Relocated and feeling fine

From the movin' 'n' shakin' department...

I got the blog set up to publish over at the CPS web server instead of on blogspot. We don't have anything against blogspot, mind you -- it's just kind of nice to have our content sitting on our server.

Oooo, and if you've got a feed reader (until recently, I guess they were called RSS readers) you can subscribe to the dispatches here: http://www.coprosperitysphere.com/dispatches/atom.xml

If you've got a Mac, try the beta of NetNewsWire, which does support Atom format files.

Accomplishments Aplenty

Today we:

1. Did huge masses of laundry. Washed so much laundry, a veritable Kilimanjaro of laundry was done.
2. Made buckets, I say, buckets! of amazingly delicious red sauce and put it all in the freezer.
3. Met the neighbors across the back fence.
4. Squeezed a quart and a half of lemon juice.
5. Shopped for groceries.
6. Fixed bicycles.
7. Washed dishes.
8. Slacked.
9. Mocked opera. Why can't these people die, already?!
10. Played Fluxx with our kid.

Thinking About Bees

I have a dream about keeping bees. I'd like to start out with five. A big one, two medium-sized ones, and a small one. That's five. And every day, when I wanted to put honey in my tea, I would take one of the bees from his little beepartment in the Sucrets box I keep them in, and I would sqeeze him into my cup. I don't like a whole lot of honey.

One day, I would open the box and there would be seven bees instead of five. And then I'd have to re-think things.

Bees are very particular about their space. Each bee needs his own little space. Some bees like to put posters of their favorite film stars up in their little beepartments. Some like to put up their sports heroes.

Some paint the insides of their beepartments black and sit inside even on nice spring days and listen to Morrissey. They are the depressed bees who think that nobody understands them. You've seen them. They're huge and fat and buzz around buildings. They're called mason bees, but that's usually only once they've hit middle age and someone's sponsored them into the lodge.

Some bees tell you how beautiful you are and entice you with drink and smooth talk and then don't call and then show up at the same club three months later hanging all over your best friend like stank on a ho. They are the drones and they are usually impotent. They're really not worth getting worked up over.

Some bees are queen bees. They have a lot of babies. Their babies are the princess bees, and their fuzz shows like gold against the rich brown of their sculpted little bodies, just like Princess Stephanie of Monaco.

I like bees.

Cooking

I cook. Which is to say that I take one bunch of things and, through the magic of chemistry, make them into one big mass of something else and expect other people to destroy the evidence of said alchemy by eating it.

When I was a kid, even though it was the seventies and women were all busy smoking Virginia Slims and wearing "Little Prunes" (betcha forgot about them, didn't you?) and Looking for Mr. Goodbar, I was still expected to take home economics where I would learn how to cook and sew and do laundry and care for children. Even the ugly girls like me were expected to know those things, even though it was also a foregone conclusion that we would be living with our parents for the rest of our lives and never need them.

Cooking at my house was a survival thing. There were four children and only one parent in our household - an unfavorable ratio at best, and a formula for "Lord of the Flies" at worst. We children were expected to cook the meals at dinner once we were old enough to reach the stove, and you could only make so much macaroni and cheese before mom blew her stack.

Something happened, though, over the years. I got good at cooking. It was passable at first, but I was encouraged by my successes. The first was my late high school/early college boyfriend who tasted my tempura and then went home to tell his mother about it, only to have her try to duplicate my rice flour/iced club soda recipe with buckwheat flour and lukewarm beer.

My second success was my first husband. This "success" was made easy by the fact that his mother was arguably the worst cook on the planet. Apparently his father had told her "one day, all food will come in pill form and it will taste exactly like this." How he could taste it is anyone's guess, as everyone in the entire household, including the the aged corgi, chain smoked unfiltered cigarettes. The furniture was covered in plastic that was amber and sticky with years of accumulated tar. In those days, all of my cooking skills were directed at just making something the poor man could taste.

My second husband was also impressed by my culinary abilities. Again, I have his mother to thank. The poor woman was allergic to wheat, and so he had to endure things like the cake she made out of rice flour that was so dry that he couldn't unpucker for days. He drank endless glasses of water, only to have them turn to glue in his mouth. I don't think he used the bathroom for more than a month. This is the same woman who found out that cucumbers are hard to pull off as a vegetable side dish when shredded and boiled. I don't think she had a recipe. This was entirely a brainwave on her part.

What really spurred my culinary creativity, though, was my third husband. This was a man who absolutely scorned vegetables of any sort, and who also inspired the sort of contempt that made the marriage the blessedly short-lived thing that it was. I created vegetarian masterpieces, purely out of spite. Every night at our house was a vegan dream, lived out by a carnivore in purgatory.

So, all those years of training have paid off. The ugly chick has made good, the years of cooking to overcome the handicaps of others are behind me, and I'm currently married to a vegan who eats like there's no tomorrow and who never met a vegetable he didn't like. No, I don't make spite chops or hot roast vengeance. I'd like to think that, as my cooking skills have evolved, so have my interpersonal skills.

Then again, I have so many bodies in my wake that argue against both of those things.

Cats

I have always wanted to like cats. Cool people like cats. Edward Gorey likes cats. I can't think of anyone else that I admire offhand who likes cats.

People who like cats consider themselves cool. The collective species of cat-lovers has developed an entire mythos around cats that says that they are mysterious and noble and intelligent. They talk about themselves in relation to their cats the way that career servants talk about their bosses.

Cat fanciers like to think that cats are aloof and discerning in their choice of companions, so the fact that the cat that lives in their household chooses to show affection to them means that they are somehow special or accepted into that cat's tribe.

BARF. That entire notion just makes me want to barf.

In an effort to like cats, I have kept cats for the last eighteen years, and I don't like them any better now than I did when I started.

My first cat was given to me by a former boyfriend. This guy made me promise that I would always keep this cat safe and make sure he had a good home. True to my word, this cat is still alive and in relatively good health. He lives with my mother who called me up about six or seven years after I had received this cat and said "You still hate your cat, right? I was thinking about getting a cat and I figured if you still hated yours I could just take him and you'd give me all his stuff, too." I was over there in under half an hour with the cat and hundreds of dollars' worth of cat accessories in tow.

I was under the impression that perhaps in order to really enjoy cat ownership one had to possess the right accessories. Like, to really enjoy my computer I've bought speakers and a different mouse and a lot of cool software.

There are very few things that one can purchase at a pet store to make cats more entertaining. The best thing I've found to make cats more entertaining is a couple of gin & tonics, but those are for me, and after that, even the goldfish are good for a giggle.

I will never understand the sort of people who say that cats are intelligent. Granted, if you put a cat into a position where it has to get around, into, or behind something in order to get something else, it might actually do that. But it's just as likely that the cat will walk halfway across the room from its challenging puzzle and proceed to lick its own ass.

And for every stupid behavior cats display, cat fanciers have come up with some sort of anthropomorphic explanation that makes the cat sound really intelligent and cool.

Cat ignores you completely
cat fancier opinon: he's aloof and doesn't feel obligated to show his affection if he doesn't feel like it
another possibility: he's stupid and either hasn't noticed that you're in the room or has already forgotten

Cat turns up his nose at his food
cat fancier opinion: he's finicky and knows the difference between "good" and "bad" food
another possibility: he's not that hungry

Cat spends all day licking himself
cat fancier opinion: he's fastidious and keeps himself clean and well-groomed
another possibility: he's rolled all over the floor and thinks that floor crud tastes good - at least better than that dry kibble shit you've been feeding him

Cat spends all day laying in a sunny spot
cat fancier opinion: he's luxuriating in his catness
another possibility: he's the laziest sack of crap on the planet

Cat catches a lizard and brings you half
cat fancier opinion: he's trying to curry favor with you by sharing his kill with you
another possibility: he's full and you just happened to be around when he dropped the other half

I can't romanticize them. They smell gross, they're untrainable and some of them look as though they've been hit in the face with a cricket bat.

But I'm told they taste like chicken, so there might be a use for them yet.

My God! What Have I Done?

Okay. I now have a new blog. I'm not yet sure what differentiates this from my other blog, except that only YOU know about it. Nobody else.

So...it's exclusive and stuff. I'm sure you feel really special.

When I have time, I'll tell you about myself. Or I'll tell you about the person I want you to think I am. Or about the person I think I am when I'm deluding myself that I'm someone people want to know about.

But for now, I'll be content with this small amount of verbage.

Weekend Weather

The weather seemed to be consistent all weekend - grouchy with widely scattered bitching in the morning, clearing by midday to general laziness. The afternoons gave over to a low-pressure zone that extended well into the night.

Things could suck much, much worse.

I Don't Know What "Mercury Retrograde" Means

But I do know what WTF means. We had so many good plans for today. Our plans: we were going to go to Watercourse Way at 9:10, followed by the library and the park for a nice picnic lunch we had packed in advance.

We got out of bed and got everyone dressed. The baby wanted a clip in her hair, so I stood in the bathroom putting it in for her. As she ran out of the bathroom, she ran face first into the door. BAM! Much crying ensued, and snuggling and soothing and all was well. Until we tried to get her to eat some breakfast. It's less like pulling teeth than trying to put them back in.

On the way to Palo Alto, I asked The Pirate if he had remembered to pack the lawn chairs. Nope. Whoops! 'Sokay, we'll figure something out.

We arrived early enough to go to Peet's for a cuppa, and on the way the baby fell down and skinned her knee. Didn't dampen her spirits any, she's just fine. We were standing outside Peet's trying to get everyone and their beverages situated when, right in front of us and about 25 other Peet's patrons gathered in the parking lot, a car and a produce truck locked bumpers. The car, who had tried to pass the truck on the left as it was trying to make a wide left turn into the parking lot, popped a tire (a very spectacular sound) and sustained heavy damage to the right front quarter. The truck got its front bumper jacked up.

We got into WW and got settled into One Pine, a room with a hot tub, sauna and cold plunge. I hung with the girlies-O in the hot tub whilst The Pirate relaxed in the sauna until his core temperature just about doubled, then we traded. It was back and forth, and the Baby Goddess has decided that the spa is the place to be. Then The Pirate burnt his hand in the sauna on some live steam. His finger is now all bubbly and gross.

We got back to the truck and Peaches spilt chocolate all over the back seat. I gave her some tissues to sop it up, and then PG told her to go down the street and around the corner to a trash can, except that it wasn't there and the two of them ended up walking a couple of blocks to find one. In the meantime, the baby and I got it into our heads to go and find them. I started the truck and took off down the street, but before we got to the end of it, here they come. I stopped heading northbound to wait for them. A guy heading eastbound stopped at the light and apparently felt that he couldn't go unless I went. It took the two a minute to get into the car, and the guy still hadn't moved, so I turned left around him. I have no idea what he was waiting for, as he couldn't have turned right - I was on a one-way street. As I came around him, he said "Nice driving, sweetheart." The mean part of my brain hopes that he did turn right, going the wrong way down a one-way street and then felt like a barf-encrusted jumbo jerk.

Off to the library. We got there in time for "family story time," which PG and the BG partook in while Peaches looked for books on ancient China. As I came from the ladies' room, I noticed a very striking man walking in. He was dressed in bright-white cotton trousers, a long tunic of the same bright white fabric, and a very elaborate turban that also wound about his lower face. In one hand he was carrying something that looked like prayer beads. He was noticeable not just because of his wonderful mode of dress, but because he was walking slowly around the entire library looking for all the world as though he had never been in one before. He examined the stacks of books, he went up and down the escalators several times, he looked at a wonderful exhibit on Gandhi, King and Ikeda (which made me proud) . I found a desk at which to sit and do my editing, and he went to a librarian and asked her all sorts of questions, and then walked off again.

We left the library because we were all starving. We were going to go to Cesar Chavez park, but there were no spaces to be had because the church was having a special Mass to celebrate the Feast of St. Joseph the worker. We were going around the park just as the procession started, and my heart, I must admit, skipped a beat.

We ended up at Edith Morley park in Campbell. It's beautiful, except that the BG kept saying "where's the play structure?" She was climbing on a fairly large rock, and we told her "that's it." She wants to go back.

We came home and the BG had a much-needed nap, then out again for the supplied to make Mother's Day quilts for the mothers. That'll be nice. And stuff for the makin' of the yummy Thai food.

The morning seems a million years ago, and I'm very happy and content now. And the Thai food was amazing, I must say.