buzzz buzzz

okay, the baby-prep bug hit. i wandered into a section of town yesterday to pick up futon covers, and came across a children's furniture store. saw a crib i really like, although i can't quite decide on a finish - i like white, but this will turn into a full size bed later, and maybe the kid won't want white when she's a tween/teen? but, they had a crib bumper set with bumble bees on it, so i had to get it. and a little beehive toy set....



i'm trying to resist the urge to cover the nursery in pink girly froof. which is weird, i mean, i don't like pink girly froof for me, and i would be surprised if my kid would like it either. and let's face it, babies probably don't worry too much about home decor.

i did a lot of gardening today, getting 10 plants into the ground and removing weeds, a dead clematis, and several deadly nightshade (!!!) plants from around the yard. i plucked some deadly nightshade from my neighbor's front yard, too, as i don't want their young kids getting sick from them. it turns out that while the sellers did a nice-looking landscaping in our yard, they did nothing to improve the soil, so i had to prep the soil for every plant with compost and fertilizer. what's really bad is that i'm already plotting (har har, pun not intended) what plants to get next.... the landscaping that was done included very little color, and i'm pretty much a color addict. i'm having to tone down my temptation to throw lavender all over the garden because i really need some reds, yellows and oranges around the place as well.

let's see... my parents visited last week. we saw a good number of things, although we were slowed by another 100 degree heat spike. on the third day of the heat i couldn't stay out of bed. i'd get out for about five minutes, and then i'd be back down. my mother also had more mobility trouble than she's had in a while, so while we got her to the rose garden, she didn't want to walk around it. after they left i thought of a million things that i wish we had seen, but that's the way, isn't it. plus, they'll be back, and we'll be here.

big. big and tired.

i think i'm almost halfway through the pregnancy? it's funny how with the first, you know exactly how many weeks and days you are, and for the second you're thinking, hmmmm, 17 or 18 weeks, maybe, whatever let's call it 4 months.

in any event, i'm feeling big, and the recent heat spike isn't doing much for my energy level. i'm having a hard time doing more than lying in bed. i need to pick up some maternity tshirts, which is annoying in a way because i know i'm not going to use 'em again after the next 5 months. hooray for cheapo foreign-made clothes, i guess.

haven't been into getting the nursery stuff yet. probably because we need to put the basement in order so i can move my office stuff down there, clearing out the back upstairs bedroom for the baby. actually the only thing i've seen while out that i wanted to snap up immediately for the nursery were paintings that were only display at a yarn shop. but they're very pink, and although i'm about 90% sure i'm having a girl i kinda think i should wait until ultrasound #2 happens before plunking down a couple of hundred on paintings.

algie's simply good, simply awfully good, at al-l-l-lgebra, at al-l-l-lgebra

sometimes songs get stuck in my head.

today's mix has been malcolm mclaren & the bootzilla orchestra's 'something's jumping in your shirt', seguing into 'algernon's simply awfully good at algebra'. both from the 1989 album 'waltz darling', which mixed house and, yes, full orchestra waltz.

and since i was in the basement, the b52s' 'legal tender' was running through my head as well. stocked it full of jelly jars, and heavy! equipment! we're in the basement.... learnin' to print....

so in playing 'guess what's stuck in my head' with a friend, i gave him the clue "cult adult pop". fits, eh?

congrats!

congratulations to my friend tony, who has just been hitched!

(actually, tony and eric have been married longer than boodad and i have. and finn & charlie are NOT tony & eric.)

bead show = danger

yesterday i went to a bead & gem show at the oregon convention center. four hundred dollars later, i walked out with oodles of stuff. and yes, most at better prices than i could find elsewhere or more interesting that i can usually find. but now i'd better get cracking on making more pieces to justify this....

saabalicious

husband's car is finally here. it's saabalicious. (really, GM, drop the 'born from jets' marketing and hire me. i've already given you 'saab luust' and 'saabalicious'.)

i measured my belly yesterday, and it's already 7" bigger than prepregnancy. woah.

another dream, another post

last night's dream was that after driving my husband to work (yep, we still don't have the saab, maybe tonight??), i somehow goofed off and didn't come home until 8:30 pm. this freaked out my husband, of course, but also my kid and my cousin who is visiting from connecticut and who has an interview and tour at reed college this afternoon. oops.

surfaced a little, went back to sleep, and then dreamed that husband and i went for lunch in a pub. he wanted a beer (it was brewed by amazon.com?!) but couldn't get the bartender's attention. i went up to the bartender, asked for the beer, and he told me they were out of it but would be getting more in a few hours if we wanted to wait. i said no, and could i try the copper ale instead. the bartender thought the best way to deliver a sample was to dribble it from the tap onto his finger and have me suck his finger.... eeugh.

insomnia might be better.

like i needed a dream to tell me this

last night i had a dream in which i went to a friend's house. she was a journalist and had lost her mother in 9/11. (this is an imaginary person.) for some reason she had a copy of ann coulter's book 'godless' was getting all in a twist about it. i picked it up, flipped through it, and found the following passage:

'my editors encourage me to conflate fiction and fact, and to do so at my own discretion to drive home truths...'

there were little bits surrounding it that basically said, she's a deliberate liar.

now, i'm not going to touch that woman's book with the proverbial 10-foot barge pole, so this is not an actual quote.

like i needed a dream to tell me this, anyway.

you know this makes me happy

new ryuichi sakamoto album!

bricolages is actually a remix album, with tracks taken from last year's wonderful 'chasm' album and remixed by cornelius, alva noto, fennesz, taylor deupree, steve jansen and others. i was kinda surprised by this, as there's no mention of the project on his website (http://www.sitesakamoto.com) and i only learned of it through a music store ad in the local weekly alt paper.

it's interesting to hear the interpretations, even if in some parts they seem to go completely against the music/lyric cooperation of meaning that was present in the originals.

bumper sticker idea

inspired by being pissed off at the "marriage = 1 (man symbol) + 1 (woman symbol) stickers, which thankfully i pretty much only encounter in the suburbs here in portland.

how about:

marriage = 1 (heart) + 1 (heart)

um..... anybody reading this any good at graphics?

boo song

"i don't like it,
i don't like it,
it's for grownups,
it's not for kids."

song inspired by PBS changing from kids' to adult programming.
who said tv can't inspire creativity?

sad

on the phone with my mother this afternoon, she said she had something to read to me from the local paper.

it was the obituary for someone i went to school with. in fact, i went on my first-ever date with him. (not a big chapter in my romantic life, but you tend to remember that first date.) i lost track of keith after high school; i knew he and his brother headed out to san francisco for a while. i knew he had returned to the hometown area when a bizarre story cropped up in the paper - his wallet had been stolen; he hadn't reported it because it was apparently during a drug purchase. the thief committed a major burglary and since he had been using keith's identity, the real keith wound up in jail. he later returned home. i tried looking him up a few times on trips home but never found him.

the obit mentioned a life partner/caregiver. one assumes AIDS in this case. i'm glad he wasn't alone. i feel sorry for his partner. the obit was written with a lot of tenderness and love, and mentions lots of family support. i'm glad the local catholic church isn't shutting their doors to his family for the funeral service.

after getting this news, we went out to run errands this evening and wound up in a food court. i watched a pair of men there; both probably the same age, one was noticeably thin and frail and in a wheelchair, the other gently assisting. they were watching the ice skaters in the center court. it was while seeing them that i began to feel the small good things in keith's situation: he wasn't alone, he had support, he was loved. things diseases can't steal.

downtime between books

no surprise, i'm a reader. and now that i'm not working, i'm reading more.

so last night i finished up nathan singer's 'chasing the wolf', a time-travel based SF that looked interesting enough to take off the new books shelf at the library. it was a short read, under 200 pages, and it was engaging. reminds me a bit of cory doctorow's style.

prior to that, i read magnus mill's 'explorers of the new century', which was also fairly short. i want to do some research and find literary criticism of this, because in his sly and sarcastic way i think mills is bring up a huuuuge issue but oh so quietly. i had read mill's 'the scheme for full employment' a couple of years ago and was delighted to see that the local library system has kept up with his work - the system i worked for did not. he writes socioeconomic satire, a modern jonathan swift.

i have a novel by samrat upadhyay checked out, which i requested after reading his new short story collection 'the royal ghosts'. i'm a sucker for anything (well-written) set in southeast asia, and upadhyay sets his work in nepal. the short stories all dealt in tangental or direct ways to the recent antimonarchist violence in nepal.

so this is my question - i finished 'chasing the wolf' last night, and since it's set in modern NYC/1930s mississippi/1960s california, i'm not quite ready to start the upadhyay novel yet. i need a couple of evenings of downtime. usually i do suduko puzzles for a while before bed, or (since my due date has been moved up almost 2 weeks) i should hop-to on my knitting project, a maternity cardigan. i have an issue of tikkun magazine to get through as well, although it's admittedly dry reading (i'm going to try again on tikkun founder michael lerner's 'the left hand of god', though....) anyone else need downtime between books?

saab luust

well, we tried living the one-car family lifestyle. but basil's workplace changed to a location with no nearby transit, and when he brought his bike out to be stored at the closest train station, it was gone within 12 hours....

so we're getting a second car. it's a 1999 saab 9^5 sedan, and we're getting it from this swedish guy who only works on saabs and volvos. basil is pretty much indulging me, because he wanted to look at cheap old japanese/korean numbers (kia, suzuki) and i pointed out that mats offers a warranty on his cars and (pout pout) i've always kinda wanted a saab, but they are ridiculously priced new compared to the retained value.

this is part of the portland experience: getting used to how laid back things are here. mats is lending us an older saab until ours is ready; there is a wiring job he has to do on ours first. i drove the loaner saab home tuesday and the driver's side view mirror fell off onto the highway. i called him sheepishly on wednesday, and he said "ya no problem, bring it in and i'll put another mirror on it." oh and i kid you not, he was wearing a t-shirt from the ABBA musical 'mamma mia' when i went in that afternoon.

nathy is a little disappointed that we're not getting one of the 9^3 convertibles, but they're two-doors which is a little too impractical with kids.... also, it kinda rains a bit here, so how much do we get to put the top down? the clencher for us, though, is that the tops were cloth, and we could just see them getting knifed. "too much time in DC," said a local friend when we related that concern.

the other thing that hit me is that my dad immediately started listing new cars we should look at. yes, we're about to get some money from selling our house in virginia, but we don't want to spend so much on a car. and we don't want a car payment. it made me realize, though, that i've been hardwired to get new cars when used would have been better for me/us economically. so i had to move across the country to break that?

best url evah!

SJIHBO!

guilty tv pleasures

now, we're talking guilt. in a fit of 'we shall only worship at the shrine of PBS, and it comes in just fine with rabbit ears', we are forgoing cable or other services. (well, there is also the sworn-enemies-of-comcast thing, and a reluctance to put a dish on a 1912 bungalow.)

and i should explain that pregnancy leaves me tired every so often. brain-numbingly tired. and you know if brain numbing is to happen, the appropriate channel is the just-about-to-be-CW'd WB network.

so i'm watching their friday night lineup last week. no wait, that's a lie. i'm flipping the very few channels that we get. PBS before NOW is on is kinda of a wash - yeah, i know, Fareed.... is smart but dull or at least certainly not mindless passive watching. and i flip some more, and see a sitcom that has sara gilbert on it. yes, sara gilbert, smart-slacker darlene from roseanne, sparkling appearance in high fidelity, and one of those actors you just like to see pop up from time to time. and i see in the supporting cast this nebbishy older guy. looks so familiar, yet i'm racking my mushy brains to place his name. is it an actor i used to see at trinity rep in providence? there is something about him that makes me think i used to see him regularly long, long ago....

and tonight i realize who this guy is...




















IT'S COUSIN LARRY!






















now i am so happy, i do the dance of joy!

and the wikipedia entry on mark linn-baker also calls him 'nebbishy'.

btw, my other guilty tv pleasure will transfer from UPN to the CW this fall. i thought i was alone on this, but slate magazine recently revealed a love for 'girlfriends' as well....

google news thinks i care about...

brad & angelina leaving africa
nba finals

news stories on these two came up as 'recommended for me' when i looked at google news this morning. weird, since i haven't used google or google news to look up info on either topic. also, dead wrong as to interests. so maybe they were recommended to me because i'm too disinterested in brangelina and basketball?

fear o' committment

the topic of temple shopping came up over breakfast this morning.

husband isn't into it, and i'm... still not ready. even though there are some good options to explore here, including a reform congregation that is actually liberal, a reconstructionist congregation, and a renewal group.

is it that quitting ner shalom showed me that i can be jewish alone?

we're eng-er-land!

yeah, i know, two youtube posts in a week. i haven't heard the embrace england world cup song yet, but will any world cup song ever be as brill as this?

happy bday, pfms/ep/hipinion