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Wednesday, September 30, 2009

daily tweets 9/29/09

• Contemplating a social-network moratorium for a while. Something has GOT to give; there's just not enough time & nothing else is optional. about 12 hours ago from web

I don't think I'll eliminate Facebook and Twitter completely but I am thinking of ways to cut back on my time involvement at those two places. (I don't even do the applications!) I'm too tired to elaborate much on this (why is it that this kind of phrase is always followed by a long rambly paragraph?) but the short version is this: This fall, since the semester started and especially since the kids' school started, I feel like I am always chasing my tail. I never feel caught up, ever. I'm not doing all the school stuff with the kids that I wanted to (no need to call CPS; either the stuff we're leaving out is optional or we're doing it but not every day). I don't feel like I'm doing an adequate job preparing for my own exams and things, although so far they've come out OK. And of course the laundry is never caught up and my room is a total sty and there are some medium-sized projects (framing pictures, painting the bathroom) that I need to do, that I want to do, for which I have all the supplies just sitting there looking at me, and I'm not getting to them because I'm just too busy. I bought an elliptical machine from the classifieds at the beginning of the month and when I bought it I thought I'd have, you know, muscle tone by now, or something, and I've been on the thing once. This situation in general wears on my nerves and stresses me out. I like myself so much better when I'm more relaxed and less stressed out, and yet what can I cut out to make things work better? Two solutions: I have to get up earlier, and I have to not spend so much time staring at this screen. Because I can't just stop doing laundry, much as I would like to.

• Positively giddy at the thought of putting on a sweatshirt. Also, I'm feeling a delicious urge to knit. This is what 72º does to me.
  about 16 hours ago from web

It is cold in here right now. COLD. And it's even way colder outside, to the point where I feel a little sorry for the chickens even though everybody says they can handle cold just fine. It's refreshing, this cool weather, but I find myself wondering why I wanted it so badly when I remember that we haven't gathered a single stick of wood yet, and all we have in the woodshed is last spring's dregs. Goodbye, weekends.

• I want. this room. SO MUCH. http://www.lileks.com/30s/kitchens/10.html via @Lileks 11:13 PM Sep 28th from web

James Lileks is one of my favorite Internet strangers. You know how some celebrities feel like friends*? I've been reading Lileks' Internet stuff since my very early days on the Internet, and I feel very chummy with him even though he doesn't know me at all and we've never met (but he did once reply to one of my replies to one of his Twitter posts, which is the 21st-century equivalent to getting a one-line reply to a fan letter, right?). We like the same things. He makes me laugh. Anyway. Mr. Lileks frequently posts material from vintage catalogs and things, either for purposes of nostalgia or humor (the first thing I saw of his was his "Gallery of Regrettable Food", a collection of food photographs from the 1960's which was so hilariously atrocious that it made my ribs sore for days), and just yesterday he put up pictures from this flooring catalog from the 1930's that filled me with covetous desire in a way that modern interior-design stuff could never dream of doing. I have now decided that I need at least one, preferably several, glass-block walls in my house. Click the link, you'll see what I mean. (The sewing cabinet with the thread rack! I LOVE IT SO MUCH!) Another room from that same catalog that I like a lot is this one, except I would leave out the chickens.

PS My grandmother's house has an exhaust fan EXACTLY like the one in the chicken kitchen. It's not over the stove, though; it's there to circulate warm air from the kitchen into the bedrooms. Because the only heat source for that house is the woodstove, in the kitchen, in one corner of the house. On cold winter nights, I could count on being able to see my breath in my bedroom. I had a huge heap of blankets and slept like a log. Even now I sleep best if there's cold air on my face and warm blankets everywhere else.

*Other celebrity pseudo-pals of mine include Weird Al Yankovic and Brandi Carlile. Who are yours?
*This happens to me with book characters too. Most vivid case ever: the Tillerman family from Cynthia Voigt's books.

Monday, September 28, 2009

Garden, chickens, puppy.

No, I didn't take any pictures; what do you think this is, 2008?

I just wanted to relate that the garden is doing well and we're eating a ton of stuff out of it and that it is a great reminder of how fast the year is slipping by. I was watering it today, thinking about how many weeks of tomatoes I would be enjoying before frost, because after all, we don't generally get frost until the end of September, and that's...

the day after tomorrow.

SERIOUSLY PEOPLE. On a DAILY BASIS I experience this jarring what the frack sensation every time I realize that September? Is over. If you asked me when I was half asleep and didn't have time to consciously think about it before answering I know I would tell you that it was mayyyybe the fourteenth or so, at the latest, but it's gone. Life is like a banging, slamming, speeding, whooshing freight train and my poor wee brain just can't keep up. (This is still the case even though we had C's birthday party on Sunday and I know that her birthday is at the end of the month. The party is over, it was an insane madhouse full of crazy fun and there's no way I can forget that it happened, but I still catch myself thinking that her birthday will be coming up soon and we'll have to start planning for it. Because, you know, it's getting on toward mid-September now. Somewhere. Maybe in the alien civilization where apparently my brain has been forcibly relocated.)

Also: Our chickens have laid two eggs. This just started yesterday. It was a Big Event.

Further also: I forget. (I TOLD YOU.)

Oh yes. Rowsby Woof is getting bigger. He's still very adorable and he still pees everywhere in the damn house without seeming to mind or care that he gets praised for doing it in the grass and scolded for doing it on the floor. And he's teething, which means that nothing is safe, whether I as a reasonable human being would think of it as chewable or not. This includes our couches. Oh well, I've always wanted to slipcover them.

The Day In Tweets: in which I am humbled.

OK, I'm going to try the daily posting of tweets thing. Without further ado*:

• A&P work done. I read half a chapter without taking notes. Feels a little scary, like I should be in hiding from the Studying Secret Police. about 7 hours ago from web

I got a 9/10 on the quiz. I cannot allow this to lull me into a false sense of security about the exam I will be taking this week, though, and I am studying like a maniac. Except when I'm , um, blogging. Or tweeting. Or reading other people's blogs or tweets, or playing Lexulous, or hanging out at Facebook, or eating leftover birthday cake, or idly fantasizing about diving into a giant pool filled with cold tingly diet Coke.

• I have to take a quiz by 4:00 on the entire skeleton. In a week's worth of studying, have now learned... the skull. I am dead meat. about 10 hours ago from web

This was poor planning on my part. In fairness, the skull and the stuff that came before it (bone cells, bone anatomy, bone repair, etc.) made up about half the chapter BUT STILL. Side note: I LOVE this class so, so much. It's right up there with linguistic nerdiness on my list of Favorite Kinds of Stuff to Learn (what, you don't keep track of this too?), but I'm very glad that I don't study in public because it'd look a little odd for me to be sitting, say, on a commuter train, instead of on my couch, feeling my zygomatic arches or pronating and supinating my hand or contemplatively wiggling the condyloid joints in my metacarpals. And you know I would do it.

• I am publicly confessing that I was wrong about what monkey bars are called & my husband was right. (Good thing he can't see this at work.) about 13 hours ago from web

I wasn't very vehement about it, but in my mind "monkey bars" was a generic term for any kind of jungle-gym bars setup (at my elementary school we used to have a set that was vaguely rocket-shaped), and the bars that C likes to do, the ones that are like a ladder lying horizontally and you go hand-over-hand across them, I've always called "horizontal bars." T maintained that horizontal bars were for gymnasts and that C likes monkey bars. He was right and I was wrong and just look at me posting this where he can see it now! Aren't I a good wife?

*I occasionally contemplate closing this blog and moving to blogger where I will have a free blog titled "Further Ado" or maybe "With Further Ado", because really, I am ALL ABOUT further ado. And now the word "ado" looks like a non-word that I've just made up. My work here is done.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

I think I'll put this one right *there*. Hey, where's all this water coming from?

I've just spent half an hour or so updating my blog's stylesheet, which was a waste of time on a level somewhere between "hours of Tetris" and "rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship", but the simple fact was oh my GOSH those colors were ugly. And now they're not, and my soul feels just that much more restful knowing that this is so.

There's been so, so, so much happening that I couldn't possibly decide where to start, so it's a good thing you all are on Twitter and Facebook with me and I don't even need this blog anymore, right?

A related poll: Would you hate it and never come back here if I started posting my Twitter posts at the end of each day? I've seen other people do this, and I've thought of it myself for archiving purposes, especially since almost nobody comes here anymore anyway. If I were to do it I would try to expand a bit on some of the juicier tweets (hey, at least it's a prettier word than "blog"), partly because I wish I could at Twitter and partly because it would make for extra content for people who see my twitter feed anyway, and partly because when I'm sixty and I pull up my old blog on my, I dunno, two-way eyeglass telescreen, I will have forgotten all the backstory for every tweet I ever wrote. (That doesn't actually have to wait 25 years, to be honest.). It could be fun. Or lame and off-putting, either one.