cookies are an all-the-time food

Many a well-meaning... well-meaner has said, semi-helpfully, "You THINK you like Ithaca, but wait until you see it in the winter!" And then laughed a knowing har-har and flicked a glance of pure evil over their shoulders as they swished their swishy capes and swished off to make more dire predictions.

Well, I'm here to tell you: It is 4:19 p.m. on my first full day here. It is as dark as midnight. I am in J's apartment, sitting at his desk in the circle of light from one little lamp. I took a shower two hours ago and I'm trying to motivate myself to stop eating oatmeal cookies (note to Shannon: are these the best cookies ever or what) and leave the apartment for the first time today.

But did I mention it is dark? And also that it is raining -- RAINING, because NPR tells me it is 47 degrees outside, and what is up with this rain, it is supposed to SNOW here because it is supposed to be COLD. Not that I would really be appreciating the coldness, however, given the aforementioned inability to leave the apartment.
I think we're heading for the movies tomorrow night for the third year of our "we're Jewish! let's go to the movies on Christmas Eve!" tradition, and I'm only semi-determined to have gone outside before then.

This darkness thing -- yeah, it's a little harder to love than the Ithaca summer with its farmers' market and its pretty waterfalls and its hippies in their sundresses. But you know what is also hard to love? DC in August. Or July, or September. So I'm reserving judgement; check back in 11 days for the final verdict.

over the river and through the... crafts...

(Through the crafts? What the hell? That song has been stuck in my head all day for no discernable reason. I would like to discern one now, please, and make it go away.)

Anyway, crafts, yes. I discovered Craftster this week, and I am so completely hooked. I want to make everything, EVERYTHING, on that site, including embroidered pillowcases. I have two embroidered pillowcases that my parents got as a wedding gift that I adore. I mean, look at this. How creative and arty is that, and how much fun would it be to make it? Despite the fact that I never like fussy projects, and a project involving tiny needles making tiny stitches in tiny patterns is probably fussier than anything I've ever tried?

The new Craftster fixation actually dovetails nicely with my existing Etsy fixation -- I can admire the stuff of alread-crafty people and then daydream about my own crafty things, like making sketchbooks out of recycled paper and a Luna Lovegood iron-on transfer. And I think it is only a matter of time until I give in and admit that I really want to learn to sew. And some mysterious day in the future, endless supplies of time and money will fall like manna from the heavens, and I will indulge all this stuff.

hallowhat?

It may be that Halloween only has a purpose if you either a) have adorable children who want to dress up in cute costumes or b) want to be a sexy nurse/cat/pirate/antelope/whatever and pick up similarly dressed strangers at bars. (In 2000 or 2001, I was hit on -- so my friends said, let me assure you that I didn't catch on -- by a very drunk man dressed as a very drunk nun at a bar on Halloween. Ah, good times.)

I actually forgot that the actual trick-or-treating portion of the holiday was yesterday until I saw one of my coworkers wearing a psychotic red wig. I ate two mini-KitKats. I went to yoga. We had a handful of trick-or-treaters. It was anticlimatic. But recovery starts now: I'm going to bake these to make up for it. And... yes, that's it, but they sound really delicious...

30 for 30 (goats)

Too bad I didn't make one of my goals to take 30 photos of goats, or else I'd totally be there:


I promise, I'm done now.

so many people in my suitcase heart

I've been told -- and it makes sense -- that your 30s are so much better your 20s; you're more settled, more stable, you have a clearer idea of what you want even if you're not sure exactly how to go about getting it. You're more grounded. You know how to deal with yourself better. I'm not sure if any of that is true yet, but it makes sense, and it holds true for my early 20s vs. my late 20s. And at the risk of tempting fate: So far, 30 is so, so good.

I spent the last hour trying to figure out how to express how wonderful my 30th birthday has been. Fancy brunch and a musical with my family; a weekend trip to Charleston with J.; an incredible and thoughtful and amazing surprise party; another surprise trip still to come next weekend. Words aren't cutting it.

A birthday's not a birthday without a goat.

Or hanging moss.

Or parasailing (photo by J.)

Or sunsets on Folly Beach.

Or giant Dora balloons.

But without being able to show you the faces of the people who made everything this way, I can't even begin to explain what they mean to me and how loved they've made me feel in the last few weeks. So I apologize: These limp words fall so far short of what I want to say.

This pig wants you to know he's happy too, and also thankful for the corn and stuff.

it's a great big universe...

... and we're all really puny, in the immortal words of the Animaniacs, but donating to this actually made me feel like I was part of something pretty huge and pretty great. And this kind of brought tears to my eyes. And the list of prizes kind of made me drool. (Have you seen the Embittermints? Ha.)

fall stories

Pretty lake in New York, near where J. and I went camping this weekend. It was fun and lovely and cold, but not too cold.

Pre-camping, we went to Storm King, which is an amazing outdoor sculpture museum. For scale, I am sitting at the base of that sculpture. Big, yes?

Post-camping, we went to Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome. Also amazing. For scale, that is a tiny plane very far up in the sky. Small, no?

And, for the opening 30 for 30 goal, we have the first entry for #18. Behold, rust:

how to fix an american quilt

My bed, with new Ikea bedspread. Not pictured: the quilt in question.

Slowly, apparently. I took my favorite quilt -- the one Angie's grandmother made -- to a cute little quilt shop staffed by cute little women. Some of the squares need to be replaced, but the binding and backing are OK, so shouldn't be a big deal.

Like all the other idiots in the world, though, I stuck the quilt in my closet in April, when it got warm, and left it there until the first cold night last week. All the other idiots and I think, "Hey, time to fix the quilts!"

End result: I'm waiting two weeks just for an estimate, and then probably until Christmas to get my repaired quilt back. I will be a cold, cold idiot until then.

In the spirit of... something to do with that story, I'm thinking about a little "30 for 30" plan -- 30 goals for my 30th year. (Technically my 31st year, but the year after my 30th birthday, whatever.) So far I have stuff like "knit one item that is not a blanket, hat or scarf" and "go for a 15-mile bike ride." I'm looking for self-contained, definitively achievable things, like items you can put a date on and say you've completed, not big things like "set more goals" (ha) or "don't be an idiot." Suggestions?

why god invented the internet

Blogs and online dating and all the Doonesbury comics you want... great, fine. But the Internet's one real true purpose is to share things like this and this.

the farms that made it through the last days of the century

So, my visit to the New York State Fair really, really, really made me want a goat or two or seventeen. Did you know goats don't really eat tin cans, contrary to my very extensive previous knowledge of goats? It consisted of a children's book I had when I was little, and I thought it was a reliable source, but apparently not. Goats are actually very particular eaters; they might LICK tin cans for the salt and what have you, but they would never actually eat one.

I would like a goat, please and thank you. But they are social animals and do not thrive alone, so I actually need two. Or, you know, seventeen.

OK, that's all.

(Speaking of the end of the summer, did this photo ever give me a lump in my throat. I just saw her yesterday, and we drew pictures and played games and read books and it was just like it usually is... but already with that backpack she looks so grown up, and I remember her when she was a tiny newborn, and oh my gosh.)

medium rare, with a side of condescension and some idiot sauce on top

"I mean, a woman who is really enjoying life, who doesn't withhold anything from herself, a woman who recognizes what she wants and takes it? To quote Posh, that's major. But the assumption that women are only trading one feeble attempt at attracting men (deprivation in order to be or stay thin) for another one (circumventing former vegetarianism in order to get a date) is just fucking sexist bullshit."

I have long had a blog-crush on Weetabix, and this post from her paid gig at Elastic Waist made me love her even more. It's based on a stupid, stupid, stupid article from the New York Times that I'd seen on my own last week and quietly fumed about, because it's all about women overthinking everything and contorting themselves in yet another way to make themselves attractive to men, and men judging women on some ridiculous crap that means nothing, and women doing a right-back-atcha move on the men. (The walkaway quote in this story made me want to stab myself in the eye. I was thisclose to getting away with feeling all superior about how no self-respecting woman would ever judge a man that way, and then... yeah. Thanks, Brice, freelance design writer.)

The way the article was written infuriated me too. And the Internet dating angle. And that weird undertone about sex that's in there also, about what women want and how they get it, and aarghghgh I'm so irritated. This has totally, like, harshed my Wednesday-night post-yoga buzz, man. Read this.

remember when he burned his hand?

I just finished reading Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously. The author embarks on a project to cook all of the recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year; she's funny and likeable and a bit of a disaster, and reminds me enough of Elizabeth Gilbert (whom Julie apparently knows and thanks in the acknowledgements) that I wonder if they've started a new genre: self-deprecating memoirs of entirely relatable people taking on some kind of structured project to help them through a rough time.

She's probably someone I would like in real life anyway, and then I found her Powell's interview. When asked which fictional character she would like to date, she comes up with... Johnny Tremain. Ha. What a great answer. I think my sixth-grade self would have totally backed her up on that one.

count the verbs: an interactive text adventure*

I rue the day I accepted this project. I rue, I ruefully rue.

I'm rueing and rueing, and I'm waiting for the next episode of Top Chef to download from my iTunes account (more procrastinating! see, still looking at the screen! it counts!). I'm thinking about what to have for dinner. I'm feeling chilly and over-air-conditioned. I'm wishing two weeks would go by faster and I'm liking this quote:

Grace is when something is more beautiful than we deserve, more elegant and lovely than it should be.

-Ayelet Waldman

*You can count "rue" as many times as you want. Like, 45 billion times. There aren't enough numbers in the world to truly express all the rueing I'm doing.

hiatus from the hiatus

Suddenly, I sort of miss blogging. I believe this attack has been brought on by a massive freelance project I have stupidly undertaken... it is so truly massive, so overwhelmingly time-consuming, that I am desperately casting about for something that lets me tell myself I'm working (i.e., facing a computer) but can use to sneak furtive breaks in the actual work. Plus maybe I missed you.

I will add the link list soon, I know you are waiting with bated breath. Be back in a flash.

a story, by the fruit of the genius tree

The scene: J.'s backyard, during his going-away party. Gaby, Shannon, Ernie and I are sitting lined up in a row, and Gaby (age 4 1/2) is dishing on the latest from school.

Gaby: Bobby is my boyfriend. I am his girlfriend. I love him best and he loves me best.

[a few minutes later]

Shannon: Tell us what happened in school.
Gaby: Well, Bobby and I were playing kitty. And then he didn't want to play kitty no more, but I really wanted him to play kitty. I tried everything. I tried giving him a sticker. Didn't work. I tried giving him a hug. Didn't work. I tried telling him the truth. Didn't work. I tried everything! Didn't work. Then Nathan came and he didn't want to play kitty either. Bobby wanted to play Dragonball [I thought she was saying "Dragon Mom," which sounds better] and I did not want to play that. Nathan wanted to play ice cream store and I did not want to play that. It was very hard.

[some sort of tangent about heart-shaped leaves]

Me: So what happened with Nathan and Bobby?
Gaby: We played kitty.

And... scene.

How great is that. I love that kid so, so much, and I really needed some nice distraction from answering the 43rd person who asked me why I wasn't moving to Ith*ca with J. I am so not who I want to be in this situation... I want to be cool and calm and collected. Or, I'd settle for brittle and funny. (At various points during the day, Shannon and Alissa and I came up with quite a few good suggestions for what I COULD say, such as “I wanted to go to Ith*ca, but J says he needs me here to continue prostituting myself, to pay for his Ph.D.” Better, right?)

Anyway. Am not calm, cool or collected. Although I never really am any of those things, so I guess it's unreasonable to expect myself to be them now, under duress. Damn it. I need a sticker.

meme-ory, all alone in the moooooonlight

Aw, Angie tagged me! Hm, six weird things about me...

1. I have webbed toes. Just a little webby web between the second and third toes, higher up on my right side than my left. Tante used to sing, "This little piggie went to market, these two little piggies stayed home together and ate roast beef..." when I was a baby. I*n R*ppke was the only other person I've met with the same thing (besides my father, hence the genetic connection, although none of my first cousins have it).

2. I can't procrastinate. Not on big things, anyway -- they hang over my head and make me crazy, and it's easier just to do them than to worry about them. If I were in graduate school, I would be insane.

3. I am unable to walk down the street without petting every pettable dog in my path. It's a little bit of a compulsion, actually, and something that will probably get a hand bitten off some day.

4. I don't like James Bond movies. They are boring. Sorry.

5. I love vegetarian hot dogs. And I do not know another soul who finds them acceptable as food.

6. I'm unable to throw away books. I have trouble even giving them away, actually... I just saw the stack of 14 gigantic boxes full of them in my parents' basement this weekend and was terrified anew at someday having to figure out where to put them all.

postcards from new mexico

Last weekend, J. and I went to New Mexico for some of his family stuff. We went for a hike near his cousin's house. Look, it is the desert!

But there were more deciduous trees and fewer giant cacti wearing sombreros than I anticipated. It is definitely spring there.

A fence. Not pictured: The Rio Grande river, because it was really glarey. But we saw it.

Black and white = I M R-tistic.

These are the Dr. Seuss guys, no?

The next day, we visited Santa Fe, where we went into a store with this amusing barbeque sauce. The sauce helped me feel less bad about the delicious pork-filled tamales we ate on the street a few minutes later. I am not a vegetarian when the spirit of "cultural exploration" strikes, no sir.

We went to St. Francis Cathedral, right in the center of town. Outside it is a statue of the first Native American woman to become a saint, Kateri Tekakwitha.

Pretty votive candles in the church.

Santa Fe was really lovely. For all you "Rent" lovers: We did not open up a restaurant there, but the song was in my head all day.

missed connections

There's a sign in the locker room at the gym threatening to punish people who don't pay a monthly fee for a locker and then leave a lock on one anyway. Or something like that, I'm not sure; living across the street from your gym allows you not to need a locker and therefore exempts you from paying attention to signs like that.

But anyway, the sign:

Clean out your locker blah blah something WE WILL CUT LOCKS.

Why do I always, every single time I see it, think it's talking about hair?

pretty pictures

Photos from Europe are here -- in under a month, this time! A low bar, but I have cleared it. Low expectations, baby.

I wish I were still in Europe. If that were the case, I wouldn't be going to work, which would mean I wouldn't have been trying to merge onto Rock Creek Parkway at 6:50 this morning, which would mean some woman wouldn't have whacked into me with her car and cracked my fender. No one was hurt, no big deal, but inconvenient and annoying. Only one reason to want to be across the ocean right now, but a pretty decent one.

up in the air, junior birdmen

(Five pretend bucks to anyone who can explain that song to me... who are the junior birdmen? Why are they up in the air, upside down?)

I am leaving for Europe in one (1) week. That is seven (7) days from now, but really not even that, because my flight leaves mid-afternoon, so it is actually less time than I thought. I had the urgent need to touch my passport today to prove that it still existed, because I didn't really remember bringing it back from Canadia. It still exists, and is good until Oct. 17, 2010, in case you were concerned.

We will be going to four (4) (is that annoying yet?) (it is annoying to me) cities in less than two (ha! not doing it anymore! i am free from its clutches) weeks. I don't really know anything about these cities, which seems like something I should correct. Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, in that order. Ideas welcome.