Bathroom on the right 7 November 2009

Tell me I’m not the only one to have misheard that lyric when I was a kid.  I’m sure it’s a common thing, common enough to make my friend and I giggle during a football game yesterday.

Oh we were so bad last night.  Our team was doing quite well, which is the norm and not the exception, but our cheerleading team was something else.  They were far more interested in gossiping with each other than keeping the crowd excited.  It got to the point where I would start a cheer by my own self with my friend joining in.  We got a few dirty looks from the cheerleading coach, but it didn’t compel her to get the girls cheering.

The other team had, in addition to their cheer squad, a dance team.  And all our boys could do throughout halftime was stare with undisguised longing at those girls as they romped across the field.

Ahhh, teenage hormones.  Gotta love it.

It was just after halftime that the moon started to rise, and it really was that angry, orange color.  It was pretty creepy, to tell the truth.  The color faded as it rose in the sky, so by the time we left the game, it was almost its normal white. I’ve noticed that orange-red moons seem to be rather common here in Rhode Island.  I tried running one down a year or so ago, but failed in photographing it because I didn’t have my big camera on me.  A shock, I know.  This I took with the big camera and my 55-200mm zoom lens, and even then, I had to take something like fifteen shots before I was satisfied with this one.

Thank goodness for digital.  I love being able to see whether I’ve gotten the shot or not, especially with night shots.  They’re so easy to mess up.  My first try at that shot was horrible — too bright, too noisy, and way too blurry.  I doubled the shutter speed, stood as still as I could, and braced the long lens as best as I could, and voila!  A pretty shot.

Seeing as technology has been failing me as of late (what with popping streetlights and randomly broken point-and-shoot cameras and now my computer that likes to take forever to start up a new program), it was quite nice to have it work for me gloriously well this morning.  I got to sleep in, thanks to my lovely husband who got up with the girls this morning and allowed me to sink back into my dreamworld, so it was late by the time I made it out to the living room.  I checked my email, Facebook, Twitter — and there on my Twitter was a tweet from a friend who said he was on his way to Boston for the weekend.  I immediately sent him a direct message, assuming it would go straight to his phone as a text since he had tweeted by text, and he sent back his cell phone number so we could keep in more direct contact.  All this turned into a random jaunt up to the big city, where we were foiled by the prospect of delicious mac n’ cheese.  How does a restaurant justify being closed on a Saturday afternoon??

Oh, well.  The weather was lovely, the company engaging and entertaining, and the food, when we finally found a place to eat, quite scrumptious.  It was my first time meeting my friend’s wife, though I’ve known him since we were both fifteen and sophomores in high school.  We went to the same college and graduated with the same degree, but after college he went on to law school in New York while I married Kurt.   I was supposed to go to their wedding last summer, but my cousin was married that same weekend.  And hindsight being 20/20, it was probably a good thing I didn’t try to go to both weddings, as I gave birth to Mary Ellen just a week later.  Everyone was shocked I went to Aubrey’s wedding at all, being so huge and all.  Folks, I was just pregnant.  Not sick.  It wasn’t that big a deal to go to her wedding, and I’m so glad I did.

I put my Stamp of Approval on my friend’s wife tonight.  How could I not?  She’s going for her Master’s in Library Science, and anyone with an MLS is way cool in my book.  Maybe one day I’ll hie myself back to school and procure an MLS for my own self.  One day…

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?