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Amelia and Sage are in London with their mom for June and part of July, so Rick and I pass info from them back and forth as we get it (him from phone calls, me from Facebook). This morning’s conversation degenerated quickly.
I haven’t really been paying attention to the news for the past week. Rick is a news junkie and generally has it on 24-7, but when he’s away and I’m left to my own devices, I’ve got sitcoms on in the background. Hey, I’ve been depressed and sitcoms are my mental comfort food. However, last night before bed, I heard something on MSNBC that yanked me out of my fog. The words were “nude hiking” followed by “Republican South Carolina Governor Sanford.” Huh? I did a double take. This kind of shit cannot be happening, it’s too good to be true. But it is happening! And it gets better! Because he wasn’t nude hiking after all, he was in Buenos Aires with his mistress. It’s days like this that go a long way towards making up for the Asshat Administration. The continuing trainwreck that is the Republican party: now this is good TV. Thank you all for the kind words and thoughts – we’re making do, even though that was hands-down the most craptastic vacation I’ve ever taken. A recount: Joe died, Jordana and I worked like hell on getting a grant done in time (and did), there was a flying trip to New Haven to see a performance of someone we might work with in the future, and my mom’s rental car got towed Father’s Day night so we had to take a trip to the impound lot in Red Hook yesterday morning to get it back before she flew out in the afternoon. And no, I did not get to sleep in once on that vacation, which would have made things a little better. Damn. Good things did happen on the vacay, and I have to keep reminding myself of that. For example, in spite of the 87 straight days of grey skies we seem to have had this June, Mom and I went to the circus at Coney Island. That was fun. We also went to Sagamore Hill to visit Teddy Roosevelt’s home, which was awesome. Jordana and I found a wine bar in her neighborhood on Friday and I discovered a really great local honey wine, then we went to the Botanical Gardens, then to Celebrate Brooklyn with Thabiso. These are all good things, but on the whole the impression this vacation left me with was “not restful.” And then I came back to work yesterday to find out that we’re expected to be in the new office in the new building on July 20, so now we are stressed out about that. I think I need another vacation.
Joe passed out of this world on Tuesday night at about 8:30, right as Keith Olbermann was reading the day’s World’s Worst Persons. He had been going downhill for a while, and by Sunday he wasn’t really able to use his back legs. We were bringing food and water to him and taking him to the litterbox when he acted like he needed to go, but on Tuesday morning he wasn’t showing interest in food or water anymore. His breathing had also changed early that morning-it was shallower and more labored. We knew that he was going to go soon, and decided that if he could, we wanted him to pass at home with us instead of with the vet. Joe hated the vet, and I wanted him to have good memories at the end, not be stressed out. I made some calls to let people know what was happening, and we settled in for the wait. Continue reading Requiem for a Joe That rule is, “If it’s free, take it.” This rule has led to some interesting situations, as you might imagine, but basically since there’s no such thing as a free lunch, when an actual free lunch comes around, I’m eating it. That didn’t sound good. Oh well. So earlier this week, I saw a free David Byrne concert in Prospect Park. I figured that was my freebie quota for a while. Possibly for the rest of the summer. But no! Because today I was reminded that Shakespeare in the Park starts, and as every New Yorker knows, that shit is free! It’s also a royal pain in the ass to get tickets to unless you don’t have a job, because traditionally, you get up at the butt-crack of dawn to line up by the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park, and even then, no guarantees that you’re going to get those tickets (they give two to each person standing in the right part of the queue). Except! Last year someone at The Public (Theater, for those of you who don’t live here) apparently thought of us working stiffs stuck in offices all day and invented a Virtual Line. You sign up between midnight and 1 PM of the day of the performance, then log back in between 1 and 6 PM that day to see if you’ve gotten tickets. Today, I figured “What the hell, it’s the first show of the season, let’s see if I can get in.” I also figured I had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting in, because I tried a couple of times last year and it never worked out. But today, today my friends, it worked. I signed into the line at 12:55 PM, then checked back at 1:05 PM and I had tickets! So tonight, rain or shine, I am going to see Twelfth Night with Anne Hathaway and Audra McDonald. I’m jazzed! And hoping for no rain. Cross your fingers for me, will you? Because those chairs are open to lightning, and I would like to make it to Sage’s 8th grade graduation tomorrow intact. See this? That’s where I was last night. At a free concert by David Byrne in Prospect Park with 27,000 other people who either really like David Byrne or really like free. I’ve been going to Celebrate Brooklyn concerts for years, and I have never seen them close the gates because the venue was full. Fortunately, although we got into line at about 6:20 (gates opened at 6:30) and were well back in it, we found a guy that Rick plays softball with. Who happens to be the head of security for Celebrate Brooklyn. (Hi, Mike!) He got us in ahead of most of the line, and we were able to set up our blanket and picnic spread in plenty of time, which means that when Amelia arrived in Brooklyn, she had someplace to meet us. Fortunately, she got in ahead of them closing the gates as well, because we hadn’t come up with a contingency plan for that. The show was fantastic. It was a lot of songs that David Byrne had collaborated on with Brian Eno, but there were a couple of big Talking Heads hits as well, and they kept the crowd jumping. But although I was very happy that it was someone I liked doing the opening concert of the year, I was happier still that the venue was finally open. I spend a lot of time at Celebrate Brooklyn concerts/movies/dance pieces in the summer because it’s a great chance to hang out with friends and have a picnic. Seeing it through Amelia’s eyes last night, I found an added benefit. “Wow, I didn’t know there were this many hipsters in New York!” she exclaimed when she got to our blanket. And thus the “Count the Hipsters” game was born. Last night’s total, before the show started: 54. Good times.
This happened to me yesterday, while I was knitting on the girls’ balcony for a couple of hours. The sun was stronger than I thought, even indirectly and it was the first time my fishbelly white legs had been exposed to the sun for any length of time. As you can tell (I think), the sun was on my left and I was stretched out on a bench – my left leg is also burned on the left side, but I showed you the pale part for comparison. True story, I didn’t even realize I was this burned until several hours later because immediately after I came in from the balcony we saw Mary Stuart on Broadway and in the pitch black of a theater, my legs just felt a little itchy and I was blaming that on the seat upholstery. It was only when we got out of the theater that I was like, “Oh. OUCH.” Flash forward to today in the office when I am wearing business shorts (the very thought of fabric touching this burn made me want to scream, so I didn’t even attempt it). We have three part-timers in their 20s in my office. All three are black, and one’s family is from Jamaica. I tell you this because I became an object lesson for them this afternoon when they came in. “Oh my god! I didn’t know skin could get like that!” Well, yes, I’m pale. I burn (new concept for them, I don’t think any of the three of them has ever had a sunburn). “That’s going to peel, isn’t it? And then you’ll be brown?” Yeah, it’s going to peel like a mo-fo, but after that I will be just as pale as I usually am. “You don’t get tan? I didn’t know white people could burn like that and not get brown from it!” (calling other young part-timer over) “Dude, come look at Julie’s legs!!” That’s because you have never seen Irish/German people in the summer. We are unique. I’m looking at this as a culture exchange. They have taught me about weaves, braids, and hair moisturizers, so I feel like it’s only fair that I can teach them about pale-skinned freaks like myself. I’ve got a post-in-progress in my mind about my unholy love of the Wii, but it’s just not happening right now. Hopefully I’ll get to it in the next few days. I’m going though a lot of ups and downs right now. I have a tendency towards depression – definitely genetic, as most of my family has it as well – but usually by this time of year, I’m through it. Mine is very seasonal affective disorder, and usually the longer days are enough to kick me out of it. We’ve been getting a lot of days of rain in a row this spring, so maybe that has something to do with it. The grey skies bring me down, and then I’m prey to whatever bad thoughts come along. Those thoughts are mainly about my cat Joe these days. If you’ve been reading for any length of time, you know my cat Joe is not exactly a spring chicken anymore. As near as we can figure, he’s 18, turning 19 at the end of August. Joe hadn’t looked or acted his age, well, ever, and I had pretty much decided that the bitchy little guy was going to live forever. Or at least until age 25, like Rick’s brother’s cat Maynard. The plastic incident changed things for Joe. At the time he swallowed the plastic, he was still a fairly respectable 12 pounds. I’ve called him my linebacker kitty for years, and he’s always been solid. I guess those three days without food while we tried to figure out what the hell was going on took their toll and his body started to live off its reserves. He’s gotten thinner and thinner since then. Today, he’s about 8 pounds, and I can feel the bones in his spine and his knobby little knees. He’s also started to have a fair amount of problems with arthritis. His hips especially bother him, and he went from jumping up on things to trying to jump up but missing, to not even trying to jump. We put up a stool at the end of the bed so that he can get in and out without injury and sleep with us when he wants, but he much prefers us to carry him. The past couple of weeks, he’s not really shown much interest in the dry food he’s always eaten. I’ve given him wet food, but that leads to diarrhea, and a cat with arthritis in his hips doesn’t need to be squatting in the litterbox every five minutes. He doesn’t have the energy even to move his feet out of the way when he pees, so we’ve been cleaning litter balls out from between his toes a lot. This morning I found that he was so exhausted from a night of diarrhea that when he had peed in the litterbox, he had apparently gotten his tail in it, so there were litter bits stuck there as well. All of this sounds bad, and when I’m really depressed, I think he doesn’t have much time left with us. I hope that he can make it the next three weeks until my mom comes up for a visit so that she can see him before he goes. But on the other hand, he’s still very interested in the wet food and in treats (most of the time), he always makes it to the litterbox, he still loves to sit beside me and purrs like mad when I pet him, and he played with Rick a bit the other day, swatting at Rick’s hand and eventually biting Rick when Rick wouldn’t quit touching Joe’s paw. So I just don’t know. I’m talking to the vet this evening, getting medicine to stop the diarrhea, and I’m going to tell her what’s going on and ask her point blank if she could tell me if we’ve reached the point where we’re going to have to put him down. I’ve never had to make that decision before, and never been around when my mom had to make the decision for two of her cats. I like this vet immensely and she likes Joe a lot, so hopefully she can tell me if I’m just being pessimistic or if we’re getting close to the end. In the meantime, I would really like to see some sunshine instead of grey skies and rain. Apparently the answer is “If you don’t keep up with them, eventually you’re going to have to spend a really long time trimming both.” In the past three days, I have given my blog the equivalent of a thorough tweezing/waxing/ladyscaping. You may have been here one of the eleventy-million times I changed the theme, or the options, or the sidebars, or the header. You probably didn’t even notice the mess I was dealing with in the links section. I used to figure I was the only one using the links because they were on a separate page. Because of that, I wasn’t so hung up on figuring out who had stopped blogging, or moved URLs, or any of that, and when I just clicked through my blogroll, holy hell was that evident. But now that’s all straightened out, and to continue a metaphor that got old five minutes ago, my blog no longer has a unibrow. I would like to come up with something really great to write about, but frankly, all that behind-the-scenes work exhausted me, so I’m going to go drink a beer and play some Wii and maybe even eat some dinner now. Sorry. Maybe tomorrow. Time speeds up as you get older. I can remember when I was a kid, a school year was an eternity and when it ended for the summer, I couldn’t visualize Labor Day. It was a lifetime away, a lifetime of trips to the pool and the park, bike rides with friends, trips into Pittsburgh with my mom to see museums, occasionally a few days at my aunt’s house, a couple of weeks with all my cousins at my grandparents’ place. Long about sophomore year of high school, I realized things were moving a little faster. After years of waiting for it, then end was in sight, and there were five million things to be done before I graduated. Then college, where time is compressed into two 16 week semesters. Then I moved to New York City, the place that moves at the speed of light on a daily basis and did a sixty credit graduate program in two years instead of the three it would have taken at another school. Getting a job that I was doing to pay the bills rather than for any great love also made the time speed by. Mondays drag, then it’s a slog through to the weekend that is done in the blink of an eye. “Working for the weekend” makes the months fly past. And goddess help you if you either have kids or know kids, because that will make the time go even faster. The Oldest will be starting her senior year in the fall and is busy checking out colleges and acing the SATs. The Youngest will be graduating from 8th grade in two weeks, which means she’s starting high school in the fall. I guess at almost 17 and almost 14, I can stop using the pseudonyms and just call them Amelia and Sage now, can’t I? Especially since I’ve been calling my littlest girl by her real name on the blog since she was born. Speaking of that little girl, Samang’s going to be two next Monday. Unbelievable. So with all this time speeding by, I’ve been resorting to things that move in more “manageable” chunks than an unwieldy blog entry. Twitter, Plurk, Ravelry forums, those are where I’ve been hanging out. Places where I don’t have to think about the craft of writing, where I can just call someone “hoar” and get instant feeback. But starting in the fall, I’m going to be doing something where the writing requires thought again, and I’d better get back into practice. In the fall, I’m going to take advantage of the fact that I work at Some College by doing so get a tuition waiver, and I’m going to start my second master’s degree. See, I took a flying trip to DC and Virginia to hang out with my Uncle Norm back in March. It was supposed to be for the purpose of taking pictures of the cherry blossoms, but a few storms killed that (they’re very delicate, those cherry blossoms), so we went to the Capitol, the Newseum, Monticello and Mount Vernon instead. And somewhere in the middle of being surrounded by all that history, and having someone I could discuss all of it with, and quite possibly because we watched John Adams and damn, that really brought history to life, I remembered that once upon a time I had quite enjoyed history. Enough to major in it as an undergrad. And I thought “Huh, I wonder if I can take some classes when I get back” which turned into applying to the MA program in history, because I like to do things right. And I got in. So in the fall, I’ll be taking a course in historiography as well as a course in pre-modern China. I’m looking forward to it, to reading and learning again. I won’t lie, I also have moments of panic because while I’ve read quite a few books about history over the last few years, there was never any pressure to take it to the next level and synthesize my feelings about what I was reading. I was reading them for pleasure, which is great, but is a whole other can of worms from really studying it. So wish me luck, because I’m going to need it. But in the meantime, I need to practice writing out my thoughts in more than 140 characters, so I’m going to try this blogging thing again. What the hell, the domain’s paid up for a while, might as well get my money’s worth. But since I’ve just written what Word Press tells me is almost 800 words, I need to take a bit of a break. So I’ll show you some of the other things I’ve been up to in pictures.
Samang and Thabiso at the Life is Living Festival. Samang wanted “Baba wear coat!” so he did. On his head. That’s her coat, it really wouldn’t fit him any other way.
Sage, Rick, and Amelia after Sage’s school performance in Iolanthe. Sage was the ingenue. Of course. Note how tall both girls are – 5′10″ and Sage might still be growing. At least Samang is still shorter than me.
We took this picture in Prospect Park to taunt Samang’s Uncle Lucas, who is an insane Baltimore Ravens fan. She’s almost able to say “Steelers” now, although it sounds like “Stee-ers!”. Next task, teaching her to say “Ravens suck!”
Oh, yeah, I went to visit Regan and Grace for Stitches South. Blurriness of this picture caused by wine. Which is also what caused me to rip back the shawl I was working on when I took this picture. Actual knitting content to come…soonish.
In the meantime, this was my haul from the first day at Stitches. I might have fallen down a bit more on the second day.
Oh, wait, I do have knitting content! I knit these socks for Lori. They’re her birthday present, but since she’s in West Virginia doing regional theatre all damned summer, I had to give them to her a month early. She owes me.
I love this picture so much that it’s my desktop wallpaper at work. Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.
And to wrap it up, my favorite picture from this spring. Don’t photograph George Washington’s dentures. They mean it. |
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