Quodlibets

Things I'm Loving Right Now

• My new flannel Chicago Bears pajama pants.  I don't love the stinky Bears so much right now, but these pants rock.
• My new purse.  My dad's done it again.  Even though I pick out the purse, the purse is only good if he buys it.  From now on, he's going to be buying all my purses, even if I give him the money to do it.
• Sewing.  Oddly enough, my break from it has gotten me all excited to do it.
• Lemon Zinger tea.  You can start laughing now, when I tell you how much I LOVE this tea, and how excited I am to experience the full oeuvre of Celestial Seasonings teas.  I've never had any before, now, but cross your fingers for me, the tea isn't causing migraines.  Knock on wood.  Rub your rabbit's foot.  All that stuff.  I adore hot tea.
• Bagels.  Some days, the only thing I feel like eating for every meal is a toasted bagel with peanut butter or cream cheese.  We're out of them right now, and I think I'm partaking of the toasted carb family anyway, in the form of toast.
• The fact that all the ornaments are off the tree and stowed happily away.  All that's left to clean up from Xmas is the actual tree--a 10 minute project at most--and some odds and ends that are being "stored" on the dining room table.
• Our new router, which is password protected, and according to Sam, stunningly easy to set up.
• Which combines with the new Leopard operating system, which is okay, I guess.  There's some nice things about it.  As soon as Sam learns about Time Machine, I'll love it.
• My new Danskos.  Oh, I've read the preaching, and I've held out, but oh. my. god.  They are SO comfortable (immediately, too!) and I'm over the clunkiness already.
• Netflix.  This whole writers' strike thing, it's made TV a wasteland.  Everything is in reruns, and there is just nothing on.  We're going through probably 2 to 4 DVDs a week now, and that's unprecedented.  For us. 
• Football.  Yeah, yeah, I know.  But it's still fun.

Slush

Today is one of those days on which I feel a sickly loathing for the city.  It's probably a combination of slogging through gray mush, feeling damp and icky from slogging around in the gray mush, and the nausea of being on a bus for a long time, watching people get on and off and on and off while I stay in the same place.

I went to have lunch with Sam, in the falling snow, and while lunch was nice, and I enjoy having what seems to be a stolen hour with him, I did not enjoy waiting for the bus in the snow.  And having my purse and hat and coat and pants get all wet.  The driest part of me was my feet, which were encased in a lovely pair of black boots.  I tucked my pants in them for the first time ever, which is mildly uncomfortable, though it did save my pants from the muck.

Sigh.  The snow looks pretty until you have to walk through it and transact some form of daily life in it.  Not pleasant.  Thus, my hatred.

Happy Rock Band Holidays!

This will go down as the family's rock band Xmas.  My brother and dad have the new game, and boy howdy, it's fun.  I personally prefer to be the singer, and I did some singing today.  My sister filled in on drums and guitar, as did the brother.  The dad stuck to bass and guitar.  Seems no one else is brave enough? to sing. 

I think I've badgered my brother into giving his old Xbox 360 to Sam, but really it's for me.  I want to get Rock Band and spend hours singing.  I can't lie.  I absolutely love it.  It's not like karoke AT ALL, because a) no audience of strangers, b) there's a real voice singing behind you and c) everyone else kind of sucks at their instruments too.  Plus, they're all concentrating on their notes, so they're not paying attention to you.  I.  LOVE.  IT.  I'm going to splurge, I think, and get myself Rock Band as soon as it can be found in a store.  Is this a dumb idea, considering I don't want the other instruments?  Just the mike, please.  Maybe.  But I'm not sure I can be dissuaded just yet.  We'll see.

Anyway, hope your Xmas was as rockin' as ours!

Around Town

Is that what I would call my gossip column, if I had one?  No clue, but here's my first item:

What's the best way to prepare for a football game?  Italian food, of course.  At about 5:40 this evening, we saw Kyle Orton get out of a cab and go into Carmine's.  He was with a girl, who I didn't really look at, so I can't say anything about her.  I was too distracted by his disastrous haircut.  Kyle, I'm sure you're a very nice man, but dude, get a haircut.  He also looked far more slight than I would have expected.  Anyway, we weren't close enough to his table to really see what was going on, but he sat at a table with some older gentlemen (in their 50's, Sam guessed) and apparently ate Italian.  Or a steak, the other thing Carmine's does.  Carbo loading?  Sam said Orton eyed Sam's camera on the way into the restaurant, and Sam thought he might have walked around to the side a bit to avoid it.  I don't know it that's true, but we would NEVER take a picture of a sorta-celeb and interrupt a meal.  Or even just interrupt a walk into a restaurant. 

Either way, that was the notable thing about this evening.  Save for the food, which is always remarkable at the Rosebud restaurants.

"MTV Unplugged" 10,000 Maniacs (1993)

There were other albums before this, but this is the first album I remember asking for independent of my dad's influence, and absent of the (sad) influence of early 90's Top 40 radio.  I don't know when I got it, but to my thinking, it must have been right around the time of its release (which Wikipedia says is late October, 1993), since I heard it in a mall music store (over the store's sound system; the actual MTV Unplugged may have even been on the TVs in the store, for all I can remember).  In my memory, it goes something like this: "Dad, how can I find out who this is?" "Uh, ask someone."  "Okay."  The answer was, of course, 10,000 Maniacs.  And I'm fairly certain my dad bought me the CD at that point. 

I would have been a freshman at that point, and for some reason, in my memories of this historic event, I'm younger than that.  But there's no mistaking that it was this 10,000 Maniacs album and not some other, because I still don't own any studio albums of theirs.  And frankly, I had thought I was into a lot of different music by the time I was a freshman, but maybe I'm wrong.  There are things I can remember liking before the Maniacs (REM, for instance, and lots of classic rock), but most things came after.  It's hard for me to pinpoint exactly how I felt about the album, actually, because it was so long ago, even if I did get it in early 1994.  That's 13 years ago, and I didn't think about music then the way I think about it now.  I'm not sure if I was aware of MTV Unplugged at that point, or not.  I don't know if I was listening to Q101 at the time, or not, though I suspect not, because most of my alternative leanings came after I got a car.  Anything I listened to before the car got played on one of those giant boom box contraptions, with a CD player on top and two tape decks in the front. 

Maybe I've got my chronology wrong here, but I swear, everything came after.  That's how it feels, anyway, in my little personal history through music.  Whether or not I've got it right doesn't matter, because it was an important moment if I remember it that way.  Suffice to say, this album probably begins my musical life, and it also probably begins the great branching of my musical life from both my dad and my sister.  All three paths have crossed and run concurrent at certain points--and now my brother's musical life is doing much the same thing with all of us--but this is, for me, the first great point on my own path.

I still really enjoy this album, and pull it out occasionally for a spin.  And songs from it make my mixes all the time.  But as mentioned before, I don't listen to other 10,000 Maniacs albums, so the album wasn't a jumping off point in that sense.  It's likely that I know every single word of every single song on the album, and I think (but am not 100% certain) that the CD that is in my books at home is the 2nd copy I've owned.  On some of these early influential albums, I've owned many copies of each CD.  That's how much play they got.  That's how much they got beat up, going from my car (though I am guessing that there was no CD player in the Corolla--Kate, do you know?) to my room to wherever I was. 

Regardless, this was it, for me.  This is where I start my own personal musical history.

(This is the first in a series of posts about albums that influenced me.  I'm not sure that's the best phrasing for it--"influenced" me--but I can't think of how else to say it, and I've been thinking around it since the end of NaBloPoMo, so we're stuck with it.  Anyhow, periodically, whenever I feel like it, I'll add another.)

Expletive Expletive Expletive

If it's at all possible, I've regressed with the present wrapping.  Out of 2 attempts on one box, I failed twice.  Yes, both times I had to rip the paper off (expensive, gorgeous paper) and discard it.  The box in question is now sitting unwrapped on the dining room table along with two of its cohorts, and I'm seriously considering writing the recipient's name on the damn box in colored sharpie.  I'm that exasperated.  Especially because in between those two failures, Sam thought he could fix my wrapping idiocy (it turns out he can't) and that one other wrapping attempt failed.  I did salvage the paper that time, and turn it into some nice wrapping for the only kind of present I can wrap.  A CD.  (I take that back.  I'm also quite lovely at wrapping DVDs, as long as they're not a box set.)

For years now, it's been a joke that I can't wrap a present, but the sad truth of it is this:  give me a box to wrap, and I'm sadly, utterly unable to do so.  No matter that more than one person has tried to teach me.  No matter that I'm a fairly intelligent woman with all kinds of skill sets.  It's just that apparently none of them extend to the wrapping.  Next year, I swear to god, I am just buying bags.  Tons of bags.  I mean, it's just worse than ever this year, and it's given me a headache and made me cry, and that's enough.  I'm done.

Obviously, I'm not, because there is still a PILE of unwrapped presents (including the aforementioned three boxes) and a dauntingly large number of large boxes.  (At least three, which for me, is daunting.)  If that's not bad enough, tomorrow my sister is bringing over a load of other things to wrap, and I swear I'm wrapping them candy-style.  Enough with the tape and shit.  Even worse, I don't think Sam really wants to wrap presents either, and man, they need to get done.  He's at least middlingly competent at it, whereas I truly scrape the bottom of the wrapping barrel for my skills.  He's going to have to do at least one of my bigger items (not one of the three aforementioned big boxes, sadly), but right now, we're not exactly speaking after the last box fiasco.  The second time I ripped the paper off a box with it 75% finished.  That didn't leave us in happy straits.  We're strained right now, and over what?  Present-goddamn-wrapping.

I don't want to even think about how the hell I'm going to wrap his presents.  It's going to be awful. 

Sharpie, here I come.  Sigh.

Progress Report Monday #7

See that little bitty section directly below the horse's head, at the very bottom?  If I can finish that by next Monday (almost 100% going to happen), I'm halfway through with the cross stitch portion.  That'll be what I show the g-parents on Xmas Eve.  I'm too tired to say much else right now, but I will update the progress report on Sunday, not Monday, of next week.

Friday Night List

Things I don't understand:

-People who are not generous
-Pine nuts
-Squash
-how gay marriage will personally hurt anyone
-why being a "Christian" gives you a right to be nasty (not all ya'll; just some'a ya)
-wet cake
-hot pie
-people who think sex is dangerous in and of itself
-porn
-people who rag on TV
-Wilco, Dylan, the Stones, anything with gnashing guitars
-thinky books
-how people can steal or cheat
-how you can love someone unbearably much and still want to throttle them
-compu-speak
-wasabi
-blue cheese
-sweet things combined with savory things (fruit in salad.  pork chops and apples.  raisins in couscous.)
-the difference between a fullback and a halfback
-people who think it's ok to say, "you're great but...."
-silk underwear
-technical aspects of photography
-why people are scared of the truth
-politics
-why people think there is a war on Christianity
-people who think it's ok to blow things up in the name of a god
-leggings

Brought to you by a bad mood and the book The Abstinence Teacher.

Baaad Housekeeping

You might have noticed that I've been updating my blogroll over the past few days.  Or maybe you haven't.  Maybe you ignore my sidebar completely.  But a few months ago my dad was kind of disappointed that he wasn't on the b-roll (I think he thought I thought he was embarrassing), and I tried to reassure him that no, I'm just a really, really bad blog housekeeper.  And then I thought, you know...I should update it. 

I kept putting it off and off and off and then I just did it.  I'm not done updating, in case you're wondering.  I'm just adding as I read blogs.  Per my whims, as it were.

That is all.

Required Reading

Ah, it is time for another go-round on the food and weight issues carousel.  I don't have much to say this time, though, because someone else says is so perfectly.  Her name is Kate Harding, and her blog, Shapely Prose, is my favorite new reading material.  I can't get enough of her archives; I love reading what she and her co-bloggers write, and even what her readers have to say.  For those of you who have struggled with body issues (and what one of us hasn't, really?), and especially those of you who have shucked off diets and denial for good (as I have, I think), this blog is the place.  Kate Harding says the things I'm thinking, only in a much more eloquent way.  Do not be surprised if I do some more blogging about these issues, because this blog has me thinking about them more.