Whatta Fiasco

Dear Janitorial Staff, The schedule says you’re supposed to clean out the office refrigerators on the third Friday of each month. I just checked my calendar and that was the eighteenth, not the twenty-fifth. I was planning on taking my left over polenta home with me Friday night anyhow, but got distracted in talking to some coworkers on my way out the door. I was in the car and already running a bit late for fencing when I remembered it and decided that it would be just fine, just this once. But it wasn’t. My lovely polenta with the dried tomato pesto is gone, as is the container it was in. Luckily it was a cheap, disposable rubbermaid. But now I have to go buy some more dishes, and I had to go buy some lunch, and for some reason the greasy spoon downstairs doesn’t sell polenta with pesto. A BLT just isn’t the same thing at all. I’ve never even left food in there overnight, so it stands to reason that the one time I leave something over the weekend, you’d decide to clean things out for the first time in months. I guess I learned my lesson.

I think I had a weekend. It was mostly good although I was incredibly tired after fencing practice Saturday afternoon and ended up taking a nap for a few hours instead of going to a family reunion. I guess I’d been pushing things a bit lately and my body decided it needed to catch up. And I got to play some bridge and I got to play with Ms. K. some before she turned into cranky tired baby. Oh, and I cooked some tempeh for the first time this weekend. If you’re one of those people who can’t stand to watch sausage being made, you might want to give tempeh a pass, at least as a home cooking ingredient. It doesn’t look appetizing at all. But I made some coconut curry with mine and it was quite tasty. It looked like greyish glop and I need to work on just how to best cook the stuff. It’s much better when it’s crunchy but I cut it too thin and ended up with mostly crumbles. The experimentation will continue
.
My two favorite sentences from today are: 1) A state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation’s citizens. and 2) Were the heels on my summer sandals always this slutty? No disparagement is intended toward the inestimable Maud Newton. Smile already!

Lots of good books and movies lately. Flying review time. Ken McLeod’s The Stone Canal is good enough that I’m continuing to read his stuff. James Branch Cabell’s There Were Two Pirates is obscure but wicked fun and a very fast read. I’m reserving my judgment until I see Volume II, but Kill Bill Vol. 1 was an enjoyable gore fest. Shaolin Soccer, on the other hand, was enough fun that hubby mentioned he might like to own a copy, so I ordered one this weekend to avoid getting stuck with the revamped release supposedly due out sometime this summer. Way way over the top fun.

Life continues. I’m still in the process of getting the ceiling mudded in. Such fun. Here’s hoping I get another coat done tonight so that maybe we can think about painting after Summer Nationals. Whee. Max is now twenty-one and is still employed. He’s also still making copies of his resume and dropping them off around town.

I got more books out of the library. Big news, eh? But at least I finished the Poodle Play book first. It was both good and frustrating. Ben Watson is a devoted fan who has spent an otherwise unreasonable amount of time researching and thinking about the Zappa oeuvre, or corpus is you’re eschewing the snooty French terms. There he goes, casually rattling off impressively detailed analysis of construction techniques and continuity issues, only to stumble over something insanely simple. Does he really think that a lyric talking about impressing something on the mind is intended to reference leaving a physical impression upon a physical brain? Geddoudahere! There were just enough of these boners sprinkled throughout that I was usefully reminded to take anything he wrote with a large grain of salt. Over all, it was a good read, particularly if you like Zappa’s music, but it’s monstrously completist in its approach. I also think the epilogue would have been more useful if it had been cast as a preface instead. If you really want to understand where Watson is coming from, I strongly encourage you to flip to the back and read the epilogue first.

Looking for a fun summer DVD? Check out the remastered version of Sammo Hung’s Magnificent Butcher. The whole thing is wacky, but do not miss the Fighting with Calligraphic Brushes/I Dare You to Do Calligraphy While I Try to Kick Your Ass scene. And the Cat Man goes so far over the top that you’ll be wondering what happened to the bottom. Oh, and it also features a (partial) game of Xiangqi, the same variant of chess as was the focus in The Chess Player.

But if you get a chance to see Jackie Chan’s Around the World in 80 Days, consider going. Yes, it’s a slightly cheesy kid’s movie. It’s also well done, a lot of fun, and with more names than you can shake a stick at, including an aging Sammo Hung and Kathy Bates playing a perfectly straight Queen. (And cross dressing jokes. Apparently you’re not allowed to make a kid friendly movie this year without including at least one cross dressing joke.) I’ll give it seven out of ten tigers.

Voila! With some tools, know-how and moral support from Kernat, we no longer have a hole in the ceiling. We have officially achieved forward progress in the Making the House a Better Place to Live project. We ended up not replacing the entire ceiling;just one piece of sheet rock. It’s up, taped and mudded. And the living room is even clean enough to be livable again while the mud dries. Then we get to sand and mud again. Many cheers for large plastic tarps. There’s going to be lots of mudding and sanding before we even get to the paint and figuring out how to get the popcorn ceiling to match. But we’re making progress and I’m very happy.

I’m also looking at all the space in the living room with things cleared out of the way and wondering if I can keep things this clear.

We also heard from Max the other day. He did make it to the doctor and got a legitimate excuse. It turns out he’d had a nasty case of gastric flu. However, he took so long about getting the excuse that he lost the job anyhow. But the doctor got him a prescription to be sure the flu got knocked out for good, and he’s no working full time at another job. It’s for less money and he has to commute with friends, but he’s working and making money.

Time to get some sleep.

It’s that time again and I still haven’t taken a weekend off to spend reading Ulysses straight through. And the only Joyce I’ve read lately are the quotes used in Poodle Play. There’s a strong argument to be made that Zappa is the Joyce of the music world. Dead serious jokesters, the both of them, they’ll take your breath away if you let them. It’s a mystery how I ever got to be this age without having obsessively worked my way through the Zappa continuum. Plans for a project are under development.

Yes, I made it to Sioux City for the team tournament. No, the storm didn’t blow the house down, but when I left at four in the morning I spotted wandering branches hanging out in the trees like leafy gibbons. The largest one obligingly leaped onto the porch, blocking the door, and waiting for my return later that evening. The drive was uneventful, even if Zappa’s Freak Out! really isn’t the best thing to be listening to immediately before a tournament. And even though I got there in plenty of time this year and even took some time to stretch and warm up, I wasn’t warmed up at all, at all. All three of us were in less than optimal form and we ended up taking third out of the three teams. Alas. But it was still good fencing. Afterward a handful of us decided to have an impromptu individual event. By that time my fencing brain had kicked in and I was fencing much better. Then it was time to hop in the car and do the long drive back home.

Since then it’s been a week of work and fencing practice and getting ready to (hooray!) patch the hole in the ceiling. Tonight we get to babysit Ms. K. Tomorrow night we get to patch the ceiling. Assuming that goes well, then I get to start the process of prepping the walls for painting so we can tear out the nasty old carpet and bring in the new. Somehow or another we’re going to make all the necessary puzzle pieces fall into place.

What a strange weekend. A front blew in just before ten this evening. Very high winds were shaking the trees loud enough that I turned off a movie to catch the weather report. Seventy mile an hour winds expected but most of the rain and hail for the initial line was staying north of us. I expect we’ll pick up some of our own later this evening. I opened the window to let the storm blow in and to listen to the trees sway.

I ended up going to a solo fencing practice this afternoon. Hubby was out of town on business, coach as at a wedding, and Daisy and a passle of the kids were in Sioux City at a youth foil tournament. And while I was caught in traffic driving into town, I got a call from the only other adult I was expecting to show up saying his wife had just got back in town so he wouldn’t be there. I did get there in time (in spite of the construction traffic) to let the blacksmith’s son know what was going on. He and his dad took off. I stuck around for a little while to do some footwork just in case anyone else popped out of the woods. No one did, but I did find some grapes left smashed on the gym floor. Silly little gymnasts left them there.

So instead of hanging around until two, I took a detour over to the Nelson-Atkins art gallery. I’d been meaning to go for ages but it just hasn’t happened. Ugh. The poor art gallery is under even more construction than the highway is. They’re supposedly increasing the gallery space by sixty percent, but less than half of the original space is currently viewable, and a lot of my favorite pieces are in storage right now. How sad. There was also a noisy guided tour group I kept bumping into, upstairs and down. I want my art gallery back, but it could be another year, easily, before that happens.
Did you know that they even moved Kwan Yin out of the temple room? Blasphemy. They also took the benches out. That used to be such a peaceful place to pause. I thought it was bad when they stabled the ceramic camels in with her. And the annoying tour guide had the nerve to claim that there was controversy over whether Kwan Yin as male or female. She expressed an opinion that Kwan Yin must be male because a bodhisattva is an incarnation of Buddha. Ha! It’s not nice to spread misinformation. Besides, that’s the most delicately androgynous statue I’ve seen in a very long time. It practically oozes gender ambiguous sensuality. Silly people.

Yesterday morning I got to work and hooked up my laptop only to discover that the power cord was no longer doing its job. The little red bar on the battery indicator caused me to shut the machine down for the first time since it came into my hands. Amazing. That the power cord stopped working was not a huge surprise as it had been resoldered at some point and the design is just awful from a functional standpoint. (Dear Apple, which is more important in a power cord: reliability or aesthetics? Please consider your answer carefully in light of the products you’ve been shipping over the last five years. Hmm?) Hubby went out and found a clunkier but sturdier and more flexible solution. The little white box is back up and happy again.

Other than that, life is spectacularly non-eventful around here right now, even if it is a bit of the calm before the storm. There’s still no word from Max on whether or not he’s still employed. Reagan’s funeral means that our office is closing early on Friday, leaving me at loose ends between lunch and fencing practice. I’m sure I can find something to do. I need to get some clothes shopping done and I wouldn’t mind stopping by the art gallery, if it’s open. And hubby will be leaving for a business trip to Dallas, immediately following which I’ll be heading to Sioux City for a team tournament. Next week we’ve tentatively planned the great ceiling patch caper.

Tomorrow? Who knows about tomorrow? Tomorrow I go bowling. (Contain your excitement.) Today it is raining. Tonight i had over priced steak, a decent glass of merlot, and a pasty bread pudding. (What good is bread pudding if all the life has been squeezed out of the bread?) But the company was excellent.

Summer has got her stompy boots on already. Pity, that. Like a three day weekend, Spring always leaves me wanting a little more, just a few more weeks. Ninety degrees makes for a warmer trek to the downtown library, but the last block is always in the shade of the library itself. Five stories of white stone keep the sun at bay and draw you into the air-conditioned corridors. A couple of guys in hardhats can usually be found in the shade of the building, eating their lunch and reading papers. This afternoon they were aghast at the price someone will be paying to park on the street in front of them: thirty-eight fifty! One of them had taken a peek at the parking ticket left on the window. (Dear peoples, there are parking lots within two blocks of there that will charge you no more than twenty dollars to park all day, and chances are good that the spot you find will be under cover from the sun and the rain.),
Anyhow, I took back two books and only brought one out. Can I count that as a victory in the reducing the number of books to read project? I’m counting it as a victory anyway. The new book was Ken McLeod’s The Stone Canal. I passed on Ashley Montagu’s On Being Intelligent, partly because I barked my shin on the marble stairs getting up the third floor, and partly because I decided I couldn’t really take a 1950s Better Living Through Science self-help book right now. Not to slight Mr. Montagu, but later is soon enough, and it might turn out to be an entirely different book.

And yes, I saw Kevin Costner’s Open Range this weekend. Very pretty, good supporting cast, and a decent story. I can’t say that I’ve done an exhaustive search of his work, but it seems to me that when he directs he likes to use Grand Epic pacing. This time it mostly works, and the picture and sound would have benefited from being seen on a big screen. And again, speaking from an ignorance born of not having read the original book, I don’t see why they didn’t write the doctor out of the script entirely. His only reason for existing was to leave some doubt as to the marital status of Sue Barlow (Annette Bening), a minor plot point at best, and entirely too much time was spent trying to account for the movements of this otherwise important person in a tiny frontier town. It would have been much tidier to have made Sue Barlow the doctor, historical accuracy be damned. But I wasn’t the director. Sadly, the director’s commentary was a snoozer. There were a few good tidbits (yes, the amazingly back lit scene (you’ll know it when you see it) was a happy accident) but Costner is much too laid back to project any enthusiasm about his project.

Don’t you just hate journal entries that are shopping lists? Well, sometimes I like them and that’s hat you’re getting today.

Today I went shopping and brought home: bulk crystalized ginger, four whole nutmegs (over twenty dollars a pound? good grief!), one grapefruit, one small delicato squash (I’ve never had this kind before but it looks pretty), some dried tomato pesto, and eight ounces of firm tofu. I was going to get some good yoghurt, but they were out of the kind I like. And the cashier smiled when I pulled out a recycled plastic bag and bagged my own groceries.

I went by the library and dropped off one book and to CDs without getting anything new. This was a good thing as I’m still hip deep in things to be read. Going by the library before it opens on a Sunday helps quite a bit with the goal of not getting buried in books. Then I went by the bookstore, hich as open, and located a copy of Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch. And then I found a cheap, remastered copy of Sammo Hung’s Magnificent Butcher. I had counted on spending about twenty bucks on the Eric Dolphy CD but it was only twelve, so spending eight bucks to have my own Sammo seemed a good deal. I decided I didn’t really have time to lounge around in the bakery reading and eating decadent pastries, so instead I stopped by the roasterie to get a half a pound of Celebes Kalossi beans (I wanted a change from my usual Sumatra) and an iced au lait to go. I forgot the chocolate and the dish soap.

And I can still feel the sore spot in my throat when I swallow, but it’s much improved. On the other hand, I woke up this morning with a croak in my voice that still isn’t quite gone andI suspect it might be a side effect of healing. At this rate, tomorrow should be just fine.

At fencing practice last night I took a pretty hard shot to the throat. It went under the bib of my mask but hit the catch pocket in the neck of my uniform. Or would have if it hadn’t been heading straight in. I’m ok (and I won the touch) but afterward it hurt to swallow. A full day later it’s still a bit sore, but healing. Annoying and uncomfortable, but it’s healing just fine.
After practice we went out for dinner at a restaurant we hadn’t been to before, the Blue Moose. Yes, there is a blue moose head on the wall. Too silly. But the beer was good and they had fried pickles. I hadn’t had them before. Quite tasty.

Fencing this afternoon went much better. And then we saw the latest Harry Potter movie. Decent flick, but somehow we managed to get into a close-captioned showing. It was more than a little confusing until we figured it out, and a little distracting. It’s tough not to read the subtitling with it right in front of your face, especially as we got there late enough that we were in the second row. Still good.

For entertainment later this evening I tore down wall paper. Nearly all of the awful paper in the entry way that I’ve disliked since we first moved in is now gone. The joy of destruction! The paper came down very easily. Getting the wall prepped and painted will be a lot more work, but it feels good to have the process started.

I had a quiet evening to myself last night, as planned. Mostly that involved searching for a copy of Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch and finding a six dollar copy of Almodovar’s Talk to Her instead. Wonderful movie, and it increased the size of my DVD collection by a third. Woo. And it was marked at ten when I picked it up but it rang up as six? I may have to stop by there again this weekend and see if I can find any other cheap thrills. Later, downtown, there were some kids in karate pants kicking breakdance moves on the lawn in the park. The comic book shop was already closed so I walked down to the tea station and got some satay and coffee milk.

News on the Max front is shaky at best. Last week he called in sick for a few days, to the job he’s had for less than a month. When he went back to work, they sent him back home saying he needed to get a doctor’s note to explain his absence. Hubby gave him money and sent him off to the walk in clinic, where they refused to see him because at some point a few years ago he’d been a patient there and his mother had refused to follow the doctor’s orders. It was a monumental cock-up given that he’s no longer living with his mother and is no longer a minor, but they wouldn’t budge. And with one thing or another, for reasons I don’t understand, he ended up not seeing a doctor until this morning. Will he get a note from the doctor? Will he still have a job even if he does? Who knows. There’s some other stuff going on too, but his situation is pretty marginal right now. It will probably be Monday before he finds out if he still has that job.