artificial mystery flavor

1. Today was the Junior Rose Festival parade! It's the oldest/largest children's parade in the country, and it goes right by my work. I got to watch a bit of it from a great vantage point in the meeting room while we waited for meeting attendee #4, who got stuck in a parade morass and never made it. (He was warned but did not heed the warning! HEED IT, PEOPLE. It's all fun and games until someone gets stuck behind a pack of 4th graders on unicycles.)
2. 
   
3. this picture is from I don't even know when but I took it, I like it, I'm using it. 
4. I'm playing around with the numbers feature here. I don't like it all bunched together, so there may be some blank space.
5. or not.
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7. I left work an hour early today due to incipient migraine. The weather has been whipsawing back and forth between bright/warm and cloudy/rain/cold. In either state my head is fine, it's just when it's moving from one to the other that I have problems.  I am having many problems this spring. 
8. I'm reading a book about the Mitford sisters called, strangely enough, The Sisters. It's SO DENSE and slow going, but totally enjoyable. Things are picking up now that the sisters are old enough to start having disreputable affairs and shocking politics. 
9. It's for book group. 

mystery books

The teen council at the library did a "blind date with a book" project. They wrapped them up and wrote a hint/personal ad for the book and put them on display. It's pretty cute! Several of them have already gone out. With our system, they can be checked out without unwrapping, which helps preserve the mystery! I haven't checked any out* but maybe I will!

* because my to-read stack is too tall! On the docket: 

• Wolf Hall - still reading this. I love it, but it requires my full attention. The good news is the Thomas problem isn't as bad as it was in the beginning. (everyone is named Thomas!) 
• Saga vol. 4!! I'm so excited to read this! my hold came in and I've got to get it read, but also don't want to just read it in a hurry. 
• Get in Trouble by Kelly Link. BEYOND EXCITED for this one. I love her so much. My hold just came in from the library, but she's reading at Powell's on Wed, so maybe I'll just buy my own copy. 
• The Shadow Cabinet by Maureen Johnson - book 3 of her Shades of London series, which I love! The previous one left off in a very exiting way. 
• Exploding the Phone - for non-fiction book group. Very much looking forward to it! 
• Spear of Summer Grass by Deanna Raybourn. I almost forgot about this one because I checked it out digitally from the library so it's not in a visible stack right in front of me. I wanted to read it when it came out, but it got away from me. The Vaginal Fantasy book group just read it and renewed my interest. 
• Whispers Underground by Ben Aaronovitch. Book 3 of the Rivers of London series. love these books! (also a digital hold from the library.) 

what's on your book stack? 

supermoon spider bites

I think a spider bit me on the face or near-face region last night during the SUPERMOON which seems like it should give me at the very least a minor superpower.  (do supermoons feel super at all now that they happen 3 months in a row, etc.?)  Nothing yet, I WILL KEEP YOU POSTED.

Zinnias are wonderful and no one will ever convince me otherwise. So if you've got some problem with them keep walking pal. 

RANDOM FOUR (OR FIVE): 

•I'm sad that So You Think You Can Dance is over for the season, for this was a very good season! I loved this take on the show and how it has changed for the better. The author of that piece has stronger feelings about Adam Shankman than I do, but I 100% agree about the fabulousness of Cat Deeley. She's the best! 

•spider season - I have to admire the optimism of the spider that builds a web across the front door every day. 

•this is the part of summer that is hard. It's still summer in spirit, weather, and fact but the days are getting shorter, the kids are back in school and wah. Winter is coming. 

•Finally watched Season 2 of Game of Thrones. I enjoy it, but it's really murdery.  I have to turn my head a lot. 

•I found a bunch of local garden blogs and am now filled with ideas and a sense of inadequacy! Woo! But I don't mind feeling inadequate to a task (some tasks, I should say)  - it takes the pressure off, somehow. 

Same Zinna picture but different.

and now to bed - I'm sleepy!

when your world is full of strange arrangements

(this picture from nine years ago (9!) came up in my flickr stats today.  Have you been to the redwoods? You should go.) 

ha ha! I just deleted a bunch of wah wah stuff and it feels GREAT. I will say that today was a weird one for me and I felt manic yet sluggish at the same time which is a gross combo. But my normal brain is returning for which I am grateful. 

THOUGHTS/ QUESTIONS/ OBSERVATIONS: 

• were 2006/7 peak blog years? I mean personal blogs. It feels like so many people have either gone pro or gone to Facebook and I just kind of miss the old freewheeling days of WHATEVER out in the open by anybody. I know this is largely replaced by Twitter for many and that's cool, but still. 

• I am super digging the Mad World book and am so happy they're already at work on volume 2. MORE ON THIS in the future when I will also include a bunch of pictures and videos. 

• My old computer won't even turn on and on the one hand it's fine because I have a newer, functional computer and I can get whatever I need off of the backup (I THINK), but on the other hand aaaaarrrrgghhh. Just do what you're supposed to do, brick of plastic! 

• So, I've been listening to some ABC (thank you, Mad World book) and my favorite part is always when Martin starts talking to himself. "Martin, maybe one day you'll find true love. (heavy sigh)" ha ha ha ha! The Best! 

• ho ho - I just deleted (or delted, if you like Original Typo Style) something else that is not worth devoting any infinite free space to. Ha ha! take that, THOUGHTS. 

in list form

1. I have 9 different nail polishes on 6 fingers.

2. I'm reading The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith aka J.K. Rowling. I like it! She has such a gift for description and I'm enjoying the slow unspooling of the story.

3. Sewing, sewing, sewing. Not as fast as I'd like, but that's entirely my own doing.

4. Do you ever have one of those snakeskin moments where you just want to shed whatever stupid thing you've cloaked yourself in and start all over? ME TOO.  It's fine, though! Great, even. If you stop evolving what's the point?

5. I miss mixes - Leslie made me a Prince one (which is fantastic), but it just underlined how lacking in mixes my ears are! So I'm working on one. It is so ridiculous it makes me laugh whenever I think of it. HahaHA. I don't even care if I get caught laughing to myself is how much fun it is!! Do you still make mixes in this ipod age?

6. In the Questlove book (which is excellent) there is a section about roller skating with Prince and it is everything you would hope a memoir retelling of roller skating with Prince would be like. Read this book!

7. Speaking of books, I recently read a romance novel that was written in the 90s. Oh, man. That was a long time ago - the culture has changed dramatically and some things did not age well. It was hard to finish, but I did. I mean, it wasn't quite 45 year old Greek Billionaire who "romances" his 18 year old ward/secretary but it was written so long ago that OJ Simpson was a minor character as a sports guy. (!) (I'm just going to let "so long ago that OJ Simpson was a minor character" stand in for all the things that bothered me. It's enough.)

8. There was more, but now I am TIRED so I'm going to bed.

9. I love sleeping!! Not an inordinate amount or anything, but I'm an enthusiast. WOOOOOOO, sleep!

up to the minute reading

What a weirdly underwater day. I don't know what the deal is - maybe just mid-winter malaise.

to counteract, a list!

Books I just finished or am just finishing: 

Are You My Mother? - Alison Bechdel: I feel like I should have liked this more than I did. The art is amazing - as good as anything I've seen from her (Fun Home), but I only connected intermittently to the story. This book is about her relationship with her mother and is very meta (a book that's largely about writing the book and how hard it is to write the book and why won't her mother report back on the book and what does her therapist think of the book) and features a lot of heavy duty capital A Analysis.  I can see how it resonates for many, but it wasn't a Love It book for me. The art is really good, though.  (4/5 stars)

Winning the Wallflower - Eloisa James: I've read and enjoyed another Eloisa James book, so when I saw this novella for free on Amazon, I jumped at it. I've been reading it in the middle of the night on my ipod when the cats are having late night cat insanity. She's a good writer but I think the novella form is not for me, at least as far as romances are concerned. There's just not enough time. I should say novellas about a couple I've already read a novel about would be fine - it's just this so few pages with relative strangers to accomplish so much - it was a little wham bam for my delicate middle of the night cat insanity minder sensibilities. (and not just wham bam but wham bam I love you I want you you're beautiful let's get married have children and thwart the expectations of your parents and my odious cousin the duke - in less than 100 pages.)  I will certainly read more of her full length novels, but this was too much and too little all at once. (2/5 stars)

My Journey to Lhasa - Alexandra David-Neel: first of all - check her out - she had ADVENTURES and lived to be 101. This book is concerned with a trip she took with her adopted (adult) son into Tibet in the 1920s. Westerners were not allowed, western women certainly not allowed, so she disguised herself as a Tibetan pilgrim and snuck in. She spoke a lot of languages, thought quickly on her feet, and had an extreme tolerance for hunger and altitude. I'm about 60 pages from the end and she just thwarted some robbers. (!!!) It reminds me of the Odyssey in a lot of ways - they travel and have adventure after adventure (some of them very similar) before finally arriving at their destination of Lhasa. I had a little trouble slipping into the book at the beginning, most of which I chalk up to not being used to her cadences - but now that I'm acclimated it's easy going. Now to finish off the last little bit! This was for book group and everyone liked it. (4/5 stars)

next up: Hamlet (I was having Shakespeare FEVER and decided to start back into it with the play I'm most familiar with - a friend is reading at the same time, so we're having a mini read-along. Although I don't think either of us is past Act 1 yet.)

a nap cat list

•Haircut today! It's short and exceptionally smooth since she flat ironed it. And when I say flat ironed, I mean constructed an architectural model of the flat iron building into an elaborate hairdo!  (no I don't, but it makes me laugh to think of it - like the elaborate ship hairdos of OLDEN TIMES.) In flat iron reality, it's an angled bob short enough to have me worrying about having a cold neck all the time.  But super cute!

•perhaps time to make a scarf inventory

• the striped cat is napping on my arm between me and the keyboard. He does this every night. When he was a kitten, it was nbd because what kind of weakling can't type with a sleeping kitten on her wrist? (besides one allergic to cats, of course.) But he's well beyond tiny kitten size now and keeps hitting the space bar and the trackpad button with his big butt or paws or tail.

• I'm reading a book that's many days overdue at the library. It's the new Timothy Egan about the photographer Edward Curtis, and it's SO GOOD! He just visited the scary J.P. Morgan to ask for money and I swear a whole novel (or many novels) could be written about how Morgan gave his money away. I'll find a quote tomorrow, but right now it's too hard to reposition the cat, get the book, etc. etc.  Anyway - it's very good. Highly recommended! If you have someone on your gift list who is interested in history, non-fiction, the American west, Native Americans, and photography save yourself some trouble and just buy this book for them right now!

•I'm blogging more this month. I've been missing it, but it's hard to get back into the swing of it without pressing hard on the reset button. So while that happens, there will probably be a lot of photo posts.

• there's more, but it can wait until tomorrow! (because I will be back tomorrow - maybe earlier in the day will foil the butt-typing nap cat.)

what comes to mind

•It's 11:59 PM  and raining and this picture doesn't have anything to do with anything, other than I made a quick stop to flickr before I opened up the blogger page, noticed that this only had 2 views and thought "goddammit, that's a pretty flower" so here it is.

•I just set my itunes on random and it's playing My Mathematical Mind by Spoon. I love this record and  haven't listened to it in a long time. first video is a live version - man, Britt Daniel has such a great rock music voice. Second video is the album version, but with footage from old educational films. Pretty rad.







 • I'm finally feeling better enough to say I feel better. I'm like 92% there, which is good. This infection bullshit is some BULLSHIT. For a while there it felt like I was just putting out one fire after another but now everything feels like it's moving from the core to the surface on its way out. Although I do still have two perfectly round white spots on my left tonsil which anger me. They don't hurt, but they're lurking around like "aw yeah, we gots some more infectionsssss for you." Ha ha! I am going to drink a lot of water and go to bed shortly. Take THAT you little assholes.

• Halloween! I love it, but it stresses me out. Mostly because I think that I should plan a perfect costume and make myself go out and show it off, but I don't because I guess I don't really want to? I don't know.   In my mind Halloween should be one of the fun, slapdash shambley holidays - more costumes made out of tinfoil or cheesecloth and fewer 'sexy cookie monster' costumes. But seriously - why do I care what other people or doing, or that stores have had Halloween stuff up since Labor Day?! Ugh.  Probably because I have invented some dumb reason! (inventing some dumb reason is now my brain's originally part time but now shading into full time job. You need some dumb reason for something, just ask me and I will hook you up.)

•I returned an internet bought raincoat to the store today.  Store clerk asked if there was something wrong with it, I said "the color" (an unfortunate orange.) The clerk agreed, saying "it is rather barfy." Thank you for the radical honesty and the refund!

•I AM SO TIRED OF THIS ELECTION CYCLE. I can't even imagine how insane it is in a swing state.