Missives from the Birdcage

a-ha!

I know, I know, everyone has seen it already...

 

And yet. There are several points of awesomeness here. You know, besides the Take on me in jaunty accordion style.

1. The camera is crooked. It is like watching the happiest band of the Titanic play on while the deck lists to starboard.

2. Those plastic sunflowers.

3. They are dressed like a Depression era Salvation Army band.

4. That ginormous landscape painting in the background.

5. So jaunty!

No comment necessary. Right?

 

That's right. Llamallamallamallamallamallamallamallamallama....

Kick in the Pants

Apparently, the economy is having an impact all around. There was still shooting last night, but it was nothing like last year. I guess ammo is an expensive luxury no one can really afford in this economy. We both commented this morning that it sounded like fewer people shooting, and less being shot by those who did.

Well, I hope it was enough to scare 2011 away for good, because I, for one, really don't want to see it come back. Here's a kick in the pants for you, 2011! And don't come back!

Honey bun

Well, most of the deadlines have been wrapped up (there's a couple of stragglers, but what can you do?), so I've let out a biiiiiiiiig sigh this weekend. As soon as the new year opens I'm back on the treadmill set to high, but I have a couple of weeks of visiting family and reading novels and maybe even knitting something, in store....

Mr. P's birthday was this last weekend, so I took him out to dinner at his favorite local restaurant. (They still haven't sorted out their seating issues, but the food is purdy darn good. And who can resist tater tots?). I attempted to surprise him with his birthday gift, but was foiled by logistical issues. I got him storage for his tools, but when the larger of the two chests (this one) came out on the palate I knew it wasn't going to fit in my car by itself, never mind with the second one. So I had to call Mr. P to come to the store to pick up his own gift. Not exactly the surprise I was going for....

I also took him to see the musical South Pacific. It had gotten a pretty good review in the New Yorker a while ago, and I must admit that I love the movie. (Yes, yes, it trades in all sorts of uncomfortable and icky stereotypes. But still. How can you resist 101 pounds of fun?)

 

Wellllll.... the ensemble numbers were good. And the guy who played Billis (though younger than he should have been) was funny. All the singing was good. But the leads for the traveling show.... Uhm.... let's just say that we know why they are in the traveling show.They both sang well, but they both had some major accent issues that were totally distracting. Nellie kept claiming to be from Arkansas, but she was sliding all over the eastern seaboard every time she opened her mouth. She was one part New Jersey and one part Scarlett O'Hara. And zero parts Little Rock. I might have been able to live with the Scarlett O'Hara thing (okay, maybe not, but it wouldn't have been quite so bad) if she'd managed to just stick with it. Every time she spoke it was a little shocking. (She was fine when she was singing).

But she wasn't half as distracting as Emile. He is supposed to be French, but before he'd finished his first sentence I was thinking, "He sounds.... Argentinian. Or Chilean....." And then I thought, wait, he sounds like....

 

And trust me.... that isn't good. During the intermission we looked in the playbill and discovered that the actor is from Uruguay. Mr. P thought he looked and sounded like Dracula, which puts a whole new spin on things (Emile does say he had to leave France because he'd killed a man.....).

We finished up the weekend by watching an absolutely terrible, I mean mind-blowingly-bad, movie, and eating red velvet birthday cake. Yeay, Mr. P! Happy Birthday, Love!

My precious

I just got an email that some neato fat quarters I ordered aaaaaaaaages ago are finally coming. I might even be able to enjoy them if I survive this weekend and the imminent deadlines.

Skips

I've been totally obsessing over having a pair of shoes made for months. I found this woman on etsy a couple of years ago and have been coveting a pair of skips from her ever since. I mean, are these not the cutest things ever?

She makes heaps of things, and admittedly, I'm not so much into the pointy toe end of the spectrum, but these? I lovelovelove the two on top. Love. LOVE.

But as with things like this, it's tough to get into the queue to have them made. I check her site often, hoping that exactly the pair I want will pop up in my size, in the color I'm looking for. Thus far, it hasn't happened, though it's been close a couple of times. I've been right on the verge of buying more than once, thinking, well, Toffee is close to Marmite, right? (It totally isn't). And then I catch myself at the last minute, telling myself, no, no, I'll try to get into the bespoke queue. But, you know, she's a one woman operation, and you can only make so many shoes a month, so she only takes so many orders. I sat, poised, at my computer at the start of the month, waiting for the queue to open, and...... denied. I was suddenly transported back to my youth, obsessively calling over and over and over, hoping to sneak into ticketmaster's phone lines to pick up those seats to see U2. I never did get to see them.

Part of my obsession with these shoes is that the internets make it possible for me to be looking at them at 3am when insomnia takes over. And they are not the only pair of bespoke shoes over which I obsess. These, for example, I covet deeply. And part of it is that I have wanted, for many many many years, to learn how to make shoes. Where does one pick up this skill? I remember going to a shop on Ludlow Street in the city, years ago (years after I'd lived on the street, but around the time when it started to become a hipster paradise), and there was a woman there who would make bespoke shoes. She was in the back shaping stacked leather heels on a gorgeous pair of shoes, and it suddenly occured to me that learning to make shoes was a possiblity that existed in the universe. I've just never been able to figure out where, exactly.

Of course, even if I were to find a place to learn this skill, I'm sure it would take years and years to figure out how to make anything cute and wearable. So I'm back to trying to get into the bespoke queue.

Fasten your seatbelts

So I haven't been around these parts for a while.... the last couple of months have been a bit like this:

 

Nothing too earth shattering, mind you, just constant. Highlights?

• New professional responsibilities-- some super interesting ones, but new always = extra time, right?
• I have now learned what IRB is. FEEL MY PAIN.
• An opera! We went to see Aida. I've always wanted to see Aida. I probably should not have made Richmond my first Aida experience. I should have realized from the last time, but hope springs eternal in the human breast. This time around, no ninjas. Yeay! Singing okay, but.... it was a bit like watching an opera-Menudo video mashup. Or, actually, it was kind of like watching the cast of Aida get lost on The Reflex set.

 

• Got to go on a work trip to Chicago that involved visiting lots of museums-- exicting!
• Went to see Wicked. Which was a much better production than Aida. The woman who played Glinda was HI-larious.
• Took on extra projects that all have deadlines in the middle of all the other deadlines. Sigh.
• Went to an awesome museum geek conference where I got to embrace my secret love of data. 

Basically, in the last few months I haven't had a single day where I didn't have to work on something for someone that was due immediately. It's Thanksgiving, and I have five looming deadlines of things that need to be done by Sunday morning, plus pies to bake. (Also, as a sidenote, I had an epic journey trying to get a Tofurky. Not because, as I would have expected, it is not a product carried by the grocers of, ahem, Richmond, but because every. single. place. sold. out. I'm not kidding. Even Whole Foods. I did, finally, find the one place that hadn't-- yeay Trader Joe's! Not that you should get any ideas here-- on this journey Richmond went ahead and performed true to character in the form of two redneck-hiphop styled teenaged boys who were filling out job applications at one of the grocery stores. After explaining to the customer service folks what Tofurkey was one of them looked up and said, "I could kill you a turkey." Which was, you know, 1000000% the opposite of what I was looking for. And he was not being ironic. Five minutes later he asked the customer service person how to spell Charlottsville. Which is apparently something important to his personal history-- you know, his residence is there, or he worked there-- as it was something he needed to put on a job application. Please file under: Not Impress Potential Employers, How To). At one point I hadn't spent more than 18 hours in Richmond, but had been to the airport three times. The upside of this is that we have finally figured out how to use the unmarked secret airport exit that will send us to the road headed toward our house and not the opposite side of town. The downside of it is that, you know, who wants to be at the airport that much?

Here is how hairy it has been:

Why yes, those are my glasses. Not the ones I usually wear, mind you. Those, well, those I broke twice in the last two years and Phil super glued them together. But in September things got so wild that I lost them. LOST THEM. I've never lost a pair of glasses. So I went to the back up pair. Which, within a couple of weeks, had split down the middle. Which left me with the back up back up pair, which sit crookedly on my face and slide down to the end of my nose so that I'm constantly poking myself in the face to push them back into place. It took me two months to get to the eye doctor to get a new prescription. His office is literally around the corner from my house. And? He's open on Saturdays. 

So, yeah. Busy. Need to go make pie. And get back to these deadlines. Wish me reprieve! And how is everyone I haven't been able to talk to since the summer?

Wild ride

This summer has been a wild, wild ride, on all levels, with a whole lotta work to boot. Some big changes that have left me scrambling just to hang on-- but exciting things on the horizon if I manage to do that. In the meantime, it's a bit of a bumpy ride. Which is all to say that if I haven't answered an email you sent me in June...

Speaking of bumpy rides, we made it through the Week Of Natural Disaster (TM) in Virginny, starting, of course, with the earthquake. I know a 5.8 isn't much to old hands at these things, but it was big doin's down here. Not nearly as big as some people seemed to think (yelps that the end times had come seemed, well, misplaced), but big enough  to knock things off shelves at work and at home. There've been aftershocks, but I've only felt two, one of which was a 4.9 that woke up Mr. P and The Kitteh. I, however, was already awake, despite it being 1 in the morning. In both the lead up to the actual earthquake and to the late night, sizeable aftershock, had a headache that went away immediately after the earth started shaking. Which either means that I'm like the cats and dogs that freak out just before an earthquake, or it's just a coincidence.

 

Then five days later, Hurricane Irene. While we were in it, it really didn't seem all that bad-- very, very wet, and sometimes pretty windy, but we left the front door open (just the glass outer door closed) through the duration, so it didn't seem too worrisome. Later, we found out we were just lucky.

I took this on the way to work on Saturday-- a week later. That's the roof leaning against the front of the house. Mr. P passes this way most days and said for most of the week the top was open and you could see right in-- for the first couple of days with the tree still inside. We know quite a few people who lost power-- some for more than a week. We only lost it in short bursts (when we heard transformers blowing up nearby-- probably from trees landing on them). We did lose internet for a week..... Yeah, really not anything to complain about.

The storm blew away our internet, but also brought in a lot of rain and a whole week of cooler tempertures, which was actually pretty awesome. The garden did Not. A. Damn. Thing. this year, pointedly refusing to thrive. I got beans. That is all. Not one tomato (despite having a dozen plants, different varieties). No cucumbers. Even the flowers have refused to bloom. Actually, most things have looked terribly diseased. But, weirdly, some things seemed to like the abuse of Hurrican Irene dropping ten inches of water and little (and not so little) branches all over them.

 
I've planted these flowers for three years and this is the first time one has bloomed-- which it has done four times since Irene.

All summer I've had morning glory vines, but no flowers....

And then there's the tomatillo plant, which grew very tall and looked healthy, until we got back from Maine and found two thirds of the leaves had been stripped off, by this:

An enormous tomato horn worm. Since the plant hadn't done aaaaaanything, I just left it out there. The day after Mr. P and I investigated this thing it disappeared.... we assume some bird's super duper dinner. Two days later? Hurricane. Two days later? Three tomatillos finally started growing. Perhaps I just have masochistic plants?

Sadly, neither earthquakes nor hurricanes can disrupt my insomnia. This week's 4:30 am project? Knickers! (American ones, not British ones).

Black courdoroy. I saw a picture of some chick in a magazine wearing knickers and thought, hmmmm.... those look kinda cool. I mean, they kind of remind me of being a kid in the 70s when I feel like I saw people sporting knickers. But I thought, where would I be able to get knickers? Wait! I know! I'll make some!

So I did. I put a shiny button on the cuffs.

Spent a looooot of time reading theory and philosophy today for a project that totally snuck up on me.... Damn those stealth academic projects! In between reading I put some of my haul from the farmer's market into action:

First apple pie of the season. And it is yummy, boy. Ohmnomnom. So I guess all in all not a bad weekend. I had to go to work on Saturday, but got enough done that I didn't have to go in today (the day of the labor), which would have been kind of depressing. Here's hoping that things let up so I can catch up with laundry and novel reading and maybe even blogging and not going into the office.

Birthday, fully capable edition

Yesterday was my birthday, so I took the day off and made myself a birthday giftie....

A cape! It's what all the cool kids and superheroes will be wearing this fall.

It's got split flaps so I can get my arms out.

I kind of can't wait for it to get cold enough to wear.

Extra special bonus-- Mr. P was home yesterday, so we got to hang out and have lunch together on a weekday, no less. Yeay!

Florid....

It's been a busy summer. No, really. Busy. Stupid busy. So we went on a road trip.

To Florida! First night plan: camping in Georgia, right on the Florida border. Plan scrapped when the skies opened up. Instead, we watched a giant puddle swallow cars from the safety of the Days Inn lobby in Stark, Florida.

Plan for day two: Weeki Watchee!

Success! Followed by a couple of days with my dear friend, Fran, with whom I have numerous wacky college memories involving a fair amount of Brooklyn hijinx and terrorizing Ireland. Sorry about that, Ireland.

After a scoot through the Everglades, we headed south. All the way south.

Camping in the Keys. I enjoyed it, though it would have been better if a) we'd had a spot on the beach side of the little road where there would have been a nice breeze. Cause it was pretty hot. And, b) the people next to us had SHUT UP. It is the danger of car camping, of course, that there are going to be people there. Other people, in the spot next to you, which is only fifteen feet away from where you're trying to sleep. And it is a danger of which I am well aware. And yet, I convince myself it will be better this time. Which, of course, it isn't. In the Keys our neighbor told camping stories well into the night. They all started, "This one time, we went camping...." Really. At one point, Phil rolled over toward me and said, "this one time, we went camping, in the Florida Keys, and the asshat in the spot next to us WOULDN'T SHUT UP." It didn't help.

They Keys are purdy purdy, I must say. Wish we'd been able to stay longer.

Then we drove home. The rest of Florida kind of blends in together. We stopped for a dip briefly at the beach in St. Augustine. We spent a night in Palm Beach. We contemplated camping at the Georgia camp site that had been rained out on the way in, but when we got to the exit for it, it was raining. Again. So instead, we stopped in Savannah. Lots of people have told me how nice Savannah is. And the historic part is awfully pretty. But, it became quickly apparent that everyone had failed to mention that the historic part is surrounded by many blocks of serious urban blight. It was a bit of a shock.

We stopped at a wacky flea market on the way out of town, browsed and browsed. Mr. P picked up a couple of neat things, we saw other neat things we couldn't afford, and then we skidaddled on out and headed home to the Mr. Tibbs welcoming committee.

And then there were so many emails in my box it has taken me a week to get through them. Sigh.