Time for a bonfire 5 November 2009

What, aren’t you having a bonfire tonight??  My good friend who lives down the street spent several years in England, her husband being stationed there, so she is utterly Anglicized.  Often as not, she’ll shout, “OI!” to her sons instead of the more American “HEY!”  I told her we need to have a bonfire tonight, in honor of Guy Fawkes Night, but alas, she’s in nursing school and had to go to class tonight.

*sigh*

Everyone ruins my fun.

Who is Guy Fawkes??  He was one of the infamous conspirators who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament on this night in 1605.  The thought was that the Catholic conspirators would kill most of the Protestant members of Parliament, as well as King James I, himself a Protestant.  But the plot was discovered and the plotters executed.

Excellent reason for a bonfire, no?  We used to have neighborhood fires before all my friends moved away, so any reason to light up a chiminea is a good one — though we’re technically not allowed to have them here in housing.  ME was only a few weeks old when she attended her first neighborhood fire, where the children raced around in the dark till they collapsed like puppies in exhaustion, and the adults drank homemade hot chocolate spiked with peppermint schnapps.  Yum.

But now everyone is gone, except my Anglophile friend, but she’s so busy with school that I never see her.

I have a new friend now!  Our dear Poolagirl saw how enthralled I was with her Nigel, and she graciously offered that I take him home with me.  How could I refuse?

Getting an alien through security was quite fun.  I was worried he would cause problems, as his body is constructed from a metal frame, but the TSA agents thought he was the coolest thing since sliced bread.  All the agents crowded around once he emerged from the X-ray machine and asked about him.  Nigel rode in my backpack all the way to the gate, with his head sticking out so he could see.  Apparently I nearly whacked his head on the bulkhead as I boarded the plane, causing the flight attendants to gasp in horror.  They thought he was a real baby!

I had spoken with a few of my fellow travelers during my layover in Chicago, and they were so captivated by my handsome friend that they wanted to know his name and where he was from.  And once I arrived in Rhode Island, they asked how he had enjoyed the flight, and whether he thought he’d like his new home.

They did get his name wrong, though.  They thought it was Nathan.  He doesn’t even look like a Nathan!  Nigel suits him perfectly.

Apparently the  first night I was home from San Diego, Grace had to get up in the middle of the night to visit the little girls’ room, and she saw Nigel in the light of the hall lamp resting on our little end table.  She said he freaked her out, and she wouldn’t go anywhere near him when they were first introduced.

I guess he would be freaky to encounter in the middle of the night.

She quickly got over her fear of him.

Now they’re the best of friends!

But then Shippie, Poolie’s niece, and the one who had given Nigel to Poolie to begin with, noticed that he was now residing in Rhode Island.  This morning I got an email from Shippie, asking me to prove that Nigel is hale and healthy, and that he’s having a good time here with me and my girls.  She wanted a photo of him with a current newspaper as proof.

Here he’s reading yesterday’s paper, as our newspaper is delivered in the afternoon.  There are some weighty things in the news here in the tiniest state in the Union.  Yes, folks, the world’s oldest profession is legal here, if it takes place indoors.  At least it was until Tuesday.  Apparently our Governor has signed a law that makes it a misdemeanor, punishable by prison terms of up to six months for a first-time offense, to up to a year for repeat offenders.

Fortunately I don’t think it will affect Nigel in any way.  He doesn’t really seem to be interested in that sort of thing, mainly because there isn’t a female of his species on the planet.

Poor guy.

Somebody other than me 2 November 2009

I swear, I have a curse.  If it’s electronic in nature, it’s going to go south on me.

I first noticed it in college.  Every time I walked across campus at night, at least one streetlight would pop as I walked underneath it.  It got to that I didn’t even startle when it happened, though my friends who walked with me would jump.  It still happens, though with less frequency now that I’m not out and about at night.  But as Beanie and I left Poolie’s house after we’d had dinner, the light under which we’d parked blew out.

That’s probably why the transformer popped the night of the really bad ice storm back in Washington state.  It was December 2006, and we’d gotten about four inches of snow and a thick layer of ice.  The power went out at 9pm the night before, so I went to bed.  Not much to do when the power’s out.  I read for a bit by flashlight and slept till almost 9am the next morning.  That’s when the power came back on, and I congratulated myself on sleeping through the whole thing.  Not fifteen minutes later, I heard a muffled pop — and the power went out again.  I looked around my neighborhood, and it appeared as though I was the only person in the neighborhood without power.  Come to find out, the transformer at the end of the driveway had popped, cutting power to my house, my next-door neighbor’s house, and the two houses across the street.  Even though power workers were in my neighborhood that day, fixing downed lines, it took them a couple more days before they came out to make the simple fifteen-minute fix to my transformer.  I ended up staying with a neighbor, as it was only 40º in my house by then.  My heat and my stove at the time were all run on electricity, so I couldn’t even cook food for myself and Grace.  It was pretty bad.

Did I mention Kurt had just left on deployment?  He kept calling the power company from Mexico to try to get them to come out more quickly.  I’m not sure it worked.  Thank goodness for my kind neighbors.

Every computer I have had has gone back in one way, shape, or form.  The first desktop Kurt and I had, it ended up with a corrupted version of IE, and there is no way to remove IE and reinstall if it becomes corrupted.  So we bought another desktop, and made the permanent switch to Firefox.  After a few years, the new desktop too went south.  It won’t even boot!  It sits in my closet, awaiting the day when I feel like reformatting the damn thing.

Damn Windows.

Then you have my HP laptop, whose hard drive died after only 15 months.

And my bad luck isn’t restricted to computers.  Remember my oven?  How it wouldn’t heat one day and had to have its glow plug replaced?

My pink Casio point-and-shoot developed an oddity where it wouldn’t stay on, and it would display something akin to the Blue Screen of Death that we Windows users are quite familiar with.  I would have to pop out the battery for a few moments to get it to work again, but it would do the same thing after only a few minutes.  (Kurt used the Casio while I was in San Diego and reported no issues, which just confirms to me that it’s me that’s the problem.)

My brand-new iPod?  It can’t seem to find my location, instead insisting that I live on a cul-de-sac in El Paso, Texas, which is a good two thousand miles away from my actual location in Rhode Island.  After searching through the help forums and turning off my iPod and resetting all my settings back to factory defaults, I contacted Apple, who had me restore my brand-spankin’ new iPod.  Gah.  And it’s still telling me I live in El Paso.

And tonight?  I turned on my little Nikon point-and-shoot, the one I bought to replace the pink Casio back in July, only to get a lens error.  It would extend and retract the lens, all the while beeping in distress, before displaying “LENS ERROR” on the screen.  *sigh*  The help forums tells me to recharge the battery, and if that doesn’t work, leave the battery out of the camera overnight.  If that doesn’t work, I have to send it in.

You know, I would like my things to just work for a reasonable amount of time and not crap out at me every time I turn around.  Is that really too much to ask?

Get down on your knees and start to pray 1 November 2009

I may be committing blasphemy by  admitting this, but I’m not a huge fan of Halloween.  I never really have been, to be honest.  Sure, it was nice to get a butt-ton of candy one night out of the year, but my parents sort of took all the fun out of it by going through our loot before we could have any of it, and then rationing whatever was left.  I lost interest so quickly that I usually ended up forgetting I even had Halloween candy less than a week later, and it would sit on the top shelf of our pantry until my mom found it the next summer during one of her rare purges of our stockpiled food.

My mom was a working mom to boot, and a woman who didn’t exactly expect to have three kids, two half-grown, by the time she was 38, considering that just five years before, she was a single woman focused on her career with the US Navy.  It was quite an adjustment for all of us, but especially for her.  She did the best she could, and she did a good job — but Mrs Cleaver she was not.  She did make all of my Halloween costumes, though they weren’t very elaborate.  In first grade, she bought a costume kit, as it were, from the fabric store, which ultimately ended in my wearing what amounted to a pillowcase decorated with glow-in-the-dark skeletons, with my face painted to match.  The face painting was pretty darn cool, I have to admit.

The next costume I remember was the one I wore in fifth grade, in which my mom pinned a tail made from braided red raffia to red sweatpants (just about the only time I was allowed to wear them out of the house), and I wore a red turtleneck to match.  She painted my face red too, and I wore devil’s horns and carried a pitchfork.  We were living in northern Illinois by that time, and I was amazed I wasn’t cold, though I didn’t have gloves.  That’s about all I remember about that year, my strangely warm hands.  It was probably snowing.  It usually did on Halloween.

My final costume in my memory was made for my seventh grade year, though I am not sure I was allowed to go trick-or-treating.  I continued to walk around and take my brother for years after I grew too old to get candy, but I think seventh grade was probably my last year for candy-gathering.  I probably didn’t even bother to go trick-or-treating in eighth grade because we were in the process of moving to Nebraska, and life was in a bad state of upheaval at that time.  Not fun.  Anyhow, that year my mom sewed strips of white fabric to a white sweatshirt and sweatpants to make a mummy.  I remember wearing it to the Halloween party our school had at a local farm, where we had a bonfire and a hayride that was supposed to be haunted.  One of the vampires or ghosts following our tractor didn’t realize the second tractor was following us so closely, and when I pointed it out to him, that the other tractor was on our heels, he exclaimed, “Shit!” and ran off to try to get into position.  My seventh-grade brain found that hilariously funny, and I didn’t stop laughing for a good thirty minutes.

That was also the year I was asked to dance by a boy for the first time.  When I lived in Illinois, I was one of the outcasts because I was so different.  I talked differently (still had my southern accent at the time), I looked different (I was tall for my age, though I grew out of that, and I developed quite early), I had a different name (I was the only person of Jewish ancestry in a school full of white protestants), and I was extremely socially inept.  I still am, though I do try my best.  When all the girls, all fifteen of them in my entire grade, had paired up with boys, I was still left on the sidelines.  Finally at this bonfire during my seventh grade year, this one boy named Adam, a so-called nerd by general consensus, asked me to dance.  And I said yes, mainly because I had had a crush on him for several months, as he was an extremely nice boy, but also because holy crap, someone wanted to dance with me??

And then that was the end of it.  Both of us were too shy for anything to develop from that, and we knew the social backlash would be huge.  Besides, he was a grade ahead of me, and I was moving in a year, though I didn’t know it at at the time.  The memory of that evening, dancing with him by the light of a bonfire, is a fond one.

At any rate, we still do Halloween in this house, though neither Kurt nor I are wont to dress up in costume.  ME went as a ladybug this year, in a costume given to me by a friend.  It’s not something I would have chosen, but dang, was it cute!  She only lasted about a block, though.  I don’t know what was wrong with her; she was really zoned out all night long.  Grace was the most amazing robot I have ever seen.  Kurt had made this pretty elaborate costume using nothing but a big box and some flashing lights while I was in San Diego with the javelina hunters, and seeing it for my own self was pretty amazing.  The bonus to it was she was extremely visible all night long.  She had four flashing red lights on the front of her costume, along with six glow sticks, and somehow Kurt had wrangled my Woot-off strobe lights onto the back of her costume — and those things are damn bright.   Her arms were made from dryer ducting, and she wore silver sparkly leggings with silver sparkly Crocs-like shoes to complete the costume.  It was awesome!!

I love it!! (Click HERE for a look at the costume in better light.)  And like the terrible parents my parents were before me, we’ve gone through Grace’s candy, stolen those containing peanuts and consumed them, and put her candy away so that none of us will even remember she has any.

Not till Easter, at the very earliest.