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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Friday, November 28, 2008 Lighten Up I've written before about how I changed the process of putting lights on the house from a full-weekend ordeal to something I breeze through in a matter of hours. I used to spend days out in the front yard, working my way through one string of lights after the next, plugged into the porch light and stretched out across the frozen yard. I'd stand there shivering, painstakingly replacing bulb after bulb in hopes of bringing fifty or a hundred tiny lights back to life. When that failed (and it always did), I'd try to cannibalize the lights on that string to patch up the next one. Only to find that those lights didn't fit in the other string. Not fun anyway, and even less fun when crunching around in the snow while trying to manipulate these tiny little bits of plastic and glass with fingers that had long gone nerveless from the cold. In trying to create a "thousand points of light" effect, I ended up with few more lights and precious little point. So years ago, I quit trying to fix every string of lights and just started throwing out the ones that didn't work any more. Of course, in these difficult times, concerns about the environment and the economy make that a less viable option. Now if a string is half-burned out, it goes on the bushes, where the dark part of the string isn't visible. It's my version of recycling. The trouble with this plan is that I had forgotten how many half-burned-out strings I had at the end of last season. It was fine last year when the bush next to our front stoop looked like a robot on life support during daylight hours, but when I broke out the exterior lights this week it just meant a lot of trips to the trash bin. One other thing I tried this year was keeping the inside lights and the outside lights separate, so after I did the house I'd have enough left over to illuminate the tree inside. This is important, because once I have just a couple of thousand lights on the tree but I'm all out of strings, Trash won't wait for me to run out for more, and she starts putting up ornaments and garland on branches that still have several needles languishing in relative shadow. So the inside lights went in the basement when we took them down last January, and the outside lights went into the garage when I took them down last June. But the main advantage of that this year was that after a few hours, I could finally see an endpoint because I was running low on outdoor light strings that worked. I kept plugging them in outside, having them come up dark, and then bringing them in to try them out inside, just in case they actually were on and simply overwhelmed by the daylight. But even with the time saved, the waste of this method continues to bother me. So last year I decided to start phasing in the new LED lights. They're a little more expensive, but they're also brighter, more energy efficient, and longer-lasting. Or so I thought. Of the three LED strings I bought last year, two and a half are still working. At ten or twelve bucks per bulb, maybe this wasn't the smart investment I thought it was. Even so, it wasn't the lights that were out when I tested them that got on my nerves. It was the ones that went out after I put them up. Like the one I was stringing along the railing of the front stoop. That one was fine, until my bare palm brushed across a broken bulb and the two copper leads that used to send current through a tiny filament to light it up instead did that to my hand. You'd be surprised how much juice goes through those things. I know I was. Another nice benefit of the incident was that my brief contact with the wires shorted out the whole string. It's nice to know that of all the things I suck at, I can add "being an electrical component" to the list. And then there's the "high string." The front of our house has a big triangle over the front door and kitchen window whose apex is a good twenty feet above our front walk. More than half of the Christmases we've lived here, Trash has tried to talk me out of outlining that peak in lights because she's kind of superstitious about me working a staple gun when two stories above the concrete while balancing on one foot on the top rung of an extension ladder that's balanced on a narrow, icy step. Some of those years, I even listened to her. This year, I got that high string up pretty quickly. And then half of it burned out while it was up there. The whole string going dark would have been better. Instead of a neat triangle of lights, I was going to have a backwards, fallen "7." So I did what I swore I'd never do again: While leaving it in place, I tried to patch up the string by replacing one bulb at a time. Except that instead of doing it while crunching around on the frozen snow, I was dong it two stories above the concrete while balancing on one foot on the top rung of an extension ladder that was balanced on a narrow step. Which at least wasn't icy. And, as usual, it didn't work, so I had to rip the whole thing down. And by this time I was out of strings that would fit there (all I had left were the kind with one prong that's inexplicably wider than the other, when the only places I had to plug it in was the female ends of other cords with equal-sized slots). By this time, I was in a pretty foul mood. And then dealing with the light-up animatronic reindeer that had gotten all tangled up in the garage over the summer didn't improve my mood any. The best part of that was that one of them didn't light up at all, so I got to throw away my first electric ruminant. But it was all worth it, because M. Edium was going to come home that evening and see the house all lit up, which always makes him so happy. Trash picked him up from school, and excitedly pointed out the glorious spectacle to him as the car pulled up in front. "Eh," he said. "Needs more lights." Maybe this is a tradition that I can start passing along to the next generation. posted by M. Giant 8:16 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:
Go to Target. Buy the $19.99 Light fixer gun.
By
I've never heard of Coco's magical light fixing gun, but another suggestion, that at least saves the fingers from freezing, would be to test all the strings of lights indoors.
By Tuesday, November 25, 2008 Not Easy, But Plenty Off When I was putting plastic shrinkwrap over the windows a couple of weeks ago, Trash and I were debating which windows we should leave unsealed. She's a good cook, but we do have the occasional smoke emergency in the kitchen when the oven gets too hot. It wouldn't be so bad if our smoke alarms weren't hard-wired into the house. Now when a black cloud rises forth we have to race open a window or two before the alarms start keening. It was much easier before we had a kid, when our smoke alarms were the kind we could just leave the batteries out of. Anyway, the discussion of which windows to leave uncovered came to an end when Trash said, "Or we could grow up and clean the oven." I said, "Meh," which I thought would be the end of it. Except that on Thursday, we're hosting an "orphan Thanksgiving" at our house, and our friend BuenaOnda is in town from Mexico. And she wants to make the turkey. In our oven. Now, all I know about cooking turkeys is what I've learned by cultural osmosis, and even that's limited by the fact that I shut down when I hear the word "cavity." But I don't want to have to say to BuenaOnda on Thursday morning, "Thanks so much for making the turkey! Don't turn the oven up past 293.2 degrees, 'kay?" So my course of action was obvious. I wasn't happy about it, though. Cleaning an oven is a dirty, smelly, uncomfortable job. You have to take out all the racks and stuff. You have to work bent over. The can of oven cleaner lives in the deepest part of the space under the sink, and it dates back to a previous century. And for an individual like myself, the task is fraught with ways for me to get suffocated, poisoned, burned, and blown up all at the same time. If I want to know what it's like to have my head in an oven I'll read The Bell Jar. Plus it's so hard to find a putty knife. And how often are you supposed to clean an oven, anyway? I mean, it's not like we've cleaned this one before, but we haven't even had it that long. Barely five and a half years, in fact. Don't tell me we have to take on this project twice a decade. But last night I sucked it up. Yes, I sprayed oven cleaner all around inside there and closed the door. All done! Then today I thought I should probably finish the job. Again, I don't know what BuenaOnda's exact plans for the turkey are, but I can't imagine she'll want it to taste…what's the word? Caustic? After I was done, I cranked the dial up to "Broil," and ten minutes later the air in the kitchen was Antarctica-clear save for a pleasant aromatic hint of finely aged gravy. Plus I had forgotten that the brownish panel set into the front is in fact a window through which one can view one's food without opening the door. Genius!. Except before all that, I decided I needed some rubber gloves first, based on the instructions on the Easy Off can ("Neglecte not to protect thy meat-hooks with gloving of cured sheep's-bladder" are the exact words). I don't own rubber gloves. I don't even rent them, like Fletch. So I went to the drugstore to pick some up, and then walked off and forgot them at the register so I had to drive back. When I got home, I discovered that rubber gloves come in different sizes. I may have the smallest hands of any bass guitar player in history, but the mediums are small enough to get me acquitted. And when I had to answer the door to the big, burly FedEx guy with my hands encased in dainty yellow rubber like my mom used to wear to mop the floor, I felt oddly self-conscious. I found myself wishing for mighty black gauntlets all the way up to my elbows, along with a matching apron or even hip waders. Add a splatter shield for my face and I could have been rendering a hog or dismembering a corpse in the bathtub. And then, when I was finished and everything was back together and the oven had been on "broil" for eleven minutes, every smoke alarm in the house went off. But that was only because of the skillet I had set on a lit burner to dry and then forgotten about. So the oven's clean, but maybe there's still a little growing up to do. posted by M. Giant 8:05 PM 7 comments 7 Comments:
Love it love it.
By It's time for a new oven w/self cleaning feature!
By I'm with Anon...I'd have just bought a new oven.
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Self-clean is the way to go. Seriously.
By There is no greater struggle than a person taller than 5'7" trying to clean an over. It's not even something you can sit cross-legged and do either, it's just uncomfortable. Luckily I have had self-cleaning for my last two places...
By I gotta add to the chorus: self-cleaning is the way to go.
By
Agree on the self-cleaning. It's golden.
By Sunday, November 23, 2008 Passenger I was sitting near the back of the cabin, in an aisle seat on the starboard side. For some reason, Trash was in the row behind mine, also in the aisle. Suddenly everything flipped. I remember thinking that if I hadn't had my seatbelt on, I certainly would have slammed into the ceiling. Out the window, nothing was visible but skyscrapers. On both sides. We were falling. Backwards, it felt like. Windows were broken, and I could feel debris streaming past me in the howling wind. There wasn't much screaming; just frightened, incoherent chattering from the rows ahead. There may or may not have been the mangled corpse of a hapless pedestrian stuck to the wing, its churned-up face pressed against one of the few intact windows ahead of me. I leaned around the back of my seat to clasp hands with Trash, who seemed oddly calm. And my last thought before the pilot regained control and returned us to low but level flight was the worst part: This time it's not a dream. It was, of course. It always is. I've heard about lucid dreaming, the skill whereby you realize a dream is just that, even while it's happening, and you take control of events. I've never gotten the knack of that. The closest I've ever come is thinking in a dream, Boy, I sure hope [x] doesn't happen now, whereupon [x] invariably happens, and forthwith. And there's the this time it's real factor, which fools me every time, even though very few of my recurring dreams have ever come true. The problem is that my dreams are smarter than I am (how else to explain the fact that I come up with my best jokes in my sleep? Once I even generated an entire 30 Rock spec script in a dream, before ever having seen an episode. Just because I couldn't remember a word of it in the morning doesn't mean it wasn't brilliant). And they're a little worse every time. The first version, in which I was freaked out by how the plane lost so much altitude that the pilot kept slaloming under power lines and overpasses, would seem like a theme park ride to me today. It kind of makes me miss my old recurring dreams, the ones I used to have in which I had to start school all over, beginning with first grade. At first there was the horror that I would have to go through all that again, quickly replaced by the realization that this time, with the knowledge and education I lacked the first time around, I'd be able to get spectacular grades and, when high school came around, score some serious tail. Of course I always woke up before high school. Then there was the old one where I used to be trying to drive a car from the back seat. The main variation on that one was that sometimes I couldn't reach the brake pedal, and sometimes I could but it didn't work. It probably doesn't take a genius to interpret any of the above back seat dreams (not counting the school one -- like I said, I never stayed asleep long enough to end up in any back seats in the that one). At my job, I work with large numbers of people on complicated projects with immovable deadlines. If one of the people upstream screws up badly enough, the inevitable result is a crash. But when crunch-time comes, and I'm about to give up on the whole thing, somehow it always comes together. As I write this, I'm in the final days of the biggest such project of my entire career. It's going to get done; I just don't know how yet. And it's not that I'm a control freak, because I'm not. I'm not, really. Say I'm not. No, say it like you mean it, dammit! And look at me when you say it! Thank you. Now where was I again? posted by M. Giant 7:19 AM 1 comments 1 Comments:Glad to know that someone else has dreams in which they are not in control...! And recurring...got to wonder about those. Say hi to Trash! I need to know the story behind that!
By Tuesday, November 18, 2008 Enjoying the Season Trash used to make me crazy with her Christmas shopping. She loved to start early. And before you nod in recognition, this time of the year right now is not early. We used to take long road trips out west around our anniversary in September, and one year she made us sit and try to think of gift ideas for people all the way from Rapid City to Billings. It used to annoy me in the fall, but then come Thanksgiving, she would have our Christmas shopping all finished, and we could "enjoy the season." In case you're part of the majority of people who have always wanted to finish early so you could "enjoy the season," but could never really visualize what that would entail, I strongly recommend it. It involves listening to a lot of Christmas music at home because a) it's too cold to go outside if you don't have to, and b) you don't have to. The only downside was that she liked to go through all the gifts we'd bought for people, over and over, because she kept losing the list of what was going to whom. I suspect on purpose. The pattern has evolved over the years. When she went to grad school, she didn't have time to finish the Christmas shopping in the fall. Her demanding course load meant that she could only do half of it then. And after she graduated, she never really got back onto her old schedule. She'd be stressed out about it for weeks leading right up to the holiday, saying things like, "I can't believe how far behind we are. It's the second week of December and we're only 98% done!" One big step forward is that we moved the gift/recipient list onto Excel a few years ago, so at least we only have to go through each year's list three or four times. In more recent years, she has discovered the joys of Christmas shopping online. She orders stuff in great lots, which has the double benefit of knocking down great swathes of our list at a stroke and getting us free shipping. Plus we don't have to go outside except to bring in those unnecessarily large boxes that are semi-regularly left on our front step. And I could tell you about some of the bargain sites she frequents, but I wouldn't want you to think she got your gift there. Your gift was carefully and lovingly selected before being imported by hand from the finest Asian nations (/Smoove B). Another big help is that this year's list has been winnowed down. One of the hidden advantages of our current economy is that people are expecting fewer gifts, and fewer people are expecting any gifts. So thanks, financial crisis! And now, a week before Thanksgiving, most of the columns in that Excel spreadsheet have been highlighted in green, indicating done. The ones that aren't, Trash knows what we're getting. The only reason she hasn't started wrapping yet is because we don't have our Christmas tree up (I haven't made the case about the hibiscus yet). So once again, we can look forward to enjoying the season And no, we're not doing your shopping. After we fill in those last few gaps, we are done buying Christmas gifts. At least until the January sales. posted by M. Giant 9:33 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Sunday, November 16, 2008 Putting Down Roots Our friend Bitter moved out of the house this week and into her new apartment. We miss her already, but the household has a new member that I'd like you to meet. Here it is:  It's a hibiscus tree that M. Edium got me for Father's Day. It spent the summer outside on the patio, generally at the mercy of the elements and how often I remembered to filter some water through the fibrous mass in its pot. It even bloomed once, before it came home. Now that it's moved inside and officially become a houseplant for at least the winter, I'm finally paying it some attention. But let me back up a little. About 18 years. I've always been a little weird about houseplants. When Trash and I first moved in together, we got this little one-and-a-half-leafed fichus that I got way too invested in. Like Jean Reno in The Professional, only with not so many guns. I misted it and gave it plant food and talked to it. We made grand plans for our future together, when I would be a professional writer and it would be a mighty specimen straight out of Little Shop of Horrors. Then we got cats and they started eating it, and the sprayer started to get used on Strat and Orca more than it did on the plant. Months, this went on. Finally I had the genius idea of placing the plant where I thought it would be out of their reach or at least out of their everyday awareness, on the high windowsill of our garden-level apartment. I should have predicted the outcome: the next time Orca decided to enjoy a green snack, it ended in a loud crash and a pile of terracotta, dirt, and dismembered fichus. Three leaves were all it ever had. From that day on, I resolved never to let another plant into my house -- or my heart -- again. I loved my cats, and couldn't change them, so why let myself in for all that grief? It was an overreaction in the other direction. In fact, years later, when a coworker gave me a small cactus for my desk at work, I ended up letting it die out of neglect. It took several years, but I managed it. And now there's this hibiscus tree, which was only supposed to be in our house for the few days between the first frost and the time when my parents could stop by to bring it home to their place for the winter. But a funny thing happened in those few days. Well, not really funny, per se, unless you think water is funny. But not long after the sad, droopy, Charlie-Brown-Christmas-tree hibiscus came inside and I had watered it a few times, the sparse leaves that had been hanging in a limp gray fringe for weeks started turning back to green and spreading out horizontally, in a clear and mystifying defiance of the laws of gravity. What was up with that? And what could I make it do next? Certainly not go home with my parents. Since then I've been maybe a little too solicitous of this tree. I keep its non-absorbent root-ball as moist as I can, make sure I keep the blinds open during the day so it can get plenty of sunlight, chase Exie away from it, and yes, mist. Now this week, the ends of some of the branches are starting to develop these funny pointy green things. What manner of magic have I birthed? You don't need to worry about me, though. I'm not going to lose perspective again this time. I haven't run right out to buy a bigger pot for it, or the most expensive potting soil I could find, or plant food to dissolve into the spray bottle, and I hardly ever talk to it so far. Although I will confess to being a little concerned about where we're going to keep it when the Christmas tree goes up in its current spot. You don't think I could talk Trash into letting it be our Christmas tree, do you? Because just imagine what that could do for its self-esteem. posted by M. Giant 2:01 PM 4 comments 4 Comments:
If you want to explore your obsession with houseplants further, or even just protect the hibiscus from Exie, you might invest in a bottle of Bitter Apple spray (available at pet stores). The stuff is magical in terms of convincing kitties that your houseplants aren't their own, personal salad bar. The stuff smells a wee bit funky when it is first sprayed (sort of a cross between past-their-prime raspberries and alcohol, like a weird, cheap hairspray) but the smell dissipates fairly quickly. If you have a smarter cat, they'll catch on in short order that the plants taste icky and leave them alone. (If you have a less intelligent feline, like our present crazy cat, you may need to keep re-spraying every few weeks forever. Fortunately Bitter Apple comes in extra-large bottles.)
By A lovely, wistful, funny children's book that features a hibiscus early on: The Marzipan Pig, by Russell Hoban
By
My cats are easily distracted from my houseplants by cat grass that I buy at the pet store (along the lines of this stuff: http://www.petsmart.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2755041)
By I think you'll be fine. It's pretty friggin hard to kill hibiscus. Trust me, I'm like the angel of death when it comes to plants, but my two hibiscus have been alive for 6 months.
By Wednesday, November 12, 2008 Secret Obsession Hey, all - Trash was kind enough to come up with a guest entry for tonight. After I made her. Bright lights may have been involved, but a confession is a confession. Enjoy. My secret obsession? I love stupid computer games. No, no shoot-em-ups or role playing. No, I love these ridiculous time management games you can buy from Big Fish games where you pretend to be a waitress or a daycare worker or a hotel manager, and then you spend increasingly frantic hours trying to serve your customers and make them happy despite idiotic obstacles that in reality no self-respecting person would ever endure. I know, I make it sound so appealing. And I do understand that the average person wouldn't want to spend several hours - or in my case days, since I don't have much time - managing a fake ranch or building new towns, but I am obsessed. I am happy to fork over my hard-earned cash to escape into a world that requires me to be far more organized about my time than I get to be in real life. I excitedly spend hours determining the order to complete office tasks in The Office (with actual characters from the show) or the best order to serve my coffee house clients. No, the games aren't all the same (so shut it, Mr. Giant head). The Diner Dash series (now on its fifth version!) is far superior to the boring Cake Mania offerings (yawn). M. Giant would argue that I am making them sound more fun than they actually are, but he is stubborn and blind and wrong. For some reason, they are actually fun - and not just to me, as is supported by the ever-lengthening list of available games. There is something deeply satisfying about a job where you have specific goals and activities, and when you screw up you simply start over. You could argue that it seems as though being a research librarian would offer the same satisfaction of a job well done, not to mention an incredible amount of organizational skills, and you would be correct, but it's different. I can't explain it, but nothing brings a stressful day to a close better than a quick round of Diner Dash. And no, they aren't paying me to say any of this. You don't think they would, do you? Labels: trash talkin' posted by M. Giant 7:28 PM 15 comments15 Comments:
I love Diner Dash, and am too cheap to buy it. But I love it. You are awesome.
By
I too am addicted to these games. I think it's because I'm a control freak and I can decide how many pigs to raise or who gets served first. But I could easily spend HOURS in one of these "clicky clicky" games. I figured it was me and a bunch of retirees playing them. I get really mad when I download one and it's super boring or poorly programmed.
By
I knew I wasn't the only one who's addicted to games like these or else they wouldn't be releasing new versions of Diner Dash so often. I'm addicted to time management games like these too.
By I lurve those kinds of games! If you go to friv.com, there's a pizza making game that I was obsessed with for several weeks that I think you might like. Long live stupid gaming!
By Yep, I'm addicted to these, too! Diner Dash is great--I must be behind, though, I didn't know we were only version 5! I actually like Cake Mania, also, for some inexplicable reason.
By I enjoy the hidden object games, such as the Mystery Case Files. I really wish the new one was available for the PC. I also like the ones that require you to solve a puzzle, like Mushroom Age (which is wonderfully silly-I love it!) and Escape from the Museum. Great way to relax in the evening while semi-listening to the TV.
By
My name is Jennifer and I am a Big Fish Game Addict.
By Oh! Don't forget Farm Frenzy - I can spend hours trying to save poor chickens from bears. I am also a slave to Big Fish.
By
Interesting "secret obsession", Trash, thanks for sharing. (Although a tad tame, I must say; are you immune to bright white confession-inducing lights?)
By
Ohhhh - I am going to love these games. I had never heard of them!
By
Count me in on the "Farm Frenzy" love. I especially am tickled when the "AAAARRRRRRRnnnnHHHH, AAAARRRRRRRRnnnnnHHHHH, AAAARRRRRRRRnnnnnHHHHH" sound of the invading bear comes in and I have to run to the rescue!
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Yay! Trash wrote an entry!!!
By I'm going to start inventing games for people like you. Watching Paint Dry! Extreme Standing! Pinwheel Holding! Rocking Chair Championships! Competitive Staring!
By I LOVE Diner Dash! Yeah Trash!
By
This comment has nothing to do with the post subject, but everything to do with the post author:
By Sunday, November 09, 2008 Lovey Boy Are kids supposed to be this fickle? I'm not asking because M. Edium has lost interest in us, or any of his relatives or friends. I'm only wondering, because one always hears stories about kids who have had a certain toy from which they were inseparable throughout their childhood. From the Velveteen Rabbit to Hobbes the tiger, it seems like the most usual thing in the world. They're commonly called loveys, and the child is all but bereft without it. Not that M. Edium doesn't do that. He does. But he's a serial lovey-er. Here are a few of the items he's been passionately yet briefly attached to over just the past few months: "Turtle," a stuffed turtle that he spotted at the mall, kind of away from all the other toys. M. Edium felt bad for it, and decided that it needed a family and we would be it. Very poignant, especially for a little boy who might have been just beginning to understand the meaning of adoption. "Linny," a stuffed guinea pig from Wonder Pets. This resulted in Turtle being demoted to being just a fellow Wonder Pet, Tuck the turtle. Very poignant, for different reasons. "Fuzzy Shuttle," a stuffed space shuttle that he got at Kennedy Space Center, which he carried around Walt Disney World. "Cubing WALL-E," A stuffed WALL-E toy that he got at Walt Disney World, which he carried around Kennedy Space Center. "Fuzzy Ghost," A ghost Beanie Baby. This is the first lovey that he borrowed from someone else, namely one of his grandmothers. There was a time when we never would have done this, but we have since realized that given his proclivities, we might as well check them out of the library. A stuffed bumblebee. My sister, DeBitch the Elder, got it with a flower delivery a while ago and gave it to him. Lately it has leapt to the forefront of his attentions, to the point where we got halfway home without it last night and had to turn around. Fortunately we weren't traveling by air. Oh, and if you think we don't call it "Busy Bee," you are out of your mind. And then there are the things that aren't stuffed: A little plastic pumpkin on a stick, that goes "waka waka waka" when you shake it. I got it for him at the Halloween store because it was the cheapest thing there. You know how upset a kid gets when a lovey goes missing, and nobody gets any peace? That would have been worth it this time. A plastic coin from Kennedy Space Center, which he lost twice before we got home. It was much less interesting to him during the intervals when he knew where it was. But maybe there is hope. Along with Busy Bee, his current lovey is a multicolored caterpillar that was literally one of the first things he ever owned. He had a few separate phases with it as a baby, but now it is back with a vengeance. Its name? "Lovey." posted by M. Giant 6:43 PM 5 comments 5 Comments:Bean is six and she still does the same thing. Recently, a baby favorite of a stuffed duck head attached to a little blanky (named Duck Duck Goose) has reemerged as a fave. But, generally, she rotates through a variety of animals and changes up every month or so. The good thing is that if you forget one animal, you can easily substitute another. The bad part is that if she decides a particular one should be in favor and you can't find it, you're out of luck.
By I thought I was so smart when I bought a second "puppa", an ikea dog, for just-in-case, except now it's all about this music-box in a cow that when it plays, the cow's head slowly rotates. Not only is this cow NOT WASHABLE I don't know where it came from and I don't have a backup cow.
By My niece has five, count'em, FIVE fluffy pink bunnies. Her overindulgent parents are terrified that they will find themselves without a bunny and she'll panic. At first I thought it was cute, and now it just annoys the snot out of me.
By
I love that my oldest child (now age 10) has the lovey that I had when I was a child. It's a stuffed tiger (appropriately named Tigey) that looks, well, about how you would think a 37 year old stuffed animal would look.
By M. Giant, I think we all love things serially and intensely. I don't know if people ever get over this style of attachment. The flexible and fleeting nature of it *is* disturbing, indeed.
By Thursday, November 06, 2008 Forward I just want to give a shout-out to Trash, who spent quite a bit of time during the last couple of weeks calling people to remind them to vote, and offering to help arrange rides to the polls for them if they needed it. She did great, important work, and the fact that all the people she talked to were excited and happy to talk to her doesn't take away from that one bit. I thought about pitching in, but thought I would only be counterproductive on account of the fact that I am terse and charmless on the phone. I guess I could have called on behalf of the other candidate to drag him down, but that probably would have been disingenuous of me. And, as it would turn out, rather unnecessary. * * * Trash and I were in New Orleans in January 2001. Rather than hanging around in our frankly undeservedly luxurious hotel suite to watch the inauguration, we went out to get some more food. Or to get hungry. The thing about visiting New Orleans is that we were always either eating, about to eat, recently done eating, or walking around while trying to get hungry again so we could eat some more. It was a different country back then, for a lot of reasons. George W. Bush wasn't the same guy to me that he is now, by a longshot. Back then, I just saw him as some lightweight with a famous name, an amiable caretaker who I could only hope wouldn't be capable of doing too much damage in his one term. That has changed. The country has changed. The world has changed. And so, obviously, has New Orleans. I could go on. Both candidates promised to bring change. I say we've had plenty of change in the past eight years. Too much, in fact. Part of the rap against conservatives is that many of them are seen as wanting to go back to the way things were. Does that make me a conservative? Because for quite a while, I've kind of been wanting some things to go back to the way they were in January 2001 and before. Up to and including a possible return trip to the Big Antediluvian Easy, especially if we can get that suite so cheap again. But then I think about my son, who wasn't here in January 2001, and how I'd never want to go back to a world without him in it. I remember when he was less than a month old, four days home from the NICU, and after his third or fourth late-night bottle of the night, I checked the election returns again and worried about the world he was going to grow up in, wondering if it was too late to somehow raise him in the nineties. What can I tell you, I was sleep-deprived. But there's no way back. Even if some people still resist that idea, there's no way back. The only way is forward. More than I have in some time, I'm looking forward to forward. posted by M. Giant 8:56 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:Oh, M. Giant, that is a lovely entry. (And I feel you on the New Orleans gastronomic experience, too.)
By Tuesday, November 04, 2008 Work With Me What the -- what are you doing? Why are you reading this? Don't you have stuff you need to be doing? Stuff like…VOTING? Go do that. I'll wait. In fact, if you want to check back in on your iPhone while you're waiting in line, I'll be right here. Call 866-OUR VOTE if anyone at the polls tries to fuck with you. * * * Thanks. So, I thought I'd plug a book besides my own for once, because I'm sure you're all sick to death of hearing me faff on about A TV Guide to Life by now. So check this out. You may not recognize the names of either of the authors listed on the cover, but you do know one of them as Trash. She's been trying to downplay it all year, like it's not as big a deal as my book. I maintain that getting a book published like I did is what writers are supposed to do, whereas the fact that she is not one and got published anyway is quite as impressive. She brought home some extra copies last week, and they're on the bookcase next to the "potato book," as M. Edium still calls my book. He hasn't come up with a snappy nickname for mom's book yet. It's still just "mom's book." As opposed to "dad's book." It's kind of awesome that our kid's going to grow up assuming that it's perfectly normal to have two parents who have published books. Then one day he'll get old enough to realize that it's kind of special, and he'll hold it over other kids' heads until the day he meets Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman's kids and they give him a little perspective. Or the Jolie/Pitt kids, with whom he can at least exchange adoption stories as well. * * * You did vote, right? Okay, good. I see your sticker. Thanks. posted by M. Giant 5:24 AM 11 comments 11 Comments:When is the book signing?
By Hey, some of us live in states with early voting and did it two weeks ago, okay?? Where is Febrifuge? He can back me up on this!
By
Hell yes, I voted.
By Wow. Thats a very smart book...congratulations!
By Yay for academic publishing!!!
By Congrats, Trash - hopefully your son will come up with a snappy sobriquet for you book some time soon!
By It looks like a TAR flag book to me. Congrats, Trash.
By Congratulations, Trash! That's wonderful!
By
!!!!
By It _is_ cool that he'll grow up with two writer parents. Now if only Trash would start blogging! Congrats to her on the book!
By I'm form the UK so I couldn't vote but I really, really wanted to. Congrats on the book(s) and the election :)
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