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Wednesday, April 30, 2008

playing catch-up

I had a post almost ready to go today, and then I forgot I hadn't quite finished it, let LT have a computer turn, and told him to close all the browser windows. Oops. I hate rewriting stuff so I'll try to just hit the high points. I'm nearing the point where if I don't post now I'll never post again. (Considering my diary-writing history, I'm frankly quite surprised I've kept going as long as I have.)

Um. The dog is a pain in the behind with her chewing. She particularly likes to chew on C's clothes. Not the clean ones. And not necessarily always the ones that are suitable for bringing out in front of company, either. Eew. It is costing us money now (even at Target jeans are $10 a pair and her size is in short supply at Goodwill) and money is not something we have a lot of.

Speaking of which, ohmygosh food prices. Thank you, biofuels researchers! Thank you, burgeoning overseas markets! Here, why don't I just set up the direct deposit to be divided between the grocery store and the gas company and we'll just go live in a cardboard box. Goody! The economy gets to have its severe 1929-style cyclical correction when we just got a mortgage! Fabulous. Gas prices have hit the much-feared $4/gallon here. At least for mid-grade -- regular unleaded was still only $3.90 the last time I looked. (I feel truly sorry for the diesel people, good mileage and all. $4.50. Ouch.) Can I just say how tired I am of people talking about how now we'll all use public transportation or walk? HELLO. Not everyone lives in the freaking CITY, people. It is six miles of narrow, fast highways over steep hills from here to the nearest grocery store, and there is no public transportation. WE'RE DOOOOOOOMED.

Wow, I'm gripy right now.

Um. Claire was sick all weekend, sick enough that I took her to the ER on Sunday on the advice of the on-call pediatrician only to be brusquely and rudely informed by a doctor who spent all of five seconds with my child that since the strep culture was negative it was just a viral sore throat except she didn't have a sore throat. (The ped thought it might be mono. So far I'm thinking no, but I'm still not 100% sure.) HATE HATE HATE our emergency room. HATE.

We're doing a lot of work in the garden. (I know I have never posted pictures. They'd be really boring.) Right now we're filling the raised beds with dirt. Oh, I thought I'd told you about the raised beds but I just remembered that that was in the post that got eaten. We had this old rickety deck (one of those "no permit required because no segment is 8' or larger and nothing's attached to the house" construction deals) ouside our back door, and we'd meant to take it down for months but never got around to it until we realized how utterly perfect it would be if we "repurposed" (thank you craftzine) it into the raised garden beds we needed. Perfect. So much easier than starting from scratch, and as a bonus we evicted (and squished) a whole bunch of black widows and gave ourselves more backyard in the process. Filling the raised beds is a lot of hard work and oh my gosh the mosquitoes are awful in the evenings and oh my gosh it was hot during the days this weekend, but it's going OK. OK and slowly.

Also over the weekend (it was a very busy weekend), I qualified for my concealed-carry permit. It's something I've meant to do for a very long time and T finally made me stop putting it off. So that was good.

AND I spent much of my "free" time last week -- up through Sunday night -- writing a history paper. It was supposed to be 7-10 pages in 12-point type and it ended up being ten full pages in 11-point type and I still felt like I was leaving a lot of stuff out. Note to self: Next time pick a nice tidy topic like World War II or European history, and not the International Geophysical Year. That'll be easy, because I never want to hear the phrase "International Geophysical Year" again. Ever. Starting now.

I am all twitterfied. No, not the Bambi kind, the twitter.com kind. There's a link over there --> which you can use to "follow" me, if you like. Twitter is handy because I can do a quick little update without having to do the whole Major Blog Post (Must Be Coherent) thing. You might try it. It's not addictive per se because I just use it in conjunction with my Google Reader and Facebook so it hardly adds any time at all to my Wasted Hours Sucked Away By The Internet tally.

I got a whole bunch of TV seasons on DVD from the library today. When I reserved them I kind of figured they'd arrive all staggered-like, but noooo, now I have like forty gajillion hours of old TV to watch in three weeks. Can I just say that I have no idea why "Full House" was ever so popular? STUPID. GAG. And yet I can't -- look -- away. Maybe they have inserted subliminally-perceptible images of Cadbury Roast Almond bars between the frames, or something.

OK, now I'm hungry.

And I think thatisall. Goodnight.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Am I so white and nerdy?

I frequently refer to myself as a "nerd". Really, when I say that, I am aspiring to a level of greatness that I suspect I do not quite achieve. Case in point: I never got any higher than trigonometry in mathematics (yet), I don't play any computer games, and frequently the higher-level stuff in xkcd comics flies over my head with an audible whoosh. But if I take away my nerd status, where does that leave me? Then I'm just... a dork. A grammar-nazi, Austen-reading, socially backwards dork. Which doesn't sound nearly as cool as "nerd", which is why I cling to the inaccurate term as hard as I can. Here, though, is the ultimate test: Would Weird Al call me nerdy? We'll go line-by-line through his modern nerd rap anthem and find out.

They see me mowin'
My front lawn
Actually, my son mows my front yard. So this is 0 for 1.

I know they're all thinking
I'm so White N' nerdy
Lots of people did think I was nerdy. Or do. 1 for 2.

(Think I'm just too white n' nerdy
Think I'm just too white n' nerdy
Can't you see I'm white n' nerdy
Look at me I'm white n' nerdy!
I wanna roll with-
The gangsters
But so far they all think
I'm too white n' nerdy
Think I'm just too white n' nerdy
Think I'm just too white n' nerdy
I'm just too white n' nerdy
Really, really white n' nerdy)
Nothing to comment on there.

First in my class here at M.I.T.
Um, no. Had I attended MIT I'm sure I would have been far nearer the bottom of my class. Yet I didn't even attend MIT, or, for that matter, any university; only in my 30's have I even begun at the local community college. This one counts as two and I don't get either of them. 1 for 4.

Got skills, I'm a champion of D&D
I have never even held one of those freakish little gazillion-sided dice in my hand. 1 for 5.

MC Escher: that's my favorite MC
Hey, I like Escher! 2 for 6.

Keep your 40; I'll just have an Earl Grey tea
Don't drink alcohol; do like Earl Grey. 4 for 8.

My rims never spin; to the contrary, you will find that they're quite stationary
Definitely true. 5 for 9.

All of my action figures are cherry
I... don't have any action figures. 5 for 10. Slipping again!

Stephen Hawking's in my library
I think we have A Brief History of Time around here somewhere. The line doesn't say I have to have read it. 6 for 11.

My MySpace page is all totally pimped out
I got people begging for my top 8 spaces
My MySpace page is the default template and almost entirely empty. Drat. 6 for 12.

Yo I know Pi to a thousand places
No. I only know it to four or five places. I AM SO EMBARRASSED. 6/13.

Ain't got no grillz but I still wear braces
I've never had braces. Dang! 6/14

I order all of my sandwiches with mayonnaise
What does this have to do with nerd-dom? Do hip people not like mayo? I do. 7/15

I'm a whiz at Minesweeper; I can play for days. Once you see my sweet moves, you're gonna stay amazed:
my fingers movin' so fast I'll set the place ablaze.
I used to be pretty good at Minesweeper, back when options for time-wasting on the computer were more limited (i.e. before I had Internet access). 8/16

There's no killer app I haven't run
This is definitely not true. There are dozens of killer apps I've never even heard of. 8/17.

At Pascal, well, I'm number 1
I have never done real programming. I should just hang up the nerd jacket RIGHT NOW. 8/18.

Do vector calculus just for fun
See above re: never got above trig. I do, however, do algebra problems for fun. But that's not the line, is it? Nope. 8/19

I ain't got a gat, but I've got a soldering gun
No. 8/20

Happy Days is my favorite theme song
I cannot tell a lie: I do not have a favorite theme song, but if I did, "Happy Days" would not be it. 8/21

I can sure kick your butt in a game of ping pong
Too much manual dexterity involved. 8/22

I'll ace any trivia quiz you bring on
I am pretty good at trivia, as long as it doesn't involve popular culture, which it always does, so no. 8/23.

I'm fluent in Java Script
If you call copying-and-pasting "fluency". 8/24. Only 1/3 nerd and going downhill fast!

as well as Klingon
On my list up there, I forgot that I have only ever seen maybe three episodes of Star Trek in my life, and I watched those less than a year ago. 8/25

(Here's the part I sing on: Chorus)

They see me roll on my Segway
Don't have a Segway; don't really want one. 8/26.

(I know in my heart they think I'm
white n' nerdy!
Think I'm just too white n' nerdy
Think I'm just too white n' nerdy
Can't you see I'm white n' nerdy
Look at me I'm white n' nerdy
I'd like to roll with-
The gangsters
Although it's apparent I'm too
White n' nerdy
Think I'm just too white n' nerdy
I'm just too white n' nerdy)
(or... not, apparently)

How'd I get so white n' nerdy? I've been browsing, inspectin' X-men comics; you know I collect 'em.
I am so not a comic-book person. what is this, 8/27 now.

The pens in my pocket? I must protect 'em.
I carry pens in my purse or in my school bag but I have never owned a pocket protector. People in elementary school would throw around the term "pocket protector" when they teased me about my nerdiness and I actually had no idea what they were talking about; I never saw one in person until I was an adult. 8/28.

My ergonomic keyboard never leaves me bored
I do actually seriously heart my ergonomic keyboard, and MUST have one. 9/29.

Shopping online for deals on some writable media
I have bought writable media online! On sale even! 10/30.

I edit Wikipedia
I did once. They had the name of a local business wrong and I fixed it. That totally counts! 11/31.

I memorized Holy Grail really well. I can recite it right now and have you ROTFLOL.
Well. Not the whole thing, but enough parts that I am going to go ahead and give myself the point. 12/32.

I've got a business doing websites
Had one in 1998. I even hand-coded all the HTML. 13/33.

When my friends need some code who do they call?
Me! Well, sometimes. 14/34

I do HTML for them all. Even made a homepage for my dog!
Not my dog. Does my husband's car count? No? Dang. 14/35. There goes my streak.

Yo! Got myself a fanny pack. They were having a sale down at the GAP.
I don't have a fanny pack, although I did in 1989 when they were cool when more than five people owned them. 14/36.

Spend my nights with a roll of bubble wrap. POP POP! Hope no one sees me gettin' freaky!
I like bubble wrap as much as the next guy, but I wouldn't go this far. 14/37.

I'm nerdy in the extreme and whiter than sour cream. I was in AV club
Our school didn't have one; N/A.

and Glee club
I was! 15/38

and even the chess team!
No. (I am terrible at chess; it's that whole "strategizing and planning ahead" part that gets me.) 15/39.

Only question I ever thought was hard was: do I like Kirk, or do I like Picard?
See above re: Star Trek. 15/40

I spend every weekend at the Renaissance Faire
LOATHE Renaissance Faires. Well, not loathe, that's too strong a word, I guess. But they just don't float my boat. I am more a "county fair" type. 15/41.

I've got my name on my underwear!
I don't now, but when C catches up to me in size we're going to have to resort to this, I'm thinking. 15/42.

(They see me strollin'
They laughin'
And rollin' their eyes 'cause
I'm so white n' nerdy
Just because I'm white n' nerdy
Just because I'm white n' nerdy
All because I'm white n' nerdy
Holy cow I'm white n' nerdy)

I wanna bowl with the gangsters
I haven't bowled since I was a teenager. I was very, very bad at it then, but I liked it. But I would never particularly want to do it with gangsters. All in all, this would be a 'no'. 15/43.

(but oh well it's obvious I'm
white n' nerdy
Think I'm just too white n' nerdy
Think I'm just too white n' nerdy
I'm just too white n' nerdy
Look at me I'm white n' nerdy!)

As we have demonstrated, I am not. I am only 34.88% nerdy, according to Weird Al, who ought to know. It's like... like I don't even know who I am anymore. *sniff.* I think I'll go play some Scrabulous to cheer myself up.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

putting the "ideal" in "idealized"

I've been thinking lately about male literary characters written by women. There's a certain kind of guy in books aimed at women who, though very well-written, is obviously the feminine ideal of a man, who may or may not exist anywhere in nature (but I'm betting on 'not'). For instance (ooh, goody, a list!):

• Cal, created by Jennifer Crusie in Bet Me. Cal is well-off, good-looking, sensitive, popular, and fun. OK, you say, I know lots of guys like this. Me too. Well, not lots, but shut up Rachel, they get the picture. The thing about Cal, though, is that he is falling for this woman, Min, who is plus-sized, although we never learn how plus-sized. Now, I am THE LAST WOMAN IN THE WORLD to say that well-off, good-looking, sensitive, popular, fun, and sane guys can't fall in love with plus-sized women. Happens all the time. But for those men to find the plus size to be a positive factor? For said men to discourage -- not just politely keep their mouths shut, which all men should know is wise, but to actively discourage their plus-sized love interests from losing any weight because they prefer round women? I'm sorry, but that just smacks of female fantasy right there. Liking curves? Fine; I don't think most real men want to get into bed with a skeleton with skin on, regardless of what Madison Avenue and the Hollywood might try to tell us. Not minding the extra weight? Totally believable, because most men are not jerks who can't love a woman if she's not fresh off a magazine cover. But most of the men I have heard of who actively want their women to put on extra pounds, beyond just avoiding being "skinny", are not... exactly... as normal as Cal. Nice idea, Ms. Crusie. Great book, and thank you for the lifelong Krispy Kreme craving. But I just don't believe you.

• James Fraser in Outlander and the rest of that series. Lots of women (many of whom I have met on the Internet) are full-out in love with Jamie, who is strong and handsome and rugged and virile and sensitive and loving and not afraid to cry and just flawed enough and he has red hair and of course a nice body and he's tall and twenty-three years old and he speaks with an enchanting and linguistically inaccurate burr. And he wears a kilt. There are thousands of pages with Jamie on them, and in every one of those pages he becomes more and more of a mythic creation. Men, if you are unsure what women want, do yourself and your lovelife an enormous favor and spend a few days reading these books, and then make yourself over accordingly and you'll have scores of a certain type of single woman knocking down your door in droves.
  
  Except, oh yeah, your average ordinary guy would rather, um, not. Wear a kilt. Or cry. Or, let's face it, be an enthusiastic virgin on his wedding night as he marries an older woman with vastly more experience. (Well, maybe that one.) And a note to women: most near-strangers to whom you end up having to marry yourself under an assumed identity in order to keep nefarious and corrupt British soldiers from harming your person -- meanwhile keeping said man out of prison and possibly saving him from hanging -- will not end up being this congenial. Perhaps this is because the author was free to take her favorite qualities of a modern male and combine them with the best qualities of a 1740's Scottish hero and then put them in a form that most women find rather appealing. In other words, Jamie only works because he is completely made up.
  
  Of course, the entire romance subgenre (I am an expert in this because I read five Silhouette romances when I was a teenager) is thickly populated with unrealistic ideal men, but I'm not counting them because a) they tend to be less well-developed than the two I've mentioned, for page-count reasons if nothing else and b) nobody expects them to be real; they are there to serve the heroine and the author and her legions of readers and everyone pretty much knows that. Whereas there are many, many women -- I've met some -- who now fantasize that some kind of red-haired kilt-wearing sword-wielding Gerard Butler clone is just around the corner, because his creator did such a good job making women believe in him. I remember Diana Gabaldon mentioning, maybe at a reading or maybe in an interview, that her husband told her that Jamie Fraser isn't a real guy; he's a woman's conception of a guy, which is totally different, and exactly what I'm talking about here.
  

Rachel, you are saying, hello, fiction? Escape? Ringing any bells? I know, I know, I don't mean to sound like I expect every man ever created in fiction to be straight out of real life. The topic seemed interesting to me when I started writing ;), and I meant to be much clearer about what sets these authors and their creations apart from the ordinary imaginary men we all like to read about, but I don't have time. I also meant to do more than two, but I have a history paper to write and dinner to plan. Any others you can think of? Do you disagree with me about these?

Monday, April 14, 2008

I can only laugh because it wasn't [shudder] a centipede

(Seriously, just typing that subject line is making my body feel funny. I'd go delete it but then I'd have to look at it.)

This afternoon we were taking the dog on our usual stroll to the mailbox (which, sadly, DOES NOT COUNT as exercise, even though it's a quarter of a mile each way) when we noticed that Smokey had a lizard. Now, we live in the country, hope to have a garden, and possess fruit and nut trees. Hence, there are a few kinds of small animals whose consumption by Smokey we at least ignore, if not actively encourage. (Gophers, I am looking at you.) But all lizards are protected species as far as we are concerned, and they're also bad for cats, so I got Smokey to let go of the poor thing, and it promptly disappeared. I was ruffling the grass trying to make sure that it got far enough away before I let go of the cat, when I felt a suspicious... tickling sensation... on my shin. Which was and is covered by my jeans. No way, I thought. That only happens in movies.

And, apparently, in my front yard.

I don't mind reptiles; except for venomous ones, I actually really like them. This doesn't mean, though, that I didn't yelp a little bit at this point while engaging in a very silly-looking one-legged Lizard Dislodging Dance, to the immense amusement of my children. The lizard made good his escape (at this point, he probably wished the cat had just gone ahead and finished him off), fortunately before I had to resort to the removal of any clothing, which would have traumatized everyone concerned including the lizard, the cat, and the dog. Not to mention any neighbors who might have happened to drive by.

Moral of the story: This is why tapered jeans with (artfully mismatched) socks over the zippered cuffs should have stayed in fashion.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

I did it again.

Fringe benefit of this exercise program: Scout thinks I am an angel from heaven. Or at least the coolest alpha dog in the world. WALKIES!! Walkies for MILESES!! (Hey, two miles qualifies as "miles".) Also, there is an adorable little family of Canada geese (or maybe just brant geese? I think Canada geese are maybe bigger), with a little huddle of goldeny babies, living on a pond that is exactly at my turnaround point, which is a great motivation not to cheat and give up early.

So, anytime with the strong, sculpted calves that look great under above-the-knee skirts, right?

Friday, April 11, 2008

stupid ***** class.

I am not one of those inexplicable people who NEED TO RUN. Know what I mean? The ones who just feel that their day isn't right unless they've got out there in whatever kind of nasty or nice weather and pounded the dirt with their shoes for eleventy gazillion miles. I might wish I was one of those people from time to time, in much the same way as I used to wish I could be anorexic when I was in high school. (Thank you, popular culture's conception of the acceptable female form. Thanks so much.) But instead, here is a list of things that I feel I simply MUST do every day or lose part of myself:

1. Read.
   
2. Eat.
   
3. Check my email.
   

I'm going to be brutally honest and not put "pray" on there, even though it should be, because that's more of an external-reminder-needed kind of thing. Ditto "study", "read the Bible", etc.

So. I have no internal motivation to seek any kind of exercise, which is maybe why I have struggled with my weight in some degree or another for my entire life, if you include being ordinary-shaped in high school and wearing a size ten and thinking I was SO SO FAT as "struggling with my weight". But now I have a pretty hefty external motivator, in the shape of a really expensive textbook and a college class, both of whose goals are basically to teach me to feel bad about the way I feed myself and my family, and to encourage me to do better, and oh yeah, to exercise. Often. Often and sweatily. Which is why, today, I (drumroll please)....

jog/walked for two and a quarter miles.

You must understand that other than an occasional brisk walk, frequent easy strolls (which, contrary to my comfortable self-delusions, do not count), and a very brief encounter with a perky British woman named Petra in a Reebok aerobics video who kept telling me I was doing great and to remember to move those ahms, I have not engaged in substantial exercise since I was required to do so. In high school. Three pregnancies, three thousand bowls of ice cream, and nearly half a lifetime [choke] ago. So the fact that I voluntarily chose to begin the famous Couch to 5K Running Plan, with no Mrs. F or Miss H standing over me threatening a bad grade if I gave up, is a testimony to the efficacy of NUTR-10 as a motivator. I am frankly unsure if I will ever make it to the 5K end; at this point I'm just enormously proud of myself for having left the Couch. Once, so far. If I never mention this again, you'll know why. (Where is Mrs. F when you need her?)

Saturday, April 05, 2008

work and play

One of our favorite features of this house is the "forest" that surrounds it in one direction. When we were first looking at the property and trying not to love it, that little quarter-acre (if that) of pines, cedars, and a couple of huge and majestic oaks made it very, very difficult. The kids promptly named it the [name of our road] Forest and began planning tree forts and playhouses and who knows what all kinds of imaginative, fanciful kids' play right out of your favorite early-20th-century British children's novel. We love how it shelters the house from view in that direction; we love the shady, quiet secretiveness of it; we love the row of yellow pines that is absolutely perfect for young climbers; we love that our son has already built a treehouse that any boy would love in our favorite tree in it.

So you can understand that to have to hack it up makes us really sad.

Fortunately, we don't have to cut it down (heaven forbid! Did I scare you?); we just have to trim the lower branches on all the trees. The oaks will be fine as they are, but all the pines have branches going all the way down to the ground, and fire-safety regulations require I think six feet between the ground and the bottom limbs. Having sat on the front porch of our rented house during a dry summer night a few years ago, watching a wildfire advance one bullpine-fireball at a time down the hill across the road from me, I can appreciate the need to manage our "forest" with fire safety in mind, especially since it pretty much bumps up against our house, which is, hello, made of 35-year-old wood and also rather expensive. I just don't like it. Maybe once we're done and the whole thing looks all inviting, with the little meadow of green grass in the middle surrounded by dappled shade, I won't mind so much, but I miss the dark secret forest-ness already, and we've only trimmed maybe an eighth of the trees. Not to mention the fact that now I'm going to really have to put curtains on my bedroom window.

There's always a bright side, though: dragging fifty million (or so) tree branches thirty yards up a steepish hill to our burn pile is great aerobic exercise, something I need in a very bad way. And all that exercise means I feel less guilty about my newest Internet hobby:

Scrabulous.

Please, please play it with me. I'm signed up through Facebook, where you can find me if you know my main email address or my full name or if you email me and tell me you want me to add you; I also just signed up at the regular scrabulous.com website with the username rachel74. Scrabulous is like Scrabble except that you can set it up so that you just play as you can, whenever, and you don't have to sit at your computer through an entire game. And also, you don't have to set it up or put it away. And further also, there's a whole world of people who can play it with me, as opposed to just my family who would usually just as soon not. Please? I shall flail you with more italics if you refuse.

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Books for March

I don't know what happened. March is usually a good reading month for me, but this time I only have two books to discuss. I think the main reason is school, with a side of general busyness. I did have an ongoing transcribing job this month, too, and late-night typing tends to interfere with my late-night reading. I have a good-sized stack of books from the library, but I'm not getting anywhere with them.

ANyway. On with the books. At least I'm posting about them.

1. Songs Without Words -- Ann Packer -- 3.5
   
   • A surface description of this book -- it's about a teenaged girl's attempted suicide and its impact on her family and on her mother's best friend, whose mother committed suicide when the friend was a teen -- sounds rather dramatic and overdone and trashy, but this is a very well-written book, whose issues (not just suicide) are deftly handled. I especially liked the way the author wrote the girl's character; having been a teen (and, let's face it, a thirtysomething) who's been known to go around muttering under my breath to myself about how socially inept and ugly I am, I found Packer's treatment of adolescent-girl mountains-from-molehills angst to be pretty much spot-on. (Excuse me while I go hug my daughter and tell her how beautiful she is.) At times Packer's descriptions of the details of the inner and outer lives of every -- single -- character get a bit old, but this was worth a read all the same.

2. Alas, Babylon -- Pat Frank -- 4
   
   • I read this at my husband's request. He doesn't read many novels, but he does go for the occasional end-of-the-world-as-we-know it apocalypse story, and he thought I might like this one. I did. It's not Lucifer's Hammer (READ THIS NOW THIS MEANS YOU), which was also one of his recommendations for me a decade or so ago, but it's really pretty good. In this 1959 what-if, Frank deals well with the practical issues that would be faced by the survivors of a nuclear holocaust; my favorite aspect of the book, though, is the way it (sometimes quite subtly) contrasts the attitudes and priorities of a life of ease against those where every decision has to be made with survival in mind.
   
   

And that's it. How pitiful is that?