2, 4, 6, 8, Come On Snow, Accumulate!

Yes, OK, I realize that my enthusiasm about snow is directly related to the fact that I don't have a "job" which requires me to go out on the "roads" when they're total "crap." But even when I did, I liked it. Winter without snow is just wrong, it's like summer without humidity. (I live in Indiana, after all...)

Actually my excitement at our 6 inches of white stuff is somewhat tempered by the fact that my pipes froze last night (we got down to -10, I think) and so now I've got no shower, no sink, no ability to wash laundry or dishes, and can only flush the toilet by flinging a gallon bucket full of store-bought water into the bowl. Unfortunately, the frozen pipe is somewhere between my house and the water main, so the tiny space heater I've got blowing on the pipes inside the house ain't doing diddly. Oh well. Hopefully it'll thaw by tomorrow, or the folks coming over for the Superbowl better limit their beer consumption...

Speaking of the weather, check THIS out. The man is brilliant. Check his other auctions; he also sells tinfoil hats to prevent the government from reading your pet's brainwaves.

And finally, since I jumped on the meme bandwagon with the last map, here's my states one. Got the east pretty well covered, but the west needs work. Jersild? Want to drive out to Jane's wedding?


create your own visited states map
or write about it on the open travel guide
Jeremy, I'm with you on Southeast Asia. Let me know when we leave.

I’ll Take Indonesia for 300, Please.


I love travel. I also hate travel. I hate packing; I hate airports (I especially hate airports in the present age of guilty-until-proven-innocent); I hate the way airplanes smell; I hate wondering if my pets died and my house burned down while I was gone; I hate feeling uprooted. It’s not my fault, mind you, it’s genetic, just like the clumsiness thing. But I also love seeing new places and things. I guess you could say I love being there, but I hate getting there. So I don’t often fantasize about travel except in a very abstract way.... but then, this.



create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide

Bugger. Now I want to go everywhere, and see the red just spread across the map like...like a....er....well ok, all the images I came up with there were gross. But you get the idea. Look at it! I haven't been to Asia at all!! And man, there are just spitloads of places I want to go in the US as well, all kinds of stuff I haven’t seen. I’d really better get moving on that whole "independently wealthy" thing.

Spam, and Shameless Promotion

I've been getting a lot of weird spam lately. No, not more "Alpha Male" ads--though I'd welcome a followup explaining just what they're extracting from those elk, and how they're extracting it. This seems to be the product of some new spamblaster type of program; the subject lines are always a jumble of letters followed by three words that sound vaguely like the beginning of a sentence, only the sentence is...well, bizarre. I can't for the life of me figure out exactly what the strategy behind this spam format is, other than a hope that you'll be so mystified by the nonsensical subject line that you'll open it up. (And once you do, of course you'll order their leopard frog extract or whatever it is.) Here's a few of the best ones I've gotten in the past 3 days:

Re: WTQNLTAT, with increasing severity  
Re: XEJKHP, the steeds were
Re: FCPBZVTJ, his magician! have   
Re: MAOBFCF, the roman procurator  
and my personal favorite, Re: DK, bears playing concertinas

I mean, seriously, what the hell is up with this? It's like that Star Trek episode, where the aliens are trying to communicate and all they can say is stuff like "Shaka, when the walls fell." I actually opened that last one (see, it works) and here was an ad offering me medicines delivered "direct to your do!"--great, my hair gets so little mail as it is--and then I kid you not, about 30 lines worth of more random words out of the dictionary, of which this is but a small sample: loki spectrography bengal rufous chromium lorinda anthropology sarcophagus vernal continuum accidental quicklime flog tnt eggshell enigma alistair cozy grope tenuous honk ilona deflector lycopodium cramp complex pasty dread

The first person who can convincingly explain the logic behind this spamming methodology will receive a small but entertaining prize.

On the link front, I've added one for my good pal Emily, who is a talented musician as I've mentioned here in the past. If you're interested in hearing Em's music, click the link; it'll take you to a site where you can download some MP3 clips, and if you like them you can order her CD from them as well. ALSO, if you haven't done this already, pleeeeeease check out my friend Rob Harrell's comic, "Big Top"! It's amazingly funny (this week involves Pete's struggles with the evil Chicken Boy) and well worth your while. I went and bought some original art from the strip from him today, he's a good guy and it's a great comic. Tell your local paper they need to pick it up! But in the meantime read him for free over at ucomics.

Well Gee, That’s.....er....

Every time one of my friends posts their results from one of those personality test things, I go take the test. I almost never actually copy over the link into my blog (though the Marvel Superhero quiz was an exception) because my results are usually pretty silly, or the same as my friend got. But today, I am Schindler’s List.

What Classic Movie Are You?

Sure, it says nice flowery stuff in the text.... but let’s face it. I’m a black and white movie about the holocaust. Sure, I’m an oscar winner, and a triumph of filmmaking... But I’m not something you’d want to watch over and over again. I’m not good for repeat viewing. I make people cry.

I guess I just always thought of myself as being more of a “Philadelphia Story” type...

A Discovery of Volcanic Proportions...

Earlier this week (when I was feeling productive, and the temperature was above 20) I went out to run a few errands. I needed a bag of sunflower seeds for the birds, and bulgur wheat for a recipe I was making. This being Indiana, it took me trips to THREE different grocery stores to find one that stocked bulgur, in an overpriced box of tabouli mix from Middle East Cuisine... so I wasn't in the best mood by the time I got to the hardware store to buy the sunflower. Got that taken care of, and found myself standing cattycorner from the old family drugstore at 49th and Penn. Yep, it's the Hamaker Pharmacy; growing up, every year my new teacher would stop while calling the role and say, "Hamaker... like the drug store?" It's that much of a fixture on the north side of Indy. It's still very much the little neighborhood pharmacy, with narrow aisles, a tiny spinning comic book rack, a penny scale, and higher prices than Walmart. The Hamaker family actually hasn't owned the place since I was in high school, my dreams of being a druggist there were squashed pretty early on.... but I still like going in now and then, and our name is still over the door. I went on over to pick up some shoelaces and deodorant, and poked around a bit. Things seem pretty much unchanged, other than them having shoehorned in a couple large refrigerator cases to sell cold Cokes... But I wonder if their business might be better if they carried this product:





This may be the best spam I have ever opened by mistake. Who knew that the male wapiti elk was the most prolific lover in the animal kingdom? Well, other than Mrs. Wapiti Elk? I mean, wow. The best part is the comparision chart.... "Average middle-aged human male.... Average middle-aged elk." All I can say is, wow.

Ringin' It In, Yo.

A New Year, bright with promise! It's true, I have great hopes for 2004. Could this be the year I get a job? Get my shit together? Finish school? On a larger scale, could it be the year when our country frees itself from the grip of George W. and his dangerously loopy pals? I'm starting to feel the slight gravitational pull of the Dean Machine....

So what's new? Well, first off, I ran a half a mile yesterday. Yes, it's a--hey! Stop laughing, you! Stop it! Damn.... You have to understand that running has always been hard for me, from an asthma standpoint. The worst part of fencing practice in college was always the 3 lap warmup around the gym. I hated it. I hate how running makes me feel. And my stamina is, how you say, awful. But I'm realizing that the best kind of exercise for me is probably the kind I can do with the least amount of preparation--no drive to the gym, no membership fees, no special equipment. And I live right on one of the nicest jogging paths in Indianapolis. Literally, I can walk out my door and be on a no-car crushed limestone path which goes for 4 miles along the canal, turns paved, and continues another 3 miles right to downtown. PLUS, just a half mile along the path from me is Butler University's "Fitness Course," one of those things where you jog through the woods and periodically stop to do pushups etc. on slightly soggy wooden equipment. So when things dry out, I'll be doing that... and in the meantime, I'm jogging a half mile. Next week, 3/4 of a mile. Then a mile. Tomorrow, the world.

Great news for the New Year, Jane and Sarah are tying the knot, getting hitched--they're getting grbzniaked! Go over to her blog and congratulate her! Oh, wait.... Jane doesn't have comments enabled.... So congratulate her here instead. :]

Things to Remember.

First off, when the cookie recipe says "mix dry ingredients," sugar is NOT a dry ingredient. Oh sure, it looks dry, and it feels dry, but if you read just ahead in the recipe you'll see that the sugar is to be creamed with the butter and the eggses in step #2. If you've already gone and mixed it with the other so-called "dry" ingredients at that point, it's just too darn bad. Your blender will threaten to catch fire, and you'll end up having to mix the dry stuff in with your hands, a la bread dough, while watching a repeat of "Cops" from 1987 because your hands are too sticky to operate the remote.

Second, if you live in a humid environment, and you have old varnished wood furniture whose surface gets slightly tacky when moist, don't leave the one "Call of Cthulhu" gaming book you own which is actually worth something (in a collectable sense) sitting on the buffet for a month. You'll be sorry, I guarantee it.

Third, don't do either of the above things when you're having a monthly-hormone-related mood crash. Things that would ordinarily make you irritated instead make you blindingly furious, and things that would make you unhappy instead trigger mad bursts of tears and longing for the sweet release of death. Well, ok, maybe not quite that last bit... But jeez. Could I possibly feel any worse?

Well, of course I could! Andy called me late last night to say that he and Karen were back from Vienna, but their luggage (including car/house keys) was not. Arriving from a day of travel in a pouring rainstorm to find that one's keys are idling somewhere in the Chicago airport, awaiting approval from "homeland security" to continue their journey.... That's worse than ripping the back cover off my copy of Green and Pleasant Land any day. I think. Maybe. Ok, so I'm not really thinking clearly at the moment; but I should be back to normal within 24 hours, in plenty of time for xmas cheer. Happy holidays, y'all.

The Return of the Blog

Every nerd and his aunt is posting about ROTK this week, I feel certain, and I hate to be trendy. But I do love the sound of my own typing, and it's hard to contain my enthusiasm. Third time pays for all, as Sam would say. Much of my disappointment in The Two Towers has faded, between viewing the extended edition and watching the third movie. Battle scenes were GLORIOUS! Minas Tirith was amazing, that whole sequence where Gandalf is riding Shadowfax up...and up....and up.... Too very cool. Two thumbs up to nearly everything. My only complaints were the obvious ones--no Gandalf-Saruman confrontation? What the hell? It was filmed for TT, they cut it, and then didn't bother putting it in this one either?? What kind of crack is that? Leave out some of Arwen's mooning in Rivendell, if you're worried about run time. I know it'll be in the extended edition; in fact, this rather smacks of intentional "let's make sure we leave out something key so we can put it on the DVD," and that's just ugly. My consternation with their version of Gollum continues, as the scene with dropping the bread over the cliff made little sense to me. (Nerdy aside, for anyone who gives a crap about nitpicky details: in the book, the scene that this dialogue is taken from involves Gollum rethinking his plan to hand the hobbits over to the spider. He's feeling guilty, in fact I think this same episode is where most of the "two personalities" dialogue in movie #2 came from. He's reaching out to pat sleeping Frodo on the head, tentatively affectionate, and then Sam wakes up and says "get your hands off him, what are you doing sneaking around?" or some such. And that ruins it. Bad Gollum takes over, because Sam's a suspicious dickhead. It's one of the great scenes in the book, because you're just like "No no no Sam, you jackass!" but it's too late. In the movie, Gollum's just being evil in this scene, and it has no purpose other than to set up separating Frodo and Sam for some reason. Oh well. Can't have it all.)

Alex made a good Gollum comment--how come he doesn't just burst into flames when he hits the lava? I would, if I fell into a volcano. Perhaps molten rock affects CGI's differently.

The armies of the dead.....soooooo cooooool.....

Lord. Lord, lord, lord.

It's 4 am. I'd tell you what I thought of the film in great detail, but I have the a massive sinus headache. (Not caused by the film, but somewhat exacerbated by my obligatory crying at the sentimental bits at the end. I feel like the bones in my face are imploding.) So I'll just say, thumbs up. More later. I'm going to go make some toast, and then go to bed.

HAH!! SUCKERRRRR!!!

I was worried that the half-dozen or so people reading this are getting tired of weird animal stories... but Sarah assures me this is not the case. I got suckered by an octopus last week. His name is Omar, and he's the Indy Zoo's giant Pacific octopus. The keeper of the invert. department invited me to watch him feed. "You can pet him," he said. "He likes that." So I did. And Omar petted me back, with approximately 4000 suckers. I swear to god, this was one of the weirdest tactile experiences of my life....

In other news, I saw the extended version of Two Towers this weekend in Chicago with Sarah and Alex. Thumbs up, yo! More Merry, more Pippin, more huorns. More cookies. Oh wait--that wasn't the movie, that was Sarah. Mmmm. Kibble. Biscotti. And I myself just entered the world of holiday candy production this evening with chocolate-covered pretzel sticks rolled in toffee bits. We'll see if it's possible to have well-tempered chocolate without the use of a double boiler OR a candy thermometer.

Mo' Better Bats

Tonight I'm on the final leg of the semester, crossing the finish line, breaking the tape, and doing a victory lap around the classroom. The place: Exhibit Development and Design class. The medium: a team presentation using (ugh) Powerpoint. The topic: bats.

God, I love bats. They're such amazing little creatures... Didja know their brain structure has more in common with that of primates like us than with rodents (which is what they're usually mistaken for)? I'm a member of Bat Conservation International, and when I proposed doing this project I figured no one else would sign on my team and I'd get stuck on the team doing an exhibit on Dress Codes and Clothing... But Team Bat ended up with 4 members, all of whom actually did what they were supposed to do which I think may set some kind of record in the history of group projects. So we designed a zoo exhibit, featuring the Rodriguez Fruit Bat (Pteropus rodricensus) and the endangered Indiana Bat (Myotis sodalis) (The real reason I put those Latin names in is because it drives up the hits on my site. Seriously! When I wrote that post about tropical fish a couple months ago my hits jumped up from people searching for Osphrenimus gourami and Colisa fasciata. Of course, I also got hits last week from someone searching for "Terre Haute Gay Sex" and "Brighthouse Cable Sucks." Google isn't very discriminating. Anyway, what were we talking about? Oh, yeah, bats.) So I'm whiling away my afternoon writing Bat labels and stealing Bat pictures off the internet for use in the Powerpoint. And struggling with MS Word, which keeps f-ing around with my margins--"Oh, you want an indent here? Then you must want ALL your lines indented!" Stupid sonofabitch program. I know there are ways to turn off autocorrection--but I shouldn't HAVE to go looking for them! The people who want them should bloody well have to go turn them ON.

And I had a job interview this morning. Went fine. Don't expect I'll get the job, but should know in a week either way. And it doesn't involve using MS Word, thank god. (I don't think....)

Yeah, yeah, yeah....

No posts in a week, so sad. But it's finals time, which means projects not actual exams in my case. It's been a whirlwind of projection around here; a design project on Pirates in the Caribbean, a project on the exhibition of human beings as artifacts in World's Fair settings, and a project on Bats: Our Nocturnal Pals. The latter two of these involved my learning to use MS Powerpoint. Like all MS products, it has many "features" which I find irritating or counter-intuitive; but I must say, it's a fairly effective visual tool. I gave a 20 minute presentation on Humans on Display tonight, and used powerpoint just as a way of getting some cool pictures up on the screen while I was talking. Naturally, the first question I got after I finished presenting was about my slide of The Camel Girl. Not about my insightful commentary on the ethics and implications of live human display at fairs and museums.... No, it was "What was the deal with that girl on slide #4???" I love it. When I get a chance I'll upload the jpg of her, and then you too can ask me, who IS the Camel Girl?.... All right, it's back to projectville. I'm done on Monday. Woo hoo!

A Little Trip Down Memory Lane

Tomorrow, of course, is Thanksgiving, and as usual, I'm the one in charge of Pies. This year the Pie Commitment has been reduced, I'm only doing 2 pumpkin and no fruit pie. Still, to accomplish the task I needed to borrow a pie dish from my mom, since I only own one; I also needed to borrow the two-level pie carrier she inherited from her grandmother (affectionately known as the "Port-O-Pie.") So this morning I'm down in their basement, unearthing the Port-O-Pie from where it's been sitting since last Thanksgiving, and I'm suddenly confronted with one of those deja-vu, childhood comes rushing back to smack you in the face moments.... in the form of a small red paperback book titled Roughing It Easy, by one Dian Thomas.

Now, I've never actually read this book, mind you. I think my mother purchased it when she was the leader of my Girl Scout troop in elementary school, and she felt that she should take us camping despite her own general dislike for the rugged life. It's a cookbook of "things you can cook over a campfire," and so far as I remember it was only used once--but that once is indelibly inscribed on my brain. When I was a kid, we'd go up to my grandmother's house on Lake Wawassee in northern Indiana for about a week every summer. Our family friends the Hoskins from Kentucky would join us, and it was the high point of the summer for me. The summer that Roughing It Easy came into mom’s posession, she decided we should try it out before unleashing any of its recipes on the Girl Scout Troop (we were a little squirrelly, after all.) So one morning, bright and early, Mom announces that we kids are not to have our usual cereal and toast, but should wait for the completion of a camping delicacy called “BREAKFAST IN A BAG.”

Yes. Breakfast in a Bag. A brown paper bag, with strips of bacon laid across the bottom, an egg or two cracked into the bag, and then you put the whole thing on the Weber grill. Oh sure--you say you see the flaw here, and so did we.... But Dian Thomas said it would work! It was in Roughing It Easy! We trusted Dian not to lead us astray. Which is, of course, why it was so shocking and heartbreaking to us when the bag burst into 3 foot high flames on the grill. My father and Mr. Hoskins had already clearly stated their refusal to be a part of this project, so it fell to me to run for the hose. Mrs. Hoskins was our camera operator, and the whole thing was immortalized in slide show format:
SLIDE ONE: My mom proudly displaying the contents of the bag
SLIDE TWO: Bag sitting on grill
SLIDE THREE: Bag looking slightly blackened on one corner
SLIDE FOUR: Weber Grill engulfed in flame
SLIDE FIVE: Charred bag dissected to reveal solid rectangular mass of burned egg and bacon at bottom
SLIDE SIX: Mr. Hoskins sitting in a lawn chair covering his eyes with his hands.
As I said, the whole thing is a fond childhood memory of family bonding. And burning. It’s just as well that no one is here at my house with slide film for the making of the pies every year.

The Pot Calling the Kettle Pork.

I was in the corner grocery store at 11:30 tonight buying breakfast cereal and milk. I love going to the store that late because there’s a sort of surreal quality to walking up and down the spotlessly mopped aisles, all alone... But more surreal than the clean floors and the canned Neil Diamond playing on the overhead speakers this evening was the fact that a featured product in the frozen foods case was the Large Bucket O' Chitterlings. Each door panel of the freezer cases had a single large bucket right in the middle of it, prominently positioned in such a way that someone reaching in for non-chitterling frozen food might still stand a good chance of knocking it off the shelf and onto their foot, causing a grevious chitterling injury. And it occurred to me that despite living in Indiana for the bulk of my lifetime, I’m still not entirely clear on what exactly chitterlings are. I mulled this over as I picked up milk and corn chex, and strolled to the canned foods section to get some quick and easy dinner. I mean, they’re pig parts--but what part of the pig exactly are they? They’re not like pork rinds, I don’t think... Maybe you could tell by looking at them; but hell if I’m going to open one of those tubs. (This is sort of like when I was living in Chicago and found myself confronted with menudo blanco for the first time. Shudder.) So I’m thinking about how some people will eat anything... and then I look down at my hand and realize I am carrying a can of Franco-American Spaghetti-Os, with “meat” balls, up to the counter. Do I have room to be critical of the chitterling eaters of this world? No, my friends, I think not.

Oh yeah, the reason I was at the store so late was because I went to hear Emily, who was opening for Vienna Teng. I missed Em’s part of the show, thanks to my Thursday class; disappointing. But there was Guinness on tap, and the main act was excellent, y’all check her out.

Progress Is Progress

Hooray for Massachusetts, whose Supreme Judicial Court ruled yesterday that the state must offer the right to marry to single-sex couples. It's been quite an eventful year, legally, for the gay community.

On the one hand, I'm thrilled. It baffles me how states that recognize common-law marriage (which I'm not sure if MA does or not) can justify discrimination against same-sex couples in similarly long term yet not legally formalized partnerships. Two things worry me, though. One is the term "marriage." Apparently a large segment of the American public declares itself to be opposed to "gay marriage," and asserts that a "marriage" should be defined as involving one man and one woman. But another good size chunk of the American population believes that workplace benefits should be extended to people in same-sex relationships... So it strikes me here that a lot of the resistance to this concept could be neutralized if the word "marriage" is taken out of the equation. Fine, call it "legal partnership"--hell, call it "Grbzniak." We're getting grbzniaked, want to come? But if this makes more people comfortable with the concept, it seems like a small concession to make. I bring it up because someone on NPR this morning was expressing dismay that the MA ruling did not completely shut out the possibility of legislation to strictly define marriage (which several states have already done.) Getting bogged down on the technicality of what to call it when gay folks git hitched seems to me to dilute the impact of the real progress that's being made here. It's not that I don't see their point, but if you can get around the people legislating "marriage" by calling it something else, I say do it. That's part of my second concern, which is that this is an election year, and this has the potential to be a rallying issue for a lot of people. If there are folks out there who are unhappy with Mr. Bush's handling of the Iraq situation and unhappy with the economy, but still want to express a strong opposition to gay marriage, this could be a big stumbling block to the push for change in the White House. The thought that we could win this battle but lose the war is a frightening one to me....

Ok, back to writing papers. Stupid school, cutting in on my blogging time.

I'm Nothing If Not Responsive To My Public

Halloween Photos, including the now-famous Demon Bunny of the Mexican Apocalypse, are here. Note that even Mighty Cthulhu himself is learning at the feet of the true Master.

For anyone interested in heavy theological discussion, you can check out my questions to Tripp and his responses on his weblog.

Butler seems to be having some sort of event today; I'm guessing football. A booming loudspeaker voice is audible through my closed windows... it's sort of Orwellian, for all I know he could be saying "Big Brother Is Your Friend! Trust the Computer!" and it's all just subliminally seeping into my head. "George Bush Is Your Friend! Drilling in the Alaskan Reserve Is Good! Iraq Is Not a Quagmire!" Yeek. I sure hope it's just football.

Doing My Civic Doody

If you had said to me, "Gosh, Cathy, which day of the week that you've been summoned for jury service would be the worst possible day for you to actually get called in?" the answer would certainly have been "Thursday!" Without a doubt. It's the day I volunteer at the zoo, and also happened to be the one day this week when I actually had meetings scheduled at The Children's Museum to try to accomplish something meaningful for my internship. Naturally, well....

First I was late. Because I'm always late for things. I made it to the City-County building, suffered through the "why you should feel guilty for wanting to skip out of here" video (for the fourth time, I get called for jury duty like clockwork every 2 years or so,) filled out the paperwork, and eventually got called to one of the criminal courts. I sensed doom when I was jury # 9 out of the 32 of us in the room.... and while an astonishing 7 jurors got recused, I did not. Time to cancel all my appointments. Got to go for lunch at the City Market, which is always a happy thing; I love the food, I love the architecture, I love the ambiance. I had Jamaican for lunch, headed back to the CC building and got to spend about 30 minutes listening to evidence, and 20 in deliberation, trying to convince 2 obstinate people that it's fair to say the legal definition of "operating a motor vehicle" is "behind the wheel, with the engine running and the car in gear, applying pressure to the gas pedal so the car moves forward." I mean, come on.... if that's not operating it, what is? Still, after 20 minutes we came around to a unanimous verdict. I got to be the foreman, but I didn't get to say "Your Honor, we the Jury find the defendant guilty of the charge of Driving While License Suspended For Life," which I'd kind of looked forward to doing. In Indiana, you hand a piece of paper to the judge, and she reads it. Oh well. Being a jury foreman isn't just about the glamour, you know. It's about civic duty. And about $40 plus mileage.

Trials and Tulips

On the one hand, it was a bad weekend in that I did almost nothing of an academic nature. November is ticking away, like sands through the hourglass (or maybe, like ticks through the hourglass...an hourglass full of ticks? Ugh) and I'm as usual behind on the semester's projects. To increase my sense of impending doom, I managed to totally blow an assignment--was supposed to attend one lecture, movie, or event at the Eiteljorg Museum's new exhibit opening...which I thought was this past weekend....only it was the weekend before. The only thing I could possibly have still attended by the time I found out I'd gotten the time wrong was the $50 a head gala opening dinner. Which required reservations. Doh, doh doh doh, DOH! Doh.

On the other hand, I got to spend a day in Terre Haute, IN, planting tulip bulbs for my friend Emily's mom. This came about rather suddenly:
I'm in the slowest line ever at the post office at 11 am Saturday. Glaciers move faster than the Broad Ripple postal clerks. Suddenly, my cell phone vibrates, causing me to react like someone just slipped an electric eel down my pant leg. I manage to fumble it out of my pocket, trying to look cool and sophisticated, like I get calls on my cell all the time.
ME: Uh, oops, dammit--Hello?
EMILY: Hey, what's up?
ME: In line at the post office. What's up with you?
EMILY: What're you doing today?
ME: Other than waiting in this line, not a lot, why?
EMILY: Good. Come over, you're going to Terre Haute with me.
ME: OK, I--I'm what?
Sure enough, a couple hours later I was planting about 200 tulip bulbs in Mrs. W's front yard, after which I was fed almost to the point of explosion, and got to watch a lovely clear view of the lunar eclipse over their lake. Not a bad tradeoff, really. I'd like to think there'll always be room for spontaneous tulip planting in my day-to-day life. The papers will get written eventually, regardless.

...DRINK 3097 IS ON ITS WAY!...

That was the message scrolling across the little LED screen on the coffee machine as I stood in the basement of Cavenaugh Hall waiting for it to pony up my 50 cents worth of caffienated beverage. I don't know about you, but getting a message like that increases my excitement about the beverage experience by leaps and bounds.... It's not even just "YOUR COFFEE IS ON ITS WAY!" It's got its own little ID number; presumably now, DRINK 3097 is immortalized forever in the memory space of the coffee machine as having been strength 2, whitener 1, sugar 0, small. Call me crazy, but I feel just a bit more special knowing that! Hmmm, maybe it's just that DRINK 3097 is finally kicking in....

Stretch Before You Vote...

The democratic process remains alive and well here in Rocky Ripple, Indiana; I myself hopped on my bicycle at 10:45 this morning to pedal squeakily over to the Town Hall to cast my ballot. Unfortunately, as this is the first time I've hopped on my bike for several weeks, by the time I got to the polling place (a mere half-mile from my house) my thighs were burning and I had to walk it off for a minute before going in. (Pathetic. To think I used to be a collegiate athlete--albeit a pretty lazy and ineffective one.)

Rocky Ripple is a town of about 300 residents, encased within metropolitan Indianapolis but cut off from the city by water on all sides; two small bridges are all that prevents us from having to swim to the grocery store. Well, no--you could also hike through some scrubby woods and escape that way, if you had to. Anyway, so it's like living in small-town America, except we don't have a Wal-Mart--just houses. Everyone knows everyone, for the most part.... And Election Day is a major event. This is a Town Council election year, and like all small towns we have candidates on the Democratic ticket, the Republican ticket, and the Nutjob ticket. It wasn't possible to vote straight Nutjob this year, as they'd split their forces between Democrat and Republican. So I opted against voting for people who I believe to be certifiably insane, and instead carefully split my vote between the two major parties' uncrazy candidates. My first observation at the polls was that one should never vote straight party anyway; I saw two people in great consternation because they realized (after marking their ballots) that since there is no Democratic contender for Town Treasurer, a straight ticket vote means they cast no vote for that office at all. (not that it's going to matter, as the same lady has been town treasurer for about 20 years and it would probably take a demolition crew to remove her from the office. Hell, she knows what she's doing, I cheerfully voted for her.) My second observation is that the new scantron voting system sucks. Indianapolis used old-style lever machines up through last year, and it was a lot less nerve-wracking. Observation #1 would not have been an issue with a lever machine, it's instantly clear with those things who you've voted or not voted for before you register your ballot. Now mind you, I'm not entirely clear on what happens after you pull the curtain lever in the old machines; maybe they never tabulated my votes correctly, and they were prone to getting jammed and needing emergency fixes on election day. But somehow it still seemed more decisive and reliable than filling in bubbles and feeding my ballot into the orifice of a faintly malevolent-looking machine. So I'm a Luddite. So sue me.