Okay, I know at least one person reads this journal and lives in Chicago.

What's on the must see list?

I'm thinking the El, Navy Pier/the Lake.

Where should I go to be exposed to real, actual, Chicago deep dish pizza?

Would anyone be interested in a fannish meetup? Not a "Let's meet Jenna!" thing because I'll be the one lurking in the corner anyway, but more of a "Hey, let's get together and talk about Leverage media and happen to schedule that gathering on this date!" kind of thing.

Anyone?

No, not wedding related. Wedding plans continue apace, though really, at this point, it's finishwork, details, final reservations and the bachelor and bachelorette parties. Himself is using it as an excuse to buy a new suit. His new suit was aproximately seven times the cost of my dress, though if you add the fact that I bought all of her veil materials, plus some other stuff, it's closer to balancing out. Don't care. I love weddings, drinks all around.

But this post isn't about the wedding.

When we bought our house ten years ago, we walked in, saw that the seller had put in cheap white carpet, cringed, then shrugged. We knew we'd be having babies (plural was the plan, anyway) in this house, so we figured we'd let it stay until we were past the crayon and play doh years, then pull it and replace it with something nicer.

In 2005, we repainted the (rose and wedgewood blue) bathroom to a lovely cafe au lait with a mosiac tile patterned wallpaper border and at that point, decided we wanted to pull the carpet (seriously, who puts wall to wall carpet in a bathroom? *) and replace it with a creamy brownish tile. Maybe with a pattern around the edge. In 2006, we watched friends gut and retile their guest bath and Himself made noises about our bath being our Spring Break project that year. He continued to make such noises through Spring Break of 2007. And Spring Break of 2008. For four years, we've periodically discussed what we want to do with that bath and for three years, nothing has changed. All the measurements are still the same. Color hasn't changed. Tile choice hasn't changed. The piece of paper with his original sketch has been to so many home improvement centers that it's soft as old cotton now and the left corner is blurred to a smudge, but he's memorized it by this point. Any suggestion that we hire a contractor to do it has been met with the same indignation that he would give oh, I don't know, suggesting that he put on a tutu and dance the lead in Swan Lake. The Nutcracker he'd do; every boy wants to be a prince, after all, but Swan Lake? No, no man is allowed to enter our castle with a tool. Except of course the plumber. And the elctrician. And the guy who hooked up the internet. Oh and ... yeah, you get my drift. Anyway, no, it's his project and his masculinity and I bit my tongue and held my impatience and oh look, maybe we'll tile the bathroom for our Spring Break Home improvement project for 2009? Turn the calendar page. Nope. Not this year either.

Or so I thought.

The weekend before last we were driving by the discount floor supply place and they were having a sale and apparently, the planets were in alignment (I don't have a high enough testosterone level to sense them. All I have is my radar. Radar is apparently located in one's breasts, because I'm 1) the only one the house with C-cups and 2) the only one in the house who can find keys, the mayo in the fridge, the canister of salt, the dust pan. How do bachelors live? Apparently, they simply make do using mustard, more mustard, and a piece of cardboard and a sock. I have no idea about the keys.) and so that afternoon found us sweating, unloading forty thousand pounds of really quite heavy tiles from the trunk of the car to a neat stack in the kitchen. Well, the bottom of the stack is neat. The top of the stack is less neat and more sweat stained, but that's because I was the one doing the stacking as Himself and Bear brought tiles in from the car, Bear in single units, Himself in groups of five. Did I mention heavy? Really quite heavy. Also a hundred degrees.

Skip forward to yesterday evening. I knew something was up, with my maternal instincts honed to a razor edge as they are and the fact that both of them were following me, giggling as quietly as they could, which wasn't particularly quiet, to the back of the house so I could switch out of work clothes and into yoga pants and a tank and Oh! There's... concrete...in my bathroom. I leave for work at seven, and Himself leaves at nine, so he and Bear had started ripping the carpet after I left and wow... it's very concrete. Even after two sweepings, it's gritty under foot and cold to wet feet post-shower and downright shocking to a very sleepy me at one in the morning when I zombie-walked in to go potty after waking in the middle of the night. Carpet, carpet, Wah! Drop of two inches to a stop on hard gritty concrete! Oh yeah, shuffle shuffle shuffle. Even better? Only half the carpet is gone. Most confusing to a sleepy me.

Of course, now the feature creep begins. We'll have to paint the water closet now, since we'll have the toilet yanked out anyway and since we'll have to pull the wood molding at the floor, we might as well replace it properly with floor molding that matches the floor and Himself eyed my toilet and asked how much I liked it. I have to admit, I never really considered how much I liked my toilet. it's not the kind of thing you think about, after all. I've been very grateful for it on occasion (oh, the great buffalo wing horror of 2001. Shudder.) and as rule, I'm quite fond of indoor plumbing, but oh! no no no, you are not taking away my perfectly good toilet for months so you can upgrade it, no. Because I know how this works. My toilet. You cannot haz.

And so it begins.




*the previous owner had renovated what is now our house to specific purpose. He owned it but his mother-in-law and developmentally disabled sister in law lived in it. So the house was modified inside and out to be as easy-care as possible. Interior doors were removed and stored in the attic, the entire house was carpeted, there was glow tape on every single light switch, only the two windows in the dining room and kitchen facing the street had curtains, all of the landscaping was ripped out, so the lawn service had only straight edges to mow and no edging was ever needed. We've spent the last ten years undoing all that, planting trees in both the front and back yard, setting flower beds, building the garden and smaller veggie beds, painting rooms (okay, that wasn't for convenience. Every single room save the formal living room had or still has pink in some form. I'm slowly eradicating the pink. I ripped down the (pink) curtains in the dining room and put up my seafoam green ones while the guys were making another trip as we were moving in, and this morning we discussed tackling the breakfast nook. Eventually, I will have no pink anywhere but my dresser. Pink undies are okay. Pink walls are not.) and such.

Not quite an insta-rec, though I did tag it on delicious almost immediately, but it actually took a night's sleep before I realized why I liked this fic so much.

Okay, other than that Fay uses words beautifully, because that's a given. We all knew that.

As a mother, I have responsibilities to my son, to feed and nuture him, to make sure he gets a varied diet and doesn't think that the whole of nutrition is contained on the menu at Mickey D's or even Cracker Barrel. His grandmother is alarmed that he lists sushi with pizza in his favorite foods, but I'm delighted. I have a duty to keep him modestly clad (for varying degrees of modesty - as we are in the middle of a Texas summer and the child refuses to wear shorts. Meanwhile on weekends I'm in single layers so thin that if I did get caught in a rainstorm, I'd be scandalized.) and healthy, both in terms of reactive medical care and preventative.

But just as I make sure his diet is varied, I expose him deliberately to various forms of music; we've got Erasure and Enya and Billie Holiday and Janis and Concrete Blonde and Flogging Molly and Sisters of Mercy and okay, we're a little light on country cds, but I've got some on my computer and these days, that's where our background music at the house comes from. I blame beadslut's fascination with Christian Kane for that, actually.

And that's kind of my point. I use the word blame with a smile. She has taken over part of Catt's role in my life as fannish enabler, since I've rather moved away from HP and Catt's splitting her time there and with her original work. Mind you, Catt is still an enabler in many ways and that's a good thing, that's a necessary thing.

As is (and here I'm actually meandering toward the rec, but go ahead and skip to the end if you want, since I'm mostly navel-gazing here.) Kevin's role as godfather to Bear (hey, I said meandering, not actually moving toward) a necessary thing. He is the other parental influence, the one who doesn't live by Mommy's rules but rather by his own, who shows Bear by his existance and relationship that we love people who aren't ours by birth, that people don't always leave, that friends can stay friends for twenty years and more, that being naughty doesn't mean being unsafe.

We need such influences, not bad, not even naughty with a smile, but varied, just as he reads books at school of families with a weekend Daddy or Grace Lin's The Year of the Dog, just as he has friends at school who have grandparents across an ocean, just as the third grade holiday concert had a carol and a Kwanzaa song and a song referencing a dreidel and ...

Variety isn't the spice of life; it's the breadth of it, the foundation, and a broad foundation makes for a balanced building. It's hard to knock a pyramid over. Mom gave me that, in many ways. My best friend in kindergarten spoke Spanish at home. My best friend in third grade introduced me to the wonders of challah, or rather her mother did, but whatever. And at home, mom never said that a book was too advanced or too adult or too anything, so I spent hours in Lake Town watching Smaug approach over the Long Lake just as I snorkled the Great Barrier Reef and drew steel with D'Artagnan and touched down on the lunar surface with Neil Armstrong and ...um...wandered away from the point again. Where was I? Oh yeah, variety is good. Friends who help you do things you've never done, or wouldn't do without a push, are good. Experience is good. Experience with a trusted non-parent sitting behind you is good. Which circles me back from my digression to my point, which is the story actual recommendation, Role Model in which Jim Kirk is the best of all possible bad influences on the five year old daughter of Uhura by Spock.

Yes, Kevin, I just compared you to Jim Kirk. Don't tell Mark.

Still on the Words! meme: cincodemaygirl gave me ( comfort_foods,wildest_dreams,abroad,fears,pregnancy )

Same offer applies – if you want me to give you five topics to write about, comment here.

This is Not the The Rope Job: Three Reasons Why Hardison Doesn’t Do Bondage

My dislike of seeing stories with titles I’ve used is a little too obvious, isn’t it?

Fandom: Leverage
Rating: R for non-graphic sex (since I’m writing what I want to read, but it’s still me writing)
PG-13 for aftermath of violence (since we are talking about Eliot after all)
1600-ish words of indulgence for the_stowaway and unmisha and when she has time to read lj again, beadslut and anyone else who is looking forward to the DVD of season one coming out this month.

Set in Season one, spoilers for a third of the way through the season, most of the way through the season, and the finale (the First and Second David Job), respectively.

Unbeta’d – please let me know if you spot something I need to fix. ( Read more... )


Yeah, I'm gonna need an icon.

Though the idea of a leverage story being "The Caper Caper" is so amusing that I may actually have to write that one.

Okay, a story, but not really, since it's really just a scene, written for beadslut, but posted for the_stowaway.

( Doughnuts )

Not me, apparently.

From gblvr, a meme:
take the major fanfic catagories and write something for each using ten words or less.

I’m on a Leverage kick right now.

Angst:

Sophie turned away as Nate poured.

Six words. I can do this. Of course, that was an easy one.

Fluff:

Hardison popped the top of the Tupperware and peered in. “You handmade marshmallows?”
Spencer didn’t bother to look up. “Doesn’t everyone?”
Hardison set the container on the hearth. “Don’t even. You are not normal.”
Spencer hid his smile.
Devereaux gestured with one fluffy cube. “I don’t know what your problem is, these are really good. Parker, share.”
“No. Mmmph!”
Devereaux rolled her eyes and rubbed her fingertips over the paper towel, still talking to Hardison. “Besides, you didn’t bat an eye at the Ghiradelli. It’s not like I brought Hershey’s.”
He raised one eyebrow in feigned disbelief. “You lifted it either way. You didn’t make the chocolate. Parker, stop hogging the marshmallows. They are supposed to go on the crackers. Here, like this.”
The muffled noise she made sounded vaguely like “Why?”
Hardison: “Just trust me and do it my way.”
Parker swallowed and said, “Okay.” The other three were careful not to react.

Not the fluff you were looking for? Certainly not the short that the meme commands. 154 words according to Word. I fail. Okay, let’s try this again.

UST:

Since when could Alec recognize Eliot’s actual smile? Oh shit.

Ten on the nose.

Friendship:

Please, Nate, no.
It’s not optional. Rendezvous at Will Call.

ten words and will make no sense at all to anyone not familiar with the show. That’s a special kind of win, isn’t it?

Hurt/Comfort:

You need a doctor?
Nah, man. Got you. Ow!

Nine words. Go me!

Adventure:

What’s in the bag?
My perfume and your climbing rig.
Good.

Shoot. That’s eleven. But it needs the last word. Drat. We’ll apply the extra to the one above and call them both ten, how’s that?

Smut:

Hardison knew better than to suggest bondage.
So they did.

Ten words on the nose and an OT3. *grin*

Humor:

“You’re upside down.” Alec blinked.
“Gonna punch Parker,” Eliot growled.

Okay, so it’s funny to me…

At some point, in the not so recent past, in a comment thread in someone else's journal, where these kinds of conversations so often wind up being, someone mentioned that her spouse knew she read stuff on the internet but thought it was academic and published stuff. Public stuff.

On the other hand, my husband? looked over my shoulder at the screen and said, "McCoy? Like as in Star Trek McCoy?" He reads a bit over my shoulder. "Is that one of your..." He reads a bit more. "Oh... that's um... ."

There was a song on the soundtrack to the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off that was basically instrumental, but with a voice over chorus that went, "Oooohhhh Yeeeeaaaaahhhhhh." You know the one I mean?

So he says, "McCoy, hunh?"
And I say, "Ooohh Yeeahh."
And he says, "I've, uh, got a project spread over the bed. Guess I better clear that off, hunh?"
And I say, "Ooohh yeeeaahhhhh."

Well, I spent yesterday's reading time on Leverage. Eliot? Oooh Yeaaahhh.

(Anyone got recs?)

Ten Things about Me that I assume anyone reading my journal knows. ( Read more... )

Okay, I volunteered for the five words thing from Catt, so these are what she gave me. ( fidelity,labor,hospitality,home,Hermione )

But she demanded a couplet (and am I wrong in thinking a couplet is two lines?) instead of just a call and I rather like that. Hit me with a pairing, and I'll give you five words that I associate with you. And I might even write the pairing, though I'm still staring at the alst one I was given - Teyla Emmagan (SGA) / Philip J. Fry (Futurama) in despair, so I'm not making promises.

And on the gardening, or rather landscaping, front, we came home to see that the jasmine had wilted and dried. I'll coddle them for a while, in hopes that one might pull through. I've been pleasantly surprised before at the resiliancy of plants, but I've lost a lot of plants to the local heat and dry clay, too.

The hotel in Iowa, or actually, technically, Illinois, since we were on the east side of the Mississippi, walking distance from the bridge, had unfamiliar trees at the corner of the building, trees with a strange roundish berry and I was curious. The birds ate the berries quite happily, and I wondered if they were crabapples and so I pulled a fruit, thumbnailed it in two to examine the flesh and pit, smelled carefully, and eventually tasted it, to find that it was, in fact, a cherry tree. Don't laugh. I can identify a sagaurro or mesquite or live oak, but I'd never seen a cherry tree in the wild, as it were. Of course, my mother is reading this, appalled that I dared lick the fruit of a strange tree. Don't tell daddy, okay?

So I pulled five cherries and have them sitting in a pot on my kitchen window sill. I figure it'll be a good lesson in botany for the boy to see that five go into the dirt and maybe two, if I'm lucky, will come up, so we'll coddle those and eventually put them in pots and if they grow at the rate that the flowering cherry that we planted it in the back yard when he was born then I'll have house plants until we are ready to retire and I'll send one with him and take the other to our retirement cottage.

As we were driving through Missouri, I kept seeing a splash of orange out the car window and it took miles before I was able to identify it. The pink climbing roses, no problem, because hey, roses on posts, I know those, but seeing lilies, in the wild, along the side of the road and not carefully cultivated and watered obsessively? How can that be? So yes, at a roadside stop, there we were, my husband explaining to his parents that no, I wasn't ill, I'd jumped out of the car and run into the high grass and was bent at the waist so I could go nose to nose with the local flora.

For some reason they view me as eccentric. Can't imagine why. At least she didn't see me lick the tree.

On the other hand, he had an equally silly moment of glee. Somewhere between Dubuque and Minneapolis we stopped for gas, just past a river (no, I've no idea which one. We crossed a lot of rivers.) and as he was pumping gas, he saw a familiar shape bounding across the corner of the parking lot. An otter. A river otter. Now this is the man who considers the otter the highlight of any zoo. He turned into a six year old, waving at us to come see, bouncing with joy. Otter!

The Iowa road trip took a turn into Minnesota for multiple reasons that don’t really matter, because the important part is that yay! I got to meet beadslut in person and cuddle her adorable Baby Wednesday (well, not technically her baby, technically, her son’s baby, but what do we care, because while I was cuddling her, she was my baby and that’s as it should be. We played with the dog and toured her garden and I showed her my clumsy hat and she showed me the gorgeous socks she working on and we hugged and kissed and traded gifts for one another and the kids.



So we had a fabulous meal at Chez Beadslut, courtesy of her house chef, her husband. And then I went away to work (in Minnesota, yes, long story) while Himself and Bear went to the Mall of America and spent the entire darn day. They took fifteen rides on the log flume. Getting popped in the face by the safety harness gave Bear a nose bleed, but didn’t dampen his enthusiasm. The log flume did, however dampen his pants and they were festooning the chair on my return. However, he was wearing his Harry Otter tee shirt ( This is one like it, though advertising the wrong aquarium) and Himself made the crack that the Otter had a nose bleed, too. But the splashback from the log flume disguised the hurried washroom clean up. And he talked his father into going back the next day, so he actually had two days at an indoor theme park and that, I hope, made up for the hours of sitting in the car. I spent the time while they were at the mall in a customer meeting so close to the Canadian border that the morning news was from the CBC, and I was tickled at how the morning hosts seemed so much more genuinely happy to see one another. And then I caught the first few minutes of a kid’s show called Jazzberries. (? I think? Aha! I love Wikipedia. Apparently, it’s Razzberry Jazzberry Jam) A bunch of musical instruments learning life’s lessons via special guests and music. I’d watch it. I mean, not just when Bear was of an age for bright open animation, but right now today I’d watch it. My life needs more anthropomorphized musical instruments, it really does.



And then we got up at four in the morning and drove drove drove (Bear slept) and drove some more (Bear played on his DS) and switched drivers so we could nap (because four in the morning, good grief) and at one point Bear and I were playing the alphabet game because Himself was asleep and I was drifting there. So Alice and Adam lived in Alabama and grew apples and then Harry and Hermione lived in Hogwart’s and sold hats (his choices, not mine) and Xenia and Xavier lived in Xanadu and played the xylophone (those were mine) and we watched the temperature gauge go from 70 to 100 and you know, normally, I like getting home, to my bed with its familiar mattresses and my shower with my shampoo and more importantly conditioner and okay, yeah, the shower is still nice, but I’d give up a lot to stay where it’s 70 in the morning and 80 on a hot day. It hit 102 yesterday. I bet it’s nice in Minneapolis today. But I’d have to have a summer home and a winter home, because I am too old to learn to deal with twenty degrees below zero, thankyouverymuch.



But Minnesota, in the summer, is beautiful, not just the bit around Minneapolis, but also the chunk up by the Red Lakes, where the roads act as borders between squared-off fields of various shades of green, punctuated sporadically by clumps of trees, outlining waterways.



Maggie May the GPS (so named by Himself because like the woman in the Rod Stewart song, she may be travelling with us, but she has her own destination, which may or may not coincide with anyone else’s and is subject to wandering off on her own or about every seven hours, falling asleep in a drunken stupor on a broken bed. Luckily we spotted it well out of any place where we needed to turn, but it was sort of odd driving next to a lake and the GPS not showing that lake. I mean, really, they’d had flooding, but that was a pretty well defined lake. And yet, she is a shiny technology and talks to satellites and other magical beings and so he loves her, though he knows it’s neither reciprocated nor healthy.) was apparently influenced by all the Supernatural discussion - beadslut + me, together. What do you think we talked about? Well, yeah, knitting and kid’s and her son’s job and how mockworthy Sunday’s episode of Merlin was, with a few digressions into Shakespeare, as one does, plus a brief foray into the crackfic that we are working on and other projects and such, but Maggie May picked up on the Supernatural and not Merlin, which is good, because I’d not want to go to London via highway. Might get damp. But she decided we needed to see Lawrence, Kansas, so we took a bit of a detour to the west, which I wouldn’t have minded had we (1) been able to stop and take a picture and not travelling at 70 and (2) on a flipping toll road. Bad Maggie May, no cookie.



But there are a few “always funnies” on a road trip. Pointing out same name cities and laughing about taking a wrong turn – “Oh no, there’s Webster! We’re in Houston!, that sort of thing never gets old. Well, it might to anyone else, but we laugh. Both of us seeing a sign for the city of Burnsville and in unison, steepling our fingers and saying “Excellent” in the Monty Burns voice. That’s even funny when you’ve been on the road since four am. Sunrise is lovely even if it comes too early, slowly creeping up on us. Here, it’s falt, so sunrise is, if not sudden, then hasty, but there, with the rolling hills and the trees, there was light in the sky at 4:15 when we zombie-walked, yawning, to the parking lot, and we had beautiful clouds at 4:40, but it was past five before I had to worry about road glare.



But Kansas was flattened by the sun and tired eyes and Oklahoma was hot and 35 in Lewisville was a parking lot and here we are, home again home again, jiggety jig. The fish and the dog were very happy to see us or at least their food sources, the washing machine will get a workout and I’ll be dreaming of June in Minnesota for a while.

More thoughts on the recent trip coming soon, but it’s taking second place to the towering avalanche launching itself from my inbox, but I had to get something off my chest. I know the universe doesn’t time things for my preference, but dammit. Farrah Fawcett was a lovely woman who followed her heart and yes, made some bad decisions in love, but jiminy, so have we all, and had a horrible end, but she championed education about her disease and allowed the public access into her world to keep others from some emotional pain, to show us what she dealt with.

Yes, he had an effect on the music industry, but Jackson was not a loving, lovely man, and okay, yes he settled out of court, but to have two cases go to court? Meant there were a hell of a lot of others who didn’t tough it out, kids whose mothers saw the glitter of Neverland and just weren’t paranoid enough. Granted, it’s a triggery subject for me (and oh, ironic, typing that out, given the current discussion and how I’m staying the hell out of it.) but I do wish that we’d had a few days to discuss both the red bathing suit pop idol of the seventies and the terribly brave woman who filmed The Burning Bed and who allowed a documentary film crew to record her pain in the hope that someone in the audience would then be able to ease someone else’s pain before the media went fawning over Wacko Jacko and splashing pictures of him and his monkey and the prayer circles at radio stations and histrionic fans. This near-worship of at best a pop idol who made more money than he could deal with is irritating.

In more cheerful news, we submitted our 36K story to the hermionebigbang mods yesterday (well, actually, beadslut did, since I can hear the sherpas readying themselves for another launch on the mountain of paperwork.) They have nifty graphics and I’m a Luddite who can’t make them show, so I’ll leave the actual promotion to those who are cleverer than I, but just know that if you read my journal for the fic, if you wandered this far, there’s a novel length one coming at you in September. Or possibly sooner, if the mods don’t consider it up to snuff, but I’m pretty confident. Though I did pull up the file after it was sent and on the first page spotted punctuation errors that I could have sworn I fixed. Sigh.

Galena, Illinois is actually unexpectedly charming. It's a tourist destination, filled with overpriced boutiques and such, but the architecture is gorgeous, brickwork and hundred year old buildings. One of the shops had shelves that didn't bump up against the smooth walls of the renovation, but was open to the original heavy stone at ground level of all the buildings along the street. We wound up getting a wee bit lost, pulled over, and had a very nice fellow volunteer to lead us to where we were going. I rather like Illinois hospitality. The Market Haus Restaurant has adequate food, but a lovely setting with a "garden" room that uses, again the wonderful raw building stone and brick to full effect.

The Sunshine family Restaurant is everything you could possibly want in a greasy sppon, brightly light, plastic covered chairs, linoleum tables, soft hash browns with crispy edges and a NY Strip worth the name of steak, waitresses who recognize regulars by names and sling coffeepots with casual practice. We've eaten breakfast there twice, and will probably do so again and I can promise you that the interior will show up in something I write at some point. It's in downtown Dubuque, right by the river, wonderfully working-class, surrounded by brick buildings with aging neon signs.

The American Lady tour might be lovely on another day but last night was disorganized and uncomfortable and crowded and stressful, but we did eventually wander up to the Captain's area where he explained to Bear the various gauges and showed us his cheat sheet for morse code and Bear pointed out that his fuel gauge was nearly empty. *facepalm* It was a laugh all around, as the captain explained that a recent renovation had upgraded the tank but not the gauge. And then he very sweetly thanked Bear for his observation.

Yesterday morning, we made a family trip to nearby Crystal Lake Cave which was actually a lot of fun, though a little chilly and the rain up top forced us to miss some of the normal tour. It's not as grand or open as InnerSpace Cavern by mom's house, but it's interesting from a human view, as it was found, then carved out some time ago, and not really developed, so the pick marks are still there and there's a lot of stalactite damage. Plus, two warnings: the bathrooms are running water but open to the outdoors and small, and two, some of the paths are darn skinny, not so skinny that I couldn't get through, but narrow enough that they pressed a little on my brain, if not my butt.

So we are on a tiny farm to market road in nowheres-ville Arkansas and Himself is driving. There is, because we are in farm country in NW Arkansas, a truck carrying chickens in front of us and one behind us. the truck in front of us pulls up at a red light and I, ever mindful of my otherwise sane husband's fondness for his vehicle's paint job, tell him, "Those things are filthy, don't get too close."

He pulls up closer.

I say again, "Honey, gravity doesn't apply to chicken poop, and you'll want to keep your distance."

He scoffs, and closes a bit of the gap. I glance down at my knitting only to look up again quickly as both man and boy blurt out variations on "Did you see that?!" No, I did not, I was trying to cross over and knit into the back of the second stitch on my holding needle, actually.

So for the next two miles, I hear about how that chicken shot poop at least ten feet away from the truck it was caged in and wow, it must really suck to be a chicken in the center and guess what? Next red light? He keeps a healthy distance from the chicken truck.

(Flocked, since we are out of town.) un-flocked, as we are back in town now.

Wanna bet that the shotputting chicken poop is the highlight of the trip for Bear? Yeah, me too.

Catt loves me. 8-)

I got a package from Woot.com last night. Not my first package from Woot, as pakka had enabled the Pirate exercises tee-shirts this spring, but unexpected. And I should have, but didn’t connect Catt’s email of “Quick what size shirt do you wear!” of last week, though I probably should have.

Though I’ll admit, I do the same thing:

Me: Okay, don’t ask questions, but your choice of teddy bear colors are pale tan, medium brown and russet. Which do you want?
Her: {color}
Me: Okay cool.
Her: So, I’m getting a teddy bear?
Me: hahahaha actually, technically, no.
Her: I will be allowed to ask, at some point, though, right?
Me: yep. Hee hee hee hee hee.
Her: Oh good. Bye!

(The teddy bears were for the dolls. The doll was for her. All those posts are gathered in the “crafts” tag in 2004)

Anyway, so what was in the Woot bag? A tee shirt with dancing raindrops (see icon). Given my fondness for rain, (here’s the kiss, too) it seemed appropriate.

I'm too busy living life on weekends to post about it. I'm drooping over my desk from a combination of "better things to do than sleep" last night (insert eyebrow waggle here. Himself's been gone since Thursday and got home last night. What do you think we did? Well, yeah, after a shower, dinner and watching an episode of Leverage. We may be a couple, but we are still old and married.) and low level body aches from either physical exertion or Siko's cold. I'm hoping it's the first, and quite honestly, I exerted enough that it's a viable option. Scottish Festival + zoo + DDR with the boys waiting for Thing 2's dad to pick him up. I beat the nine year olds, but it was a fight to do so. My knees are reminding me that they, too, turn forty soon.

Notes to self: liking another person's kid does not mean you love your own any less. Mine was the one making fart jokes and climbing the termite mounds and clowning about. His friend was the one who was correcting the woman who called the gharial an alligator (okay, I facepalmed there, too, but it was a proud facepalm) and explaing how the zebra's stripes work to aid in protecting him from predators. Though Bear beat him in geography as we jumped about on the map on the ground.

On the other hand, mine was the one helping me find navigational signs for the interchange downtown while the other one was snoozing on the way home, so that works, too. then again, he had an interest in making sure we got home quickly, since I missed the exit I wanted (and the next exit that would have corrected my original mistake, yes. Have I mentioned how much I hate navigating downtown?) and we took a scenic tour of Downtown Dallas before missing yet another turn and the benefit of getting caught in a construction zone is that everyone's moving at a snail's pace, so we have plenty of time to read the signs. We had an adventure, aigh! But that was Saturday, and Sunday we didn't make a single mis-step and got on 75 just in time for him to snore all the way home while I sang under my breath along with Billy Idol and the Ramones.

But he'd had a busy weekend. We'd spent the day at the zoo with his friend and the first two thirds of Saturday at Arlington's Scottish Festival with Siko, who wimped out with a head cold but not until we'd done the vendors and watched the nice young men heave rocks about. I do so love the athletic events at the Scottish Festival. And of course, everything else, the vendors, the music...yeah, I'm not fooling anybody. And I've got the kind of sunburn that shows I put on sunscreen. Dead fishy white where my clothes covered, pale pink that isn't noticable unless I'm showing skin where I had cloth and two quite pink stripes, one where my shirt seems to have ridden lower than I expected it to and one on my back that shows exactly where my fingertips can reach to. As in, about three quarters of an inch away from the edge of my shirt. Whoops!

Bear and I were talking about books, since it's summer and although he would be perfectly happy to atrophy his little noggin with Pokemon and games all summer, I'm less than keen on the idea, so he'll be reading a chapter out loud to me each night. So I picked up the first two Belgeriad books, figuring short chapters, relatively easy, and he's got some books here that his teacher recommended and of course, I've been trying to get him to actually sit down and read the Potter books, so we have a variety of books to choose from. But I also made it clear that he could read any book he wanted to, not just "his" books, and then I thought twice and caveated, because we have some vintage erotica in the house and while i was trying to remember exactly where that was (we have more than one covered bookcase, yes, but one of those holds my cards and some other stuff that he's free to read, but I don't want the exterminator seeing, that sort of thing) and he said, "Right, like your book. You suck!"

And I had a half breath of "What the hell? Where did that come from?" and turned to him and demanded to know what he was thinking, telling me that I suck and he said, "The book on the back door chair. Where you put your purse."

*blink*

Oh, right, Moore put out a sequel to Bloodsucking Fiends and I picked it up and .... yeah, that is the title, isn't it? Fabulous. So I apologized for misunderstanding him and said that he probably wouldn't be interested in that book, since it was about people falling in love (or out of it, but I didn't add that) and he finished for me, "Yeah yeah, but they're vampires."

Apparently, he'd read the blurb on the back of the book at some point. I didn't hide it; there's nothing to hide. I'm just not used to his showing an interest.

Sigh. Still can't get him to show an interest in Harry and the gang, though.

The good:
gblvr * found nervous hands** toys for us. little edamame that pop in and out of their pods. they have faces!

Also on the page she linkted to: for those who make bento, happy face hole punch thingies for nori. No, really. I sense a trip to the kawaii store for us this weekend. Glee!

The bad:
David Eddings has passed away. there is literature and there are books and I enjoyed the heck out of Polgara and her adventures once upon a time and besides, this alone is reason to mourn his passing:
He was unfailingly self-effacing on the subject of his success, once saying: 'I'm never going to be in danger of getting a Nobel prize for literature, I'm a storyteller, not a prophet. I'm just interested in a good story'."

Eddings was always delighted, he said, to hear that he'd turned non-readers into readers.

That alone is reason to tip my hat to the man.

The ugly:
OMG, my desk. When I took this job, I knew it would challenge and stretch me. I was right. Rule of Toyota.





* anybody want to teach me how to do the "lj user=" thing for dreamwidth?

** hey, it's better than a book of matches. I can drive people nuts with a clicking bell point pen (if you've ever seen me carefully put my pen down at the top of my notepad, that's why. At least I'm aware of it and as soon as I realize what I'm doing, I'll stop. It may take someone taking my pen away to make me aware I'm doing it, mind.) but a high school buddy would burn through a pack of matches one by one unless you gave him LEGOs or toothpicks or a piece of paper to tear into tiny squares. LEGOs really are the cure for everything, yes.

Okay, back here when I requested prompts, fabu gave me Rodney liked to be in on the ground floor, in the inner circle, in the know.

Three thousand words later, I tried to reply in comments and drove myself crazy, so here's the whole darn thing.

( Circle )

Heh, there are people who can write short. I appreciate those who can contain a single thought in a small number of words. Like haiku, that takes skill, to encapsulate something worth saying in only a few breaths. I cheerfully admit that I can’t. I have grocery lists that run more than a hundred words and have been known to footnote weekend to-do lists. I don’t do drabbles because the idea of a precisely 100 word limitation seems arbitrarily restrictive. We assigned an arbitrary word count on C_D once and I spent 45 minutes writing the story, then an hour and a half getting rid of the 20 extra words to bring it under 500. I got it down to 499 words, using MS Word’s wordcount function to check my word count, posted it, copy-n-pasted it with no changes to Skyehawke, where the wordcount was 502 words. At that point, I pretty much threw my hands in the air, said “Fuck it” and promised my sanity that I wouldn’t fall prey to the temptations offered by drabble communities.

Because clearly, I like prompts. I'm just ridiculously verbose.