Everything is Extra Fine

It's been 100-plus, temps-wise, here for at least 4 days. Actually, at 10 p.m., it's still...



( Recipe after the jump... )

I'm not normally a superstitious person. I've broken many a mirror, stepped on cracks, followed a black cat. Last Monday morning,  I left on my way to work and heard a strange wheezing sound from our front yard. Tucked under our monkey grass border was our neighbor's shih tzu, Cookie. I instantly knew that Cookie was dying. And as my husband carried her over to our neighbor's house and knocked on the door, I sadly looked at her lolling tongue, dirty, foamy mouth and the labored rise and fall of her chest. It wouldn't be long for Cookie.

I went on to work with a heavy heart. As I creeped into my office later than usual, I noticed that the rosemary bush on my desk—an impromptu Christmas tree—that had been green and bushy on Friday was now thoroughly wilted. And not just wilted, but black. Another rosemary we had bought at the same time was on our mantel at home and showed no signs of a similar descent. I sighed and slipped the dead, dreary plant under my desk, out of sight.

When I arrived back home in the evening, there was no sign of Cookie, so I assumed the worst. (And our neighbors still haven't mentioned Cookie's demise.) About an hour later, my cell phone rang. My mom told me that my grandma, my MawMaw, had just had a massive heart attack. Is it true that things happen in threes?

Now almost a week later, my MawMaw lies unresponsive in a coma in a hospital in South Texas. The prognosis, which started out as possibly hopeful on Monday night, is now without hope; she retains involuntary functions such as breathing and heartbeat, but there is no sign of higher brain function. And yet, while the body still lives, there is little to be done, except in the slow, painful choices of passive euthanasia. Remove the ventilator. Stop the medications. And then wait.

And wait. And wait.

Lots of changes going down at work--two editors (head and music) are being replaced within the next couple of months. I'm somewhat nervous about what may happen under a new regime.

I need to figure out how to get my iPod hooked up to my car. Effin' Subaru, they give ya no aux input, nor do they make it easy to switch to a new deck. I priced a new stereo with iPod input at CarToys. $242. Nice.

In the meantime, I'm burning myself mix CDs like it's 1999. Speaking of, here's one I'm working on for a friend. Not sure that I have the sequence I want yet, but I'm working on a poppy mix that's good times in the car.

So far:

Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)/Looking Glass
The Way I Am/Ingrid Michaelson
Black Mirror/Arcade Fire
Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key/Billy Bragg & Wilco
Art Bitch/CSS
Season of the Witch/Donovan
Zak and Sara/Ben Folds
Dress Sexy at My Funeral/Smog
Let the Poison Spill From Your Throat/The Faint
OneTwoThree/Sam Winch
You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb/Spoon
Honeybear/Yeah Yeah Yeahs
You Are What You Love/Jenny Lewis & the Watson Twins
Sea Legs/The Shins
Keep the Customer Satisfied/Simon & Garfunkel
Don't Stop Me Now/Queen

Live journal was glad to let me know that I had not posted for 34 weeks. So, to those waiting with bated breath, here ya go.

I'm spending the last evening of a four-day weekend attempting to catch up on my various Internet "tasks." I visited MySpace, where I had to deny a couple of bands' user requests and delete a comment that seemed to be phishing for password info. I also sent a "sorry" to an event invitation that I had missed.

I checked in on Facebook, where I denied two requests to join "Catbook," ignored multiple requests to add additional widgets/apps to my profile, and completed a Princess Bride quiz, on which I missed one question. Damn.

I then signed up for Twitter, since I keep hearing about it.

Following that, I skipped on over to Bloglines, to catch up on the 3,688 blog posts I needed to read. I skimmed the boingboing entries, the Unfair Park posts, the exchristian.net Anthony Flew posts, and deleted my subscription to TreeHugger since I'm apparently never going to read it. I really wanted to look at slashdot and techdirt, but alas, they had more than 100 posts accumulated. Each. I wiped the slate clean.

"If you erase the debt record, we all go back to zero," said Tyler Durden in Fight Club. Sometimes I feel that my technology is taking over my time; TiVo records hours of "Suggestions" for me, and it seems that every week there's a new networking site or microblogging black hole that someone wants me to join.

So I encourage you to take a moment, look at your RSS reader, your TiVo Suggestions, or whatever else is clogging your inbox and your life, and consider setting yourself back to zero. It's a good way to start the week.

In case anyone's interested, I'm justifying my thrift-store habit by selling off some of my better finds. (And prices are negotiable, 'specially for friends.) The blog's a work in progress and I'm still adding info on the items. But this'll give you a rough idea:

http://simplyfetching.livejournal.com

I do requests, too--that is, if you're looking for a particular clothing item, I'll see what I can do to score it for you.

Not trying to brag, I'm just very excited about my book finds lately. Me & D have been dutifully scouring the local used book emporia for the past six months or so for books to re-sell on Amazon.

Sometimes you buy a book that you think is a winner and it sits on your shelf for weeks until you give up and put in the box to go to Half-Price. Other times, you pick up something that seems relatively innocuous and it sells almost as soon as you can list it. Before last week, the biggest score was a 79-cent paperback copy of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" that sold overnight for $26 (now, the cheapest copy on Amazon is $57).

Then last week I pulled three books on a weekday afternoon at a local store:

1) My cost: 49 cents. An innocuous-looking paperback book on architecture. No copies were available on Amazon. I listed it for $95 and it sold within the hour.

2) My cost: $2. A slipcased reproduction of the manuscript of Winnie the Pooh. I haven't sold it yet, but it's selling on other sites for $50+.

3) My cost: $2. A plain-looking hardbound book about Robert E. Lee. The cheapest complete copy of this edition of the book (1886) I've seen is about $200. Though I also found it on a rare book Web site for $750. I'm trying to decide what to do with this book.

And today a hardback about banking in Texas that we listed a few weeks ago sold for $80.

It's a good month for books.

Why is it that we can bounce cell phone conversations off a miles-long chain of towers and yet they haven't devised a good drive-thru speaker system?

***

Been having lots of religious discussion lately with an ex-roommate/ACU alum. Once you get past that awkward uh-I-don't-really-uh-believe-that-anymore conversation, things get pretty interesting. I find the evolution/devolution of "faith" to be fascinating. What causes one person to cling to Christianity for a lifetime and another person, raised in the same tradition, to reject it?

I hesitate to say it's because of a tragedy, a miracle or some other life-changing event. Rather, I think for those who leave the church, that decision was a long time coming: a slow erosion of belief, faith, trust in God or the infallibility of the Pope or the Bible, or whatever their particular denomination teaches.

So this week I had my five-year anniversary at the Observer. I remember that on my second day of work (February 14, 2002) I wore a "Boycott V-Day" shirt and everyone looked at me strangely.

I wasn't sure that anyone would remember, but Village Voice (our corporate master) sent me a card that said, "Thanks for your five years of dedication to the Denver Westword." OK, well, at least they both start with "D." But the $250 gift card disposed me toward forgiving them.

Today, I rode on the elevator with a very tall man. When he got off one floor below mine, I noticed that his hoodie still had the security tag affixed to it. Did he stop and do some shoplifting on the way to work?

Whether you celebrate Valentine's Day or not, I challenge you today to Google some crush you had back in high school or junior high or summer camp. It has to be someone you haven't had any contact with for at least five years. I couldn't find most of the people I thought of, but I did find one guy, who was on a rival drama squad in high school. He's now in a sketch comedy troupe in L.A. How little things change, huh?

Between talking with my ex-roomie Rozie and my husband, I've been motivated to try to do some freelance writing. Of course, uh, I have no idea how to get started. I really enjoy writing and editing, but I suck at coming up with ideas and marketing myself. I guess that's how I ended up as a copy editor.

But the first piece I'm working on is fiction, more specifically a pitch for BUST magazine. Cross your fingers for me--I've gotten some good critiques and I hope to submit it within a month.

Dog drama is so much more dramatic than boy drama.

I have an appointment tomorrow with a veterinary behaviorist, which I'm very nervous about. Because though you know you'll be talking about the dog, you're REALLY talking about, in a less-than-veiled way, how you've failed as a pet owner. And who likes discussing their failures?

Do I sound like a rich yuppie when I say "veterinary behaviorist," by the way?

Had a delicious dinner at Madras Pavilion (multiple courses for 4 for $52) with old-time college pals and realized how far I've let myself slide into using profanity instead of the rainbow of other verbiage available to me. Must correct.

( Happy Mew Year! )

I carved this with my very own hands. Happy Halloween!

Got this yesterday from a guy on Craigslist...

Definitely needs some work, but I think it'll be fun to get it going. It's a "Gobby Explorer."

This made me laugh harder than I've laughed in a long time. But maybe you have to be a fan of Law & Order: SVU. From Brandon Bird's web site:

( Sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous )

Per nerver's request:

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now. Post these instructions in your livejournal along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they're listening to.

1. Fake Palindromes, Andrew Bird. For some reason, I just like singing, "She's got an old death kit she's been meaning to use/She's got blood in her eyes, in her eyes for you."

2. You Are What You Love, Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins. "I'm fraudulent, a thief at best/A coward who paints a bullshit canvas/Things that will never happen to me"

3. Sing Me Spanish Techno, The New Pornographers. Fortunately or un, I find myself singing the little hook from this song for hours at a time.

4. I Summon You, Spoon. One of the few songs that I downloaded onto my iPod before my copy of Gimme Fiction became irretrievably lodged in a car CD player. This might also have something to do with the fact that I had a Britt Daniel dream a few nights ago.

5. Monster Hospital, Metric. I don't know. It's a song you can scream along to: "I FOUGHT THE WAR BUT THE WAR WON'T STOP FOR THE LOVE OF GOD."

6. Evil, Interpol. I like the song but the video solidified my inner belief that puppets and evil go hand-in-hand.

7. And to come full circle: Skin Is, My, Andrew Bird. Because I do spend at least three minutes a day wondering what a "macrame bird of prey" is and whether it would actually sing "la-ling, la-ling, la-ling."


Sadly, I don't think I have seven people to "tag" but I would like to see lists from:
random_name_356
vinomazzei
ennui330
texantart

A commercial that bugs me: the spelling-bee-themed Frosted Mini-Wheats ad

The little girl begins to spell the word "aardvark"...

GIRL: A..r..d...

The microphone-straddling mini-wheat stops her, reminds her it's at the beginning of the dictionary...

GIRL: A..a..r..d..v..a..r..k. Aardvark. [wild applause]

Obviously, the writers of this commercial have never been in a spelling bee. This sallow little girl would've been stopped and disqualified the moment she started over with a different spelling than the original spelling she began with. This is, like, a basic rule.

I'm sure others have blogged about this, and maybe it's just my inner spelling nerd but this commercial is seriously gauche in this age of Spellbound.

For those of you that know my hubby, his new LJ is random_name_356. Visit his journal and nudge him to make lots of posts.

I got my first birthday present today. A $100 gift certificate to Torrid. So, ladies, go to <a href="www.torrid.com">Torrid</a> and tell me what you think would look <b>fabulous</b> on me.