Wash and Dry and Wear

Folks, I am happy to report that we actually have a washer and dryer now. As much as I enjoyed hauling clothes to the laundrymat down the street and laundering my clothes in washers used by all kinds of interesting people, there is something about turning a knob or pushing a button and letting the machine do the work while you do something else in your very own place (like blog) with your now lazy afternoon.

Our washer and dryer are kind of fancy-like. They are made by LG (a company we had never heard of before now, which made us very nervous), and these models were recommended to us by "the fantastic Bob" at the Best Buy in Antioch. He has the same pair at home himself, which we felt was a good vote of confidence. When we researched LG equipment online, it also seemed like you got a lot of extras for the same or less amount of money. That's what reeled me in, even before Bob made his expert suggestion.

Our washer has many settings and combinations of settings to choose from, uses at least 50% less water than a top-loading washer because the clothes get dunked into the water at the bottom of the drum (indeed, if you are sitting in front of the washer watching it work -- not that I would know from experience -- you can hardly see any water at all), it has a water heater inside it that can heat tap water if your hot water heater runs out, it dispenses the soap and fabric softener (which I started using now, but still don't understand what it does) when it knows it's the best time to do so, and it spins at 1200 rpms so that your clothes come out feeling nearly dry. It also has plastic rollers inside the drum to make the clothes move around better.

The dryer can "sensor dry clothes" so that your things never get over-dried, and has lots of different settings, just like the washer does. Most useful to us has been the "ultra low heat" setting which allows us to dry all those clothes we would otherwise be hanging up from door jams around the apartment, afraid of them shrinking in the high-heat dryers of the laundrymat. And the few things we do hang from the doorjams now dry in a few hours instead of the former two days, thanks to the high rpm spin thing!

I am very enamored with these new gadgets, as you can tell, and cannot do a load of laundry without exclaiming, "Les, I really love this washer and dryer!" I think he might be getting a little jealous.

When I was about 12 or 13, my cousin and I were doing some door-to-door evangelising (yeah, yeah, yeah) and when we knocked on the door of one apartment, the young couple insisted that we come in so they could show us their new washer and dryer. At the time, I thought it was really weird that they were so excited about it. Why? Didn't everyone have a washer and dryer in their house? Everyone I knew did. But now, nearly 20 years later, I get it. If you visited my apartment now, I would breathlessly drag you into the laundry area and encourage you to ooooh and aaaahhh over our new washer and dryer, and would probably offer to wash the shirt on your back, just so you could see it in action.

Did I mention that installing a washer and dryer cut my closet size in half, and I still enthuse about them? That's real love, and there's no denying it.

Sitting Pretty, er, I mean, Sitting Real Tough!

We just got a new office chair and it's so comfortable. Les is happily modeling it here, just a few short minutes after we both broke into a sweat attempting to put it together (Pay $50 for assembly? Why? It's much for fun to struggle and swear!). This sure beats the dining room chair with the broken seat we were using previously. Now there are no good excuses for not blogging!

Tennessee Plate

I thought I would share this photo of my new license plate with all of you. I knew I wanted the Watchable Wildlife/Bluebird plate (the most popular specialty plate) because I saw about 30 bluebirds in one spring month after I first arrived here, and the extra money to get this plate is deposited in the Watchable Wildlife Endowment Fund to be used exclusively for the preservation of non-game and endangered wildlife species. I wasn't sure what kind of personalization I'd be able to come up with using only five letters, and figured that I would just get what they gave me if I couldn't think of anything. LR2TN was my first choice, but apparently someone out there (and I will find you!) already has it, so they made up my second choice instead, and I'm happy with it, if only for a year. Next year, I won't be so new, now will I?

In other exciting Tennessee license plate news (I know you're waiting breathlessly to read the rest of this paragraph...), our state will be a launching a new standard plate in January 2006! Since arriving in this state, I have been complaining about how old and dorky the current standard plate is, and I could not be happier that my complaints have been heard and we'll be seeing the new plates out on the road in just a few short months. If you would like to see a picture of the new plate and read the press release, click here. (I have to add that TN has some of the most awkward-to-navigate online information about license plates, so please click the link above instead of trying to find the information yourself. It will take you at least ten minutes to even locate information about license plates in TN at all.)

I am still waiting to see what Les is going to get for his own license plate. He had "culture" in Michigan, but that will be too many letters for the plates he likes, so he'll have to abbreviate. Somehow, I don't think my "cltr" is going to be the winning entry.

A Bad Habit

I must confess a bad habit to my long-time readers. For the past month, I have been creating posts that I have back-dated so it appears I created them in May, when really I may have written them in July. I did this so that I wouldn't constantly be saying things like, "A few months ago . . . " or "On May 28 . . . " since it sometimes takes me a while to get around to putting the event or thought into my blog. Instead, it appears as if I was diligently writing the posts a few hours after the subject matter actually happened. "Ah, what a dedicated blogger!" some may have thought. Well, it's time to come clean.

Temporarily looking like a dedicated blogger (even if you decide to shoot yourself in the foot later by confessing your tricks) is one of the great things about being able to change the date and time on your posts. The other great thing is being able to blog at work and make it look like you aren't. Not that I would know from experience.

While post-dated posting doesn't really affect any new readers, since they're working their way backwards through the blog anyway, it does affect people who have been reading my blog from Day 1. Most long-term readers (and I love all three of them!) would probably not go back and reread past months, thinking that surely nothing new has appeared there. Thanks to Blogger time travel magic, however, they would be wrong. I just thought I would let everyone know.

Now that our big Michigan-to-Nashville move is over, however, and life is back to normal and pretty chilled out, I feel quite caught up on blogging and am not anticipating much more post-dated blogging.

Or I'll just come back and correct this post in a few months if that proves not to be the case.

Somehow, I Never Even Saw It Coming

Artist's Statement: When I look at this painting, my first thought is, "Gosh, that bird looks so cuddly!" My second thought is, "How do those stubby little wings keep him airborne?" Who cares what that girl is thinking? She looks like she's thinking about something boring anyway.

I once heard a story about a hummingbird that ate so much that he could not fly. The person who picked him up off the ground (where he was just plopped down, all fat like) put him in a box overnight and the next morning he had metabolized all the nectar and could fly again. This painting reminds us that good and bad things can sneak up on us and surprise us. If you wait, something else will come along, good or bad, and life will change again. Looking around helps you anticipate the changes, but doesn't necessarily change what will happen. And sometimes someone else intervenes and keeps us safe until our shock wears off and we can handle life again.

This is my first forray into the world of painting. I'm not sure what's up with that stripe through the middle, but I thought I would share this painting with you all anyway. That kind of looks like me, so it's obviously autobiographical in some way. I just made up all the stuff above on the spot, so if you would like to post your interpretations of what's going on in this painting, I would appreciate it. You are probably more right than I am, and I like to delve into my unconscious mind as much as the next starving artist.

Ironically, I was not wearing my shirt that says "Artists Have More Fun" when I made this. But I was having a lot of fun nonetheless.

Priorities

(I feel like I'm just adding to a flood of posts about Harry Potter, but I wanted to put a note in here to explain why you probably won't be seeing any posts from me for a while. The only reason I'm posting now is because it's early morning and Les is still asleep so I can't be getting through Harry Potter instead.)

The new Harry Potter is out and every spare moment is being spent getting to the end of the book. We picked up our copy on CD this year, and are listening to it together during lunch and after work for a couple of hours a night. We're already done with CD 9 (of 17) and I feel we're making pretty good time, while not cruising through it "too fast."

Someone at work was giving me flack for buying it on CD instead of book form, "But it's so much better if you actually READ it." Although I am a big reader and am generally not much of an aural person, I have no regrets when it comes to the Harry Potter books. The audio reader -- Jim Dale -- does an excellent job, and in some ways I feel that I have a better picture in my head of Hogwarts now than when I just read the books myself. He also does different voices for the various characters, which was certainly something my husband and I weren't doing when we read it to each other.

We began the CD thing with book #5. We originally bought Order of the Phoenix in hardcover, and were reading it to each other in bed every night. After three days, it seemed like we were making no progress whatsoever and we felt like we would lose our voices before we got through the nearly 900 pages. We exchanged our hardcover for CD and got through it in no time.

The only bad thing about listening to these books on CD is that you don't really know how to spell a lot of the names in the stories, which makes any kind of Google search more challenging, or guarantees that you won't be winning any Harry Potter Spelling Bees.

It's also much easier to fall asleep while listening to a book than it is while reading it. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

Almost (a tiny little bit) Famous

I just went and checked out Nashville is Talking and saw that my blog posts end up there. I haven't seen my fake name on another website before, so it felt like a brush with fame to me. If you visit the site, you might see my posts in the sidebar!

I also noticed that someone had linked to one of my posts in one of his posts. That made me nervous! I read his post with one eye shut in case he totally lambasted me, but he agreed with me. Whew!

The world just got a little smaller to me.

Living in a Modern Age

Sometimes I wake up on a Sunday morning, start the washing machine, start the coffee maker, heat up some oatmeal in the microwave, get soy milk out of the fridge, turn on the CD player, empty the dishwasher, and stand amazed at the age of machines I live in.

I know it doesn't feel that "space-age" as we go about our days, but it hits me every once in a while that I can push a bunch of buttons and have about seven machines in the house working at the same time, doing things that people used to have to do manually (things that I wouldn't necessarily even know how to do manually now). And that's above and beyond all the machines that are constantly working (fridge, water heater, clock, air conditioning, etc.) without any assistance from me.

These realizations usually come to me early in the morning, when I've just woken up, and my brain is still stupid with sleep, right before the dub music starts playing and the coffee hits my system. A turn of events that I never expected: the sleepy brain knows the pathway to clarity.

What's up with all the scootchy-scootchin'?

Let me first start off by saying that if I could make citizen's arrests, I would. I took a personality test once that said I am most suited to be a police officer, and I must admit that I at least enjoy enforcing the law in my head when I see people who are out of line. I think this is why people who seem completely oblivious to common courtesy, even if they aren't breaking the law, make me mad. And since I can't actually give them a ticket, I will publish a post about it.

I made the diagram above to help people understand what a scootchy-scootcher is, and why they are so annoying. Unfortunately, I made this diagram in MS Paint, so it's extremely low-tech. I think you can get the idea anyway. You probably have seen scootchy-scootchers yourselves, and know what they are. Hopefully, however, you have never been one, because scootchy-scootchers are rude, thoughtless people.

Every morning, I pass through a heavy construction area on my way to work. Cars are backed up through intersections, people sit at red lights through three turns, and tensions run a little high, because it's really the only way all of us can get from Point A to Point B without adding another five miles to our commutes. It's the same way on my drive home, if not a little worse. My six-minute commute has turned into a 15 minute one.

People who are considerate drivers will wait at the Stop Line, even if their light is green, to let the intersection clear before they cross to the other side. This prevents the intersection from being jumbled with cars if the light suddenly turns red and the cross traffic has its turn. If everyone waits for their light to turn green in backed up traffic situations, instead of trying to sneak into bottlenecked traffic, things go much more smoothly. I have seen it happen.

Instead, scootchy-scootchers see the empty intersection as an opportunity to get their car noses out there and merge in on red, even if they have only been waiting at the light for five seconds. I have even seen scootchy-scootchers who do the lovely double-up move -- two cars side-by-side, both turning right -- to squeeze into the intersection. When the cars who are waiting at the Stop Line on their green light see this going on, they immediately pull forward, trying to cut off the scootchy-scootchers, or at least tailgate them angrily. This then blocks up the intersection so that when the scootchy-scootchers' light does turn green, the cars behind them have no space to move forward. Yep, it's really great for everyone!

Then there are the weird "Secret Scootchy-Scootchers" who actually let the scootchy-scootchers in in front of them, even though this then strands them in the middle of the intersection! Sacrificing themselves to forward the Scootchy-Scootcher chaotic cause . . . Trust me, people, there's no reward in that. Scootchy-scootchers won't even give you a courtesy "thank you" wave!

Maybe I should make a sign for the intersections on my way to work: "No Scootchy-Scootchin!" Or I could stand there protesting, throwing my body in the path of cars who are trying to scootchy-scootch. Or I could just take down license plate numbers and call them into the police: "Officer, I caught the following cars scootchy-scootchin' on my way to work today. Can you please give them a ticket?"

Obviously, these scootchy-scootchers have driven me to madness. Or maybe I'm just jealous.

Was that just movie magic?

Last night we watched 50 First Dates, which was much more tender than I expected it to be, and I really liked it. I didn't get my hopes up because I feel that Adam Sandler movies can be kind of hit-or-miss. Amazingly, this is the only movie I have ever liked Rob Schneider's character in. Making me like Rob Schneider is quite an accomplishment.

I won't go on further because of a commedian I once heard who jokes about how no one wants to talk to you about movies that you've seen six years after they've come out.
Person 1: "Hey, I just saw 50 First Dates. It was great!"
Person 2: "Dude, I saw that movie six years ago! That movie is so old!"
Person 1: "But I want to talk about it now!"

In one of the special features (the goofy music videos, which I usually don't watch), there's a scene where people are watching a movie on a big drive-in screen, but they're sitting in their boats, docked in a bay. I immediately had to know, Does such a thing as a "boat-in" or "float-in" movie theater really exist? It seems like a cool idea. How do you line up your boats? Seems like there would be a lot of precision driving involved.

After 20 minutes of Googling, I had turned up nothing except a collection of theaters that had putt-putt-boats for the kids as part of the "entertainment complex." I found one reference on this page to theatres "designed around lakes where patrons could dock their boats at giant marinas. They could then sit in their boat and watch the movie from the water." Has anyone seen these in real life? I want to know if it was just a concept or if it really existed.

In the music video, most of the boats were sailboats and I thought that it would be pretty terrible to be stuck in a little speedboat behind one of those "tall ships", what with all the rigging and those masts blocking your view. Sailboats: the big haired ladies of the Float-in Movie Theatre world.

500 Hits

I am excited to note that my blog has just reached the 500-hit mark. For some reason, this seems significant to me, and I'm therefore excited enought to blog about it!

The other good news is that, by my most accurate guesstimates, only about 350 of those hits are from me, checking to see how many hits my blog has.

Thank you to my seven other readers for helping me achieve this awesome accomplishment!

And, no, I haven't had this post drafted for the past week, optimistically anticipating the day when I would get to hit the "publish" button. Not me!

Green Goodness

I am a vegetarian who has a really hard time getting all her fruits and veggies in each day because there are a lot of things I don't like and I have a hard time finding perfect fresh fruits and veggies (they're always not ripe enough, too ripe, or not at their peak). That's why I enjoy juices which claim to have at least 2 servings of the green stuff in one bottle. All I need to do is drink two of those a day, and I'm sorted (I'm sure I can manage to get the fifth serving in there somehow). I have tried a variety of these juices (see also Odwalla SuperFood), and the one I'm enjoying right now is "Green Goodness" from Bolthouse Farms. It's sweet and easy to drink, and I can't even taste the spinach (very, very important!). Plus, it looks kind of gross, so I always feel tough when I'm drinking it.

It may be psychological, but it does make me feel awake and lively (even moreso than coffee does) after I've consumed it. I feel like I would like to drink at least one of these every day, but at about $1.40 a pop, it seems kind of frivilous to be spending money that way. I can rationalize it with, "it's for my health," but I would ultimately still be thinking that I could be eating veggies for much less money than that AND get fiber, too! Ah, the healthy eating conundrum!

Well, time to put my pizza in the oven... Do you see the irony here, people?

Happy 4th of July

Happy Independence Day! This is the first time in a long time where I have not gotten up to go to a parade. Instead, I stayed up really late last night watching movies and playing video games (the Tiger Woods 4th of July Real Time Event, of course!) and slept in until 10:30 a.m. Normally, I would have seen most of the parade by this time!

For the past three or four years, I have gone to the parade in Northville, MI, with my aunt, uncle, cousins, and their kids. My aunt is the ultimate parade co-attendee because she wakes up at 5 a.m. and goes downtown to reserve our seats with towels and blankets. We roll in, well-rested, at 9 a.m. and we have the prime parade-watching real estate. She also usually brings drinks to keep us cool, hands out flags for us to wave, and she makes sure that her family is all decked out in coordinating red, white, and blue. What an auntie! It's also fun to go with the little kids in our family and see what they get excited about each year.

This year, I'm alone for 4th of July, and I didn't feel like going to a parade by myself. I might try to figure out if there are any fireworks tonight (vs. all of them being done already). I haven't been to a 4th of July fireworks display since I was in college. In the Detroit area, the local towns always seemed to do their fireworks on days other than July 4th, so it seemed like a lot of work to figure out where to go when. There's always next year. I didn't go to parades for about six years in a row and I don't look back on those years now as "the dark days of depression" or anything. It's okay to take a break from traditional holiday activities.

Although I have never mentioned this aloud to anyone, I like to think of July 4 as my own personal independence day. I make an effort to do something that I'm kind of afraid to do, and so it's my own day of freedom from fear or nervousness. I usually pick things that other people would find very tame, and don't go in for bungee-jumping or sky diving, but I guess when you're kind of a wuss about a lot of stuff, it's easy to find something you need an excuse to try.

Today, I'm going to the pool in my apartment complex. Yep, it's pretty tame, isn't it? But I have not been to the pool yet this season (and it's been hot enough, let me tell you!) for a couple of reasons: (1) I like to imagine that when I'm wearing clothes, I look pretty thin, and people don't know how it's all really going with my body. When you're wearing a bathing suit, there's no hiding, and I guess I enjoy a little more mystery than that. (2) I can't figure out what you actually DO at the pool. I'm not going to swim laps. I'm not planning to start diving for pennies. I don't have a game of water polo planned. If you're a kid, you splash around with other kids and swim back and forth across the pool and practice swimming underwater, amazed at where you surface in the pool. If you're a grown-up with kids you pull them around in the water, you float so that they can swim under you, you catch them when they jump in, and you do a lot of "no running around the pool" yelling. What do grown-ups do at the pool if they don't have kids? I plan to do a little sunbathing, but ultimately, it seems like the point of the pool is to be in the water and not be hot. And what do you do once you're in there? All this is what I hope to find out today.

I'll report back on how it goes. And I'll definitely wait two hours after eating before going in the water. I don't think muscle-cramping takes a holiday.

Dub Sundays

At our house, we have something called "Dub Sundays." I'm not sure when it started (my guess is within the last three years), but it means that we start off the first couple of hours on Sunday mornings with dub music. If you don't know what dub music is, I'll let our friend the free encyclopedia wikipedia define it for you (click on the word "wikipedia" to see the whole dub page): Dub is a form of Jamaican music, which developed in the early 1970s. Dub is characterized as a "version" of an existing song, typically emphasizing the drums and bass for a sound popular in local Sound Systems (in the 1950s, in the ghettos of Kingston, a new type of public entertainment came about. DJs would load up a truck with a generator, turntables, and huge speakers and set up street parties). The instrumental tracks are typically drenched in sound processing effects, with most of the lead instruments and vocals dropping in and out of the mix. The music sometimes features processed sound effects and other noises, such as animal sounds, babies crying, and producers shouting instructions at the musicians.

Dub music is great waking-up music because it's pretty chilled out, pretty cheery, and pretty similar from song to song so you don't get jarred jumping from one genre to another, or from a slow song to a fast song. There aren't a lot of CDs that can boast that type of consistency.

As recently as a year ago, I really hated dub. I loved reggae (the original songs that dub strips down, reggae usually has a more typical song structure and many more lyrics. See Bob Marley.), but felt that dub songs all sounded exactly the same, especially since there weren't really lyrics to set the songs apart ("Oh, this song is about the evils of Babylon, this song is about slavery, and this song is about smoking ganja!"), and I felt like dub was basically just music created for stoners. Les has always really liked dub, but never had an excuse to play it at the house because I would always demand "that stupid dub music be turned off immediately," pointing out that you only had to add an "m" to make dub dumb (yes, I can be difficult at times!). So I think he started Dub Sundays as a way to listen to one of his favorite kinds of music for a few hours, at the same time reassuring me that I would only have to suffer through it for a short time.

I don't know what changed, but I like dub music now. I don't know if Les just wore me down over time and my resistance lessened, if it's familiar now and so I like it, if I understand the Rasta culture more and the methods behind making this music and don't just think they're a bunch of stoners, or if something changed in my lifestyle (you know, I have been wanting to slow down and chill out more...) that allows me to vibe more with the music. Whatever it is, it allows me to embrace Dub Sunday even when Les isn't home to put on the CDs. I'm alone at home and listening to dub right now!

You may still be thinking that you've never heard dub music before. I assure you that you have. But just to make sure, if you come 'round to the house, we would be happy to play some for you. Even if it's not Sunday.