June 2009 Archives

You know, the first time I ever truly weeped for someone I didn't even know was when Jim Henson died. [caption id="attachment_413" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Kermit and Jim"][/caption] I never knew him but he was a member of my family.  Oh sure, I watched Bugs Bunny, Fat Albert, Scooby Doo, but those were cartoons.  There were things in my childhood that taught me to read and wonder and question and learn, not to just laugh when a cartoon cat got blugeoned with a hammer.  The best of those was Sesame Street.  Electric Company, 3-2-1 Contact, and Pinwheel were awesome, but nothing shaped me more than Sesame Street.  There was something so real and alive about Jim's Muppets.  Even the Muppet Show when I was too young to always get the jokes, I never felt left out.  The Muppets were like crazy cousins who only got to visit on holidays.  I loved every single one. I knew Jim as the man behind the Muppets.  It didn't make them seem less real.  I don't think I ever not knew they were anything more than puppets - well, except for my early days on Sesame Street -  but the puppeteers had such a way of making them practically extensions of their own souls, it was always hard to believe they didn't have lives of their own.  Even now as I watch the DVD releases of the Muppet Show, I still feel this sense of awe on how those beings are just some felt and glue.  They still touch my heart and whimsy. The day Jim suddenly died I felt I had lost a dear uncle.  He and his Muppets had been with me since the earliest days.  I was shaped by his creativity and love.  Hell, one day I woke up and was watching Sesame Street.  It was the episode where the human characters were trying to explain to Big Bird what death was.  Mr. Hooper was gone, and he wasn't coming back.  Watching that giant bird wrestle with his innocent lack of understanding touched me, because at 11, I still didn't quite get death myself. That's when my father called and told me my grandmother, to whom I was extremely close and of whom I still mourn 25 years later, had succumbed to cancer and died. There wasn't a moment since that I didn't feel some higher power was reaching out to me to explain what it was all about and that it really was okay.  Jim broke death to me in a way I could understand. His own death hit me very hard.  I cried off and on for several days.  I still have the Life and Time magazines that talked of his life, death, and legacy.  It's still very hard to read the words:

Jim Henson's lingering presence had been in powerful evidence the week before at his memorial service, an epic and almost unbearably moving event in which this shy puppeteer was laid to rest as if he had been the world's last living vestige of goodness and whimsy.  You would have had to have been a Muppet yourself to not feel the hair stand up on the back of your neck when Big Bird walked into the vastness of the Catherdral of St. John the Divine and sand a quavering rendition of Kermit's theme song, 'It's Not Easy Being Green.'"

Yes, the tears still fall.  You may laugh, but when you spend your entire childhood being shaped by someone whose very soul was extended by the creatures he created, it's hard to not be attached to him.  It's hard to not feel as if you didn't really get closure.  After all, I didn't get to go to the funeral. And, honestly, I sometimes think that makes it even more powerful as I was never able to go to my beloved Grandma's funeral either.  I never ever got to say goodbye. I felt silly, in a way, for crying for a man I never even knew, but at the same time, Ididn't.  I did know him in a way.  Oh, sure, I didn't know him personally, but I knew his passion for life and love and gentleness and caring for each other.  I knew his ideas about using humor to teach kids and how it wasn't okay to shelter them from the world.  Sometimes hard issues like death came up, and instead of skirting around them, he helped kids to ask the had questions and face them head on.  Even when it hurt. Just like Mister Rogers. [caption id="attachment_414" align="alignnone" width="240" caption="Mister Rogers"][/caption] Yeah, I cried just has hard when he passed away. Where I had Sesame Street for whimsical education and having my imagination brought to life with bits of felt and glue, I had Mister Rogers as the face for it all.  He was a real person with real emotions.  He took us to the Land of Make Believe, but it was  just that, make believe.  When the trolley carried us back, we were in a real neighborhood with real people.  Well, real as far as we kids were concerned.  There was no lacking in the tackling of real issues children might face.  Death, anger, sadness, joy, laughter, curiosity, fear, love, hope...there was no taboo situation.  Everything was handled with love, care, gentleness, and in a way a child could understand.  I remember an episode where Fred Rogers explained that yes, we all get angry when we can't have our way, but it's what we do with it that counts.  Of course, being older, I don't always remember that lesson, but sometimes, it comes to my mind, and I hear Mister Rogers singing a soothing little song about it. He knew how to talk to kids in a gentle way that never seemed condenscending.  He spoke to us on our level without making us feel like little kids.  He made us feel like little people.  He explained that it's okay to be confused about the world.  It's a pretty confusing place.  Even adults have rough times.  I think that's why there was that episode where he took all of us on his trip to court to contest the parking ticket he had received.  (I thought I was crazy in that memory, but I looked it up.  It did indeed happen.)  Even then, even dealing with a very adult thing we kids didn't identify with, he managed to bring it to a level we could at least understand. I once had a supervisor tell me she never let her kids watch Mister Rogers because he was too "effeminate".  All I could think was, "Wow.  You deprived your children of this most gentle soul with this boundless wisdom because you attached your homophobic ideas where they don't belong.  Shame." He was a consumate human being who saw the best in us all. Hell, he and Henson both did, when you think about it. There was no way in this world these two men didn't shape me as a child.  I cried as if I had lost a relative or a close friend.   There was a small child in my heart that reached out and begged them not to go. I may sound old, but we lost a lot when they passed. You might be asking yourselves why I  am even writing about this. Well, you all know by now the recent trend of celebrity deaths we've had.  David Carradine, Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and of course, Michael Jackson. These are all people I grew up with in some way or another.  I don't feel quite attached to them as I did Jim Henson or Mister Rogers, but then again, they never touched my heart in that way. But, they touched someone's heart. These people were icons in their own right.  They have been around a long time and were part of the lives of more than one generation.  They are staples, constants we always thought would be there.  It's really hard to see them go. People are going to mourn for them.  People who have never known them.  It would be easy to mock them, but everyone, every0ne has mourned a family member they never really knew.  Everyone has been touched by someone, whether celebrity or not, someone they never really knew but whose passing leaves a dull ache in the heart.  It's not that their own families didn't mean more to them, but the pain of this person's passing is still there. I'm not going to begrudge these people their mourning.   The internet is a very cruel place where there will be much teasing, laughing, and poking at those who shed tears for the recent passings. I can't say anything. I cried for a puppeteer and a man who still believed in make believe. ___________________________ I'm not sure what makes you feel older: having your childhood icons pass on or listening to the music you thought was "hard core" play over the sound system in the grocery store.

We all have our standards. Our ethics.  Our moral codes. When a place you work at starts to bend those in a way that's mildly bearable, you tend to grit your teeth and really bear the pain. I've been there many, many times. Recently, the clinic I work most of my hours has decided to be a little more greedy than I consider "human growth".  I had a once-a-month 30-min patient convinced to come in for an hour.  She doesn't need an hour massage.  Yeah, well, that's all well and good, I'm informed, but the insurance pays more for an hour massage. So, convincing people to do more treatment than they actually need just so you can bill the insurance more money...this is acceptable? I've had some people call it fraud. Either way, this is an attitude from which I wish I to separate. Look, no job is perfect.  No idea can't be warped.  But, damn, when you actually physically accept the only reason you're trying to convince a patient to get an hour massage is because it will bilk the insurance of more money, that's skirting fraud. Time to move on. _____________________ I'm sorry.  Those assholes can bilk the public for all they can, but I will never ask for more than what is needed to heal my patient.  If this is not acceptable to some folks, then they can kiss my big ass.

We've had yard revelations recently.  Some good.  Some bad.  Some, huh? We bought a push mower.  I admit, if it doesn't work out, it's my fault.  We have a small amount of yard, and I seriously didn't want to spend money on a gas mower that's way too damn much for our yard or an electric mower with a cord I'm destined to run over.  Look, I admit my limitations.  I have no sense of direction.  I can't sew worth a damn on a sewing machine.  Gas-powered machines other than cars, and sometimes even then, scare me.  I like simple machines because I understand them.  Or, at least, I understand they won't run over my feet without some form of aid. We also bought an electrice trimmer.  This I don't mind so much.  It's lighter than our vacuum and easily maneuverable, so I don't fear the cord. Now, we need said trimmer because our grass is long enough at the moment that anything relatively tall really just gets pushed over by the mower.  This is why if your lawn is relatively manacured, the push mower is perfect.  It will keep it up with little problem and you only need to hose it off.  But, at the moment, we're fighting a jungle and while the push mower does well, it mostly just runs taller things down and keeps moving to more manageable stuff. I don't mind yard maintenance except I know nothing about it.  Yards to me just grow and kind of wave at you when they need a cut. Yeah, well, you all know that's not the truth. Funny thing is we have some guerilla gardening going on in our yard.  I walked to the side of our house and was greeted by this: And, this... Now, the front of our house isn't an eyesore, but definitely lacks in landscaping.  The trees are nice, but the planting area against the front wall is made up of a lot of dirt and one lonely, rather pathetic rosebush.  Someone didn't even really try. What we couldn't figure out was why the previous owner would put such gorgeous plants on the side of the house and not in the front where people could actually see it.  But, then, we didn't really wonder for long because, well, this is the same guy who had a kamikaze approach to DIY.  Just as we were going to get back to work, our neighbor, Ms. Brownie, drives up with her daughter, who she promptly wants to introduce to us.  (Why does this always happen when I'm wearing the rattiest clothing?) I asked Ms. Brownie what the flowers were because she has l33t gardening skills.  They are hydrangeas, and she planted them.  Apparently they've been there for years as a testimate to her enormous green thumb.  She said it was funny because these bushes became huge in our side yard, but the one in her yard was like a sickly child who never really tried.  I don't mind.  I think they're gorgeous, and considering it will be next year before we can plant and I have been known to have anything green cry in my presence, I'll take what I can get. Incidentally, have I mentioned lately I love our neighbors? Since beginning this post, we have managed to get the yard into a more suburbia-acceptable state, much to the dismay of the resident yard bunny, whose twitchy nose has been absent ever since push mower scared him to a blind panic across the street. I hope he comes back.  There's just something about having a resident yard bunny. Until then, I leave you with a bunny blur: ____________________________________ Of course, there are plenty of fornicating squirrels around here right now.  I'm just sure people would rather look at squirrel porn than the resident yard bunny.  I'm sure your lives just aren't complete withouts squirrel porn. Man, I wish I still tracked my google hits.  I'm sure that last paragraph will send some of the more interesting dregs of the internet to Ye Olde Blog.

VERY, VERY BAD: Because of the color of their food and the fact little changes until it comes out the other end, cat puke is incredibly hard to see on wood floors, especially in dim light when you're half asleep and not wearing shoes. Can I get a "Holy Shit that's gross!"

I love our wood floors.  Love them!  When we first looked at this house I was excited about two things: there was no wallpaper, and the original wood flooring had been kept and not hidden by some hideous shag carpeting. Of course, switching to wood flooring after living in a place with carpeting for so long takes some adapting.  If anyone is thinking of getting a house with wood floors or installing them in your current home, here's the good and bad of it: GOOD: Wood floors tell you immediately when they are dirty:  Oh, sure, that's every other day, but carpet takes weeks to announce it's holding enough dirt and crap to choke even the most long-winded politician. BAD: Wood floors make you sound like Godzilla: Sad thing is, no matter how lightly you walk, if you have wood floors, especially in a house with a crawl space, the resultant echo when you walk is not unlike a small localized earthquake.  Even the lightest cat in the house sounds like a rhino in the middle of the night. GOOD: Wood floors are beautiful: These are floors that came original to the house.  They have flaws and wear and tear from being under carpet, but they have their own indescribable charm.  Carpet just sits there and looks self-absorbed.  (And, gods, ya'll don't want to know what its' absorbing.) BAD: Litter on hardwood floors + bare feet in the middle of the night = The Owstupiddamncats Dance. GOOD: Everything is easily moved:  Even the heaviest pieces of furniture move with little effort over a hard wood floor.  It erases the need for deciding on the Generic Florida Beach House style just so you can get wicker that you can actually vacuum under. BAD: Everything is easily moved:  It's bad when your husband gets into bed and the bed rolls to the other side of the room.  It's even sadder when he manages to grab the window sill and, with manly strength, reposition the bed only to find rolling over will shift the bed to the opposite side of the room.  I'm sure it definitely sucks when your wife is standing there, watching this, practically wetting herself with laughter.  But, hey, at least I was entertained.  (Although, whenever you flop over and the bed lists you have this incredible urge to sing sea shanties or at least go searching for a bottle of rum.) GOOD: Wood floors are easy to maintain: Ya'll even the odd blop of spilt paint comes off.  Most scratches can be polished out, but even the deeper ones can be sanded. BAD: Wood floors require various tools in which to clean them: Okay, it's the same for linoleum, but with carpet you need a vacuum and maybe, from time to time, a carpet shampooer.  This is, once again, why horrors from the beyond can hide in the carpet fibers, but that's beside the point.  (Yes, I keep mentioning it. Seriously, once you get a really good vacuum, you become seriously horrified by what comes out of carpet, especially with the knowledge it's still not picking it all up. Ugh.)  With wood floors, you need a broom and dust pan to get the big stuff, like litter, off the floor.  And, because dust bunnies and fur tumbleweeds fear a broom and run away to hide in the corners.  Those require a dust mop or a swiffer.  Then, of course, you need a good mop and a special wood soap to mop the floors.  And, if you feel so inclined, you can actually "wax" the floor with Pledge to protect, moisturize, and initiate Cat Capades as traction goes comepletely out the window. (Not sure that's really a bad thing.)  And, of course, because dirt can't hide on wood floors, you have to do this more often.  The price for beauty. GOOD: Cat Capades: Cats are funny.  Most times they are lazy lumps covered in fur whiling away their days in a sun beam only really giving you the time of day when they need to be a) fed and/or b) worshipped like the feline gods that they are.  Other times, for some reason only they know, they are great blurs of panic tearing around the house in an attempt to either run off some energy or catch up with their insanity.  Now, this sudden need to be on the other side of the house at the highest speed possible is funny in itself.  It becomes hilarity when you add to the equation a definite lack of traction.  What this equals is one of two things: running, running, running but getting no where or Cat Pinball where a panicked attempt to regain traction only leads to bouncing madly from wall to wall in the hallway.  If you are lucky, you might also witness Bumper Cats, in which the objects they bounce off of are other cats;  Spin Out, where the attempt to stop results in a swirling cat tornado that still crashes into a wall; or the ever popular Mad Flail, which is usually seen when the floors are damp or waxed in which each leg tries to go a different direction in a great spasm of confusion that makes the cat look like it's being controlled by a puppeteer having a seizure.  Wood floors can be very entertaining. BAD: Kitty rearranging: Yeah, so as I pointed out earlier, things move easily across wood floors.  Cats aren't big creatures.  (Well, most cats. Tabster is two cats in a larger cat costume.)  But, they have the ability to increase their mass at will.  So, your small, sleek, fluffy Baby Girl might dash through the house like the wind but will hit a chair with all the force of a bowling ball launched from a catapult, especially if chased by another cat.  Furniture doesn't stand a chance.  It isn't uncommon to come home and find the house completely rearranged.  I have to tell you, felines have no sense of Feng Shui. GOOD: Wood floors creak: Okay, that might not seem like a good thing, but imagine you're home alone, watching a horror film, in the dark, the cats all around you, tension thick enough in the air to touch, when a deep, footless creak sounds down the darkened hall, made only worse by the cats looking up and bristling...  You'd freak right?  Yeah, so would anyone who came over for Horror Movie Girls' Night.  The possibilities are endless! BAD: My floors don't creak that much:  I'll just have to resort to other twisted endeavors. Thus, the adventures in wood continue.  I'm sure I'm bound to find more fun, or have others send them to me.  Good, bad, they are still way more awesome than the evil that is carpet which is only slightly less evil than wallpaper. ______________ Hey, you know, I only just thought of that Horror Movie Girls' Night.  That would be totally awesome.  Once a month, instead of Stitch and Bitch, we have Horror Movie Night.  Good, Bad, Indescribably Evil...whatever the group votes on!  Ooooooh...I know my girls read the site.  Any votes?

So, yeah, we're moved. Finally.  Officially. And, now, we're too damned exhausted to unpack our house.  Go fig. Well, we try anyway, but not much gets done at the end of the day.  It's hard to want to drag boxes around and try to find room for all the crap you really wish you had no attachment to and could have abandoned on the highway.  Okay, sure, it's all stuff we wanted, but why does it just sit there in the sun room?  Why doesn't it crawl to its designated spaces?  I know it can move.  Bits of it play hide-and-seek when I'm looking for things.  Oh, yeah, you think it's inanimate, but when was the last time you saw your keys?  Or, anything that's vitally important at the time you're searching for it?  The more you need it, the quicker it scurries away.  It's why you can never find your favorite pen that you know you just left on the cabinet, and why you'll find said pen in a shoebox under your bed when you're looking for your only good pair of panty hose. We moved all that damn stuff here; the least it could do is unpack itself.  It's very ungrateful. Either way, we're moved. It was actually a rather bittersweet moment before we locked the townhouse door for a final time.  I suddenly found myself standing in the empty living room crying.  I lived there for 8 years.  Because of the parental's divorce, the lack of good jobs/my mother's nomadic behavior, and several other issue, that's the longest I've ever lived in one place.  There were a lot of memories there.  My mom and I starting our lives over.  The insane roommate.  The awesome roommate.  The first Halloween party where I met one of my best friends.  Meeting my husband-to-be.  Facing down the demons given to me by my father and finally letting that relationship go.  My lost virginity.  Housing dear friends after Katrina.  Welcoming home my Todd the day after he moved in.  Silvara's passing.  Tabster's illness.  Changing careers and my life.  Wedding madness.  House madness.  Moving madness. It's amazing how much you accumlate in a home in 8 years, but it's also amazing how many memories you pack away in the attic of your mind in that same amount of time. It makes you kind of regret the several months of "Damn, I can't wait to get out of this place."  I felt kind of like I was ungrateful.  It wasn't an unwholly terrible home, just poorly maintained by the owner, old and new.  I guess, it's the way we deal with letting go sometimes.  It was time to let it go so that I can embrace the new. And, man, I love our house. Love! Lovelovelovelovelove! All I really have at the moment or pictures of the painting chaos. The Den: The walls are now a nice golden beige that is unintentionally close to the beige in the sunroom.  That fan is now in the office, replaced by a much nicer bigger fan. The Kitchen: We really didn't change it although it's not currently covered in assorted snack foods.  It's small, but very serviceable.  It might not look it but there is amazing amount of cabinet space, which is nice.  There is also a fridge now.  The mop bucket wasn't very good at keeping food cold. A rather sad pic of the Sun Room: There are 15 windows total, and, as mentioned above, it is currently filled with stuff.  Our entire townhouse packed fits in that room.  That should give you an idea of its size.  It is practically half the square footage of our house.  It's a wonderful room.  I spend a lot of time chilling in there, even among the piles of stuff. The Guest Room/Soon-to-Be Library Also known as, the Lunchmeat room.  There is no better way to describe the color than that.  It's not a deep burgandy (after several coats and curses).  You can kind of see in the window edges the original color, but it always looks better in pictures.  I have no idea why.  I think the ugliness was sentient and hid away for fear the camera would steal its soul...or I have rotten photography skills.  Take your pick. Our Bedroom: Okay, the green doesn't look great in this pic mostly because it was it's first coat.  It is a rather pea looking green, but trust me before you start scowling, with the deep reds in our bedding and accessories and the gold accents I plan, it's actually quite lovely.  It's extremely calming.  I love this color and this room. But, I hate that damn fan. It'll go soon. The house is in a bit better state now.  Granted, the sun room still looks like a big box store exploded in it, but the kitchen is mostly unpacked and the office is pretty much in order.  Our living room is no longer decorated in Chez Redneck Geek.  (Until the furniture arrived we were sitting on lawn furniture and computer chairs in front of a plasma TV.  Oh yes, we were stylin'.)  So, it's coming along.  As long as most of the house stays relatively in order, I don't feel so overwhelmed. There has been this strange side-effect of owning a house, though.  I clean.  All the time. Ya'll don't understand, I Hate To Clean. Hate it.  But, I feel downright uncomfortable if things are dirty.  My mom said it was because it was my house; it's not a house that someone else owns and we're living in; and there's a certain unspoken pride you feel when it's yours.  Okay, I can believe that.  My car was mine and I pampered it.  Then, I found out my asshole "father" had his name on it so it was partly his.  I've been rather neglectful ever since.  (Which is strange because I'm not normally neglectful of other people's things. I think it's because it was once mine and suddenly I feel I've been unfairly usurped.) I said a while back I would find a way to make sure the house stayed clean.  The hubby and I have been very conscious of cleaning.  If we see it needs cleaning, we clean it.  There is an advantage to that because it means we'll have to spend less whole days cleaning the house. However, when I caught myself wiping down the clothes dryer, I had to wonder what kind of cleaning monster I had become. I guess we'll have to wait and see.  If you guys suddenly see a lot of posts similar to "Day 59: He moved the fifth knick-knack on the second shelf two inches to the right.  He might have to die." then it might be time for an intervention. And, on that note, I shall share what else we have besides amazing neighbors I've adopted (will share more on a later post) and a sudden anal retentive attitude towards cleaning.  Something I've mentioned before.  Behold our resident yard bunny: Our immediate neighbor thinks he lives on the side of our house.  He alternates between the front yard and the back, usually in early morning or evening.  He is brown, cute, and something I want to squeeze, hug, pet, and call George. But, mostly, his normal state of being is a blur. We'll see how he does after I plant the bunny garden next year. The next adventure?  Mowing. Now, that should be comedy. __________________ Thanks to everyone who helped us paint, move, clean, maintain sanity, or insanity in some cases.  Ya'll are seriously awesome. In case anyone was wondering, the cats are adapting as cats do.  It usually involves extreme neediness and random insanity that includes bouncing off of walls and getting themselves trapped in the pantry.  So, all in all, things are pretty normal.