Supernatural occurence in the kitchen
The other day my husband Plosswood summoned me to the kitchen: he'd been washing a few bits of cottage cheese off a plate, and then he had a vision. Some people see the Virgin Mary in a potato chip; he saw something very special on the scrubber. I saw the vision too, and took a picture of it. Taa daa!
[Incidentally, Plosswood has been busy in the kitchen lately; I wanted him to make a found-it-on-the-web Swiffer-jailbreak homemade cleaning solution with water and vinegar but he used wine vinegar instead. Now, every time we mop, our kitchen smells like salad dressing.]
Labels:
Swiffer Longhorn vision
Life with a Puppy
Everyone loves puppies. So it will come as no surprise when I tell you I'm am nuts about our new puppy, a long-haired miniature dachshund. But I never knew that a dog can chew on a floor! Yes, it can be done.
Nor did I expect him to reduce me to stomping desperately around the kitchen looking for urine puddles and saying things through clenched teeth like "why is your penis wet?" Nor did I anticipate his believing that my big blue exercise ball is a terrifying foe.
Puppy-raising theory has changed since my long-ago childhood. Nowadays, you're told not to rub puppies' noses in their doo-doo nor whack them with a newspaper. You're told not to give them table scraps. You're supposed to brush their teeth regularly with doggy toothpaste that smells like fish, and engage in something called "anal expression." (Icky-poo.) And, according to our puppy manual, it's best to "have a special sound that only means 'no' for the puppy, so instead of raising your voice and saying 'no,' try using 'Erhhh' instead. Use a guttural, half bark half growl sound when saying 'Erhhh.'" I've tired it several times, but it just makes me sound like a pirate. I guess the idea is to make me seem like the alpha dog. Or part of the pack-leading alpha COUPLE. The book says that leading wolf couple, a male and female wolf -- though surely there are gay wolf couples out there -- leads the pack, and implies that my husband and I should assume the role of pack-leading couple in our puppy's mind. So we are Mr. and Mrs. Wolf now, I guess, at least on a good day.
Names today: Bucky Godbolt, Blossom Fight, Octavius Frothingham
Nor did I expect him to reduce me to stomping desperately around the kitchen looking for urine puddles and saying things through clenched teeth like "why is your penis wet?" Nor did I anticipate his believing that my big blue exercise ball is a terrifying foe.
Names today: Bucky Godbolt, Blossom Fight, Octavius Frothingham
Don't Embarrass me again, Texas!
I so agree with the fabulous blogger "In the Pink", who notes that Rick Perry is a terrible candidate for president. Yes, he is. I beg your pity. For though my Oregon-born friends up here in the not-hot-enough Pacific Northwest could EVER understand my pain and suffering, it is TERRIBLE to be a Texan and be deprived of my birthright, Texas Pride. (I'm not talking about the beer. Incidentally, I once gave a can of Texas Pride to Tom Wolfe, who was a visiting speaker at my college in Minnesota, and whose tailor's son was my boyfriend at the time. So I had lunch with the two of them and gave Tom Wolfe the beer -- since he was a sort of a sociologist, I knew he'd think it was hilarious.) Anyway, when you grow up in Austin and you make regular visits to the Capitol to view the magnificent gigantic paintings of battles, and you color maps of Texas, and your brother plays the role of Stephen F. Austin in the third-grade Texas pageant, and you make drawings of "Come and Take it", and you sing "Texas Our Texas", and "Beautiful, Beautiful Texas" and you lie down in bluebonnet fields every spring, and you've actually seen (well, from a distance) Molly Ivins and Ann Richards and Gonzalo Barrientos around town, and your daddy hunts, and you call him your daddy instead of your "dad", and your legislature is funnier than anyone else's, and you get to eat the best BBQ in the world and the best Mexican food and when you're gone you always want to come home to the Armadillo -- well, you have Texas Pride.
And when George Bush comes along and claims to be a Texan (even though he grew up in the north, got a fake degree at Yale where I went to graduate school and found out that a C- average there -- like he got -- is really an F- average) -- and starts a ridiculous war and acts like such a stupid swaggering idiot and steals an election and gets so many innocent people killed -- well, it's really hard to have Texas Pride. I hate not being able to brag about being a Texan, but I had to stop it for eight long years. When people said "Ew, you're from Texas, how horrible" I would meekly explain that there were also nice people there, including African-Americans, gays, Democrats — I would make my 'rainbow' argument because all people up here could ever picture was "W" so they thought that Texas was populated by idiot white Republican males. And now, just as I am beginning to get my Texas Pride back, here comes Rick Perry. RICK, YOU'RE MAKING IT TOO HARD ON US TEXANS OF THE DIASPORA! PLEASE GIVE IT UP!!
And when George Bush comes along and claims to be a Texan (even though he grew up in the north, got a fake degree at Yale where I went to graduate school and found out that a C- average there -- like he got -- is really an F- average) -- and starts a ridiculous war and acts like such a stupid swaggering idiot and steals an election and gets so many innocent people killed -- well, it's really hard to have Texas Pride. I hate not being able to brag about being a Texan, but I had to stop it for eight long years. When people said "Ew, you're from Texas, how horrible" I would meekly explain that there were also nice people there, including African-Americans, gays, Democrats — I would make my 'rainbow' argument because all people up here could ever picture was "W" so they thought that Texas was populated by idiot white Republican males. And now, just as I am beginning to get my Texas Pride back, here comes Rick Perry. RICK, YOU'RE MAKING IT TOO HARD ON US TEXANS OF THE DIASPORA! PLEASE GIVE IT UP!!
Labels:
Rick Perry,
Texas Pride
Academic Freedom
As a fifty-something scholar I'm continually amazed by the vast amount of info available at my fingertips, through the wonderful world of the internets. But sometimes there's TMI -- tonight I was looking for a 1931 book by the costume historian Carlos Fischer but was first confronted by a list of six-hundred eight-three publications by people named Carlos Fischer, and the first on this list was about BARN-OWL PELLETS!
A contribution from Barn Owl pellets analysis to known micromammalian distributions in Buenos Aires province, Argentina
Remarkable names of real people du jour: Treon Spletstoesser, Ethel Crummy
A contribution from Barn Owl pellets analysis to known micromammalian distributions in Buenos Aires province, Argentina
Remarkable names of real people du jour: Treon Spletstoesser, Ethel Crummy
Labels:
costume historian,
remarkable names,
TMI
Not Hot Enough
Call me crazy, but I miss the Texas heat. Yes, my home state is in the midst of a terrible drought and heat wave. My uncle writes:
The next time you get those nostalgic yearnings for Texas, I want you to picture us now: hot, hot, mercilessly hot and dry, dry, mercilessly dry. The outside is like an oven and my heart bleeds for the poor postman. I rarely venture out-of-doors and few people are seen on the street. Everyone seems to be cowering inside with their air condititioners. I try to remember what Archie said, "If you don't like the weather, remember that it probably doesn't like you either", so I try not to complain.
Still, it just seems WRONG to be wearing a down vest over my pajamas when I take our puppy out on an August morning, and WRONG that I always have the urge to jump into the hot tub at our local pool (up here in Oregon) after swimming a lap or two and getting goose pimples. I'm taking about DURING THE SUMMER. (In fact, I DO get in the hot tub, and there are always plenty of other people in it, too. Can you imagine a hot tub at one of those groovy Austin municipal pools? Snort!)
Remarkable names of real people: Taco Proper, Boxy Hornburger
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