Category: Life

Humor, Husband, Life, School, Work

Praise Jupiter, Odin, and Quetzalcoatl!

“If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.”
– Woody Allen

Oh, C., you and your plans! So droll!

Ever feel like God/the Universe/Fate/Whatever is doing that thing when you make plans and They laugh at you?  Well, recently it’s felt like God/the Universe/Fate/Whatever has been having a benevolent but enthusiastic chuckle at our expense.  Plans that we make, good plans, solid plans, with all necessary effort behind them to accomplish them, have just…not been happening.

Not to sound vain, but this is really the first time in my life that I’ve come up against so many game-changers (not counting my university’s Football team).  I don’t know if that means I’ve been extremely clever, extremely lucky, or more than extremely pig-headed about getting what I plan on…but likely some combination of the latter two.

But I digress.  Yesterday, the God/the Universe/Fate/Whatever decided that It had had enough of yanking our chains and allowed our hard work and single minded effort to pay off.  Wiping the last of laughter tears from Its eyes, It gave a last little sigh of amusement and waved Its finger benevolently at us.

J. has an internship!

Granted it’s not the one we’d thought he’d have, but that’s not a bad thing.  If he’d gotten the one we originally wanted, he’d have been shipped off somewhere for 6-8 weeks and I’d have stayed behind holding down the home front.  Perfectly doable, but not at all fun (and the amount of Netflix I’d have consumed would have been perfectly shocking by any standards).  But now he’s got an internship with a Fortune 500 company, local, that pays very  well, and adds additional sparkle to his resume.

Collective sigh of relief.

Family, Friends, Humor, Life, Weekend

Ducklings, I Haven’t Forgotten You…

“I’ve got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.”
-Thomas Carlyle

This past week/weekend:

-Marie had a bridal shower, reception, wedding, and luncheon (Wed., Thurs., and Friday respectively)
-We had our school’s Football season opener (and won!)
-Labor Day, several hours of which I spent throwing nieces and nephews around on a trampoline
-I bought food for the first time in over a week
-Ate a full meal…which seemed like the first time in over a week
-I didn’t sleep more than five hours a night, and apparently started grinding my teeth in my sleep (according to J.)
-Fall showed up.  Seriously.  I turned around and there it was with sweaters, boots, and temperatures plummeting thirty degrees.  Unlike most people I know, I’m thrilled because Fall is my favorite season
-Had a perma-migraine

Weddings, even fabulous ones like Marie's, can have unforeseen consequences.

So instead of updating you as was clearly my duty and your right, my loves, I spent last night in flannel pajama pants, dosed with pain killers, and watching Emma – not sharing pictures from the wedding.  Every once and a while I lurched to the kitchen for sustenance, but only at moments of near death.  Apologies, but I really wasn’t fit for anything else.

I’ll get them up today, I promise.  And I’ll never neglect you like that again.

Life

Well, I Promised!

“Clothes make the man.  Naked people have little or no influence in society.”
– Mark Twain

Darlings, you asked for exciting news, and I deliver!  I’m thrilled to announce that Shabby Apple, supplier of all things fabulous, is generously doing a giveaway through yours truly.

Lots of exciting, and more importantly cute, things are happening with Shabby Apples these days.  They are releasing several lines a year these days, their late-summer Berkshires line dropped a couple of weeks ago, and their Yosemite line is coming out soon.  They’ve got completely darling bridesmaids dresses, gorgeous retro-inspired swimwear, and even aprons!

Anyway you, my lovelies, get to reap the benefits.  Because one of you is going to win this fabulous dress from their Paris-inspired Oh la la collection, the green lawn L’Amour dress!

Isn’t it pretty?  Perfect for the end of summer, and with a cardi and some lovely boots you’re set up for the fall as well.  You can win this dress one of two ways:

  1. Comment on this post, and make sure to leave your email address so that I can get in touch with you to make sure you get your prezzie.
  2. For a second entry, visit Shabby Apple’s site (just click the button at the top of the page), browse through all their dressy goodness, and come back and comment again telling me which of their dresses, swimsuits, or accessories is your favorite.  Make sure to leave your email address again, just in case.  I don’t want you to miss out on this!
  3. Ooh, look.  I decided to give you a bonus!  If you post a link to this giveaway on your blog or Facebook page you get another entry.  Just comment again and post a link to your site/page.

Good luck, kittens!  Winner announced Thursday!

Books, Humor, Life, Movies, Music

If A Equals B, and B Equals C, Then A Equals Muffin

“Fastidious taste makes enjoyment a struggle.”
– Mason Cooley

The science of Recommendations seems, to me, to be very imprecise.

Pandora, set to my station of summery, party, of-no-artistic-value-whatsoever music, was feeding me a lively stream of Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Ke$ha, and other culturally reprehensible choices.  And then suddenly, out of no where, an unmistakable disco beat.  And then, “Ah, ah ah, ah, stayin’ alive!  Stayin’ alive!”  Who ordered the Bee Gees?

Then later on Amazon.com, Small Dog’s personal crack, I was casually leafing through their recommendations for me.  They defy logic.  Wondering what had possessed it to recommend Conan the Barbarian I clicked on it to see why.  Answer: because I once ordered  Planet Earth.

Quoi?!

Humor, Husband, Life, Snark

Mother. Nature.

“Nature’s all well in her place, but she mustn’t be allowed to make things untidy.”
– Cold Comfort Farm

Pictured: Summer, after a particularly impressive bender.

Of course, summer is moving towards its inevitable end.  Though not quite in her death throes, she’s sensing that they’re not far off and so is  looking to have a last fling with a boy a third of her age, wear skirts that are far too short, and spend all her money rather than let her grasping nephew Fall get a penny of it.  In other words, generally behaving badly.

The other day J. called me up.
“Are you coming home for lunch?” he asked.
“Wasn’t planning on it.  Why?”
“Because you need to go to the store.”
“Again, why?”
“Because you need to pick up ant traps and spray.”

Summer's attack German Shepherd. And although I didn't catch a glimpse of this guy, I am sure he was lurking back behind the suitcases.

Augh!  Apparently ants had descended on our flat.  They were crawling in from a closet runner, bent on global domination (For the record, Mum, our flat is in no way in a state to attract the wildlife, please don’t wring your hands and bemoan anything).  Anyway, I dashed home armed with chemicals, J. vacuumed everything, sprayed and booby-trapped our closet to the point that those famed nuclear-resistant cockroaches of lore couldn’t survive, and we waited with baited breath to see if it had worked.  So far, nary a six-legged fiend has been sighted.

However, marshalling the ants to send them indoors was only Old Lady Summer getting drunk at her granddaughter’s wedding.  She finished the night by climbing up on the buffet table, shaking her bon-bon, and collapsing spectacularly into the punch.

That night we had a massive lightning storm.  I read later that in a half hour period we had nearly 150 lightning strikes in the area.  And unlike normal storms, where the flashes and rumbles are spaced out a bit, this was explosion after explosion for hours.  Neither J. nor I slept because every few seconds our whole room would light up and it would sound like someone had cracked a whip right next to our heads.  And this sort of weather has continued, with varying degrees of intensity, for the last three days now.  The power was knocked out yesterday, making getting home from work a nightmare.

Small Dog gets Summered-out.

Summer and I have a middling relationship.  Round about February of each year I whine and long for sunlight, but as soon as we’ve made it through July, I start glaring at bank signs along the road with their publicly displayed roasting temperatures and start mumbling things like, “October sounds good.  I could do October right now.”

*Photo of cracked old biddy, from mygutinstinct.wordpress.com
*Photo of the vile insect invader, still from the 1954 film Them!
*Photo of my approximate face come mi-August from: findavet.us/blog/2010/04/how-to-keep-your-dog-safe-in-the-heat/

Friends, Humor, Life, Sad

Keep Calm: An Emotional Evolution Since Yesterday

 “Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.”
– Virginia Woolf 

Happy independence to me…from Venice.  She and Val are on their way East (though if Facebook updates are anything to go off of, they are already having a horrid time of it).  Since her departure, I’ve been going through the most frightful emotional rollercoaster, best illustrated by the following series. 

I'm fine. I'm fine.

 

I'm not fine! I'm not fine!

 

Minor meltdown/The Crazies

 

Successfully avoiding.

 

Unsuccessfully avoiding.

 

Denial.

 

Bargaining.

 

Acceptance. Sort of.

 So.  Here’s to absent friends.  Whenever any of you may be.

Life

One Year Anniversary

“By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll be happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.”
– Socrates

A year ago I got married and it was quite a party! Although the year has flown by (seriously, a year) it hasn’t seemed like it at all.  That’s a whole round of holidays, a school year, and two birthdays between us.   I hope he hasn’t been turned into a philosopher yet, I sure haven’t!

I'm still awfully fond of him!
Family, Friends, Humor, Life

Soundoff Part II

“Nothing but heaven itself is better than a friend who is really a friend.”
– Plautus

Remember this list?

Well, J. took the GMAT today and scored a 720 (way to go, love!), Venice is going to be interviewed by the local paper tomorrow for a petition she’s started, Lexie is engaged, Hennessy is getting married any second now, my brother Gio got an impressive scholarship to virtually any school in the US and he’ll be making a final decision about where to go by the end of the week, my father retired and has decided to move…to the States!  Which makes little sense to me, I’d have picked Tuscany, personally.  My mother, her Classics degree from Cambridge fresh under her belt, is in the US already going through an intense Latin program that should make her a nice candidate to teach Classical Studies Stateside.

Our family is already dreading moving.  Apparently, one of the highest accolades that the kids’ school gave itself this past year was getting in fewer fights than the year before.  And they chief form of entertainment was lighting fires in the school and then calling the bomb squad.  Interesting.  “We’re going to be the weirdos now.  Don’t tell them where you’re from, where you’ve lived, or what you’ve done,” is my father’s advice, “LIE.”  You know that when your pretty spectacular family, though I say so myself, is planning very hard to be inconspicuous that life is about get odd.

My whole family and I are going to be on the same continent for the first time in six years.  Permanently.  Bizarre!

Fabulous, Friends, Humor, Life

Weekend Soundoff

 “A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

And if ever this becomes necessary, I've got a crack team on speedial.

I have one friend going to study in Korea for the next few months.  His wife is staying here, working, and currently performing in The King and I.  Another friend is officially back from her world travels and has found a lovely house to move into in the city.  Yet another friend is recovering from morphine withdrawals.*  And finally yet another dear friend received and turned down the offer to be a man’s mistress. 

I know SUCH fabulous people! 

* Post surgery, which doesn’t sound nearly as intriguing.

History, Humor, Life, Office, University, Work

Top. Men.

“We have top men working on it right now.”
“Who?”
“Top men.”
– Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark

Pictured: a villain immediately preceeding his revalation of exactly how badly he has been behaving for the last hour and a half.

In almost every movie there is that incredibly silly moment when the villain is confronted with the fruits of his or her destruction and, looking over the rivers of lava/ looming black hole/ annihilation of an entire civilization/ etc., murmurs in despair, “My god, what have I done?!”

I had one of those moments today.  After getting all the archives into chronological order (which you’d think they’d already be in, right?  Hah!), tagging them by date, pulling original photos and making notes on when/where they originally occurred in print, and hauling it one massive armload at a time to the library, I asked for the archivist.  Student employees helped me carry the stacks of papers and binders and asked what I was doing.  I couldn’t very well shout, “Saving history!” in the library, so I quietly whispered the tale of the iniquitous order to dispose of fifty years of information.
“He told you to shred it!” one girl squeaked in horror.
“I know,” I squeaked back.

We were all awash with the enthusiasm of the young until the archivist appeared.  He looked like Eeyore the donkey in human form: droopy, awkward, exhausted, and less than thrilled to see me with my arms full of documents.
“Hi, I’m C. from the police department.  We talked on the phone and–”
“Oh, right,” he sighed, “Follow me.”

The whole cavalcade meandered down some halls and through secured doors…to a lonely room, lined with shelves and piled with papers.
“Here’s a project for you,” he mumbled to what appeared to be a heinously overworked student employee, and ordered us to drop the whole pile on her (already covered) desk.

My project is somewhere alongside the Ark, I'm sure.

Which is when I had my cinema-villain-is-confronted-by-what-she’s-done moment.  I’d committed the most rookie of cardinal sins: I’d just turned over fifty years of history to a bureaucracy!

I’ve gained all sorts of skills and experiences at this job, but law enforcement is not my calling, to say the least.  But history!  Oh, yes.  And this project is the first thing in over a year and a half that’s come close to the things I’ve studied and feel passionate about.   Certainly it’s the only thing that’s got me excited enough to annoy my co-workers with my near constant cries of, “Read this!”  And now, I’ve an awful premonition that my precious bundles are only going to slowly decompose in the bowels of the library.  There is no justice in the world.