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July 13, 2008

Verizon Stopped Working For Me

Tuesday afternoon we had an intense, dramatic, kickass thunderstorm. It pummeled my plants and knocked out electricity all over town--and, it seems, my phone service.

When I noticed the problem, I called the phone company from my cell phone, who said that the diagnostic tests they ran revealed that the line was fine, so it was probably a problem with my house, and I should unplug all my phones from the phone jack and the electricity, leave them unplugged for five minutes, and then plug them back in and see if they start working, which seemed like bullshit to me but I did it anyway.

That didn't help, so then they told me to test a plain old phone that I knew worked at the "gray box" outside. Turns out I don't have a gray box outside; I have a gray box inside my basement, and it took me forever to find it. But find it I did, and I plugged a regular old phone into the test jack, and heard nothing, which meant it was the phone company's problem, and they'd have to fix it.

I informed someone of this, and he said, "Well! We're very sorry. That's very odd. Everything should be working fine. But we'll send someone out to fix the problem--on Saturday."

Now, because I have a cell phone, I could live without a land line--people do it all the time--but my internet service is through my phone, so I was not connected to the world. I couldn't check my email. I couldn't blog. I couldn't google anything, damnit! I couldn't look at the weather forecast. It SUCKED.

It sucked all the more because I had originally planned to spend the week at home, completing a couple of big projects. I work from home a lot, and I need to check my email and google stuff--at home--for my work. But eventually I went to the public library, which has free wireless, so I could at least see if I'd received any important email and update my Netflix queue.

And then Saturday rolled around, and some guy named Tim showed up to restore my phone service. Because my gray box is inside, he had to come into the house, and when he first showed up, he was friendly and polite, and wanted to chat a little. That was fine. Several houses in the neighborhood were for sale; we talked about the real estate market, blah blah blah, after I showed him the box in the basement. I went upstairs to wash dishes and he went to work on diagnosing the problem, etc. He spent about five minutes downstairs--and then he came upstairs and asked me what I do for a living.

I told him I'm a writer and an English professor; he told me he never did well in English, he majored in engineering; he liked nonfiction. I said I liked nonfiction too, that it was the main thing I studied, and that I also liked history. He said he liked military history; I said I did too, etc etc. Then I had to hear all about his years in the army, as well as all sorts of details about his daughter the supply sergeant. He spent 20 minutes in my house, telling me about this crap. My patience started to wear thin. I started to hope he'd just get out of my house and fix my phone and go the hell away.

Finally he went outside to fix stuff; then he had to come back in and put my gray box back together. And when he came in, he was on the phone with his wife--why he couldn't stay outside until he was done talking to her is beyond me--and then he had to tell me about the conversation. And then he said, "You know how I was talking about how I like history? I wanted to show you a book that's the most important history book I've ever read. I wish I had discovered it years ago. It has helped me understand things I never got before."

And he opened this zippered bag and pulls out some book on Jesus.

So I handed him A History of God by Karen Armstrong, but he wasn't interested in that, because in addition to a cross, on the cover was the star of David and the moon of Islam.

And he stood there and told me how great this book was, on and on, and about all the other books on religion he has read, and the church he goes to, and I just wasn't going to go there. Finally he ran out of things to tell me about, so he went downstairs and repaired whatever he needed to repair.

And then he came back up and spent another 20 minutes telling me about his educational history and about his son's plans for college and about how people he finds that people tend to remember, for years, perhaps because he has "good people skills."

I kept thinking, "At what point do I tell this guy he has to leave? He's boring me out of my mind and I've got shit to do." But he clearly thought this was a very interesting conversation, and he was a good-natured guy so I didn't want to insult or embarrass him. But I did feel my hospitality had been abused. I'd engaged in some polite conversation with the guy when he first showed up just to be nice, just to be friendly, but that didn't mean I wanted to discuss my career with him, or hear about how much he admired Jesus.

Finally the technique of nodding and smiling when he said something but not adding anything to the conversation worked, in that it convinced him to move to the front door, where it still took another five minutes to actually get him out the door--he had to remind me again who wrote the book on Jesus, and tell me about his attitudes towards various social issues, and wish me luck for the future, etc.

I was very glad to have my phone service restored, but I want to say that the repair was not free; I paid very dearly for Tim's repair work. I have thought about calling Verizon to complain about Tim but I know it would astonish him and hurt him--he really thought it was nice conversation. I just hope I never see him again myself.

Posted by Holly at 8:25 AM | Comments (3)

July 5, 2008

Some Reflections on the Fifth

I love my country and I'm glad she exists--for all the ways we've fucked up lately, I still think the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and all that business was pretty amazing and very important, solidly positive developments in the story of humanity. Which is one reason I'm happy to celebrate her birthday. I just get really annoyed at some of the ways OTHER PEOPLE celebrate that birthday.

I'm talking firecrackers. I HATE firecrackers. Fireworks--you know, the big light shows costing lots of money and staged by professionals--are great, though I've seen enough in my life that they don't really fill me with excitement, and they certainly don't arouse the wonder and awe I feel for my favorite light show, the Milky Way.

But firecrackers, the little containers of explosives whose purpose is to make noise and leave a nasty smell, I just can't stand, and I can't stand people who go out in the street and set them off at all hours of the night. I am glad that I spent most of my life in states where the damn things are illegal, and look forward to leaving the one I currently live in, where they are legal. Which, if you ask me, is one more reason Pennsylvania is just back-ass-wards, along with its bizarro liquor laws and the fact that it elected Rick Santorum as its senator.

Posted by Holly at 8:44 AM | Comments (0)

June 23, 2008

After the Deluge

Here's a great NY Times op-ed by Joe Blair, one of my friends my grad school, about the flooding in Iowa.

Posted by Holly at 7:44 AM | Comments (0)

June 17, 2008

Wading Through the Flooding, and Blowing Off Steam

I have been obsessed with coverage of the flooding in Iowa, and every morning I look at photos of the damage and read news stories about the entire area and about my alma mater. Most of the images are very upsetting, and most of the news is devastating. I wanted to share this photo because it is not only upsetting, but witty and ironic, and I wanted to share this bit of information because it demonstrates a certain resilience and understated humor that reassures me that Iowa City will somehow manage to recover from this.

Posted by Holly at 8:18 AM | Comments (2)

June 13, 2008

Windy, Soggy Iowa

It took me a long time to realize that I liked Iowa City. I was often very unhappy there, but eventually I figured out that had more to do with the fact that I was in a PhD program than with Iowa City itself, which, I eventually saw, was pretty cool and remarkably livable. (It also got cooler the longer I was there. It's quite hip these days, or was, before it started filling up like a kitchen sink.)

Not so much now. You probably heard about the terrible tornado that devastated Parkersburg, Iowa a few weeks ago. Or the tornado that killed four boy scouts two days ago (and would have killed more except that the other boy scouts knew how to do things like apply tourniquets or give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the 48 who were injured). Now there's terrible flooding in eastern Iowa; downtown Cedar Rapids, all of the Coralville strip (Coralville being a suburb of Iowa City, where I lived for a few years when I first started grad school because that was the only place I could find an apartment--Iowa City historically has a very tight housing market) and much of the University of Iowa campus--including, I would guess, my old office, which was in the basement of the English-Philosophy Building--are under water.

Iowa City was recovering from a terrible flood when I moved there in 1993. This flood is already much, much worse, and the river hasn't even crested. I realize it's not Katrina, the typhoon in Burma or the earthquakes in China, but it's still pretty awful, and it's hurting a place I care about.

Posted by Holly at 7:39 AM | Comments (3)

May 31, 2008

Why I HATE Going to the Hair Salon

To paraphrase Dorothy Parker: I hate getting my hair done. I love it when it's done.

I like how I look with a nice, recent, even haircut. I like how I look when all my gray hair becomes the same color as the rest of my hair. I like how I look when strands of hair framing my face are highlighted a nice caramel color.

But I HATE the process of having it done.

There are several reasons for this.

One is that I'm cheap, at least when it comes to stuff like this. I have good hair, and I like to keep it simple, so I don't need an expert stylist: someone who can even up the ends is good enough, so I'm inclined to go for ten dollar haircuts, about once every ten to 15 months. And that's fine, when all that's involved is cutting. But add color, and you need to have someone who knows what they're doing, and you have to maintain it.

I colored my hair for a little more than two decades, starting the summer before seventh grade, when I was 11, and Sun-In was all the rage. I went on to color it red a few times, and magenta twice, and black once, but mostly I went with blonde highlights, especially during the 80s, when almost everyone had highlights.

And then I hit my late-early-30s and I quit with the color. I decided I was sick of the bother and didn't want to send any more nasty chemicals down the drain and that my real hair color wasn't so bad.

And that was great for a few years, and then I started going gray.

And I lived with the gray for a few years, and then Matthew asked me to be in his wedding, and I decided I didn't want to be gray in the photos.

That was a year ago, and I've kept up with the color since, more or less, for a variety of reasons, though the stylist always chastises me for the fact that I go as long as possible between touch-ups.

Yesterday I had it done again and I am just about to decide that I must STOP.

Yes, money is a factor. I hate spending a big chunk of change to make my hair look like it used to look on its own. Time is a bigger one.

I find sitting there by the dryers waiting for the color to work BORING BEYOND ALL BELIEF. I could be doing the most interesting or enjoyable thing in the world--say, writing a blog entry, or eating gelati, or reading Austen--but if I was doing it to pass the time while my hair was being colored, I would still be impatient and irritable and watching the clock and muttering under my breath, "You better come over here and rinse this shit out of my hair in the next five minutes, or... or else I'll just sit here and keep muttering"--because really, what am I going to do? Attack my stylist with a hot curling iron? Rinse my hair myself? I don't know why 40 minutes pass so very slowly and are so vastly unpleasant to live through while there are a bunch of toxic chemicals concentrated on my head, but the fact of the matter is, I just can't WAIT to have all that shit removed from my scalp.

And then it gets rinsed and then I get my hair cut, and while it's being cut I have to listen to shit like this from the patron at the next styling station, some well-to-do 40-something woman wearing really dreadful sandals with all sorts of glittery jewels on them:

"I just couldn't believe it when none of my kids have blue eyes! Damien, my husband, he has blue eyes, and so does everyone in his family--I mean EVERYONE! Whereas in my family, some people have blue eyes and some are brown, so I thought for sure the kids would get his eyes--but nope, all four them have my brown eyes."

And I'm sitting there thinking, "Lady, didn't you pay attention in seventh grade when they taught the introduction to genetics and told you all about Gregor Mendel and his sweet peas, and used blue versus brown eyes to explain, in a very simplified way, the concept of recessive genes?"

That's the real reason I hate getting my hair done: listening to the dumb shit people talk about in hair salons. I went to a new stylist yesterday because I simply couldn't stand my old one anymore: she was a nice person, but god, she was STUPID! I couldn't bear to hear any more statements like those she'd expressed over the last few appointments, such as 1) Across the Universe was the best movie EVER, and if I didn't like it I must not be a real Beatles fan like she was, never mind the fact that she born well after Lennon was shot, and whereas I was listening to their music when they were actually a band, or 2) she didn't really like Heath Ledger but thought it was too bad he committed suicide--because it HAD to be suicide; it couldn't be an accident, not if he was depressed, or 3) George Clooney was indeed very handsome, but that Michael Clayton movie just looked too serious, or 4) it's completely shocking that a movie made in Spain is in Spanish rather than English, and it's very weird of me to watch a movie by Pedro Almodovar when there are all these great American movies to see first.

I guess it makes me a bitch and a snob to feel so superior to people just because they're criminally ignorant fools.... I sorta feel bad about that, but I also think a way to avoid feeling superior is just to stay home and not subject myself to people who annoy me so much. So I may just live with the gray at my temples and not get my hair cut for another year, until it looks so ragged and unkempt I just can't stand it, and then get the cheapest, quickest hair cut I can manage.

Posted by Holly at 9:28 AM | Comments (10)

April 18, 2008

I Hate April Fool's Day, But I Love Deadlines

First of all, I hate April Fool's Day. As far as I'm concerned, it's the single worst ritual of spring, and the one we really need to get rid of. Easter might have become irrelevant, Daylight Saving Time might be a great unnecessary, contrived annoyance, but April Fool's Day is irrelevant, unnecessary AND annoying.

I'm sure someone is saying, "What a killjoy you are, Holly! April Fool's Day is about JOKES! Don't you have a sense of humor?" But April Fool's Day is about practical jokes, about jokes that depend on trickery and deceit. They are jokes of which someone is the butt. The jokes are only funny if someone falls for them. I prefer other types of jokes.

And OK, this year, I fell for the first joke I came across: I admit I was horrified when I read that Al Gore had announced he'd run for president on an independent ticket. "Oh no," I thought. "Not another divided election...." And then I happened to glance at the date. So I didn't even cock an eyebrow when I heard that Philip Morris would cease all tobacco production and begin growing organic peanuts instead.

But I had to deal with a rash of emails about some discovery of a letter by Jane Austen, announcing her fondness for hamster curry. Remember, Jane's sister Cassandra had burned or cut up most of Jane's letters, getting rid of anything that would depict Jane (or anyone else) in a less than flattering light. (And given Jane's penchant for satire, that means darn little remained of her voluminous correspondence.) A genuine letter by Jane, in her own hand! It was quite find! It was also a hoax.

Anyway.

April Fool's Day isn't why I haven't written lately. No, I haven't written lately 'cause I had a few deadlines over the last few weeks. Seriously, thanks to the powers that be for deadlines. I am so glad to have deadlines, in all their coercive pressure. I love them because I A) almost always meet them, and B) have a slew of really productive techniques for avoiding the work I've committed to. This month, for instance, as part of postponing that moment when I would sit down at my computer and begin producing the documents I promised to write, I did a very thorough spring cleaning, including cleaning the basement, a vile and filthy task I hope I won't have to tackle again for another five or ten years.

Of course, the aftermath of assiduously avoiding and then meeting a few deadlines is extreme fatigue. I met the last deadline on Monday, and have sort of been recuperating since then.... Well, the first couple of days were recuperating, and then I was enjoying the weather, which has FINALLY turned nice. Wednesday I actually worked in my garden, which was a real pleasure. I love bulbs; spring flowers are among my very favorites. It doesn't get cold enough in Arizona for things like hyacinths and tulips, which might be one reason I find them so glorious and miraculous, but that's what they are to me. The hyacinths are in bloom, the tulips are getting ready to bloom, and my tulips have a ways to go, but they're coming.

And Saturday is supposed to be lovely as well, so I'll be spending more time in the yard. It's supposed to rain on Sunday, and on Tuesday--well, we'll have thunderstorms, though hopefully they won't be at the polls: that's right, it's the Pennsylvania primary, and I'll be going to vote.

Posted by Holly at 9:35 AM | Comments (2)

March 15, 2008

Rare, Beautiful, Ephemeral, Glittery and Very, Very Dangerous and Destructive

Last week was a pretty funky week weather-wise here in Northwest PA. It ended with the blizzard that dumped two feet of snow on us, but it began with abnormally warm temperatures--it was 65F on Monday, March 3, well over 20 degrees above average.

And then on Tuesday, March 4, we had an ice storm. It started raining in the afternoon, and then temperatures dropped sharply, and precipitation continued to fall, not as snow, but as rain, which froze when it hit just about any surface--in particular, roads and sidewalks. It's really hard to control a vehicle when you're driving over a surface entirely coated with an inch of slightly bumpy but still very slick ice, which is why ice storms can be one thing that entirely shuts down an entire city used to cold temperatures--in Iowa City, when there were ice storms, buses and so forth quit running and people did their best to stay home. Here, apparently, they just called out the cops and the ambulances to deal with all the people who ended up in traffic accidents because schools and businesses didn't shut down.

Anyway, I am not writing to complain about the ice storm--I'm writing to praise it, or at least to tell you how astonishingly beautiful and strange it made everything. And I'm not asking you to take my word for it; I'm going to include photos.

Here's what my porch looked like Wednesday morning:

Pretty funky! (If you want to know what my porch looks like in the summer, go here and scroll down.) It looks like the glass in a shower door or a bathroom window, which I guess is why they call that stuff "frosted" glass.

Keep in mind, this

is a vertical surface, so you can imagine what the horizontal ones were like. I was VERY glad I didn't have to drive anywhere Wednesday morning. And while I was out taking these photos, I kept hearing this weird clacking sound, which I eventually realized was the noise made as the wind blew the ice-covered branches of the trees against each other. It was a very alien environment.

Wednesday afternoon, however, the sun came out, and that's when things got downright gorgeous. Thursday morning things got even better. The sun was out, but the temperature wasn't high enough to melt much. I went for a walk early, and saw things like this:

It's a neighbor's tree, entirely encased in ice, and backlit by the sun, so that it positively glittered. The photo doesn't capture its brilliance.... And I'm surprised that it turned out as well as it did, because I couldn't see a damn thing--I just aimed the photo in the right direction and hoped for the best.

As I walked, I kept seeing these little partial tubes of ice

which I eventually realized had fallen off powerlines. I was also intrigued by the way ice-coated blades of grass poked out of the snow like strange little antennae.

Here's my favorite photo I took, of an oak branch (acorn caps still attached) coated in ice:

Of course, I also saw things like this:

Plenty of trees snapped under the weight of the ice. One of my colleagues walked out Wednesday to find a great big branch on top of his car. And surfaces stayed slick and slidy as the ice melted, because chunks of ice would fall of the trees, so that the area under one might look like this:

I burst into astonished tears several times at how gorgeous and strange it all was.... The world creates these scenes of profound and passing beauty, and they're a gift. I've seen ice storms before but the aftermath was never this lovely.... I feel lucky that I got to witness this rare confluence of the elements. I wanted to stay in that environment for hours, but I had professional and personal obligations to attend to.... And even if I had the entire day at my disposal to wander around that winter wonderland, it wouldn't have lasted. The sun moved up in the sky and the scene wasn't as striking--the trees were more dramatic and glittery when the light was behind rather than above them. And there's always the fact that as the sun got warmer, the ice melted.... It just couldn't last.

And I also kept thinking about all the damage the storm had done, and could still do: I had to guard my head from falling ice. It all reaffirmed for me the basic truth that nothing is an undiluted good, everything costs, has its drawbacks. Even--especially?--beauty.

I'm still glad I saw it.

Posted by Holly at 9:26 AM | Comments (2)

December 8, 2007

Every Inch of Snow Plus Every Inch of Driveway

Thursday morning I woke up, rolled over, stretched, then asked myself, "Good grief! Why on earth are my arms and shoulders so incredibly sore?"

Then I got out of bed, opened the blinds, looked out the window and remembered: on Wednesday I shoveled a foot of heavy, wet snow from my entire driveway, as well as the sidewalk in front of my house, up to my front door and off my front steps. When I got done, my driveway looked like this:

Which constitutes, I think, a reasonably good job of clearing the snow.

Last year I mentioned that during a period of particularly heavy snowfall, I had shoveled my driveway upwards of three times a day. This prompted a comment providing a link to an entry on someone else's blog about how stupid it is to shovel snow before it stops snowing, after which someone posted a comment on how there is no good reason to shovel the driveway three times in one day.

This all transpired at a really busy time in my life, when I was scarcely managing to blog at all, so I didn't respond. And while I didn't lose any sleep over the matter, I admit I have thought of that comment with resentment a time or two throughout the past year.

Because the fact of the matter is, as this Arizona native learned once after following what is cavalierly touted as the only sensible way to approach snow removal, i.e, waiting until the snow stops entirely before you try to remove it, there are a fucking hell of a lot of excellent reasons to shovel one's driveway three times in one day. They include not only every last goddamn inch of heavy snow you have to heft, but every inch of snow you have to heft the shovel over, as well as every single inch of driveway and sidewalk you have to clear, and every single minute you have to spend outside in nasty, nasty temperatures.

The thing is, snow looks all powdery and light, and when you pick it up to make a snowball, it is. But when it's on the ground, particularly when it's on concrete that has recently been retaining some heat so that the bottom couple of inches closet to that concrete melt a little and get soggy, then one foot of snow is PRETTY DAMN HEAVY. Whereas three feet of snow is SO GODDAMN FUCKING HEAVY it's impossible--yes, impossible--for someone like me to lift it. Not only that, but even if I COULD lift a shovel full of three feet of snow, I couldn't lift it high enough--clear up past my waist--to clear a three-foot high drift of snow, which, after a few shovel-fuls, would become shoulder-high, so that I'd have to lift the snow as high as my head.

I can't get out of my garage if there are three feet of snow in my driveway. But even if there's only a foot of snow there and I can drive over it if I want to without clearing it first, I have learned from doing exactly that, that's not a good idea either. First of all, packed snow gets really slippery. Furthermore, one day of warmer temperatures, so that the snow turns first to water and then to ice overnight when the temperature drops back down, is all it takes to turn your entire driveway into something it's unsafe to walk or drive on--particularly when you factor in drainage from gutters. If shoveling three feet of snow sucks, chipping eight inches of solid ice off the top of your driveway REALLY SUCKS.

So as I have learned the hard way, it is best to follow the example of my neighbors who have lived here for decades and to shovel the snow before it gets so deep it's unmanageable, even if that happens three times in one day.

(I would also note that unless you have one that is brand new and ultra high-powered, even snow blowers have problems with three feet of snow. The only thing that easily clears three feet of snow from a driveway is a snow plow, but that can do a lot of damage to plants, lawns, and even the driveway itself. Mercifully the one year we got FIVE feet of snow in one storm my neighbor was driving a snow plow for extra cash, and he cleared my driveway for me, free of charge and with the utmost care. Otherwise, I would have been snowed in for several days.)

p.s. Yes, it's not just my arms and shoulders but the entire subject that's a sore spot. Don't give me advice on this topic unless you personally have shoveled your way out of three feet of snow in the past year.

Posted by Holly at 11:48 AM | Comments (9)

October 15, 2007

I Wish Bush's Claque Would Spontaneously Dehisce

Yeah, I've been a lazy blogger lately.... I've been busy. I've been writing a lot--had a lot of deadlines to deal with, for entities that print my writing on actual paper. I've also been just sort of trying to be, you know, creative, in the ways writers are supposed to be. One form that has taken is playing with poetry again. In particular, I've been toying around with word lists, something I used to use a lot while I was working on my poetry MFA to generate new material. I haven't used them much of late, but I'm remembering why I thought they were cool: it's because there are just so many cool words. Like dehisce, which means to burst open, particularly what a plant does when it blooms or when its pods open and discharge pollen or seeds or whatever. Or claque, a group of people paid to applaud a performance; professional sycophants. How can you not want to use those words?

Posted by Holly at 11:18 AM | Comments (2)

September 6, 2007

Happy Birthday, Mom

Today is my mother’s birthday. She was born 70 years ago today in Tucson, Arizona.

I’m kind of freaked out by this--not that it’s her birthday; I’m used to that happening every year--but that it’s her 70th birthday, because 70 is kind of old, particularly if you have health problems, and my mom does. Back when she first started manifesting some of these problems, I would say, “But she’s young! She’s only 59!” I really can’t say that any more, and not just because she’s not 59. Fifty-nine is young for certain problems, but 70 really is not. My mom’s health problems are not going to kill her tomorrow, but they will kill her eventually, and it’s not unheard of for people to die in their 70s of things like liver disease or a stroke.

I don’t know that I want to stick around for as long as some of my relatives have done, who, especially on my dad’s side, are a very long-lived group of people; I have plenty of ancestors who hung on into their mid to late 90s. I watched some of them get frail and feeble and cranky and forgetful. It didn’t look like fun, and I’d rather skip some of that. But I don’t want to bow out particularly early, either. Nor do I want my mom to go any time soon. But the fact of the matter is, she might.

At least she isn’t forgetful yet, though recently I’ve been stricken at how frail and feeble she can be, considering how vibrant and strong she always seemed before. As for cranky, well, she had a formidable cranky streak even when she was young. I won’t say it’s part of what we loved about her, but it was part of her, and we dealt with it.

I seriously doubt my mom reads my blog--at least, I hope she doesn't; I’ve done my best to protect her from it. My blog, like my tattoo, is primarily a source of pleasure and pride for me, but I know from experience that making my mom confront certain things about me just leads to unhappiness for the both of us.

So even though I already sent her a gift and called her this morning to wish her “Happy Birthday,” and even though she’ll probably never read this, I want to say “Yo! Mom! Congratulations, and I hope you celebrate a few more milestone birthdays!”

Posted by Holly at 3:02 PM | Comments (2)

August 8, 2007

Justin Timberlake and Salt-N-Pepa a Turn-On for Sharks

This story, about sharks being turned on by certain kinds of music, was too goofy for me not to post a link.

Posted by Holly at 6:08 PM | Comments (1)

July 1, 2007

O Canada

Today is Canada Day, which has nothing to do with me, aside from the fact that I like Canada, but then, I like a lot of countries, and I don't always know when their nationalistic holidays are. And it's not like I'm going to display a maple leaf today, or find a hockey game to watch. I like to celebrate Canada Day quietly, in my heart.

Posted by Holly at 7:01 AM | Comments (7)

June 13, 2007

It's a Tool, Not a Toy, and If It Ain't Working, I Ain't Playing

I've been planning since, oh, October or so, to get a laptop. I never really thought about getting one until my mother asked me if I'd accept as a Christmas help in buying one, and then I said, "Uh, sure!"

And after Christmas I went to buy one, but I didn't know what to get, and the IT guy at school came very close to talking me into buying a Mac, which I was willing to do because I hate Microsoft. But the problem is, I still use Word Perfect as my word processing program (believe me, it's SO much better than Microsoft Word), and I was going to have to run Windows on the Mac (which you can do) to use Word Perfect. And there were going to be Mac innovations and I was busy and the semester was hectic etc etc and there was always a reason to delay actually making the order, but then the semester ended, I was less busy, and it was time to buy.

So I consulted my friend and blog host Jim, asking him for specific advice about what to get. He's also a university IT guy, and he said, "Given what you want to do, you don't want a Mac. You want a highly rated PC laptop." He suggested a few makes and models.

About two weeks ago, I ordered a highly rated PC laptop, and a bunch of peripheral stuff, including a really great backpack to carry the damn thing in, and a printer, and so forth.

A week ago, everything arrived.

I let it sit in the box for a couple of days, because, well, just because. Because I knew it would be a pain in the ass to figure it all out. Because I had other things to do. Because sometimes I resent the accommodations and concessions technology requires.

Finally, Saturday, I got the laptop out of the box and turned it on.

And discovered I could do next to nothing because I didn't have a high-speed internet connection for it.

That's right: Windows Vista does next to nothing without an internet connection. And what little it does, it does SLOWLY. I got all this extra RAM or whatever it's called, and the damn thing was still just so freakin' SLOW because Vista is just SO complicated.

And most of the software I use all the time wasn't compatible, and the logic of the entire operating system seemed to have changed but not for the better, and I hated and resented the whole thing, and wanted it to go away, and wished I could just get a laptop with XP on it, because that would let me do what I wanted to do.

So my IT guy suggested I call the company and see if I could get a laptop loaded with XP, and guess what?

About a month ago, this particular company started selling XP again, because people if the only option people had was Vista, they didn't want it.

When I said I wanted to return my laptop, the customer support guy offered me $250.00 to keep it. (Remember that when you buy a computer.) But I didn't want the $250.00; I wanted to be rid of Vista.

So yesterday I boxed up everything but the bag (it's a very nice bag) and mailed it all back.

I had to spend over $50 at UPS to send it off, and the whole experience, from start to finish, was a nasty pain in the ass. But I suppose I've made more expensive mistakes in my life, and at least by buying that unsatisfactory one and trying to do stuff with it, I have a better sense of what I really want and need.

But I can't buy another until my credit card is debited.... Blah blah blah.

And part of me thinks I should just get a portable typewriter.

Posted by Holly at 11:51 PM | Comments (8)

February 16, 2007

Accumulations Less Than One Inch

According to the websites of both the National Weather Service and the Weather Channel, my town has received six-tenths of an inch of snow since the beginning of February.

Now, I know that when you shovel snow out of something like your driveway, you end up with drifts on either side of it that are taller than the actual amount of snow you've received. Still, even if you double six-tenths of an inch, so that there would be one and two-tenths of an inch of snow in my lawn, I still think the websites are wrong. Because this does not look like an inch and two-tenths to me:

And it sure as hell hasn't FELT like an inch and two-tenths the last few days, when I've shoveled my driveway upwards of three times a day.

Posted by Holly at 3:06 PM | Comments (7)

February 13, 2007

Stuff Happens, and So Does Snow

Sorry I've been incommunicado.... Some stuff happened, you know? And as soon as that stuff was done, some more stuff happened. And then, before that stuff was even dealt with, some new stuff came along. So I've been dealing with stuff. I think I've just about got the stuff resolved.... I hope to be blogging again normally long about the time the weekend arrives.

I confess, my entire life hasn't been consumed by stuff: there's also been the weather. The last couple of weeks, one of my favorite little hobbies has been to check the weather and see if daily high temperatures will rise above freezing any time in the next ten days. For a long time this very nasty thing happened, where each day that I checked the forecast, it would say that the next nine days would be miserably cold, while ten days from now, it would be about 30 degrees (-1 C) or so (which isn't above freezing but still beats 9 degrees [-13 C] by a hell of a lot), but that warmer day was always ten days away, if you know what I mean--the forecast was always revised to SUCK for the immediate future. Anyway, now when I check it, temperatures are supposed to be around 34 degrees (1 C) in about a week, and until then, they'll only be down around 14 F (which is at least double digits in Fahrenheit, even if it's -10 C) and we're only supposed to get six or so inches of snow in the next few days.

So eventually, really, I am starting to believe, it will warm up, and I can go outside without a hat on.

I just don't know what to do about all the dirty, icy, chunky snow the snow plows have left at the entrance to my driveway.... It's getting really hard to back out into the street. I swear, the thing about Iowa was, it would get COLD, way colder than Pennsylvania--actual temperatures of -20 (-30 C) were common, with wind chills of -40 (-40 C), and then there would be the dreadful day or two with an actual temperature of -40 (-40 C) with windchillls of -60 (-51 C), but Iowa didn't get so goddamn much snow! I am just so sick of snow.

Yeah. So, I've been dealing with stuff, and with snow. I hope both will abate, at least somewhat, soon.

Posted by Holly at 4:38 AM | Comments (5)

January 18, 2007

Nurse, I Spy Gypsies--Run!

One of the things I did while visiting my family is trade favorite youtube videos with my siblings. My brother introduced me to this video from Weird Al. Entitled "Bob," it consists entirely of palindromes, and it freakin' cracks me up everytime I watch it.

Posted by Holly at 2:18 PM | Comments (4)

December 12, 2006

Christmas Meme

This is the first meme I've ever written. It was inspired by Dale's story about his father chopping down Christmas trees.

What greeting of the season do you use?

Happy Holidays. It's not that I'm unwilling to say "Merry Christmas;" I just prefer to include a reference to New Year's as well.

Do you open presents on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning?

Christmas morning! Are you kidding? Santa Claus doesn't come down the chimney on the afternoon before Christmas!

Did you leave out milk and cookies for Santa?

No. My mother said he didn't really have time to eat them and anyway, the milk would be warm and icky by the time he arrived. Santa was always generous to us in terms of the gifts he left, but a little rushed and spartan about their presentation. He didn't wrap presents. My mom said he was too busy making and acquiring the presents to have time to wrap them. We could always tell presents from Santa because they weren't wrapped but simply bore tags with our names on them, written in handwriting that looked a lot like my mom's.

What's one Christmas Eve tradition your family had?

OK, we received ONE present on Christmas Eve: every year we got new pajamas, and got to wear them to bed that night. But it wouldn't be right to say we got to open that present, because the pajamas weren't wrapped, either.

(Have I ever mentioned that I LOATHE wrapping paper? I prefer to give and receive gifts in reusable bags or boxes. I hate the waste involved in wrapping something in paper that just gets ripped off and thrown away. I think I am figuring out how I might have acquired that attitude.)

What's your favorite Christmas song?

That's a difficult question, because I really love Christmas music--at least, I love Christmas carols and hymns. I really like old-y weirdy songs like "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" sung by the Motabs. I love "Far, Far Away on Judea's Plains" which is a Christmas song not many non-Mormons know, but all Mormons know it because it's in the Mormon hymn book. I love "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" mostly because it's fun to play on the piano--it's one of the only songs I can play. I love the chorus to "Angels We Have Heard on High." And so on.

I also love Judy Garland singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" from Meet Me in St. Louis. And I choke up whenever I hear the Band Aid song, "Do They Know It's Christmas?" I adore the way Boy George belts his lines!

And, for obvious reasons, two of my favorite Christmas songs involve holly: I think everyone should "Have a Holly, Jolly Christmas," and I always remember that "The holly and the ivy, when they are both full grown, of all the trees that are in the woods, the holly bears the crown."

What's your least favorite Christmas song?

I hate a lot of popular Christmas music. I LOATHE the wretched "Little Drummer Boy" song--rum-pa-pa-pum indeed! Sometimes I can't bear to be out in public between Thanksgiving and New Year's because it involves listening to horrible versions of jingly, jangly Christmas songs.

What's your favorite Christmas movie?

As of about a month ago, it's Joyeux Noel, which I liked so much I found an excuse to show it to one of my classes. It's a Wonderful Life might be next, just because I can't recall that many others. Are there many others? If I think about it, I guess there are.... A lot of Christmas movies bug me, because they're so, well, seasonal. You can enjoy singing a bunch of three-minute song once a year in a way that you can't really enjoy watching a bunch of two-hour long movies once a year.

What about A Christmas Story?

Is that the one with the pig-eyed blond kid who's always being told he'll shoot his eye out with a b.b. gun? I HATE that movie!

What's your favorite Christmas tv special?

Honestly, I hate them all at this point--I've just seen the old ones, like Rudolph and such too many times, and can't be bothered to watch any new ones.... Are there any new ones?

What's the best present you ever got?

Mm, well, I'm hoping that will be the present I'm supposed to get this year: a new laptop.

What's the worst present you ever got?

Continuing the electronics theme, that would have to be a very old word processor that didn't even work, long about 1989.

What's the best present you ever gave?

About 15 years ago I made one of my sisters a quilt that she still uses every winter.

What's the worst present you ever gave?

I have no idea, because whoever received it was too polite to tell me how much they hated it. But I did make my brother a tiger-striped nightshirt he never wore, not even once. I finally appropriated it and now it hangs in my closet. I should put it to use.

What do you want for Christmas this year?

I've reached the point where I am just happy with whatever people give me. But my mom offered to buy me a laptop for a combined birthday-Christmas present and also because she wants to spend her money on us instead of leaving it to us, and I simply wasn't going to say no.

Is Christmas still a religiously significant holiday for you--in other words, do you celebrate it as the birth of the savior of humanity?

No. I like Christmas a lot: I like the cheeriness; I like giving and receiving presents; I like singing carols and hymns; I like remembering loved ones. But Christmas lost its religious significance for me long ago.

Addendum (see this comment)

Real or artificial Christmas tree?

Well, I tend to travel over Christmas, and I live alone, so I don't typically get a Christmas tree. I much prefer live ones, though, and I am swayed by the argument that they are more environmentally sound, given all that's involved in making an artificial one and the frequency with which people throw them out so that they end up not rotting in landfills, whereas Christmas tree compost is actually very good for a number of uses.

I tag anyone who ever celebrated Christmas.

Posted by Holly at 7:52 AM | Comments (10)

November 25, 2006

The Kind of Person Who Goes through Unlocked Gates in Public Spaces

I hope everyone has had a lovely Thanksgiving. Mine has been quite nice: quiet and restorative, which is what I wanted--nothing like the exciting trip to Paris and Brussels I took last year over my Thanksgiving break. I had dinner Thursday with friends but other than that I've mostly just worked. I'm still struggling to dig myself out from under the mountain of grading and school-related business that fell on me two weeks ago, but I think, by the time classes start again next week, I will have succeeded.

Anyway, here is something I wrote in my journal two years ago about an event that happened the Saturday after Thanksgiving in 2004.

***

I got bored with the business I was doing on campus and decided to go for a walk in an area I'd never explored. I discovered this very old, very tiny cemetery, from the early 19th century. There's this "meditation garden" outside it with no place to sit but it does feature a kind of cool cairn built of fragments from broken headstones. The cemetery itself is enclosed in a waist-high chain-link fence, and there was a gate in it, and I thought, if the gate is unlocked, I'll go in it, because I have always been the kind of person who goes through unlocked gates in public spaces--they seem to demand it; they seem to say "go through me" the way that bottle in Alice in Wonderland said "drink me."

And I went in and there was this poor turkey, pressing itself against the fence in an effort to melt through it. The poor turkey was very unhappy, because it was a windy day and we've had rotten weather lately, and chain-link fences offer little protection from the elements--and neither do narrow old headstones and a few old trees. I was struck by how pretty it was--though when I thought about all those turkeys we colored with brown and orange and red crayons in grade school, their tails all fanned out like some autumnal-colored peacock, it didn't seem so weird that it would be quite a lovely bird, except for its head, which was of course scaly and red and rather gross. For all the beauty of its feathers, you could see that the turkey had injured its side from pressing against the fence. It occurred to me that someone was keeping it there, but if someone was, s/he was doing a bad job of it because the turkey had no shelter and no food.

So I did what seemed best: opened the gate and walked behind the turkey slowly enough to keep it moving but not so fast that it freaked out and started running all over the yard. It walked right past the open gate once, so I opened it further and this time it saw the opening and ran out. But then it didn't go far: just on the other side of the fence, the side that kept things out rather than in, was a big pile of scrap wood, branches and sticks and such, and the poor turkey huddled up under that and seemed relieved to be there rather than in the yard, so I left it alone and continued my walk. I went back about 20 minutes later and it was still there. I might check tomorrow and see if it's around--probably someone will shoot it before too long, but at least it won't be quite so cold and wet during its last days on earth. Or maybe turkeys have ways of weathering winter: build big nests or something; who knows? I'm not a turkey expert.

But it did seem rather appropriate in a weird way to rescue a turkey from a graveyard during the Thanksgiving weekend.

Posted by Holly at 11:31 AM | Comments (3)

November 21, 2006

Punchline

A guy walks into a bar.... And two women having a leisurely conversation over drinks they bought themselves don't even notice.

Posted by Holly at 6:41 AM | Comments (2)

October 2, 2006

Recalcitrant

As is entirely appropriate for a language oriented writer like me, I subscribe to the dictionary.com emailed word of the day.

Today's word is recalcitrant, a word I have long adored, because it reminds me of so many instances in my life. It means

–adjective 1. resisting authority or control; not obedient or compliant; refractory. 2. hard to deal with, manage, or operate. –noun 3. a recalcitrant person.

I have been accused of being recalcitrant, and my insomnia is recalcitrant indeed. Which is why I am reading and answering email and posting blog entries at 4:53 a.m., having been awake for a good long while (after a day that included a long walk and a long yoga workout in the hopes that they would both relax and tire me out, so I'd actually sleep soundly tonight) and having recently downed two shots of vodka and thus become very hopeful that if I just make myself horizontal soon, my consciousness will dissolve into sleep and I'll just fucking be UNCONSCIOUS for a few more hours.

Really: Is eight hours of inert unknowing too much to ask from each day? I hate being awake in the middle of the night.

Back to bed....

Posted by Holly at 4:53 AM | Comments (1)

August 28, 2006

As Good as the Replacement

I recently discovered something amazing: It is possible to play solitaire without a computer! Just get a regular old deck of cards--the kind you use to play poker or some such game--and replicate on a table or some other flat surface the layout of your favorite version of computer solitaire. The rules and so forth are the same, except that you must shuffle and move the cards about yourself.

I think part of me always knew this--now that I plumb my memory, I can recall a time in the 1970s, back before VCRs were commonplace; back when there were only three networks, all of which showed reruns in the summer, so that there might be nothing to watch on television, necessitating other ways of amusing oneself after the sun went down (which it does around 8 p.m. in mid June in Arizona, a state that resolutely refuses to observe Daylight Saving Time); back when my mother would try to get my sisters and me to entertain ourselves quietly from time to time and so taught us all to play every version of solitaire she knew of and bought us each our own deck of cards. (Which was kind of a big deal because there was this whole weird to-do in Mormondom in the 1970s and 80s about how "face cards were Satanic." Rook cards were fine; Uno cards were fine; Gin Rummy played with Rook cards was fine and Go Fish! played with Uno cards was fine; but play those same games with a deck of face cards and you were practically ringing the doorbell of hell, because cards bearing stylized representations of European royalty were the devilish creation of Lucifer himself, and the sin in such cards was so potent it would rub off on your fingers if you even picked up a deck.)

But seriously, when I recently came across a deck of cards and thought, "Huh. I so rarely run into anyone who enjoys playing cards any more; what am I ever going to do with these?" it felt like a discovery to realize that I really truly could, all by myself, play a game of cards that wasn't virtual, that the object itself was every bit as good as the electronic replacement.

Posted by Holly at 10:12 AM | Comments (6)

July 12, 2006

Hey Joe

Yesterday as I was getting in my car to run some errands, Joe, my mailman, strolled up to my driveway with my mail. I thought I would save him the few steps up to my porch and so walked over to take it from him.

"How you doin, Ms. Holly?" he asked. The first time he addressed me by name, I was a bit surprised; but I soon realized of course he knows my name; he reads it almost every day. He probably also knows, if he cares enough to analyze the magazines I subscribe to, my religious background, my political leanings, my general taste in music.

"I'm fine," I said, taking the envelopes he held. "Thanks. How are you?"

"Doing real good. You have a good day, now."

"You too," I said.

It was, like every interaction I have with Joe, brief and extremely pleasant. He's just so damn good-natured! It never occurred to me to notice the temperament of my postman, until I had a really pissy one: the previous one would huff and puff coming up my stairs like I was a little pig in a brick house he needed to blow down, and he'd thrust the mail through the slot as if enraged that my house was still standing, because that meant he'd have to come back and do the whole thing again the next day. The one time I spoke to him, to ask him if instead of leaving a package on my front porch he might place it on my back porch out of view and the elements, he replied, his entire being slack with resentment, that he'd try to remember to accommodate my special, unusual and extremely inconvenient request.

Not Joe! He's always polite, always grinning. He's also really hot, if you go for tall, well-muscled men with those lean, long legs that look good in bicycle shorts. He's an aging hippy, in his mid-40s, I'd guess, with a full head of dark hair (far less gray than I've got) which he wears gathered in a pony tail hanging to his waist.

Hot though I think he is, I simply am not the kind of person to entertain sexual fantasies about the mailman. Instead what I really respond to is his grinning affability. It arouses in me a benevolent protectiveness. I really want to make his life easier. I know that patches of ice are a serious occupational hazard for postal carriers, and I don't want him to fall, so I keep my walk shoveled and my porch steps swept all winter. I want this guy to stick around and deliver my mail for a long, long time to come.

Posted by Holly at 5:00 PM | Comments (8)

July 1, 2006

Ding Dong, The Couch Is Gone

Remember when I wrote about how much I hated my couch, the hideous, old, uncomfortable couch desecrating my living room?

Well, last week I just couldn't stand it any more, so I went furniture shopping. It took me a while to find something I both liked and could afford, but eventually I came across something I could live with and put down a deposit. Tuesday two very nice young men showed up and assembled a spiffy new futon in my living room. At first I wasn't sure I liked it: it's a futon, not a couch, and futons just aren't as settled and grown-up as couches. But I wanted something practical--something my cat couldn't shred, first of all--and I also don't feel settled enough to invest in expensive upholstered furniture. The futon is also big: taller, wider, and deeper than its predecessor. At first it seemed to overpower the room, and I worried that I'd made a mistake.

But now I've had a few days to get used to it and it's fine. I don't love it, but I don't hate it the way I hated that couch, either. But the real bonus is that the couch has been granted a new life and I no longer hate it, either. In fact, I love it!

I have a screened back porch that's bigger than my bedroom. It's really great. I have lots of plants out there, and my cat sits and watches rabbits and robins cross my lawn, so she feels she's communing with the outdoors but I don't have to worry about her being run over or throttled by a nasty dog. There's a table and chairs as well, and I often eat out there during the summer. I sometimes sit and read, but the chairs are those formed plastic affairs and they just ain't good for long-term sitting.

Enter the crappy old couch! Originally I had the guys haul it back there just so I could store it someplace until I could call someone to take it to the dump. But then I thought, "What the hell; might as well use it for the summer," and I covered it with an old flannel sheet so the dust wouldn't settle into it. And then I sat down on it to read and while it wasn't very comfortable compared to the furniture INSIDE my house, it was a billion times more comfortable than the other patio furniture OUTSIDE. The cat seems pretty pleased with it too. And now I'm thinking I'll get a tarp and cover it during the winter so the snow doesn't damage it, and it can live out there forever.

One of my friends told me that when he lived in Syracuse, there was an ordinance banning furniture from front porches unless it met certain specifications: wicker was allowed, for instance, and wrought iron. But the ordinance was designed to make it impossible for people (i.e., students) too lazy and/or cheap to transport some awful castoff couch to the dump where it belonged to instead plop the couch down on the front porch where everyone would have to look at it, and where couch owners could lounge, drink beer, and heckle their neighbors and unsuspecting passers-by. My town has no such ordinance, but even if it did, I don't think it would matter because MY hideous castoff couch is on my BACK porch.

And it is glorious. I'm going out to sit there now.

Posted by Holly at 8:01 AM | Comments (3)

May 29, 2006

Home Again, Again

I'm home. The flight home was uneventful, which is exactly how I like my flights. My house and all my stuff are fine, which is exactly how I like my house and all my stuff. The conference was fabulous (more on that later), which is how I prefer my conferences, and I'm already trying to think up something to present on next time.

One nice thing is that when I got home, several of my plants were in full bloom. I have an azalea so heavy with deep pink blossoms you almost can't see any greenery. My rhododendron and looks fabulous, as does a bunch of chives--I guess most people don't typically think of chives as decorative plants but they've got these cool fuzzy purple blossoms that I quite like. Purple is one of my favorite color for flowers: last year I planted lupine and purple columbine, both of which are healthy, established and blooming right now. The first plant I see when I walk out the back door is this vine thing (I can't for the life of me remember the name of it) climbing a trellis by my garage--it's covered with deep purple star-shaped flowers. And I finally know what color my irises are! Last year a friend gave me some cuttings from her garden but she couldn't remember what color they were. I was hoping they'd be dark purple, but they're a deep gold, almost brown--it's very dramatic and pretty, and contrasts with all the purple very nicely.

The only disappointment in the whole matter of my garden--and it's not a cause for weeping and wailing, I know, but it is kind of a drag--is that I'm leaving again in a few days, to go on a nice long vacation that will involve visits with both friends and family, and when I get back two weeks later, all these really cool plants will be done blooming for this year, and I won't get to appreciate them again until 2007. I guess next year I shouldn't plan two trips back to back, and shouldn't make one of them so long.

P.S. Now that I'm home and can manage my spam comments, I've turned the comments back on, in case anyone was dying to say something about Riley or anything else I've mentioned recently.

Posted by Holly at 4:33 PM | Comments (8)

April 27, 2006

Limits of Civic Pride

I've lived in some fairly miserable cities in my life--Kaohsiung and Shanghai spring to mind. Reese Witherfork tells me that Kaohsiung has gotten worse since I was there in 1986, and everything I've read assures me that Shanghai has gotten better since I was there in 1991. Still, I have no particular desire to return to either, and whenever I've felt inclined to lament the shortcomings of anyplace I've lived in the past 15 years, I can always cheer myself up by saying, "At least it's not as bad as Shanghai."

Although not as crowded or filthy or schizophrenic or cruel as Kaohsiung or Shanghai, the city I live in now isn't exactly glamorous or exciting (which I'm told Shanghai has become in certain ways, though even when I lived there you could find glamor and excitement if only you had loads and load of foreign currency, which I lacked). Instead, like so many once prosperous cities in the rust belt, it's economically depressed and culturally deprived, blighted by urban decay and bad management. Some cities have managed to remake themselves into something that can draw industry and tourists, but this place hasn't--partly because it's also cursed by crappy weather.

I can't help feeling, however, that it could be a reasonably appealing place if only someone could shape it properly, then sell that shape to other. Apparently the city council feels the same way too, because billboards have been springing up around town, bearing slogans to help residents feel good about their city.

Unfortunately the slogans are thoroughly half-assed. Instead of actually promoting the city, citing its strengths and inciting pride, the slogans bear witness to just how little civic pride we've got. One big billboard features big block letters written on notebook paper, stating,

It's OK to love this town. --Anonymous

Anonymous? Anonymous? The city council can't even find someone willing to go on record saying that it's OK to love this town? Then there's the fact that we're not assured that it's GOOD or GREAT to love this town--no, it's merely OK. Every time I pass the sign I snort in derision. The billboard is worse than blank air or even a derelict brewery in terms of announcing and advertising the city's strengths: blank air can at least provide you with a decent view of the land or city scape, while an abandoned beer factory announces to teetotalers that the place has cast off some of its hedonistic devotion to booze and announces to imbibers that at some point residents understood what a city needed to keep its residents happy.

Another billboard points out that "Lots of places are cold in the winter." Well, that's true, but it's not exactly a motto that warms the heart--or anything else, for that matter.

I'm waiting for a billboard that tells me, "Buffalo has more vacant houses than we do," or "Be glad you don't live on an Indian reservation." Though I could always offer them a slogan of my own: "This town isn't as unpleasant as Shanghai in the early 1990s."

Posted by Holly at 9:41 AM | Comments (6)

April 18, 2006

As Good as My Day Was Going to Get

Warning: this post is cute to the point of being cloying. If you have a low tolerance for cuteness, don't read it. It will gross you out. It might also make you think I'm kind of pathetic, but I'm willing to take that risk.

As I've mentioned, I suffer from insomnia, which I sometimes treat with alcohol (a couple of beers or a shot of vodka being my preferred alcoholic treatment), antihistamines, or prescription sleeping pills--or, if things are really bad, both booze and pills. It's not ideal but desperate means call for desperate measures.

I also have trouble waking up. I've met--and marveled at--people who stir, open their eyes, then immediately and joyfully rise to greet the day! Not me. I stir, notice that it's morning; I look at the clock and feel profound relief if I don't have to get up in the next half hour or so, then snuggle in my blankets and doze cozily for as long as I can.

Last week sucked. Crap happened and I was anxious. As a result, I didn't get a single night of chemical-free sleep all week.

Until Sunday night, that is....

My cat Dinah often sleeps at the foot of my bed. She's black and white, cute and cuddly, and if I ever get around to learning to use the digital photo I got for Christmas (I asked for it specifically so I could post photos on my blog), I might even upload a photo of her here.

I woke up a time or two Sunday night, but still managed to go back to sleep without drugs. (Yay!) At about 6:30 a.m., I woke, turned onto my left side, nudged Dinah with my foot while making a series of silly noises intended to beckon her to me, and lo and behold, the noises work. She draped herself over my right shoulder and we both went back to sleep for a while. Then I rolled onto my back and she adjusted herself to curl under my chin, but the only place for her head was on my cheek, so that's where she stuck it. And I could feel the vibrations of her purring against my head and my bed was warm and comfortable and I thought, "This is perhaps as good as my day is going to get."

The day didn't suck. The weather was decent; work was decent; I wore an outfit I really liked. But it never did get better than lying in a warm bed I had no need to leave before I was ready while my nice little cat purred against my face.

Posted by Holly at 10:34 AM | Comments (6)

April 3, 2006

Daylight Saving Time Sucks

Yesterday morning I went through that strange ritual of setting my clocks ahead. I have many clocks: at least two in every room except the bathroom (just one in there, but you can see it from the bathtub), plus a clock in the basement and one of the back porch. Typically when Daylight Saving Time rolls around or goes away, I adjust all my clocks BEFORE I go to bed, but I was suffering from a cold Saturday night, went to bed early and so forgot. I hacked, coughed, sneezed, snorted, tossed and turned in the darkness; when I awoke fully to glorious daylight, I glanced at the clock and saw that it was only 6:57 a.m. I felt a moment of satisfaction when I realized that it was early enough that I didn't need to get up, that I could luxuriate in my warm bed a while longer--until I remembered that DST had started and a full hour had been lost during the night.

OK, I know that within a given time zone, places in the east are, relative to actual solar time, earlier than places in the west. I'm not at all in favor of every major city figuring out exactly when noon is, then setting its clocks to be precisely accurate in terms of that. I don't mind time zones--I can live with the fact that Detroit and New York are on the same clock, even though they're more than 600 miles apart and on opposite sides of the Eastern Time Zone. (There are repeated announcements in the Detroit Airport informing you that it's in the Eastern Time Zone--apparently a lot of people think it's in Central.)

But once we accept that the sun moves around the earth in 24 hours and mark that movement in 24 slices, why screw with the system by having everyone Spring Forward and Fall Back? I don't understand why it makes life better to decree that for almost seven months out of the year a particular point in the progress of a day is 9 a.m. when that same point is 8 a.m. for the five or so months remaining. Most people have trouble getting up in the morning, so what good does it do to make them wake up earlier? Why can't we just say that what we call 8 a.m. shall remain 8 a.m., and start our day later or earlier, as convenience dictates? (I vote later: I heartily applaud those schools that have done away with 8 a.m. classes, and wish my institution would do the same.) Why do I have to move all my clocks ahead in April and back in October?

In the 18th century, dinner was generally served in the afternoon, so that it could be prepared, eaten and cleaned up after by natural light. Candles and lamp oil being very expensive, it was a real status symbol to eat dinner late enough that you had to use artificial light in order to see your meal and your companions (root pan, bread; prefix com, with; the word originally meant "the ones you eat bread with")--and imagine the expense involved in providing candles for the help to wash the dishes by! One justification for DST is that it saves energy in that more things can be done by natural light, but given how much people drive, how many people work in buildings without much natural light, and how much people use electronic equipment throughout their day, I doubt DST saves much energy, if any.

I once checked out a book from the university library called Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time by Michael Downing, kept it for two or three semesters, then returned it unread. I plan on doing something similar with Seize the Day: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time by David Prerau. I learned this from reading the dust jackets and on-line summaries of the two books: DST has little to do with agriculture (farmers generally resent it) and plenty to do with military and industry. It is the dumbest idea Benjamin Franklin (whose other inventions include the fire department, bi-focals and, of course, the Franklin stove) ever had, and a strange custom we should get rid of.

Posted by Holly at 9:43 AM | Comments (8)

March 29, 2006

Broken Window Coda

Some of you may remember my account of finding a storm window broken back in January, and of the fact that after the storm window was replaced, smudges remained on the window it had protected, in a way that I couldn't clean it--plus there were all these shards of glass trapped on the sill between the inside and storm window.

The good news now is that a friend has been visiting me, and yesterday he helped me take down the new storm window and do some final cleanup. We managed to get all the bits of glass vacuumed up, but the bad news is that the marks I thought were smudges on the inside window are actually scratches--when the storm window broke, its glass struck the inside window hard enough to gouge some fairly deep scratches.

The window faces southeast, and the scratches on it are right at my eye level and especially visible on a bright clear morning like today. They ain't going away unless I have the entire window replaced.

Posted by Holly at 8:41 AM | Comments (2)

March 20, 2006

Springtime Is Not Come In

Today, I see by looking at my calendar, is the vernal equinox, also known as the first day of spring.

This is one of the days when I wish most desperately that I lived somewhere with A) a sizeable Druid population and B) warmer weather. I would really love to join a bunch of nature worshipers and frolic through the woods right about now, but I don't know many pagans here aside from myself, and it's still too stinkin' cold out.

Spring doesn't exactly suck in southern Arizona--sometimes, if it's been a wet winter, the desert will erupt in California poppies or other lovely wildflowers--but it's not something you long for, something you almost can't help but worship when it arrives, the way it is when you see this gradual but nonetheless dramatic victory of warmth and fertility over the bleak and barren cold, and you think, my god, looks like I'll probably survive a few more months after all.

I admit I never really got spring--in the sense of either understanding or receiving it--until I lived in Iowa. I remember walking along on a snowy day and noticing these strange bits of purple, like a few bright scraps of fabric strewn carelessly across a neighbor's yard. I remember the shock when I realized the scraps were flowers--crocuses, the first flower of spring. There is something deeply magical about crocuses, their petals so fragile and delicate while the plant itself is robust and bold enough to burst through ground that hasn't entirely thawed. I certainly delighted in strolling along sidewalks lined with orange trees on the University of Arizona campus, breathing in the heady, gorgeous scent of orange blossoms on a bright April morning. But that experience, although lovely and memorable, is still not as miraculous as welcoming the triumphal appearance of crocuses, tulips, hyacinths and some of the other early-blooming bulbs after a long, cold, dark, miserable, sucky winter.

Bulbs don't do well in southern Arizona--never gets cold enough--so I didn't really understood their appeal until I lived in the Midwest, but now I far prefer spring flowers to fall's late bloomers, like chrysanthemums and asters. And even among the bulbs, there are some I like better than others. I think daffodils are fine, but I'm not generally crazy about pale yellow anything. I like lilies of the valley and narcissus quite well, but I really prefer the more dramatic tulips. And my favorite bulbs of all are hyacinths--actually, hyacinths are one of the flowers I love best, particularly the pink and purple variety. I find the large clusters of small blossoms very beautiful, and I LOVE the smell.

But although the bulbs have already sent green bits up out of the ground, they haven't bloomed yet. OK, there's not much snow on the ground today and at this precise moment the sun is shining, but it's still really cold out--around freezing during the day, and well below freezing at night--and I'm FREAKIN' SICK OF WINTER.

There's this famous poem you read when you study medieval English literature, that begins "Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing Cuccu," which translates, I am told, to "Springtime has come in, loud sing cuckoo!" (The cuckoo, I am also told, used to be one of the significant signs of spring in ye olde Englelonde, but global warming has changed that a bit.)

I would LOVE to sing cuckoo, I really would! But springtime hasn't really come in yet here, no matter what the goddamn calendar says, and while I'm not above singing cuckoo on my own, it's one of those activities (unlike taking a walk, watching a movie, reading a book, or blogging--you know, the kind of thing I generally like to do with my time) that just isn't as fun when you do it on your own.

So if you're someplace where springtime has come in, and you have someone who'll join you in the activity, do me a favor and sing cuckoo.

And then tell me about it. I would love to hear your springtime celebration story, and I hope I'll soon be singing cuckoo myself.

Posted by Holly at 9:14 AM | Comments (6)

February 14, 2006

Happy Valentine's Day

My three favorite dates are December 16 (my birthday), December 25 (although I'm one of those evil pagans who prefers wishing friends and strangers "Happy Holidays" to "Merry Christmas," I still dig the whole giving-and-getting-gifts part of the gig), and February 14.

I like February 14 for two reasons: One, it's Arizona Statehood Day. That's right, Arizona became the 48th state in the Union on February 14, 1912. Because it was so fashionably late to the AWESOME party thrown by the Federal Government, I am able to say that none of my grandparents were born in the United States: three were born in Arizona before it became a state; the fourth, like a good many Mormons, was born in Mexico (which is where the polygamists went to stay polygamists, until Pancho Villa came along and told them to get the hell out).

Of course, the other reason I like February 14 is that it's Valentine's Day.

This is the 43rd Valentine's Day I've spent on this planet. For, oh, 39 of those 43, I've not had a Valentine to call my own (I even had two long-term relationships where I managed to be on the outs with my sig/ot during the month of February), but the fact that any flowers I received on such days were from my mother (she never neglects me or my sisters on Valentine's Day: she sent bouquets to all four of us on Monday) and any chocolate I got, I bought myself, hasn't dampened my enthusiasm for the day.

I just like it, you know? I like construction paper and scissors and glue. I like doilies. I like crayons and markers. I like red a lot, and pink is OK. I like chocolate. I like flowers. I like hearts. I like sending big envelopes through the US mail and I like telling the people I love that I love them, even if they don't offer to take me to dinner, call me sweetheart and kiss me passionately on the 14th day of February. (I'm not saying I'm opposed to the idea, I'm just saying it doesn't have to happen. I accept other gestures of affection and regard. One of my all-time favorite Valentine's Day presents is a garlic press my sister bought me in 1990 when we shared an apartment--I use it still.)

There have been years when I've made fudge for the dozen or so people closest to me. There have been years when I've baked heart-shaped cakes. There have been years when I've sent dozens of Valentines, to pretty much everyone in my address book. I'd rather do that than send Christmas cards--I mean, it's just so commonplace to send red envelopes in December to people you ignore the rest of the year, but who does it in February?

If I'd had my shit together this year, I would have fashioned a huge, elaborate heart of pink and red paper, a sincere token of my affection for all my friends and readers. I would have taken a photo of said creation, and uploaded it here. Unfortunately, however, that did not happen.

So you'll just have to accept this blog entry as my Valentine to you. If I know you well enough to love you, then believe me, I love you! And if we're still in the early stages of our friendship, then I like you every bit as much as I can without seeming pathetic, threatening and weird.

And if you like or love me too, please leave a comment and tell me so.

Posted by Holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (12)

January 31, 2006

Mellencamp, the Game

As I mentioned a million years ago (OK, it was five and a half months, but in blog time, that is the equivalent of a million years), my friend and colleague Dr. Sweet Baby Jesus introduced me to this game we call Mellencamp (if you want to know why, you have to read the original post), where you take two basically equal and/or frequently paired things, and decide which one you prefer.

If you're playing this game properly, you wouldn't ask someone, "Which do you prefer: a full-body massage, or a poke in the eye with a sharp stick?" Rather, you'd ask, "Which do you prefer: Swedish massage, or shiatsu?" Opting for one does not necessarily mean that you are dismissing the other as thoroughly vile. For instance, I prefer raspberries to strawberries, but that doesn't mean I don't like strawberries--I love them, in fact. I just love raspberries a teeny bit more.

I prefer

sunset to sunrise
questions to answers
the Middle Ages to the Renaissance
skirts to trousers
pedicures to manicures
mountains to the ocean
the west coast to the east coast
the desert to the tropics
Arizona to the other 49 states
Tucson to Phoenix
saguaro to any other cactus, though I also really like those purple prickly pears
Jane Austen to the Brontes
Emily Dickinson to Walt Whitman
meticulously produced rock music like Pink Floyd to punk
new wave to grunge
Christmas to New Year's
baths to showers
water skiing to snow skiing
aisle seat to window
raspberries to strawberries
chocolate to any other form of candy (though I like a heck of a lot of candy)
wild berry skittles to regular
pecans to walnuts
Mexican food to Italian
tortilla chips to potato chips
Coke to Pepsi
vodka to gin
beer to wine
margaritas to martinis
sobriety to drunkenness (I grew up a teetotaler, and while I have learned to appreciate the occasional, decent booze buzz, I'd still rather have my thinking unclouded and my motor skills sharp)
coffee to tea
decaf to regular (because caffeine really screws with my sleep)
hyacinths and crocuses to chrysanthemums and asters
maple leaves to the leaf of any other tree (having lived in someplace that has sugar maples, I can now understand why the Canadians put a maple leaf on their flag--they're just really cool)
deep colors--especially greens, reds and blues--to earth tones
cats to dogs (I really love dogs, but I find cats require less maintenance, so I prefer them as pets)
solitude to crowds
jacks to tiddly winks
jump rope to hop scotch
seeing my acupuncturist to seeing my MD
Elizabeth Tudor to Mary Stewart
Gene Kelly to Fred Astaire
Bette Davis to Joan Crawford
Buffy the Vampire Slayer to its spinoff, Angel
Spike to Angel
People who call themselves feminists to people who, for whatever reason, don't
Curious skeptics engaged with the mystery and even godless heathen to the religiously devout and orthodox of any ilk
holly to ivy

OK, there are a few pairings where one choice is obviously right and the other is obviously wrong--like ANYONE actually prefers Angel to Spike, or tiddly winks to jacks? (I really used to love jacks. Someone with children between the ages of, say, five and 11, tell me: do children still play them? Can you even buy them?)

I tag any and every blogger who reads this to make and post a list of your own.

Posted by Holly at 9:01 AM | Comments (13)

January 13, 2006

Fun and Games

During my recent visit in Arizona, at each of the homes I hung out at, I played a game. At my parents' house I played Chinese checkers; at my sister's house I played the Turner Classic Movies version of Scene It?; at my brother and sister-in-law's house I played Carcassonne.

Chinese checkers was one of my favorite games when I was little--at least, it was my favorite game to play at my grandmother's house. My grandmother had this really cool set: a round, flat tin about the size of a dinner plate that served as both playing surface and storage for the marbles: you pushed a lever and suddenly six shallow holes appeared, each holding ten very beautiful translucent marbles of a specific color. When I saw that my mother had bought a set I asked her what happened to that set and she said she didn't know, but she bought the new one because she did remember how much we liked the game. I convinced her to play with me a few times, and when she got tired of that, I played myself, trying to figure out the fastest way across the board. It was so much fun that I think I'll have to find a set and someone to play with.

I am not a terribly competitive person, which is one reason I suck at sports: I prefer winning to losing, of course, but winning often doesn't seem worth the work it requires, and as long as my opponent doesn't gloat or play dirty, I can lose without minding much. This attribute comes in handy when I play any kind of trivia game with my sister Lisa, who has one of the best memories I have ever encountered in my life, and generally takes any and all who challenge her. When she was a teenager, her boyfriend (subsequently her husband) took her home to meet his parents, and they ended up playing Trivial Pursuit. She got a question about the name of a man who spent his life tracking down Nazi war criminals, and when she knew the answer--Simon Wiesenthal--her future father-in-law became enraged, convinced she had cheated. He couldn't believe that this perky bleached blonde whose shoes and handbags always matched had the intellectual capacity to even understand what it meant to hunt down war criminals, much less remember the name of someone who did it. I watched the same thing happen with a guy I was dating: we sat down to play Trivial Pursuit with Lisa, and she ended up kicking his ass and mine. He was flummoxed and angry; I couldn't have been more pleased if I'd won myself, since it meant he finally admit to me that Lisa was a lot smarter than she first appeared.

Anyway, all of this is to say that I lost when I played Scene It? with her. Not only did she knew the directors of movies she'd never seen, but she also just got a lot of easy questions: "What country was The Sound of Music set in?" Then there was this one category of question that I got wrong and she got right every time: you'd see someone's high school yearbook photo, and have to figure out who it was. "How can you tell who these people are from these grainy black and white photos?" I asked. "They don't look anything like their publicity shots."

"I guess I can just see the diamond in the rough," she said.

This game comes with a DVD; a lot of the questions involve watching a film clip and then providing some detail about it. There are cards with questions, but they're not so interesting, and after a while, we set the DVD to "party mode," which meant it just cycled through all kinds of clips and all kinds of questions. Then we weren't competing; we were just seeing what we knew about the movies, and that was really addictive; we stayed up far too late doing that.

The game I liked best was Carcassonne. My sister-in-law, Mia, really loves board games, and she and my brother have a bunch. But this one was special. It involves selecting tiles (laid face-down, of course) on which were bits of river and/or road and/or a town and/or a cloister and/or farmland, which you then arranged to form medieval settlements, farms and roadways around a river. I totally dug it, and I totally won, every time we played, either because of 1) beginner's luck or 2) the fact that I was most likely a medieval French peasant in a past life and so understood intuitively the goal of the game.

My all-time favorite game is Celebrities, which requires no special equipment. (If you don't know how to play, let me know--I'll try to post something about it in the future.) I admit I don't own any game equipment except a deck of cards, and I had all the games removed from my computer because otherwise, I would waste time playing them. But all of the games I played over the holidays are worth owning, and I may break down and buy one.

Anyone want to tell me about a game you really like?

Posted by Holly at 9:35 AM | Comments (3)

January 5, 2006

My New Favorite Plastic Bag

Yesterday when I picked up my mail--all twelve tons that had accumulated during the two weeks I'd had it held--there was a package mailed from Scotland by a friend. It contained a t-shirt bearing the cover art from The Queen is Dead by (of course) the Smiths. I am not much one for wearing clothing with slogans or writing on it, but I will wear this shirt.

I've blogged about my loathing of excess packaging as well as my fondness for cool plastic bags, an eccentric interest, perhaps, but one I like to think is harmless if not virtuous, given that I reuse for as long as I possibly can something a great many people throw away. Much to my delight, included in the package was the bag in which the shirt had been carried from Unknown Pleasures, the store where it was purchased. The bag bears a claim that it is "Probably the best carrier bag in Scotland," as well as a blurb from John Peel, stating, "I was talking to a guy the other day who was trying to convince me that CDs were better than vinyl because they had no surface noise. And I said ‘listen mate, life has surface noise.'"

I personally still prefer CDs to vinyl, but I am willing to believe that the carrier bag I've got now is indeed the best one ever to have come out of Scotland, and I will treasure it for a good two to three years.

Posted by Holly at 11:44 AM

August 26, 2005

Celebrated Saturday

Last Saturday afternoon, SBJ and our new friend Anesthesia and I went downtown to Celebrate! the city we live in. It was your typical street fair, with jugglers and really cool chalk drawings on the pavement and a couple dozen tiny girls (three, four, five years old) doing fierce tumbling routines along the main thoroughfare of town.

We walked around, looked at crafts, searched without success for a stand selling funnel cakes with tomato sauce (SBJ claims they're all the rage in Connecticut), drank beer in the park. We talked about important things, like emoticons. We agreed that the only acceptable emoticons are the plain old print ones, like :-), and that the cartoonish ones you sometimes see online should be banned from use forever more. We spent some time figuring out what Anesthesia should be called in this blog–we were happy enough with the nickname we came up with. At first she said, "Yeah, but it puts you to sleep!" I said, "That's not my main association with it. I think about getting general anesthesia before surgery, and how it feels really good, but it's dangerous--too much can kill you." Which didn't reassure her all that much, but then SBJ pointed out that the word would make a great album title for some metal band, and then we couldn't think of anything better, and this word sounds like another name that is meaningful to her, so we went with it.

SBJ asked about really bad haircut stories. This is a competition I always win because I almost died from a bad haircut. Seriously: I cried so much my intestines exploded and I nearly hemorrhaged to death. (That's the short version--the long version is truly fascinating, provided you're not afraid of being grossed out. I'll tell it someday.)

We found a stall where girls were selling samosas and painting on temporary henna tattoos. SBJ wanted something to complement his three questions, so the girl gave him a straightforward geometric pattern an inch or so below them--she said she had never hennaed a man before and wasn't sure what would be appropriate, so she went for something simple. It looked fine, but SBJ was not overcome with pleasure at the finished product. In fact, he said he felt gypped.

Then it was my turn. I got a paisley (one of my favorite designs) on my shoulder, which looked pretty awesome, and felt very celebratory. All in all, a very satisfactory day.

Posted by Holly at 8:43 PM | Comments (1)