Here Comes The Sun, Little Darlin'

Everyone Plays

Last weekend, while simultaneously reclining and knitting, I watched The Bad News Bears on HBO. Boy, what a trip down memory lane. Sure, I was born the same year the film came out, and I don't think I ever actually saw it before Saturday. And sure, I wasn't a little leaguer (it was all about AYSO for me). But everything that wasn't plot-specific reminded me SO MUCH of my childhood (except for the racist 11-year-olds and the anti-semetic coach.). I'm pretty sure it was filmed in Southern California, but it could just as easily have been the non-descript, San Francisco Bay Area suburb in which I grew up. The ball fields, the snack shack, the banana seat bikes, the oh-so-1976 clothing (think very wide lapels and lots of plaid--not the good kind of plaid), the arcade, everything. It felt really good to watch and has left me with a lingering but definable feeling of nostalgia. More so than usual.

I think the only Bad News Bears movie I ever saw as a kid was The Bad News Bears Go To Japan. Brilliant stuff, even without drunken Walter Matthau.

And now I hear they're re-making the original movie? With Billy Bob Thornton as Buttermaker??? Hmmmmm.

He only drinks when he's sad.

Mmmmmmm, lunch. For your post-lunch viewing pleasure:



This is me enjoying the heck out of the M. Ward show last week.



Now, I'm not saying that I had too many beers, but this is pretty much how O'Farrell Street looked after the show.

Super sofa

As you can see, the kitties enjoy the new sofa. Pillowy arm rests and heated cushions make for feline happiness and marathon napping sessions.



It's funny because these two don't really get along all that well. You'd be hard pressed to find them napping in the same room, let alone on the same piece of furniture. This sofa brings out the best in all of us.

When I wasn't busy reclining this weekend (and even when I was), I was hard at work knitting (drum roll please) completed project #2: Arm Warmers!



Complete with ribbing on each end, and super professional tapering through the wrist, these lovely tubes 'o yarn will keep my arms and hands warm until summer quits slacking and finally get here. And they're functional too! The lack of finger tubes and the generously-sized thumb holes make everyday tasks like typing and channel surfing a breeze!



Many thanks to the D.I. Your Own Damn Self section of jejune.net for the inspiration.

When Fashion Attacks

I want one of those puffy down vests. The most recent incarnation of the puffy down vest was one of the many fashion trends to which I didn't catch on until about two years later and the article of clothing, or the color, or whatever, is much harder to find than in was when Target was selling it. Like the super super pointy-toed shoes. And hot pink highlights. And now the puffy down vest.

Fed up with eBay's outrageous puffy down vest prices, I turned to ye olde Craig's List, typed "down vest" in the search box, and got this:

I too seek someone who has stolen a car

Hi all

I and a few choice friends are planning on an interstate crime wave and need a getaway rig banks being tight as they are these days we planned on hitting casinos (they always have such nice buffets) with spring just around the corner I thought a convertible would be nice air conditioning a plus, perhaps in black as we're working on our gangster image also we'll be in need of some gats (prefer automatics) perhaps some of those nifty teflon tipped hot loads, ya know the ones that slip right through a bullet proof vest

can't wait to hear from you

I just wanted a warm torso and compfortably cool arms.

Welcome home, my pet

Oh, happy day! It's back! My lovely little laptop is back where it belongs--squarely in my possession. It was a lo-o-o-o-o-o-ong two weeks. Outfitted with a new power board, my shiny little plastic friend has been returned.

Oh, happy day for other reasons as well! Like manna from heaven, a sofa full of beauty has befallen upon me and graced my living room with comforty goodness. The furniture whence Max has begotten now adorns our humble abode and has settled ever so nicely into its rightly occupation: giant cat bed. I did see a wee black kitty climb out from underneath the sofa yesterday afternoon, having woken from a nice sleep, and it gave me pause: certainly the inner-workings of a recliner contain metal pieces and springs which are capable of lopping the head off of a wee black kitty, like so much a zucchini? O, cruel fate why have you cursed me with the sofa of divine comfort and ass-warming, a sofa which also yearns to decapitate my feline companion? Fie, I will choose if I must; the sofa stays.

These are a few of my favorite things

I have recently discovered that there are some things that I absolutely need. I'm not talking about food, shelter and clothing, I'm talking about wall-mounted goldfish pods and subversive cross stitch. Turbo-boosted pogo sticks. Stuff like that.

And, of course, photo paint-by-numbers. I mean, come on. I need many of these.

I would like to officially thank www.mightygoods.com for being the best shopping blog to which I have ever been addicted.

Happy. Birthday. Captain. Kirk.

Finally, I can play Has Been here in the office again and no one can stop me. It's been far too long. Let. Us. Celebrate. The. Birthday. Of. The. Shat. While. Reveling. In. His. Lyrical. Genius.

I feel it necessary that I apologize for laying the smack down on my mom yesterday on this very blog. She did nothing wrong by disposing of all those My Little Ponies, and probably even asked me first. I'm sure that the teenage recluse that I was at the time answered with a sneer-laced "Whatever," and that some very happy 10 year old began her very own love affair with those plastic horses...

And the seasons, they go round and round. And the painted ponies go up and down. We're captive on a carousel of time. We can't go back, we can only look behind from where we came, and go round and round and round in the circle game.

We can thank four years of summer camp in the Santa Cruz mountains for that little gem!



I. Love. My. Mother.

Crazy Mixed-Up World

We all know that some things that are fantastic on their own, and become even better when combined with other fantastic things to make one uber fantastic thing. Chocolate and cheese (or chocolate and peanut butter for you conventional types). Pizza and french fries. Jay Z and the Beatles (in some circles). This list goes on and on, and contains mostly food items.

From when I was about 8 till I was about 11, I loved, LOVED My Little Ponies. We're talking every cent of my allowance, every holiday that could possibly warrant a gift, involved ponies and pony outfits, pony accessories, pony playsets--to an extent, it probably got a bit out of hand. Lord I loved those ponies. Long ago, my mom re-appropriated those ponies to a needy, age-appropriate child, and someday I'll forgive her for that. But as an adult, when I first discovered e-Bay, I immediately bid on Moondancer--she was my favorite back in the day, a Chanukah gift in 1984 (I can still feel the joyful tremors when I think about opening that present...)--who now sits proudly among my snowglobes, protecting, monitoring, moon-dancing.

When I was in high school, I began to love Quentin Tarrantino movies. Not with the same ferocity that I had previously loved the ponies with the painted rear ends, but his films were my introduction into independent movies and films that addressed ideas and topics other that how to get a date and how to kill dinosaurs (also my introduction to Uma Thurman.). I loved the concept that non-mainstream ideas were available for not-quite-mass-consumption, but you could find them if you knew where to look for them (read, if you were cool. Like me. I was cool.).

This is, however, one case where the joining of 2 fantastic things does not exponentially increase the fantasticness. In fact, I am appalled:



Just say No to the Uma Thurman Kill Bill My Little Pony.

Lounge-o-matic update

For those of you who are just bursting with anticipation to hear about the new sofa, keep waiting. Delivery has been pushed back to Thursday. Upon learning this, many expletives rushed forward from my mouth. Many expletives.

It's OK--it's part of a balanced breakfast

Don't let anyone tell you I'm not a festive person. I began celebrating St. Patrick's Day at 6:30 am with a generous bowl of Lucky Charms--but not just any Lucky Charms. New CHOCOLATE Lucky Charms . Chocolate! I fell for that gimmick, hook, line, and sinker. But the marshmallows were all weird. If I remember correctly, an I believe I do, Lucky Charms always had marshmallows shaped like pink hearts, orange stars, yellow moons, green clovers, and blue diamonds. I watch enough cartoons to have seen the commercials for new marshmallows over the years; I'm fully aware of purple horseshoes and even red balloons. But these Chocolate Lucky Charms had none of the above mentioned original marshmallow shapes, save for a bastardized green clover (it was some weird sort of multi-colored, clover-inside-a-clover deal). No pink hearts (although there were pink lumps of some sort. Maybe they were supposed to be hearts. I don't know.). No orange stars. No yellow moons. No blue diamonds. I was, and am, thoroughly disappointed. I'll have to do some scientific research to see if this marshmallow epidemic has infiltrated regular lucky charms as well.

I don't even like the marshmallows in marshmallow cereals. The have the consistency of chalk when I bite on them, so I suck all of the sugary goodness out of them instead. But I couldn't resist the chocolate factor, and, well, it is St. Patrick's Day. Normally, when I need to satisfy my need for sugary cereal, I go straight for the Cocoa Puffs. I am, one could say, coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs.

Of course, these cereals were never allowed in our home when I was a child. My mom's favorite rule: "If one of the first three ingredients is sugar, you can't have it." She might as well have said we couldn't have it if one of the first three ingredients was "fun." Thank goodness for Cheerios. But my mom totally put her money where her mouth was, and regularly ground up fresh walnuts and mixed them with honey to put on our cereal, and voila: home made honey-nut Cheerios. Let's see that stupid cartoon bee do that.

Hit my car, please.

Last night I was rear-ended. Again. This is the thrid time in two years that I have been hit, and at this rate, I'll soon be able to make a CD of the songs that were playing on my stereo each time I've been hit in this car.

The first time, April 2003: "Ramblin' Boy" by Kinky Friedman.
The second time, October 2004: "It's All Right to Cry" by Rosie Grier.
The third time, March 2005: "Hoist That Rag" by Tom Waits.

From the looks of it, it's going to be a pretty good CD!

Oddly, and fortunately, it appears that little to no damage was done to my car or to my person. And it's no wonder I continually get rear-ended:



Thankfully, the dogs were at home with Max. I was picking my folks up at the airport and the dogs wanted to stay home and help Max play Rocky on the X-Box. They're good helper dogs.

Where can I get an after-market sun roof for my sofa?

The bad news: the dang sofa wouldn't fit through our apparently terribly narrow stairway up to the living room (or, as I call it, room of loaf.). So the super duper reclining sofa had to be returned. Sunday morning around 11, I was NOT loving it at Levitz. And Levitz can't stand to be unloved, so it got on its knees and begged for one more chance to make everything right.

And I have given it that chance.

The sofa that is supposed to be delivered this Sunday is the Escalade of sofas. Dual recliner? Well, duh. Triple-thick royal blue chenille? Aw, yeah. Remote controlled dual massage? Rolling and shiatsu. Ass-warmers? You betcha. I'm not fooling--the thing's got cup holders and storage consoles. I'm going to embroider racing stripes on it. And this one comes apart into three stairway-compatible pieces.

Unless Levitz screws this one up, too, pictures will be available next week. Please try to contain your excitement.

Hey! Ho! Let's Go!

Let me just say, hooray for the Ramones. Thier lightning-quick beat, 3-chord melodies and barely intelligible lyrics make me so excited about everything, I just want to jump up and down. The weather is GORGEOUS, our new sofa is being delivered this weekend (our new greenish-grey, dual-reclining sofa, mind you), and hey, it's Friday. You just can't beat that. Friday feels nice.

I wore these earrings today in honor of M. who is into dangly earrings these days.

"You want me to put my hand where?!"

I've decided I'm going to start doing that super cool blogger thing where instead of saying people's names, I'll just use their first initials. Because the people I know are so important that their privacy could be destroyed by being mentioned by name on my uber popular blog. Right. To be sure, I probably shouldn't have mentioned M.'s first, middle and last names on my post the other day (heh heh, oops. sorry 'bout that, M.). But then again, I suppose I do a lot of stuff I shouldn't do, and on a surprisingly regular basis, too ( I own 2 ponchos purchased within the last 12 months...and Max warned me about both of them.).

But there's one person who doesn't need to be cloaked by a dumb initial shield-my Mom! Neat how that worked out. Well, she sends me all kinds of emails, but this has to be the crowning jewel of the bunch.



I love my Mom.

Is my inner child having fun yet?

It seems strange to me that an obscure icon of my childhood is anything more than that. I'm not talking about commercially advocated and mass-produced toys or images or pop culture. As far as I'm concerned, My Little Pony, Hyper-Colors T-shirts, and Strawberry Shortcake cereal belong to everybody (especially now that many of us have kids of our own, and the toys of our youth have made quite a come back... but that's a different story entirely.). When some random combination of sights and sounds forms a memorable blip in my emotional and social development, it usually ends up being a fairly personal and introspective affair. Example: when I was a kid (young enough--and lucky enough--to have no real concept of global affairs outside of general poverty and historical wars), the US government held the Iran-Contra hearings. "Iran" and "Contra" were words I would only hear on the car radio when my devoted mother was driving the carpool, or driving me to Hebrew school, or soccer practice, or the orthodontist, or piano lessons...you get the idea. But I would also hear "Contra" on the car radio in the context of Contra-Costa County (a county in the East San Francisco Bay Area, as in "Traffic is moving slowly in Contra-Costa County as you make you way toward the Bay Bridge...I'm John McIntyre in the KGO skycopter--traffic and weather together every ten minutes on the eights."). Slowly but surely, my juvenile brain melded these two contra terms together, and before I knew what was happening, I was convinced that some sort of guerilla-terrorist-hijackers from the east bay were coming to kill us all.

But the thing that's getting me today is the Western Exterminator logo. There's a Western Exterminator building in Burlingame off of highway 101, and it has this huge cartoon-ish statue on top of a man staring down rat, and the man is holding a large mallet behind his back. In my young mind, not yet corrupted by marketing and advertising, I would gleefully exclaim "Popeye!" every time we drove by the building.



Apparently, to me, every cartoon man was Popeye. I know, I know, I was absolutely precious. The disturbing part is this: Popeye does not belong to me--far from it. He has a web page explaining his history, he was a mascot for a Van Halen tour, he even appeared in a Zippy the Pinhead strip (which is actually pretty neat). I know it's not as if some rebel fighters in in South America started calling themselves the Iran-Contra-Costas, but it makes the connection I've had with Popeye all these years a bit less intimate than it had been. Fortunately, I drive right by Popeye twice a day, five days a week. It shouldn't take long for us to rekindle our special bond, the kind of bond that only exist between a girl and her giant advertising statue.

This space for rent.

Today's post is brought to you by the letters M, E and H. No, not "meh," but Miriam Elizabeth Hanes (figure 1.), who requested this song. Miriam, I am going to strat charging you blog rent.


figure 1.

I boldly go places.

I'm feeling rather hopeful today. It must be the spring-like weather we had over the weekend. That, combined with learning new skills (knitting, touch-typing, and Hebrew classes) make me feel optimistic about my ability to adapt to our changing environment. This is an incredibly important ability, especially because I am, like, so getting old. Yesterday, I got so fed up with the loud and ridiculous "music" that was being blared in the hip n' cool section of Macy's that I had to leave--without purchasing anything. And when Max and I were at Safeway buying cheese and German beer to make Rachel Ray's 30 minute Cheese and German Beer Fondue, the cashier asked for Max's ID, while he said to me,"I don't need to see yours. You're old enough."

But I'm not bothered. Because I can adapt to my changing environment, as evidenced by my newly acquired knitting, touch-typing, and Hebrew-speaking skills.

Here's me looking optimistic:

Can I get a "whoop whoop"

My precious, precious hound dog Nanna is going to be fine. Her lumpy leg has turned out to be a pretty bad gracillis (thigh) muscle injury, from which she will soon make a full recovery. She gets to keep all of her legs, and she gets to start fetching that tennis ball again real soon. So let's give a collective "whoop whoop" for my girl, and throw in a couple of those Arsineo Hall arm-cranking maneuvers for good measure.

Special Delivery

This song is especially for Miriam. Cause she asked. Nicely.

Sea Ranch, underneath the water. Sea Ranch, at the bottom of the sea.

I just got my Lomo pictures back from the weekend before Valentine's Day which we spent at the Sea Ranch (known historically as the weekend Ozzy walked by at least three piles of horse poop and DIDN'T roll in any of them. He's a darn good dog.). It really seems like ages ago; so many things have happened since then. Not the least of which is my newly acquired knitting expretise.



The moody weather made for excellent Uno-playing opportunities. And what's more fun than a brightly colored card game where your boyfriend and your dad can conspire to cheat just so the game will end and they can go about their business? I can't say as I blame them--it was a rather long game of Uno. And everyone knew it was only a matter of time before I decimated them with my mad Uno skills.

And I dance, dance, dance...

Loopy Loo and the Lurid Lump

Nanna had biopsy number 2 yesterday. There's this imposing lump in her left thigh and we're trying to figure out whether it's an old muscle injury, or... well, something scarier than an old muscle injury. It's a long and involved process, full of specialists and words I can't readily pronounce (it's "gracillis" muscle, not "grazelda" muscle). But an entertaining side effect is watching poor Nanna when she's all hopped up on anesthetic. Just look at those eyes.



When she's in this state, it becomes imperative that we call her "Loopy Loo."

If your dog or cat ever needs a specialist, the good folks at San Francisco Veterinary Specialists are terrific. Warm staff, extremely knowledgeable and skilled in the ways of all things animal.

(Yes, I'm terribly concerned. No, I'm not going to panic until the pathology report comes back.)

Gimme Five

I'm going to see a band called OK Go this weekend at little club near my apartment. I've seen them twice before; once before they were more-or-less famous, and once right during or maybe just after they were more-or-less famous. By more-or-less famous, I mean that they had a major label release (it rocks, I tell you), and that I once saw one of their videos playing on the dozens of display TV's in the electronics department of Target. But now they seem to have faded back into the kind of relative and proper obscurity which allows real fans (me, of course) to see them play at little clubs near their apartments.

Anyway, the band recently acquired a new guitarist. And they convinced him to keep a tour blog. He has reported on everything form the bratwurst at the Milwaukee airport to a mighty fine bowl of borscht he had in Columbia, MO. But this is the very best. OK Go's new guitarist, Andy "Rusty" Ross, explains the hip new handshake all the Midwestern kids are doing:

"It's called the 'explode-implode.' Here's how you pull it off:

1. Both hi-fivers start with a closed fist.
2. Bang the fists together and immediately pull away while opening your hand (making an explosion sound at this point is highly advisable).
3. Once you've fully retracted you should be in perfect position to go in for a normal hi-five.
4. Complete the hi-five, but immediately pull back and re-close your fist (again, a sound effect is preferred, this time making a 'shhhhhhmmmp' to simulate the implosion of your hand and proper end to your greeting).

It may take practice, but it's delicious."

Thanks, Rusty! I'm looking forward to heckling you Saturday night.