Friday Faff: Lights Out Edition

I believe I've mentioned before that we live in an 1895 Victorian house, with original windows and no air conditioning. We had a bit of a heat wave last week and over the weekend, and things were roasting in Chez Stryker by Monday evening. We listlessly discussed what we might have for dinner that would require no use of a heating element that could contribute to the temperature being even higher than the 82F it already was in our house.

And then the power went out. Luckily, it's June so even though it was around 6:30 PM, it was still plenty light outside. At first we figured it was because the power grid was overloaded from too many fans and air conditioners running at once, but then the plume of black smoke to the east and the plethora of sirens convinced us that something else might be going on, but because we had no electricity we had no television, internet, or plug-in radio to inform us of the deets. We sat outdoors with peanuts and cold drinks and read our books, waiting for the power to come back on. It was hot, and only the occasional warm breeze punctuated the stiflingly still air.

After a while, we realized the power wasn't going to come on anytime soon, and it was starting to get dark. We decided to have turkey sandwiches and leftover potato salad and cole slaw for dinner, since Dan was uncomfortable cooking in the dark, and since neither of us wanted to contribute any additional heat to the house, especially considering our fans weren't functioning. We ate our cold meal at our dinnertable in the last light of the evening, reminiscing about power outages we remembered from childhood. Most of the ones I remembered happened during winter thunder-and-rain storms, so a hot summer evening was a totally different experience.

When we finished eating, we retired to the living room. Dan found his head lamp, and lit several of the decorative candles we normally have in our non-functional fireplace. And we sat in the hot, stuffy room, full of food. There wasn't quite enough light to read, so we just sat. I thought about how much we depend on electricity for just about everything.

The kitties, expectedly, were more than a little freaked out by the situation. Humans at home! but no lights on! and no delicious, delicious fan! Why so hot, humans? Why no lights? Something was Just Not Right.

And then, for about 3 minutes, the lights suddenly came on.

A half hour after sitting in the dark, digesting dinner and watching the decorative candles flicker, they came back on for good. We found out that the cause of the blackout had been an explosion at a nearby power station, right near a hospital. Apparently some of the patients had to be medevac'd out when the hospital lost power. I thought some more about how much we depend on electricity for everything, for large, life-saving things, and for small things like an evening's entertainment. It was kind of nice to have no teevee and no internet for an evening, but to not even have enough light to read by was more than a little disturbing. It was a little like camping, except in our own hot, stuffy house in the middle of the city rather than under the stars. I'll take the lights when I'm home, thank you very much.

* * * * * *

Two bad things this week, offset by two good things today:

First, I'm going to have to find a new shampoo. Again. I'm still bitter about the last time, and after over a year of looking I finally found something that wasn't horrible. And effing Pantene had to go and change up all their products again, the bastages. I bought a cheapo clarifying shampoo and I'll know in a week or so whether or not I hate it. Why the hell do hair product companies have to change up their ENTIRE PRODUCT LINES when their customers already like what they have to offer?

Second, I was really looking forward to doing some swimming this summer. I've been trying to change up my workouts a bit, and thought the chance to spend some time in a pool would be lovely. The City of Denver's outdoor pools are only open in the summer, so when I went to the website for Congress Park's pool I was dismayed to learn that they're only open from noon to five. WHEN I AM WORKING. My only other nearby option is to pay $5 a pop to swim in an overpopulated indoor pool. No thanks. (Harrumph.)

Today, two good things happened. First, I found a key that had been missing for at least six months in the pocket of my jeans (a pair I hadn't worn since sometime this winter.) Yay! Also, I won another theoretical cooking contest. This one was more of a Chopped-style challenge than an Iron Chef one. It involved red bell pepper, walnuts, and artichoke bottoms in the appetizer round, pork loin, coconut, and lima beans for the main, and sour cream, candied lychee and pretzels in the dessert round. I think all three of my recipes would be top notch if I were to actually make them. (Especially dessert!)

Goings-on

* My brother-in-law came to visit over the weekend. He prefers to go incognito. (The weather in our part of Colorado was not especially warm on Saturday, hence the hooded sweatshirt.




* I got a haircut.



* Robin spent a not inconsiderable amount of time walking on the floor this week. Yes, this is progress.

Yep, that's about it. What's new with you, internet?

Joining the 21st century

I'm not one for what you might call technological innovation. I resisted getting a cell phone until I moved to Denver in 2003 and discovered that a basic cell phone plan (including free long distance) was the same price as a land line. I've never done much with any cell phone other than make phone calls; I send and receive so few texts that we don't even have texting on our phone plan and pay for them piecemeal.I know my current phone has a camera, and I've used it twice (once to take a background photo of Loki and once to snap something in a store) and have no idea how to get the photo off my phone and onto someplace more useful. I didn't get a digital camera until Dan gave me one for Christmas in 2004 (?) For someone on the cusp of Gen X and Gen Y, I'm startlingly old-school when it comes to gadgets and gizmos and The Latest Thing. We'd probably still have the same old non-HD, non-flatscreen TV had we not gotten a fancy TV as a wedding gift.

As with technological devices, so too am I often behind the curve when it comes to web-related stuff. I never programmed my own website or learned HTML. I have Friendster, Tribe, and MySpace accounts primarily because for some time or another they were the only way to communicate with certain of my friends. I joined Facebook, finally, about a month after we got married, since it seemed everyone I knew had migrated there from previous social networking sites. And for the past couple of years I've been reading people's individual twitter feeds from their blogs or on twitter directly.

It occurred to me, the other day, that there was a lot I was missing out on by not having everything in one place. And so, internet, you can now find me and my inane drivel at Twitter, username pantalonesfuego. I have finally submitted to the dark side of the force internets.

Fantasy, reality

I am a roller derby queen.

I am in graduate school.

I am someone's mother.

I am living in California.

I have an awesome job.

I have a renewed passport and a fabulous trip planned.

I am blonde and it looks good on me.

I'm a redhead and it looks good on me.

I have straight, white teeth and pretty skin.

I have a tattoo.

I am a size smaller.

I have a tarantula.

I have completed a marathon.

I own a house. It has an amazing yard/garden.





I have a kitty.

I have a moustache.

I have a husband who loves me very much.

I'll take it.

Snack fail

So someone has been bringing in these assorted "100 calorie packs" of snacky things like cookies and crackers to my office, and I thought that today I might sample one, just to see what all the fuss is about. I've spent my 7+ hours in the gym this week and been eating mighty healthily these days, and it's Friday, so why not, right?

For the record, the 100-calorie pack of "oreo thin crisps" tastes nothing like Oreos. They taste sort of like chocolate graham crackers. And now the inside of my mouth feels funny in kind of a bad way. SO not worth the 100 calories. I mean, I'm not a huge fan of Oreos to begin with (I like the chocolate cookie part, not so much the sweetened crisco filling), but damn, yo. Those things taste like ass.

I think I'll have to make up for it when I get home by having a slice of homemade oatmeal molasses bread with butter on it.

The blahs

As you may or may not have noticed, for the three of you still reading this, I haven't been posting much. I think it's because I have the January blahs. For the past few years, we've gone on a fun trip in January. Not this year - the double whammies of Petra's illness/death and Christmas, coupled with the furlough (unpaid) days I have for work now, meant that we couldn't afford to do any of the trips we talked about.

So here I sit, in the blahs. The sky is gray. It's cold outside, not horribly cold, but not pretty and snowy either. I'm still not over my mild cold. I want to go snowshoeing, but we have to buy snowshoes. I feel as though I'm once again stuck in a rut, unable to move in any direction.

We've had friends and relatives over the last couple of nights for dinner, which has been a nice change from the usual routine of computer-staring and TV-watching. I haven't yet mustered the energy to start any new projects. At least the house got cleaned over the 4-day weekend I just had.

I think January blahs are normal; however, in recent years there's been a trip to look forward to and/or go on, and this year, nothing. We have a new little kitty, growing daily, who has helped to bring some laughter back into our house of Dead Kitty Sadness, but even that isn't enough to get me out of the doldrums. I continue to go to the gym nearly every day, trudge to and from work, and wonder when I'll feel inspired again.

Friday Faff: Because everything else is so sad

Man, the past week or two have been pretty awful on the general scale of people's inhumanity to one another. This week in particular has made my heart hurt.

So, because I don't want to focus on the negative, here's some faffiness that helped keep me from offing myself:

Wombat is walking! And I wish I could be there to see it.

Spats Turkey has teeth!

Dan made some awesome drawings and wrote exactly what I wanted to say about what happened in Maine.

Cheers/Jeers: The weekend

I'm totally stealing this from my pal JT

Cheers: I got to bake a birthday cake and pumpkin chocolate chip muffins
Cheers: The baking was for two different parties we were invited to over the weekend. Parties! I love parties. Steve's birthday was nice and low-key on Friday, and Deb's baby shower was fun. I freestyle-painted a onesie (a green dinosaur with purple spikes. Alas, I forgot to bring my camera, so no photos exist).
Cheers: People that I don't actually know about read my blog. The proof was when we walked up to the house where the baby shower was yesterday and one of the hosts greeted me with, "Hey, I read your blog!" It was the first time anything like that had remotely happened to me. In the Swim, if you're reading this, post a comment, lady! What a small world, that the friend of the person who teaches the classes I take at the gym is a blogger, reads my blog, and recognized us because sometimes I put up photos of us here. (She found me initally through the lovely Leah.)
Cheers: After a cold and crappy week, weather-wise, Colorado paid us back by a couple of exemplary fall days. They were warm and gorgeous. The one regret I have about the weekend is that we didn't get up into the mountains to see any foliage at all, but we had a lot of other things going on. Like parties!
Cheers: Chu's wax works just as well when I do it myself. Plus, we got an excuse to buy a new pot.
* * * * * * *
Jeers: The baby shower was for the person who teaches the classes I take at the gym, and today is her last class for at least 8 weeks, and I am trepidatious about who might be taking over for her! I generally only take classes from instructors I like.
Jeers: Target, while normally a place that has everything I need, did not have several things we were looking for on Saturday. Including canned pumpkin, which the grocery store did not have either. I guess there was a run on canned pumpkin all over Denver. Luckily, I still had some frozen processed pie pumpkin mush from last year in the freezer.
Jeers: Fame, the recently released version. I was so looking forward to this, even despite the presence of SYTYCD-alum Kherington Payne, who I disliked when she was on the show but was willing to keep an open mind about. I love movies that have dancing and singing and all manner of talented kids in them, but I think the movie tried too hard to straddle the balance between performance and plot, and didn't have enough of either. It didn't help that some of the actors cast as the main character kids were terrible, and what little plot there was about them didn't give me any reason to care when bad things happened or whatever. If the movie had done more performance, it might have come close to awesome. If it had focused on one year rather than trying to get in all four, that might have helped. If they'd scrapped some of the performance and gone in for a really interesting plot, that would have been good as well. But as it was, the movie was just really disappointing. And a note to Kherington Payne: Stick with dancing. You can't act your way out of a paper bag, even when you're essentially playing yourself.

The week of stuff

Big stuff and little stuff happened this week.

Big stuff:

Scarlett moved to town! She and her boyfriend arrived with the u-haul on Tuesday, just in time for a seriously spectacular smoky sunset, courtesy the fires in LA and Utah and western Colorado. Her new apartment is wicked awesome and only a half block away from us.

We went on a hike on Saturday and reached the summit, though it was only 11,700 feet and not 14K+. I keep forgetting to upload the photos.

Little stuff:

We got amazing pears and peaches at the farmer's market, and I baked some peach cupcakes (adapted from this recipe). I frosted them with browned butter icing, which is super-tasty but also very, very rich. I gave half the cupcakes to Scarlett.

Our contribution to dinner with friends on Wednesday (game night!) was chocolate chip cookies, which means I baked twice in one week.

I gave blood yesterday and got my 1-gallon pin! I know I've donated more than that over the years but have officially given blood 8 times with this particular blood bank.

We watched Milk last night on DVD and it was fantastically good. It made me wonder: had it been released in October last year instead of December, would it have had any effect on the passage of prop H8 in California?

I finished a baby blanket for the person who teaches my classes at the gym, who is now 8 months along. I'll take some photos before I give it to her next week.

Friday Faff: Not so faffy edition

Last night we had dinner with a work friend and her husband, who are amazingly like us in interests and intellect, down to the same exact tattered copy of The Chronicles of Prydain on the bookshelf. We played some Zauber Cocktail and ate homemade pizza and strawberry shortcake and played Cranium and had a generally wonderful evening.

The interesting part was that they're quite religious and completely opposite us politically.

Luckily, it didn't stop us from having a great time. But I did think it was interesting.

Of course, this isn't the first time I've been friends with someone who had very different religious and political views. Joey, for example, was Catholic and pro-life and I think I opened his eyes to the fact that someone doesn't have to be religious to be a good person.

Then there was my Christian Republican cowboy country singer travel friend, with whom I got along like peas and carrots, but with whom an actual relationship would never have worked for any number of reasons.

I find myself wishing that people who have opposing viewpoints would be willing to see the similarities between themselves and people who disagree with their viewpoints. Everything does not always have to be how one side or another is right. How about how both sides can work together to make things better for everyone?

Let's talk about something a little less morbid, shall we?

Good things about the weekend:

Feeling more like myself again after a nasty bout of what I think was food poisoning Thursday night/Friday.

Getting our house more in order and laundry done. One nice thing about summer is hanging our clothes to dry (inside); the evaporation as the clothes dry helps keep it cool in the bedroom where the clothes are hanging.

Incredibly cute kitties that do silly things.

Watching the first two discs of Mad Men season 2.

A fantastic dinner idea I had on Saturday (including a zucchini and some herbs from our garden! Post with recipe to come) and homemade sushi on Sunday, with oodles left over.

Green tea ice cream.

Watching an episode of 16 and Pregnant that actually made me feel better about the future of our nation's youth, instead of a mixture of horror and fascination like I usually do. Finally, 2 teenagers who are mature and responsible and do the RIGHT THING for their kid, despite a serious dearth of support from their respective toolish parents.

A trip to the farm in Brighton just to see what they had and a trip to the Asian market to procure the sushi supplies, amongst other things.

Sitting in a cool movie theater on a hot day. Harry Potter 6 wasn't as good as I hoped it would be, and the lights came on halfway through the movie (and stayed on about 10 minutes, which sucked because we were right underneath one set). We mentioned it to a manager after the movie was over and got free passes to any other movie! Sometimes it pays to speak up.

It was a weekend that seemed like nothing got done, but looking back on this list, a lot happened in those couple of days. We didn't do any hiking (we'd originally planned to hike a 14er but there was no way I was up for that so soon after Thursday night/Friday), but we hung out with each other and went to the movies and ran errands and cleaned our house. Those sorts of weekends aren't all bad.

Friday faff*, good news edition

1. My new (to me) camera appears to function exactly as the old one did. I'm a little suspicious about how much it was used by the previous owner (I used mine a LOT and it wasn't as scratched up as my "new" one) but it works so that's good.

2. After months of work, I'm finally starting to feel a difference in how my clothes fit. I still have a ways go go and plans for how to get to where I want to be before Operation New Stryker starts, but I'm feeling less hopeless about it all now.

3. Thank you all for such wonderful feedback about the flowers I did this past weekend! I was really happy with how they turned out and the process gave me a much better idea of what I'm capable of doing, of the amount of time and effort it takes to do certain things, and helped narrow my focus a bit. I have to admit I'm still pretty proud of the accomplishment.

4. A coworker and friend had her thyroid levels checked a couple of weeks ago, only to find out that she had some suspicious nodules. They couldn't tell much from an ultrasound so she had a needle biopsy earlier this week and just got the results - no cancer! My other friend who had thyroid cancer more than a year ago is doing fine these days, but I don't wish cancer on anyone and am so glad my coworker is going to be OK.

5. I'm going to the batting cages this weekend to get some more batting practice in (!)

6. This is the first weekend in WEEKS where we didn't have anything in particular planned - no social engagements, no trips. I think we'll probably run errands, do some house cleaning, and maybe go hiking on Sunday. I just hope the weather gets a little nicer.

*courtesy Hillary

Deaths, weddings, births, and ploofs - four life milestones

Things that are on my mind recently:

How I am far more bothered by people dying relatively young in accidents (Natasha Richardson, of course) than by people dying of old age or dying of diseases. Accidents are unpredicatable and scary, but there's not much you can do to prevent them. I do my best to prevent illness and disease, but short of encasing myself in a bubble for the rest of my life and never being able to experience the world again, I'm just going to have to chance it. I'm really sorry for her family, though.

How even people who consider themselves to be nonconformist and easy-going can get all worked up about wedding planning, especially when looking at other people's wedding porn (tm Ariel of Offbeat Bride). I confess to being this way myself to a small degree, but knowing the constraints of time, budget, and space, I never let myself get too worked up over stuff other people were doing for their different and/or unusual weddings. Ours, quite frankly, ended up being far more traditional than I expected but there were enough quirky touches to make it our own, I think. I remember posting on Hillary's blog while she was still working out the last kinks of wedding planning, trying to reassure her that honestly, nobody will notice if the flowers aren't exactly what you were hoping for. And you won't notice, either. It's hard to look back and think that reassurance from anyone who's already gone through the whole wedding rigamarole would have helped matters for me, because you don't really know until it's all over. I hope my comment way back then helped Hillary, and I hope that in the hypothetical future when I am hypothetically doing things for weddings, I'm able to impart a bit of serenity.

That I know a whole lot of people who are currently in the last stages of gestation and will be giving birth soon. (JT, holla!) Am currently working on yet another blanket for an April arrival, and will probably do a hat and booties or something for a friend due in May because I just don't think I'll want to be doing blanket knitting once it really warms up.

That we just went through the warmest, dry-est winter I can remember since I moved to Denver. We've hardly had any snow at all and it's been mostly in the 50s and 60s for all of February and March. What the hell, Colorado? Where's all my snow? I only got to see ploofs ONE TIME this year. ONE TIME ploofspotting is not enough for my necessary ploof quotient. WHERE ARE MY PLOOFS? (I do realize that having written this, the universe will hear my hue and cry and we'll get another March blizzard that dumps 2 feet of snow downtown or something.)

And tonight, we're having an out-of-town friend over for dinner who we haven't seen since New Year's Eve of - 01 to 02 I think? Should be fun!

Three breakfast day

Yesterday, I ate breakfast three times.

It was the most I did all day. My biggest accomplishment: eating not just breakfast, and not just second breakfast, but THIRD breakfast.

Granted, second breakfast was actually lunch and third was dinner, but it was all breakfast food.

Somehow the one glass of diet coke I had with dinner on Saturday night equalled me being awake past 4 AM (sometimes I can consume caffeine and have no issues, sometimes it makes me Not Sleep For Hours, and there's no way to predict which reaction I'll have. Sucks). We were scheduled to have lunch with Dan's parents on Sunday, so when I woke up at 9:30 I knew I couldn't go back to sleep. We cleaned up the kitchen from Saturday's dinner and Dan made toads-in-the-hole (basically, a piece of bread with a central hole removed and an egg cooked in the hole of the bread, all in a frying pan). It was a small breakfast, but we knew we'd be eating again in 2 hours so it was OK.

We went to lunch at a restaurant Dan and I hadn't been to in a couple of years (and we've only ever been there for dinner). I found myself lusting after some of the brunch options so went with one of those rather than a truly lunch-ish thing (what was billed as a fritata turned out to really be an omelet, but my food was pretty good and I was hungry). Plus, they had $2 mimosas and bloody marys and you can't go much wrong there.

By the time we got home, my severe lack of sleep had caught up with me and my big plans for working on projects and being productive so did not happen. Instead, I vegetated on the couch for an hour in front of a rerun of America's Next Top Model (season two, wherein Jenascia gets kicked off for being short) and then gave up trying to stay conscious entirely. I lay down to take a nap and didn't wake up until about 2 hours later when Dan came in to forcibly remove me from my pillow (he was afraid if I slept too long I wouldn't be able to sleep Sunday night) (it turns out he was right, and I didn't fall asleep 'til after 2 last night, but that's not the important thing here). We did a grocery shopping once I was functional again and Dan made what he had been craving all day for dinner: waffles from scratch, breakfast sausage, and strawberries and kiwis. I insisted we have a little bit of vegetable matter (sauteed bell pepper, mushroom, onion and zucchini) but other than that it was straight up breakfast. For the third meal of the day.

I guess "I ate breakfast three times and took a 2 hour nap" sounds like a more accomplished day than just "I took a 2 hour nap". How often can you say that? Not very often, I bet.

It's my opinion birthday balls should be held every night.

The past week or so has been filled with productivity, accomplishment, and a general getting-stuff-done attutude around these parts.

Case in point: The house is clean. It took 2 days, but it looks awesome.

Case in point: I spent Monday (had off for dead president day) doing things like culling books and working on Secret Birthday Projects in between the running in the park and the lounging on the bed and the playing with the kitties.

I am definitely feeling better. Saturday's highlight was a surprise from-scratch paella (made by Dan) accompanied by the best appetizer ever (smoked salmon, Humboldt Fog cheese and fancy herb crackers) and 2 amazing Spanish wines. I made dark chocolate mousse for dessert, making a 2/3 recipe from the Joy of Cooking and it still took us 3 days to eat it all. All of our laundry got washed, dried, folded and put away (even the throw rugs!); all of our dishes were at one point washed, dried, and put away. Spending part of Monday in the house felt good instead of oppressive.

An interesting thing has happened recently: I have reconnected with some old friends through one of those social networking sites all the kids are talking about these days. Except these aren't just old friends, they're people who at one point were like my brothers that I wasn't actually genetically related to. The younger one goes by a different first name than how I always knew him, but in his photos he and his brother look just like they did when they were kids, except they also look just like their parents. And like themselves. I might meet up with them the next time we go to California; there is something both nostalgic and immensely satisfactory to trade stories with people with whom one shared one's childhood. We were at each other's houses multiple times a week. We took baths together and had sleepovers. They were my brothers 20 years ago, and now they can be my friends.

Four overdue packages got mailed off yesterday: housewarming, thank-you, and new baby boxes are winging their way to the East Coast and to California. My newest cousin baby (#4 for them) was born in January (and thankfully her name is a real one, Jenna). Here is the blanket I made for her.


(As you can see, it's significantly smaller than the one for Wombat.)

And here is the sweater that I made Dan that got finished in January. He wears it all the time, so I think he likes it. Either that or he is just trying to make me feel better for spending so much time on it!



(He was thrilled that I wanted to take a photo of him in it this morning, obviously.)
I want to share photos of Super Secret Birthday Project, but I think the recipient might see them, so they will have to wait. It's not a knitting project, but it's going to be awesome.

Speaking of birthdays, I have been invited to a 30th Birthday Ball in Southern California for Oldest Friend. I will be attending. What should I wear to a ball? Gloves? Mask? Should I actually try to find a ballgown, or wear something I already have? I'm excited about the prospect of dressing up but I'm already flying and renting a car, so don't exactly have hundreds of dollars to spend on a fancy dress. Ideas?

You can call it faff, or you can call it not so faff.

Most interesting thing I saw this week: (tie)

1. Guy on the free shuttle bus dressed in silver, painted with silver, so I figured he was one of the buskers that does the painted statue thing. As soon as the bus started moving, however, the guy witnessed and prosyletised loudly and with great gusto to the entire bus for about 10 blocks. He was impossible to ignore.

2. Last night, the release party for the magazine Dan's class has been working on all semester was held. The party was a lot of fun, particularly the part where Ooh La La presents performed. I got to see both dudes and chicks take off their clothes to music. Sweet! This burlesque group is, shall we say, a bit less than traditional (two of the acts included a woman in a straightjacket and a woman in an octopus costume).

Thing I have been thinking about most this week:

The impending arrival of Wombat, who seems to have learned that teasing can be fun (even in utero!). I intend to give him a piece of my mind when he finally arrives. Because teasing isn't nice, especially when so many people have been waiting to meet him for so long.

Cookies I intend to bake this weekend:

Rum balls courtesy Cil; mocha slice cookies courtesy Sara via Martha Stewart, also possibly some of my family's traditional cookies, including Mexican Wedding Cookies and Austrian Chocolate Balls. Now I just need to figure out what to do with them all. Who wants me to send them some cookies?

Knitting projects I am currently working on:

Too many to really name, especially since some recipients of said projects are blog readers, and there has to be some surprises left in this world. Photos forthcoming.

Number of angel tree-type gift requests we were able to fulfill this year:

six from the grocery store tree(!), one from my work (an 11 y/o girl who likes historical young adult fiction! I got her Anne of Green Gables, The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, and The Witch of Blackbird Pond).


I would also like to thank Hillary for letting me totally steal the faff thing. She has pretty hair and cute doggies. And faff is such an appropriate word!