All posts by Mush

About Mush

I want to be a veterinarian because I love children.

Just like Jack Kerouac

In which we ask, “Wyoming?” and answer, “Hey, why not!”

I should be out of here by midday tomorrow, unless I screw around too much with my remaining chores, which include visiting the farm one last time and doing extremely tedious shit with many cardboard boxes: loading some into the jeep, getting rid of some, and shipping still more.

The Ex didn’t get around to returning my call until Saturday evening, so I didn’t get out there last week like I’d planned. Behind the swollen closet door at the farm I expect to find two boxes of family things my dad sent to me (because he lives in a motor home and has no storage room and foolishly thought that I was stable enough to care for heirlooms – hah!), my sewing machine, and perhaps some clothes or jackets that still fit. I’m also going to grab my monitor, keyboard, and bowling ball, look one last time for my PPCs sync cable, and then take one final sweep through the house in general to be sure I haven’t missed anything precious to me. (I’m of the opinion that once I leave the state, The Ex will pretty much have carte blanche to throw out anything I’ve left that he no longer wants, so I want to be thorough.)

I also need to take the jeep for a drive-through oil change at Fessler’s to get all the fluids topped off and the tires properly aired up. I meant to do it Friday after I picked the jeep up from getting its new fan belt, but I was having major issues with The Curse and I didn’t make it.

Hopefully I can get all this shit done and be out of town by early afternoon, and get some miles under me and my blue dog before dark-thirty. I plan to sleep in a motel in Nebraska somewhere – Lincoln or Grand Island, perhaps – and thus be at my mom’s place at a decent hour on Wednesday.


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At my mom’s I intend to catch up on my blog reading, send my resume to all seven of Walla Walla’s ISPs whether they’re hiring or not, drink lots of tea, knit wool slippers, read, and shamelessly make my way through half of the household’s DVD library. I also might cook weird foods and try to feed them to my mom for laughs. At night, my dog and I shall sleep cuddled together right in the middle of the bed, and moan groggily in the mornings when mom tries to wake us up to hang out with her.

I’m posting this entry at two thirty in the morning because I slept most of the day. I slept most of the day because my Going Away party was last night (thank you so much for a lovely party, Baby Girl!), and you know how it is: all those cocktails just seemed like a good idea at the time. Now, in spite of the hour, I’m going to finish packing up my clothing and stack all my boxes together and then determine which ones I should ship. I suspect I will also have a pile of garbage I’ll have to dispose of somehow; I can’t leave it here to fill up the trash bin so maybe I’ll just dump it in some previous employer’s dumpster.

In other news, my birthday is Saturday. I’ll be thirty-nine. I have no idea how I got this fucking old, nor did I expect at this age to be driving across the country with everything I own. Oddly enough I am once again as I was when I arrived back in Fairfield eleven years ago: single, broke, with no savings or insurance, with all of my earthly belongings in a vehicle too old to be anything more than merely functional, separated from utter destitution only by the generosity of friends and family, and yet irrationally possessed nonetheless with a bubbling suspicion that something way cool is on the cusp for me.

I guess I’m blessed, in the sense that rootlessness of this sort tends to feel exciting rather than scary to me. I feel hopelessness when I’m conventionally safe, with shelter and income and work and bills and monotony, but when I’m like this – in transit, homeless and uncounted – I feel buoyant and grateful and as if the world is full of potential.

It occurs to me that I may be wired wrong. *wink*

The most fun I've ever had with a battery-driven device

In which I looooooooooooooooooooooove gadgets, omgwtfbbq!!

While I was in Portland my bro-there, Jay-rob, and I exchanged iPods. He gave me his 5th gen iPod Video, and I gave him my older iPod Photo (plus Firewire cable, charger, and FM transmitter) because I didn’t need it any more after he gave me his. (Because I guess he’s in love with his PSP and basically quit using his iPod. Plus he’s way fuckin’ cool.)

Additionally Jay-rob forced me to watch Serenity. (Let me tell you: it totally rocked out with its cock out. The fact that I only got five hours of sleep because I stayed up late watching it is totally irrelevant: THAT’S how much it rocked. Dude.)

(I know, I know, how can I call myself a card-carrying sci-fi geek when I haven’t watched Firefly? Well, it’s like this: NO FUCKING CABLE TV FOR YEARS, MMM’KAY?)

Anyway! (Focus, would you?) The result of all these things is that today, I used the $10 in my PayPal account (thanks, Amy! *smooch!*) and bought five episodes of Firefly from iTunes and synched them to my video iPod.

And then I laid in my bed and watched one of them. And then I sat on the porch with a cocktail and watched another.

AND I’VE STILL GOT THREE LEFT.

This is a totally true story.

Back in the Midwest

In which I now consider myself to be a resident of the Left Coast, visiting Iowa for a week.

I’m baaaaaaaaaaaaack! Back online and back in Iowa, that is.

The captain of my flight out of Portland said that we could listen in to the air traffic control chatter on channel 9 if we wanted to, so I pulled out my iPod headphones and did just that. For the entire flight. And now I think it would be fun to push tin for a living. I could totally do it, too. It’s geek, but with planes instead of packets! (Not to mention you would not have believed how sexy that German Lufthansa pilot’s voice was! OMG. For real. WTF Lufthansa was doing in Denver I’ll never know, but whatever.) So I’ve decided I need to learn the phonetic alphabet. Alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, echo, foxtrot, golf, h, India, j, kilo, lima, motel, November, o, p, Quebec, r, sierra, tango, u, v, whiskey, x-ray, y, Zulu. I’m half-way there.

I’m taking a couple of gigs worth of stuff off of the iPod my brother gave me before I wipe it and put my stuff on it. Tedious. But worth it, for delicious tunes.

In fact, I’ll be spending all day playing with my new laptop (it’s old, but new to me and it works, and it’s MINE) and organizing my few belongings into coherence.

It takes a lot of software to make a laptop comfortable. And a lot of cleaning to make things that have been stored at The Ex’s house reasonably clean.

Greetings From The Left Coast

In which I’ve made it!

I took a commuter flight from CID (Cedar Rapids, IA) to ORD (Chicago O’hare). Then I took a big ass jet from ORD to PDX (Portland, OR) where my kick-ass baby brother picked me up and promptly took me to a dive bar so I could decompress over a few drinks.

iPod Pr0nNow I’m at his place and we’re dorking out hardcore (his desktop is gorgeous) on hardware. The image is of our two iPods plugged into his tower. (No, iTunes doesn’t know what to do when you connect two iPods simultaneously. We don’t suggest you try it if you’re not a card-carrying FUCKING GEEK.)

Jay-rob’s giving me his iPod and I’m giving him mine. Right now he’s loading an assload of Todd Rundgren onto my new iPod BECAUSE HE’S SUPERIOR IN ALL WAYS.

Bro-there’s are excellent. You should get one, if you don’t already have one.

Tomorrow, we’re driving up the Gorge to Walla Walla to see the fam-damily for gramma’s 85th birthday celebration. Whee!

Warming Up & Cooling Down

In which I must be part bear or something.

It’s warming up to birthday time! I can tell because I’ve been getting gifts already. (I love gifts.) Someone emailed me an entire Ben Folds album, and someone else bought me lunch via Paypal. (Fear of Pop, Vol. I rocks, by the way. I’d already had a few tracks off of it, but listening to the whole thing in context is even more kick ass. I sure do love that Ben Folds.)

In contrast, the weather is cooling down. Rapidly. Much too rapidly. I don’t like it.

I usually adore autumn, but the days seem to have shortened much more suddenly than usual and it’s cold enough at night to see one’s breath. My physiology is reacting by wanting to sleep for 12 – 14 hour stretches. Since it got cold three days ago, I’ve hit snooze on my alarm for an entire hour each morning. I just can’t wake up and when I finally do my brain literally, physically hurts.

I’ve always been this way. I’ve been socialized to believe that I don’t try hard enough, that I can’t wake up because I’m lazy, but I can tell you it ain’t about my attitude. My body must depend on some combination of temperature and ambient light to process my sleep patterns, and when those things change so suddenly I get stuck in deep sleep and can’t get out.

Or something. (I don’t know! What the hell am I, a sleep expert?) All I know is that the temperature dropped 50 degrees from one day to the next, and I woke the day after having slept 13 hours and feeling headachy, confused, and stupid.

Yay for coffee!

Tonight I gotta pack my suitcase and tidy my room and get some of the boxes out of the back of the jeep. Tomorrow is my last day at work; I’ll be leaving around three or so. I have a 6:30 flight out of CID and tomorrow night I’ll be in Portland hangin’ with my baby bro!!! HELL TO THE YEAH, BITCHES!

Update: Packing for travel this time of year is a pain. I’ve checked the weather for PDX and Walla Walla, and it says it’ll be, like, 85-ish during the days and 57-ish at night. So I need strappy summer things and also jackets and socks. Gah.

My mom suggested that I use my luggage allotment to take some shit out to grandma’s, saving space in the jeep. She’s a genius! If time allows I may just select a box at random, tape the shit out of it at work, and take it as my second piece of luggage. I’d meant to go through my boxes of shit and consolidate it (most of them are half garbage anyway, I think) next week, so I don’t really have anything that I know contains only stuff I want at this particular juncture.

Moving. Such a pain in the ass!

My September Schedule

In case you’re curious what the hell I’m doing during the next few weeks.

Sept 13 – 18: Fly to Portland Oregon, drive to Walla Walla Washington with my brother, celebrate grandma’s birthday with the family. Back to PDX, return to Iowa.
Sept 19 – 22: Tune up the jeep, organize and pack my belongings. Hock books at local used bookstore. Get dog’s records from the vet, etc.
Sept 22: Enjoy a lovely Going Away Party!!! at the little bar.
Sept 23: Recuperate.
Sept 24: Depart Iowa. Whee!

Sept 25: Arrive mom’s house in Wyoming. Hang out for a week or so. (Note to self: get the hell out of there before winter snows your ass in.)
Sept 29: My birthday! Whee!

Oct 1-ish: Get back on I-80 heading west.

Oct 3-ish: Arrive in my new home, Walla Walla!

Local Food

In which my time is limited.

India Cafe buffetIt occurred to me this morning that I only have so many opportunities left to have Indian take-out for lunch.

I don’t remember there being any Indian restaurants in Walla Walla (there’s Thai and sushi, though!), and I don’t have high hopes that my grandma will be up for eating a lot of home-made Indian food. (She does have mucho freezer space and a microwave, though, so I may be able to make myself some homemade curry TV dinners.)

I love India Cafe’s dhal mahkani. Yum.

As long as there are yarn stores and places to buy spices, I’ll be just fine. God knows the weather’ll be better!

More Little Things

In which there are several visual aides!

With the help of NLW I collected a bunch of stuff from the farm yesterday, but I never did see my beloved Polaroid camera. I looked all over the place several times but it wasn’t there. Bread said he couldn’t remember seeing it anywhere.

Last night in bed I thought about it really hard, and remembered seeing it on the white shelves in my old office a year ago. Those shelves were packed by Bread himself the last time I went out there to get stuff. Therefore, the camera could be… in that box right there!

I jumped out of bed and opened a box. The camera wasn’t there, but it was in the box below! (Now all I have to do is find my Kodak Brownie and I’ll be good.)

The reason I love the Polaroid so much is that it takes pictures like these:

[color] [black & white]

The thing is simply amazing, and that’s all there is to it. If only I didn’t have to hoard the flashbulbs.

I threw away half of the stuff in those two boxes, but in the process I found a couple of old short stories. (The ‘Fixer’ one I wrote the last time I lived in Walla Walla – eleven years ago, as a matter of fact.)

Here they are, for your amusement, two short stories I’d totally forgotten about, found in my stuff, and scanned into PDFs:

[A Real Fixer-Upper] [Landed Aristocracy]

See, I used to be a cool person who took awesome photos with vintage cameras and wrote short stories for fun! And now I’ve proved it.

In other news, Iowa is pretending to be Oregon today. The sky is overcast and has been steely and unchanging all day. It hasn’t rained, but it looks as if it should. From horizon to horizon, the color is the same uniform pearly gray.

Things I Want

In which it’s probably true that McDonald’s isn’t so good for you. On more than one level.

There’s a story about a monk who suddenly and inexplicably becomes obsessed with the news. It turns out that the servant who prepares his food does so while reading the paper, and the subtle vibes in the food have affected the monk.

Similarly, today I had breakfast from McDonald’s and ever since I’ve been thinking about things I want, things I would buy if only I could.

I tend to avoid magazines and malls and catalogs because they cause me to want stuff I can’t have anyway and which is generally overpriced and no more functional than the things I already do have. Seeing the things I use, after looking at the nicer things available generally, makes me feel like a style-less bumpkin and so I make some effort to avoid the whole thing by shielding myself from advertising.

I’ve had New Agers tell me I don’t have tons of nice stuff because I have issues with abundance, that I need to realign myself and clear out feelings of guilt in order to experience proper flow. But that’s all crap, and I know it. If stuff was truly important to my path, I’d have figured out how to get it by now, hey what? That I haven’t – that I’ve given up all of my stuff repeatedly – informs me that this life I’m living is not particularly about the stuff. If I want beauty I can go outside and watch a sunset: I don’t have to own beautiful furniture and appliances in order to recognize myself as a lover of beauty, an appreciator of functional art, a Libra.

So, yeah, there’s a lot of nice stuff out there I’ll never own. And I’m okay with that. After all, it’s just stuff. Other than the occasional playful foray into the world of shopping, I tend to ignore the whole thing altogether.

Usually. But not today! Here’s a list of crap I want:

When I rejoin the ‘real’ world in the near future, I will probably have a fairly rocky readjustment period. In Iowa, one can get by without nice things for looooong periods of time. One can simply not think of nice things, if one is judicious, and be quite happy with what one has.

But in the ‘real’ world I’ll need normal clothes, at the very least. I have the feeling I’m going to be longing for things I can’t afford much more than usual for the next year or so, or until I can reconcile myself with the new local laws of nature. I’ll probably bitch at first, and then it’ll all go down hill from there. You should probably stop reading me now.

Well, after you buy me a birthday present, that is.

Clear Your Calendars!

In which there will be a little gathering before I leave.

Baby Girl, who is awesome, is throwing me a going-away party. It will be at the little bar on Saturday the 22nd. The official hours are from 7 to 9, but it will probably continue much longer. Please come there and let me hug you goodbye.

Even though September is my birth month and my moving-away month, all I really want are mix CDs from everybody. Send me off with some of your favorite music! Please?

If you read this, you’re invited. You might also receive an evite by email (twice!) or a phone call. Either way, please come see me off on the 22nd!