Oh crapola, one day in and I already blew NaBloPoMo. Oh well, I'm still going to try to carry on with it - I just won't get any prizes. More later...

Why do I feel compelled to make sure the sheets on MY bed are changed before my parents come to visit? Am I really afraid that my mom's going to sneak into my room when I'm at work, lift the covers and take stock of the clean sheet situation?

Yes. Yes, I am. The term "house-proud" isn't just a phrase, it's a religious devotion with English matrons of her species. I've learned, however, that it's actually best not to have things 100% clean, especially when I have to go to work while they're visiting. It's not that I WANT my mom to do housework for me, necessarily... It's that I know she'll do it whether I want her to or not, so it's best to plan accordingly. By "forgetting" to dust the bookshelves, or leaving a few shirts around which need ironing, I provide outlets for her fussing, making her less likely to resort to more exotic household aid efforts which would take her into areas I'd prefer remain unmolested by anyone but me. Honestly, it's not about getting free housework - it's about making Mom happy! And also getting free housework. But mostly the happiness.

However, there's an additional level of difficulty in this game these days called Mobility, since her hip is taking a while to recover from its replacement and she also apparently has a broken bone in her foot... Not that any of this really keeps her from overextending herself in the pursuit of Tidy. I have to make sure, then, that she doesn't find things to do that will pose a risk to her osteopathic well-being. I don't want the other kids getting on my case because I broke their mom. This is why last night I debated for a good two minutes on whether or not to wipe down the dishwasher door. On one hand - perfect Mom task. On the other - requires low-level contortion. Tricky. (In the end, Wee wiped it down. Good lad!)

Ultimately, I just have to accept that my house isn't going to be in OCD-perfect order when my folks get here, and remind myself that they actually do understand that we both work full-time, and unlike many of our yuppie compatriots we don't hire Merry Maids, and we're both sort of packrats, and we're also kind of indifferent to low-level clutter. So really, any clear clean surface they do find in the house is a testament to my respect for their comfort, because at any other given time that surface is likely to be covered in old magazines or dust or wineglass rings. And for a couple of glorious days, when I get home, that place is guaranteed to be cleaner than when I left it, and dinner's likely to be started, and best of all I get to hang out with my tiny folks who are pretty much the easiest houseguests ever. So it's all good.

The Police have officially announced North American dates for their tour this year. HUZZAH!

When I saw them on the Grammys last night, I couldn't stop grinning. They all look pretty damned hale for a bunch of Senior Rockers. Of course I'm an unrepentant Sting fan... Not that I've liked all of his recent stuff - I can't really listen to "Mercury Falling", and I haven't bothered acquiring "Songs From The Labyrinth" since hearing excerpts - but on the whole I'll give anything he does a fair shot. Bill and I both really dig the solo stuff that Stewart Copeland's done, too (under his own name and his pseudonym Klark Kent).

Anyway, this tour Bill and I must attend. They aren't coming to California, but I sure as hell have my eye on scoring some tickets for their Phoenix show if possible. I know it's going to be an ungodly feat, however. I'm even tempted to get a Premium Fan Club membership to get access to ticket presales - it's expensive, but it might be worth it. I can't even remember the last concert we went to, and honestly there are very few bands I'd be into seeing live anyway these days - but to have one last chance to see The Police (!!!) in person...? Hells yeah, I feel justified throwing a little extra money at the thing to make it stick.

So excited!

"What kind of clown show do you have going on over there?"

- William Rhodes, half-asleep, upon being awakened this morning by the sounds of his wife spilling the red cup full of water on his bedside table, knocking over the empty steel flask next to it while mopping it up, and his alarm going off in the middle of it all.

I've been thinking a lot today about James Kim and how this awful mess could've happened to someone like him.

I'd never heard of the guy nor his family before they became a news item, but I identify with them. James Kim was my age, was involved in the tech industry, lived about an hour's drive from my house and died about a two-hour drive from where I grew up. I know exactly what it's like to get lost on those little logging roads in the mountains that look OK on the map but get desolate and scary all too quickly. Sometimes they're narrow with steep, tree-lined borders, and it can be hard to find a place to turn around right away; sometimes, and this sounds like what happened to the Kims, you might feel like you must be getting close to a larger road and will be OK if you just keep going - until you realize that your gas gauge is getting low and there's no out in sight. I've been in a car that broke down on an isolated road at night with the temperature below freezing; my friends and I huddled together through a night that seemed to last a week, using carseat covers for sleeping bags, until someone drove by at dawn. That was bad enough - and yet we weren't even in any danger; there were houses within a couple of miles. We were just cold and unwilling to walk as far as it would take to get to a phone, knowing eventually someone would come by or that we could walk out the next day.

A lot of people might find it easy to armchair-quarterback the decisions that the Kims made on that night, trying to get to their hotel after dark in an unfamiliar part of the state. We wonder how an intelligent young couple, equipped with things like cell phones, maps and GPS's, could still get so perilously lost in such a short time. We reassure ourselves that we would've made different decisions. However, it's scary how many disasters are not derived from one devastating event but a series of small problems or decisions that by themselves might make sense, but which stack up into something FUBAR. I'm certain the Kims made choices based on what seemed to be reasonable assumptions. I can only imagine the surrealness of the oh-fuck moment when it became apparent that they had dug a dreadful hole for themselves out there. We'll never know why James Kim didn't stay on the road when he went for help instead of going down into a ravine - was he hoping to follow the creek to the Rogue and find a house or a bigger road? I doubt he was down there without a good rationale, at least in his mind. The trail he left behind would tend to support this...

At any rate, very few of us can say with certainty with how we'd act or what would seem the most effective thing to do if we were that hungry, freezing and stressed. For James Kim, his family - his babies - had been slowly suffering for over a week, far longer than I'm sure he could ever have imagined they'd be out there without rescue. Just imagine - 9 days in a car in the freezing woods with two babies and no food. 9 days - when 6 hours was a cold, hungry eternity to my teenaged ass shivering in a broken-down hatchback a couple miles down the road from town. A countdown was booming, loud as a kettle drum, for the Kims. So James did what he thought he needed to do, and he did it as logically as he could manage. Possibly he overthought it, overengineered a solution that ultimately made it harder to find him before it was too late... but who's to say?

Another thing - I think many of us, especially the urban and gadget-crazy, might be too complacent in the thought that technology will always be there for us when we need it, when in fact technology was not enough to help this family make their way out of those deep, cold woods on their own (although admittedly a cell phone ping was enough to help three of them be found). We think of ourselves as smart people who could solutioneer our way out of any bad situation. I'll bet that if you'd asked James Kim the day before this happened whether he could seriously imagine that this is how he'd die, alone in the woods with not one tool that could help him, he'd have said no way. I'm smarter than that. I have a good car, a cell phone, a travel plan. And yet.

The whole saga has just really struck a chord with me, because if it could happen to people like the Kims, it most certainly could happen to me. I'm grateful that I at least married someone with a lot more caution and sense of practical survivalism when it comes to travel than I myself have. The next time we're planning a road trip anywhere arguably remote, however, I hope that I'll think about the Kims, and about Murphy's Law, and maybe be inclined to stock up and consider contingencies. It can't hurt - and man, it certainly could help.

Mom and Dad have been a little blue lately - change of seasons, health stuff, etc... So Mom decided they needed something to brighten them up. A funny movie, say. My parents aren't big movie-goers; they go to maybe two flicks a year, tops. But Mom looked in the papers, found a comedy that seemed to have a lot of good reviews, and began cajoling Dad to take her. "We need a few laughs!" she said. Dad finally caved, and off they went to the Pelican Cinemas.

The movie she chose? Borat.

So they didn't so much get those laughs they were looking for from their night out, poor souls; but lordy mercy... The mental picture of my conservative, ultra-polite little parents sitting through that crass-a-copia of a movie - the looks that must have been on their faces! Their tense little whispers: "We should leave." "No, let's just wait a bit and see if it gets any better." "I don't believe this." Oh, that's comedy gold.

That being said, my poor folks need a chuckle now more than ever. My tastes tend to run non-PG, though, so I'm stumped as far as recommending anything for them to rent... Any suggestions? (Obviously, PG-13 and under would be swell; the slapstickier and unraunchier the better...)

Copied from an email I sent to my Midwest cousins - me, of all people, one of the only Democrats in the bunch. Downright shocking! Or maybe not so much, considering that my dad and brother were career military (Thom is a combat veteran many times over; Dad served overseas in peace and honorably stateside during the Vietnam War), and my mom tended bar at the local VFW for 20+ years... Four of Mom's brothers served in the British military during WWII, while one of Dad's brothers fought for the U.S. So, Veteran's Day has always been pretty notable in our family. I may not agree that our nation should be fighting the current war in Iraq - but you bet your ass I have as much respect for the men and women who are fighting there now as I do for the ones who've served our country in the past.

With Veteran's Day coming up tomorrow, I'm thinking back on the trip that Bill and I took this summer - we toured European WWII battle sites with two of the men from Easy Company, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne Division (the soldiers featured in the HBO mini-series "Band of Brothers") - Babe Heffron and "Wild" Bill Guarnere. These guys were absolutely awesome, and it was, needless to say, an amazing trip (I posted way too many pictures , if anyone's interested in checking them out).

When we were in the Normandy American cemetery in France, we were told that French families have adopted many of the graves in the cemetery - they leave flowers and pay their respects on holidays, and pass the obligation down to their children. With all the bad press that American/French relations have gotten, it was good to discover on our recent trip that there's actually still an incredible amount of respect and gratitude among the French people (and the Belgians, Dutch, English, Austrians, etc...) for what American veterans did for them 60+ years ago. They have monuments to American soldiers/sailors all over Europe, and memorial days are a big deal to them. Europeans who weren't even born until after the war would get teary-eyed describing the gratitude their parents and grandparents had for their American liberators. In Eindhoven, the Netherlands we attended a huge parade on their Liberation Day, at which our guys were guests of honor (Babe is credited with being the first American to enter Eindhoven, so he's a pretty big deal among the Dutch...). Really, everywhere we went our veterans were treated like rock stars.

I've attached a picture of three of the veterans I'll be thinking of most tomorrow - Babe, Frank Fericks (a US Navy pilot) and "Wild" Bill, at the Luxembourg American cemetery. It struck me that the inscription above their heads is not only a good way of describing the places where our soldiers are buried, but of the hearts and minds of ones who are still alive. Here's to letting all our veterans (including my own brother Thom!) know how much their valor and sacrifice mean (or should mean) to all the rest of us who benefit from the results every day. (Middle picture: Bill Guarnere, circa WWII. At right: Babe Heffron circa WWII).

I can barely stand looking at my own site anymore because the masthead graphic is so cheesy. It's bugged me for ages. What am I, a newspaper columnist? Or a high school senior, with the whole perky, chin-on-hand pose? Gah. I put it up in 2001 and was already done with it by... late 2001. The thing is, we moved to Movable Type and I totally cannot remember how to change it. I'm going to have to shanghai Wee tonight and make him help me swap it out. Now I just need to figure out what to do next. I'm no Dooce when it comes to clever graphics. Hmm...

The sounds in the courtyard outside my front door today:

- Hooting and yelling from the pack of middle-aged Indian men who play cricket in the park behind our house every weekend. They really worked up over every game. Our Indian neighbors seem so mellow and quiet most of the time that it's funny to see these guys out there playing with such loud enthusiasm in their tucked-in polo shirts and belted jeans. Plus, it's... you know, cricket, with the googlys and sticky wickets and whatnot. I've always pictured it as some goofy, twee hybrid of baseball and croquet; it never occured to me that there might be players out there who'd get all extreme over it.

- One of the family of awesome pianists in the house next to us is practicing piano. Sort of. Judging from the jangly, discordant arpeggios they're pounding into the keys, whoever it is must be feeling pretty feisty about something... Like a fiendish house elf, as put it. One of them is pretty much always at the piano, and I've gotten so used to gardening with accompaniment that I actually get kind of annoyed if they aren't playing. I'm tempted to see if they'll start taking requests. Gershwin is great for planting, though Vivaldi works, too. Thanks!

- Tiny, angry peeps from the hummingbird hovering at the feeder. It's pissed off because I'm hanging out nearby and because the feeder is empty. Taking off, it makes a whirring fly-by near my head. Clearly, the level of service at Chez Tessenwee has been unsatisfactory. Time for me to go boil some sugar-water.

- Metallic rasping of a rake against asphalt as the neighbor across the street cleans up dead maple leaves from the road. I'm still loving that October smells like old leaves and wet soil and wood smoke here, as it should. And yet, the weather's still warm enough that I can plant another round of vegetables in my Earthboxes. I'm attempting broccoli, broccoflower (a broccoli-cauliflower hybrid), brussel sprouts, lettuce and peas, and replanting my herb pots with rosemary, basil and chives. Last weekend I brutually pruned out the overgrown morning glory and thorny bougainvillea along our fence, and the courtyard seems pretty barren now... My arms still look like I was wrestling angry cats. I needed to do it, though - the live vines were growing on a base of old dead foliage that had become top-heavy and was beginning to collapse in one big, snarled sheet. Creepers had started seeking out new territory across the patio and have been slowly consuming Seymour, our giant split-leaf philadendron. Now I have to figure out what to do with all the space I created. Having a garden nursery a 1/2 mile away is going to be dangerous, I fear.

Meet Vertigo! You'll have to wake him up. He's mighty fond of mouse arrows...

So here's the thing - I'm most likely going to bail on the NaBloPoMo thing... Just thought I thought I'd just get that out there and save all three of my devoted readers the trouble of checking in every day.

Something about this "write every day" thing just bugs the shit out of me. I hate the sense of obligation. It's the same reason I don't usually join clubs or volunteer or make resolutions that I have any intention of keeping. Same reason I dropped that writing class at Stanford. OK, not so much "dropped" as "mysteriously stopped showing up but was too embarrassed let anyone know I had no plans to go back because writing on command is hard!!".

I still haven't quite figured out what it is that makes me such a putz about the concept of obligation - fear of failure, inner-child contrarianism ("I'll do the dishes in a minute! When I'M ready to do them! Jeez!"), or sheer garden-variety laziness... I'm sure there are plenty of psychological catch-phrases fit for tattooing across my metaphysical forehead, summing up why I'm whining instead of relishing the challenge. What it all comes down to, though, is that I'm declaring pre-emptive defeat, but I'm feeling pretty OK with that. I embrace my inner slacker!

Anyway, next time I have some thought binge that needs purging, I'll be back. Until then - hey, there's always Flickr...

Right. It's November 1st and I said I'd post something every day this month.

"I don't have anything to write about," I bitched to Wee.

"Talk about buckle bunnies!" (We were just on the topic. By way of talking about dumb Americans. By way of talking about the star of "Borat" and the wealth of especially witless costars he'd find at places like, say, rodeos.)

"I don't want to talk about buckle bunnies."

"Do you know what a buckle bunny is?"

"Dude, you couldn't walk three steps at the Tulelake-Butte County Fair without bumping into a buckle bunny. But I don't have anything to say about them."

"Well, talk about counting resistors at inventory today. Plenty of people have had jobs where they had to count things. They can relate. It's commiseration!"

"It's bad enough I'll be counting them in my sleep tonight. And counting them again tomorrow. Next."

"Talk about all the cute kids you saw at the door last night."

They were cute. But that kind of goes without saying. Although it was kind of weird that a couple of the parents were not only in costumes but actually holding out their own candy bags this year - like, not for one of their kids, but for themselves. When did that trend start? Oh, and I kept getting called out by the kids for guessing their costumes wrong. I was just trying to be interactive, but it's a little like asking a woman with a protruding tummy when her due date is - assumptions can be hazardous. Plus, it sucks to be a kid with a costume that no one gets.

Bill's solution to this is simply to not answer the door, and thereby to be released from the burden of interactivity. But I love the Halloween candy giveaway. Sure, I'm a sucker for tiny kids in costumes, but I also feel like it's a karmic obligation in return for when I was one of those kids, released from my parents' recognizance and unleashed on the neighborhood for one cold, giddy night. My mom and dad never ran security for me like parents do today - granted, I lived in a good part of a smallish town, and maybe it's a more dangerous world now than it was 25 years ago. That's a pity, though, because for me the independence was a big part of the deal - that rush of freedom and apprehension that made everything look a little sharper as we ran along familiar streets turned exotic by shadows and stillness. I loved that I could just run up to the doors of strangers with every expectation of having them opened and of scoring free candy. I liked peeking inside the houses whose outsides I passed every day and seeing who lived in them. Even when we eventually wore down and started jonesing to get home and lose the costumes and makeup, we could look forward to the serious science of sorting, categorizing and prioritizing the booty, and figuring out a good place to hide it from mercenary older brothers. (As if that ever worked...)

Man, being a kid on Halloween rocked. Serving up chocolate to whatever kids who still brave the neighborhood streets instead of sucking out and going to the mall just helps me get a little closer to those memories.

Although, now that I know that it's apparently cool for grown-ups to dress up and beg for candy as long as they have a kid with them? Yeah, I really need to hook that up.

Ha, and with one minute to spare... There's day one!

OK, I admit that I'm only posting to get rid of the blank space on the main page. However, I fully intend to take a stab at joining Fussy.org's NaBloPoMo effort, and post every day in November. That's right, every bloody day for a month. Let the inevitable tedium ensue!

In the mean time, please feel free to scroll down and check out my archives if you haven't already. Chock full of tasty ephemera.

I wish whatever is making that occasional tappy noise in the back rooms would cut it out. Ghost, transient, squirrel, whatever... Either attack or retreat, pal. I sure miss having a big dog around when Bill's out of town. I mean, I miss her for a lot of reasons - home security is simply the one that springs to mind at the moment. Although, as I mentioned to Josh H., I guess in a pinch I could use the cedar box she's in to clock someone over the head...

I've been pissed off at Korean-made things this week due to the crapping-out of both major LG appliances in our kitchen... But then I saw this page about artist Hyungkoo Lee's exhibition Animatus, and it's the best thing I've seen all month. All is forgiven, South Korea.

So I've had this one of me up on Flickr for a while - and yesterday a celebrity-mocking art site called Gallery of the Absurd ended up linking to it as a prime example of 80's High School prom hair (comparing my AquaNet-shellacked hair lilt to that of Conan O'Brien). Righteous! I feel so much better about the fact that my prom dates were all platonic...

Ever since I went back to work, Indy has started up with her version of angsty teen cutting, the Lick Granuloma, where basically she licks her leg into an oozing raw mass of torutured flesh. I've written about this before, but apparently dogs get an endorphin rush out of it or some crazy thing. Anyway, usually she'll do it a while then stop, but this one's gotten bad enough that we decided it was time to put a cone on her head and give the leg a chance to heal unmolested.

She's dealing with it better than we expected - she's not clawing at it or whining or anything - but she is in kind of a manic panting mood. We can't decide if she's doing this for amusement, to dislodge the thing, or simply to bully us into taking it off - but several times this evening she's made for the opposite end of wherever she sees us standing up, then gallumphed her arthritic, neuropathic bones across the room to ram our legs, head on. It's like she's head-cone jousting, and it's incredibly silly.

Last week we finally broke down and bought a Cuisinart food processor, and boy, are they everything they're cracked up to be if you're someone who likes to cook. So far, I've made hummus, basil pesto, guacamole, salsa, and my very own mayonnaise - all very non-complicated and the results have been uniformly kick-ass. "So," Wee said, "Looks like dinner's going to be... assorted sauces?" I have yet to explore the wonders of the dough blade or the cheese and veggie shredders - but the night is still young.

I always thought that the expense wasn't justifiable, but Costco had a great deal on the one we bought. We do a lot of cooking, and I've wished for one several times in the recent past, so it was time to invest. Judging from the results, the bigger risk is that I'll be making too many tasty snacks for anyone's good. Another good reason to be glad I'm working again is that I can pawn off leftovers to my workmates, who all seem to be quite enthusiastic eaters.

So, Yuppie Creep once again insinuating itself into the Rhodes household? Fucking-A right it is. Asceticism is for monks.

Our house has an A-frame roof and matching picture windows in the front and the rear. Ever since we had the windows washed, it seems that the occasional bird will look through our front window, see the redwood trees waving bright and clear through the back window, and make the tragic assumption that they've found a breezeway through which to fly.

RIP, tiny wren that scared the bejesus out of me when you BONNNNNG'ed into our window last evening. Every time I glance at the goo angel you left on the glass, I shall heave a melancholy sigh.

I just had that shit cleaned, you know?

All server-migrating issues resolved, I'm pleased to once more be able to intend to update the blog one of these days.

This weekend Bill and I went out for sushi and to go see �Munich� (good story, with some obvious relevance to current events). Bill had referred to the movie title as �M�nchen�, so as we were walking into the theater I began babbling in pidgen German. �Rechts, um die Ecke!� I chirped. �Um die Ecke! Ach, hier haben wir M�nchen! M�nchen, es ist ja hier!� I sounded like a drunk parrot on a Berlin tour bus.

Right after my little bout of saxon Tourette's, we noticed for the first time that oh, by the way? The two metrosexual guys walking about three feet in front of us? Were speaking perfect, native German.

Hello! I'm an American idiot! Wie geht's?

Dana at Bobofett asked people to email her some of their favorite iPod songs. Here's a copy of what I sent her. Clearly, I'm not a girl of refined musical tastes. Regardless, here's a sample pack of songs that, one way or another, scratch an itch in my tune-listening soul:

- One Night In Bangkok - Murray Head: because I get my kicks above the waistline, Sunshine. I fucking love this song. I can't explain.

- Dear God - XTC: I'll bet He's getting a lot of these types of letters lately

- Nightswimming - REM: reminds me of old friends, and skinnydipping. Also, one of the few REM songs where you can almost totally discern what the hell Stipe is singing.

- Starry Eyed Surprise - Paul Oakenfold: Just makes me completely happy. I liked it way before it was featured on the Sprite or Diet Coke or whatever commercial.

- You Rascal You - Louis Armstrong: only Satchmo could sing a go-fuck-yourself song that's so chipper... "I'll be glad when you're dead, you rascal you. I'll be tickled to death when you leave this earth, you dog..."

- Ring of Fire - Johnny Cash: Even though Bill and I are convinced that it's really about herpes.

- Seether - Veruca Salt: you can't fight the Seether.

- Flower - Liz Phair: Never guess from the title what a dirty, dirty little song this is. Not one to absent-mindedly sing in the bank line.

- Love You Madly, or Comfort Eagle - Cake: I couldn't choose between them. Although, for lyrics, I suppose Comfort Eagle wins by a nose. You can dress up like a sultan in your onion-head hat!

- Little Miss Can't Be Wrong - Spin Doctors: Ugh, I know... Next I'll be defending the virtues of Hootie and the Blowfish. May as well be twiddling someone's fraternity ring on a chain around my neck when I cop to this one.

- Last Laugh - Dance Hall Crashers: Calling this tune "ska" is seriously pushing the definition, but I love singing along with the weird harmonies

- Feel Good Inc. - The Gorillaz: This song forces me to groove. Resistance is futile.

There it is. Feel free to share some of yours...

(Yes, Eric, I realize that you don't see any Dan Fogelberg ANYWHERE on this list. That's for another entry, the one called "My Secret Songs of Shame").

- What Indy feels toward the vacuum cleaner is not exactly fright, but rather horrified fascination. She darts from room to room while I'm vacuuming; I used to think she was trying to hide, but I've come to realize that she's actually playing chicken with it.

- She's not only gotten used to her insulin shots, she's added them to her mental DayTimer. If I'm late with one, she'll follow me around shaking her scruff at me. Once she knows the needle's loaded, she'll usually pick a spot across the room to await the poke. If I come up to her while she's still standing and tell her to sit, however, she'll just glance at me stubbornly and stand her ground. Sadly, I have no qualms about exploiting the fact that a light tug on her collar will make her weak back legs fold like a card table. Lately, though, I just put down the needle and raise an eyebrow at her, and pretty soon she'll heave a big resigned sigh and cop a squat. It's all about the illusion of consent, I guess.

- A few months ago she started making this really harsh hacking noise every now and then. At first I was worried about it, thinking she might have kennel cough, or a splinter in her throat, or some diabetes complication we hadn't read about. Pretty soon, though, I noticed that she only does it when she wants me to do something. It's like the dog equivalent of clearing her throat. So now it just pisses me off.

- When she's asleep, sometimes her paws will start twitching and she'll yip like a coyote. I've never heard her make this sound when she's awake. I wonder what her dreams are like.

This morning I found this link on Fark: "After decades of being dissed, the ranch-style house is cool again". The article got me thinking once more about our house's design roots; so I went poking around the Goog and found an article about the origins of steep gable roof design in California homes of the 50's and 60's. Lo and behold, the article featured a picture of our exact house model, and a couple of paragraphs about its design (second image down, labeled "Anshen + Allen's gable design for Gavello homes, 1956"). The Internet, people! You really can find bloody everything here.

The article describes our roof as a "clerestory", which made me laugh because about half the people who've visited the house so far have referred to it as "the church". (Other comparisons have included "boat", "chalet", and "cabin" - the place is a conversation piece, for sure). I guess the ecclesiastical overtones are particularly appropriate, though, considering we have the Wrong Reverend Wee in residence...

In other news, the hardwood floor refurbishing is completed, and holy shit, is it pretty. Also, you can get a pretty decent buzz from huffing the polyurethane fumes. I'm so glad we had it done, even if our current mobile lifestyle is wearing a little thin (we've been living in a rented RV parked outside the house since Wednesday, and can't really move back into the house until Tuesday). Most of the floor was in OK shape to begin with - the thick rubber carpet pads were probably in place for most of the house's existence, and they really protected the floor surface. Given our dread of moving all our shit around yet again, we were tempted just to scrub the surface and live with it as-was. When we sold the last house, though, we did a lot of things to "increase value" that we were kicking ourselves for not doing sooner just for our own benefit; afterwards we promised ourselves we wouldn't procrastinate like that in our next place, within financial reason. So now, having followed through on that notion despite the temptations of slackery, we have a gorgeous floor that's worth probably 4-5 times what it cost us to fix it up. O happy day... Now let's just hope we can manage not to fuck it up too badly.

When I was reading the IMDB message boards for the cinematic tour de force that was 1976's "King Kong" this evening, I came across a poem that... You see, it's... um. Well, I just thought others might enjoy it as much as I did. Here you go!

KING KONG AND QUEEN DWAN

Dwan what a charmer,
like Faye Wray, well ALMOST like Faye Wray.
She holds over the beasts being
total absolute sway
Atop the dual phallouses
that sadly are no more.
The Queen Begs DONT LET ME GO!
But he knows what is is store.
Is his own gargantuan simian way
as tears fills his giant eyes
He seems to know in his giant heart
that he is going to die.
"O beautiful queen, I will die,
before you I let them kill.
You have, my heart with total joy
given such great fill."
And man with his instruments of destruction
go after the kings beautiful head.
The king falls off the palace top
and on the street lays dead.
His beautiful queens weeps bitterly
for her king is no more.
She was a regent in his eyes.
And never was the whore.

Being a "high-balance customer" (as defined by our Citibank rep in explaining why she was giving us our check order for free) has been a gratifying feeling; we're savoring it while it lasts, though, because pretty soon that hefty pellet o' cash will be flying right back out of our account and into that of the people whose house we agreed to purchase on Tuesday.

Bill's done a great job of describing the house on his page already, so if you want to know the backstory, check it out... The place is pretty funky, needs some therapy, and contains a blinding array of brass fixtures as well as a powder-blue color scheme and frilly wallpaper, all of which most certainly must be purged. However, we dig it because, after looking at countless boring ranch homes with their bric-brac facades, generically boxy floorplans and locations deep in the heart of suburbia, this one seemed unique and interesting.

Also, we were hoping to find a place that had some shops and things within walking distance. Before I moved to San Diego, I'd always lived in neighborhoods near college campuses with lots of nearby shops and places to eat and hang out; I missed that accessibility during our stint in the driving-addicted bedroom communities of Southern California. Our new house is within reasonable walking distance of Murphy Ave, a short stretch of road in downtown Sunnyvale with several cute little Irish pubs, a bunch of decent-looking restaurants, a lively used bookstore and a couple of pool halls. Perfect. Every Wednesday evening in summer they block off the ends of the avenue and have a street fair. Apparently, downtown Sunnyvale in general is poised on the brink of a huge renovation effort - it's been in the works for years, but only now seems like it's going to kick into gear.

We didn't realize that getting a moderately-priced house in Sunnyvale was sort of a coup until Bill talked with some of his coworkers about it. Many of them ended up buying houses in outlying areas around San Jose like Campbell and Cambrian. Their commutes are 2-3x as long as the 15 minutes it takes Bill to get to work from here. Most of the houses we looked at out there would need just as much fixing up as our wacky little chalet does - and in the end, maybe we'd have a place with a nice kitchen and some refinished hardwood floors, but it'd still be cracker-boxy and mired in the 'burbs. Luckily, the owners of our place fixed up the kitchen a few years back and we like the cabinets just fine. We plan to swap out the flat-top electric range with a high-output gas cooktop, but otherwise, it's tip-top. Something about the house is tickling our tiki sensibilities, and we plan to trick it out accordingly. Ooga-chaka!

The important thing, though, is that I can totally picture us living in this place and thinking of it as home... Not just as the place where we keep our stuff and hang out in when we don't have anything better to do, but also a place that pleases and amuses us, inspires our imagination a little, is fun to show to guests, and has a layout that's useful and accomodating to the way we live. All that, and a relative bargain to boot (well, as much as any house that costs over three quarters of a million dollars (!) and still doesn't come with manservants or a yacht slip can be said to be a "bargain"... Welcome to Silicon Valley.)

Anyway, I feel like we scored a pretty decent place - and even better, unlike the prior house we bid on, with this one we won't have to sell plasma and find 100 ways to liven up Ramen dinners in order to make our house payments. So, whew.

Overheard at the interim HQ of Tessenwee Ltd.:

"You know, we could just stay here, and blow the wad on liquor and high-end electronics instead."

"Sure. Although hookers and blow are the more traditional way to go."

"Good point."

Translationh: We closed on the house today. Wahoo!

Blog? What blog?

More soon. No, really.

Sorry I haven't been updating lately. You'd think that, given all the time I have on my hands, I should be writing up a storm... I just find myself with not much to say, I guess. This is a kind of strange time for me now, a weird limbo of living in a house that's been more or less stripped of all of our most personal stuff and which has to be kept in show condition all the time - I spend my days chasing the dog around with the vacuum and Swiffering as if the Queen were coming over any second to take high tea off my kitchen tiles.

My car has been in the shop for the past three weeks, so I've been sort of stranded here except for the times when my wonderful friends have come and rescued me for a few hours. I've done a massive amount of walking; the resulting fitness aspect has admittedly been a silver lining to the whole experience. It's not exactly the way I'd have chosen to kick-start a health regimen, but I'm (mostly) not complaining. I've also had the unmitigated pleasure of making acquaintance with San Diego's mass transit system. The nearest bus stop is, sadly, 2 miles from where I live (ref: all the damned walking I've been doing), but I survived the trip there and back, as well as a couple more miles of walking once I got where I was going that day. My Achilles tendon is killing me, but my leg muscles are toit like a toiger.

Other than that, my main entertainments have been online poker (I won $90 on my birthday - o Happy Day!) and watching my own little Wild Kingdom episode out on the back patio... A hummingbird made a nest on the Xmas lights strung up around our spa, so I've been checking them out up close and personally. How many people ever get to do that? I've taken a bunch of pictures and putting them up on my Flickr account.

Oh yeah - by the way, we have a Flickr account now! Click to check it out. So far, it's mostly pics of the birds, Indy, our GORGEOUS MUST-SEE PENASQUITOS HOME! UPGRADES GALORE!, and our "going-away" party (if only I COULD go away, already!). I just bought the "Pro" account, though, so I'll probably be sticking all kinds of random shit up there soon.

Outside of Von's today, two boys about 5 and 7 were waiting at the curb for their mother to put the shopping cart back; the younger boy stepped toward the parking lot, and the older boy leaped on him and wrestled him back to the curb, saying, "You wait for Mom, or I'll punch you in the butt!"

I'm SO using that phrase the next time someone crosses me.

Is it just me, or does new Pope Benedict XVI just look kind of... well, a little creepy?

I wonder if any old Catholic WWII vets were pissed off when they heard that a German would be wearing the funny Hat?

I have so much love for Go Fug Yourself. So. Much. Love.

Cat's out of the bag. This is why we're moving to Silicon Valley. Hooray!

After a hard day of throwing dirt-encrusted shit into a big metal box, nothing beats a quiet evening prying your insulin-shocked pooch's clenched fangs open so that you can squirt a couple turkey baster-loads of Karo syrup down her throat, followed by a brisk stroll out into the cool night air to scoop up some huge, wet piles of her kibble vomit. Good times!

So it turns out that the reason thatIndy has been losing so much weight, drinking water like she's on fire, and generally been an unhappy pooch is because she has diabetes. Poor girl.

Poor owners, too, because it sounds like we'll have to give her insulin shots TWICE a day for the rest of her life. There are very few things that I can remember to even do once a day on a regular basis, let alone twice, so this should be an interesting task to undertake.

A coworker asked me if we were going to put her to sleep because of the diabetes. I just blinked at her in amazement for a couple of seconds. Why the hell would I even consider that, if it's something that's managable and she can still have a good quality of life? Sure, it'll be a pain in the ass to do the insulin, and might be kind of expensive... But this is the sort of thing you have to be prepared to do for those you love. I read a quote once about life priorities that said, "If it doesn't breathe, it doesn't really matter." Indy breathes; she feels; she matters.

We adopted Indy 9 years ago when she was 6 weeks old, just 6 months before we got married - she's a charter member of our family unit. She's just the best dog we ever could have hoped for. She's so smart, and emotionally vivid, and loyal and funny and obedient... All told, the epitome of a Good Girl. We love her like any other family member. She's certainly less difficult to love than many people are, and gives back more in return than most. She protects our house, she makes us laugh, she understands when we're in bad moods and need space, but she never holds a grudge and is always happy just to be close to us. Also, she's the Supermodel of the dog world. She's our Pooch Garou, our Indy-Gatta-Da-Vida, our Pup D'Amour.

Of course we'll take care of her, as long as she can still have a good life. She's our girl.

So my hometown, Klamath Falls, OR, made national news today! Apparently some KFallsian thought it'd be a swell idea to celebrate the joyful tidings of Valentine's Day by convening a bunch of his Internet pals for a suicide party; their plan was to meet remotely in an online chat room and then - 3, 2, 1, GO! - all do the deed at once.

Granted, Klamath Falls is the sort of backwater agrarian community that has driven more than one sad soul to the brink... But you have to admire the ambition and creativity of this particular cadre of the desperate, employing technology to bring mass suicide to the next level, man! They were gonna put this fuckin' cowtown on the MAP!

Then again, admiration may be a strong word. Especially when there was one woman willing to kill both of her children as part of the event, the nutty bitch.

Disaster apparently averted, anyway. So now Klamath Falls is known not only for defiant potato farmers vs. endangered suckerfish, but for suicidal megalomaniacs. Sweet!

On Sunday, while the majority of the nation was parked in front of some TV or another catching the Big Game (whatevah!), Wee and GJB and I decided it'd be a fine day to pursue some hot Go-Kart action at Miramar Speed Circuit. GJB and Chagen had generously given us memberships for Christmas, but honestly, I had no idea what it was all about until GJB suggested we go this weekend.

As soon as I got there, I realized, correctly, that So! Much! Fun! was about to ensue, and in fact did. 10 people at a time go out on a 1/4 mile course for about 10 minutes, which is plenty of time; you end up doing about 10 or 11 laps (unless you're a speed monkey like G.). The carts are amazingly stable - they turn great and I think it'd take a lot to flip them, and the referees are pretty good about watching drivers and calling out the foolhardy. It takes a while to learn how to take corners and to get up the gumption to go full-out on the straight bits, but after a while I was zooming around pretty fast. You get a decent arm workout too, cranking that hard little steering wheel back and forth for 15 minutes straight - my biceps are kind of stiff today. We're totally going again next weekend.

Yeah, so my inner child is a 14-year old boy. What's your point?

Canine dental cleaning:
$200

Canine molar extraction:
$250

Canine exam/bloodwork/heartworm treatment/vaccines/all the other shit you're told you really oughtta have done to make sure a senior-citizen dog is tip-top:
$300 ($500, actually, but I put off a couple of tests when the tooth yanking came up)

Indy's worth to us:
Priceless (luckily for her)

OUCH!

You know, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Phoenix may be an ultra-conservative, fire-and-brimstone bulldog of a law enforcer, but you have to give the man points for creativity. When he does things like color his handcuffs bright pink so that other law enforcement agencies can't get away with hanging on to them after prisoner transfers, you have to dig the guy a little.

Plus, I bet he could TOTALLY make money selling those to the general public. I'm just saying there might be a market.

Did I ever tell you that my brother-in-law Mickey is an official "Special Deputy" for the Phoenix Sheriff's dept? He even has an official, heavy-ass badge that gets him access into prisons when he goes to minister there. Sheriff Joe himself gave Mickey the badge and swore him in. Hmm - maybe if I ask really nicely, Mick could score a pair of those cuffs for his sista...? They'd go really nicely with my little bitch gun.

I am happy to report that the formerly recalcitrant toe is now the recalcifying toe. Go, toe!

However, between the healing of Floppy Joe and the winding down of the Neverending Cold, I'm fresh out of maladies about which to whinge and wrangle sympathy out of my friends and colleagues. Worse, soon I'll have to bite the bullet and start exercising like I promised myself I would at the start of the year. Balls.

Happy New Year, all...

Hope yours was good; ours was fine, although all the big plans I had for household projects over my week-long break were derailed by the Cold Virus from Hell, which set in on the 28th and continues to spelunk in my breathing passages and give me a voice laden with the sultry tones one might expect from, say, a drunk toad. Also, my boss is out all this week, which means that I'm the pseudo-boss, so my level of joyousness is all the more compounded now that we're back to work.

Topping it all off, it seems that my broken pinkie toe has decided to be somewhat more high-maintenance than most. I went to my GP Dr. K for a follow-up visit last week; at first he seemed kind of incredulous that I'd even bothered to come see him, but once I explained that the toe still seemed kinda more - well, wiggly - than I'd expect it to be, he went ahead and ordered a follow-up set of X-rays to compare with the original set.

The results show that the ends of the "nasty break" (to quote Dr. K) have apparently engaged in absolutely no healing in the 3-1/2 weeks since they parted ways - probably because there is a gap of 2mm or so separating them. (Doesn't sound like much until you look at a ruler...). Can't knit back together if they aren't touching, I guess. So, rather than having a useless nugget of meat flapping off of the end of my foot for all eternity, Dr. K has suggested that I go see an orthopedic surgeon for an evaluation.

So, I guess my decision to go with the more expensive insurance plan with better coverage this year was a good move after all...

This year had better improve from here, or... or I'll give it what-for! Or else! Buh.

Is it wrong that I'm a little bit proud of having finally broken my first bone?

Even though my childhood was riddled with so many minor mishaps and stumblefuck maneuvers that my mother dubbed me an Accident Waiting to Happen (this was her second favorite term for me as a child, next to "Snotbox" - a veritable architect of self-esteem, my mom), I always felt like I'd just dabbled; I hadn't really done anything, like, major, other than a couple of sets of stitches in the same spot on my eyebrow within a year of each other. The boys never really seemed to hurt themselves despite their most daredevil inclinations. My sister - hi, Suzi! - was the one who really cornered the market on Serious Maladies growing up - near-drownings, compound arm fractures, pernicious viruses, etc. I just did things on a smaller and somehow more humiliating scale, like running into bricks face-first or spraining my neck while blow-drying my hair. With the snapping of my right-foot little toe, however, I feel like I've finally earned my Advanced Klutz Badge.

Thursday morning I was ironing some Dockers for Bill to wear for his first day at his new job when I realized that it was nearly time for me to leave for work, and I hadn't managed to get dressed yet. As I hustled across the living room toward the stairs, my right foot apparently began to hear the siren song of sharp corners, which my easily-bruised hide can't resist; my wee toe responded by slamming hard into the end of the kitchen wall. I heard two sharp "SNAP!" sounds as it connected, and thought, Uh-oh.

Still, having never broken anything before, at first I told myself I just jammed it. Then I looked down, and noted the cocked angle at which my toe was now sticking out from my foot. Oh. That's not right. Strangely, it didn't hurt much, so I reached down and gently poked at it. The toe wiggled around in directions it had never gone before, and too easily. It felt like a slightly-stale Gummi Worm.

I decided to consult with the resident expert in fractures, and hobbled upstairs to show Wee, who'd been roused out of his loop of denial-snoozing when I yelled OW. He seconded the notion that I had indeed busted it. So, off to the Urgent Care I went (driving the car was interesting). The X-ray confirmed a diagonal break in the second bone of the toe, from the top to the outside. They buddy-taped the toe to its neighbor, which is pretty much all they can do. (The RN who took my info asked me if I wanted to bother with X-rays, when the treatment would be the same regardless of whether it was broken or just sprained. Dude. It's my first broken bone - this is an EVENT. You bet your ass I want X-rays! If I could, I'd have them done daily for the next 6 weeks). I was sent on my way with a lovely foam rubber/Velcro sandal, some crutches - which I don't really need, but hey, FREE CRUTCHES! - and a scrip for Tylenol 3 (party!).

I made it into the office a mere 2-1/2 hours late. The doctor had written me a note and I totally could've scored a day off... My inbox would just have been that much uglier when I returned, though; also, our department was going to a holiday lunch at a semi-fancy Italian place, and hey, FREE FOOD!

When I got home, I found the Dockers sitting on the bed, unworn. Buh! Someone's learning how to do their own ironing from now on. However, that same someone made me a delicious lobster-tail dinner and fetched things for me all night, so it's all good.

All I can say now, with Christmas a mere 2 weeks away and half my list still empty... Thank the sweet birthday-boy Jesus for online shopping.

Note to self: there's a good chance that the type of no-nonsense person who becomes a aerospace mechanical engineer may also be the type who will utterly fail to appreciate why anyone would ever call him a "groove commando".

Clearly, I forgot to take my vitamins today.

The only thing better than getting flowers is getting surprise flowers on an otherwise-uneventful Tuesday evening. Followed by a dinner of 2-inch thick, medium-rare ribeye steaks with sauteed portobello mushrooms and some fancy, rich sauce involving shallots and Cabernet and cream.

So yeah, my husband rocks.

This weekend, I:
- Slept for 11 hours in one long, beatific row;
- Attended Kim's birthday party, where I listened to an Englishman's funny stories about pikeys, and pretty songs played on a very cool guitar;
- Rejoiced in Wee's successful installation of a fake log gas-fireplace thing. I used to resist the notion; I thought I'd miss being able to burn real wood. But I'll be damned if the pseudo-log-fire doesn't look and feel reasonably close to the real thing - it even has little pseudo-embers (made from fiberglass fluff) that glow orange and purple. And it never dies down or needs restoking or scooping out. While the pseudo-fire lacks the smoky pine smell of a real one, it also lacks the burned-down-candle-factory odor of the Duraflame logs to which we'd resorted last year because it gnawed at our very souls to pay $10.00 for a bundle of three damp chunks of firewood at Von's. In sum, the new fire solution rocks, and I will be spending a great deal of quality time with it this winter.

That's about it. Oh, Wee has some massively good news too, which we celebrated over steaks and champagne on Friday night. However, I'll let him bust out with it in his own blog if/when he's ready. =)

So , it would seem that had herself a little case of painful gas pressure, and she's breathing a geological sigh of relief now. Better light a match, Portland!

I remember the 1980 eruption. In our southern Oregon town, the cars and houses were dusted in fine gray ash, which we scraped into piles and shook into little containers for keepsakes. I don't know where mine went, but I'm sure that my souvenir-loving Uncle Frank still has the vial we sent him, tucked away in his tiny English house somewhere between the thunderegg from Crater Lake and the plastic yard-o-beverage stein from Red Lobster.

So Wee and I have come up with a theme for decorating our Halloween party (which is on October 30th - and for those to whom this means anything, we're not conflicting with the Brotherhood's gig this year).

Wee doesn't want me to advertise specifics, in case the results are lamer than hoped. Still, I think it'll be cool - I wanted to do something different from last year but was uninspired about how to go about it; now that we've picked a motif, though, I have all kinds of good ideas. It's just a question of whether we'll have the motivation and/or means to do it all. Let's just say there's some papier-mache and minor construction involved. Could be messy.

So, if you know us, and you are (or can arrange to be) in San Diego on Halloween weekend, we hope you'll come on over! The Evite will be mailed this weekend - inevitably, though, we'll omit someone by accident or because we don't have current contact info - so if you read this and think to yourself, "Why didn't those bitches invite me?", please email me, because I'm betting we actually do want your ass there too...

(By the way, the few of you who are clued in to the decor... Zip it!)

So I found a way to console myself over the Fievel thing... I went out and procured myself a couple of baby girl rats. =)

Wee had been warned that the day was coming - I'd already been cruising the "fancy rat club" sites and plotting my acquisition; Fievel was just the kicker... An omen, if you will, that it was time to get myself some rodent pals. On Monday evening I had to visit the neighborhood Postal Annex to get an online traffic school test notarized (don't ask), and lo and behold, two doors down - the Penasquitos Pet Center! Fate took its course, and 20 minutes later I was walking out of PPC with a big-ass cage and two tiny furry pals.

I tried giving them girly names like 'Morgan' and 'Stella', but they just weren't sticking; right now I'm thinking they're going to be called Bee (she likes to be up high, and has a gray-brown splotch on her face that looks like a lower-case "b" - the rest of her is white), and Tilde (she has a white " ~ " blaze on her gray-brown head; the rest is white with gray-brown speckles). I'll post pictures soon.

Lordy, they're JUST. SO. DAMNED. CUTE. They were a little freaked at first and, understandably, not feeling too social; but I've been bribing them with wee bits of pasta, which seems to be warming their hearts (or at least stomachs) toward me. Eating pasta super-charges them, for some reason - they zip around the cage afterward like tweakers with OCD. Run! Clean! Climb! Clean! Run some more! Their cage has three-count-em-three stories; Bee digs hanging out on the top level, but Tilde prefers keeping it on the down-low in the big cardboard mailing tube at floor level. Bee was sleeping up above last night, which made me a little sad for Tilde since she really likes curling up with Bee to sleep, but by morning I saw that Bee had come down and tucked into the tube with her sister again.

Indy is mostly indifferent, rather surprisingly; I think that as long as I don't actively provoke her, like triggering her chase instinct by letting them run on the floor, she'll be cool...

Anyway, there's probably nothing more boring than someone talking about their pets, but I'm pretty damned tickled with them.

So Wee and I have had traps set up all through the house to kill the mice that live in our walls. They pepper our garage and the under-sink kitchen cabinet with poop. We hear them skittering around in the walls at night. One of them had the gall to chew through our cable TV line. We are most definitely not fans of the undomesticated rodent. So, what would logic dictate that we would surely do when we found a baby version of one in the backyard? Guesses, anyone?

I was watering the plants in back Wednesday night when I noticed a small dark shape wobbling across the concrete pad by the door. I peered at it; in the dim evening light, I only could tell it was a small mammal of some sort, and it wasn't so much crawling as lurching... listing and shaking like Keith Richards at a Mormon weekend retreat. I was kind of freaked out by it, so I called Bill down to examine it. I flipped on the porch light. "What is it?"

"I think it's a baby mouse or something," he said, crouching down to get a better look.

"Why's it all shaky? Is it sick? Is it rabid?"

"No," he said, and scooped it up, which made me cringe. He held it up. "Look. It's just a baby." He started picking dog hair and soil off its nose, and we saw that its eyes were still fused shut. Up close, it didn't look mangy or sick or hurt; just blind and tired and helpless. It was definitely bigger than a mouse baby.

"So... What do you want to do with it?" I was still uncertain. After all, weren't we anti-wild-rodent on principle? But yet... He was just a little guy, all lost and sad. He couldn't help being born a varmint.

"Well..." Bill said, much to my surprise, "We could try keeping it." (OK, so I must say that the sight of my husband standing there with a wee furry guy in his hand, suggesting we could rescue it, sort of made me get a crush on him all over again.)

I had a pet rat in college, named Merlin. Merlin was smart, clean, clever, and a great companion. She has a place of honor in my Pet Hall of Fame exceeded only by Indy. I thought about her as I looked at the mystery pup, whom by that time Bill had convinced me wasn't carrying plague and had deposited into my hand. He had huge sealed-shut eyes, a weird, turned up snout and back feet that were so long that we later speculated as to whether he might be something exotic, like a kangaroo rat. He'd stopped shaking and was napped out, comforted by the warmth of my skin. Well, shit.

So we brought him in, and I made a nest for him out of paper towels and a sock in a small pet cage I had. I found a dropper and tried giving him milk. We named him Fievel, after the lost mouse in "An American Tail". Bill put him in his office for the night, the warmest room in the house. I began Googling "raising orphaned rodents", and learned how I was supposed to feed him baby formula, and give him little massages after feeding to simulate the mother licking him and keep his insides working, and wipe his privates to make him go (yeah, I know, blech... but for the record, and to my somewhat scientific interest, it worked).

In the morning, I stopped at Von's and bought some Enfamil, and took him to work so I could feed him every couple of hours. (Luckily, the boss was on jury duty.) I put his cage on top of my monitor, and he gravitated toward the warmest parts. By the end of the day, he'd gained strength and would open his mouth wide when I busted out the dropper, then laid contentedly in my hand while I gently rubbed his fur with the damp corner of a napkin. After I brought him home for the evening, one of his eyes winked open for the first time, and the other soon followed. He squinted up at us and twitched his nose, and seemed happier in our hands than in the cage, even though I'd bought him a furry mouse toy to snuggle with.

During the day, both Bill and I had poked around on the Web to try to figure out what kind of rodent he was. Kangaroo rat, Bill was convinced. I thought it was possible, except that he didn't have a tuft of fur on the tip of his tail like they did. I looked up different types of rodents. I kept looking, until finally I came to a page about "roof rats".

There are two major types of common rats. Norway rats are the type from which domesticated or "fancy" pet rats descend; they're softer, slower, more burrowers than jumpers. The other type, roof rats, are their trashy cousins - the ones that carry plague, over-run ships, prowl the sewers of cities and infiltrate people's garbage cans and pet food supplies. Their snouts are pointier, their tails and feet longer, they're faster and more limber than pet rats. They are tricky to domesticate. I saw a picture of their pups, and realized Fievel was most likely not a kangaroo rat, but a roof rat. We'd seen his bigger counterparts in our outside trash before, and one had even lived in the garage for a while.

The question was, did that change my mind about saving him? Did I want to try to raise and domesticate a pest - a critter whose brethren people made careers out of exterminating? Other people who'd tried to domesticate them were lukewarm about the results. A roof rat will never be as comfortable around people as a Norway rat will, they warned - although one raised by hand might bond with the person who raised it. I thought about what he'd look like when he got big - stocky, dark, vaguely oily. Would he escape and terrorize the house, a Templeton singing "Downstairs is a veritable smorgasbord-orgasbord-orgasbord, after the lights go down!" ? Would he gross me out?

I realized, though, that in the day I'd spent coddling him, watching him nap with his wee feet curled up, that I was stuck; I was already attached to the little bastard. So I'd keep up with the rescue effort and see how it went; worst case, Bill and I agreed, was that if once he older he became too obnoxious or impractical to keep, we'd find a likely field somewhere and release him. He was born to be wild anyway, and at least we'd have given him a chance.

That night I noticed a clicking sound when he breathed. I'd read that hand-fed babies often inhaled formula and could get it in their lungs, and the clicking sound could be a sign of congestion or pneumonia. His mouth was working when he did it, though, so I thought it could just be his white stubs of teeth rubbing together... Maybe he was teething?

We left him in Bill's office again Thursday night, and in the morning I warmed some formula and went up to feed him. He didn't move when I bumped the cage, and when I lifted him out he was sluggish. His breathing came in labored spasms. His eyes were partly open - his very first glimpse of the world by day - but they weren't bright. I tried to offer him milk, but he wouldn't eat. His legs twitched sharply. Obviously he was in bad shape. I went to put him back in the cage, intending to leave a note to Bill that he was sick. By the time I laid him down and snuggled up the mouse toy to him, I realized that he'd stopped breathing. His wee pink tongue was poking out of his mouth - a sign of demise so cliched that I half-expected to see little "X"'s appear over his eyes too. No more breath. He was gone.

Maybe my efforts to feed him had made him get pnuemonia; or, given that he was scrawny and thin when we found him, maybe he'd been sick already - perhaps his mother had died, or possibly had kicked him out of the nest as a reject - and he had simply rallied for a bit with care before succumbing. Regardless, at least he'd been clean and warm and safe when he passed. I think he knew he was being cared for; and I like to think he was comforted, in whatever way his tiny brain might register such a thing, that I was with him at the end.

So, that was that. We only had Fievel for two days, but I was surprised at how attached I got to him. The rest of the day on Friday, I found myself thinking about him, our wee guy who just wasn't tough enough for the world. Yeah, it was probably just as well that he didn't stick around. It was probably dumb to try to save him in the first place. But I was inordinately sad to see him go.

Anyone who, upon reading this account, concludes that the whole thing was just a manifestation of our underutilized maternal/paternal instincts and that we clearly just need to damn well get ourselves a baby soon... Well. Um. No comment.

First Item:
If you have a choice between seeing "Aliens Vs. Predator" and, say, getting a high colonic, go for the latter. Both fall under the category of "poo and poo-related experiences", and although I've never had one myself, I suspect the colonic is more entertaining. However, in terms of being able to sit in air-conditioned comfort eating popcorn for two hours instead of killing ants while being slow-cooked in my crockpot of a house, I must say I almost got my money's worth.

Second item:
To the person who rammed their car into the Silver Bullet's driver side door while I was parked at my friend Kim's condo complex on Saturday night, and didn't even leave a note to say "Oops, sorry!": You are an ass-sucking fucktard, and I hope you get some sort of malodorous and incurable genital disease as karmic payback. /eom

Third item:
I am very, very happy to have my husband home. It's much friendlier with two.

So apparently, ponchos are back in style. That's right, people, ponchos. Crocheted, tassled women-doilies with neckholes. This is worse, even, than the tube tunic tops I've seen girls wearing this summer, which can make the most anorexic girl in the world look like she's in her third trimester.

I saw several women wearing ponchos in Las Vegas - when I saw the first one, I thought maybe someone's grandma knit it for them and they wore it so they wouldn't hurt her feelings, or that perhaps they were from some second-world country where women still scrub floors by hand and boil cabbage for breakfast. Then I saw a couple more and realized that it was a bona-fide, fashion-forward trend. The horror. The horror.

Why would anyone purchase and wear these? For fuck's sake, why? Have they no ability to say no to stupid trends? Do they not realize that when designers run out of ideas, they just pull some retro shit out of their ass and fling it at consumers to see whether or not it'll stick?

Well, let me just say, "Bitches, you gotta duck!"

It's time to draw a line in the sand with the latest 70's fashion revivals. Just say no, women of the world! Ugly is NOT just in the eye of the beholder; these monstrosities of fashion are proof of that. They are empirically, emphatically, undeniably ugly. Say no to ponchos. If you see a friend wearing one, have an intervention. Sit them down and make them watch re-runs of the Partridge Family and the Sonny and Cher show until their eyes begin to bleed.

Seriously, they'll thank you later.

That is all.

So it turns out that the diving frog I bought to be a companion to Jean Loup-Garou was a girl after all; this week I saw them doing the Wheelbarrow of Love position, and shortly thereafter the little peppercorns emerged on the water's surface.

I've scooped them up and put them in a container, and have a jar of nasty water set aside to breed some little protozoa for them to eat... So we'll see. Wee bought me this cool microscope to check them out with, and I'm eager to do so - but I've misplaced the disks for the software that I need to run it. Damn it all! Gotta find that this weekend. You know, before I manage to kill the wee froglets...

The most random thing happened last night when I was playing online poker...

My profile lists my location as "America's Finest City", so a guy asked me which city that was. I was coy about it for a while, then gave him obvious clues that led him to guessing San Diego.

"Hey, I know a gal in San Diego. Is that you, Mary Ann*?" he joked. (*not really her name. Not that it matters).

"No," I replied, "But I do know a Mary Ann. Is your friend a redhead?"

"Yes. Did your friend move out there about 10 years ago from Cape Cod?"

"Well, she's more of a friend of a friend, but I think she did move here a while ago from somewhere back East."

"Wow... How old?"

"Early 40's, I guess."

"Interesting. The Mary Ann I know is a little ditzy, but nice."

That's when the bells really began to ring. The woman in question is, in fact, very nice and smart, but the way she talks is uniquely spacey - like a cross between the blond chick on "3's Company" and Phoebe from "Friends".

"That definitely sounds like her! The one I know has a boyfriend named Ed*."

"Yeah, that's right. Do you know her last name?"

"I don't, but my friend K does. I'll call her." So I did, and K. confirmed that Mary Ann had moved here from the Cape about 10 years ago. She gave me her last name, and I made the guy spell out the first couple of letters before I gave the rest to him. Now we were 100% sure it was the same person. I felt kinda weird giving out someone's info to someone else, but he didn't sound at all creepy about it, just amazed. They'd been platonic roommates in Cape Cod about 15 years earlier, and the guy had just moved back to the US from Cozumel and was living in the Bronx. He'd meant to try getting back in touch with her but hadn't gotten around to it yet. He did have her number - he told me the last 4 digits, and Kim verified it - so I told him she'd be expecting a call once K. had a chance to tell her. Today Mary Ann confirmed that she knew him (and that he wasn't some stalker that she'd been hiding from or anything... whew).

So, I ask you, what are the odds of that? Some random guy in an online gaming room starts chatting me up, not even knowing where I live at first, then jokes about me being a long-lost friend from 15 years ago with a pretty common first name... and, in a city of over 2 million people, she just happens to turn out to be the next-door neighbor of one of my best friends?

K. is convinced that it's fate and that the two of them are supposed to get back in touch for some reason, and that she and I are just the messengers... I'm not quite as convinced; but it's pretty damned amazing, none the less. There is, also, the fact that I met my most excellent hubby through a similar quirk of fate that put us in the same AOL chat room on an otherwise boring October weeknight in 1994, and now I'm so unable to imagine going through life without knowing him that I can't help but believe that meeting him was somehow meant to be, too.

So - fate, or coincidence? Is the Internet a conduit for Destiny to weave its mysterious patterns, or are things like this just dumb fuckin' luck?

Well, that was fun!

We had an earthquake here about an hour ago... 5.2 magnitude, centered about 45 miles off the coast from San Diego. I was in my second-story office building, when I noticed my cubicle walls begin to shimmy a little; then there was a sharp, back-and-forth tugging motion, like someone had grabbed the base of our building and yanked it back and forth once, quickly. By the time I thought, "Buh... why, that was an earthquake!" and stood up, it was over.

I'm sure Bill will post his own entry, but he was in a 5-story concrete building at UCSD right on the coast - he said his building swayed a couple of inches - enough for him not to want to be in it any more today. I think that's probably all we'll be getting, but it was enough... I've always wanted to really feel one, so now that's taken care of, I'm good. No really, that was plenty. I feel like a true Californian now. Thanks!

OK, I'll admit it - after spending the week half-amused, half-annoyed by all the pomp and circumstance surrounding the Gipper's demise, the funeral services in Simi Valley just grabbed hold of the sentimental part of me and shook it like a bunny caught by a hungry pitbull.

The whole ceremony was picture-perfect - as it should've been, considering Reagan apparently began planning it as early as 1981 and given that Nancy had 10 years to perfect the details once Ronnie started his dive into oblivion. The service was touching, the eulogies by his kids were heartfelt and funny and well-delivered; the sunset couldn't have been more perfect if they'd placed a premium order with Heaven for it. The whole thing was just a grand sendoff for a guy who knew the importance of setting a scene, especially a final scene.

When I saw Nancy receive the flag and linger at the coffin, weeping for her lost love, surrounded by her kids, I just lost my shit. She'd maintained a sense of dignity and quiet strength through a really grueling fucking week, hauling ass from coast to coast behind that flag-draped box o' dead guy. At that moment, though, it seemed her grief finally broke through all the barriers of decorum (and Valium, and/or whatever else her doctors were pumping into her to help preserve that legendary composure); right at that point I didn't see politics or pretense - I saw a woman who'd been devoted to her husband for over 50 years, and stood by him through some really tough moments and years, and was finding it hard to say goodbye for the last time. Who knows, maybe she orchestrated the timing of her tears as well; but they still touched me, and I related to her as any person who loves their partner can relate.

So rock on, Nancy; and sleep well, Mr. President.

You know, I'm very glad to hear that Courteney had her baby OK, but... She waited all that time to have a kid, and she names her Coco?

I'm all for unique names, but some names pretty much only work for the person that made them famous. You don't see too many people naming their kids Arsenio or Zsa Zsa or Cher... Sting and Trudy Styler named one of their kids Coco as well; but she lives in England, where I don't believe she suffers the indignity of sharing her name with a popular breakfast cereal. Young Miss Arquette, however, can surely look forward to a childhood filled with people telling her she's cuckoo. (Given who her father is, of course, they may well be right. But still.)

Ah well. After all the news of death topping the charts lately, it's still good to hear about a safe and happy birth.

I got a tear in my tiny eye today as I was driving back from lunch and heard that Ray Charles had passed away.

First Reagan, now Ray Charles... They say these things happen in threes. Hope Ray Bradbury's taking good care of himself.

(My coworker, C., just confided to me that the guy she's been seeing is one of Ray Charles' sons. Was it bad of me to suggest that it'd be cool if he asked her to be his date for the funeral? Come on - would that not rock? Just think of who all might be there...)

So, after reading one of Eric's recent entries, I realize how much I miss letters.

I don't mean emails - I mean physical, snail mail letters. I miss writing them and sending them out with little doodles on the envelope. There was always something about writing a letter that felt more creative than typing an email ever has - choosing the type of paper and the color of the pen; writing in the margins, or in a spiral; sticking bonus items in the envelope like flowers or confetti or clippings. I miss emptying the mailbox and finding among all the ads and bills a letter addressed to me - yay, fun mail! - and the whole process of ripping it open and curling up somewhere to read it. I have boxes of old letters in my closet from all kinds of people - family, friends, foreign pen-pals, old boyfriends (no, wait, I burned all those! Uh, mostly...). I do not, on the other hand, have piles of email printouts from anyone (well, except Bill - but only because that's mostly how we dated for the first several months).

There's just something special about a physical letter - it's a gift, really. Having someone's handwriting on a page is like having a little bit of them, in a weird way. You're holding something that person held and took time to compose and stick in an envelope and address and mail. Writing a letter takes more effort, more purpose, than writing email, I think. A person's handwriting style is also a unique part of them - a feature, as distinctive as a fingerprint or an expression on their face. In my mind I can see the handwriting of the people I love as clearly as I can imagine their faces; looking at something someone's written me is almost like looking at a picture of them. I haven't printed out a whole lot of emails that people have sent me, but I have almost every letter that anyone close to me has ever sent.

So, I know what I want for my birthday, from anyone who cares to give me something...

I want a letter. A handwritten letter, sent via snail mail. Don't skimp - I want a good full page, minimum - more if you have it in you.

Come on - how else can you give someone exactly what they want for the bargain price of $0.37?

Let me know if you need me to email you my address...

Just a follow-up to say that the Blondie show was pretty cool... worth going even on a worknight while nursing a mean little hangover from hanging out with the girls on Sunday and drinking too much wine (how unusual!).

Wee and I were amused by the range of people in the crowd who came to see her, from college raver-kiddies to housewives and balding middle-aged dudes who were fans when punk still had its new-music smell (i.e. before most of the rave kids were born); perhaps not surprisingly, a significant contingent of GLBT folks showed up too. We were a little pensive on the band's behalf when we first got there (way early, as it turned out) and only saw about a third of 4th and B's general admission floor filling up; under-capacity turnout for a former superstar in a small venue is always a sad thing... but by the time the curtain went up, the floor had filled in and Blondie emerged to a respectably thick sea of bobbing heads.

It's amazing to me that Debbie Harry is pushing 60, and she's still up there getting her groove on the best she can - which is to say, still better than a lot of other pop divas out there. You could tell she was moving a little more stiffly and carefully in her high heels than she probably did 25 years ago, and she's got a bit of middle-aged waist creep going on; still, I think it's cool that she didn't take the Stevie-Nicks-flowing-robes approach to wardrobe, and instead wore a skintight, flaming-red shirt/skirt outfit, and an attitude which suggested that whoever didn't dig on her curves could pretty much go fuck themselves. She's apparently had some plastic surgery done, but I don't blame her - unless you're Keith Richards, it's a lot harder to pull off the rock star thing when your face is going all Shar-Pei on you. Obviously Debbie's still not the kind of girl to give up just like that... (Oh, noooooo-OH!)

Whenever someone famous appears on stage in front of me, I always seem to have kind of a delayed reaction about the fact that it's really that person, right there in the flesh, and not someone who just looks and sounds a lot like them... Last night it was when DH shot one of her sideways glances, and I got a good look at those distinctive, refurbished cat-eyes, and thought, No shit, that's DEBBIE HARRY! Her voice is still great, though it seemed by the end of the 2-hour set it was becoming a little thinly-spread. She gave her performance some good energy - shaking her wild blonde shag-do, striking weird poses, shimmying and vamping and pouting. When someone tossed roses on the stage, she said "Why do people keep throwing vegetation at me?", snatched them up, bit off the pink petals and spit them into the audience. (Say don't stop, to punk rock!) She knew which parts of which old songs the audience would inevitably sing along with and offered up the microphone to let them wail their hearts out.

Their newer songs were OK, worth a listen; but of course the highlight moments really were when they played the classics - "Rapture", "Heart of Glass", "The Tide is High", "Call Me"... All the songs that remind me of being Suzi's 9-year old sidekick, driving around with the radio on in Mom's curdled-cream-colored '77 Mercury Zephyr (possibly the ugliest car ever made).

The only really bad part of the show was that her sound technician sucked - the attention-whoring drummer's mic was way too loud, as was that of the freaky younger keyboardist (whose video-game-soundtrack interpretive touches on some of the songs were earning him dirty looks from not only the audience but some of the band members - I wonder if he'll survive the tour). I think it sounded worse initially, though, because we were in the balcony where the acoustics suck; the sound was better when we went downstairs, though DH's voice was still drowned out too often.

Anyway, all in all - very cool to see Blondie.

Just coming up for air right quick to let my dedicated reader(s) know that I'm still alive.

Work is still hell; however, Wee and I have an unusually busy entertainment schedule over the next few days which hopefully will provide some good distraction from the daily grind... On Saturday we're going to see Henry Rollins' spoken word show - he used to come to Eugene pretty regularly but, as with the Grateful Dead, I never managed to go see him. Doc Norris saw him up north and gave a pretty good review of the show, so I'm looking forward to hearing what he has to say for himself.

Then, on Monday, we have tickets to see Blondie. My sister used to listen to Blondie back in the day, which of course meant that I did too, so she helped shape my musical tastes early on. One of the first records Bill owned was hers (and she was, I believe, one of his first crushes), so we've both got history with Ms. Harry. It's amazing to me that she's still rocking at age 58... a guess a 16-year hiatus can really re-energize a girl. It's gonna be pretty amazing to hear her sing "Rapture" and "Heart of Glass".

Anyway. Just thought I'd share. We DO get out of the house, sometimes...

You know, this morning I posted two ranty little entries about Condoleeza Rice's refusal to testify in public before the 9/11 Commission, and Bush's little fundraiser knee-slapper about looking for WMD's under the couch (like one Farker said, wonder if he found the bodies of 500 American soldiers under there instead, maybe?)...

However, it occured to me that I haven't exactly seen rampant enthusiasm among the half-dozen or so readers who visit here over my little political rants... So I took them down. From now on, more humor and trivia, less proselytizing would seem to be my mandate...

I blame Alton Brown for the fact that we finally broke down and bought one of these.

I'm almost ashamed to admit how in love with this thing Wee and I have become. Gleeful to the point of mania. It's sick, really.

Admittedly, deep-fryed items are not exactly a staple of a weight-conscious diet. But people... we made fish-n-chips. Lordy mama, unbelievably tasty fish-n-chips. Fish-n-chips that would make the Gorton's Fisherman weep salty tears of joy. That meal alone made every penny we spent on the thing worthwhile, as well as every bite of salad and plain tuna fish I have to eat this week to make up for it.

Of course, we didn't stop there. The next night we made tempura shrimp and veggies, and I borrowed a tip from Wee's sister Mandy and made donuts using a can of pop-n-fresh biscuits (no, really, you'd be surprised how good they turn out). The thing is unbelievably easy to use, and almost all the bits (basket, oil reservoir, even the lid with the filter) can be detached and run through the dishwasher afterward. So easy! So fun! So sinfully tastee!

Now, of course, we're wondering what else we can batter up and fry... The possibilities seem endless, and also somewhat dangerous. String cheese? A Cornish game hen? Ice cream sandwich? Little Smokies? Marshmallows? Three Musketeers' bars? What do you think?

So check out Indy's Dogster profile.

Well, people have Orkut... why shouldn't dogs be able to network, too? heh Some of the other dog profiles are pretty cute too... although Indy's clearly the most beautiful of them all.

OK, I've been pretty unfazed by all the stories/pictures of conjoined twins in the news lately, but this one about the is kinda freaking my shit out.

I can't help wondering... does the second brain think?

Eww.

So yeah. Happy New Year and all.

I feel like I've only just now begun to regroup from the sturm and drang of the holidays. Which were fine, thanks (other than my getting the Ubercold right before Christmas, Bill getting it right after, American Airlines losing our luggage on the way home from Oregon, and Bill's brother Mickey going into the hospital...).

Christmas in Corvallis was brief but fun, in spite of my craptastic state of health. It was a gaming holiday - we had some rousing tournaments of Apples to Apples, cribbage and even Texas Hold'Em. We had lunch at McMenamin's, which is a requirement for every time we visit Oregon, and visited one of the best used book stores in the known universe, the Book Bin. Both were reminders of why it would be so very cool to be able to move back there someday. We missed the snow there by only a couple of days, which vexed me - I mean, snow at Christmastime? I would've loved it too much - loved it long time, even. I suspect our failure to encounter any more extreme weather than a hard rain had to do with the fact that we'd pre-emptively rented a 4WD Outback; if we'd have gone with, say, a Geo Metro, I'm quite sure we'd have been facing snowpacks and black ice on the way home.

We spent an unexpected amount of time in AZ waiting for Mickey to be sprung from the hospital. Our original plan was to get home on New Year's Eve, since for once we actually had invitations to something potentially fun and non-stressful enough to lure us out of the house. As it turned out, though, our NYE was stunning in its lack of spectacle, with only Bill, me and Bill's dad at the family compound. Still, being there for family was the right choice. Besides, it was actually nice to relax for a couple of days in the middle of the holiday shuffle. Spending time at Club Rhodes isn't exactly a hardship, either. Indoor pool, sauna, pool table, movie theater... it really is like a wee (Wee?) resort.

We passed the time on NYE playing online poker with Bill's aunt and uncle. I've become a bit obsessed with Texas Hold'Em from watching tournaments on TV, so it's cool to be able to go online and practice playing against people. I'd never play people for real money online, but a lot of people apparently do. Interestingly, the guy who just won the World Series of Poker was an amateur online player who'd never played a live tournament game in his life; he'd earned his $10,000 stake for the WSOP by winning an online tournament with a $40 entry stake. He won $2.2 million in the WSOP. Not a bad return on investment.

Anyway, Mickey got out of the hospital on New Year's Day and we had a nice belated Christmas with him and the rest of the family, thus officially extending our Yuletide season right into 2004. He went back in a couple of days later for another week or so, unfortunately; but he's home again now, albeit rightfully bummed because he had to miss his appointment to visit the "Friends" set to watch the taping of their second-to-last episode.

In other news, Frogopolis is back! The tank is up and running again with two very perky baby frogs in residence. We've named them Jean Loup-Garou and Pierre. Get it? Frogs? Ahem. Anyway, I'll post pics shortly. Wish them lots of luck surviving the crucible of life as a pet in Casa Del Rhodes!

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
-Percy Bysshe-Shelley

Here's to the capture of a modern-day Ozymandias.

Wee noted that he kind of looked like Ted Kaczynski when they pulled him out of that rathole... Or the Anti-Santa, maybe (Anti-Claus? Santa Hussein?). It's cool that they got him alive instead of bringing him in as a dead "martyr". I think the world needs to see him old, pathetic and defeated - incapable, in the end, even of the bravado of firing a weapon at either his captors or himself to achieve that lauded final glory of dying rather than surrendering to the enemy. Guess he won't be cashing in on those 100 horny virgins when he goes to the alleged afterlife now. Unless those virgins have fangs and claws and razor-barbed strap-ons, and a taste for blood. That seems reasonable.

Anyway, here's to a little closure for once... with caveats; I don't think Saddam's capture lends any greater validation that this war was initiated appropriately from a global perspective or based on an imminent threat to world security (discovery of the much-touted weapons of mass destruction, for example, would be much more relevant to the argument than this news). I also don't think people should forget that Saddam wasn't the one who tagged the WTC and the Pentagon - that bad Santa is still in his spider-hole, and when's the last time we heard anything significant about how the hunt for him is going? The Iraq war, and all the distraction it entails, is the best thing that's happened to Osama since the day those towers fell. Still, one simply can't dispute that the world is a safer place without this particular asshat loose in it.

I only hope his capture doesn't drastically boost the chances for four more years of Bush, because I still think he's one of the worst Presidents we've had in recent history.

Ah, Thanksgiving... This chica knows what it's all about.

My first Thanksgiving spent at a house that wasn't my parents' or my sister's was odd. I missed the things I was used to having, like Dad's Waldorf salad. I don't even like the stuff that much, but it was just always there, and Thanksgiving seemed wrong without it. Maybe I'll make it for the Rhodes family T-Day this year... Less the walnuts, though. Walnuts are Satan's snack of choice (well, when he runs out of souls, and baby hearts, and such).

God help us, though, if the day ever comes when this is a Thanksgiving tradition...

This morning the sky was gray and rainy; fall is finally, officially here - a month past schedule, but welcome all the same. Now the sun is shining on the wet asphalt and browning maple tree leaves outside my window, but I know that by the time I leave here at 5 o'clock it'll be dark out. Having the sun go down before I get home is hard to take - it makes me feel like I've been at work much longer than in summer, when you can still go home and still have some daytime left to spare.

The cold and the leaves and the rain and the early sunset are making me really miss London all of a sudden. I just went back and read an entry about planning to go there the last time. I thought about Suzi and Pete's recent trip - this morning I used the Marks and Spencer teabags and hand cream that they brought back for me. Yesterday Bill and I were talking about our next big trip, and we both felt that we could easily go back to London just as soon as go anywhere else - although of course there are many, many other places we really should explore before we go back to the one we've seen: Germany, Scotland, Belgium, Amsterdam, Ireland, Italy� At the end of this train of thought I just really, really wanted to be in London again.

My brother Thom was unimpressed with the city during his recent visit � "Too touristy", he said. "Too many foreigners, too crowded." He's not wrong. It's a challenge to encounter an English person in the touristy parts of London. Some of the best times we had in the city were when we went off the beaten path, like when we took the Tube to a working-class neighborhood and walked along the streets, checking out the little curbside markets selling familiar veggies with unfamiliar labels ("courgette" for zucchini, "aubergine" for eggplant) and the people and the lorries and the bustle of a normal day. People were actually looking at us oddly when we spoke with American accents, as if thinking, "Why aren't you at the Tower, or the Eye, or some museum?"

We did plenty of sightseeing too, don't get me wrong� but the memories that really stick out for me are the more subtle ones - like walking through Hyde Park and seeing a group of ponies carrying children in brass-buttoned riding jackets, and scores of silvery kamikaze squirrels leaping around for booty, and packs of football players running across the bright green grass, seemingly oblivious to the cold mud clinging to their legs, and the polite interrogation of a park policeman who was suspicious of why we were hanging around too long behind a tree near some bushes (to prove we weren't up to something nefarious, we had to 'fess up and explain about the Geocache there, in which we were dropping our travelbug, George � he was amazed that this box had been hidden there for months without his knowing about it, but in the end seemed quite tolerant and amused about the whole thing). I remember Ted, the 80-year old former drive-in-lorry-wash entrepreneur wearing his Kensington Rowing Club cardigan ("I still row there twice a week!"), who politely asked to join us at our table and told us about how as a Royal Navyman in WWII he volunteered to dive for mines, because he made an extra threepence a day for it (three extra pennies, for putting a big tin can on his head, diving into freezing dark ocean water, and defusing bombs...). I remember the wet gray streets, and the smell of rain and car exhaust and damp grass and curry shops, and the incredible centuries-old carved-stone buildings, their glowing windows testifying to their continued vitality - that distinctly European fusion of the modern day with centuries of history which even the oldest cities in America can't match - and the carefully blank faces of commuters protecting their personal space mentally while forced to stand torso to torso with each other on the Tube at rush hour.

Yes, London is expensive and touristy and somewhat grubby; but it's also lively and park-laden and historically rich, and beautiful in its own jumbled, soot-stained, busy way; I love it madly. I miss it often. I will go back again and again, because there will always be something new, and something old, and something else to see.

Oh, sweet baby Jebbus...

My score: 142.5. I'm frightened at my own prowess. Did I do nothing but listen to bad radio in my formative years?

Surely I can't be the only one out there who has this much useless crap floating around in my archives! So it's your turn. Take the quiz and post your score, por favor.

Correction on a news item - turns out that Josh and Jen didn't get deployed here after all; they were called in but their team never got sent. That's a relief, though I'm kind of curious why they didn't end up going. My sister said something about California crews having a chip on their shoulder about Oregon crews - wonder why? Then again, Oregonians tend to have a chip on their shoulders about Californians in general, especially those who move to Oregon, so I suppose turnabout is fair play.

Anyway, Happy Halloween, everyone. We had our Halloween party last weekend (it was a blast - I'll post pics as soon as I get them scanned), so I've had the weird sense all week that Halloween was already over, especially with the distractions of the fire. None the less, Halloween night it is - so my plan tonight is to dispense candy to whatever kids still have parents who will allow them to go door-to-door instead of cooping them up in some "safe" gymnasium party or whatever.

It makes me sad that less kids do neighborhood trick-or-treating anymore. I always felt such freedom and glee, dressing up and going out with my friends, all of us thrilled and just a little nervous at being outside after dark without an adult. I loved knocking on the doors of houses of neighbors who for the rest of the year were anonymous to us, with the full expectation that on this night a lit porch light meant that they'd not only greet us but give us free candy bars just for stopping by. We'd run into other kids and admire costumes, compare tips on who was giving out the best loot, etc. That night was the best night of the year, a night of transformation and magic, a time for little kids in crazy outfits to claim the streets and the night as their own.

So I'm super-glad that every year some kids do still show up on our doorstep, and as a result I'm overly generous with the candy. Indy loves it too, and in the past I've found it funny as hell when the little kids get a brief look of anxiety on their faces when she comes up to sniff their bags of loot, before they figure out she's cool - after all, what's Halloween without a wee bit of a scare? This year, though, given that she's getting older and has had some less than optimal interactions with kids this year (albeit under extreme circumstances that wouldn't be a factor in this case), I think I'll make more of an effort to keep her in the background. But I'll definitely be on duty for candy dispensing, just like my neighbors were for me, and hopefully as my neighbors will be for my kids someday.

Military helicopters have been flying back and forth past our facility all day. There's a big controversy over why they haven't been deployed in the battle to save key locations like Julian and Mount Palomar yet - the Cal. Dept. of Forestry is apparently claiming that their policies prevent them from allowing the military units to fly "their" fire until they certify the pilots and the equipment per CDF standards, make sure the communications equipment is compliant with CDF equipment, etc. The communications portion I can see, but it would seem a matter that could be resolved in hours, not days; as for the competency review... well, jumpin' Jebbus - do they really think military pilots and military-grade aircraft are going to be LESS competant than their own crews? Anyway, I heard that the flights today may have been evaluation flights, but hopefully they'll be on the lines soon. It's hard to know if the wheels of bureaucracy are actually turning slower than they could be, or if we're all just impatient for help and lacking understanding of the limitations involved in mobilizing crews.

As my sister told me earlier in the week, my nephew and his fiancee have apparently been deployed somewhere in SoCal (they work for a privately-owned firefighting contractor), but I'm not sure where. Having a relative out on the line somewhere makes me all the more keen to keep up with the news. It's hard to concentrate on work. Please think good thoughts for Josh and Jen!

The air in Kearny Mesa is much better today - it was almost odd to see a yellow sun in a blue sky today - but our office still smells terrible, and our dept. has been a Greek chorus of hacks and coughs.

I'm at home now - it's 2 pm, although it looks like twilight. When I got home at 12:30, the sun was a neon red polka-dot, as it was on Sunday; now, when I just went outside, it's pretty much disappeared completely behind the blanket of smoke above and around us. The tone of the light outside has gone from bright orange to burnt orange. We tried to take a picture of a neon-copper square of sunshine hitting our tile floor; it looked as if it were being filtered through stained glass. The air in the house smells better than at work, where the dusting of ash on the file cabinets made us suspicious of the air filtration system's efficacy. It's still not great, though; my head hurts and I'm coughing more.

Apparently Julian is at risk now - a 10-mile fire line is moving toward the town. I've always meant to drive up there some weekend, although Bill said I wouldn't miss much; still, I hope it is spared so I can still see it.

What a mess.

On Sunday morning I stumbled downstairs, all squinty with a hangover from our Halloween party the night before, to answer the door for some Sears guys that were there to deliver a dryer. As I looked out at our back porch, I saw the orange pumpkin lanterns we'd hung for the party - but noticed that the light all around them was orange too. Was I that hungover, that my bleary eyes were making the color from the lanterns bleed into the morning light? The sight was surreal, but I shook my head and moved on to let the delivery guys in through the garage.

As they brought in the dryer (wrong one as it turned out), one of them asked me if I knew the status of the fire. "What fire?" I asked. He looked at me in disbelief. "Have you not looked outside this morning?" "Um, well... we had a party last night, and..." I shrugged in embarrassment, and walked through the garage to our driveway. The sun was a dark red dot in the bruised-looking sky - very surreal, like a "Planet of the Apes" backdrop.

I spent the rest of the day watching news, wondering whether we'd end up having to leave our house as so many others did. At one point, news crews were filming from the east side of I-15 right across from the place where I work. Fire had jumped to the west side of the freeway and began to burn in Murphy Canyon, at the top of which our facility is located. The camera showed flames licking up the canyon right toward a white building that I suspected was the one we call Building 3 - then the thick smoke parted enough for me to see a couple of letters of our company logo on the wall facing the canyon, and I knew without a doubt that the Big R was at risk. Until this morning, I simply wasn't certain whether or not I had a place to work anymore. As it happened, I did, although the fire came so close to Building 3 that the bushes underneath my VP's window were burnt to a crisp. We lost a wooden deck in back of that building, and a neon sign on the back wall of our machine shop a block away was blistered and warped from the heat. Fire came within 5 feet of a number of hydrogen tanks that were sitting behind the building 3 - any closer and the tanks could have blown up and taken out half the structure. Still, the firefighters did their job outstandingly well, and they saved all of our buildings from harm. One of the business next to us lost some windows from the heat, but ours stayed intact. The fact that our facility is safe is a testament to the skill and dedication of our local fire crews, and I salute them. Buying back all this stuff would have been one grand bitch of a job.

Our house is fine, although there was a time on Sunday night that we were concerned about the Poway arm of the fire, which was being blown to the west toward us. We had heard that embers could be carried on the wind as far as 3-5 miles, and so we fretted about how the winds were blowing from Poway's direction down the canyon behind us and through the tops of the highly flammable 50- to 70-foot eucalyptus trees in our backyard. We have friends who live in Poway and were concerned for them as well. Thankfully the winds died down that night, though, and the fire stalled on the eastern edge of Poway, about 10 miles from our house. I think they lost about a dozen homes there. The north edge of the Scripps Ranch fire was about 10 miles from us as well, and the southern edge of the Paradise fire was about 20 miles away. Our yard and cars were covered in ash, and the air is hazy, but other than that all is well with us.

The real devastation is just east and northeast of where I work, in Scripps Ranch and Tierrasanta. We don't know if any of our coworkers had homes there yet, and we're also worrying about some of our staff who live in Ramona and the surrounding area. I feel so terrible for everyone who lost their homes. The stories on the news were heartbreaking. We stayed home yesterday, and I spent the whole day cleaning my house, my gratitude over having my house and belongings safe translating into a compulsion to care for them. I'd moved our important stuff - the storage boxes of letters and childhood miscellany and wedding mementos and pictures - to places where they could be grabbed quickly, and I'd collected my jewelry and some clothes and toiletries in a bag just in case. As I did so Sunday night, and again as I dusted and vacuumed and tidied on Monday, I kept thinking about how inconceivable I still found the prospect of losing these things, and yet how many hundreds of my neighbors only 10 miles away were facing that very reality. The only recurring nightmare I've had in my life has been that of having a fire approaching my house, and having to decide in a flash what I should take and what I have to leave behind. Facing the possibility of having to make those decisions in real life was one of the most surreal things I've ever felt - a strange deja vu from all those nights my mind had taken me through the process. While thankfully we didn't have to make those decisions after all, my heart breaks for everyone who did, and who came back to where their homes were and found that everything they managed to grab was everything they had left in the world.

I came into work today, but the smoke is still thick around the campus and it's a terribly unhealthy place to be. The filing cabinets are covered in a film of ash, so the filtration system could obviously be better. Hopefully the wind will bring some relief tomorrow so we can all get back to business, but right now I think we're all better off at home, closed up as much as we can be.

Anyway, think good thoughts for the people of San Diego - we're having some tough days down here.

I think Jesus is punishing me for going around telling people He owes me money.

On Sunday I came down with a fever and ache, the progression of which has kept me semi-to-nonfunctional all week long. I've had pretty much no interest in food, which is an alien concept to me, good little eater that I generally am... It's a strange feeling - yet not entirely unwelcome, since I've lost at least 5 pounds since Sunday. The high temp, chills, and skull-splitting headache have thankfully subsided now, but yesterday a sore throat made its debut, and this morning's latest iteration is that of a classic chest cold - stuffy nose and the occasional deep-lunged cough. (I'm trying to pass off my gunked-up voice as "sultry", ala Lauren Bacall, but so far no one's buying it; Lauren Bacall with emphysema, they might more readily concede). I suspect the cold may be a separate bug that snuck in when the fever swung open the doors of my immune system and hung a big "Open for Business!" sign over them. Dragging ass into work on Monday and Wednesday, where two of my other coworkers are sporting their own colds, probably didn't help - but with one buyer out all week on paternity leave and work picking up in his absence, I just couldn't in good conscience be out more than the one day that was absolutely non-negotiable from my body's perspective. I slept for 15 hours on Tuesday, which I think is a personal record. Just as well, since on Tues. night the NyQuil/Theraflu combo in my bloodstream made me wake up every 20 minutes or so in a semi-panic from weird hallucinatory dreams (note to self - no more mixing streams with nighttime cold medications), and last night wasn't much better, since I had a bout of "restless legs" which I get from time to time, but which I really could've done without last night in particular. (Side note: no, I'm not suggesting that just because my legs do this, I have some "syndrome", as Wee was teasing me about last night; just that occasionally it happens and it's hard to explain the sensation very well to anyone who's never felt it, so it's kind of validating to know that others have had it too. Ever had it happen to you? Just curious...).

So, in sum, Tess has been a mess this week. I know that complaining about illness ranks right up there with housekeeping details and grocery lists in terms of sheer journalistic entertainment value for my reading audience. If you will, though, consider it more of a Public Service Announcement: Don't succumb to my wretched fate - if you haven't gotten a flu shot yet, go get one, and it wouldn't hurt to develop a little temporary OCD when it comes to handwashing this season. Save yourselves while you can!

If you're in San Diego and have nothing to do tonight, you should consider heading down to the Ken to see "Bubba Ho-Tep", starring Bruce Campbell as Elvis (this is the last night it's playing there).

The premise is... well, one of the more original ones I've seen in a while. Its tagline: "The King of Rock Battles the King of the Dead". Campbell is spot-on as an elderly, pouchy, downtrodden Presley who lost his true identity via a "Prince and the Pauper" style switcheroo gone wrong. Ossie Davis costars as an elderly black man who insists he's JFK and helps Elvis battle the evil that's terrorizing their nursing home at night. If this sounds like your cup of tea humor-wise, or you liked any/all of Campbell's "Evil Dead" flicks, you'll probably want to see this.

"Don't make me use my stuff on ya, baby." Thangya vurry mudge.

So apparently, the election is shaking things up so much in California, the very earth is trembling in anticipation of the results... Either that or Skynet just sent its Ahnald doppelganger back to take over the reins once he wins the election.

I noticed that our building seemed to be vibrating as if we had a basement and someone was down there with a jackhammer. The sensation only lasted a few seconds, so I thought maybe it was just some maintenance guys doing work on the property. I looked outside to see if the leaves on the bushes were shaking the way they did during the last quake I felt here, but couldn't tell. About 10 minutes later one of my coworkers told us the news.

Of course, this is California - if shit isn't falling off the shelves, it doesn't really even count.

So I'm following the news about with more interest than I should admit�

I have to say that I personally would never have ever paid $110 to peruse the pair of plasticine Prussians prancing about with their pigmentless predatory pussies. (Alliteration! Brilliant! Thank you.) Still, the spectacle of Roy's plight is sparking my curiosity in a way that the actual show never did. Is such macabre interest the long-distance equivalent of rubbernecking at the crash site? Yeah, maybe. Still, it's undeniably quite a drama. If this is the end of his performing career (or life) and of the show, one must grant that while the accidental finale was horrible, it was also luridly, almost absurdly, appropriate... The ultimate cat tamer, attacked in the middle of his own birthday gala performance by one of his most trusted tigers and literally dragged offstage in the beast's jaws like a gazelle. Was f�r ein Ende! I can't help but feel like maybe the showman in Roy would be gratified at the spectacle of it all - the reports of him gasping one last plea of "Don't kill the cat!" as he was rushed to the ambulance; crowds of fans and fellow performers - including the likes of Penn and Teller and Lance Burton - holding vigils outside the hospital; the ongoing suspense of "Will he pull through or not?"

The economic impact of the show's closure is significant too. Say what you will about the ethics or the asthetics of their show, or their eccentric lifestyle � Siegfried and Roy are undeniably a Las Vegas institution, and their act one of the most lucrative and longest-lasting in the city's history. The sudden and tragic circumstance of the show's closure is the biggest tremor to rock Sin City in a while. I can only imagine the way the town must have been buzzing like a bat-whacked hive on Friday night as the news rippled out onto the Strip and into the casinos. Needless to say, the Mirage's bottom line just rolled craps. I'd be curious to know just what type of insurance they have for this type of contingency � you know they must have hedged their bets pretty extensively given the type of show it is and the amount of revenue involved. Still, I'm sure Rolaids have become the most popular buffet item over at Mirage HQ today�

Anyway, I'm rooting for the tight-faced little liontamer. After all, the best stories are still those with happy endings.

So, for the first time in my life, I'm on a jury. Never thought I'd see the day, somehow...

Bill and I were summoned to jury duty within a couple of weeks of each other this year, and since I'd already postponed once and rescheduled the postponement makeup date once, I was out of evasive options, barring grievous bodily harm or a sudden revoking of my citizenship. I ended up needing to reschedule my date yet another time to accomodate my parents' visit, but the people at Jury Services were amazingly helpful for a government bureaucracy, and I was allowed to choose the same date as Bill was summoned; so we carpooled. Of the hundreds of people there, we ended up getting called in the same jury selection pool of 60 people (they called groups in alphabetical chunks).

The trial was, we were told, expected to run at least 2 weeks. (That's about all I can safely say about it, I'm guessing). I ended up on the short list of 24 potential jurors - #20 of 24. I figured there was no way they'd toss out enough people to get down to me; I also mentioned an incident relevant to the type of case being tried which I thought might make the defense dismiss me.

I was wrong. 8 rejects later, I was the last person called to the 12-person final jury before both lawyers declared themselves satisfied. The lady next to me said I must be nervous about being on a hury since my hands were shaking. The jury part is fine, I replied; I just don't want to have to tell my boss this. El Jefe is going to kill me, I thought.

Anyway, they still had to pick alternates and all of the remaining three after me were tossed by one of the lawyers or another. More names were called from the pool, but Bill remained unscathed. When the end of the day came without firm alternates, the judge decided to keep a pool of six to choose from - the two that were already being evaluated and 4 new names. The first new name called? Why, that of Wee! We were really eager to see what would happen if/when they interviewed Bill and figured out he was my husband. We were fairly sure they wouldn't keep spouses on the same jury but were curious to find out, and to see whether the judge would be the one to dismiss him, or one of the lawyers would. However, the next day the lawyers kicked #1 out and kept #2, so Bill was never asked a question and he and the others were dismissed. Bummer! Still, it was fun to have him there watching me get chosen.

Sure enough, El Jefe was less than thrilled about the news (he'd spent the day joking with the rest of my coworkers about me getting called onto a jury and how much he hoped he wouldn't have a bad-news voice mail from me when he got in on Tuesday... feh), but he rallied OK and wasn't pissy about it. I am volunteering to come in for an hour in the mornings, from 7 to 8 am, which seemed to mollify him a little. I figure I may as well; it's very much on the way to the courthouse, and leaving here earlier means less chance of getting logjammed coming out of the neighborhood. I just need to figure out a better parking solution than the $15 lot I was in today. Might try Horton Plaza, like one of the other jurors did - you get 3 hours free w/ validation, so she went back @ lunch, validated and paid for the extra hour, then drove out and back in to start another 3-hour free period. Not a bad plan, especially since there's a food court there to which I ended up going anyway. We get an hour and a half for lunch, anyway - time to shop too! Heh, Bill might rue the day I was given one hour per day in the mall for 10 days straight... Think about all those times you see something and think, "Hmmm.. I'll think about it, and if I have time maybe I'll come back for it", knowing you probably won't but sometimes thinking about it as proposed and then wishing you'd gotten it when you had a chance? Well, I'll be able to go back to those things. Could be trouble.

Anyway, my fellow jurors all seem nice. Got through the first day without too much drowsiness. Fortunately they fixed the air conditioning problem, which yesterday had provided the opportunity to find out whose deodorants held up under a challenge and whose were thanked and excused by their wearer's sweat glands. I'd dressed for yesterday's heat and ended up shivering - a side-effect of which was to stave off nappiness, however, so it worked out. We'll see how the rest of it goes...

Truth be told, I'm glad I'm serving. I've always wanted to be on a jury. Corny as it sounds, I do think it's my duty as a citizen; and if, by some freak of fate or extreme case of Tess-bunglery, I ever did end up as the defendant in a trial, I'd hope that I had reasonably intelligent, educated, open-minded people deciding my fate. (Yeah, I'm including myself in that description, fer any smarht asses out there (and don't think I don't know who you are. In fact, I'm fairly sure this category encompasses the majority of you. My point? Uh... Twelve. I mean, I dunno.)). And my company will still pay my salary for up to 10 days, which is about how long it sounds like I'll need. So not only is it, as Bill keeps reminding me, something I'm required by law to do - it's a good thing for me too, even if it loses me some boss juju at work.

My parents left on Sunday, after a visit that I think was good fun for them as well as for me.

I really enjoyed the time I spent with them; I think I managed to find activities that were fun for each of them and also gave me a chance to spend one-on-one time with both. Dad got to go to the track three days; twice Mom and I dropped him off and went shopping - I joined him for part of one of those days while Mom and Bill made dinner - and on the Pacific Classic day all three of us went. (He had the laptop streaming live coverage of the races on the days he didn't go - for a septuagenarian, he's quite the computer geek). Additional wagering opportunities were had at the Viejas Casino too; my dad and I went on a blackjack jag (appropriate, since I'm sure I inherited the gambling bug gene from him; and amusing, to hear the little sotto voce commentary he makes as he plays). Mom was content to work the video poker machines. We saw the Aerospace Museum, and had fish-n-chips at Shakespeare's, which as authentic an English pub as you could find in SoCal, after which Mom got to do some shopping for favorite foods and knickknacks at their English store (Bisto, Horlick's, Maynard's Wine Gums, flake chocolate, dessert cream, etc...). I introduced them to our favorite card/word game, "Apples to Apples", which Mom in particular loved and which we played while drinking her expertly-mixed margaritas with Todd and Wy on Friday night.

When I had to work, they puttered around my house, doing little chores (and in Mom's case, some minor redecorating, heh). I kept telling them they shouldn't bother and I didn't want them doing chores on their vacation; but I think they liked the feeling of being helpful and putting things in order. And really, like I'm going to complain if Dad feels compelled to clean Indy's nose snot off the dog door and Mom simply must clean the cobwebs off all my deck plants?

Unfortunately, Mom's hips and knees slowed her down a lot this visit; they give her a lot of discomfort and frustration, which is sad to see. My parents have always been pretty agile compared to most folks their age, so it's hard to see age getting the upper hand on them now and then. I still have a hard time thinking of them as "old", and they say they have a hard time thinking of themselves as senior citizens too - which is a good thing, I think. A side-effect of not thinking of them as old, though, is that I have to remind myself to be patient when they aren't as quick on the uptake as they used to be. The line between being considerate and being overly-solicitous is a thin one, so I tried to find a balance by alternating in taking care of them and letting them take care of Bill and me. And honestly, despite my protests for them to take it easy, I'll miss coming home to find that dinner's been cooked, the deck's been swept, and the wrinkled blouses I've had in a ball in the laundry closet for 4 months are crisply ironed and ready for duty.

So, in the end, although I thought a 10 day visit would be trying, it really was OK - I had a lot of fun too. I miss them more than I thought I would. Indy, for her part, is downright doleful at the wrap up of her 10-day glut of attention, snacks, daily walks and company.

With every visit I realize how lucky I am to still have them around and in relatively good health. This fortune was underscored by the sad fact that their visit was bookended by the loss of two brothers-in-law who were like brothers to them. English Uncle Terry (mom's sister Grace's widower) was found dead in his easy chair at home the day Mom and Dad were leaving for my house. Terry resembled the actor Jonathan Pryce - he was a gentle, smart bloke with a wonderful sense of humor. He loved Aunt Grace dearly and was lost after her death, which was less than two years ago - they were one of those couples who did everything together, and I suspect he just didn't have much interest in life without her.

Midwest Uncle Ivan died of pericardial cancer the day after they got home (having already survived, I think, two prior cancer battles in the past - he was a tough old bull). Ivan was Dad's sister Dorothy's husband, and he was like a surrogate father to Dad since my trick-pony-riding grandfather abandoned the family (again, and for good this time) when Dad was a baby. Ivan was the one who bought Dad a bike when he was a kid, and who taught him to drive a car - even loaning him the car to go out with his friends a time or two, much to the chagrin of his wife who was certain her footloose baby brother would end up in a ditch. Ivan was a hard-working character - a sly teaser, but one of the most generous people I've met. Despite being an in-law, he was a true patriarch of the Crawford clan he married into, and he'll be missed.

Anyway, as my parents were among the youngest of their respectively large clans of siblings, I know we'll be getting this sort of news with increasing frequency in the years to come. It's sad, but at the same time I feel grateful that longevity runs in both families, and that in living long the majority also manage to live well. I'm hopeful that I'll have the same fortitude if fate allows. All I want is what my elders have been given - a nice long ride, and sufficiently good health, relationships, and attitude to allow me to enjoy the journey all the way to the end. Cheers.

In light of our recent car-buying experience, I found this article by a writer who went "undercover" as a used-car salesman very interesting. If you think you'll be buying a car in the near (or even not-so-near) future, you should read it too...

Wee and I are back in SoCal after a week of extreme travel. Four days of trade show procurement and gambling in Vegas were followed by three days of nostalgic (and semi-alcoholic) reunions with old friends in Klamath Falls (hi, Nick and Dee and Lex, should any of you be visiting the Gumbo - leave me a note in the comments if so!) and the lovely wedding of one of them. The constant activities (wandering around the trade show for hours on end, sitting at the blackjack table till my back ached, bowling and shooting pool and rocking a baby to sleep, not to mention the subtler stresses of catching planes and driving in cars for hours and sleeping in strange beds) have taken their toll on my less-active body; right now I'm downright exhausted and definitely noticing the difference between doing these sorts of things at age 32 vs. my agile 20's. Tonight is all about healthy comfort foods and a looooooong soak in the hot tub, maybe a little catchup on some shows our TiVo has stacked up for us in our absence, and an early bedtime. Sounds a little like heaven, really.

Anyway, I hope to get some anecdotes about the trip posted soon, even if just in a bullet-point format; but for now I just wanted to say that we're home and, fun as the week was, very glad to be back.

So by this evening, we will have an additional 4 adults and 5 children, ages ranging from 6 months to 7 years, all camping out in our house. Jesu Cristo - makes the ganglia twitch!

On Saturday Todd, Wy, Wee and I attempted to go to Comic-Con - but we were soon thwarted by the sheer enormity of the line to get in; it was, quite literally, one mile long, winding away from the Convention Center down to the Embarcadero, threading through Seaport Village, and then back toward the skyscrapers of downtown. We would have had a good 2-3 hour wait just to get in the door, standing in the sun with 85% humidity wilting us the whole time, and once we got in we knew the crowds would be thick and annoying and we'd have missed a good majority of the presentations. All this for the bargain entry fee of $25.00 each!

I couldn't think of anything or anyone in there that I wanted to see anywhere near that badly, so instead we hoofed it back up to Horton Plaza, where we'd parked, and saw "Pirates of the Caribbean". Great flick! Johnny Depp totally hits the mark with his Keith-Richards-inspired portrayal of Captain Jack Sparrow. The latest ingenue playing opposite him looks distractingly like the lesbian-love-child of Natalie Portman and Winona Ryder (not surprisingly, she also played the "decoy" Queen Amidala in Episodes I and II - apparently when both she and Natalie were in the full geisha makeup, not even their mothers could tell them apart). Orlando Bloom was good, and it's nice to see him continue to take roles that involve the wearing of snug breeches (heh); Geoffrey Rush was duly sinister as the Black Pearl's mutinous captain, and I was pleasantly surprised to see the guy who plays Steve on BBC's "Coupling" pop up as a priggish Royal Navy officer. If you're in the mood for a really entertaining swashbuckler, check it out. (And yeah, if you've been on the ride at Disneyland there are several sets/props that'll have you thinking "Hey, that's just like the ride!" - but it's definitely not necessary to have been on the ride to totally enjoy the movie).

Anyway, it turned out to be a fun weekend even if I didn't get to have my meet and greet with the former Wesley Crusher. Whateveh.

An update in case anyone was wondering about the tadpoles... they're ex-tadpoles now. I've come to suspect that raising them successfully would entail an investment of research, money and effort that exceeds my interest level. A pity; but then again, their own parents would have eaten them before they ever made it out of poppyseed stage, so at least with me they got a few days to cruise around.

Guess that means I have to give my Science Nerd title back, huh? Wonder if I can still cancel those orders for the pocket protector and the Bunsen burner...

It's Comic-Con time - I'm looking forward to going, and not just to say howdy to Wil. I've always wanted to go, but have not yet managed to make it. I (we, assuming Wee joins me) plan on going Saturday morning. I'm really looking forward to it. I've never been to a convention like this, which is kind of surprising considering science fiction has always been my favorite genre, and although I'm not a huge comic book fan I imagine I've still read more of them than 99% of women in the world. Maybe part of me was holding back from going to one because it would mean I'd crossed the line from "person who enjoys the sci-fi genre" to "sci-fi geek". Now I realize that I don't mind that at all. And let's face it - it'll be one hell of a people-watching opportunity. Neil Gaiman has a major role in the festivities as well, which is incredibly cool, since pretty much anything in which he participates is bound to be interesting and worthwhile. I'd like to see Kevin Smith's presentation, though I'm sure it'll be packed.

Anyway, there's how I'm spending Saturday. If you're in town and I know you and you want to come along and you're capable of being awake and mobile by 9 am or so, let me know! =)

Feel free to skip this entry if you're sick to death of hearing about my fine floating friends...

Round two of Tadpole Madness is in swing, with about two dozen of the little guys swimming around this time, having hatched on Thursday. I've put them in a larger vessel in case their older siblings' demise was caused by too high a concentration of toxins in the smaller one. So far they're hanging in there despite our weekend absence (I read that they live off the remains of their yolk sac for the first week or so anyway), and seemed to be enthused about the infusoria. We'll see how it goes. I'm wondering, actually, if I should put them in multiple containers - maybe there's too much competition for food?

Pescadito survived his four-day fast as well, although he seems a little edgy now. I suppose I would be too, really... He jumped out again last week, and this time he flopped down behind the desk when I tried to fetch him - when I finally got to him he was covered in floor lint (which made him look sadly like his brother Bluto right before he died), but it all seemed to wash off OK and he doesn't seem to have sustained any long-term damage. Gotta keep that lid closed.

As if I didn't have enough of a budding menagerie, I'm in talks with my brother-in-law Mickey to take possession of his pet cockatiel. He adopted the bird from a family friend who couldn't take care of it anymore - it's a geriatric thing, on year 17 of it's 20-year lifespan, but it seems bright, and very lonely, being a social bird with few opportunities for interactivity. Mickey's got cerebral palsy and thus can't hold him or whistle to him - in fact no one in the house can whistle, oddly, which means a whole form of bonding with the bird is lost to them. Mostly the bird sits in his cage and stares at himself in the mirror. My father-in-law, not a huge pet fan, has been campaigning to get the bird relocated and Mickey's finally agreeable. Wee is tepid on the issue but willing to consider it. All I need to decide is whether I really want the responsibility of caring for one more pet and all its associated mess. I have been thinking about getting a bird for a while, though, and he comes with a very cool cage and all the accessories, so it's a minimal investment on our part. I dunno - what do you think?

Woe is me. The tadpoles have suddenly developed a failure to thrive.

We came home last night at an ungodly hour, having spent over 3 hours at another Toyota dealership trying and failing to negotiate a feasible deal on trading in Wee's truck for a new 4Runner Sport. Ugh. At least the sales guy was an actual human being instead of a blood-sucking parasite; he did a good job of going to bat for us with the sales manager on our admittedly aggressive targets, didn't pawn us off on a more aggressive salesman when we proved to be tough customers, and was a good sport about not making a deal in the end. Once we do a little more thinking on it, I'm sure we'll be back to talk to him some more - whether he likes it or not... heh Anyway, I checked on the tads, and was alarmed to find them either dead or moving very sluggishly. Thinking it was something wrong with the water, I transferred the ones that still seemed alive into a new dish. I glanced at them this morning, though, and they don't seem too perky. What went wrong, I wonder? Something in the infusoria water that wasn't good for them?

Oh well - the next batch is already forming in their eggs, so if at first you don't succeed, try try again... at least until you get bored and decide to toss the whole mess down the drain. We'll see how it goes.

The tadpoles have become a minor obsession. To tell you how bad things have gotten, I've actually been doing science on their behalf. I've been reading up on what they need to survive as far as food and water conditions � temp, pH, etc.

First, food � I read that the only thing they'll really eat at first are these little parameciums and protozoa, collectively called infusoria, that can be found in brackish water that has organic material in it � mature aquariums have them, as do ponds and other standing water. Water that's had cut flowers sitting in it is good, too. As it happened, I had access to all three of these sources � from the aquarium, the carnations sitting in my kitchen window, and the red cup of water out on the back deck. I combined the various types of water into a quart jar (resulting in a stinkade of impressive putrescence), added some dried-up lettuce and celery leaves, and a snail that was in the bag my neons came home in, and set it in the front window to grow tiny bugs.

Next, tank water. Thanks to the warmer weather, the temp's pretty much where it needs to be. As for the pH, I busted out my spa's test kit and found that the alkanity of the water they're in is a little too high � their ideal is 7.4 and they were at 7.8 or so. How could I get it down where it needed to be without risking use of something that might harm the tadpoles, or spending more money on aquarium chems? Out of curiousity, I also tested the infusoria water - and found that it was off-the-chart acidic. Eureka! Using the test kit again, I calculated the correct proportions of aquarium and infusoria water that, when mixed, would produce water of the ideal pH � and also contain all the protozoic pabulum my wee frog fry needed.

Yesterday I busted out Bill's vintage Bausch and Lomb microscope, which had been sitting in our garage thickly coated in dust. Amazingly, the light source still works fine and the lenses are clear as a bell. We didn't have any slides so I MacGyver'd one out of some clear poly sheet ripped from a snack food box. I put a drop of infusoria water on the makeshift slide, focused in it � and I'll be damned if there weren't all kinds of parameciums darting around in the water - round ones, oval ones, ones with all the little bits I remembered from biology class; cilia and vacuoles and nuclei � oh my! There are other critters as well � our favorites are some little guys that Wee says look like some splattery orange amoeba-esque tech company's logo (the name of which I'm blanking on at the moment�.) In sum, plenty for the tads to munch on.

So yeah � I've gone and assigned myself a biology project. I fear I've broken the surly bonds of geek girl and powered straight on into computer-free Science Nerd. What the hell, though� My prediction is that I'm really on the cutting edge of the latest propellor-whirling trend � a backlash against this whole silicon-centric geekdom and a renaissance for good old fashioned life science!

What? It could happen. In the mean time, I'm having fun with my tiny pals, so it's all good. They're terribly cute - their eyes take up half their body; in the shine of my light-up magnifying glass (which Wee very kindly procured for me yesterday), they sparkle like green/gold/copper glitter, and they're big enough for us to see little speckled patterns on their backs, the proto-organs growing inside, and tiny white spots where their back legs will someday bud. I know they run on pure instinct, but it still seems to me like they chase and bump into each other on purpose every now and then as if they're playing (or, more likely, competing for snacks). I harvested a second batch of eggs this morning � so it's Tadpole: The Next Generation, coming soon to a screen near you!

It's tadpole madness at Casa del Tessenwee. 11-count-em-11 wriggling commas with eyes. The miracle of life! At least until they eat each other or something.

Thanks for all the thoughts, etc. on the "Shockabuku" entry. I've taken it down because, frankly, I meant to earlier - it was really more of a self-pitying rant than a cry for advice, although I do appreciate the perspectives that people provided. All is well in Tessland and I'm already getting caught up on stuff. I'm generally an even-keeled sort; I think posting the entry itself was representative of the "low point" that Wy mentioned, and now I'm rather self-conscious about the whole thing. So, moving on now...

As I mentioned in comments from a couple of entries ago, the frogs are officially parents-to-be - the eggs are sprouting. I'd scooped up the peppercorns into a separate container (good thing, since it appears that the others were subject to - what would you call it when one eats one's own children - pedophagy?); now about a half-dozen of them have developed into little apostrophes within the transparent sphere of their eggs. I'm not sure what I'm going to need to feed them when they hatch in a few days, but plan to surf the web and go to the pet store to see if they have anything appropriate. I give them about a .027% chance of making it, but it's kind of a fun science experiment.

Also, Freewheelin' Franklin has turned into quite the crooner in the past couple of days. Last night he was singing for hours. The sound is basically just one long rasping note that kind of sounds like one of those noisemakers with the metal box that spins around on a stick. I probably would have mistaken the sound for a filter pump noise if said pump hadn't have been turned off at the time. I'd read that amorous male ADF's sometimes busted out with the rhymes for their ladies, but it was still funny as hell to hear it. This page has a .wav file that sounds just like it (the 831 KB one), except that Franklin tends to let out just one long buzz instead of a few at a time.

Not a bad source of entertainment for $2.49 each, these froggies of mine. Way better than those sea monkeys I always wanted!

I've recently discovered that Franklin and Phineas were not destined to be brothers.

My first inkling as to the true dynamics of their relationship came when I caught the two of them in a clinch last week - Franklin had wrapped his arms around Phineas' waist (such as it is) and was holding on tight; all four of Phineas' feet were flippering rhythmically as they sat there, and I couldn't determine if the twitching should be interpreted as "Yes, baby, yes!" or "Someone get this asshat off me already." I tapped the glass and they broke it up. A couple of days later I saw them doing the same thing at the back of the tank, but they were more mobile - Phineas cruised around on the tank bottom while Franklin rode along boogieboard-stylee. Obviously, these two were up to some funny business.

A quick Google session soon provided me with a crash course in African Dwarf Frog Amour. The boogieboard clinch is apparently called amplexus; the male frog rides around on the female, prompting her to gestate a bellyful of eggs. Accordingly, Phineas has gotten really fat in recent days. There's no actual bumping of uglies in frog sex; the female shoots eggs out into the water and the male shoots out sperm to fertilize them. Supposedly this happens while they float around near the top of the tank doing little spirals (rather sounds like a scene from the newest Cirque du Soleil show in Las Vegas...).

However, the frogrobatics seem to have occured while I was napping, because this morning I looked into the tank and noticed that the surface is riddled with tiny black dots that look like poppy seeds. Frogasms have occured; the eggs have landed. Phineas has taken to floating at the surface, limbs splayed wide like shoots sprouting from her pale flowerbulb of a belly, as round as if she'd swallowed a pea. At first I thought she might be ailing because she looks pale and bloated and isn't moving much - but then I realized that this description was just as apt for many extremely pregnant human females. She swims around every now and then, so I believe all is good in the hood.

So there it is. Freewheelin' Franklin and Phineas Freak are getting their freak on - the Adam and Eve of our household, issuing forth wee peppercorns of love.

So I cleaned out the fish tank today (I suppose I should call it the frog tank now, since the frogs outnumber the fish two to one. Or did when the day started, at least.) Here's how it went down:

Unhooked filter tube from filter grid and removed lid from tank.
Toted tank over next to kitchen sink.
Scooped out a few inches worth of water (checked for critters before dumping) and removed bowl decorations in preparation for capturing and transferring occupants to temporary holding bowl.
Looked in tank to pinpoint location of frogs.
Saw one frog.
Did not see second frog.
Looked in tank again.
Still one frog.
Inspected decorations in case frog clung to one of them on the way out.
No frogs.
Repeated tank inspection approximately 27 dozen times, each time theorizing that I'd just been looking at the wrong angle or something, and that upon reinspection there would be two frogs.
One frog.
Emptied the kitchen sink of all dishes with thought that perhaps other frog did mad Superman-style leap out of tank when back was turned and was now huddling dejectedly in a puddle of last night's beer and chunks of World Famous.
No frog.
Peered into garbage disposal, thinking, "...?"
Put hand in garbage disposal.
Pulled hand back out in horror at unidentified nastiness encountered in dark scary place.
Decided that if frog was somehow in there, had only his damn self to blame for what was to happen next; got the water going and and flipped on the disposal.
Turned disposal off.
Thought to self, "What if frog was in there, but turned off disposal too soon, so that frog did not have quick thorough death but instead is only shredded and not-quite-dead?"
Quickly turned disposal back on to mercifully finish off frog if applicable.
Shuddered.
Went back to see if frog had magically appeared in tank.
One frog.
Inspected tank-toting route in case frog somehow snuck out without notice while tank was in my hands.
Sighed and gave up, caught singular frog and algae-eater (alas, poor Freddy... but I'm getting ahead of myself) and deposited them in temporary bowl.
Scooped rocks away from filter grid at bottom of bowl and removed.
One frog.

The little bastard had somehow managed to worm his way under the filter grid when I moved the tank, probably through the hole where the tube goes. This probably should have occured to me, but instead I spent over a half-hour in complete brain cramp over the impossibly missing amphibian. "He has to be there! He's not there. Where is he? He has to be there! He's not there. Where is he? He has to be..." The influence of a fair-to-middling hangover may or may not be pertinent to the question of why I remained in a state of flabbergastitude over the disappearing frog trick for so long. None the less, I must say I'm happy that he reappeared and was not, for example, julienned by the Dispos-All.

However, not all denizens of the tank were destined to survive this day. Upon completing the tank cleaning, refilling it and depositing the the Freak brothers back into it, I soon noticed that Freddy was acting strange - twitching and spiralling around jerkily in the water. I realized that something about the new water - change in temperature, pH balance, whatever - was sending him into shock, so I quickly grabbed the net and got him out, plunking him back into the temp bowl. Woefully, however, by that time Freddy had given up the ghost and joined Master Bluto in the Great Watery Beyond. Sorry about that, pal.

The frogs seem fine, though, which is a relief. I gave them some salmon bits tonight in apology for the stress and the loss of Freddy. The first time I saw one of the frogs eat, I thought it was dying. They eat as if they're having seizures - a series of violent twitches forward which shove their mouths into the food and vice versa. They loves them a tasty bit of fish, I've found. I briefly considered freezing Freddy and chopping him into tiny froggy canapes, but soon concluded that feeding a fallen soldier to his comrades in tank would be rather an offsides thing to do.

Rest in peace, Freddy. May you spend a blissful eternity sucking celestial scum off the Pearly Gates.

I just realized that I'm remiss in failing to announce the untimely passing of Master Bluto Wasabi Cap'n Bob Betta this past Sunday.

He succumbed to what I believe was a combination of velvet (a type of parasitic infection common to Bettas) and sort of white body fungus that can take hold when they're sick and lose the gelcoat that covers their scales. I began treating him as soon as I noticed the fungus, but it spread literally within hours, and by the time he went to the Big Pond in the Sky he looked like something that had been left in the fridge about a month too long. Nasty. We performed the traditional burial at sea.

Pescadito, I'm glad to report, is still faring well. We've had no more farewell-cruel-world incidents, and he's lacing the water surface with bubble nests, which are a sign of a well-adjusted boy betta. Bettas are apparently quite enlightened in terms of gender roles, since it's the male that creates the nest in which the wee fry hatch and grow. Their procreation is strictly a one-night stand affair, apparently - the female cruises by and drops off some eggs, and she's on her way. As I anticipate no romantic interludes in 'Dito's future, however, I just hope he doesn't grow to realize that his efforts are in vain and go all kamikaze on me again...

Ever been to Wil Wheaton's website, wilwheaton.net? I've referred to the site here a time or two, and I've been reading for a while. He's attained a certain level of renown in the geek world for being the rarest of breeds, an actor who authentically embraces computer geekdom. He's a regular on Slashdot and has his very own category tag on Fark.

He's also a really good writer; in fact, he's just published his first book, called "Dancing Barefoot" � sort of a precursor to the larger autobiography he has coming out later in the year. I believe he's started a little publishing storefront, Monolith Press, to self-publish the book. Since he doesn't have a big publishing house to promote the book for him, he mentioned in his blog that he'd welcome assistance from anyone who could help him find out more about how to get a book tour going.

Well, I just happen to have a friend, Maryelizabeth, who co-owns a prominent independent bookstore here in town � Mysterious Galaxy, specializing in sci-fi/fantasy as well as mystery books (give them a visit if you're in town � they're an outstanding resource for books in those genres!) While Wheaton's book is, strictly speaking, not in those genres, his resume certainly fit the bill. So I contacted him and offered to get him in touch with M., which he accepted and I arranged� and the net result is that now not only is Mysterious Galaxy carrying his book, but he's also got a place on a writer's panel at this year's Comic-Con convention. It's mighty cool of M. to hook him up like that. A better demographic - outside of the Star Trek con circuit, that is - would be hard to find. I suspect I've enabled the former Wesley Crusher to earn some great PR, and many sales of books and other WWdN schwag. As a bonus, one of the con's "featured guests" is Steve Jackson, from whom Wil got a great book review that he's been rather giddy about � so now he'll get to thank him in person, as a fellow featured speaker.

So I feel like I did a pretty good deed. The funny part is, I just feel like I've helped out a fellow geek whose journal I read (I read several of them on a regular basis), rather than doing so under the auspices of being a "fan". I liked the things he's been in well enough, but frankly never gave much thought to him one way or the other until I started reading the journal via fark.com about a year ago and found that I liked his writing. There's a "rooting for the underdog" element about supporting a former child actor's efforts to reinvent himself as an author from the ground (or the Net) up. I think it's cool that he's earned the respect of the community with which I most closely identify. He's become sort of the celebrity mascot of the geekosphere at large. Beyond all that, he seems like the type of smart, amiable person whom Bill and I would befriend anyway. So that's why I felt like contributing to his efforts to build his rep as an author. He seems to genuinely appreciate the help. Plus, I'm apparently getting a complimentary WWdN T-shirt out of the deal. Free schwag is always a good thing! =)

So, as determined in the comments section of the previous entry, the blue fish has an official name now: Master Bluto Wasabi Cap'n Bob Beta.

The frog, too, has been named, albeit not by committee like the fish. Henceforth let him be known in this kingdom as: Freewheelin' Franklin Cap'n Bob Frog.

(Bonus points for anyone who knows where the Freewheelin' Franklin part comes from - and by that I mean, knows without consulting a search engine. The fact that I myself know about F.F. is my brother Thom's fault, from back when he was not the Conquering Hero he is now, but rather just a mere mortal teen delinquent.)

I have yet to name the Chinese Algae eater. Have at it!

We saw "Matrix: Reloaded" today. I liked it. It was nothing more nor less than I expected it to be. The fight/chase scenes were simply amazing; and when you get right down to it, the Matrix series definitely holds its own simply as a solid postmodern sci-fi interpretation of a kung fu movie. So, as long as they're delivering on the action, the plot - with its efforts to address deep metaphysical concepts in tidy soundbites between ass-kickings - is just icing on the cake; and if the icing's a little thin in places and a little clotted in others, well... it's still a tasty treat.

At that, though, I thought the storyline was decent and sufficiently engaging. They've added new levels of intrigue to the question of what motivates the creators of the Matrix and what role Neo really plays in the Big Picture. If anything, I think the third movie will be under a lot of scrutiny for its ability to follow through on the philosophical web-spinning of this one and resolve the questions, both practical and theoretical, that have been posed. I liked most of the new characters. The depiction of Zion and its leaders and people suited my expectations. (Although I don't know that, were I a Zionite, I'd respond to a proclamation of my impending doom - albeit a blow softened by Morpheus' oh-so-inspiring "I'm not afraid and neither should you be because... well, we ain't dead yet, right?" speech - by doing a sweaty little Lambada with 5,000 of my closest friends. I obviously lack appreciation for joie de vivre. That being said - the scene itself was fairly hot...). I definitely need to see it another time or two to really try to wrap my brain around plot points like what the Architect tells Neo, and who exactly the Merovingian is and how he fits in to the storyline - and that's all I'll say lest I hatch a spoiler on anyone who hasn't seen it and wants to. To sum it up, it was fun and intriguing and I enjoyed it and I'm not at all disappointed. Whew! The Curse of Sequels has spared the Wachowskis, for now at least.

Hope y'all are enjoying your weekend -

Our family has expanded by two as of this weekend - two lovely Beta fish, that is to say. Some friends had a baby shower for which the Dr. Seuss-themed decor included blue and red Betas (for "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish", of course). At the end of the party they gave them away, and since there weren't a lot of takers I ended up with two, a blue one and a red one with some purply undertones.

The red one has accompanied me to work in a 1-gallon mini-tank - he has a plant and a funky rock-shaped hut in which he likes to hang out. I've named him Pescadito (yeah, that's "little fish" in Espa�ol - so what? I doubt he'll have any identity crises over it). He seems to have a fondness for the tight spots in his tank - there's a little gap down between the rock-hut and the side of the tank through which he can only pass if he wriggles hard, but doing so seems almost like a game for him. Now and then he gets excited about something and busts out with a little fishy break-dancing - possibly responding to his reflection in the side of the tank, although he doesn't flare out his gills the way he does if he sees another Beta (or his reflection in a mirror, which is a great way to mess with him).

The blue guy is residing at home in a 2.5 gallon tank with some plants and one of the kings of Argonath keeping watch over him (one of the bookends I got with my LOTR special edition DVD set - geek alert! geek alert!) - since it has a pump and filter, I'm probably going to get him some company by way of a plecostomus and maybe a few neon tetras (apparently Betas only get aggro with other male Betas, but are down with other community fish). He seems pretty even-keeled, and like his red brother he really digs freeze-dried bloodworm snacks. Blue Fish does not have a name yet - we tried "Poisson" and"Sashimi", but neither seemed to fit, so we're open to suggestion if you're feeling clever. Maybe "N'Chips" would work...?

Maybe these will satisfy the yen I've had lately to get another pet... Although there are some half-Siamese half-tabby kittens at the pet store that kind of remind me of Akasha, and Indy could really use some company.... heh We'll see.

Our Easter weekend was quiet and domestic. Poor Wee was still feeling terrible due to his sinusitis � one of the worst cases his doctor has ever seen, apparently � and quite understandably wasn't up for much of anything in the way of activity. As for me, I was perfectly happy to spend the weekend puttering around the house. I did a lot of gardening, and finally assembled the gardening bench my mother-in-law gave me for my birthday last year (Wee rallied to help with some final assembly � drilling of holes for screws and repair of a drawer - but I managed to put together most of it myself, of which I was rather proud). This summer's new paper lanterns are now in place; swapping them out has become sort of a yearly tradition, marking the official beginning of the spring/summer season at Casa Del Tessenwee. I planted yet more flowers and cleaned up the back patio area, and I hung some cute dragonfly lights I got for Christmas. My tiny veggie garden is flourishing with herbs and little tomato and pepper plant seedlings. All in all, it looks pretty nice out back now. I'll post pics of the finished results pretty soon.

I also did something a little bizarre with our master bath area � I painted it orange. Not a sedate pastel Creamsicle orange, either... I'm talking about circus peanut-tangerine-carrot-safety orange. Orange with a capital "Oh!" I've had this thing for this color lately, you see, and combined with some time on my hands and a decorating itch I needed to scratch, the results can only be described as unique. It came out significantly brighter than I anticipated, and I'm not entirely certain whether the results lean more toward cheerful or� well, scary. I have a plan for adding some toned-down accents of dark blue, turquoise and green, but we'll see how effective they are in anchoring the wildebeest of a color I've unleashed on that quiet corner of the house. Bill has been remarkably tolerant of my whimsy but has successfully lobbied for keeping the sink area clad in its current, sane whiteness. Once again proving that compromise is the essence of a good marriage�

This morning at 3:30 the storm that moved over us last night was so intense that it woke me up - I got up and looked out the window, surprised at the violence of the rain and wind. The huge eucalyptus trees behind the houses across the street were whipping around like Solid Gold dancers on meth. I was glad we topped ours a couple of years back to shorten their spindly growth and keep top-heavy limbs from breaking off and hitting our house.

The storm reminded me a lot of monsoon season in Tucson, less the thunder and lightning (unfortunately). I miss monsoon season so much. I miss Tucson in general, really. I would move back there in a heartbeat if we could find decent enough jobs. We could get a great house for the money we'd make selling the one we have. I'd love to buy a place in the Sam Hughes neighborhood, an area east of the University filled with gorgeous Craftsman-style houses. The University area has dozens of great restaurants and shops within walking distance, and I miss being able to walk to places like that, not to mention the places themselves. There are days I'd give a small body part for lunch at Sausage Deli or a slice of Z's pizza, or Sunday breakfast at Frank's (home of the Food Bitch). Yeah, Tucson... I miss the kaleidoscope of its sky; the technicolor sunsets, the way sunlight and shadows crawled over the sharp edges of the mountain ranges encircling the city. I miss the smell of creosote and wet mesquite in the air after a good hard rain. Tucson's climate was different from the traditional spring/summer/fall/winter that I grew up with, but it had a definite character, a rhythm and an intensity to its fluctuations. I always felt strangely in touch with the outdoors, even when I was locked in the windowless bowels of the electronics factory where I worked.

San Diego's climate is simply monotonous in comparison. Of course, I wasn't complaining last Saturday as Wy and I sat on the patio of the neighborhood Mexican restaurant with a margarita, enjoying the not-too-hot, not-too-cold bliss of a perfect spring day... I admit that I have a particular soft spot for April here, when the hills are still green from winter rain and their rampant blooms help explain why there are signs along the highway for "wildflower control" (which we thought was proof that San Diego was in fact Paradise when we first moved here from Tucson - where else would you see a place with so many wildflowers that crews had to go out and wrangle them?), and sunlight finally begins lingering into the evenings after work again. April was the month we moved here, and also the month we closed on our house, so I have some sentimental associations with this time of year here, a sense of exciting new beginnings in both a physical and psychological sense. Much to my surprise, though, it turns out that perfection can be, well, boring. Which is why nights like last night are worth losing a little sleep over - appreciating the rare novelty of extreme weather in Paradise.

So Todd and Wy came back from attending a Food and Beverage convention with Todd's folks in Vegas, and delivered into our grateful hands all sorts of fun schwag from their forays - thanks, guys! One of our favorite items is a shot glass that has an electronic LED die (as in dice that you roll) at the bottom - you "roll" it by tapping the bottom of the glass on the table, and it beeps and flashes and stops on a number.

Wee and I decided that we must come up with a drinking game to utilize this handy accessory to its maximum extent. The game we devised is brutally simple - but then, so are most drinking games, so we think that's appropriate enough. Since we know that most people don't have a super-cool dice glass like ours, we've adapted it for play with regular dice, and even have two versions - one using five dice, and one using one die with cards (useful if you don't happen to have 5 dice floating around the house).

Thus, I present to you the beta versions of our new game, which for the moment we've named, in honor of the nature of the item that inspired us, "Schwag".

Schwag � Dice Version
Requirements:
� 5 dice and a shot glass (or preferably, 4 dice and a shot glass with its own electronic LED die in the bottom).

How to play:
Shot glass is filled with alcoholic beverage of choice.

First player rolls one die (or taps the shot glass to make it roll), and sets it aside. Player then rolls other four dice, and looks for numbers matching the first die thrown.

If none of the dice match the first die thrown, the player drinks.

If one die of four matches the first die, no one takes a drink and it's the next player's turn;

If two dice of four match the first die, the player gets to make another player drink;

If three dice of four match the first die, the player gets to either make another player take two drinks, or if playing with more than one other player, can make two players take one drink apiece;

If all four dice match the first die, it's a "social", and every player drinks.

Schwag � Card Version
Requirements:
� A shot glass and a die (or preferably a shot glass with its own electronic LED die in the bottom).
� A deck of cards

How to play:
Separate the ace, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 cards from the deck; these are the only cards that will be used to play. (Optional: add one or two jokers or jacks to the pile, making them "wild cards")

Each player is dealt 4 cards, which only they should look at. (If playing with more than 4 players, cards from two decks should be used). The balance of cards are set in the middle as the "draw" deck, from which players will replace their cards after they play them so that they always have four total in their hand.

Shot glass is filled with alcoholic beverage of choice.

Player rolls the single die or taps the glass to roll; player then reviews their cards to see if they have any that match the number shown on the die. If they do, they show the cards to the other player(s), then place them face-down under the bottom of the draw deck.

If the player has no cards that match the die, the player drinks.

If one card of four matches the die, no one takes a drink and it's the next player's turn;

If two cards of four match the die, the player gets to make another player drink;

If three cards of four match the die, the player gets to either make another player take two drinks, or if playing with more than one other player, can make two players take one drink apiece;

If all four cards match the die, it's a "social; every player drinks.

Repeat until drunk or bored, whichever comes first.

In other news, Suzi and Pete came down and we had a great visit with them. We went Geocaching down in Rose Canyon on Saturday - Suzi and Pete released their first "Travel Bug" in a cache down there. It was a gorgeous weekend to be outdoors, and we were glad S&P were here to enjoy it now, rather than if they'd come a couple weeks earlier when it was rainy and gray. Weather like this makes us incapable of successfully bitching to people about anything that makes living in San Diego hard...

Wil Wheaton has offered up another good link, this time to a CNN article about Ass't Sec. of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and the modern version of manifest destiny - now termed "Neoconservatism" - that he's brought to the forefront in the current administration.

Just now, in thinking about how the impact of our aggression toward Iraq is going to play out in years to come, I found myself unconsciously humming the CCR tune "Bad Moon Rising"... I went and read the lyrics, and got kind of a chill up my spine. I do think we're in for nasty weather. All of a sudden I don't want to live in San Diego - I want to live in Oregon, or Colorado... someplace where I won't feel like I'm walking around with a big target on my head.

It seems weird to do an Oscar review right now, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway.

Sadly, I confess to having missed parts of the show by accident. My first mistake was assuming in error that I'd set the TiVo to record the show; we were out shopping when it started so I missed the first half-hour. Once I got home I set it to record, then went out to plant some flowers; I wanted it to store up for a while so I could zip through commercials when I watched it later. Setting it to actively record the show instead of just relying on the half-hour's worth of "live TV" buffer meant that I wouldn't miss anything if I was away for more than 30 minutes. The plan seemed to be working fine... About 20 minutes from the end of the "live" broadcast, however, the TiVo interrupted to ask if it could switch over to start recording another show, and when I said, "No, I want to keep watching this channel", it complied � but instead of going back to recording the Oscars, it switched over to live TV mode. I didn't notice because I was still midway through watching the recorded portion. The recording thus stopped halfway through the "past winners" presentation; it took me a few minutes to wrap my brain around what happened and realize that I had missed recording some of the show. I thought I could still catch the end via the live-TV buffer; however, because I had paused so much while watching the recorded version, the original show had ended more than a half-hour earlier, so the buffer only held post-show war news. Oh well. Nothing like a war to put little hassles like lost TV programs in perspective, right?

So anyway� here in a nutshell were some of my observations about the portion of the year's awards that I did manage to catch:

- Noticed that many women really muted their look � lots of black dresses and low-key designs, and carefully understated hairdos. How does one dress up in such down times?

- Catherine Zeta-Jones may be a smug prima-donna� but you have to hand her some credit for being an intrepid entertainer as well; props must be given for her performance of a duet with eight months' worth of baby shoving up against her diaphragm and teamed with a professional songstress, who apparently stepped in when Renee Zellweger decided SHE couldn't stomach the task, poor fragile waif�CZJ is a force of nature in comparison to her pallid costar, so she may as well work that good Welsh robustness for all it's worth.

- Adrien Brody won Best Actor � who saw that one coming? Halle Berry sure didn't know what she had coming with that outrageous kiss he stole from her � their impromptu stranger's embrace made the love-me-long-time smooch Al Gore gave Tipper at the Democratic Convention seem downright patrician in comparison. I'm dying to know what her husband thought of the whole thing (as if he could possibly take a moral stand on the issue, alleged Prince of Philandering that he is). I thought it was sweet and funny, albeit pretty damned presumptuous. He proceeded to give a brilliant off-the-cuff speech � nicely worded acknowledgment of the weirdness of accepting such an award at such a time, and a much classier reference to the war than that of the ever-pugnacious Michael Moore. If the win didn't increase his career cache, his energetic acceptance of it certainly did.

- Ah, Michael Moore � as soon as they announced his name as the winner of the Documentary Award, I scooted forward in my seat and thought, "Well, this should be good�" Sure enough, he didn't disappoint. Bringing up the other nominees was an interesting touch � wonder if they all agreed to do that no matter who won? The crowd reaction to what he said was equally noteworthy � I don't think I've ever heard booing like that during an awards show. I wanted to see more shots of people who were doing the booing; instead we got a lingering shot of the jury-like row inhabited by the likes of Nicole Kidman, Denzel Washington, and Ed Harris � all of them sitting still with tight inscrutable little smiles (OK, except Amy Madigan, who was cackling but just seems like a spaz in general).

- Barbra Streisand got her dig in too, albeit a much subtler one about free speech applying to artists as much as to anyone. Fair enough; why shouldn't they, as concerned citizens, make use of their high profile to express their opinions, as long as they're making clear the fact that they are speaking for themselves and not for America at large? Doesn't mean anyone's obligated to listen to them or agree with them.

- I'm glad Chris Cooper got Best Supporting Actor. It's great to see recognition go to someone who's worked hard for years and finally achieved professional acclaim based on their talent rather than their genetic endowments, and has also managed to preserve a good life with his family. He seems like a good and humble guy, dedicated to his work, and I'm just happy for his success.

- Brendan Fraser was far less creepy during his presentation than he was at the Golden Globes. Glad to see it.

That sums up the Tess take on Oscars 2003. Back to life, back to reality�

Earlier in the day we got some badly-needed yard clearing done on the east side of the front yard after our neighbors cut down the nasty half-dead tree that overshadowed the hill; they also cut down all of the bamboo on our side without asking, but we actually didn't mind so we didn't say anything. That side of the house is much brighter and neater now � it was pretty messy and ugly beforehand, so we're really glad to have it cleaned up. We also talked to them about finally getting estimates to have our shared fence replaced, which has been on our to-do list since the day we got the house. Hate to say it, but between that, the leaky roof, and the patchy stucco on the house, it may be time for another equity loan�

Can't muster up much commentary for the war at this point, other than to say that I hope our POW's make it out OK in the end. It's sad to be reminded that the faces of warriors are sometimes also those of scared-looking kids. Sad also to see images of Iraqi children hurt or killed by our bombs. Then again, will fewer children die in the long run if Saddam is no longer able to use their nations' wealth to build palaces and weapons instead of putting food in their starving mouths? So many shades of gray in this situation...

Wil Wheaton's site mentioned a link to a site that provides books for service personnel serving overseas. I think this is a great idea, and I plan to go through my bookshelf this weekend to see what I could send.

I'm glad to note that it's actually somewhat unlikely that my brother will be going to Iraq - he was told after his last hitch in Afghanistan that that was the last deployment he'd have to make, and that his work would keep him stateside from now until his retirement in a couple of years. This was well before war commenced, of course, but I'm hoping it holds true, especially since he's in charge of his shop now and needs to be available for meetings with suppliers, etc. I'm so selfishly glad that he's not there, especially when I hear of things like helicopter crashes taking out some of our guys before they even see combat. T. can take care of himself in battle (name an international trouble spot over the past dozen years and chances are he's made a guest appearance there); but what can a guy do when his Blackhawk takes a header?

Anyway, I'm still hoping hard for the families of those who were deployed that future losses are few, and that we come to find out that, all taped messages of defiance to the contrary, Saddam and/or his psychotic demon-spawned sons were actually blown into kibbles and bits by that first round of missiles on Wednesday (Assassination? Nope - not when there's a war and he's the Supreme Commander of the Iraqi forces... Should've kept wearing that nice Western business suit instead of switching back to the uniform and jaunty beret, eh Saddam, old bean?).

I was not in favor of this war, but now that it's underway, I can't help but hope that a way will be found to assist Iraq into becoming a nation of progress and peace instead of oppression and war. We've really stirred up a hornet's nest over there, not only in Iraq but in the rest of the world, both Muslim and non-Muslim. I think the way the Bush administration handled the Iraq situation was a diplomatic debacle. The only thing that's brought me close to believing that what we're doing could be the best option is actually the display of conviction evinced not by our own president but rather by Tony Blair. Blair is one of the most intelligent and genuine leaders we've seen in our generation, a true servant of the people he represents; so if he's in, then I have to try to see what he sees. This guy's putting his whole career as one of Britain's most popular Prime Ministers on the table to support this effort, not to mention the UK's relations with its EU partners; I believe that he's truly convinced that this effort is, albeit not an ideal solution, still the best choice among a host of bad alternatives for how to deal with the danger of advanced weaponry falling into the hands of third-world tyrants, whose religion may make them regard mutally-assured destruction not so much as a deterrent but as a quicker path to Heaven. What good is deterrence to an enemy convinced that their afterlife will be a nice permanent vacation from their nasty brutish little lives on Earth?

At any rate, I guess I've come to terms with the fact that, for better or worse, we're committed now. The history buff in me is, I admit, fascinated at the balls-out boldness of this action and the fact that we are living smack dab in the midst of events that will change the course of international relations for years to come. To paraphrase the Chinese proverb, we are indeed living in interesting times.

This is the funniest thing I've seen in a while. Thank God the Dept. of Homeland Security is there to continually provide us with clear, unambiguous communications about personal safety in these dangerous times! Or, at very least, an easy target for gallows humor...

So it looks like my brother's friend Dubya is sending him to war. T. is a veteran of Gulf War I; lucky him, to land a part in the sequel... (working title: "Gulf War 2: Electric Boogaloo").

As for me, I buy parts that go into microwave communications assemblies that go into missiles and jets that will soon go to Baghdad and bring on the funk, as well as satellites that will be watching it all happen. Guess we're both assured of job security for the forseeable future... Like it or not.

All the protests in the world - literally - are not going to stop this thing from happening now (if, indeed, they ever could have). My hopes are centered, at this point, on the following: a short duration of the conflict, surprising levels of support from Iraqis who are ready for a regime change and a normalization of relations with the outside world, a solution that will get both Saddam and Allied troops out of Iraq as soon as possible, and sufficient diplomacy to calm the tidal waves of political discord that we're stirring up and prevent this conflict from escalating into World War III and the U.S. from turning into a police state in the name of keeping us secure from terror. And most of all, selfishly, I hope no one I love gets hurt.

Reckon that's all I have to say about that, for now.

Throwing together an entry just to confirm that I haven't been incarcerated, or dragged off into the bush by dingoes, or spontaneously combusted. Just FYI.

So HBO's Six Feet Under is finally back for a new season - right on, right on! The first episode was kind of weird, though. Nate's being the opening-scene stiff was odd, but not totally shocking. I can actually wrap my mind around his coming-back-from-death-and-marrying-the-mother-of-his-child thing... But what's with the phantom visions of him having a kid with Brenda? I'm sure all will become relatively clear soon, but it was a strange way to start the season, for sure.

Visting the accountant tomorrow - should be interesting to see if we get anything back this year. Last year we withheld too much and ended up getting a lot back, so we adjusted our withholdings so that we weren't giving the government as much of an interest-free loan this year - I just hope we didn't overcompensate and end up owing. Guess we'll see... It would be so nice to get enough back to fix our perilously sagging back fence, at least. Pretty soon it's just going to be a pile of rotted planks on our hill. Getting the house's stucco repaired and painted is quickly becoming a priority as well. Not to mention fixing the leak in the roof, and finding out why the fridge has suddenly decided to start leaking water... Bah. Maybe I SHOULD start playing the damned lottery...

What else to comment on? Man, I'm drawing a blank. Is my life really this boring? Rhetorical question, mind you. =) I'm actually really happy with having no trips coming up, no major social activities on the weekends, just time to relax, sort things out around the house, catch up on reading, etc.

Well, yeah. There it is. Hopefully inspiration will hit me like it means it pretty soon, and I'll actually have something semi-interesting to post...

On Sunday Bill and I drove up to L.A. to see our new nephew, Luke Carter Smith (named such under protest from his sister Lizzy, who lobbied hard for tagging him "Frosty"). Luke is, quite predictably, adorable � Mandy and Zac are 3-for-3 as far as perfect procreativity. (Check out http://www.zacsmith.com for ample pictoral proof).

Mandy went through a somewhat complicated delivery � she deserves enormous credit for her endurance and courage in bearing the physical toll of bringing these kids into the world; none of her three pregnancies and births have been anything close to easy. Zac always jokes that �Mandy�s a rock�, but he�s more right about that than I think even he realizes. She�s bounced back from major surgery every time with nowhere near the fuss as she�d be absolutely entitled to make - if anything, it's tough to keep her from doing more than she should.

Beyond that, she�s simply one of the best moms I�ve ever known. She is patient and attentive and informed; her kids are smart and well-mannered and happy in a way that makes it obvious how cared-for and secure they are. Of course Zac deserves a ton of credit as well, since he�s a wonderful, devoted dad � but parenting is Mandy�s full-time job (anyone who doubts that hers is a �real job� is either ignorant or deluded; if anything, it�s a triple-shift every day, since mothers like her are rarely ever off-duty), and the sheer effort she puts into it is clear to anyone who knows their family. As young and inexperienced as they were when they became parents, both Mandy and Zac have taken on their roles with complete dedication and determination to provide the best for their kids and make their needs a priority in all that they do; I respect the hell out of what they've accomplished. If only all parents were so competant and caring... Anyway, we're thrilled to welcome our newest family member into the world. It will be a joy to watch him grow and see what sort of person he becomes.

And Bill�s right... clean newborn baby heads smell better than just about anything in the world. We were huffing poor L.C.'s fontanel like bored secretaries with a fresh bottle of White-Out. Hopefully it won't be too long before we're getting the hookup from our own zoomer...

Yesterday I was inexplicably blue; this morning I am equally inexplicably happy. The world seemed like a sad place yesterday, but this morning it seemed happy and bright, and I'm grateful for that.

My drive into work was a parade of small lovely scenes � a glowing gold confetti of leaves blowing into the street, the bright green of new wild grass growing on a hill, the drive south down Black Mountain Road seeming soft and pastoral in the hazy morning air. I saw a young dark-haired guy jogging past the new fire station in Mira Mesa in bright turquoise mid-calf pants and a sleeveless black shirt, and he would have been unremarkable except for two things: a tiny Jack Russell terrier running full-bore a meter in front of him; and the bouquet of balloons clutched in his right hand, red and white with one heart-shaped mylar one, flapping against each other in the air behind his head as he ran. The effect was that of a circus clown working out in his civvies. Further down the road at a stoplight, the sideview mirror of the car in front of me reflected a pretty blond-bobbed woman yawning then smiling to herself � I wondered what she was thinking about. I was listening to Jack Johnson, playing the song �Bubbly Toes� repeatedly � it was exactly the right song for the ride. As I sped down Kearny Villa Road on final approach to the Big R, the buoyancy of my mood seemed to be fading a little; so I grabbed the rubber fright teeth from Dave and Buster�s that I�d left in a cubby in my car door after Halloween and put them on, leering at myself in the rear-view mirror. It�s damned hard to be gloomy when one is wearing spooky fright teeth. I'm going to keep 'em around for contingency purposes.

So yeah, I�m in a silly mood, but I�ll take it any day over the gloom of yesterday.

It's my first day back to work, and I'm struggling against a mean case of the blues. I'm not sure if it's attributable to post-holiday letdown, or the hangover of two weeks of regular overindulgence of various sorts, or the sheer annoyance of coming back to the Big R and the piles of work and problems and managerial oppression. Probably a combination of all of these things, I guess. I'm just finding it terribly difficult to concentrate on what I need to do. I probably should try harder to focus on being grateful for having a good stable job - with optional window cubicle, for Pete's sake - what the hell do I have to complain about? Sadly, whining doesn't seem to make any of the issues I have go away, so I need to figure out how to cheer my ass up and get some stuff done.

It's resolution time as well, and I can think of a lot of them that I'd like to pursue. Basically, I think it all boils down to a matter of consuming less - be it money, food, whatever - and doing more positive things. The holidays were fun, don't get me wrong; but right now I feel like I've washed up on the shore of this New Year as sort of a sodden castaway, amidst a pile of flotsam and jetsam that represents career and body image and finances and household organization. I just need to get it together. New Years represent fresh starts, and I'm really hoping that this one will provide the impetus for me to make some really good changes.

That having been said, we really did have a nice holiday break. Christmas in Phoenix was fun - we got a bunch of great gifts, including a TiVo, which is delightful. Apparently I have earned the dubious distinction of being the Rhodes family wino, as a significant proportion of my gifts from various in-laws had a wine theme - glasses, charms, festive bottle bags, a chiller, right down to wine-scented candles, not to mention the multiple bottles of wine (I think I got about nine bottles total). I can't dispute that I like and will get use out of all these things... but I"m still a little taken aback that at least four different family members chose to present me with wine-related items. Am I really coming off as that much of a lush? Hell, AM I that much of a lush? Back we come to the less-consumption resolution. It seems to be time to reverse the trend a bit.

New Year's was laid-back and fun - Todd and Wy stayed the night, and we played games, watched the ball drop on TV, hopped in the spa, and generally hung out. I like New Years Eves at home. They're much less complicated. Don't have to worry about who's driving home, don't have to deal with drunk drivers, or pay an exorbitant cover charge to hang out in an overcrowded bar with idiots shoving you around as everyone jostles for a good place to stand... I have never yet had a New Year's outing that turned out to be anything but a disappointment compared to the anticipation and sense of "doing something fun" that preceded it. The Flathead show we were at a couple years was fun, granted - but all told, I'm still happier to be home.

OK, I'm going to stop now - I'll check back when I'm in less of a buzzkill mood!

I'm back! Yep, London was amazingly cool - I plan to publish the journal I kept there soon; just been in pre-Christmas overdrive and haven't managed to put blogging on the agenda.

Basically, for now, I just need to say that I think "The Little Drummer Boy" should be banned, permanently, from all Christmas song anthologies, radio play, and any other public venue. This song sucks my will to live. I was just on hold with a supplier, and it was playing - not only the song itself, but a "special" rendition that featured an additional singer crooning a secondary set of words over the main singer - like, "We have to teeeeeeach the children, to come togeeeeether..." or something equally smarmy and horrible. Seriously, and I'm not kidding, it brought tears to my eyes - not of sentiment, but of sheer suffering and embarrassment for whoever was singing. It was that bad. Almost as bad as listening to Steely Dan. (Ah, you know I'm just playin', E! LOL!)

Christmas is barrelling down on me like a Pamplona bull, and our living room/dining room is an abbatoir of present-prep detritus. The rest of the house is covered in dust and fur, since cleaning has been below even blogging on the list of priorities. Yet, not only do I need to have all the wrapping done in the next few days, but I need to completely clean the house in preparation for lodging 6 family members as part of the "second Christmas" the Rhodes family is having in L.A. since Mandy is about to have her third kid and can't travel. Sing with me, now (Chipmunk voices optional)... "Christmas is a time for stress, my house is such a friggin' mess!"

OK, back to the mountain o' paper I have in front of me... Bad Tracy for slacking enough to write this! Bah...

It takes so little to make me happy� A new set of shelves in the bedroom closet did the trick yesterday. Wee constructed, I painted, and now we have twice the shelf space in there, which will cut down the cluttered-nightmare factor immensely. Happy day!

I have this strong urge to nest and get the house in order before we leave for England. I guess part of the motivation is just that it's so nice to come back from a long trip to a clean, tidy house - the last thing you want to think when you walk in all jet-lagged and exhausted is, "Well, home sweet home is certainly a shithole". Also, I had the strange morbid thought that, should anything happen to us, I don't want our family coming into the house to clean it out and having to deal with it being all disorganized and nasty on top of things. Now isn't that a pleasant scene to envision when one is planning a trip - weeping relatives picking through your dirty laundry?

Still, international relations being what they are, taking an overseas trip makes you think a little about the potential of encountering trouble. There's a little more risk going to London than, say, Norwich where my family lives. London is obviously on the short list of potential metropolitan targets for terrorists, especially with the UK's support of the US positions on Afghanistan and Iraq. Just within the past week, the BBC reported that three men were arrested for planning a nerve gas attack on the Tube. At least the IRA hasn't been feeling its oats lately (what's up with them these days, anyway? I obviously need to brush up on my Irish current affairs - better read this, I guess...). I feel a wee bit wary about being an American in a major international city. If anyone asks, I'm quite tempted to claim that I'm Canadian. That being said, though, I'm not actively worried about our welfare over there. Odds are that, should we have any sort of trouble there, it's far more likely to be a garden-variety mugging than a terrorist attack. Anyway, all we can really do is keep our eyes open, our wallets and passports secured, and our focus set on the very important business of having an excellent time. Visiting museums and cathedrals, finding the best pub lunch, shopping for Christmas gifts, finding the best pub dinner, seeing a play, finding the best pub nightcap... Screw world politics; we're going to have a blast!

We're hoping to take a laptop with us this time, so that we can upload digital pics, keep a travel journal, possibly even get on the Web and do daily MG updates... The hotel apparently has ISDN lines in the rooms, so we'll definitely be looking into it.

It's raining here today. The silvery wet sky and and the leaves flying off the big maple trees in the cul-de-sac outside of my office remind me of Oregon, and that makes me happy. This morning, standing at my kitchen window watching the rain sifting down through our eucalyptus trees, I was yearning to call in sick and spend the day sitting on my couch with a cup of cocoa, a book, some Billie Holiday on the stereo, and a view of my backyard. Sadly, Fridays are the worst day for me to not be at work; this is the day we buyers have our weekly interrogation - I mean, status meeting - with the Boss, and our TPS reports - I mean, our workload indicators - are due. Today was particularly non-negotiable in that I agreed to give aforementioned Boss a lift after work to pick up his Jeep at the garage. So I resigned myself to being here, but a part of me hopes tomorrow is exactly like today so I can still follow through on my lazy scheme.

Rain is a novelty here. It's also, I imagine, a source of dread for police, fire and EMT workers, because the rate of accidents goes up exponentially. Californians lose their shit when it comes to having to drive in the rain. I'll grant that precipitation causes problems on the roads - because it's so infrequent, the roads become slicker than snot when the rainwater soaks in and loosens up months' worth of accumulated oil and dirt. Caution is definitely in order. The real danger, though, comes out of the interaction between nervous drivers who overcompensate and plod along like half-blind narcoleptic grandmothers, and impatient drivers who get aggravated by the slow-movers and careen aggressively between lanes trying to get around the slow boats. Mishaps inevitably ensue. The worst offenders, predictably, tend to be folks in SUV's who get all cocky thinking that their all-wheel drive and big knobby tires somehow exempt them from the laws of physics as they apply to slick surfaces. My CR-V has something called "real-time 4-wheel drive", which essentially means there's a computer monitoring the amount of traction the tires are getting and automatically switching the tranny into all-wheel drive whenever it seems necessary - I don't have to do anything; in fact, I have no say in the matter one way or the other, but that doesn't bother me - the car's brain knows what it needs better than I do. It's reassuring� but I'm still reasonably wary on days like this.

Anyway, on tonight's itinerary are a log in the fireplace, warm cider with a jigger of rum, a good movie to watch, and later on a dip in the hot tub. Yes, thanks - I do feel pretty damned lucky.

* A Wee quote; ask him about it if you're curious.

So Casa Del Tessenwee successfully weathered another party this weekend... Todd and Wy requested that we provide the forum for a combo Halloween/birthday bash, and we gladly obliged.

Deciding that we wanted to bring something different to the social table this time, we came up with the idea of digging out the DLP projector we had in the attic and showing movies on the back deck. Bill, along with plucky assistant Toddler, constructed an eight-foot square screen out of plywood and canvas drop cloth (Indy and Wy shown for scale, heh):

The other cool thing we did was turn the hot tub into a spooky (albeit square) cauldron, by means of glow sticks and dry ice. Turns out you can buy dry ice from Baskin-Robbins - very handy, that. Although the vapor didn't tend to last terribly long, when it was in full flow the effect was pretty damned cool:

Anyway, we had a faboo time and really enjoyed the company of everyone who showed up (especially those intrepid souls who chose to wear costumes!). Check out scenes of the tomfoolery here (oh, and I was just holding that clove for someone... Honest!). If Bill and I were profoundly hurting units the day after� well, such are the wages of excess. Our livers were not only battered, but then deep-fried and served with cocktail sauce� yet they have survived to fight another day. Salud!

Wee and I carved pumpkins last night:

Anyway, jack-o-lanterns at hand, we are now officially ready to ritually distribute sugar to the neighborhood youth. I'm tempted, however, to see what happens if I tell kids "trick" when they ask me to choose between that or treat... and to ask them to elaborate on what, exactly, they have in store for me as a result. I wonder how many kids actually have tricks on deck in case anyone asks calls them on it? I never did...

Indy loves Halloween. She really digs all the excitement of the repeated doorbell ringings and sniffing the kids and their bags o' loot. It's also kind of funny to see the sudden startled glances of the little ones when a big dog pokes her nose up to them (well, it's Halloween, they're supposed to get a little spooked)! Either they rally right away and become interested once they find out she's a nice dog, or if they stay nervous, I'll shove her back inside.

Indy's really gentle when kids are at the door; she doesn't stay defensive like she does at first when adult strangers show up. This reassures me that she'll be fine when we have our own kids. She was a little grumbly when she encounted Zac and Mandy's kids at my in-laws' house - but she was on unfamiliar turf then and probably felt a little threatened, and her lip-curling proto-snarls seemed more like warning than true threat. She does the same thing with other dogs when she feels her personal space is being invaded. She's never actually bitten anyone, human or animal; the worst she's ever done is accidentally glanced a tooth off someone's hand when they've riled her up with rough play, and she's always contrite when it happens. In fact, the overall level of control she has over those nasty fangs and powerful jaws of hers is incredible to me. Last night we watched her snap through some thick pork rib bones like they were Chik-o-Stix... yet she can be whipped into a jaw-snapping playfight frenzy, and should you put your hand in her mouth as it's closing, her teeth will still barely touch your skin before she pulls back. In times like that, you have to marvel at the fact that you live with a powerful carnivore who could kill you quite readily if she chose - yet there's a bond of trust that assures you that she would never willingly hurt you or anyone she loves.

Some may doubt a dog's ability to love; I do not. Almost every night when I get into bed, Indy will come over to my bedside and rest her head on the mattress beside me. I put my head next to hers and scratch her ears for a couple of minutes, watching her huge polar bear eyes squint sleepily, then send her to lay down. She came up with this goodnight ritual of her own accord, and it seems important to her. That one small gesture is enough to make up for all the hair-sweeping and poop-scooping and vet bills, a hundred times over... let alone the myriad other things that make our lives better for her being part of it. She's intelligent, loving, expressive, friendly, obedient, protective within appropriate bounds, possessed of no major behavioral problems... and, of course, she's the supermodel of the dog world. It's likely we'll never have another dog as excellent as Indy. I'd clone her if I could.

Anyway, enough about our superior pup... Happy Halloween, all y'all!

A year ago, my clock radio blared to life at 6:30am like every other weekday, and as usual my hand shot out from the covers and slapped the snooze button before I was fully awake. A couple of seconds passed in the silence before the words the DJ had been saying absorbed into my sleepy brain: "Two planes have hit the towers..."
Planes? Towers? Was there an aviation accident? (I confess to a morbid fascination with plane crashes, so my first thought was that two planes had collided, and crashed into buildings below or near them). I turned the radio back on.

After a few more seconds, and a muttered "No fucking way", I was on my feet and headed downstairs to turn on the TV. I watched, live, the first tower falling. It was like something out of a Jerry Bruckheimer film, and I could not yet accept that it was real, that thousands of real people were being atomized before my eyes and on the air. Reality caught up soon enough though; it appeared in the form of photocopied pictures, countless faces smiling in stark contrast to the pleas for information written below them, posted on a crowded wall or waved by crying survivors clinging desperately to hope. Have you seen my husband, please call if you've seen our daughter. But all we saw was smoke and dust, the encompassing gray shroud of mourning, laden with molecules of the mourned.

Grief was a palpable thing, those first days and weeks - it hung in the air like smoke, like dust. Not all of us had lost someone; but most of us felt like we lost something. The mainland of America wasn't safe from war anymore; war had come to us for the first time in over 200 years. Our attackers were maddeningly nebulous - not a country with definable borders, but a shadow group hidden deep in caves and lurking in cells like cancer in the bodies of our nation and dozens of others. A year later, we've taken out the largest tumor, but we know the disease still lives.

Trite as it may be to say, though, in those first weeks I also felt an authentic sense of community with those around me, in all the people who displayed flags and lit candles and watched the news and heard the stories and wept for what was lost... a unity of sentiment that I'd always associated with the WWII era and had wondered if Americans were even capable of anymore. Beyond the reactions of Americans, I was deeply moved by the reaction of other nations - I welled up when I saw the British Brigade of Guards band play "Star-Spangled Banner" at the Changing of the Guard, and when Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder, Vladimir Putin - leaders of nations that at various points in history have had their own problems with the US - spoke of sorrow and solidarity. As sappy as that sounds, these things resonated with me. While I didn't watch the all-star tribute on TV, or buy a T-shirt that said "Let's roll", or go to any vigils or ceremonies, I did feel that it was an amazing experience, to bear witness to an event that shook the entire civilized world to its core, and which would take a place in history equal to that of Pearl Harbor or Kennedy's assassination. I'll tell my kids about it someday, and hopefully when I do the event will still stand as the most horrific event of the Millenium, because nothing else will have happened to supplant it. Let's all cross our fingers.

I can't say that I don't feel some level of frustration with those (other than survivors, or family and friends of the dead) who get unduly overwrought on this day, a year later - I do think that there's a fine line between being respectful of the anniversary and being mawkish about it. However, I will say that on this day, the memories of last September are very much with me, and I will take time to think about what happened and what's happened since, and I'll hope hard for the ongoing safety and prosperity of America in times to come.

Yeah, continuing in the vein of sparse entries... sorry 'bout that. Pretty soon I'll be back to having plenty of time to bore my half-dozen devoted readers with regularly updated trivialities.

In the mean time, a couple of quick items... just because I'm sick of seeing the name pop up in our "most popular search terms" list, I've gone back and edited the names in my entry about the V@n D@m child murder case.

I will say that I am very satisfied with the verdict handed out by the jury last week in this case, and I will feel justice has been done the day D@vid Westerf!eld is strapped to a gurney and pumped full of potassium chloride. How anyone - anyone - could look at all of the evidence and NOT think this bastard did exactly what he's been convicted of is beyond me... but apparently there are a core group of conspiracy hounds out there that are just certain the guy's been railroaded and that the parents are actually culpable in some fashion, despite so much as a shred of evidence to support their view (as opposed to, say, the girl's BLOOD in Westerf!eld's RV and on the clothes he was so desperate to get cleaned, her hair in his bedsheets, his erratic flight out of town that weekend, his prediliction for kiddie bondage porn... Hello???). These people are offended by the parents, so they are determined to judge them guilty for their child's death, even though the only way of supporting that conclusion involves a series of ridiculously weak assumptions (Dan!elle's hair and blood got into Westerf!ield's home because he was having an affair with her mother - yeah! And she killed the kid and framed him for it, knowing that he wouldn't disclose the affair even if he was facing the death penalty for a crime he didn't commit! Or wait - the dad killed her, then snuck out to his neighbor's home and planted his daughter's blood, prints and hair in DW's RV and on his clothes! The wily sod!) These people should be introduced to the principle of Occam's Razor... which per Merriam Webster can be interpreted as saying that "explanations of unknown phenomena be sought first in terms of known quantities." These folks can indulge in wild speculation all they like, but the available facts all point in a single direction... and thankfully, the jury agreed.

Anyway, in other news, my folks made it to my house just fine, of course. We've had a nice few days of visiting, shopping, horse racing (War Emblem, Schmar Emblem - that nag surely didn't live up to the hype in yesterday's race!), etc. I have high hopes that the rest of the visit, as well as their trip back, will be equally copacetic. And then I'm looking forward to a long period of down time this fall with nothing, just nothing, going on... =)

Lordy, I have been busy as one beaver lately. My intent is to do an entry about the ASD show experience, but I just haven't had a chance to sit down and knock it out yet. So mostly, I'm just writing to say, "Sorry I haven't written!", and my grand plan is to catch up very soon�

This week, the visitations continue, but from an alternate perspective - people are coming to see us this round. Our friend Todd is staying with us tonight - he's in town for a job interview. My brother Thom is in town for a meeting and will hopefully swing by in the evening. Then, on Thursday, my parents are driving down to spend a few days. The Casa Del Rhodes door is a revolving one this week!

Happy news - Bill has been offered and accepted a permanent position at UCSD today - happy happy joy joy! It's so great to have it all settled. Yay for Wee!!

As much out of compulsion as tradition, at sunset on July 4th I went out to watch me some fireworks. Although pretty much any sort of light show sucks me in like a moth to a bugzapper, I come particularly unhinged for pyrotechnics. This year I didn't feel like driving too far so I chose to check out the show at a local high school, my observation point the wrong side of a chain-link fence overlooking the football field. It was one of the more meager displays I've seen in a while, like maybe the fundraising campaign didn't go so well. Even though they had some of my favorites (the gold ones that explode and then shimmer as they fall) and some that I hadn't seen before (ones that burst in multicolor dots, then sent out a halo of screeching silver corkscrews - the noise made them big crowd-pleasers), all told it was just OK.

Still, as I stood there looking over the crowd - hordes of kids wearing glow necklaces or sitting wrapped in quilts next to their folks, parents in sweats grinning at the kids' oohs and aahs, teenagers torn between checking out the show and checking out each other - I began to think of other July 4ths... other places, other people who were there with me. I felt a strong sense of deja-vu, thinking of younger me standing in the dark, watching the show, a year ago, five years ago, twenty years ago...

The only display I ever saw when I was a kid was the one over Klamath Lake - most years we'd watch from my house, since we were on a hill and could see them pretty well from there. Once my brother helped me up onto the roof; I'd always been envious when the folks let him go up there to fetch a frisbee or hang Christmas lights, so I thought that was a pretty audacious and thrilling place for me to be. As a teenager, I went with friends and climbed into the hills next to the lake. The summer I turned 18, a friend let us sneak onto his dad's docked boat, toting our contraband wine coolers. We felt privileged and daring, the boat bobbing beneath us as we tucked back bottles of Bartles and James and hooted at the show, our voices carrying over the water but still anonymous amidst the other floating spectators. It was the last summer my childhood friends and I would ever spend together. Like bottles chucked off the S.S. Mighty Pelican into the sea of What Next, we all drifted to different places after high school. I don't think any of us who were on that boat even live in the same state as any other now; the odds of that are pretty steep for a bunch of kids from a small town in Oregon, where getting out seems to be as impossible for some as it is imperative for others.

The next year found me camping at Diamond Lake with new friends from my summer job at Crater Lake. We were all very intoxicado, stumbling around in the dark woods on the edge of the lake and caterwauling patriotic tunes at the top of our lungs amidst giggles and the fwhump-boom!-crackle of the fireworks. Less fun, by contrast, was the part later in the evening where we got rounded up by Park Rangers and handed M.I.P. citations... I vaguely remember mumbling, "Yes sir, yes sir" repeatedly at one of the officers - until I was hissed at by my boyfriend-du-jour to shut the hell up, as the "sir" in question was actually a "ma'am"; I'm surprised she didn't haul my dizzy ass in. I confess, though, that there's a corner of my good-girl soul that relishes the memory of my single non-vehicular run-in with The Law. The court in which we pleaded our case was a one-room strip-mall setup in tiny Canyonville, OR; as we drove up, our intimidation was tempered by the humor of seeing it nestled humbly between a dry-cleaner's and a deli. The judge was a friendly older gal who listened to our carefully-rehearsed pleadings for mercy and kindly reduced the fine to something more managable to a bunch of college kids on seasonal wages. We were reassured that, as legal adults, nothing would be sent to our parents to tip them off to our failings... Although years later my sister told me that, of all unlikely things, a contact of my father's in the Medford Police Dept. happened to see my name on a list, connected it to Dad, and spilled the beans. Dad's never discussed it with me - just like I've never discussed with him a certain driving-related infraction he incurred many years ago, of which I'm sure he thinks I am not aware. A little quid pro quo in family secret-keeping never hurts.

Fast-forward to the first year Bill and I shared July 4th together� Bill had come to stay with me for a couple of weeks in the summer after he completed his Geology Field Camp. We were engaged, and had spent over two months apart, so we were, needless to say, a tiny bit pleased to be together again. He'd rented a sporty red car - a Mazda something-or-other - and we drove it over to Newport to see the show there. We drove up into a construction site on a hill and parked on the summit. Lacking other seating options, we decided to kick back on the hood of the car ("It's a rental!"). The way the fireworks glittered over the dark water dotted with tiny bobbing boat lights was magical, all the more so because we were giddy with lovestruck comradery (and possibly something else, though that's none-yo...) to begin with. The next day, we discovered all the sand-laden scratches we'd put on the hood of the brand new rental car, and panicked; however, we also found to our relief that the polish you can buy in auto-supply stores that promises to minimize paint scratches actually works well enough to pass casual inspection by a rental clerk.

The Independence Day after that, we watched fireworks with our toes dug into the sand of Waikiki Beach, midway through our honeymoon in Hawaii. Blissful.

Recent Independence Days have been less eventful, but only once have I not had a fireworks show to watch, and then not by choice - it was the year the Rhodes family spent up at the family cabin, Adullam, where a local drought made fireworks verboten. It bothered me a lot to miss them - more than I expected. (Said cabin, incidentally, missed being engulfed last week by the Rodeo-Chediski fire by, oh, all of 4 miles� Whew!).

I've come to realize that Fireworks on the Fourth of July are a more important tradition to me than turkey on Thanksgiving, almost more important than a decorated tree at Christmas. The memories of them - where I was, who I was with, what my life was like in that moment - are like index tags in the book of years past. They help me keep track. And every single time, they make me happy.

Beware of grateful Macedonians bearing expensive cognac and Cuban cigars... Especially on weeknights.

Oy. I feel like I got about 15 minutes of sleep last night. I went to bed late to begin with, but at about 3:30am our dog decided there was some life-shattering peril in the backyard and it was her duty to bark her head off till the whole neighborhood was alerted. She has a massive, roaring bark on her (which she rarely employs, thankfully), so I'm sure there were several disgruntled folks cursing her from their beds. Bill finally got up and locked her in our room, where she punctuated the balance of the morning with intermittent growls and pacing.

She's been hellaciously skittish lately, and we're not sure why. I was taking her for a walk last evening, and we had just crested the hill at the top of our street when she all of a sudden stopped dead in her tracks and began tugging her leash back toward home. I thought maybe she'd seen a cat, even though she's usually oblivious to any other animals when we're walking. There was a guy working on his truck engine by the curb ahead of us, but he wasn't doing anything threatening and usually she wouldn't care less. She did run up to him like she knew him when I tried to walk her past him, which is also unusual, but then she commenced with the backtracking effort. I finally gave up and turned back - and she galloped, choking herself on her lead, until we made it home. As soon as we got in the door, she was fine, but reluctant to go back out. I finally convinced her to restart the walk going in the opposite direction, but I had to cajole her. This, from a dog who's generally so anxious to get out on walks that I can't even look at my walking shoes without her getting uppity and whining to go, and once we're out is so wrapped up in an orgy of sniffing that nothing fazes her. She's generally a well-adjusted, non-jumpy sort of pup; all of a sudden, though, she's like the kid in "Sixth Sense" - like she's seeing dead people everywhere or something. It's somewhat unsettling. Maybe we need to get her some doggy Valium...

Speaking of unsettling, we watched "Mulholland Drive" last night. What a bizarre movie. I can't decide if I liked it or not. I don't mind a movie that makes you think, but I'm not sure how I feel about a movie that deludes you into trying to make connections that don't really exist. My own dreams are nonsensical enough without my spending two hours trying to interpret the premeditated chaos of a David Lynch character's dreams. It was intriguing, but in the end I was burned out on trying to pull together all the strange threads and weave them into some sort of coherent conclusion. Maybe I'm just too conventional, too focused on the destination instead of the journey... it's just that a small sense of payoff for having taken the long, strange trip would have been nice. I imagine, though, that this sense of uncertainty was exactly what Lynch intended to inspire. So... whatever.

Last night Bill and I drove past one of the many new McMansion developments cropping up like a rash on the hillsides of Rancho Pe�asquitos and were commenting on their oppressive homogeneity - row upon row of boring, identical pastel stucco boxes with postage-stamp sized backyards, set so close to each other that one could borrow a cup of sugar from one's neighbor by opening a window and having it handed over to you. We've taken to calling them "hive homes", and as we drove by these ones we speculated about the terms and conditions set by their homeowner's association.

"I'll bet there's something in there that says you're required to take turns fanning the hive opening."

"Yeah... And one a week you're required to put on your pollen chaps and go run through the flowerbeds."

"Whenever someone hears about a good sale at one of the local stores, they have to come back and do a special dance in the courtyard to let the other residents know where it is."

(Insert image of Tess doing a little jig reminiscent of the gopher dancing at the end of "Caddyshack"). "Ah - the double back-and-forth fist-jutting indicates Mira Mesa Road... The shoulder shimmy means discount clothing... And three head bobs means 30 - there must be a 30% off sale at Ross! Let's buzz on over!"

Heh.

We apparently have a homeowner's association in our neighborhood - but thankfully, unlike most of the developments built over the past 10 years or so, there doesn't seen to be an active committee for it and we don't have to pay any HOA fees. Some people I know who live in newer developments are on the hook for several hundred dollars each month, which I would have an enormous philosophical problem with having to pay. Ostensibly the HOA is there for the betterment of the neighborhood, paying for upkeep and communal services like swimming pools and landscaping. Nuts, I say. I would have no interest in those services, and it would be a huge annoyance to me if I had no option but to pay that much money every month to fund them anyway. HOA's are notorious for telling you what you must do and what you are forbidden to do with the exterior of your home and yard, in the supposed interest of maintaining a tidy, property-value-enhancing uniformity of appearance among the houses. Want a basketball hoop in your front yard? Sorry, it's not allowed. Want to paint your house blue? No can do; it won't match the other houses then (God forbid). I have a really hard time wrapping my brain around the concept that someone else can tell you what you can or cannot do with your own private property - but that's the deal I guess you make when you buy a home in those neighborhoods. The fact that our neighborhood had no HOA fees (nor the dreaded "Mello-Roos" tax, the non-payment of which can result in foreclosure on your home) was a major selling point for us.

Still, despite the absence of any overt enforcement body that we could discern, we did read the neighborhood association-type terms and conditions documents we were given when we moved in, just to make sure we knew the scoop. The most amusing one to us was that we were specifically forbidden from keeping bees on the property. Nossir, no bees. Keep any other insect or animal you like - hell, any other constituent of Phyllum Arthropoda, really, knock yourself out - just no bees. We wondered, however, what our liability would be if bees just happened to take a yen to our property and began building a hive - squatting, in a sense? Would we have to take steps to evict them? Perhaps serve them with tiny eviction notices, nailed to the outside of the hive? Or, what if we decided to keep, as a personal pet, a singular bee? The T&C's really only prohibited bees in the plural...

Anyway, I am continually counting the lucky stars that were swirling over our heads in the finding of this house in this location. The neighboring houses are, albeit similar in appearance, set more widely apart than newer developments and we live on the side of a hill, which sets our house on a different level than the ones on either side and thus provides more privacy. We have no one behind us - our backyard overlooks a shallow canyon through which a major neighborhood street was built. While there is some traffic noise, our back deck is a good 15-20 feet above the road and the hill is covered with eucalyptus trees and other vegetation, so there's some buffer between us and the road. It's a small price to pay for the breathing room and the pretty overall view. Best of all, we don't have to pay some stupid association thousands of dollars a year for the privelege of owning property here. And we're never asked to help fan the hive opening. Although I kind of do wish I had a pair of pollen chaps...

I love the referrer log for monkeygumbo - it's very entertaining to see some of the Web searches that lead people to our site. Current favorites:

#1) 'fuck ass wife bitch turkish' - what can I possibly say about this one? What was this person hoping to find? A support group for fellow husbands of fuck ass Turkish bitches, perhaps?
2) carageenan dangers - beware the carageenan! It's an industry plot!
3) emaciated women pics - Why? What is it about a skin-covered skeleton that could be remotely appealing? Bah... Go find a famine relief site if you want to see that shiznit.
4) jennifer connelly weight loss - *shrug*
5) e-stimulate pics - Sure, I guess my goal is to offer e-stimulation to my select group of readers - but not so much pictorially;
6) excellent dentist new york - outta luck; the one I know is in Scottsdale, AZ.

In other news, things are looking up for Bill's dad. Apparently he has pneumonia (dunno why it took them so long to figure that out...), so that's the malady that's apparently made his general health turn south. He's improved quite a bit and may even get out of the hospital this afternoon (we're crossing fingers that he does - Bill is anxious to get back to work, and he's wearing thin under the caretaker routine, poor fella...) Anyway, it's a big relief that his dad's on the mend!

So what's all this about? Well, Wee and I came up with the bright idea of posting a weblog (it's 'blog! It's 'blog! It's better than bad - it's good!) so that we can throw random crap up on the Web for our own amusement and the reading enjoyment of... well, almost no one. Given my own nearly pathological inability to write email to people on a regular basis, however, I'm hoping that my friends (of whom I assume you're one, since I don't exactly anticipate this site being hyped on Yahoo! Cool Site of the Day anytime soon...) might be up for coming here and get little doses of TessNews instead. Acceptable compromise, or lame impersonal copout? You be the judge.

At any rate, this is just my first test-run here, so I'm going to keep it short and see if this monkey works...

Today was one of those days that makes people really resent you when you tell them you live in San Diego. Amazing, Praise-Jaysus-and-pass-the-barbeque weather. (Damn, you may be thinking, only two entries in and she's already resorting to commentaries on the weather. This is going to be one kicker of a journal. Well, just remember, your money is 100% refundable if you aren't completely satisfied).

Bill and I spent the morning coming up with this little weblog dealie (yes, we were not only conscious but also productive for several hours this morning - shocking, I know). In the afternoon we washed our autos. In the case of my Escort, I almost wish I'd left it dirty - asthetically speaking, I may have been better off. As it was, washing off the uniform surface layer of soot only served to reveal just how many of the smudges were not, in fact, transitory grime but rather permanent features of the surface finish. Also, alarming chunks of rubber bits always come off when I scrub, and I worry about what will happen once some critical percentage are shed. My car is aging way too prematurely - I fear that it's become afflicted with some sort of automotive version of progeria.

Poor thing. I never have bonded to it the way I bonded to my beloved Skate. (For that matter, I've never even nicknamed it, which is a very rare exception among items that are part of my daily life for more than a few months.) I'm certain it knows I want to trade it in for a Honda CR-V. It's heard me talking about them (did you know the CR-V has real-time 4-wheel drive? And a fold-out picnic table in back?), it's felt the longing looks I give their sporty little packages when we pass them in the street. It can put two and two together. I feel guilty that I may be giving the poor thing bad self-esteem, maybe even depression. I can only hope it's not feeling suicidal - or at least that it doesn't decide to take me along with it if it is. "If I can't be your ride, no car will!" I'm getting a funky vibe from it, one that didn't go away with last month's tune-up. But hopefully having given it a nice bath will have shown it that I still care...

Oops, way past bedtime. Sweet dreams.

I hab a code. A nasty, creeping crud of a virus that has plagued me since Tuesday. It seemed to be transient at first and I'd hoped to be better by the weekend, but by last night things were taking a downhill turn from the encouraging upswing of Thursday, and I've spent all of today malaising on the couch watching movies instead of my original plan of doing housework. Actually, now that I think about it, maybe that's not such a bad thing...

I watched a couple of films that I'd never heard of but which turned out not to be so bad: "Two Ninas", a romantic comedy that mostly caught my eye because it starred Ron Livingston of "Office Space" and "Band of Brothers" fame - he's currently one of my favorite actors; and "Sweet Revenge", a dark British comedy starring another couple of actors I'm fond of, Sam Neill and Kristen Scott Thomas. Also re-watched most of "Jane Eyre" - a great, aptly-casted adaptation of the book - and the well-made sub flick "Crimson Tide".

Last night, Bill & I and our friends Tony and Kris went to see "Spiderman". I went in with cautious enthusiasm, but came out very impressed. Sam Raimi did an excellent job with this one. It had a hefty portion of gee-whiz special effects, but I didn't think the action bits were at all gratuitous or over-the-top... it's Spiderman, for Pete's sake - the more web-swinging action the better! The CGI was some of the most convincing I've ever seen - sure, if you looked for it you could tell which scenes were digital; but not once was I distracted because the imagery seemed blatantly fake. It was very smooth, realistic and served the pace of action well. Equally well-done, though, was the Peter Parker side of the story. Casting Tobey Maguire as the geekboy-turned-Webbed-Wonder was a coup; he was totally convincing as the sweet gawky guy turned accidental superhero (and did an admirable job of hard-bodying up for the role - discretion demands that I refrain from further comment about how he looked in that Spidey-costume... ;-) Although speaking of which, I did feel a disconnect there - whence the origin of that slick Spandex wondersuit? Presumably Parker bought himself a Singer and whipped it out - after all, commissioning it from someone else would have compromised his true identity - but that's some slick tailoring for an 18-year old boy... *shrug* But I digress.) I think Sam Raimi was wise to emphasize the character development of the man behind the mask; in doing so he avoided the pitfall of producing an empty popcorn action flick. Moreover, while the supporting characters are, in keeping with the story's comic book origins, cut from simplistic patterns - the bully, the dreamgirl, the supportive but concerned family members - Parker's interaction with them is realistically complex and evokes empathy in the audience without being excessively cloying or trite, and that's no small task. Again, I think good casting helped, especially that of Maguire. His screen presence is an apt, intriguing blend of sensitivity, wry self-effacement and quiet inscrutibility - a winning formula for a misfit protagonist with whom anyone who's ever felt like an outsider can relate. This same persona is what made his performance in "Cider House Rules" so compelling, and it definitely does the trick for this role. I also thought Willem Dafoe did an outstanding job as the Green Goblin - he filled the role with just the right amount of leering, over-the-top malevolence. His strange Jay-Leno-chinned mask could have been better rendered, but that's a small quibble. J.K. Simmons, who plays Jameson, absolutely nails the egocentric, eccentric editor role, too - his performance was a gem. Kirsten Dunst did well and had great chemistry with Maguire - I'm sure at this moment there are legions of teenage boys with her image burned on their hormone-marinated synapses like the menu text on an old VAX monitor that's never turned off.

Anyway, of all the "Man" movies I've seen to date (Super, Bat, etc.), this one was by far the best - and I suspect it may take up permanent residency on my all-time favorite list once I have a chance to see it a couple more times and see if my initial impression holds up. I'm sure we'll not only end up going to the theater to see it again but that it'll eventually see heavy rotation in our DVD collection.

Now, if only the upcoming "Attack of the Clones" leaves me feeling this enthused, I'll be one happy chica. Although right now, happiness could also be defined as the renewed ability to breathe through my nose...

Are you sick of reading entries about paintball yet? How about ones where I talk about having people over to the house? I have a feeling it would be rather tedious of me to recap Saturday's paintball/BBQ party for Wee's birthday, then. But seeing as I don't have much else to write about at the moment, I'm going to have to bore you with details of the day, though I'll try for relative brevity�

Paintball was fun - $4R-related folks Amy, Josh, Chris, and Kent joined Zac and Wee and I, which made for a fun group of compatriots. Amy hadn't gone before, but I think we got her hooked. The weather was perfect (aside from the fact that we'd forgotten sunblock and got burned). I almost didn't get to use my gun because the velocity adjuster bolt thing was mysteriously missing off my gun (the first of two unusual disappearance events of the day - more on the second one later). I resigned myself to renting a gun, but after I paid for one and went to pick it up, a resourceful kid at the rental area to whom I'd mentioned my dilemma pulled out a box of rusty old components and found a bolt that fit my gun. My hero! Later on I was able to get my refund for the rental and use it to buy a replacement loader elbow for one I'd cracked - very handy.

I think I played pretty well - I scored a couple of good tags, and even helped my team win a game by covering a teammate as he grabbed the plastic barrel that was our objective for that round. Usually I couldn't care less about capturing the flag or the cone or whatever, but it was kind of fun to actually engage in the objective for once and succeed. The guy, a 20-something dude that looked like a regular player, came over to me afterward and shook my hand, which made me feel absolutely bad-ass. *grin* The worst hits I took were, sadly, accidental ones from my own teammates as I left the field after being tagged out. Friendly fire isn't. In the very first game I took one on the head that left a big lump (the kid that hit me was nice about coming up and apologizing, though), and on the last game I got one on my arm that actually bled. If I'd worn long sleeves and a baseball cap like I sometimes do, neither hit would have been quite as painful - but the day was hot, so I'm not sorry I dressed light. Physically I don't really mind getting hit - although I'd prefer it wasn't by my own team! At any rate, we had a great time.

Our post-paintball barbeque was a veritable hootenanny. Bill was a good sport about having to do the barbequing at his own party, poor guy - but the drumsticks and ribs were very tasty, so I'm glad he made the sacrifice. We were looking forward to leftovers - there were about a dozen drumsticks left and about that many ribs by the time people were done eating - but at some point in the evening we realized that the Pyrex pans that had held them on the kitchen counter were completely empty. Each of us thought the other had put the meat away - but when we compared notes, we realized that neither of us had done so. An inspection of the refrigerator and freezers revealed that the leftovers were not to be found there. Hence our second and more perplexing disappearance of the day... The Mystery of the Disappearing Barbeque. We briefly wondered if the dog had gotten to them; there was just too much for her to have pulled it off, though, and we don't think she would've been able to reach the bits in the back half of the pans - at least, she couldn't have done so without making a big mess, possibly tipping over the pans, and without anyone noticing her do it, especially since she'd have had to make multiple trips. Also, she just wasn't acting guilty enough. If she'd done it, I guarantee she would have slunk off somewhere, and/or given us the squint-eye when we looked at her with suspicion, and she was doing neither. So, did someone decide to take them home? If so, what did they put them in? Doesn't seem likely. Did someone simply eat them? Nah - they'd been sitting there en masse for a significant interval after everyone had finished eating, so I can't imagine anyone getting a sudden impulse to come in and chow down on several pounds of tepid barbeque. So we're still pretty perplexed over the Disappearing Meat Incident. Other than that, though, good time had by all, I think. We pretty much spent Sunday in recovery.

Short work week for me and Wee, this is - yay! Wednesday night we're driving up to Phoenix for a dental visit and for Birthday Party Redux - the Family Edition. Should be a hoot�

My sysadmin informed me this morning that his server's referrer log made note of this that led to TessNews. Heh. I don't think they got quite what they were looking for here. Though I know people I could refer them to...

One has to wonder, though... Why was the Googlee in question specifically looking for an mpeg of this act, vs. a general discussion of it? After all, the actual process is fairly straight-forward - one wouldn't think a demo would be required to get the gist of it. So was this person seeking a visual for education... or for titillation (so to speak)? Hmm. Maybe if they come back and visit TessNews again, they can and set me straight on the subject...

I have to confess. I can't live a lie any longer. I'm compelled to share the truth, and if doing so engenders derision and hatred in the hearts of those I love, then that is simply the cross I must bear:

I really, really like the Ace of Base song, "I Saw the Sign". When it pops up on a ShoutCast channel, I'm happy. I know it's wrong; but I can't help it. Maybe it's a lingering after-effect of my early exposure to ABBA (their "Greatest Hits" was the first album I ever owned; the second was Shawn Cassidy's self-titled debut, featuring such hits as "Da Doo Ron Ron Ron" and "That's Rock and Roll"). I don't like any of the wacky Swedes' other songs, though - just the one. Is that so wrong?

OK, maybe so. May God have mercy on my soul for my poor taste.

Oh, wait - I forgot my recent conversion to apatheism. So... whatever.

New favorite show on TV: Greg the Bunny on Fox (I saw it on 8:30 pm Thursday - which is a great slot, perfect to watch after "Friends" instead of that hideous "Sex in the City" knockoff NBC offers - but apparently its regular slot is 9:30 Wednesdays).

The show is pretty damned funny. It's based on the concept of "What if TV puppets were actually alive and walking among us like they do on their shows?" The puppets on this show (including some familiar faces like the Count from Sesame Street - old and wrinkled, just like he'd be in real life by now, blah!) have all the foibles of their human actor counterparts - egos, career worries, substance abuse problems, colorful vocubularies... It's sort of a "Meet the Feebles" reworked as a prime-time sitcom with human counterparts.

The human cast is great as well - especially Seth Green as Greg's roommate Jimmy, and Eugene Levy as Seth's father Gil, the producer of the children's show on which Greg sort of inadvertantly lands a job as the lead character. I love both of these actors in pretty much anything they do, and it's super-cool to watch a show that features them both. The humor is clever, a good mix of goofy and sarcastic, and some of the lines are surprisingly risqu� - it reminds me of Mike Myers material. Apparently Greg and Co. have been around on New York cable access and IFC for a few years, and finally grabbed the attention of the folks at Fox who developed it into its newest incarnation. Anyway, cheers to "Greg the Bunny" - here's to a season of equally amusing shows to come!

Todd and Wyoming's going away party was this Saturday at our house. With nearly 40 positive RSVP's to our Evite invitation, and a few more we knew were coming, it was the largest social event we've ever attempted to host in our house� We were kind of, well, curious to see how it would all pan out, but I think everything went extremely (surprisingly) well. The guests came and went in waves, so we kept a steady crowd of about 20 or so throughout the evening. There seemed to be just enough food - plenty of it, but relatively little left over - and more than enough to drink. Seating wasn't a problem - in fact, we rented a dozen folding chairs and almost none of them got used; most people seemed to prefer milling about standing rather than camping out for too long in one place. One thing I'm so glad we did was rent a propane patio heater; it gave off an impressive amount of heat in a large enough radius for a group of people to sit around it comfortably, and it really helped us keep the crowd spread out across the deck while still helping them stay warm.

Both the CEO and the Chairman of the Board of Bill's company, $4R, stopped by, which was a little weird considering that Bill just gave his one-week notice last Thursday; he got a job doing full-time contracting for UCSD, which we're hoping will pan out into a permanent position... Although, as it turns out, $4R counteroffered by asking Bill to consider it an "unpaid leave of absence" until June when they plan to kickoff Phase 2 of the project Bill was working on. Technically the UCSD job is a project-specific "temp" position, and while our preference would be to see him transition into a permanent job there, it seems useful to keep both doors open and see how it goes. There's always a chance that the permanent position at UCSD won't get approved, in which case Bill still has the option to go back to $4R (assuming they're still around by then - they announced a merger deal with Infosys on the same day Bill gave notice, but no one's quite sure what that will mean for $4R as an entity in the long term). So it's a good deal, and sort of makes for a less painful parting for all concerned.

Anyway, it was nice that the two execs came by to wish Todd and Wy well, but things did loosen up a bit after they left. In fact, by the end of the night, there were very elevated levels of looseness, as documented in the pics I took, posted here: http://www.27.org/images/1017615083 Monkey imitations, Cirque du Soleil-style balancing acts, phallic vodka bottle displays, and general tomfoolery.... What can I say except, "Oh my!"

So I think most everyone had a lot of fun, and it was a good opportunity for T &W to say their goodbyes to lots of people at one time, so I'm really happy and glad at how it turned out. I definitely benefited from the experience of helping out at the events my mother-in-law's always hosting at her house - that household is a well-oiled party machine - and I learned a lot about what and how to serve, and how to make sure there was good balance and good location of the key elements - seating, food, drinks, etc. I had fun playing host and seeing people having a good time in a setting we provided. I'm finally starting to get why people do this entertaining thing! =)

So, for your next entertaining event, consider Casa Del Tessenwee - home of the Technicolor Baby Aspirin Rum Punch, scenic tree-canopied patio setting, and a helpful and enthusiastic (albeit potentially tipsy) staff...

Another weekend of unprecendented hospitality at Casa Del Tessenwee. On Friday night I had a girls' night at my house - lots of good food, and wine, and the standard dose of gossip. Then, on Saturday, we had two other couples over for dinner. We actually ate at the dining table, with placemats and cloth napkins; another major divergence from the household norm. Despite garlic mashed potatoes that came out with the consistency of vanilla pudding (the result of my too-clever decision to put extra milk in them to keep them from drying out in the oven while the chicken was grilled), and green beans that were also served past their peak state of steamy goodness, everyone bravely cleaned their plates and smiled, which I think was mighty generous of them.

The get-togethers went very well, which was a vast relief to me. Bill and rarely "entertain", so I'm still a little nervous when I go about attempting it. I've learned a lot about the care, feeding, and maintenance of guests from helping out at countless events at my in-laws' house; their home harbors an ever-flowing tide of birthday parties, holidays, and other group events. Still, I�m always convinced that, should the invitees actually show up (visions of having a party with no one there always haunt me until the first ring of the doorbell), I'll end up with a group of people floating around nervously in a stagnant puddle of silence. Luckily, however, and somewhat to my amazement, things went smoothly, and I honestly got the impression that everyone had a good time, which makes me glad to the point of giddiness.

People are generally complementary about the house as well, which I love. I suspect that many people are taken aback, when they first visit our house, at the fact that we have sort of a sense of d�cor. (I'm guessing that may be because neither of us are overly fashion-savvy in our personal appearance; Bill probably is more than I am, albeit kind of unintentionally� For instance, he has worn army cargo pants ever since I met him, so when they suddenly became trendy we were pretty amused - all of a sudden young fashionistas would be coming up to him and raving over his camos and asking him where he got them, and would about fall over when he said "$10 at the surplus store" when they'd paid $60 for their identical pair at the mall�). Anyway, albeit that it's not exactly picture-perfect, I like that our place kind of surprises most new visitors. The other comment I hear over and over about the house is that it's "homey", "cozy", or "comfortable". That can be taken many ways, but the way people say it is sort of with a wistfully enthused tone - as if they kind of wished their house had more of the same feeling. I think of the house as a projection of us - a little rough around the edges, but fairly pleasant and easy to spend time around. Bill would say it has way too many knicknacks - or "dustknacks", as Suzi and Pete call them - but I think that those are the things that give a house a personality. Of couse, sometimes that personality can come across as schizophrenic, or tasteless - but I hope ours says something nicer. I've always loved images of cluttered libraries filled with exotic treasures, so I think there's a little of that feel to my decorating. Couple this inclination with an English heritage, and the incidence of tchotchkes in any place I occupy is just bound to be high; that's something I've endeavored to help Wee understand when he gets alarmed by the volume of them. I like to think that taking him to my mother and sister's houses, and then to England, helped him better understand my genetic compulsion to react to an empty flat space by occupying it with something. Marriage is full of little compromises, no?

At any rate, it was fun to play host and have it all turn out OK. Sunday was a well-earned and thoroughly enjoyed day o' slack. Now it's back for another five days of office-induced tedium�

We had a fun and surprisingly social weekend. Our brother-in-law Zac came down and, along with our friend Burt, Wee, Z and I played paintball on Saturday. Z and Burt hadn't played before - we're kind of evangelical about getting others to experience the joys of paint-laden combat. I always wondered how badly it would hurt to get shot in the boob, but now I am wondering no longer. It fucking stings, thank you! Next time I'm seriously considering sticking athletic cups in my bra� Or perhaps I'll go full Viking-maiden and get one of those metal corsets they wore. Of course, the outfit would be incomplete unless I glued a set of horns to my mask, and I'm afraid they'd stick up too far and get me tagged� so maybe not. I also suffered the indignity of having my gun - oh sorry, my marker - jam on me mid-game, requiring a full dismantling and cleaning before the next round. I think I've finally watched Bill do it enough so that I can disassemble/clean/reassemble the marker myself. Color me foolish for wanting to assume a task that I could so easily just keep foisting off on my hubby, but it's kind of a point of pride to me to be able to know how to do it instead of relying on Bill to do it for me. After all, a real paintgrrrl should be able to maintain her own equipment.

I think that, mentally, I must be about 1/3 boy, 2/3 girl (let us be clear, I mean in my head - on the outside I�m 100% pure chica, baby). I like boy stuff - one of the first things that Bill and I bonded over was our mutual love of movies like "Aliens" and "Star Wars". In high school, most of the books I read were either science fiction or espionage thrillers. I did (and will) read any book involving a submarine or a spaceship. People at work do double-takes when they see me wear a skirt; I buy a significant portion of my wardrobe from the men's section. I would much sooner go camping or shooting or to play paintball than go to the beauty salon or shopping. Danielle Steel books make me ill, and I have never, as far as I can recall, watched the Lifetime channel. I could care less which lipstick color, handbag, or eyebrow shape is fashionable to have this season, or if "orange is the new pink". I would wear camoflage every day before I'd wear pink. Lace pisses me off.

Hanging with the boys can put me in dutch sometimes with my female in-laws, who don't understand how I get away with crashing the rusty-boy circle, nor why I would want to (mind you, sometimes I do like to hang out with the girls - I just want the right to choose one way or the other without getting shit for it). Sadly, every so often one of the guys will also offer up a knee-jerk "no girls allowed" complaint, on sheer principle. I've come to understand that nothing I can say nor do will change their prejudice in such cases. These same guys, I've found, often tend to have distinctly adversarial relationships with their girlfriends and wives; they're the types who relish opportunities to "get away" from their partners, and to whom it would just not occur to refer to their wife as their friend, instead expecting them to fill a combination mother/maid/hooker role in their lives and leave them the hell alone the rest of the time. (Of course, any woman who chooses to stay with someone like that gets little sympathy from me�). Still, I�m lucky in that the guys I know whose opinions matter most to me are cool with me tagging along on their reindeer games, and for that I'm grateful and glad. Most guys at paintball are surprisingly cool about having a chick in the ranks as long as plays her best and doesn't whine about getting dirty or bruised.

Anyway, back to the weekend� In the evening we went to go see "Lord of the Rings", since Zac hadn't seen it yet and Bill and I had had to watch it from the second row of the theater last time, making it hard to get the scope of the action. We bought our tickets hours ahead of time, went to eat dinner and have a couple of cocktails, then came back 20 minutes before show time, in what we thought was plenty of time to claim seats - and found the theater was packed full. We ended up in the second row again. I couldn't believe the movie was still playing to packed-full theaters nearly nearly three months after its release. So we were a little disappointed, but I was still glad to see it again and catch some of the stuff I missed last time.

On Sunday we lazed around, tired from our exertions the day before and decidedly inclined toward entropy. In the evening we got a supercool soo-prise - Eric and Toia decided to take a last-minute road trip to San Dog to see their friend Josh and also drop in on us and tour our swanky digs. On Friday Wee and I had been tag- teaming Eric on Jabber, trying to coax him into visiting us - so Bill was convinced that their call and request to come over was a hoax to get us back for pestering him to visit; he figured Josh was really in Phoenix and they were using his cell phone so the 619 area code would show on caller ID. Mind you, it wouldn't be the first time Eric has employed the services of a pal to pull a merry prank on yours truly (Mark Mazurkiewicz and the "Froggy Outside Muh Door" - that's all I�m saying), but I was about 80/20 convinced that they would actually show, and they did - so my heart was duly warmed. E, you and the little missus come on back soon nah, y'hear?

Have you ever wished you could go back and see yourself as a child? I had a dream last night that I went back to our old house on Lincoln St. - apparently shortly after we moved in, because I was still a toddler. I somehow ended up babysitting my baby self. The weirdest part was sniffing my baby Tess head and thinking about how I smelled like - well, like me. Then I put us both up in front of a mirror, cheek to cheek, and compared our faces. As I figured, the nose hadn't changed a bit between age 2 and age 30.

Happily, I also got to see young-Mom, and our dog, Nails. Suzi and her kids made an appearance - like me, they were coming back in time as their 2001 selves. Mom knew we were the grown kids, but wasn't freaked out by it. She gave us a nostalgia tour of the house, although - as in all my dreams of the house - it was much bigger and more Winchester-house-of-mystery like than the real one, with weird back-stairwells and lots of floors and little rooms and balconies.

I love those kinds of dreams. Sometimes I have them about my old schools, or Crater Lake. Exploring strange places is fun. In the back of my mind, I've always wanted to join one of those clubs of people - like this one - who break into old abandoned subways and public works facilities type places and poke around. I'm too chicken, of course, but a girl can dream..

So Bill and I were driving to the grocery store to pick up some items for dinner yesterday... my brain wasn't functioning at full capacity on Sunday afternoon (never mind why). We had the car windows open, and I was trying to tell him that I wanted to pick up some corn; he wasn't hearing me right, and kept saying, "What, cord?"

"Corn!"

"Cord? What kind of cord do you need?"

"CORN!!!"

Finally, I realized the verbal effort was futile, so I grabbed my pen and my grocery list, and painstakingly drew a piece of corn. Corn is not the easiest vegetable to draw, especially while in a moving car and nursing a raging - um, headache. But in a concerted quest for clarity, I finished it and held it up to him.

"Oh, CORN," he said. Pause. "Why didn't you just write the word 'corn'?"

The funny part was that he knew that I wasn't trying to be clever by drawing it - but rather that writing the actual word had simply NOT occured to me until he said it.

Lordy. I really need to stop killing off brain cells. One only gets so many, and I think that cumulatively I may have passed some crucial tolerance past which the higher functions start to slip...

(That was a darned fun birthday party for Valarie, though. Happy Birthday, V-Lo! Viva la 'Shitey Bollocks'! Quick-quick-stop!)

This insightful gem dropped from the lips of my beloved this morning - I felt I must share it:

"If the solution to pollution wasn't dilution, then farts would never go away."

So it turns out I did end up taking a couple of half-day's worth of sick time for this stupid cold. Truth be told, I probably could have slammed a bunch of DayQuil and powered my way through the entire 8 hours both days. However, I was self-conscious about the sick-person cacophony of nose-blowing and coughs that I was inflicting on my fellow cubehogs, not to mention the germs I was most certainly sharing. Add 80 hours of accumulated sick time and a boss out for the week, and my resulting conclusion was, "Fuck it, I'm outta here." The half-days were a compromise, born of a vestigal sense of duty handed down from my pathologically responsible parents; while this inheritance doesn't function quite well enough to keep me from being a serial procrastinator in the course of my daily life, it does generally suffice to keep me from playing outright hooky, which is what a full day off would have felt like to me. Plus, the challenge of getting a full day's work done in a half-day made me work very much more efficiently than I have been lately; in fact, I probably got more done in the two half-days than I did in any given full day in December. I've always worked best under pressure.

So anyway, thank Heyzeus for the short week. I still don't feel quite settled in from the holidays. Bill did a pretty good summary of the holiday haps in his latest entry, so I don't really think I need to add much. I'm grateful that we had no real travel mishaps - we caught all our planes on time, made good time on the road, no lost luggage or wrong turns or airport security cavity searches or anything. Family relations were 90% copacetic, which I think is the maximum that anyone can hope for on the holidays. I'm still kind of pissed off/frustrated/stymied by a certain relative's ongoing lack of ability to get his shit together, especially when I know he's capable of so much more... but fundamentally I realize that there's just not much I can do to influence his choices. Mostly I'm just sad that his hijinks cause so much worry and pain for others in the family. Ah, well.

Christmas was still very good - I loved seeing snow, and sledding on Christmas night with our fellow "kids", and playing with Mom's wax-therapy thing, and watching Dad fuss with his new MP3 player, and generally relaxing with the family unit on the divan. I wish we saw them all more often. Phoenix was fun too - there are lots of little kids running around now, and it's cool to see them growing up and becoming little people. Hopefully someday soon Wee and I will add our own to the mix.

At any rate, here's to 2002 - the sheer symmetry of the number should count for something, don't you think? Let's consult my new Palm Pilot dictionary.... symmetry: n., beauty of form arising from balanced proportions. Yep, that works. 2002: Year of Symmetry. Cheers to that.

Misc. thoughts from this morning:

- Yup, it's definitely a cold, not just leftover sore throat from that clove cigarette I had on New Year's Eve. Better than being sick over the holidays, I guess, but it still sucks. And just when I thought I'd developed germ-resistant superpowers. Crap.

- I so do not want to get out of this bed; call in sick? No, too much to do - there's no point to slacking if I'll just end up feeling guilty all day. Besides, it's already Wednesday - I can suck it up for a three-day work week.

- But I'm going to leave 15 minutes later; boss is off this week, and no one else will care if I�m late.

- The decision-making process I just went through to determine whether it's OK to be 15 minutes late is kind of pathetic. Ooh, look at me being a rebel!

- Uh-oh, Bill just rolled away when his alarm started going off instead of hitting snooze; this does not bode well.

- OK, in keeping with New Year's resolution to eat better/lose weight, will not butter my toast. Will use sparing, barely-there film of raspberry jam instead.

- That's a lot of jammy toast, though. I really prefer buttered toast. I wish I had the buttery spray. Must buy some. Oh well, it's best to ease into these things anyway. I'll just butter one slice. Thinly. Did I just put too much on? Should I remove one sliver and try to scrape the rest over to the bare side? Am I really obsessive- compulsive about buttering every millimeter of toasty surface evenly, as Bill claims? OK, maybe so. I just like maximizing my flavor enjoyment. There's nothing wrong with that.

- (Driving to work) Use your gas pedal, slow Red Mercedes person. License plate: "BZY BLND". First translation that comes to mind: "Boozy Blonde"? Surely not. What's this person trying to convey here? Maybe "Breezy Blonde"? "Buzzy Blonde"? "Boozy Blind"? Now there's the version you don't want that cop behind you to come up with. OK, Boozy, you're too slow, I�m passing you now. Hey, it's a bald guy. That's weird. "Boozy Baldened"?

- Wow, light traffic. Means many people still off work. Bastards. I hate them all.

- My car is a disaster area. And it smells funny. Two road trips to Phoenix + no cleaning = pigsty. New Year's resolution #1: get the Silver Bullet detailed.

- Oh good, Paul's pulling in behind me; I won't be the latest person to arrive. Not that it matters. Really.

Anyway. Such was my first hour and a half of being Back To The Grind. Maybe I'll share tales of our holiday travels later, maybe I won't. In the mean time, try not to let the suspense become a medical issue or anything...

Went out and watched the Geminid meteor shower last night for about an hour. It was chilly, and I didn't drive far from my house - just down to the place where they're constructing the final leg of the 56 highway, which was at least an open space with relatively few lights, although the surrounding city at large still made for marginal viewing. I was only brave enough to venture a little ways down the construction truck road, before visions of transient psychos stumbling across my path and seeing a golden opportunity for some nooky and a new car made me stop at least within I-can-probably-crawl-there-before-I-bleed-out distance of the main road. I also saw a coyote on my way down, and wondered how hungry he was... I really have become a paranoid chica in my old age.

Anyway, it was worth the effort, as shooting stars were plentiful - I counted over a couple dozen. I made a specific wish on shooting star #14 - the number was auspicious because of the nature of the wish; but if I told you, it wouldn't come true, so there it is. I hadn't sat outside and looked up at the stars in a long time. Used to do it alot; side-effect of being a science fiction geek, maybe. I'd forgotten most of the constellations I'd once taught myself to know, so I made up a couple and gave them incredibly clever names, like "Stick Dude" and "Wee Tiny Dipper". Maybe they'd be more impressive in Latin.

Introspection being a somewhat predictable side-effect of stargazing, the view left me feeling a little... speck-like, I guess, compared to Everything Else Out There; but in a good way. Perspective is useful, in whatever form you get it. I wondered for the 800th or so time about whether any of the stars I was looking at were like our star, looped by planets carrying living, thinking things... critters who might also believe they're The Only Game in Town simply because no one's proved them wrong yet. "Contact" may not have been the best movie, but I admit to identifying with Jodie Foster's character, tirelessly tuning in to the music of the spheres out of what amounts to an extreme case of the same existential curiousity. Are we really a fluke, a lonely burn mark flicked by the Big Bang onto the couch of the universe... or have we just been living too far out in the sticks to know our neighbors?

The crux of all this being, I suppose, that I really am a core-level geek... and a bush-league philosopher at best. With a penchant for really bad metaphors, to boot.

Well then. Enough of my galactic woolgathering. What else...

More later, maybe.

Yesterday was action-packed. Wee and I got up way too early for a Saturday morning and got together with some of his coworkers out at the paintball course in Escondido. Carnage ensued; some pics of Team $4R in action are here (this is me). Bill's the one with the "27" on the back of his jersey (of course). I made a couple of good tags, though I'm sure my hitter-to-hittee ratio wasn't too impressive (at least, judging by the number of paintball-sized welts I'm sporting).

I have to remind myself that I've only done this twice and really can't be expected to be all that good yet. I tend to get frustrated and annoyed with myself if I can't do something well right away. It's probably the combined side-effect of being a smart chick and having a short attention span. I'm impatient with the process of learning to be good at a new skill... although I am a little more patient in learning something like a sport because I give myself far less credit for being physically adept than I do for being bright, and therefore have less potential ego-bruising to deal with if I don't do that great.

But given my tomboy childhood, I'm generally a little ashamed that I'm not as much of an action girl as I was when I was a kid. I was one of those girls with tangly hair, callused hands and a constant array of bruises on my shins. I'd much rather make dirt trails for Hotwheels in the backyard or take my Star Wars figurines out into the hills behind my house and pretend they were on Tatooine than play Barbies in the bedroom. In summer I was outdoors most of the day, every day. That's why it's been cool to do "action" stuff recently, like paintball, and riding the quads up at Adullam. It's really fun to get outdoors again, to run around and get all grungy. Not to be hackneyed about it, but it really does make me feel like a kid again. Paintball is cool because it reminds me of playing Cowboys & Indians or Cops & Robbers as a kid, and wishing there were some way to prove you shot someone when you said you did. Seeing a big splotch of pink paint in the forehead portion of someone's mask that you put there from 50 feet away is immensely gratifying. Even getting shot's not all that bad; it hurts, but not as badly as I thought it might - it'a usually no worse than someone flicking your skin with their fingers - and it's just part of the game.

So anyway, we played a full day's worth of paintball, then came home and, in a total shift of pace, got ready for my company's Holiday party. The party didn't turn out to be as fun as last year's, though. (OK, all I want to say about last year's party is that the parts I remember were lots of fun; there were some latter-night debacles that I've been told were decidedly less pleasant, but thanks to my notoriously faulty memory in times of extreme intoxication and an extremely forgiving husband, I am able and very inclined to afford those bits very minimal acknowledgment). We were both pretty tired out. Our table was right next to the dance floor so we couldn't hear much of anything conversationally, and not too many of my work friends were there; the ones who were there were off doing their own thing and just didn't cohese into a fun group the way I'd hoped. The most entertaining note of the evening was that one of my coworkers smuggled in a bottle of Cuervo 1800 Anejo and was distributing shots at their table. I accepted a couple purely out of bravado - tequila isn't my bag anymore, and the biggest payoff for me was a sharp little headache when I woke up this morning. But the smuggler in question is a pretty mild-mannered Turkish guy, so it was intriguing to see him all loopy from the contraband hooch. More than that, I found it hilarious to see some of the other, older gals in our department tuck back a shot or three without so much as a wince. They're both Latina, however, so I'm sure it's not the first time the Elixir de Agave has touched their lips. At any rate, we left sort of early, but I was kind of glad to have a more sedate holiday party experience to counterbalance the extremes of last year. My party karma is now in balance.

So today is a day, I think, for sitting on my tuckus and getting some stuff sorted out around the house. Christmas is in two short weeks - ah, that thought just shot a little spike of panic through my heart. I have a lot to do! So I'd probably wrap this up and get to it. Right, then... Off in search of wrapping paper.

Here's a ditty I came up with to describe this day (sung to tune of "Camptown Races", but slower and more dolefully):

Campfire cocktails knock one knot, doo dah, doo dah,
Head is pounding, eyes bloodshot, oh I rue this day,
Had some fun last night,
Now I gots to pay,
Wishing I were home in bed, oh I rue this day.

Work. Hangover. Not a nice combo...

As if turning 30 this year wasn't hard enough on my aspirations for eternal youth, this week I've had to face up to another of life's sad little transitions... receiving my first pair of glasses.

Ever since I tested as 20/15 in high school, I bragged about my good vision, and always just took it for granted. I used to pity those who weren't as blessed with visual clarity as I was; I'd think about how frightening I'd find it not to be able to see everything clearly and having to rely on devices for good sight. With a dad who's worn glasses since he was a preschooler, though, and a mom who's worn them since before I was born, I should have known better than to be smug about my eyesight.

And sure enough, over the past few months I've come to notice the telltale blurring of words on a page, or a feeling like there's a film over my eyes keeping me from seeing clearly. For a while I dismissed it as fatigue or eye goo (What's that Mark Twain said about that river in Egypt...?), but after I found myself always leaning over to the phone list on my office wall to make out people's numbers, and skimming over magazine articles because it was too much work to focus on the small print, I finally 'fessed up to myself that the problem wasn't going away, and I paid my first visit to the optometrist.

The verdict: affirmative - the warranty on my peepers is slowing expiring. I'm 20/32, mostly farsighted, with a dash of astigmatism for good (or not so good) measure. The Dr. said I was pretty young to be heading down this ocular slippery slope, called presbyopia (which sounds more like a term for a moderate Christian perspective)... It's usually more of a middle-aged thang. Then again, the sprinkling of silver that pops up along the crown of my head when I'm between dye jobs already proves that I'm a precocious little minx where aging is concerned. I find this ironic, since I was about the last in my class to lose my baby teeth and get my boobs (such as I got, anyway). Ah, the regrettable brevity of my salad days!

So anyway, I gots me some progressive lenses, which are essentially blended-in bifocals for vain people. They're tough to get used to. Walking around in them, I seem to be up to my ankles in sidewalk. It's like I swapped bodies with someone who's about 6', but my brain's still stuck at 5'8". However, I have to admit that things at my desk look much sharper now - I didn't realize before how just fuzzy they'd been looking to me.

Still, I feel like this wearing glasses business is just something I'm fooling around with, like some sort of temporary fashion experiment - instead of something I'll always need, for the rest of my life. I'm having trouble accepting that this is how people will see me from now on and that one day people may even think my face looks odd when I'm not wearing them, like my parents' unbespectacled faces look to me. It's strange, but I'm so used to seeing my parents with glasses that I'm almost embarrassed to see them unspec'd, as if their bare faces are too intimate or exposed for public viewing. I'd prefer not to look that way to my kids. Of course, I could just decide to not wear the things and deal with blurriness... but that's kind of silly.

Several times throughout the day, I get annoyed with the process of getting used to them, like having messed-up peripheral vision due to the curvature of the lenses, and I think it's not worth it and that I'll stop wearing them. So I take them off and try to read something. Then I quietly put them back on.

Getting old's a bitch. I really do not approve.

... are three of the sweetest words in the English language.

Not long ago, my boss, a coworker and I attended the horse races at Del Mar Racetrack as the guests of one of our vendors. Every year this company reserves one of the swanky "skybox" suites at the top of the grandstands, six stories above the track, and provides lunch and (bonus!) a hosted bar for the afternoon. The suite has its own betting counter. At the end is a large outdoor balcony overlooking the westernmost end of the final stretch of track just as the horses are coming out of the last turn and making their bids for the finish; you can stand at the end and watch the afternoon sun shimmer across the incoming seatide only about a half-mile away as it rolls up onto a beach framed by grass-topped sandstone cliffs. Free drinks, easy betting, and an unobstructed view of the track from a beautiful overhead vantage point; it's about the most perfect setting a horse-racing fan can imagine.

Albeit the appeal, however, my decision to go was not made easily. I generally don't accept the "freebie" opportunities that sales reps regularly offer - I can't even remember the last time I let one of them take me to lunch. Also, I felt guilt in that I was the only buyer of our group to go (and, honestly, I don't usually handle the commodity this supplier sells). I have the suspicion, all attempts at discretion to the contrary, that the other buyers knew and resented the bit of preferential treatment my manager showed me in letting me take the afternoon off and attend with him. The night before, I had nightmares about getting in trouble at the track, and of betrayal scenarios that, while not directly involving my coworkers, had obvious roots in my conflicted feelings about accepting the invitation. As a result, I was tempted to bail.

In the end, though, I couldn't let the opportunity pass. I see it as a fringe benefit to working for company I do not like. The fact is, my manager thinks it's fun to have me there, because I'm enthusiastic, somewhat knowledgable about betting, I like to have a few cocktails, and I have a similar sense of humor and attitude - we play off each other well in social settings. So in that sense it is favoritism, but I roll with it despite my misgivings and my conflicted feelings about socializing with a boss who, while I like him well enough as a person, has a micro-managing, sarcastic managerial style that really bugs me... because I have such a damned good time when I go.

Going to the races has been one of my favorite things to do since I was a grade-schooler. I used to go to the track in KFalls with my dad every summer. I would save allowance money for months in advance, because Dad was willing to place my bets on my behalf. The fact that I used my own money and won or lost on my own merits, instead of just asking him to make a bet with his own money per my suggestions, was what made it so fun for me. I learned to read a racing form and establish my own little handicapping methodology; as with all good handicapping, it's partly based on stats, partly on superstition - preference given to dark horses, lively but controllable horses, horses who drop manure in the paddock (who isn't raring to go after a good dump?); demerits to horses with frothy inner thighs, bored demeanors, blinkers. Of course, I'm also swayed by auspicious names - my biggest win of this most recent excursion came from the quinella combo of Jeds Knight and Ms. Twining, on whom I bet due to the "Star Wars" connotation and the brand of tea, respectively.

Before I moved to San Diego, Dad had never actually visited a major racing venue - he'd only bet them off-track. So you can understand when I say that one of the great joys of living in San Diego has been the chance to take my dad to Del Mar. I was reminded of when my folks took me to Disneyland; I think Dad must have felt much the same walking up to the grandstands as I did walking down Main St. of the Happiest Place on Earth. He gazed intently at the elegant renovated Spanish architecture of the grounds and the expensive landscaping, and took pictures in the paddock of jockeys he'd seen on TV riding in the Triple Crown, bemoaning not having brought his video camera. As usual, before each race he walked off solo along the wide grandstand aisleways strewn with the confetti of losing tickets, so that he could mull over his picks in private, and place last-minute hunch bets, about which he was cagey when asked lest he jinx them. Last year, the icing on the cake was that we were able to go on the day they ran the $1,000,000 Pacific Classic, Del Mar's hottest race of the season. There are not too many pastimes in the world that would be more fun for my dad than a day at Del Mar, and not too many things more fun for me than to share with him the chance to hear that Call to the Post trumpet and see top jockeys and horses kicking up dirt right in front of our eyes.

So you see, there's a little anteroom in my heart where a love of horseracing will always live. Given half a chance, when someone invites me to come play the ponies, I will go. You can bet on it.

So... Yes, boys and girls, it's time to play ROLLING BLACKOUTS! Who will be lighting candles and singing "Kumbiyah" tonight instead of watching "Weakest Link"? Who will be eating cold, congealed leftover Chinese takeout instead of piping hot, microwaved leftover Chinese takeout? Who will not be able to log onto the Tribes 2 server but will instead be weeping hot tears of denial onto their keyboards as they behold their dark, dead monitor screen? Nobody knows - because advance notice is NOT in the rules when you play this game! You pays your (exorbitant wad of) money, you takes your chances!

So I guess you've inferred that we had another Stage 3 alert here in SoCal today, which means random patches of the city's grid shutting down for an hour or so at a time (random to the general public anyway - it's considered to be a "security risk" to give us much in the way of advance warning, so for most people, the first sign of a blackout is - well, when everything shuts off). It's half amusing, half appalling that this is Southern California - arguably one of the most technologically, culturally, and financially advanced chunks of real estate on the globe - yet our power supply is about as reliable as that of, say, a village in Myanmar with a generator run by locals who chew betel leaves like Trident and occasionally forget to remember that they must periodically refill the diesel tank lest the "lightning god" get upset and stop providing the spark they need to watch "Magnum P.I." reruns on the town's one battered old black and white TV set.

Deregulation is a great idea, in theory... unless it is unleashed in an industry providing a basic building block of civilization as we know it and controlled by an oligopoly eager to recoup some cash lost through bad investments and subject to pretty much no restraints nor normal market controls (electricity being a relatively inelastic good; in other words, our demand for it isn't really going to go down all that much even in the face of increased prices - it's not exactly a luxury item for most of us. Sure, we'll bitch and moan about our bills, but the fridge still needs to be cold, and no matter how easy Vincent Price made it look, candelabras are a pain in the ass to haul around the house at night). So here we are, going broke paying the electric bill yet never knowing when the off switch may be triggered for our patch of the grid, casting us into darkness and, even worse, suffering us to reset all our digital clocks.

Viva la California! Covet our climate and our semi-soft-cheese lifestyle if you will, but rest assured - it comes at a premium.