off to lisbon for a writing workshop and some serious port tasting.
keep an eye on the coast and a four paws on the teeter.
Category Archives: things i worry about
tough guy
recently a friend of mine with kids told me that her 7 year old son had started skateboarding and soon afterwards was begging to be taken to a real skate park. so off they went, somewhere in the safe environs of South Pasadena, to a park filled with older kids popping ollies, being cool and constantly texting on their phones. my friend’s kid, snotty, nerdy, and skinny, took a position against a wall, pretended he didn’t know his mom, and pulled out his calculator and starting texting. Yo. lol. ~\(+.+)/~
Stevie: the only reason you win is because i’m more interested in a real flesh rather than a dumb toy
MO: mmmmf
Stevie: for instance i got that possum good
MO: yeah, that was gross
Stevie: wimp
MO: am not
Stevie: are too. i shook that possum down, and then i rolled on it. i wore its perfume. you? you let that stinky-ass stub-tailed cat drink from our water bowl.
MO: nah-ah
Stevie: yah-ha
MO: i rolled on a dead animal just the other day
Stevie: yeah, right
MO: no, i did. eau de doo. i did.
Stevie: where was this? where was i?
MO: on the sidewalk, maybe you thought it was the letter “E”
MO: (^_-)———-
Stevie: [[(>_<)]]
Shake it shake it shake it
it rained dead animals left and right this week so i am only posting pictures of cuteness.
on Tuesday at dog agility class where our teacher has goats, chickens, bunnies, turtles and dogs, we found out one of the turtles had been sat on to death by its older wiser fatter friend. I thought turtles have this built-in defense, like they bring their own helmet to battle, but apparently this turtle had a faulty helmet or at least one with a bad ISO rating or whatever. a friend once told me the story about his large grandmother rolling over in her sleep on top of her chihuahua. (*smash*). the family didn’t have the heart to tell her so they just got her another dog that looked the same (i think its name was Fifi) and that was that.
even though i was tempted, I didn’t take a picture of the turtle, but then last night one of the dogs (and I know which one) did a little disco with a possum—Shake it Shake it Shake it—and so first thing in the morning i discover a dead little thing back behind my garage. I suppose even though peace has been found inside the house it’s still a little iffy out in the real world.
we called animal control who said we had to be present when they arrived or else they wouldn’t go into the backyard. since we were on our way out they told us the best thing for us to do was to somehow get the thing to the curb.
so David navigates a shovel to pick up the thing, which still has its tailed all curled up, likes it’s sleeping, and it’s a bit of a struggle because he sounds like he’s about to puke and he’s using all his long-limbed advantage to scoop, while staying as far away as possible. of course mr. possum resists being picked up, as most dead things do, and when he dumps it into my trash bag, all I can think of is that there is nothing like something that stiff, weighing roughly the same as our cat (without the scratching and screaming), plummeting to the bottom of a bag you have open and are barely wanting to hold on to.
so like I said no dead pics but here’s the bag we managed to get to the curb.
from there we went to a store that wasn’t open yet, and while waiting a freaking bird flies into the window and rolls its eyes and plops over right in front of the dog who Shook it Shook it Shook it last night and slept very well thank you very much. the bird survived but was in shock for a few minutes and then the security guard came over and just as i said “don’t touch it” he picked it up and brought it to the nearest tree.
Not dead yet!
update: it’s been almost 12 hours since possum discovery and the bag is still out there. i had a thought maybe by the time we got home it would be deflated with a little tear in the plastic, but no such luck. animal control did say to give them 24 hours. ick.
growing meat
the May 23, 2011 issue of The New Yorker has an article by Michael Specter on growing meat in a test tube or petri dish. i’ve always wanted a meat tree in the garden, so now that we’re putting in new containers and ordering shitloads of dirt i thought it would be a great time to try.
first we pulled up all the fava beans still lingering in the yard.
then we staked out the area for the new containers, set them into the ground, sprinkled heavily with water… and the next morning…
VOILA!
turns out you don’t need compost, or dirt or anything. just a nice steady morning light. chicken cacciatore anyone?
on a different note, Specter’s article talks about Willem van Eelen, who “was born in 1923 in the Dutch East Indies, yet his youth of freedom ended abruptly on May 10, 1940—the day the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. Van Eelen enlisted and served in Indonesia, but he was eventually captured and spent most of the war as a prisoner, dragged from one P.O.W. camp to another. After the war, he studied psychology at the University of Amsterdam, but he struggled with the intertwined memories of starvation and animal abuse in the camps.”
for some reason (combined with the fact that the Rapture came and went with hardly a tremor of any kind in this earthquake-prone city) this reminded me of my sister-in-law’s parents, who started out as missionaries in Indonesia. they soon realized that the locals didn’t need religion, they needed irrigation. so off they went back to Europe to receive a degree in agriculture, and afterwards returned to Indonesia to help on that front.
NY as it will be soon
just a response to the comment regarding my post on chain stores invading NY.
on time
time is a funny thing, especially “brain time,” which is the clock inside our heads that we rely on as “real,” even though it’s actually dependent on our subjective consciousness and perception rather than fixed increments of seconds, microseconds, etc.
the April 25, 2011 issue of the New Yorker has a fabulous article by Burkhard Bilger on David Eagleman and brain time. David is a fellow New Mexican, which fuels my half-assed theory that kids who grow up in New Mexico develop such a weird sense of space and scale they are bound to have a screwy understanding of time as well.
during grad school David didn’t want to take time away from programming in order to eat so he kept a bag of raw potatoes under his desk. he would cook the potato in the microwave and bite at it while he typed. Impressive!
here’s my version of that, eating the entire bucket of ice cream while waiting for something to process. (definitely a disadvantage to have to use both hands, but it’s homemade salted caramel ice cream and that you cannot possibly manage with one hand).
as everyone knows, our perception of time is context dependent. our contractor told us our garage would take a month to fix up, and now three months later it’s really pretty much, essentially, nearly done. so nearly done that we’ve put up the ropes for the yoga wall, and we’ve hung our contractor up on them. ask him how long he thought we left him hanging there, and he’d say half a minute or more when in reality it was closer to 10 seconds.
which is a long time compared to the couple of seconds it took for me to snap this photo at Lincoln Center, where some guy behind me said “some people think they can stop and hold everyone up for a minute just to take a picture,”
and in the excruciatingly long 80 minutes of opera that followed, my brain drifted to things that take an even longer time (relatively) to happen, like my current writing project, the gentrification of Williamsburg (hello! Blue Bottle coffee!), and the formation of a redwood forest.
after all, for every action there is an equal and opposite abstraction. or in other words, they will make no sticks to chew on, before it’s time.
what cute b/w animals do in color
this black and white cuteness made the milk that went into the licorice ice cream from Fosselman’s in Pasadena:
nice purple!
this black and white cuteness…
did this:
nice purple!
god playing tetris
post-internet generation revised
so there’s the post-internet generation:
and there’s the post-internet generation:
and yes, that’s an ethernet cable.
rainbow in my kitchen, underwear in my chips
i came home the other day to a rainbow in the kitchen, which must have been unlucky, as i received a pair of shoes i ordered and found out they sent me two right feet. i asked the company if they could send me two left feets, but they said they didn’t have any more of those shoes at all, rights or lefts. bleh.
my luck turned when i ate a chip in the shape of underwear—the tighty-superhero kind—with the negative space of a rainbow, if rainbows were a cookie cutter type of thing. instead of buying something, i was able to get rid of the crap that had been in the garage by combining all my piles (the “so-and-so might want this” pile, the infamous “maybe” pile, the “aw – i made that by hand” pile, and so on) into just two: the trash and the goodwill pile. phew.
but really, what to do with stuff that you can’t get rid of. like the top of the washing machine, which we don’t need because right now the dryer sits on the washer, but what if we ever needed the washer/dryer to be side by side (!)
with everything out of the way the new beam in the garage sticks out like a sore thumb – it’s the only thing that is straight and level in the whole place. we’ve already scavenged the concrete for pieces to go in our reclaimed concrete project, but then again, that beam seems like a nice place to hang a horseshoe…
