a half a lemon over it, wrap up securely in foil, grill.) and a hamburger. I only ate the hamburger and half of the asparagus (well, okay, and a quarter of a chicken breast) because I wanted the leftover chicken to eat tomorrow or whenever, but oh god, it was all so incredibly good. I always feel like I'm wasting the fire if I don't grill pretty much everything in the kitchen when I actually go to the trouble of lighting a fire and all, so I put some potatos wrapped in foil (with olive oil, salt, pepper and a big sprig of fresh rosemary) on to it to cook overnight for yummy potatos for breakfast. Ahhh summer.

Nothing Is Working Right Today

I would really have been better off staying in bed this morning. Pretty much nothing has gone smoothly today; I'm having my own personal little Mercury in retrograde experience. I was supposed to start an actual paying gig whereby I will be doing remote data entry for a NY financial services company. This would have been fine, if I already had MS Excel, but I don't, and my contact in the company couldn't just give it to me, because MS Excel needs a disc to install it and she is, you see, in NY and I am in NC. It took us a long time to figure this out. So I thought I would get around that by doing the 60 day trial of Office. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough disc space, so I thought I'd save some space by putting all the pictures that are cluttering up my hard drive onto CDs. That is how I found out that my CD burner no longer works at all. That was when I started shouting FUCK FUCK FUCK at the computer and had to go outside and work in the garden for a little while. That went well. I hope. I may yet wake up tomorrow to find that I killed all the flowers.

So I finally freed up just enough hard drive space to install Excel, explaining to Office that I only wanted Excel, because I already had Word. I had a bad feeling about this to begin with - which was justified, because when I tried to open Word a couple minutes ago I discovered that downloading a trial version of Office has done away with it altogether. That means I have to find the original, antique disk ~ and I have a legal copy of Word, god damn it. A perfectly fucking goddamn legal copy, Mr. Gates; I don't appreciate your softwared destroying it. Fuck you very much.

Then I went shopping, where I bought a flash drive thinking I would put the graphics for the website I work on onto it but I realized tonight that, duh, that wouldn't work, because they all have to be in the same place or dreamweaver doesn't know how to fetch & upload them. So that was a waste of money I should have used to get a new CD burner, which I almost did. Argh. I moved on to the health food store, planning to at least buy some of my favorite perfume in all the world. . . they were out. No telling when they'll get more in. They don't stock lemon/cucumber water anymore, either.

On top of this, I started class tonight, only to discover that I had underestimated my own skills and the class I signed up for would be a complete waste of my time, since I already know HTML (to some extent, anyway.) Thus, I need to transfer to the advanced class. Which is full. But there may be some hope there; the teacher said he would talk to the people in Continuing Ed and try to get me in. Okay. It was an hour and a half where I made myself shut up because I knew all the answers and I had two coughing fits, which is a stress thing that happens to me sometimes in situations like meetings and classrooms. I think that now I will go to bed, hope the bed doesn't collapse underneath me, and try it all over again in the morning.

Some days are like this; it's just one of those miserable soul grinding facts of life, I know. And, as people have told me, if I had a good aura, was more relaxed and stuff, I could laugh as I flitted gracefully from flower to flower, accentuating the positive (my car didn't break down; I'm healthy) and ignoring the small frustrations of life. If only I had met someone today who could have told me that in Asheville-ease. . . then I could have killed her, and standing over her broken bloody body in the Greenlife parking lot would have helped SO much.

Who Should Paint Me?

Shamelessly stolen from Edgy Mama despite the fact that she no longer comes to Drinking Liberally. ;-)

Who Should Paint You: Salvador Dali

You're a complex, intense creature who displays many layers. There's no way a traditional portrait could ever capture you!

What Artist Should Paint Your Portrait?

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

There has been an Easter miracle in my very own home: a blessed resurrection in the backyard ~ Fish is alive again and swimming around just fine. I thought he was dead, in fact, the fishy equivalent of nailed to the perch, but he must have been resting. He really has gotten huge and beautiful; for some strange reason the water in the bathtub has cleared up a bit and I got to truly see him today. I'm wondering if I could sell him on Ebay as an exotic Koi and/or the Second Coming, but that would be mean and unfair to Fish, not to mention a logistical nightmare. I doubt those federal express mail pouches are all that water tight. In other good news, the bank got back to me and has placed a fraud alert on my account, although on calm reflection I have realized that a) there probably wasn't a checkbook in the glove compartment and b) the kind of people who dedicatedly search your entire car but end up taking only about 73 cents in filthy pennies and some hippie jewelry are probably not the same kind of people who go in for identity theft.

Also, I put in about 3 solid hours worth of work on the garden and yard and it's starting to look good. I have made a resolution to work in the garden one or two hours a day from now on; this will trim my waistline, which is woefully in need of some major slimming down action and make my garden look awesome, or at least like somebody at some point did something out there besides drink beer and smoke cigarettes while staring at the weeds and sighing. This is good, but in the bad category, it occurs to me that if I spend an hour a day, every day for the next five years, doing nothing but ripping out honeysuckle and wild blackberries, I may make a tiny dent in one corner of the yard which will probably immediately fill up with poison ivy or kudzu.

In the bad category, my organic gardening status is really falling down. Not only am I going to spray the roses for black spot again this year, because otherwise they inevitably get, what else, black spot and all the leaves fall off (yeah, thanks, I tried the cornmeal and the aloe and the dish detergent and walking widdershins around them naked chanting to the vegetable god - no dice) but at Lowes today I bought a giant industrial sized plastic jug of deadly plant poison and I proceeded to spray it on the aforementioned wild blackberries that are intent on taking over my yard. I know, I know, this is wrong and evil and bad in so many ways, but I'm tired of being ripped to shreds while trying to mow the lawn or plant anything, and every year they get bolder and more aggressive. I tried pulling them out by the roots, and maybe it's something that Baron Sacher von Masoch could have gotten into for kicks, but those thorns go all the goddamn way down into the ground and they can penetrate anything I'm wearing.

And the Ugly category: I'm pulling my personal ad off ActForLove.org because in two or three weeks, despite the fact that everyone says that all women get at least a couple of emails from losers on all internet dating sites, I have not gotten anything but three winks, one of which came from somebody named KinkyMaster. I am a woman, so far as I know, and there's even a picture of me up there, wearing a skirt and a tight shirt; hell, I must be a woman, because not only have I borne & breast fed kids, I've been known to enjoy shopping for clothes, I crave chocolate once a month and, final proof, I've gone and paid someone money to wax my eyebrows, something men simply do not do. Except for metrosexuals, I guess, but I hardly ever meet any of those. But according to online dating, I guess I am not female, or, I am so creepy I can't even attract the creeps. Except KinkyMaster. I'm not quite desperate enough yet for KinkyMaster - besides, he lives in Raleigh. So fuck it: I can feel insecure, hideous and unlovable all by myself without the help and validation of the internets, and thus the profile shall vanish in a puff of metaphorical smoke.