Monday, April 30, 2007

We Sang Shang-a-Lang, and We Ran with the Gang
Going Do-wop, Ba-doobie Do-ay...


So suddenly tonight, while emailing my oldest friend to tell her about the job, I remembered that I'd also been meaning to tell her about being thwacked with the 2 x 4 of nostalgia a few weeks ago while shooting pool at Chumley's. I'm standing there, waiting my turn, and all of a sudden what should come on the MP3 Jukebox but the Bay City Rollers 1975 blockbuster hit, "Saturday Night." Said old friend and I literally wore out the needle on her record player on that album when we were 8 or 9. I was stunned to even think that it might exist in electronic form (and even more stunned to learn that Rat Girl, a full decade younger than myself, had heard the song before. "Bay City Rollers, right? Yeah." Well, I'll be damned.) So anyway, remembering it tonight and needing a few more items off iTunes to make my next car mix CD, I looked up the BCR in the Music Store. Even better than Saturday Night, the above tune--whose lyrics are utter fluff and nonsense, and I freely admit it's the worst kind of 70's Brady Bunch style crap--is now my favorite song in my iTunes library. Yes. I am in full regression mode. Next thing you know I will be buying the Partridge Family full season collections on DVD. Gah. It's not easy being a child of the 70's.

Saturday, April 28, 2007

But It's Saturday.....

Friday Five, ganked from Jane:
What am I....
1. Wearing? New jeans and my bear totem shirt.
2. Pondering? How I can be really intellectually happy, yet feel inexpressibly sad at the same time. (The answer, for those of you playing at home, is HORMONES. In two days I will be wondering what the hell was wrong with me, as usual.)
3. Reading? Perry Mason and the Case of the Baited Hook.
4. Dreaming? Anxiety dreams--see #2 above. But at least it's not The Alligator Dream. Which freaks me out every time it happens, because I love alligators and if I really did see some in the canal in real life I'd be all excited. But in the dream they are always Angry Alligators.
5. Eating? Coffee and toast. Pumpernickel, with butter and basswood honey.

So if you didn't already know, my long jobless drought is finally at an end, and I've been offered an excellent gig at Large Local Museum. I'm pretty damn excited! Adding to #2 above, of course, is the sense that everything in my brain has been rapidly shuffled in the last 2 weeks and now I am playing 52-Pick-Up trying to sort it all out. But I will, no fear. I think my parents are even more excited than I am; they've done a good job of hiding their fear that I might never have a real job again for the last 5 years, but the sigh of relief was so profound that I felt a substantial breeze right through the phone line. My dad is already listing all the things he thinks I need that I should buy once I have a paycheck again. I must admit that one of my first thoughts was, hey, I could buy a new computer! Because my old one is covered in toast crumbs, honey, and coffee stains....

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Wow! I Don't Even Know What This Is, But It's Spot On...



Ottava rima? Me? That can't be right!
   Too frivolous? But tut, there's no such thing!
Let others ponder thoughts of wrong and right,
   Or sit and think how much they love the spring;
I'd rather spend my time in gleeful spite,
   Or maybe laugh, or maybe sit and sing.
Besides, it might be fun to be inspiring -
But surely it would get so very tiring.
What Poetry Form Are You?


For those, like me, who had no idea what Ottava Rima is, you may check the Wiki entry here. Apparently it's a Roman form of poetry, originally for long heroic poems, but eventually adapted for humorous parodies of epic works, a la Boccaccio! That totally rocks.

Saturday, April 07, 2007

Anchors A-Whey

Lately my work schedule has been fairly complex. (Not as complex as getting an old blogger template listed on Technorati, mind you.) I'm teaching in the mornings Mondays and Wednesdays, and Thursday afternoons; volunteering at the zoo still on alternate Thursday mornings; working at Crocodile on Tuesdays and Fridays; and now contract working pretty much all the rest of the time at the museum, which is in a high state of panic about an upcoming exhibit. So I was kind of shocked to find that I had Thursday afternoon completely free after finishing up with the baboons. I got a call from Rat Girl around 11, saying she wasn't going in to work until 2 because they were doing repairs at the dairy; all she had to do was drive a truck full of whey to Monrovia in the afternoon. I figured, cool, we'll go for lunch downtown and hang out. Then over lunch it occurred to me that I was already wearing smelly, zoo-stained clothing, and that I had absolutely no other commitments for the afternoon. "Want company?" sez I. "Well....sure!" sez she. So I got to ride along in the truck while RG demonstrated her skillz at driving a cranky behemoth of a stickshift on the highway for the drive out to Monrovia. Why whey, you say? The dairy she works for makes cheese (though they don't have a cheesecam, sadly) and a byproduct of cheesemaking is whey--lots of whey. We had 2 enormous tanks of it in the back of the truck, and we were taking it to a pig farmer who uses it to feed his pigs. It's high in protein.... and also utterly repellant, it smells vile and includes chunks of semi-solid curd stuff that looks like vomit. The pigs love it. So we got out there and backed up the truck, and basically just attached a hose to each tank and used it to fill up about 8 oil drums of muck, while the pigs were all "ooo! ooo! can't wait!" We still had about half of one tank of whey left when the drums were full, so the farmer had us just dump it out in the middle of a field, making a sort of small swamp of grossness--thank god it got cold, or the smell would have been unimaginable by the following day, I expect. Naturally I got whey on my shoes, and RG almost "accidentally" sprayed me in the back with the barf hose, and it was stinky and gross and involved heavy lifting. And I loved every minute--it was a TOTALLY AWESOME way to spend an afternoon!