ALL YOUR GOSSIP ARE BELONG TO US!!!

The news about Mr. Bush tapping people's phones, (or having them tapped, whatever) really didn't surprise me at all. In fact I think my reaction went something like this:

"oh, is that really news?"

A few months ago I was on hold, and singing to myself. What was I singing?

"Remember, remember, the fifth of November,
gunpowder, treason, and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
Should ever be forgot."

yup! A jaunty little ditty about blowing up houses of government! What can I say, I love V for Vendetta, and had been recently on the website for the upcoming movie. Anyway, after the phone call was completed, I found myself feeling a little nervous. It's hard to deal with this constantly thickening cloud of uncertainty and fear that surrounds us. I think Mr. Bush and his fellow officials are putting logs on this fire, not running up with an extinguisher. The recent shooting involving sky marshals and a mentally unstable individual was really unfortunate. I don't blame the marshals, not with what little I know about the incident at this point. I feel sorry for them and the victim. Both of them steeped in this fear and unease, I'm surprised this sort of thing hasn't happened sooner. And I blame the administration, fully. Was there a 911 conspiracy? Did they know? I have no idea, and I don't care. What matters is how this whole incredibly tragic situation has been handled in these few years. As much as I dislike any kind of military action, I really felt that Mr. Bush's decision to go into Afghanistan was at least an attempt at bringing in the people responsible for what happened. He waited a few months, did some talking, and then in we went. But this Iraq thing? What the hell???? I wish I could reach right through the radio sometimes when I hear him speak. I didn't vote for him, and honestly I think we should have had some kind of oversight in that last election, it was fucked up. And I am sure many other elections have been equally fucked up. It's a fucked up system. It's big, awkward, and clumsy. But it's what we've got until we get something better, so I'd like to try and use it. So this guy is president, ok, I'll grit my teeth and wait four more years.

because I can't run away to New Zealand, as much as I want to.

I listen to a lot of NPR, everyday. Earlier this year, the little boy really started noticing what was being said on the news, suicide bombers, what's that mama? Where is there a war? Who is arial sharon? Were there so many spiders in there with him? Was it like Mirkwood?
The boy, being four, is a big fan of the president. He like rules, and he likes leaders and kings, and all that. He's going to be a little hall monitor, I'm sure. So whenever the president would talk, he would listen. And he like George Bush, and said he couldn't wait until he grew up so he could vote for him. I did nothing to convince him otherwise, he's four! Let him have it, the security and faith in leadership. Sure makes my job easier. But recently, as the debates have really heated up, the little boy and I were having lunch and he said to me:

"I think he wanted that war."

He does this a lot. He introduces a sentence with no context, and no reference to who or what or where he is talking about. "hey, she totally did the thing!" ???? Who did what? And it takes a few minutes to sort out what he's talking about. We have discussed the idea of subjects and objects and references, but this has not taken hold. "who wanted what war?" I asked between bites. "the president, I think he wanted the war, I think he's bad. When is his turn over?"

oh my god, a freakin' four year old can see through him.

end times

i completely forgot to mention that we had an earthquake today, and that i actually noticed it happening, which i almost never do. 3.5, baby! i saw the mirrors go all woggly, and i knew it wasn't just a bigass truck.

The Holidays were never the same after cousin Stevie shot the Christmas Tree Man

And it's true. My cousin. He held up the owner of the Christmas Tree lot where everyone in the county came to find and then cut their trees. He went one night after closing, with a shotgun and robbed and shot the Christmas Tree Man. This is the same cousin that dyed his hair red, but still kept his black beard, and then robbed a quik-e-mart with his former cellmate. They took off in a stole Corvette with vanity plates and led the cops on an interstate chase. All for beer and cigarettes.

So my mom sent me a clipping from our local paper, and it featured a boy who used to be my neighbor, a boy i used to ride bikes with and play barbie dolls with! He had logged almost four years in prison for burglary and drug use.

I have another cousin who was in military prison, now on parole. And then the most popular girl in my high school is back there as a teacher.

I haven't gone to any reunions, but also, I haven't been invited.

Today i made 7 batches of cookie dough, cooked two of them. yum! xmas cookies galore!


Books:

The Bad Mother's Handbook: it was going great, no one was getting the funny cancer, or the poignant and temporary break-ups, the mysterious benefactor....but it turned on me in the last chapter by revealing the hidden fortune and the wise dementia sufferer. bastard of a book!

Willful Creatures: I think this is one of the best books i have read, ever.

The Unicorn Tapestries: bit of non-fiction for a change. Big old coffee table sized book full of mostly black and white images, so disappointing on that count. But otherwise marvelous.

Flights: extreme fantasy compilation: Bought mostly because of a short story by neil gaiman, called 'the trouble with susan'. About CS lewis' dislike for girls over a certain age. funny, but not nearly long enough.

knit-knacks

a ball of yarn the size of a toddler's head! this was once a polar fleece blanket, now...?











a shawl for our realtor, who helped us find thie freakin' awesome house. It's made with worsted weight wool and mohair, each stripe in a differnt lace or other type of stitch. The scalloped edges are from that old stalwart, fan and feather!

listy

i love making lists. It seems so productive without the bother of doing work. And near the end of the year lists seem to be everywhere. Counting down, minutes, songs, movies, special spoons for eating grapefruit. If it can be counted, we'll count it. here's some favourite lists.

Favourite household chores:
________________________
polishing furniture
vaccuming
ironing
organizing shelves

Favourite Books:
______________
His Dark Materials series, by Phillip Pullman
I, Cladius, by Robert Graves
Bones of the Moon, by Jonathan Carrol
Dune series, by Frank Herbert
Lord of the Rings/the Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
Watership Down by Richard Adams
the Ender series, by Orson Scott Card
anything by Jane Austen or the Bronte gals.


Books I'm most ashamed that I read but I like them anyway:
___________________________________________
Halo backstory novel
THREE(!!!) Alias backstory novels
My Secret Garden, by Nancy Friday.
The Cinderella Complex, by somebody who i can't remember and won't look up right now.
(ther are so many more, but i don't have them, i'll read whatever's in front of me,
sad isn't it?)

Foods most often eaten:
_________________
macaroni and cheese
nachos
cereal and milk
warm tortillas with butter and cinamon
luna bars
pasta of some kind
peanut butter and jelly

Foods most often craved but rarely eaten:
______________________________
sushi
pudding
chimichangas
tuna salad
deviled eggs
tempura anything!

Television shows most often watched:
___________________________

The Daily Show
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Alias
Lost
House


Shows most dearly missed:
_____________________
Farscape
Firefly
Twin Peaks
Freaks and Geeks


Favourite words:
_____________
ALL curse words.
curse words in different languages
Curse words on sci-fi shows
expiditious
superior comestable
asshat (it falls under curse words, yes, but it's just so great)


Deplorable words:
__________
wound
woumb
limb
guacamole (but i love to eat it.)


Moral Affronts to society:
_________________________
Repeat celebrity marriages, such as donald trump and elizabeth taylor
asshats
hydrogenated oils


The best pet names ever:
__________________
pop tart
abraham lincoln
momo
chairman meow
f. cat fitzgerald
otho
mrs. whiskerton
mr. bigglesworth
tom noddy

gang of four

the Gang of Four are in my head this morning. "I will be a good boy, I said, i will be a good boy."
I don't even know the name of that song. Yes, Gang of Four rock band not political superevilfriends. There is a new Mao biography by the same woman who wrote Wild Swans, I should check it out. A little obsessed with mr. Mao, to the point where i would totally name a cat 'Chairman Meow'. It's freaky. Like naming your cat Hittler. But somehow lennon and Trotsky and Mao got the slightly tinged with ironic nostalgia treatment by history, at least here in America. They get artistic t-shirts.

here's a scaleable poncho formula:

one skein of el cheapo verigated baby yarn.
one US 8 circular needle, 18" in length.
4 stitch markers, but make sure one is distinctive.

cast on 52 stitches, nice and loosey-goosey, since they will barely fit on the neddle. In fact, use
double-pointeds to start out on. Knit 4 rows. Place your stitch markers every 13 stitiches, making sure that the marker at the start of the round is the distinctive one. now, every other row preform and increase by either making one on each side of every marker, or just a regular knit into the front an back of each stitch. whichever you prefer. continue on like this untill you have a an inch or so left to go untill your desired length, then start in whatever edge pattern you'd like. a nice sturdy strip of moss stitch? some fan and feather action? eyeletts to run a length of ribbon through? wonderfull. do no increases while doing your edging, unless you want to and it's easily incorporated. bind off.

now you have a poncho for a small child.

NOW, just move your gauge up and down, to get your size. just remember that the number of stitches works best when it's divisible by four. For grownups you might want to do a ribbed collar of some kind, or just a stockinete roll. measure your person's neck to get an idea of what to cast on. just add more yarn to get more length, obvi!

the kid poncho took maybe an hour, a grownup poncho worked in stockinete with a fan lace border took me maybe 10 hours, maybe.

It's always hard to tell when you only knit sporadicaly durring the week. No sense of time.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I went super crazy on i-tunes the other day, buying up all these odd songs that I had been searching for. I still couldn't find the original 'lime in the coconut' but I now have a 'kiddified'
version of it, that soesn't suck too badly, since it is for my kid. every year i make a cd of his favourite music. The first year that mostly consisted of whatever songs i could sing to him by heart, which was very few. the Smiths: 'Asleep'. a very odd lulaby, but it worked. 'As I Lie' by J Church, "Birdhouse in your Soul" They Might Be Giants, and then when he was about six months he really started to enjoy some crappy punk-pop, like Green Day and Blink 182. So i learned "Minority" and "Warning" and "All the Small Things". At least it wasn't Barney. He also dug on "Egg" by Alice Donut. I felt even weirder singing him that one than I did 'Asleep"
Next he took to "Mad World", and i Looooove Tears For Fears, but i love the gary jules version featured in Donnie Darko almost more. Little boy called it the 'worn out faces' song.

everyday

I'm supposed to be doing this everyday. Three pages, like the lady said. I tried twice, maybe three times to do it in an actual notebook, 'cause that's what she said. But I just can't . It's too permanent. This seems os safe and ephemeral, and still bizzarely exposed. Anybody could read it, but nobody will. A print diary might get found, I might lose it, I might die and peoples would read it. I know that's what I would do. I love to find old diaries and letters at the thrift store. At estate sales I'm pleased beyond description when i find items i like that area also somehow inscribed or related to each other and reveal a bit about the previous owner. I had the most rad plastic purse from the 50's that came from a house where the woman stopped buying anything after 1958. I swear. there was not one modern piece of anything! Even food! apparently she had been hoarding it all for some time, and managed to somehow keep away the nasty little ants that plague every house in California. She had boxes of sugar cubes that had colored designs stamped into them. She had a huge collection of Heinz 57 pickle pins, and even a few off the gold ones. Great stacks of Heinz 57 letterhead stationary, which i totally scooped up. I used to work in a warehouse that was located in the old Heinz 57 factory, and went to the bar next door that was called the 58 Club. Sadly, it's closed now. And i gave the purse to a friend's girfreind when i saw that she collected them. But i still have the stationary, and a couple of small ettiqutie books that i got there. I also remember that her house was stuffed with vintage dresses, none of which fit me. I'm a big girl. I can't wear vintage nuthin'.

Another estate sale had a few inscribed books, a large ledger style journal that had a few random notes form the woman who owned it, she was in training to be a nurse in 1940-ish.
I found some books her husband had that she had written in after his death, one being a Mason's book of symbols. She had written that she didn't know that he was a Mason, but did know he belonged to some sort of club, and that it had given him happiness.

i love diaries and personal histories, books of letters. All of these things are going missing now that everyone and their sister (and me!) has a Blog. How ephemeral. Nothing left to the archivists. What will survive?

all those damn scapbooks.

whale blubber

In tyring to find a show about dinosaurs, I find something called "mysteries of the deep" and it looks like it's going to be giant squid and things like that, but it's not. It's another damn loch ness show. I am so sick of Area 51, The Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot, and the Goastsucker. I just can't take another crop circle conspiracy show. I will violently explode if exposed to another druid death circle at stonhenge.

Whe I was a kid, I lived in Lake George, NY, an very lovely place. Georgia O'keefe had a home there, but I never knew that untill I moved away. Oh well. But, also, a lake monster. What's it named? Georgie.

So many of the photos of monsters washed up on shore turn out to be massive hunks of decomposing whale blubber. I think that's great. It looks so freakishly like a massive octopus.
So now any phantom creature will be written off as whale blubber.

Weapons of mass destruction?
Whale blubber.

Recent books: Gary benchley, rock star by Paul Ford. I laughed so hard hot tea gushed from my nose.

Knitting, a novel by Anne Bartlett. In Austrailia 911 is 000. a pretty good read.

A Good Yarn by Debbie Macomber. It's like eating a tart made of treacle dipped in honey with chocolate syrup and caramel on top, then smothered in whipped cream and on a stick. Then, possibly deep fryed. it's really that bad.

Assasination Vacation, by Sara Vowell. I never like her, and the sound of her voice literally sets my teeth on edge. But this book is great! I like her so much better now, and I find my self actually interested in American History, which I've always ignored. bad, bad me!

Singularity, by Bill DeSmedt. Fun, dumb, and adventure-y. Like a good episode of Alias. Lots of explosions a pseudo-science. Maybe some real science too. But it gets perilously close to whale blubber, as it is connected to events of the Tunguska meteor strike in 1908, that everyone likes to say was aliens. They have a different idea, and I'll be spoiler sensitive to the non-existant people who read this, and not say. If i ever come back and re-read this and I can't remember, too bad.

Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James. I saw the movie with NIccole Kidman, and thought it looked really interesting, but wasn't sure if it was a good movie. Jury's out on the book too.