beancounters

You saw me standing alone

Tonight's the blue moon, how about that? I wish I could think of something to do right now that would be so out of the ordinary, I could honestly put forward to you that I act like this only "once in a blue moon".

Well, here are three unusual things I've done or have yet to do this weekend. One should qualify, yes?

* Last night, I cleaned my refrigerator. Truly, it's been almost as long as the intervals between blue moons since I did this. But in between blog posts (I was up until 2 a.m. all told), I realized the fridge was half-empty after our week's vacation, and it would be the perfect half-hour to get it done. "You should have used baking soda, not ammonia," my mom told me afterward. But she didn't understand, there were actual chunks on the bottom that would budge for nothing less than a major toxin.

* This evening, I suddenly took it into my head to google a woman from my past who once hurt me very badly. She had married into my family briefly - but the marriage and subsequent separation were so acrimonious, the fallout hit many nearby relatives. Anyway, I was interested for some inexplicable reason to see if she has a blog. It seems she does not. But lo, she has authored two or three books about an excruciatingly specific needlecraft, and is famous within a very very small circle of crafters. Reading the way people gush over her books, I'm a little nauseated. I think, 'If only they knew the real her'. But then that's not fair of me at all, is it? It's been over 20 years; I myself have changed so much, she'd never know me - what makes me believe she's still as evil as I remember her? Still and all, it was a relief to find she lives on the East Coast. Whether she's still bitter and twisted, or newly-minted and happy, I don't have to worry about running into her and finding out.

* Tomorrow, I am going to sing in front of my church. I've never, ever done this before, so this may definitely qualify as the big blue moon activity. It was all the idea of my friend Tracy. We sat together one Sunday and shared a hymnal. It was a wonder to hear the way our voices blended together. Then after service, she turned to me and asked, "Wasn't it a wonder to hear the way our voices blended together?" Next thing I knew, she talked to the music director and we started rehearsing the song "Everything Possible". Bizarre! Who was it that said inexplicable events are dancing lessons from God? Tomorrow, we rhumba.

So! I turn the microphone over to you. Did you, or will you, do anything highly unusual on this Blue Moon weekend?

I'm outtie, and I'm takin' my Peabody with me

Excellent news. Bob Edwards joins XM Satellite Radio to host a morning show. Now I'll have to figure out what and where this station is, and how to listen to it without a lot of pesky clients calling during the show. Whoa - wait - that's what voice mail is for; never mind!

Meeks Bay Social Club

Canadian geese abound at Lake Tahoe. In the late afternoons, they get extremely bold, and walk up the beach in gangs (or I guess it's "gaggles"), trolling for chips and hot dog buns.

Cabin life: a study in poor taste

Once a year, my husband and his siblings rent a large but astonishingly unattractive cabin at Tahoe for a week. We haul in a lot of food, charcoal briquettes and booze, and decorate the inside and out with wet beach towels and childrens' shoes.

Day 1: This is my dog Daisy’s first trip to the cabin. Most of the family hasn't met her before. Boy, did people fawn over her! Daisy always sits on one particular couch, central to the action, in line of sight to the kitchen and both doors. Throughout the day, nearly everyone has taken a turn at her side, scurtching her ears or belly. No fighting over her so far; there must be a sign-up sheet floating around here.

Day 2: First day at Meeks Bay. Sat too long in the sun. Due to less than scrupulous application of the sunscreen, I have an unsightly burn on one leg, the approximate shape of Brazil. My coworkers are used to my returning from Tahoe with life-threatening burns. This one wasn’t bad at all, lifeforce-wise. Besides, I can hide it.

Birthday party! My niece turned nine this week. Major photo op for the family. It looked like she was in front of a press corps, not a group of happy birthday-wishers. Well, we all have photo archiving on our minds due to a new-found interest in gene/a/logy. You can’t blame us.

OMG. One of my relatives came rushing over to me during the party. She was sitting in the wrong place at the wrong time, happened to see up the very short skirt of another female relative, and saw that she was not wearing underwear. Gaaah! We were both seized with hysterical laughter, jamming dishtowels into our mouths to keep from braying. Hmm, think that pic would make it into the photo archives??

The kids discovered this card deck in a sidetable drawer. We’ve all had special fun playing Go Fish with it, though it seems dreadfully wrong, even by our low standards of anti-Dubya humor.

Home again

Unlike other Tahoe tourists, it only took us 2 1/2 hours to get home to Sacramento today, and that included lunch and a trip to the post office.

NeighborBill is not only our neighbor and house-sitter, but our postman. He was behind the counter when we stopped in to pick up our week's worth of mail, which was supposed to be on hold. He saw us in line, and despite the guy at his window with 15 giant boxes, all ready for certified mailing, NeighborBill and I shouted the following conversation:

N. Bill: Howdy, neighbor! How was the trip?

Me: Great! Ended much too early. We didn't want to come home.

N. Bill: Glad you had a good time. Say! Guess where your mail is!

Me: [puzzled look, one simple index finger pointing hither and yon to take in the luxurious mail-holding accommodations]

N. Bill: Nope! It's on your kitchen table!

Me: You had to bring in our mail? Well heck! It was supposed to be held! What kind of place are you running here?

And as if to prove my very point, NeighborBill walked away from the 15-box customer (who squeaked a protest) and went to the back of the office to retrieve a couple of PennyS@vers that actually did get held. Life! You can't buy comedy as great as this, folks!

Anyway, must unearth the laptop from the back of the truck so I may share vacation pictures (including those of Mindy and the li'l kids) later today or this weekend. First, I guess I'd better make sure everything is out of there and put away so my conscience will be clear. Yes, first check the blog, then do the unpacking. My priorities are crystal-clear.

How dextrous are you?

Well, that's their title. I would title it, "How smart-alecky are those smug kids at the Bruin Online?" Or, "How gullible am I?" Mwheh-heh.

I did it in 2 minutes and 17 seconds.
I deserved an F--!!
Take the How Dexterous Are You? Quiz!!

City Museum, cont.

This museum is highly kid-oriented - slides, caves, a train, even a sort of skate park that's for climbing and sliding, not for skateboards. But my favorite thing about it was its third floor. Here, the City of Saint Louis tucks remnants of its former architectural glory.

Grandma and I snuck away when Bunny and my dad headed for another kid ride, and we poked around this section for quite a while.

There are rows and rows of building cornices, medallions, etc. on display on big warehouse shelves. And so many gargoyles! Wherever possible, notes about the artisans or the techniques used are written down. I'm sure that all too often, though, the names of these craftsmen of the past have disappeared from memory.

Don't you feel like this some days?

Test your senses

Those tricky Brits! Test your senses, and learn more than you ever wanted to know about your own tongue.

[Via Welsh View]

City Museum, St. Louis

On one of the days with record humidity levels, it seemed like a good idea to find a tourist spot that was indoors. My cousin Judy recommended the City Museum.

It's coooooool.

Click here for a panoramic view of the first floor. Using just recycled and other found objects, artisans created what feels like an underwater grotto. Neptune's palace! The ceiling is covered with frayed parachute silk. The pillars are encrusted with tiles, mirror pieces, and rusty cogs with beads in the holes. There's a stage in one corner, and a real fish tank you can view from beside it or from above (though we had to go through a maze to get up to the balcony).

"Caves" all throughout the place are kid-sized. Some are adult-sized, but only to a point! I, like many intrepid parents around me, had to bail in the middle of the maze when my little daughter squeezed through places that have been too small for me since puberty. In one of these pictures, she's in a tube that leads Heaven knows where. I'm still not sure where she came out.

The day Eris favored the foolish

Ffungo from Cabaret Discordia (Do NOT click on that link!) shares a few incidents that proved to him that the Goddess knows what he needs before he does, and it ain't world peace.

I have a story to go with Ffungo's. Eris once bought me a tank of gas. Really. When I was first married, we lived near Modesto, CA. Though we were living on our own, in a dump, on BB's income as a bartender (I was unemployed), with no savings whatsoever, we somehow took it into our heads that this would be the perfect time to move to Sacramento. And I, Pam, should immediately take a job there and do some apartment-hunting on the side.

In retrospect, it was a spectacularly, embarrassingly awful idea, particularly when you watch me commuting three hours a day from Modesto to my near-minimum wage job at Monkey Ward in South Sacramento. Why did I do this? It was Christmas and the retail season. Gas was expensive, as it always is. Why didn't I just find a local job, and have us save up for a move? Somebody once said a person can only gain experience after doing stupid things, and well, now I have a helluva lot of experience, what else can I say.

Anyway, one Saturday, Wards was packed with customers. We clerks were so busy we hardly had time to stop for lunch. But that was all right, because I had no money for lunch. I had no money for gum. I had. no. money. BB had none, either. And what was worse, my car was on Empty. I would not be able to make it home to Modesto until right around, oh, payday. What could I do? (Yes, yes, I know. Spectacularly awful idea. Shut up.) I wasn't the type to steal from the till; my life was already complicated enough. So though all the other employees were strangers to me, I steeled myself to hit up somebody for some gas money. I could just imagine the ensuing conversation. ("You live where? Geez, what a spectacularly awful -" "Shut up." "Hey Connie, come and listen to this!" "Shut up, dammit!")

Suddenly I glanced down, and what th - ? There was money on the floor, right in front of me. I picked it up. Twenty bucks! I looked around and sort of held it out a while, waiting for some little old lady to shout in alarm that she was missing her kitty litter fund or something. When nobody showed up, I pocketed it. Sheer relief gave me a buzz for the rest of the day. Saved! Money "randomly" falls into the hands of the desperate! All hail Discordia!

Emma doesn't think much of hotcake carpentry

Part 2 of The Avengers in Green Acres is this week's matinee performance at the other camp. It's going pretty well. I don't have it finished yet. Have to work up a "bang" for the 30-minute mark. Don't all TV dramas use this gimmick?

Why I'd rather be cremated

Visit the Tombstone Generator and write your own last words. [Thanks Jennifer!]

Agnostics gotta dress, too

The good news is the Church of the Apathetic Agnostic has a gift shop. The bad news is, they're so apathetic, they can't be bothered to keep the shop going past the end of July. So hurry and get your orders in this week.

Which Annoying B-list Celebrity Are You?

Oh. No.

Which Annoying B-list Celebrity Are You?
Brought to you by Rum and Monkey.

Possibly the most obnoxious B-list celebrity there ever was or could ever be, you were once an MTV veejay but have since moved into the world of really, really bad movies. Take, for example, Biodome. Or the risible Encino Man (aka California Man). You've complained that Beavis and Butthead stole your act - and you may well be right. Ugh.

Credit should go to you, though, for making a documentary called Spooge.

And here I thought I was more clever than that test. I was wrong ... so wrong.

Genuine Girl is famous

We all have children of such superior breeding, I know they're all destined to be prodigies. It seems Genuine's daughter was the first to achieve fame in the world of haute couture ...

Packing Daisy

Look who isn't about to let herself get left behind!

Vacation chores and fun

Look at the Sacramento weather forecast - see what we're escaping for a week?

Bunny is standing beside me right this minute, though she's been tucked in three separate times. She says to tell you she's much too excited to sleep. She's hopping up and down like her namesake. "The Tahoe cabin is better than Christmas," she reports breathlessly. "You can't stay at the North Pole for a week!"

I just pulled the Mom Card and ordered her back to bed.

Last-minute chores this evening included lawn care. Due to procrastination, I finally wrapped up at 8:45. By the end, it was so dark I had to guess if I was mowing in even rows. And when it came to fertilizing, the rotary spreader jammed again, so I just reached in and scattered big handfuls of beads all over the lawn. Just like our forefathers did in days of yore, before there were rotary spreaders. Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't the manufacturers take into account that rotary spreaders might get jammed by the little fertilizer beads? Wouldn't you think that's the first thing they would strive to overcome in their design process?

Next, I have to type minutes from a community meeting and e-mail them to the EPA. Doesn't that sound impressive? BB is moving laundry around. Bunny's job, getting to sleep, isn't going very ... hold it ... say, it's really quiet now. Cross your fingers.

And out of the blue, Mindy casually mentioned that her family will be in Tahoe next week too. Woo! Tentative plans are in the works to invade Rosie's restaurant for lunch, children in tow. We will gawk at the bicycles chained to the ceiling! We will marvel at the moose above the fireplace!

Enough blogging. Will I ever get to bed?

Top 5 foods that are mainly just an excuse to eat salt

1. Hard-boiled eggs
2. Tomatoes
3. Soft pretzels
4. Popcorn
5. Cantaloupe

Mmmm!

Power of love

Keri Smith's engaged! I read her story, then went to her fiance's blog and read his version of events. What a beautiful thing for two people so obviously in love. Wow! I'm a little verklempt now! Go read, and talk amongst yourselves.

B.D. becomes a democracy for approx. 36 hrs

As I may have mentioned, I have next week off, and we're going out of town. To Lake Tahoe, to be exact! My husband's nuclear family (plus spouses and children) rent a big cabin once a year. It's usually a crowded, noisy, and very fun-filled heap o'trouble, and I can't wait to get there. Swimming! River rafting! Wet towels draped everywhere! Gossip! S'mores and barbecue! Cheesy paperbacks and the annual showing of "Caddyshack"! And oh so many children! (Tried to write like Jo for a moment. How did I do?)

But - as on the last trip, the same primitive internet access rules may apply. The cabin we rent has one regular-strength land line, which is almost always tied up by all the adults until the wee hours of the night. And I don't have dialup anyway.

I'm sure there'll be a cafe in town where I can plug in. Or I can borrow somebody else's laptop. But I don't bet on getting around to either.

So I intend to do that auto-post thing again. And this is where you come in. What would you, the esteemed blog reader, the person I have come to know and respect so highly, like to read here? Vote for as many as apply:

1. More Discordian enlightenment
2. Quiz of the Day
3. Cute puppy pics
4. Stuff about St. Louis (I never did get around to sharing - sorry)
5. Exhaustive history of my grad school soul-searching
6. Part two of "The Avengers in Green Acres"
7. "Star Trek IV" from the whales' perspective
8. Other (be specific)

Deadline for entries is .... oh let's say Friday, early-ish.