incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

Sleepy tired cranky week. Chad had a lot of late nights, so the doggie was pining away, which she does in a remarkably demanding way. Things got better Friday and Saturday, though Sunday I was back to a brain full of molasses.

In house news, our lawn service came and fertilized and killed dandelions and stuff. And Chad put up some speakers in the backyard, so when the weather gets nice again we can have convenient music.

I really need to exercise more restraint when gift-shopping. Last week I bought gifts for "Administrative Professionals Day." At the Lindt store, I bought for my paralegal, a box of truffles; for the department secretary at Chad's work, a spring-themed truffle thing—and for myself, a bag of raspberry truffles (limited time, apparently, and oh my goodness are they good). At a little fair-trade gift shop, I bought for my secretary, a pretty picture frame—and for myself, a terracotta cat, now sitting on my desk looking silly; and an apple carved out of what I think is alabaster, which looks like puffy white clouds drifting across a pale-yellow luminscent sky, now sitting on my desk looking beautiful and symbolic. Okay, the cat was two bucks, but still.

Though I didn't buy myself anything extra when I sent off two boxes of books for soldiers last week. ( details )

Right. Link-dump and then back to work.

• In case you didn't see this when it made the rounds previously: The Silmarillion in One Thousand Words, in script form and in a shorter narrative version. Shiny!
• If you can't find or afford The Lord Peter Wimsey Companion, some of the stories have been annotated online.
• Want to browse the LiveJournals of space vehicles? inspace has them friended.
• A.S. Byatt participated in a Washington Post online discussion last week.

Not much to say for two weeks, really. Last weekend, we did yardwork for the first time this year, including sowing rather a lot of grass seed. Of course, this Thursday, it poured buckets, resulting in a little stream going into the neighbors' yard across the planted area. We still had standing water in the yard as of this afternoon. We want to get more grass to help with the drainage, but because we have no drainage the grass seed gets washed away . . . . Chad did spot some mesh to go over new grass seed, and if this lot doesn't take, we'll give that a try.

We also browsed some garden shops. We've pretty well decided to replace the horrible everyellow [*] in front of the bay window with a dwarf burning bush, and the spiky red triffid next to the front path with heather. We'd like a couple bushes or dwarf trees (~6') to put between the patio and the neighbors' yard, as the former owner's roses refused to bloom and have been dug up; some azaleas looked promising, but we haven't made a decision yet. Of course it's supposed to snow tonight, so there's no rush to decide.

[*] It's like a small conical evergreen, except a sickly yellow. As it's been yellow since we moved in, I have to assume that it doesn't actually have a horrible fatal disease.

In other yard news, the power company finally came to trim the trees along the back line of the yard. We'll have to see how it looks when it leafs in, but it's likely that we no longer own a piece of darkest Mordor.

Yesterday we went on a housework binge. Look, the tops of the counters and tables are now visible! I'm absurdly happy about this, but we'll see how long we stick to the plan of keeping them clear. Then we went to a joint birthday party for our cousins Z. (now four) and C. (now two). We got them books, of course; Z. got Diary of a Wombat, which is the cutest thing ever, and C. got a small board-book version of There's a Wocket in My Pocket!. We had a lovely time—played with Z., talked with family, watched the kids get sidetracked from opening more presents by playing with the presents they'd already opened, admired their new playhouse (and swatted away the mosquitos that are ALREADY OUT!).

And right now I am waiting for the laundry to be done and resolutely ignoring the New York State income tax forms that need to be double-checked. We owe the state money anyway, so they don't need to go out tomorrow. (We're getting a healthy chunk of change back from the federal government, so those are going out tomorrow—and I'm annoyed at myself for not doing them much sooner—as is a form changing the amount of money I have withheld from my check.)

Oh, and new dog game: take one of these toys. Stick some bone-shaped biscuits in the holes. Give to the dog. Watch her chew the protruding bits off, at which point the rest falls into the interior and she freaks out trying to get at them.

Boggling literary link of the week: the original draft of Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds is online (under "Features"). Much of the plot is the same, except the first-person narrator is the nineteen-year-old . . . Master Li.

Like I said, boggling.

Babies this week: a co-worker's first, early, and another co-worker's third, also early. My cousin's first was last week, also early. Just one left of the end February/early March due dates, my friend, though as I think she was having the easiest time of her pregnancy, I suppose it's not unreasonable.

[Edit: actually, my friend's baby arrived Saturday night, I just didn't know it until now. So no Leap Year babies in this crop, and no late ones either.]

Illnesses this week: Chad: rather sick. Me: feverish and tired for most of the week, but nothing else, yet. *crosses fingers*

Vanity this week: gave up on growing out my hair and got it cut yesterday. I'm currently considering whether I dislike it enough to get it cut again now; I think not, but just barely. Also bought a new suit—yes, I know, another, that's the fourth this year, but it was only $60 and it doesn't need alterations. I think my wardrobe's sufficiently stocked now, though.

Dog this week: best game ever: take one (1) favorite toy. Wrap in one (1) large towel. Knot ends. Give to dog, let fun commence. (Be sure not to knot too tightly, or else the dog will just rip the towel fabric rather than dig at and toss the towel around until it comes loose.)

Food this week: cheese lasagna. Mmmm, cheese, my Platonic ideal of lasagna. And very easy, too, especially if one uses (two 27 oz. jars of) pre-made sauce and Barilla no-boil noodles. Notes to self: don't bother slicing the mozzarella, just buy a couple of bags of shredded. Don't worry if the layers come up past the top of the pan, the grated (not shredded!) parmesan won't stick to the foil.

Movies this week: Lost in Translation. Mostly Chad has said what I would, but a couple of extra comments:

• Opening credits consisting solely of a shot of Scarlett Johansson's butt in translucent panties? Strange.
• Despite that, this was an incredibly lame R. The rating claimed to be for "some sexual content;" the movie featured one misunderstood prostitute, played for (awkward, uncomfortable) laughs and no real skin, and one strip-club dancer with three seconds of breast, and that was it. The ratings system is seriously screwed up, especially considering that The Passion of the Christ avoided an NC-17, seemingly without cuts.
• I guess I'm just a narrative junkie, because I prefer to know that something happened in a movie. And to know what that was.

Public service announcement of the week: if you are linking to the New York Times, try putting the URL into this weblog-safe link generator. It won't expire, and you won't need a login, either. (The links generated are from the RSS feeds.)

Same-sex marriage news this week: unfortunately, this article about the latest developments regarding New Paltz isn't on the RSS feed for some reason. Offered without comment, because of its connection with my professional life.

Footnote of the week: the very, very last one (just hit end) in this decision, via The Volokh Conspiracy. "It is counterproductive for counsel to litter his brief with burdensome material such as 'WRONG! WRONG ANALYSIS! WRONG RESULT! WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!'"

And finally, spam of the week: two e-mails arrived at the same time, hawking Viagra, with rather good From: lines: Decrepitude K. Servomechanisms and Booker G. Assiduousness. I don't know, they have a ring.

This week had good things bookend too much cold and not enough sleep (one night the dog was a pain, another I was feeling rotten). Last Monday, I got very welcome, very unexpected news at work. Yesterday, ( my football team won. )

Today I had off for the holiday, so I said "what the heck" and saw ( Return of the King—yes, again. )

I actually cooked this weekend, too. Saturday I made meat lasagna, which was tasty, but not as thick (height-wise) as I would have liked, so I think I'll look for a different recipe. Today I tried Mormon funeral potatoes (simple)—I didn't really know what it would taste like, but it was good, definite comfort food.

( Brief dog stuff )

Link things:

• Cold snap pictures from the Boston Globe:
  • "Biscuit, a snow leopard, examines an icicle at the Bronx Zoo"
  • Billowing clouds of steam, with a small dragon in silhouette (no, not really)
• Bubble wrap!
• Best headline of the week (New York Times): Tests Suggest Scientists Have Found Big Bang Goo

I have a booklog post on The Silmarillion mostly done, but I'm stuck on articulating precisely why it pissed me off. Unfortunately, I'm pretty tired from staying up to watch sports highlights last night, so I don't think I'll make any progress on it tonight. Good night, everybody.

Last week was a very long one filled with late nights. Sunday night, I was up late watching the second half of Angels in America on HBO. Monday night, I was up late working. Tuesday night, I went to a baby shower for a co-worker and then was up late again working. Wednesday, we saw That Movie. Thursday and Friday, I was up late getting presents ready. Saturday, Chad and the dog and I went to Massachusetts for a Christmas party with my dad's side of the family. That was very nice, particularly seeing my sixth-grade cousin Ch., but it was a rather lengthy party and tiring—both because I'm an introvert and because we were stressed out by our dog not wanting to be in the same house as my parents' dog. (Not just the same room, the same house. She slept in her crate in our room, and at seven a.m. Sunday, when she heard my parents' dog go past the closed bedroom door, she was up and barking away. I wasn't asleep anyway, hearing her shifting around, but it was still not a nice wakeup call.) We headed back Sunday afternoon; the dog was very happy to be home, but we were mostly in a stupor.

Monday was my deadline for all the work I'd been doing, and I made it, though not without some metaphorical tearing of hair (mine and, I'm afraid, my secretary's as well). Tuesday I (again) excavated my desk, and then we headed to Chad's parents, sans dog, for the holidays. We had the traditional fondue the night we got in, and then the traditional fish and pierogi Christmas Eve night. Spent most of Christmas Eve playing with Z., our almost-four cousin, who is positively adorable and who we really should see more often (his family lives very close by). Chad's parents' dog is a big, loveable, loud lunkhead, which did put a small damper on my attempts to catch up on my sleep, but not too badly—and the relief at knowing that Emmy wasn't there to be stressed out by him helped. We came back Christmas day, because I had to work Friday. Yesterday, I experimented with our new food processor (its claim to handling dough for 75 cookies is somewhat overstated); larabeaton and her sister stopped by for a bit; the Patriots beat the Bills in a perfect 31-0 reversal of the first game of the season; and I did a bit of booklogging. Today we saw That Movie again, details about which will be in another post, and did a bit of post-Christmas shopping. I'm still tired (particularly from That Movie), but getting back to normal.

Blog-like items, all from the Boston Globe, coincidentally:

• Advantage: blogosphere? Around the start of December, discussions of cover songs ran around varous blogs, such as Chad's. On December 19, the Globe ran an article and sidebar on cover songs—and even mentions some of the same songs that Chad did.
• Cool picture of a bird's breath condensing in cold air.
• End of the regular season in football, and the Patriots are, astonishingly, 14-2 and looking at home field advantage throughout the playoffs.
  • Good article on how odd this feels to Boston-area fans:

    It's rarely like this around here. History has conditioned us to live in fear of folly. Too many men on the ice. The grounder between the legs. Roughing the passer. Pesky holds the ball. Bucky Dent. Grady sticking with Pedro.

  • Summary of the twelve-game winning streak. I didn't see all of the games, but of what I saw, the goal-line stand at Indianapolis is the most memorable. I'm glad I went to bed before the intentional safety at Denver, because even though it worked, I don't know if I could have stood it.
  • Pictures of the snow-confetti during the win over Miami: one and two (because I didn't see the game, damn it, and think it's such a wonderful image).

( 59KB of cute dog picture behind this link )

Oh, look! Snow!

(My mom calls it the curse of the new snowblower.)

(Besides the current nor'easter, we had a dusting of snow this Friday that looked like set-dressers from The Fellowship of the Ring had come by: these little ovoid pellets that looked exactly like crumbled Styrofoam. If they hadn't melted I would have been sure someone was playing a prank.)

We purchased a Christmas tree today, a Fraser fir, and put it up. This is the first real (i.e., non-artificial) tree I can remember having (I was voting for a fake tree, but to no avail). For those of you who've seen our house, it's sitting in front of the built-in bookcase on the left side of the fireplace, just on the living-room side of the big opening between the living room and the dining room. It fits very well and looks great: classic little white lights, no tinsel or garland (Chad doesn't like garland, I don't like tinsel, and it's a pretty small tree anyway), and our ornaments. I must remember, next time I'm shopping for ornaments, to look for glass ones and very brightly colored ones, to add balance to the tree.

(I love decorating the Christmas tree, and take it just a little seriously. I have no idea why, as generally neither Christmas nor decorations are my strong points. Maybe it's because I have an unfortunate fondness for knick-knacks, and I feel less guilty about buying and playing with ornaments, because they only come out at Christmas and so aren't clutter.)

Fortunately for Emmy, I wasn't getting any sleep last night for a different reason. A co-worker gave his annual holiday party last night, and it was a lovely time, but I ate something that did not agree with me; that, or it was just my stomach deciding to hate me, as it does every so often for no apparent reason. My stomach feels better today, but I'm extremely tired.

I'd hoped to get a lot of writing done on a brief this weekend, but instead I've spent hours chasing down an idea that came to me on the way home Friday night (to only small benefit, alas). Maybe I'll skip Part II of Angels in America tonight and watch it some other time; or maybe I'm too tired to write anyway. Decisions, decisions.

A few links from this week:

• Chad wrote a silly post about walking Emmy in the snow.
• The Return of the King movie advent calendar is pretty, but the most inspired day by far is December 4.
• And finally, words to live by: "It's important not to introduce a dancing army of Popes into your writing without a bit of backstory."

Work this week: spent an afternoon being trained in how to do electronic filing in federal court, which starts for us January 1, 2004 (which seemed so far away when we first heard about this in the summer . . . ).

Weather this week: the first snow on the ground, just a dusting and gone by mid-morning, and brutal winds post-Thanksgiving. But we are fully ready for winter now, with a brand-new snowblower, which was a mind-bogglingly wonderful early Christmas present from Chad's grandmother. (Words just cannot express how happy I am about this. Last year we borrowed neighbors' snowblowers, but we'd just moved in and couldn't get away with that now.)

Holidays this week: yay, Thanksgiving. We spent it at Chad's parents, along with my parents, his grandmother, and one of his great-aunts. Plus the respective parental dogs. (We boarded Emmy because she would have been very unhappy with the other dogs.) Overall an excellent time, very good to have everyone together—not free of the little sharp edges rubbing together that comes with extended time spent with family (especially for introverted me), but only a few of those and by far outweighed by good things. The most memorable image of the holiday was courtesy of the dogs: Truman, my parents' twenty-pound Boston Terrier, lying on a sheepskin pad at the back of his crate and chewing on something-or-other, and R.D., Chad's parents' seventy-pound yellow Lab, slowly pulling the pad out into the room: it looked for all the world like he was trying to drag Truman back out to play. (He only pulled it out halfway, so we think he was just after some food crumbs.)

Also, Chad's family came up Saturday to see the new curtains and all. Emmy was extremely good (except for the Triscuit-licking incident) and we had a nice lunch.

Shopping this week: Christmas shopping is in good shape, though the hardest people are still left. Chad and I have decided to get each other a new TV (27", flat screen) for Christmas, so we looked at those too; anyone have experience with Daewoo or Apex? Also, I saw pameladean's reprinted Secret Country trilogy and drooled over the covers, but I was good and didn't buy them now (personal spending being on hold until after Christmas). Later, I promise.

Health this week: the persistent cold subsided for most of the week into just a little congestion, but last night I had a bad sore throat and headache. It's better today but I'm going to be very aggressive about medicating any recurrence, especially since I'm inexplicably exhausted and have been all weekend.

Football this week: don't get me wrong, I'm very happy that the Patriots are 10-2, but I'd be even happier if those wins weren't so damn ugly. Most of the Colts game wasn't on TV here, but I did see the best bit, the four consecutive defensive stops inside the five-yard line. Go, Pats.

Link of the week: a comic that is rather apropos given my book log's title (thanks, Skwid).

Work last week was, well, I could complain, but it would be (a) tedious and (b) indiscreet. Suffice it to say that I decided I needed to take Saturday completely off, else I feared I would start looking for nearby concentrations of liquid in which to drown myself. I took a nap and read one and a half books (the half was finishing something I'd started after our 40-odd trick-or-treaters stopped coming)—such luxury! I'd planned to go to a co-worker's Halloween party too, but at the last minute I realized I was still very sleepy, with a rotten headache to boot, so I skipped it. Of course, Sunday when I started working again I plunged right back into the Pit of Despair, plus the dog was sick which cut short my working hours. We were both very glad to have Chad come home from a weekend D.C. conference, though.

A couple of links:

• William W. Bedsworth, Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal, writes a monthly humor column; this month's is about inmate litigation:

  What's more, there's some kind of primeval energy that infuses inmate pro per cases. They're like rabid wolverines—capable of inflicting damage way out of proportion to their size and completely indiscriminate about their victims.

  *nods furiously*

• It's one thing to know that Yale sends a really high number of clerks to the Supreme Court; it's another to glance at an article focusing on minority clerks and immediately recognize three of the names as people you were in class with or worked on journals with. (That doesn't count the non-minority Yalies, whose names aren't mentioned in the article.) I know they're all extremely smart, but it's still just weird.

And now I have lots of work to do.

Baseball this week: aaargh. (Such is the life of a Red Sox fan, even a casual one.)

Okay, three more comments: pinch running is a silly concept. The commercials suck: the local ones are for obnoxious personal injury firms, the national ones are repetitive, and all of Fox's shows look extremely dreadful. And at least I'll be able to catch up on my sleep now . . .

Work this week: volunteered for an . . . interestingly difficult . . . project, the kind of learning experience that you hope you don't have to put into practice. Also discovered that I'd annoyed an opponent to the point that I could nearly see the frothing at the mouth through the papers; properly responding to that took up more time. Which meant that I had to go into work today to prepare for tomorrow's deposition. It's two hours drive, so I'll be going to bed very soon.

Football this week: while I was working, I was hitting "reload" on the Boston Globe's website to keep up with the Patriots game. Chad called as they went into overtime to tell me that the Giants had lost on a last-minute punt return, at which point I knew that the Patriots would win: and indeed they did, though it sounds like a close and ugly game. Our zero-sum football karma continues.

My parents came up yesterday with their dog. Fortunately it went reasonably well—they could at least stand to be in the same yard with each other, though we had to crate their dog inside because Emmy apparently regards the house as even more strongly her territory. It was considerably better than the meeting with Chad's parents' dog, though, since we were actually able to eat and have conversations and so forth. In other dog news, Emmy has started doing ( a very cute thing. )

Computers this week: iTunes for Windows, baby (as the new Barenaked Ladies album and that song for Chad download in the background). I really, really, really want an iPod, and really, really, really cannot justify spending $500 on one . . .

Right. Time to go lie awake in bed and fret about tomorrow.