The Desert Mermaid

Well, that was exciting. Took off work an hour early because otherwise I'd never make it home alive through THE SNOWZ. As it was, blasting gusts of wind do not mix well with icy road conditions.

The cat is convinced she wants to go outside. She is mistaken, but she is being so damn obnoxious about it I may have to whack her with a snowball just to get the point across.

I am thinking I will probably not be going to my doctor's appointment tomorrow morning. But if I never post again, assume that I did try, and that I FAILED. I'm sure sunshine_shaman can fill you in on the details of the car-induced avalanche that probably caused my demise.

And if that wasn't the cause of my death, advise the homicide detectives to take a good hard look at the cat. She will probably say it was self-defense, but dammit, she'd HAVE to defend herself after driving me to the breaking point, so take that with a grain of salt.

Look, y’all! Look what I got for Christmas!

( Or not. But aren’t you curious? )



But what is this? A fancy book? No! It’s ( Awesome Christmas Thing #1! )



And the gift I bought for myself! I know it’s bad form, but dammit this thing was just too awesome. But what is it?

( Awesome Christmas Thing #2 )

Anyway, that’s all for this year! Now tell me: what did you get?

While you’re thinking, enjoy some Christmas dinner. I dislike cranberry sauce, but I will chug cranberry juice all the livelong day, so it is indeed complete! Aye, it was a merry Xmas indeed!

-Hope y’all USicans had a good Thanksgiving! I sure did. We got a 25-pound turkey, which means that we will subsist on leftover turkey until roughly Christmas.

-At the beginning of this week the heroic weathermen predicted a SNOW APOCALYPSE here. Naturally, it snowed maybe an inch. I am severely disappointed.

-It sure is cold, though. We are not letting the Outdoor Cat out.* She is not happy, mostly because she hates peeing in the litterbox. I told her if she pees outside she might get stuck, but she pretended not to hear my crude remark because she is classy when she’s not licking her butt.

-My dermatologist, Dr. Frowny Face, has ordered me to cease and desist with the Bath and Body Works because it may be contributing to the patches of pangolin skin on my hands. I say unto him: Sir, you may have my Twisted Peppermint and Island Nectar when you pry it from my rough, chapped hands.

I will concede that I’m not going to use it very often, though, because I do rather enjoy not trying to tear my own skin off to stop the itching.

-Hey, look! I made another thing!



I’m very, very pleased with this outfit. The Global Friends dolls don’t have much in the way of casual wear, and I have lacked the skills to do anything about it until recently.

I love that skirt, too. I’ve had that fabric for years, but it only just occurred to me that it’d look great with box pleats.

She’s changing out of that into her Xmas stuff with the rest of the gang, however, but still—she’s got it!

Next up: Christmas dress for Loke. It's gonna be red. SO RED.

-For once in my life, I know exactly what I’m getting everybody for Xmas, including my aunt. IT IS A CHRISTMAS MIRACLE, DUDES.

-I also am just about to explode with excitement about the Thingy I’m getting myself for Christmas. I am going to surprise myself with it, so I can’t tell you what it is, but I can tell you that I’ve been dying to get it for some time, and that a lot of you will fall over when you see what it is.


*Sad moment: I realized when looking at the temperatures that if by some remote chance my kittybug Charlie was still alive out there, she is now frozen solid. This bums me out. So I have decided, in order to spare myself more heartache, that Charlie was Raptured back in August. Turns out she was the only righteous one among us.

What I Learned Since The Summer Solstice

• Flash photography really does damage exhibits.
• I knew about the state dinosaur, but I had no idea Utah had an official state cookware. Upon learning this, however, I did correctly guess what it was: the Dutch oven.
• The story of Marco Polo bringing noodles to Europe from China is a myth.
• Every year in Teton National Park at least one family assumes that “bear spray” works like bug spray. So before going on a hike they line their kids up, and … well, I hear the park’s clinic is very good.
• Never try to do a road trip after missing a day of Zoloft.
• There are petroglyphs like EIGHT FEET off the road to Moab. Why have I never seen them before?
• Grendel was a velociraptor!
• Okay, maybe not.
• In the study of prehistoric animals and so-called “transitional fossils,”* the question of whether an animal was reptile or mammal is settled by checking the jaw and inner ear apparatus.
• Psittacosaurus was a great dinosaur—basically a badass parrot.
• Those Wheel of Morality bumps at the ends of kids’ TV shows—Knowing Is Half The Battle, And Now A Message From The POWER RANGERS!—have a distant ancestor in medieval theater, when people would perform stupid farces in churches and conclude with a sudden random promo for Christianity. “And so the shepherds found out their friend had stolen the sheep and pretended it was his son, and they all had a good laugh, in conclusion Christ Child.”
• Speaking of Power Rangers and tolerance, David Yost left the show one day when the homophobic taunts of the crew, who apparently never watched those bumps, got to be too much for him. AND UPON LEARNING THIS, ALL THE PIECES OF MY SHATTERED CHILDHOOD SUDDENLY FIT TOGETHER. All I had known of those dark times was that suddenly Billy was no longer on the show, and so I was no longer watching it.
• Ear drops are more trouble than they’re worth.
• Pets don’t always live their full life span.
• Neither do people.
• Even when you know it’s coming, death is a shock.
• Losing a twin is more traumatic than losing a non-twin sibling.
• Dad is a Led Zeppelin fan.
• Magnetic clasps for necklaces are expensive, but totally worth it.
• Ngila Dickson is my new hero: she designed the costumes for Lord of the Rings, and thus had to figure out what each culture would wear. Also, she had to have each costume made around forty times—and in the case of the hobbits, she had to weave the fabrics twice so they’d fit the same on both the actors and their smaller doubles.**
• YES, CORN IS GRASS.
• Quad-ruled notebooks are the best kind for clear thinking.
• The Hawaiian Islands were, in fact, plagued by wild cattle after Captain Cook introduced them as an ill-advised gift to King Kamehameha I.
• Major depressive disorder is insurable, but PCOS isn't.
• Glass stovetops can be hazardous additions to any kitchen.
• Mint is a thug. Never plant it in your container garden. And thanks to the Awesome Power Of The Internet, not to mention kitmf , I didn’t even have to learn this the hard way!
• The Northern and Southern Air Temples were run by monks, while the Eastern and Western Temples were run by nuns. Just as I suspected!

*This phrase always bugs me.  All fossils are transitional fossils, really.  But it does make sense for the transition of our nomenclature.

**She also gets bonus points for something I noticed a while back: she does the same thing to differentiate Rosie Cotton that they do in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast to set Belle apart from the villagers. Notice how both Belle and Rosie are the only ones in their villages to wear blue.

So I broke down crying tonight because Charlie continues not to be around. It’s possible she’s just taken off till the emotions blow over, and she’ll be back at some point, but it’s also quite likely that my rather stupid cat went and got herself et or blowed up or something.

And tonight it became apparent that the uncertainty is stressing me out just a tad.

I’m always surprsied at how physical distress is—I kind of feel like vampires got me. I’m mostly sitting around aimlessly watching MST3k and doing logic puzzles, although sometimes I’ll summon the energy to ruin some sci-fi or do some art or something.* Not very exciting, but I think I need a little bit of a break from the world again.

That’s the plan, anyway. With luck this funk will either end with the return of the cat, or my graceful acceptance of her absence as I also attempt to gracefully accept my uncle’s absence. I just hope that ends soon. I hate being sad.


*When I get back to the sewing thing again, there will be a few new outfits for Daja. And I will also have some questions for you folks about a project I’m toying with …

Okay, y’all! I have finally managed to get some pictures of what Dad’s been referring to as The Farm! So here I’ll finally give you the story:

( A long pointless background. It features the Apocalypse. )

So last month, I picked up a couple of gardening books and set out to learn to garden.

I started with a container garden for two reasons: first, I may get an apartment rather than a house with a yard, and I want to know how to grow things that way; and second, because I wanted to start small before taking on a big ol’ garden. Thus, The Farm!



These are homemade self-watering containers. I took pictures while I was building, but they didn’t turn out—but I would just like to thank my brother for helping me with their construction, since Power Tools have not been added to my list of skills yet. So you only get to see them after I dumped dirt into them.***

( More! )

So! Despite my getting a cold that laid me low for a few days, it’s been rather busy around here, starting with moving my sister into her new apartment on Monday. I feel a lot better about dumping her at this place, because unless toast_zombie leads an implausible double life, this time there will probably not be perpetual drunken sex parties. This is encouraging, I think.

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Also, I shrunk a favorite pair of pants because I forgot they were in the load so I ran them through the dryer. They feel okay, but I am assured that in the butt region they do not look okay. So now I am down a pair of pretty brown harem pants.

I tried my damndest to find a duplicate, unshrunken pair, but all my efforts went to waste. That’s the trouble with hippie clothes. So I went the alternate route and added a couple of thigh-length dresses, which I treat as Long Shirts, to my Long Shirt collection. Now I’ll just wear shirts that cover the butt part of my pants. PROBLEM SOLVED.

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Also, today was the LAST DAY OF SCHOOL! I know this because I was there, at my old elementary school, right for that excellent Feast of Fools ritual when report cards are handed out, and once you get it you are FREE FOR THE SUMMER.* Which means that as kids streamed out we got to see the full spectrum of human tragicomedy, from tears at finding out you and your friend don’t have the same teacher next year to glee that it’s FUCKING SUMMER YES.**

The reason I was there was twofold: my first-grade teacher had offered to get me the name of a contact who can evidently help me break into the Writing Biz, and my sixth-grade math teacher is retiring. So I thanked one for the help (“I remember you being a lot taller”), and said farewell to the other. The waist-high chaos and anarchy was a bonus.

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Had to reschedule the cats’ Tuesday appointment, so they got to go to the vet today. The vet says that for old cats, they’re looking darn good, healthy and happy. Right at this moment, the cats would disagree with him. They had to go to the vet, so there is no justice in the world.

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The last thing I’m up to warrants an entry all its own, what with the dirt and the power tools. Basically, here’s the deal: I have decided that I need some useful skills. I have a whole list of things I want to learn how to do, but the first is small-space food growing.

So I’ve built*** a couple of self-watering container gardens. I’m conditioning the soil right now, and in a couple days I’m going to get me some vegables and herbs and try to see what will grow well out on the deck. I am a pretty clueless gardener, but I have the help of my mom, who is clueful, and a Book that tells me what to do. And, probably, a simple source of advice here in this blog.

For now, though, I think it’s time to make a snack and take a break. It’s been a busy day.


*Unless you have one of those darn parents who feels that summer is a gaping hole that must be filled end-to-end with Structured Activities, and you have no time to just do whatever it is you can think of because you’re constantly getting ferried from baseball to ballet class to Camp. There were a few wonderful Structured Activities in my summer, but not enough to get in the way of some good downtime.

**Though my favorite moment was seeing a small child’s Candy Radar go off. She was waiting with her mother for some sibling to emerge from their room, when another parent came up carrying a couple of shopping bags containing what were obviously carefully put-together candy packages. My brother and I both saw the girl suddenly fix her full, undivided attention on these bags.

The greatest thing was knowing exactly what was going through her head: the GET CANDY conniving. I recognize that all-important thought process: “That is candy. It’s obviously not meant for me, but rather for my sibling’s class. However, if I do this right, I can orchestrate it so that I get some candy too.” Kid finally went with the classic strategy of dragging her mom into the sibling’s classroom, on the familiar principle that once you are in the classroom, the grownups’ sense of fairness means that you will get a candy package too.

***Okay, jerry-rigged.

So every year, the family gets together to wrap each other’s presents in the same room, blocked by bits of furniture, so’s we can commentate on the presents without giving them away.


AMELIA: Dude, I really went all-out on your present this year. You get a wireless reading device!
AMELIA’S BROTHER, THE DUDE: You got me a book, didn’t you.

AMELIA: Dammit, why didn’t I get you a hardcover? Paperbacks are hard to wrap.


AMELIA’S LITTLE SISTER, 妹: I am so prepared today. I even wore the Dumb Santa earrings!

( More Scenes )
Anyway! Happy What-mas To All, And To All A Good Night!

For Prime’s sake, cat, shut UP and get the hell off my windowsill. See, I know you want to be let in. That’s why I went around to the TV room and OPENED THE GOD DAMN DOOR.

At which point you stared at me and yawped like an idiot. It did not, it seems, occur to you that the open door meant you could come in.

That, my friend, is why you are STILL OUTSIDE.

Moron.

I love the way cat tails shrink when they’re soaking wet. The sudden loss of apparent mass is hilariously pathetic.

Yes, we bathed the cats today. This is a big deal—our cats are the semi-feral Outdoor Cat type who rarely get dunked—except, you know, in extenuating circumstances. And the circumstances have become extenuating—Fern, especially, has spent pretty much the entire summer just sitting around in dirt. It’s her new hobby. Every time I go outside, somewhere in the front garden I can see a big ball of increasingly filthy fuzz just meatloafin’ around.

We were going to let it go till the end of the month, but Fern’s other hobby is meatloafin’ in the clean laundry hampers.

“I think,” Mom said, stepping out of the washroom with a re-washed stack of jeans, “that we should probably not wait any longer.”

Charlotte got a bath too—while she doesn’t trail around a Pigpen-worthy cloud of debris like her sister, she does like to pull off the heads of small woodland creatures, and that deserves some washing.

Anyway, on Bath Day the drawbacks of irregular schedules is made abundantly clear: perhaps if we bathed them more often they’d be more sanguine about it. As it is, however, there’s a reason we refer to it as “waterboarding the cats.” But with Mom and me on actual cat wrangling duty and Dad taking his job of cat taunting very seriously, we got ’em looking more or less halfway decent.

They’ve spent the rest of the day nursing their injured dignity* and, probably, wondering what they did to incur our wrath. As for me, I’ve spent the rest of mine nursing a couple of gashes down my arm.

Pets are great.


*By composure grooming and, of course, rolling around in the dirt.