Mid-day snack

The fire alarm just stopped blaring. That was a good little time. Instead of scoping out all the boys, as my friend suggested (while the girls around us lamented that had they *known* about the fire drill, they would have dressed-up and fixed their hair), I entered a reverie about my grade-school days. I began pondering how easily I was manipulated as a little girl. I remembered getting into trouble for lifting up my skirt to prove that I had my gym shorts on...of course incited by a boy. I'm sure that's *exactly* what he'd been hoping for...

It's good to see that things haven't changed, though. Just like in college, us 30-year-olds stood outside the building today and stared wide-eyed at everyone else thinking, "My he's cute....I didn't know that SHE worked here...Oh, god, that's a terrible outfit...Isn't so-in-so still in the building? How come we have to freeze our asses while they're still all toasty?....and lastly, How can I possibly manipulate this so that I don't have to hand in my assignment/do any work today?"
But it was fleeting. Less than 10 minutes later they let us back into the building that now smelled of unidentified-burning-object. Given the rumors of the elevator going afoul, I think I'll take the stairs.

I may not be a good "rule-follower"

I had an epiphany during work last Friday. I realized that while other people have "their special song", I have "my special block." (Yes, OK, what the hell does that mean?) Well, you see, I took stock of the recent events of this about-to-be past January and realized that I have had more than my share of accidents and police run-ins in the mere block distance between my daughter's babyschool and my work. Not to re-hash too much, but there was that SUV that hit Noel and I (back in the beginning of the month when black, crusty snow didn't hamper our walk/piggy-back ride down the sidewalk.) Then there was the policeman that was oh-so-close to ticketing me for parking outside of the babyschool in a zone that was off limits from 8am-noon. (oops.) And then finally, Friday morning I was pulled over for running a pink-ish light (I had already committed to making the light, but the guy in front of me was picking daisies as he drove through the intersection.) The lady cop also was a hair away from dishing out a $114-ran-the-red-light ticket to me, but didn't. She had theorized that I was trying to escape her by turning into the parking garage, but apparently believed me when I insisted that I worked in the building, and actually hadn't even noticed her until I got out of my car. That diffused her enough to have pity on me. Thank god...after the $100 tow incident that was just 4 days previous, I would have problems feeding my baby if I got stuck with another expensive money drain.
So, I don't know whether I'm lucky not to have been hurt and ticketed or whether I should just be pissed that all of this happened at all? If ya didn't know me, you might think that I was a reckless girl....

A five-star birthday

Wednesday Noel turned the big *3*. I am taking the liberty to rate her birthday for her, and I believe it was a 5/5 star time. Here's the proof....

As with any wonderful experience, it should last a long time and there should be chocolate involved. In keeping with that, her birthday has been an ongoing event, beginning with the $12 dessert that she consumed in Boston on Saturday. (Which had the 1st set of birthday candles that she extinguished...there were 3 more sets on more cakes and ice cream in the days following, and likely, there will be one last round still to come...) In fact, the birthday week will continue at least into the beginning of next week (Yay, for those late people who get behind in their mailings and cause holidays to be extended!) As it was, Noel started opening presents Wednesday morning and didn't finish until today, thanks to the excessively generous next door neighbors in particular. She has a very calculated, lovely way of opening presents. The first present that she chose was NOT the one at or near the top, and actually it wasn't the biggest either. But she specifically chose it, not knowing what was inside. (oooh, if I only could know the criteria that a 3 yr-old uses to determine "the best present"...) And when she opens a present, she carefully unwraps the gift, often preserving the bow and wrap. Once it's open she refuses to move on to the next one until she has played with it, if it's a toy, or read it, in the case of a book, or held it up in front of her little body, for clothes. She says "oooooo" as she opens each one, and has never thrown a present aside upon opening it. She has very good manners...

To be certain there needs to be some photography included here, but due to limitations on my flickr account...you must wait a couple days. But 'til then...

New England dressed in white

CT is closed due to inclement weather today. Really I think that "the man" (or whomever it is that makes these decisions about closings) wanted to build a snowman. The snow is beautiful and fluffy today-not the dangerous, vindicative kind that makes you fear driving and stimulates your back to ache before you consciously ponder finding the snow shovel. I really think that someone with power just wanted to play in the winter wonderland that has appeared outside my window. For me it just means that I have to shush my newly 3-yr-old girl every 2 minutes, as I futilely try to read about poison ivy dermatitis. The lovely lady that works in the office next to me has already called my phone and hung up, and then knocked on my window and mouthed, "Keep it down!" I can't wait to move my office...

The extended weekend

My trip to Boston was lovely and decadent, even in the blizzard.

But then, my very conscientious friend decided to move my car from its
perfect space in front of their apartment to a far off place. There
were signs not to park on their street during "snow emergency", but
no signs at the far-off location. Apparently, though, the main "arteries"
(code word for big streets) are off limits during major snow
accumulation (as any CT resident should know, EVEN without signs. I read signs, not minds, ya Boston piss-ants.)

So, my car was towed. Fuckers.

Sunday night we began calling tow companies and Boston city transportation to find my car, but were thwarted from finding out
anything useful. So at 6:59am Monday morning, I started again. Calls
and more calls to people who kept saying, "no, we don't have it." It was very disheartening and I was beginning to think that my car had been stolen.

Let me just record now for prosperity, my license plate is 509 TOL.
And the torture endured for not knowing that when it was lost....! (Yes,
I *did* just get a new license plate 2 weeks before, so my insurance
co. did not have it yet, but come on: I'm in MA and the plate's from
CT and I know every other spec on the car possible, including vin #.)
After 45 minutes of phone calls, it was finally determined that Phil's
towing had my car (even after specifically being told once that they
did not.) God, they were a collection of terrible, unwashed, unhappy
people. The obese secretary harassed me about my signiture (I was
forced to sign three times) and my friend was yelled at for 5 minutes
to move his car. Despite paying $85 for a tow and 2 days of storage
that I did not want, they argued with me for 5 minutes about not
helping me locate my car in their lot. The owner finally said: "Let's
get these people OUT of this office" and proceeded to help us locate
the car. A 2 inch square bit of blue (literally!) was visible, as it was
under a 7 foot snow drift. They said: "I hope you brought your
shovel." Yeah, bastards: I'm a fucking girlscout. The shovel's in
the trunk (i.e. completely inaccessible, but there.) I was crying at
this point, as I hawled my 4 travel bags and my 2-yr-old through the
2-ft deep snow (where I was lucky... it was deeper in many other
places.)

We got home. I shoveled out my driveway until my shovel broke.
I'm mostly recovered, but not heading North anytime soon.

Snow world

Happiness is coming down from the sky and swirling around and accumulating on the ground. Ooooo, it's beautiful.
But this weather, what it inspires most is cuddling with your favorite cutie and lots of food consumption. In accordance with the prescibed course of action, there has been much, much eating and drinking. There's been bubble tea :) :) (did I mention that I was happy about that?), cheeses and breads and fruit, the most decadent chocolate molten cake that you could imagine (with a side of vanilla gelato), an omelett, some more bread and cheese, some Turkish-style meatbals, rice with turkey and vegetables...I haven't had dinner, yet. ;) Oh and I'd forgotten about the Turkish coffea and tea, and the Mountain Dew. Probably I've had enough calories in drinks alone to fufill my intake for the day. I keep expecting to look down and see a bulging tummy (but really it's my ass that I should be monitoring.)

Ahh, Boston. The food, the shopping, the *cold*. This morning, none of that was on my mind, as I had a nice, slow beginning, celebrated with an aesthetically pleasing, extremely tasty spread of food. But the thing that was really of note was my bath. My friends have one of those beautiful tubs with iron-claw feet and a hand-held shower spray. It's an experience-trying to get yourself clean. The last visit I managed to spray every inch of the bathroom, including my set of clean clothes that I'd laid out for after the bath. I've improved significantly since then: my clothes, still laid out as before, were not a bit soggy. There's definitely technique involved in this style of bathing.
It really reminded my of my visits to the Gion community baths of Kyoto, Japan. Being naked in front of scores of other women (and a couple of kids) was a difficult thing to swallow. And being the only white girl for miles certainly helped to feed my self-consciousness. But the thing about those baths, and even more so this morning in a room by myself, the experience is really quite intimate. In both cases you sit down and scrub and spray and examine and clean and really *see* every nook and cranny of yourself (for better or worse.) The stand-up method really allows you to be distant from your body, as you often soap places without looking at certain parts of your body for weeks at a time. The Japanese style bath makes you really look at yourself and notice the areas that need cleaning or shaving or just *attention.*
I'm thinking that I need to open a spa steeped in this intimate bathing method. Would you go?

Brace yourselves

Wow, I just read that this coming Monday, January 24th is predicted to the worst day of the year. It's very scientific in fact. It was based on this calculation:

day of misery = 1/8W+(D-d) 3/8xTQ MxNA

(Where W is weather, D is debt - minus the money (d) due on January's pay day - and T is the time since Christmas. Q is the period since the failure to quit a bad habit, M stands for general motivational levels and NA is the need to take action and do something about it.)

I think a national holiday should be declared.

Calling names

OK, a blog that I just visited was devoted to a collection of weird names.
So here's my 2-cents on that.
To begin with, there's me. I had been destined to be Gaylord Farquar, had I been a boy. (Well, at least that's what my Dad told my aunt. But, he could be a teaser.)

Then, before I was fully able to appreciate the torment that this young boy was doomed to endure: I met (and kissed) Mike Hunt in first grade. (NO, that is *not* a masturbation reference, thank you.)

Then I met Penny. Oh, with a middle name of Candy. Penny Candy. Can you be taken seriously as a woman with that name in front of your title?

(Parents, please be gentler in the moments of the birth certificate name decision.)

Not a pretty picture, folks

So tonight I gave myself a facial. It was nice and tingly and
relaxing and all, with the extra bonus of scaring the crap out of my
2-year-old. She just would give me a wary look like,"Mom, what the
hell are you up to, now?" She theorized, "You the blueman.."
Anyways, I figured that I should capitalize on the situation to make
sure that any potential suitors *ever* would be permanently scared
off...I'm sick of the heartache. On that note, here's me with a mud
mask. :)

Oh, I decided on the title of my one-hit wonder song. It'll be "hit me with a kiss."
I'll get back to you with the lyrics.

Yucked-out

There's something about thick, black, crinkly hairs that yucks me out more than anything else. I think that subconsciously I'm just being reminded of the grossest thing that ever happened over the course of working at a library.

I'm a bookworm and enjoy the pursuit of knowledge, so working at the library was really my kind of gig. It wasn't highpaying or anything...I was just a page at the time (and *no* that wasn't just a bad joke, that really was our official job title). It could get dull- we were occasionally made to do ultra-ennui-invoking tasks such as shelf reading: the code words for opening every book on a shelf and making sure that it was labeled correctly, had been checked in, and was filed properly. Major yawn, OK? But anyways, overall I was in love with the opportunity to be exposed to new reading material juxaposed with the chance to help people answer their innermost burning questions (OK, that's a little over the top, considering that it was a quaint, local branch with a limited collection that I was employed at, but....) To get to the point, one unfortunate day found me checking in books left in the bookdrop from the previous night. One book in particular had a "present" of sorts. It contained a sizable clump of large, black, most likely pubic hairs with lots of dried white stuff flaking off all over the place. Now a good reporter would be able to tell you the subject matter, title, or hopefully the most recent borrower of that book, but that book hit the trash can so fast that it made Nolan Ryan's pitches look slow.
Anyways, that's why I have a hyper-aversion to "pubes" as I fondly like to call them (I say "hyper" because don't we all have some aversion to the the disembodied pubic hair? I mean really...)

And there was one on the toilet this past trip. Thank you.

But on the plus side (in an effort to be optimistic) I have successfully optimized the configuration that the rugs have to be in, when being cleaned in the washer to avoid loud thumping, crashing, and ultimately many trips to the basement to re-adjust the washer so that it will function. I always end up sitting on top of it at the end of the cycle so that it will *just* finish. Oh, and I haven't been hit by an SUV this week ('course it's only Monday.)

My stock value

My creative energies got spent today on writings that cannot be posted.
Then, the rest of my energy got blown trying to wrangle my 2-yr-old. When I said that we were going to the "store", she thought I meant to my "place of work." (Oh, the good-times that *could* have been had, had I not been the mean Mom that didn't take my dear child to the office.) And screamed about it for 10 minutes. When we went to the store to get the milk, she refused to get out of the car. Then when I surrendered and got back in the car and drove away, she contorted herself and screamed so much that I had to pull over to adjust the seatbelt. She wanted to go back to the store.

For dinner there was no milk. I made a peanut-butter-and jelly sandwich, after removing the mold from the best piece of bread that I could find. We also ate cheese, once I trimmed the mold from that, as well.

I think that Noel is mad at me for provoking the failure of another relationship. She keeps saying "I need Joe daddy" and "I need Joe daddy to come home." I think that I've reached a new low and I've brought my 2-yr-old with me.
(Note: I have never dated a Joe-daddy or even a regular, plain Joe, for that matter. I think that she's referring to a video that she likes about Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat. Which makes the story even sadder, in my estimation.)

Hmmm, so I'm pretty sure the sentence, "I'm going to drip on you" has never left my mouth before this evening.

NY Times editorial: science

from 14-Jan-2005
"One mammal was the size of a 30-pound dog. The other was smaller, the size of an opossum, but - here's the delicious part - its last meal had been a juvenile dinosaur, as evidenced by tiny dinosaur limbs, fingers and teeth still lodged in the mammal's rib cage eons later. What a turnabout. The supposedly meek mammals of that era actually dined out on the flesh of the reptilian lords of the land.

But before we hoist ourselves up the ancient food chain, it is worth noting that the victim was a teeny tiny baby, only five inches long, and a plant eater at that."

Yeah, and I *was* just about to get all snobby about my place in the food chain, duh.

If you thought the 2003 Halloween was cute incarnate; take a looky here:

We went on a witch kick this past fall. We read several witch books
from our little library, daily. (Do you think it's weird for a 2-year-old
to have more than a dozen books about witches? They're not how-to's
at least!) Anyways, we got over it and the current 2-year-old idea
for next year's Halloween is to "be the bad guy." I can't wait to see
what exactly the soon-to-be-3-year-old mind will concoct for that....

and since I'm in the photo-posting mood...

Golden Pavilion, Kyoto, Japan-
This looks impressive and serene.
It's because you can't see the screaming school girls.

I'm off my pattern: mmmust write....

Today's trajectory indicates that things will be rough around the edges. Of course this is coming off of the unpredictable past 2 days, where I went from feeling like I was doing a bad job with my little part time, pasttime of tutoring, to being offered a full time position as science director. Who could tell?

New spin please

Today my eyes wore the filter of a bleak future. Maybe it was the 47 year old man that hit on me, or the fact that despite my meticulously balanced checking account which has a balance that agrees with online information, I still keep getting denied every time I try to use my debit card. It just gets embarrassing after awhile, although I'm sure the same situation has happened to just about everyone at some point (unjustified denial of funds!!! bastards.) Or, the reason is probably more straightforward: the fact that I'm hating my job right now because I feel like I'm being monitored constantly, while under pressure to finish a project that is being rushed without real cause (other than the reason that everything should be rushed...because it's better done sooner than later.) Oh, and the double standard that happens at work as well; some people roll in in taking their own damn time, while others are chastised for tardiness. Hmmm, and is that it? Well, not really. There's the significant loss of my closest friend in CT; he's moving tommorrow or the next day. 2005, you owe me.

bring on the radiation, I want superpowers

Is it backward to think that I'd be happier if I just cried more? I think that's going to be my new tactic. So far, in my crying zone, I've felt less frustrated, but I have a much redder, puffier face. Although, I'm sure that I notice that more than anyone else...a theory supported by the fact that after being hit by the car and walking into Noel's daycare with tears streaming down my face, her teacher was completely unawares. She thought that I was compaining about being splashed by a passing vehicle when I opened my mouth to explain myself. The next day, when it was clarified that we had been physically hit by an SUV, she began apologizing profusely and said, "Oh, I didn't notice that you'd been crying." Um, OK. I do wish sometimes that I could go completely unnoticed. I used to like wearing glasses back in the day because I felt like I could hide behind them (and to a certain extent, I'm sure people looked at me a little less.) Definitely, the superpowers that I would pick would be invisibility at will.

Aftermath

So, in the aftermath of nearly being run over by an SUV, my heroic daughter now vigilantly reminds me every time we near a cross-street, that we should "not get hit by a car." Maybe all parents should *stage* being hit by a car, to burn the importance of looking both ways into their dear child's memory. For me, I'd rather avoid the whole scene, although I must say that now I'm all cocky like,"Yeah I made it to work today without getting hit. Take that!" In other words, appreciating some things that I had not before. I still would rather not have to take a walk down treacherous road every day, though. I am very suspicious of every car that I meet on the way....

me and my baby

me and my baby

a classically bad day, and there's alot left to go

Part I of the story deleted, as I am a nice girl.
Suffice it to say that the day started out very crappy; use your imagination.
(I did however get myself together and was walking my daughter to babyschool at approximately 9:10am, when....)

Then I got hit by a car. Luckily I was giving my daughter a piggy back ride and was able to hold onto her while I pounded on the SUV that was making a right on red without looking at what was in front of him. So my daughter is fine. I was left crying and shaking on the corner though, packed with adrenaline at just being hit and then carried on the hood of a car for several feet, while I lost my shoe and had my feet dragged. I recovered the muddy lunch box that was flung in the street during the debacle and then carried my daughter to babyschool.

Adrenaline ebbing away; I feel slightly sore, but I think that I'll be fine.

The 2-year-old word of the day is: sweaty. Everyone and everything is being told, "You look so sweaty", including boyfriends and Incredible figurines. It may just be an adjective day, though, because other statements leaving the 2-yr-old mouth include "It's too smelly outside." and "Oh, no, it's very stinky down the road." I'm guessing that it was a malodorous day at the babyschool, likely initiated by someone's lack of hygiene spurring this little language rant. Just a guess.

The other side of the world

So, what do ya think? Was it my call to the presidente that sparked him to finally get off his ass and donate a reasonable and useful sum of $$ to the tsunami relief fund? OK, not likely, as I called Washington and our lovely leader was at his ranch in Texas for a full week post Asian earthquake/tsunami disaster. So he probably didn't get my message. In the end, props to him for coming through, despite making the US look like stingy, rich, dicks in the meantime. I guess we have a bad rep anyways, why fix it now?

I really wish that I could earn a living AND be helpful to the tsunami relief effort. I would be there in a second if that could work out. Anyone involved in the relief effort need a biochemist/medical writer/ex-EMT? I'm there if ya do...