Category Archives: Love

Settling in means shopping, apparently

Life, Love & Marriage, Moving

In which there’s been lots of consumerism.

So. Much. Buying. Stuff.

We’ve purchased the following things: a dish drainer, Pyrex casserole dishes, an immersion blender, a bicycle, many groceries, a big scented candle, a bike lock, a nightlight, a tiny bungee cord and a bike basket, a box of 25 different kinds of incense, a short coax cable, a small shelving unit for the bathroom and a can of spray paint, herb seeds, a rotary egg beater, and a cell phone.

We’ve been to three different grocery stores, an Indian shop, a junk store, Target, two Walmarts, Menard’s, a bike shop, and a Super America.

The kitchen cabinets have gone from more than half empty to stuffed. The linen and front closets are much less empty than they were. I’m using cardboard boxes in the bedroom for a dresser. I’m about 65% unpacked, with nine boxes remaining to deal with.

I’ve done tons of cooking and currently my fridge is full of leftovers!

I’ve had an interview, talked to a recruiter, and registered at three temp agencies. I think I applied for a dozen jobs last week.

Once the bike shop is done with the Raleigh, I’ll be more mobile and will be able to get the store and back in less than an hour. All I need now is a job! And for it to stop raining.

Life is good!

Derivative food blogger crap that could only be interesting if I’d thought of it twenty years ago.

Bentō, Food, Soapbox

In which there are Mason, Kerr, and Ball jars.

I like jars. You can get a bunch of them for like twelve bucks, and use them for pretty much everything from juice glass to food storage to coffee brewing. They’re probably less awesome in kitchens with stone floors, but in general if you don’t drop them they’re lovely.

And now for some pictures of things in jars.

Portable breakfast in a jar:

Coffee brewing in a jar:

A sewing kit in a jar:

(Although, if you make one, do use a wide-mouthed jar, as this one requires you to pour all of the contents out in order to get a single item.)

More breakfast in a jar:

A jar transformed into a sippy cup:

And old jelly jar made into a soy wax candle, with an even smaller jar with sand paper glued to the lid holding matches:

My grandmother’s basement is full of old jars. It’s handy as heck.

. .. … .. .

I’ve decided not to buy plastic containers if I can help it, especially not single-use items. So much comes from the store in a reusable plastic container with a lid — Kalamata olives, cottage cheese, etc — that you really don’t need to buy storage containers.

It’s so weird to me that we throw those things out daily and then go buy GladWare, a product with lids that don’t even fit.

I have no idea why Mason jars are suddenly all the rage, but I feel it must have something to do with people’s reactions to the expensive, resource-depleting absurdity that is bottled water.

On the one who thinks you’re perfect, even though you’re not.

Introspection, Love & Marriage

In which there’s a very long-form piece about love. (Originally posted here, but since I wrote it I decided I’d like a local copy and moved it. So here it is.)

A year ago, if you’d asked me if I’d ever been in love before, I would have said yes, of course. I mean, I’m a divorced grown-ass woman, aren’t I?

I’ve been in love a dozen times or more, haven’t I? I’ve had that wonderful flush at the beginning, and the horrible heartache and tears at the end, and the various shades of really good to merely okay to this-fucking-sucks in between. I’m an old hand at this shit. Been there, done that.

So much so that I weighed the pros, as I understood them, of being with someone versus the cons, and came to the only logical conclusion:

Fuck relationships.

Continue reading On the one who thinks you’re perfect, even though you’re not. →

The weekend

Life, Love & Marriage, Music

In which there is THE BEST OMELETTE OF ALL TIME. And I’m moving.

Saturday night, Coyote Kings and I along with Gary Winston & the Real Deal played at concert venue Main Street Studios here in Walla Walla.

The venue is pretty cool but it’s new enough that people don’t seem to know about it, so while the audience was appreciative it was very small. I think I made maybe thirty bucks for the night, which doesn’t even cover my bar tab. Oh, well.

After the show I went to Marcy’s with my friend Kimi. Much of the regular crew were there and it was like old times. We all sat around the fire table on the patio and hollered at one another. It was glorious.

As last call neared, Kimi informed me that she was no longer eligible for any kind of driving-type behavior, so I offered her lodging with me. We stumbled back to the house around one o’clock in the morning and hung out in my room hollerin’ (and drinkin’ sparkling wine that I’m sure we really didn’t need) until we passed out. (I offered her the front room like a decent hostess, but she chose a pile of blankets on my floor anyway. Gotta love yourself a low-maintenance woman!)

The next morning we walked back to town together in search of brunch. There was a wait at Maple Counter so we snuck into Marcy’s. This probably saved my life:

Eventually we got into the restaurant and this happened:

That lovely thing is a mushroom and Swiss omelette with mushroom bechamel. It was perfect. I loved every bite of it! The owner of the restaurant knows Kimi and came to our table (and recognized me!). She was incredibly gracious and nice.

I love this little town and I love the friends I’ve made here. Being able to bike or walk everywhere is wonderful. Being greeted and hugged by a dozen people when walking into the bar is gratifying and satisfying. Being a bit of a local celebrity is super fun.

I’m really going to miss it here after I move to Minneapolis next year. Yup, I’ve decided I’m gonna quit living in an attic and go shack up with the LDBF. He’s my best friend, my partner, and the only man who has ever waltzed with me in the kitchen. Plus the job market there is amazing. (The weather sucks, but after 15-plus years in Iowa I know I can adapt.)

I don’t have an actual date set yet, but am looking at probably somewhere between late March and May. I’m not really excited about going through all my crap and the multiple trips to Goodwill to donate things I haven’t used in six years, but I am excited about arriving there and enjoying city living again for the first time in years. And being with a fantastic human being. And Indian and falafel joints. And a real job market.

Anyway, the news is that I’m moving to the Midwest. Again. (Heh.) I guess I should probably tell my grandmother about this.

Vacation

Love

In which there’s lots and lots of relaxation.

Doing basically nothing for a whole entire week is AWESOME.

Happiness

Sleeping in, cooking, eating, cuddling, movie dates, bottles of wine, cuddling. Yaaaap: you’re jelly.

At night, I’m an electronic device the size of a pen

Love & Marriage

In which you gain insight into The Relationship with LDBF. Or not. I have no idea.

So this happened via SMS:

LDBF: Had a crazy dream with u in it
me: Did we have adventures?!
LDBF: Yes, kinda… at one point, you were eating raw butter, at another u were an electronic device the size of a pen
me: Both of those things are AWESOME! Ur subconscious knows me well
LDBF: Wanna keep you in my pocket and feed u dairy
me: Yay! Also maybe what you want is a pet rather than a woman
LDBF: dogs don’t give great blowjobs

I hate the implementation of the goddamned Internet!

Soapbox

In which I bitch about the ‘improvements’ we’re seeing on sites net-wide, because they’re not making things work better, they’re just fads of style.

The Internet is now being built by people so young they have never lived in a world without it. They’ve been online all their lives and probably started coding as tweens. They barely remember the elegance of plain old HTML; the ‘net has always been client-side apps stuffed into browsers to them.

Now they’ve got jobs designing the resources many of us use on a daily if not hourly basis. Every so often they decide to redesign and modernize whatever property they work on (because WE HAVE TO FIX IT even if IT AIN’T BROKEN). Then you get shit like the new improved Flickr, a site I have loved and used for years, which basically no longer works and, to add insult to injury, is just plain ugly. Same with the last Twitter update, and the redesigns of basically every large web property ever. Some old guy retires, the new guy says LET’S BRING THIS SHIT INTO THE FUTURE, and then it’s a bloated abortion of a service that has so much crap buried in each page you can’t even load the site on half your devices.

The following things have become pretty much standard on all sites and yet they all suck and they all piss me off:

  • Continuous scroll – Fuck this. Pagination is better. Eternal scroll just fucking hammers resources, isn’t cool, breaks paging Back, accomplishes nothing in any case ever except for long reads of Tumblr accounts WHICH NEVER HAPPENS EVER, and the fact that everyone is doing it does not reduce the fact that it fucking sucks.
  • Pages that won’t stop loading when you click Stop – LISTEN, I DONT WANT TO WAIT FOR ALL THAT SHIT TO LOAD. I ONLY WANT TO SEE WHAT’S BENEATH THE FOLD FOR LIKE FIVE FUCKING SECONDS. I AM NOT GOING TO LOOK AT ANY OF THE SHIT YOU’RE STUFFING INTO MY BROWSER RIGHT NOW, ASSHOLES.
  • Putting the content I want under the fold – Fuck you. Fuck your ad revenue. Fuck your layout. I followed a link here to see your CONTENT, and all you’re doing for the first 32 seconds of my visit is hiding that from me and showing me a bunch of crap.
  • Non-local authentication only – Fuck you, I do NOT want to link my Google, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn accounts to your stupid recipe site. That information is none of your goddamned business.
  • Endless push notifications as default – Listen, I don’t give a fuck that 20 friends are chatting on Facebook. Your stupid apps BLEW THE FUCK UP, ON EVERY DEVICE I HAVE when that chat started. Jesus.
  • Video – Listen, embedding video on a landing page is fucking AWFUL. You’re wasting my time and I DON’T WANT TO SEE IT, NO MATTER WHAT IT IS. I CAME HERE FOR SOMETHING ELSE, AND YOU’RE FORCING A FUCKING VIDEO AT ME? It’s because of assholes like you that I have to leave my speakers turned off at work.
  • Meaningless pages requiring redundant clicks – I’m looking at you, Pinterest, Yummly: I clicked on something and I want to SEE IT. So fucking take me there! I DO NOT want to click through your stupid interim page that does nothing at all but require me to CLICK AGAIN to go where you already know I want to go. FUCK your ad revenue; you’re wasting my time and resources and pissing me off and that’s why I quit using your sites.
  • Sites so unusable in a browser you can basically only interact with their content through mobile apps – The Flickr and Facebook mobile apps beat the actual websites hands-down. Unfortunately the apps aren’t available on all my devices, which pisses me off. (I want Flickr for Kindle Fire, goddamn it.)
  • Sites that simply don’t work at all if you have AdBlock enabled – LOOOOL YOUR CODE SUCKS, SON.
  • The need for AdBlock in the first place – Dude, I get you need to monetize. I honestly don’t mind ads on web properties; it’s when you slam them down my throat and hide your real content so coyly that I give up on it altogether that I think you’re a fucking jerk.

I love having so much information available at all times. I love the ubiquity of bandwidth these days. I love my phone and my worstations and my tablet. What irritates me is time-wasting bad design and the endless reinventions of wheels that already worked.

Autumn, work, and airplanes

Love & Marriage, Work

In which I wore a coat to work this morning. RIP, summer.

That huge tree in the neighbor’s yard has begun dropping horse chestnuts into the alley by the bushel, it’s darker earlier every night, and we had our equinox on Saturday: it must be fall.

Horse chestnuts

I really need to get some working lights on my bike since it’s going to start being dark all the time.

I’ve decided that if one hasn’t gotten into a box in over five years, she probably doesn’t need any of the contents. So now I’m going through the dozen boxes I brought with me — and put in the attic when I arrived here in October of 2007 and have ignored ever since — and basically donating everything that isn’t actual garbage or a family photo album. (I still want to scan the albums. They’re so bulky and nobody really displays stuff like that any more.) I went through three boxes over the weekend and kept nothing but a couple of paperbacks and a stack of photos that belong to my ex-husband and which I’ll mail back to him.

Applied for an additional position at the paper; have a second meeting about it tomorrow. Might end up working full-time again through virtually no fault of my own! I love working part-time, I really do, but there’s nothing wrong with extra income. And I really do enjoy working in the newsroom; the people are great, the vibe is great, and it’s only a couple more hours each day.

Last Friday my boss walked up to each of us in turn to tell us what our remaining vacation hours for the year were; I was pleased and shocked to learn I have 33 hours to use up before the end of the year. Once I get my vacation dates approved I’m going to book a flight so I can spend a week with LDBF, who is the best thing ever.

I could go on and on about how wonderful he is, but people generally don’t care about new couple stuff. (My friend Embo usually responds with something along the lines of, “Eww! Barf!” when I say cute shit about him.) Suffice it to say he and I still talk every single night and both feel as if we have yet to uncover in one another anything we don’t like. We have a great deal in common, are very compatible, and would probably already be shacked up by now if we didn’t live so far apart. It’s wonderful to be in love, but it’s kind of a bitch having to do it over the internet. Thank God for Skype so I can look at his face, at least.

I’m going to go do the dishes and then maybe take a decadent autumn afternoon nap. I can do that shit as long as I’m still working only part-time!

OMG OMG OMG WTFBBQ BEST WEEKEND EVAR IN THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE WORLD!!!1!

Love & Marriage

In which the e-BF is now the LDBF (long distance boyfriend).

I’m sure I cannot express to you how much fun I had with LDBF this weekend, but I’m’a try.

Thursday I left work at one and caught a cab to ALW. Was nervous as fuck. Sat in the lobby and waited for his plane to land; saw him walk in the door and thought, “Wow. That dude’s tall.” Got his attention, we hugged, went to the Hertz counter to pick up the rental car.

Drove to Marcy’s. Had a few rounds. Kept touching him because he was THERE, IN REAL LIFE, OMFG WOW. Dropped his stuff off at the house, introduced him to G’ma and my brother. There was a storm and the power went out. Went over to the Wendover-Briggs patio and ate Thai food and drank adult beverages in the dark. Went home, chatted with G’ma in the dark. Went to bed. May or may not have done one or two adult things in the dark. Snuck up to my own room about four o’clock in the morning and passed out for a few hours.

Got up happy as a clam and packed a picnic lunch. Woke the man up, got cuddled for awhile. We took off about one o’clock and took the scenic route to Soap Lake. Had a picnic at Lyons Ferry, visited Palouse Falls and saw some yellow-bellied marmots.

IMG_20130906_141550

Soap Lake is kind of a sad little burnt-out town with a lake in it. We stayed in room 14 at Notaras. Had a soak in the jacuzzi. Went to Ephrata for Mexican food (in keeping with the lodge room theme, of course). Hung out alone together in real life. Did a lot of grinning and gazing. Passed out at a fairly reasonable hour. There was much snuggling.

Saturday we had a leisurely drive to Grand Coulee. Ate a bunch of sunflower seeds in the car. Saw Dry Falls and Banks Lake. Got to town too early to check in to our hotel so wasted a little time at a casino. He played slots and turned $20 into $40; we drank the winnings.

IMG_20130907_125240

Checked in, went out and ate Chinese food. Saw the dam’s laser light show cuddled in the dark on a picnic bench. Went back to the hotel, drank a bottle of champagne and soaked in the jacuzzi tub. Sat on the balcony and giggled.

Went out for brunch in the morning, then checked out at eleven. Visted the Grand Coulee Dam visitor’s center. Wandered around outside. Went shopping. Eventually went to Sunbanks Resort to check out the festival. Went back into town and ate lunch at a taco wagon.

Sunbanks

Sunbanks Blues Festival

Played a set with Coyote Kings from 4-5. Great crowd! I had expected it to be in the low 70’s so the gig clothes I brought were entirely too warm; signed a few CDs after the set. Changed into a skirt and t-shirt in the car and then we took off.

Arrived back in Walla Walla about nine o’clock. We decided to watch a movie but ended up just cuddling and talking instead until we passed out.

Monday morning we just sat around and spent every single second together that we could; left for the airport a little after twelve-thirty. Dropped off the rental car, got his boarding pass. He went through TSA into the fishbowl. I called a taxi and we sat with a glass wall between us texting each other.

I got into my cab about one thirty and had the driver drop me off at Starbucks on 1st & Main. Went inside, ordered an iced coffee, and nearly broke into tears realizing that he was just then boarding his flight and was leaving.

The man is wonderful. We get along fantastically. He’s kind and generous and hilarious and smart. I miss him terribly and will probably wear the t-shirt he left me until it falls apart.

So now I’m in love with this big tall fuzzy nerd who lives two thousand miles away. We’re either going to have to get bored of each other real soon, or someone’s gonna have to move real far.

Moral: getting mauled by an adorable bearded dude from the Midwest is awesome.

But I don’t want to drive to Seattle tomorrow!

Love & Marriage, Music

In which there are essentially four aspects to my life these days: gigging, the e-BF, wine, and my awesome day job.

My uncle Dangerous is in town. Yesterday afternoon I got abducted by him and my aunt and my brother and two dogs and mercilessly dragged to Marcy’s for “lunch,” which was in actual fact not lunch as much as a lot of drinking and hollering and Morgan family fun.

Untitled

After a few hours of that, I trundled my tipsy ass off to bed for a disco nap. Woke up, spent a little time gazing and making kissy-faces at the cute e-BF via Skype (he sent me an HD cam as a gift to himself, so we basically leave Skype running all the time now) and horking down a bean tostada with slices of a perfectly ripe avocado. At nine, I biked down to Sapolil to do a set with Coyote Kings at a benefit for a local musician with leukemia. Dan and James were there. I sang and danced and drank and had fun. Got home a little after midnight.

Tried to call the e-BF to say good night and discovered my phone was off. Paid my bill, called him for half a minute, passed out.

The e-BF will be here in two weeks. We have a little mini-vacation planned up in the Grand Coulee Dam area. I’m very excited! Crazy lodge with weirdly themed rooms! Laser light show! Tour of the dam! Sunbanks blues festival! The adorable e-BF in real life!

I’m madly in love with the creature and cannot wait to hang out with him in person. Who knows. If it goes well maybe I’ll move to Minneapolis or something. That’d be a good mid-life crisis, right? Move two thousand miles back to the Midwest and take up with a doting younger man? Because God knows I have no interest in owning a sports car.

The band is playing Poverty Bay blues & brews tomorrow so it’ll be TEN HOURS IN THE VAN just to do an hour-long show. I’m always stoked to do the actual set, of course, but I’m really getting sick of driving. We played Big Sky in Montana a couple of weeks ago and that was another long day of driving. In September we’re in Spokane and Electric City as well as twice in the Tricities… so. Much. Driving. Ugh.

I love singing and I like the money, but honestly I’m really ready for gig season to be over. Not that it’s ever really over, but it does slow down a lot in the autumn. Sometimes you just want to stay the fuck home and do nothing all weekend for a month or two.

Perimenopausal acne is bullshit. Fuck hormones. Seriously. I’ll be 45 next month. I have absolutely no idea how I got this old, and having zits again like I did in my teens is just utter bullocks.

I had sushi for lunch today. Happy roll (smoked salmon, cream cheese, jalapeno), edamame, miso soup. It was delicious.

The longer I work at the paper the more I like it. The personalities in the newsroom are great, the challenge of building pages every day is engaging without being frustrating, and overall I just really like it there. Apparently I just have a certain thing for dying industries!