S'wee doobie dah doo s'wee doo dahbee dah doo-wah. Doo-wah!
I'm rather tempted to make one of those illustrious "GuYz, I'm DrUnK!" posts but we all know it would be a big, fat lie.
I will not deny that I finished off the bottle of Riesling my father sent me for my birthday (it needed to be done...oxidation is a terrible thing to do to a wine like that...nummies...) but the only significant problem seems to be a crumbling of my defenses against Olde English spellings and my "artistic e", meaning that I'm spending a lot of time backspacing and replacing things like "Rieslinge" and "ilvstrivs". My head's been swirly all day (stupid non-effectiveness of Excedrin on certain types of headaches) so there's really no discernible difference there.
I can't even take myself seriously when joking about alcohol; after a rather trying Monday, I called my mother and announced that I needed a beer then proceeded to blink at the ceiling and muse that I had absolutely no desire to actually get one. My sister, undoubtedly, would be/is cringing in shame at her failure to corrupt me. It all reminds me of the time I accompanied my father to the liquor store and tried to talk him into purchasing some rum. He just laughed at me. During the drive home, he said, "If you were your sister, I'd go ahead and buy it but I know you wouldn't drink it."
Incredibly and undeniably true. But just say the word with me: "rrrrrrrrrrrrruuuuuuuummmmmmmmm!!" Surely it's worth buying on merit of name alone?!
Backing up a bit and speaking of my head not being properly attached to me shoulders, I spent an extra hour at work today. I went down into the stacks about 45 minutes before my shift was supposed to end (we're working on an exceedingly massive shifting project that dementiapraecox, for one, has been slaving over for more than a year) with my iPod and my water bottle and my phone turned to utter silence. I missed my father's phone call and didn't realize how long I'd been down there until the fifteen-minutes-long classical song I'd been enjoying ended.
Whoopsies.
Ah, well, we all got a good laugh out of it and I was delighted to discover, upon stepping out of the library, that the heat had broken sometime between my 12:30 lunch break and my eventual 6:00 departure. And the Annals of the Whatever Place Society of Some Science all need to die. With a match and judicious application of lighter fluid. Why, for the love of trees, are there so MANY of them?! Why, for the love of shelf space and the continued functionality of our collective backs and arms, do we retain THIRTY YEARS' worth of them?!
At least they tend toward mildly interesting topics. Unlike the USGS Surveys, which we've been collecting since the beginning of time and haven't been moved since they met our shelves. Those? All. Need. To. Go.
Tempers do improve with the breaking of the heat, though. There have been no angry horn honks or vicious arguments outside my apartment building all day. Even if Boston is a spectacular place to spend a heat wave (come on, a Frog Pond and heat-resistant Free Shakespeare on the Common? Bliss!!), it's even nicer when the breeze is shifting a soothing seventy-something.
Shakespeare on the Common, as it happens, is "The Taming of the Shrew" this year. I believe the already lauded dementiapraecox said it best: "My feminism hurts." Still, there was a great deal of fun to be had during a ninety-seven-degrees-and-humid evening with the Bard. Bostonian accents and attitudes lend themselves more readily to that show than any I've yet seen ("Beeyahnkaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh" *insert collective shudder among female audience members*). And the people!watching was just as good as the actual show (with the notable exception of the straggly man who needs new pants - or at least a belt).
I must admit, to my chagrin, that my reading has fallen spectacularly by the wayside during the course of the last couple of weeks. I still have a number of books to write up (I'm beginning to wonder if I should hire a monkey to whip me with reeds until I've actually posted about them) but I managed to leave my copy of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell in my mother's car and it's been too hot to venture into my room to retrieve any of my other reading projects or even think about turning on a light. I AM making headway into the Pirate!!book, though. (Again with luffs for dementiapraecox, who is spending a great deal of time allowing me to pester her, these days.)
Having briefly mentioned my mother's weekendly visit, let me say that it was a blast. We rented a room in one of the suburbs so that we'd have air conditioning, went out to a Cubanish restaurant for dinner (with the ugliest light fixture I hope I ever have the misfortune to lay eyes upon), drove around in the quasi-countryside for a while (apparently she was trying to find Walden Pond), and returned to the hotel room to lounge about in pajamas simply because we could.
We also smashed our diets (well, my diet, really, because she's not really actively dieting anymore, bad woman!) into itty-bitty pieces with late-night birthday cake. We Dunkin' Donuts'd (that's a contraction, so the apostrophe is correct, thankyouverymuch) for breakfast on Sunday (mmm, bagel sandwiches) and thereby further obliterated my diet, then went shopping. Linens N' Things had put an adorable, brightly colored, glass mosaic table/stand/thingy on clearance and, since the craft store wasn't open yet (said the man who had brought his young daughter and reached the door at the same time we did, "Thaaaaanks for the iiiiiinfo, Mooooom") and we were giggly, she bought it for me.
I love parental visits and birthdays. I get spoiled rotten on both occasions and it is sheer wicked glee when they coincide.
The reason we were staking out the craft store was: bobbins for my sewing machine (we hadn't found any in the packaging, at that point). That's right, my VERY. OWN. SEWING. MACHINE.
This thing? Is awesome. It's at least ninety times the sewing machine I will ever need. It does regular running stitches and locking stitches and whatnots, but it also embroiders and can be used to cross-stitch small patterns. It's computerized and has automatic foot-raiser and stitch lock/end functions. It's beautiful. And it's all, all, all mine. I need a better room set-up to accommodate any real sewing, though. My singular attempt at real work produced a quilt trapezoid instead of a quilt square after two hours of moving various equipment on and off my desk and floor. I never have been one for strip-piecing, anyway (the single exception to that has been Ais's quilt, which I made in the spaciousness of my mother's quilting room and living room floor). Huzzah for squares!!
Shaddap, I'm a beginner, I can stick to squares forever if I want to!!
At least I have the somewhat miraculous ability to make all my mismatched squares somehow go together smoothly...you would simply not believe some of the unmatched seams that I've made quilt together nicely. None of us can quite figure it out ("us" being me, my mother, and my mother's sewing group friends - some of whom quilt professionally). By all accounts, my projects should be miserably haphazard and mismeasured. Joyfully for me, this has not been so.
Knock on wood.
In the meantime, my father's version of "The Spitfire Grill" goes up this weekend. I wish I could be home to see it. Not as badly as I wish I'd been able to see him actually be onstage in the "Oldtime Radio Show" this spring but hopefully I'll get my grubby little mitts on a videotape of each production at some point.
Hee...this song is completely representative of my mood right now. I am flighty!
I will not deny that I finished off the bottle of Riesling my father sent me for my birthday (it needed to be done...oxidation is a terrible thing to do to a wine like that...nummies...) but the only significant problem seems to be a crumbling of my defenses against Olde English spellings and my "artistic e", meaning that I'm spending a lot of time backspacing and replacing things like "Rieslinge" and "ilvstrivs". My head's been swirly all day (stupid non-effectiveness of Excedrin on certain types of headaches) so there's really no discernible difference there.
I can't even take myself seriously when joking about alcohol; after a rather trying Monday, I called my mother and announced that I needed a beer then proceeded to blink at the ceiling and muse that I had absolutely no desire to actually get one. My sister, undoubtedly, would be/is cringing in shame at her failure to corrupt me. It all reminds me of the time I accompanied my father to the liquor store and tried to talk him into purchasing some rum. He just laughed at me. During the drive home, he said, "If you were your sister, I'd go ahead and buy it but I know you wouldn't drink it."
Incredibly and undeniably true. But just say the word with me: "rrrrrrrrrrrrruuuuuuuummmmmmmmm!!" Surely it's worth buying on merit of name alone?!
Backing up a bit and speaking of my head not being properly attached to me shoulders, I spent an extra hour at work today. I went down into the stacks about 45 minutes before my shift was supposed to end (we're working on an exceedingly massive shifting project that dementiapraecox, for one, has been slaving over for more than a year) with my iPod and my water bottle and my phone turned to utter silence. I missed my father's phone call and didn't realize how long I'd been down there until the fifteen-minutes-long classical song I'd been enjoying ended.
Whoopsies.
Ah, well, we all got a good laugh out of it and I was delighted to discover, upon stepping out of the library, that the heat had broken sometime between my 12:30 lunch break and my eventual 6:00 departure. And the Annals of the Whatever Place Society of Some Science all need to die. With a match and judicious application of lighter fluid. Why, for the love of trees, are there so MANY of them?! Why, for the love of shelf space and the continued functionality of our collective backs and arms, do we retain THIRTY YEARS' worth of them?!
At least they tend toward mildly interesting topics. Unlike the USGS Surveys, which we've been collecting since the beginning of time and haven't been moved since they met our shelves. Those? All. Need. To. Go.
Tempers do improve with the breaking of the heat, though. There have been no angry horn honks or vicious arguments outside my apartment building all day. Even if Boston is a spectacular place to spend a heat wave (come on, a Frog Pond and heat-resistant Free Shakespeare on the Common? Bliss!!), it's even nicer when the breeze is shifting a soothing seventy-something.
Shakespeare on the Common, as it happens, is "The Taming of the Shrew" this year. I believe the already lauded dementiapraecox said it best: "My feminism hurts." Still, there was a great deal of fun to be had during a ninety-seven-degrees-and-humid evening with the Bard. Bostonian accents and attitudes lend themselves more readily to that show than any I've yet seen ("Beeyahnkaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh" *insert collective shudder among female audience members*). And the people!watching was just as good as the actual show (with the notable exception of the straggly man who needs new pants - or at least a belt).
I must admit, to my chagrin, that my reading has fallen spectacularly by the wayside during the course of the last couple of weeks. I still have a number of books to write up (I'm beginning to wonder if I should hire a monkey to whip me with reeds until I've actually posted about them) but I managed to leave my copy of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell in my mother's car and it's been too hot to venture into my room to retrieve any of my other reading projects or even think about turning on a light. I AM making headway into the Pirate!!book, though. (Again with luffs for dementiapraecox, who is spending a great deal of time allowing me to pester her, these days.)
Having briefly mentioned my mother's weekendly visit, let me say that it was a blast. We rented a room in one of the suburbs so that we'd have air conditioning, went out to a Cubanish restaurant for dinner (with the ugliest light fixture I hope I ever have the misfortune to lay eyes upon), drove around in the quasi-countryside for a while (apparently she was trying to find Walden Pond), and returned to the hotel room to lounge about in pajamas simply because we could.
We also smashed our diets (well, my diet, really, because she's not really actively dieting anymore, bad woman!) into itty-bitty pieces with late-night birthday cake. We Dunkin' Donuts'd (that's a contraction, so the apostrophe is correct, thankyouverymuch) for breakfast on Sunday (mmm, bagel sandwiches) and thereby further obliterated my diet, then went shopping. Linens N' Things had put an adorable, brightly colored, glass mosaic table/stand/thingy on clearance and, since the craft store wasn't open yet (said the man who had brought his young daughter and reached the door at the same time we did, "Thaaaaanks for the iiiiiinfo, Mooooom") and we were giggly, she bought it for me.
I love parental visits and birthdays. I get spoiled rotten on both occasions and it is sheer wicked glee when they coincide.
The reason we were staking out the craft store was: bobbins for my sewing machine (we hadn't found any in the packaging, at that point). That's right, my VERY. OWN. SEWING. MACHINE.
This thing? Is awesome. It's at least ninety times the sewing machine I will ever need. It does regular running stitches and locking stitches and whatnots, but it also embroiders and can be used to cross-stitch small patterns. It's computerized and has automatic foot-raiser and stitch lock/end functions. It's beautiful. And it's all, all, all mine. I need a better room set-up to accommodate any real sewing, though. My singular attempt at real work produced a quilt trapezoid instead of a quilt square after two hours of moving various equipment on and off my desk and floor. I never have been one for strip-piecing, anyway (the single exception to that has been Ais's quilt, which I made in the spaciousness of my mother's quilting room and living room floor). Huzzah for squares!!
Shaddap, I'm a beginner, I can stick to squares forever if I want to!!
At least I have the somewhat miraculous ability to make all my mismatched squares somehow go together smoothly...you would simply not believe some of the unmatched seams that I've made quilt together nicely. None of us can quite figure it out ("us" being me, my mother, and my mother's sewing group friends - some of whom quilt professionally). By all accounts, my projects should be miserably haphazard and mismeasured. Joyfully for me, this has not been so.
Knock on wood.
In the meantime, my father's version of "The Spitfire Grill" goes up this weekend. I wish I could be home to see it. Not as badly as I wish I'd been able to see him actually be onstage in the "Oldtime Radio Show" this spring but hopefully I'll get my grubby little mitts on a videotape of each production at some point.
Hee...this song is completely representative of my mood right now. I am flighty!