Things to Do in Bloomington When You're Dead
Warning: This is a long, boring entry about things I did on Thursday and Friday. It is almost Schuminesque in its self-absorption. I figure this is my journal and you're here voluntarily, so I'm entitled to be a little self-absorbed periodically.
I decided to go up and make a day of it, though by the time I was ready to go it was already ten-something in the morning (eleven-something in Bloomington), and I got there about 1:30 or so. I made myself go straight to one of the places where I was going to apply in person on the south side first, since I try not to voluntarily set foot on Walnut Street if I can help it; that didn't take long. The University art museum is hiring guards, so I thought I'd apply even if it doesn't pay enough, because hell, it's work, it's in Bloomington, and I love the art museum.
Nobody was at the information desk, nor at the front desk, so I stomped around the galleries. They've done some rearranging since the last time I was there; the café and gift shop have been melded into one entity and are now on the second floor instead of the first. Also, God love I.M. Pei, seriously, but those stairs give me vertigo. (zyphryus knows whereof I speak.) I actually went to the third floor (African, Pre-Columbian, and Oceanic art-really kind of an incongruous grouping there, unless the intended message is "All these cultures were doing perfectly all right until white people ruined a good time for everybody") in the name of Serious Research Purposes™.
(Serious Research Purposes™ is sekrit code for "looking at the Maori shit and wondering why we haven't got more of it, then". Also I was stomping around and looking at the Polynesian shit and thinking that I really ought to properly look at Polynesian linguistics because my fictitious islanders' made-up language is All. Over. The. Map. I think it should require VCV order because I'm a lazy ass and can't bother with the rest, but then I'd have to explain my protagonist's name which does not go VCV, and I'm thinking about being intellectually lazy and writing it off as an archaism which survived several millennia. Except I don't really want to go the Mary Sue route. I also don't want to change Salki's name, because the alternatives I fiddled with don't go and don't fit him/her. On the other hand, I can't make a case for "lk" being one consonant. The probable modern form, given what I've established in other bits of the language, would be Sauki, which Isn't Right. YES THIS IS AN ENTIRE PARENTHETICAL ASIDE ABOUT SHIT NO ONE CARES ABOUT, SHUT UP DUN H8.)
Oh! And I visited the second-floor gallery (ancient and Asian art, wheeee!). BITCHES DONE MOVED MY GENJI SCREENS. I'm not too worried because eventually the religious rituals of Mongolian nomads, whilst fascinating (which is actually not sarcasm on my part for once, the item cards made me want to learn more), will lose their shine, and the Genji screens will return. They also removed a bunch of the Chinese stuff (temporarily, I hope). Plus I seem to recall the statue of Shiva Nataraj as being larger, but maybe I made that up. The classical art remains unmolested, as it should, and at least nobody caught me praying to Lord Ganesha (or figured out that that was what I was doing, at any rate).
Also, it makes me a bit sad that Japanese woodcuts reached their aesthetic zenith in the late 17th/early 18th century.
I'm kind of burnt that I forgot to visit the Enchanted Slinky Forest on the first floor, though. Yes, I do take my art museum visits very seriously, why do you ask?
I guess it is foreordained that I'm not supposed to be a museum guard, because nobody was still at the information desk when I came out. And by then I had to make my interview at 4 o'clock about fifteen minutes away, so.
Had the interview; it was on the better side of average. We'll see what happens. Then I went to O'Malia's and bought grocery-store eel sushi and ate them with my fingers and went window-shopping for books I can't afford but came away wanting a whole bunch of stuff anyway because I am a shallow, vapid, book-grubbing bitch that way. And then, reluctantly, I wended my way south again. That bit really sucked.
On the bright side: the lolmom finally got paid, so we went grocery shopping (om nom nom nom). I control the horizontal, the vertical, and what we eat, because I do most of the cooking. We were over budget this time, because the lolmom wanted ground beef and steak (they were marked down for quick sale, so it's not like this was OMG EXTRAVAGANCE), and also had volunteered to make things for some sort of church persiflage she's doing this weekend. I proved brilliantly, once again, that I don't know anything about chocolate; I apparently suggested The Wrong Kind to Mom. (I am not a fan of chocolate and don't really care about it, and as far as I'm concerned, there are two kinds: the dark kind, preferably more bitter than sweet and even better when cut with espresso, and the crap kind. I don't eat the crap kind, except very infrequently and then I have to be in the mood for it.)
I got her back, though. Mom is a bit illiterate technologically, and when she spazzed about having left her cell phone in the car all day, I told her it was just a little melty around the edges but if she put it in the freezer for an hour or so it ought to firm right up. She almost believed me for a minute. Lolmom is lol.
The lolmom had previously gone to a Pampered Chef party her friend was having down the street, and came away with swag in the form of a citrus peeler and a cookbook. I made one of the salad recipes from the cookbook and found it pretty good (mmm, spinach with avocado and grilled chicken and grapefruit, mmmm), but what amused me was all the bolded product-placement references in the recipe (which I guess is only what you'd expect). For instance, spinach should go in the Prep Bowl before you use the Citrus Peeler to peel the grapefruit.
We're somewhat h4rdk0r3 about cooking in our house, so most of our dinners are accomplished with the Knife (pick one, it doesn't usually matter which), the Cutting Board, and some Wooden Spoons. For some reason we get CHEFS catalogue, probably because the lolmom got the stand mixer from them some years ago, but I find myself giggling at half the stuff in it. I mean, sure, if I were a restaurateuse, I'd probably want to have some of this stuff, but being l33, I personally am extremely unlikely to use, say, a crème brulée blowtorch more than once every couple of years, if that, and if you really do cook, you don't need most of the gadgetry in order to accomplish perfectly good results. Also I see no reason to spend $12 on special pie weights when you can use half a small bag of rice for the same purpose. (WARNING: In case you don't already know, the rice will be totally useless for eating purposes after that, so if you use rice for pie weights, be sure you continue to reuse the same rice for pie weights thereafter. You can reuse it several times--we actually have a special Tupperware container in the fridge for the pie rice.)
So. How was your weekend?
I decided to go up and make a day of it, though by the time I was ready to go it was already ten-something in the morning (eleven-something in Bloomington), and I got there about 1:30 or so. I made myself go straight to one of the places where I was going to apply in person on the south side first, since I try not to voluntarily set foot on Walnut Street if I can help it; that didn't take long. The University art museum is hiring guards, so I thought I'd apply even if it doesn't pay enough, because hell, it's work, it's in Bloomington, and I love the art museum.
Nobody was at the information desk, nor at the front desk, so I stomped around the galleries. They've done some rearranging since the last time I was there; the café and gift shop have been melded into one entity and are now on the second floor instead of the first. Also, God love I.M. Pei, seriously, but those stairs give me vertigo. (zyphryus knows whereof I speak.) I actually went to the third floor (African, Pre-Columbian, and Oceanic art-really kind of an incongruous grouping there, unless the intended message is "All these cultures were doing perfectly all right until white people ruined a good time for everybody") in the name of Serious Research Purposes™.
(Serious Research Purposes™ is sekrit code for "looking at the Maori shit and wondering why we haven't got more of it, then". Also I was stomping around and looking at the Polynesian shit and thinking that I really ought to properly look at Polynesian linguistics because my fictitious islanders' made-up language is All. Over. The. Map. I think it should require VCV order because I'm a lazy ass and can't bother with the rest, but then I'd have to explain my protagonist's name which does not go VCV, and I'm thinking about being intellectually lazy and writing it off as an archaism which survived several millennia. Except I don't really want to go the Mary Sue route. I also don't want to change Salki's name, because the alternatives I fiddled with don't go and don't fit him/her. On the other hand, I can't make a case for "lk" being one consonant. The probable modern form, given what I've established in other bits of the language, would be Sauki, which Isn't Right. YES THIS IS AN ENTIRE PARENTHETICAL ASIDE ABOUT SHIT NO ONE CARES ABOUT, SHUT UP DUN H8.)
Oh! And I visited the second-floor gallery (ancient and Asian art, wheeee!). BITCHES DONE MOVED MY GENJI SCREENS. I'm not too worried because eventually the religious rituals of Mongolian nomads, whilst fascinating (which is actually not sarcasm on my part for once, the item cards made me want to learn more), will lose their shine, and the Genji screens will return. They also removed a bunch of the Chinese stuff (temporarily, I hope). Plus I seem to recall the statue of Shiva Nataraj as being larger, but maybe I made that up. The classical art remains unmolested, as it should, and at least nobody caught me praying to Lord Ganesha (or figured out that that was what I was doing, at any rate).
Also, it makes me a bit sad that Japanese woodcuts reached their aesthetic zenith in the late 17th/early 18th century.
I'm kind of burnt that I forgot to visit the Enchanted Slinky Forest on the first floor, though. Yes, I do take my art museum visits very seriously, why do you ask?
I guess it is foreordained that I'm not supposed to be a museum guard, because nobody was still at the information desk when I came out. And by then I had to make my interview at 4 o'clock about fifteen minutes away, so.
Had the interview; it was on the better side of average. We'll see what happens. Then I went to O'Malia's and bought grocery-store eel sushi and ate them with my fingers and went window-shopping for books I can't afford but came away wanting a whole bunch of stuff anyway because I am a shallow, vapid, book-grubbing bitch that way. And then, reluctantly, I wended my way south again. That bit really sucked.
On the bright side: the lolmom finally got paid, so we went grocery shopping (om nom nom nom). I control the horizontal, the vertical, and what we eat, because I do most of the cooking. We were over budget this time, because the lolmom wanted ground beef and steak (they were marked down for quick sale, so it's not like this was OMG EXTRAVAGANCE), and also had volunteered to make things for some sort of church persiflage she's doing this weekend. I proved brilliantly, once again, that I don't know anything about chocolate; I apparently suggested The Wrong Kind to Mom. (I am not a fan of chocolate and don't really care about it, and as far as I'm concerned, there are two kinds: the dark kind, preferably more bitter than sweet and even better when cut with espresso, and the crap kind. I don't eat the crap kind, except very infrequently and then I have to be in the mood for it.)
I got her back, though. Mom is a bit illiterate technologically, and when she spazzed about having left her cell phone in the car all day, I told her it was just a little melty around the edges but if she put it in the freezer for an hour or so it ought to firm right up. She almost believed me for a minute. Lolmom is lol.
The lolmom had previously gone to a Pampered Chef party her friend was having down the street, and came away with swag in the form of a citrus peeler and a cookbook. I made one of the salad recipes from the cookbook and found it pretty good (mmm, spinach with avocado and grilled chicken and grapefruit, mmmm), but what amused me was all the bolded product-placement references in the recipe (which I guess is only what you'd expect). For instance, spinach should go in the Prep Bowl before you use the Citrus Peeler to peel the grapefruit.
We're somewhat h4rdk0r3 about cooking in our house, so most of our dinners are accomplished with the Knife (pick one, it doesn't usually matter which), the Cutting Board, and some Wooden Spoons. For some reason we get CHEFS catalogue, probably because the lolmom got the stand mixer from them some years ago, but I find myself giggling at half the stuff in it. I mean, sure, if I were a restaurateuse, I'd probably want to have some of this stuff, but being l33, I personally am extremely unlikely to use, say, a crème brulée blowtorch more than once every couple of years, if that, and if you really do cook, you don't need most of the gadgetry in order to accomplish perfectly good results. Also I see no reason to spend $12 on special pie weights when you can use half a small bag of rice for the same purpose. (WARNING: In case you don't already know, the rice will be totally useless for eating purposes after that, so if you use rice for pie weights, be sure you continue to reuse the same rice for pie weights thereafter. You can reuse it several times--we actually have a special Tupperware container in the fridge for the pie rice.)
So. How was your weekend?