Monthly Archives: March 2005

I love discussions about what songs get stuck in your head. Personally, when I get a song stuck in my head, I just have to hum a few “do do do-do”s from a particular Suzanne Vega song. Out with the old, in with Tom’s Diner.

On Stereogum, there;s an article that shows a poll of songs people get stuck in their heads. Then, in the comments section, people posted more. I found it highly amusing.

Today I have to finish filling out my brackets for the men’s college basketball tournament. The pool is over $250, so it’s well worth the effort. I think Illinois is going to choke, but other than that, I haven’t figured out all the nitty gritty. Post a comment if you have an opinion, and if I win, I’ll split the proverbial kitty.

Last night I went shopping. Retail shopping. I havent done that in ages. I ended up buying this fabe-u-los mint green corduroy jacket. Am I turning into both a retail shopper and a girly girl?

I shouldnt scrutinize who I think I am. I dont think Im too over-the-top anything – not too hippy, not too corporate, and not too geeky. Maybe a girly phase is just what I need.

(I did shave my legs. This is a common indicator that one is going through a girly phase.)

Last night I continued working on the sweater Im knitting for my brother. It is good sweater pattern in its own right, but I added a little something special to it. The back is plain in the pattern, but I’ve knitted a two inch high letter ‘A’ just below the base of his neck. I was trying to chart out my own ‘A’ – but it took Abbie and a Word file to come up with something legible and stylish. I was going for the Ambrose A. You know, like the tattoo on <a href=http://web.sau.edu/theatre/seasons/9899season/picasso/PicKiss.jpg>Andy Allen</a>.

Sunday, March 13 2005
10:00 a.m. – Wake up and eat a croissant. Knit while watching college basketball
11:00 a.m. – Jason wakes up and looks at me confusedly as I am watching college basketball
12:00 p.m. – Jake, Jason, and I watch Freaks and Geeks episode that begins with drumalong to Rush song.
2:00 p.m. – Leave Jason’s, drive up to Kenosha.
3:30 p.m. – Meet woman who is offering up her cat. Sit around for an hour and a half as she tells stories about cat. Daughter is at the age where she’s experimenting with humor. She refers to their basement as three things: dirty, dirty, and dirty. Watch 1 year old wrench cat’s tail around and pull lots of hair out. Become convinced that I must take cat with me. Woman refers to cat as Katrina, Trina, Treeny, and Mon Chi Chi. Contemplate changing a 13-year-old cat’s name.
5:00 p.m. – Thank God. Finally leave with cat in carrier, water and food dispensers, litter box, and rabies papers. Even if the cat kicks it tomorrow, will have saved $100 in pet accoutrement
5:40 p.m. – After mewing in a 4/4 rhythm for the duration car ride, cat and I return to Casa Waukegan. I put out food, water, and litter box, and orient cat to new setup.
7:00 p.m. – Having called Allison and Alena to brag about fluffy kitty, I settled down to watch Simpsons and Arrested Development and knit.
8:30 p.m. – Switch over to crap detective program, and become enthralled with knitting.
8:40 p.m. – The cat is watching TV. Hm.
10:30 p.m. – Cat begins mewing in 4/4 time again, and decide that cat is telling me to shut off lights and go to bed.
11:00 p.m. – Shut off lights and read "The Tipping Point" in bed.
11:03 p.m. – Cat begins meowing in 6/8 time.
Monday,
March 14 2005
7:50 a.m. – Decide that I should get up,
and perhaps it will stop the meowing.
8:00 a.m. – Can hear cat mewing through door while showering.
8:15 a.m. – Eat oatmeal next to deck window,
cat sits quietly next to me.
8:20 a.m. – Leave for work. Can hear cat meowing, perhaps in 2/4, as I leave building.

Oh, by the by, the reason I was reminded that I really wanted a cat was because I was watching a TV show, and there were some awesome cat on it. Oddly, I found a mention of the show <a href=http://www.nerve.com/regulars/scanner/03_08_05/>here, on Nerve's Scanner</a>. The "Crush of the Week" is the host of the show that is responsible for the past twenty four hours of my life.
Last night I did finally do my laundry. In fact, I also hand washed stuff too. Amazing.

Anyway, I seem to always do laundry at the same time as another couple in the building. I know it's the same people because it's men and women's clothing, and her jeans are the same size as mine.

Last night I went down to start the ol' process, and someone was in laundry room ('nook' would be more appropriate). It was DownstairsNeighbor. We introduced ourselves, and I observed that they must have friends over a lot on the weekends. (Jason and I actually held glasses to the floor to hear better one Friday night. It sounded like a combination video game party/orgy.) She said that I should come down some time. Sweet. Her name is Jamie and her husband's name is Bobby. I wonder, judging by the amount of Sublime that's played, if they'll be anything like that one crowd I hung around in collge sometimes.

Later that night, when I was sleepy and cursing myself for forgetting about the wash, I went to transfer wet clothes to the dryer. I was surprised to find my clothes already in the dryer, with five minutes left to go. Jamie must have paid the $1.30 to dry my clothes.

Totally awesome. I always think about doing stuff like that, but then I think my neighbors will think I'm creepy. Now I have a really good excuse to bring some beer bread down to them on a Friday night when I happen to be around.

If we were all as cute and endearing as Amelie, it would be easier, but it's nice to know that there are other people who are willing to forgo the 'creepy' factor and perform random acts of kindness anyway.

Sunday, March 13 2005
10:00 a.m. – Wake up and eat a croissant. Knit while watching college basketball
11:00 a.m. – Jason wakes up and looks at me confusedly as I am watching college basketball
12:00 p.m. – Jake, Jason, and I watch Freaks and Geeks episode that begins with drumalong to Rush song.
2:00 p.m. – Leave Jason’s, drive up to Kenosha.
3:30 p.m. – Meet woman who is offering up her cat. Sit around for an hour and a half as she tells stories about cat. Daughter is at the age where she’s experimenting with humor. She refers to their basement as three things: dirty, dirty, and dirty. Watch 1 year old wrench cat’s tail around and pull lots of hair out. Become convinced that I must take cat with me. Woman refers to cat as Katrina, Trina, Treeny, and Mon Chi Chi. Contemplate changing a 13-year-old cat’s name.
5:00 p.m. – Thank God. Finally leave with cat in carrier, water and food dispensers, litter box, and rabies papers. Even if the cat kicks it tomorrow, will have saved $100 in pet accoutrement
5:40 p.m. – After mewing in a 4/4 rhythm for the duration car ride, cat and I return to Casa Waukegan. I put out food, water, and litter box, and orient cat to new setup.
7:00 p.m. – Having called Allison and Alena to brag about fluffy kitty, I settled down to watch Simpsons and Arrested Development and knit.
8:30 p.m. – Switch over to crap detective program, and become enthralled with knitting.
8:40 p.m. – The cat is watching TV. Hm.
10:30 p.m. – Cat begins mewing in 4/4 time again, and decide that cat is telling me to shut off lights and go to bed.
11:00 p.m. – Shut off lights and read "The Tipping Point" in bed.
11:03 p.m. – Cat begins meowing in 6/8 time.
Monday,
March 14 2005
7:50 a.m. – Decide that I should get up,
and perhaps it will stop the meowing.
8:00 a.m. – Can hear cat mewing through door while showering.
8:15 a.m. – Eat oatmeal next to deck window,
cat sits quietly next to me.
8:20 a.m. – Leave for work. Can hear cat meowing, perhaps in 2/4, as I leave building.

Oh, by the by, the reason I was reminded that I really wanted a cat was because I was watching a TV show, and there were some awesome cat on it. Oddly, I found a mention of the show <a href=http://www.nerve.com/regulars/scanner/03_08_05/>here, on Nerve's Scanner</a>. The "Crush of the Week" is the host of the show that is responsible for the past twenty four hours of my life.

Sunday, March 13 2005
10:00 a.m. – Wake up and eat a croissant. Knit while watching college basketball
11:00 a.m. – Jason wakes up and looks at me confusedly as I am watching college basketball
12:00 p.m. – Jake, Jason, and I watch Freaks and Geeks episode that begins with drumalong to Rush song.
2:00 p.m. – Leave Jason’s, drive up to Kenosha.
3:30 p.m. – Meet woman who is offering up her cat. Sit around for an hour and a half as she tells stories about cat. Daughter is at the age where she’s experimenting with humor. She refers to their basement as three things: dirty, dirty, and dirty. Watch 1 year old wrench cat’s tail around and pull lots of hair out. Become convinced that I must take cat with me. Woman refers to cat as Katrina, Trina, Treeny, and Mon Chi Chi. Contemplate changing a 13-year-old cat’s name.
5:00 p.m. – Thank God. Finally leave with cat in carrier, water and food dispensers, litter box, and rabies papers. Even if the cat kicks it tomorrow, will have saved $100 in pet accoutrement
5:40 p.m. – After mewing in a 4/4 rhythm for the duration car ride, cat and I return to Casa Waukegan. I put out food, water, and litter box, and orient cat to new setup.
7:00 p.m. – Having called Allison and Alena to brag about fluffy kitty, I settled down to watch Simpsons and Arrested Development and knit.
8:30 p.m. – Switch over to crap detective program, and become enthralled with knitting.
8:40 p.m. – The cat is watching TV. Hm.
10:30 p.m. – Cat begins mewing in 4/4 time again, and decide that cat is telling me to shut off lights and go to bed.
11:00 p.m. – Shut off lights and read "The Tipping Point" in bed.
11:03 p.m. – Cat begins meowing in 6/8 time.

TGIF, yo. I’m looking forward to my weekend. I have a double-birthday party tonight, and a cat to meet in Sunday. By the end of the weekend, I plan to be partied out and catted up. Yeah yeah.

I’ve started knitting a sweater for my brother. I bought the yarn about a year ago, at a sweet yarn store in Muscatine. I’ve been sitting on this yarn (nine skeins adds a lot of bulk to one’s stash) for long enough! I finally found a pattern I liked, and then I realized that my brother’s particular frame is nothing like the pattern. I spent a night with a book of graph paper and a calculator, and came up with my own version.

So I’m freestyling, I guess you could say. Yo, my stitches are fat and this aint no weave …

I just realized that South By Southwest music festival is coming up and again this year I have no imminent plans to go. Last year Jason and I were torn between driving down to Texas for SXSW, or driving up through Canada to New York to visit his mom. Mom won out, although the weather would have been much better. Alas, maybe some sort of body-part fairy or godmother will bestow upon me some sweet tickets and a week off.

So this cat thing is actually Martha Stewart’s fault. I was watching TV last Saturday morning, and I ran across a pet show. The show was not particularly fascinating, but there was this cat, and it made me realize that I wanted a cat.

Now, I’ve had a cat. You might have met my cat, Maceo. Around the house in Iowa City, he was mostly referred to as (and this is at the top of one’s lungs): NO! NO! NOOOO! or FUCK OFF. Maceo was and always will be an outside cat. He had a lot of fun qualities, but he was also kind of terrible. Kind of like a child, I imagine.

So anyway, I’ve been kind of gun shy about a cat. On Abbott’s intranet, there’s a wanted/for sale page. A woman in Kenosha is getting rid of her half-Siamese 13-year-old cat because she accrued a husband, three kids, and a dog since she and the cat first joined up. The cat is miserable, hides under the bed all day, and needs a quieter home. Not that she’s wheezy, just that she gets sat upon and played with roughly.

She’s already declawed, and is a lap cat. These qualities alone make her exactly Maceo’s opposite. I mean, if she just wants to chill out and read the pape, I’ve got no problem with that. It’s if she attacks my head in the middle of the night, or climbs up on screen doors that we’ll have a problem. I’m willing to drive to Kenosha to see.

Jason pointed out that cat-allergic folks like Kate and Aden won’t want to come over. I pointed out that 1. I live in Waukegan, and 2. I vacuum.

I don’t know if you know this, but I have this epic trail mix that’s been an ongoing part of my life since 2001. The person I most clicked with at Camp Little Cloud during the summer I was a camp counselor was Emily (or Pebbles, for those in the know). We both came with our own trail mix, and at one point, mixed them together. My sunflower seeds were in with her raisins, and her two-year-old Valentines M’Ms were in with my stale Cheerios.

As the summer progressed, we dumped more variants into this bucket of GORP. GORP stands for Good Old Raisins and Peanuts, which is the base of any good trail mix, but now because of our combined efforts, there were now soy nuts and Craisins and dark chocolate bits and a bunch of other stuff. At one point, I began adding dinner mints, for when your trail mix is your lunch, it’s nice to finish it off with a minty bit so you don’t continue mowing as you hike. These alterations and Frankensteinations ultimately became what is known as Zen GORP. I have the recipe somewhere in a journal.

At the end of camp, Emily and I went our separate ways. She went off to college in Ashland, WI, and I went off to D.C. for a year of liquid intense at AmeriCorps. She helped save wild Utah, I fought fire in Maryland. She studied at the Audubon Society Center in Minnesota, and I went to Florida to work with Habitat for Humanity. We got together that next summer and traded GORP again. We doubled the sights our GORP had seen by remixing it together.

I stored my GORP in a gallon ZipLock with the heavy duty zip. On it, I wrote all the states the GORP had been to. We both just kept adding to what we had, and much like Friendship Bread (ask your mothers) the stuff always had a little bit of an old addition. My favorite was finding a really old Valentines M&M, and eating it triumphantly.

The GORP travelled with me to Munich, and I always meant to send Em a baggie full so she could add it to hers and have truly international GORP. The GORP hung out in the freezer for a long time when I lived in Chicago, for there’s no real reason to lug around a gallon baggie full of food everywhere you go.

Thus began the downfall of the GORP. I dont need a constant travel food the way I used to. I lament this fact. I wish I was hiking and canoeing and camping and travelling around, and required a culinary companion. I haven’t restocked the GORP bag in a long time. I’ve merely added chocolate chips to fill it out a little.

Today, I brought GORP with me to work, because I won’t have a chance to eat dinner tonight, and it pinch hits nicely in this capacity. I’ve been sitting at my desk, eating handfuls of the bottom of the bag. As I sat here, I looked down and realized that the years and years of nut hulls had accumulated at the bottom of the bag, and I was now eating this dust. (Much like the last bowl of cereal.) My dark shirt and pants were bespeckled with bits of GORP dander.

It ocurred to me that this wouldn’t be a problem if I was outside; most likely the wind would blow it right off of me, or I could stand up and brush it to the ground, making a snack for ants.

Sitting in my cubicle, I became sad.

Jason and I started watching all of the Freaks and Geeks DVDs. We’ve both never seen any of the episodes, and I think – nay, I state – that we’re hooked.

As soon as I got to work this morning, I IMDB’d the show, because I knew some of these actors had gone on to do stuff I have seen. I’m proud to have made the connection myself, but the bully in the first few episodes is actually Squints from The Sandlot. HA!

Somehow, that makes me feel triumphant. Perhaps that’s because we live in a world where I just can’t get that from hunting down prey for a meal.

This morning, I was determined to be cheerful. I wore the pink shirt that came in the care package from my mom, and I bought myself and my favorite co-worker lattes at the Abbott cafeteria.

Two thirds of the way through, I realized that I was drinking two shots of espresso plus some sugary syrups. Yeah.

My kidneys hurt. I haven’t hallucinated, but now I know (the hard way) that I have not cured myself of my coffee sensitivity yet.

Hey – hey – so I might get a cat. There’s this cat that someone at Abbott is getting rid of, and it’s sooo cute (and clawless and spayed and all those good things). I’m going up to Kenosha on Friday night to meet and maybe become the foster owner of a cat named Katrina. Don’t worry, I’ll keep you updated.

Heres a really great link to a blog that has been collecting international school yard rhymes. It makes me happy that I came across this, since I was just waxing nostalgic about the same subject.

That’s all I got. Most of my attention is being paid to my after-work plans. I’m going to take my car in for an oil change, work out whilst watching the Simpsons, then spend the evening frogging a scarf and reknitting it, with a Netflixed DVD of Sex and the City (I’m almost done with them, which will mean no more disgusted looks on Jason’s face as he opens my mail).