alitris

Relocation

2010-01-24T23:34:00.003-05:00

I've decided to give Tumblr a try. See me over there for a bit; I may be back here later.

Qball

2009-10-11T00:30:00.005-04:00

Image via rlr77

Provo is a marvelous place to be in the summer, or it was in 1996, anyway. There was no traffic, and because of the wonky way landlords collect rent based on the school season, it was much cheaper to live in the summer. Rent was collected per person in the apartment, not per unit, so it was not uncommon to have 6 people per apartment, which is how I lived for a couple of years at the Reeg. But in the summer, fewer students = your own room for 4 months. So Michelee and I lived in 1996 with two other girls, one of whom had a boyfriend named Butch, fought with them over the thermostat, wrote bad (me) and good (Michelee) poetry that we faxed back and forth to each other at our respective Carol's Copy Centers (me in Orem, she in Provo), and hung out with cute boys, sometimes at a squeaky clean pool hall on 5th West called QBall. (Not that often, though, because it was like $6 and that was a fortune.)

I'm a pretty terrible pool player, but the actual playing wasn't really the thing that was awesome. I wrote a poem about it which I will never share, because college English major summer poetry is best hidden away forever, but it was about how annoying my name is, the point at which people in my life make the transition to Lis, and how at Qball one time, that was monumental. (Except not.) Michelee had a crush on a boy who played jazz trombone, whom we called "the boy," and I really wish I still had the poem she wrote about him, on shiny roll fax paper, because I want to go back, relive it all again.

3 Sixty 5

2009-09-03T23:17:00.003-04:00

I joined a group of 75 strangers shooting and posting one photo per day for 365 days over on Flickr. I think it will prove to be daunting round about day 158, but in the meantime, it's been really fun. That's my day 1 photo.

Handwriting

2009-07-27T17:55:00.003-04:00

Go here and download lots of handwriting fonts for free, some terrible (like that one: Pea Summer Sweetness), some pretty cool.

(Thanks to Zoe for the link.)

That gleam in your eyes

2009-07-23T00:51:00.009-04:00

Everyone thinks their family's kids are the cutest and funniest, whether their own birthed children or nieces and nephews. But seriously, I believe I can say without prejudice that my niece KG has a terrific habit that she's sure to lose soon enough, so thank goodness for video and the internet to preserve it.

In preparation, you'll want to refresh yourself with this little bit of Sleeping Beauty:

In June, visiting Neck, JG, and the kids, I took Baby Bubba outside on the patio to rock him to sleep because it was 72 degrees with a breeze and that, combined with the sounds of Fountain Valley traffic, really seemed to calm him. KG joined us with her swaddled baby and sang a little lullaby. (I'm sorry to say that I appear, quite unshowered after lots of time in airplanes and the bed, and with a silent laughing maniac smile.)

Sleeping Beauty herself would fit right in to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir circa-1982 with that deluxe vibrato, but she stays pretty well within her range. We can't quite figure KG's interpretative three-octave jump, but then who am I to deny her artistic license?

West Virginia, mountain mama

2009-07-19T08:49:00.019-04:00

Back in March we drove to Detroit (can I get a Go Heels?) and wound around the West Virginia mountains, through two tunnels and Charleston, along the rivers for awhile. It was cold, and snowed off and on, which frankly made the whole scene that much more alluring. Like most states with a reputation, I imagine there are a great many tax dollars at work to make that stretch, anyway, attractive and non-hillbilly, to play against the type with which the whole state is saddled. I'm a sucker for a good bridge, and cities and towns along rivers. I like to imagine earlier times when coal was king, when the towns bloomed on the water in the shadow of industry.

Montgomery

Richwood

South Charleston

On a whim, I went there this weekend to revisit that curiosity. I stayed in the Marriott in downtown Charleston, which was strangely cheaper than Holiday Inn Express, even. I'm a real dork when it comes to how much I love hotels. I still remember the first hotel I ever stayed in: the Handlery in Union Square in San Francisco. I was 13 and I had an acid-washed purse and pink jeans that I wore proudly, heaven help me. It's an old hotel, and was being remodeled. The whole family was there, which means a lot of little kids, but the only reason we stayed there was that our friends the Leisters were there for business and we were together. I'm sure it was nothing short of a nightmare to haul 5 kids and their junk through a lobby under construction, to pay for parking in the deck, and endure the eccentricities (Donnie's worst nightmares) of a small, old, downtown hotel in 1989. But I didn't care, because I felt so urban and cool, sitting in the wide windowsill listening to the jazz coming from the club across the street until late at night, and the ever-present honking. I loved it. Had it been just our family, we would have stayed in some 2-star Best Western in Alameda for sure, as we always did. We have stayed in some seriously terrible motels on family trips, which is understandable; we required two rooms minimum and we were definitely on a budget. I'm clearly trying to make up for feeling deprived of hotels.

Cynical in tone and apostrophe abuse

There's an element of this hobby that is quite self-indulgent, I think. I really like the freedom of being alone and choosing the schedule based on light and where the road takes me. My goal is to approach these places with an appropriate balance of voyeurism and appreciation for the "other," but even that is potentially problematic, because I never want to be judgmental or superior (unless there's bad grammar; then all bets are off). And there's a risk that by looking at people and businesses and towns from this perspective -- the search for aesthetic -- I can oversimplify their lives and experience. Ideally, the search for beautiful and interesting things -- and translating them into the correct aperture, shutter speed, and composition -- is inspired by a purely artistic instinct and an attempt to present something in a new way, not that I feel entirely up to the pressure of creating pure art. I haven't yet worked out to what extent I feel okay about my invasion of their space with the proper balance of all these goals. I sense that if I did this in California, for example, I would feel more or less evened out, but beyond that I start to question my permission to be there.

I do think there is a safe zone, though, and that is nature. Really talented photographers with serious equipment and an intense obsession with light can make nature photography, and by extension the subject, new and appealing to even serious bums. I had a lovely drive to the southwestern edge of the Monongahela National Forest, which is just levels of the green transcendent beauty that is the entire state. I started a hike to the Cranberry River but since there wasn't a soul around and my survival skills are nil, I decided the 10 miles to the river might not be the smartest choice. Nonetheless, the 45 minutes I spent in the forest were very good in the way that 69 degrees, fresh air, and copious ferns always are.

More photos (+coal) on Flickr.

Dog

2009-07-15T20:38:00.012-04:00

So I find myself in primary physical custody of this pit bull, Indy, for going on six months now:

He is primarily a PIA but sometimes I really like him, which is confusing. I am lately a disciple of Cesar Milan and often in the course of his shows on NatGeo he says, "A family without a dog is incomplete." To which I say: No Way, but then I don't come from dog-loving people. My mom likes them; I think there might have been a dog named Rusty in her past life but don't quote me on that, and she isn't scared and will generally pet most dogs. She says, "Hey, fella," something I daresay she picked up from Grandpa T. I hear his voice in my head when she says it, and that is a happy moment of childhood dog relations, mixed in with all the holy terror and screaming. My dad is, I think, tolerant-ish. He could take them or leave them; his family never had one, as far as I know. I don't know if dog ownership is common in Germany like it is in America, but they emigrated not long after World War II, and they had bigger fish to fry once they arrived.

We had other pets: hamsters (gag), which escaped a lot and ran around the drop ceiling in the basement, help us all, and one my dad accidentally kicked down the stairs to his or her death. We also had a couple of bunnies (gross), and some cats, two of whom, Panther and Sophie, we inherited. Panther came with the Fresno house, and he was more like a barn cat who ruined window screens to be let in to the garage to sleep and poop (why we had a litter box when he spent his days roaming around, I'll never know. I fully ascribe to the controversial cat-owning theory that the world is your litter box), and I know my dad, anyway, generally ignored him until he got old and started peeing in the air intake of his car. It will show you how much I really cared about Panther when I say I can't even remember if he was put down or died of old age.

But don't judge! I've kind of reformed from my ambivalent upbringing. I like animals more or less, more if they don't smell too terrible and are Waco:

less if they are golden retrievers with really disgusting ear problems. I'm terribly fond of our barn cats, particularly old fatty Rooster.

(What I really like is posting pictures of Boozie.)

I've drained a few cat abscesses in my day, and that's grosser than cleaning up three barfs worth of sickness in the back seat from the dog. And the joy they bring you is supposed to make up for all that, I suppose, but I'm still working on that particular emotion. What I have is light fondness, and a weird and surprising loyalty that manifested itself when someone whom I judged wanted Indy for his pitbullness responded to my "Free to a Good Home" flier at the BP and had their child call me at 10 pm. I said no way, or rather I made Robbie do it.

But he's so hyper, this is the main problem. He's never bit any humans around here, and heaven only knows what the first couple years of his life were like before he found his way to the Ranch, but among his jumping, spastic behaviors is this super annoying need to have his mouth on you, licking, nipping (in an attitude of love, the dog groomer swears) but I prefer to not be anywhere near the business end of that strong jaw, and I mostly don't want someone else to get freaked out by it. When I first checked out Cesar's tips for training, I fancied myself a good student of his method, because it's primarily based on the idea that a dog is a dog, not a person, and to treat him like one goes against his nature and instinct and leads to confusion and bad behavior. I'm saying, you would never see me kissing any dogs on the lips, right, so I decide I have the correct amount of detachment to run with this idea of becoming his pack leader and making him submissive to me.

Which is all well and good, but it is hard. Cesar takes this pit bull named Daddy to a bunch of his house calls on the show, and I get inspired/devastated by watching his incredibly calm, obedient nature. Indy has made some serious improvements, especially on walks, where he has stopped pulling and stays at my side, and he will sit and wait for me to give him permission to eat his food. Last night when I fed him it was late and dark and I didn't have time to do a calming walk or blue squeaky bone chasing activity, so I just ditched it all and fed him, and he was an absolute basket case, the opposite of everything I had been trying to teach him. So tonight I took him for a long walk, thought I had tired him out enough to get him to walk calmly beside me without the leash, and instead he took off like a lunatic. I cannot for the life of me teach him to come when called, so he ran around the pasture with the horse mamas and babies a couple times and got nearly to Nick Adams's property line before he listened to his better angels, I guess, and noticed that I was calling him in my happiest, most excited voice for five minutes straight to get himself back to me stat.

I love the small victories, but I feel like I carry around a big SmarteCarte full of dog-fearing, dog-hating baggage that never quite gets me over the hump to the patience and love he really deserves. So, despite my fondness and tenuous attachment, I still want him to find a home with someone who will.

In the meantime, I am pit bull pack leader, and don't you forget it.

Road Trip Days 3 & 4: Antiques and the Confederacy

2009-05-26T21:17:00.011-04:00

A few years ago, wandering around Savannah with my friend Sydney, we happened up on the now-closed gallery of Jack Leigh, a marvelous photographer who has passed away. He is most famous for his shot of this statue from the Savannah cemetary, immortalized on the cover of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The woman who ran the gallery told us that they had to move the statue because people would, like, picnic on it, and of course it was someone's grave marker. Anyway, Jack Leigh is marvelous, became a photographer idol that day. She suggested we buy The Land I'm Bound To to choose what prints we would like to buy. I bought the book, and one day I would love to own this one photo of a room, bed, mirror. Maybe one day when I have a spare 1000 gs.

That photo above is my attempt to channel the wonder that is Jack Leigh. I don't believe I came anywhere close, but I do like the idea of playing with light and dof in the way he mastered. The room at the Sheraton downtown Chattanooga was such a contrast to America's Best Inn, I considered canceling the rest of the journey and staying put right there. Instead, I wandered around Chattanooga in the rain, had brunch at the Blue Plate

and rode a free electric shuttle back to the Sheraton, where I reluctantly checked out. Chattanooga, despite the Riverfront area which is quite revitalized with the right kind of things to bring families (childrens' museum, aquarium, the shuttle), suffers from the same problem of so many cities of its size and vintage - empty large buildings and a semi-depressed downtown. I try to imagine what these cities must have been like in their heyday, and I wonder things about how important it is to preserve a downtown when the exodus to the suburbs all but makes its necessity obsolete but for select occassions like weddings at the hotels, and visits to the more flashy and pristine Riverfront. There were a handful of indie bookstores, though, which I heartily support.

Good things were in my future: Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, which is just like you'd expect, and someone will sell you this saggy offensive bikini:

and antiques, of course . . . so many antiques. From there to Mt. Airy, the way is lousy with antiques stores and flea markets, along with great piles of rusty crap outside falling-down buildings. I got to wondering about why we love old things, especially rusty old signs, chipping paint, semi-broken furniture. I believe that, among other reasons, we like things with interesting textures and colors, we like anthropomorphizing the object and imagining how many people before us have been involved with it, and we like things which are the predecessor for new, shinier things we can buy at Wal-Mart. We like the idea that a Coke cooler was once an interesting and unique object that was manufactured in the USA by our grandpa's friend, taken on a picnic with Coke bottles and potato salad inside, and that it has lasted who knows how many years languishing in someone's barn until it was rescued by the proprieter of Treasure Potts in Fancy Gap to be sold at an arbitrarly high price to a Yankee on his way to the beach.

I feel that way about old buildings, especially, which is why I am tempted to take photos of every bit of chipping paint and rusty metal I can see.

Also, I am pretty sure I found Mater

and I love Mountain Dew, but seriously

Once the roads turned NC shoddy bumpy and the end was near, I passed the Star Lite Motel in Mt. Airy

and whammo, I was taken back to a summer between 4th and 5th grade when I went on a little nature expedition of some kind in Middle Utah called Summer Science, on a school bus with Mr. Shaw. When he announced we would be stopping at the Starlite Motel for a bathroom break, the veterans started snickering knowingly, as you do when you're 10 and you know the secret an extra year teaches you. Turns out it was a grove of juniper trees, pick one for your private moment, and join us back on the bus. It's so weird, it's hard to believe I'm remembering it accurately, but I don't have a fact-checker I can remember. Was Shannan there? It seems likely, as we were inseparable. I must say that, despite the cool retro sign, the Star Lite might not have been much of an improvement over a juniper in the desert.

The rest of the photos on Flickr and FB.

Road Trip Days 1 & 2: A study in extremes

2009-05-23T22:16:00.012-04:00

Outside Cabarrus County Convention Center, Hwy 49

I recently watched Pride & Prejudice with the director's commentary turned on, and the running idea is the quest for perfect shooting light. It's sort of vital in a movie like that, because it's all about making you fall in love with England along with Mr. Darcy, and illuminating your actors' faces at the swelling romantic moments. I think the film is quite successful, but I take his point about being obsessed with natural light. Since taking up my new hobby, I am also a little obsessed. I planned this weekend for good lighting; the weather is not cooperating and it is mostly overcast and rainy, so it's hard not to feel like I'm missing every fantastic shot.

It has, nonetheless, been a nice two days of roadtripping so far. Yesterday I took a long route to Athens after work, via 64 & 49 to avoid traffic and see what the waning evening light had to offer.

Junkyard near Badin Lake, NC

It's hard to take good photos at junkyards, I think, especially from behind a fence. There are so many interesting objects but they blend together and muddle the background. The front row of cars is incredibly rusty and waiting for someone to make them come back to life.

Also there was lumber.

When I got to Athens, I learned that what $32 per night buys you is not the funky and retro Bulldog Inn . . .

(fun with Crosshatch filter)

. . . but something else altogether - the kind of place where people end up with their heads bashed in by the lamp on Law & Order. The less said about America's Best Inn the better; I was awakened all night by mysterious noises from left and right. I left gray Athens early without fully appreciating its certain myriad charms just to wipe that night away and get on the road to Milledgeville, where Flannery O'Connor spent her last, lupus-filled days.

It was her most prolific time, writing-wise, even as her health declined. With her mother and her birds for company, she wrote for 3 hours each morning in parlor at Andalusia, a room that also contained her bed and bookcases.

Today, the preservation society lets the house sag a little, lets the paint chip, and the plaster crack, and they've preserved a lot of the furniture, the kitchen sink, a collection of her childhood books.

Unlike Flannery, I lack the prose to say how much I loved being there, imagining her walking slowly with her crutches, tending to the four dozen peacocks wandering around the farm. I went to her grave after; there was a little burst of rain that subsided as I drove to the cemetery. Her plot is unassuming, and she's buried next to her parents. Each of her family's stones has that symbol at the top: IHS, which evokes their devout Catholicism. It stands for the first three letters of Christ's name in Greek, meaning something like "in this sign you will conquer."

Someone had left a note on a hastily torn-out planner page under a rock on her stone. I was nosy and opened it up but the rain had long-since washed away the ink. I suspect that whatever they wrote wouldn't have adequately expressed what they meant. Admiration and respect for someone long gone are difficult to say out loud.

More photos on Flickr & Facebook.

Me and my buddy

2009-04-20T16:50:00.003-04:00

I have a new friend. His name is Nikon D60, and though he is low-end, in terms of DigiSLRs, he is quite satisfactory. I'm just kind of sick of myself so instead, if you feel like it, you can look at the photos I've been taking around this wonderful state of mine. That one above is my favorite, taken on Franklin Street.

I always liked the word alluvial

2009-03-06T20:28:00.004-05:00

Dogey went to Fresdoggy-dogg recently and saw some remodeling to our old house. We are all depressive sentimentalists, so to make it more sad for us all I'm posting this low-budget video I shot during the last Christmas at 1441 W. Alluvial. It will undoubtedly only be 5:29-worth of interest to my family and maybe my BFF Erin, but here it will live for when anyone wants a good cry.

This is the Christmas where Trav spent most of the time on the phone with Delta looking for his luggage. I didn't pick up a thing; it's in a state that Marge would probably object to having filmed, but it's accurate. The house is good, but honestly the best part is little Buddy and the raccoon potholder. There's a great moment where I'm walking down the hall and Pops turns off the light. He is famous for that. Jessie has highlights. Owie's a little baby. There's some random Christmas music blasting, and someone is always doing dishes - that night, it was Heff. Marge & Pops' bathtub looks especially grotesque in bad video. And Trav is not actually, you know, on the pot.

Fresno House from Alisa Muelleck on Vimeo.

Short Story: "My Widow"

2009-02-20T13:38:00.012-05:00

There is a big overlap in friends, blog readers, and book club, so many people I know will have read this one already, but it's . . . oh my. T.C. Boyle is a weird dude & really great writer, with an amazingly prolific body of work, full of diverse characters and places. "My Widow" was the most horrifying story about animals in the house I'd ever read, until he topped himself with "Thirteen Hundred Rats" in 2007, and then . . . well, I have a personal problem there, so "My Widow" remains high in terms of the visceral, if one step lower in the terror department.

I like this story for the same kinds of reasons I love Flannery O'Connor: there is a mastery of using the grotesque for its own inherent power, and not for shock value. Done badly, the grotesque is inserted to cheaply stun rather than be the means of moving the story and slowly building the sense of place and character, which this story accomplishes in spades. There is no escaping the widow's house once you've joined her there.

It is always impressive when writers do an unconventional narrator well and without pretension (for the opposite, see: The Lovely Bones); Boyle here uses a dead husband, watching his beloved widow from heaven or thereabouts. She is very old, has dementia, lives in a house going to ruin, and is surrounded by dozens of cats. The narration is loving and tender, not without a few wry jabs now and then, though they are filled with fondness and sympathy for her loneliness and advancing helplessness. The story is structured into sections with cryptic titles, and reads like a series of observations, which works well from a dead narrator who seems old himself. I don't sense that he is omniscient as much as able to observe her actions, and when he tells us what she's thinking, the sense is that he knows it not because he is dead, but because he was her husband. It helps the story stay far away from the supernatural or the maudlin, which is why the structure works so well at establishing the horrifying sights and smells of the widow's cavelike existence. Though it isn't chronological, the list structure still contains a definite passage of time, a closing-in of cats and decay, a building sense of dread and sadness.

"My Widow" also seems to be unavailable anywhere Google can find it, so you can either locate the February 12, 2001 issue of The New Yorker, read it in Boyle's After the Plague, or ask me in the comments and I'll send you a .pdf toute de suite. If that all seems like much too much hassle, let me tempt you with the opening paragraph:

"My widow likes cats. No one knows exactly how many cats inhabit the big solid old redwood house I left her, but after several generations of inbreeding and depositing fecal matter in select corners and in an ever-growing mound on the mantlepiece their numbers must reach into the thirties, perhaps even the forties. There are cats draped like bunting over every horizontal surface in the house, and when they mew in concert for their cat chow and their tins of mashed fish heads, the noise is enough to wake the dead, if you'll pardon the expression."

It's hard

2009-02-17T11:03:00.005-05:00

When you sneak in the office for a rare late-night nap out of the cold and there's just so little room in the fat cat inn.

New things

2009-02-16T17:15:00.003-05:00

My new Room & Board Metro sleeper is now appropriately accessorized, with gorgeous new pillows in Michael Miller Ginger Tile in Caribe & Anna Maria Horner Volumes in Rose made by my sister Bean, and soon to be joined by this trendy but lovable chair from Target. It will live where you see the sliver of a tan chair on the left. Farewell, purple phase.

Twinkle lights & sunset on the Haw

2009-02-16T11:04:00.003-05:00

Double Stuf

2009-02-10T14:18:00.003-05:00

From here via Tastespotting.

I have super-talented friends

2009-02-02T22:34:00.011-05:00

(click on this one to see the blingy paint job)

Merry Christmas to me from friends & metalworkers extraordinaire Emily & Casey Lewis of Beechwood Metalworks. I love how it looks against the brick, don't you? Thanks so much, you guys.

I've got my very own set of designer genes

2009-02-02T11:42:00.008-05:00

Look, Mom! You may have gotten through to me after all.

Pantry, before:

Pantry, about 80 buck worth of baskets and shelves later:

Also on the project list for the weekend:

Plant stand, before:

Plant stand, after sanding and 3 coats of light gray paint (flat, so you can see all the mistakes, but it was leftover so it seemed wasteful to buy more just for this dumb thing). This will be the new home of a terrarium once I build it.

Things I do not want for Valentine's Day.

2009-01-26T21:52:00.009-05:00

This bird and this turtle are . . . in love? And being assaulted by red hearts.

Before you buy this for your teacher, remember that it's just a mold of sugar that's worth nothing because you can't actually eat it.

Hmmm . . . no, not really.

Because a poor-quality midi file says I love you (in a burning sort of way).

They let the children with bad handwriting make this lollipop because it was going straight to the Dollar Tree.

Well, okay, I do want this, but only if the claw will let you have it.

And then what? It can't stand up on its own, and if you try to stir drinks with it, the stem will break and you will swallow glass shards. I love you, indeed.

Short Story: "Symbols and Signs"

2009-01-23T14:16:00.012-05:00

My freshman year at BYU, I had aspirations to graduate with honors, which . . . didn't so much happen, but that first semester I signed up for an Honors class called 203H - Studies in Literature. It was back when we didn't use computers for registration, but a touch-tone phone, and chose classes from the newsprint catalog, and it had no description beyond the Russian last name of the professor. When I walked into the classroom, stadium-style, half-circle tables with chairs attached, it was clear that the 20 or so people in the room were well beyond their freshman year. I didn't really start to freak out until I was sitting and people all around were having conversations in Russian. Dr. Julia Nemirovskaya, in very competent but heavy-accented English, passed out the syllabus and introduced the subject matter, which apparently everyone else had already figured out: the works of Leo Tolstoy.

Needless to say, this was not what I was expecting from a 200-level class, but was way too embarrassed to leave, even though I was horribly out of place. Then I got some arrogance and thought myself totally equal to the task of reading hundreds of pages of War & Peace each night, and stuck it out for the sake of having done it. I will confess that there were 50-page chunks of War & Peace that I clean skipped over, because there are thousands upon thousands of words of war planning inside Napoleon's head, and I wouldn't say I possessed the maturity at age 18 to appreciate it. I know I didn't appreciate her particular expertise in the subject. Despite feeling unnecessarily proud for having done it (I mean, I did get an A), I didn't really enjoy the novels very much (with the exception of Resurrection) and I think it colored my appreciation for all the Russians, who any writer worth anything will tell you have influenced people's good writing for many decades since.

This particular short story is not by Tolstoy, but by Vladimir Nabokov. It was published in the New Yorker in 1948, and somehow the name was changed from "Signs and Symbols" to "Symbols and Signs" but apparently Nabokov was never really happy about that decision. (I learned that from the New Yorker Fiction podcast, where Mary Gaitskill reads the story beautifully.) Whatever its title, this story will most decidedly call you to repentance about not respecting the Russians; it's a marvel.

The characters are an elderly couple with a teenage or young adult son "who was incurably deranged in his mind," and living away from them in a mental institution, a fair distance from their tenement apartment. They are immigrants, living in New York, but dependent on the husband's brother and faced every day with the possibility of receiving the news that their only son has committed suicide because of his extreme paranoia, in a case so severe and perplexing that his doctor had published a paper.

The prose is incredibly spare and tight. Each place the couple goes in the course of the day is described with few details, but they are visceral and piercing, and build together a world generally bleak, gray, and with unpleasant smells. It is raining, the subway malfunctions, the sanatorium is understaffed and confused, and they are told that their child has tried, again, to take his life by a nurse none of them likes. There is a dying bird, the "hopelessly uncomfortable dental plate" worn by the husband, and pale and soft food for supper. The flat is quiet, compared to the cacophony of their previous stops, but it is haunted by the ghosts of their past, pored over in photographs by the wife, and with a looming sense of present failure.

In the course of the few pages, this family is brilliantly, tragically sketched, and the ending is hauntingly ambiguous. We are left not knowing exactly what happened, with a vision of "luminous yellow, green, and red little jars" of jelly they had planned to take to their son, for his birthday.

A thing and its corresponding lesson

2009-01-23T09:15:00.001-05:00

There are those indie rock songs you hear and it's love at first listen, right? Like if there was a soundtrack to your life, that would be playing during the scene where you're driving, plaintively, with a sunset in the background. Last early Saturday morning, driving back from the airport with the benefit of XMU (please don't make me say SiriusXMU), Bon Iver's soon-to-be-released "Blood Bank" comes on, and whammo. I'm hooked. I listened to the 30 seconds on Amazon for awhile and then forgot until yesterday, when I went to CD Alley (cutest Ryan was working) and got my hands on the EP.

It's a good, mournful, repetetive, reverb-y indie rock story song, plaintive guitars, Justin Vernon's falsetto voice dubbed in many echo-y, harmonious parts . . . in other words, the exact formula that makes me fall madly in love. I had heard that he recorded the album almost exclusively in a remote cabin in the Wisconsin woods in the middle of winter, which, despite being just so hipster artist as a story goes, still produced this result, so I can't hold on to that too long. Then there's a little note in the liner that it was partially recorded somewhere in Raleigh, so that seemed good - maybe he's a North Carolina boy? Bonus.

I'm late to the Bon Iver worship service, because now he's been in the New Yorker and on Rolling Stone's list of whatever, but no matter. It's still nice to know some things, such as he is not a North Carolina boy, but an Eau Claire, Wisconsin boy, and was in Raleigh for awhile experimenting in other bands, getting his heart broken, and getting mono that did something to his liver.

When I first saw Bon Iver on the artist name display, I had the following thought process: 1) Either he spelled the French hiver wrong, or it's a similar word in another language who also has bon as good; 2) Man, that reminds me of the fabulous Northern Exposure episode when the Cicelians wish each other "Bon Hiver!" (Good Winter!) at the first snow, which I don't happen to agree with; 3) Man, it really bugs me that it's spelled wrong; 4) This is a really great song.

Turns out that Justin Vernon also watched Northern Exposure because of the liver thing, and changed the hiver spelling because it reminded him of liver. Which . . . you're that kind of dude, but whatever, I forgive you. I'm sure it was a bad time for you. There's more to know about Justin Vernon, and it's worth knowing, but I am trying to get around to my point, which is this: I really wanted to tell someone this story. I've told the internet, now, in the guise of making a point, so that's kind of cheating the lesson, but what I mean to say is that I had this weird revelation that this right here is why people partner up in life. This pretty flimsy and boring story of silly connections (" . . . and then I thought this, and it reminded me of this") is a lot how I see the world; I like it when things remind me of other things, especially things I remember with fondness. I like when people look like other people I've known in other places, I like it when short stories remind me of movies or scenes from a car window remind me of home. But even your best people don't want to hear about that junk all the time. I had this vision that if you have a spouse who is more or less interested in how your mind works, you could call him whenever and tell this story and he would care. Or at least, he would know that it's the kind of thing you would be dumping in his lap from time to time, for the rest of his life, and he was fine with it.

It's things like this caption that send me on a short trip to Crazytown

2009-01-08T14:49:00.000-05:00

Short Story: "The Ceiling"

2009-01-07T21:07:00.010-05:00

I was driving tonight as a storm was rolling in with some venom, and there was this moment where the sky seemed to be slowly pressing down. I may be reading too much into the metaphor, given my current state of mind, but when I took this photo, I was reminded of a truly marvelous short story: "The Ceiling," by Kevin Brockmeier. It was originally published in McSweeney's and then anthologized in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards in 2002, which is where I read it. It is also published in its entirety here, but I can't recommend reading a short story on the internet in a skinny column in Times New Roman when you could have a musty library book or a crinkly magazine instead. It is, nonetheless, worth your 20 minutes.

It also reminded me that, though I like to keep the 4th wall intact and not discuss my blog on my blog, I had been meaning to start a regular -- maybe weekly? -- review of a short story, mostly to remind myself that I once went to college, and because the short story remains my favorite form. If this seems dubious and boring, well, I won't pretend to understand, but I will forgive you, my legion of fan, if you opt to skip them.

My goal is to discuss why something is awesome without revealing anything that would spoil it; that may or may not end up being unbearably pretentious. We'll see.

"The Ceiling" begins, like so many great ones before it, with a tranquil scene of domestic pleasure; a group of family and friends enjoying a backyard birthday party. But it only takes until the second paragraph to introduce, ever so subtly, the first inkling of dread. Dread, and the disruption of pleasantness, are the makings of the best short stories for me. I don't mean postmodern existential angst or full-blown tragedy, but I look for a shivery moment of knowing that something is coming, and it will be unsettling and profound without pedantry or sensationalism.

He writes in simple, tight prose, and his story is quiet and slow, which is perfectly appropriate and mimics the pace of the omnipresent titular "ceiling." In true contemporary fashion, the domestic happiness is quickly turned on its head, but Brockmeier manages to give both its undoing and the "ceiling" equal and appropriate weight without settling for melodrama. In this way, it possess another of my favorite fictional approaches: real, prosaic happenstance co-mingled with hyper-realistic elements.

In this way, hyper-realism in fiction is not unlike what I appreciate about abstract art. I wrote last year about something the abstract painter Barnett Newman said about his particular style of work, controversial in a world of still-lifes and portraits, and it bears repeating: ". . .the feeling is that you're here and out there is chaos, so that what you have is a sense of yourself. The feeling is instantaneous, complete, and you can't ever wipe it out of your mind."

I think the best short stories possess a hearty helping of chaos, and yet it remains tightly controlled within their walls. "The Ceiling" is based around a conceit that will ultimately affect every character both named and unnamed in the story, and its conclusion will leave you chilled and horrified, but deeply satisfied.

Gathering Storm, Old Greensboro Highway

2009-01-07T20:53:00.004-05:00

I am wild about boat art

2008-12-21T21:44:00.002-05:00

Don't ask me why.

Afloat by Stephen K. Sheffield

Stille Nacht

2008-12-21T09:46:00.007-05:00

Bean & Heff are staying home for Christmas this year, then braving all this horrible Western snow to join us in Utah after the actual day, and we've been talking about what of our family's traditions she's going to include for her kids.

Our family made some changes to the traditions over the years, necessitated first by our move to Fresno and then somehow cheese soup on Christmas Eve got replaced by the Bethlehem dinner, which Pops does somewhat begrudgingly since it involves lying prone on a vinyl Christmas tablecloth in the middle of the living room and eating sandwiches, dates, olives, and grapes, and drinking Welch's white grape juice out of our Christmas mugs. It's a simple meal that's easy to prepare, and is meant to call our minds back to Israel and away from Santa or the Food Network. I could do without the lying on the floor, like Pops, but it's hard to object to how the change in altitude lends itself to a different kind of family unity. And it's the only time of year we drink white grape juice, which Buddy would probably tell you is the best part.

I have come to believe that every tradition Mom instituted has been motivated by a desire for her children to feel connected to each other; when we were younger, that meant putting aside animosity and saying out loud why we loved each other before we opened the simple gifts of a notepad or a basket with hotel shampoo purchased for a dime at the Nelson sale. I think I was the most unlovable then, because the kids usually said about me: "I love Lis because she gives me rides."

Now that we're adults, we get along fundamentally and are generally terribly fond of each other -- in-laws included, which I find to be no small blessing -- but we can be reticent about being demonstrative and can be easily embarrassed by overly emotional displays. I suspect it is our German guarding, but the trouble is that these kinds of traditions call up all this love that Mom has been fostering all these years, so we are presented with an emotional conundrum.

Never was that more obvious than the year that, on Christmas Eve, before presents, instead of visiting the Living Nativity in a nearby Central California town whose name I don't think any of us kids could tell you (we called it Pootown because of, well, the cow population), all of us went downtown to a hospital to visit a dying German woman with whom Pops spoke their shared native language and took care of spiritually. When she was more well, she had been on our Christmas caroling route, along with her other fellow widows and elderly people from the ward, but that year we took our Stille Nacht to the hospital room.

Though it is our heritage, we did not sing it with great accents; Pops would print out these papers with the lyrics and we'd have a quick pronunciation lesson before we left, which helped a little. The problem in the hospital room wasn't our pronunciation or our singing, but that once we started and were moved by the promise of the words and the sadness of her looming death, we were forced to sing over tremendous lumps in our throats, and eventual crying. This was, of course, embarrassing for teenagers and almost-teenagers, so we looked away and let our parents do the comforting words to Martha, but I think if you surveyed the Muelleck kids, it would be included among our sweetest Christmas memories. We will likely always think of Martha Lehwalder when we hear Stille Nacht.

One day,

2008-12-05T16:13:00.001-05:00

. . . these girls will laugh about behaving this way. Hopefully. In the meantime, just laugh at them. It's not exactly timely, but man, it's hilarious:

When I was ten, I wanted to run away and find Robert Plant*

2008-11-20T20:19:00.004-05:00

Photo from here.

I listened to the Led Zeppelin XM station for awhile on Tuesday and I forgot how much I love Robert Plant. His voice could not be more dreamy, and those jeans are wearing him. Me-ow.

* From the spoken intro of a super ghetto live version of Tori Amos singing "She's Leaving Home."

Overheard on the plane

2008-11-16T17:23:00.001-05:00

Redneck Man, to his sister in front of him: "Y'all should renew y'all's vows."

Sister: "Who?"

RM: "Y'all!"

S: "Where?"

RM: "Vail."

S: "Hell?"

This can't be real, can it?

2008-11-14T18:19:00.002-05:00

Clearly that image is . . . sketchy. But it's an eBay listing with 4 bids. Wha?

Facebook makes me homesick

2008-11-12T17:16:00.002-05:00

I feel a little dumb writing about Facebook on my blog, since I joined, like, 5 months ago and it's kind of grandma to talk about it, but I'm still in the finding people phase of Facebooking, and it makes me miss Fresno in a heart-achy way. It's not like I want to go back, exactly, but it's just a recurrence of that wistful feeling when you find someone you used to babysit and watch Golden Girls with who's all grown up and beautiful and successful and 28, for crying out loud.

Man, we ragged a lot on Fresno growing up. I know I told my parents a million times I would never come back there, never want to live there as an adult. In high school, I had this huge crush on Virginia. My best friend Erin went on a trip to DC once and did the Virginia tourist sites and her family made this corny home movie for me, complete with suggestions of buildings I should live in and a shaky-cam tour of the outside of George Mason University, where I was going to get a BFA in Creative Writing.

I can unequivocally say that North Carolina is a much better fulfillment of that particular dream, and though I am living as far away from Fresno as is possible and still in the continental United States, I feel drawn back. I am surprised, surfing Facebook, how many people I know stayed or went back or have plans to go back (said BFF Erin, in fact, and her Fresno husband Scott). It's not that it's amazing or great, just that it's pretty good, and it's home. Distance from home feels unbearable sometimes, and worse when your parents sell the house and move somewhere it snows and leave behind the pool and the fat cat Soph[t]ie.

North Carolina is confusing old school

2008-11-12T01:02:00.012-05:00

Sometime between 1905 and 1915, someone made this postcard (which, was irony a thing at the turn of the century?) and it's sort of what you expect of old school prisoners, with the stripes and the dirty faces and the working on the railroad. It's all very mythic.

So now, North Carolina puts their prisoners in this outfit:

It's kind of an exercise in humiliation. It's comical in a way that seems inappropriate for hearings and court appearances, and it's . . . clownish. The black and white stripes are one thing, but this is a creamsicle. I object.

I like old buildings

2008-11-11T01:22:00.004-05:00

Cedar Grove, NC

This is a very good list

2008-11-09T23:01:00.005-05:00

Oxford University has come up with the Top 10 most irritating phrases, and I do love a good bit of judgment and mocking. Here we go:

1. At the end of the day
2. Fairly unique
3. I personally
4. At this moment in time
5. With all due respect
6. Absolutely
7. It's a nightmare
8. Shouldn't of
9. 24/7
10. It's not rocket science

Hear, hear! And I would add these:

11. Literally (as in ValleyGirl style, when it is most decidedly not literal)
12. Mom and I's trip is coming up (as in, should be Mom's and my)

Sometimes my job is like this

2008-11-08T20:32:00.001-05:00

Ask yourself,

2008-11-08T19:29:00.002-05:00

Etemity is a long time . . .

Prop. 8 and the Backlash

2008-11-08T07:23:00.015-05:00

I do a lot of fluffy talk on this blog, with an occasional foray into something deepish re: books or whatnot, but ever since Donnie posted about opponents of Prop. 8 banding together to boycott Utah for being 60% Mormon, I am all tore up, as they say. I didn't have to exercise my vote on the issue this time, but one day I might need to, and I need to figure myself out. I'm awake at 7:30 am on Saturday, so clearly I need some sorting.

Of course I am hurt on the first level, because I am a Mormon, but I have gay friends and I love them and I want them to be happy in their lives just as I want that for my heterosexual friends and myself. When I was in California for that wonderful wedding with my immediate and extended family, our conversations naturally gravitated towards Prop. 8, and I will admit to expressing reservations. Not about its content, because that I believe, but about changing the Constitution. I do feel better about changing a state's Constitution than the Federal one, and in general, support a State's rights to handle the problems of its constituency vs. making it Federal.

But knowing that many members of my church were backing it with their time and their money, in addition to the fact that our church's leadership encouraged its support, left me unsettled. It's uncommon for them to choose a side, and in general, our church leaders extend the all-encompassing message to exercise your civic duty and vote your conscience. For plenty of people that is Democrat and for plenty it's Republican; we have Senators and Congressmen of both parties in office, and I've certainly not polled it, but if my circle is any indication, Republicans are not necessarily a dominant party within the American church like Utah seems to indicate.

Nonetheless, the defining of marriage solely between a man and a woman looks and feels like a Republican issue (if the parties are even recognizable anymore), and certainly many people who are socially conservative are registered Republicans. Abortion is the same kind of issue: both are things which are considered morally in opposition to God's commandments - from whatever scriptural or church source you receive them - and therefore, people assert, ought to be legislated away.

From a voting standpoint, I am more comfortable with my personal rejection of those actions than I am of supporting legislation against them solely for morality's sake. In the case of marriage, I think it's useful to factor in some legal or secular argument that it would be in a state's interest to keep the definition of marriage status quo. I like what I read here, in a piece written for the MIT newspaper in 2004, when Massachusetts was having its own battle over the issue. (Thanks to my cousin Cam for the link.) The gist of Adam Kolasinski's piece is that states have a compelling interest to permit marriages that could result in offspring; of course it's not accurate to suggest that all heterosexual couples will have children, but, he argues, "without mind-reading technology, excluding them is impossible." His ultimate point is that it is not the state's obligation to guarantee you a marriage based on your "sexual love."

That may be oversimplifying a tremendously nuanced issue, but it is a compelling point to me, and certainly one that I would research further if my state were to put this measure forward for my vote. So to lump me, and others who have reservations about law-changing, into a mass of people (Mormons and not) who you, Mr. John Aravosis, consider to be bigoted and discriminatory, is wholly unfair. It's one-sided discrimination and it's damaging to your cause.

I understand why people think it looks like discrimination against them; in some cases, it might be. If you look at the long list of churches and organizations and individuals who publicly declared their support of Prop. 8, I'd venture you'd find some people in there who do fall on the side of bigotry and small-mindedness, just as you would find people on the other side of the cause hating Christians en masse. If you are not religious and don't have any interest in that side of the argument, I understand why it looks cruel.

But the whole thing is based on a fundamental truth that we (Latter-day Saints) hold sacred, and I'll explain it as I see it: marriage between a man and a woman only is the unit God has outlined for His children to live in on earth, so that we may also have children and live together as families. Sex is for unification and strengthening of that marriage and for the potential creation of children, so men and women who are not currently in a marriage are celibate. No one is going to tell you that being celibate is easy, not by a long shot, but if you come to this spiritual conviction, then that is what you choose to do, if you are straight or you are gay. If that's your choice, you figure out how to live a happy and fulfilled life regardless. (Those are my own words of the Church's official stance, which you can read here, if you want.)

Barack Obama won this election for a lot of reasons, but I've read over and over that it was in large part because of his supporters' presence on the ground, in getting people registered, out to vote early, and voting for him because they found in themselves some kind of conviction that he was the right candidate for the job. The same thing was done here, this time by sympathizers and members of churches with myriad reasons to support Prop. 8, finding people with myriad reasons to vote for it themselves. So, with the same kind of free speech and democracy in action, it passed, and I know it feels devastating to its opponents. I understand why it does, but people vote on their convictions, be they religious or otherwise, and it's the fabric of our system. Now I've told you mine.

Missing Provo

2008-11-07T17:49:00.009-05:00

Just a little, especially after I heard it snowed this week, ugh. I bet Doge is beyond thrilled.

I was reminded by the internet how sometimes (I can't remember why; is it for homecoming?) someone or another hikes up to the Y and puts lights on it, or turns on the lights that are already there. I don't really know. But I used to love that. Those mountains at dusk are nothing if not inspiring. Enjoy for yourself.

Here we are

2008-11-05T18:39:00.004-05:00

"You were in there a long time," K said to me. He came with us to his school to vote, and he was right - I stood there at least 5 minutes trying to choose my presidential vote. Ultimately, it didn't make a difference for the electoral outcome, but after being categorized with people like myself (that is: the great expanse of moderate "Undecideds," thrown off voting Republican despite being registered as such by the choice of Sarah Palin for VP, among other concerns) on the news for a million years, I have to say that I was, nonetheless, thankful that I could have a choice.

It was a strange feeling to be not entirely passionate about either candidate (though not the same kind of strange as last time, when it was more like dread), but it still felt important. I liked that it felt important, because it's easy to dismiss your vote. It's a number in the giant machine, sure, and since it's just a directive to an elector, it sometimes seems middling. But it's also your offering to the founding fathers; it's your call to say one thing or the other, and it's your right to keep it to yourself or splash it all over your car and Facebook page. Whatever happens, it's the way we collect everything we've synthesized about someone's ability to lead, make good and moral choices, be a good representative for the millions of us, and do whatever they can for at least 4 years, and to allow a reset to be a motivator for turning some things around.

I don't really want to get into specifics, because the time for debate is passed (not that I really got all that involved in the cause while it was happening), so now what we do is just wait and see what happens. Some of it is sure to be good, some of it might be disastrous, and having the Democratic party in control of the entire free world makes me shake in my boots a little, being a Republican and all, but doing the process is meaningful, and I'm thankful for it.

Alltel's Revenge

2008-10-30T20:25:00.004-04:00

Officially, the Alltel wizard and Chaaaad are fifty thousand times less annoying than the newish Verizon commercial with the dude asking his secretary what's on his schedule and she lists all the stupid texting whatnot and moves his real meeting. It sucks so bad it's not even on the internet.

Trav gets the last laugh.

(Boozie just says, "They made me wear this shirt. I'm really a Carolina fan at my deepest level, see?")

Who would suspect a bunch of ding-a-ling dames?

2008-10-29T15:50:00.001-04:00

In honor of Cloris Leachman finally getting kicked off Dancing With the Stars, please enjoy this clip from her finest performance: Phantom Fox in The North Avenue Irregulars, one of our favorite Disney films when we were kids. This scene is amidst the zaniest of antics this fine film offers: it's the demolition derby at the end.

Cam & Rebecca are MFEO

2008-10-27T17:00:00.011-04:00

My fabulous cousin Cameron and lovely, lovely Rebecca got married in Sacramento this weekend and it might as well have been shot for Martha Stewart. Their invitation was the greatest thing you ever saw, and the whole day was perfectly lovely. Thanks to California for the killer weather.

Sacramento Temple.

The bride is wearing burgundy shoes which she didn't remove the whole day, bless her feet. Also, she made her dress. She is that kind of cool.

That's love jam. Peach.

Local apple pie (still warm) and also local juice, donated by the juicers for a wedding present. The pomegranate-berry juice had crack in it.

Their fun band o'hippies did not play the chicken dance. That's Rebecca's brother singing a song he wrote.

My aunt Kathie sewed all that bunting out of vintage fabrics. Totally fabulous.

Rebecca collected vintage dishes & silverware for dinner and chose gorgeous fall flowers.

If I had a boat

2008-10-24T19:36:00.010-04:00

Eudora Welty, by Curt Richter

If I could be reborn and exist wholly immersed in a different place, it would be Eudora Welty's Mississippi. Excluding the racism, the world from which she came and the one she put on paper have surpassed for me, suddenly, even the beloved world of Flannery O'Connor's creation. Mississippi has a bad rap these days, accused of backwardness and redneckness and other dismissive terms of the outsider's perspective. I haven't spent much time there, other than driving through, so I can't defend it properly, but I suspect the Mississippi of Delta Wedding didn't get a whole lot of respect either, not that you'd know it once you become immersed in it.

Once you arrive in the Delta with the Fairchilds' outsider cousin from the Yellow Dog train, on the day of Miss Dab's wedding, you are tasked with staying put until the end of the wedding, at the very least, and certainly until you've popped in and out of the heads of the various children and adults making up this plantation legacy family and the servants who bake cakes and tend to their whims. I've read Delta Wedding three times, and I'm still not sure I totally understand it, but such is the wonder of Eudora Welty.

In both this novel and her short stories, two of which were read recently on the Selected Shorts podcast, she possesses two gifts which make a story vibrant and exactly as I like them to be. First, she is a master of presenting place, but it is revealed slowly, in bits and pieces in between a usually omniscient narrator's character mind-reading and casual physical description. It is almost always summer, hot, and the characters move at a languid pace, even when they're hurrying. They talk to one another with equal parts of fondness and exasperation, and always proper decorum and manners. People are just this side of surreal, and it lends to the writing a significantly slowed pace, which leaves the narrator free to give copious commentary of the smallest things whenever she sees fit. (I am assuming - she usually feels like a woman; though it’s not how I was taught, I have a hard time picturing anyone other than Welty herself. That face is so regal and lived in and captures what I am describing in her prose.)

Second, she writes wonderful and complex women - or, more precisely, Southern women, which are a class unto themselves and a class I adore. I am sure Southerners tire of incessant analysis of their lifestyles and mannerisms from outsiders, especially if they are done without sympathy. I hope that I can say this without reproach, because I long to be Mrs. Fairchild for a week, or Robbie, the shadowy and judged Fairchild (by marriage only), married to the most beloved Uncle George. Each woman fulfills expected 1923 Delta woman roles, obeys tradition, is loving and nurturing in her own way. But what I like about trips inside their mind is that we don’t find subversion there, but a deepening of the psychology of this kind of woman, and revealed in language that takes its time to get to the heart of it, and then steps back quickly so you’re left with a little more than before but also a little more wonder. It’s writing to the tune and speed of “April the 14th, Part 1” or “I Dream a Highway” by Gillian Welch. You might never get there, and then suddenly you do. It’s exactly what I look for in fiction.

I’ve been accused of being too esoteric when I talk about this kind of thing, but I feel discontented these days (maybe because my house is such a mess) and I want to time travel to become one of these women, managing the men around her without them knowing, keeping them anxiously intrigued, sipping lemonade in a white lace dress and a straw hat on the wraparound porch in intense Delta humidity with only a slow fan to cool me down, no BlackBerry, DVR, car, plane, or email to answer in sight.

Paula Deen has outdone herself

2008-10-14T11:18:00.002-04:00

Spotted on Tastespotting: The Lady's Brunch Burger. (Yeah, those are Krispy Kremes. Hot Now, I would hope). I'm not saying I wouldn't eat it, but I wouldn't feel good about myself.

There are bags and there are bags

2008-10-13T14:08:00.007-04:00

Margey and I looked at a lot of bags recently, and I am ready for a change. I have had my eye on the hobo shape of this Coach bag for awhile, but I hate logo fabric and also: $398. So . . . no.

In the meantime, though, I found this bag on etsy and I'm about to die to buy it. The only reason I haven't yet is b/c I'm not sure I want a red or black bag, and I'm holding out for gunmetal gray.

Also, I've been known to drop up to $80 on a lark, but $121 feels like a real choice, considering that what I want the most right now is a new couch.

Which one? This one. Not sure on the color yet, but maybe the Walnut (chocolate brown) velvet-like microfiber.

This concerns you if you've been a guest of mine recently and were forced to sleep on the chiropractic nightmare that is my current sofa bed. Because: new bed with no bars in the spine.

Well, sure

2008-10-08T12:48:00.004-04:00

Now that I've invested all this coin into buying 2 million smaller and smaller containers that can be wedged, puzzle-like, into a freezer bag, the TSA is thinking that bombs aren't likely in your foundation after all. Or at least, they'll be able to tell a little better. Wonder what this will do to sales of nasty-topped VASA water in the airport? I bet that old woman in a wheelchair we saw recently at JFK would have appreciated it being 2009 already. She was clearly a novice flyer, and when they opened her ratty bag, they pulled out 4 brand-new bottles of liquor. Guess she didn't get the memo.

On an unrelated note, I really, really, really, really hate landscaping machines. The pitch of their motors is absolutely unbearable, like to the point where I spend most of those 3 days per week that they're outside with their blowers, mowers, and edgers feeling like I'm descending into madness. I sorta wish I lived in a desert where there would be nothing to blow but sand. And who would do that anyway?

Hi, I'm Boozie

2008-10-06T00:45:00.001-04:00

I'm storing nuts in my cheeks for the winter.

I'm a businessman. I love money, I love power, I love capitalism.

2008-10-05T23:38:00.007-04:00

And I love movies about assistants. Or, more accurately, I have a soft spot for movies about assistants, even if they don't turn out to be that good, movie-wise, like "The Devil Wears Prada" and "Twenty-seven Dresses."

Tonight, I was watching "Annie" on TCM, which I've seen a million times, but not since being a grown-up with this particular career, and aside from so many things suddenly making sense (Miss Hannigan's gin-filled bathtub, when Daddy Warbucks says, "Everything's urgent to a Democrat") now that I have a touch more historical and contextual awareness than I did when I was 10, I also discovered that Grace Farrell is the greatest assistant ever.

She's probably called a secretary, but nonetheless she's totally glamorous and competent and a great dancer and has fabulous suits with swinging skirts and hats. She's totally present and attentive and unselfish, and beautiful and sympathetic. She knows when to push Daddy Warbucks into, you know, adopting Annie, and when to sit back and watch him be his blustery self instead of intervening, like in my personal favorite scene of the film: The Iodent Hour. She interviews all the fake parents and bows out of the FDR visit, probably knowing full well that sending Daddy Warbucks with Annie to Washington would shake the Republican out of him. I think we're supposed to embrace The New Deal optimism and all the millions, which is kind of a beautiful simplistic perspective.

Now that we're in the midst of our own modern-day New Deal (if you will) I'm pretty sure America just needs a Grace Farrell to take care of business in kicky heels.

Fall Festival

2008-10-04T17:56:00.004-04:00

Those are sweet pickles purchased this morning from the Orange Chapel Methodist Church Fall Festival, which is a lovely morning of kind neighbors, really good country breakfast including biscuits and spicy gravy, grits, country ham, and Diet Pepsi, baked goods, and gospel music sung on the back of a flatbed trailer. It always falls the same weekend as General Conference, and it's all together a very life-affirming and uplifting series of days. If Pops was still here, I'd share those pickles.

If I had an extra $1200

2008-09-30T20:20:00.002-04:00

I would immediately buy this chair from Anthropologie. Holy cow.

Shuffle Junkie

2008-09-28T17:29:00.006-04:00

View of Utah Lake from Squaw Peak

The trouble with being a shuffle junkie is that sometimes songs you've forgotten about can pop up and what happens depends on whether it's a busy day and it produces just a little twinge, but if it's a sultry fall night just after a rain storm and the windows are down, that's when it smacks you in the gut with a little more oomph. And I remember that one fall Saturday night in 1995 when we went up Provo Canyon for a little wholesome campfire and guitar-playing under the clear, Western sky.

T & I rode up in the back of Korb's Nissan Sentra, with Dave in the front, 1/2 of the four boys of the Briar Avenue basement apartment that we were collectively and individually madly in love with. (Not specifically Korb & Dave for me, and with T there would be an eventual realigning of affection, but that night Korb had a little advantage with her, and our friend Brooke would later capture Dave.) Korb put in the Hootie & the Blowfish disc and skipped it to number 3, which is "Let Her Cry," of course, and he said, "I know I have an economy car, but this stereo was the best thing I ever did." I'm sure it sounded great or whatever, but for me with that song it's more about the tragic first chord and the lonely girl by the lamp post.

We met J & Chris up the mountain, where the fire was already toasty and crackly and J already had his guitar out. There were more girls waiting, too - Kari & cute, ditsy, flirty Kiersta, who were also collectively and individually in love with the Briar boys, and lived across the hall from us. They were a little older, and Kari, anyway, possessed the hippie no-makeup, long blonde hair confidence that seemed very much the right thing to have in that group. I was really jealous of her, despite the Birkenstocks; she was at ease around these boys, who were much older than us. I was wearing a big Eddie Bauer pullover, and whatever the real story, how I felt was that unlike the rest of these girls, I was liked fine but unadored. I felt unsporty and uncool and Kari could run a room in an effortless and breezy way that was never obnoxious somehow.

So the night for me was fun in theory - it was perfect with cute boys and marshmallows and guitars, but the perfect made me crazy and insecure and I like I wanted to go deep in the dark canyon and find my way back alone with no one to see how dumb I felt. I don't hate this memory; Hootie starts singing and I have to close my eyes for a second and take a deep breath, because it's that young and hopeful combination of joy, anticipation, embarrassment, and the overwhelming crush of the moment, long since passed and been replaced for all of us by other people, other friends, other loves. But I can also pretty easily tap into that odd girl out, even if that perception is tainted.

Now that Darius Rucker is trying to start a country career, he pops up with more frequency, but nothing he does can replace the heartbreaking pathos of "Let Her Cry," those first few guitar chords, the sad girl by that lamp post. She's destined to stand there forever. I can hear her tale from high up the canyon, looking down.

B&E

2008-09-23T14:52:00.008-04:00

Okay, so you know this commercial, right?

I hate it. It's totally alarmist and awful. But it certainly does its advertising job, because it leaves you unsettled and like you really can't afford to not have Brinks.

So last night at 2 am the downstairs alarm was tripped, and we have the same kind of deal with the calling to see if it's a false alarm or we need the cops. The speaker for the alarm is right outside my bedroom door, so it didn't take long to wake me up, but I got all discombobulated and it became part of my dream for a minute, so by the time I could figure out what was happening, the phone was ringing and I still had my teeth-grinding mouthguard in when I answered it and I had to go outside on my front porch to even hear the woman on the phone asking me for my password. And then I realized that I was outside and possibly unprotected from the possible murderer, so I asked her (um, after I took out my mouthguard) if she would stay on the phone with me while I checked things out.

Mind you, we still weren't communicating well because I actually have to go down the stairs to turn off the alarm, but I was faced with quite a conundrum: knowing that it is very most probably a false alarm, do I still risk going downstairs? What would I have done if I had met a murderer on the steps? Sure, Security Central lady would have sent the cops, but out here that recently meant 45 minutes, so I'm pretty well dead and in the Haw River by then.

With the being not awake, I didn't have the presence of mind to think too long, especially because it was SO LOUD and so I just crept down the stairs, my heart beating like nobody's business, and finally got the thing silenced. Then she told me it was an outside closet door (why it's connected to the system, I don't really know, because it doesn't actually lead to access to the house. It houses the water heater, so we're guarding against shower espionage, I guess?). This particular door doesn't have a doorknob on it, so you can imagine that a little wind can make it blow right open. If I had asked her what tripped the siren, I would have known that there was no murderer, but the truth is that I watch too much Law & Order: SVU and I'm just so suspicious.

And in point of fact, going downstairs without at least a kitchen knife was potentially pretty stupid, but is it dumber to let the Sheriff come out for a false alarm? I guess these are not questions you can ask if you're dead, so thank goodness I don't have to be in the tragic victims section of the Chatham County Record today.

Dear Summer,

2008-09-10T13:43:00.004-04:00

Don't let the shade deceive you. It's not cool on the porch.

This is my statement: I am over summer. Over the humidity, the cicadas, the fogged up windows from a/c, over always needing a/c, walking face-first into a billion spider webs. Over the constant sweating, no real breeze, no shade that feels like shade, hazy skies, 80-degree nights.

Summer's not even that fun when you're a grownup; it's just hot. I can't discount the lovely vacation, but it's bookended by two stressful events, so it's hard to relax.

Let's be done already.

I don't get it

2008-09-07T22:36:00.001-04:00

Do you?

It does make me want to eat a churro, though.

For Girls Only

2008-09-07T22:01:00.003-04:00

Not to perpetuate stereotypes and make any boys feel awkward, but let me just tell the women I know out there to go immediately to mon.thly.info and see what helpful scheduling and reminding it has to offer. The internet is our BFF.

The Saints

2008-08-29T21:42:00.005-04:00

My fun friend Holly, whom we like to call The New Holly since we already had one who left us for some seriously prolific and literary adventures, was explaining how she did us a solid this week (being a kind Mormon apologist among those who think we are weirdos) with some of her co-workers by paying us a great compliment about the strength of our community. She was referring to the one she has the most experience with, which is a little Triangle contingent, with special dispensations for our Boston, New York, and Portland arms. (Ditchers.)

She observes -- and often helps with, bless her -- the myriad things we Mormons do together; some relaxing and fun, some extremely stressful and tremendous amounts of work, some worshipful and quieter and calmer. While it's true that not all of us feel connected to our larger ward community all the time, there is always someone here or there with whom you can find a connection. Mormons don't have a corner on this market by any means, but, like in other close-knit communities, deeply-felt spoken and unspoken beliefs entitle you to belong.

The universe of blogging has added a new dimension to that dynamic. There is a tremendous network of (mostly women) Mormon bloggers with all kinds of angles: Design, Sewing, Cooking, Mommying (this is maybe the biggest category, unsurprisingly), The World We Live in and Life in General (every good Mormon girl's favorite slow song, at least where I come from) and these women wear their beliefs with varying levels of transparency.

I don't read too many of them regularly, but I do stop by now and then, and among the happysad times of cjane (whose husband I know from college, in a bit of common Mormon kismet), there was this tragedy of her sister and brother-in-law being critically injured in a plane crash. Reading this news does no favors to my distrust of small planes (ahem, Donnie), and among the sympathetic feelings stirred up by helplessly observing the sadness of strangers -- particularly because it's someone's family -- I have been frankly surprised by the response of the regular readers (certainly not all Mormons) of their family's blogs. Balloon releases, prayers, cards, auctions, and what's looking like lots of money, and that's just the stuff we know about.

I don't mean to be skeptical, because it's really moving, but I can't stop analyzing the phenomenon. I am trying to put it in the context of something else outside of the internet, and I thought of the time when I went to a hot dog supper & bluegrass concert at a school to raise money for a teenager's leukemia treatment. He was (he passed away not long after, bless him) a friend of a friend, and part of my neighborhood, such as it is. But it's not exactly the same, because for one thing, I got a tangible item (hot dogs, mmmm), and it wasn't like I personally heard about it from a flyer at Jerry's and showed up with $50, if you see my point.

A reward is not why we ought to be altruistic, certainly, but there is often something given in return (advertising, a tote bag) for donating to a cause where the person or need is not personally known or connected to you. There is a grand tradition of making donations to strangers or global needs in the name of empathy, but in my experience, that has been more commonly achieved through the vehicles of organizations like the Red Cross or our church's Humanitarian Aid fund. Or, like in the case of Katrina or 9/11, a not-personally-known to me celebrity-type has been the one asking for it on television, and strangers' donations were at least partly in response to seeing your favorite musician or actor ask for it. The anonymity of a large body doing the collecting and dispersing, and possibly mailing your mug to you, has seemed more safe and effective, if you will; it's the traditional model.

All of which is not to say that I think it's weird or that anyone is running a scam, just . . . something new to me in the internet world. I guess people's support in whatever way reflects how they have come to feel a part of cjane's and nie nie's lives, which is, at times, probably both a blessing and a burden to them, but one that comes with the territory of opening at least some portion of your life to the internet, and especially to a community which thrives on shared experience. People like when others say what they think, only better, funnier, with more gravitas, and the compliments flood in via the comments. And I've come to the conclusion that people like to see where their charity is going and believe that it will make a personal difference, especially in the continued shared stories through the blogs.

So I guess why not, right? Why not try to give something back in a time of such need; why not, when, in our experiences with people's sadness in our real lives, we often feel helpless and unable to find anything to give to real and complex grief. Maybe joining this community with an offering both builds it and stands surrogate for the time when we couldn't find the right thing to do.

Product Review: Givenchy Phenomen'Eyes

2008-08-28T16:35:00.009-04:00

For the past forever, I've been using Great Lash Very Black over the top of Shiseido Mascara Base. Great Lash is cheap as can be; Shiseido is not, but I am sort of anal when it comes to mascara application. I haven't tried tons of expensive mascaras, mostly because I thought the base was doing all the work and Great Lash was making up the minimal difference. I have certainly tried pretty much everything you can buy at the drugstore, which is how I landed where I did.

Turns out now there exists in the world this most crazy-looking brush coated with marvy mascara and costing more than you would ever think is reasonable to pay for such a thing.

Givenchy Phenomen'Eyes (I have NO idea what is going on with that punctuation there) for a cool $27, looking for all the world like a Viking club doohickey with spikes.

But it does some seriously good work, as evidenced by my scary closeup here (PS that little hole on the bottom lashes is a chicken pox scar, not a miss by the mascara club):

It's pretty much exactly what I expect from a mascara: pretty extensive coverage of all the different lengths and extension of the outer corner lashes with very minimal clumping. That has always been my problem with Great Lash - lots and lots of wiping off the brush before application to avoid some serious clumps. Also: really messy tube. This brush might seem like more of a hassle, but its shape pretty well mimics how I use a more traditional brush, anyway - I tend to just use the end to cover smaller swatches, so this shape really facilitates a more even and careful application. And did I mention no clumps?!

I don't know that my eyes are phenomenal, because I have kind of wimpy lashes. Everyone knows that mascara advertising is filled with devious trickery and fake lashes all around, so to have something (especially something this expensive) actually perform is quite refreshing.

We've had a little rain

2008-08-27T16:36:00.013-04:00

6.12 inches, in fact. Water was gushing like mad on a downward path to the river, but before I knew all that, I woke up Wednesday morning to its pounding on the tin roof and I had a feeling of utter contentment, which I haven't felt for a few weeks. And I had two memories, one recent, one ancient.

I remembered a similar rainstorm one weekend in Paradise. It was probably a weekend trip for someone's baptism and it was dark early, but not winter, because T and I opened her bedroom window to hear the rain fall. It was at the Rocky Lane house, with its Victorian (was it?) sensibilities and am I carzy or was there wallpaper on the gable ceilings in the girls' room? I know we found The Carpenters Greatest Hits tape and played "Rainy Days and Mondays" a few hundred times. Probably wore the tape out.

The other one that calmed me in my semi-sleep was just a few weeks ago in Oregon. On our trip back from Tahoe, Bean pulled onto a frontage road for me to take what could have been one of the greatest photos ever, but to get the right compsition I should have gone further into the field and I was already over the barbed wire fence on their private property and I could see a body watching from the screen door of the house trailer. So I chickened out and only got close enough for this:

Amazing subject, sad composition. If you click on it, you'll see why. I was really disappointed because we were discussing art at my house recently with Bean, and she was saying she doesn't really have the fire to think too hard about art for her walls, and if that photo had been awesome, she would have hung it up. I wanted it to be awesome for her, but instead when I got back to the van I saw, on the ground, a broken piece of 1x6 with nails sicking out of it - pokey side up, do I need to say? Her back tire was dramatically perched on the board between the 2 nails, and I thought we dodged the flat. But the next morning, we found that the front tire had already had its day with the nails and it was deflated - "soggy," according to Owie.

So Bean, Heff, and the boys and I took a trip to Costco for flat repair and lunch. It was totally packed with Eugenians (?) in their bad clothes but we found a table and had some pizza and hot dogs, churros and berry sundaes, and plenty of Coke and Owie's "picey stuff" Sprite.

We were there for about an hour, and I can't tell you exactly why it was so nice, but it was perfect in that way that unexpected family plans can be the most memorable. I remember it with the kinds of feelings that are peaceful, truly happy, free, and eternal in that way that there aren't words to adequately describe.

Frogs and snails

2008-08-27T11:24:00.006-04:00

Northgate Mall, July 14, 2008

With no offense to my Pops,

2008-08-22T15:12:00.005-04:00

And no offense to the Reader's Digest "Humor in Real Life" division, this I received from a person younger than I with the subject line "Funny Email" which just tells you right there something not at all funny is coming behind the click.

What I do think is amusing about it is not the subject matter or the way in which it is presented like it actually occurred, but the path it took to end up in my inbox.

I like to think it happened like this: someone FWD: Fwd: fwd: FWD: fwd it to John Beahan, who is most definitely of the generation before ours, and let's say his sister-in-law is a features editor at the local paper somewhere in the Midwest. So John sends it along with some sort of addition at the top: "SCROLL DOWN YOU WONT BE DISAPPOINTED HA HA HA LOL" and it was so funny, Judy the features editor was so tickled, she had to print it in the newspaper. An email forward. In the newspaper.

And then the next baby boomer read it, got a chuckle, shared it with Martha over breakfast, folded his newspaper up and asked his granddaughter the second-grader to scan it and FWD: it back to him so it could begin its journey as a bad scan and end up here, where I will mock it. The end.

At the track

2008-08-16T12:29:00.003-04:00

Something just happened - all the Formula cars slowed down by where I'm sitting, and then all the emergency vehicles + one backhoe (and two old-school cars, inexplicably) just drove by.

If the announcer man would speak slower I might have caught what the emergency is, or at least the gist, but he's done talking about it, so while we wait, what's coming through the horribly crackly speaker zip-tied to the fence is a medley of oldies 50s to 90s, not sung by their original musicians, mind you, but by French speakers, so that some verses are in French or sung with a French accent. We were just treated to "The Times, They Are a Changin'" and "Roll Out the Barrels," and now it's "The Marcarena." And a girl is doing it on the bleachers. There aren't enough words in either language to describe the pain. And I'm wearing ear plugs.

Bobble

2008-08-14T23:26:00.007-04:00

So, yeah, Alicia Sacramone lost the gold for the Americans and totally fell apart under the horrifying gymnastic pressure, but the whole debacle was made worse by the Debbie Downer, doomsday commentators Elfie and Tim and that other guy who doesn't actually seem to have ever been a gymnast. I'm watching the all-around final on Canadian NBC from this hotel in the Québec countryside and these commentators are just so much more zen about the whole thing. They tell us the mandatory eight-tenths deductions for falling on your booty on the vault, sure, but without the gasping and the proclamations of disaster. Tim and the other dude are so grandpa-cynical about it all (they hardly ever let Elfie get a word in), and most of the time the score doesn't match the drama-queening. And oh my gosh, shut up already about the disappointing Romanians. We get it.

Also, they just said Naaaadia (as in baaa) Comaneci like good Canadians.

(P.S. That one Chinese girl is 12 if she's a day, but I still wish not-Tim would shut the h up about how we need to decide for ourselves if they're lying their heads off and they forged a birth certificate when they pulled her out of the circus to train in the scary gymnastic machine.)

Back from vacay

2008-08-12T13:17:00.019-04:00

Here are the reasons my trip to Lake Tahoe and Oregon were in the category of awesome, very:

Funny little boys

Plenty of Diet Coke

Grandmas in funny swimsuit cover-ups (who haven't yet discovered the beauty of board shorts)

Breaking Dawn (ohmygoshitsfinallyhere!!!!thebestbookever!11!!!) (with my apologies to Trav)

The Hall of Mirrors in the House Built by Leprechans
(possibly 2-way with cameras behind them? What say you, Robert Whilhelmy?)

Super fun times taking family pictures on a bench which broke soon after

Fabulous cousins and siblings and goodbye hugging

The Lake (Wateeee!)

Swimming in clear, refreshing snow melt

Cutest baby boozies

Cutest little blonde girls and Opa

Clean mountain air and clear blue skies

California (sigh)

Oregon, through the windshield - even Pacific Northwest-y through filthy glass

You might have heard that California is on fire

2008-08-11T16:57:00.005-04:00

Just outside Yreka at around 5 pm.

Picking blackberries in Springfield, Oregon

2008-08-09T23:29:00.005-04:00

We found these by the Willamette River and by the By-Gully Bike and Walking Path. They are sweet and super juicy. Bean made fruit salad and Ellie Krieger's coffee cake. Mmm.

Her ponytail will hang its pencil lead down her back*

2008-07-21T22:37:00.007-04:00

"Calm Water" by the marvelous Justin Hackworth; prints for sale here

I have been, with varying levels of success, trying to transition from super lazy, non-moving sloth to a girl who exercises with some regularity. For the most part, I feel the following about exercise: hate. There are moments, on a treadmill or an elliptical machine, especially when the iPod is spinning something by The National, when I get the feeling of blissed-out endorphin rush, and I can appreciate a good sweat every now and then, but in general it is, at this phase in the process, hard.

However. Tonight I went swimming and it occurred to me that being in the water is the only activity in which I can feel truly in a groove. Whereas the rhythm of an elliptical machine starts to make me crazy after about 10 minutes, the rhythm of the crawl is hypnotic and smooth and intoxicating in a way that I can only feel in water. As long as I can remember, I have been naturally extremely buoyant -- as in, I probably would not be able to drown even if I wanted to because I can float with my nose out of water without any effort whatsoever. Like, treading water is just a thing to do to keep from getting cold. It's cool when it's not annoying. Therefore, I don't require one of those leg buoys to move smoothly when doing just the arms in a crawl (possibly called doing "pulls"), which is my favorite thing to do. I love to feel my arm muscles burn and stretch out my shoulder joints over and over. I always find it surprising that I am actually happy and content working out when I am in the water.

I have a friend who is a grown man who doesn't ever go in water because he doesn't know how to swim. This I find devastating. Though, in the interest of full disclosure, I'm sure my mom would remind me of a number of hissyfits on the way to the Cottonwood Heights pool for summer swimming lessons because I was . . . scared, I guess, though I don't remember being afraid of the water, exactly, because we went playing around in the pool almost every day, and our mom's best bargaining threat for good behavior was not letting us go. I can't be bothered to analyze what was really going on in my kid mind with those swimming lessons, but I do remember when we moved to Fresno and joined Clovis Swim Club, that trouble was the usual mixture of embarrassment and knowing I was the slowest, worst athlete in the Olympic-size pool at Clovis West High. We were fortunate kids -- spoiled brats, really -- with a very nice pool in our backyard (the middle one), and that amazing facility in our high school. (Here's proof: Michael Phelps at Clovis West. Even I can't believe that.)

Nonetheless, all that swimming/perceived trauma in my youth certainly left me with a decent skillset of all the strokes and a great love for being in and underwater, as close to the bottom as possible, if you please. I am not great at breaststroke or backstroke, and I have completely forgotten how to do a flip turn, but I am nonetheless really, really happy in the water.

* Sharon Olds, "The One Girl at the Boys Party"

Nice belt, Rachael Ray

2008-07-18T10:35:00.009-04:00

Here's a hearty helping of depression from James Ledbetter's piece called "Why Martha Stewart's Company is Doomed" @ Slate.com:

"The hard truth is that demand for Martha Stewart in all forms—magazines, books, TV shows, Web sites, and stuff—has passed its peak. You can feel it in the culture, where Rachel Ray is today's go-to domestic goddess."

By which you mean that the woman who named her company Yum-O and brought the terms "EVOO" and "garbage bowl" into the zeitgeist, is now in charge? I reject! Say what you will about Martha's uptight personality, overly persnickety aesthetic, and awkward hosting style, but she and her people have taste and know how to put a magazine together with gravitas. Rachael Ray doesn't even know what gravitas means.

And the thing is, I feel really guilty, because I am part of that problem - I let my MSL subscription run out last year (after, like, 10 years probably - I would have to go check in my white antique cabinet of secretly hoarded magazines) because I had a giant stack that I never got around to reading, much less even looking through. But when I did read them, I always found many, many things that inspired me, even if my taste has leaned more towards the less pristine brand of vintage modern that Martha's been selling all these years.

And I religiously bought the Weddings magazines for years, even when I was on my mission (I packed them at Grandma M's) so I wouldn't miss even one. But I've gotten less obsessed with weddings in general lately, so I haven't dropped my $6 for one of the quarterly issues for at least 3 quarters.

Financial writers make these kinds of predictions about companies all the time, and sometimes they are right on, and sometimes they are alarmist. It seems likely that Martha's brand will persist in some form for years to come, but to what sacrifice, I ask? It's hard for me to let something like Martha Stewart go, when she - it, the whole package - has been such a defining part of my personal style evolution.

Have a listen

2008-07-16T10:32:00.006-04:00

Every summer I do believe this sound will be the death of me. It is definitely the enemy of my REM cycle.

(Edited: The most recent Firefox update broke the embedded link, grumble grumble, so if you care enough you can listen here.)

(recorded on my front porch)

Part 12: Sunset at the Snow Camp P.O.

2008-07-16T08:27:00.002-04:00

East Greensboro-Chapel Hill Highway

Part 11: Wigs and Hair by Charlie

2008-07-15T10:04:00.003-04:00

Highway 54

Part 10: Sound aphorism from Pine Hill United Methodist Church

2008-07-13T21:58:00.005-04:00

Highway 109, Montgomery County

Part 9: Field in rain, Snow Camp Road

2008-07-12T08:42:00.002-04:00

Part 8: Little white building, what's your job?

2008-07-11T07:15:00.005-04:00

Highway 64, between Ramseur and Siler City

Part 7: Barn & blue hills

2008-07-10T11:43:00.002-04:00

Highway 64, outside Asheboro

Part 6: Go ahead and just mow around that truck

2008-07-09T15:21:00.003-04:00

Snow Camp Road, Alamance County

Part 5: St. Julia's Catholic Church

2008-07-08T09:21:00.002-04:00

Highway 64, Chatham County

Part 4: Go ahead and call Doris

2008-07-07T16:22:00.002-04:00

Snow Camp Road

Part 3: This is for Dogey

2008-07-06T21:24:00.003-04:00

Highway 64, Chatham County

Part 2: Three barns, Silk Hope

2008-07-05T11:09:00.002-04:00

Let Freedom Ring (and Part 1)

2008-07-04T22:22:00.014-04:00

Highway 64, Chatham County

Martina was singing in my head while the following things happened on this, the 232nd birthday of our uneasy country:

1. Discovered that the farm was visited by JWs while I was at brunch with my friends. I saw a bright neon orange sticker on the mailbox when I pulled up; I first freaked out that someone more unsavory had marked the place, but then I had a flashback to the pen marks that Salt Lake City JWs left on the door moldings of apartment buildings - vertical line if you visited and no one answered, cross (as in . . . you know) it if you found someone home. They left two tracts I've found so far - one talks about why farming is going so bad for America (something to do with disobedience) and one is just the regular Watchtower. That one I found on the front porch of a non-residence, which was . . . weird and unsettling.

2. Decided, kind of impetuously, to borrow Donnie's good camera (um, thanks!) and do a little honoring of my particular corner of America, and found some pretty delightful things to appreciate/be amused by, which I have decided to post for the next 11 days (above is Part 1) so you can do a little honoring of your own. It's the 12 days of being happy if you live in NC.

3. Landed, at dinnertime, at Ruby Tuesday, because it was late and anything local was closed. I really wanted some salad and they do have a decent salad bar (pardon, Garden Bar), even with edamame and julienned beets. I also ordered the teensy turkey burgers, which were on, like, miniature Merita buns. Not the best. Ruby Tuesday has a weird personality, with the square plates and the attempt at flavor combinations with the illusion of being gourmet but not so much with the actual delivery. But the salad ingredients were fresh, so I will give them that. Also, it was like $11 with Diet Coke. While at dinner, read a charming 6-page New Yorker "Personal History" piece on one dude's nicknames, along with those of his family and friends, and thought fondly of my family and our nicknames.

4. Watched a little GAC, decided that despite his popularity with the ladies and men alike, Brad Paisley (or at least his persona, because he doesn't seem to write all these songs) is kind of a misogynist. This video I just watched, "Waiting on a Woman" is "with" Andy Griffith, which is a serious misnomer, because Andy doesn't sing, just says, over and over, how he's spent his life waiting on the chronically late woman. The final scene, heaven help us, is Andy sitting in a white tuxedo on a bench on the great beach in heaven, waiting on his wife. To DIE. Brad Paisley thinks women are annoying enough to dismiss when they show up late and don't approve of drinking or fishing, among other things. (Remember, he's still a guy.) Over. It. I do love this new Keith Urban song called "Stupid Boy." It came on right after Paisley's nonsense; deliberate programming choice?

5. Pondered on how I spent most of the day by myself (excepting the lovely brunch on the patio at the Weathervane) and thought how much I enjoyed it, but decided that not being able to spend holidays with my family leaves a serious hole in my life.

It's back

2008-06-30T15:52:00.005-04:00

* image from here

Tastespotting is rebirthed. It's not part of NOTCOT.com anymore, but seems to be serving the same purpose. Sure wish the archives were still somewhere, because I wasn't through them all, but let me join the rest of the universe in welcoming it back to the land of work time-wasters.

Two silos, dusk, Mebane-Oaks Road

2008-06-30T15:07:00.006-04:00

Em says she hates dusk, but I am crazy about it. I love this moment in particular, when the sun is almost completely gone but there are still a few pinks on the other side of the horizon. And in the summer, it's close to 9 pm so you have had many hours of (hot) sun and now you can see lightning bugs.

I just bought this marvelous thing on etsy

2008-06-20T14:14:00.005-04:00

from a shop called Bird & Banner and I'm going to frame it and hang it in my bathroom. Whee!

(I do have the teeniest bit of advice for B&B, though, and that is to not photograph their things in front of a be-tank-topped girl. It's odd.)

"I have a dollar. That's all I have. I have a dollar."

2008-06-20T09:44:00.006-04:00

I was at the Dollar Tree in Hillsborough yesterday, which is not among the busiest of shopping centers since the Wal-Mart moved out. (Donnie once tried to sell me the idea of opening a drink-vending business out of that still-empty space. It was born of the trouble of not always finding all the rarer sodas like Dr. Brown's Black Cherry and Cheerwine at Sam's or Costco, and my general inability to keep us stocked with any kind of consistency. I'm glad that idea died a quick death along with the one of me becoming a used-car dealer.) Anyway, there's only ever one person working because it is usually pretty slow. But there was this family in line two people in front of me, comprised of a grandma, a dad, and 3 kids. The youngest little girl - maybe 4ish - was holding up the line because she couldn't find anything she wanted. I gathered, once she came running up with her older sister, who shouted, "Wait! Campbell found something she wants!" that Granny was buying them all a present at Dollar Tree. There was no mom around, so obviously I don't know exactly the nucleosity of the family, but Dads generally have a higher tolerance for the kind of cheap Chinese crap that Granny will buy you at Dollar Tree, even if it is quickly discarded behind the couch once the extremely short novelty wears off. I didn't see what the boy or the older girl got, but Campbell got a sad little clear plastic case with a couple of sad hairbrushes inside, maybe a mirror. Everything was purple. (P.S. Older girl endeared herself to me forever by removing the purple brushes from the plastic bag and telling the confused dude, "We don't need a bag" in that semi-haughty voice tween girls are best at.)

As for me, I had this wonderful flashback of trips to Kmart on 13th East or thereabouts with Grandma M, because she did the same thing when she watched us for the afternoon. In some ways, it seems crazy that she subjected herself to 3 or 4 of us, all pretty young, hopping in her blue '72 Pontiac LeMans with domed hubcaps (a car that became mine in college - awww, Betty), where I doubt there was a carseat or a seatbelt in use, and schlepping us up to Kmart to buy us a little present. I don't know if she steered us away from toys and into the school supplies aisle or if we were just naturally nerdy enough to go there first, but Bean and I at least were complete novelty eraser junkies, like I remember a whole collection, unused as erasers, that I would carry around in a clear vinyl bag. They were shaped and smelled like fruits or chocolate or contained glitter; my prized one was an ice cream cone whose white eraser looked like soft serve and rested in a plastic pointed cone.

This one afternoon I remember Grandma M buying for me a white eraser that smelled like a Tootsie Roll (ew) and was encased in some kind of cardboard sleeve that made it look like a giant Tootsie Roll and it was my favorite eraser by a lot for a long time. Somehow I don't think that little Miss Campell will be saying the same thing about her purple brush.

Graphalicious

2008-06-18T10:37:00.005-04:00

This is, like, super-nerd humor, but maybe you've gotten that forward recently with all the graph representations of songs. Apparently it's a trend. I will admit to laughing out loud a lot of times, though some are really stupid and boring. Something about The Princess Bride and Star Wars seems to be inviting a lot of submissions.

It's the little things, really.

The first web editor

2008-06-17T11:44:00.008-04:00

In the years I have known my friend Bunny, she has chosen for herself many, many nerd boyfriends. Alas, they have eluded her for myriad reasons, sometimes being that they were engaged to other people or went off to far countries, or they were on TV or they were Michael Stipe.

But I think we should be officially the saddest about this one that got away: Paul Otlet, born in 1868 in Belgium, who, with his other laywer friend, invented the internet. The New York Times ran a piece on the museum which exhibits his works, called the Mundaneum, which unsurprisingly doesn't see quite as much traffic as the Louvre. In this, the year of its 10th anniversary, its curators are planning to publish what remains of Otlet's papers and ideas on the web, in hopes of giving him due credit in the evolution of the internet. Though he is not well-known for his influence, some give him the credit for inventing the hyperlink. From the article:

In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. . .Otlet. . .described a networked world where “anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation."
Although Otlet’s proto-Web relied on a patchwork of analog technologies like index cards and telegraph machines, it nonetheless anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today’s
Web. . .Otlet’s vision hinged on the idea of a networked machine that joined documents using symbolic links.

Eventually, he was given money to pursue his project, and set about creating a massive card catalog to house the world's information. People could send in requests, but eventually the project began to drown in its paperwork, and in 1934, he imagined a “'mechanical, collective brain' that would house all the world’s information, made readily accessible over a global telecommunications network."

Not much later, the Nazis invaded Belgium and destroyed much of his work, and his space was cleared out in favor of Nazi propaganda. He died with his ideas in a shambles in 1944.

In terms of nerd-factor, Paul was Bunny's ideal. His father didn't permit him to attend school until he was 12, operating under the theory that it would squelch imagination, so he spent his early years doing little but reading. “I could lock myself into the library and peruse the catalog, which for me was a miracle.” But the museum's current curators know what they're up against:

"The problem is that no one knows the story of the Mundaneum," said the lead archivist, Stéphanie Manfroid. "People are not necessarily excited to go see an archive. It’s like, would you rather go see the latest ‘Star Wars’ movie, or would you rather go see a giant card catalog?"

I know Bunny's answer.

Boo

2008-06-14T01:26:00.005-04:00

My new (and now former) favorite food blog, Tastespotting, is no more. The "legal complications" reference begs the question: most of what I read (and, well, blog about, frankly) is borrowed from somewhere else on the internet. So is the internet just one big wormhole of recycled ideas? Sometimes it seems that way.

Its end is sad, but not as sad as poor Tim Russert dying from a heart attack at age 58 while he was at work, may he rest in peace. Like Jon said, "How can we have an election now?" Indeed.

Filling Station

2008-06-10T14:46:00.008-04:00

Highway 87, Chatham County

I drive by this empty gas station regularly; the signs always make me think of this marvelous poem.

Filling Station

Oh, but it is dirty!--this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!

Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it's a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.

Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.

Some comic books provide
the only note of color-
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.

Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)

Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
ESSO--SO--SO--SO

to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.

Elizabeth Bishop

Earth hath no sorrow that heaven cannot heal*

2008-06-10T14:37:00.006-04:00

I took this at the Barbecue Presbyterian Church Cemetery, Harnett County, NC with Donnie's trash-kicking SLR camera. She is the only statue in a cemetery full of traditional headstones; she is holding a bouquet of carved daisies.

* Thomas Moore

I am so lucky!

2008-06-06T14:51:00.006-04:00

I've said it before, but it bears (heh) repeating: I really have the most wonderful sister-in-law.

Look at the happy friends who came in my mailbox today! I donated one to my North Carolinian co-worker, who had never even heard of them, and he could barely finish it. For shame.

Thank you JessieGalua! What a happy Friday treat.

Pahdon?

2008-06-06T12:42:00.002-04:00

Hey puppy!

That is a hair hat, and it's a real thing.

I am a lone reed

2008-06-04T20:35:00.009-04:00

I think there are two kinds of girls in the world: those whose $9.75 made up a portion of the 57 million bucks Sex and the City collected this weekend, and people who love Nora Ephron movies. I mean You've Got Mail, specifically, but Sleepless in Seattle is in 2nd place, and While You Were Sleeping, while not an actual Ephron extravaganza, gets honorable mention for its embodiment of important lessons.

There are a gaggle of girls going looney tunes over the Sex and the City movie, and, like, crying in their heels outside Radio City when their premiere tickets were a big fat PR stunt. Those girls say that their lives are just like S&tC, to which I say, knock yourselves out with your new movie. I like when someone's mom says "Fiddledeedee" and they drop it. And of course, not all S&tC girls wear Manolos, nor do all YGM girls wear sweater sets. The one thing both of our types have in common, though, is that we both get tricked that we are actually like Carrie Bradshaw or Kathleen Kelly, but we'll pretend for argument's sake that it's not pathological for either of us.

Around the middle of YGM, Kathleen Kelly has to shut her little store and she eats some soup next to Eloise and wonders to NY152, "Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life. Well, not small, but valuable. And sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven't been brave?" It's all very existential, Nora Ephron-style and I think of it often when I consider where I have positioned myself in my life. Sometimes I feel like the hugest impostor, like I am out of my body hearing things I say and watching my facial expressions and incessant hair-sniffing and -twirling and wondering how on earth I ever tricked all these people that I am competent, in charge, and anything but a completely ridiculous, not-brave person with unending opinions and a need to be funny. Not unlike a Nora Ephron heroine, who loves books and daisies, who is having a minor/major personal crisis whilst falling in love with her sworn enemy. At least, it seems that's what ought to be happening. What use is a personal crisis without all the kissing in Riverside Park?

I want me some Wellies

2008-06-02T16:09:00.002-04:00

Just because.

Family big pimpin'

2008-05-30T12:06:00.004-04:00

Bean is a guest-blogger today on a cute kids' craft blog. She and the kids made a fabulous organizer out of recyclables, thereby rendering unnecessary some similar thing from Wal-Mart made by Chinese children.

Plus, I gave Buddy those Sharpies, so I'm totally a part of it in spirit, if rarely a part of such things in body. Sigh.

Hillary wears white ankle pants in Puerto Rico, loses the vote of the gays

2008-05-25T23:10:00.003-04:00

This bounty hunter is my kind of scum

2008-05-25T20:19:00.012-04:00

I stumbled on Return of the Jedi on Spike tonight. I haven't seen it in ages, and not since getting addicted to Battlestar, at any rate, and in general it's as delightful as I remembered, in that terrible corny way that seems to be Lucas's trademark. I don't actually think it's faulty on its own, it's just . . . there's not a lot of . . . nuance, is there?

Take the Emperor and Lord Vader, for example: they are all business, all the time, and speak in tyrannical absolutes. Always. Like how in each of the three earlier movies, they have some underling with an indeterminate British or Continental accent who can't complete some mission on time. You know, even if you haven't seen it 100 times, that they are going to end up choked or whatever magic Vader can do that drops you dead right there in the control room and the next dude in line just whisks your body away. And it's because Vader says something like, "The emperor is very disappointed in your progress. You have to go faster." And the underling is like, "But Lord Vader, we are working at full capacity." And, splat. Next!

And how did a big giant blob worm, basically, with no legs and useless shorty arms become someone who people, er, droids, things with tentacles for hair, and a room full of muppets call "Your worship?" It makes no sense. At least Vader and the Emperor have the force. And they can walk. Jabba actually drools and gets some kind of green slime on you if he touches you.

And seriously, is anything worse than when Leia releases Han (or Han like pan, says Lando from the Canada planet) Solo from the carbon whatever, and he says, "Who's there?" and she says, "Someone who loves you." These are the subtleties of the script.

And my absolute favorite thing is how when the Death Star is three-fourths finished, there are still all these little tiny holes in it, like someone was working on a section and got distracted. I guess you can't expect too much fine finishing work from storm troopers. I guess it's refreshing that all construction projects have trouble with the last 10%. And finally, nothing in the world is cornier than the oversize Vader hats that some random flunkies wear on the Death Star. They're like the mullet version.

Which is not to say that I can't appreciate the whole lot of it by its own standard of goodness. It's the same way I can appreciate the new Indiana Jones movie with the exception of the very end, which makes absolutely no sense, even in terms of itself. But the corny car switching, the killer ants, all of it can be pretty delightful if you can give in. There's a lot to love.

And I'll say this: if we lived in a world (or galaxy, I guess) with as many different terrifying, slobbering, monster enemies as these guys have to deal with - yikes. And PS I always freak out a little when Yoda disappears and his blanket falls all slow.

Don't forget the droid!

(PS Leia, aren't you kind of grossed out by that one time you kissed your brother on the lips to make Han jealous?)

Sister Cinnamon

2008-05-24T00:18:00.003-04:00

That is what some cute children call my friend DanaLee, who hates cinnamon to a degree that it makes me think she should maybe be tested for something. Girl can taste and smell it in things like french toast, where there might be 1/4 teaspoon or something. My other friend Dr. Street, who is at least 9 times smarter than me, no exaggeration, currently doing super-important research about . . . cells . . . and possibly things related to exercise in cells . . . at a little community college called Harvard University, says that DL is what we call a supertaster. There is apparently a thing where for $4.95 you could know if you are afflicted similarly. Seems like you might already know, unless you are a white American child living in Bunn Level, NC and you are a supertaster for star anise. In which case, drop that $4.95.

I was blogstalking earlier and this girl mentioned she was currently eating chocolate-covered cinnamon bears, which are found in the acreage of the bulk food aisle at Macey's (not the department store) and at the BYU Bookstore, and not, I am sorry to say, at Food Lion. Or the Teeter. If bulk candy is sold at either of those stores, I would be hard-pressed to tell you where it is. And now I really want one. Or twenty, even though it's that horrible/fabulous super cheap chocolate that's 1% cacao, 92% sugar, and 7% wax.

I'd settle for a regular cinnamon bear, extra-hot like my mama taught me. She happens to be a cinnamon bear expert. She is quite choosy; no lightweight cinnamon flavor for her. She could probably tell you what brands are the best - in fact, I think she has told us before, because we used to give her packages or bulk foods bags full of them. She bites their heads off and chews a minute like a sommelier and can tell you if the cinnamon-to-heaven-knows-what-else ratio is worth her time. I do know the 59 cents for 1, $1 for 2 bags at the gas station aren't even worth the buck, and I think she is wary of the cinnamon lips at Valentine's. In North Carolina, the gas station might be your only option. It's a sad world. We're probably all going to get Alzheimer's from the Red 40, but it might be worth it.

Bob Ewell fell on his knife

2008-05-22T22:48:00.006-04:00

I don't do a lot of walking around the ranch, it must be said - I'm trying to remedy that, kind of, except now it's going to be summer and hot and ticks . . . nonetheless, tonight I had this problem of car key being in barn and car being here and I needed to be at the other side of the compound, so I walked. It's not far or difficult in any way, except that later, it was going to be night and I'm not going to lie that while I am scared of ticks in the day, freaky animal noises echoing over the river in the dark are a strong deterrent.

But instead of being scaredy-cat girl, I instead imagined I was Scout taking "[my] longest journey together" with Jem through the patch of woods behind the schoolyard, past the Radley place. You know what happens next - Bob Ewell's knife rakes along the chicken wire in her ham costume and Jem's arm gets broken and it's all in pitch-black night with no moon even. Tonight the moon was somewhere else, and though there was a bit of ambient light from the barn, it was pretty dark and coyotes and dogs were barking somewhere, and the cats were doing their darnedest to scare me half to death by jumping out of bushes directly in my path, but I made it all the way to the gravel path through the woods to the gatehouse before turning on the flashlight. Because: spiders. But more than spiders: walking face-first into their webs strung between trees.

I love the whole novel, especially Miss Maudie and "His food doesn't stick going down, does it?" but that scene, too, because it's wonderfully visceral. I've read it at least 30 times and I still try to map it out in my head: how far is it from the school? They can see when the janitor turns off the lights, but in the blackness, they were the brightest thing, so they could have been far in the distance, and at what angle, exactly, does Boo Radley's house face the Finches, and how much woods are we talking here? Scout is barefoot, which adds an important layer - cold earth and stumbling over tree roots. And mostly, I love that the scene ends with Heck Tate, who is, after many readings, right up there with Miss Maudie in terms of my deepest love and affection. I am always glad he is the endcap to that night's story - if he had been waiting up here in my apartment tonight, I daresay I might have walked through the woods without the flashlight.

You get mistaken for strangers by your own friends

2008-05-21T20:35:00.008-04:00

That right there is Mr. Delicious Baritone Matt Berninger of The National, my favorite band of the moment. I can't stop listening to their most recent disc, "Boxer." They are one of those indie bands whose later discs I love much more than the first ones. It might be because the sound is more muddy and reverb-y than their previous songs, but the main reason is this: The National really knows how to write a bridge. For me, songs live and die by the bridge, and the songs distinguish themselves from each other and all possess a very intoxicating bridge. They have great melodic sensibility, effortless harmony, and perfectly obscure and sometimes kind of poetic lyrics. It doesn't hurt that there's almost always a running beat, which is kind of like my crack.

Being addicted to AI this year has forced me to sit through some of the most boring and annoying songs ever written (uh, QUEEN) and I was thinking about how many songs in the world I really do not love. Donnie & I were driving to and from Sanford today listening to the XM station I think called Hiltlist or something like that, which plays songs, like I told Donnie, that I would always skip if I owned the disc. I'm not going to say they're bad songs, per se, but not aesthetically pleasing to my ear. You know the type: "Bad to the Bone," "Maneater," "Jesse's Girl," anything by Billy Idol (except the freaky and nonsensical and awesome "Eyes Without a Face"). It's happy radio hits, basically, and I'm not some goth who hates happy, but give me minor and melancholy at least some of the time. I definitely wouldn't choose "Glory Days" when there's "I'm On Fire" available, I'm saying. And p.s. Donnie has this crazy secret talent of knowing every word to most of the Hitlist songs. I don't know if there's an XM station out there where I could compete. Maybe if there was a Mormon Hymns one. I do know most of them.

She grubbed this earth with her own hands*

2008-05-15T17:00:00.007-04:00

(image from AT; where else?)

When I moved to North Carolina almost 8 years ago (!), I had to leave behind a passel of plants Steph and I had cultivated in our Wellington II apartment. I wanted to bring them all, but settled on two ivies that I had gotten as cuttings from Grandma T, the greenest of the green thumbs. There was a teeny heart ivy, which was precious and grew like one inch a decade, and the one pictured above - Grandma T called it oak ivy, though that might not be its real name. I saw that photo on AT today and it took my breath away for a minute.

I'm sad to say that though the oak ivy made the cross-country four-day drive swimmingly in my '96 Honda Accord, it didn't survive the significant lack of light of my second apartment in Chapel Hill. I loved the place, despite that it was hot as blazes and had exactly one ooooold Sears air conditioner, oddly-placed much too far away from the bedroom. And the bedroom ceiling fan had a squeak, so I slept in a super inferno. (And my neighbors were self-described vampires, like, blood around the neck and a black Mazda Miata with a VAMPYRE vanity plate. One night they said, "Did you hear anything last night?" And they grinned a little creepy. I said no. Um, thank goodness.)

But all my plants died there, which was devastating. My official policy now is to not get attached to plants, and make sure to only purchase them at Ikea or Lowe's, so as to not imbue them with any sentimental value. So that photo made me feel sad and miss Grandma T for a few minutes. Her plants thrived, even the ones in the basement. My plants, then and now, just . . . live. And not always that. They don't tend to actually grow leaves, and I am known for inciting root rot. I wish Gram T. could send some posthumous plant care my direction. Heaven knows I could use it.

* William Carlos Williams, "Dedication for a Plot of Ground"