I forgot to bring home my nice, reusable lunch bag from work yesterday, so this morning Kevin made me take this one. I quite approve of the pose in which I am drawn, long-suffering woman that I am. However, I’m not sure what story he is trying to tell. Hamchrist? The Passion of the Christlet?
Original art by Kevin Potpie
On the weekends and on the days I work from home, my neighbors are quite used to the inspiring sight of me watering the gardens, taking out garbage, petting the neighbor’s dog over the back fence, getting the paper from the front walk and the mail from the box across the street, and occasionally mowing the lawn, all whilst sporting my big morning hair and my faded red-white-black plaid pajamas. They are also used to hearing Kevin yell at me from the kitchen door to “get back in the house and get some clothes on.” But the aforementioned spaces are included in my definition of “the house.” He should just be glad I don’t include the 7-11 up the street.
via Everyday People
It’s what I got in abundance first thing this morning from Kevin.
Apparently he is unimpressed with my last post. I guess he doesn’t like photos of his nekkid torso posted on the internet without his prior permission.
Sorry, houseboy!
Now take off those superfluous clothes and bring me a rocks margarita. With salt. And a little umbrella.
May 25th is the day that I, along with my fellow free citizens, take time to honor the many women and men who have served us. It is also the day that I, along with me and myself, run to the bookstore for a momento to honor Mr. Fix-it’s latest successful orbit around the sun.
Kevin is a year older than me but claims that from some mysterious mathematical perspective, that 365-day length of time somehow gets shorter and shorter the older we get.
So does that mean if we live long enough, we’ll get into negative numbers? Will there be a brief, shining moment when we were born at exactly the same time, and then we start going in the other direction, like Benjamin Button? Will I be Cate Blanchette to his Brad Pitt?
Anyway. This is for the child within your heart.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2p5augniQA[/youtube]
This is Kevin’s depiction of our game of hangman we played whilst waiting for our nachos last night. Legend:
Upper left: Uppity is dropped from a great height, causing her body to sever from her head.
Upper right: The Big Hand(s) of God.
Middle: Preacher. Zot. ‘Nuff said.
Lower right: A spectator reacts to the spectacle; someone named “Fifi” (wearing a cheerleadng skirt) consoles a tearful Kevin.
This weekend Kevin and I did what is known around our house as Casting A Stern Eye.
This means we go through all our shit and purge as ruthlessly as possible. We do this two or three times a year. It is generally precipitated by my suggesting that we build another room or excavate a bigger crawl space in which to store our shit.
But this weekend’s activity was inspired not by cascading piles of shit, but by our bank’s annual “Spring shredding event” (wear your party dress!). Rather than the usual closets and cupboards, we took on the filing cabinets.
We not only went through our financial files but also our personal ones – you know, our separate stashes of random shit that each of us finds meaningful or interesting.
I like to do this once a year to remind myself that miracles do happen. Specifically, that Kevin and I find each other meaningful or interesting in any way for longer than 37 seconds on a daily basis.
Me: Oh, look, it’s a copy of the Myers-Briggs test. That personality test I made you take and then we got into a huge fight about it.
He: In my file, I have “How To Hang A Door.”
Me: I wonder if I should keep this astrology chart…
He: Hey, here are my military security clearances. I should put these somewhere….
Me: You should take this test, too [holds up paper] and see “What Goddess Are You Ruled By?”
He: [resignedly] I am ruled by you.
Me: “Mold Control.” Hmm. [Thinks for a minute, then shrugs and tosses it in bag]
He: Don’t throw that out!! [snatches paper out of bag] That’s perfect for my Duct Air Cleaner file.
Me: “The Physiological and Cognitive Benefits of Creeping in Infants.”
He: “Mission: Readiness – A Personal and Family Guide to Deployment.”
And so on.
We took three bags full of paper to the “shredding event.” Alas, they were not serving margaritas.
Take the distance around a circle and divide it by the distance across the circle and you get an irrational and transcendental number called pi. Irrational numbers don’t have nice neat ends, but go on as long as you can stand to do the math. Pi starts out as 3.14159265…. and just keeps on going. Since today is 3-14, someone thought it would be good to celebrate irrational, transcendental pi.
Carl Sagan’s novel Contact has only one good chapter: the last chapter in which he suggests numbers like pi are the fingerprints of god. In the book, they just kept wading past all the decimal places until unmistakable patterns emerged; “The signature of the Artist” to quote Sagan.
I like to think that irrational numbers are a philosophical warning sign of how bad we are at recognizing inappropriate comparisons between things. The word used to describe this notion of incomparable entities is “incommensurable.” I’m pretty sure there are other non-Euclidian mathematical spaces in which pi is rational, which goes back to the idea of how you compare, and not what you compare.
Anyway, happy pi day, go eat pie. And for all you chronics, April 20 only happens once a year, but 4:20 comes twice a day. Huzzah!
Hannibal Lecter: You were smitten. You were forty years old. You lived with him in Washington, in the suburbs. And…?
Uppity Rib: [tears begin forming in her eyes] And one morning, I just ran away.
Hannibal Lecter: No “just”, Uppity. What set you off? You started at what time?
Uppity Rib: Early, still dark.
Hannibal Lecter: Then something woke you, didn’t it? Was it a dream? What was it?
Uppity Rib: I heard a strange noise.
Hannibal Lecter: What was it?
Uppity Rib: It was… screaming. Some kind of screaming, like a child’s voice.
Hannibal Lecter: What did you do?
Uppity Rib: I went downstairs. I crept up into the dining room. I was so scared to look, but I had to.
Hannibal Lecter: And what did you see, Uppity? What did you see?
Uppity Rib: Mushrooms. The mushrooms were screaming.
Hannibal Lecter: He was slaughtering the spring mushrooms?
Uppity Rib: And they were screaming.
Hannibal Lecter: And you ran away?
Uppity Rib: No. First I tried to free them. I… I opened the top of their box, but they wouldn’t run. They just sat there, confused. They wouldn’t run.
Hannibal Lecter: But you could and you did, didn’t you?
Uppity Rib: Yes. I took one mushroom, and I ran away as fast as I could.
Hannibal Lecter: Where were you going, Uppity?
Uppity Rib: I don’t know. I didn’t have any food, any water and it was very cold, very cold. I thought, I thought if I could save just one, but… it was so heavy. So heavy. I didn’t get more than a few miles when the police picked me up. Kevin was so angry he took me to the Denny’s for dinner, and he made me pay. I never saw the dining room again.
Hannibal Lecter: What became of your mushroom, Uppity?
Uppity Rib: He sautéed it.
Hannibal Lecter: You still wake up sometimes, don’t you? You wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the mushrooms.
Uppity Rib: Yes.
Hannibal Lecter: And you think if you blog about the poor LoLcats, you could make them stop, don’t you? You think if the Matt Harding videos are seen by a few more people, you won’t wake up in the dark ever again to that awful screaming of the mushrooms.
Uppity Rib: I don’t know. I don’t know.
Hannibal Lecter: Thank you, Uppity. Thank you.
I like Valentine’s Day.
And the older I get, the more I like it.
I know it’s a Hallmark holiday, commercial as all get out, blah blah blah. I still like it.
I’ve always liked Valentine’s Day, even when I was single, though I admit to feeling a certain annoyance for it then, too, since it reminded me that, in general, society abhors a single person.
But in my heart, I still liked Valentine’s Day in exactly the same way I enjoy Christmas: I celebrate the spirit of the holiday.
I choose to ignore the commercialism and expectations. Those things are for those who want to focus on them.
For me, Valentine’s Day is all about celebrating the love in my life – all of it, though most especially the love of my life, who to this day I am still astonished and ecstatic to have found.
Yes, we can be lovey-dovey mush balls any old day, I know. But having a recognized holiday for it adds a playfulness to it. And like any ritual, it helps one focus one’s energy on something good and meaningful. And that’s close enough to a spiritual experience for me.
So we got a box of mushrooms for Xmas, and not from one of my old Deadhead “screw school, lets go to Shoreline to see the show” buddies. A no-kidding do-it-yourself mushroom growing kit from Auntie Barb and Uncle John. And I am seriously thrilled.
I really like getting these project kits as a gift. In fact, one of my earliest memories was a make-your-own-wallet kit with pre-drilled leather and plastic lanyard to stitch it all together. I used that kid-sized wallet until I started making enough money for it to be weird. That and the condom kept falling out. (Like I needed a condom in high school – but that is another story all together.)
I’ve had plastic models, chemistry kits, paint-by-numbers, build-your-own-radio electronic kits, home brewing kits, Ikea furnature – you name the activity, I’ve probably done it as some sort of kit. Thanks to the technological wonder of bark in a box, I’m now looking forward to growing my own tasty portobello mushrooms.
So far as kits go, this one is pretty straight forward. The box has about ten pounds of what looks to be wood chips, peat moss and mycelium. The instructions are to add six cups of water on day one, keep moderately moist and warm thereafter, and leave it the fuck alone until it’s picking time – three to five weeks later.
I recon you’ve failed as a mushroom kitter if:
A) You never get around to doing the kit.
B) You start the kit, but no mushrooms grow.
C) You poison yourself by getting all innovative with additional mushroom species. (Instructions are there for a reason, dude.)
D) Your house burns down, taking the mushroom kit with it. (This may seem more relevant to your fire-prevention skills rather than your mushroom kitting skills, but nobody said growing mushrooms was going to be easy. Unless the person who wrote the instructions counts. Because they did say it was going to be easy.)
This kit seems to be pretty much foolproof, which I think is a sign of a good project-in-a-box. I’ll let you know if it’s Kevin-proof in a few weeks.
Here’s day one, which was a few weeks ago:
