you’re face to face with the man who sold the world

maura @ 7:59 pm

I really owe you a meaty, substantial post, o interwebs, but it’s been a loooooooong week, culminating in the Harvest Festival at Gus’s school today. I helped staff the apple booth and schlepped heavy boxes of apples around and I am tired.

So here’s something light, frivolous, and weekendy!

Footwear trends I hate:

CROCS: Aiiieee, it’s not possible to fully explain the depth of my hatred. Alice comes close, but I must add that a tidbit I picked up at my old job about a certain celebrity chef who has 30 pairs that he washes in the dishwasher also feeds my ire.

BALLET FLATS: Look, I’ve still got all my Duran Duran records, too, but some things that happened in the 80s should stay in the 80s.

Footwear trends I love:

CHUCKS: Everyone loves Converse Chuck Taylors. Low top, hi top, all manner of colors + prints + even those stealthy black w/black soles ones. I had some orange ones once and then some dinosaur ones in college but ultimately I had to accept that Chucks are not for the slightly wide of foot. I’ve made my peace + moved on, and instead I got some for Gus on eBay.

FUN RAIN BOOTS: Yay for colorful and whimsically-patterned rain boots for kids AND grownups. I have some plain all black ones, but am keeping my eyes peeled for a more fun pair. Bring on the puddles!

open the till, give me the change

maura @ 8:57 pm

This morning I had my annual physical. I’d like to take this opportunity to give a shout out to my GP. She is awesome! She is super nice + always seems interested to talk with me. Of course she could be faking the interest, but still props to her for spending more than 3 minutes with a patient. I’m sure the insurance companies all hate her. She even gives patients her email address!

Also, she always has fun extra bonus items for me. Today it was a flu shot — a very nice surprise. I hadn’t even thought I’d be able to get one this year. Of course, now my arm feels like someone socked me, but I’m sure it’ll be better tomorrow.

Last year she offered me a combined tetanus + pertussis (whooping cough) booster, to which I said bring it on. Since I’m no longer an excavating archaeologist I don’t get the tetanus shots as often as I used to. Again: sore arm, but worth it, esp. since that pertussis resurgence last winter.

I think she’s a couple of years younger than I am, which always makes me think of the (first) time that I was on leave from archaeology and went to visit a post-baccalaureate pre-med program to see if I really wanted to go to medical school. Turns out the answer was no, and I’m pretty happy with that answer still. But sometimes I think about my alterna-self, the doctor. What is she doing now? Is she an orthopedic surgeon, because I have always been interested in bones? Or is she a GP, because they are always in short supply and get a wide variety of cases?

Likely she is very tired. Which, given the busy day I had and how tired I feel, makes me sad for her. Alterna-Maura, go to sleep!

anarchy with a note attached

maura @ 2:39 pm

I wasn’t going to blag today, but then during my morning interwebs reading I learned that today is Blog Action Day and the topic is the environment and, well, you know I loves me all things green + crunchy so here I am. But I only have a few minutes, so let’s make this snappy!

I sketched out a few post ideas in my head while I was making lunch earlier, then I realized that all of them were about how things we’ve bought recently have made our lives greener. And then I felt sort of guilty, because it’s better to not drive at all than to drive a Prius*, right?

* Metaphorically, of course. We don’t have a Prius. And no Prius endorsement, positive or negative, is intended.

So I thought I’d list a few things I haven’t bought recently, instead.

1. With just a few exceptions (a hat for me, and bathing suits and underwear for both of us), I haven’t bought new clothing for me or Gus all this year. (Sadly, shoes for Gus are another story. Man, kid feet grow fast!)

2. The only books I’ve bought this year are one for school and the new Harry Potter. Yay for the public library!

3. I’ve really done a lot more listening to new music online this year, surfing MySpace pages and music blags. I got one CD for my birthday, but that’s it.

An extra bonus to #2 and #3? No new storage space necessary!

don’t leave the key under the mat for me

maura @ 8:53 pm

I’m a blocker, yeah, I know it. I can’t really say why. It’s not like nothing is going on around here. I do stuff, really! But I haven’t felt moved to write about it recently.

Maybe I am saving up the goodness for NaBloPoMo. Yes, I am crazy enough to do it again this year. Woo hoo! Just smell the crazy in the air!

This weekend my mom came to visit, so Jonathan and I went out to dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, which was lovely. I got a bunch of organizing done around the house: taking pictures for the virtual stoop sale I’m setting up this week, cleaning some stuff out of the closets, giving my mom a huge box of Gus’s old shoes to take for my nephew.

Now I’m getting all crafty and painting an old frame to finally get the personalized funky chicken Marlys that Jonathan got for me years ago into a frame and onto the wall. The frame was ugly brown faux-wood — I’m painting it purple with green polka dots. If I planned ahead more I’d have realized that the poster paint of Gus’s that I’m “borrowing” for this project is too thin to cover the dark brown of the frame in one coat, and I’d be finished by now rather than waiting for purple coat #2 to dry before adding the third and final coat. But then I couldn’t be writing this all down for your edification now, could I? No, I could not, because I’d be relaxing on the couch with a beer and some Steven Millhauser. So rock on with my ill-prepared craft project-ness! And let’s hope Gus doesn’t freak out when he realizes that I’ve used up all of his purple paint.

early in the morning looking for the coffee shop

maura @ 8:03 pm

Aiieee, it’s been in the humid 80s most of the past week and it is driving me batty. It’s OCTOBER, for (Al) Gore’s sake! We’ve already deployed the Halloween dish towels!! Actually those exclamation points are poorly-placed: really the heat + humidity is making me sluggish + cranky.

I really wanted to wash the windows this weekend, but just could not manage it in the heat. So I weeded the filing cabinet instead. Who knew how much old paperwork we had? After clearing out approximately 1.5 linear feet of it (not sure exactly — I’m not an archivist) there was a huge mountain o’ shredding to be done. Even after enlisting a pint-sized helper it took more than a day to finish, and now I have 2 garbage bags full of shred to recycle. Wahoo!

The heat is supposed to break this week, so I expect I won’t be able to evade the window-washing for much longer. It’ll be worth it for cooler weather, though. I am so completely over full-body sunscreen + sweating. Let’s go, Fall!

hey hey my friend where are you going today

maura @ 1:49 pm

Greetings programs! Lately Gus has been repeatedly watching (and Jonathan and I repeatedly mocking) Tron. How did we get here?

It all started with the pirates. Gus has been big into pirates for a few months now, and I’m not at all sure why. It’s not those stupid Pirates of the Caribbean movies, he has not even seen them, honest! (Though we do loves us some Johnny Depp in this house.) I guess it’s probably that every other kid loves pirates too, so the iconography is all around us.

A few weeks ago I spent ONE SOLID HOUR putting the lego pirate ship together while Gus asked if it was finished yet approximately once every 2.5 minutes. This lego ship was mine when I was little*. We gave it to Gus as a recycled gift last xmas. Yay for recycled gifts! Esp. legos, since the new ones are so much lamer than the old ones.

* In this case “little” = “in college” and if you are so fusty to think that college students shouldn’t be playing with toys then I guess I will never show you my rad yo-yo collection, either.

Recently Jonathan has informed me that actually, this lego ship is NOT a pirate ship, but rather they are the “good guys” in the navy. To which I reply: don’t ask me, I’m just a girl.

Back to the legos. After the (non-)pirate ship was finished Gus wanted to make me build more elaborate lego sets. So I tackled the lego Boba Fett’s ship (Slave 1) that Jonathan bought for himself a few years ago. This has far fewer parts and was much much easier to build. Gus even successfully begged to be given the little lego Boba Fett that’s been keeping watch on one of Jonathan’s bookshelves lo these many years.

Of course Gus started asking questions about Boba Fett, the ship, the little carbon-frozen Han Solo lego, etc. Jonathan gave him the basic plot outline of Star Wars in about 20 minutes. Of course we love the original 3 movies, but the story sounds SO cheesy when you relate it verbally.

Yes, we are the only people in the world who have not yet let their almost-6 yr old watch Star Wars. Gus is very into swords and guns right now and it just seems wiser to wait until his fascination has died down. But I’m sure this makes me a horrible square and he’ll be the last kid in the world to see it and everyone will laugh at him.

So we scrabbled around the house for “something in space” for Gus to watch. Tron was the substitute we settled on. Why do we even own Tron? I think a couple of you know the answer to that question, but I’ll share it with the class. Last millennium I worked at Disney Online, and I used my employee discount to buy 3 videos: Freaky Friday**, Bedknobs & Broomsticks***, and Tron. Lisa bought Tron too, and we joked that we probably cleaned out the stock.

** Which I cannot even watch anymore, even though I love it, because it reminds me of the remake, which I also love, which makes me want to shake some sense into Lindsay Lohan.

*** A classic! Also used to fan the flames of Gus’s swords-n-guns mania by fast forwarding to the end where the mysteriously un-aging Angela Lansbury uses her mad magic skillz to chase off the Germans with ghost soldiers.

Tron is not in space, but close enough, apparently, because Gus is hooked. And it is hilariously useful for illustrating some of the weird things from our youth that Gus can’t believe, e.g. that you used to have to leave the house to play video games on a big giant machine and after you died you had to put another quarter in to keep playing! This blows his little mind.

End of line.

and never give it more than a frowning hour

maura @ 8:48 pm

Lately I’ve had the nearly overwhelming urge to get rid of lots of stuff from our apartment. Between the big purge I did at the beginning of this year and our last stoop sale we are running pretty lean + mean here at mauraweb! HQ. But like everything else, it could be better. Sometimes I daydream about the eXtreme minimalism that would be possible living in a studio (or one of those very small houses I love so much). And wouldn’t it be easy to keep it clean?

Part of the problem is that I recently read a bunch of posts on 43 Folders called My War on Clutter. As I read through these posts I couldn’t help thinking how much stuff we still have that we don’t use, things that could still go. Sometimes it’s stuff we can’t even see: old CDs I’ll never listen to again, unused art supplies (why do I seem to have so many boxes of crayons? From COLLEGE?!), etc.

Of course, once the things are reviewed and decisions are made, there’s the hurdle of actually getting it out of the apartment. I have used Freecycle, but you have to be home for people to get stuff, sometimes they flake, etc. What I wish is that we had a monthly Really Really Free Market (essentially a huge free swap meet) the way they do in San Francisco.

I got to 43 Folders from No Impact Man, which I am not going to link to because you can use your own google-fu to find it easily. Also because I am trying (so far unsuccessfully) to stop reading that blog. It makes me feel guilty about taking the subway and using the washing machine. When really I should be all, hey, I could be driving and using the dryer!

I have a love/hate relationship with ecoblogs. Right now they are my preferred source for interwebs distraction/procrastination surfing. But when I read about all the eco stuff others are doing I tend to get bogged down in all kinds of coulds + shoulds and then I feel bad. Which is silly, because we are doing a pretty decent job in my household of avoiding plastic, conserving energy, wasting not, etc. So yay for us, we rock!

p.s.

maura @ 10:21 pm

I almost forgot!

Today’s fun fact gleaned straight from the interwebs to Jonathan to me: Viggo Mortensen and Exene Cervenka (of the seminal LA punk band X) used to be married, and they have a college-aged kid named Henry! Who knew?

some say it’s a game of skill

maura @ 8:38 pm

I’d meant to do some work tonight, but I’m tired and we have three (3!) freshy-fresh movies from Netflix AND our friend’s new TV show starts tonight so maybe not. And tomorrow is another day. Plus, Jonathan just whipped up some cashew brittle, woot!

But, so as not to leave you in the blurch (blog lurch), here’s the Mauraweb! Index of Today:

Today’s wake-up time: 7:06am

Today’s weather: sunny, clear, high 74F (but it was dang sunny + felt warmer on the playground, see below)

Today’s clothing choices: spring green w/white + yellow daisies pants from high school (!), purple tshirt, red sneakers

Today’s incidental household chore: one load o’ laundry

Today’s job search goal (completed): send in an application for an adjunct position

Today’s work: freelancing for my former employer

Today’s lunch: leftover tofu, broccoli and red pepper stir-fry

Today’s admission of error: as it turns out, the new Shins record really is quite good

Today’s caffeine intake: 1 cup of coffee, 1 cup of tea, 1 iced coffee

Today’s afternoon activity: playdate at the playground

Today’s question: is rhubarb a fruit or a vegetable?

every word means no i heard you say once long ago

maura @ 8:19 pm

T-47 days to Halloween and already the anticipation is running high in our house. Last week we got out the halloween dish towels, and Gus has watched Nightmare Before Christmas a few times since last month. Right now he’s watching the Halloweenies episode of The Adventures of Pete and Pete. Surely The Great Pumpkin can’t be far behind.

He’s also been obsessed with pirates lately. This year for Halloween he wants to dress as “a skeleton with a cutlass.” We’ll just reuse the skeleton costume he wore last year, but he wanted a real (plastic) sword (rather than the cardboard ones he + Jonathan create). So off we went to our mall-type place this morning.

I was hoping for something smallish and made of hollow plastic, but the sword we ended up with is nearly as tall as Gus and quite solid. Of course he can’t stop swinging it all over the place. I suggested that he whack the bed with it so hopefully nothing in our house will be accidentally broken anytime soon. The label said cutlass but Jonathan says it’s really a scimitar. And because nerd + nerd = little nerd, Gus spent much of this afternoon lecturing me on the differences between the two kinds of swords.

Let me take this moment to point out that the little hoarder hasn’t even finished his candy from Easter nor the most recent few birthday parties he’s attended (even with significant post-bedtime parental snacking!). All the same he’s cleaned out his traditional Halloween candy bag in preparation for the big event. Bring it on — we are ready!