Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Wednesday, June 27, 2007 Professional Pride Trash had surgery a couple of weeks ago. There were some mysterious lumps on her thyroid gland that needed to come out, lest they turn out be harbingers of the Big Casino. The surgeon took out a little more than half of her thyroid. Trash spent the following night in the hospital, which was a night more than she wanted to spend. But the operation was a success, and any malignancy was confined strictly to her mood towards her weird roommate. But the operation also left her wiped out, almost completely unable to regulate her own body temperature, and with a swollen, smile-shaped incision almost three inches wide across the base of her throat. She was kind of self-conscious about it at first. The incision was initially covered with five adhesive Steri-strips, arranged vertically across the width of the opening in a rather Frankensteinian manner. She wore a scarf to work the first day back. But when it was time to take the Steri-strips off, she felt even more vulnerable, as though those little strips she'd been wearing for a week had been holding her noggin in place, and without them there it might just roll clear off her shoulders. "I feel like Nearly Headless Nick," she told me. Fortunately, she had sent me to the drugstore the week before to pick up these sticky bandage pads that are supposed to be great for minimizing scars. You wear them for a few days at a time, taking them off and washing them every day, and there's enough in the box for twelve weeks' worth. Unfortunately, I'd lost them. So I went back, got another box, and helped her put them on. The scar looked too wide to be covered by one of the pads, so I put on two, leaving a slight overlap. Unfortunately, the pads don't stick to the back of other pads; only humans. So then every time we changed or adjusted the bandages, it was a challenge to find the right balance between avoiding a dangerous overlap-peel and leaving a tiny gap in the center. The latter situation made Trash worry about all the dire warnings about how the worst thing that could happen to her scar was to get a sunburn on it. Presumably that also applies to a sixteenth-of-an-inch length of it as well, and leaving that tiny spot bare would have been enough for her to end up with a puckered little hole there that she could have smoked cigarettes through. I had figured that with two boxes of special bandages in the house, the missing one would turn up soon enough due to M. Giant's Law, but it didn't, probably because we were still going to have to go through two boxes as a result of doubling up on them. But then the other morning, Trash went in for her post-op appointment with her surgeon, who is very cool. But as soon as she saw her star patient, she was like, "Hey, how are you doing, great to see you, you look terrific. Why do you have two bandages on?" Taken a bit aback, Trash explained that one bandage alone didn't seem to cover it. "I don't do two-bandage incisions," the doctor insisted, peeling off Trash's bandages. She centered one of the bandages on the incision, covering it completely. The other bandage she threw away on the spot. "See?" "Maybe it was just more swollen before," Trash speculated. The doctor harrumphed. Trash finally asked, "So…how does it look?" That seemed to break the tension, as the doctor realized how ridiculous she was being. She removed the one remaining bandage again, and seemed quite satisfied with how well Trash's incision is healing. All the stitches are on the inside, and should be dissolving soon, not that Trash currently experiences them in any meaningful way now. It's not like she was in any danger of having one of the cats snag an end and then run off in a panic, unraveling her entire torso in the process. They ended up laughing about it, and the good news is that thirty-dollar box of bandages will now last twice as long, but Trash thinks she may have unwittingly bruised the surgeon's professional pride. So tell me about unknown, esoteric things about your calling that you take pride in -- high standards you hold yourself to that nobody outside your area of expertise would care about or even fully understand. The more embarrassing, the better. I'd start things off with one of my own, but since all of mine are perfectly understandable and not at all weird, I can't come up with a good example. Like, the fact that I insist on all my recaps having an even number of letters? I think everyone does that. posted by M. Giant 7:06 PM 16 comments 16 Comments:I had my (entire) thyroid out almost 3 years ago...tell Trash that if she can endure the scar for about 6 months, Mederma is THE BEST for making that thing disappear. My doctors all told me I had to wait until the incision wasn't red at all to put anything on it. But seriously, people don't even notice my 3-inch line anymore. Also, my surgeon kicked ass, so that may have helped.
By Trash might be able to appreciate this as a Librarian... watching people take books or movies off the shelf, decide they don't want it, and then shove it back in some random place. I want to stand at the desk and holler at them to put it back in the correct spot.
By Ha, Rebecca, I actually do tell people to "Put it back where you found it!" in the library....and I don't even work there! It just peeves me so much...
By I'm a NICU nurse (how I found this blog, actually...) and you'd be surprised at how neurotic we night shift girls are at making perfect beds for the isolettes and cribs. It's a whole origami thing with blankets and pillowcases, dependent on the size of the baby (preemie vs term, etc) and having NO folded corner edges showing. There's legit life-saving stuff we get even more tetchy about, obviously, but you asked for the silly ones, so there you go.
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My mom had her thyroid removed and they told her to buy a bottle of those gel cap Vitamin E pills. Then, she would just cut one open each morning and smear the goop on the scar.
By I work in publishing, and nothing bugs as much as the overuse of that. Drives me nuts - more than bad grammar, more than you're/your, more than just about anything.
By It's not my weirdness, but my brother-in-law will always carry a bean hook (you use this to cut weeds) with him whenever he drives by his soybean fields. If he sees a weed, he'll walk out into the field, no matter how far away it is to get rid of it. This has nothing to do with helping his yield- a few weeds don't hurt beans- he does it because he knows other farmers will be driving by his fields and he doesn't want them to look 'dirty'. I asked him how he can possibly keep all the vast amount of weeds in check (he and his Dad farm 1500 acres) and he looked sheepish and said he can't really, but if he can get the ones he sees, he feels better about it. Hee!
By Wow, that is so creepy. I insist that my recaps have an ODD number of letters.
By I own a bakery, and have been baking for a looooong time. We make a product called "streusel bars". It's pronounced "stroi-sel". When people call it "stroo-sel", it's cool. When people call it "strudel", it just drives me nuts. There's no "d" in it!!! Argh.
By I work in Marketing as a designer. I find myself binding my printed ad designs with matching colored paperclips, and placing them on my desk just at the edge of my peripheral vision in a carefully fanned-out manner, so that I can glance over at them occasionally and admire their matchingness, and then claim I'm not completely lost to OCD.
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I'm a grad student in classics, and the misuse of the Greek alphabet sends me into fits. A capitalized sigma is not an E, no matter how much you want it to be. Nor is a theta a fancy-looking O.
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I don't have any quirks about my job in finance, but...
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When I make travel plans for my (uber-picky) boss, I give him a packet of info with the car service, flight, car rental, hotel, return flight and return car service info in that order, with color-coded, rainbow-ordered post-it flags for each leg of the trip.
By It's not even my job, but I am the person who rearranges the nailpolish in the drugstore when the colors aren't in the right slots.
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As an attorney, I'm going to go with any time a judge on "Law & Order" overrules a defense attorney's hearsay objection because of Jack McCoy's "brilliant legal reasoning". Which is always wrong. I just scream at the TV, "The declarant has to be unavailable you ass. Why don't you just say, 'It's not hearsay'? Because. It. Is. Not."
By I live in South Africa and have a post-graduate degree in Geography. When people refer to Africa as if it's a country, as in, "I went to Africa on safari", I always feel the overwhelming need to scream, "Where precisely in Africa? It's a freaking continent, not a country!" Sad, I know.
By Thursday, June 21, 2007 What's in a Name One of the things I thought I'd miss least about my old job is the other person in the company who had my name. It's not like my name is all that uncommon. If you Google it, you have to go past several pages of a film composer (not Danny Elfman) before you find any reference to me. So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that in a company of over 50,000 people nationwide, someone else would have gone by the same moniker as I do. He started a few months ago. Although we had the same first and last names, we had different e-mail addresses, both for internal and external senders. But mine came first in the directory, so I ended up getting a lot of his e-mail. If the reverse was ever true, I never heard about it. The good thing was that it was pretty easy to tell when I got a note meant for him. He was in a different division of the company, and he was based in Florida, and he kept getting e-mails about things I didn't know the first thing about from people I'd never heard of. In combination, these factors were a giveaway. I'd heard through the grapevine that someone else with my name had joined the company. I also knew it wasn't unheard of, because a guy who sat on the other side of my cube wall also had a namesake in another division, and had for years. Things between them seemed pretty peaceful. The first time it happened to me, I forwarded the e-mail to my namesake's correct address, introduced myself, and politely asked him to make sure he gave out his correct e-mail address to people. Some misdirections were inevitable, but I thought they could be kept to a minimum. And they probably could have been, if he'd been remotely conscious of what e-mail address he was giving out. After a couple of days, I stopped including little notes and would just hit "Forward" without any comment. Which was fine, because I never got any acknowledgement back from him either. And the same people kept e-mailing me when they wanted him, which told me he was making no effort to straighten them out. I suppose I could have done it, if I'd wanted to, but I didn't. I just hit "Forward" and got on with my life. And I must confess that there were a couple of occasions when I accidentally forwarded his e-mail right back to myself. So I can see how it would happen. But this is out of hundreds, including a long and drawn-out series of e-mails confirming, changing, changing again, and ultimately canceling some hotel reservations he had made. In Florida. Where he lives. Hmm. It was bad enough getting his work e-mail. But I started to get actively pissed off when I began to get his spam. The spam filters at my old company are excellent. In two-plus years, I never got a single unsolicited e-mail from an outside entity. Yet by some odd coincidence, weeks after this other guy got hired, my inbox started getting clogged with e-mails about real estate opportunities, seminars, stock tips, and certain Internet-targeted pharmacological products. There was only one explanation. He wasn't only giving out my work e-mail address to coworkers. He had also signed up for shit with my work e-mail address, and now I was spending part of every morning getting rid of missives from any number of the world's former Ministers of Exchequers. These I simply deleted without forwarding. By this point, I was actively looking for a job elsewhere anyway and didn't expect to have to deal with it much longer. Otherwise I would have drafted a note to him that, if I had accidentally sent it to myself, would have bleached my eyebrows. I just told myself.I'll be out of here in a few weeks, and I'll never have to deal with it again. And then I was out of there. And then, two weeks into my current job, I got an e-mail intended for the other guy with my name at the company I work for now. Again, it's a company of over 50,000 people nationwide, but this time the other guy is in the same division as me. And it takes me a lot longer to figure out whether I'm getting one of his notes by accident. Sure, the people sending him notes are people I've never heard of who are talking about things I know nothing about. But I'm still new enough that people who actually are contacting me are also people I've never heard of who are talking about things I know nothing about. Fortunately, this guy with my name seems much nicer than the one at my last job. He's already cc'ed me on several e-mails that he's sent back to people, telling them to quit bothering me and get his address right already. There's much more of a sense of the two of us being in this together, even though he was here first. And for that reason, I'm not going to try and drive him out of the company by signing up for a bunch of spam-generating websites under his e-mail address. posted by M. Giant 8:18 PM 7 comments 7 Comments:
That happened to me once, which seems odd -- I was monty@mycompany, and he was monte@mycompany, and neither of us expected to have to deal with a semi-duplicated name.
By That is happening to me now. I also have a very common first AND last name. I work for a ginormous research hospital and am pretty sure I get more of her emails and not vice versa. The problem is if you use the search function it just lists our first and last name as well as our slightly different email addys---with no specification to what areas/departments we are in (trust me...VASTLY different). It's great though, I have discovered she is an OR nurse and have probably seen some confidential patient information that was never meant for my eyes.
By When I worked for GE, I was one of three people with my name, and the one listed first in the global address list. I didn't get much misdirected mail, and no spam at all, but one time I received an invitation to a New Year's Eve party in Budapest. When I forwarded it to my namesake, who worked for GE Lighting in Hungary, he wrote back and told me that he'd checked with the hostess and that if I happened to be in Budapest on Dec. 31, I was welcome to drop by. Nice gesture.
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Man, I didn't realize Buck Melanoma was such a popular name. That's just weird.
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I've also run into this problem at work. However, as the second person on the gobal address book, I will say in defense of the guy at your old company, sometimes no amount of reminding do people get it right. I had one manager I worked with who for 2 years kept sending mail to me to Hong Kong (where my namesake worked), after the frist 6 months, I made it a rule not to respond to any request that wasn't sent directly to me.
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At my last company, there were three Michael Andersons. All sales managers. I was in sales support and had to work with them on a daily basis, but only via email so I didn't have a visual aid.
By There's a running joke in my department that TPTB are deliberately hiring people with the same names/similar sounding names. We have 2 Wills, 2 Chrises, a Penny/Jenny pair, and formerly had a Katie/Sadie pair.
By Saturday, June 16, 2007 Stick it in a Blog The whole point of blogs is that you get to go on and on endlessly and with little purpose about tiny little things that happen in your life that nobody else could possibly even begin to care about. I think M. Small gets that, except that instead of a blog, he uses one of our next door neighbors. Our neighbors are a quite active couple in their forties who moved into the neighborhood a couple of years ago, when M. Small was still a baby. For a while, the husband, G., would try to get M. Small to say hi to him, but M. Small was shy around him for some reason. But G. persisted, and now M. Small not only considers him a neighbor and a friend, but a confidante. Unfortunately, a two and a half year old does not have a great deal to confide. This does not stop him. Subjects upon which M. Small has expounded to G. include his toys (both out in the yard and up in his room), what he had for lunch, the dream he had last night (or indeed any night), where he went that day, what he had for breakfast, where he went at any other point in his life, where he hopes to go one day, and free-form verbal essays on such targets as hot air balloons, garden hoses, the stuff in our garage, which window of our house is his, what he's wearing, and anything else that may be visible from where he's standing. It's not like this with anyone else. He doesn't tell me and Trash every little thing, because we're either there with him and we already know, or he was in day care all day, in which case the answer to the question "What did you do today?" is always, "Played with my friends." One day a few weeks ago, M. Small brought the day care lady's attention to a potentially dangerous situation with the baby of the class. She told us about it, and how impressed she was with M. Small's heroic action, but when we asked him what he'd done that day, all he said was, "Played with my friends." But he spots G. and suddenly his whole life comes spilling out. At least M. Small doesn't treat this as a one-way relationship. He's interested in G. too. "What are you doing?" he'll ask. And because M. Small certainly never sees me doing anything like washing my motorcycle (don't have one), glazing my windows (don't know how) or washing my car (too lazy), it's always new to him. And then he'll say, "Why?" G. will patiently and pleasantly explain. M. Small will pretend to absorb this for a while, and then it's his turn to talk again, about the grass or the driveway or where one of the other neighbor's cats is or what he got my dad for Father's Day. And I think he's fairly conscious of this dynamic. This week, after going a few days without being able to provide one of his regular updates, he finally asks, "Where's G.? I need to tell him some things." I don't know whether he had those specific things already in mind or if he was just going to wing it. Anyway, G. continues to be amused by it all, which is good. I don't want some kind of dysfunctional Dennis Mitchell/Mister Wilson relationship developing there in a few years. Before that happens, maybe I should just give him my Blogger password and cut him loose. posted by M. Giant 9:00 PM 8 comments 8 Comments:
No, M.Small needs his OWN blog, like Norm at normtasia.blogspot.com Norm is a five-year-old who gives advice. He's a hoot!
By God, I love your kid. He's such a charmer, I'm sure that G. doesn't mind having his ear bent. I've been there for it a few times, and I'm pretty sure he feels as lucky to be blessed with M. Small's friendship as everybody else.
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That has got to be one of the most adorable things I've ever heard. And M Small has done many adorable things.
By Happy Father's Day, M. Giant!
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"Where's G.? I need to tell him some things."
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LMAO! I miss you guys!
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Too late, Michelle! My daughter (18 months) is going to marry M. Small - they just don't know it yet.
By M. Small: peewee Internet mack daddy.
By Wednesday, June 13, 2007 Sleep Study, Part II When we transferred M. Small from his crib to his toddler bed a few weeks ago, we were almost certain that there was no way he was going to stay in it. He's an energetic kid, and doesn't do well with non-physical borders. We're fairly certain that the only thing that kept him in the crib most nights was the bars around it, and then the large drop beyond the bars if he were to climb over. The first night he asked to sleep in "my race car bed," I very earnestly explained the rules to him: just because there weren't walls, it didn't mean he could be getting up and running around. He had to stay in bed until it was time to get up, or until one of us said he could. And he's been doing great at that. Even though the walls were gone, I don't think it actually occurred to him that he could get up. The other night, it occurred to him. He had had an unusually long afternoon nap that day -- three and a half hours, to be precise -- so I wasn't expecting him to go down with his usual ease. I didn't know the half of it. Trash was trying to get him to bed while I was watching Big Love, although I heard him talking on the monitor through most of the show. Some time after it was over, I paid a brief visit to the two of them upstairs, and he was still awake. When I finally knocked off recapping for the evening and came up to bed around eleven, things were quiet. At least until I came up the stairs. One of the most precious aspects of Dr. Jellyfinger's enduring legacy is that he once literally ripped out the bedroom stairs so he could get a king-sized mattress up there, and then cobbled together new ones out of scrap lumber, using nails, screws, staples, glue, chewing gum, and God knows what else. Not even kidding here. I've repaired them several times, but it's still impossible to go up and down those stairs quietly, no matter how careful you are. So at eleven o'clock on Monday, when I reached the top of the stairs and heard M. Small say in an alert voice, "Daddy, is that you?" I cursed myself for not having waited longer. In a attempt at damage control, I sneaked right past his open bedroom door, knowing that if he saw me he'd be awake for another half hour. But I still kept hearing, "Daddy, is that you? Daddy, is that you?" Right up until I reached our own bedroom door. Inside our room, Trash was sitting at the computer, looking at our Flickr photos. And M. Small was sitting in Trash's lap, looking at me and asking, "Is that you, Daddy?" "Why yes," I said. "But that can't possibly be you, because it's three hours past your bedtime and you're asleep right now." Trash looked at me guiltily. "I just sensed someone in the doorway, and I thought it was one of the cats, but then when I looked up he was just standing there, and he asked, 'Can I see if it's dark outside your window, too?'" M. Small knows we always try to reward his curiosity. Cynical little cuss. She had brought him back to his bed a few times since then, but he kept returning. The last time before I had come up, he had declared, "I want to look at pictures of me and hot air balloons on the computer because I touched the peppers." She also showed him some pictures from when he was still in the NICU, and I think he may have actually been a bit alarmed at seeing himself so tiny and incompletely formed. "What happened to me?" he kept asking. We put him back to bed several hundred more times that night, and every time he would come bopping back up the hall, announcing "I need one more kiss" or "I need one more squeeze." And we're going to say no? Even closing his bedroom door didn't work, because he figured out how to open it. Finally Trash hit on the idea of positioning a baby gate across his open doorway, and he only squirmed under it once before we figured out that we had to lower it. I don't know what time he finally got to sleep, but I could still hear a bit of movement in there when Trash and I finally turned out our light after midnight. "You know he's in there quietly trashing his room," I remarked. He was pretty reluctant to get up the next morning. We may have to go over the rules again soon. posted by M. Giant 10:45 AM 6 comments 6 Comments:My 28 month old has a toddler bed in her room now (due to a nasty fall trying to escape the crib back in March). But she usually falls asleep at nap time and bed time on the floor (on pillows, usually). Attempting to keep her in the bed was a lost cause from the beginning. We do have a baby gate installed to keep her in her room. But now she's figured out that if she tells us she needs to use the potty, we will let her out for a few brief moments of freedom. Mind you, she is not potty trained and never asks to use the potty during the day time. But how can we refuse at night, thus giving her a negative view of potty training? She's definitely won this battle. The first of many, I'm sure.
By My 5 and 7 year olds still get up 2 - 3 times after we tuck them in at night - they need water, they're hungry, they need to tell us something. I hope you have better luck, but putting the boys to bed lasts about an hour at our house (and that's AFTER we've read our books).
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The most ingenious baby gate alternative I've ever seen was a screened door. Whoever installed it (clearly the parent of a toddler) took a new wooden screen door, painted it white (to match the woodwork in the room) and installed it in the doorway of the child's bedroom. There was a simple hook latch on the outside (which would possibly be a fire code violation, but a double deadbolt positioned high enough that a child couldn't reach might work...). Anyway, it amused me. I always figured that an engineer lived there.
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This is totally a damned-if-they-do, damned-if-they-don't situation, you know... Our kiddo vacillates between the getting up when she's supposed to be in bed (though these days she doesn't usually leave her room - she just plays in there in the dark with her flashlight, as she's discovered turning on the light tips us off more quickly to her covert activities) and then the REFUSAL to get up out of bed for things like a drink of water, which she is perfectly capable of wrangling for herself. Nothing like the 2am yell for room service, forcing whichever parent can no longer pretend to be sleeping through it to get up, get the water, and give it to her just so we can get back to sleep!
By That is exactly why my son, who is only 1.5 months away from turning 3, is still in his crib. He climbed out once about a year ago but never has again. So far, he hasn't yet grasped that other kids his age have big boy/girl beds, even though his younger cousin already has a toddler bed. I love that I can put him in his crib and he lies in there talking, playing, and singing to his heart's content and doesn't bother me until morning. If he ever caught us watching t.v. and eating ice cream without him he would never go to sleep!
By I like that he's pinged onto the high value you place on curiosity. For my daughter, she knows that if she asks her father for anything Swedish (a film or a book or computer game), he will NEVER EVER say no. She has managed to push her bedtime back on several occasions using this trick. (BTW, she's 10, and it still works.)
By Friday, June 08, 2007 Pottery Almost four years ago to the week, I wrote about why I wasn't reading any more Harry Potter books. That entry is here. A lot has happened since then. Two more Harry Potter books have been published, with the seventh one due next month. Two more Harry Potter movies came out, and I paid to see both of them in the theater. Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events books came to a conclusion that turned out to be one of the biggest letdowns of my life (far behind The Phantom Menace, but still quite a disappointment). And I think I picked up this kid at some point as well. But until very recently, I had still only read the first two books in the Harry Potter series and seen the first four films. My reading schedule isn't what it used to be. Between my day job, and recapping, working on writing a book of my own, blogging, and the aforementioned kid, I don't have as much time to read as I once did. I'll maybe get about ten pages under my belt before turning off the bedside lamp, which makes for about a book a month. I am becoming an illiterate peasant. So a few weeks ago, I suddenly realized that if I plan to get the first six Potter books read by the time Harry Potter and the Lengthy Hallows hits our front doorstep (and cracks it right down to the foundation), I'd better get a move-on. The first two books were a pretty quick read, kind of a refresher since I've already read them both and seen both films (the first one twice, for reasons that are now completely mysterious to me). Book three was more of a novelty; although I had seen the movie version of Prisoner of Azkaban, I wasn't previously aware of how many liberties Alfonso Cuaron took with the story (and I just realized that I've seen every film Cuaron has made this decade. The only other director I can say that about is Joss Whedon). I read most of Azkaban in Denver and on the plane back, because while Trash and I had brought a laptop for me to write on, she was there attending a conference and I was there slacking so she won (note to self: bring two laptops next time I tag along for a librarian conference). So this week I started Goblet of Fire, although I'm not even at the point in the book where the movie begins. I'm already wondering if J.K. Rowling was getting paid by the word for this one, and I'm aware I'm not the first to think that. Everyone said the house-elf subplot could have been excised from the book entirely, and I certainly don't remember missing it in the film. I might skip those parts of the book. I haven't decided yet. It might depend on how long it takes me to write a Big Love recap each week (yes, now it can be told). It's not just a race to get the six books read before the seventh comes out, but to read The Order of the Phoenix before Trash takes me to see it. Actually, now that I think about it, I'm okay with either the film or the book winning. I read two of the books first and saw two of the films first, and it was cool both ways. Although I remember sitting in the theater at the end of Chamber of Secrets and thinking, "Wait, is that it? Doesn't something else happen?" Referring back to the book, I'd have to say, not so much. Trash has been teasing me with made-up spoilers from later in the series ever since I started reading the books again. Stuff like about how Crabbe and Goyle end up saving the world and how Sirius doesn't die. Things like that, and always with a straight face. I'm planning my revenge, however. That third weekend in July, I'll be all caught up, with the events of the six previous book fresh in my mind, having just read most of them for the first time in my life (don't tell me that some of you don't kind of envy that). I'll spend Saturday morning in the front yard, diligently doing lawn work. And when the postman arrives with that giant white cardboard box, I'll intercept it, wheel it into the bathroom, lock myself in with it, and not come out until I have some good fake spoilers of my own. Wait till she hears that Ginny Weasley and Neville Longbottom are expelled from Hogwarts after being discovered in Moaning Myrtle's bathroom in the midst of a vigorous session of lapsnorkeling. That is, if she doesn't kill me first. posted by M. Giant 8:36 PM 4 comments 4 Comments:Lapsnorkeling? Tee hee
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I don't envy you for reading the books for the first time now. I love the fact that I read books 1-3 eight years ago, and have had eight years of delicious anticipation. Eight years of talking to friends, strangers, and the internet about what might happen next. I feel lucky to have been a part of the fandom for so long.
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No way, M. Giant... Neville and Professor McGonagall hook up in what looks to be the biggest scandal in Hogwards history!!!
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Those aren't fake spoilers! It was about time Crabbe and Goyle got some character development. And it added some nice twists to the "is Snape REALLY evil" debate!
By Monday, June 04, 2007 Welcome Home I think this is the longest I've been away from M. Small in two years. That time, he was not quite eight years old and thus probably didn't understand what was going on. But when I got home, he was standing in the living room, holding himself up by leaning on the sofa, and his knees started bopping up and down in a fair approximation of jumping with excitement. His expression was difficult to read around his pacifier, but it was pretty clear that he was glad to see me. Last Friday, when Trash and I left in the evening, we were glad he was awake to see us go. No matter how many times we had explained to him in words that we were going to be gone for a couple of days and that his grandma would be staying with him, we didn't want him waking up and finding us gone. So when our minivan from Airport Taxi arrived, we made sure he was watching out the front window as we went outside, dumped our luggage in the back, climbed in, and rode off. Of course, we were careful not to go to pieces ourselves until we were well out of sight, and when Trash called on our cell phone about ninety seconds later, her mom assured us that M. Small was doing just fine. Naturally, we called him several times a day from Denver. Each. He would always talk to us, saying he missed us and loved us and look at his shirt (holding the phone up to it in the latter case), but I still don't think he quite understood. Yesterday he asked his mom over the phone, "Are you still in a taxi?" Trash tried to explain that no, we'd just ridden the taxi to the airport, where an airplane had taken us to another city, just like it had with him to Albuquerque last year. "I can't go in a taxi," he said. I hope he realizes that when we leave him for the better part of three days, it's for something a lot more interesting than an extended taxi ride, especially one that would have cost more than it will to send him to college. I was glad that the taxi I took home from the airport wasn't the same maroon minivan we'd left in, but I needn't have worried. He was in the middle of his afternoon nap when I got home, and so didn't witness my arrival. But excuse me for now. I think I hear him moving down the hall now, and I want to see what kind of reaction I get this time. posted by M. Giant 2:05 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:
Denver? How come? See, now I don't know anything that's going on.
By Friday, June 01, 2007 To the Curb Trash is always on the lookout for a good deal. And where can you get a better deal than by the side of the road, where somebody has ditched something they don't want any more? She also says it's better for the environment to reuse preexisting items than to buy new ones. I, however, am in favor of an environment in which I don't have to go try to fit stuff in my car before someone else shows up and takes it. For example, a couple of weeks ago, when CorpKitten was in town, the two of them took M. Small for a walk and hadn't been gone for more than five minutes when they discovered a large stack of discarded picket fence segments. Since we've been planning to fence in a section of our backyard next to the garage to create a little play area, Trash smelled opportunity. All she had to do was call me on her cell phone, tell me to get in the car, come drive over to where they were, and start loading them into the back of the station wagon two at a time, while taking all possible care with the protruding nails that threatened to rip my upholstery and give it tetanus. CorpKitten helped me load and unload them, riding back and forth with me and holding them in place while my car was running on fumes and Trash was valiantly trying to keep M. Small entertained by walking his stroller up and down the steep hill where she'd found the fence. Obviously after an hour or so of that, M. Small had lost interest in a walk. Fortunately, so had everyone else. And then a couple of days ago, Trash was on her way to a work thing in the evening when she spotted a bunk bed frame that someone had set out on the curb. She thought I should go get it. "We only have one kid," I pointed out. "He might have friends over," she said. "I don't know how I'm going to get it into my car," I protested. "You'll figure it out," she assured me. "I don't wanna," I whined. "Just go look," she said. So I stuck M. Small into his car seat and we headed off down the street. "Where we going?" he asked me. "I dunno, kid," I muttered. So we got there, and M. Small loved the white metal frame at first sight, immediately beginning to climb up the ladder. Clearly I was outvoted. Fortunately, I could see how the bed frame could be disassembled. The thoughtful owners had been kind enough to take all the bolts out and tape them to the frame in a Ziploc bag. All I had to do was get it apart and put all the pieces in the back of my station wagon. While I was still cogitating on how exactly I was going to accomplish that, it started to rain. I put M. Small back in the car, so now I didn't even have help from him any more. But then this old hippie came along, who had just come out to see if his car windows were closed, and he helped me get stuff in. We quickly realized that if M. Small was going to be in his car seat in the back, the largest pieces would be resting partially on his head, so he was just going to have to ride in the front for those five or six blocks, which meant I had to unstrap and reinstall his car seat next to me. And the bed frame, even disassembled, was far too large for me to close the tailgate even partially. I admit that I was in a hurry to get it in and get going as a result of the rain, so I didn't do the best packing I could have. It was pretty much built around the concept of jamming stuff in as tightly as possible and hoping the tension would hold it in place. This would have to be supplemented by an extra-careful driving style: slow, steady, and never, ever uphill. We had just gone around the block and were at least headed in the right direction when I was not entirely surprised to hear a metallic crash behind me. In my rearview mirror, I saw a large, white, U-shaped bar resting in the middle of the street and receding behind me at about three miles per hour. The other U-shaped bar was half in and half out of the car, dragging along the pavement. "What's that noisy sound?" M. Small asked me over the racket as we pulled over. "Part of the bed falling out of the car," I explained. "I think I should go back and get it, what do you say?" "Please," said M. Small happily, since that's almost always the answer to the question "What do you say?" His second guess was "Thank you." So while I was running back up the street in the rain, an SUV came along and ran over the U-bar. It rattled noisily and settled back into the street with a couple of distinct new bends. I suppose I'm lucky it didn't take out the vehicle's transmission. "I can't believe she didn't see that," said a guy walking past. "She was on her cell phone." Despite the fact that it was raining harder, my second packing job was much better than the first, although it required me to drive with my right arm cocked uncomfortably behind myself, holding four large segments in place at once. With my tailgate open. With M. Small totally getting his Sean Preston Federline Spears on in the shotgun seat. In the pouring rain. With only one wiper blade. When we got to the single traffic light on our way back, I took advantage of the pause to call Trash and tell her, "The next time you see something on the side of the road that you want me to come get, you can take a flying leap." And then I hung up before the light turned green. I would have hated to run over a bed frame or something. It was still coming down in torrents when M. Small and I got home a minute later, but he didn't want to wait in the car for it to let up. I picked him up, got out of the car, and dashed with him to the back door and inside. I hadn't even put him down before he asked, "What happened to my shoe?" Indeed, one of his socks was exposed to the elements. "Good question," I said. "Did you lose it in the yard or in the car?" "In the car," he said after some thought. "Then it's staying out there with your bent new bed until it stops raining," I informed him. He seemed to be fine with that. When it stopped raining a little later, I went out and unloaded the bed frame pieces, surveying the damage as I did so. The U-bar still looked like a U from the right angle, but from the side it looked more like a ( than a |. And the two rectangular brackets that hold up the horizontal part of the upper bed had been flattened against the poles. I decided to hang on to it for now, though. Who knows, maybe with a little bodywork it can be repaired. Getting it fixed might even cost less than a new frame would have, and we'll still be ahead. Oh, and by the way? After the rain I found M. Small's soaked left shoe in the yard. So there. posted by M. Giant 11:10 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:
Psssst to Trash - have you heard about Freecycle? Same "saving stuff from the landfills," environmentally friendly theory, only you can arrange a convenient pick-up time for items you are taking and there's no "hurry and get that off the curb before someone else does and/or it starts spewing weather down on us" stress.
By Freecycle rules.
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And you people laughed, no, loudly MOCKED the rubber-necking yokels that sent their 8 year old hauling down the street for six blocks to pick up our old computer monitor. And bookshelf. And bar stools. You are SO THEM!! Teeth aside of course...
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