new style of compliment - use it on your friends!

i almost forgot about this - it happened on saturday evening, as i was on my way home from dinner with scott and his brother, kevin. it was kevin's birthday, so i was making a secret stop at the safeway up near Piney Branch road to pick up a Carvel ice cream cake for desert...

there was a drunk/high older woman serenading everyone in the checkout area with her homemade song - which went something like “oh, my beeeeeaaauuutiful blue balloon, my shiny blue balloon….” she was twirling around, looking up at the ceiling, so i suppose the song was inspired by the mylar birthday balloons hanging around the florist/plant section. Everyone was cracking up, but giving her a wide berth. I got my ice cream cake and started to leave, but as I headed for the doors, I passed by the aisle where she was now buying some stuff. I overheard her tell this odd compliment to the poor little teenaged kid who was ringing her up:

“you are cute, yes you are. i could just crawl up inside your BEHIND. right up in there. yes i could.”

i almost peed my pants laughing all the way home. that poor kid will probably never recover from that.

cozy places.

why can't i have one of these? to escape to for weekend and vacations?



http://www.simondale.net/house/gallery.htm

lumberjacking, crafting and kitties

i chopped down a tree on saturday! all by myself! my back is punishing me now, of course, but it was very satisfying work. we had a mulberry tree growing in the front yard, pretty close to the house. i've been meaning to do something about it for years, but mostly i just hack the top of it off a few times during the summer and ignore it. i like to eat the berries in the spring, but the thing was getting dangerous... i ignored it too much this year, and with all the cool weather and the rain the silly tree was getting really top-heavy and huge. and threatening to topple over into the neighbor's front window. and probably ripping out our foundation at the same time. so! i chopped it down. well, i SAWED it down using a little hand-held saw from el Depot. then i had a huge pile of brushy stuff in the middle of the yard. and i wanted to run away or sell the house and move. instead i dragged a chair outside, along with a can of coke and an array of saws and clippers, and set to work. i now have 4 big logs, about 93 smaller logs/sticks, and a bajillion skinny branches - all drying behind the front bushes. once they are dry, we'll be set for camping firewood for a weekend or two. i'm pretty sure the neighbor's think i'm crazy. in fact, i know they do. and dad? if you're reading this, i'm pretty sure you would have had a thing or two to say about Safety With Saws. (standing on the tippy-top "this is not a step" step of a ladder while wielding a hand saw above my head; sitting down, sawing through a branch that is braced against my fleshy bare leg; sawing towards my own hand; scratching mosquito bites with the sharp edge of the serrated saw; doing all this while wearing flip-flops instead of real shoes; you get the picture. i'm very sorry.)

second meeting of Sew Watts Cookin' on sunday - 4 new people showed up! yay for that. i embroidered a cute little dogger onto a boring thrift store handkerchief. some folks knitted and some cut fabric. all was well in the world. next month we are meeting in rock creek park to do camp skillz (fire making, cooking, whittling maybe) and knitting scarves.

and..... we got another cat! a kitty sister for nilsson! a co-worker of mine knew of an abandoned kitty that needed a home, so i said i would take her. i picked her up on sunday morning. she is peachy-pale-orange tiger stripey, very very lovey and kissy, probably a little younger than nilsson - maybe 7 or 9 months? right now she has an efficiency apartment set up in our bathroom and bedroom. she'll meet her anxious grey brother tomorrow... yikes! i hope he doesn't stay mad forever. and that they have fun playing together.

pictures to come.

fondling the collections

as an archivist in the united states, i deal with collections of materials. i use the word "collection" all the time. about a billion times a day. if i worked in canada, say, or the UK or France, or pretty much any other place... i would use the word fonds instead.

Fonds.

i hate that word. it looks like it should mean another word for someone's private parts. it gives me the heebie-jeebies to see it on paper. and even worse, most American archivists pronounce it just like it looks - "fon(d)z." it just sounds like a dirty, leering word.

it's a french word, so it should be pronounced something like "fahn" or "fawn." archivists in canada/france/UK/etc. use it to mean a body of work created by someone and kept in its natural, meaningful order. or something along those lines. (this is where i should do some fact-checking, but i am too lazy and will therefore rely on knowledge gained in grad school... but that was 3 years ago.) even in the US, if i recall my SAA glossary of terminology correctly, archivists claim that "fonds" is the correct word, and that "collection" implies something false or not genuine. a collection meaning a bunch of stuff not naturally accumulated but instead "collected" on purpose and with a false/unnatural order. but we all say "collection" anyway. maybe i'm not the only one skeeved out by the word after all.

i won't even go into the phrase "respect des fonds."

sounds like something a mangy-looking prostitute would yell at someone on the street: "Respect des fonds, bitch!"

olympic death.

for FOUR nights in a row i have stayed up WELL PAST MIDNIGHT, watching the f-ing olympics. it's got to stop. now.

i haven't been this consistently tired since high school when i would regularly stay up reading until 3:00, only to get back up at 6:45... there were times i can remember starting to fall asleep standing up in the shower, as i closed my eyes to shampoo my hair. not even in college was i ever that tired. if i stayed up late, then i would just sleep late in the morning to make up for it! it never even crossed my do-gooder's mind to skip school in high school. i just drank lots and lots of Mt. Dew.

that's how i felt this morning. but without the tangy promise of Mt. Dew to get me going. but tonight! oh ho ho. tonight is going to be different. i plan to watch to sun set from my bed and hit the sack before it even gets dark. (maybe not that early, but close...)

in other news, scott and i tore out our old garbage disposal and installed a new one - all by ourselves! it was a fun teamwork project - scott spent most of the time crouched under the sink in awkward, hunching positions, his saggy pants stereotypically showing some crack, while i read the badly written instruction manual and scurried about fetching tools. i stood w-a-y back when we reconnected the power and flipped the switch - i have paranoid visions about the chopping mechanism levitating out of the hole, then flying around the kitchen before chopping my face off. i was also worried that the metal sink would electrocute me when i touched it, due to improper grounding. it's true! and that worry is actually founded in experience: in my old apartment in raleigh, there was something amiss with the kitchen wiring - if you touched the shiny chrome toaster at the same time as you touched the water heater and the sink, you would get a thrilling little shock. it sounds like an impossible combination, but due to a ridiculously small kitchen, a water heater located under the counter, and a shortage of outlets... it happened often enough. (rest gut against the counter/water heater... lean way over to the corner to put the toast in... grab the sink for leverage... ZZZZZT!)

i miss that apartment sometimes. it had a nice little yard, and a really great deck. big enough for a hammock. and a cool swinging door in the kitchen. then i remember that i now have central air conditioning. and more than one heat vent in my whole house. and no black mold growing under my bed and behind the couch. and no cold, wet sheets in my drafty winter bedroom. and that i live in a really neat city, near my old friends. in a really neat house. with a really neat person who i love very much.

avoidance.

okay, so i am supposed to be making lots of plans. but each time i start looking stuff up online, i get confused and i stop. i can't keep doing this! i have decisions to make, darn it!

in college, i had a friend who showed us her notebook of "ideas" that she kept as a teenager - wedding ideas and baby names, and house ideas. !!!! of course, we all mercilessly made fun of her, but now i wish i had been that girl. cutting out pictures in magazines, dreaming of the wedding i would have one day, making lists and pasting things into a notebook. because then i could have pulled that dusty old notebook out last week, clapped my hands together and declared it "Done!"

now i have to get busy - a lot of dreaming and imagining to be done in the next few months.

in any stressful situation, i normally adopt the attitude of "oh, it'll all work itself out in the end - for good or for bad." but i hesitate to do that with a wedding. i'd hate to show up to my own wedding, crying, and think "hey, this isn't what i wanted at all!"

or have a bunch of people fly in and wonder "um, where are the flowers? and wasn't there supposed to be some kind of dinner? and you know what, where's the bride?"

and i'll be the one hiding under the bed because i forgot something Major.