Social Security

As in “I went to their office today,” and not “I’ve been thinking about it generally.” I went to the Social Security office to legally change my name. Pretty exciting stuff, in a rather dull office. I guess that’s the beauty of bureaucracy, they can pretty much add a form and suck the romance out of just about any situation you could imagine. I’d tried to go on Friday afternoon, to the office in Campbell. Call it a knee-jerk reaction, but if given the choice to carry out some important bit of paperwork, the kind of thing that could follow you around and haunt you if something went wrong, in either San Jose or Santa Cruz, my gut reaction says “San Jose.” I feel like they take their form filling out more seriously on that side of the hill. However, they also hide their office in a mess of expressways and streets that aren’t where they seem they should be. Even leaving work two hours early on Friday, I didn’t make the Campbell office before it closed. So today I tried my luck in Santa Cruz. Rock star parking, lovely office on Walnut street, which is always where you think it should be, and very minimal wait. I should have my new card, and my new married woman identity in less than two weeks.

Super Scrabble

This last weekend we broke in the new Super Scrabble board we received as a wedding gift. Sure, it was 110 degress in our living room. We still had one room with air conditioning, and a board with Quadruple Word Score spaces on it. Quadruple Word Score. Can you even imagine such a thing? The combined scores of this game soared over 1000 points. There are 200 tiles, double the number of almost every letter. That’s two Z’s, two J’s and four blank tiles. It was a thing of beauty. The honor of scoring the First Ever In My Apartment Quadruple Word Score went to Sarah, who was, coincidentally playing her very first game of Scrabble ever. The wonders never cease.

Calls from the Homeland

My mom and aunt are visiting our homeland this week. They flew out to Indiana to hang out with my great aunt and uncle, and then they all drove to Kentucky to see where my grandma and great aunt lived when they were little girls. My mom had never been to Kentucky so she was extra stoked. Gram’s family are all Pitchfords and Cliburns…my great aunt got them to Grandpa Cliburns house, which is on a street called Pitchford Ridge. They stopped to take pictures of the house and the lady who lives there now came out of the front door and said “Well, you must be relatives.” She showed them the inside of the place, and then called up her neighbor, a man who is 100 years old, and them all on to his house. Apparently he didn’t have any hearing aids, was “sharp as a tack” and when a bunch of photos fell to the ground he got to them to pick them up before my mom did. They stopped by the local cemetery which was filled with Cliburns and Pitchfords. So they had a good time. They kept calling me on Friday at work, because they were in a huge storm, and they wanted me to use the internet to tell them if there were tornado warnings. No tornado warnings, but I did keep them up to date on the severe thunderstorms and lightning they were encountering. They had to pull over to the side of the road to wait out a storm at one point, but then they called an hour or so later to let me know the worst had passed, and that they were all safely back in Indiana.

Anyhow, in an unplanned “art imitating life” moment, I watched “Elizabethtown” Friday night, which is set right in Louisville, KY, where my mom and the severe thunderstorms had just been. The family in the movie felt very familiar, especially the aunt who wanted to walk her nephew through the entire photographic history of the family.

What 2012 photos look like

Our order from Shutterfly arrived today.

The boxes were labeled “Do not bend.”

Portland is literally cooler than Boston

Some of you may have recently been dazzled by a new plan circulating the Avogadro-sphere. It is reminiscent of the Portland Plan…except that it doesn’t involve us all moving to Portland. I conducted an informal survey of people living in my apartment, and asked “Why is Portland better than Boston?” An answer that scored highly was “Boston’s hot and humid in the summer.” (Another popular answer was “The city and street names around Boston are hard to pronounce. We might look silly.” The humidity somehow seemed more tangible.)

I was reviewing the Third Chapter Chart this afternoon, not in connection with this Boston v. Portland question, and found this commentary on the East Coast Humidity,

“I often wonder, no lie, why colonists landing here in the 17th century didn’t say, “Hey,this sucketh, why not look for better land yonder, a place without fens, malaria, and this oppressive heat.” Something like that. Silly colonists.”

~ by meteowrite on July 18, 2006.

One Response to “Portland is literally cooler than Boston”

ON HOT AND HUMID SUMMERS
Name a place that you want to move to, that you think your friends would want to move to, that ISN’T Portland, that also IS NOT hot and humid in the summer.

Also, one word for you: Air Conditioning (okay, two words)

ON BOSTON STREET NAMES AND THEIR PRONUNCIATION
I need to hijack your blog for a few minutes to tell you the following:

People in New England? They can’t pronounce worth shit. They must have all failed phonetics as children. This was confirmed for me on a family vacation a few summers ago. My sister-in-law Maureen organised it. She thought it would be a great idea to have a family reunion camping trip. Lovely idea for me and my beloved, a house of horrors for many of my in-laws. Many opted to stay in hotels with lots of trees around them just a few miles away from the campsites. The camping took place in Maine in a lovely lovely national park. My husband and I talked about this trip to Arcadia National Park for months. He researched Arcadia online and checked out what this park had to offer. He exchanged ideas with his parents during their weekly phone conversations on the Arcadia trip. When we all convened in Boston ready to make the drive up to Maine, all my in-laws were abuzz about Arcadia. Would the hotels be nice? Someone heard that the campgrounds had showers and laundry facilities. Was there good hiking in Arcadia? Is Arcadia the name of the nearby town as well? Or just the national park?

Imagine my confusion when we drove up to the kiosk of a park called ACADIA National Park. Is Acadia another part of Arcadia, I wondered. Nope. It’s Acadia National Park. Our vacation was in Acadia.

I have corrected my husband each time he inserts and “R” in that name, but he still persists. And if I try to talk to my in-laws about that lovely time we had camping in ACADIA, they all look at me with blank faces. When I ask to see the photos they took at ARCADIA, they say: OH! Let me take out the album for you! There’s a really good one of Ellen throwing out the wine.

I say this to you to make you feel better. NO ONE in Boston pronounces things properly. You will never sound silly for saying something wrong. This is not unique to the Kenny clan. Next time you’re in New England, ask someone “Is Amanda in her room?” And they will say, “I think AmandaR is in the kitchen.” Everyone.

You get the idear?

My Workout Posture

A group of us library folks are taking a “Wellness” class this summer at the East Field House. It’s called “Get On the Ball,” which provides many opportunities for on the ball jokes, and is basically a pilates course utilising large rubber workout balls. Occasionally I feel dorky…we usually start the class by raising the balls over our heads and to the right, then lowering them to ground by our left foot. Over and over. We look like we’re trying out for some version of “A Chorus Line” or a School House Rock expose on the inner workings of a giant atom.

Of course, when you venture out into the world, especially to a class involving giant rubber balls, you’re bound to run into some characters. We’ve tried to fill the class with people we know, but a few random folks have filtered in. And this is Santa Cruz, where a few random folks are generally a little extra random if you know what I mean. We have an older guy with a with a collection of sweatbands who is very intent about working out his upper abs. He asks about them frequently. And of course we have the lady who is gym-serious. She’s really into exhaling on the exertion, in an intense-zen sort of way.

As our class ended today, and we were all staggering to put our weights back on the shelf she said to me “You have really good work out posture.” This is worth mentioning, because as I type this I’m slumped in my chair and my foot has fallen asleep because I’ve been sitting on for the past half hour. I won’t be able to walk when I eventually try and stand up. Good posture is generally not one of my strong suits. No one’s ever complimented my work out posture before.

Birthday Monday

At age 32, I’ve finally discovered a trick for making weekends seem longer. You have to do something outside your home on Friday night. Nothing too involved, but just away from home. For instance, I’ve gone to a movie two Friday nights in a row now. Pre-wedding, not a lot of time for movies, so we’re sort of getting caught up now. BUT, and here’s the beauty part…if you go out Friday night, then you can laze around all day on Saturday and not feel like you aren’t capitalizing on your weekend. You’ve already BEEN out in the world. You’ve done something “weekend-y.” You’ve achieved some level of recreation. Leaving home on Saturday becomes unnecessary.

We saw the pirate movie on Friday evening. It didn’t get great reviews, but I found it to be quite enjoyable. I mean, it’s a movie about pirates, it’s not going to change your life, but it’ll entertain you handily for three hours. The dialogue was laugh out loud funny, and there was plenty of good swashbuckling action. Really, that and bag of popcorn are all I need from a movie on a Friday night. Saturday, just to refresh, we watched the first pirate movie again. It held up to a second viewing as well. Good music too.

Since last December, and with my friend Sarah, I’ve been working my way through YALSA’s (Young Adult Library Services Association) Best of the Best — 100 Best Books for Young Adults list. We’re up to the authors with last names starting with “K.” I read “Blood and Chocolate,” by Annette Curtis Klause. The blurb reads “Beautiful teenage werewolf Vivian falls in love with Aiden, a human — a meat-boy — and longs to share her secret with him.” It’s better than the blurb makes it out to be. Sarah and I use a 1 - 5 scale to describe our overall feelings about the book, and I’d give this about a 3.5. It was compelling, I kept picking it up after I’d set it down. Not earth-shattering. Now, if you are interested in werewolves, that’s a different story. This it totally the right book for you if you’re a werewolf fan.

Last night, we placed an order for 2012 photos from Shutterfly. This figure is staggering. I am staggered by this figure. :) Shutterfly doesn’t like to handle batches of photos with more than 2000 items in them, but after several attempts, we managed to convince the software to take our money. I can’t wait to see how big of a box our order comes in.

No really, this time I’m going to be a blogger

I have no trouble whatsoever keeping a blog on vacation, and here at work I have a lovely internet connection. It should be a piece of cake. I’m a bit of an expert on cake. I’ve had cake 12 out of the last 14 days, so when I say it should be a piece of cake to do something, I’m lending all my authority to the statement. Really, I’m going to be a blogger.

~ by meteowrite on July 14, 2006.

3 Responses to “No really, this time I’m going to be a blogger”

1. You are SO a blogger! Group emails? Journal entries in meteowrite.com? All practice turf to get you ready for the big time. Plus you are a fabulous writer with a funny spin on life around you. I sit back and wait for the brilliance to spew forth.

   jean said this on July 18th, 2006 at 12:01 am

2. ps. I too have a wordpress account. How’d you make your’s so pretty? I took the easy way out and opted for a template. Code may be poetry, but I’m a busy girl with other things to learn.

   jean said this on July 18th, 2006 at 12:02 am

3. It was your wordpressing that led me to wordpress! I thought your blog was so lovely, and seemed to have more features than another blogging site I’d used. This is just a template too, Regulus, if I’m not mistaken. So the poetry that is code was written by someone else. Thanks Someone Else!

   meteowrite said this on July 18th, 2006 at 3:22 am