Germany: Why Not?

I believe, I realized recently, that there are two kinds of trips you take: the kind you plan for months in advance, and the kind that just appear in front of you. Both are good, or at least no worse for how they come into being, and I think the variety is, in general, a positive. Which is why, when Cameron got accepted to present at a convention in Germany next month, I decided that I would tag along. I've never been to Germany.

The convention itself is being held in Stuttgart, an industrial city in the southwest about which my guidebook* says, in essence, "Don't Bother." Apparently, it used to have many fine historic buildings, nearly all of which were bombed into a fine, historic dust in World War II. But there seem to be a number of attractive towns nearby, plus a Porsche factory that offers free tours, so I suspect I will find ways to amuse myself.

For the weekend after the conference-- the only time Cameron will have to do much sightseeing on this, his first trip off the continent-- we settled on Strasbourg, based on factors such as it's on the Rhine, it isn't very far away, and I saw one episode of The Amazing Race where they went there and it looked nice. Since it turns out Strasbourg is in France at the moment**, it isn't included in my guidebook, so I guess we'll just have to wing it. I'll let you know how that goes.




*Of course I bought a guidebook.
** Conditions subject to change.

And One Disturbing Side Note

When I was assembling the previous post, I typed the word "people" into the YouTube search box (as the first word of "People Ain't No Good") and came up with the following list of most common searches on that word:

People singing
People getting scared
People getting owned
People dying
People are strange
People farting

Yep, more people are trolling YouTube looking for snuff films than good, wholesome videos of farting. What is this world coming to?*



*Trick question-- the ancient Romans would totally have watched Christians being eaten by lions on Roman YouTube if they hadn't been so busy building aqueducts.

Ain't That A Kick in the Head

I was perusing my iTunes library the other day, as I often do when I am supposed to be writing. And one thing I noticed, because I was getting deep into my writing avoidance, was that of the top six songs in play count, three had "Ain't" in the title.

We have:

Trick Pony, "Ain't Wastin' Good Whiskey On You"


Bill Withers, "Ain't No Sunshine"




Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, "People Ain't No Good"





Based on this evidence, I feel like maybe I should look into "Ain't Nobody," "Ain't No Woman (Like the One I've Got)," "Ain't Misbehavin'," and/or "This Ain't a Scene, It's an Arms Race"

p.s. I'm also a big fan of Dwight Yoakam's "Ain't That Lonely Yet"

Department of "Huh"

Did you know that the chimpanzee who played Cheeta in the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movies is still alive, seventy-six years old and living in Palm Springs? I found that surprising, all things considered. Not only that a chimp could live that long, or that his retirement would so closely resemble a human's (apparently that's encoded somewhere in the 98% DNA homology). But what I really want to know is, how did they avoid settling in Tarzana?

Okay, This is Just Not Fair

It's bad enough not being able to shop, missing out on nice sweaters, cute skirts and sharp jackets. But now Sigerson Morrison has a collection for Target? That is simply cruel.

Thirty-One

Because you can only turn twenty-nine so many times before it starts getting sad.

I'm So Sorry

Honestly, I had no idea. When I decided to take a break from shopping, it never even occurred to me what kind of wide-ranging consequences it might have. But now here we are, on the brink of world-wide economic meltdown, and I have to say, I feel just terrible.

Free-Association Monday

This morning, I got in to work to find that, of the fourteen plates I had transformed on Friday and left to grow over the weekend, nine had worked and five didn't. (Not terrible, but I could have hoped for better.) And as a result, this song has been playing in my head all day:



I'd be annoyed, but really, who doesn't need more Dolly in their day?


(Sorry about the odd video-- the only performance I could find on YouTube involved costumed Disney characters and inaccurate subtitles.)

Half-Marathon Girl

On Sunday I ran my first half marathon. Ran-walked, actually, there being no way I was actually going to make it running all thirteen-point-one miles. And for the last quarter mile or so I'm not really sure you would call that running.

The race was the San Jose Half Marathon held, in a shocking twist, in San Jose. (Actually, the full name was "The San Jose Rock 'n' Roll Half Marathon," because there were bands scattered along the course, playing in a variety of musical styles, with a heavy representation from the "boomer rock cover band" genre.) Cameron was running with me, graciously sacrificing his chance at putting up a halfway-decent time in order to help keep me going (more on that later).

The route wound us all around downtown San Jose, though various residential and commercial areas and then back to the suddenly-poignant financial district. Some of the neighborhoods were surprisingly nice, not that I had too much time to examine them. I was too busy breathing.

A surprising number of people were gathered along the length of the course, shouting encouragement to the runners as we went past. Some of them were clearly out in support of friends or family, but a lot seemed to just be general spectators, spending part of their Sunday shouting, "Woo!" and "Keep going!" at random staggering, sweaty people. I enjoyed them, partly for the encouragement, but mostly because there's just something great about people taking the time to go and stand out along the street and cheer on total strangers engaged in a pointless task.

The plan was always to run-walk the race; I was never going to be able to run the whole thing. And since I did not have a watch appropriate to the task, Cameron was serving as timekeeper, letting me know when we had done our seven minutes of running and it was time for our one minute of walking. At least, that was the plan as I understood it. I did notice that seven minutes seemed to be getting longer as the race went on (I chalked that one up to fatigue) and if I hadn't been so tired I certainly would have picked up on the fact that we weren't stopping more than once a mile, as we should have been doing, at least occasionally. But it simply never occurred to me that what was actually happening was that my dear boyfriend had been steadily lengthening the intervals, up to about eleven minutes, without telling me, until I complained that I couldn't take the pace (this would be around mile eight) and he knocked them back down to around nine minutes. I'd be angrier, but I did finish in a relatively respectable time. Plus, my knees hurt too much to try and kick him.

At the end of the race there was a whole gauntlet of volunteers waiting to give you stuff: water, a souvenir medal, an ice-water soaked towel, yogurt, fruit cups, energy bars, bananas and more water. It was very nice, but some of the participants did get a little carried away, descending on the tables like looters and hauling off as much as they could carry. For my part, I was too tired to be greedy, so I just took what I could eat then and there. Except for one of the fruit cups, which turned out to be gross, in kind of a gooey way.

So, that was it, all over but the stretching. And the complaining, for the next day or so, about how much the various parts of my body hurt. And the celebratory dinner involving fruity cocktails. And the ibuprofen (not in the cocktails) (might have been a good idea, though). I didn't run at all for the next week, but that's going to change soon; it looks like we're training for the Austin Half in the spring.

I'm getting my own watch.

Intermission

Well, that last post was kind of a downer. How about something a little more upbeat?



There. That's better.

Of course, it would have been even better if they had included these guys.

(Original version here)

Saying Goodbye

This post was supposed to be about my move last Saturday. I was going to write about hauling everything out of my old apartment and moving it a whole block and a half to the new place, about how I dragooned my parents and Cameron into packing and carrying all the stuff that comes with being the last person to move out of a shared apartment (anyone need any shot glasses? I have extras) and how Alice won massive friend points by driving all the way down from Berkeley to help, even though it was a ridiculously hot day that no one in their right mind would choose for any kind of physical activity. It was going to be a fun, moderately exasperated (thanks to the old landlord, grr) but ultimately cheerful post. But then, on Sunday, my cat died and I didn't feel all that cheerful anymore.


I got her when she was eight weeks old and I was a sophomore in college. You were allowed to keep cats in the Caltech dorms; it was actually a determining factor in my choice of colleges. In retrospect, that may not have been the best way to handle that decision-making process, but it worked out okay. She was tiny when I got her, just a little double-handful of kitten, hiding behind the litter box in the cage the cat adoption people had set up at the pet food store. I named her Miss Marple, after the Agatha Christie character, though she ended up having little in common with that sharp and perceptive old lady. My Miss Marple would occasionally run headlong into walls.

She was always terrified of people in general, though she did warm up to me. Actually, she did more than warm up, she bonded to the point where she kind of became my stalker. If I ever went into another room (like, say, the bathroom) and closed the door, she would sit directly outside of it and wait for me to come out. In the morning, after I took my shower, she would meow from the time the water went off until I opened the door and let her in. Which is not to say she wanted me to pick her up and hold her or anything. I mean, she would let me, but she clearly considered it an imposition, at best.

Which was a shame, because she really was wonderfully soft.

I had Miss Marple all the way through college; even smuggling her in when I got stuck living for two terms in Avery, the crappy new dorm that didn't allow cats. We shared a tiny, absurdly overpriced studio in Sunnyvale when I was working for a biotech startup there at the height of the dot com boom, and she moved back home with me for my unequivocally disasterous grad school experience, and ensuing year of unemployment/recovery. She stayed with me through my reentry into industry, though I believe she remained unimpressed by things like lab moves and clinical trial failures. She was, in short, a rare constant through all of what might be imaginatively considered my adult life. But, of course, nothing is constant, particularly pets, and I should know that. I guess I just thought she would be around to see a few more upheavals, whatever they might be.



I think she would have liked the new place. It has a balcony she could hang out on and plenty of birds in the trees for her to watch, plus lots of closets to hide in and make me wonder if it's possible she could have actually dematerialized. She would have spent the first day under some piece of furniture (probably the futon), the next day rubbing her face on everything to mark it, and the rest of them trying to get into the rooms I wanted to keep her out of. Trust me, I knew her.

If Everyone Else Jumped On a New Internet Trend, Would You Do It Too?

Because, apparently, I would. That's right, I've got a Twitter page. Not sure what I'm going to do with it, but look! Shiny!

Coming to Fox, Fall 2009

That previous clip was from a program called "Hole in the Wall" which, as you may have guessed, was adapted from a Japanese game show. And now that American networks have discovered this treasure trove of inspiration from the East I have a feeling we will be seeing more of these beauties.

I call this one "Holes in the Floor With Girls With Pork Chops on Their Heads Coming Through Them to be Terrorized by an Annoyed Monitor Lizard," and I think it's going to be the next big thing:



That is, if they don't get to testing the weightlifting prowess of stray cats or holding drag pageants first.

The One Good Thing About Moving

The realization that there is no reason to bother refilling the ice cube trays.

Les Mots Justes

Because sometimes life dresses you in a shiny silver suit and sends a giant Styrofoam wall at you with a hole in it you could never possibly fit through, and in that case there really is only one thing you can say:

Key Quotes From the Movie "Anaconda 3" Starring David Hasselhoff

"That abandoned factory is just the kind of place a giant snake would want to make its home."

"Where there's blood, there's more blood."

Somebody Up There Hates Me Update

Does anyone out there know a ritual for placating the car gods? Do you build a little shrine out of air filters and brake pads, and leave it offerings of premium gasoline? Take a carburetor out to the coast and toss it into the ocean, while singing "Little Deuce Coup?" Make a pilgrimage to to Detroit, or perhaps Tokyo?

I ask because this morning when I got up, I found that someone had thrown a chunk of concrete through the window of the Jeep and stolen the (nonfunctioning) satellite radio tuner from the cupholder. So, clearly, I have angered someone and I just want to know how to get it straightened out.

Maybe if I sacrificed a chicken?

On Second Thought

I think I like these boots even more:



And they're waterproof! That makes them a necessity, exempt from the purchasing ban, right?

(Thanks to The Manolo, superfantastic as ever, for the inspiration.)

Update Night

Car Update: My car is still waiting for its new engine. For some mysterious reason, Mazda 3 engines seem to be in high demand these days. Meanwhile, having totally failed in my attempt to use public transportation, I have found a reprieve in the form of Mom's Jeep, which I have until she needs it. I was going to try to take the train today anyway, but I didn't. By the way, have you ever noticed how comfortable beds are? Especially first thing in the morning.

Cat Update: Last week my cat, Miss Marple, escaped from her temporary home in the cabin at my parents'. She has kind of a habit of vanishing, even when indoors in rather small spaces, so it wasn't until the next morning that anyone realized she was gone. Everyone (including me, coming up from work on the ultimately vain hope that she would come out for the person she knew best, and also, incidentally, picking up the car) searched and worried to varying degrees and no avail. Then, four days after she went missing, the little monster showed right up at the door, meowing to be let in so she could have her dinner. Apparently, the amusement value of watching us crawl around under the deck had worn off and she was looking for a new source of entertainment. And also dinner.

Cake Update: Cake is still delicious.

Freeze, Sucker

Recently, it seems like various drains on my finances have been kind of a theme around here. There's the car, of course, which has already racked up some impressive debits just for the rental, and it's only going to get more exciting when it comes time to pay for the replacement engine. And then there's the fact that I have to move at the end of this month, destination unknown, but definitely more expensive. Which, if you combine them with the fact that the way things are going for my employer, raises are probably not going to be a big priority any time soon, gives you some annoyingly strained finances. Which is why, in a bold approach almost certainly doomed to failure, I have decided to institute a buying freeze through the end of the year.

That's right, Daisy isn't going to be purchasing anything (barring gifts) for the next three months. No clothes, no accessories, no books, no purses. No (gulp) shoes. Not even if they're on a really good sale.

Of course, as soon as I decided this, I realized that what I really need is a denim pencil skirt. And a watch. And some boots.

It's gonna be a long three months.