Month: January 2013

hot and cold

Holly

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

Holly

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!

Holly

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.

Holly

“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.
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

Holly

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

Holly

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!