Dinner and a movie

Jason and I are going on a "date" tonight. We're going to one of Milwaukee's fanciest restaurants, Sanford. We thought that we might take in a movie after dinner but, as I explained previously, our tastes diverge. Help us decide, will ya?

Update, 9 p.m.: Dinner was pretty good - maybe I'll write a restaurant review tomorrow. However, we decided to rent a movie and watch it at home - to spread out the fun (and expenses) a little. But keep those votes coming because we'll be heading off to the movies soon enough!

Deluxe apartment in the sky

So, I was scrolling through my blog and I noticed a comment on my post about "The Lovely Bones." It is a non-anonymous post from someone outside of my department.* Only my second ever!

Katie Baker, you made my day! Thanks!

*Not that I don't appreciate you sconnies, but it is nice to get the occasional visit from someone else.

Too hot to blog

The weather report claims the humidity will break this evening. I am waiting.

Our study is the warmest room in the house so I have not felt inclined to spend extra time at the computer blogging.

This past weekend felt like the first weekend of summer. I started it off by kicking off my summer research project on Milwaukee's ethnic festivals. This weekend was pride fest - not technically an ethnicity but definitely a good starter festival for thinking about how identity is articulated within a particular cultural framework.

We spent Sunday afternoon and Monday in Door County - the part of Wisconsin my Chicago friends who summer there tell me is most like Maine (yeah, maybe the same way Tombstone Pizza is like Ian's).

On the way up to Penninsula State Park where we camped, we stopped in lovely Manitowoc, which is not in Door County, but on the way. Several WWII subs were built in the town and they now have a retired vessel there at the Wisconsin Maritime Museum.


Jason expected that I would feel right at home in Manitowoc but not so much. The waterfront, and I use the term loosely because most of the town ignores the waterfront, was completely dead. In fact the whole trip got me wondering about coastal Wisconsin. What does Wisconsin have in the way of working waterfront? What about the Great Lakes fisheries? Where are the fish markets? How is most of the fishing in the Great Lakes done? Large vessels, hook and line? Where is the fishing done? How much use do the lakes get aside from recreational boating? I want to know.

Movie review: Noi

As my partner is at a conference this weekend, I availed myself of the DVD selection at my local library to pick up a couple of movies. When I am out of town Jason rents movies that I am unwilling to watch. Generally these movies are complete crap and, thus, not a part of the library collection. Some recent examples include that movie about the 30- and 40-something men who went back to college to join a fraternity, maybe it was called "Old School," and the one about spring break or something in Europe ("Eurotrip," perhaps?). When Jason is out of town I watch foreign films. He is rarely willing to rent them, not because they're awful like the movies he wants to watch, but because he finds it too much work to read the subtitles.

Last night I watched, Noi, an Icelandic movie about some brainiac kid living in a tiny village out on the tundra. Although it received many awards, I didn't find the movie very compelling so it is a good thing that Jason wasn't home to complain about how I made him watch it. Noi, the hero, wasn't a very sympathetic character. The plot started out well but it ended up having one of those story lines which concludes with people being killed off in order for it to all work out. I have absolutely no patience for writers who can't come up with a more interesting way to conclude their tales than a plane crash, fire, cancer, or, in this case, avalanche, that eliminates the antagonists and gives the hero the push he needs to pull himself together.

I don't recommend Noi, unless you're feeling particularly trapped and isolated and you'd like to feel better about your miserable life by making a favorable comparison.

In which an epidural is contemplated

I said in the past that I didn't really want to be cognitively engaged in the whole labor and delivery thing - thinking it is best that I just let my body take over and do what it is deigned to do.

Well, when I was out in Maine I stayed with a cousin who has cable. I found myself watching the Discovery Health Channel on a Tuesday night, which is baby night. I was completely transfixed, unable to turn away from the television. Tears poured down my cheeks as woman after woman delivered pointed-headed babies. I watched as doctors inserted the several-inch needles into women's spines to administer epidurals. I chewed my fingernails nervously through commercials that were prefaced with statements like, "In Alice's birthing room, a routine labor becomes an expectant mother's nightmare. When "Birth Day" returns." In one episode, the narrator tells us the story of one woman who arrived at the hospital so late in labor it was too late to receive the epidural and, thus, "had to experience the full agony of childbirth."

And that's when I decided I needed to get cracking on locating a doula and I started reading every book on natural childbirth that I could get my hands on.

My mother always told me that they exaggerated the pain of childbirth on television. She went through it 5 1/2 times (last pregnancy was twins - only one stage 1 of labor but 2 bouts of pushing and two placenta). She never had any complications and she generally did not even use narcotics to deal with the pain. She is no longer around for me to ask her so I asked my dad how it went. Of course, they went through it so many times that they really had a routine. As my dad recalls, he would wake up one morning and mom would be downstairs having her cup of coffee. She would tell him that he needed to call in to work because she was going to have the baby. They both would get dressed, make breakfast for current children, and call Cherry Gorham, the neighbor who came to stay with us while Mom and Dad were at the hospital. A little later, my mom would peruse the boat schedule and decide what ferry they would take to the mainland (where the hospital is located). They would ride the ferry in, walk to the car, and drive up to the hospital. She and my dad would usually head straight to the delivery room, where, an hour or two later, a new member of the family would enter the world.

So, anyway, I don't really want to have pain medication or other optional medical interventions for at least these reasons:
1. I want to be like my mom.
2. Not having experienced either, I think I would prefer labor to having a needle inserted into my spine. Birth is a natural process while drugs being dripped into the area around your spinal column is not.
2. I probably sound like a fruitcake here, but there is something compelling about the idea of experiencing something so universal (for females from many species) as giving birth. I know, I know, most horses don't deliver their foals in the birthing center of their local hospital attended by doctors and nurses and husbands and doulas, but still, work with me - I want to feel my body going through the process and, just so long as my OB doesn't intervene, the process will be very similar to the one horses do go through. It's kind of like eating. Some people might opt for a pill that could effortlessly fulfill their nutritional needs or, once they discovered one meal that they could repeat ad infinitum they might refuse to try anything else in case it disagreed with them. I would opt for the food - new food, foods that I might find I don't even care for, foods that might give me gas - every time.

I get frustrated when folks (mostly my husband's family) dismiss me as some "smart-alecky college kid who has to do everything differently" when, in fact, I feel like I am doing what my mother and her mother (etc. etc.) did - giving birth to my children with minimum medical intervention. My mother was no hippie or health nut but she also refused to jump on every medical trend that came down the pike.

That's where I am at.

Rib-tickler

When one if growing a human one is bound to experience of variety of new and interesting sensations. Fetal hiccups were interesting the first time. Instead of the usual fluid motions and stretchings that come along with fetal movement, my entire abdomen began jumping - just once - at somewhat regular intervals (every 20 seconds or so). Today, however, I felt something that trumps the hiccups - foot in the ribs. It wasn't just a temporary pressure on my lower right ribs, it was as if the kid wedged his/her toes up between the bottom couple of ribs intending to stay a while - just like when I put my feet up on the back of the chair in front of me when I go to the movies. I ended up jumping up and down and stretching my arms toward the ceiling in order to shake the kid loose.

Book: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

Can't you tell that I am completely stressed out and that my sleep schedule is a mess? How else would I be coming up with so many non-work related book reviews?

This is an interesting novel - the narrative begins with the violent death of a teenage girl, Susie, at the hands of a serial killer and is narrated by the young girl herself - who comments from "her heaven" on the aftermath of her death on earth. The Lovely Bones is first and foremost a book about families coping with loss. It is unique, however, in that the family is joined in their grief by the lost one herself.

This is a great novel and a fairly quick read.

Book: The Lobster Coast by Colin Woodward

The Lobster Coast covers the European History of (mostly) coastal Maine from earliest exploration until the present. After a fairly light and entertaining introduction, Woodward embarks upon the task of laying out the history of Maine's coast. I got the impression early on that he would spend most of his time focusing on the fishing industry - with a nod to the historical roots of Mainer's suspicion of people "from away." However, Woodward ends up all over the place by the end of the book, for example, talking about recent pushes for "smart development" to combat suburbanization and sprawl and mentioning many of the elites who summered in Maine in the past, while neglecting to discuss the strategic importance of the Maine coast during WWII and what the U.S. army did to change the character of the Maine coast during those years.

I don't recommend this book - except to Mainers who read everything they can about the Pine Tree State.

The Van-ola + I-94 + Darkness

We hit a "bump" in I-94 on our way back from Madison. It took about 10 seconds before we became VERY aware that it wasn't a bump but a skunk. We arrived home a bit later to find that our nice clean and fancy looking van-ola smells like fresh skunk. When your dog mixes with skunk, you can give him a bath in canned tomato. What do you do when your entire car has been skunked?

We left it out of the garage to air out and returned from walking the dogs to find that our entire block stinks!

Wisconsin + Beer + 2:30 a.m.

Why is it, I wonder, that here in Milwaukee, and, if I correctly recall, particular areas of Madison, people announce bar time and their inebriated state by randomly shouting, "Whoooooooooh!" as they make their way home at the end of the evening?

I puzzled over this for some time last night when the dulcent "Whooooooohs!" of a couple of folks walking past my house roused me, but I was unable to come up with any explanation. It's as if being drunk isn't enough fun, one has to make sure that everyone knows they are drunk and loving it. Or perhaps, with the end of the night approaching, folks are trying to reassure themselves that the evening is worth the pending cost - lying in bed with one foot on the floor to keep the room from tipping over.

At any rate, goody-two-shoes that I may be, I have been around many a drunken revelry without the Whoooooohs so I find them curious and wonder about their function.

Book Recommendation: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

I know I am probably the last person on the planet to read Middlesex, but let me share my opinion all the same. I thought this was a good book, if a little uneven from time to time. It is the story of Callie/Cal Stephanides, who grows up as a the daughter of a successful businessman in Detroit's Greek-American community only to learn at age 14 that she is actually a phenotypical male who suffers from 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, i.e. has ambiguous genitalia.
As this is a novel, there is no indication anywhere that Eugenides read about Garfinkel's Agnes or is acquainted with the lives of the Reimer twins, however, Cal's story certainly does echo reading I've done elsewhere both in terms of typical responses to ambiguous genitalia and in terms of the effort required to learn how to "do gender." In fact, Dr. Luce is so similar to Colapinto's Dr. Money that I wonder if Eugenides should make his fiction resemble a real character a little less.
At any rate, what I liked most about Middlesex is the fact that Cal's biography, which hinges squarely on his hermaphroditism, is rooted in history and depends just as much upon world politics as it does upon his parents' genes. Cal's claim is not just, "This is who I am, this is how I was made." It's, "I am what history has yielded. I have only scratched the surface of the myriad of actions that created a world which led to the production of me." I think this is an important, if subtle, change in the typical narrative AND I like it.
As for imbalance - Eugenides' style keeps Cal/Callie in the forefront at all times and I think this may do him a disservice because it undermines his efforts to develop his other characters. Many primary characters go undeveloped the entire novel and, when he tries to elaborate upon others, he either awkwardly departs from Cal's narration or Cal apologies to the reader for laying out the thoughts and experiences of others but then goes on to do so all the same.
On the whole, however, a good read.

summer madness

Madison is quite beautiful in the late spring - when the hordes of students have departed and the stench of scooter exhaust is replaced by the beautiful smell of rosa rugosas and lilacs. The trees provide a green canopy that filters the sunlight.

Ahhh... what a beautiful day!

ersatz

I have so much work to do but I need to procrastinate a little bit and tell you about meeting my dad's new wife and what was noteworthy about seeing the two of them together.

My sister was in town with me. Friday night we went out to buy decorations for the baby shower. After that we went to dinner. We returned to the island on a late ferry and were surprised to see my dad and his new wife snuggled up on the couch watching TV. We expected to beat them home because Dad said that Mary wasn't leaving Connecticut until about 6. We thought that, with the weekend traffic to Maine from "points south," Mary would be lucky to catch the last ferry at 11:30. At any rate, she and dad were watching "Phantom of the Opera." They paused it and jumped right up and Mary hugged us both - except in my case she gave me a one armed hug and used the other hand to grab my belly. So, it started off feeling even more awkward than it would have if Mary had been a little more reserved, but such is life.

I watched the two of them, Mary and my dad, all weekend. In the end I still don't know what I think about Mary. My dad is clearly happy with her which is great to see. However, she is one of those people with a smile that is a little too bright, a voice a little too squeaky and cheerful, and a simpery- sweet demeanor that makes her seem a little unbelievable. You know what I mean? I know that she was likely nervous and trying really hard but, in my mind, she came across as one of those people who is just as likely to sport that tremendous smile when they are breaking your heart as when they are making your day. The issue is, then, is she mostly nice when no one is looking?

Anyway, I feel fine about her despite this reservation about genuineness. In the end the thing that ended up bothering me was my dad's behavior.

Although Mary and my mom are very different in many ways (Mary dresses stylishly, wears make-up, does her hair and nails, and doesn't read to name a few things), they share some characteristics such as having a lot of energy and motivation. My dad clearly counts on Mary to come in and get him organized, washed, and fed.

You must understand, my dad hasn't done a load of laundry since 1969. Once my mother died, he began bringing all his laundry to the cleaners. As far as I know, my dad has never mowed the lawn unprompted, his house is an absolute shambles both in terms of cleanliness and maintenance because he refuses to clean and he won't "maintain" without someone to direct him. My dad has probably shelled out thousands of dollars in late charges since my mom died because he just tosses all the mail into a big pile and goes through it every four or five weeks paying bills in no particular order. This is just a sample of the extent to which my dad doesn't do for himself.

So, I guess I was disappointed when I saw my dad sitting in front of the TV while Mary sorted his bills, waged war on the ant infestation in the kitchen, loaded a shopping cart with all dad's dirty laundry that she would take with her to Connecticut to wash, dry, iron and bring back on her next visit, prompted him to estimate how much paint would be required to repaint the outside trim and to change the oil in the lawnmower, and made a to-do list of the chores she expected him to see to before her next visit.

This seemed all the more disturbing to me when Mary told me that she doesn't clean her own house (she had a house cleaner that comes in every 2 weeks), Dad refused to let her even see his house before she said, "I do," and that the accumulated dust and filth in my dad's house has so aggravated her allergies that her doctor has prescribed new allergy medication, including an inhaler, for her. She excuses all of this by referencing a sob-story Dad apparently concocted about how the mess in the house is not his, but his kids' and about how he got stuck with an old broken-down house that only gets worse because it is ill-treated by his kids. Of course, in the rendition I heard, it was most specifically my older brother and sister-in-law that have so abused my father's house. I was a little shocked to hear from Mary negative things, some exaggerated and others patently false, my dad said about my siblings. I responded, "Believe me, most of this mess is his." She said, "No, he wouldn't leave a mess like this." To which I replied, "Watch out for him, Mary. He is a great guy but he's sneaky. Make sure that you make him pull his own weight."

And ever since I have wondered if my dad is more phony than Mary's smile.

Goodbye, Island Home!

It was a difficult trip to the island this last time. I spent a couple of days helping Dad and Mary clean out the house and I found all kinds of interesting things including my mother's wedding dress, which I had never laid eyes on before, and my baby book. I took some things that I wanted, like the wedding dress and the Children's Literary Classics that I loved reading when I was young, some things that my mother told me to look out for before she died including a box of her own childhood letters and photos and my grandmother's Hummel figurines, and some things that I just wanted to save from the dump, mainly photos and all of my dad's short stories. My father is an excellent writer.
That van-ola of ours came in handy pretty quick. There was no way that I was going to get all my shower gifts and all the stuff from the house back to Milwaukee. Jason and the dogs drove out for a few days vacation and then we all trekked home in the vanola.
My last morning on the island was strange one. I fully expect that my dad will sell the house before I return to Maine, probably next summer. So, even though it will still be my island, it will be different. I spent the last morning visiting some of my old haunts, like the cemetery at the bottom of the hill where I spent many hours napping amid the gravestones (oldest c.1690), telling ghost stories with friends, and engaging in various other teenage pursuits.

brackett cemetery

Jason and I took the dogs down to the beach at the bottom of the hill too. I lived on this beach in the summer. My mother set three rules. The first rule restricted swimming for 20 minutes after eating (this rules was s big pain because, as we were watchless, we needed to ask someone on the beach what time it was when we ate and then we needed to keep asking folks what time it was until 20 minutes was up). The second was that you could go swimming once the air temperature hit 70 degrees. The water rarely exceeded 65 and was more likely to be colder than that. So, the other rule was that we had to come out of the water to warm up for a bit when the tips of our fingers and/or our lips began to turn blue. By age 7 or 8 my brothers and I visited the beach on our own. We were adept swimmers - I began swimming so early that I don't even remember learning how.

sandy beach, facing whitehead passage and the open Atlantic.

It is important to me that my children get to know the island. I don't expect them to be islanders too, but I want them to have memories of the tides and this beach, to nurse barnacle cuts, to find jellyfish on the shore and learn, over time, that it is just as much fun to return them to the water as it is to skewer them with driftwood. I want my kids to appreciate 20 minutes of quiet or visiting with neighbors on the ferry. I want them to know island kids by name and feel, even after not seeing them for 15 years, that they are more than just acquaintances.

Anyway, I've returned to the Midwest.

How pregnant do you have to be?

In the last couple of days here in Maine, I've received 2 (TWO) spontaneous acknowledgements of my preggo state. So, apparently, I have finally reached the point at which those who know me but do not know that I am with child are certain that their recognition of my substantial belly will not be a misplaced reference to weight gain that is not associated with child-bearing.
In case you were wondering, if you're a big girl like me you apparently need to be this big to be seen as pregnant beyond a reasonable doubt.

about this pregnant

Incidentally, I have also experienced my first unsolicited belly touching. My 94-year-old Great-Aunt Edna copped a feel at the baby shower and my dad's new wife can't seem to keep her hands off me.

In Maine

I'm out in the field right now. A great deal is going on but I don't particularly feel like blogging about it all. Let me just say a few things:
1. My whining about a baby shower with my family was unwarranted. They threw a joint shower for my sister-in-law and myself. Basically, they had me running around to prepare my own shower. It was a lot of fun.
2. I met Mary. I don't really have much to say about that.
3. I found my mother's wedding dress when I was cleaning out my dad's house.
4. I found a couple of really great resources to help with my dissertation. I also have a couple of exciting meetings set up.

Van-ina to Van-ola

We need a new car. We’ve been putting it off for a while. The thing is, our current car, the van-ina, is too small for a baby and 2 dogs even if it wasn’t on its last legs. Seriously, I am impressed every time I turn the key in the ignition and my little van-ina shudders to life.

my little van-ina

So, what kind of car to buy? I am a big advocate of the station wagon – roomy enough for the lot of us and you can keep the dogs in the back away from the kid. However, Jason correctly points out that a station wagon is great until we need to go anywhere overnight – there will be insufficient space for all of us and all of the gear we need to take with us. It has to be a mini-van, he claims.

I agree and then I find myself completely repulsed by the idea of owning a mini-van. It’s not that I have a deep loathing for mini-vans. I have had many friends and family members who drive them. It’s just that when I imagine MYSELF as a mini-van owner that I freak out. I don’t want it sitting in my driveway. I don’t want to drive home to Maine every summer in a mini-van with Wisconsin plates. I don’t want to have to parallel park it but I refuse to start frequenting places with parking lots.

First I tried to offer reasonable arguments against the mini-van: gas mileage – hybrid not coming out until 2007; safety; difficulty parking – especially on our frequent trips to Chicago; and the fact that we are only going to run out of space on overnight trips and we could just get one of those roof containers for a station wagon. Jason has done a pretty good job shooting down my reasonable arguments. Next, I resorted to temper tantrums, sulking, and many other attempts at emotional blackmail and cajoling. “I can’t drive one of those!” I exclaimed in tears, “If I am going to start driving a mini-van to the dog-park and the grocery store [the only places we drive on a regular basis] I might as well drop out of my Ph.D. program and we can move to the suburbs, where I can start stockpiling lunchables, get involved in AYSO, and read Nora Roberts novels.” My partner remained strangely unmoved by my ranting and raving.

Finally, I thought I had the answer. “If I can find an international student who is graduating and leaving the country and selling their station wagon for a good price, we could buy the wagon and have it for the next year. Perhaps we could get by with a wagon until Toyota introduces the hybrid mini-van. Since we will get it for a steal, it won’t be such a big deal.” Jason agreed that buying a car from someone moving out of the U.S. tends to be the way to go (we’ve done it before).

So, this Sunday at church there was a notice on the bulletin board announcing the sale of a mini-van on account of the owners moving to Vancouver. We went to look at it. It is horrible but it is a deal. Today the mechanic gave it a clean bill of health. Shoot me. Shoot me now.

van-ola

Green Thumb

As much as I complained about spending an entire Sunday trying to control the type of grass growing in the backyard, the spring is fun, largely because I have no idea what most of the plants coming up are.
I think that the previous owner went a little crazy on the planting - especially with hostas. I don't really get the whole hosta thing - they are just so big and ugly and they spread like crazy.
At any rate, I am on my way to the hardware store to get a couple of garden tools so I can clear out weeds in the flower beds, spread things out, and get rid of some of the millions of hostas that appear to be coming up.

house, a.m.

What to do when you get there

I'm reading, "The Lobster Coast,"it does a great job capturing the healthy loathing that Mainers have for folks from away. I'll write a book review once I'm finished, but I just wanted to share this quote which describes life in the summer on Monhegan Island but could just as easily pertain to my island [my island numbers and additions in brackets]:

In summer, the village seemed crowded. Indeed, the resident population quadruples [increases by 8x] to around 240 [4000] in the summer... In the early afternoon, when the waves of day trippers reach their crescendo, there can be as many as 1,500 [8000] people on the island... In the height of summer, many residents feel overwhelmed by the tourist onslaught... But others say it's not the sheer numbers that trigger resentment; it's the minority of short-term visitors who can't seem to grasp that they've arrived in a real, living island community. And a few think that they are coming to a resort like Newport or Nantucket, and arrive at the dock with golf clubs and tennis racquets (there are no facilities for either [We actually do have a tennis court]) or evening wear or high-heeled shoes... But the most dull-witted think they are visiting a theme park like Colonial Williamsburg or Disneyland. Monheganers have awakened to find day-trippers wandering around their kitchen and living rooms [walk into our house and demand to use the bathroom] and have apprehended them picking flowers [eating berries, using swings, garden hoses, and swimming pools] in the backyard. "Where is the t-shirt shop [ATM, McDonald's]?" one such person asked me ... and stood agape and confused at the notion that there wasn't such an establishment in the village. In fact ... there was no shopping [ATM, McDonald's] on Monhegan at all. She looked at me in horror and, after a long pause to gather her wits asked, desperation in her voice: "Well, why do people come here then?" (pp. 19-20, emphasis added).

So, anyway, in addition to completely understanding this quote, I've been thinking about travel. I have observed what I think of as 2 very different orientations to travel. I associate one such orientation with the Midwest and the other with Maine. However, this is likely because these are the 2 places I've lived.
1. Maine orientation: travel to relax. Most towns in Maine don't rush to build some cheesy museum, upscale resort, or hotel with a water park to try to get folks to come. The thinking is that the reason to come is all around you: the beautiful ocean and mountain vistas; the quiet -in most of Maine there is quiet in the background, if I sit absolutely quietly in my backyard here in Milwaukee, there is noise behind the quiet (e.g. cars several blocks away); outdoor activities.
2. Midwest orientation: travel to see and do. You choose your travel destinations and spend your trip seeing and doing that which one is supposed to see and do when a tourist in that place. The Corn Palace, Wall Drug, the Spam Museum, Circus World Museum, House on the Rock, all of those silly giant fiberglass cows, dinosaurs, cheeses, etc. - all of this stuff is supposed to recommend a travel spot to you and occupy your time while you are there.

When I met him, my partner had the latter orientation to travel while I was a number 1. When I go somewhere, I just want to hang out and do what the "real people" do. I want to go to grocery shopping to see what the different products are and how people go about buying things( e.g. supermarket or actual market), I want to walk around random neighborhoods, find a nice park and sit in the sun people watching, eat at the restaurants that seem to be the most local. I get very annoyed if I find myself in situations where it is obvious that I am a tourist (hard to avoid on account of height and race in many places). So, although I am happy to follow the Lonely Planet Guide's walking tour, I will NEVER pull the guide out to reference it if I am in clear view of other people on the street.

Jason, on the other hand, peruses countless guidebooks in the weeks before our trip, or even before we decide where to go, to see what it is one is supposed to see when in X. He writes a detailed itinerary for the trip and feels that no visit to Paris, for example, is complete if one hasn't seen Notre Dame, the Louvre (including the Mona Lisa), the E. Tower, Versailles, Disneyland Paris, and been on the tour of the sewers.

Our early trips were a disaster. We would just argue about how to spend our time and one of us would end up sullenly giving in to the other. He would be annoyed when I wanted to depart from the itinerary to wander around, go to church or the movies, or see where in X one goes to get their driver's license. I would be mortified to find myself in a crowd of people taking pictures of a double decker bus or perturbed that I waited for 30 minutes to see a poorly-lit Mona Lisa behind several feet of glass.

We've been together long enough that we've worked this out and I think we both get more out of our trips as a result. Instead of jumping all over (e.g. 4 cities/countries in 3 days), we travel to fewer places and stay longer. Ideally, I like to be in a place long enough that I feel like I will need to get a job and apartment if I stay any longer (about 12 days) but I will settle for a shorter stay. If we go to Seattle, for example, we stay there for 3 or 4 days without taking extended day trips to the Cascades or whatever. If we want to go to the Cascades, we go for a week, much of it spent camping in remote locations as far from the park loop road as possible We also divide our days. We get up early and do the touristy stuff before too many other tourist are out and about. Then we grab lunch and spend the afternoon putzing around so I can follow my nose. We divide our dinners between places Jason finds in his guidebooks and whatever street vendor or greasy spoon catches my eye.

Rediscovery: Cocteau Twins

In 8th grade I was all about the Cocteau Twins. The extent to which I was a misfit in general was clearly visible in my musical preferences. Up until 6th or 7th grade, my music of choice was "easy listening" (e.g. The Carpenters, Neil Diamond, Gordon Lightfoot), a result of the fact that was what my mother played at home. After a very brief stint listening to the American Top 40 and trying to curl my bangs so that they would "pouf," I moved to the songs we were singing with my hippie choral director, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, songs from Godspell. I supplemented this music with a hodge-podge of other stuff I came across and liked, The Roches, Cocteau Twins, New Order, Indigo Girls, and the Dead Milkmen.

At any rate, as all my Cocteau Twins CDs were lost in the great car break-in of 1995, I have gotten away from them. However, I've been listening to them on MusicMatch jukebox lately and am reminded how much they kick ass - it's perfect "trying-to-deal-with-SAS" music.

The Stand (1978)

I have this memory of sitting on the floor in front of my dad, who was relaxing in his chair, reading. The picture on the book's dust cover (the book was hardcover) struck me as a scary one. A man dressed in white with blonde hair (I took him to be Luke Skywalker) was confronting a black monster that looked like a giant crow. I remember asking my dad if the book was scary and he said, "Yes." The picture was scary enough for me. I remember sitting and studying him and marveling at how long it took for him to turn the page. I tried to pay attention long enough to see him turn the page again. I remember thinking to myself, "Who would ever want to read a book without any pictures on the inside?"

a book with no pictures inside

First photo with my new digital camera

It's actually a nice camera but I need a bigger memory stick so the photo isn't the best quality.
Also, it is pretty dark in my study and the flash clearly flattens the picture.

I'm very excited about the prospects of a nice digital camera.

doogers

What I am NOT excited about is SAS. I am one of the lucky souls who managed to make it through my first few years of sociology without having to deal with the lumbering behemoth that is SAS. Unfortunately, my number is up. In a mostly vain effort to pay the bills, I took a research position this semester. Of course, I haven't kept up with it so now I find myself up against a firm deadline, trying to learn SAS so I can access a cryptic super-duper high security data set.