Still Life, With Cats

For the past three years Richard and I have gone on a cruise – what I refer to among friends and relations as ‘Nerd Boat’, and what is, in real life, called JoCo Cruise Crazy.

We have attended three in a row and we loved it – although admittedly the reasons we went on the cruise had nothing whatsoever to do with the destinations (frankly, neither of us is into sunbathing, or shopping, or hot, humid climates) and more to do with the sense of community; the gathering of our own kind; the amazing friends we made that we looked forward to seeing each time. Over the past three years, I have arranged music for a ragtag bunch of recorder players for the talent show; watched amazing performances from people like Peter Sagal, Grant Imahara, Randall Munroe, and on and on. I cheered on the Fancy Pants competition. I took part in a human zen drum (directed by none other than Jonathan Coulton himself). I knit (and we wore) the most awesome Tardis fezzes. I played new (to me) games and toured a Star Wars museum on a tropical island and built crazy, nonsensical things out of legos while sailing on a boat, and danced and laughed and hung out with people from every walk of life who all shared something in common; who all ‘got’ each other without having anyone think what we love; what we do is weird or strange or not normal.

We are not going on the 2015 cruise.It’s been somewhat of a struggle to make it work financially every year and there are huge projects we need to tackle on our house, and there are other ways we would like to spend our money. But oh, it is hard not to feel wistful when I see my fellow Seamonkeys getting more and more excited as the date comes closer, or to see the list of the featured performers and know that I’m not going to be able to see them, or to know that there are friends I have only seen while on Nerd Boat that I am not going to get to see this time around.

When I saw that Wired had an article all about the 2014 cruise, I was excited. I started reading it, and while at first I thought, hey, this guy actually gets it.’ Okay, so he got a few points wrong, but that’s fine, it was his first time, and it’s a huge, crazy, amazing experience and it’s perfectly understandable he wouldn’t have all the details straight. But by the end, I just ended up feeling sorry for him. Here he was in the middle of a giant crowd of people in which, for once, he wouldn’t have to pretend to be someone he wasn’t, and yet he kept on pretending. Here he was, getting angry that people tease him and judge him, and yet I got the sense that he was sitting there, judging everyone else; all those people like me who were embracing wholeheartedly their nerdery; their shared enthusiasm for being with everyone else and taking part in, for want of a better term, nerd camp at sea, and it just left me feeling unsettled.

There are other Seamonkeys who have written about this, but I think this one covers why this article troubled me the best. I wish for the author that he figures out how to get out of his own way. Maybe Nerd Boat isn’t going to be his thing. But he clearly has a lot of issues to work through and I hope that eventually he finds a place where he can feel at home, the way Nerd Boat feels for every one of us Seamonkeys, no matter if we are sailing on the boat in 2015, or simply sailing in spirit, wishing we were there.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.

Ever since I saw that they were going to make a TV series out of The Librarian, I have been so excited. I cannot remember when exactly the first movie came out (oh, wait, that’s what IMDB is for – turns out the first one, The Librarian: Quest for the Spear, came out in 2004), but I do remember watching it and absolutely loving it. Noah Wyle as a reluctant action hero! Bob Newhart in his very first (and only) fight scene! Jane Curtin as the always exasperated coordinator! It was awesome.

There were two more movies after that – Quest for Solomon’s Mines in 2006, and The Curse of the Judas Chalice in 2008. After that, however, there’s been nothing, and it looked like maybe that was going to be the end of Noah Wylie’s action hero franchise.

Thankfully, that wasn’t the case. Oh, the first episode of the new series was fantastically cheesy, and the special effects were not always the best. But it had everything I hoped it would have: Noah Wylie being an action hero again! John Laroquette as a suitably crotchety replacement for Jane Curtin! Guest appearance by Bob Newhart! Oh, and a quartet of new characters and a plot right out of a D&D game.

In fact, the whole thing felt a lot like a brand new group of people all sitting down together to play their first D&D game. Here is a disparate cast of characters who are drawn together on the flimsiest of excuses, who all cheerfully jump on board with the crazy in a way that people in real life would never do, because that’s the only way that they’ll get to the fun part later on – which is exactly how any new D&D game starts. You roll up your characters, you all collectively decide on how your characters are to be brought together and then you take a bunch of perfect strangers, throw in some magic, and poof, you have a band of plucky adventurers, off to save the world.

Yes, I suppose I could step back and roll my eyes at the fact that the plot was rushed, and more than a bit disjointed; that I really wish they hadn’t thrown in the romantic subplot near the end; that sometimes the cheese made me cringe, ever so slightly. But right now I can’t bring myself to care about any of that. It was exactly what I expected, and I am looking forward to seeing what happens next.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies!

There is no war on Christmas.

I am stating this because it is, of course, time once again in the US for the hard-right religious nuts to start bleating about yet another way that us crazy liberals are destroying America. December’s flavor of this particular meme is, of course, the War on Christmas. What is this war, you ask? Well, it starts with the fact that some people are daring to say Happy Holidays to them instead of Merry Christmas, proving that clearly those people hate Christmas and God and little baby Jesus and blah-blah-blah. And then it continues with the Anti-Christmas police barging through their doors, forcing them to get rid of their Christmas trees and forbidding them singing carols and worshiping the way they want to, and…

Oh wait. That last part isn’t actually happening. The only thing that *is* happening is that people are saying Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas; that society as a whole is publicly recognizing that other holidays exist during the month of December and responding appropriately; that “the holidays” encompasses far more than just one religion’s celebration; and most importantly, that the world is changing and some people don’t get to keep on pretending that their world view; their version of faith is the only one out there.

The ‘War on Christmas’ has absolutely nothing to do with anyone hating Christmas, and everything to do with a small but unfortunately annoyingly vocal group of people who claim to be Christian, throwing temper tantrums because they’re being required to acknowledge that not only do other religions and cultures exist, but that they might actually *also* be celebrating holidays around the same time as theirs. The War on Christmas is code speak for ‘we liked it better when we could force everyone else to do what *we* wanted, and we didn’t have to tolerate any other opinion.’ The War on Christmas actually means ‘there are all those people out there who don’t look like us and who don’t act like us and we want them to go away.’

Or in other words, there is no war on Christmas. No war. None. Just a whole lot of sad, pathetic people clinging desperately to a past world view that only benefited them and no one else. Just a whole lot of people giving the vast majority of one of the world’s major religions a really bad name. Just a vocal minority who are too scared and narrow-minded to actually look beyond their tiny little world and see how wonderful and exciting it is to live in a country that is overflowing with diversity – that everywhere you turn there is something new to learn about a culture or a faith that you didn’t know before.

There is no War on Christmas. Never has been. Never will be. But that won’t stop the same old talking heads from pulling out the same old tired bullet points and hammering the ground where the dead horse once lay. And it won’t stop some people from listening to their every word, and then believing them.

That’s fine. Go on and believe in this mythical war if that’s what makes you happy. After all, here in the US, unlike a lot of countries in the world, everyone has the freedom to believe in anything they want to.

As for the rest of us, we’ll be out here, in the real world, enjoying the way things are changing for the better. We’ll be loving our neighbors as ourselves. We’ll be embracing the entire holiday season wholeheartedly.

And we will be pitying you.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies!

For the past few days, my area of California (at least large quantities of it) has been quietly losing its mind.

What’s that, you ask? Some sort of California-related celebration? Or perhaps a veiled reference to a protest of some kind?

No, no, nothing like that. We’re all going ever so slightly insane around here because it is RAINING.

Yes, we’ve all seen rain before. Yes, most of us have all actually *driven* in rain before. But it’s been a very long time since we’ve had rain of this quantity coming in such a short time. And for a state that’s been suffering through a really nasty drought all year, heavy rain is really quite exciting. So we are all flip-flopping madly between OMG it’s raining yay!!! to OMG watch out for the lake-sized puddle AIEEE!

On the down side, a couple days with sudden downpours has led to flooding on surface streets, or worse, on highway on-ramps and off-ramps (leading to all sorts of nasty accidents). Some of the flooding is due to the fact that the storm drains just clog up with some of the bazillion leaves that have been falling from the trees over the past month or so, and some of it is due to the fact that our sewer system is old and badly in need of repair and so just isn’t equipped to handle the volume we’re currently experiencing. Our street in particular flooded completely – something that happens every time we get a whole lot of rain in such a short period, and something that takes a city contraption to clear up. But the city clears streets as quickly and efficiently as they can, and my neighbors and I have gotten used to either parking around the corner on higher ground, or else just climbing into our cars from the passenger (sidewalk) side to escape the water, and it’s an inconvenience we gladly put up with for the fact that at least it’s *raining*.

On the plus side, all that rain means we get some pretty amazing side effects. This afternoon a coworker said ‘come look at the rainbow!’ I hesitated at first – I’ve seen lots of rainbows – but then I looked toward the window and…..wow! Everyone else in the office was having similar reactions – pretty much every single person eventually meandered over to the windows to stare up at the sky.

It was a perfect rainbow. We could see every single band of color as bright as if it had been painted just outside the window. If that wasn’t enough, we could all clearly see that it was an actual, complete rainbow arc, not just half a rainbow like you usually see. And it was close enough that we could actually see the end on one side – the colors washing over the trees and then stopping at the ground. It was incredible. The fact that it was also a perfect double rainbow was just icing on the cake.

This picture does not remotely do it justice, but it’s the best I could manage on my cell phone.

It almost made up for the fact that getting home later on took 3 times as long due to the flooding and the crazy. Almost.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies!

‘Tis the season, once again, for Holidailies. And as usual, Richard and I were sucked deep into the black hole of Nanowrimo during November, so we were scrambling around to get everything set up in time for Holidailies registration to open, and then to get the site actually updated and ready for a new year. One of these years we will be far more prepared. Hah.

It seems silly somehow to introduce myself, since I’ve been doing this whole bloggy thing for nearly 15 years, but clearly, if one looks at the fact that I posted a dismal THREE times this entire year (and one of those was actually just an extension of last year’s Holidailies and involved an invasion of Daleks, because reasons), an introduction might actually be warranted.

Hi! I’m Jennifer. I live in a 100-year-old house in California with Richard and six cats. By day I do a lot of writing and data mining and occasionally some VBA coding, and dream wistfully of the time when I used to play with actual databases (although that was an awfully long time ago). By night (okay, by evening, because I am old and cranky and occasionally need sleep), I sing, or knit, or even sometimes I bake things which I then foist off on other people because calories must always be shared. As for this here online journal / blog / whatever it is the cool kids are calling it these days, I write about pretty much whatever I feel like (see above reference to the January Dalek invasion), which includes the topics mentioned above, plus other random things as they occur to me.

So welcome. Happy Holidailies. Let’s see if I can make it the whole month for a change!

‘Tis the season for Holidailies!

Last night, as we were sitting at home, enjoying a quiet New Year’s Eve celebration, just us and the cats, we heard a noise from the kitchen. It sounded eerily familiar, so we went to investigate.

Imagine our surprise when we saw a Dalek! I thought they were just a made-up thing from that BBC show with the guy who flies around in a blue telephone box, but they are, in fact, real!

Sherman and Rupert were bravely doing their best to fend it off (apparently even Daleks have some respect for sharp cat claws), but luckily Richard remembered that he has a sonic screwdriver, so he was able to take care of it.

We looked around cautiously, but we didn’t see any others and thought that was the end of it. Even the cats didn’t seem to be all that concerned, although Rupert and Sherman sure were a bit hyper after the short-lived battle.

But that was last night. This morning when we woke up, there was an ominous hum from the kitchen, and we realized that things were far, far, worse than we had thought. Apparently the larger Dalek had left scores of tiny minions behind.

First we thought it was just this one, which had gotten itself tangled in the kitchen towels.

“Aww, who’s a cute little tangled Dalek,” I said, but then Richard reminded me it’s tacky to taunt the Daleks, and so we knocked it down and smashed it, and then gave it to the cats.

Unfortunately, the rest of them heard it, and that got them angry. Try getting coffee when this is standing in your way!

These particular Daleks were intoning something about ‘Encaffeinate’. Just what the world needs – caffeinated Daleks!

And it just kept getting worse and worse. Daleks in the microwave!

 Daleks in the silverware drawer!

I opened the drawer where we keep onions and potatoes and out came more Daleks (who knew when potatoes sprouted, they’d turn in such a horrible way!)

There were Daleks in the refrigerator

and in the dishwasher

And another batch of them scurrying around with the Kitchenaid, buzzing something that sounded like “Eggs Stir Mix Bake”.

Basically we’re looking at a full-on Dalek invasion. It isn’t pretty.

Richard tried, he really did, but one sonic screwdriver isn’t enough to take out this many of them. We don’t know where the cats are, although I hope they’re safe. I am typing this from the bathroom, where we have locked the door, but I can hear them coming ever closer, and I am afraid it is likely too late for us.

Please, if someone knows how to reach him, call The Doctor. Don’t let it be too late for all the rest of you!