Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

Weekly Paint Progress: 7/29

Done with the bird baths. 

This was last week:

Here is this week:

This is the original:

I finally like it. The slant of the light in the morning is all off, and I never felt like I was getting the colors right, but now that I look at it side by side it isn’t too bad.

Who Am I to Criticize

I recently watched the Covid news, and of course, condemned the legions of unmasked virus-deniers who live in the southwest corner of my state.  

Right after that I took a hot shower, which my first neurologist told me I should never do, and then I ate a tasty lunch of sous-vide pork loin, even though the sous-vide booklet says that the sous-vide is not for the elderly or the immune-compromised. So I am ignoring scientific medical advice, no better than a Branson Missouri indoor go-kart operator ready to meet Jesus.

I suppose the difference is that mine is the only life I’m risking. Still, I can’t criticize their defiance until I toss the sous vide and start taking cold showers.

Cleveland Indians

How was this ever okay? The term Indian became controversial in my adult life, somehow — I mean, we knew we didn’t live in India — but the grinning mascot could not ever have been okay. Could it? 

I like the new name better … but, couldn’t the cartoon fastball have used more work?

It’s less offensive, sure, but it’s no Cardinal’s logo.

(Cool logos, even though the intertwined letters were stolen from the Catholic church.)

Overbought

I personally don’t like to eat the same thing two days in a row, but Gary delights in it. Given that Mr. S___ will eat no meat, and his wife will eat no carbs, we share no meals. I’m back to cooking home meals for myself on the weekends while he assembles ornate salads for himself. Each salad is a science experiment: he begins with the standing hypothesis (X% lettuce, X% feta, 1/4 cup salad dressing), eats that for two days, and tweaks it slightly on the next round. He has lost sixteen pounds doing this.

So this means Gary’s grocery list is only tomatoes, lettuce, croutons, cheeses, and two sides: cottage cheese and yogurt. Every week he tells me how much of each he needs, and for some reason last week I didn’t notice that he ordered two week’s worth of food, when he already had one week of food. 

I spent last weekend moving my food into the garage fridge, and sorting his 21 yogurts by date so nothing spoiled.

I also did this:

Note how certain bags are marked “OLD” in Sharpie. The font I used was Sarcasm Sans Serif.

Gary countered by not eating the old first, and then yesterday he went through the OLD bags and selected the one green leaf that was not rotted and incorporated it into a special Heirloom Lettuce salad.

Today he says he is off bag salads entirely. He wants to eat his cheese and tomatoes and dressing on a bed of something else. Spinach? Yeccch. Corn? Yeccch. Green Pepper? Yeecch. I suggested he augment his salad dressing with a purée of cheese and tomatoes and eat soup every day.

I think he’ll do a base of artichoke hearts and hearts of palm. He’ll be back to step one of the salad experiment but I think he likes that.

Olympics

I must have been partially asleep during the Olympic opening ceremonies. I “remember” these things, and yet they can’t be real:

The announcer said that the Winter Olympics are in “just a few months” and I thought, “The Winter Olympics are in just a few months and no one is canceling them?” But it’s true, if they start in February, technically they are in six months, right?

There was an ad for a weird all-electric car that talks to you, and Gary said, “That is our next car,” and I thought, “That is our current car,” but ours doesn’t use the floor mats to indicate who it is addressing.

Then Gary turned the Parade of Nations into the Parade of Mask-Shaming, with particular contempt for Nose-Exposers. 

A globe of drones appeared in the sky:

… and then they didn’t show it flying away, or exploding, or turning into a giant virus, or else they did and I was asleep.

I was particularly perplexed by the end of the ceremony, when they had celebrities sing the song Imagine in English (at least the parts I was awake for). Huh, I thought, shouldn’t the celebrity from each country sing in their native language?

And then, worse, they sang the Olympic Anthem in English. I began to suspect that this isn’t an “International” Olympic Committee. I mean, I know NBC pre-tapes the opening ceremony and edits it to focus on the English version of speeches, and the First Lady, and so on, but did they sing the Olympic Anthem in every language and then just air the English one? Or they might have and I just slept through it.

Foot Update

I spent two weeks with a swollen red foot, after I traumatized it with Mom’s sundial, before I made a doctor’s appointment. I just kept waiting for it to stop being red swollen and painful, and I didn’t, so clearly something was wrong.

That must have done the trick, because the day after I made the appointment, the swelling went down, the next day the redness left but I still had a bony lump, then yesterday I thought, “What’s this doctor’s appointment on my calendar? Is it the gynecologist?” I thought that when it was less than 24 hours before my appointment.

Too late to cancel, I thought, but evidently not. This makes twice though that I have placed out at the GP. Can’t make a habit of that. Good to know the appointment placebo effect is strong if I need it later.

Rewriting the Novel: Slow but Steady

This week I made up pages of predictable garbage, but I did it consistently. 

The words were still slow.

Saturday: 1 hour = 1.5 pages 
Sunday: 15 minutes = one sentence (Literally, this sentence: “I wondered if the stove was still on.” It means more in context: there’s been an explosion and gas is screaming out of an oil well.)
Monday: 25 minutes = half a page
Tuesday: 30 minutes = one 1/4 page paragraph  plus 30 minutes = half page
Wednesday: One hour = two pages
Thursday: 90 min = 3 pages 

Oh my GOD I’ve settled into a glacial pace of one page every half hour. And that’s a 400 word page (double spaced).

*Does research*

Oh, dear, that’s below average, like 25% below average. I don’t care. It’s not like I’m writing to put food on the table. 

Weekly Paint Progress: 7/22

This week the morning went from this:

… to this:

The noon version went from this:

… to this:

The evening went from this:

… to this:

One more swing and they’ll be done. 

Apologies Robert Browning

Grow old along with me?

The worst is yet to be

The aches and pains from which the quarrels are made;

Our bile grows worse each year

We pass the pain to those held dear,

Once wife, now nurse, with thinning sympathy.

====

Gary doesn’t deal well with illness. Sympathy doesn’t make him feel better, what I think makes him feel better is expelling the venom. I’m always going to be younger, and therefore healthier, and therefore always the nurse and always the target.

That works fine if I’m not filled with bile myself. How do two sickly people stay married? Do they? 

====

P. S. I have a particular hatred today for Rabbi Abraham ben Meir Ibn Ezra and the poem that bears his because my left foot, the best foot of all my feet, is still jacked up by its encounter with the Grow Old Along With Me sundial.

Fox Conflict

Fox was busy last week.

He chased what I imagine was a bunny:

He relaxed enough to sit down and have raccoons sneak up on him:

He did a little side step in the yard after a squirrel knocked the camera off kilter:

Speaking of wildlife …

News channels and People Magazine have had much to say about how this raccoon looks embarrassed after firefighters caught him raiding a house.

That raccoon isn’t embarrassed. He doesn’t like the light. It’s night time, he says, why is it so bright in here? And also, where are the big piles of nuts, both shelled and unshelled?

Poor baby.

Stimulus

So, okay, people with kids now get an extra $250-$350 per child as a tax credit because of the pandemic. That’s a good thing. Don’t begrudge that a bit.

But, why? It would make sense if unemployed parents got the extra cash, because I know kids are expensive. But these are working parents. I’d say it was so you could get daycare, but that’s nowhere near enough money for daycare.

All I can think is that it’s some social-engineering-dystopian-scheme to pay people to re-populate the earth that’s been semi-decimated from the pandemic. Fewer people, fewer consumers to have confidence? Fewer Amazon purchases, hence more global depression? 

There has to be a bottom line reason here: Uncle Sam doesn’t just feel sorry for Mom and Dad.

Review: Detour De Force

Friday I was playing Code Monkey by Jonathon Coulton on repeat at Maximum Alexa Volume just so I could hear this line over and over again:

“Code Monkey think/ maybe manager / wanna write / goddamned / login page himself”

… but then the new Barenaked Ladies CD Detour de Force landed on my porch.

Overall, 14 tracks. I am only guessing about themes here, but:

3 Songs about being a child: Man Made Lake, Big Back Yard, Live Well

2 Songs about being in a band: Good Life, Roll Out

2 Songs criticizing Current Dim-witted Fascist Society: Flat Earth, New Disaster 

3 Vague Worrisome Songs about Relationships: Flip, Here Together, God Forbid

2 Songs Complaining about Suburban Life: Bylaw, The National Park

2 Songs Remaining That Sound Like Other Songs : Paul Chambers which sounds like a 60’s LP my Dad would have, Internal Dynamo (which sounds like Liz Phair on Exile In Guyville)

I couldn’t find one typo. I thought there was one (b-apostrophe-y), but it’s a reference to BNL evidently hiring the tour manager away from Great Big Sea.

My favorite song is Man Made Lake, for the lyrics and progression, and then after that New Disaster, primarily for the rhyme “Stay tuned for scary monsters … But first a word from sponsors.”

My very favorite line overall is from Good Life: “It comes to pass / it doesn’t come to stay.” 

Salad

Gary speaks well when you get him going. Bring up Trump, he can rattle on in pentameter for an hour without pausing for breath.

In fact, he did that last night, not quite for an hour but for at least twenty minutes, when I interrupted him to ask, “Did you eat anything today?”

Indignant. “You interrupted me! Let me finish my thought!”

”Sorry, but you weren’t winding down, and I was thinking about dinner.”

He said, ”I had …” (waving hand at refrigerator) “one of those round bowl-y things.” 

“What?”

Gary got more annoyed, threw his hands up in the air. “Bowl! White round bowl-y thingy!”

All he’s eaten of late, in a white bowl or not, are salads made of 25% dressing, feta cheese, and croutons, and chicken, and scraps of lettuce. 

I said, “A saaaa … llaaaad?”  I am afraid I pronounced it just that way, slowly, two distinct syllables.

”Yes! A saaaaaaaa … lllaaaaad,” he hissed, and then I laughed for a good long time. He laughed too. Eventually. 

Rewriting the Novel: a Step Back and a Step Forward

I’ve taken some time outlining the plot for the second half, no longer does “some stuff happen.” 

It’s been confusing just because I’ll be in outline mode, and again characters will begin having conversations while I’m trying to make plans, so I have to duck out of my plotting Word document, make a new conversation document, write up what they’re saying, which is usually just stupid and inane because let’s be frank, they aren’t real. The inane comes out of my head. (Blame the Inane on Mame, boys.) Then I save it and by that time Word has gone into the doggy crawl mode that happens after an hour and a half and it’s just a pain to use.

However, at least things are happening, particularly this week.

Sunday: one half hour, 3/4ths of a page
Monday: ninety minutes, 3 pages 
Wednesday: ninety minutes, 1 and 1/2 pages (but part of that was going back to plotting)
Thursday, 45 minutes, 1/2 page, but it was all action, no dialog.

So if that averages to 1.5 pages per hour, 150 more pages to go, 100 more hours? That’s just like two and a half work weeks, or spread out an hour a day that’s three more months. And then I’ll have a draft so I can revise every word.

What’s inspired me? My bedside table has Mom’s travel journal and Jerry’s version of the book. It seems I should genetically be able to do this.