Pause

So, there was a pause, an intermission. I got tired. I grew speechless. I’ve taken the scissors and simply cut out a chunk of time, because there’s no hope of catching you up. Suffice it to say that stuff happened.

Platform 9 3/4

When we asked DramaQueen what she wanted for her birthday, she decided on a trip to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. So that's where we spent part of Spring break.

It is awesome. Except for the insane hoards exploding out of the windy paths, its a joy to wander through. Hogsmeade is a gem, a work of art, really. Look at Hogwarts - it's fabulous.

We stayed at this fabulous, swanky resort. The sort of place you can call housekeeping and say, "I forgot deodorant," and they reply, "No problem. We'll bring some right up." I was tempted to call and ask for random things, like a pregnancy test or condoms. Or both.

Anyway, because we stayed at this posh resort practically on top of the park, we got Express Passes and early admission to the park. We heard that the best thing to do was to get there at 7 am and head strait for Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, the ride that's in Hogwarts Castle. It's the main attraction and a feat of theme park technological wizardry (he he).

It's also scary as hell. I thought it was a sort of safe for the whole family ride. Turns out it wasn't even safe for me. (I can hear some of you hardened theme park aficionados snickering at this.)

But, damn. You're bolted down in these benches - "enchanted benches" I later learned they were called - and then you move along the conveyor belt of doom while the benches pitch you about. I don't think we went upside down but I remember being flat on my back at some point and then face down. I knew going in of course that the highlight was the filmed projections that put you into the action. I was hoping for the best. I have problems processing film that is right in my face and surrounding me, and swooping visually down through the trees while being tossed about by possessed benches was very unpleasant. I gave up and closed my eyes. At some point there was a roar and a blast of hot air. I think that was a dragon. I missed the spider entirely.

If you so desire, you can get a vague sense of what it was like in this video. I enjoyed seeing what I missed from the comfort of my sofa.

It seems so short on video.

The enchanted benches 

That photo of the enchanted benches is from this Orlando Informer article devoted to the castle and ride, which includes some wonderful photos of the various sets and props you pass through on your way to the ride. There's also a link to a "behind the scenes" video that shows the mechanics of how the ride works. If I had seen that before going, perhaps I wouldn't have been so unsettled.

Sadly, only the outside of Olivanders. Don't you love the fake snow?

The other highlight was our visit to Olivanders wand shop. You stand in line for an hour or two and are ushered in in groups of 20 or so. One child is picked from the crowd to be "the chosen one" who will demonstrate how the wand chooses the wizard. Of course DramaQueen wanted to be picked. I didn't have much hope of it, but by golly she was! The show was delightful. The actor playing the wizard was having a fine time creating an atmosphere of awe and mystery. It was also so dim I didn't move for fear of walking into someone. So no photos in there. A flash would have destroyed the effect. Yes I still feel guilty for not memorializing the moment.

Some young wizards and witches stopped by while we were waiting in line for Olivanders. I am quite sad that we missed the toad chorus.

You could tell these witches were enjoying their work.

You can't go to Hogsmeade without trying the Butterbeer. Happily, it was recently reformulated to be both dairy-free and gluten-free, so I was able to partake. It tastes like cream soda with foamy, vaguely buttery fluff on top.

DramaQueen sampling the Butterbeer at the Hogshead.

Firecracker is still recovering from the Forbidden Journey ride.

There is talk of creating a Hogwarts train ride, which would be so awesome. It could be Universal's monorail.

At Platform 9 3/4

I love the luggage. Note the owl cage.

The village is full of fun details. I ran across a placard for Gringott's Bank - it was next to an ATM. Most of the buildings were facade's only - you couldn't go in. But the window displays were charming and artful, with references to items in the book series.

Details like this moving wanted post of Sirius Black make the park special.

The hapless Ford Anglia.

A squealing mandrake root.

Can you see the wands and post boxes?

The window displays were outstanding.

I really wanted to capture this window display with all Lockhart's books and the moving photos, but I just couldn't do it justice.

 

Dervish & Banges is the main gift shop, and it was specially designed to be impossible to navigate, partly because the Owl Post feeds into it, and Olivanders exits into the Owl Post, which is about the width of a train corridor and the main place to purchase your wand, which are stacked up along all the walls. And DramaQueen had to open them all before choosing her wand. A checkout counter, looking like an authentic postal counter, is bang in the middle of the Owl Post. After a while you feel like clocking someone. That's a good time to find another mug of Butterbeer.
 

The Monstrous Book of Monsters. It snarls and snaps.

Somehow I didn't get any photos of Zonko's Joke Shop or Duke's Sweetshop. I think by that time the crowds were at their height. DramaQueen bought a screaming yo-yo, a golden snitch and a chocolate frog.

This box houses a chocolate frog. Or it did.

Now Firecracker is not the biggest HP fan, and she was traumatized by the Forbidden Journey ride. So we had to spend some time in the Dr. Suess area.

She rode Red Fish Blue Fish three times. I rode it twice. We got soaked.

Did I mention we had Express Passes? So worth it.

The next day we went to the Universal Studios side. We were too exhausted to do much.

At the Curious George Waterpark

Well, Dear Husband and I were, but Abby did just fine. 

"New York"

DramaQueen loves the I Love Lucy show. She bought a Vitameatavegimin magnet.

And that's all. I'm winding this up not exactly because that's all I have to say but because this post has been hanging around for days and it's irritating me.

Everything Bad Is Good

I'm reading this right now. Dear Husband complains that I never read nonfiction. So I checked out nonfiction. I have a dozen books on various TV shows and philosophy. Didn't know there were series like that, books with easily digestible bits of popcultural goodness and a dollop of Socrates and Lacan.

This book I picked up because I like the contrarian view that TV and video games are good for you because the complexity forces particular kinds of thought processes that are beneficial (there are two "becauses" in that sentence but I just can't deal). God knows TV is a lot better than the One Day at a Time and Love Boat that I grew up with. I don't have a lot of experience with video games, but I worked my way through Myst (remember that?), and it was HARD. I remember drawing a friggin map of the subway, for pete's sake. I took notes.

I also don't think our ability to socialize will be degraded by Facebook, or that we will all forget how to spell because of texting. I don't worry about e-books usurping printed books. Speaking of that, I wonder if anyone boo-hooed the loss of illuminated manuscripts when the printing press arrived. Because of the printing press, hardly anyone knows how to write entire books of intricate calligraphy and decorative marginalia.

But now I'm off to watch some TV.

Musician of the Week: Andrew Bird

I had heard of Andrew Bird at some point when I was reading about Owen Pallett. I had never bothered investigating until I recently heard a song on Pandora called Imitosis. Sort of jazzy, a little folksy, a dash of something else. As so often happens, once I started paying attention I ran across mention of him quite a lot. I even found out that he was playing in town later this month. I love this video, the colorful bejeweled mechanical insects, and Bird himself, looking like he escaped from the local college's department of mathematics.




And then there's the impressively titled "A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left."




He seems to specialize in odd titles. Here's one called "Fake Palindromes." No idea what the connection is, but I keep thinking I hear a sitar.

A Night at the Opera

Dear Husband. Those gold cords and tassel? He graduated with Distinction.

This past weekend Dear Husband graduated with his Master’s degree. See, here’s a photo of him in his gown. He looks adorable. As an aside, I don’t understand the hoods on these gowns. It came with some incomprehensible instructions about how to fold it so the colors show. And the hood is vestigial - imagine someone actually pulling it over their head. The doctoral gown looks so much easier to deal with, and it comes with a jaunty little squishy velvet cap you can actually wear. Not that I want to encourage Dear Husband to get a Ph.D. He says he’s bored now that he doesn’t have school, so I encouraged him to take up knitting. 


As part of the Grand Celebration his mom and one of his brothers came to town, and we even stayed in a hotel close to the graduation site. The girls really liked that, because kids love staying in hotels, whereas adults tend to think of what they would find if they had a black light. 


Dear Husband’s brother, hereafter referred to as Cool Hip Brother (CHB), offered to take us out to some clubs. I haven’t been to a club since 1988, I think, and I usually went to somewhat sceevy gay clubs that played the Smiths nonstop, wearing questionable clothes I found at Goodwill. Everyone danced around as if they were removing cobwebs from the rafters and tried to maintain an expression of general disdain. You're never going to hear a Smith’s song these days, unless it’s sampled.

CHB with DramaQueen and Firecracker

CHB is one of those People Who Know People. I always wanted to tag along with someone like that. The first place we went you had to go up an elevator and through some walkways and you were blindfolded for part of the journey. Just kidding. This wasn’t a club, really. More of a glorified bar. Actually, I think it looked like someone had turned off the lights in a giant corporate boardroom, with all the employees still there. The men were in suits. Suits. But CHB gave his name to someone, who passed it along to someone, who swiftly descended upon CHB to talk about whatever People Who Know People talk about. I was fascinated with the couples sitting near us. They all looked pretty bored, even the woman trying to give her date a lap dance. The lap dance struck me as a bit tacky, but the bar served really good mojitos. CHB seemed a little surprised that I stuck to mojitos, which makes me wonder if I’m out of the cool drink loop and ordered something that is just so hopelessly last decade.


But the best part is next, because we went to Opera, a nightclub that looks like - an opera! At least inside. A huge crystal chandelier hangs from the ceiling and the ceiling and some part of the architecture that I don’t know the name of are painted with cute little rococo medallion's and gold flourishes. Anyway, a really popular house dance dj/producer called Alesso was playing (or dj-ing or officiating or whatever) so the place was packed and there was a line down the block. We didn’t have to wait in the line because CHB  said something to a guy with a clipboard and earpiece, and we walked right in. I was very impressed and felt all Hollywood. 

Opera. That blurry mess at the bottom is a crowd of people.

I had been worried about dressing wrong and looking out of place and way old, but it didn’t really matter. I think I may have been invisible, which was fine with me. There was so much cigarette smoke you could practically walk on it, and now and then billowing streams of dry ice smoke blasted across the space. Alesso was doing his thing, which was a pretty awesome thing I have to admit. I gather there’s a particular flow to house music, a buildup (crowd recognizes song; much jumping up and down), breakdown (crowd teeters on silence), climax (and the crowd goes wild!).  Just like sex! The climax part included lots of flashing lights - which was the only time you could actually see anything on the floor. Otherwise most of the illumination came from the multicolored light sticks people waved around. We stayed up in the balconies, where you could actually move. Which I did. I probably looked epileptic, but since most everyone looked ridiculous anyway (to the side a circle of drunk guys had carved out some space to practice clogging, I think, or perhaps Irish step dancing), I was okay with that. And really, that kind of music gets in your head and manipulates you if you let it, and I’m not sure why you wouldn’t let it. 

Alesso. I'm too cool and Swedish to have a last name.

Angels, Magicians, Monsters, Ghosts and Pretty Boys

I was reading a book today that encouraged you to let your freak flag fly, to find your obsession and go with it, because that's how you find your true calling. Nice as that sounds, I don't think that my tenacity at Googling photos of really good looking people can be leveraged into a job. But I'm open to suggestions. I'm also not sure that I have a freak flag, exactly. Maybe a shoelace.

But I do have my obsessions.

American Horror Story

Ghosts with Garters

I thought this series was fantastic. It delivered the big scares as well as a more diffuse and  disturbing creepiness. I don't usually watch or read horror - I'm too susceptible. I can't even look in a mirror in the dark, a fear that was the subject of one episode that now has me worried whenever I see a closed shower curtain. Horror holds up our fears and scares us with them all over again, and for some reason we really like that. American Horror Story delivered: home invasions, high school mass murders, rape, death, dark corners and spooky noises,  deformity, suicide, ghosts that CAN hurt you, sociopaths and the devil's spawn. And then there are the horrors that are more corrosive than scary, like infidelity, depression, and neglect. The ghosts in American Horror Story can’t escape the house where they died, a house with layer on layer of guilt, rage, and fear. The horror house is the collective American psyche, and we’re all, innocent and guilty alike, stuck in it. Meanwhile, I give you one of the high points of the series: Alexandra Breckinridge in her slutty maid’s outfit. She didn't wash the floors or climb ladders nearly enough.



A Madness of Angels, The Midnight Mayor and The Neon Court

I found this series by accident, attracted to the cover of the third book, The Neon Court. I love urban paranormal noir.  I’m a fan of the Harry Dresden and Sandman Slim books, both about gumshoe wizards. They keep going and the trouble keeps piling up faster than they can dig but that doesn’t keep them from maintaining a constant witty and droll patter. A Madness of Angels, though, is all that plus a new level of gorgeous. Each book is almost giddy with a love of the London cityscape, from which the wizard Matthew Swift draws his magic. The author’s descriptions of spells woven from the subways, bus shelters and litter are full of energy, wit, and lively imagination. The Angels, specifically the Blue Electric Angels, slid from the mouthpiece of a phone receiver into his dying body and now inhabit his brain in an uneasy alliance with his own personality (he isn't entirely certain he still has his own personality).  Matthew sometimes refers to himself as “we”. I think it’s a sign of how good the writing is that although I noticed the shift it didn’t drive me up the wall but just went with it.


The Magicians and The Magician King

I’ve heard this called Harry Potter for grownups, which I think does everyone a disservice. If Harry Potter were Dickens, I suppose The Magicians would be Trollope. I’m not even going to try to explain that, but it makes sense somewhere in the muddled recesses of my mind.  There’s a gifted teenager, Quentin, who finds himself (through an odd sequence of events) sitting a very strange exam at Brakebills, a school of magic. Thus begins his education (which rather reminded me of Arthur’s education in The Sword and the Stone) in magic, friendship, love, and betrayal.  He also happens to be obsessed with a series of children’s books that sound an awful lot like the Narnia stories, set in a world called Fillory. He discovers that Fillory is a real place, one that he and his magician friends can visit. It’s a pretty dark coming of age story - dark as in true to the reality of how many screw ups you make on your way to adulthood.  It takes an awful long time to develop any sort of true maturity. Near the end of The Magician King one of the characters in Fillory says something like this: “The hero isn’t the one who gains  the reward. The hero is the one who pays the price.” I thought that together the books were about the journey to that painful revelation.

Sherlock
I’ve blathered on about this before, but I adore the BBC adaptation. I think they did a brilliant job of modernizing the stories, and Benedict C and Martin Freeman are excellent.  I feel faint just listening to their line delivery. And now I'm waiting for the next installment. And I still want that coat.

Being Human (the British version)

I'm a Brooding Vampire

I know - this has been out forever in the UK. But it hasn’t been streaming on Netflix for very long.  I think we usually mangle British shows when we import them. I tried to watch the American version of Being Human, and I just couldn’t. The characters on the American series lack the nuances and quirks of the British ones. We have taken the Vampire Diaries and smushed it into the basic Being Human framework. It’s slick and shallow and as far as I can tell is primarily about sex.  The British version, however, actually seems to be about figuring out what it means to be human. How do you transform the predatory and the invisible? I mean, their problems are ours writ large - selfish and greedy desire, addiction, timidity, fear, cowardice, rage, our animal nature. And THEN it's about sex. And Aidan Turner is just a better vampire. What sort of credible vampire looks like he goes to the gym everyday? Aidan looks more like he's shooting up in an alley somewhere.


Grimm

Love the crooked smile.

I love this show about the fairy tale creatures that live among us. Nick, played by David Giuntoli, is just beautiful. I like watching him shoot things. A descendant of the original brothers Grimm - who are hunters, not just story collectors - he is  The One Who Can See the Truth. He has a trailer full of weird weaponry and Encyclopedias of Hideous Monsters that he inherited from his aunt, and he's kind of playing it by ear because his aunt died before he could go through basic training. He’s also a cop, so it’s a bit like CSI in the Enchanted Forest. I love his friendship with the lovable werewolf Monroe, his go-to guy for all things supernatural. And his cop partner is great, too, even if he's unaware of exactly what's going on. That’s pretty much it, I think. Not a lot of depth, perhaps, but updating the stories of Red Riding Hood and Rapunzel and so forth really gives you a sense of the role fairy tales play in dealing with a dark and often frightening world.

White Collar

Those eyes could break a million hearts.

Why haven’t I watched this before? I’m catching up on Netflix and loving it. The conman/forger/thief Neal Caffrey is so exuberantly charming you want to smile and wear a fedora. An actor could easily flub it and come off as smarmy and crass. Instead he’s rather sweet, one of those bad guys who’s decent at heart. His developing friendship with the FBI agent responsible for him is fun to watch, as they try to figure out how far to trust each other. And his old friend and partner in crime is adorable - always there for him, ready to come through in a crisis and help him concoct ridiculous schemes, always ready to offer a conspiracy theory and a boot-kick to authority. The actor playing Nick, Matt Bomer, has stunning blue eyes, the kind of eyes that make you catch your breath when they hit you full-force. There are a lot of pretty people, but only a few have eyes that give me butterflies.

Richard Armitage. Sigh. Crooked smile
AND startling eyes.

(Richard Armitage is another example. I’ll take any opportunity to talk about Richard Armitage. Like... he’s going to be in the Hobbit movie with just about every other sexy British actor, including the two from Sherlock and the vampire from Being Human). I supposed they have what are called “bedroom eyes,” but their gaze seems more existential than that, as if they’ve bored down to your essence. (If I were really clever I could now insert something about Lacan and “the gaze.” But philosophers have a way of reducing what seems to be a nifty insight into utter boredom. Or not reduce - philosophers never reduce anything; they expand endlessly.)



Someday this Pain Will Be Useful to You
If only this book were around when I was a teenager. It’s compared with Catcher in the Rye, which is inevitable, but I was never all that fond of Holden Caufield.  I love James Svek, though. He’s a teenager in love with words, who feels wildly out of place. He's obsessed with looking up houses for sale in the Midwest and wants to move there (you get a sense of why later in the story). He has a dark sense of humor and a keen sense of the absurdity around him. Here’s a snippet of conversation with his father:

“You should have ordered a steak or something,” my father said. “You should never order pasta as a main course. It isn’t manly.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.
“No, you won’t,” said my father. “And listen, while we’re talking about this, let me ask you something.”
“What?”
“Are you gay?
“What?” I asked. “Why would you ask me that?”
“Why? Why not? I just want to know.”
“Why? Do you get to take an extra deduction on your taxes or something.?”
“Very funny, James. No. It’s just that we’ve never talked about your sexuality, and if you are gay I want to be properly supportive. It’s fine with me if you’re gay, I just want you to know.”
“You wouldn’t be supportive if I were straight?”

He’s precocious and clever, defiantly alone at the same time that he tries awkwardly (and disastrously) to connect. The descriptions of his emotional state are finely nuanced: “I ... just let everything go, turned the net of myself inside out and let all the worried desperate fish swim away.” How beautiful is that? You learn indirectly that he witnessed the attack on the Twin Towers, and the stories of those lost, particularly those who were missing but no one noticed at first, have contributed to his fear of never making the leap from loneliness to companionship.

So that's how I've been spending my time. Or at least when I'm not looking up funny cat videos on YouTube.

Falling Backward

Please stop me. I have grandiose ideas of decking out the house for autumn – gourds, pumpkins, wheat, corn, maybe a festive wreath of colorful foliage. This is what happens when I consume too much Martha Stewart, Real Simple and Better Homes & Gardens. I imagine cute little tin buckets wrapped with burlap ribbon and filled with gold and burgundy flowers. The reality is a faded, rumpled plaid tablecloth decorated with a few drips of candle wax. Little pumpkins and other such decorative items end up sprawled over the surface and buried under mail and the paper detritus the girls shed daily.

I love autumn, though. I have fond memories of childhood autumns, which is kind of odd because in South Georgia autumn isn’t a very colorful season. Leaves go brown and fall off – none of the lovely reds, yellows and oranges you see further north. But autumn was when school began (and end to the incredibly hot, oppressive, boring summer), and the state fair brought its diesel-soaked excitement to town, and Halloween – well what kid doesn’t like Halloween? Autumn here is so much prettier.

In previous years we made a few attempts at some regional activities. Apple picking was something of a bust. Turns out that you can’t just pick apples; you have to pay an entry fee to the orchard, which is a-bustlin with cloggers, food vendors, petting zoos, “museums” (some rusty farm implements in a ramshackle old building), kiddie events, and very long lines to the one restroom. My kids declared the curly fried potatoes a success but weren’t much interested in the actual apple picking process. Another year we went to a corn maze. That was my bright idea. Since when did hayrides mean perching uncomfortably on some bales behind a noisy tractor, breathing in diesel fumes? Although we had a map, we had some problems navigating the maze. Firecracker gave out and had to be carried, and Dear Husband started wheezing. Nature does that to him.

Fall is also the time when every school and church has some sort of festival. I inevitably forget when they are. There are also school fundraisers, which is why I’m getting those issues of Martha Stewart. You know, I found a recipe in one of them for blueberry ice pops that – I kid you not – called for you to steep white pine needles in hot water. PINE NEEDLES, folks. That lady is sick.

Anyway, I now know the true joy of the season – the fall television premiers.

Caching Out

This weekend we decided to try something new. I blame the wine from the night before. Dear Husband and I had heard about this cool international venture called "geocaching," and it sounded so much like a big Easter egg hunt that we had to try it. I should mention right here that no jelly beans are involved, which sort of makes it not as good as an Easter egg hunt to me.

Anyway, if you have never heard of geocaching, here's what happens. Someone puts a log bog and some doohickies in a cannister or lockbox or box disguised as a log and hides it. They record the coordinates and post the location on this big bulletin board at geocaching.com, with a few hints. Then people go looking for it, navigating with a GP, and if they find it they put their name in the log book, trade something in the box for something they have, and put the cache back the way they found it for future geocachers. See, it's a sort of international scavenger hunt.

So we thought, "Wow, this is neat! What a great family activity!"

The first cache was at a pharmacy right around the corner from us. All the comments mentioned what an easy find it was - a park and grab - perfect for a first time. Well, we wandered around the parking lot for an hour poking at the grass verges, peeking through the fence, trying to avoid looking like miscreants. Firecracker and I bought candy. It went like this for several more caches. We spent a long time staring in disbelief at a lamp post in front of a church. By the fourth stop DramaQueen had written up a sign and stuck it to the window - "I hate geocaching." We persevered and finally found a tupperware box near a bookstore. Rather DramaQueen fell upon it with a crow of triumph. By that time we didn't really care who saw us. If people wondered why we were dragging a plastic box out from under the shrubbery, they refrained from asking.

I gather that geocaching is particularly popular along hiking paths and such, part of getting out in nature and so forth. Given that the girls think nature should be thoroughly washed and everything "icky" removed from it, I'm not sure they will go for that. They might do it if they could wear gloves and a hazmat suit. I myself felt a bit woozy when I turned over a piece of wood and ants pured out across the grass.

I wonder if anyone has ever found a corpse doing this? I'm waiting for geocaching to turn up on CSI. If it hasn't already.

See that little red line peeking out? Yeah, well we didn't see anything like that.

 

I went couponing and all I got was this lousy bottle of Old Spice

Have you ever read an article or seen a news broadcast on women who do extreme couponing - you know, the ones who take $300 worth of groceries through the checkout and it ends up costing only $3? I realize that for some people coupons are the only way they make ends meet, but I have a fantasy about the uber couponer. She files her coupons by category and expiration date, buys multiple copies of the newspaper for the coupon inserts, always matches manufacturer coupons with store coupons and sales, and often buys additional coupons off eBay or similar sites. She spends any number of hours a week working on her coupons; meanwhile she is homeschooling her kids, growing an organic garden with ladybugs to control pests, upcyling castoffs into ingenious crafts, refinishing that $2 chest of drawers she found at a garage sale, sewing curtains, scrapbooking, running a profitable blog, and cleaning and decluttering her house by zone while still maintaining a stock of gallon milk jugs and empty shoe boxes for craft projects.

My first thought when seeing these jubilant women waltzing out of the grocery store paying no more than I would for a cup of coffee is that they cannot possibly be buying produce. How often do you see coupons and deep discounts for produce? They must have a cart full of tater tots, Velveeta and canned green beans. But then I think, of course they aren’t buying produce; they have an organic garden. They’re digging up potatoes from their garden, canning tomatoes and crock potting their way to financial victory.

Thing is, I’ve tried. I’ve really tried. But I’m lucky to get out of a grocery store paying less than $165 a week, WITH coupons. Gluten free products cost a fortune rarely mitigated by coupon offers ($6 for 4 bagels or a small loaf of bread; up to $9 for a packaged mix). I recently put together the items for a flour blend, a not particularly complex one, and I believe the ingredients totaled around $25. I imagine in weight it was nowhere near equal to a 5lb bag of regular flour. And that was economical, because I was making the blend myself instead of buying a mix. No wonder some GF folks grind their own grains. I’m surprised they don’t have a rice paddy in their backyard.

Anyway, we keep our consumption of prepared gluten free stuff to a minimum, but there is still the expensive assortment of in-season fruit and veg, the free-range chicken and grass fed beef (I mean, have you seen what happens on Food Inc? the regular meats are incubators for salmonella and e-coli). And then we get to the sticking point - I so rarely see coupons for any product that I use. Most of the coupons are for foods I can’t or wouldn't eat (Sunny-D? Seriously? I might as well give them soda). And my word, the number of coupons for toothpaste, air freshener and makeup just astounds me. I go to various couponing sites, and they just make me tired. I’m particularly flummoxed by Walgreens;, which requires an elaborate system of purchases in order to get register coupons (I've seen sites that go through this in detail). It’s so complex that I've never even bothered to try it. And there’s nothing more dangerous than the Kroger “But 10 and get $5 off.” You will go insane tracking the stupid items, trying to make sure that your group of 10 has more lower-priced items than higher priced items, but not getting more than the 10, because then you’re just a pawn in their game, but you won’t be taken in, oh no, you will beat this! You will emerge waving your $5 gift card in victory! Cue maniacal laughter.

And I will still end up paying at least $165 worth of groceries.

I'm Back and Better than Ever

Oh, hello there! It’s been a while. Hope all is well. Things are great here – I just haven’t shored up enough time in one place to actually pin something to the wall here. I started a long, rambling account of our excellent trip to Los Angeles, but the post was getting overstuffed, like a bit unwieldy sofa, so I stopped, and then I got sidetracked.

Here’s the summary: Great weather. The girls went to the circus and Firecracker got a stuffed elephant she named Julia.

DramaQueen and Firecracker at the circus with  Popop

And they got to see two of their uncles.

The ride up to this point was harrowing.

 That's the girls with Uncle J as close as you can get to the Hollywood sign. J drove us up in his Bronco. The passenger door didn't open from the outside, and I almost dislocated my back getting in and out. I felt about 80. Which is how old the road was, judging from its condition. You'd think with millionaires living in the Hollywood Hills that the roads wouldn't look like rural Alabama circa 1932.

Uncle D, who's pretty much still a kid himself.

I saw my BFF from college, who is going backward in age instead of forward, like Benjamin Button. He has lots of fun stories about the celebrities he meets, none of which I dare repeat. He's a writer, and we eagerly awaiting seeing one of his works hit the screen someday, at which point we'll hit him up for drinks. DramaQueen was a tad disappointed that he hasn't met Selena Gomez. Steve likes to use his friends' names for characters in his screenplays. I was rather touched to find my name attached to a transvestite.

My awesome friend Steve and Dear Husband. In a parking garage. We're classy like that.

Went toUniversal Studios, where I managed to feel ill on the damn trolley tour. I hate projected movement. And giant 3-D apes. I was happy to spend time with Firecracker in the Curious George Water Playground and nurse my incipient nausea while DramaQueen and Dear Husband dealt with the Simpsons Ride.

Visited the La Brea tarpits.
 
Here is where the pictures of the La Brea tarpits are supposed to go, but I can't find them. Imagine glistening pits of sticky black liquid. Then imagine the paleontologists having to dig around in it. The area smells like a newly paved road.

Saw the Tim Burton exhibit at LACMA (DramaQueen insisted), which did not smell at all.

This was the photo op spot. No pictures inside.

The exhibit was awesome. Uncle D and Uncle J were also there, and Uncle D and Firecracker went to the kids' area and painted. Since I had somehow once again managed to get glutined (Baja Fresh - I blame you), I spent a lot of time monitoring my position in relation to the bathrooms and trying not to look as if someone had just stabbed me in the stomach.

Went sailing, which I thought would terrify me but which I enjoyed oh so much. We saw sea lions sunning on a buoy and dolphins doing their dolphin thing. We had a captain from Munich who let Dear Husband help steer. I took Dramamine ahead of time, because of the glutined within and inch of my life thing (I somehow got glutined three times during a week-long vacation, and the effects linger for a very long time) and stayed out of the hold, which seems to move a lot more than it needs to.

Dear Husband and Firecracker set course.

DramaQueen takes her turn.

This was our captain. He's German and although he told us his name several times I never was clear about it.

   

And now, well school has started, and it has been very exciting. This is DramaQueen’s first year in middle school, with the novelty of a locker and changing classes. Firecracker is in fourth grade, and she is not at all happy about the amount of homework she has, since it seriously cuts into her time at Webkinz World. The start of a new school year always smells like hope and endless possibility to me. There’s always the chance that I’ll finally put 12 years’ worth of photos in albums this year, keep the laundry off the sofa, and remember to put air in my tires.

And what have y'all been doing?

Perturbation

I am experiencing waves of anxiety, the kind that make me dither over every decision, however small. Everything seems to take such monumental effort, and my will is weak and whiney. I can't even stand to hear myself think.

I want to sink my claws into everyone I love and make sure we all stay safe. There’s too much illness and uncertainty. Someone very dear at my workplace has advanced cancer. Dear Husband has some mysterious digestive ailment and the testing for that is before us. Blood work apparently revealed significant inflammation, and startling words such as “Crohn’s Disease” have been mentioned. More blood work and an endoscopy next week. Meanwhile everything he eats seems to hurt him. And what can I do about it? Damn all.

I myself wish I could just give up eating altogether. I’m taking acid blockers, but I still often feel queasy. And for some reason, despite the fact that I’ve found gluten free bread that pretty much tastes like bread, it disturbs me. I can never finish it. It makes me think of trying to eat mushrooms. I can, sort of, if they are in a stew or over steak, but I can’t shake the knowledge that they are fungus. That’s so gross. Why would I want to eat fungus? And somehow this gluten free bread evokes the same hesitation. It’s ersatz bread. I KNOW what it truly is. I feel like I took the red pill and I can never unknow its true properties.

Firecracker is, well, Firecracker. Everything goes well and then something strange comes out of left field, like her extreme reaction to ant and mosquito bites. I feel like I need to wrap her up just to get to the car. And by extreme, well you should have seen the enormous blisters the ants created. She looked like she had bubonic plague. Tomorrow it’s a trip to the orthodontist. That’s sounds so minor, just the usual stuff kids go through. Except everything the orthodontist says makes my stomach knot. Her palate is too small, so she will have to have an expander, which basically forces the soft bone apart (ye gads, it sounds so awful), but it needs to be done quite soon to avoid an overbite. Her teeth are all over the place. She almost looks like she has two rows, that's how crowded they are. She also has gum hyperplasia (too much gum tissue), probably from years of seizure meds, so the orthodontist tells us she will need periodontal surgery to remove some of the excess tissue. Yep, there's that knot tightening. Firecracker does not deal well with pain and discomfort. She used to, but I think she depleted all her reserves. Now needles provoke temper tantrums and crying jags, and she focuses on every scrape and cut, examining it every few minutes, asking the same questions over and over about why and when and how it will get better.

DramaQueen is, as always, healthy, thank you God, but she has my eyes, poor girl. She has to have a physical soon and the thought of having blood drawn panics her. Seems when I was a kid I was getting shots all the time, and I don't even remember the first time I had blood drawn. It just was what it was, a moment of ouch and over. Somehow DramaQueen is all, well, dramatic about it. 

I have more doctor appointments I need to schedule, the endless rounds of keeping on top of my health issues. I feel like a ticking time bomb. Somewhere a rogue cell is waiting. I feel old. I don’t get enough sleep. I don’t get enough any exercise. Mortality is giving me the beady eye. And all I want to do is lie down.

The Monday Report - Angels and Insects Edition

If I don't come up with some sort of weekly feature, I'll never write on this blog with any regularity. I'm all over the place in my subject matter. I'm all over the place generally. So I've decided to bounce in on Monday with a report of all the interesting and important stuff I do over the weekend.

Here's the weekend recap.

• Buckets of rain with lots of thunder and lightening - very thrilling. I am always slightly uneasy that a gigantic ball of hail will crash through our bathroom skylight and our house will be invaded by wasps before we get it fixed.
• I thought about calling some people I should call, and then I didn't. I plan to do the same thing next weekend.
• Finished reading the awesome A Madness of Angels, which I plan to write about at some point. I'm in love with the protagonist, who is resurrected two years after his death to find that he is sharing his brain with blue electric angels.
• Had to take Firecracker to the doctor on Saturday for some nasty-looking mosquito bites. Abby is very sensitive to mosquito bites, which usually swell up to the size of her fist and turn red.
• No sooner did we step out of the car with a bottle of antibiotic than a bunch of ants swarmed over Firecracker's foot, inflicting multiple bites. Abby is even more sensitive to ant bites, so we had to go to the doctor again on Sunday, this time for steroids to bring down the swelling. She now looks like a medieval plague victim.
• Firecracker is not very happy.
• When Firecracker is injured or sick, we are all treated to a minute-by-minute account of every ache and pain. And I do mean minute by minute.
• Why do insects target Abby? DramaQueen can go an entire summer without any sort of bite.
• I hate summer in Georgia.
• Sunday night was the True Blood season premier, hurrah. This season I'm rooting for vampire Eric, who gave the best ever public service announcement (wish I could post the whole thing, but there's a bit of it at the beginning).

• I'm doing fine going gluten free, except that bread is very expensive, with a loaf having maybe 10 slices at about $5 a loaf, making it more expensive oz by oz than some illicit drugs. I'm not sure that's entirely true, but I'm not going to research it.
• There are parts of our backyard I know nothing about. We spend absolutely no time there. See comment above about summer and ants. I would be perfectly happy with no yard at all. If I want grass I can go to the park.
• We are in the process of killing two plants. I had the genius idea of the girls going on a field trip to a nursery and getting plants. One is impatiens - Abby remembers the name because, as she says, "I'm impatient." Liz got something she said is called a "David something". I imagine they're annuals and slated to die anyway. 
• Dear Husband is, I hope, bringing home a treat.
• Oh, and here's another treat.

Game On, Swords Out, Heads Off

Beautiful sets are part of the appeal of the series.

Every summer we get HBO so we can watch True Blood. This year we happened to get it a bit early, so I thought I would check out Game of Thrones. I'd never heard of the books, since fantasy epics have not generally been part of my literary diet. I am not apt to pick up a book set in another world where the characters have weird names like Cl'ad or M'rn. But there was so much buzz about this show that I had to check it out.

Tyrion should have his own series.

Daenerys deserves a dragon.

First I will say that HBO has created a remarkable series. Even the opening credits are gorgeous. The set design and costuming work well in creating mood and place. The cast is good to excellent. At first I found the story intriguing, but after a while I'm like, meh. I've read reviews praising the moral complexity of the characters. Um, yeah, right. Oh, she is fiercely loyal to her family; too bad she kills people. That's what is meant by "complex" I guess. The bad 'uns are pretty much bad to the bone and the good 'uns are, from what I can tell, en route to being corrupted or killed. I like Eddard's feisty daughter Arya and Tyrian, the dwarf, who has been given the best lines (and Richard Dinklage, a marvelous actor, obviously relishes his role). I'm also fascinated by the character Daenerys, daughter of the assassinated former king, now in exile, who starts out as a fragile, ethereal victim but becomes increasingly kick-ass. But most of the characters are annoying, willfully blind or downright vicious. The only really stand-up guy, Eddard Stark, screws everything up because he can't outmaneuver all the other power players. Here's a piece of advice, you shouldn't tell the queen that you know her deep, dark secret after the king, your only ally in the court, is dead, particularly not after your wife has kidnapped her brother. Also, when your crazy-ass wife kidnaps a member of the queen's family based on questionable evidence from a third-party and puts him on trial at the crazy-ass family headquarters, you should not be supportive. This is a good time to play the "I'm so sorry but my wife is unhinged with grief" card. Just sayin'.

Working girls in training.

Since HBO can, they dump as much blood and brutality as possible into every episode. Within the first few minutes of episode 1 I was treated to a scene of hacked up corpses arranged is some sort of mysterious symbol (at this point I don't really care what it means or who did it) and in every episode since I've had to close my eyes at various points to avoid having some new horror seared into my psyche. Most recently a scene took place while an animal is being butchered and skinned, which I'm sure conveyed the utter coldness of the Lannister patriarch, but I could have got that with less squishiness, thank you very much. And it being HBO there's lots of gratuitous sex. Seriously, is there ever a really sound narrative reason for an explicit sex scene? Oh, puhlease. No, there isn't. I don't get, for instance, why a scene of two women practicing "the business" is dramatically necessary. While the whore training was in session, the brothel owner was busy telling his life story to one of the "trainees," who turned out to be very good at multi-tasking. I suspect he may have alluded to something important in that little talk. Or not. In any case, I gather the character of the prostitute Ros was written specifically for the TV show, because, you know, an epic without whores is kind of like popcorn without butter and salt.

When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die.

You must have to find Machiavellian politics and strategy much more interesting than I do to really enjoy this series. Or you have to really enjoy stories in which family loyalty trumps morality and humanity nine-tenths of the time. Not filial affection, mind you, just cold-hearted, unthinking, brutal loyalty.

So, next season, I might give Game of Thrones a miss. Except now they have dragons.