McPolack Recommends...
This is a hippopota-must if I ever saw one.
Did I ever get eaten by the bear yesterday. Along with (and this after going to two drug stores and two Staples and one refill place) forgetting my money when I went to refill an ink cartridge for my printer, I was feeling really sick, having episodes of lower-body pain that were so intense at times I couldn't breathe. In the end of course I think it was gas. But thank you, magnficent and colorful imagination, for taking me on a trip down the road of What Deadly Disease Might This Be? I sure enjoyed it!
There's a red-tailed hawk sitting in a tall pine tree right outside my apartment. She's (well I can't verify the sex but that's my feeling) at the tippy-top of it and it looks like she's trying to take a nap. Unfortunately she's pissed off the other birds in the neighborhood, who are circling her and screaming at her. She keeps screaming back. I think this is the same bird I saw closer to Porter Square on Monday morning. What a treat!
It's been a long time since I was in college, running the student newspaper and feeling the excitement that comes from being clueless about the world and yet in charge of the information flow for a campus full of fellow students. I remember smoking cigs in the men's room with a friend in the wee hours of the morning as we rushed to get the paper out, and smoking yet more cigs and saying fuck a lot at the swell alt weekly I worked at right after graduation.
Even as I feel ever grateful to have survived my alcoholism in the face of tragedies like the ones that have befallen my cousin Russell and numerous other relatives before him, I read articles like this one and think, there but for the grace of God go I. I was talking at a dinner party recently about my own experience with health insurance, or lack thereof - well, pretty much lack thereof, although I am past due now on getting a plan as a Massachusetts resident -- and I realized I don't know if I could see the movie Sicko, because it just might give me a panic attack.
Yesterday I visited with KBH and her family in NH. KBH is one of my oldest friends; we met when we were 15 at a crazy Catholic retreat. When I'm feeling cash poor, and I'm so cash poor at the moment I'm sick to my stomach, it's my friends I'm grateful for, and she's one of oldest.
Do you know what's frustrating?
Perhaps when I get more experience I'll know how to best use my time when I call to interview someone and their assistant says they'll call me back in 10 minutes but lately I've been all about accepting myself as I am and right now I want to use that 10 minutes to blog about this chippy.
This ran in the Union Leader yesterday. Thanks to my Uncle Joe for helping McMumsy write it, and McMumsy for asking me for my two cents. I did try to get her penchant for half-nude dancing in there but, well, it's a family publication.
Labels: Mcmumsy
I've been thinking lately, as I do the online dating thing and find that pretty much everyone's traveled and I haven't, that travel would be a good thing, a chance to stretch and see the world.
Tonight it was spinning with Melissa T, co eighth grade valedictorian with Dr. Moo, and one of two of my little sister's childhood friends who live right nearby. She wanted the goods on Moo's boyfriend, who she fixed Moo up with, and was jealous I'd talked to her. "But I'm her sister!" I said. "You've only got six years on me," was her reply, and it's true -- they've been friends since the first grade.
Labels: Dr. Moo
...that back in 2004, six short hours before he was due to step on stage in front of thousands to accept an award for coming back from retirement to save the company, the CEO of McDonald's dropped dead of a heart attack?
I was just talking about TFM yesterday with New England Eating, nee California Eating, as we took a tour of some farmers markets in the area -- a working Saturday for her and a real treat for me, especially when we got to the combination pita bakery/grocery store up the street from the one in Roslindale, with its barrels of cheap, fantastic, delicious olives and its pretty apricot paste.
This is a bit of an older tale but I haven't shared it yet and I've not got much else to say so here you go...
Labels: Dr. Moo
So today in transcription land I listened to interviews with astronauts. Not surprisingly, they're all white men with mild Texas accents and have names like Chuck, Buck, and Cripp. I've discovered through transcription that life is like it is in the movies when it comes to astronauts and, oddly enough, interrogation tactics.
Tonight I had more people in my house than I had chairs at my dining room table. As I only have four chairs for the table, only two of which match, one of which I found in the basement, and one of which I got for free from two of this evening's guests (California Eating and Cinema Tech) before they moved to California, from whence they recently returned, I sat at a rocking chair at the head of the table.
I journeyed to the South End with L yesterday afternoon to check out the open market. We held middle-school aged chickens, all stumbly legs and stroobly down and mine was falling asleep in the nest I made of my hands. We sniffed soaps and fondled handbags and then walked on, asking for directions to a human bakery at a dog bakery. We also went to a giant Asian supermarket where I was able to introduce L to something Asian and delicious she, who can tell me what to do with all manner of shrunken damp brown stinky things in bags found in Asian grocery stores, had never heard of: Ting Ting Jahe!
Labels: Polackpappy
I did my first primary series astanga class today -- 90 minutes of flowing yoga, one posture after another. It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be and I can get into lotus position pretty easily. However it does NOT look like the pictures when I do it and there's still a lot I can't do at all.
Labels: yoga
So I'm still doing the online dating thing, only at this point there's no actual dating happening. I've written a few men with no response and the doctor never e-mailed me.
Labels: the mens
Pp is 66 years old today and exactly twice my age -- something that only happens once in a lifetime for both of us.
Labels: Polackpappy
One of the things McMumsy and PolackPappy discovered on their trip the the McMotherland (along with the fact that we're related a guy who was a bishop in Dublin in the 1940's) was this: There are a lot of Polacks in Ireland. A whole great big lot. It's a hot spot for immigrants of the pierogi persuasion.
Labels: Dr. Moo, Mcmumsy, Polackpappy
Transcribed an interview with a woman who started an orphanage for street children in a foreign land at the age of 18.
D-Moon and I arrived at our Somerville abode early this afternoon. I must say it's nice to be back in my own space, despite the fact that I was partly dreading my return -- I don't really know why, except for that maybe I'm itching to be in the woods again. Change is a-brewing.
There's no backache like the backache you get when it's a combination of cramps plus muscle soreness, payback for humping your friend's 25 pound child most of the way up a mountain, a child who, upon hearing the words "Faster mule, faster!" shrieks with glee and kicks you, urging you ever upwards.
Would be what I am in work right now. Deadline's a-looming. Part of my process is the avoidy dance. Step one: sit in front of computer with coffee and fatty scone. Fart around on internet. Step two: write a half page. Step three: go for run, take shower. Step four: sit at computer and dither and write another half page. Step five: go get iced coffee, then watch the fledged chimney sweeps that have been chittering in the chimney behind me practice flying -- neat! Step six: watch 30 minutes General Hospital. Step seven: write some more.
Labels: work
...when I went out in the barn and discovered Ethel had left me an entire rattus norvegicus, in honor of the birth of our great Nation. Perhaps next she will do something about rattus gbushicus.
Labels: Holidays
Dr. Moo called last night at just the right time -- I was freaking out because MM and PP messed up their computer and I can't fix it, and my laptop wouldn't connect to the internet, and I needed it for the story I'm working on. So, thank God, Moo logged into my email and gave me the info I needed.
Ethel is the barn kitty in residence at the McPolack homestead. She used to be named "Number 5" because she was the fifth kitten in a litter of five that Fred (good job sexing that cat, Polackpappy!) gave birth to before I had her fixed when I was living with Babcia on the farm. I was trying not to get attached, see. Because there were all these kittens there and I worried for them and in fact I used to have bad dreams about them -- dreams in which there were kittens everywhere, getting run over by cars, or torn apart by coyotes, or just making more kittens so that I could never rest.
Labels: Babcia, Polackpappy