I dreamed I was telling a group of children a scary story.
“Remember, you must be careful of the unchildren,” I said, “They whistle.”
The unchildren. They whistle.
Side Trip
My aunt the Queen of Bohemia had a small scare today – her vision got blurry and her feet wobbly, so off she went to the ER, where I duly joined her as soon as I could leave work. Turned out to be nothing at all, just a small blip in the matrix I guess. Those blips happen when you’re 85 – hell, they happen at my own, not quite as advanced, age, so I get it. I only ended up being there an hour or so, which is pretty much three lifetimes in non ER hours, but still, it was really as nothing. Much worse for her and my brother, who were there for far longer.
As I was sitting there amid the beeps and bings and purposeful people rushing around I was thinking though, about my own eventual old age. I’m hoping not to have much of one; after watching my mother and now my aunt, not to mention various other friends and relations, go into, through and out the other end of seniorhood, I’m not particularly interested in that carnival ride. No, instead I think age 80 sounds like the ideal time to discover just what all the fuss has been about heroin. I used to think I would live in a dumpster behind the Waffle House with a shopping cart full of cats while I indulged my newly found drug heaven, but you know, some dreams may just not be achievable. One hopes.
However, as I was musing upon how miserable the whole indignities of old age thing looked from this side (look, old ladies, depends, all the jokes, all the cystitis in the world and yet again being female fucks you over physically towards the end, YARGH, keep those kegels coming although it probably is not enough) and then I thought, girl, when you were, say, 20, if you had looked at yourself now, what would you have thought about your lifestyle? OH GOD NO is pretty much the answer to that one and I’m not even as much older than my 20 year old self as Annie is to me.
So perhaps it is fine to be aged after all, because I don’t really hate my lifestyle so much as I think it could use some major improvements, namely, a ticket back to the middle class. Or, failing that, at least an answer to the eternal question, what the FUCK is that smell in the kitchen and how do I make it go away forever? I will hope that all this will have some answer someday.
Anyway the photo, of the oh so exciting ER entrance at Mission Hospital, has been fixed to make it, like old age itself, almost bearable and somewhat less boring.
Primeval Commentary
Wait wait wait wait. If you already know that the group of 11 hominids died at the same time in the Rift Valley 4 million years ago, then clearly Evil Helen going back in time to kill them is not in fact going to wipe out humanity because otherwise you wouldn’t exist, you git, and there wouldn’t be a wikipedia entry.
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Today’s Photo
is another Instagram shot taken during our brief but beautiful blizzard this morning. It was my day off today and the theme seems to have been Things That Didn’t Turn Out as Intended But Were OK Anyway. I – finally! – finished a calendar and ordered it from Adorama, who, by the way, are the best photo and camera people ever in the world. And huge thanks to my friend Jay who gave me a gift certificate there for my birthday which I had been hoarding towards this moment. The calendar had way more starts and stops this year than ever before and a lot of stuff that I was planning didn’t happen, due to the fragmented nature of the internet. It was all a lot simpler before I divorced Flickr, I must say. However! It is done!
I was going to make photobooks too, but I can’t possibly afford them. So I ordered prints instead, 265 photos encapsulating 2012 and 2013 that will come in the mail and have to be put into two old school photo albums in chronological order. That’s going to be fun. Not. So it isn’t what I planned on doing, however, it is done!
I made minestrone, which turned into, um. I don’t know exactly what you’d call it, either the thickest soup ever made or the thinnest pasta, but either way, while it isn’t minestrone, it’s delicious. And I am working on my giant knitting project, which I suspect is turning into one giant knot and not an infinity scarf at all. It is possible I’m not good enough at this knitting stuff to tackle anything more difficult than a straightforward scarf or a hat. I mean, they seem to expect you to remember whether you knit or purled last. Ha ha! They must be joking! I can’t possibly remember that. So as is my usual approach, I just keep on going. Sometimes I knit, sometimes I purl, sometimes I drop a couple of stitches. Never unravel, is my knitting mantra. Holes make it art. It doesn’t look too promising but maybe a knot is what I really want! Who knows?
It occurred to me as I was puttering around too that while my house is a horrific and disgusting mess – I didn’t call the stove repairman because I was too ashamed of the dirty oven, not to mention the giant piles of archaic defunct stereo equipment that are all over the living room (don’t ask; it’s apparently some plot of my brother and son to drive me finally insane) to ask anyone into the house. Then I spent the oven repair money on photo prints and thought, well, ok, things are not what I hoped they would be but at least the food is good and the animals? The animals are happy. Even in the snow.
Tree and Cloudy Sky
It occurs to me that I take this picture over and over again – bare tree, cloudy sky. It’s always a different tree and different clouds but it’s basically the same picture. Which is kind of cool, because I suppose it’s a clue as to what I find most visually interesting in the world. I never get tired of bare trees and winter skies – I don’t think I could live somewhere it was sunny and warm all the time. Although let me say that if somebody is willing to foot the bills for me to live near the beach in, say, Bali, I’m perfectly willing to make the experiment. No, really.
Federal Building Reflections
I had to drive my son M downtown today on my way to work and so I took this picture of the Federal Building, which is probably illegal but I have always liked the reflections. They sort of soften up its general I am a brutalist government building from the 70s vibe which is why, I am sure, that there is so much glass there in the first place. So, a picture a day, we’re only 14 days in and already I’m like AW GAWD DO I HAVE TO DO THIS which is not really surprising. But I will soldier on and shut up my inner quitter.
Another Day, Another Instagram of Dog
Here’s today’s picture, Theo, looking as he always does in photos: elegant, beautiful, calm and not even remotely neurotic. Turns out you don’t even need photoshop for pictures to lie like rugs! Theo is the most annoying dog we have, and when you consider that one of our dogs not only eats all the socks in the house and buries shoes but has to have special food cooked for him on a weekly basis, you begin to grasp just how annoying Theo is. In fact, Theo is so annoying that even though he more or less saved all our lives the other day by barking when the kitchen began to fill up with gas, I just yelled SHUT UP THEO and then went about turning off the gas. “Oh uh thanks I guess,” I may have muttered. “Good dog, OK.” Or maybe not. He’s annoying and I’m fucking evil these days since I got old and embraced my dark side even more wholeheartedly than I used to. Also, I’ve been working retail for going on three years now. That shit will sour the milk of human kindness right out of you.
Dropbox is still not working very well and so there still is no picture from yesterday. It is not the only thing that isn’t working fantastically: I spent basically the entire morning in Snapfish live chat with a variety of people with highly improbable names, like, I think possibly they mixed up the captcha software and the chat window naming thing. I am trying to make a calendar, just one calendar, before Wednesday when the 50% off coupon expires and I am not having much luck. The help people are not. Helpful, that is. There is not much, really, that can make me start to froth at the mouth and grind my teeth like being told to a) delete my cookies and b) restart my computer and c) it’s because you’re using Chrome instead of Firefox. “I’M USING CHROME BECAUSE YOU TOLD ME HALF AN HOUR AGO THAT THE PROBLEM WAS FIREFOX, MTZXLLPPKK!” Bastards. They have no idea what’s going on and neither do I, but I have a brand spanking new installation of Chrome and a new version of Flash player, so, yay? But no calendar and I need a calendar, a paper old school calendar so I can write down the dates the bills are due for my children to ignore.
No Photo Today – But Apps
Dropbox is down, and since dropbox is where all my photos are stored before I put them other places – the dropbox app for android is, by the way, superb and I love it – today’s photo will appear tomorrow. Or yesterday, depending on the chrono-temporal field malfunctions. But probably tomorrow.
Last night Jay & Jodi & Susan came over and we ate chili and played, first Scrabble (I won but not by all that much) and then smartphone charades, which is a totally fun game whereby you hold your phone up on your forehead so you can’t see the screen and then guess what it’s saying by interpreting your friends’ antics. We are all very antic people, so it was completely hilarious, although the categories they give you are limited – literature, I’m looking at you, as a category you do not include Rick Riordan’s YA series OR Water for Elephants, no. Plus three LOTR references are more than enough. Anyway it was a very fun evening and there should be some pictures on Facebook soonish.
Actually, while I’m talking apps, let me recommend two more, first off Pro Capture, which costs money but is worth it. Granted I lucked into a sale and got it for $2 but even I, possibly the poorest person you know, would pay full price for it. When combined with Snapseed, you’ve almost got a DSLR and Photoshop in your pocket and suddenly I find that the thought of being without my phone is, well, unthinkable. I wasn’t a smartphone convert until now but these two apps have poured the koolaid, the sweet sweet koolaid, down my throat and I’m perfectly happy about it.
Several days later, here are today’s photos! Or, well, actually it’s one picture with a before, a photoshop fix and then what I like to call an artification. I’ve been doing a lot more photo tweaking stuff lately and since this was kind of dull picture to begin with – it’s me making the dogfood, ho hum, I messed with it just a little. Not sure which one – of the two afters, that is, and the general improvement shopping stuff is just what I pretty much always do – so here’s a record of the changes. Anyway, photo a day!
Version 1, raw out of the camera. Well, phone.
Version 2, the original photoshopping to make it better
Version 3, post artification.
Painting in Frost and Windshield
Well, we seem to have survived the Polar Vortex. POLAR VORTEX! Sorry, I can’t see that without wanting to shout it, because it’s just so over the top awesome. At any rate, it’s gone, it was a comparatively balmy 20some degrees this morning and I took a picture of my frosted windshield as I was trying to force myself to hurry more to work. Which I quite like, the picture that is, not the early morning getting to work process.
This is going to be another day when I don’t have much to say. The problem might be that I have too much – I have a lot on my mind, part of which is kind of thinking about a mission statement for this blog / photo project and about focus and where mine is right now and then there’s the anxious part of the brain and the part that’s thinking about work and the part that’s attempting to keep track of just what the hell is going on in Primeval and Downton Abbey (both of which could be vastly improved by merging, come to think of it) and then of course, way too much of my brain, the part we like to call the EMO BRAIN, is also enmeshed in gloom and the neverending soap opera that is my life. That never does seem to go away. On which I blame my gloom but in reality it’s probably a chicken and egg situation.
In other news, the heat is basically working. I am tempted, sorely tempted, not to get it fixed because it isn’t, exactly, broken. On the other hand it isn’t exactly working either, it’s just kind of limping along. You could say more or less the same of this entire household, actually – and I do! I say it all the time! Loudly! – so who is the furnace to get $110 worth of special care?
I could use some special care, myself. I showed Annie the pictures of her that I took yesterday and relayed all the comments people had left.
:”Oh,” she said sadly, peering at her picture, “I wish I was beautiful.”
“So do I wish I was beautiful,” I said, also sadly. “Maybe we should go to a spa or something.” And if there was a spa that would work, we would, too.
6000onions 