Tuesday kid lit

Note: though my bachelor's thesis was about children's literature, my major was actually human development with an emphasis on brain and language development.

Anyhow, I've loved children's and young adult literature since I started reading at about age 3. The story goes that I taught myself to read with simple picture books that had "listen along and when the chime rings, turn the page" cassettes to go with them. I know I had Lady and the Tramp, Pinocchio, and Bambi, and may have had some others as well. I still remember the theme music for the Lady and the Tramp and Bambi taped stories (it's my useless superpower, remembering tunes and jingles and commercials from childhood). I started reading chapter books at about age 4 or 5 and was reading adult stuff by 8 or 9.

But I loved kids' books meant for a variety of ages. I still do, and have quite a substantial collection of YA, picture books, and anthologies of Dr. Seuss, Beatrix Potter, and Mother Goose. Every time we go into a used bookstore I check out their kids' section and sometimes find things that I loved as a kid. I've always been one to reread books I liked and read over and over books I loved, and have enjoyed the ability to get YA and teen lit at the library, which can be difficult to find in the used bookstore near our house. That way I can reread stuff I remember liking and decide if I like it enough (still) to buy it if I find it.

Three suggestions for YA/teen lit for the 3 of you that read my blog and don't live with me follow. These are three of my favorites and I've just reread two of them within the last couple of weeks.

1. Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes by Chris Crutcher. Published when I was in high school (1993), I found it at my local library my freshman year and just loved it to pieces. So many books written for teen/YA have a female protagonist ("because boys don't read!") that this brought a fresh and interesting perspective. I loved the relationship between the main characters and the dialogue was realistic for the ages of the characters. I always wished my high school had offered the kind of class the characters in this book get to take, a current events/issues/debate type class where we all got to talk about the issues about which we felt strongly. This book also rides on the tail end of the "issues" trend in kid/YA lit that began in the '70s, as it brings up things that happen in real families (abuse, divorce, image issues (the two main characters are badly scarred and overweight, respectively)etc.) without treating them as though they are the End of the World (as was big in the '70s).

2. The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin. I've read this book at least 5 times now (and now I own it, yay!) and the funny bits are still funny, the characters are still interesting, and the puzzle/mystery is still well-crafted. It was one of my most favorite books when I was 10ish and remains in my top 10 for YA lit. I love reading books in which the authors respect the intelligence of the reader, particularly when the book is aimed at a young audience. You know it's a good book when an adult can enjoy it as much as a kid.

3. Rats Saw God by Rob Thomas. I just found this at the library on Sunday. Published in 1996, I read it some time in college when my mom recommended it to me (she teaches 8th grade English). I'd only read it the once and couldn't really remember much of the plot, so reading it this weekend was like reading it for the first time. And it was good! Funny, believable (though a little dated with the references - who was still into Mudhoney in 1996, dude?), respectful of the intelligence of the reader - everything I like about a YA/teen lit novel. Every teenaged protagonist has problems - but then every teenager has problems, because isn't that what being a teenager is kind of about? Anyhow, two thumbs up.

And that's my Tuesday YA Lit recommendations. I'm looking forward to getting the second book in Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials series once the library calls me to tell me it's in. Maybe I'll review that series next week.

Virtual MLE

Since everyone's doing it, here's the virtual me. Except my feet are WAAAY bigger than the feet in this picture. And, I have a nose. I couldn't find a picture of two kitties that looked like Loki and Petra, so here's a very fat version of Loki. He's much leaner than this, but this is his coloring.

Oh, and I wanted cargo pants in a khaki green color (my China pants!) but that wasn't an option. I have no idea why I'm forced to make a thumbs up if I want Loki in the picture.

You can make your own here.

Tales from the Road

I guess that because I didn't drive for nearly 10 years that I could have been driving that the universe has decided to make it up to me by putting me in all kinds of stressful driving situations that most people get to have all spread out. Last fall I had to drive over Vail Pass in a blizzard in a honda civic hybrid with no snow tires. Two weeks ago I got rear-ended. Yesterday I had to drive down to the economically depressed hot flat plains southeast part of the state (3.5 hours each way. Woo.) and on my way home I got stuck in the worst weather I've ever even been in a car for, let alone driven in - super high winds, lightning, thunder, sideways giant rain, hail, the Little Prius getting blown around and my visibility at about 4-5 feet. I was driving in a 65 zone on a two-lane highway (one lane in each direction, divided by the dashed white line) and going 25-30 and navigating by watching the white line at the side of the road.

It took 45 minutes to go 19 miles because of the standing water, hydroplaning, low visibility, getting blown around, etc. I thought I was going to die. Then, 10 minutes after I got out of the worst of it, I heard on the radio "Oh, this just in. Severe weather warning for xyz county and these areas" and I was like "It would have been NICE TO HEAR ABOUT IT BEFORE I DROVE THROUGH IT, YOU POO HEADS."

I thought one near-death experience should have been enough for one day (on the way there, I almost got forced off the road by a semi that unexpectedly swerved into my lane - and who would have won THAT pissing contest? not the Little Prius, that's for sure). I guess I should just count on having every other possible stressful situation happen in the next year or two, since I'm obviously making up for lost time.

On the way back after I could see again I stopped for gas and found this new product that I now lurve and cannot eat because it has way too many calories (York peppermint patty cookies!) and I sped up the back way home. It's a little lonely out on the eastern prairie but it's pretty after a rainstorm and you sure can drive fast when there's no other cars for 30 minutes at a stretch. Next time I'll make sure they give me a car that has a CD player because, as Hulk posted about recently, the radio sux.

a good excuse to eat cookies

You know that I am nuts when the most exciting thing that happens to me recently is that at my chiropractor appointment on Friday I get the go-ahead to work out (on the elliptical, low resistance, take it easy!) and I skip gleefully into the gym on Monday, grin the entire 35 minutes, and wish I could do more.

(The botanical gardens, btw, were beautiful, and I think I got some really good pictures. Now it's just a matter of figuring out how to get them online. Dan's computer is too old/slow and the wireless card doesn't work, and my work computer (on which we do our at-home internetting, as it's a laptop and I bring it home most nights) is firewalled up the wazoo and won't accept any new software installation (that's needed for the pictures to get transferred onto my computer). We're still working on a solution.)

Today I got up from my dark grey cube in the dungeon and walked out to see whether the outside world still exists (it does) when I noticed that there was a blood drive going on. An hour, several personal but necessary questions, and a great phlebotomist later, I have 9 of the normal 10 pints of blood, and I was given juice and cookies. I thought I'd be going to the gym today but decided that giving blood was more important - and the one question I had (can I donate since I went to China?) was answered (yes, because I didn't go out into the sticks). I also found out that I might have issues donating after we go to Guatemala/Costa Rica this winter (malaria!). It's been three years since I donated, mostly because there was never a convenient blood drive to work (I guess this particular blood center will be coming on a regular basis now), and I feel much better about myself. My health (and therefore blood) is good, I'm A positive (most common blood type, very useful), and someone in a hospital somewhere maybe won't die because the phlebotomist sucked 1/10 of my blood out of me today.

And I don't feel a bit guilty about eating a cookie and not going to the gym.

With Silver Bells and Cockle Shells

"Mary, Mary, quite contrary
How does your garden grow?"
"With silver bells and cockle shells
And pretty maids all in a row."

Yes, in case you're wondering, I am feeling better. I got to the chiropractor on Friday, and apart from him being a) cute, in a "10 years or more older than I am, married, with kids" kind of way, and b) extraordinarily knowledgable and willing to inform about the musculoskeletal system, he was also a very good chiropractor. He had the right kind of hands. I go back on Monday, since I've been prescribed 6 visits, and he said that for whiplash I got off pretty easy. This I knew. I felt sore after the visit (but I knew I would, since I always do after an adjustment), but felt much more mobile. I was very careful not to lift anything heavy or do anything hardcore to pull my spine back out of alignment last night while finally planting our awesome garden out front.

That's right! We have a garden! It has flowers and plants and bushes and rocks. (The bushes are still very small, of course) It looks kind of naked, because the plants are smallish, but they will get bigger with time, and meanwhile we filled in some of the space with rocks that our landlords brought down from their cabin.

The fun part about planting the garden was deciding where everything was going to go. A lot of it is experimental, since we have no idea what will live through the winter (despite all of the plants being a) perennials, and b) supposedly frost-hardy). Some of the plants are groundcovers that we are hoping will spread and grow between the other plants. There are a couple of ornamental sages and some blanket flowers (see above) and some coreopsis:


So now we have a pretty garden out front between the sidewalk and the street, and we have a veggie garden with tomatoes, marigolds, peppers and herbs (basil, thyme, mint, oregano), and a zuchini plant in a space all its own. And then this morning I planted the annuals in our old window planters and assorted pots (coleus, impatiens, a fern that likes shade) and put the begonias in pretty pots (one is a peach color, and one is scarlet, because if I'm going to have a begonia I must have a scarlet one)



My rosemary is in a big pot; the yard looks so much better, and I can actually move. Life is good.

Many Happy Returns

To QIR, aka MG,

Hippo Bird Day!

Love and *assgrabs*,
mle

T-minus 2 months and counting

In two months I will attend my 10-year high school reunion. Back in February I made a commitment to myself that I would whittle myself down to HOTT, as HOTT as I could get in that time span. I go to the gym at least 4 days a week, lift weights at least one of those days (usually 2), and try to get some form of cardiovascular exercise on the weekends.

Then on Friday when that car hit me I got kind of scared. Especially now that I'm a few days in to the whole "whiplash" fun and games, I'm totally scared that I'm going to lose all the progress I'd made toward HOTT. Looking in the mirror right now, I know I look good. But not only do I want to maintain said progress, I want to look BETTER. Lose a little more fat, tone up a little bit more. And now I don't know what kind of cardio I can do (besides gentle walking, which WON'T get my heart rate up - I've got to really be sweating to get the heart rate up at this point because I'm in really good shape) to maintain this svelte me and even get me a little smaller.

I've been doing most of the work thus far by working out a lot. I watch what I eat to some extent but I'm not starving myself by any stretch of the imagination. My plan all along was to mostly do this with exercise and then cut my calories some for the last six weeks before the reunion, so when I go shopping for that dress I will really like what I see in the mirror. Now - I don't know. I don't want back/neck problems for the rest of my life, like my mom has since the time she was rear-ended in her early twenties. So I know I need to take it easy. But I know how soon I can backslide and put five pounds back on. It'll happen in a week if I'm not exercising enough. Or if I don't cut 500 calories a day from what I'm eating now (go down to about 1200-1300 from 1700-1800). And as the Hulk can tell any of you, Unfed MLE is one of the least good kinds of MLEs there is.

I'm also scared that if I do start cutting calories drastically, I'll slide back into my old pal the borderline eating disorder. That form of control is so powerful, so tempting. I find myself slipping into it some days without really noticing - it's 12:30 and I'm hungry, so I say I'll go another hour before I go home and eat lunch. And then I don't eat 'til 2:30 or 3. Just to have an hour or so of good, punishing hunger. With my blood sugar issues, I *know* that isn't good. Or I'll go to the gym at 1:30 to miss the lunch crowd and not eat anything until 3 when I'm finished working out.

The biggest thing about the disordered eating is that for me, the negative consequences never got drastic enough to outweigh what I saw were the benefits - I got thinner and thinner, and because I was swimming for hours every day I was cut and lean. My family basically told me I *HAD* to stop starving myself because they didn't like the bitch I'd become (honestly, neither did I, much). But I never got to the point of looking anorexic; never got bony or grew weird hair, and since it was summer I wasn't cold at all. Rationally, I can look back and see how unhealthy I was, especially since my personality changed. But there is a power in hunger, a power in making your body conform to the look you want it to have. A power in lean muscle defined because of a lack of body fat. To know the pull of that power, all you have to do is look on TV, at a movie, at the trash celebrity magazines. The people who are powerful in our celebrity-obsessed culture are the people who look like that.

I'm already itching to go to the gym, even though I can hardly even move my neck. My mom has spent much of her life battling a weight problem while having back and neck issues, and it's been really difficult for her. The weight I gained from that BCP two years ago is finally mostly gone and I never want it to come back. But the only ways I know to do that are to exercise vigorously on a regular basis (as I've been doing) or eat a lot less. But I also need to heal, and I don't know how well that jives with the goal that I've been working toward since February.

You must whip it. Whip it good.

See, the thing about this weekend is that since I had the state car (The Little Prius that Could) we were supposed to run all these errands, including buying a bunch of plants for the front yard, and then we were supposed to spend Sunday planting stuff and making the yard all pretty. It was even cooler on Sunday than it had been in two weeks or so. Conditions were all perfect for our purposes. However, I got rear-ended in the state car driving back from Grand Junction on Friday afternoon.

From what I understand, whiplash is a sprain or strain, just in your neck/shoulders/back. I think my problem was that since my neck was already bothering me for a few days before I got rear-ended (and the driving four hours to GJ and back in two days certainly didn't help), the whole getting hit from behind thing just made it worse. Saturday I felt OK, like my neck was OK and getting better. Sunday morning I woke up and literally Could Not Move. I had to have the Hulk put his hand behind my neck so I could sit up, because I had suddenly reverted to infancy and couldn't hold my own damn head up. Man, it hurt like a BITCH.

After heating and icing and hot showering and taking Aleve and valerian (a muscle relaxer) all day, I figured I'd get some pain relief soon. But I didn't. It didn't work. We did run a few errands in the car yesterday until my neck just couldn't take it anymore, and then we came home and I sulked. It was Supposed to be Planting Day! Our yard was going to look so pretty! Now we've got $150 worth of plants waiting to be planted with me totally out of commission and I've got a doctor's appointment this afternoon and Advil seems to be helping a little bit more than the Aleve did, and I'm sorry to say that the glass of wine I had last night helped more than any of the OTC drugs, so maybe after I go to the doctor this afternoon I'll start getting my drink on.

YIT, I know you got whiplash last year. What helped you? Anyone else? Bueller?

Birc

I had to go back to Grand Junction today, driving (yay!) four hours through the mountains and through every kind of weather there is in Colorado (sun, wind, snow, rain, wind, fog). The little Prius that Could made it OK and I checked into the hotel that gives you a yummy calorie-filled cookie at checkin and then I went swimming in their lovely pool.

I almost never get to go swimming. My gym doesn't have a pool and there isn't a public pool within decent walking distance of work or home. My opportunities to swim come few and far between and I take advantage of them when I'm able. This pool was lovely, outdoor, slightly heated (so not too cold), and had only a few splashing screeching children.

For years I was a swim instructor and lifeguard and I worked with children as young as two and as old as fourteen, helping them grow more comfortable and more confident in the water. Basic skills for each level were outlined by my employer, but I made up the curriculum for the classes myself and I loved doing it. I loved helping kids feel like they could be safe and happy and enjoy the water, and I still remember having Fred the 5-year-old pull down my bikini top with a devilish grin on his face. He wasn't the only one, just the youngest (so he could get away with it). It was a banner day when a kid who was afraid to put his head under water finally did just that for the first time, a huge milestone when a kid who took two weeks to muster up the courage to jump in the deep end would jump into my waiting arms. Swimming and teaching kids to swim is something I'm just good at.

Today there was a young boy in the pool with his older (college aged) sister while mom looked on from the sidelines. Between laps I spoke with mom and talked to the little boy, and he gained more and more confidence in showing off and taking the risk of removing one hand from the side of the pool. "He's afraid of everything," said the boy's mom, "His hair is long because he's afraid of the hair cuttery. He's afraid of going outside sometimes. He's so sensitive."

I began to work my bag of tricks, asking him to show me what he could (read: what he was willing to) do, and demonstrating things of my own. I showed him how to make a big splash with his legs (scissor kick, legs held out behind while you hold on to the side of the pool) and he told me that he didn't like having his head under the water. He would tiptoe across the shallow end of the pool while waving his arms as if to swim. He asked my name and asked if I could swim underwater, sit on the bottom of the pool, do a somersault. All the things he wanted to do himself but was too afraid. I'd talk to him, show him how to tread water in order to keep his head aloft, his skinny arms and legs moving spastically as I held him up. All those summers came back to me, the years of kids who would come back for more lessons from me at the local pool, the milestones of the kids as they grew more confident in their skills.

"What's his name?" I asked his mom at one point during our conversation. "Birc, like the birch tree. It was a common name 1500 years ago," replied his Swedish Buddhist mom. Birc shivered as the sun went behind the clouds, skinny as only six-year-olds could be. He wasn't moving enough to generate the heat he needed to stay warm, and I encouraged him to do more and more active things while daring him to take one hand or both off the side of the wall.

"I can tell you've worked with kids like him before, kids who are scared of the water," said Birc's mom, and I told her of my history of teaching children to swim. "You have the touch," she said. "He doesn't let me show him anything."

"That's because you're his mom," I replied. So many of my kids over the years didn't want their parents showing them what to do or how to do it. But a young teacher? Sure, someone to show off for! "Emily, watch this!" called Birc as I continued my conversation with his mom and treaded water. "Watch me jump!"

Eventually it got too cold for Birc, and we all headed back into the hotel. Later, I saw the family as I left with my coworker to get some dinner. "Hi, Emily!" Birc yelled. "Hi, Birc," I called back. "Have a good dinner!" My coworker had heard about my efforts in the pool with this little boy who was afraid of everything. "He'll remember you for a long time," she said. "The little ones always do." Honestly, I only spent about 45 minutes with the little boy, but he remembered my name two hours later, and I bet he'll be asking his mom when he can go in a pool again soon. I could see it in his eyes when he saw me swimming laps and pulling myself along underwater. He wanted to be able to do those things. He just wanted someone who wasn't his mom to show him how, because if Mom hadn't told me he was "afraid of everything," I never would have guessed. He was just like half my kids taking lessons for the first time. And he had the first lesson down - he could put his face in the water and blow bubbles. One summer I spent 3 weeks with another 6-year-old before he could do the same thing. Now that kid is 16 somewhere and I bet he's an excellent swimmer. Someday, Birc will be too.

You Tube to the rescue - guinea pig!

YouTube has the guinea pig eating kidney commercial I saw at the movies the other day.

It's creepy as hell, and hilarious.

Making Babies

We went to the used bookstore this weekend at one point. I know, horrible idea, especially considering we still have about half our books in boxes as not all of our bookshelf space is assembled.

Anyhow, our neighborhood used bookstore (a dangerous place!) has a "discount" area for books that they've had in stock for a long time or have too many copies of. I found a really interesting book about reproductive technology (published in 1999 by a lawyer who specializes in laws and ethics surrounding reproductive technology) and bought it for $2. I spent most of yesterday reading it.

Holy crap! The history of reproductive technology is just insane. There are so many issues that I had never even thought of, despite my genetics/ethics class in college and despite online perusal of infertility blogs. I think it's a strange thing that many women spend years and years trying NOT to get pregnant, and then when they want to, they spend years and years TRYING to get pregnant - often taking advantage of whatever the latest reproductive techniques might be. I've always been fascinated with the subject of reproductive technology since I learned about Louise Brown, the first "test tube" baby (she's only a few months older than I am). Then in middle school I first learned of the idea of "made-to-order babies" and have been intrigued and saddened by news stories about pregnant women in comas whose partners are waiting to become single parents, etc.

I had considered myself pretty liberal about most things before reading this book, but there are some ideas at which I just plain draw the line. I'm not sure how I feel about gestating a baby to (maybe) provide life-saving tissue for an existing kid (the Ayala family, for example). I am disgusted by the supertwin families like the McCaughys that have a whole bunch of embryos transferred or whatever and end up with seven children of indeterminate future health and life quality. I know I do NOT like the idea of using the product of an aborted female fetus to provide eggs for infertile women - stem cells, OK. Gametes, not OK. Nor am I comfortable with male comatose or PVS patients having their sperm extracted without consent to be used to impregnate a current partner (or given to the parents of said patient to make a grandkid! ack!).

There are so many things we can do to manipulate the original process of making babies - many of which are enabling women all over the world to get pregnant with and have the children they want. I don't begrudge those families their children, yet sometimes I have to wonder about people's motives when (and I am trotting out a probably very stale and possibly offensive position) there are so many kids out there that need homes. Seriously. They aren't all white babies without health problems, of course, and that's what most people in this country want. And if you have the money to do it, you can purchase just about any kind of reproductive service in this country - capitalism, yay! - so why shouldn't you be able to?

Another idea that gave me a bit of pause was that, as of the writing of the book, none of the children born from IVF or "test tube babies" had ever tried to have children. Checking Wikipedia, I see that Louise Brown got married in 2004. There is no mention of her having (or trying to have) children. My google-fu doesn't seem to bring up any cases of kids concieved through IVF who have gone on to have children of their own. That doesn't mean that it hasn't happened - but don't you think there would be some sort of news article? The point is, we DON'T KNOW what will happen to these million kids as they grow up.

At some point recently there was a dateline or something on TV about special-needs foster kids that need homes. And I know that the few kids they showed on TV, mostly adolescents, were the very tip of the proverbial iceberg. It totally makes me sad when there are thousands and thousands of kids, right here in the US, that would have much better lives if adopted earlier instead of being fostered out to home after home, each day growing a little more hopeless at ever being adopted and having actual parents. But that's just my personal soapbox, and I know that for some people, having children means either giving birth to their own (despite all odds, despite the risks of things like prematurity and placenta previa and disabilities) or choosing the child's biological parents (sperm donor, egg donor) or being the child's biological parent (gestational surrogate with IVF of parents' gametes).

I've never given much thought to what I, personally, would do if I found out I was unable to have children "the old fashioned way" if my partner and I decide to do that. I guess maybe I'll cross that bridge if I ever have to come to it. But a quote in the book from the Official Rabbi of England or something really stuck with me. It was something along the lines of "We don't give thanks on the Sabbath because of G-d's creations, we give thanks that He knew when to stop." And I guess that's the thing, because there really AREN'T a lot of laws or prescedents about new reproductive technologies - it's all kind of being made up as we go along. Will we know when to stop?

Don't let the guinea pig eat YOUR kidney!

So we went to the movies last night (saw XMen 3) for the first time in, like, forever. You can read Hulk's review over at his blog. I agree with it wholeheartedly - the movie itself was OK, a pretty good action movie with a lot of special effects, but not nearly as good as the first two.

One of the reasons we don't go to the movies very often is the same reason a lot of people don't go - the annoying 20-30 minutes of ads (after the "get to the theater early!" ads) before the previews before the movie. I wish there was some way to know exactly when all the ads end and the previews begin (because I usually like the previews) so we could just skip the damn ads. However, this time, it was actually worth it to be there a few minutes before the previews started - as I saw the funniest "pre-movie" ad I've ever seen.

There's a sleeping guy, awakened to find a guinea pig on his chest. The guinea pig tells him to watch a certain show that I've never heard of on a cable channel I've never heard of instead of sleeping. The guy asks why, and the guinea pig says, "Do you want me to eat your other kidney?" and then the camera cuts to a bloody hole in the guy's abdomen. Awesome. We laughed out loud for several minutes.

It's too bad I don't have cable and I've never heard of whatever show it was, because I sure wouldn't want a calico-colored guinea pig to eat MY kidney.

Getting high

The first time I ever flew out to visit Hulk in Colorado, we went to Rocky Mountain National Park and drove up Trail Ridge Road (tops out at about 12,000 feet). Being from sea level, on the drive up Trail Ridge I got totally loopy without knowing what was going on, and felt like I was drunk (later, we went to a restaurant for dinner and I ordered a glass of wine, and I drank half of it and really WAS drunk because of the altitude. I'm not THAT cheap a date). Altitude does funny things to people, even when one lives in Denver.

On Monday, Hulk's parents kidnapped us from our yard work and drove us up to the top of Mount Evans.

Mount Evans is one of Colorado's 50+ fourteeners (that means its summit is over 14,000 feet above sea level). It's the only one with a paved road to essentially the summit. On Monday it was sunny in Denver, overcast and about 50F at 11,000 feet (the ascent to Evans) and 27F and cloudy at the top of the mountain.

Tree line on 14ers is an alien landscape. Some of the trees are thousands of years old and none of them are more than a few feet high. The trunks are twisted and gnarled, as the trees that survive that climate have to bend and bow to the whims of the wind and snow and ice.

Hulk and I have climbed/hiked 14ers before. It takes a few hours (or more) depending on which trail you take, and while you definitely feel the altitude, it's a more gradual ascent and you're also exercising, so your blood is pumping pretty good. But driving up to the summit in the car on Monday the ascent was rapid and the effects were crazy. I was soooo loopy, I made sure to keep my mouth shut so as not to say anything stupid in front of his parents. My eyes felt weird (the liquids in your eyes compress!) and I was breathing really fast (there's a lot less oxygen in the air the higher up you go) and as we got higher and higher above tree line I saw more and more marmots and pikas because the vegetation and rocks got shorter and shorter.

(Marmots, by the way, are really cool. They basically live above tree line in really exposed rocky areas and they look kind of like large guinea pigs with tails. When we were driving back down the road at one point a marmot stuck his head up out of a hole in the pavement and then ducked back down before we drove over him, like a whack-a-mole)

When we got to the top of the mountain, we all got out for about two minutes, braved the freezing wind and took really deep breaths to get all the oxygen we could, and then got back in the car and drove back down the mountain. Getting out of the car I was unsteady on my feet and a bit dizzy. It sure does feel weird to be up that high. John Denver sang about "Rocky Mountain High," and maybe it was a euphemism, but it didn't have to be. There is definitely a high to be had from summiting a 14er, weird as it may be. Plus drugs and booze don't compress the jelly in your eyes and make them feel like they are popping out, so that's a new feeling.

(After that we shivered through the coldest picnic I've ever consumed. We should probably wait to have a picnic at 11,000 feet until the middle of June.)

I'm 30,000 feet above Tupelo with the members of Stillwater and we're all about to die

Let's just say that my knees are still shaking from the awesome plane ride I just took from Denver to Grand Junction. Let's also say that it isn't my favorite activity in the world to fly over some afternoon-stormy Rocky Mountains in a 17-seater aircraft, seated in the last row so I get the most stomach-unsettling ride possible. I consider it to be a spectacular feat that I did not lose my lunch (tuna and lettuce in pita pocket, orange, handful of walnut pieces) on the descent. Because DAMN. Them was some shakin'. You know that feeling of being on a roller coaster that lasts for like, 30 seconds or a minute after you've waited in line in the hot sun for 45 minutes just to have your lunch jarred a little closer to the upper sphincter than you'd like? Well, forget paying amusement park prices. Just get yourself a ticket on a puddle-jumper aircraft and fly over the Rockies on a summer afternoon. WOOO!

The cool part of the ride was sitting next to this guy who had been a bombadeer in the Air Force in WWII and he had some pretty cool stories. Plus, while waiting for my flight, I got to hear the guy sitting next to me in the waiting area have 209384029384 cell phone conversations dealing with the aftermath of a weekend trip to Vegas (and also, having to drive his laser from Grand Junction to Albequerque after said debaucherous weekend in Vegas for his 21st birthday) and if "drive his laser" isn't the coolest euphemism for SOMETHING than I'm just losing my edge.

The best part of this whole "flying to Grand Junction" thing is that I get to go back to Denver tomorrow in the same plane at the same time - after driving windy mountain roads back from Rangely for 2.5 hours. I think maybe I just won't eat anything tomorrow.

Follow the rules

Last week, for the third year in a row, I served as a reader for a scholarship given out by my work to high school seniors. The scholarship is somewhat prestigious, though not a "full ride" by any means (I think it's $1500 a semester for 4 years), and every year an estimated 150 kids apply. It is only awarded to graduating seniors who must fit a certain academic profile, and we readers score them on several bases, including the application itself, an essay, letters of recommendation, and activities and awards.

I have learned in my three years of reading applications for this scholarship that there are vast differences in writing style and ability between high school seniors. Two of the essays I read this year totally blew me away and seemed as though they had been written by highly educated, well-written adults, not 17-year-olds (though it became obvious as I read the applications that they really WERE written by the students). All of the applications reflected kids who had obviously succeeded both academically and in the categories of service and leadership, but, as always, there were standouts and there were those who looked great "on paper" but reading between the lines one could tell that they were resume-padders, so to speak.

As a reader for this scholarship I am instructed to evaluate each application on adherence to the directions as outlined in the application, in addition to each application's content. It is so sad that every year I end up having to take away major "points" for things like having pages out of order, misspellings, and generic letters of recommendation. It's unfortunate, but it's one of the only fair ways to distinguish between so many highly qualified students. For instance, I took points away from one application because the student had a school-affiliated coach write the "community member" recommendation letter, when it clearly states that the writer of that letter needs to be unaffiliated with the school.

Applications are awarded different points to the different sections, and each one is given a total value. Each application is read by three different readers and the scores are averaged to reflect a final score. The top 85 or so got scholarships this year, and for the first time, I got a "results" email from the scholarship coordinator letting us readers know which students ended up receiving scholarships. As I read through the email, I was glad to know that my favorites all got the money - and the ones I thought were weaker or more "good on paper, no substance" kids didn't.

I also recently spent three days attending a "Grantwriting 101" workshop that I signed up for back when I thought my job was going to expand a little (unfortunately, it didn't, but there were still valuable things about the workshop). I considered ranting about how awful the workshop was in this blog right after I attended the workshop, until I realized that the things I learned could be applied to other areas of my life (Plus, I got out of work for three days and got to actually interact with people who weren't all menopausal women, so that was good. And it was a room full of do-gooders with mostly interesting jobs and causes, so that was cool, too). While I read through the scholarship applications last week and assigned point values, I thought about how much the process mirrored a grant evaluation. One of the things that the instructor harped upon was that companies and organizations that administer grants want you to follow their directions to the letter - and if you don't, you aren't likely to get the grant. Whether it's a grant or a scholarship or some other instance where you're asking someone for money, there's always a process of weeding out the good from the bad - and then weeding out the good that followed directions from the good that didn't.

For better or for worse, I have always been a rule-follower. I was the goody-two-shoes who didn't break any rules when I was a kid; I sucked up to teachers and authority figures; I've always respected my parents (for the most part) and never cursed at them or told them "I hate you!" As a child, seeing someone litter or write in a book made me mad - and I still get mad at people who break rules (like drivers who don't allow pedestrians right-of way, for instance). I am good at things like editing and proofreading and finding the little bits in the language that don't fit within the prescribed rules. Even my current job involves a lot of rules, and part of my job is to train other people how to do their jobs (run the program locally) and follow the rules of the law that allows this program to exist.

I am uncomfortable in situations where Rules are Being Broken, and there are very few laws I'll break (jaywalking notwithstanding). I have always been jealous of people with devil-may-care attitudes, who could just write in the book or drink at the river in high school or look at a printed newspaper and not want to pull out a red pen to mark it all up. Because I just can't. For better or for worse, I've always been one to follow the rules - and it has usually made my life easier.

Experiences with friends, family, and significant others has taught me that many people don't want to follow rules. They'd rather be stubborn, do things their own way, and make life much more difficult for themselves - but that's their thing. And sometimes I envy it, because deep in my heart I know I'm not a bureaucrat or a brownnoser and following the rules is the easy thing to do, so in living my life I'm sometimes taking the easy way out. I often wonder what I would have been like had I grown up in the time that my mom did. Would I have protested the war? Burned my bra? Raged against "the man"? Or would I have still been the goody two-shoes in sensible clothing, telling my peers that they should just follow the rules?

Sometimes following the rules is the only way to get something you want. Sometimes it's a lifelong pattern that makes everything easier. And sometimes it's suffocating to do everything according to what "they" say to do because it's what you're "supposed" to do. I guess the important thing is to know the difference between those times.

Dude!

I have to say that this is the awesomest awesome that ever awesomed.

KICKASS!

Third night

Last night was our third night sleeping in our new place.

The kitties are slowly settling in, though they are acting differently than I would have expected. Loki, always the alpha kitty, so sure of himself, has been slinking around and much less outgoing than usual. Petra, perpetully beta, has been playing and running and flopping over constantly on our bedroom carpet saying "Pet me! Pet me on the largest flopping rug in the world!" (Our old place is all hardwoods/tile and we had a lot of throw rugs around. Petra would flop on a throw rug to ask for pets. Now she just flops on our bedroom carpet or the other bedroom carpet).

Oh yes - we have TWO bedrooms. And there are hardwoods in the living room and dining area/entry way and clean, nice-looking linoleum in the hallway, kitchen, and bathroom - not misinstalled cracking grout-coming-out shows-all-dirt white tile. At Tarjay last night we were contemplating buying a vaccuum. It's so weird, that the idea of buying a vaccuum makes me feel more grown up than anything else I've done, kind of.

It's been so long since I moved (January of 2003, to be precise, when we moved my worldly goods from Berkeley to Denver in Hulk's late, lamented Pontiac Sunfire) that I forgot a lot of things about it. I moved approximately 10 times while I lived in Berkeley (4 of those times within the same co-op but moved rooms) and had it all down to a science. But this place that we are slowly but surely abandoning is the place I have lived in the longest since I moved out of the Ancestral Manse at age 17 to go to Cal, and I've been in there for nearly 3.5 years. Though I only had a carload of stuff when I moved in, combining my stuff with Hulk's when he moved in 6 months later - and the 3 years since then - has added up to a LOT of stuff. I have no idea where some of it came from. We've already donated about two trunkloads of clothes and STUFF and there is more STUFF to be donated before all this is done. Some of our unwanted furniture will be abandoned to the alley, to be snatched up in an hour or two by another resident of the neighborhood.

This whole process has been wonderful if only for the purpose of making us cull through our piles and boxes and closets full of STUFF, thinking hard about what's really worth moving and what we don't need/want/have room for. I used to do this every semester or every year or every 18 months when I'd move into a new place or a new room in the co-op and only moved what I wanted to keep. I had to get rid of a ton of stuff when I moved to Denver (see aforementioned limit of space in car). But nothing has made me go through the letting-go-of-stuff process since I moved here, and I think it's about time. There is some stuff I haven't used or looked at or even remembered that I had that followed me from California, and I decided that if I hadn't thought about it in years, it wasn't worth moving.

I will miss our old place, or at least some things about it. I will miss living two apartments down on the same floor as our good friend/neighbor, who is currently in Atlanta for a couple of months. I will miss the industrial toilet and the fabulous water pressure and the enormous windows that let in sun all day long.

I will not miss the tow trucks towing the idiots at 7 AM every morning who were dumb enough to park overnight in the "6 AM to 7 PM traffic lane" right outside our bedroom window. I will not miss our wee kitchen or the windows that have those stupid hand crank things or the window in the kitchen that wouldn't open at all. I will not miss the sirens and the noise of drunk people on the weekends or the person who lives above us having sex really loudly and thumpily in the middle of the night.

I will be really really glad to be all done with this whole process. We moved 25ish boxes of books and other stuff in the state car I had a week ago, and then we did 5 giant truckloads on Sunday (spent 10 hours loading the truck, driving 6 blocks, unloading the truck, driving 6 blocks, rinse repeat) and another truckload last night. Tonight we are moving the last of the furniture and "stuff" and after this it will all be donation and cleanup. And I am bone tired. Having everything in upheaval, plus the actual physical part of hauling armfulls of stuff up and down stairs for hours, is TIRING. We go to the cabin on Thursday evening and I can't WAIT to get out of the city and just be still for a couple of days. And then we will come back Sunday night, and Monday at lunch and after work I'll be back at the old place cleaning some more. It's gotta be spotless on Wednesday when I do the walkthrough with the property management company and give the keys back so I can make sure I get my whole deposit back. It's got to go to the new landpeople.

The case of the defective brain.

All my life I've had problems with my hearing. It began with a series of neverending ear infections and colds that swelled my tonsils and adenoids to amazingly large proportions when I was a baby and toddler. I started going deaf from the pressure of my adenoids on my eustachian tubes, and I couldn't breathe through my nose starting at about age 3. My mom told me that she came into the room one time when I was watching Mister Rogers with the volume at maximum level and I was sitting 2 feet away from the TV so I could read Mister Rogers' lips. My parents didn't have any health insurance when I was a kid and certainly couldn't afford to pay for a major surgery, so they saved money for a while until they realized I just couldn't wait any longer, and borrowed money from my grandparents so I could have my tonsils and adenoids removed and tubes put in to drain all the fluid that had built up. I had all that done when I was five, recovered just fine, and the tubes fell out within a year.

I had another series of ear infections when I was about 12 and swimming all day long in the summer, and again in high school. At one point I had an inner ear and a middle ear infection in the same ear! During one summer fluid built up behind one of my eardrums until it burst. Let me tell you, that was about the most painful thing I've ever experienced in my life, worse than any of the migraines or throwing-up menstrual crampsI've had. It drained for days and my eardrums to this day are pretty scarred up.

Because of all the ear issues I've spent most of my life reading lips to help me understand what people are saying - particularly men who are softspoken (I have a harder time with lower, quieter tones). I was teased mercilessly in elementary school by kids because I'd say "What?" all the time when I couldn't understand what they were saying in the crowded lunchroom. "Are you deaf?" they'd ask, and I'd say "No!" but I thought I probably kind of was. I learned to kind of put together the words I *did* hear with the sounds I *thought* I heard and figure out what people were saying from context and lip movements and stopped asking people to repeat themselves, because it was just soooo embarassing.

I had a teacher in 6th grade who had a beard and spoke in a quiet monotone in a tone I just couldn't hear very well so I missed out on a lot of what he said (from what I understand, I didn't miss much. He was a bore.). In lecture halls in college I'd always sit near the front so I could hear the professor without the distractions of the other students crumpling chip wrappers and shuffling their feet.

My college boyfriend had braces (and before that, really crooked teeth that he was embarassed by and so would cover his mouth when he spoke out of habit), and a really low-toned, quiet voice. I had to train him to face me when he was speaking and spent a good six months pulling his hand away from his mouth when he was talking so I could understand him in restaurants and on buses. One of the things I like so much about Hulk is that he has a distinctive, enunciated, loud-ish voice that I can always hear or understand. In our early long-distance relationship I kind of fell for his voice before any other part of him - because I could hear it!

For the last two years I tried to get my work to have my cube furniture (built-in, or I would have done it myself) rearranged so my back doesn't face the door. I've always startled easily, because people can sneak up on me (If I'm concentrating on something, or if the copier or fax machine or printer are making noise, footsteps get masked). It took nearly 2 years but they finally did it a couple of months ago, and I love it. Part of that process was having my hearing tested to PROVE that I needed it done. I had the hearing test a year and a half ago only to find out that my hearing is normal.

NORMAL? What? How the hell is that possible? It didn't make any sense, so I approached the audiology consultant here at work (how fortunate that I work with an audiologist, huh?) She listened to my story and gave me some information about auditory processing disorders, and I read up on them on the internets. She tested me a couple of weeks later and wrote an "official" report I could use as part of my case to get the cube rearranged. And lo and behold, in reading about it online and comparing it to my experiences growing up, and in the results of the testing, I DO have an auditory processing disorder.

What does this mean? It means that probably back when I was all going deaf from my Incredible Growing Lymph System, I missed out on a key window in brain development, and so I never made some of the pathways that should have been there. My brain is defective! It's incapable of picking out what sounds are important (attending to sounds, I think is the formal terminology) when there are a lot of sounds. So when I'm on a bus or train, in a restaurant or crowded room, where there are a lot of background noises, I have a really hard time differentiating those sounds from the important sounds (person talking, for instance). Many people consider me a good listener, and I think it's because I have to really make an effort to understand what people are saying, so I pay a lot of attention to people's faces when they talk. In reading the literature, I found that all the suggestions for accomodating kids with auditory processing disorders in classrooms I've just been doing on my own since I was 5 years old.

To sum up? I have a defective brain. And if I can I'll always watch your face when you talk because otherwise I'll never understand you. Unless you're the Hulk, because I can hear your voice better than anyone else's.

I saw dead people.

Yesterday was the day. Hulk's parents came down from Up North and we all went to see the Body Worlds 2 exhibit at the natural history museum here in Denver.

I think the best word to describe the exhibit is "Wow."

Just wow. I really didn't know what to expect, other than to see the soccer player guy like they show in all the promotional advertisements, and hoo boy, were my expectations blown out of the water. It was simply amazing. And not only did we get to see the dead people, we got to see cross sections of brains, organs, and body cavities (the grossest one was a cross section of a woman with severe constipation. Ew!). One of the interesting things was that they showed organs and organ systems in various states of disease and dysfunction. We saw normal lungs, smokers lungs (ugh), and coal miners' lungs (double ugh). We saw normal kidneys and a kidney with polycystic disease (ugh!). And we saw all kinds of cross sections with various kinds of tumors. I got a little sad when I saw the cross section of metastic melanoma (a friend died of metastic melanoma a couple of years ago, only a few weeks after being diagnosed).

The best parts were the bodies in various stages of dissection, most of which were named and put into interesting positions (soccer player, baseball player, ice skaters, ballet dancer, skateboarder, diver, gymnast). Each of these was in a different state of dissection, showing different muscles, nerves, organs, and other parts, depending on the position. Seeing the ballet dancer in an arabesque en pointe was just phenomenal. I don't have to wonder what a ballet dancer looks like on the inside anymore, or what the muscles look like as they expand and contract to hold a dancer in position. The posed bodies in different ranges of motion weren't just cool to look at. It was obvious someone had taken ages to position them just right - and they looked like works of art. They were beautiful and graceful and just amazing.

There were a couple of disturbing aspects as well. Most of the bodies had the belly buttons still attached, and the skin with eyebrows, and breasts with nipples and penises and testicles. It's one thing to look at a body with no skin and no hair that's separated somewhat into its component parts. It's another to see the parts that make us look really HUMAN still attached. Each of these bodies, each of the cross sections, each of the disembodied organs, was once a person. A breathing, thinking, feeling person who lived and loved and laughed and felt pain and cried. My brain kept doing this thing where it would switch between seeing the bodies as muscles, sinews, ligaments, bones, organs - and seeing them as once-living people. I couldn't do both at once.

The most disturbing thing to me showed a cross section of a very thin man (120 pounds at death) and an obese man (300 pounds at death, though they didn't say how tall he had been) side by side. The fat layer on the obese man was just thoroughly disgusting, especially the second cross section that was just taken from his side, that showed belly fat, a tiny bit of hip bone, a tiny bit of leg muscle, and more fat. Fat, fat fat. Ugh. I wonder how many people walked by that display with an increased desire to exercise, eat well, and not end up like that man. Because I sure did.

There was a sectioned-off area with fetuses in various states of development (all, we were assured by the signs, having died of natural causes etc. (no aborted fetuses, no sir!)) and a woman who was 5 months pregnant at death. This was both interesting and weird, especially since the woman had "smokers lungs" and had died of lung cancer (willing her body to science before she died, knowing she would die before the fetus came to term). It was definitely cool to see the difference between an 8-week embryo and a 24-week fetus - and it was kind of scary to know that there are babies born extremely prematurely that are living now at 23 and 24 weeks. How can it even be possible? They are soooo tiny and look soooo underdeveloped.

Perhaps the most amazing body was called "Exploded man." Every component part (except bones) of Exploded man was there, suspended from a wire, in the place it would be in the body - but separated from the other parts so one could see all the parts individually and how they related to the other parts. I know I'm not explaning this very well - but there were hundreds of parts, all suspended from wires, and the whole looked very much like an exploded man. There was also "drawer man" - who had various parts kind of cut and pulled out as though a drawer to allow you to see what was underneath/inside. The Hulk, his mom, and I all inspected the "orthopedic man" with all the different replacement parts - a pacemaker, artificial hip, artificial vertebrae, a metal jaw, metal pins in the legs and arms, and a titanium knee - because Hulk's dad has a titanium knee. It was really cool to see what his knee looks like on the inside.

I was very pleased to see that everyone was respectful and interested in the exhibit. Kids of all ages were in attendance and could have made lots of crude jokes and been disrespectful - but none of them were. I saw teenagers taking keen interests in the diseased organs and admiring the grace and beauty of the variously posed bodies. It was obvious that there were people who were bothered by the exhibit, or at least some of it, because they were sitting along the sides of the room, away from all the bodies and organs and cross sections, patiently waiting for their people to finish so they could leave. I understood their feelings. In a way, it was deeply disturbing to be in a room full of people flayed open for inspection, as respectful as the exhibit was.

After we finished, we went to lunch and we all ate way more than we should. And then we went for ice cream, which I almost never eat - but somehow, I wanted to. And I wanted to stand and move and feel myself alive. Later on I thought about it and realized that my feelings were probably similar to those of people who leave a funeral and then have a lot of sex - to prove life. We are alive and we move and we have all of those component parts that we saw on all those people in Body Worlds 2 - but they are all working, functioning, and living bodies with skin and hair and moles and wrinkles and stretch marks are all still more beautiful than the dead people we saw yesterday. Because we're alive, and are not in stasis for all time, kicking a soccer ball or balancing on a toe, with our bodies flayed for the world to see. The exhibit was amazingly cool, and I'd highly recommend it to anyone interested - but it left me with the feeling of wanting to move and live and eat and have sex and all those other things that those people whose bodies we so admired can never do again.

My Person

It was right around this time 5 years ago that the Hulk and I started IMing once in a while, after a thread on That Message Board about people's messenger handles. I went to Toronto for a long weekend of debauchery and he didn't even tell me until a week after we got back that he'd had a birthday while I was gone. He just didn't think it was that big a deal.

I think birthdays are big deals, and I have lots of presents for him to open when I get home from work today. I will also make him a fabulous cake and do lots of other things that I won't detail here to spare people's sensibilities. Needless to say, I think he will have a fabulous birthday.

Happy birthday DGS. I love you very much.

*VAPT*

April in Colorado = Schizophrenia

Saturday was in the 70s and sunny.

Sunday morning was in the 70s and sunny. Sunday afternoon was a bit overcast. By 5:30 there was a 20-minute long hailstorm that had hail ranging from marble-size to gumball-size. It was the biggest hail I've ever seen. And loud! It was so loud, I thought the stray ones might break the windows.

Sunday night it rained and yesterday it rained. Then the rain turned to snow. It snowed for most of the afternoon and evening and there was still snow on the rooftops, grass, and new tree leaves when I woke up this morning. It was also cold as fuck.

It's a good thing I waxed my legs Sunday afternoon, so I could wear skirts to work this week, and spent part of last week switching out all my winter stuff for summer stuff, isn't it?

Batizado!

The first time I ever saw capoeira was on the street in Berkeley, I think maybe during the "How Berkeley Can You Be" parade/day/thingy. I remember how fluid, dynamic, and fun it looked, and thought that someday I should try it. I also saw a roda at Burning Man in 2001 in the center camp one day. The images of the people playing, with dread locks, in their underwear or less, sweaty and dusty, still stand out in my mind. Capoeira is a beautiful cross between a dance, a martial art, and acrobatics combined with a rhythmic music that just speaks to me.

One of our friends is a capoeirista (a practitioner, or player, of capoeira), and we found out that her school's batizado was open to the public this weekend. To a capoerista, a batizado is a Really Big Deal. So on Saturday we headed down to the downtown YMCA (my gym), paid our $10, and spent four hours watching mestres (masters), profesores (teachers), and students play music (drums, tambourines, blocks, bells, and berimbaus), display artistry, acrobatics, cunning, skill, martial art, and dance in the roda, and totally kick ass.

The batizado (baptism) is the ceremony in which students progress from one corded belt to the next, and in which newer students get their first belt. This batizado included players from all over the US, all of whom are a part of the United Capoeira Association. Some highlights included special appearances by highly respected mestres, including the guy who basically brought capoeira to the US. The very first student to vie for her belt (after all the kickass demonstration stuff by the higher-ranking players) faced off against this guy. Here's this 8 year old girl demonstrating her knowledge of capoeira moves being tested by this 50-something or 60-something guy who's like the father of capoeira in the US. I don't know if she understood how cool that was, but I bet she will when she's older.

We saw about 30 students of all ages receive their first belts, and a varying number receive higher belts. The higher the belt, the more people tested you in the roda, and the harder it was to evade all the tricks that come with playing capoeira at higher levels. We saw some people that were really good receiving their first belt (green), and some that were still at a very basic level.

The cool thing about capoeira is that the terminology really makes sense - you play capoeira, and that's really what we saw - people smiling, laughing, having a great time. It's about discipline and control, of course, but there is also quite an emphasis on cooperation, fun, and sharing the experience with the other players - particularly the music, which involves the voice as well as instruments, and the students surrounding the roda sang along with those playing the instruments. It was also a chance for friends who live in different places to come together and get to play with one another. And it was a chance for us, the audience, to get to see some really amazing things.

One of the things that struck me at the batizado was how thin and in shape everyone was. It made me feel totally out of shape to see these thin, strong people do amazing things with their bodies. A woman (maybe late 20s?) sitting nearby me dressed to play was there with her husband, a profesore of a school in the area where I grew up in Northern California. She was nursing a 4-month old baby and looked like she'd never even been pregnant. I found out that it was her second kid; she also has a 3-year old. She told me that she had played capoeira up until a week before the 4-month-old was born and had gotten her current belt while pregnant. Now that's dedication - and she wasn't the only one there with a similar story. I saw two other players (one a teacher) who were nursing moms, and to look at them you would never have guessed that they'd even given birth. I guess it speaks to how dedicated you have to be to play capoeira, that you continue to play while pregnant and bounce right back after having your kid.

Capoeira has an interesting history and is beautiful and exciting to watch, particularly when the participants are highly skilled and moving at almost lightning speed intermixed with those typical slow, deliberate, almost impossible to do handstands and headstands and such. We both had a lot of fun watching the show. And when we have a car again I'm definitely looking into joining the same school where my friend plays capoeira.

Katee Sackhoff, you are teh hott

Can I just say how refreshing it is to see an actress on a kickass TV show who is built like ME and does not have toothpicks for limbs, no butt, and a boob job? Katee Sackhoff of Battlestar Galactica (aka Starbuck), you rock my world and you kick ass.

Seriously. If you watch the show and you see the parts where she doesn't have a lot of clothes on? She LOOKS LIKE ME. Not in the face, but in the body, with the arm/back muscles and the same girly shape I am and everything. And she is drop dead hott.

Joey

My friend Joey and I have had a long and interesting friend-history. The story starts when I was 15 and went to the sweet 16 birthday party of a wealthyish classmate (The Other Emily). She'd invited everyone in the class, all her relatives around her age, and some of their friends. At the party I met this guy who was friends with Other Emily's cousin. Since he was from another town, he only knew the cousin and only peripherally knew Other Emily. I think we started talking when he and the cousin were sucking helium from balloons and lauging like only 15 year old boys can.

The party was kind of like a dance, only with less parental supervision, and I totally danced slow with this guy. I thought he was really cute and gave him my number.

A month later he called me. I still have the piece of paper where my sister took the message with his name and phone number. He told me later that he liked both me and one of my classmates who was also at the party and it took him a month to decide which one he liked better. I think that was actually a lie, looking back on it, because he's catholic and she's mormon and she wouldn't have ever gone out with him.

Anyhow, we started "dating," if you can call hitching rides with parents to hang out and taking the bus to one another's town on the weekends dating. We talked on the phone a lot and wrote letters and I really liked him a lot. But being 15 and in two different towns with no good transportation put a strain on the relationship, and we broke up a couple of months later.

Aside: Joey had a thing for my Oldest Friend, who went to junior high with him. I didn't know that until a while after we became friends. Later, Oldest Friend went to Joey's prom with him, and this other friend of ours took him to her prom, and I took him to my senior prom, all in the same spring. I have this picture frame with the little pictures from each of the proms and the fourth rectangle of the frame says "Joey's prom dates."

After we broke up, Joey and I became friends. And I don't just mean high school hi how are ya friends, I mean really good, really close friends. We talked a lot, having long grown-up philosopical conversations about evolution and morality and I learned how to be friends with someone who had totally different ideas about the world than I did (religous! Catholic! Republican!) and he drove up and visited with me and my family in his silver 1960 crazyass van after he got his license, and we wrote letters back and forth every week or so, complete with scribbled pen drawings of a mouse named Hot Cheese. We made each other mix tapes. Joey saw me through several failed relationships and crushes, and I dealt with it when his first really serious girlfriend turned out to be a psycho hose beast and forbid him from talking with any of his female friends for like 6 months, of whom he had many. We all loved Joey; he was crazy, doing stunts on his bikes and roller blades and hotwiring a cherry picker with his friends and videotaping it. One time he told me about a napalm-making experiment. One time he told me how to ruin the paint job on a car of someone you don't like (cut letter shapes out of bologna to spell whatever you want the car to say, and put the bologna on the car in the night. By morning, when the person finds the bologna and peels it off, it will have eaten the paint underneath, and the car says "Poo head" on it or whatever. Ha!) He'd tell me about his latest insane plan or exploit like maybe the time he put a shopping cart on the train tracks or the time he was shooting paint balls at passing cars and accidently hit his parents coming home early. I'd just shake my head and laugh, because it was Joey.

We'd all go to the beach, a big group of 8 or 10 of us, in his big silver van that was always breaking down. Or we'd run around Healdsburg in the middle of the night, making teenage mischief. He helped me make a video project for school my senior year and it was one of the most fun days of my life. I'd always bring him a birthday cake on his birthday, and one time his autistic little brother ate the whole thing when we were in his bedroom working on a video.

I took him to my senior prom as my best friend, and he was, and we totally made out that night and then the next week he got back together with the psycho hose beast. And then I went to college.

Joey did visit me at college my freshman year. He loved coming to Berkeley, and we'd always find something fun going on. When I came home for breaks he was always at my house visiting with me and my family and teasing my sisters. My sophomore year, I found out that Joey had started dating my middle sister, four years younger than he was, and it totally freaked me out. I mean, he was my best friend. And he was going out with my little sister! It was too weird. Our friendship got really strained after that, and it wasn't until about a year after they broke up that we really became good friends again. I found out later that Joey was in love with Lissa but realized that he couldn't make things work with her because they were in different life stages (he was 20, she was 16), and he was Catholic and conservative and she, like me, was not. I think he pined for her for years, just like he pined for Oldest Friend.

And then I broke up with my college boyfriend, and I was home visiting, and we went to the movies and smuggled in some rum and drank a gigantic movie coke full of rum and we got so wasted and we totally made out. And we might have done more, but we were both too tired and drunk.

The last few years, since I graduated college and moved to Denver, Joey's been busy finishing school and now is working constantly to save money to go back to get another bachelor's degree and teaching credential. I've seen him a couple of times in the last 3 or 4 years when I go home and he isn't sick or working on his (still usually broken) van. The Hulk got to meet him last new year's, the friend I have been talking about since Hulk and I got together.

Two weeks ago Joey called me to say happy belated birthday and to tell me he's been putting all his old videos on DVD. Today, I got a package in the mail with the DVD of the movie we made together in high school set to the Rancid song I'd picked, plus a cd with the same songs on it as his favorite mix tape that I made him. The cover of the DVD had a drawing of Hot Cheese. It made me smile. I can't wait to get home this evening to watch the movie and listen to the tape and think about my friend Joey, who I am glad to know.

Happy Birthday Monkey!

My dearest Monkey,

May you have the most fabulous of birthdays. Three cubed has been pretty good so far for me; I hope it is for you!

*does happy Monkey birthday dance, throws confetti*

Love and hugs,
mle

Holy Flurking Schmidt!

So we've been thinking about moving for oh, say, about 6 months or so. We knew we couldn't do it in the fall (I was too busy with work and then we were going to China) and we didn't really find anything that looked interesting available in the winter. But the last couple of weeks we've begun looking in earnest, mostly at craigslist - because everything good comes from craigslist, right?

It's not like we have to move or anything. We've been in the same place since I moved to Denver over 3 years ago, and they've never raised the rent or anything, and it's only 3 blocks from my work, so it's a pretty sweet deal. But living in one place for so long has gotten me antsy and anxious for change, and there are a few things that we decided we absolutely must have in any new place. We need 2 bedrooms, a gas stove/oven, a bigger kitchen (one big enough for us both to cook in at the same time), and my number one issue - a yard we can work in (grow a garden, play in the dirt, etc.). We'd also prefer offstreet parking available, a good amount of storage space, and a washer and dryer. Our current place is pretty good for what we pay, size-wise, but it's got a tiny kitchen and a tiny bathroom and we just want a bigger place. And I hate sharing two expensive washers and two dryers with 23 other apartments.

Last week we looked at a 2-bedroom upper flat in a duplex in the neighborhood near the University of Denver - it's kind of a ways from where we live now, but it's a good neighboorhood. They wanted a lot more for the place than we really wanted to pay, and nothing much about it made us say to ourselves "Hey! This is it! This is where we want to live!" So we moved on.

Today, we went to look at the inside of a flat in a Victorian in our neighborhood. I saw the listing on Craigslist on Thursday and emailed about it. The woman told me that we could walk around the outside and that they'd show the inside of it to us this weekend. We made an appointment for this afternoon, and walked around the outside of the place on Thursday evening on our way home from the grocery store. Hulk's comment was "The inside will have to be really something for me to be truly interested" and I agreed, because I was concerned about the amount of light the place got. The apartment we're in now is on the second floor and has east and south windows, so gets lots of light. With the amount of plants we have, and for my mental health, we need light inside.

Today we got to see the inside. It has every single thing we wanted - 2 bedrooms, a washer and dryer, a big kitchen, a yard (front and back) to play in and improve, plenty of storage space, a gas stove, and offstreet parking. It's the first floor of an 1895ish Victorian and has some interesting architectural details - high ceilings, original hardwoods in the entry way and living room, hidey-hole closets, 1950s era pulls on the cabinets in the kitchen, with a huge backyard area that could use all kinds of TLC - but isn't bad as-is, either. There's plenty of room for me to grow vegetables and herbs.

It isn't as light inside as our current place. The main bedroom will certainly be a lot darker than I'd prefer (It has a big window that faces south that's five feet from the big Victorian next door), but the laundry room, kitchen, entry way, and living room will get a good amount of light. We stayed nearly two hours poking around the place, asking questions of the landlords, and meeting the upstairs tenants. As we were walking through the place, and the longer we stayed, I found myself fantasizing about what furniture could go where, and what could go on the walls, and whether there might be hardwoods under the carpet in the bedrooms.

After the first 20 minutes, I'd made up my mind - and so had Hulk. We're going to move!

The rent is a lot more than we're paying now, but they pay for all utilities except electricity. Currently, we have to pay all individual utilities, plus a share of the building utility expenses. Plus, we pay $50 a month for a parking space that is included in the rent of the new place. Ultimately, the new rent will be only $200 more a month, all those things considered. It is a few blocks east and a block north of where we live now, so my morning commute will be a 15 minute walk instead of an 8 minute walk - and Hulk will have to leave a little earlier to get to school. But it's on a much-less trafficked street, in a mostly owner-occupied block, and it's not near any liquor stores or bars or other establishments that might cause a lot of noise and foot traffic.

Man, I'm so excited to have a big change like this. I've been feeling so stagnant, and we've stayed in our current place so long out of inertia and convenience. It's time for a change. I can't wait.

Barenaked Leghair

I'm thoroughly convinced that the recent regrettable "fashion" trend of wearing a dress with jeans underneath (and not even a really short dress, which I could excuse, but a dress that perhaps could have a hemline at the knee) is because all these celebrities just don't feel like shaving their legs.

I can relate. For reasons still unexplained, I have extremely sensitive skin on my legs, to the point where I just can't shave them unless there aren't really any hairs there. It HURTS for me to shave my legs. (I tried for years and years, and got to the point where I was using a new blade every time, shaving only once a week, using expensive organic unchemically shaving lotion, having to wait two days to put lotion on my legs to avoid razor burn, and it just got to be too much). And it must be something that runs in my family, because my little sister has the same problem.

Gloriously, a few years ago I discovered something new.Instead of shaving my legs, I wax them and then shave the few hairs the wax didn't get. So instead of having 5 days of painful razor burn before my leg skin has recovered enough to be shaved again, and having more pain (and faster stubble) any time I got goose bumps, I have about an hour or two of redness and then smooth, unpainful legs. Waxing means that I get two good weeks of smooth legs before the hairs reappear unwelcome to brush against the insides of my pants. But then I have to wait another week or two for the hairs to get long enough to wax again- so I endure that time with unsightly and uncomfortable hairy legs. Luckily, my leg hair isn't that dark - it's more that I don't like the way the hairs FEEL. They poke into my pants and they poke into my legs when they touch each other and they poke into the Hulk's legs. Bleah. I wish I could afford laser hair removal or electrolysis and never have to worry about the damn legs being all hairy again.

It's an issue now because it's finally gotten warm outside and I want to wear my skirts and my shorts and not have to feel all self-conscious about my Sasquatch-like lower extremities. In a month or so my legs will be tan enough that the hairs will hardly show at all between waxing, but right now I'm at my palest, since that skin hasn't seen the sun since last October.

I might have been raised in a hippie-like fashion, and I might have neo-hippie tendencies, but I have no interest in growing out my leg hair. Bleah. The Hulk doesn't seem to care one way or another how long I let the hair on my legs get - so it's not pressure from him - it's that I just don't like that two week wait between wax jobs. If I had a million dollars, I'd kill all those damn hair follicles. And buy you a green dress (but not a real green dress, that's cruel).

Exciting news from the gym front

On Friday last week I didn't work out because my gym was installing all new cardio equipment. I was so excited to try out the new stuff (and apparently there are more new things coming, but they couldn't do it all at once).

I've now tried the elliptical without arm swinging action, the elliptical with arm swinging action, and the recumbent bike. Here are my reviews:

Elliptical without arm swinging action:
Pros: silent, higher off the ground, easy-to-read display
Cons: 2-inch-high lip around the outsides of the feet things. This is bad because it forces my feet to be in a smaller area on the feet things and my hips don't like it.
Verdict: The older ones were better (for me, anyway)

Elliptical with arm swinging action:
Pros: silent, higher off the ground, easy to read display, handles are bigger around and easier to grasp, display area is better designed to hold water, cd man, and magazines/books
Cons: The lip thing is there too, but the arm swinging ellipticals have a bit of a different motion and my hips didn't mind so much.
Verdict: New = good

Recumbent bike:
Pros: exactly like the old bikes, but with slightly cushier seats (and better pedal straps)
Cons: None
Verdict: Slightly improved version over the old ones

There are also new treadmills, regular stationary bikes (with cushy seats!), and rowing machines, and the gym is supposed to get new stair climbers (that I never use, because I hate stair climbers) and some kind of crazy cardio step/treadmill machine for which they had a prototype 6 months ago and I actually liked it. I'm looking forward to those.

In other news, my fitlinxx thingy emailed me last week and told me that in March I lifted 178,800 pounds/22.3 African Elephants and I burned 14,771 calories or 40.4 ice cream sundaes. So I suppose that's pretty good. April hasn't been as productive as March, but now that it's getting warmer my appetite has diminished significantly and I'm naturally eating less, so I don't feel the need to kill myself in the gym.

Did you hear that, QIR? I'm not killing myself in the gym this month!

This is why everyone in America is fat.

Today, I almost got hit by two different cars in the same crosswalk, one after another.

It was double plus unfun. For whatever reason, drivers driving through that particular intersection tend to be exceedingly oblivious to pedestrians in that particular crosswalk - and it's only drivers turning left into the crosswalk (it's an intersection of two one-way streets). I hate crossing that intersection and I have to do it twice every day on my way to and from work - and in the last 3 years I can't even count how many times someone has come *this close* to hitting me, hitting another pedestrian, hitting a dog, etc. I am RIGHT IN FRONT OF PEOPLE who are turning left, and I MAKE EYE CONTACT, so I know they see me, and they STILL turn and almost hit me sometimes. One time I was across the street and I saw someone get hit in this intersection, and he flew like 20 feet. I can't imagine how wonderful it felt to be that guy. I had my phone out immediately to call 911 but there happened to be a police officer right there to take care of it.

This isn't the only superdangerous intersection in Denver, or even in downtown Denver. There's one intersection where there's a protected left turn AT THE SAME TIME AS the walk signal, so the drivers who are trying to turn left get really pissy and honk and swear at you as you try to cross the street while they're trying to turn left. I'm not even counting the intersection where the Hulk got hit by a truck turning right into the crosswalk while he was walking - luckily, the truck was at a dead stop and accelerating, so the driver didn't have time to be going very fast before he hit him. Though from what I could tell, being hit by a truck at any speed isn't a particularly pleasant experience.

I've been a pedestrian for far, far longer than I've been a driver (only had my license for just over a year and a half now, and yes, it was nearly 10 years later than most people get theirs). I've seen drivers do so many shitty things to pedestrians and bicyclists. One of the worst was when this big semi pulled all the way through the crosswalk before stopping and a whole bunch of people who were trying to cross the street had to walk out into traffic they couldn't even see coming because the semi was in the way, including a woman with a baby stroller.

I think that people spend too much time in their cars, in their own little worlds inside those metal boxes. Those metal boxes get you from point a to point b, sure, but many people spend more time in their cars than they do with their children or loved ones in a given day. Americans seem to have this great love affair with their cars, one that completely ignores all others who might be trying to use the same road. I almost got hit a couple of months ago by someone hauling ass through one of the alleys to a street and if I hadn't heard him (like, if I'd had headphones on or been deaf or something) I wouldn't have known he was going to hurtle across the sidewalk right in front of me and into the street at a much higher-than-safe speed. And what if I had been walking a dog or pushing a stroller?

Drivers drive along in their own little worlds. It's way too easy to get used to only paying attention to what other cars are doing, and that only sometimes, and completely ignore things like traffic laws that are IN FAVOR of pedestrians. Pedestrians are not surrounded by metal death boxes; therefore, in pretty much all circumstances, they have the right-of-way. But do people actually LOOK for pedestrians coming the other way before they pull out in the direction they want to go? What ever happened to looking left, right, left, or whatever it was? I think people forget; it's too easy to forget what it's like to walk places if you never walk anywhere.

If I were queen of the world, every 5 years or so I would make everyone who wants a driver's license have to go without a car for a week. Maybe that would make people actually realize that hey, the roads and sidewalks are used by walkers, runners, bicycles, people with babies, people with small children, people with pets, skateboarders, roller bladers - you name it. And none of these people have metal death cages around them. Plus, it wouldn't hurt people to get some damn exercise - and maybe people would be less likely to design suburban areas to be so unfriendly to pedestrians. Last week we were walking through a neighborhood and came upon a 6-block stretch that didn't even have a sidewalk on one side of the street - and that was in urban Denver! I've been through many a suburb where there wasn't a sidewalk on either side, so you either walked in the road or you drove.

If you are reading this, and you drive a car - at all, ever - think about this the next time you are driving that car. Are you paying attention to all the people who are using the roads and sidewalks? Or just the other cars? How badly would you feel if you turned right without looking both ways and hit someone in the crosswalk? How much more badly would you feel if you hit a dog on a leash or a baby in a stroller? Driving your car is awesome, and lets you do all kinds of shit, but, as Uncle Ben (of Spiderman fame) would say, with great power comes great responsibility. Don't be that asshole. In a pedestrian vs car scenario, car always wins - even if driver of car loses. Taking that extra few seconds to let a pedestrian cross the street keeps everyone that much safer and happier, and you can make up that extra few seconds by, like, running the next light when it's yellow or something.

Why my sister will never be a supermodel

That skunk post got me thinking about my upbringing and the area where we grew up and stuff. It wasn't really a farm or anything; just a cabin with a fence around the yard in the middle of someone's cattle ranch (beef, not milk). I ran around barefoot and picked figs, blackberries, oranges, and apples from our neighbor's orchard and the wild bushes that grew everywhere. We had a huge garden (tomatoes, strawberries, peppers, etc.) with an apricot and a walnut tree that both produced massive amounts of fruit.

We had chickens for a while but they got picked off by coyotes and possums one by one until the only one we had left had learned to flap up into a tree to roost at night. My favorite chick was named Lucky, but he grew up to be a mean rooster. We had goats before I was born but the male goat (Vinnie) pinned my very pregnant mom against a fence when she was home alone and my mom got so freaked out (because if you were 8 months pregnant and a big billy goat pinned you against a fence with his horns, wouldn't you be?) that they got rid of him. There was a forest nearby and a field full of cow patties where I rode my bike and a hill that you could climb and a tire swing and a rope swing and a jungle gym and a really awesome view.

Only one of our neighbors was within walking distance. He was flamingly gay and used to mow his orchard bare-assed nekkid except for big steel-toed boots.

This one time, we had a bunch of strawberries that my mom wanted to give to another of the neighbors, so we hopped in the car and drove down the road to their house. I think I was six and my sister was 3ish. While my mom visited with the neighbor, my sister and I played outside with their dogs.

One of the dogs' favorite games was fetch, but did they like to fetch regular dog toys? No, they liked to fetch cow bones. So I was throwing these big heavy cow leg bones for one of the dogs and my arm started to get tired. During one throw the bone slipped out of my hand and fell behind my back..

...smack into my little sister's forehead, who happened to be standing Right Behind me and I didn't even know it. She started screaming, and my mom ran out of the house and started screaming, and they brought my sister into the house and wiped up her face and it was a really bad cut. So they had to drive down the mountain and all the way to Healdsburg to the emergency room because of course it was a Sunday and the pediatrician's office wasn't open. I was so scared that I had killed my sister. It was a total accident! When she came home she had a line of stitches on her forehead and a rubber exam glove blown up like a balloon with a smiley face drawn on it, and she'd totally gotten an ice cream cone (I could tell from the drips all over her shirt). I was so jealous.

It turned out that her stitches SHOULD have been done by a plastic surgeon instead of an intern, because when her stitches came out she had a big scar that my mom covered for years with bangs. The scar is still there, though it's faded over the last 20 years.

Now, my sister is beautiful. Drop-dead, totally gorgeous, with perfect white straight teeth (and she never needed braces), clear, glowy skin, lustrous hair, great bone structure in her face, and a thin frame with good muscle tone. If I hadn't given her a big-ole scar (and, I suppose, if she were 5'10 instead of 5'4) she totally could have been a model. She's never held the scar against me, but I've always wondered whether she hates me for giving her the one flaw on her perfect face.

My transformation is nearly complete

My boyfriend is a big nerd. OK, we all know this. His nerdliness manifests in things like gaming, science fiction/fantasy, and comic books. I'm already a scifi/fantasy nerd, but before I met him I wasn't particularly interested in gaming or comics.

He doesn't game so much anymore, but when he was doing it regularly I did try it out a couple of times (wasn't really into it). I think my experiences were clouded by the circumstances, and had there been a better game master, using a better system, I might have been more interested. So I suppose there's still time. We both like playing board-type games, and QIR has turned us on to several outside of the milton bradley/parker brothers classics; we're fans of several of the Rio Bravo games like Carcasonne, San Juan, and Settlers of Catan.

But it still took me a while to warm up to the idea of comics/comic books as a storytelling medium. I'm so much more of a verbal person than a visual one when it comes to stories, and I've tended to get impatient when reading the few comic books I'd read before we met. But drawing and reading comics are two really important things to him, and over the years I've slowly grown used to the idea of storytelling through primarily visual means. I think I really started to warm up to it when he was working on this comic that didn't have any words in it at all - and it was really good, and I couldn't wait to see the next page.

Anyhow, over the last several months I've read a comic rendering of George RR Martin's short story "The Hedge Knight," I've read Audrey Nieffeneger's new work without words (The Three Incestuous Sisters), and I've worked my way through Jeff Smith's entire Bone series. Last fall, I read Craig Thompson's Carnet de Voyage over a couple of weeks while eating my morning cereal.

While we were in California, His Nerdliness found a used copy of Craig Thompson's "Blankets" and got all excited about it (though couldn't understand why someone would sell it). He told me about how much he thought I'd like it. It's been sitting in our apartment for over a week now. Last night I picked it up, just to see what all the fuss was about, and except for when I was making and eating dinner (and watching The Aristocrats on DVD - my favorite joke teller was the mime, though I thought the guy who was telling the joke to his toddler that wasn't Andy Richter was really funny, too, and most of them made me laugh at least once), I didn't put it down. I read all 500+ pages in just a couple of hours, and it was BEAUTIFUL. Absolutely stunning. It's basically an autobiography including parts from his childhood and adolescence, and his experience of his first relationship. I loved how he was able to convey the emotions of his childhood and teenage self primarily in his artwork. It reminded me of things from my teenage years, and the character of himself reminded me of one of my high school pen pals. Feelings and emotions from some of my own high school experiences came back to me and made the experience of the book that much richer.

To sum up: "Blankets" by Craig Thompson? Good. Read it. Also, I should probably go out and buy myself a D20 or two, because if the comic books have gotten to me, it's only a matter of time before I'm a half-elf warrior with a +5 in shape shifting ability or something.

The skunk: A tale of woe, with comeuppance.

I was just reading Amalah's blog about the scary geese and that got me to thinking about various scary animal stories. Growing up in the middle of nowhere like I did on a cattle ranch meant that I had a lot of close encounters with a variety of wildlife during my formative years. I remember being stung on the neck by a wasp at age 3. I was chased by cows more than a few times; I stepped on bees at least 5 times (it'll happen when you walk everywhere outside barefoot, and yes, my parents let me walk barefoot everywhere. It was the country in the middle of nowhere!) There was a rattlesnake in our house once and once there was some kind of snake in the washing machine. I had a tick embed in my neck from which I still have a scar. Probably the most unpleasant wildlife experience for me personally was when my college boyfriend and I drove out to Lake Sonoma and hiked into a secluded area and totally did it on the ground and then we got back in the car to drive home, and I felt a really sharp pain in my boob. I scratched it. It happened again. I said "What the hell IS that?" and lifted up my shirt only to find that a tick was trying to burrow into soft boob flesh. I screamed a little and grabbed the tick and threw it out the window.

But that's nothing compared to what happened to my mom. See, my mom has never been one for running, and she's prone to ankle injuries. One time she had sprained her ankle a little so it was swollen, and she was wearing flip flops to incorporate the ace bandage. It was summer time. This skunk had been coming into the yard and eating dog food, and my mom wasn't very happy about it, so she put some dog food in a big rubbermaid trash can on its side and propped the lid against it with just a small amount of space for a skunk to squeeze through. Sure enough, she went outside at noon one day and the skunk was in the can, eating the dog food.

(You might guess at this point that a skunk looking for food at noon is a somewhat unusual occurence, since skunks are primarily nocturnal, and your guess would be right because it's not normal for a skunk to be wandering around in broad daylight, particularly where there are also people. It's indicative of a diseased animal, particularly one with rabies.)

My mom put the lid on the can, turned it right side up, made us go in the house, and started hauling it out of the yard and across the field that was in front of our house. On the other side of the field were some trees, and my mom figured that that was where the skunk lived. So she hauled that thing about a quarter of a mile wearing flip flops with a sprained ankle, set the can on the ground and took the lid off.

Was the skunk scared? Did it run into the forest? No, of course not. It turned around and charged my mom.

My sister and I were watching this whole thing out the window, and we started to laugh.

My mom got frightened. as you do when you're charged by a skunk, and started to run away, with a sprained ankle, wearing flip flops. Here is my adult-sized mom being chased by this little black skunk across the field, and she's screeching and totally freaked out and sort of half-limping because of the ankle thing. My sister and I are laughing hysterically. My mom makes it into the yard and into the house and slams the door, and then she yells at us for laughing at her.

The skunk takes his sweet time wandering around the yard, looking for more dog food.

The next day my mom determines it's OK for us to go out in the yard because we haven't seen the skunk all morning. We play as usual and my mom runs a load of laundry. A while later she puts it in the dryer and we leave the house to run some errands.

When we come home, my mom goes out to get the laundry and notices a really awful smell. Like, really, really awful, the smell of burned hair and charred meat and just acrid odor. It's a nasty smell. When my dad gets home, my mom charges him with determining and getting rid of the source of the smell that's coming from the greenhouse where the washer and dryer are. My dad searches around for a while and finally finds the source of the foul odor. Mister skunk had decided to crawl into the exhaust pipe for the dryer, and either he was taking a nap or he was stuck, and my mom had run a load of clothes through while he was in the pipe and cooked him.

It took a few weeks before the smell was completely gone.