This is a recurring theme with me. I love RAIN. Nothing inspires me, invigorates me, so much as a good soaking rainfall, such as the one I was watching just a few minutes ago. Earlier this morning, I’d seen blue skies, and while other people might have smiled at them, I was disappointed, because if there was ever a week when I truly needed a cozy stay-home-and-nest rainy weekend, this is it.

It’s not so much that anything bad happened, as it’s been a very long, very stressful week, and I’m feeling prickly and tired.

I was happily puttering away at my computer, browsing websites devoted to Great White Sharks because I’m currently reading Twelve Days of Terror by Richard G. Fernicola, M.D. It’s a more scientific look at the series of shark attacks down the New Jersey shore in July, 1916. The same string of attacks I read about last year in the book Close to Shore, which was more about the culture and history than the actual attacks, and felt more like a novel than a historical account. (These are the same attacks that helped inspire Peter Benchley to write Jaws, also.)

I grew up swimming in the water at the beaches mentioned in these books, and in a way, reading about them is like visiting home, seeing pictures of those stately old houses on the sand, seeing the sea of umbrellas below the boardwalk…I can almost smell the hotdogs and cotton candy.

But I digress.

I was reading a website, when I heard Cleo barking, and it took me a few minutes to realize this was REAL barking, not “another dog barked a mile away” barking. So I went to investigate, and found a tremulous poolboy with a large net. The kind of net I associate with fishing boats, and not swimming pools.

I called Cleo inside, and apologized to the pool guy, making a mental note that while an old white t-shirt with no bra under it is FINE for puttering at one’s computer, it’s really not what one should wear while conversing with the pool cleaner. Also, I promised to leave the door closed on Mondays from now on, as Monday is now Pool Cleaning Day. (This works for me quite well.)

I went back to reading about sharks, and beaches, then got sidetracked by the special effects information from my OTHER favorite shark movie, Deep Blue Sea. (IMO, Jaws had the best lines, and was scary because it took place in familiar waters, but Deep Blue Sea was a better film. )

I was brought back into the present by the realization that the light had changed outside my windows, and I smiled, thinking that we might at least get some cloud cover. I opened the blinds further and saw that water was spattering the windows. I released Cleo from the bedroom, and went to investigate the back yard, grinning, even dancing, when I realized how steadily the rain was falling.

I love that I can sit on my back patio and watch the rain, and feel the damp air on my skin, and not get wet. I love that I can walk all the way across the patio (lengthwise) and peer around the corner, only getting wet at the very last minute, to confirm that the gate is closed. I love that Cleo takes as much pleasure in rainstorms as I do, her tail curling over her back in doggy glee, as she barks at the raindrops and plops into puddles. (Zorro hates getting his feet wet, so it was a sign that his bladder was REALLY full when he went out to pee in spite of the rain.)

I stayed out there for a good five minutes, watching the rain fall on the grass, the pavement, the roof, watching the pool water turn choppy, and wishing I still had my grandfather’s old super 8 movie camera (I have a camcorder, but it’s not the same), so I could make disaster films in the pool with model ships and the chlorine-ducky.

And now, I ‘m back inside again, and the blue sky is creeping back into view, but I don’t mind, because the rain has awakened by senses and my synapses, and that ten minute festival of precipitation has helped me to radically improve my mood.

Oh, I still want to nest, but now I’m doing it with a grin.

So, after reading everything I could find at Movable Type‘s website, and finding nothing useful, I gave up on Image::Magick which is installed on my server, but still doesn’t let me thumbnail, and resorted to NetPMB, which thumbnails beautifully, and was really easy to install, and everything.

I’m starting a photoblog. Easter egg pictures are here. Egg photos are by CLAY

Do note: it’s veryveryvery rough, and not completely set up.

A book meme stolen from Branwynelf at LiveJournal

* * *

Bold titles are books I’ve read.
Italicised titles are books on my “to be read someday” list.
Titles in plain text are books I’ve not read, and have no burning desire to read (which doesn’t mean I wouldn’t, just that I don’t have them lurking in the back of my head).

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua – Things Fall Apart
Agee, James – A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James – Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel – Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul – The Adventures of Augie March
Bront묠Charlotte – Jane Eyre
Bront묠Emily – Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert – The Stranger
Cather, Willa – Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey – The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton – The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate – The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore – The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage
Dante – Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel – Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles – A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore – An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre – The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George – The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph – Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo – Selected Essays
Faulkner, William – As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William – The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry – Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox – The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von – Faust
Golding, William – Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph – Catch-22
Hemingway, Ernest – A Farewell to Arms
Homer – The Iliad
Homer – The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor – The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale – Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous – Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik – A Doll’s House
James, Henry – The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry – The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz – The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong – The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper – To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair – Babbitt
London, Jack – The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas – The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel Garc�- One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman – Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman – Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur – The Crucible
Morrison, Toni – Beloved
O’Connor, Flannery – A Good Man is Hard to Find
O’Neill, Eugene – Long Day’s Journey into Night
Orwell, George – Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris – Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia – The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan – Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel – Swann’s Way
Pynchon, Thomas – The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria – All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond – Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry – Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. – The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William – Hamlet
Shakespeare, William – Macbeth
Shakespeare, William – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare, William – Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard – Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon – Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles – Antigone
Sophocles – Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John – The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis – Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Swift, Jonathan – Gulliver’s Travels
Thackeray, William – Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David – Walden
Tolstoy, Leo – War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan – Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire – Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. – Harrison Bergeron
Walker, Alice – The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith – The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora – Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar – The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee – The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia – To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard – Native Son

The problem with being 1099’d is that you end up either paying quarterly taxes, or owing the feds. For me, the result this year, is the latter. Yes, we’re still paying off stuff from 2002 and 2000; yes, we’re requesting that they extend the installment agreements…

The good thing is: I’m not earning the bulk of my income from 1099’d income any more, it’s almost all w2’d which means next year, we’ll probably either break even or get a refund.

(The goal is to break even, honestly. Getting a refund means you OVERPAID via withholdings, not that the government is giving you a gift.)

But, anyway.

In other news, I might actually be caught up enough to resume the visits to Curves on Saturday. I’ve missed almost a month, and I’m not happy, but I’m caught up now. So, it’s all good.

…that impress me most.

Here’s an example: Viking Office Supply‘s remanufactured inkjet cartridges are half the price of the actual HP model. In addition, they come with a postage-paid return envelope to recycle the cartridge, and a moist towelette for removing stray bits of ink from one’s skin.

Color me Impressed.

The day began with me waking to a hazy sky and a raw scratchy throat. Also, the pool guy had called last night to ask to come give us an estimate at 10 AM, and I’d forgotten we needed to leave earlier than that today (note: there is nothing wrong with the pool, it was just the pool cleaning service).

I managed to get into my office without spilling my chai, but I didn’t remember to cancel my facial appt (which I am just not in the mood for) tomorrow, and since it’s now less than 24 hours, they’lll charge me if I cancel now. Well, tomorrow’s Friday, and I’ll probably be in the mood then, and if not, well, it gets me out of the office at 12:30. Can’t complain about that.

Today, by 10 AM I had already dealt with so many stupid people that I dubbed the day Stupid Thursday! (the exclamation point is, in fact, obligatory)…alas, I was confronted by more and more of the mentally challenged as the day went on and yet, despite the fact that we were in constant motion, it was productive, AND we got to chat which hasn’t been a factor in the work day in a long time, and I’ve missed it.

Also, we’ve confirmed now, that we do, in fact have a floor in our office, even if it does slope.

I came home wanting to write, but instead I felt hungry and crabby and anti social. Fuzzy brought me lasagne, which was inhaled, not merely eaten, and then I came into the bedroom to lie down, except there was a story burning, except that once I picked up a pen all the dialogue in my head had vanished and all I’ve produced now is a trio of handwritten pages full of stilted speech in a setting I’m not sure I like and at a time I’m not sure I can justify.

Some days, I feel like I should turn in my pen and pad. Today, for example. This notion was affirmed by the fact that my cute little lavender laptop decided to have a nervous breakdown and froze, then restarted and blamed the issue on bad graphics drivers.

I’ve downloaded an upgrade, and the system seems stable, but then, I’ve had the thing for over a year, and it’s only rebooted once, so who can tell?

In a bit over two hours, Stupid Thursday! will be over.
Maybe, just maybe, I can keep from committing senseless acts of violence before then.

Week of 4 April 2004

1. Condemn:: vilify
2. Promiscuous:: sex
3. Pro-life:: anti-choice
4. Mona Lisa:: Nat “King” Cole
5. Crown:: half-crown
6. Mumble:: mutter
7. Hack:: chop
8. Diet:: coke
9. Introduction:: preface
10. Latin America:: Canada*

I blew off the last two hours of work today, not because I couldn’t have found more things to do – there are always more things to do – but because by noon, both Jeremy and I had already had a day that felt a month long. By one I was fractured, and fractious, and just needed to be AWAY.

I came home, and spent about an hour just singing along with songs from Napster cranked up to the point where, if the neighbors hadn’t all been at work, like sensible, normal people generally are at three in the afternoon, they surely would have complained. Well, perhaps not quite that loud. But still, it was freeing, cathartic, to get lost in music, to remember the way resonance feels in my head, in my body. I think in melodies and lyrics, more than in text or images, and I’ve been boxing that part of myself this past month or so.

To further combat the severe Mondayness that permeated my life today (and involved a failure to visit Starbucks for my usual morning macchiato, among other things) I’ve decided to list fifty things that make me smile, in no particular order.

1) Rainy days, especially when I can hang out at home, and write.
2) The beach, in winter, or right after a large storm.
3) The beach, any other time of year.
4) Puddles, especially when no one’s watching and I can splash like the inner seven-year-old I still harbor within myself.
5) Cheesy musicals, especially the old Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland “Hey let’s put on a show” kind.
6) Horse racing.
7) Figure skating.
8) Sunflowers, and irises, and flowers in general.
9) Impressionistic art.
10) Good novels, and quiet time to read.
11) Fuzzy.
12) Zorro, especially when he play bows.
13) Cleo, especially when she’s wrinkly and tired.
14) Swimming.
15) Strong coffee.
16) Dark chocolate.
17) The smell of Clinique make-up – it’s my mother’s smell.
18) Sunshine on the wood floor of my office.
19) The smell of freshly-turned earth.
20) Stargazing.
21) Swimming.
22) Tap-dancing.
23) Singing.
24) Random *snugs* from friends I generally only see online.
25) Random hugs from friends I generally see offline.
26) Long phone calls with my aunt in Connecticut.
27) Handwritten letters.
28) Postcards, especially from places I’ve never been.
29) Smart dialogue in television shows.
30) Non-traditional casting.
31) Micro-fine roller-ball pens.
32) Crayola crayons.
33) The fortunes inside Perugina Baci chocolates.
34) Grumbacher oil pastels (the scent as well as the colors).
35) Brand-new spiral notebooks, college ruled.
36) Soft white cotton ankle socks on freshly lotioned feet.
37) Really good drawing paper, even though I can’t draw.
38) The cello.
39) Travel.
40) Coming home after a trip.
41) The moment in the middle of a hot summer night, when the heat breaks, and cool air drifts in.
42) Lightning.
43) Lady bugs.
44) Music, in general.
45) Pasta.
46) Grilled cheeseburgers.
47) Bubblebaths.
48) Clean sheets.
49) The smell of clothing dried on a line, outside.
50) Love – in pretty much any form.

1. What are the last two movies you saw?
Mona Lisa Smile on DVD and What a Girl Wants on cable.

2. What are the last two TV shows you saw?
The West Wing and, mainly because it happened to be on, and NOT because we chose to, American Idol.

3. What are the last two items you purchased?
Aside from coffee drinks? Algaecide and a lightbulb.

4. What are the last two beverages you drank?
“Cool blue” Gatorade and a generic chocolate protein drink.

5. What are the last two sites you surfed (before coming here)?
OpenDiary and LiveJournal.

Questions from Tuesday Twosome

I didn’t post anything about the weekend because I’ve been having this feeling that I should be writing real stuff, and not just “What I did on Saturday” stuff, but then I thought, is that any less real? And I realized that even if such posts are largely idle chatter, sometimes when I go back to them, they spark something else.

Translation: Even though it’s Tuesday, I’m writing a weekend wrapup post.

I’ve been in nesting mode, more often than not, this spring. Partly, this is because work is busy, and even though I generally like the people I work with, by the time I get home, I don’t want to deal with people. Especially, I don’t want to answer questions. This is why I’d never have made a good teacher; I’m impatient, and I don’t like repetition.

I’ve realized that I also don’t like it when people don’t try finding information before asking. No, this isn’t directed at anyone, and maybe it’s just a me-thing, but, it’s become a pet peeve lately, that I’m called upon to provide answers that are easily accessable. (Okay, it is directed at someone. Mom: You have highspeed net access in your home office If you need an area code or zipcode, you are just as capable of going to smartpages.com or usps.gov as I am. It is not my job to do this for you. Those sites work just as well from a computer in La Paz as they do from a computer in San Jose.)

I haven’t been to the gym in two weeks, and I can’t believe this, but I miss it. Just as I miss music, when I’m not around it, I miss having something physical to do. I’m going tomorrow morning, no matter what.

No, really.

So, anyway, the weekend. It was nice. We lazed around on Saturday, and then went to Jeremy’s concert. His group was joined by the SJ Peace Chorale, and I swear I’ve never seen a more dour group of singers outside a funeral mass. No, even in a funeral mass. I’ll accept that some music is serious, but there’s a such a thing as taking oneself too seriously, and this group was an example of that. Also, their director’s hair did not move. At all. Not even when she was conducting really wildly. This disturbed me, both because I’m certain this is a woman who doesn’t care if she uses aerosol loaded with fluorocarbons, and because it’s just not normal.

Anyway, we came home, and I changed clothes because I was cold, and then we went out for our monthly dinner with the Group. Somewhat frustratingly, for me, these group dinners coincide with the heaviest day of my monthly ‘visitor’ and I’m always overtired and a little on edge, so quieter than usual, as a result. Still, dinner was nice, conversation was fun, hey, even though I did NOT get coffee (my fault), I did get to spend time in a bookstore. This is never a bad thing.

Sunday, we slept most of the day. Well, Fuzzy slept most of the day. I left the bedroom to write, and ended up reading Harry Potter fanfic and watching cheesy movies, between naps, and then in the evening we hit Target, and the fabric store at Westgate, because my mother needed Pellon fleece and Schmetz sewing machine needles, and Beverly’s was out of the latter, and while there, I bought a quilting frame, even though I don’t quilt, because they’re great for doing large embroidery pieces.

We went to Friday’s after that, more because neither of us was in the mood to cook, and neither of us had eaten at all, and I was pleased with one of their Atkins offerings: two cheeseburgers (no bun) and a side salad, which I replaced with a side of broccoli. It satisfied my meat craving, and didn’t give me carb crash. I just wish they didn’t succumb to this paranoia that meat is only safe if it’s charred halfway to destruction.

And there we are, a quiet, completely unproductive weekend, in which I failed to write anything of interest, and accomplished nothing except managing enough laundry to provide us with fresh sheets, and clean underwear.

I think I’m feeling apathetic this week, but I’m not sure….