and if you break my heart

maura @ 10:11 pm

After nearly two months, I think I have finally made some sort of Uneasy Truce with the commute to Gus’ new school. Or maybe it’s Resigned Acceptance. Either way I am spending far fewer braincycles stressing out about it, which can only be a good thing.

The craw-sticking fact of the matter is that it’s only about 2 miles from our house. But because of the way the subway is set up (mostly to go from the boroughs into Manhattan) *plus* the Gowanus Canal, which only has a few bridges over it, it’s really been a puzzle to figure out the best way to get from here to there and back again.

There is a city bus that gets us pretty close. But on that route the buses only run every half hour or so and if you miss it you’re sunk. There’s also a really complicated way to take the subway which involves switching trains in the most labor-intensive way: getting off the train, going up to the street and walking 2 blocks to a different train station. That’s about 200 stairs just to get him home in the afternoons.

Just this week we’ve reluctantly concluded that the best way to get him home in the afternoons is to drive. I have a complicated relationship with the car (which will have to wait for another day to discuss, because there are cookies to be eaten and Lost to be watched!) so this sort of feels like failure to me. On the other hand, when we drive I don’t have to endure the “I’m too tired to walk” whining, nor the begging for a cookie from the bakery, granola bars from the newsstand, or a hot dog from the cart.

Also this week, I’ve realized that the bus in the mornings is really kinda nice. It’s usually lovely and quiet on the way home (and sometimes on the way there, too). The route goes through some beautiful and interesting neighborhoods, and is slightly different each way (because the bridges over the canal are only one-way). And, even though it takes about 100 minutes total, it’s really not an unpleasant way to start the day.

Here’s a small sampling of what I saw on my bus ride this morning:

– 2 (maybe 3?) pieces of art by Swoon, 1 (2?) ripped, 1 not
– lots of trees in various fall colors
– a beautiful Carnegie-era branch library
– the South Brooklyn Casket Co.
– innumerable gorgeous brick townhouses and brownstones
– innumerable new condos being built, many ugly
– two giant inflated pumpkin/ghost Halloween decorations
– a small sailboat named Fat Cat
– fresh red graffiti that reads “i love you callie”
– a curious small awning with an art-deco-ish logo for Milso Industries
– a beautiful wild-and-hippy-looking community garden
– one of our favorite date night restaurants
– a store in the poshest part of the bus route called Classy Nails (would its opposite be Tacky Ho Nails?)
– the highest elevated section of subway track in the entire city

he could eat you with a fork and spoon

maura @ 10:55 pm

I am completely in love with my new librarytastic life, but I must admit that there are a few things I miss about my old job:

1. a paycheck
2. my coworkers
3. the (relatively) inexpensive + easy-to-obtain health + life insurance for me + my family

So we applied for life insurance recently. We filled out the forms and answered invasive questions over the phone and were told we would need to give blood and urine samples. I was expecting to have to go to a lab to donate my fluids but the other day we got a call that no, a nurse would come to us.

This set off a huge paranoia fest in my brain. I mean, who’s to say that the nurse who takes our blood + pee is REALLY affiliated with the insurance company? How do we know it’s not just someone walking in off the street (albeit with all the right equipment and paperwork)? Clearly I have watched one too many X-Files episodes or something*, but the whole thing just seems really really weird to me.

ANYway, today the nurse came. She was 3 hrs. late, so I really REALLY had to pee by the time she got here. I had to pee in a cup and pour it into two little vials. We had to take the trash out right then and there because we could totally see Gus saying “what’s that little cup for?” and reaching in to grab it. The nurse was not a good phlebotomist and now I have a bruise.

And I still don’t understand why they couldn’t have just sent us to a lab.

* Jonathan says I should mention “something about clones and doppelgangers and whatnot”, so I am. You know, how they could make those things of me with the blood samples.

every day is halloween

maura @ 8:29 pm

Let’s start off the month with a Halloweeny post, shall we? With a crunchy link-rich coating! Mmmmmmmmm.

1. You will laugh and laugh at the easiest costume evar.

2. Those fine folks at Penny Arcade have some incredibly cute pictures of their kids dressed as video game characters (scroll down for pictures). Only a NERD would do that! Oh, wait…

3. Gus went as a skeleton. While it was just a normal skeleton costume, he did go around screaming and trying to bite our heads*, just like the ReDead in Wind Waker, the video game we were all obsessed with recently. I think they are really mummies, but he likes to think they are skeletons.

* As far as enemies go, the ReDead are kind of annoying. They scream real loud which momentarily paralyzes Link, then they bite his head. He doesn’t take much damage, and they’re easy enough to run around, leaving one to think what is the point of them anyway?

4. We only trick-or-treated on about 4 sparsely-bepumpkined blocks in our ‘hood, but somehow Gus really did come away with much more candy than last year**. GOOD candy, too, tons of chocolate and only a few weirdly-flavored lollipops. Jonathan and I regaled him with stories about how when we were little, we only got ONE tootsie roll (or equivalent) from each house. (As we trick-or-treated in the snow! Uphill! With no shoes!)

** About a month ago, out of nowhere Gus said to me “Mommy, I’m going to need a bigger bag for Halloween this year, because we will need to go to more houses because I am bigger and I need more candy.” Full justification, who could argue with that?

5. And of course, after making such a big deal out of the whole sugar-dusted chocolate-coated day, Gus is now hoarding his candy. He refused to eat any of it today! More for the sneaky parents, I say.

P.S. NOT that I am doing this NaBloPoMo thang for potential prizes or anything, but would that I DO win something, I’d love it to be one of these swell shirts. How sweet would it be to have a hand-embroidered “N is for nerd” shirt?! Or maybe “L is for librarian”. Dude.

pop quiz

maura @ 7:32 pm

You’re so busy you can barely keep up with your leisure blog reading (much less your daily library fix, which grows larger every day because, as you may have guessed, librarians write a LOT) and the house is a sty and you need new clothes and to get the car inspected and you need to pick your classes because registration is coming up and your kid still won’t let you drop him off in the schoolyard so you have to go up to the classroom with him and read one book (just recently down from two!) and you just started an internship in an academic library and said kid needs winter pajamas and rain boots and…

Quick! Assuming this is you, what should you do for the month of November? (Besides vote, duh.)

NaBloPoMo, of course!

Those fine people at fussy have spun that crazy dealie where you write a whole book in a month (insanity!) into something more blogriffic. Who says I can’t post on this blog-of-small-readership every day for 30 days? Who says it???

Well, I might say it. But the more I think about it, the more I could use a little pants-on-fire-ness in my writing life. Some practice for my future, which will likely include publication requirements (though admittedly less bloggy and more scholarly, I bet).

EDITED 10/24/06 to swap out the blog or die image for the Yoda one, because it’s less jarring. Down with jars!

i’ve got a feeling

maura @ 9:55 pm

I just got a spam with the subject line “betterment certification.” Sounds great — sign me up!

So the other day Jonathan was listening to the Buffy musical episode and now I just cannot get that damn music out of my head! It is hard to read about cataloging while you are hearing Anya singing about bunnies.

(Or maybe it is just hard to read about cataloging. Strange, you’d think I’d be all over that, what with the OCD tendencies to organize everything on the planet.)

what’s happening at my house right now

maura @ 4:59 pm

Gus is sitting on Jonathan’s lap, staring at J’s ludicrously large new iMac screen, listening to the creepy woman’s voice in text to speech read a page on a site about how to beat all the bosses in Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker on the Nintendo.

It’s just slightly surreal. Plus Jonathan just said to me: “We’re going to need a bigger quiver.” Not something you hear every day.

And what are you doing?

i’m the last splash

maura @ 8:28 pm

If there is one thing I would gladly outsource lately it is bedtime. The whining! The procrastinating! The desperate attempts to trap us with convoluted, exhausted almost-5-yr-old logic: “Just wait ONE second! I have something to tell you.” (Okay, Gus, tell me.) “Now, do you want me to get REALLY angry? Because I will!” (delivered in a nearly hysterical sob). Plus there is the suddenly starving situation, which magically appears at zero minutes regardless of the fact that food was offered at the ten minute mark. And if someone can please explain to me why the person who is asking for five more minutes of video games is magically too tired to brush his teeth?

Truly, we are all ready for bed by the end of it. The only good thing is that he is so tired that he passes out in 5 minutes, which is a bonus for us since we still lie down with him until he is asleep, because we are suckahs.

Time for Veronica Mars, prerecorded (and commercial-free!) for our pleasure. Wahoo!

no time for music these days

maura @ 8:30 pm

Not to whine, but the season premiere of Veronica Mars last night was, well, eh. I mean, I get the whole last season was confusing, let’s just start with monster of the week eps thing, but there has to be SOMEthing there for us veterans. And why was there so little Logan? Yay for Mac making the credits, though. I guess we will wait and see how the season pans out.

Ahhh, premiere week! Damn you, television, with your suddenly goodness! My leisure reading, not to mention well restedness, has suffered for it.

And while I’m (not) whining, last night we watched live TV, what a mistake! SO many commercials, practically every 2 seconds. And they are never long enough to get up and do anything, so of course you end up watching them. From now on we are strictly a prerecorded TV household, and we’ll watch only while sitting in our rocking chairs on the screen porch cradling shotguns yelling “get offa my lawn, you kids!”

And in other news, three weeks til Halloween! We have already gotten out the Halloween dishtowels here in Casa Smiller. What, you say you don’t have any Halloween dishtowels? Poor you. Ours are witchy and ghosty and cool, and they make me very happy.

house, in the house

maura @ 9:18 pm

It is incredibly weird to me that it’s only been a month since I finished working. My days are so completely, entirely, starkly different now. Like Gus*, I’ve not had the easiest time finding my new groove. I guess when you work the same schedule for three years that groove gets worn pretty deep, and it’s harder than I thought to jump into a new one. I wrote out a very insanely OCD schedule for myself because I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be doing all the time yet, and that seems to be helping.

* Actually, Gus is doing really well at school, remarkably so given the circumstances of his transition. His teacher and classmates are great, and he seems happy to be there. But he’s still giving us that old transition-phobic pissy attitude at home which, while completely understandable, is frustrating nonetheless.

So we’ve been watching season 1 of House lately, and I’m fairly ambivalent about it. On the one hand, it’s enjoyable enough: I’m very medical-friendly (I’ve seriously contemplated going to medical school several times) so that part is fun, and Hugh Laurie is a good guy. But part of me is kind of annoyed by the whole thing, because it’s not THAT good of a show. And now we are interested, paying attention, invested, hooked. And the real shows that we do watch (Veronica Mars, Battlestar Galactica, Lost) will be starting up again next week which will probably take up all the spare time we have. But I will be tempted to watch House too, and will stay up too late and will be tired and grumpy. Grrr. If only I’d had the restraint to space out that Veronica Mars marathon over the summer, damn me!

The theme song for House is this slow instrumental sort of rap-like (rappy? rappish? rappesque?) keyboard and drums thing, fairly benign (like a tumor! get it?). But Jonathan’s taken to inventing his own words for the song every time we watch. Of course I can’t remember any of his hilarious lyrics right now, but maybe they are only hilarious to us, anyway.

take a nap, take a nap

maura @ 9:39 pm

Is it even possible to write for a long time on the visor? I am out of non-library things to read on the way home from class tonight (and too tired too read school stuff) so I guess I will find out. Certain letters are even faster than my handwriting, which is often crabbed and illegible, even to me. But mostly it is slow.

So I’m partying like it’s 1999 here recently. I wanted a lightweight & portable word processing solution for taking notes etc. so I got an old visor pda & targus folding keyboard from ebay.

It’s been interesting having a pda again. Before Gus was born I completely relied on my pilot for keeping track of appointments. But when I cut my hours after I found that I didn’t use the pilot as much, so I sold it on ebay (har).

Now I am not quite sure what to use it for, beyond taking notes at libraries. I never used the to do list before, but it might come in handy for homework. And the appt. function is useful for remembering to move the car, go to a meeting @ Gus’ school, etc.

But damn, without the keyboard it is SLOW. Elapsed time for this entry = approx 20 min.