milwaukee

d's typing all about milwaukee on her blog so i don't feel that compelled to give you the minute by minute here, too. it was VERY different for me to plan it because i couldn't ask her advice. i didnt' realize how much of my travel planning is compromise, bouncing ideas off my fellow travelers. but i did have a great time doign it with my two new resources. first, i love virtual tourist. better than any travel guide one can check out of the library. my other obsesion became google maps. i think that link will take you to the map i made for our trip. it includes not just the bus stop, hotel, and every museum, but also every place we ate every meal. can we say overplanned? but we had a good time. it was a great get away and i didn't think about the computer once. which is more than i could even ask for on a trip the first weekend of february.

quickie

thanks for the comments, yo.
unfortunately past my bedtime, and i have to get up 4 more times this week. so no long blogging for me. but you should know:
1. meet my therapist tomorrow
2. d and i had a fabulous time this weekend... in milwaulkee!
3. wow. you haven't heard ANY of the computer updates. the geeky guy came by, ran his tests, and said that our harddrive's fine- but our motherboard is dead. really, there's no replacing it on a system that old. so we called teleflora about the little toyota of floral software instead of the cadillac- and THAT is going to cost us $13,000. i said we'd go with the $10.000 version, thanks, but then he reminded me we pay $300 a month to maintain our software, and the new toyota version is only $150 a month. so we went with that. we'll get our hardware and three days of training as soon as we can get dsl.

the floral situation keeps getting worse. our software people won't train us unless we have highspeed hooked up. dsl was promised BY friday, but now they say it won't get hooked up till next monday. so we said fuck you to our phone company and called rcn and are getting cable. hopefully. dude comes by tomorrow to make sure we can. as ch says, we are totally due for some good karma. it started out by hoping we could get it done before the weekend so we wouldn't have to work sat and sun. now we're hoping we CAN work over the weekend, because mon-tues-wednesday training in the midst of v-day is a nightmare i won't fathom.

hey don't bitch at me for not blogging

i didn't do my killer yoga podcast, either. but my little sister has been threatening me to sign up for facebook for awhile, and when she tells you to do something, well, you do it.

i am america and so can you

heard stephen colbert interviewed on fresh air the other day, and the bookstore has a whole row of this book, one has to walk by on the way to the bathroom. his eyes follow you. z loves colbert, and i can see the draw. i can see how the title is so perfect for his character, the best title possible. still the grammar DRIVES ME FUCKING CRAZY.

ch can't stop haunting me with it. he'll call me on the way to the bathroom.

in more pleasant things one can do to one's brain, check this out.i couldn't see anything but clockwise, but then with enough staring it switched. i couldn't get it to switch back, but if i stop her i can switch back and forth at will. i guess this comes from beign right handed and left eye dominant?

something i never learned in elementary school

yes, i was in riverside elementary's chorus, and i learned the fifty nifty united states song. but i never learned the state song. if you were wondering:
Pennsylvania
Written and Composed by
Eddie Khoury and Ronnie Bonner

Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania,
Mighty is your name,
Steeped in glory and tradition,
Object of acclaim,
Where brave men fought the foe of freedom,
Tyranny decried,
'Til the bell of independence filled the countryside.

Chorus
Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania,
May your future be filled with honor everlasting as your history.

Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania,
Blessed by God's own hand,
Birthplace of a mighty nation,
Keystone of the land.
Where first our country's flag unfolded,
Freedom to proclaim,
May the voices of tomorrow glorify your name.

Chorus
Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania,
May your future be filled with honor everlasting as your history.

oh yeah. it's from here, so you can look up your own home state's song. i was lead there from the always fabulous mimi smartypants, who i think of as a neighbor, even though we've probably never met.

although, it's also very likely we sat next to each other on the train. but i'd never notice. because i never notice anyone. my New Best Friend (™) ryan tapped me on the shoulder today because we were on the same traincar, and we discovered we both work in the sears tower! i don't know about you, but i think this is a Sign.

reincarnation of pearl

when pearl died, when she showed that ugly face that no ipod owner ever wants to see, i didn't panic right away. i knew my first aid. i restarted. i went online to the site she told me to and did all the other rs. but still, no vital signs. no breathing. no heartbeat. i knew it was the end. i carried her with me all weekend, knowing i would soon get the chance to care for her as she so richly deserved.

today after work i made an appointment for her at the ipod section of the genius bar. while waiting for my appointment, i undressed pearl, and when jeff my genius called my name i passed her off to him. as he gently cradled her in his hands, i explained the things i had already done. jeff connected pearl to his laptop, and held her up to his ear. there was none of that clicking pearl the first made to show her discomfort. there was only silence. her heart had stopped. he checked my insurance information, affirmed that she, like me, is uninsured, and we had last been to visit february of 06 (goddess, what a miserable february that was!) i was prepared for him to start administering last rites, talking about organ donation or recycling programs. but instead, he said, let me try one more thing, i'll be right back. and he took her to his operating room in the back, and got out his tiny defibulator, and bam! zapped her heart back into working again. jeff at the genius bar, you have revived my ipod with dignity and humor. you are my hero for today.

so now, i'm going to copy my library list onto my desktop and update it regularly, because i know pearl and i are living on borrowed time. no one knows when cardiac arrest may happen.

dearth

pearl gave me the sad ipod face today, and no restarting or charging is fixing it. so lets make a list, i am currently missing:

a girlfriend
any co-workers
an ipod
hours and hours and hours of sleep

it's a lonely life.

HALOSCAN!!!

oh, i've missed you and your lovely blue pop up self! after fooling around with all that fucking code they finally posted a wizard, and it's so easy, and so now- i present to you....

HALOSCAN COMMENTING AGAIN!

since i know at least two of you have said you will never again comment in blogger format, i am so glad to give you the option you all so richly deserve. now, btw, would be a lovely time to comment in the lovely new pop up about how much you love my new comments, or conversely (or addionally!) how much you love me.

same old same old

continue to waste time on tuesdays. took me till THREE today to get out of bed, fold the laundry and put it away, shower, eat breakfast, and fool around online. once i was done doing all that i was able to get a little acomplished- got the squares cut out for the quilt i'm making jr for his birthday, patched a few pairs of his pants, and walked to the hardware store to get housekeys made for d and ch. and there's a new light on glenlake!!! how long has that been there? it's very new and exciting to me. d swears we've stopped at it before, but i don't remember it being there on friday when i did my shopping. it's perfect, because between granville and thorndale there are so many stores and it was so annoying to have to walk all the way to one or the other to cross. since the cvs and the healthfood store and the hardware store and the library are all on one side of the street, and the dominicks, fabric store, and walgreens are all on the other, i was always tempted to jaywalk. but now it is unneccesary, because there is a new light at glenlake! huzzah! it reminds me of when they put the stopsign right in front of my building in hyde park, and it took me a few days to figure out why the cars were all waving me across the street.

anyway, part of my wasted time today was reorganizing my podcasts. i'm really upset that there are no new ebert and ropers. what's up with that? grrr. i deleted morning becomes eclectic videos- i never watch them. don't have the heart to cancel chubb creek yet, even though i never listen to it. but krista likes it so much i feel i should. i signed up for KPBS's a way with words on her recomendation. then i tried to get statler and waldorf's podcast (from the muppets) to replace ebert and roper, but there seemes to be an error. THEN, while listening to windy city queercast i foudn that senator obama has a podcast, which as a voting citizen of illinois i am very happy about, and it's little 5-10 min soundbites of what he believes and what he's doing in washington every week, which i am so glad to hear, beacause all i ever seem to read about in the paper is the hype and the presidency, and not anything meaningful. so it's one of those catch22s- the more podcasts i listen to, the more i subscribe to. still have 20 to go from since christmas. it's worse on netflix. i keep saying i have a moritorium on adding to my queue, but the number keeps getting higher- more sneek in than i watch. watched 2 this weekend... but my queue's still at 125. i really wanna keep it under 100. i'm going to become a better movie watcher this year though. more movies more books (the easy part) and less online wasting (the harder part). also, i am going to buy a suntimes every monday and do the patternless crossword, until i am confident enough to buy it on tuesday. i think i'm kind of making the resolutions up as i go along. i think that's ok. especially in january. will turn them into an actual list, at some point, if i need to make myself feel better.

d and jr came over for dinner, and it was very successful. we made a new recipie from crecent dragonwagon's passionate vegetarian, the curried eggplant sweet potato stew. it was good. had sweet potatoes and nothing too scary for jr, vegan for deb, yummy for me. i mixed up a good curry powder (equal parts tumeric, corriander, garam masala [the real stuff from swad] and cumin) and there were lots of things for jr to peel (the eggplant, the sweet potato, and an apple. d with her contacts chopped the onion, and eveyone seemed happy. i thought it was delicious, and i think it is the first thing jr ever ate in my house.

affterwards, we played some cards, then i had jr read to me. which you know i love. a board book by rosemary wells (who doesn't love ruby and max?) and we started one fish two fish red fish blue fish. he's a good little sounder-outer, but he started wildly guessing when he got tired. so they went home, d with good news from her parents, but sad that she won't see me again for a bunch of days.

another new years resolution- make and send out valentines. can it all happen? stay tuned!

cut and paste

so mom sends me an email saying, "did you look at the cat loafs?" with an attached picture.

i reply with, "are those your cat loafs? what a pretty quilt!"

and so what are the sponsored links?

Wall Mount Quilt Holders
Thousands of products to display your miniature and full size quilts
www.ackfeldwire.com

Butterfly Quilts
Let Mother Nature bring fluttering friends into your bedroom.
www.TouchofClassCatalog.com

Turkey Meat Loaf
$250 Turkey day grocery giveaway. Turkey day rewards are limited.
www.ThanksgivingDayRewards.org

Used bakery machines
used 2nd hand bakery machines more than 600 machines in stock
www.usedbakerymachines.com

am i the only person who finds these just hilarious? i know people hate gmail ads reading your email, but i love it. certainly better than the flashing myspace crap.

secret photos

so joe and i are talking about sarah waters, and joe says he met her on her last book tour and says i'll probably look like her in 20 years. so i did a google image search for her to see if it was a complement, insult, or crazyness. then there was a picture that linked me to alison bechtel's flickr site, so of course i was brousing her photostream, and look what i found:

i'm chasing after the tattoo girl. creepy, huh?