dynagirl

I’m sitting here at four minutes past midnight (on a FRiDAY; god, I am SUCH A FUCKING ROCKSTAR AND YOU KNOW IT), weaving in ends and doing miscellaneous finishing business on a baby sweater for a friend, and meanwhile, catching up with the TiVo — and I see now, why, as a child, despite being very much into musicals, I was fucking terrified of The Wiz.

BECAUSE IT’S FUCKING TERRIFYING.

omgwtfbbq?! This is one fucked. up. movie.
And I’m SO buying the soundtrack tomorrow.

*probably, then also on late night televison, under a misguided babysitter. This so explains both my fascination with Nipsy Russell and my fear of Big City Subway Turnstiles. AND WIERD SUBWAY MONSTERS AND THEIR CRACKHEAD MASTERS. (And crack. And tile.) No. You don’t ever want to be in the playground of my mind.

**although the fact that Toto is a miniature schnauzer makes me really happy… and also fits right into the 70s trippy milieu ( we had a schnauzer, too; albeit better groomed than this one ), as well as the linoleum yellow brick road that looks like the vinyl uplholstery on the kitchen chairs in my grandmother’s house.

For the last three nights, there’s been something going on that’s like Al Pacino is rioting with knives in my hip joint. SCIATICA! SCIATICA! Shit! I wake up at 2am to roll over, and can’t move for the pain. Six aspirin (stragetically placed on the nightstand) and a half hour later, I can sort of tease myself over onto my side, then burst into tears. Six aspirin taken forty-five minutes before I have to get up, and I can gimp into the shower, and then it’s 95% fine for the rest of the day. What the hell? After three nights of this, I don’t want to go to bed.

UPDATE: HOLY HELL! I called the rheumatology clinic, and even though I am in their clinic group AND have previous experience with psoriatic arthritis AND am BLEEDING OUT MY EYES FROM THE PAIN, they want me to get a referral from my doc — who, as an obgyn, has a SIX MONTH waiting list. OMGWTFBBQ.

Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow!

The standpipe water absorbed pulsations of the reticulating, steam-driven engines.

There is no Regulon in the semiosphere.

A question over on Soopermomz, which I hope gets discussed further.

Between growing up in Iowa (and still living in a tornado-tastic area) and having spent EVERY FUCKING CAMPING TRIP EVER cowering in a tent with nobody having adequate weather information (let alone CHECKING the fucking forecast before departure), it’s been really bothering me that we don’t have anything on hand should there be an emergency. We’ve got satellite TV, too, so if there’s something nasty in the area, we don’t get reception at all. Fed up, I ordered (and just got) the coolest emergency radio (almost) ever. DUDE! We’re talking well designed. Check it out:
Power supply:
- A/C adapter, OR
- three AA batteries, OR
- the rechargable battery OR
- the hand-crank (which will also charge the rechargeable battery)
Reception:
- NOAA Weather Channels
- AM / FM
- Television audio (hugely cool, because they’re the ones that update shit in an emergency)
Other goodies:
- CHARGE YOUR CELL PHONE!!! Even if there’s no power you can use the hand crank to charge it – NOICE.
- Flashlight
- Siren
- Alert Mode – leave it on and it only squawks if there’s something coming your way
- Water-resistant

HOLY SHIT IS THAT THE COLLEST EVER?! We’re ordering more — for the car, and for our parents. The only thing I find annoying is that the siren is on the same knob as the power and alert — so you try to turn off the alert mode and you easily end up going EEE AAAAW EEEEE AAAAW at ear-splitting levels. Other than that, and the fact that we have to order a different adapter because our cellphones are Treos, it’s SO worth the money and I will never be a loser cowering in a tent with “experienced campers” again. Rock.

I got this Dorothee Becker Uten.Silo for TWO BUCKS. A little elbow-grease and the stickers, sand and paint drops are gone, and it’s perfect. I’m guessing original, too; if it were a re-issue, it would have had a very different price tag.

Actually, I didn’t know what it was either, other than something I’d seen crop up a lot in the backgrounds of gorgeous spaces in the Terence Conran house design books from the 70s.

Garden: 31 May 2006, wide
Whenever someone’s asked what I’ve been up to lately, it seems the only thing I can say is, “gardening.” Well, here’s why. From the window, and stitched up in Photoshop.

New things this year:

• sod
• bamboo fencing cover
• bricks finished
• compost contained
• clematis
• rehabilitated front bed #4
• added bed along the side of the house
• added and rearranged some stuff in the other front beds

It doesn’t sound like that much when it’s listed out like that, but believe me, there’s probably seven solid days of work in there. And the tricky thing is that it’s never “done,” even though you may think so at the time. I’ve been to the greenhouse THREE TIMES thinking, “OK! That should do it for this year, save the weeding.” And, yes, there will be another trip in a week. Fooey.

I love roses*, and how could I not plant this lovely bush with petals that –hunh! imagine that– are the color of butter? She should be arriving May the fifth, which is a good incentive for me to get the bed on the south side of the house finished (started, too).

*hardy, no-maintenance, wild and lush and smelly and bordering on invasive roses; not the huge fucking pain in the ass, must be painstakingly cultivated and pruned and covered and sprayed and coddled roses that barely bloom, and when they do they have no fragrance roses, so preferred by other people I know, who though they may be blood relations are not spoken to or about.

I’ve got errands to run today, and having found these clips of R.E.M. on Letterman c. 1983,* I’m feeling a little nostalgic and thought I’d whip together a 120 Minutes (Kevin Seal-era) highlight playlist. Whoops. For all the technological advances that allow me to do this with files on a computer instead of painstakingly sitting in front of a turntable with artful use of pause/play/record, you can still only fit seventy paltry minutes of music on a regular CD. Which, really, totally sucks. Our CD changer is in the trunk (tape up front! easy!), and it’s really pathetic to make multiple CDs that aren’t really all that rewriteable and are much more fragile. SO: I am going to pick up some beautiful magnetic tape that fits a good TWO HOURS of music on it (120 minutes, get it?!), and make some real mixes. And I’m going to stop at the mall and pick up some Obsession to make the fun complete. Today’s (short!) playlist in the comments.
*Thanks, Quiddity!!

I hearts teh internets, and the geniuses at TurboTax who made that a lot less painful.

It’s a perfectly lovely dark and rainy morning, so the fact that we’re out of coffee and instead drinking proper tea* makes it all the better: with each sip, I’m in Ireland. Aaah.

“*PG Tips! A Wueeerkin’ Man’s Cuppa Slosh!”

Last week, during the after-podcast chitchat, we were talking about old video games, and I brought up that I’ve always wondered what the heck it was that my friend Katie and I played all the time in high school. I knew it was an old game even then (1986?), since it was on her family’s TI-99/4A (beige) that had been consigned to the basement for homework use. I also remembered was that it involved a dungeon, and a quest, and maybe wights or orcs… but the main thing, the thing that all this time I haven’t been able to get out of my head, was the MUSIC. I can’t really sing, but I managed to beep out the “doo-do-doo-doo-doo, DOO DOO DOO DOO,” and Chris Spruck the Awesome was able to identify it RIGHT AWAY as TUNNELS OF DOOM. The internet bows before Chris’ knowledge! Bonus: that last link points you to an emulator, so you can run the dungeon from your windows box. Schweet!

click for larger
Ta-da! This weekend’s garden project was the installation of split-bamboo fencing cover over the ugly cyclone fencing around the garden. This was a snap to put up; I did the whole thing by myself in about five hours. Just a lot of putzy wiring. It’s a bit higher than the cyclone fence, and screens the view of the neighbor’s driveway and garbage cans. It also gives the garden a much better sense of space. I didn’t do the whole perimeter, as there’s a twelve-foot span across the back that has a number of tall grapevines that are quite enmeshed in the fence. Next up: finish the brickwork, and lay gravel on the path.

Hey, hey! I think the economy might be turning around soon, or at least Web 2.0 is going to be big.

I finally got past the nauseating first three pages of this article from New York that’s making the rounds, and by the last two pages, I realized I’ve already read this article ten years ago, when the first round of bitchy, labelling articles about Gen X and what a bunch of slackers they are. After the b(r)and-name dropping and thinly disguised jealousy, it’s the same old saw (truth?): Gen X doesn’t want to work in the same “Man in the Grey Flannel Suit” model that we watched our parents struggle with.

“If I had spent the last six years working at that job and progressed, I would have made a lot of money,” Nathanson told me from San Juan Capistrano, California, where his surfwear company is based. “But honestly, there have been very few days in the past six years where I’ve gotten in my car to go to work and thought, Fuck, I’m going to work. When I was at the investment bank, that was happening 50 percent of the days. And now I can go snowboarding at Mammoth in the middle of the week if there’s a good storm, rather than worrying about being at work at six in the morning. And there’s another upside as well: I have a total and complete passion for this business.”
…
Which brings me back to my father: the one who wore suits, not jeans; the one who, when he was my age, already had four kids; the one who logged a lifetime at exactly the kind of middle-management jobs that no one wakes up excited about going to in the morning, and who then found himself sandbagged by the late-eighties recession, laid off in what must have felt like the worst kind of double whammy. All the adult trade-offs he’d made turned out to be a brutal bait-and-switch. Is it any wonder that the Grups have looked at that brand of adulthood and said, “No thanks, you can keep your carrot and your stick.” Especially once we saw just how easily that stick can be turned around to whap your ass as you’re ushered out the door, suit and all. Just how easily a bona fide, by-the-book adult can be made to wonder where it all went wrong, and why you ever bothered to grow up in the first place.

My brother and I were very lucky in this regard — our parents (and both sets of grandparents were) entrepreneurs, and we have no qualms about following our interests, working for ourselves, and saying, “take this job and…” when things get too stupid at workplaces.*
*Did I mention that today is my last day at this glacial, inefficient, wasteful insurance behemoth? w00+.

Besides the fact that the stereotypical stock images are teh g3y, this quiz is for amateurs. Viz…

1: How many functioning computers are in your house?

Available answers stop at four, and don’t include, “I can’t remember, hang on while I go down to the server room and count them.”

2: What kind of computer do you use?

The answers reference operating systems, not computers. Also, there is no option for “OSX, Windows (but only for testing and himself’s work), at least 2 flavors of Linux and THERE IS NO MENTION OF BSD.

4: Do you text-message or e-mail from your cell phone or BlackBerry?

Hello?! Treos are much more awesome, I am in IRC right this minute on mine, and himself got into his AS/400 box on his on the way to work this morning. Blackberries are for corporate hacks.

8: Which of these do you have attached to your television?

OK, props for mentioning Slingbox, which we don’t have but really want. (Mentioned in our podcast a couple weeks back. And no, there were no bonus points awarded for podcasting.)

9: Which game system are you playing most often today?

Hacked Xbox with MAMEs not an available option. (Not that I hacked it, but still.)

17: When you need driving directions you…

No option for “use internet in car, either wardriving or on Treo.”

My score was 79, Seriously Nerdy (out of a possible 102); however, the quiz didn’t give me an extra ten bonus dork points for blogging a complaint about it. Meh.

Holy crap, I just looked at the other results. Out of 16948 people taking the quiz, nearly 60% were under 30, or “stuck in the last century.” Only four percent are as geektastic as I am, which is is scary, considering that of the tech people I know, I would consider myself on the low end of the totem pole (being a web designer, not a programmer). No wonder we have to translate ourselves so much.

Thursday: Megan Patrick, Editor of HOW Magazine speaking at Design Madison. Brief, but inspriring talk. Drinks after at the always-annoying Opus Lounge.

Friday: Errands galore, then meeting friends for drinks and Rockstar Happyoke with The Gomers at High Noon Saloon. Happyoke is karaoke with a real band, and it’s freakin’ awesome. The Gomers know every song ever, and it’s really amazing, the people who you’d never guess could do it, and then get up there and rock it hard. Lots of fun, we’ll definitely be going again soon. The other nice thing about Happyoke is that it starts at 5pm, so if you’re not one for staying out like a rockstar any more, well… yeah. There was pizza and falling asleep on the couch later.

Saturday: Himself’s mom arrived, and we took her to a bead show, which was interesting. (Cougar-hunters, you should start beading…) Home to cook the corned beef and assorted Oirish goodies, and welcome himself’s brother and his girlfriend, Jay, and a friend of my brother’s who was checking out Madison as a possible grad school.

Sunday: An Irish breakfast, a nice walk outside, himself fixed the dripping sink, and we had a lovely and quiet housy evening.

Apologies if you recognize yourself because all my friends are awesome and I love them, but I’m really getting fed up with this shit.

1. New Years Eve, vegetarian friends, call to cancel two hours before dinner. They have friends coming in from out of town and forgot they were supposed to be our friends coming in from out of town. Fifty dollars worth of seafood spoiling in the fridge. Good thing champagne doesn’t spoil if you drink it!

2. Friends for his birthday dinner. Grilling a turkey. Thirty minutes past expected arrival, he calls to cancel because of suprise visit by mother from out of town. Invited the mother too, had a lovely evening. His mother even sent a thank you note and a small gift she had made.

3. Indian feast almost on the table; the guests called wondering if we could bring the food over to their house since they had just had a baby (5 month old; with a live-in au pair). We went along with it that time. Maybe a year later we invited them for dinner again: “oh, why don’t you just cook over here?” Or why don’t we not.

4. Two days before Thanksgiving, guest announces she is bringing the seventeen year-old daughter of a friend to show her “good influences.” (This will include an overnight stay.) One day before arriving, she almost forgets to mention that her young companion will not be joining us after all. She brings her dog* instead, which terrorizes our two cats. Decides to stay an extra evening.

5. Barbecue for board members of an organization to celebrate the end of a successful season. Invitiations sent six weeks in advance, and reminders at two weeks. Only *one* R.S.V.P. at one week out, so I stalk with the phone. Guest list now at six, including one who insists that they will bring the salad. Day of party: Four guests (one leaves after an hour) and NO SALAD.

6. New friend from work. 2:00pm that day he gets an invitation to a birthday party out of town. “But OMG! There will be hott chixx there!!!!” He did not get laid that night, but I did!!!!

7. Invitation accepted three weeks in advance. Three days prior, a request to move the night up from Saturday to Friday, because guests forgot they had (season) tickets to a college sporting event. Thankfully it was not any later, as menu involved two days of cooking and well over $100 in groceries and wine. What’s already been bought / cooked will stay in the freezer until Easter. Hope they enjoy the hotdogs and nachos.

And that, dear readers, is why I will drag my sorry ass to your party come hell or high water; emergencies are called such things for a reason. Barring hospitals, vomiting or other contagion, I will be there, probably with flowers.

*Yes, the dog is a wee one, but cats are cats and they don’t know any dogs so to them it’s a bear, and they spent the whole weekend under the bed, moaning and hissing. Also, yes, in this case “guest” means “mother-in-law,” which you already probably figured out. (and by “mother-in-law” I mean someone I’m lucky to have in my life and is dear and sweet and much beloved and the mother of my most beloved husband. But still.

I usually don’t bother with these but couldn’t resist:
Neutral Good Elf Bard

Alignment:
Neutral Good characters believe in the power of good above all else. They will work to make the world a better place, and will do whatever is necessary to bring that about, whether it goes for or against whatever is considered ‘normal’.

Race:
Elves are the eldest of all races, although they are generally a bit smaller than humans. They are generally well-cultured, artistic, easy-going, and because of their long lives, unconcerned with day-to-day activities that other races frequently concern themselves with. Elves are, effectively, immortal, although they can be killed. After a thousand years or so, they simply pass on to the next plane of existance.

Primary Class:
Bards are the entertainers. They sing, dance, and play instruments to make other people happy, and, frequently, make money. They also tend to dabble in magic a bit.

Last night brought two epics; one a Doctor Who story that had something to do with Daleks (only they weren’t?) and I was flying an ultralight somewhere and there were cathedrals or something and I had to swim sneakily down a canal to get past the bishops who were in league with the Daleks or something. The Doctor in question was Christopher Eccleston, and I think maybe we were victorious but I don’t remember.

The other dream is so cliché it’s embarrassing – it was opening night, it was “Chicago” (but it wasn’t?) and I hadn’t learned a single line of dialogue or song or blocking and I hadn’t even shaved my legs and I was wearing a bathrobe. HERE IS MY BIG BREAK AND I AM UNPREPARED. *sigh* Time to learn Flash, learn how to SING, and get a new freakin’ job.

Bountiful! Originally uploaded by TheRuss.

Heidi thought I sent a NUDE photo of myself to her. For the record, Internet: LONG JOHNS !

Two weekends ago there was much fun and laziness and food at Casa Dynagirl. Saturday we bummed around with my folks, and I couldn’t resist these plaid Danksos. We met up later for dinner at Magnus. I really need to start making lamb chops. Dinner, needless to say, was fantastic.

Sunday was lazy and very pleasant; I got up early, made the beginnings of dinner, and sat down to knit and knit and knit during our Doctor Who marathon.

While I was busy knitting, Mr Dynagirl was busy in the kitchen making this absofuckinglutely fantabulous poppyseed cake with a custard lining and buttercream frosting.

Julia Child & Company
Fish Chowder, pp. ??
Before the cake made its debút, friends joined us for supper: one of my favorite soups, Julia’s fish chowder. It’s a snap to make if you use her suggestion of clam juice, and the only sinful thing is the croutons – though it’s heavenly and velvet. I’ve only made it once before but I think it’s going to be in a more regular winter rotation from here out.

I think we’re going to TiVo the Superbowl on one tuner, and then watch the ads, but really have on Puppy Bowl II! We missed it last year, but that’s ok, because that’s available on DVD. Woof.
Thanks, Jen, for the heads-up!!

It would be a bad day for everyone if I were a trucker; I can hardly keep my head up and thinking is like, really hard.

We had friends over for fish chowder and birthday cake (poppyseed with buttercream frosting, THANK YOU, MISTAH DYNAGIRL!!!) last night, and I might have picked up a cold bug. Looks like zinc lozenges and an earrrrly bedtime for me…

So there was this G8 conference in Spain and we went with (taller) Jon Stewart to cover it; we flew weird-looking WWII planes. My parents came with us, and my mom and her friend went to this winery where they had this AWESOME wine, but it was $3200 a bottle – but if you went to the winery you could have three glasses.They were going to buy a bottle for a Spanish symphony dinner, because they could get it for half-price. My mom gave me a taste of hers and it was beautiful – I showed it to Jon and said, “this is what you WANT wine to taste like, look, it’s like the color of my nail polish but it tastes perfect” or something. Then we had to go upstairs to a reception room to hear Bush speak, and we got right up front. The secret service wheeled him out, he was sort of in a chair but sort of on a dolly, like Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, and he looked really decrepit and was painted dark metallic blue and could barely talk. My dad went up to him and said something like, “hey, you shouldn’t be showing these tubes when you’re speaking in public, and sort of opened Bush’s vest a bit, exposing some sort of surgical tubes. The secret service took him away and said we could get him in the lobby. I think I woke up then, but later there was something about my Iowa grandparents’ house and monsters, and something else about a tavern and ladders.

Parents need to take control, and stop feeding the processed food corporations our dollars in the name of convience and feed our kids nutritious foods from the beginning. I know that this is easier said than done, but if we take the time to feed a baby nutrition-dense foods early on, his palate will be trained to like those foods. If we feed a kid processed foods with added fat, sugar and salt, her palate will be trained to like and seek only those flavors.

I really don’t understand the whole kid-parent food battle. [Disclaimer: I am one to talk, since we don't have kids yet, but still...] I’m always amazed when parents complain about their kids’ eating habits – “they’ll only eat X!” – and yet, they don’t provide a better example, and they keep providing the junk food. (And then they wonder why everyone’s fat!) I remember being horrified around age eight when my nasty cousins wouldn’t eat anything – one would only eat celery sticks with peanut butter, and the other would only eat “Chef” Boyardee ravioli. NOBODY in that family would go near an onion (a situation which my brother and I later tried to turn to our advantage, by ordering extra onions on the pizza if we knew they might “happen” to turn up at dinner time when their parents would go out with ours…).

Do parents in France or China go through this? Is this food battle a cultural phenomenon, or is it part of pediatric development? I’m inclined to think it’s a bit of both – kids go through a scaredy-cat period, which makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint: you don’t want them to put any old plant/rock/whatever in their mouths, just as they start toddling around and are able to wander a bit. However, this food-anxiety gets reinforced by parents who give in to this, and who probably don’t cook much on their own anyway.

I clearly remember being told, “This is not a restaurant!” If a kid truly doesn’t like something, they don’t have to eat it – I’d pick the beans out of my chili* and give them to my mom, but the rule was that you had to have one bite of something before rejecting it, and that there were no alternate meals available. (Somehow this was not the case when there were lobsters at stake; thankfully, I outgrew that phobia!) My brother and I were also involved in the kitchen as soon as we could be – helping, doing science experiments (making butter by rolling a jar of cream across the floor to each other), and always tasting and talking about the food. In a small town in Iowa, we learned about the world with cookbooks and a globe.
The article’s point about jarred baby food is a good one. Why would I feed them pre-processed food at that age, when I wouldn’t think about it at a later one? It’s a perfect application for my mini-Cuisinart, doesn’t feed into the baby-industrial complex, is better environmentally, and will be better nutritionally and for fostering curious, adaptable kids.
Yes, I eat beans now, and love them.

UPDATE: It appears that kids’ early diets and the diets of their mothers (through milk) influence their lifelong taste preferences – so get that kid eating diverse foods early, and eat a balanced, interesting diet yourself.

I’ve been reallllly concentrating on something and making good progress for FOUR HOURS STRAIGHT and it’s really getting painful (see, look at me blogging just to have three seconds distraction) and I want to stop and take a break but I’m afraid of getting really distracted because this HAS to be DONE. Ugh! Dare I pee?

I got this awesome thing for Christmas (THANKS, HON!!!XOXO) and I love it – love love LOVE. Fifty million pages of the best. magazine. ever. – how do you not love that? Sadly, it’s not quite perfect yet, as Mr Jalopy details his attempts of loading the whole eight DVD set onto one hard drive — because swapping the disks is teh sux: one, two, three, four. I hope they fix this soon.

My other issue –and I can’t really blame them, glass house and all that– is that the software doesn’t support 800×600 and doesn’t resize (or at least can’t, since I can’t get down to that part of the window) and my old clamshell iBook doesn’t go any higher. Time to get a new laptop!
via BoingBoing

UPDATE: A-HA! Still time to get a new(er) laptop, since the program doesn’t fit my monitor, and my eensy hard drive couldn’t come close to taking it.

My brother just launched the Sophie Scholl movie site. Root for it at the Academy Awards in March!

Mr Dynagirl has started podcasting with some friends, and here’s the first Chumpsquad podcast, featuring Dan Cody and Christ Spruck chatting about technology.

I think the last time I got my haircut by someone qualified* was…. Oh, my god; I was still living in Milwaukee, because I went to Nikki at Beauty. Even then, I most often did it myself. Well, now my hair is a bunch of random lengths, and it sucks, my pedicure is ratty, it’s winter, I’m stressed out about a thousand silly things, and I just need some general salon magic.

The ladies whom I’ve asked about their hair (only the great hair) have all said Sojo Blau, and I just called, with fingers crossed — and dear, sweet Josh can get me in for a cut and a style AND a pedicure tomorrow at noon. JOSH, I HEART YOU!!!!!!! Make me pretty again! I am embarrassed at how swoonily excited I am about this.

i.e., not me, especially not me in a dimly lit bathroom…