Missed

Came home to a voicemail from my friend H today in which she noted her elder child had asked after me. I immediately dialed H's number and we caught up over the sweet symphony of her two feisty chitlins, the aptly nicknamed Hella and Lucyfer. They were requesting Santa's phone number (H has told them she's going to call him and inform him of their naughtiness) and when they weren't doing that they were singing and when they weren't doing that they were shouting "A wienie is a penis!" It was divine. Earlier that day Hella gave Lucyfer an Indian sunburn and in return Lucyfer bit Hella. Last month H brought home two chocolate mousies, one for each girl. Lucyfer stuffed hers into her mouth immediately. Hella left the room for approximately two seconds. So Lucyfer made room in her three-year-old maw for a second candy rodent. Soon there was loudness. H came in to find Hella crying, and Lucyfer was crying, too, because she knew she'd done something wrong. But since there wasn't much room in her mouth for the sad, a lot of chocolate was bubbling out.

Murmuration

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.


I'm not online much these days. I really need to get a new laptop, because if  the one I have now were a child, it would be old enough to attend elementary school.

I also haven't felt like writing, at all. Totally uninspired, and angry - that's where I've been at for a while. It sucks. I've been rolling out the old fake-it-till-you-make-it saw to get through.

Anyhoo. I managed to troll the magical Interwebs a bit this morning, which is where I found this bit of loveliness, which is sure to brighten even the gloomiest of days.

Stinkalicious

The salted Hulk-Smashed cabbage on my kitchen counter still isn't stinky but I am afraid to put it somewhere warmer. Maybe a watched batch of sauerkraut never ripens.I just finished fixing up a batch of pierogi filling. It's nice to use my big muscles in the way evolution intended because - and I'm not complaining - I don't live in a world where I need to be big enough to carry a cookstove, five children, and a couple of goats over a mountain.

Hulk Smash!

Decided to try my hand at homemade sauerkraut. I've got a small crock resting on my kitchen counter with what started out as two pounds of cabbage and two tablespoons of salt. You have to punch the crap out of the cabbage/salt mixture with your fists before letting it rest and (hopefully) ferment. Mine doesn't seem to be doing much, but it's only been three days.

Scavenge

The person who did my qualifying exam on the 3D x-ray machine at the LNFU is one of those sci-fi/goth/punk science types you see working the computers on murder porn shows on the teevee. She's got medium-sized holes in her ears, or will when she takes out the plugs - and she will take them out one day - and she's tough.

But she's also a class-A trash picker. Case in point: on Tuesday evening when I was headed over to look at the data from a recent scan, she was walking down the hall with an armload of  hand-dovetailed wooden boxes. I'd seen similar ones on my travels through certain basement sections of the LNFU.

Turns out they were one and the same. The mineral people were moving on to a more sophisticated storage system, which meant the boxes were moving on to a landfill. Most of the boxes. I grabbed three of them. I would have grabbed more, but I watch too many hoarder documentaries.

Pretty guten

Yesterday I:
Learned to navigate the marble layers of an LNFLibrary

Saw one of the few complete Gutenberg bibles in existence

Had a pleasant chat with a Parisian-born Milanese fellow.

The Paritalian worked at a big financial newspaper whose name he spoke as if it were very well-known. I didn't recognize the name, which sounded something like Un Crossaint de Republique Oo Huh Huh Huh Le Monde Depardieu. Then because as everyone knows newspaper writing=make crap money doing hard work, he left the Crossaint of the World to work at L'Oreal, a much easier to remember and recognize French company. But then he left L'Oreal and went back to Croissant of the World, although currently he is on leave from Croissant to study the philosophy of communications. He was on the library tour with me and was very polite. Cold at first, but once he heard I had a journalism degree he was friendlier. His favorite philosopher is Schopenhauer. I think. This part of the conversation is harder to recall. Anyhoo, I'm more of a fan of Kierkegaard.

“Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.” ~ William Gibson

Lately I cannot hide a single g-d emotion, apparently. While at some training last week the trainer was discussing an odd feature in a Web design program and in my head I was thinking what idiot executive insisted on that addition. And the trainer called my name and said I looked perturbed. Today I went to my first therapy appointment in a long, long time. Curiously, the person I saw today resembles the person I saw for many, many years. Maybe 15 minutes into the session she told me she was a pragmatic and direct person. Then she said I'd been looking at her sideways since I sat down, but that she thought it was kind of cute. Anyways, I booked as many appointments with her as I could before the end of the year.