Missives from the Birdcage

Oh Oh Ontario

Lake Ontario, that is. Me and Mr. P took the kayaks out for a spin this weekend, and got some camping and a nature walk as well.

We spent the weekend on Lake Ontario in New York state at Golden Hill state park. We hadn't had a chance to get out camping for quite a while. It was something we used to do quite a bit, and we are car camping masters (if you ignore our regular forgetting of key items-- flashlight, sleeping pads, matches).

It took some doing to find the tent. We own three tents between us-- one cheap two person tent I had when we got married, one pricey, high quality single person tent Mr. P brought to the marriage, and the Target special we bought for a cross crounty tent camping trip a few years ago. The Target special has disappeared, but the other cheap tent has reappeared-- huzzah! We forgot matches. We forgot tinfoil. We forgot butter for the corn. We forgot this and this and this and this. Clearly, we're out of practice. Our list of forgotten things was worse than usual.

 What we remembered, though, is how much we like being outside. We got a bit of rain on the second night and in the morning, and left a bit sooner than we'd thought we might, but the first day and a half the weather was glorious. And the sunset--- whooo!

 

We did get those kayaks out on the lake, too.

 

Like a Zombie

Why? Because I'm coming back from the dead. In the blogosphere, anyway. Where in the hot holy hell have I been?

Bizzy, y'all. Lots of cool and exciting things in the Land of Cleves, in the Places of Muses, in the House of Kittehs. Things have started to settle down a bit-- enough so that my beloved Mr. P decided it was high time that we spend some quality weekend time checking out the great outdoors.

Kayaks! We're going to get ourselves out on the water-- exciting!

New Girl

We decided that Mr. Thibbs might need some company. So there is a new girl in town:

Mr. Thibbs isn't totally sure about this development. 

Actually, he seems to be wondering if this is really going to keep going on or what.

He seems to be trying to tell us something but we can't really figure out what it might be. 

Meet Shazaam! We actually thought we were going to bring home a calico kitteh, but this little girl kept trying to get our attention. She had a rough start-- her ear is clipped and she's blind in one eye from an injury that also crushed her nose a bit when she was very young-- but it doesn't seem to have slowed her down one bit. 

Thibbs seems to be starting to acclimate to having a new kitteh in the house.

Doppelganger Double Down

I have had a plague of doppelgangers. For years, going back to when I lived in New York and everyone thought I was someone named Zoe. Then there are the phone doppelgangers. There are alumni doppelgangers. I have my army of dingbat doppelgangers, who never seem to learn. And they still don't. I get orders for work from a clothing company. I have been thanked for helping out on Staten Island with post-Sandy clean up. I get notices for my season tickets for the Vancouver Canucks. All of my South African friends send me articles about my new Johannesburg neighborhood. The spa in Austin keeps wanting to confirm my facial on Tuesday. A farm in Alabama sent me a notice that my check was ready for pick up.

Yeah.

But all of these have been related to my name. Which is pretty common. Today, I got a new doppelganger. Instead of going to my name-related email address, these came into my other email address. It's a Cambodian word. I set up the email account when I was in grad school, working on Cambodian art history. I've had it for more than a decade. This morning, my Cambodian word email address joined facebook. And sent friend requests to every. single. person. in. Cambodia. And they are ALL confirming. My inbox is completely full of messages from facebook telling me that Samnang and Bun and Srey Na and Chandra and a million other people have confirmed our friendship. So far I haven't seen anyone *I* know. But at the current rate of friending it's only a matter of time.

In the Land of Cleves

Whoo, the last few months have been a blur. I haven't been writing much, but that doesn't mean nothing has been going on....

1. New Job. Yes, indeedy, I started a new gig, at a new museum, in a new field. (Well, not entirely new, but a new title). It's very exciting! I am digging the job, though it has been BUSY. No, no, no.... BUSY. NO, SERIOUSLY. I AM BUSY. All of the times. Every single one of the times is a time when I am busy. But I do like the work, so that's pretty cool.

2. Mr. P went on an Arizona Art Adventure. The sailing was about as smooth as it could be if one were to attempt to sail in the desert. He was gone for a long, long time. He made beautiful work, but he was gone for a long, long time. During which time I moved to a...

3. New City. Cleveland! Yes, I know. It rocks. That is what everyone tells me. Here is the list of things I have seen in Cleveland: 1. My apartment. 2) My gym. 3) The shoreway (it is a road, along the shore of the lake). 4) The museum where I work. (reachable by the shoreway) 5) The grocery store and adjacent Target. That is all, I am told there is a rock and roll hall of fame here. I'm also told that a two minute walk will get me to the Museum of Natural History. I know nothing of these things. See number 1.

4. I am in an apartment for the first time since 2005. It is conveniently located close to the shoreway. Everything else about it is not so convenient. I am on the fourth floor. I have no air conditioning. Heat rises. Sadly, the elevator only rises occasionally. In the first month I was here,  the elevator was broken for sixteen of the thirty-one days of that month. I am now in week seven of my stay here. The elevator is broken again. I came home yesterday to find that someone had parked in my parking space, for which I pay extra. Today they were gone, but I was told that the property manager "misplaced" my parking lease and gave my parking spot to someone else (hence the car in my spot), but that had all been sorted out. This is the second time this has happened since I have been here. I remind you that I haven't even been here two months. This has become OLD. I am very happy that this is temporary.Mr. P is still in RVA with Mr. Thibbs. I miss them both terribly, and can't wait for them to be here.... not in this apartment.

I did get to go to Maine for a bit, which was awesome. I got to see Mr. P, I got to see my family, I got to see Maine. There was kayaking most days. It was not hot. There were many onion rings. I had to work most days, but at least I was looking out at the loons on the bay while it was going on.

So. The Land of Cleves. Now back to work.

New days dawning

Mr. P has graduated! Yay! I'm so very, very proud of him. He graduated, on time, with honors (magna cum laude, suckers!), while working, teaching, having shows, and making art. *And* the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts recently purchased one of his pieces from Flight Patterns for their collection.

Yay!

We moved to Richmond almost five years ago with the plan that Mr. P would be going to school. (There is a long, amusing story associated with the series of oblivious decisions we made in association with this. The take home lesson of which is that there are times when the universe rewards you for being oblivious). Now that he has completed that mission, wheels are in motion to send us on to the next chapter, new adventures, and a whole new part of the country. Details soon, but let us just say that it is perhaps a good thing that my years in grad school got me used to lake effect snow.

Taking a shine to it

Tonight was date night a chez nous, and I took Mr. P for Indian food at a place on the West End. The food was pretty good, we had a lovely time. In the parking lot Mr. P was getting text messages from friends at the 1708 charity auction, so we were sitting in the car while the texting was going back and forth. Parked in front of us was a ginormous pick up truck with a built in tool box across the bed of the truck just behind the cab. A guy appears, clearly the owner of the truck, and he is, shall we say, to type.... big hoss, shaved head, serious accent. He is being followed by a couple, the guy looking like a shrunken version of the truck owner, but stuffed into taking-someone-on-a-date clothes. The woman had big, blonde hair, too much makeup (if I can see it in a dark parking lot twenty feet away, that's too much), and a much too tight black dress that had ruffles and sparkly things on it. As the bald fellow comes into view he says,

Gonna get drunk tonight! whooo-hoo!

Mr. P and I look at each other. The three of them look only a little younger than us. Then, Big Hoss opens up the tool box and reaches in. And pulls out.... a mason jar full of moonshine. Seriously.  He hands it to the woman, who takes a swig, sucks her breath in loudly and then waves her hands in front of her like she's trying to dry just-painted fingernails. We decide we need to get out of there before any of them joins us on the road.

Thank you for playing, no really, there's a reason why that stereotype exists.

Of Opera and Travel

We went to the opera last night. I got season tickets, which is why we keep going to the opera. I can assure it that it is not because of Mr. P's enduring love of Verdi. Indeed, accompanying me to the opera is an example of Mr. P's five-star-ness as a husband.

That said, even he enjoyed seeing The Mikado.

In part because it's Gilbert and Sullivan, and G & S operas are funny. The sets were interesting (still not spectacular, but perfectly servicable and not weird and distracting a la Aida). The costumes were interesting (see comment above re: sets). But also? The guy who played Ko-Ko was hi-larious. The performances of Pooh-Bah and The Mikado were also really good. The rewrite on the list of those whom Ko-Ko would execute was great (hipsters in their skinny jeans with fake fedoras. Right on, brother).

Meanwhile, I got my new passport.

I don't know when this happened, but the new ones are hiiiiiiiiiiiideous. What the hell? Every page has the most hackeneyed, cheesy, pathetically boring and so stereotypical as to be its own characiture picture of "America" on it. When did this happen? Can I get one without the ugly illustrations? It's like the passport Team America would have designed.

And, they don't send your old one back anymore. I asked. (* see update below) I got my last passport in Phnom Penh. My previous one still had about six years left on it, but the lamination came loose and I could pull the picture out. I didn't really think too much about it until 9/11. I was in Chiang Mai on 9/11, visiting a friend who was there to do dissertation research. I managed to get back into Cambodia, but thought that I needed to get that sorted because lots of places were going to be on security lock down. I remembered being really aggrivated that I'd just gotten a new six month Cambodian visa put into that passport and I was going to have to get a new one. In the picture I'm wearing a burgandy button up shirt I'd had made in Hoi An the year before and there are two stitches on my right cheek where the German dermotologist at the international clinic in Phnom Penh had just removed a mole. I had to wait in line at the consulate behind a pile of Americans trying to finalize the adoptions of Cambodian children.

The pages of that passport were filled with Cambodian and Vietnamese visas. There was page after page of entry and exit stamps marking my travels-- flights from Pochentong, arrivals at Bangkok International, motorcycle trips where I crossed out of Vietnam and into Cambodia at Bavet, once, twice, half a dozen times. A stamp at Poipet when I left Cambodia on a motorcycle for the last time, on my way to the Lao border and the untimely, car accident induced demise of my beloved bike and my own shocking survival. Stamps for Paris, Marseille, Paris again. And again. Trips to London. A trip to Spain for a wedding and a zip up the Costa Brava. A couple of weeks in Ecuador.

In a shredder somewhere, I'd imagine.

Also, as Mr. P pointed out, my new passport smells like a new car. Seriously. Which I guess means it's off-gassing. Awesome.

UPDATE: My old passport arrived in the mail today. Yay! I've got Bavet back! Thank you, State Department.

Slip Sliding Away

What would a week without a deadline look like? If you find out, let me know.... SuperStats midterm was the highlight... or lowlight... or maybe just the what-the-hell-is-this-asking-me?-light of last week. So to get past that I used my, ahem, free time (read: time I stole away from other things) this weekend on a project. A craftycrafty project. Mwahahahahahaha!

I made slippers.

I am an inconsistent knitter/crocheter. One of my big problems is patterns. I feel about patterns like I feel about recipes. Which is to say that I can only adhere but so closely to them. Then I start questioning them, then I either make adjustments, or I lose track of where I am in the pattern... This is why I am a pretty good cook, but not a particularly good baker (baking requiring the precision of chemistry, cooking less so). This is also why I've never managed to make a sweater.

So I looked up slipper patterns. I disliked many of them. I tried to follow one, managed to crochet a slipper toe that was large enough to use a sling for the cat, thought about it for a while, and then just decided that I could probably just visualize what needed to be done. Et viola! Slippers!

They were pretty easy, actually, and quick once I'd figured out the sizing. And Mary-Jane-y! Which none of the patterns I saw were, but who doesn't love MaryJanes?

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!