Tag: life

Ten Reasons Why I Haven’t Updated My Blog Lately

~ Laura ~ 45 Comments

1. I’ve been busy at work. I know everyone always says that, but my job is really challenging. Performing brain surgery while rescuing kittens from burning buildings is harder than it sounds.

2. I was abducted by aliens. Really boring aliens. I kept waiting for them to do something interesting enough for me to write about, but they just kept droning on and on about glorfball, which apparently is a very popular sport on their planet.

3. I sold a short story to a magazine and got hit with a case of rebound writer’s block.

4. My intern quit and it took me two months to figure out how to work the keyboard.

5. The intern who quit had secretly outsourced his job to a group of monkeys living in my basement and banging randomly on typewriter keys. It took me a while to find new homes for them.

6. When I first went down to the basement to check on the monkeys, I slipped on a banana peel. I managed to catch myself before I fell, but then I realized we were almost out of bananas, so I went to the local banana emporium. On my way home, I was in a car accident. It was just a fender-bender, but the bananas were crushed, so I had to bake some emergency banana bread. While reaching to get my banana bread cookbook from the top shelf, I lost my balance and fell. I landed on my head and got the kind of amnesia where you remember everything else but forget that you have a blog.

7. With the intern and monkeys gone, I decided to try Blog-O-Matic Content Generator 2.0. Big mistake. It kept crashing my system and would only generate shopping lists.

8. I called the Blog-O-Matic customer support line six weeks ago. I’m still on hold. After the first hour, I started counting how many times their on-hold music repeated itself. When I got to 50,000, I hung up and reinstalled my operating system.

Oh, and if you think hanging up means I’m no longer on hold, you’ve probably never listened to the same on-hold music loop 50,000 times in a row. It changes you. I’ll be on hold, hearing that music in my head and half-expecting a Blog-O-Matic customer support representative to appear at any moment, for the rest of my life.

9. When I reinstalled my operating system, I lost all my saved passwords.

10. My dog ate it.

To celebrate my return to blogging, I’m holding a contest. The first three thousand people to comment on this post will each receive a free pre-owned typewriter! Each one comes with its own unique collection of stains and odors.

My Cats Probably Don’t Have the Disease From the Movie “Contagion”

~ Laura ~ 44 Comments

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This morning I found blood spatter stains on my bed. It wasn’t a huge amount – I was able to eliminate “maybe someone stabbed me while I was asleep” and “maybe I accidentally stabbed someone in my sleep” as theories right away. It was a collection of small drops that looked like the pattern a cat’s sneeze might make if a cat’s sneeze were made of blood, right in the spot where my cats like to sleep.

Spatter pattern from an apparent bloody cat sneeze
This week on CSI: Feline

I did what any rational person would do – I panicked. One of my cats was sneezing blood. I’m pretty sure that’s the first symptom of the disease from the movie Contagion. I knew exactly how the conversation with the vet would go:

“We’ll have to run some more tests, but it looks like your cat has the disease from the movie Contagion.”
“But… that was fiction.”
“That’s right. There’s no easy way to tell you this, but you and your cats are fictional characters.”
“Is it serious?”
“That depends on the genre. Based on your symptoms, the most likely candidates are Medical Thriller or Romantic Comedy. Can you think of anything in your recent history that might point to one or the other?”
“A guy made eye contact with me while I was being adorably clumsy in Whole Foods the other day.”
“This may be a romantic comedy. If so, you and the cats are fine, and the stain is from some red wine you spilled last night while watching an old black and white movie on TV.”
“But I wasn’t drinking wine last night. And I don’t have a TV in my bedroom.”
“Oh. Then you should probably focus on getting your affairs in order.”

I prepared for the appointment the way anyone would: I took a picture of the blood spatter on my phone to show to the vet, then I decided the phone display was too small, so I emailed the picture to myself and printed it out, but then I noticed that the color balance was off, so I took more pictures with my “good” camera, uploaded them to my laptop, and printed them. The vet appointment wasn’t quite as bad as I’d imagined, but in the end, she said the words I’d been dreading: “Give each cat one of these pills twice a day for a week.”

Wish me luck. I’ll need it.

The vet thinks Holly may have a sinus infection, but she’s not sure. We should get some lab results tomorrow.

Three Scary Things In My House

~ Laura ~ 66 Comments

Scary thing #1: creepy-looking insect.

I was going to use my cat's paw to show scale, but he wouldn't cooperate. You'll have to go by the carpet fibers instead.

What is this thing? What planet is it from? Why is it in my house? How many more of them are there? If my cats try to play with it, and it bites them, will they turn into mutant alien insect cats? Do mutant alien insect cats eat cat food, or what? (Actually, based on the pictures at whatsthatbug.com, a site that actually exists, this appears to be a potato bug. But my other questions still stand).

Scary thing #2: ambiguously-labelled water filter.

Sounds delicious, doesn't it?
Sounds delicious, doesn't it?

The scare quotes on the label do not fill me with confidence.

Scary thing #3: confusing condiments.

Sugar and spice.

On the left is a jar containing a mixture of crystallized sugar, chocolate, and coffee beans, with a built-in grinder; on the right is a jar of pepper with a built-in grinder. Alone, neither of these is scary — but I know that one day, when I least expect it, I’ll confuse the two. It’s like having a ticking time bomb in my kitchen.

Before There Was Spam…

~ Laura ~ 48 Comments
I can't decide whether I blurred his name and contact info to protect his privacy or because I didn't want to give him any free advertising.

Before there was spam, there were advertising circulars. My front door is a magnet for these things — every day, I find flyers for real estate agents, restaurants, dry cleaners, and home improvement services. Occasionally, I’ll see one for an optometrist or a dental clinic — so I really shouldn’t have been surprised when I got one from a gynecologist.

I could tell right away that this guy is better than my regular doctor, because his flyer offers a menu of “Specialties and Procedures” including several that my doctor has never mentioned (for example, she’s never once asked me if I’d like to have “Major Surgery”). So of course I decided to make an appointment.

I did have some misgivings, though. The silhouette of a pregnant woman on the left side of the flyer didn’t fill me with confidence. I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure that having skin that particular shade of green is not a sign of a healthy pregnancy. Also, her hands look kind of ghostly and skeletal, although I may be biased because my own hands are freakishly small.

So I did extensive research (okay, five minutes of googling) on this physician and found a detail he’d forgotten to mention: he’s currently on probation in California for a “misdemeanor count of sexual exploitation of a patient” (his defense to the criminal charge was that no one ever told him he wasn’t supposed to have sex with his patients). This raised a question about the “Specialties and Procedures” listed on the flyer: at first, I’d thought that “STD’s” meant that treating STDs was one of his specialties, but now I think he may have meant that transmitting STDs is one of his more common procedures. I should probably ask for clarification when I call for my appointment.

The Five Stages of Realizing You’ve Written a Poorly-Worded Blog Comment

~ Laura ~ 80 Comments

Sometimes I read other people’s blogs. Sometimes I leave comments on other people’s blogs. And sometimes that process goes terribly, terribly wrong.

Self portrait (assuming that, in a previous life, I was Edvard Munch and imagined this is what I'd look like today).

I don’t want to alarm anyone, but every time you write a comment, you run the risk that someone will misinterpret it. While everyone is different, most of us go through the same five stages when faced with this kind of emotional trauma.

Stage 1: Denial

You notice that a blogger has replied to a comment you left on his blog — but instead of engaging in friendly banter as you’d expected, he seems to have interpreted your comment as a personal attack. Your immediate reaction is to assume there was some glitch and that his angry response was intended for someone else, but then you notice specific details that could only have been directed at you. You decide he must be hypersensitive. Or crazy. No sane person could possibly have thought you meant that.

Stage 2: Apology

At the end of the denial stage, you read your comment once again and are shocked to realize that it really could be interpreted to mean that. Easily. By a sane person. You’re hit with an intense wave of embarrassment, which you try to alleviate by shooting off a combination apology and explanation of what you really meant. This will fix everything, you tell yourself. He’ll read the explanation, understand what I really meant, and we’ll both laugh about it. You just need to check back later for the friendly response you’re sure is forthcoming.

Stage 3: Stalking

You check back later. No response, but maybe he hasn’t seen it yet. You reread your apology. You’re not sure it’s clear — after all, you wrote it kind of hastily. You write another comment expanding on the explanation. Then you wait a reasonable amount of time (say, 90 seconds or so) and check back again.

Still no response. You look at your apology and your apology clarification, and even though you meant them sincerely, you realize they could look like the comments of someone who was initially wrong but is now backpedaling. So you post another comment explaining that that’s not what you’re doing. That just makes it worse, because denying it makes you look even more guilty. You post a comment explaining that.

You decide all these comments are starting to make you look like a stalker. You post a comment explaining that you’re not stalking him and that you’ve never stalked anyone. Unfortunately, you can’t resist ending that one with “but there’s a first time for everything”. You post another comment explaining that the last bit was a joke.

You begin to regret leaving all these comments. You send the blogger a tweet apologizing for the first one and asking him to ignore all the others.

You send another tweet explaining that you meant he should ignore all your other comments, not anyone else’s.

You send another tweet explaining that you meant he should ignore all your other comments on this post, not the two previous posts of his you’ve commented on, and that you remain steadfast in your opinion that his children and pets are adorable in their matching purple sweaters and that his brownie recipe looks delicious but could probably be improved by adding a cup or two of chocolate chips along with the nuts. Technically, you have to break this into three tweets because of Twitter’s character limit.

You send another tweet explaining you’re not a stalker, because you just realized that if he follows your instructions and doesn’t read all the comments you left on his blog, he’ll miss that very important bit of information.

You send him a friend request on Facebook.

You add him to your “People I Am Definitely Not Stalking” circle on Google+.

You realize there’s probably nothing more you can say to him at this point, so you start asking friends to act as character references. No one seems particularly enthusiastic about the idea. You can’t imagine why.

Stage 4: Depression

All your tweets and friend requests and comments go unanswered. The blogger clearly doesn’t believe you. You feel like you’ve lost all credibility. You start to wonder how many other people you’ve offended without realizing it — after all, lots of people just ignore comments they think are offensive, so how would you know? You withdraw from the Internet and resort to speaking to people in person. You realize you’ve hit rock bottom when you find yourself buying the print version of a newspaper.

Stage 5: Acceptance

You begin to put the situation into perspective and return to the Internet. You’re filled with something that you try to convince yourself is a sense of inner peace, but it’s really just numbness. And then a thought comes to you, bringing with it a shining ray of hope: hey, this might be a good topic for a blog post.

Another Reason Why You Can’t Take Me Anywhere: Dim Sum Broccoli

~ Laura ~ 29 Comments
So beautiful. So delicious. So slippery.

I have a love-hate relationship with dim sum broccoli. It’s sauteed, but not too much, so it’s crunchy and sweet, crisp and fresh. It looks gorgeous, sitting there on the plate, a vibrant, shiny green that almost shimmers in the light. And I love the idea of it — I can tell myself that yes, I just ate three days’ worth of calories and five days’ worth of sodium and fat, but I also had some broccoli, so it all balances out.

There’s only one problem: I am unable to eat this dish and maintain any semblance of dignity. That gorgeous sheen is really a thin layer of oil that, combined with the smooth texture of the stalks, creates a slippery surface that makes them difficult to pick up with chopsticks. But I manage, and then I’m faced with a new challenge: taking that first bite. But from where? On one end, there’s a single, solid stalk, which branches out into three or so thinner, leafy stalks. The leafy end seems like the natural place to start, but the leafy stalks fan out just enough to make it difficult to take a bite of all of them at once, but not enough to allow me to take a bite of one without having the others hit my cheeks. And the leafy stalks are sometimes a little stringy and difficult to bite through cleanly. So that leaves the solid end. Taking a bite of that is easy enough, but it causes the leafy stalks to wave back and forth in front of my face like the arms of an overly-eager schoolgirl trying to attract the teacher’s attention.

Know your vegetables! Broccoli and rapini images via Wikipedia.

I wouldn’t have this problem (and, to be fair, it wouldn’t taste as good) if I were actually eating broccoli. Broccoli stalks are thick enough that they’d have to be sliced and not served whole. But instead, they use some other vegetable that’s more like broccoli rabe, which always sounds like it should be a character in a western (“There’s a new sheriff in town. They call him Broccoli Rob”) or maybe a crime story (“Robert ‘Broccoli Rob’ Tortellini stared across the table at Vinnie ‘Soft Serve’ Zamboni. By the end of the night, their two families would be embroiled in a war that would last for decades”). I keep hoping that someday, a real Broccoli Rob will emerge and teach me and others like me how to eat this stuff.

My New Year’s Resolution: In 2012, I Will Humiliate Myself Publicly On This Blog

~ Laura ~ 33 Comments
What passes for an illustration on this blog today.

I love reading illustrated blogs — blogs with cartoons, watercolors, or even doodles. But although some of my posts have included photos, graphs, and even a few images I’ve cobbled together with Photoshop, I’ve never posted any original drawings. The reason for that is simple: I can’t draw. At all. Which leads me to my first resolutions:

Resolution #1: I will attempt to learn how create some kind of original freehand illustration that won’t make me cringe with embarrassment. (Any suggestions on how to accomplish this would be greatly appreciated).

Resolution #2: I will post some of my attempts on this blog, even though I don’t really expect to achieve the “won’t make me cringe with embarrassment” part of Resolution #1.

Also, because of recent events:

Resolution #3: I will not buy any flashlights in 2012.

Resolution #4: I will acquire some matches.

And finally:

Resolution #5: I will make Sugar Plum Awareness Month a reality in 2012. Sugar plum fact of the day: sugar plums are the most popular of all the flavored plum confections, outshining vinegar plums, anchovy plums, and even wasabi plums.

Happy New Year!

That One Night It Got Really Windy

~ Laura ~ 28 Comments

It’s official — I live in a disaster area. And for once, that’s not a reference to my housekeeping skills.

I’d tell you the name of the disaster, but it doesn’t have one. It probably never will. Other wind-related events, like tornadoes and hurricanes, get names. So do earthquakes and wildfires. We even named a scheduled three-day freeway shutdown — but not this windstorm. Is that fair? I don’t think so. It’s time to show it a little respect; from now on, I’ll be referring to it as That One Night It Got Really Windy.

I was completely unprepared for That One Night It Got Really Windy. When I left work that one night, I noticed that it was, in fact, really windy — windy enough that, on the way to my car, I had to put more than the usual amount of effort into standing upright and maintaining contact with the ground — but the significance didn’t really hit me until I reached my neighborhood and started seeing severed tree limbs everywhere.

My nearest street corner. It was a fun drive home.

I got home at about 9:30 pm, and the power was out on my block. But that was okay, because I have a super-fancy flashlight / lantern combination, and I knew exactly where it was. I went right to it, flipped the switch — and nothing happened. I decided to go to the store to get batteries for my flashlight and matches for my stove.

The three-block walk to the supermarket was amazing. Leaves were flying everywhere. Trees were moving in ways I’d never seen them move before. At one house, the festive holiday decorations had been beset by tragedy — one wireframe reindeer had a broken neck; the others lay, lifeless, on the ground, as though, in a senseless act of workplace violence, one of Santa’s elves had gone on a murderous rampage.

Three blocks from my house. This tree used to be bushier, and more vertical.
Same tree, from the front. I'm pretty sure the huge piles of greenery on each side were cut from the tree after it fell.

At the store, I bought batteries and, on impulse, two additional flashlights. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was the beginning of my descent into flashlight addiction. In the two weeks since That One Night It Got Really Windy, I’ve bought five flashlights. There was a practical reason for buying at least one of them — I used it on the walk home.

Flashlights I've bought since That Night It Got Really Windy

When I went to replace the battery on my lantern, I discovered that it actually has three switches, and the one I’d flipped in the dark earlier was the wrong one — the battery had been fine all along. I’d forgotten to get matches, so for dinner, I feasted on cheese and crackers, fruit, and chocolate.

I used my cell phone to check on the status of the power outage — something I’d be doing pretty frequently for the next day and a half. The power company has an “Outage Center” web page that shows the status of outages, but every time I looked at it, I’d momentarily think it said “Outrage Center”. I’m not sure whether that’s a reflection of my emotions or whether I have some sort of undiagnosed learning disability that causes me to see Rs where there are none. I’m leaning towards the latter explanation, because I also often misread the title of the Cute Overload web site as “Cute Overlord”.

Throughout the storm, my cats kept alternating between being a little freaked out by the howling winds and being fascinated by the flashlight beam as I moved from room to room. Eventually, I settled into bed with my Kindle (the case has a built-in light), with one cat on my lap and the other by my side. It was pretty cozy.

A cat, a comforter, and a Kindle -- what more do I need?

In the morning, the winds had died down, and the power was still out. I looked out my kitchen window and saw my neighbor’s back yard — which was odd, because there’s normally a fence separating our properties. A chunk of fence was missing on the other side as well, along with lots of roof shingles and some branches from a tree in the front of the house.

This fence is less effective than it once was at keeping my neighbor's dog in his yard.

On the bright side, my insurance company will soon be writing me a check for more money than I’ve paid in premiums over the years. I think that means I win at insurance.

Office Supplies: The Movie

~ Laura ~ 23 Comments

You’re at the office, and you want to clip some papers together, but there are no paper clips in your desk drawer. So you go to the supply cabinet, and there are no paper clips there either. As you walk back to your desk, you realize there weren’t any empty spaces on any of the supply cabinet shelves, which implies there are never paper clips in the cabinet, which can mean only one thing: you’ve somehow been transported to an alternate universe that’s identical to ours in every way except that the paper clip was never invented.

You begin to panic. You break into a run, and when you reach your office, you fling open your desk drawer. Your stapler is still there. You can breathe again. You force yourself to calm down, to focus. How long has this been going on? When was the last time you saw a paper clip? When was the last time paper clips came up in conversation? Has it been days? Weeks? Months? You can’t remember.

Maybe it’s not so bad. Maybe you can use this to your advantage somehow. You toy with the idea of “inventing” the paper clip yourself. You could patent it, collect royalties on every paper clip ever sold, and make huge amounts of money. But without competition, the stapler industry is probably much more powerful in this world, and they probably won’t take too kindly to the idea of another fastener hitting the market. What kind of tactics would they use to prevent that from happening? Would they resort to violence? You decide to proceed with caution. Also, you have some doubts about the ethics of claiming this invention as your own.

Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe there’s another explanation. Maybe if you just walk into someone’s office and ask them for a paper clip, they’ll open their desk drawer and hand one to you. Or maybe they’ll just sit there, looking confused, and you won’t know whether they’re unfamiliar with the concept or whether they just didn’t hear you. If no one’s ever heard of a paper clip, then “do you have any paper clips” just sounds like gibberish, and you can’t let your colleagues think you’re standing around babbling incoherently all day. You’ll need to explain it away somehow. You almost settle on “Paper clips? No, no — I said, do you have any vapor strips“, but then you realize that “vapor strips” doesn’t make  sense in either universe. Unless “vapor strips” does mean something here. You decide to google it.

Before you can do your search, you glance at your email, and you see something you’ve never noticed before: all the messages that have attachments have little pictures of paper clips next to them. You check Wikipedia, and paper clips do seem to exist, so you haven’t stumbled into an alternate universe after all. You have, however, stumbled upon a brilliant idea for a series of science fiction movies.

The first movie would be the paper clip movie. The main character wakes up in a universe without paper clips, decides to “invent” them, and experiences lots of intrigue and car chases involving the evil stapler industry. In the final scene, the main character somehow makes it back to the real world and celebrates by throwing a handful of paper clips into the air; the closing shot of the movie is the paper clips raining down, which is why the movie needs to be in 3-D.

In the second movie, paper clips exist in the alternate universe, but staplers don’t. The main character decides to “invent” the stapler and clashes with the evil paper clip industry.

In the third movie, paper clips and staplers exist, but the staple is never invented. This is the final movie of the series, and the least successful.

Ten Warning Signs That You May Be Experiencing a Wind Storm

~ Laura ~ 34 Comments
There's some damage to this fence. It's subtle, but if you look closely, you can just barely make it out.

1. When walking outside, you spend much more than the usual amount of effort staying on course, remaining upright, and not flying away.

2. Your car rocks from side to side, especially when parked or stopped at a light, and the motion feels all wrong for an earthquake.

3. In a festive move, your city has kicked up their fall decorations a notch by arranging a tasteful display of giant tree limbs in the middle of most of your local roads.

4. All the trees in your neighborhood are moving in ways you’ve never seen before, as if they’re taking part in some sort of frenzied tree dance.

5. You vaguely remember having electricity. And not living in a Starbucks.

6. The tree in your front yard has fewer branches than you remember.

7. The fence in your back yard is somewhat less continuous than you remember.

8. Your roof has fewer shingles than you remember.

9. The people who live in the house three houses down from yours appear to have made the unusual landscaping choice of scattering shingles across their lawn. You applaud their good taste in choosing lawn shingles identical to your roof shingles.

10. The next morning, you fail to wake up in Oz.

Update: the electricity came back on early Friday morning.