Oct 22
Seriously, was my brother not the cutest little kid? Look at that grin! In case you're curious, I'm holding my pet rat in my hands in this picture.
By the time you guys read this, Wes and I will either be on a plane or in California. We’ll be spending the weekend celebrating the marriage of my little brother to his high school sweetheart, and, as such, will be away from computers.
Please join me in congratulating my brother Nick and his fiancée (soon to be wife!) Karen!
Oct 20
My oven looks like this, but on the inside.
I miss my oven. Lo, do I miss my oven. It broke a month ago, and we’ve since had someone come out to diagnose the problem and recommend a course of action. A course of action that requires the simple replacement of a part.
A part that no one in the universe has, aside from the direct manufacturer in China.
Wes’ brother, who is a contractor, ordered the part for us from his supplier. The problem is, the supplier won’t get a shipment of these until the end of November.
All of this wouldn’t be an issue, except for the fact that we’re supposed to host Thanksgiving dinner for my side of the family here. And they’ll be here well before that elusive part ever shows up.
How in Sam Hill am I going to cook Thanksgiving dinner without a fracking oven?!
We had a good menu planned, too. A very oven-intensive menu. I was going to look past the fact that we don’t even have room for all the people who were coming over, and instead just focus on making enough food to distract them from the lack of adequate seating.
Now, though. Well, I do believe this is what most experts consider being up the creek without a paddle*. I just keep looking at my oven, trying to turn it on in the futile hope that it will spontaneously decide to get over its malaise and start working again.
Alas, no dice. The unexpected side effect, however, has been a dearth of baked goods spilling forth from my fruitful oven. The beginning of fall is always my favorite time to bake, and we can usually expect to gain a few pounds in the month of October thanks to my pumpkin bread, peanut butter cookies, and general love of all things baked and sweet.
This year, though, we’ve been rather subdued in that area. I’m craving a fresh pumpkin pie like no one’s business, but then again, when am I not craving pumpkin pie?
So that’s the state of affairs of my appliance. Riveting stuff, I know.
*Wouldn’t it be a good thing to be up a creek without a paddle? You only really need a paddle when you’re trying to go up-river, but if you’re already up the river, isn’t that kind of a bonus? You can just float down the river with the current, right? I guess you might need a paddle to steer, but who says you can’t just dangle a leg out the side of your boat/canoe/kayak to give you a shove in the right direction every one in awhile?**
**Maybe we should amend the saying to be “down the creek without a paddle, with a desperate need to go up the creek”. It doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as nicely, but I’d venture to say the truth is worth a bit of verbal wrangling.***
***Unless the creek in question is s*** creek, in which case…Ewwww. I don’t care if you do have a paddle, if you’re up or down s*** creek, I’d say something’s gone horribly wrong.
Oct 14
Aidan and I were in his music class yesterday, sitting in our place in the semi-circle facing the teacher. His teacher, whose name is Rebecca, has a collection of noise-making things guaranteed to captivate and enrapture babies.
Some of her favorite noise-makers are stuffed birds (plush stuffed, not taxidermy stuffed. That would be grotesque) that make tweeting noises. She shows the tweeting bird to each baby, and makes the ASL sign for “bird”, and the babies love it. In honor of October, she decided the time was ripe to show us what she called her “spooky owl.”
She brought out a stuffed, innocuous-looking owl, and pressed the owl’s midsection to produce not a kid-friendly hoo-hoo sound but a vicious, nigh-monstrous screech of pure rancor and evil. It literally sounded like someone left a teakettle full of malice on the stove and it was boiling over.
As Rebecca explained to us that she’d originally ordered the owl because she’d hoped to have a hoo-hoo sound to add to her collection of birds. When it arrived and produced that horrid shriek, she shrugged and gave up on it, though she does still keep it around just so she can tell the story.
The other moms in the class laughed at the story, and as Rebecca squeezed the owl again so we could all take one last listen to the squeal, the other moms all offered up agreeable assertions that the sound was terrible.
Because I lack a proper mind-to-mouth filter, I piped up with, “That is the last sound a rabbit hears before it dies.”
Pure silence accompanied my comment. I swear even the babies stopped playing with their toys as they regarded the giant crazy lady who makes non sequiturs that make everyone furrow their brows in confusion.
After an interminably long time, Rebecca burst out laughing and shook her head, asking who in the world comes up with something like that.
Who indeed. Or, should I say, hoo indeed?
Oct 13
Oh man, October plunges perilously onward, rushing headlong into November like it knows that November’s where it‘s at. What’s it, you ask? It is NANOWRIMO!!!
I know I’ve talked about this before, but I just want to mention again that I’m doing it this year and invite you all to do it with me. Why should you do it, you ask? Why put it all on the line, writing 50,000 words in the month of November? Well, I’ll tell you:
That said, if you decide to devote all your spare time in November to writing a novel, visit the NaNoWriMo website to create your profile and sign up for NaNoWriMo 2010! So what if you don’t finish? Nothing ventured nothing gained, yo!
After you’ve created a profile, add me to your writing buddies list! My username is ParsingNonsense, and if you add me to your buddies list, I’ll add you to mine, and we can be novel writing friends forever! You can also leave your username in the comments, and I’ll add you that way. This way, I can peek over at your progress and cheer for you!
18 days, my friends. 18 days until I open my brain, scoop out a bunch of words, and hurl them at a computer. I’m ready. Join me, will you?
Oct 4
I’ve never really cared for the whole “green” marketing craze that’s literally inundated every facet of our consumer culture. You can’t go shopping nowadays without finding something that’s trumpeting it’s green-ness in the biggest, flashiest letters possible from the front of its seemingly innocuous packaging.
It used to be that green was a bad thing. Green connoted jealousy, avarice, and sickness. If someone said you looked green, well, it wasn’t because you were wearing organic, fair-trade cotton clothes and vegan shoes.
Now, though, everything purports to be green GREEN GREEN! I pick up my bottle of Windex, and it assures me that everything’s fine because it’s a certified GREEN product. Cars, hotels, clothes, and food are all going green and, at least for me personally, it’s having the opposite of the intended effect.
Quite frankly, I’m sick of the term green. It has over freaking saturated the marketplace and I’ve reached the point where if something says it’s green I’ll only buy it if there are no alternatives.
Because really, what does green even mean other than that the manufacturer and marketing team behind the product knows you probably have a vague awareness of the environment and they hope to capitalize on it? Otherwise, what would be the point in my Windex being a green product? I have serious doubts that my once-a-week mirror cleaning was having an adverse effect on the environment to the extent that something needed to be done to make the product more environmentally friendly.
Of course, there are times when the term green actually means something, sort of. Like, for example, with buildings. Except, there are different standards for the different green accrediting agencies, so once again green means very little. If a hotel merely washes sheets only when asked as opposed to washing them every day, they can say they’re green even if they’re out back burning tires and using rare rainforest trees to make kebab skewers.
I guess what I’m asking for here is a moratorium on the term green. Green is a color. Yes, I get it, trees are green! We like trees! Therefore green is good! But green as a marketing term has reached the obnoxious stage, and I think the marketing geniuses can do better. Don Draper would do better.
Here, I have some suggestions:
Who knows, maybe I’m over-reacting. What do you think? Take my poll and chime in on this issue!
Is the term GREEN still an effective marketing tool?
Total Voters: 14
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