Oh, my stars and garters!

Accomplishments are for suckers.

I'm not quite sure how I managed to do nothing all day, but I pulled it off beautifully.

Well, not quite nothing. I took a full shower: leg shaving, hair washing, exfoliating, everything. Which, as bad as our water pressure's gotten, is actually quite a feat. I finished rinsing my hair with the garden hose on the porch because I got bored waiting for the soap to dribble out. The landlord's supposedly on it, but I think I should make a crabby supplemental phone call tomorrow. Maybe the realization that his tenants are being forced to bathe in the front yard will speed things up a bit; he's a fundamentally decent guy, after all. In the meantime, I guess I'll schlep all my toiletries down to work. Their showers work like magic, and I'll practically be living there soon enough anyway.

P.S. Get your neti pot stuff together if you want a button! I'd like to get the buttons out early next week. I have three submissions so far (one photo, one poem, one drawing), with two more photos and possibly a limerick on the way. Which is a pretty great response, considering.

Get ready for O3 '06!

Ozone has its own season now? Can something that lasts more than half the year even be considered a season? At that point, isn't that just pretty much the way things are?

The city should be commended for at least trying to do something about it. Still, seeing a city-funded sign cheerfully and matter-of-factly announcing the advent of seven months of stagnant, murky haze makes me feel like we're kind of screwed as a species.

Potted plant

Sleepy. Dull. Passive. Chop up the TV. Chop it up with an axe.

Nature 'n' shit

We went to McKinney Falls State Park yesterday and walked around for a few hours, getting sort of lost and taking pictures and checking the altitude function on my watch. It was pretty fun.


Falls.

Little pools above the falls.

No trip to the state park is complete without a hike down the dry creek bed to visit the rusty, washed-up washing machine!

Obligatory shot of bluebonnets. There aren't many of them this year, but they are very blue.

I took a late lunch from work today and went home for a while. Eric made insanely strong french press coffee because our coffeemaker's broken, and we took our mugs out on the porch and watched the rain for a while. Our street was very green and silent and peaceful. Nobody was out except our sweet mailman in his pith helmet. The coffee was delicious, and Eric was still in his robe, all friendly and sleepy. It was almost fucking impossible to get in my car and go back to work. But I did, and now I feel like I deserve a medal or something for coming back and finishing out my shift.

Theo and Tootie and Laura Ingalls Wilder

I just spent four hours watching back-to-back specials on child stars on A&E that were taped probably five years ago.

Patty Duke can't hide that she's bitter, but she's kind of funny about it. Kim Fields started crying in the the child-star roundtable discussion because she will never be able to top being Tootie. It probably sucks pretty hard to have been Tootie, now that she's mentioned it. She's really lovely now, though; surely she can find something else to do. Malcolm-Jamal Warner looked like he turned out to be pretty hot too. The woman who played Nellie Olsen on Little House on the Prairie talked about how hard it was to find a date because her character was so repulsive, and how twisted she thought the people who were attracted to her were because, seriously, what kind of sicko would want to fuck Nellie Olsen? Also, Melissa Gilbert's description of Michael Landon's loving, natural directing style was a little creepy, and I can't believe this is how I spent my Friday night.

I'm not expecting an overwhelming response on this one.

Who wants a neti pot button?  I made a whole batch the other night, and I don't know what to do with them.

If you are a fan of the neti pot and would like a button depicting one, please send me an e-mail with your mailing address and a picture of you using one, like this. I will not post these pictures unless you give me permission, of course. 

If you want a button but for some reason you can't get a picture taken mid-neti, you can send me a Shakespearean sonnet about neti pots. I won't post those unless you give me permission, either. If you'd rather write a Petrarchan sonnet, I guess I'd accept those too.

Actually, tell you what. I'll give you a neti pot button in exchange for any neti-related art or poetry, other than haiku. Lately I've been thinking that haiku needs a rest.

(More information on neti pots here. I got mine at Walgreen's. I realize this sounds like horseshit, and disgusting to boot, but I swear to you that they help. My allergies aren't cured exactly, but they're a lot better this year. Also, I hear if you have certain sinus or ear problems, neti pots might not be the best thing for you, so use your discretion.)

Panting

I got these pants at the Gap about a month ago. I liked them when I tried them on, but I was reluctant to pay $50 for a pair of friggin' pants. My sister talked me into it, though. She said they were perfect, and if I didn't take her advice and buy them, not only would she kill me, she'd never go shopping with me again. We have very dissimilar tastes but are great shopping partners because she talks me into buying things I really need but don't want to spend money on, and I talk her out of buying things she really wants but doesn't need.

Multiplied!

Six flashes over a two-second exposure makes for so many Erics.

Bouncy!

I got a gigantic used flash yesterday at Camera Co-op. It's a zoom flash! I never even knew such a thing existed. The best part is the pivoting flash head, which lets you aim the light source somewhere besides directly into someone's stunned, blasted-out face.

Let's look at the test roll:

Full-on flash in a nearly dark room. Yuck.

Flash bounced off the ceiling in a nearly dark room. Better.

Flash bounced off the white door directly behind me (it swivels 360 degrees!) in a nearly dark room. This would have been lovely if Eric hadn't been getting just a teeny bit fed up with having his picture taken over and over. As it is, he looks like he's about to bite my throat out.

My favorite shoes in a very dim room, with the flash bounced off the adjacent wall.

Etc. Tonight I played with black and white and the strobe feature, and I'm making my sister come over and play guinea pig for me tomorrow night. This is totally fun.

I just wish film and developing didn't cost so damn much. Digital isn't nearly as interesting to me, but it provides instant gratification and is extremely inexpensive, which in the end makes it a much better medium for my cheap, impatient little soul.

Worst case

Tonight I watched a really dumb show, Perfect Disaster, on the Discovery Channel. This episode was about an unprecedented supertornado obliterating downtown Dallas during rush hour. Which, weather-porn fetish aside, is an idea I find is not without its merits. But this show was lame. A pastiche of clumsy CGI, ominous voiceovers, poorly acted vignettes, and real-life interviews with bored bureaucrats  made it clear that Dallas is doomed! doomed! by this completely hypothetical scenario.

The only good part was when the fictional team at the emergency operations center learned that "Dallas Stadium," filled to capacity with spectators watching a generic event (a Metroplex Ranchhands game?), was destroyed by an F-5. One woman's eyes crossed as she started to cry, while the rest of the actors stood around woodenly, trying very hard to look somber and frightened. 

If they'd bothered to do an animation of Reunion Tower getting tossed like a spear, ball down, across downtown into the middle of Central Expressway, I'd have given it an A++, but as it is, I can only in good conscience give it a C-. Really, if you're going to do a fear-baiting show on chaos and destruction in our cities, you should do it right.

I like the dumb jokes.

Q: What kind of shoes do people with two left feet wear?

A: Flip flips!

ATTENTION, EVERYBODY! ROONE NOW HAS A MEGAPHONE. IT TAKES EIGHT D-CELL BATTERIES.

 

That is all.

I am the superwinner!

And that is because I made delicious mango green tea custard tonight. (The recipe says it's a green tea mango custard smoothie, but just ignore the smoothie part and eat it with a spoon.)

Also I am a superwinner because I let my sister into her house when she got locked out tonight, and I further am a superwinner because I went out and saw the Paranoids tonight. (And afterwards told Joel that Eric and I were going home to make smoothies, and he furrowed his brow and looked slightly shocked and intrigued but mostly confused and said, "Really?" And I was like, yeah, smoothies, what's the big deal? And he said, "Ohhh. I thought you said you were going home to watch movies." And while it's true that I don't watch that many movies, I didn't think I did it so infrequently as to elicit such a reaction to the announcement that I was (but not really, ha!) going to watch a movie. Film-Watching Robot has a great post with lots of movies people should watch and his post made me sad that I don't. I think I'd like to get into the reasons why I don't watch many movies later (short answer: because I'm hypercritical and twitchy), but for now it's late and I'm going to shut up. Try the custard. You can skip the straining step if you use bags instead of loose tea, and if you cook it too long and it gets grainy, don't fret, because you can just whisk out the lumps. Superwinner! Superwinner signing off!)

Boobies!

They liven up any dull afternoon!

Interactive breast bounce-ometer. The FF/G-cup-on-horseback simulation is particularly mesmerizing. (Dan showed me this.) 

"Knockers up gal" Rusty Warren and her MP3 clip of "Bounce Your Boobies." (Lynell told me about her.)

Bust Doctor vibrating bra: "Spray special healthful liguid on bust. After put on bust doctor, plug in and trun on switch button." (Lynell sent me this link too.)

And the funniest calculator trick in the whole wide world:

(Demonstrated by a second-grade classmate whose name I have long since forgotten.)

Someone sure woke up on the wrong side of her personality today.

I'm crabby. My neck hurts. I'm tired of spinning my wheels. I wish I could move out of my house tomorrow instead of this summer. I'd spent so much time dreading the day that we have to give this place up that I kind of hadn't noticed that I've kind of started to hate it. (Roo, who has moved in and out of this house no fewer than three times, knows all about the attract-and-repel aspect of living here, in what's either a fun, quirky, comfortably rambling house or an oppressive, fucked-up, grimy shithole, depending on your mood.)

Anyway, I don't have the energy to do anything about any of this right now, except to bitch (and bitch and bitch), and I suspect doing that will just snarl me up even more. So, freed from the tyranny of my own good cheer and sociability, I will now drink a beer and sullenly sit in judgment on everything I can think of. Cheers!

P.S., 90 minutes later: Sitting in judgment is boring. I'm gonna go watch TV.

Stinky will totally eat your face off.

The current barometric pressure is 1006 millibars! Woo! Hoo!

I got the barometer watch! It's real ugly. The barometer seems pretty accurate when I check it against NOAA's website, and the compass is cool.

The altimeter tends to drift, though, so I have to reset it against a known elevation least once a day. Also, thermometer only works if it's been off my wrist for about 30 minutes because otherwise it factors my body heat into the reading. It's not the informational powerhouse I'd hoped for, but it's still pretty great.

The best thing I've learned from it so far is that if you sit on my toilet, you're facing due south. The residents of my house all agree that's fantastic feng shui.

Lost and found, safe and sound (or, I guana tell you a story)

Today started out on kind of a bummer when I read that an 88-year-old man with dementia and only two teeth was reported missing after wandering away from St. David's hospital. Poor toothless, lost, confused old man! What if he wandered into the street and got run over by a bus or something? It made me sad to think of it.

Then my sister called. In a weird, wavery voice that indicated she was either going to burst into tears or a prolonged giggle fit, she told me she was in the process of making lost iguana signs. Apparently her boyfriend's iguana, Zerd, had escaped out their back door last night. They didn't think they had much hope of finding it, but they figured it couldn't hurt to put signs up.

Lost iguana sign:

Zerd:

 

I asked my sister if she had put a notice up or looked on Craigslist, and she said that seemed like a longshot. I checked the lost-and-found section just in case, and, sure as shit, there was a post from someone who'd found an iguana in my sister's part of town last night. After calling to verify that it was indeed Zerd and not, say, some other random lost iguana (poor Chingy!), it was determined that Jill's boyfriend and his iguana will be reunited as soon as the finder gets home from work tonight.

Then, right after I'd finished laughing my ass off over all the iguana drama, I refreshed the Statesman website and learned that the old man had been found unharmed late this morning. So ever since then, today has been pure magic.

Empty day

Wow, that was pretty amazing how I did next to nothing today.

The only time all day that I felt I'd accomplished anything was when I cracked myself up at the kolache place this afternoon by thinking about how funny (to me) it would be if I ordered my Polish sausage kolache by pronouncing it "polish," as in "a smooth glossy surface," instead of "Polish," as in "from Poland."

That is not much of an accomplishment at all. It's probably for the best that I have to go back to work tomorrow morning.

Full day

I got up and greeted the vet to get Stinky dewormed (get a vet who makes house calls if you can, especially if you have hard-to-round-up kitties). Then we met my parents for lunch at South Congress Cafe, admired their new car, and took them to see Eric's art at End of an Ear (which will come down Thursday morning, so you should go tomorrow if you haven't seen it yet but want to). On the way there, I came within a yard of running over a guy who walked out in front of my car in the middle of Oltorf. Jackass. I wish people wouldn't try to make me kill them, because if I accidentally killed someone I would then have to kill myself, and I would be totally pissed off about that.

After all that, I drove back home to drop Eric off, went back down to South Lamar for a sassy haircut, and then went back home again to get Eric and the bikes, which we rode down to the Ransom Center to see Binh Danh talk about his chlorophyll prints on leaves. The lecture was a little droning, and although the guy was slightly charming and didn't come off as anything close to pompous, you could tell by the way he spoke of his "body of work" that he'd spent too much time in art school. Maybe I was disappointed because I was much more interested in the technical than the historical or conceptual aspects? Anyway, I'm glad we went because Dan and I are inspired to try something similar this summer.

Afterwards, we went to Madam Mam's for dinner and took a walk down the Drag so I could give my distended, Thai-stuffed belly a chance to subside before the long, fun bike ride home.

Now I'm drinking a Liberty Ale and checking on the statewide primary race results.

I feel like that's kind of a lot to pack into 12 hours for someone as sluggish as I am.

Also, according to the UPS tracking site, my barometer watch is all the way up in Secaucus, NJ. Come on, barometer watch!

The plot of every Barbara Kingsolver novel I've ever read, more or less:

A smart, spunky woman moves to a new town and is branded an outsider. As soon as she makes some friends, she realizes a small-scale environmental or sociopolitical disaster is about to befall her new home. Meantime, she meets a hot salt-of-the-earth guy. They flirt, fight, and, if she's lucky, fuck. Through dialogue that sounds like a biology textbook interspersed with "you know"s and "see"s for authenticity, she gets him to appreciate the severity of the situation. He in turn explains the working man's point of view and makes her see that everything isn't black and white. Then, with a little work, the crisis is averted, at least for the time being. The end!

I just read Prodigal Summer (which actually mixes the above elements up with three separate plot threads, but believe me, it's all there), and I like Barbara Kingsolver, I really do. I think she has a natural, understated style, and her writing's good but not too good, so you feel like she's this nice, smarter-than-average lady just telling you a story. But jeez, she must be able to write these things in her sleep by now.

Stuff 'n' things 'n' shit

Click on the photo to see a few pictures of the craft night we hosted last night. It was fun to see everyone. It was especially fun to drink a lot of beer and play with the heat gun.

I've been pretty near worthless today. That's okay. I had so much fun last week I took this Monday-Wednesday off too.

The barometer watch is on its way. It's hideous, and the face dwarfs my dainty little wrist. But that's the sacrifice I'm making so that you may know the temperature, barometric pressure, altitude, and your orientation from true north whenever you're with me from now on. I am sure you can't wait and will never grow tired of hearing about all that.

Also, Choo bought me a 1938 USDA pamphlet on cloud-form codes. The introduction says, "This publication is not designed for public distribution. The cloud codes are of little interest to the general public." Those damn Washington bureaucrats in 1938 apparently didn't realize that history would be judging them. Judging them and finding them to be completely full of shit. No, seriously, it's really boring. But it's got pretty pictures and it's nice to have on my bookshelf.

Stinky has what I think is a tapeworm. It waved at me this morning: Hi, Joolie! Let's be friends! Good thing you haven't had breakfast yet! It was horrifying. God, I hate cat butts, especially ones with parasites protruding from them. We'll have to call the vet first thing tomorrow; fortunately, he's much more qualified to deal with this than I am, which is not at all.

Product review

If the label copy of Neutrogena Healthy Defense Moisturizer with Light Tint is to be trusted, Sheer hint of color gives your face an instant healthy glow! is synonymous with Weird-ass terra cotta shade makes you look as though you've worked a bowl of butterscotch pudding into your face!

I don't know much about cosmetics, so maybe I'm not one to judge. Still, I don't think anyone should buy this, ever.

Nothing says "American ingenuity" like frozen pickle juice on a stick.

I tried a pickle popsicle from El Chilito today after swimming with Eric, Choo, and Jennifer K. It was very salty. I'm not even sure how they got it to freeze, that's how salty it was.

I wouldn't say it was good, exactly, but it was weirdly compelling. I couldn't stop eating it. In the process, I discovered it's not easy to drive a stick shift and eat a pickle popsicle at the same time, but I managed. That made me feel pretty accomplished. Not as accomplished as the person who had the idea to freeze leftover pickle juice and sell it to suckers for $1.50, but still.