Pithy music review: Velella Velella

Velella Velella: Wheeee! Wheeee! (Not all PMRs are gonna be snark.)

Check 'em here. PDXers, go see 'em at Holocene on 2/28.

Pithy music review: Girlfriend in a Coma

If this wasn't by the Smiths, it would have been laughed off the planet.

"I have been in villages in rural Gujurat! I have been a patient in a hospital in rural Gujurat!"

In planning our trip to Kerala this coming November, my husband has been sweating the details of our itinerary. Which town, which hotel, how many days, how to transport from A to B, etc.

And what he keeps asking me is, am I sure I want to visit his family's rural village?

This is bugging me - not the question of whether or not to go; I definitely want to go and would consider the trip incomplete without going. But my husband, who hasn't been in India since he was 3, seems convinced that village life would take me outside of my comfort zone, even though I have been in rural villages before. I'm also wondering if the fact that his repeated asking bugs me so much indicates that (a) he's reluctant but feels duty-bound to go, and would like an out or (b) I am experiencing "I am soooo into diversity! Lemme show you!" whiteyism.

So I keep telling him, I want to go, I am part of his family and would feel awful if we didn't go. Maybe by the time we're on our way there, he'll believe me.

John McCain wants me to break the law

I am getting several calls a day from John McCain, asking for my vote in Virginia's primary.

These calls are coming to my Oregon home phone number. When we moved, we had the "this number is no longer in service, please call this number...." message direct people to my still-Virginia cell phone number, so we don't know how the McCain folks got our home number. We're also perturbed by the fact that these calls come from "blocked number" or "no data" IDs.

In any event, I can't legally vote in VA's primary, and something - like say, a 503 area code - should have clued McCain's databankers to this fact. But maybe he's that desperate that he's willing to take a chance on the possibility that I am not registered in Oregon yet (which, of course, I am).

Pithy music review: Tu Fawning

Tu Fawning describes the audience, enthusiastically clapping for this. Yikes.

"There are better ways to show one's appreciation for Tom Waits. Sitting alone in a room is one of them."

"A soundtrack to a movie I would stay the hell away from."

Heretical perfume review: Rose Ikebana v. Clarins' Par Amour Toujours

Hermes' Rose Ikebana = Clarins' Par Amour Toujours.

Rose juice with berries and grapefruit. One is designed by Jean-Claude Ellena, Hermes' in-house perfumer, as part of their Hermessences line and thus accoladed; the other is available at the department store and has a heart on the cap and is therefore to be ridiculed.

XTCensored

Took a few moments to walk the baby in a stroller today, in between raindrops. Put on the iPod, which was set on shuffle as usual. It starts up with an old favorite, XTC's Respectable Street. But this was some odd version, and I wonder where I got it...

"Now they talk about ?absorbtion?, in cosmopolitan proportions to their daughters..."

Oh yes. Suburbanites discussing paper towels, or perhaps feminine hygiene products, 'tis the scourge of Britain.

"Now she's talking 'bout diseases, and which ?proposition? pleases best her old man...."

Ok. The real lyric is 'sex position.' Maybe not OK with the BBC.

"Sunday Church and they look fetching, Saturday night saw him ?stretching? over our fence..."

So.... no drunken wretching. Yoga! Your obnoxious neighbor does yoga over property lines!

All part of decency's jigsaw, I suppose - indeed!

Fiddling around my playlist, it looks like this version is from the greatest hits compilation Upsy Daisy Assortment. Cleanliness wipes a lot of the fun from it. Do yourself a favor and make sure you listen to the Black Sea version.

sweetest thing

On the advice of my music teacher, I picked up a copy of Ravi Shankar's autobiography and musical exercise book, My Music My Life. There is a beautiful new edition published by Mandala, and it features a recent picture of Shankarji, playing his sitar with closed eyes.

My daughter likes to take the book, drape her fingers across the sitar's strings, and kiss Ravi Shankar's face.

swimming upstream

So here's what's going on with me....

Some kind of weird, girl-area pain. It's been on the heels of some other problems, and I finally got another doctor to look at what was going on after my first doctor seemingly dropped me. But it's a case of "you have small abnormalities that shouldn't be causing a lot of pain, so come back in a couple of months and we'll check again." In the meanwhile, I'm on Vicodin to keep on top of the pain, as ibuprofin and other OTCs do nothing.

A friend of the family is in a very uneasy situation, and I can't say much about it publicly, but it has had me and my husband worried sick. We think things are looking up, but not sure yet.

I completely screwed up a work situation - someone had asked me to cover for them today. They asked me in November, and hadn't mentioned it since, and I just plum didn't keep track of it and was gobsmacked by the 'where are you' call this morning. Adding to that, I was in an increased amount of pain today from yesterday's poke-n-prod, and I realized I had one Vicodin left so needed to stop to get a refill or the pharmacy would be closed before I got home. I have been pining for a device that would easily sync calendars with my Mac, and would allow me to update in the field. I time. As it is, I don't utilize my calendar enough because I have to be in front of this machine to see it. Want it in my pocket. It's new cellphone time. You know where this is heading.

I'm also lobbying for the return of a cleaning service. The pain and the medicine leave me very tired, and screw up my sleep, and I can basically keep the toys from completely overrunning the place and the laundry and dishes done and the crumbs swept and that's about it.

Despite the tone of this post, I don't spend a lot of time griping about this condition. I do have fears about where it may be leading, but there is nothing I can do at this point. I'm not getting much reading done, I'm pouring my energy into coordinating a group knitting project at work, into my kids, and trying to stay comfortable. But I don't have much energy for much else, and I feel that it's time to get some help with the daily tasks if I can't get medical relief for a while.

Things I have had to explain to my 6-yr-old

- Many, many aspects of Star Wars, including lots of questions about "Dark Vader" and "Obi Wan Kedobi".

- How that woman got a beard on her chin (yea Portland).

- Why some medical treatments make you feel yucky even if they're doing good things for you.

- Why boys can't have babies.

- How long it takes things to turn to compost.

- Which things will never turn into dirt or compost.

- Who was Martin Luther King Jr.

- Why, if MLK was so important, he wasn't President.

- The difference between primaries and the presidential election.

- Why the gums around a loose tooth bleed just before the tooth comes out.

I've probably forgotten a bunch already. Whew.

tabla lesson

This was later on Bea's birthday.

medical pet peeve

When you get an ultrasound, and it's not for pregnancy, you're in the room staring at the screen, trying to relate the grainy black & white images to the nice color diagrams you've looked at from medical texts. The technician can tell you what that blob is ("That's your uterus.... that's your ovary.... that's your endometrial lining....") but since that person is not a radiologist, they can't show or tell you what's actually wrong or not-so-wrong. It's another day or two of waiting until your doctor gets back to you with the radiologist's reports. So, you've already seen the images first hand, but you still don't know what's going on.

I know they do this for efficiency, because the radiologist can determine what is going on in much less time than it takes to grab the images, but I do wish they'd just schedule a few minutes of time to hear the interpretation at the end of the ultrasound. Waiting really, really sucks.

Birthday hijinx!

Oh my, I no longer have a baby.

sarangi

My fingering isn't perfect in this pic. But anyway.

still gone.

drove to the county animal shelter today, talked to the neighbors, posted on craigslist, checked the online 'founds' at the humane society and the biggest animal hospital.

it is wrong that i got a crush on another cat while i was checking out the found kitties? feels too soon, but he wanted to play and he had orange eyes. bea had a blast looking at an entire room of kitties. i felt so sad, knowing that most of them probably wouldn't have anyone coming to look for them.

according to the movies, she should have shown up at the door either when i was packing bea and the stroller and the cat carrier into the car to go to the shelter, or right when we got back, or right after i talked with all the neighbors. damn lyin' movies.

cassie

she's missing.

i've had this cat for nine years. only a few months shorter than the length of my marriage.

she's gone missing on us once before, when we moved to portland, and she decided to hang out in the neighboring overgrown yard for a couple of days. but we've been in this house about a year now, so there should be no disorientation.

i came back from music lesson last night, read my son a couple of chapters, and settled with my own book before drifting off to sleep. i didn't get to ask my husband if he had sent her out for the night - a source of squabble, as i've never believed it to be safe, but the cat has never believed in letting us sleep through the night, either. i would be the one getting my nose or toes chomped around 3 am, while my husband simply couldn't stand the mewing or clawing to get into our bedroom if she was shut outside our room at night.

i noticed yesterday that she was walking gingerly up the stairs like an old cat. she's at least 11, and tiny. we don't know her true age as she was an adult when we adopted her. she hadn't been acting sick, but she had seemed to need more time with me after the kids had gone to bed recently.

even tj seems a bit put off, as if he's trying to ask where she is even though they were hardly buddies. he's had many a nose-swack from her in the mornings, idling for space at the breakfast bowls. the rest of the time, they ignored each other.

i hope i open the door to get the paper tomorrow and find her. i've checked the animal shelter's online lost and found, and unless she made it to gresham, she isn't there. also checked the major animal hospital, and craigslist. the number of lost pets on craigslist in just one day made my heart break a little. i have searched all the hidden nooks in the house, hoping that if she has passed, she found a comfortable space and slept until she couldn't wake.

How did I not know

... that John Larroquette is now on Boston Legal?

Strikingly white-haired now, but you'll always be Dan Fielding to me....

bibliofantasy

noun: something you've always wanted to see in print, but it doesn't exist.

usage: "I did recently check out a history that is exactly in the area I was researching, and noticed that most of the secondary material cited in the book postdates my graduate studies. This is kind of a bummer, because if I had finished my thesis, it likely would have been cited in it. As a library geek, it's always been a little bibliofantasy of mine to be cited."

"It's wicked cold!"

A few days in New England trained my son well.

learned to do / to learn to do

recently i've been exploring jewelry making more, and music. and now i'm starting to develop a check-list in my head of things i'd like to dabble in:

- there's a few quilting shops around here with great fabrics. i just want to find a nice, simple tunic pattern and whip some up in the spring.

- more jewelry making techniques. after thanksgiving we're dedicated to gettin the garage in order, which include machine shop space, and i want to use what i've learned and expand. here's what i made on my first go-round:



- scent. while i've been having some fun going up to a custom-scent body products shop not far from my house, i'm curious to see what i could come up with on my own. i don't know if i really have the patience, though - mix up a batch, wait six weeks, see if it needs chucking or tweaking...