Friday, May 30, 2008

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Officially Official

Last night, Christian and I decided to begin the process of adopting a newborn. Hand-holding and calming words will be much appreciated. Oh, and advice. We need lots of that. And, oh yeah.

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

And it will make me rich, and then I'll retire, and then...

Stupid yarn barf.


















Someday, I shall invent the first perfect center-pull ball to be commercially wound, and all knitters shall revere me as their yarn queen and will organize a parade for me and all the floats will be made of hand spun alpaca and I'll have the prettiest queenly gown made of cashmere and I'll wear a crown of circular needles plated in platinum.   I shall be so very, very pretty.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Close Calls

There are times that living in the city and commuting to two jobs makes me think that I'm not going to live to 40.  Yet another close call today, this time while turning left onto my near cross-street.  The wretched stoplight at which I turn doesn't have a turn signal, so I was waiting in the intersection at a green light.  When the light turned yellow, two people ran it, so I had to wait until the light turned red, as one can legally do when already in the intersection to turn.  I started to turn, and a large Lexus pulled out from the car turning left opposite me and tried to run the red light.  He swerved just in time and only avoided hitting me full on by about an inch.  He, of course, pulled over on the side of the road to check his car after his swerve had forced him to turn (I could see him in the rear view mirror), but he didn't even bother to look and see if I was OK.  Wanker.  I'm going to hurl.

Friday, May 09, 2008

The Key to World Peace

There are those who say that, to achieve world peace, we'd merely have to put all the warring leaders in one room to have afternoon tea. The key is apparently not tea, however, but walnuts. Observe:
















These two have never been what you'd call enemies, but they certainly weren't above taking a swipe at the other's toes when they each had a half of the divided cage and one would walk across the roof of the other's side, and they certainly never seemed fond of each other. We started to catch a glimpse of the power of food in peacemaking scenarios when, one evening, Christian was lying on the bird room floor eating cereal, and each of the birds came down from their respective cages for a bite, and were polite yet distant with each other. However, this is unprecedented. Harmoniousness through food. It's the means to the end of all wars. And I shall provide the walnuts.

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Hey, you, in the front row...

Yeah, you, the ass-clown in jeans and a t-shirt sitting right in front of me. Do you see what's going on around you? Have you noticed that a large group of people have congregated on stage but have stopped singing and are, oddly, bending at the waist repeatedly in the direction of the audience while making gestures of heartfelt thanks and gratitude? Do you notice that the people seated around you are (hopefully) doing something vigorous with their hands? Yes, they're repeatedly bringing them rapidly together to produce a sound commonly known as a clap, usually used in polite society to express appreciation and respect for job well done. But you're not clapping. Did you not find that we all did a good job? By your slouched posture and back visibly turned towards the stage, I can only assume that you found something lacking in the evening's festivities and feel the need to show your displeasure by behaving in a fashion more suited to a small child recently denied a new toy from the vending machine at Safeway than an adult man who can obviously afford the best seats in the house but just as obviously cannot grasp how to show even the smallest modicum of gratitude for those who just worked their collective asses off to entertain you on this dreary Wednesday evening when they could have been home knitting. Were you dragged here against your will? Did the woman sitting one row behind you to whom you just directed a comment obviously offensive enough to cause her to adamantly shush you with both hands trick you into thinking that you were, in fact, going out for a night on the town with the boys to Dirty Dick's Tavern and One-Stop STD Shop to watch naked Jell-o wrestling while baseball/Nascar/bass-fishing played on the big screen TV behind you and scantily clad toothless waitresses served you $0.99 pitchers of Michelob, only to then have said woman, who must have been driving, turn the corner onto Mercer instead and say, "Oh well, since we're here, we may as well go to the opera?" Well, then I applaud you for making such a brave statement against the oppression of her and opera and all they stand for by putting on your baseball hat before the soprano even made it to the stage and casting around behind and around you for enough audience members who were also rude enough to try and flee before the house lights were brought up to obscure you in your escape attempt, using their great and equally insulting numbers to hide you in their midst. And for you, sir, and those other people, while I appreciate that, at a monster truck rally, your ticket buys you the whole seat but you only need the edge, a ticket for the opera buys you the whole seat because you need the whole plush, endowed, reclining $300 a show seat. Why do I need the entire seat, you ask, in a seemingly innocent manner? So your bourgeois and/or tornado bait buttocks will have a comfy place to repose while you show due deference to the people on stage who have just done what you could never do, even if you were stapled to Joan Sutherland's ass. Go buy a button down shirt, you Bud Light swilling, Camel smoking, Chevy-driving, gun-owning, refuse blanc dill hole who probably doesn't tip in restaurants or bring his wife to orgasm, either.

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Gnash gnash, rend rend

I rescheduled my dentist appointment twice as I felt terrible and I just couldn't bring myself to go get scraped with sinuses that felt like they had been filled with lye, and I was punished for it.  I have my very first cavity.  Ever.  Ever ever.  V. depressed.  Thank God my dentist is so good-looking or I'd deeply resent his news.

Sunday, May 04, 2008

Astonishing Things

As singing in the chorus is a job, most of the time it's pretty, well, jobbish, job-like, jobesque.  However, there have been one or two times when I realized that, next to being a soloist, it's the coolest job ever.  Tonight, when Larry Brownlee was singing, I really loved my job.  And when he sang the "F" in his final aria, and a woman in the front row had to wipe away tears, I really couldn't imagine being anywhere else.  And I didn't want to set John Relyea's hair in hot rollers, or anything.  Nope, I didn't.  I would never think such things.  And I didn't tell him, or anything.  That might have been creepy.  He just didn't look enough like a Musketeer.