Category Archives: Uncategorized

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S is for Standoff

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Since we live on the very edge of a town that is surrounded on all sides by large amounts of rural farm area, it is not uncommon to be driving along the back roads to work and be suddenly confronted with some manner of livestock. Usually it is chickens, which, while they may not be the brightest birds there are, have enough sense to skedaddle out of the road the instant they sense a car is coming. Every once in a very long time it is sheep, when one of them figures out that there is a hole in a fence and maybe things might be a bit more exciting if they wandered out to check out all those strange objects that whiz by at such high speeds. And lately, at least in this town, the livestock in question is a peacock. An either very stupid or incredibly brave (or perhaps both) peacock who has not yet figured out that standing in the middle of the road facing down oncoming traffic is not the smartest place in the world for a bird to be. Best of all, this particular peacock is convinced that he is incapable of being harmed, and is, in fact, far mightier than those oncoming cars, because lately he has taken to standing in the middle of the road in full defiant stance – tail feathers splayed out, neck extended, no doubt hissing for all he’s worth.

I am continually amazed, each time I am confronted with this stupid peacock and am forced to inch my way slowly around him because he refuses to get out of the way, that he has not yet been splattered all over the road by some oncoming car whose driver was not paying attention and couldn’t stop in time when suddenly faced with a full grown peacock in all his feathery glory. I am certainly not stupid enough to get out of the car and go chase the damn bird off the road because I have tangled with a peacock before and thus have been shown in no uncertain terms why there is a reason that people used to keep birds like peacocks and geese as guard animals. I would like to point out, for those of you who are now wondering just why I thought it a good idea to tangle with a peacock in the first place, that it wasn’t exactly my idea, and that my ‘crime’ in that previous encounter had been nothing more than walking down a path minding my own business when the peacock stormed out of the bushes and promptly pecked me for all it was worth in the leg. I would also like to point out that a pissed off peacock has a very strong and painful beak, especially when applied to the calf of a young elementary school child who was stupid enough to be wearing shorts at the time.

But I digress. We are discussing the current peacock encounter, and so far, no beaks have met skin – at least skin that I might happen to be wearing at the time. And in the meantime I continue to ease my car around the bird and watch other drivers do the same while cursing at the bird from the safety of their cars and vans and farm vehicles, and once even a large tractor trailer, and think that perhaps I am not the only one who knows the wisdom of staying far away from an aggressive fowl. And I wait, like everyone else, for the day when it either gives up on this little game, or else it ends up, one morning on a day when someone didn’t have their morning coffee and is maybe running a little late to work, a bit flatter than it was meant to be.

This has been an entry for Alphabytes.

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F is for Feathered

I may have mentioned at some point last year (although I am not going to bother looking up any relevant entry links) that one of the reasons why I like my current job is because of the birds. Oh, there are certainly downsides to where we are located – most notably the noise problem due to lack of insulation in the walls and ceiling/floor between the various offices. But one of the major upsides is the birds.

It’s not just that we are located right on the river, although that certainly does help. My boss keeps a pair of binoculars on the desk and at any moment during a conversation about some paper or presentation we are working on, he might suddenly cut short what he is saying, get up, and stroll to the window with his binoculars trained on something he’s spotted on the opposite side of the river. We’ve seen herons of every variety. We’ve seen some kind of swan. There are huge black and white magpies that swoop up onto the balcony outside our front door and twitter incessantly in the tree below us. There are swallows (or perhaps they are starlings – I can never keep the two names separate) who nest in the opening at the base of the balcony outside our back door, where balcony floor meets supporting beam, and who occasionally swoop by, low across the water. There are sometimes ducks – singles and clusters and sometimes babies if it’s that time of year – wandering around on the docks or in the water below. And then there are the birds whose soft cry is the one I love the most – the mourning doves – who nest in the eaves right outside our back door.

The people who own these buildings at some point put down rows of something slightly spiky along the interior part of the eaves which is supposed to keep the birds from nesting there. However, they failed to tell the mourning doves that this was supposed to be a bird deterrent, because it is, if one is a mourning dove, apparently actually the perfect place to build a nest and raise a family. Last year we had one nest, tucked into the furthermost corner of the eaves, so far in that we could not see her unless we went outside and stood on our toes as high as we could. We could certainly *hear* her and her mate cooing to each other on and off over the course of several weeks last year, and we would see them swooping by, occasionally landing on the narrow little sill that lines the window right beside my desk. But we never actually saw the babies because the nest was so well secluded.

This year, however, she returned – or if not her, another one just like her – and decided to build her nest in a slightly more open location. This year we can see her seated in her nest, her soft gray head just visible over a few scraggly bits of nest, and this year we were a bit startled, after a morning of a lot more cooing than normal, to discover that she had company. Two babies sat in the nest with her – large enough to flutter down and then back, although she was still feeding them as we stood there and watched.

The doves had grown used to us last year coming outside to peer at them, so this year I decided to try to get a picture, especially now that there were babies, and she was in a much more accessible spot. I dragged the stepstool outside, climbed to the top step, and took the shot below – a perfect picture of mom and two juvenile mourning doves seated in the nest. None of those birds even blinked an eye, nor did the flash bother them at all. But I nearly fell off the stepstool when I heard a coo from that secluded corner further back down the eaves. Turns out this year there wasn’t just one nest – there were two. I couldn’t get close enough to see if that nest had babies as well, and I didn’t want to upset either mother any more than I already had, but I did find it pretty amusing. All that hard work putting in that bird repellant, and this year there’s twice as many nests to show for it.

Anyway, here they are – momma and her babies. Aren’t they just beautiful?

This has been an entry for Alphabytes.

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A is for Accident

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Yesterday afternoon we went to see a movie with friends. As we drove around the movie theater parking lot, we first spotted a group of women climbing into a car, and then immediately spotted an open spot directly across from them. Naturally, the open spot won, so Richard started to pull in, only to realize that the person in the car next to that spot had yet to close their door. So he stopped, halfway into the spot, waiting for the door to shut, when suddenly there was a substantial jolt in our car.

At first I thought Richard had hit the brakes really hard, but then I realized that no, we’d actually been hit. By this time the car door was shut by what turned out to be the very friends we were supposed to meet for the movie, so Richard pulled completely into the spot, and we got out to inspect the damage. The driver of the car we’d seen earlier, with all the women climbing in, apparently did not look first before she pulled out, or else Richard’s car was just in her blind spot, but she’d managed to smash the right side of her bumper into the left side of his.

Luckily they weren’t going very fast at all, so no one was hurt, and aside from a bit of an adrenalin rush on the part of most of us involved, everyone was very good natured about the whole thing. Richard and the driver exchanged insurance information, and I and one of the passengers of the other vehicle whipped out our digital cameras and took pictures of both cars to chronicle the damage. Ah, the wonder of modern technology that I now carry that thing with me at all times! And then once we’d all laughed about it there was nothing left to do but for them to go on their way and for us to go off to see our movie.

Accidents are never fun, but really, there are so many worse ways for them to happen. If the car *does* have to collect a new ding or dent, I’d much rather it happened this way – with slow moving cars and no injuries – than on the road where someone could be hurt, or worse.

This has been an entry for Alphabytes.

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M is for Movies

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Friday night we were supposed to go see Chronicles of Riddick with a friend. But schedules and busy lives being what they normally are, it was postponed until this afternoon. So instead we went to see the latest Harry Potter film.

We went to the latest showing on Friday night, which was chosen despite the fact that as I get older I have a harder time staying awake that late, because Friday was my dad’s birthday and I wanted to make sure we would have time for that as well. So Friday night we wrapped up my dad’s birthday present (an odometer for his bicycle, because he’s been bit with the bicycling bug almost as bad as we were!) and headed over to my parents’ house for dinner and birthday cake and unwrapping of presents.

My older sister and her family were down for the occasion and were planning on spending the night. So once the two little nephews were put to bed, Richard and I talked them into going out to see the movie with us. A movie without kids? It didn’t take much convincing.

The movie was marvelous – so very much better than the first two that it was almost amazing at the difference. It helped that the third book in the series is perhaps the best one (although I think it might tie with the fifth book on this). The dementors were deliciously horrible. Professor Lupin looked just as I pictured him – tired and gaunt and still somehow calm in the midst of everything. Gary Oldman did a marvelous job of playing Sirius Black, and Emma Thompson was almost unrecognizable as Professor Trelawney, so perfectly did she take over that role.

This afternoon we met the friends to see Chronicles of Riddick, which was perhaps even cheesier than any of us were prepared for. We’d seen the first movie – Pitch Black, which was actually a rather enjoyable horror film despite itself. So naturally we knew we had to see this one, even though we were fully prepared for it to be a rather substantial ‘B’ film. And it was, oh how it was. The special effects were amazing, of course, since one can do literal magic with computers these days, but oh the cheese of the horribly contrived dialog, the implausible plot, and the fact that harsh prison life still leaves a young girl’s hair and skin in perfect condition, even when racing through brutal terrain against the onslaught of the burning sun. Still, if there’s a third movie in this series I have no doubt we’ll all be there in the theater, cheering on Vin Diesel and his eye-rolling one-liners. There’s something to be said for good cheese, and his films certainly have it in abundance.

This has been an entry for Alphabytes.

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R is for RPG

Richard has been running an ongoing Dungeons and Dragons game now for nearly two years, with the same group of players. It’s always lots of fun, but it’s been hard sometimes getting the group together and sometimes there have been weeks or months that go by before we can continue. So for some reason he decided that he wanted to run a one-shot game – something that we could all do with just one session of game time instead of trying to gather everyone together time and time again. And to make it even more fun, he decided it was time to return to the D&D genre of old, and make it a dungeon crawl. Or in other words, we were actually going to be playing our characters through a real dungeon, instead of traveling from town to town, or fighting monsters in taverns and dark alleys and castles like D&D usually is.

He’s spent weeks preparing for this, poring over his gaming books at nights while I worked on my pretty purple sweater, mapping out his maze of caves and tunnels and figuring out the plot. He put out a call to everyone he knows to see who was interested, and we ended up with six people in the game. Since I had no preference what type of character I would play I told him to just figure out what the party needed once he was done collecting the information from everyone else and tell me what I would be. Hence, I got to play a cleric for the very first time in my life.

Everyone came over this afternoon, and gaming started at about 2pm. We gamed. We talked. We ate food (Richard made amazing stuffed peppers for the two of us since we’ve been back on the Quick Start program for Weight Watchers). We gamed and gamed and gamed some more. And when it was all over and people were starting to nod off at the table we realized that it was almost midnight and we were only halfway through what was supposed to be a one-shot game.

But it was so much fun we’ve extended the one-shot to a two-shot, and scheduled a follow-up game to finish it all off the first Saturday in July. It’s been a very long time since any of us have spent an entire day gaming like that, and it was a bit startling to realize that we’d been at it for over ten hours straight. It certainly didn’t feel like it had been that long.

I know that for a majority of people, role-playing games make absolutely no sense, and they cannot even begin to imagine why anyone would bother spending an entire day hunched over a table, rolling dice and referring only to numbers on a sheet of paper to invoke a world of fantasy so very different from our own. And I realize that some people will never really ‘get’ it, just like I am never going to get why on earth anyone would find watching a bunch of grown men run around a field chasing funny-shaped balls, or swatting at tiny balls with sticks, or smacking each other in the face while wearing ridiculous costumes, remotely amusing. To each his or her own.

It’s this sort of thing that reminds me why I love role-playing games like this so much. To get a group of friends together who are all interested in playing a fairly intricate game of ‘lets pretend’ – who all have that vested interest in suspending belief in the real world long enough to create characters who interact with each other, and have personality quirks that we players do not, and to make it all, somehow, work.

This has been an entry for Alphabytes.

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K is for knitting (what else?)

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I am still madly knitting on a regular basis, just in case you all were wondering. But I decided that my obsession had reached the point where I was probably boring anyone but fellow knitters, so I moved all my babble about needles and yarns and what-not over to a new spot. So if you’re so inclined to keep up on my latest adventures in yarn, you can follow along at Knit One, Purr Two.

This makes three separate journals I’m keeping if you count the photolog. And to think I once scoffed that anyone would ever need more than one. I also once thought that I would never come up with enough random chatter to keep more than one journal at a time. Clearly I was wrong.

But anyway, I was talking about knitting. I’m fully aware of the fact that I have become just the teeniest bit addicted to it. But really, that makes complete sense, since this *is* me we are talking about here – the one who used to dream in database code. I like numbers. I did very well in math. Algebra and calculus made sense to me. And since knitting is, pure and simple, all about the numbers, it was only natural that I’d take to it like a cat to sunbeams. Every pattern is just a mathematical equation written in yarn instead of on a chalkboard, but they both come out the same. Get the numbers wrong and your equation doesn’t ring true. Get all the numbers right and you make something pretty. And above all else, always remember that any equation can always be fixed with enough tweaking. Sometimes it just takes one heck of a lot of tweaking and it might have made far more sense to just erase it all and start over with a fresh piece of chalk, but nevertheless, numbers always work out in the end. That’s the beauty of math, and thus the beauty of knitting.

I have been amazing myself with each project I do, just how quickly I am picking this all up. Everything I make involves new techniques to learn, and nothing I’ve done so far has been the slightest bit difficult because (do I really need to say it again?), it all boils down to numbers. My knitting-enabling friend laughed at me at our last craft night and commented that I’m going to know more than she does if I keep at it at this rate, and she’s been knitting for most of her life. All I know is that it makes me happy. When I’m sitting there with my needles and my yarn, and a cat or two snoozing on my lap and pretending very hard that they really have no intention of trying to eat either yarn or needles if I happen to be stupid enough to leave them unattended (ha!), I enter a zone of contentment. I can knit while watching TV. I can knit when I’m on the plane flying to and fro. I can knit for hours on end. When I do not have a project I can work on I feel a distinct loss, as if something is missing, and I immediately track down something to work on Right Now.

I fully recognize that a year or three down the road I may give it up and move on to something else, but in the meantime I’m going to take full advantage of the obsession. There is a small but impressive stash of yarn in our spare room. There are finished and partially finished Christmas presents that I’m quite proud of, waiting in drawers with cedar blocks to keep them from getting musty. And best of all, there are beautiful handmade things just for me.

Now…what shall I cast on for next?

This has been an entry for Alphabytes.

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G is for green

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I realized that it is now way past spring and I never did a pictorial update on our backyard. While some of the flowers have come and gone and some of the plants have exploded in size while others look as if they might need replacing (or at least some strong encouragement), overall the backyard has turned into something lovely. When people come over, it is inevitable that eventually someone will wander out into the backyard, and before you know it, there are little clusters of people, either running around on the grass (usually that would be the toddler / elementary school set) or perched on the wall of the flower bed we built with our own little (scraped up and very sore) hands. It seems like every week, there’s something new to go outside and see. All summer the curly sage has been doing its best to cover as much area as possible, and lately the day lilies have been slowly blooming.

That flower bed, by the way, is taking off like crazy. I cannot speak highly enough of High Country Gardens. The plants they sent us have all done wonderfully so far, and if one or two of the primroses are struggling, that’s more to do with my tendency to forget to do their weekly watering than any fault of plant quality. I have already picked out the collection I intend to get next, and sometime next winter or early spring that strip of water-guzzling grass beside the driveway in the front yard is going to be ripped up and replaced with yet another colorful assortment of drought-tolerant goodies.

The trees and other green things are doing pretty well too. Our little white peach tree is going to overload us with fruit, I can tell that even from the first year. We yanked off over a dozen little immature peaches when they first started to appear, and finally gave up last week and yanked off all but 1 of the remaining 6 peaches we’d allowed to grow, because they were so heavy I think the branch might have bent too far and broken. The walnut tree thinks that it is in a race to grow as quickly as it can, and I can see now why my mom always talks about how their walnut tree is trying to take over the world. And the pomegranate tree, which looks more like a shrub than a tree, has finally produced two brilliant red flowers that I hope will turn into actual pomegranates by the end of the season.

I am already pondering a few additions to the selection of fruit trees we originally planned for. There’s one final section left to plant with trees, so I think perhaps we’ll add a pear and a satsuma orange tree to the mix. Both of those grow quite well in this area, and I know I will have no problem foisting extra fruit off on various friends and family members if we get overwhelmed.

The fruit trees are the ones that amaze me most of all. It seems like such a basic thing – a tree, some dirt, some water, but somehow they produce huge, juicy fruit from such very basic ingredients. Mother Nature sometimes leaves me in awe. Every time I go out and look at that one peach left on our tiny little tree, or peer at the slowly unfurling pomegranate flowers, or check the walnut tree for progress, it hits me how amazing it all can be. And if nothing else, having these things in our yard is a gentle reminder to me of why we are living where we do. I may not like the heat, and I may not like the higher cost of living, and I may wish for mountains and snowy winters and maybe a little less wind in the spring and summer to make my biking habit a little easier to feed, but you know what? I can deal with all those little inconveniences, if it means I can have walnuts and apples and pomegranates and oranges and peaches right outside in my back yard.

This has been an entry for Alphabytes.

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C is to choose

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To be childfree by choice is to feel with utmost certainty that you never wish to be a parent, biological or otherwise, to any human being. To be childfree by choice is to know this with every fiber of your being, in times when you are safe and healthy and whole even more than in times when you are scared and uncertain and your world seems as if it can never be right around you again. To make this decision is to understand fully the consequences of what you will not be. You will not be a mother or a father. You will not have babies or toddlers or teenagers or any of the stories and trials and fears and joys that come along with them. You may have nieces and nephews and your friends may have children that call you aunt or uncle and you may love all these children as deeply as you are able, but they are not yours. No matter how deep a bond you forge with these young lives you still always remain in their periphery. And what everyone else cannot seem to understand is that you are okay with this. You accept this. This is the way you want it to be.

To decide to live childfree means that you will, for the rest of your life, probably always feel as if you may not ever quite belong with the rest of the people around you. To live without children means that you get lost in conversations everyone else seems to understand naturally, and that your conversational topics may often leave those around you confused as well. To decide to live childfree means that you may have to leave people you care about because you cannot be what they want you to be.

To decide to live childfree means accepting a life of living in a world that is unwilling to recognize that you, as a demographic, exist.

To decide to live childfree means that you have resigned yourself to an entire lifetime of people questioning you; of strangers assuming that you cannot possibly know your own mind; of pressure from well-meaning friends and family; sometimes even of hostility. You will be accused of being selfish. You will be told in condescending terms “of course you will change your mind”. You will be asked who will take care of you when you are old, as if the sole reason for having children is to provide a ready-made nursemaid for the elderly and infirm. If you are single they will assume that marriage will change your mind. If you are married you will be told over and over of what a wonderful father or mother your spouse would make, accompanied with sly glances and narrowed eyes suggesting that somehow you are failing them for being unwilling to procreate.

And yet you make this decision, because you know deep in your heart and soul that this is the right one for you. You make it not because of some emotional reaction to an act of violence or to the build-up of national fear and anxiety perpetrated by the media. You make it not because of financial reasons. You make it because this is you; because you cannot be someone you are not and you cannot want something that is not in you, no matter how desperately and persistently anyone else insists that you should. And above all, this is a choice. Your choice. Your decision. Your right to not want, need, desire, crave, have what everyone insists you should have.

Your choice. No one else’s.

Yours.

This has been an entry for Alphabytes.

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B is for Business Trip

I’ve been at this job over a year and have made many a trip here and there, mostly to the other offices, for work-related reasons. But none of those trips has been more than a day – down in the morning, back home late at night and back to office and normal life the morning after. This has actually been rather nice. I never minded business travel in the first place; it was just that the constant travel when working for Benthic Creatures, and before them, the Big and Little Fish, became so wearying.

The reason I mention this is that this evening I flew down to the office in Santa Monica for my very first ‘real’ business trip since I started this job over a year ago. Yes, there’ve been those day trips, but they’re really just no different than having to commute extra distance to another office – a commute that just happened to involve a little bit of air travel along the way. And this is actually the third time I’ve been down in this office in the last four or five weeks, all to gain progress on the same fairly large project, but this one was different because I actually had to spend the night.

It reminded me of all the reasons why business travel stinks. There is an entire world out there, outside that office, but I only ever see it through the window, or in glimpses as I rush off to get lunch and then rush right back inside again. But this is nothing new to me – business travel is never about seeing the sights. It’s just about doing the work in a different location, and then camping out in an anonymous hotel room until you get to repeat it all over again the next day. And in this case, it is a hotel where they not only charged you 75 cents to place a local phone call, they also dinged you 10 cents per minute for that call. Forget about trying to dial out to get email or do any work at night – sheesh. I sucked it up and paid them ten bucks to access their wireless network, all the while muttering unkind comments about the petty gouging that was going on. Why is it that the more you pay for a room, the more petty little charges there will be for everything else?

I don’t mean to spend this entry griping, however. It has been an extremely productive trip so far, and the big difference between this sort of business travel and what I did before is that not only do I like what I’m doing, but I’m also not having to do this sort of thing over and over and over again. It’s enough to keep me optimistic that one of these times when I go down there I might have a chance to do more than just rush in and out for lunch, and actually get to walk down to that beach I saw from the window of the hotel this evening before zipping back to the office to put our noses to the grindstone once again.

This has been an entry for Alphabytes.

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Still crazy after all these years

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I am now, as of yesterday, 35 years old. Not surprisingly, so far it feels absolutely no different than 34, which felt not a whit different than 33, which felt just about identical to 32, and, well, you get the idea. Yesterday was my birthday. There were presents. There was cake. There was a celebratory gathering of family. It was all good.

The day started, as most Sunday’s do, with me heading off to church for choir practice. Then I sat through a Sunday school discussion of the movie Chocolat, while figuring out how to knit beautifully invisible seams in my current sweater project. Then there was church and singing and then we got to go home and mill around frantically, Richard doing grill-related things while I wielded the vacuum cleaner against the evil forces of killer dust bunnies and did a few loads of laundry and dishes and basically tried to get the house in order so it would be presentable for guests. Oh, and in between church and cleaning there was lunch, which also involved singing of wait staff and free ice cream, but luckily no embarrassing hats.

Richard’s parents and little sister came up, and my parents and my older sister and her family came down for my birthday dinner. Richard did marinated pork on the grill, which always turns out delicious, and there was much boisterousness and chattering and noise that often accompanies gatherings of our families. There was an extremely large helium balloon shaped like a cactus, for some inexplicable reason, and an ice cream cake from Ben & Jerry’s with my new favorite flavor – Dublin Mudslide. There were presents – of course there were presents – and now I finally have a working blender again (the old one died months and months ago, leaving us unable to make potato cheese soup for far too long). Plus there was a very cool pewter goblet from Germany (handy to have a dad who gets sent to work in Munich on occasion, yes?), and season six of Buffy (which we have been waiting for to come out on DVD forever), and notices of subscriptions to many nifty and much-wanted magazines, and a sink-side composting bucket, and knitting books galore and even a s’more maker. Now I need some marshmallows and some Hershey bars and some Sterno and we will be all set for sticky, gooey goodness.

Today has been hot and sticky outside, which means that we have spent most inside, in some manner or another. The cats got me up early, as usual, so instead of going back to bed I whipped out a rough draft of the paper we’re working on at the office, so that I could feel like I’d done something vaguely productive for the day. Then we drove off to watch Shrek II, which is worth watching for no other reason than to see Antonio Bandaras as the best cartoon cat ever. And then there was much watching of Buffy, and pizza for dinner, and even though I feel as if – with the exception of today – this weekend has been all about the rushing around from here to there and being insanely busy, I must say that, when it comes to birthdays, my 35th was a pretty good one.