Quote of the Week

"Anyone can look good in a long black trenchcoat and leather..but it takes a special kinda style to pull off blue longjohns and little antennae."

--Arnon Clark

Wai!

Dominar Rygel XVI, from Farscape. He would actually probably be pleased at being marketed as a doll; he's that arrogant. Though I think I'd like him even better as a backpack--knowing Rygel, just think how much he could hold. ;)

Blog-surfing

I don't go blog-surfing very often. (Most people don't have anything terribly interesting to say, at least, not unless you know them. Come to think of it, that probably includes me). Anyway, I stumbled onto this tonight. It amused me greatly, so I thought I'd share.

That poor mouse.

Quote of the Week

(Okay, so I'm half a week late. Here it is):

"God bless you on this day in celebration of the savior's birth. Now give me presents!

--David Hopkins, of Jack (the finest current webcomic I read. Also not for wimps. Check it out, y'all).

(Have I mentioned how much it irritates me when I ask a friend how their holiday was, and they tell me what "loot" they got? I didn't ask you what you got, I asked how your holiday was).

from Cinema to Comic Strips

I treated myself to a movie tonight. I went to see Casino Royale, after reading a good recommendation from marinredwolf. His comment was that James Bond is a time lord. I know just enough to know that this is a Dr. Who. reference, but never having watched Dr. Who, I don't feel it at a particularly deep level.

I was surprised to find that I had a related thought, that did hit at a deep level. Some time ago, I was playing a character who was living in a world not his own. He was, for some reason I no longer recall, trying to explain Charlie Brown to a bunch of people with no referents. He was surprised to find himself describing good ol' Chuck as something of a folk hero and an unaging, existential philosopher. But there are rules to being Charlie Brown. Among other things, you can never really win.

Tonight, I realized that James Bond is another one of those characters that transcends the limitations of his character. Heck, he transcends continuity, too. There are rules to being James Bond. It doesn't matter a whit that I remember the current M meeting James Bond for the first time, and now she's talking about having hired him. It doesn't matter that his double-0 designation is newly minted, when we've seen him running around being a double-0 pain in the ass for decades. He is always charming, he has a macabre sense of humor, he drinks vodka martinis, and women around him have good odds of getting killed. The character is the same, no matter the actor, no matter the story. James Bond is not so much a person as a state of being.

Any of y'all got any other nominations for a character that somehow transcends the designation?

To the two high-school kids behind me in the theatre:

Kiddo, I don't personally care if she's got her hand down your pants, as long as you don't whisper back and forth about it for fifteen minutes in the middle of the movie. You're thirty inches from my left ear: You are not as quiet as you think you are. Watch the movie or make out, but pick one--either one is quieter than the whispering. Better yet, find a less crowded theatre with an empty back row. Or a car. Doesn't anybody make out in cars anymore?

Because I've been at work for 11 hours . . .

Read My Result
Take the Test

Well, mostly right. I've never had any trouble telling somebody it just ain't gonna work. As gently as possible, but there it is.

Holiday Highlights

Here's the highlights reel:

Roxann asked me how Pete was getting to Denver for Christmas. After I stopped trying to convince her he was going to swim, she clued me in that there was a blizzard going on. I made the offer that if the worst happened and the airport still wasn't open, he would be very welcome to have Christmas with my family, but I didn't get a call, so I think he made it to Colorado okay. He should be flying from there to the ancestral homestead, as it were, on Hawai'i, today. He'll be back on January 2nd, I think.

At 8:56 AM on the Friday before Christmas, our Finance manager came in from a smoke and told me I had to go put air in my left front tire. Now. The tire was all but flat, and once I'd limped the 300 yards to the local Circle K and filled it (and checked the other front tire--I only have trouble with the front tires, for some reason), I waited until the compressor quit and put my ear down by the problem tire, and listened. And heard it hissing. So I called my Daddy for a recommendation on a shop that deals with tires, limped to the closest one, and had the good news/bad news thing. The good news is, it was a screw in the tread, and easily patchable. The bad news was, on the Friday before Christmas, they were backed up 2-3 hours. Our office had only planned on being open till noon. I gave up and called my Mommy to come pick me up, and spent a couple hours hanging out with her while I waited, which was nice.

My sister and her boyfriend came down on Christmas Eve. My sister and I elected to sing with my parents' church choir for the Christmas Eve service. The choir director, you must understand, is Dr. Bruce Chamberlain, who teaches at the university of Arizona and directs the Tucson Symphony Orchestra Chorus. He'll tell you that he can spend three minutes with a high school choir and improve their ranking a full step, and it's true. And, oh yeah, he puts up with a bunch of church altos who can't sing their way out of a paper bag. So sis and I spent most of an hour that afternoon copying down breath marks, dynamics, and tempo changes, and then running the pieces we weren't familiar with. Because, even coming in cold, we couldn't be worse than some of the aforementioned altos . . . but that's cold comfort.

(Side note: A good conductor makes you want to do better than your best. What so few people understand is that, if he's doing his job, that guy who stands in front of the choir/band/orchestra isn't just waving his arms around: He's playing the orchestra. That is his instrument. Your job is to know your part and watch the conductor. He's the one who fits the parts together. He controls the speed, tone, volume, mood, and color or the orchestra. If he chooses to emphasize the wrong part of a beat or can't tell that the viola sitting next to you is consistantly flat, you can sing or play your heart out and the group will never sound the way it's meant to. I quit orchestra in high school because the orchestra teacher was a fine violinist, but a terrible conductor.)

The Christmas Eve service at my parents' church is a candle-lighting service, so choir rehersal before the service began with the obligatory lecture on how to light your candle without setting yourself/your robes/your neighbor on fire. This was followed by the obligatory instructions on how to blow your candle out without splattering wax everywhere. Marian offered that if you hold your finger in front of your candle, the air will go around on both sides and put it out, gently. Bruce replied that that was a fine idea, but your other hand would be full of your choir music. To which tiny, delicate, eight-five-year-old Marian replied, "Oh. That crap." The entire choir broke down laughing (yes, including Bruce. Marian looked like she couldn't quite believe she'd said that . . . out loud).

After the service, we had Christmas dinner back at my parents' house, and then opened presents. For the highlights reel, my parents got my not-quite-a-brother-in-law Guinness pajamas, I got them weird plants (a pancake plant, crown-of-thorns, and dinasaur back--they were delighted), my sister got her boyfriend's employee-of-the-month bonus in the form of an iPod, and I got a phone that doesn't suck (which is tantamount to giving me my fiancee, given the circumstances).

My friend Mark (not to be confused with my boss, Mark) gave me a puzzle. Not a jigsaw. One of those metal things where the challenge is to take it apart and then put it back together. Only this one is in the shape of a heart, with a male symbol and a female symbol that thread through it, and it's stamped 'amour.' It is, in some ways, the perfect gift--not because it's such a wonderful thing in and of itself. Because of me and Mark. Mark is one of three people I knew before I ever met Pete with whom I might really have been compatible, but with whom there was one thing that would always be in the way. It's a different thing with each of them. With me and Mark, the situation is so deeply tangled that affection and pain become inextricably entwined. It is, at this point, bittersweet, and somehow all the affection and the pain are now tied up in one ironic little puzzle. I appreciate irony.

At about 11PM, I went home and discovered that seven other people were having Christmas in my living room. Kendra had mentioned that Amy and Rob would be coming back down from Phoenix with her on Christmas Eve; I had somehow failed to make the connection that they would end up at our apartment for Christmas instead of Kendra's parents' house, or that they would have two teenagers with them. So I hung out for the forty minutes or so that I was still conscious. Someone other than me got to enjoy the Christmas tree. Hooray!

On Christmas morning, it was back to the family. We watched Lady in the Water. I was quite pleased. It didn't have the pacing problem some of M. Night Shyamalan's earlier movies did and played more with the best elements of them. And I'm sorry, the pool is a yoni. It just is. And it's deliberate. Kendra had seen this in the theatre and I think characterized it as one of those movies that either you get it, or you don't. I like to think most of you reading this would get it.

And I found out my sister's roller derby association is the pre-parade entertainment for the Fiesta Bowl parade this year. And her boyfriend is marching in the Rose Bowl parade--he's a storm trooper. He's likely to end up carrying the flag for the Arizona garrison, since he's the tallest of the three Arizonans who were asked to march. My father is going to record it so that if he doesn't end up with the flag he can point himself out, later. I am much amused.

The Gingerbread Javelina in His Native Habitat

Be careful--he's stupid and near-sighted, but ornery enough to eat prickly pear . . . candies. No, seriously, I have no idea who made these, but I saw them in our lunch room and had to share.

For those of you not from this part of the world, here's the real thing. And yes, they do eat prickly pear cactus.

And speaking of hooker shoes . . .

In case you haven't figured it out, I'm a shoe whore. I finally ordered the purple boots today. Which, to complicate things, means I can add other things to that order for no additional shipping for the next several days. Which led me to look at other shoes I now have to talk myself out of buying.

I love the plaid pumps. I keep trying to talk myself out of them by wondering what I'd wear them with. Unfortunately, I think the answer is "anything black." The knee-high boots are really great and might actually be a good staple piece. The real problem is that mostly, I don't get to wear great shoes. I get to wear sneakers to work and my Chacos on the weekend. Work and heels don't go together (the joys of being a computer geek) and the chiropractor has me feeling rather guilty if I wear heels just for fun on the weekends.

None of which may help talk me out of leopard-print pumps. Mind you, I'm really not a leopard-print person. I find it tacky. Which is really not the point. The point is that they're so bad, they're just kind of off-the-wall. They're the kind of shoes that you wear with some simple, solid-color outfit, because the whole point of the outfit is the shoes.

Quote of the Week

"One die to rule them all . . . "

--source unknown

On Weddings

I'm already developing a nagging feeling of distaste I'm ready to direct at anyone who tells me "you have to" about a wedding. I suspect that, thirteen months from now, this will have escalated to the strong desire to choke the living shit out of any such offender.

I got a quote back from what I'd thought was a serious potential wedding venue in Boulder, CO. For site, tables, and chairs, they want $2700. When I kind of went yikes and asked if they did a discounted rate on weekdays, it was mentioned to me that weddings in that area generally run between $10,000 and $15,000.

Now, I'd been looking at some sites in Tucson and Sedona that ran around $2500 and included low-end catering. So I started looking up average wedding costs by region. I found estimates that the national average for weddings is between $19,000 and $31,000. I no more know what accounts for $12,000 worth of difference in estimates than I know why you'd want to spend half your annual salary on a wedding in the first place. And I no more know that than why, by the nine billion names of God(s), you need an aisle runner.

Based on this highly scientific research, I have come to two conclusions.

1) It is likely to be far more cost-effective to hold the wedding in Arizona than in the Denver/Boulder area.

2) We do not "have to" do this any particular way but our own.

If it's traditional to have a bride-and-groom cake topper, I'm just ornery enough to want one where the bride is wearing hooker shoes and the groom is wearing flip-flops. And that kind of goes for the whole wedding process.

Dreams

I had an awful dream a couple of weeks ago. I was at a doctor's office. Pete was with me. The doctor proceeded to read off test results and tell me all the things that were wrong with me. Among other things, my ovaries weren't functioning. It took me awhile to wake up enough to understand that it had been a dream, and these things weren't really so.

I mentioned this to Pete. He looked thoughtful and told me that he'd had a dream where I was being forced to marry someone else. Probably the result of our just having watched A Midsummer Night's Dream, just like mine was probably the result of having been discussing medical things at work just previously.

Of course, the solution to these dreams is to run off to Vegas and then get pregnant. Except that then, we'd have bad dreams about balancing the checkbook. ;)

A couple days ago, I noticed frown lines in my face for the first time. I mean, technically, I had my first wrinkles when I was fifteen--but that's the under-the-eye thing that's really genetic. Sometime in the last year, I noticed little lines at the corners of my mouth. I told a number of people, "The only lines in my face are laugh lines." But now I see the hint of a crease at the corners of my eyes, and worse . . . the dreaded frown lines, faint but present, between my eyebrows. I don't know why they're dreaded. They're the exact same ones my mother had by the time I was old enough to notice these things. Perhaps only because the solution to laugh lines is to laugh more--that way, no one will notice. I certainly don't want to frown more.

I have never feared age. What I fear is things undone. Like the children. It's one more reason that waiting is so hard.

2/3 Broken

Today, I did gird myself for battle. I stepped boldly into my panoply, making certain I was shod for war. I came up with my plan of attack, mounted my noble steed, and rode toward the battlefield. Though beleaguered on all sides, I made my way to the high ground and surveyed the situation, laying out the best route through enemy forces. And finally, I emerged triumphant.

Though I did have to visit Target in addition to Wal-Mart.

My electric blanket was 2/3 broken. I was hoping I was imagining it, but on the second night I found myself going, "Wow, these sheets feel ice cold," I felt all over the blanket for any heat, and finally found some . . . in about the bottom 1/3 of it. That means it's not even the controller that's busted, it's something in the blanket, itself. I'd been working very hard to avoid big box stores for the next six weeks or so, but I couldn't find another option.

I seriously found myself feeling like I was in a game of Frogger on the roads, especially around the malls. I planned sneaky things like which entrance to come in and where to park for the easiest get-away. I had several other things I needed which I'd planned to just put off till January, so I found myself in the parking lot of the Evil Temple of Roll-Back looking at my list and pre-determining my route so I could get in and with as little harm to life and limb as possible. And after all that, Wal-Mart had queen-sized electric blankets (at $70) and "heated fleece throws," and that was it.

Target did indeed have a twin-sized electric blanket. For a reasonably affordable $32. Mind you, they had exactly three and they were all blue, but it's not like anybody ever sees this anyway--it's always sandwiched between the sheet and another blanket. In Tucson, you can't afford to be picky.

And before anyone gets on my case about an electric blanket in Tucson . . . it's been getting down into the mid-20's this week. My roommate and I keep the thermostat at about 66F, which is too cold for me and too warm for her. (She closes her bedroom door and keeps her windows open, I think. I wear a sweater. I'd wear more sweaters, but any lower than about 65F and I start to cough. We're such good roommates in most other ways, we put up with it). Our bedrooms are on the outside wall, so it's quite a bit colder where my bed is than where the thermostat resides. And for the record, I tested how warm I sleep, once: I'll kick off even a sheet at about 80F.

It was nuts on the roads. It was even nuts-er in Wal-Mart. Please, gods, no more until after the first of the year. And boy am I glad I had all the holiday presents that need to be mailed ready to go today. It took me fifteen minutes to send out four packages, and I didn't have to wait in line. This will so not be the case by next week.

Quote of the Week

"It is impossible to love and be wise."

--Francis Bacon