Here I Am!

6.30.4 Ahoy
I love history, but generally my explorations revolve around the world that surrounded the military actions that we all learned about in school. Well, most of us didn't pay attention; I was the weirdo in that class, I guess. Anyway, folks, go forth and read the series by Patrick O'Brian. Not only is he a ripping good story teller, he's able to capture character in just a few words of description. Grace + economy + passion for your subject = one great author. Although I can't recommend the books wholeheartedly for those in high school--Mr. O'Brian makes me able to appreciate some kind of weird nobility in the whole trappings of the military that simply doesn't exist anymore. It's this sort of romancing the gun that helped made our own war between the states happen. Eating rats and accidents like the Sultana are not romantic. (Please note that the Sultana was only built to hold 375 passengers and was carrying 2,400. It is made to sound like the prisioners just couldn't be held back from making the trip, but in fact the captain was paid by the head for transport.) I like the idea of the "Sultana Survivor Society": drinking club or post-traumatic stress coping? Probably both.

6.29.4 Adventures
We made it out to the Darrington Timberbowl rodeo Saturday afternoon; good fun. On the return trip, we discovered a small slice of grubby heaven that I highly recommend for a visit. Where else can you hold a baby wallaby, who is cuddled into a polar fleece false mother? Where else can you slide alfalfa pellets between your lips and have a soft-faced alpaca slide them back out again? I've been wanting a pug for a long time; now I'm thinking a wallaby with a wee pug poking out of its pouch would probably kill me with cuteness.

Sunday, I went to Madrona and ate cupcakes. They weren't all that, but then, I make cupcakes semi-regularly. I had a fairly unfortunate moment when I said to Coach, "and they don't even pipe the buttercream!" in an I'm-so-offended voice. Then I thought, shut up, jackass. So I did.

While I was eating cupcakes, Sweetie borrowed a boat and headed off down the Wenatchee with some coworkers for the afternoon. The last rapid before the takeout is known as "Granny", and in the 10 years Sweetie has been doing the trip, Granny has changed quite a bit. While he and his boat were hanging out in the sun at the end of the trip, they got to hear some fool kayak guy say, "Dude, Granny is sick!" to another kayak guy. The next quote is not remembered precisely, but "I rode Granny all afternoon" is close. Poor Granny. No wonder she's not feeling well.

Tomorrow is lunch at Salumi; the fixed price deal. Can't wait. Must stop eating now in order to build up appropriate appetite.

6.23.4 Relevant and Meaningful
This is a somewhat long article about advertising that includes a quote from "Fruit, at Coca-Cola". I'm especially curious about the future of ad content; targeted placement is clearly where the smart money's at, but do carefully targeted customers need brand or cleverness? Some probably do; if the customer is presumed to be clever. But giant expensive movie-like ads in the "pre-show countdown"? I once asked Cheesepants what comes after brand, since nothing lasts in the world of consumerism (remember McLuhan's "customers won't buy things they can't touch"? I didn't think so, web shoppers.) and there's always a next thing; even Christianity will have a next thing (even if that "next thing" is the end of the world). Anyway, Cheesepants said no, branding is permanent. I am interested to see what sort of ads end up with solid results: those like google adwords, which simply say "come here to get this" and are wildly successful, or those that place image over item (anything from Nike, and and and). I'm the one that thought the first I, Robot movie ads were actually for robots; clearly I should bow out of the conversation and go back to writing my daily chunk of catalog copy.

First, though, I must atttend to some early Christmas shopping. Brothermine gets a leopard with cub; Sweetie gets a unicorn. I get the battery operated chicken for myself.

6.22.04 Horror
She came all the way from New Zealand for this.
Does everyone run from Nazis at the end of the show? Apparently, it's a full-blown phenonmenon. not running from Nazis, but the group karaoke thing.
These stamps are not horrifying. In fact, black-n-white stamps are extremely cool.
These are neither especially gross nor especially cool. Do silkworms always taste like chicken? Apparently not. Why would anyone want their granola to taste like chicken, anyway?

6.16.4 How To Fix The World
First stop flipping out when puppethead prezzies and princesses die and pay more attention to the musicians and artists and writers and thinkers and bighearted people who make amazing things happen all the time. Next, disband all the armed services except the National Guard and the Coast Guard (if they count as an armed service). Take all the freed up money and throw half at the national debt and the other half at educuation (teachers should be paid a minimum of 45k/year, people, and that is more than the national average). Wait five years, until the world forgives and forgets a bit, and the debt is paid down a nice amount. Then start throwing money at responsible international agencies like the Red Cross and Amnesty International and the Nature Conservancy. Legalize pot and tax the hell out of it, like booze and cigarettes. Make the search for reliable, inexpensive alternative fuel sources as much of a national priority as sending a man to the moon was.

I can hardly wait to see all the emails telling me how wrong I am in some area. But really, it's all nicer than a revolution. See how much I've mellowed with age?

Mawwiage is also on my mind. Brothermine called it a "patch", and he's right -- like I've said, we got married because we fought the law and the law won. Marriage, especially a semi-planned elopement, is way easier than filling out a giant pile of separate forms for hospitals and taxes and real estate, which is the current alternative to getting hitched; as far as I know, the real estate and hospital papers can be filled out by everyone, regardless of gender or even the nature of the relationship. All the teary-eyed people who think they won't be able to visit their partner in the hospital are wrong, as long as they plan ahead. And there are these little things called wills that can be written in an evening that take care of possessions and children. On the one hand, I want to support all those little pieces of paper and screw marriage. On the other hand, well, I just got married, didn't I? Anyway, if you are a young urban adult who doesn't want their parents to make health care decisions in emergencies and/or want their parents to inherit any assets or debts they carry, go here and follow the links to the proper forms and get it all taken care of. At one point or another, most of you have talked about the idea of an urban family that has been chosen, rather than randomly delegated. Make it official. It's also a patch, but a more flexible patch, like a band-aid instead of a plaster cast.

6.11.4 Eavesdropping
Living on a corner so close to an urban community college and a whole row full of group homes and a church with a biker AA thing every week results in many odd snips of conversation that I could only not hear if I spent all day wearing headphones. There's a lot that is quiet enough that it sounds like Simspeak and speaking in tongues; there are many arguments and hey babies also. Just now, it was "so, yeah sigh, I'm doing the girl thing. sigh whine She says I have to, like, sigh forego the crack money whine and I'm like"...and then I couldn't hear any more. Damn those girls, making you stop with the crack.

Using "just say no" as my seague, I have two things to say about Mr. Reagan: I am very tired of the whole "only the good people die" method of eulogizing, and I am very disappointed that Mrs. Reagan didn't wear a giant hat to the funeral. Granted, she wore her giant head, but it's not the same. Ok, a third thing: when talking about him with Sweetie yesterday, I described his "big puppety head". That phrase makes me happy. They certainly did have a pair of giant heads, did they not?

I don't think this show has anything at all to do with giant heads, but nevertheless I am looking forward to it. I do not approve of the poster art, though--my first reaction was "my, that certainly is one hell of a herpe". You weren't going to go look, but that sort of forces the issue, doesn't it?

Two days ago I finished a liberry book that surprised me. If you can imagine a graphically sexual novel that insists it's about kindness, has routine interjections on a variety of political philosophy matters and is written by an author that can't help but constantly remind the reader that he is the one making the story up, and then imagine that it's good...then you should read it.

6.9.4 Pollen
I forgot to report that nothing exciting happened during Sweetie's dry ice plumbing adventure. Very anti-climactic. In fact, we seem to have made it generally past the constantly exciting holy-crap-this-sucks stage of homemaking into the holy-crap-this-is-tedious stage. Also the holy crap Boom is allergic to everything stage. And the holy crap we've dropped a pile of money what were we thinking stage.

I persist in thinking that homeownership isn't the deal it's cracked up to be in our post-WW2/pre-WW3 world. Our annual rate of interest is, give or take a few hundred bucks, the same percentage that value typically increases every year in this city. That should mean we should be able to spend any number less than that percentage and come out ahead after the first year. But it appears that we're spending about three to four times that number; that means, to my bad-at-math brain, that we have a few years before we can expect to break even. Assuming price increases stay at approximately what they are, and that the building doesn't have any major assessments happen, and that our prettifying doesn't actually add anything to the value (which it often doesn't).

Houses that are not in a coastal state don't have the benefit of steadily rising value; a home purchased, in say, Sheridan or Little Rock or Valentine, NE won't really change in purchase price over a 10-year period. So any money spent on upkeep is actually money lost, and you simply get the money you've invested back, and maybe a little tax writeoff, which is dumb, because chances are if you live in one of those cities you're not exactly in giant need of a humongous tax writeoff in the first place.

It's nice having more, better space than our old pad, it's really nice that our bedroom isn't 10,000 degrees anymore, and it's nice being able to spend money to make it look the way we want it to look. But really, I refuse to be convinced that homeownership is something that makes financial sense for everyone. If we can sell this place for a substantial net profit in less than 10 years, I will bake all my words into a hat-shaped cake and eat every one of them. If it's less than five years, I'll make this one and walk the plank right after eating it.

6.8.4 Freak Say Relax
I saw Mean Girls a couple weeks ago (go to the site for the horoscopes, if nothing else, you lazy non-link-looking person) and basically thought, well, Lindsay Lohan is totally hot, plus that was fun. Since then, I keep seeing the little movie messages in action: Mall shopping is bad! Being weird is good! Being smart is better than doing well in school, but they should be basically the same! Everyone cares about boys except the lesbian goth chick! Mathletes are badass MCs!

On Mr. Hughes' Day of Age Celebration, several of us were pitching metal balls into Mount Doom when two younger-than-us (everyone was younger than us) chickipoos came to look. Mr. Hughes said something about us being geeks, and they giggled and assured us they were too! Geeks, that is! 'Cause, um, they like elves! And stuff! (So I implied everything by the first italics. You didn't really go look at the Mean Girls link, did you? We're even.)

As a wee Boom, I thought geek meant "good at math". I was rather profoundly not geek in that sense. Mostly, I was tremendously bored and fighting against it. I never had the weird self hatred/awareness that things I liked to do were considered freakish (although walking down the street talking about rogue feats does now give me pause). My, oh, let's call it lack of concern, for grades, had nothing to do with wanting to be cool; in a special program for special people, it doesn't take much to be cool (awesome; they've now taken the name of the program and given it to a "life skills program that transitions to vocational training"). The movie left me wondering that since I wasn't a geek, does that mean I was a mean girl? Probably I was just supporting cast, wandering around bored, but happy to be making union scale.

Which leads me to the conclusion that being geek is the sort of weird no-means-yes lie that having majorly Low Rent family members is: no wants to be just plain old middle class supporting cast. Why, oh why, wasn't I ostracized?

6.7.4 Sheboygan
I just found my ideal travel book. Anyone up for Lentil Fest or Pasco's Fiery Food Fest? Or perhaps wandering further afield for Sheboygan's Bratwurst Fest and/or Ducktona 500? (I apologize to the world for not coming up with more info for the Ducktona; apparently, it involves renting rubber ducks and racing them on a pond.)

I'm sure this coolio fair would teach me a lot of things, but I am stuck on the fry bread contest. How does one go into training as a judge for such a thing?

Speaking of cramming starch into one's mouth, Sweetie came home with a new contest to try when one is utterly bored. Assemble several friends, a stop watch and a pile of saltine crackers. Everyone must try to chew and swallow six saltines in one minute. At Arbiter, the best and brightest of the world of Internet advertising, the record is 4, held jointly by three people (including Sweetie). I suspect the way to go is cramming all six at once and powering through the "cement block in trachea" problem.

6.4.4 For The Birds
You all know about my love of the wee bushtits and redheaded finches around our new pad, but that love now has a Condition, like so many loves. Please, wee birds, understand that 5am is not a good time to start saying hello to the world. Not loudly, in a bird monotone (CHIRP!...CHIRP!...CHIRP!...) and steadily for an hour. The world gets it after the first five CHIRPs. Why don't birds have a snooze button? Why can't I blot out the sun until about 8am?

Last night was one of those crazy dream nights where I know I woke up but I'd just go right back into Chapter 2 of the same dream. This one involved me and a nice demon Saving The World.