You would think that given my circumstances I would be up to my armpits in bodies. But despite the fact that I am a middle aged single white female with a bookstore job, who enjoys cooking, cats and knitting, I have never yet found a corpse. And if I did find a corpse? I can pretty much guarandamntee you that I would not then feel it incumbent upon me to solve the murder. So I guess I fail the cozy mystery test.
Director
Here is a photo of Perdita, yet again the chosen model for Picture of the Day. You can’t tell from the picture, but I did actually leave the house today on this, my day off: I went to the grocery store and bought a dozen eggs and a container of sour cream and a pound of butter and a box of mushrooms and, because they were out of lentils, an eggplant, which was a little random but I think there is a recipe I wanted to try. Then I came home and made amazing potatoes* – note, most everything is amazing if you use enough butter, I find – and salmon cakes. And I stopped by my friend Jodi’s and went to my aunt’s. so, yes. Basically, though, it was another Day of Sloth and Gluttony, but the kitchen floor got mopped, so that’s something. As deadly sins go, I’m getting really bored with Sloth and Gluttony and feel that it’s way past time for a little Pride and (oh god I wish) some Lust.
However! The big news is that my friend and coworker – well, ex coworker now – had her baby, 6 weeks early. So I am thinking of them tonight and hoping they’re out of the NICU soon and healthy, happy and home. I have no details, just generalities but last I heard mother and son were doing well. This means that an entire two days ahead of schedule, I have become the Fiction Director.
This is my favorite title I have ever had. Director of Fictions! “I am the Director of Fiction,” I said to my son, trying it out.
“Ooooh,” he said, “But do you ever tell the truth?”
The title is, alas, more glamorous than the job. But still! It is a good title and I like the job.
* We made potatoes fondant in the pressure cooker, inspired by this video (warning: the guy is somewhat annoying) and this recipe and all I changed in that recipe was to use russet potatoes, peeled and cut up into very large chunks like the size of red potatoes and vegetarian stock instead of chicken. They were amazing and I think I never want to eat anything else so if you see me and I seem to have gained 7000 pounds, that would be why.
Oh and yesterday’s photo of the day, if you missed it, is indeed the first crocus of the year.
And that’s not embedding again. ARGH. Well, I will figure it out later.
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Saturday Selfie
here’s Saturday’s picture, a spinny selfie because all the pictures I took of the cat in the kitchen were orange – note to all you budding food bloggers out there, do not, repeat, do not, paint your kitchen a crazy bright and happy yellow / orange combination – and all I did otherwise on Saturday was work and bitch and sleep. And play Minecraft, because I’m back in the throes of it. My friend Lee has sent me some game suggestions and I am going to try them, just as soon as my current Minecraft binge wears off. Which it needs to do soon, because the dishes have piled up, the plants are unwatered and I’m wearing nothing but yoga pants.
Except yesterday, which was my day off. Yesterday I managed to balance Minecraft with some real life exploration: my friend Jay and I tried to go out to the Spivey Mountain overlook. We failed – you cannot go there anymore, which is fucked up.
I had heard rumors that it was all closed off and they were more or less right, as you can see from these friendly signs. I know that it is private property and oh yes, you can do whatever you want with your property (although in other countries, you know, they have laws allowing people to walk around in the woods or on the mountains, they cannot be closed off, but this is America, right.) I have heard rumors that there is going to be a gated community up there – Yay! Rich people taking over an entire mountain top! How novel and exciting! GODDAMNIT. – but I have also heard rumors that the company that was building it went belly up. Some of the signs were old, some were new. The picture doesn’t show most of them but there were threats of video surveillance and 24 hour towing and a big sign about construction permits and some relatively recent truck tire tracks.
I must note that driving up to Spivey is a nice lesson in 21st century economics and class structures and I hope, if they do build the gated “community”, that the people who live up there enjoy learning how to build lean to hovels out of cast off construction debris from their neighbors. Or that it occurs to them that income inequality is real and bullshit and evil and wrong and hey, did you ever think you’d have to drive through a rural favela to get to your vacation home in the UNITED STATES? Or were you planning this all along? I don’t know, class structure, poverty and the growing gap between rich and poor is much on my mind these days and try as I might, I can’t ever be quite entirely ha ha funny anymore. However! It was still a nice Sunday!
We gave up on Spivey, because even if those signs are just bluffing, I can barely afford to buy groceries let alone a tow fee, and went to the Botanical Gardens instead. It was nice and we took pictures of water and rocks and then went to the packed and cheerful Bywater to drink not water on the rocks. Yes! That’s right! I spent $15 at the bar instead of at the grocery store and that means I am in fact one of the undeserving poor. I’m okay with that because it means i get to sit out in the sunshine and drink a Dirty French Broad (sweet tea vodka, lemonade, fresh mint, orange slices YUM) and we’ll figure something out with the stupid groceries.
In Other News
I woke up at 5:30 this morning – lately I do a lot of that, it’s horrible, bi phasic sleeping can kiss my lily white ass – and thought for a while about how I want this decade to be different. I want financial security by the end of this decade, I thought, and I should be able to achieve that: I’m smart, I’m educated, I’m organized, competent and creative. Right? Right, I told myself, and also I have an internal temperature core of 372 degrees kelvin and I am fully optimized to live on the planet Venus. So, yeah. Financial security ahead! Venus for the Venusians!
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Thursdays Photo of the Day
Is either this rather boring one of the river or this rather blurry one that a lot of artifying didn’t really help. So yesterday was a bust, photographically speaking. Oh well! I need to start carrying the real camera with me again; I’m relying too much on the phone. Yeah it’s a great thing in its own way but it’s a different thing than the old reliable beloved Rebel.
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Catching UP
OK! I have been slack lately and the picture of the day has sadly fallen by the wayside. I have taken them, though, and even posted them, mostly, but I haven’t gotten them on here, nor have I had anything new to say. I still have nothing much new to say, although the Queen of Bohemia, my auntie, told me that today while she was at the thrift store with two of her caregiver / friends, they found a lot of money inside a book. “A lot!” she said excitedly, “Like two hundred million!”
“Huh,” I said, “What was the book?”
I also went on at some length about how brutally unfair it is that I, who make my meager living by looking at old books all day, every day, have yet to find more than $2 and that was a one time thing, too. I also think maybe that was actually an honesty test by the customer, because he had that look, like he might be the kind of totally annoying holier than thou asshole who goes around testing store clerks for honesty. They exist, I am sorry to report, they exist. However! On the strength of the two hundred million (note: the Queen of Bohemia is not bothered by paltry unimportant things like exact numbers. It was probably not that much. Heh.) found in a book at the South Asheville Goodwill, I bought another lottery ticket. So we shall see.
ANYWAY. The photos! I have been working a lot, is my only excuse.
This is the daily photo for Saturday, February 15, a close up of the fantastic post apocalyptic snowglobe my friend Susan gave me for Christmas and which I love.
And this is Sunday, February 16, a lovely shot of my lovely friend Helen and a whole bunch of other friends on her birthday, which was celebrated in style at El Paraiso mexican restaurant on Haywood Road.
On Monday I was also at work, but I did manage to take this picture of the strange sky.
On Tuesday before work I took a picture of Perdita, backlit by the morning sunshine:
Yesterday, I was somewhat hungover and I had a sore throat and I was cranky and miserable and generally unpleasant to be around. I was so unpleasant that I tried to take pictures of stinkbugs and failed, so I then took one of Django, even though my GAWD it is ridiculous how all my life is nothing but dogs and books and clouds. O wait. Perhaps I have got the life I wanted at age 9 after all.
And today’s photo, when I have finished figuring out what it is, will have its own post. Whoo! Lot of catch up; I must not let this happen again. *
* It will.
Addiction
I’m back to playing Minecraft, and, much to my chagrin, I just died in a completely dumb and foreseeable and truly n00bish way: I didn’t look where i was going, fell into a chasm and thus encountered my inevitable demise. ARGH. I will never find that place again, either, and I had EIGHT diamonds on me. Eight. And I was fixing up a village and now it will never be done and the villagers will probably be eaten by zombies.
For those of you who have absolutely no idea what the hell I was just talking about, Minecraft is a wildly successful indie computer game, the brainchild of a Scandinavian programmer named Notch who built it on nights and weekends at home. That was, um, 2010? 2009, I think, but I started my journey in alpha in the summer of 2010. Nowadays, it’s a gazillion dollar Scandinavian company, Mojang, in which Notch is only, to the best of my knowledge, tangentially involved. It’s a sandbox game, which is to say that there is no plot, storyline, quest or any of that garbage: you can do whatever you want in an infinite world. It’s also kind of a lot like Legos – you can gather resources and build things from other things. There are also monsters, because without monsters, as we all know, just what would be the point of anything? Anyway, I played obsessive levels of Minecraft for about three, three and a half years and finally I got kind of bored and more or less quit. I started up a new world the other day, though, and it’s good so far. Well, except for the nagging intense pain in my right shoulder.
If you have an addictive brain, the theory goes that every time you encounter your addictive substance of choice, a pathway to pleasure gets grooved into that brain. I imagine that this is a literal pathway, like a map inscribed on the surface of your cerebellum so you could, maybe, look at it. Ah! Here is beer and here, deeply worn and lined with skulls, is tobacco. Subsequent voyages into the substance deepen those pathways, until at last your brain really doesn’t want to leave them. Or so I have heard, somewhere. Remember that I majored in art, not science.
Anyway, Minecraft hits those pathways for me in a way that very few other substances ever have. Granted, I drink too goddamn much (although it lessens every year as my body becomes more intolerant and my mind becomes more solitary) and I smoked like the proverbial chimney from the time I was 15 years old right up until 15 months ago, but I’ve never been addicted to anything the way I was or, I guess, am addicted to Minecraft.
I replaced it for a while with Candy Crush but Minecraft is heroin and Candy Crush is methadone and fuck Candy Crush, anyway. I got eventually to the upper levels where they introduce these changing candies that morph from one shape and color to another, accompanied by a noisome little rainbow, and the shifting screen gives me a headache. Besides, Candy Crush is totally a game of chance. There is no skill involved – you win when they send you a good board; you lose when they don’t. That’s just a little too close to actual real life for me.
My game playing coworker gave me a list of other games I might like but of course I lost it. I hear that there are artists out there now, making games, strange games with no real point to them, and this sounds good to me. I’m limited to simplicity, because my computer is seriously antique and cannot handle anything new. I want to try the new games, though, and when I do, I will report back. Meanwhile, I guess I had better respawn and see if there is any way on the planet I can find that village again. ARGH.
Huh
So this is a picture of my dog Perdita in the snowy backyard. It’s not the picture of the day; it’s from January and not even a particularly wonderful picture of her. The reason I’m popping it up here is because I just found something I want to remember.
See, people always think Perdita is a Rhodesian Ridgeback and I always laugh at this, because Rhodesian Ridgebacks are somewhat rare purebred dogs and Perdita is a yellow street dog who my neighbor found lost early one morning and who nobody ever claimed. As the neighborhood dog person, I begrudgingly agreed to keep her for the weekend, which turned out to last five years and is still going on. She is a sweetheart, even if she is afraid of skateboards, bicycles, vacuum cleaners and men who smell like drywall – Perditas fear of and hatred for men who smell like construction is legendary and sheds some sad and angry light on where she was the first four months of her life.
Well, over the years any number of people including people who have them, friends of people who have them and most recently, a vet tech, have said, “That’s a Rhodesian Ridgeback! She even has the ridge!” And I have said with some certainty, “Bosh. She’s just a yellow street dog! She’s Heinz 57 with maybe some hound in her, because she acts like a hound, and maybe some pit, because every street dog has pit, and maybe some Chow, because she has a black tongue and everybody knows Chows are the only dogs with black tongues. The ridge is a cowlick, because this is North Carolina, not somewhere fancy where they have fancy dogs. If she was a coonhound she might be purebred but she’s not. Look at my beautiful mutt!” All good except I just found this article that says, hey, you know who else has black tongues? Rhodesian Ridgebacks. And then I finally got around to google image searching and damned if I didn’t find page after page of Perdita clones. But don’t take my word for it – here is page after page of Perdita herself. Huh, I think, huh. What do you know? And then I read the Wiki article and thought again, huh. Perdie is also aloof, and she is mellow, which is one of the reasons, particularly since the other two are anything but, I love her so.
I still think she’s a mutt. Just a mutt with maybe one pure Ridgeback parent. Or two. It is pretty cool, actually, to think that her ancestors hunted lions. Perdita is a mighty hunter, too. Given our lifestyle, this is not really a great thing – you haven’t lived until you have fled like the abject coward you are from the house, galvanized by the horrid screams of some small dying thing in the yard – although after the zombies come we’ll probably change our minds about the dead possums. And I can’t really see her going after any lions any time soon. Although, I guess, as long as they didn’t make any really scary vacuum cleaner like noises or have wheels she might wag her tail at them. Might. If I said it was okay. And handed her some cheese.
Bye, Snow
Well, yesterday the temperature rose and rose and most of the snow and all of the icicles went away, so I’m glad I got a couple pictures yesterday morning. I also went on back to work and discovered that yesterday’s walks were not free: I have managed to do something awful to my left calf. At work I was limping around and surly (I’m always kind of surly, I know, but more than usual) and by the time I got home I was so tired that I went to bed at 9:00. My leg still hurts, too, and I have to go back to work in an hour. Pity me! Oh wait, I’m doing that fine on my own. Hee. Oh well.
At 5:30 this morning (going to bed at 9 has its own issues) I woke up and went to the bathroom and was convinced I heard water running. OH GOD I thought, a broken pipe! ARGH! So I went silently all around the house, listening intently, listening, in fact, with the sort of crazed intensity that is only matched by my sniffing intensity when, alone and late at night, I think I smell smoke. There is never any smoke, just paranoia, and there was no water running, just the heat and paranoia. I think, anyway, that if there was a broken pipe, it might not be the worst of my problems.
I am not sure, because in the annals of paranoia, we have long had an uneasy joke in the family about someone living in the garage. Oh ha ha! we say, yes, that must have been the garage people who stole all the socks, ate all the bread, drank all the wine and they are why you can never find batteries. Well. Last night during my Moment of Plumbing Fear, I went into the laundry room and it was there that I noticed that the lights in the garage were on. There is no reason for the garage lights to be on.
There is also no reason for the garage door to be wide open this morning, but it is.
I don’t think either of the kids came home last night (and even if they did, you can guarantee that Auds anyway did not venture near the garage; she’s even more afraid of it than I am.) I think it is just me and the dogs and the cat here. Yes, just me, and I am very carefully avoiding the vicinity of the laundry room and the garage by writing this because it’s ridiculous to think that there might be . . . somebody. . . living in the garage. Or something. Right?
Testing the Instagram Embed
The fine folks WordPress support say that this method will work to embed an instagram image, so let’s give it a try!
There, did that work? It’s the selfie that my friend Jodi and I took yesterday on our hike from my house to her house. I actually went for two walks yesterday – yes, 2, I also am amazed – and naturally took a lot of snow pictures (which are here if you want to look at snow pictures) and in general had a great time. I like snow days. I did not get the kitchen floor mopped or the laundry done, but I made a sort of cuban asian fusion black beans and rice, drank a lot of wine, spent too much time online, took all three dogs for a walk in the snow early in the morning, walked from my house to Jodi’s house and then to my auntie’s house and then, I finished my infinity scarf knitted creation, causing my daughter to exclaim: “Wow, Mom, your knitting has really gotten better! There are no gaping holes or anything!” Now if only the same could be said of my life.
YAY!! It worked!! Thank you wordpress and most particularly wordpress member azscvgs who found the (literal) missing link for me!
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