Talking with a friend about steampunk costumes for this weekend’s GearCon and planning my outfits for the weekend…then coming home and realizing that the vintage pocket watch in my drawer will make a perfect accessory….
Category Archives: blather
Happiness #15
The coolness of an overcast morning during a mid-August hot spell.
Comments Off on Happiness #15
Filed under blather
Happiness # 14
Big, crunchy, Gravenstein apples. Apple crisp, sausage and apples, applesauce, apple pie, apple cake….now if I only knew someone with a cider press….
Comments Off on Happiness # 14
Filed under blather
Spring yard after a busy weekend
I’m still digesting the events of OEA-RA. From all reports, it was one of the most dramatic RAs in OEA’s history. But what still has me intrigued and thoughtful is the process by which 600+ delegates engaged, cussed, discussed, and negotiated their way around some rather huge internal issues in the organization. I will say this–despite the frustrated and disenfranchised feelings of some folks on the losing end of votes, it was one of the most representative processes I’ve participated in–and that’s comparing it to similar processes in other volunteer organizations as well as the Democratic Party internal processes. Especially after the exercise of moving to a committee of the whole and the manner in which challenges to a chair’s ruling were held.
But RA wasn’t the only thing that happened.
The original plan for Sunday was to do our traditional breakfast out, shopping, then do stuff around the house before going to the ballet. That got short-circuited when we came home to discover that the son was in significant gastrointestinal pain and hadn’t been able to keep any food down for twenty-four hours. So he and I loaded up backpacks with electronics and off we went to Kaiser emergency.
We didn’t even get a chance to sit down before we were taken back–not sure if that was due to the type of situation or the fact that it was a bright, sunny spring morning and we’d beaten the onslaught of weekend warriors that would be swarming in with injuries later. In any case, he got seen quickly. It took three people and four sticks to find a workable vein for blood draws and a saline infusion.
Diagnosis: gastritis.
We got home in enough time for me to scramble around and get ready for the ballet, if I’d chosen to do so. But by then I was wiped. I ate a late lunch, then ended up napping.
The day wasn’t a total loss, though. I weeded the sugar snap peas, now up about two inches, and planted the impatiens bed. Spring is in full swing now, and both the Gravenstein and Grimes Golden apple trees are in full bloom. Many blooms (the photo at the top is the Gravenstein) with bumblebees and honeybees working the blossoms. For once the bloom timing seems to be right, as there’s not a forecast for frost this week.
Let’s hope it holds.
Meanwhile, a couple more pix.
The impatiens bed
The apple trees.
Comments Off on Spring yard after a busy weekend
Filed under blather
I miss Tom Peterson’s. Appliance shopping rant.
Long-term Portland residents know what I’m talking about when I say that I miss shopping at Tom Peterson’s. For those of you who don’t know about Tom Peterson’s, well, here’s the link that tells you about Tom and his role in Portlandia culture.
Not that “hipster icon” is necessarily why I liked shopping there for appliances. What I did like was that I could go to Tom Peterson’s looking for a moderately priced utilitarian appliance that worked. No fancy bells and whistles, pretty much plain colors, no designer icons. Just reasonably-priced, solid, functional appliances without trends or fads.
I can’t find that now, or, rather, I’ve yet to find a reliable replacement. Many of the stores I’ve gone to have high-end or low-end, without the functionality of my older appliances. I’m paying more for less functional appliances and the high-end appliances I’ve seen at these stores, while having more cosmetic and flashy bells and whistles, lack some of the useful pragmatic parts of the mid-range Tom Peterson’s line I used to like.
It’s annoying.
And dear lord in heaven, do I ever sound like an old phart. I know stores like this exist. I ran into this phenomenon when shopping for a new mattress. I just haven’t found the right one for appliances yet.
In a word, it’s annoying. And time-consuming.
I will say this, though–if I’m shopping on the Web, damn it, I want webpages that have a certain degree of search functionality which a.) displays features, b.) allows me to sort by specific categories, c.) displays prices, and d.) is reasonably intuitive and easy to use.
Two local chains failed miserably on that score. One got ruled right out because they were clearly in the same high-end/bottom-end dichotomy, as far as I could figure out from their website’s descriptions–but that wasn’t the killer. Killer? No firm price listing.
The other was bloody impossible to use. I’ve bought from them before and know they tend to the high end with absolute crap toward the bottom, but sometimes you can find a deal. But I gave up on them because their webpage was impossible.
The web winner? Best Buy, which allowed me to sort, get an idea of prices, select by features, and get a pricing idea. I’m probably looking at reconditioned stoves at a local business first, but at least now I know what a reasonable price range is.
I’d much rather support a local retailer, but damn. That doesn’t mean I want to pay boutique prices.
Where, oh where, are the Tom Peterson’s of yesteryear? The retailers focusing on the solid middle group of people who don’t want flash, they want something that works without paying a fortune for fancy designer labels. Or has that gone out of style?
Damn, I think I’m turning into an old phart.
Comments Off on I miss Tom Peterson’s. Appliance shopping rant.
Filed under blather
Meet Addie
I’m not prone to naming cars. It’s just not something I’ve done. Oh, a few metal beasts have gotten tagged with nicknames not always repeatable in all-ages audiences, but overall, I’ve not been a namer of cars.
Now, I kinda regret it, since the Mighty Subaru has gone from our lives. No big breakdown, but there were signs that it was starting to show the miles. And since the Mighty Subie is not just my work transportation taking me through some somewhat interesting microclimates but our primary ski/backwoods vehicle, and being that we are becoming Old Pharts, we decided something newer was in the cards, while the Mighty Subie still had a resale value. We did give it one last run to the Mountain, where she served mightily.
And reliably, need I say more?
But now, she’s been replaced.
The new car is also a Subaru Outback, in a gunmetal gray that almost looks black. She’s been driven home and properly loaded with working tools for my commute, as well as stickers. There’s a lot of new bells and whistles on this one, and this is a low-end model. I wonder what’s on the high-end–eek.
Anyway, after stickering her up, I noticed that I’d kind of set off the Next Adventure sticker. The more I looked at it on her, the more I realized that she’s the harbinger of our next set of Adventures. Next Adventure, indeed.
And so that is her name. Next Adventure, otherwise known as Addie.
Looks like an Addie to me.
Comments Off on Meet Addie
Filed under blather
Anyone home?
Well, uh, that was a busy week. It’s been a time of running around like a maniac doing various things, none of which happened to be blogging. And next week looks to be more of the same.
Ah well. It is what it is. I got sucked into a major worldbuilding marathon, and in the process ended up blowing the doors off of some of the original Netwalk concepts. When I get done with it, if I can manage to pull off something this ambitious, it should be a sweet little thing. Or not so little. I’m not really sure of that. Could be something. At the very least I have a process post in the making, once I recover and get to the actual writing thereof, that is.
Work is a runaway horse of craziness right now. Nothing bad, just seasonal crazy busy time. Trimester change, beginning of the end of the year wrap-up, beginning of the statewide assessment period, throw in a couple of snow days and late openings intermixed with warm spring weather, and the whole thing turns into a three ring circus. Oh yeah, been here before. And this is a union involvement year, with three neighboring districts poised to go on strike, which means additional activism in the form of attending rallies and offering reassuring advice to worried colleagues that You Can Survive A Strike, BTDT, At Least It’s Spring Thank God (my local’s three and a half week strike seven years ago coincided with the beginning of a particularly wild and strong winter). In memory, I may need to pull out a series of notes I took at the time and turn them into posts, or something. Perhaps a giveaway ebook or something like that.
And then there was the OEA-PIE political endorsement convention, which is a post unto itself. Let’s just say that despite my strong past political background, I’ve never experienced anything quite like this process. Very interesting. I met all of Oregon’s Congressional Representatives (Bonamici, Walden, Blumenaer, DeFazio, Schrader) and the three statewide incumbents up for election (Labor Commission, Secretary of State, Treasurer). Plus I did something a younger me would have been totally outraged about–ended up supporting the endorsement of someone I would never have thought of supporting even for pragmatic purposes. How things change as we age. But more of that later.
Horse has been getting ridden, and that’s it’s own post. She did something absolutely ridiculous and yet so Mocha-ish that I still get the giggles about it. We did some interesting stuff this week, and I’m still processing that.
So yeah. It’s been a busy time. At some point the whirlwind will slow down. I’m just not sure when that will be.
Comments Off on Anyone home?
Filed under blather
On weight loss
Losing and working on maintaining a significant weight loss remains an interesting work in progress. One reason I keep thinking about it and returning back to thinking about weight loss in the past three years is that over the past 30-some years, I’ve had a significant history of 30-60 pound weight swings. Not a healthy thing to do to one’s body, not to speak of what it does to the clothing budget!
Generally, the cycle is as follows–reach the OhMyGodI’mTooFreakingFat moment and start working on diet and exercise. Lose weight over the course of a year. Spend about six months at a plateau weight, then work my way back up to the OMGITFF moment over the course of several more years. Repeat process.
The whole process is usually good for about a seven-to-ten year cycle.
This last time I swore I would lose the damn weight and keep it off–for good. Several factors came into play.
1.) Menopause and aging. I’m in my fifties. Guess what, this is that drop-dead moment. It gets harder to lose weight and sustain the wild weight swings in a healthy manner from here on out.
2.) More aging stuff. Less weight means more flexibility and less strain on my joints. I already have arthritic moments. More weight doesn’t help.
3.) A desire to remain more active even in the face of pain. See menopause, see aging, see arthritis. What’s happened in the past is that I’ve let fatigue–mental and physical–draw me down into lassitude, and as I get less active, I start hurting more. Which then leads to more eating. Which then leads to a greater cycle.
I have to move to stay relatively pain-free. Sometimes that means I’m going to hurt myself, so I have to be smarter about managing my pain so as to stay active. It’s a delicate dance.
4.) I finally like the habits it takes to stay skinny. It’s not just about the exercise, it’s watching my food. Every time I started gaining weight it was about splurging and eating too many good things. One habit I’ve started up (with support from DH) is that of taking my own containers to restaurants and planning to make one or two more meals out of the restaurant portions.
5.) I’m not necessarily practicing diet restriction, I’m practicing portion control. A lot of my colleagues are loving Weight Watchers and its point system. That might have worked for me…but what is working better for me these days is the portion size awareness I developed after six months of aggressively using my iTouch’s LoseIt! app. I don’t know why I couldn’t develop the awareness before the iTouch, but there it is. Maybe it was the simplicity of recording everything I ate. I was able to internalize portion sizes more easily.
And now? Well, I’ve managed to pretty much stay at this same weight for about a year. Maybe longer, I’m not entirely certain.
What is interesting, however, is the degree to which I get negative feedback about my weight. Really. I never really had anyone except fellow folks I was working with on weight loss tell me I was fat.
I have, however, had numerous critiques about being too skinny. Or cautionary comments about “don’t lose any more weight.”
I find that to be a very interesting comment, not just about me, but about our society.
I leave it to you, dear reader, to extrapolate from there.
Comments Off on On weight loss
Filed under blather
Distraction Girl–Snow Day!
I was going to write about writing and teaching today, because I’ve had some good thoughts about how teaching remedial writing to middle school kids has helped me with my own writing skills, plus a wee bit of a rant about currently accepted wisdom about teaching grammar (hint: some claim explicit grammar instruction doesn’t help student writing problems; I think there’s more to it than that and I strongly disagree with that particular conclusion).
But…we’ve got a snow day and I am here alone for most of the day. I’m as bad as my kids when it comes to big fluffy snowflakes, even down here at home and not in the mountains. I have things to work on that I’ve not been able to get to due to not feeling well, and later on I’ll be going out to writer’s group and hanging out with other writers, which is something that just hasn’t been able to happen for a while due to scheduling.
So here I am, working on some job application materials. The bird feeders are full and there’s major squirrel and bird action happening around every feeder. Occasionally we’re getting heavy flurries of big fat snowflakes which turn to slush. I keep jumping up to look at stuff. Yeah, bad as the students. But that’s the deep dark secret of teaching…we often share some of our students’ habits (if ever you have to teach a batch of teachers, especially middle school teachers, be afraid. Be Very Afraid. We know all the tricks, that’s how we can counter them when it’s Us in front of the room).
Gotta love the occasional snow day, even though it causes stresses of its own (when I was working full-time, quite often I’d get the call that there was a two-hour delay or cancellation while on the road to work. Not fun at all. I’d kind of prefer having a more steady and predictable situation any more).
Back to work now. Also have a presentation to prepare for tomorrow’s PLC. So lots to do, lots to do.
Comments Off on Distraction Girl–Snow Day!
Filed under blather
