I finally got around to putting a Kindle reader on my work computer and Chrome browser. (My home computer is too antiquated.) The reason? Daniel Pinkwater’s Fish Whistle, whose title is apparently two words now, is free today and tomorrow! Thanks for the tip, shellynoir. :)
rat
Simone brought a rat in. We had the most enchanting exasperating half-hour hunting it in the living room. At one point I had it cornered behind an end-table, with an additional barricade of books stacked against the gap. I couldn’t decide what tool or container to use to reach it down there, and I considered leaving it there while I went to pick up sanguinity from work. But then there was a little rustling noise and I looked down to see the rat scaling the stack of books, using impressive chimneying technique.
I managed to encourage it, with a broomstick, to crawl into a plastic wastebasket I held at the gap. Then I overturned the wastebasket and scooted it across the floor to the door. I put the cat in another room, opened the door, and slid the wastebasket across the threshold. As soon as there was a gap, the rat slipped out, crossed the porch, and disappeared under the steps.
I’d pinched the rat’s tail and made it cry, and apparently scared it badly (there was a little puddle on the floor where I’d had the wastebasket), but otherwise it seemed in good shape. If it’s true that cats bring home only a quarter of their prey, perhaps Simone has caught about eight rodents now. I am instituting a policy of inspections before opening the door for her. Can’t believe I let her waltz in with it.
Wednesday reading meme
This is far from the first time I’ve meant to participate in the Wednesday reading meme, but the first time I’ve gotten as far as starting a post. Yay me! In the twelve minutes remaining in my lunch hour:
What I’m Reading: Ninth Ward, by Jewell Parker Rhodes.
What I’ve Just Read: Three Among the Wolves, by Helen Thayer. I love reading about her adventures; she is quiet and tough. Here she spent a year observing wolves, along with her husband and their dog Charlie. Charlie was able to act as their ambassador and interpreter to some extent.
What I’m Reading Next: Something due soon at the library. Maybe Brian Doyle’s Mink River, maybe Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind.
hot and cold
The outdoor part of the heat pump started making an alarming rattle; since it’s freezing rain season, sanguinity thinks it has ice built up inside somewhere. Therefore, we are now running the A/C full blast to push warm air from the living room out past the mechanism and hopefully melt the ice. Then if it works we can heat the house again, maybe.
I have turned on the electric blanket in case it’s an early bedtime instead.
Inappropriate heating and cooling seems to be a bit of a theme in our life: rolling up the windows and blasting the car heater in the summer for “car sauna” to acclimate for Badwater, rolling down the windows and blasting the car heater that Christmas the dog rolled in dead fish and we couldn’t stand to be enclosed with him, and de-smoking the house that time during the Snowpocalypse when the exercise ball caught on fire on the old furnace grate.
The heat pump controls for air conditioning go down to 64 degrees. Economically sensible, but inadequate for certain experiments or, say, a Mr. Popper’s Penguins scenario. Fortunately, you can hit a button with a little picture of a strongman flexing his bicep, and the heat pump gives it all it’s got for 20 minutes. We call him Skookum-Man.
Jeopardy Test
When I was with the in-laws for the holidays, Jeopardy was one of the tv shows that seemed to appeal to everybody. So when I got home, it occurred to me to look up how people get on the show.
Turns out the first step is a 50-question online test, and one was coming right up in January. So I registered, and yesterday I stayed a little late at work (where the good computers are) and took it.
You get 15 seconds to type each answer, and you don’t have to do the “in the form of a question” thing, so I had time to jot down notes in my notebook after typing. I think I missed eight questions. If they’re seeking a nice solid B student type, I’m sure they’ll give me a ring, hahaha.
- On the tip of my tongue, but couldn’t retrieve them: Steve Ballmer is the CEO of Microsoft. The wars between Rome and Carthage were the Punic Wars (not the Pyrrhic Wars). That popular game on FaceBook was Farm Town.
- Flat didn’t know: Kiev is the capitol of Ukraine. The Caspian Sea is considered the largest lake in the world. Andrew Garfield recently played Spiderman in the movies.
- Pleasantly surprised that I got right: Madison is the capitol of Wisconsin!
- There were lots of book questions, thankfully. Books and/or authors were Jane Eyre, The Color Purple, Joseph Conrad, Stephen King, Moby Dick, Camus, The Lovely Bones, and Annie Proulx.
Lowest-hanging fruit if I ever want to study and do better: GEOGRAPHY.
OLF envy!
This morning the announcement of the Oregon Literary Fellowships (and the Oregon Book Awards) came across my RSS reader. I was happy to see that Bedouin Books got a fellowship! It’s the small press run by Michael D’Alessandro, who taught the production part of the certificate program I did at the IPRC. I loved hearing about his press when he talked about it in class. Everything about it–how he thought about production costs and pricing, how he structured deals with his authors, all the experiments he tried–everything fit with his statement that this was a 25-year project. (Which honestly from most people would sound like BS.) In the letterpress studio all his motions were calm and reverent, and he articulated all the details of what he did, from getting the ink out of the jar with a minimum disruption of the surface area to folding the cleaning rag so it made 16 distinct clean surfaces. I’m pretty sure the $2500 fellowship will be put to optimum use. :)
I was sad that I hadn’t applied for a fiction fellowship this time around. It’s free, and the judges are distinguished (and different every year, so it doesn’t matter how often you’ve tried before). It’s exciting to be in the race. I didn’t have anything I felt good about putting forward last summer, but I really want to try again in June.
And one meeting every month will be a potluck.
“At this morning’s team meeting,” I told sanguinity yesterday, “we did an icebreaker for fun, even though we all know each other.”
“You tell me these things just to horrify me,” she said.
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Last night when I was rummaging around in the bottom kitchen drawer, aka “the drug drawer” (also home of extension cords and light bulbs), Simone the cat was very keen on supervising. A few minutes later, sanguinity saw her stretching up to pat at the drawers some more. Sang opened the next drawer up, which is the tea drawer. Simone hopped in and started excavating boxes of tea. She was serious and methodical: she wanted this one gone, and then that one. She made herself a space big enough to sit in, which I thought was maybe her objective although she still seemed a bit dissatisfied. Then I made her get out, and I put the tea back and shut the drawer. She started a campaign to get into the cabinet next to the drawers.
“Do you think there’s a mouse in there somewhere?” sanguinity said. I thought uneasily of Lily and the stove.
The mystery was solved when I made myself a cup of Super Relaxing Tea.
I’ve been buying this at Asian supermarkets since long before FuBonn, and it is serious stuff– once Jenny had a cup at lunch and barely made it the ten blocks home on her bike before a nap came on.
I was sipping and watching TV when I noticed Simone rubbing her face all over my discarded teabag on the coaster. She picked it up and carried it into her cardboard box. Sang went to the kitchen and confirmed– catnip is the second ingredient.
running resolution
I came up with a New Year’s resolution that felt satisfying as soon as it occurred to me: I want to finish the Portland Marathon this year without knee pain.
My knees have never kept me from finishing a race or an event, but they’ve slowed me down, and are definitely my weak point. Pain-proofing them will involve a little weight loss, strength and flexibility work, steady and abundant mileage, and maybe a backpacking trip in early September. :D
I’m starting from sedentary-ish, a mile’s walk daily and four miles’ walk/run over the weekend. It feels like very little, but that’s good. I still need to figure out the plan for strength and flexibility training.
Also, I don’t know if it will stick but today I went to dailymile and entered my two walks so far this year and looked at what people in Portland were up to. Feel free to friend me if you hang out there! I’m trying to convince my brain that working out and being active is the norm, by showing it people all around me doing it.
books read and holidays celebrated
I had a lovely holiday season with family and friends and road trips. I didn’t take many photos, but here’s one of sanguinity with her BFF Miss Piggy, on the night that thrihyrne and evannichols led us through the annual Extreme Holiday Lights display around the corner from their place:
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I’ve finished pulling together the list of books I read in 2012. You can see the complete list here as a Google doc if you want.
I’ll be adding these nine to my LibraryThing collection, bringing my collection there to 90 books in all:
- Me…Jane, by Patrick O’Donnell (picture book)
- How to Die of Embarrassment Every Day, by Ann Hodgman (middle-grade memoir)
- Black Hearts, by Holly Black (YA)
- Please Ignore Vera Dietz, by A.S. King (YA)
- Every Day, by David Levithan (YA)
- Dairy Queen, by Catherine Gilbert Murdock (YA)
- Code Name Verity, by Elizabeth Wein (YA)
- Middlemarch, by George Eliot (adult fiction)
- Adrift, by Steven Callahan (adult nonfiction)
You know, I was going to write a blurb about each one of these, but so many end-of-year book lists have gone by on my screen in the last few days that I don’t think I really need to add another. Maybe instead I’ll call out the audiobooks that got me through a lot of dishwashing: Ruby Dee reading Their Eyes Were Watching God, Natalie Moore with the perfect Wisconsin-teenager accent in Dairy Queen, and Steve Martin talking about his stand-up days in Born Standing Up.
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Happy New Year to all, and best wishes for a happy and fruitful 2013!
Reed in December
It’s been raining all weekend, but today wasn’t too cold. I pulled on my rain gear and walked down to the canyon at Reed. It felt great to be out.
I didn’t spot the resident beavers, but they’re around.
I don’t think of camellias as December flowers, but they look as good now as they do any other time.
In the more urban part of my walk, I listened to Sara Zarr’s How to Save a Life until my player’s battery died. Both this one and David Levithan’s Every Day, which I read last week, keep making me think in the back of my head while I read, “How’s the author going to pull this off? Corner is painted…what’s the path out of it?” I sort of wish I could turn this writerly perspective off, because it’s different from wondering how the characters will solve their problems. Every Day weakened a little at the end, I thought, with a Brand New Choice taking center stage. (And the main character’s last machination? It’s in character but kind of obnoxious, I thought, a little insulting and unnecessary!) I still don’t know what will happen with How to Save a Life. But highly worthwhile, both of them.
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Sanguinity and I watched Terminator 2: Judgment Day last night! I hadn’t seen it since college. Why is it called “Judgment Day”? It isn’t actually about Judgment Day. Anyway, you know what I could hardly stand? The way Sarah and John both have their bangs in their eyes. Srsly I was like, fine save the world but please get your hair out of your face! It’s no coincidence that I trimmed my bangs this morning.
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Work this week, and then a week and a half off! I secretly love the budget furloughs. I’d never take this many vacation days on my own for “no reason,” meaning no extended travel, but I’m psyched.