This little Sesame Street Bert doll moved into the apartment with us and sat in our linen closet up until yesterday.
The Bert for Kitof.
I do remember when Callaghan found it at the store, soon after we got back to the States, but a lot has happened since then. Over time, it just became a part of the interior landscape of the closet… I’d see it without really seeing it. It was like ET amongst the stuffed animals. So when it reappeared in the room yesterday, I needed a reminder: it was for one of Callaghan’s French friends, Kitof, who’s in Texas this week with his wife and daughter. We met them downtown late yesterday afternoon for Congress Avenue Bridge bat-viewing and dinner at Hut’s Hamburgers. (Their vegan veggie burgers are fantastic, by the way!)
“So what’s the story behind Bert, again?” I asked Callaghan as I was sitting at my desk. He’d told me once, like three years ago, which is evidently past the expiration date on the part of my memory that stores that sort of information.
“The story behind Bert? Oh, well!” He heightened his voice with a grand flourish. “It’s because Kitof and I were fans of Ernie and Bert when we were kids, so we really like them… and it does happen from time to time that we do impersonations. So when I found this little Bert, I got it for Kitof’s birthday, since they’re coming here.”
“Cute! Wasn’t there also, like, an incident involving Ernie and Bert?” I had this hazy inkling that there were specifics I wasn’t remembering.
“Oh, that. Yeah.” His voice returned to normal. The most exciting part of his story had been told, so there was no need for dramatic emphasis on what he was going to say next. “One evening in Rome, we sat in the hotel watching videos of Ernie and Bert.”
It took me a second to process this.
“You guys were in Rome and that was how you spent the evening… watching Ernie and Bert?”
“Yeah!” he laughed. “It was just Rome.”
It was just Rome. Europeans!
“Uh… did it occur to you that it was weird?” I mean, ROME! I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me being American, but when someone begins a sentence with “One evening in Rome,” I kind of expect something other than Ernie and Bert to follow.
“No, it wasn’t weird. It was Ernie and Bert. We’re pretty good at impersonating them in French, too!”
Callaghan stood in the doorway and started to affect the muppets’ voices.
“Bart! J’ai soif!” he lisped in Ernie’s high-pitched voice. Then he dropped his voice to a nasally low and growled: “Hé Ernest! J’aimerais bien dormir!”
He turned to look at me. I wasn’t in my chair anymore. I was on the floor, laughing.
He ignored my hysterics and went to his computer, found the clip online and sent it to me. Thus, I can share it with you:
De rien! You’re welcome!
It’s in French, obviously, so I’ll summarize: it’s the episode in which Ernie and Bert (“Ernest and Bart” in French) are in bed, and Bert’s trying to sleep. You know the one. Ernie is thirsty, and he unwittingly keeps Bert awake as he talks to himself, coming up with silly ways to combat his thirst (including drinking imaginary mineral water). This concludes with Ernie finally getting up to get real water. But when he gets back into bed, he still can’t sleep… because by then, he’s hungry! And Bert’s like, WTF… I can’t win.
Bert sitting next to Callaghan on the 1M, going downtown. Keeping Austin Weird.
And here’s the sky full of bats! We actually missed their emergence from under the bridge… I took this picture while we were walking along the river. We’ll have to try catching them another time.
First things first: THE HOUSTON TEXANS, NFL Football! I’m ashamed of myself… I failed to include them in my post about Texas teams. Apologies, Texans!
There’s this saying in American English (here’s a short lesson in American slang for you non-Americans): When something’s really spectacularly, unbelievably, out-of-this-world awesome, you can say, “It’s the bomb” – just like that, really stressing “the bomb” part. This comparison of something super delightful to a destructive explosive in order to emphasize the extreme wonderfulness of the super delightful thing comprises fairly common slang here in the States.
Putting it simply, to say that something is “the bomb” is to give it the very highest praise.
Therefore, I shouldn’t have been surprised when I came across a bottle of perfume in the shape of a hand grenade (a small bomb that’s made to be hand-thrown), even though the perfume’s designer isn’t American. The bottle caught my eye nonetheless, and yes, it does now reside on my bathroom counter, and yes again, the fragrance it contains is, in my opinion, the bomb. Callaghan loves it, and I’ve received several enthusiastic compliments on it from strangers both on the bus and on the street.
“Exotic” by Jimmy Choo
I’m not 100% positive that the designer intended for the bottle to resemble a hand grenade. That’s just the first thing that comes to my mind when I look at it. It’s like the ink blot test of perfume bottles.
It was a gift, and I adore it.
“Exotic” is actually an eau de toilette, not a perfume, for those who are interested in the technicalities of things. It smells like a bunch of berries and vanilla and flowers and stuff thrown on top of patchouli, which I normally don’t like. So it’s basically a fuchsia glass fruitchouli-scented hand grenade sculpture, and it’s wonderful.
(Don’t worry. I’m not aspiring to a career as a fragrance reviewer.)
On another note of uncanny resemblances, Callaghan’s been remarking for a while now on the likeness between Ronnie James and Night Fury the Dragon in the film How to Train Your Dragon, so he made a NOT UNLIKE picture to demonstrate it:
Ronnie James on the left, Night Fury in “How to Train Your Dragon” on the right. NOT UNLIKE.
…and another one:
Ronnie James on the left, Night Fury from How to Train Your Dragon on the right. NOT UNLIKE.
And that is why one of Ronnie James’s nicknames is “Precious Angel Baby Bunny DRAGON.”
I realized that ever since I decided to post here on Tuesdays and Fridays, I’ve been posting on Wednesdays and Fridays… this is the fifth Wednesday in a row. Not a Tuesday in sight on the recent calendar. Somehow, despite my efforts for Tuesday, Wednesday is just when it happens. Maybe I’ll try to start posting on Mondays, as well, to make it a 3x/week affair.
Saturday evening, we went downtown to meet a friend at Champion’s, and he took us for a stroll onto Rainey Street in pursuit of some local flavor. I kept expecting to find Casey Moore’s cozying up to the old houses lining the street. I wonder when the look-out in the back of my mind will stop automatically using my old Phoenix metro stomping grounds as a cultural point of reference for Austin? Austin is a very unique place with a distinct character of its own, but without wanting to, I’m finding Arizona corollaries for many places we encounter here, as well as many of the same businesses. Some of the Austin neighborhoods appear to have twins in The Valley (Greater Phoenix Metro Area), especially around Arizona State University.
That brings me to this one thing about Austin: there are no major professional sports teams. This is not a source of distress, mind you… it’s just different from what I’m used to. The Greater Phoenix Metro Area has the Suns (NBA basketball), the Diamondbacks (MLB baseball), the Cardinals (NFL football) and the Coyotes (NHL ice hockey). The Ironman Arizona Triathlon is there, and there’s pro fighting. Golf is also big in The Valley of the Sun; the WM Phoenix Open is the largest professional golf tournament on the PGA TOUR. The Super Bowl was hosted at Sun Devil Stadium in 1996 (Cowboys vs. Steelers). There are also two college bowl games hosted in the Phoenix metro area (the Fiesta Bowl and the Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl), and MLB Spring Training takes place there annually. Phoenix is a huge sports town by anyone’s standards.
Here, the major professional sports situation is this: San Antonio’s 1.5 hours away, which actually isn’t that far… it’s the home of the Spurs (NBA basketball). Drive to Houston (3 hours), and there are the Rockets (NBA basketball). And Dallas – 4.5 hours away – has the Mavericks (NBA basketball), the Cowboys (NFL football) and the Dallas Stars (NHL ice hockey). Also in the Dallas area, you’ve got the Texas Rangers (MLB baseball). So the teams are here in Texas, for sure. Just not here in Austin, which is perhaps a good thing, because it’s already bad enough that we’re tempted by live music opportunities every which way we turn.
It’s not like I went running off to sporting events all the time when I lived in Arizona. I didn’t. But I do enjoy the energy of a sports town, and there was the occasional game or boxing bout.
The most memorable one was on May 9, 1993; it was Game 5 of the Suns vs. Lakers NBA Western Conference play-offs. That was some basketball! The Lakers were in the house, and my boyfriend and I decided to go at the very last minute. We went downtown, bought tickets from a scalper and folded ourselves into the madness, because isn’t that what any sane college student would do when she has a final exam the next morning? I had my priorities straight. There were memories to be made. We had a feeling that the game would be phenomenal, and holy crap, our instincts did not fail us. About 500 mini heart attacks later (or maybe it was just one big long heart attack – yep, pretty sure I’m remembering that correctly), the Suns won 112-104 in an astounding over-time upset. That win constituted the biggest upset I’ve ever seen live, in person. Actually, it may have been the biggest upset I’ve ever seen, period.
I was there!
That was Jerry Colangelo’s Suns, with the likes of Charles Barkley; Dan Majerle; Cedric Ceballos; Danny Ainge; Kevin Johnson; Oliver Miller and Mark West on the roster. Remember that team, Suns fans? I was unabashedly obsessed. I was working part-time as a barista and found myself ridiculously flustered early one Saturday morning when coach Paul Westphal came in an ordered a latte. I don’t think I breathed at all while I was making his drink, and I was embarrassed because I thought he could see my hands shaking. At least it wasn’t KJ standing there before me. I would have passed out.
At any rate, I’m sure I’ll get to a point where I’m not looking around seeing Phoenix everywhere we go in Austin. We haven’t even been here two months yet. There’s a lot of discovery yet to happen, and we’re really loving it here so far!
Here are some pics from Saturday:
Stopping for a pose with this sculpture on our way to Champion’s on 4th
A casual look at the scene while I was waiting for my Greek salad at the food trucks on Rainey St
I was distracted by the industrial beauty of the view while we were eating
Rainey St hang-out (with live music, of course!)
A building downtown, lit up all gothicky and sweet at night
On Saturday night, we went to see Black Sabbath, as in, the British hard rock band that was formed in 1968, the year I was born. As in, yeah, these guys are a bit older now, so can you believe that I actually got to see them perform?
Last month, they released 13, their first studio album in 33 years, and the album took off. After its first week, it sold 155,000 copies and inexplicably ripped its way around the Billboard obstacle course, spiraling up to hit Number One on the charts in the UK, USA and seven other countries. With this accomplishment, Sabbath secured the Number One spot for the first time in history and escorted hard rock/metal done the old-fashioned way back onto the scene. At the concert, we saw many people our age and older, but we picked out all age groups in the massive crowd. The teenagers in the seats in front of us were probably no older than fifteen.
I was beside myself with excitement over this show. It really meant a lot to me.
I’m passionate about many different types of music, including classical, EBM/industrial, (some) rap and (some) country and a smattering of other genres, but since I’m talking about Black Sabbath here, I present the following brief chronology of my history just as a hard rock/metal fan:
(First, let me just say that it’s my parents who rock. They survived the years I skulked around in a Black Sabbath t-shirt and chains while they observed other people’s daughters looking cute and preppy in pink Izod shirts [and who went off to college immediately after high school. I was the only daughter they knew who joined the Army and went to war and did the whole college/grad school thing later. But that’s another story]).
–Sixth grade: I bought Back in Black, AC/DC’s new album. I was 12, and Back in Black was the first album I ever purchased myself, which established hard rock as my first love of all the genres of music. I was taking piano lessons, so I was listening to Chopin waltzes, too, among other things, but I didn’t blast Chopin waltzes. I blasted AC/DC, loudly and frequently. My parents started to wonder what was happening.
–Grades seven and eight: my friends and I fixated on Ozzy Osbourne’s Blizzard of Oz and Diary of a Madman.We shed real tears the tragic day Randy Rhodes, Ozzy’s phenomenal guitarist, died in a plane crash. The gloom that blanketed the world of music that day fell heavily upon the halls of Steinbeck Junior High in San Jose, California. Rhodes was a legend, but we felt like we’d lost our brother. I don’t know. We were 13 years old. We were like, “Randy Rhodes is dead? WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO NOW?” It was inconceivable.
–Grades nine-twelve: High school. I listened to ALL the metal out there – and it was a lot, remember… this was the 80’s hair-band era – but AC/DC, Judas Priest, Def Leppard, Van Halen, Aerosmith, Black Sabbath and Ozzy were my favorites in the genre. Also, I spent many a Saturday afternoon listening to Iron Maiden with the guy who worked the bar at Shakey’s Pizza. (David. Funny that I still remember his name!) It was cute. Though we really liked each other, nothing “happened” when we were hanging out – he was a lot older than me – but he got me hooked on Maiden with Killers, and that was it. To this day, Killers is still my favorite Iron Maiden album, and Maiden is still one of my favorite metal bands.
–During and after the Army, Queensrÿche, D.A.D., Faith No More, Vixen, Warlock, Savatage, Megadeath, Slayer, Anthrax and Metallica were some of the bands that joined the crew in my metal music collection. I also really enjoyed guitarist Joe Satriani, and my love for Alice Cooper’s Trash album bordered on obsession.
–Flash forward to 2003, when I discovered Disturbed’s The Sickness while training in Muay Thai at an MMA gym in Arizona. My trainer kept it cranked, and I loved it so much that I had to own it. I bought it and wore it out in my little truck. The significance of this is that The Sickness was the last metal album that I actually purchased until Sabbath released 13 last month. (This is not to say that there weren’t other bands in the interim, because there were. I just didn’t go out and buy any metal CDs between Disturbed in 2003 and Black Sabbath last month.)
What can I say about Saturday’s show?
It was definitely An Experience. The guys did a fantastic job overall. We had a solid good time, and I will never forget it.
It was an incredible feeling just to be there.
Waiting for the show to start. We got there early.
What I really took away from the show was a reinforced crush (maybe not a “crush” so much as some sort of hero-worship thing) on lead guitarist Tony Iommi, who is a God.
Iommi lost two of his fingertips in a factory accident when he was a teenager, but that didn’t stop him from doing what he knew he was born to do. He fashioned some “thimble-like devices” out of a “squeezy bottle” and stuck them on the ends of his amputated digits to extend them, then went on to play guitar for Jethro Tull before co-founding Black Sabbath with Ozzy, Geezer and Bill. They were a bluesy kind of hard rock band at first. From there, they evolved into their signature sound and ultimately grandfathered heavy metal and all of its derivatives. Yes… one of history’s greatest hard rock lead guitar legends has amputated fingertips.
Tony Iommi, lead guitarist and co-founder of Black Sabbath
Quoting from wiki: “Iommi is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential rock guitarists of all time. A prolific riff-maker, he was ranked number 25 in Rolling Stone Magazine’s list of the ‘100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time’.”
Fake fingertips, okay? And I mean, not costly, sophisticated works of custom-made, medically engineereed craftsmanship, either. We’re talking homemade fake fingertips that he stores in what appears to be an old Altoids tin:
The man is tireless, in possession of a relentless drive, an admirable work ethic. He’s constantly busy. The solo album he released in 2000, called, simply, Iommi, is a veritable piece of musical collaborative genius and one of my all-time favorite metal CDs. (I introduced it to Callaghan, and it’s now one of his favorites, too.)
Yet young at 64, Iommi’s now working to beat down lymphoma. Blood cancer. Where was he on Saturday night? Here in Austin, on stage, rocking his ass off. His performance was spectacular. I sat back in my seat and closed my eyes, listening to his solos in the dark with people around us screaming, and thought, Wow. That’s Tony Iommi on that stage down there!! I never thought I’d get to hear him play live.
You know, Ronnie James Dio, who took over Sabbath’s lead vox after Ozzy’s departure in 1979, died of cancer in 2010. (Why yes, we did name our kitty Ronnie James after him!)
Ronnie James with my headphones on the left. Ronnie James Dio with his mic on the right. NOT UNLIKE.
“It’s only now, since his passing, that people are coming out saying how great he was,” Iommi says of Dio in a “good-bye message” he videotaped in 2011.
(video cuts off at 1:48)
Iommi received his own cancer diagnosis within a year of this interview, in early 2012.
News for you, Iommi: YOU are great. YOU ARE THE MAN. You’re looking good and performing like it’s no one’s business, and thank you so much. Thank you for inspiring us with your passion and dedication! Here’s to many more years of showing them all how it’s done!!
Here’s my favorite Black Sabbath song, “Megalomania” (Sabotage, 1975):
And here are a few pics we took before, during and after the concert…
Callaghan, mid-stride
Me, pausing for a snapshot outside of Consuela on Congress
From left: Geezer Butler (bass), Tony Iommi (guitar), Ozzy Osbourne
OZZY
The Texas State Capitol, a gorgeous building. We walked through the grounds to get to the concert and back to our bus on Congress.
Me with Ronnie James as I was writing this. Ronnie James loves him some headphones!
My parents recently went to Hokkaido for Dad’s annual Japan summer golf trip. As usual, shortly after their return, a package arrived for me because Mom went shopping and thoughtfully sent a few things my way. For quite a few years now I’ve been using random Japanese and Korean beauty products from Japan and Hawaii, and they’re amazing. (Not sure whether any of the brands are tested on animals. I know to avoid stuff made in China, but I have no idea as to the others.)
Here are some of the things that arrived last week:
Background: facial gel exfoliator & foaming cleanser (made in Japan); Juicy Drop BB Cream (made in Korea) Foreground: a variety of sheet masks (all made in Korea)
A fun by-product of getting Asian cleansers and creams and such is the Engrish you’re sure to find on the packaging. In case you didn’t know, “Engrish” is the result of humorously botched English translations from some Asian languages; there’s a website that pays homage to it. Product packaging is a fairly reliable supplier of examples, and this blog post right here exemplifies why I would be a terrible beauty blogger: my amusement and enthusiasm in sharing the Engrish on the labels outweigh my interest in telling you about the products, themselves.
Behold:
This is the foaming facial cleanser… “Washing Form” in Engrish.
(Not sure why there’s a picture of a horse on the bottle. Not sure I want to know why, either.)
Now take a look at THIS. I hope you can read it (click photo to enlarge). This is the text on the back of the one sheet mask that’s not an Epielle – it’s the one to the far left in the array photo above, with the woman’s face in the picture:
Contains beauty gredients for skin activity in the sheets! Helps horny clear up! Put a water skin on the face. TAP YOUR FACE FOR BEING ABSORBED COMPLETELY INTO YOUR FACE. Keep it coolly at the case status and use it.
Awesome, right? And, bonus… it really is a lovely product!
We saw three movies over the weekend: Pacific Rim, The Heat and The Conjuring.
Brilliant times were had.
In the existing sea of apocalypse movies, newcomer Pacific Rim does a fair job of defying all of the superlatives in the English language… and that’s okay, because it handily makes up its own as it goes along, relieving me of the burden of description for those who ask. It’s inventive like that. Pacific Rim is such a staunchly self-defining film that I can only recommend that you go watch it for yourselves so you can see what I mean. It’s visual bombast at its finest. It’s one of those movies that manages to inhabit its own cinematic space while stealing from everywhere at the same time. I might be saying this to lazily avoid thinking of the words, but I also might be doing you a huge favor. Go and enjoy yourselves a hearty 131 minutes of campy, cheesy, Godzilla-mated-with-the-Loch Ness Monster-in-the-aftermath-of-a-nuclear-event-and-spawned-meets-Iron Man goodness. Sit back in your seat in the dark and let your eyes gobble up the spectacle that spills out before them. Not since the delightfully awful Tank Girl have I been so gratified at a Good vs. Evil apocalypse fun fest (though Tank Girl is technically post-apocalyptic). Seriously, I’m not a sci-fi fan per se, but I love these movies. They are the exceptions for me. Like Tank Girl,Pacific Rim is a sci-fi action film that I’m going to want to watch over and over again.
Side note… there should be an industry awards category called “Best Use of War-Paint in an Apocalypse Film,” because Mako Mori co-storms into combat wearing red lipstick, and she would get my vote for that award. Red lipstick? It might sound frivolous and potentially reductive, but it isn’t sexy or glamorous so much as bad-ass. (Becca in Tank Girl wore it too, come to think of it.) People from cultures all over the planet have fought battles wearing paint on their faces from the beginning of time, so there’s nothing new going on when Mako shows up wearing her “Yeah I’m a Rookie SO WHAT” shade of red. She just does it with aplomb, and it’s a costume detail that stands out when you consider the character’s personal circumstances. It’s a dash of defiance. (Interestingly, I can’t find a still online showing Mako in that red lip, but I swear I saw it in at least one scene, and Callaghan remembers it, too.)
If the Kaiju monster in Pacific Rim is the new Godzilla, then Ashburn and Mullins in The Heat are the new Beverly Hills Cops (though Ashburn’s actually a Special Agent), as Callaghan aptly remarked as we exited the theater. We went in expecting raunchy fun times ahead, but we honestly didn’t think we’d laugh as much as we did. Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy make quite a pair!
Finally, The Conjuring pulled off the nearly-impossible and thoroughly creeped us out with its sneaky direction, pacing and use of, um, props, shall we call them. (No spoilers here!) I definitely am a fan of the horror genre, and it’s hard to make me jump. The Conjuring did it.
In summary, it was an excellent weekend at the movies, which is an intensely satisfying thing, especially since a weekend at the movies is a rare event for us. Neither a cent nor a second of our time went to waste.
Okay, so I dwelled on Pacific Rim a bit longer than I’d intended. I also wanted to point out one of the hidden hazards of public transportation.
Some of you appreciated my impromptu ramble about masks, so let me do another “1-Minute Topical” as a kind of Public Service announcement. Subject: sunscreen. I wear it on my face every day, no matter what. Even if there’s no sun. Even if I’m not leaving the house. It’s the one product about which I’m kind of fanatical; I’ve been using it religiously for decades.
I once read – and I truly believe – that where there’s daylight, there’s a need for sunscreen, because a room filled with daylight is a room filled with damaging UV rays. Yes, your skin can sustain damage under a cloud cover! The term “sun damage” is a misleading one, in my opinion. You don’t need golden beams of sunshine to end up with skin damaged by UV rays. You are not safe if it’s overcast. Know how vampires are affected by daylight even if they’re inside? Same danger.
Skin cancer happening
While I envision horrible things happening to unprotected skin after sunrise, I’m not daunted. It’s easier to put on sunscreen than to hide from the daylight in a coffin until nightfall. I like an SPF of 30, minimum, in a broad-spectrum (that means UVA and UVB) formula. My current anti-UV ray weapon of choice is Eucerin’s Sensitive Skin Everyday Protection Face Lotion, SPF 30, which I’ve used since at least 2009. It’s great. (Side note: Eucerin and its parent company, Beiersdorf, claim to not test on animals, though their names don’t appear on current cruelty-free products lists… so I’m not sure what that’s about. Conflicting information alert.)
Speaking of animals, our boys’ true natures have really emerged since we’ve been here. It’s warm, and there’s carpet, so they’re letting it all hang out, so to speak. I’m not sure about Nounours (he’s harder to read), but Ronnie James is Hawaiian at heart. This is clear from the fact that he enjoys playing air-ukulele while lying on his back. We’ve caught him dancing the hula, also while lying on his back. And he loves to sit on his butt in big armchairs, as people in Hawaii are wont to do. (I know this first-hand. My family is originally from there, so I’ve spent a lot of time there, myself.)
Mmm-hmm… Ronnie James’s got the hang-loose ‘tude of the locals down (not that Al Bundy is Hawaiian), and he was obviously born with it, because his ukulele-playing, hula-dancing self has never been to Hawaii.
A few days ago, I had my ass handed to me by a giant box of kitty litter, and since then, it’s been all about pain management up in here.
It destroys more than just ammonia odors if you hold it carelessly with one hand and bend over and extend yourself at a weird angle while trying to fit it into a specific spot in the back of the closet.
Here are the results of experiments I’ve conducted with the various pharmaceuticals lying around the house:
–Extra-Strength Advil, my preferred over-the-counter pain medication: I took four at a time and experienced no relief. When I checked the expiration date, I found that it was expired. Trash! It was almost empty, anyway, so not much went to waste.
–Extra-Strength Tylenol: I took two at a time and didn’t get any relief from it, either, which isn’t surprising considering that my brain doesn’t get the memos sent by many types of pain-killers. There’s a rumor that natural red-heads tend to be difficult to anesthetize. My biological father has flaming red hair; my natural hair color is reddish (it’s actually really red in the front, where my bangs are). When I woke up from my major abdominal surgery a few years ago (my biological mother had ovarian cancer, so I had a recommended prophylactic bilateral salpingo oophorectomy with hysterectomy, aka the “Everything Out!” women’s surgical special), we discovered that I “don’t have the receptors for morphine,” in the words of one of the nurses. Yep, I woke up feeling everything. My brain does respond to Demerol, though. Lock it up! (No, on second thought, don’t lock it up. Find it. Bring it. Thanks.)
–Aspirin: I tried taking two aspirin yesterday morning, and it also failed to have an effect. So I spent most of the afternoon sleeping.
I see no reason to visit the doctor for this, because I know from vast experience over the course of years that prescription pain-killers like Vicodin, Percoset and several others have very little if any effect on me. They usually do nothing.
The true moral of this story is that I need to get back into working out, so I can keep my lower back strengthened and protected against these kinds of ridiculous mishaps. An MRI from a few years ago revealed a ruptured disc – S1, I think – so I know that I have a weakness in that area already. My favorite way to work out is to train in some kind of martial arts dojo, so I’m going to start researching options around here.
This post was brought to you by Ronnie James and Nounours, who really do appreciate their clean litter every day:
A while back, we were watching something, and there was a reference to boiling a bunny. Hart of Dixie, perhaps? I think it was Zoe Hart… she was talking to Lavon or someone about Wade – or maybe about George? – saying something along the lines of, “I’m not going to boil his bunny or anything like that.” (I could be misremembering this. Maybe it wasn’t Hart of Dixie at all.) Whatever the case, it made me snicker, and it brought to light an important information deficit. Callaghan didn’t get the reference. It turned out that he didn’t know anything about boiling bunnies, because he’d never seen Fatal Attraction. This threw me off. Callaghan got his American citizenship (he has dual French/American citizenship status) back in 2003, and I don’t know, I guess I’d just assumed that familiarity with Fatal Attraction is some sort of requirement. I mean, shouldn’t it be on the citizenship test? How can you claim to be an American if you don’t know about Glenn Close boiling a bunny? The cliché has become as American as baseball, hotdogs, apple pie and Chevrolet, as the old commercial jingle goes. It’s circa 1980’s American Pop Culture 101 material.
So we watched Fatal Attraction, effectively rectifying the situation. Now, Callaghan has all the background he needs on Glenn Close and boiling bunnies, and he is enriched. His life is complete. What would he do without me?
Being dedicated pop culture afficionados, we ventured downtown Friday night to the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema (Ritz) for The Big Lebowski Quote-Along, so we could sit in a theater with a bunch of fellow Big Lebowski geeks and shout out the famous lines captioned on the screen (lines we all know by heart, anyway), waving our glow sticks for The Jesus and swinging our oversize blow-up baseball bats to show Larry what happens when you fuck a stranger up the ass. Our waitress brought a White Russian for Callaghan, a tall glass of ice water for me, and a huge metal bowl of the best movie theater popcorn we’ve ever had.
The timing was great, since we’d been overdue for a Big Lebowski fix. Satiated, we emerged from the theater onto the thumping street. 6th Street in Austin at almost 2:00 on a Saturday morning looks like this:
Austin closes off vehicle access to 6th Street during the night on the weekends. The bar-hopping pedestrian party needs all the space it can get.
Even the going-home was entertaining! The bus that took us back to our apartment is dubbed “The Night Owl,” but it should be called “The Party Bus,” because that’s exactly what it is. From 6th Street to our apartment. Direct.
No In-and-Out Burger on the way home for us, though. Nor music by the Eagles. You see what happens, Larry?
We’ve been in Austin for a month now, and we’re finding it to be a pretty kick-ass place. We’re enjoying the process of discovering our new city, and we’re transitioning well, overall.
One thing we’ve done is we’ve freed ourselves from the hassles of ownership as much as possible. We don’t own cell phones, property or vehicles. For phones, we use Magic Jacks (we each have our own). We rent an apartment, and we walk and take the bus to get around. Thus, there are no phone bills, mortgage payments or auto-related expenses in our monthly budget. Not having a car is also economically beneficial in that it eliminates the ability to give in to instant gratification impulses… there’s no jumping into a car on a whim to go do stuff or buy stuff we maybe can’t afford. We have to mindfully plan our excursions and make decisions about what’s a). necessary, and/or b). worth our time and money, and what’s not.
At first, the idea of going wheel-free unnerved me somewhat, just a little bit, as I’d been as accustomed as anyone to the independence of mobility inherent in having a vehicle. My last vehicle – in Arizona – was a little red Chevy truck I’d named “McKenna.” I loved her and considered her to be a member of my family (I can be obsessive like that. And, okay, I’ll admit that I have a thing for Chevy trucks). (No, I did not have a decal of Calvin pissing on the Ford logo.)
In reality, it turns out that being wheel-free is anything but a hardship. It’s actually incredibly liberating, and it makes so much sense for us, it’s almost ridiculous. Our new lifestyle is quickly becoming second nature. We love not having to deal with parking and getting gas. Also, not having a car keeps us active… we walk an average of 10 miles per week, just going around doing our errands.
Our biggest surprise source of glee has been the bus. The bus-line we use the most is the 1M, and it’s fantastic. The 1M picks us up right in front of our apartment, and it cuts south through the Austin metro area, taking us almost everywhere we want to go, from N. Lamar to Guadalupe to Congress and beyond. Mainly, we go downtown. The 1M takes us there directly… no transfers!
The advantages of riding the bus are numerous. For one thing, it means that someone else is driving, so we’re free to stare out the window and make nifty discoveries. (For instance, thanks to the 1M, we discovered the Hyde Park neighborhood, which we love.) We don’t have to pay attention to the road. We can talk, daydream and even take a short power nap. All we have to do is be aware of when to pull the stop bell.
We’ve yet to have a bad bus experience (though I’m sure we will at some point… those are the odds). So far, the bus has always been either on time or early. It’s beautifully air-conditioned, meaning that we get to travel in a comfortably chilled environment, rather than in a hot car with cold air blasting onto our faces. We enjoy the diversity on the bus, all the proverbial walks of life we encounter. The mix of people includes students, yuppies, hipsters, housewives and gangsters; both white and blue-collar employees heading to work, everyone from engineers to artists to construction workers to librarians; homeless, disabled – sometimes with helping dogs – parents and teenagers. There are children and elderly. There are loners and lovers. There are groups of friends. Shades of skin represent the full spectrum of the human rainbow, and it’s beautiful. There are hundreds of stories on a bus at any given time, and with my penchant for people-watching, I love to image what some of those stories might be. A bus ticket scores you free entertainment, too, because human beings can be pretty funny creatures.
The first time we rode the bus, we were sitting there talking when an old guy got on, loudly singing a Mac Davis song:
“Oh Lord, it’s hard to be humble/When you’re perfect in every way…”
He walked down the aisle past us, continuing to sing.
“I can’t wait to look in the mirror…”
Then he doubled back and stuck his face in front of Callaghan’s to sing him the final line:
“Cause I get better lookin’ each day!”
Which caused us all to crack up. See? How often do you get to burst out in spontaneous laughter while driving? Instead of cursing out traffic conditions and other peoples’ stupid driving behaviors, we’re being comically serenaded by a happy crazy person. Awesome!
Here, check out the view from our favorite bus:
Heading downtown on the 1M, our go-to bus-line. We jump on the 1M several times a week, at least.
Crossing the Congress Ave bridge
It seems there are as many different architectural styles in Austin as there are types of people. I love them all.
Have I mentioned that Austin’s a pretty friendly place?
Coffee on every corner! Seems that way, anyway.
I posted this on Facebook yesterday: Tuesday afternoon, we were on the bus going downtown and I took this pic of the Texas state capitol not knowing that a badass Texas state senator called Wendy Davis was inside at that very moment, doing badass things. (Like her or not, she is a badass.) This is what history in the making looks like from the outside.
“Stay alert to stay alive” – there’s a reason why the military teaches you to live by these words. You want to be aware when a demon dumpster tries to sneak up behind you and your friends.
Here’s a little tribute to one of my favorite actors. Every time we pass this, I think of Christopher Walken, so finally, I took a picture of it.
say “fromagggge!” or “camembert!!!”
Making a conscious decision to not own a car is the best thing we’ve done, and we’re lucky that we have this option – I know that not everyone does. We, too, might need to get a car one day, for whatever reason, though we sincerely hope that doesn’t happen. So we’re going to enjoy this freedom for as long as we can. It’s just a pleasure to get around without speeding mindlessly through our day. We can see what’s around us when we walk and ride the bus. Plus, we’re no longer contributing to the pollution problem by adding an engine of our own to the mix. If we ever do want or need a car for a few hours, we can rent one, or use Zip Car or Car 2 Go (we see Car 2 Go Smart cars all over Austin). Win!
(That’s based on Shirley Temple’s “Animal Crackers in My Soup,” in case you didn’t know.)
This post is brought to you by the eleventh orange I’ve eaten this week. Not the eleventh hour. The eleventh orange. I’m pretty sure that crime scene investigators could apply their crazy ninja forensics techniques to my laptop keyboard and uncover hard evidence of all eleven of those oranges, as careful as I am to avoid smudges.
Now, what was I going to share? Oh yes:
“A Giraffe totem corresponds to farsightedness and balance between earth and sky.” (Llewellyn)
I’ve been thinking that my so-called spirit animal must be the giraffe, since reading that quote has an oddly grounding, motivating effect on me. Now, when I close my eyes and envision the giraffe at the window of the safari bus in Arizona that one time, a feeling of centeredness comes rolling back. It works!
I remember when I thought that my spirit animal was the wild horse. I re-thought that whole thing when I discovered, not too long ago, that I’m actually kind of uneasy around horses. I’m still in awe of the wild horse spirit, but the reality of a horse and me standing together is just… I don’t know. It’s a hard thing to phrase, so, just to show you, here’s a picture of me with our neighbor’s horse in France back in April:
Pardon me. I just live here. Oh wait, this is a French horse, so… Je m’excuse. Now how do you say “I just live here” – “J’habite seulement ici?” Or “J’habite juste ici?” Not working. American slang doesn’t translate! Nevermind.
See the body language dynamic going on there? This was a candid shot of a chance encounter. Callaghan captured a spontaneous moment, and looking at this picture brings back the awkwardness of it. That horse and I were both, like, uhhh… yeah. I just didn’t know how to relate to that guy. Have you ever felt self-conscious in front of a horse? (Surely I can’t be the only person who’s ever been discomfited in the presence of a horse.) I didn’t connect with that horse on any level. It was like he was the reincarnation of someone I used to know. Someone who used to fluster me at cocktail parties.
So, yeah, giraffes.
Speaking of animals, the other night, I was reading to Callaghan about the liger (lion-tiger hybrid) and her baby liligers (offspring of a liger and a lion) at the Novosibirsk Zoo in Russia.
“Check out this liger,” I said, shoving my laptop under his nose. “They actually exist outside of Napoleon Dynamite!” We started flipping through the slideshow.
“Look at that! He’s got strots,” said Callaghan, pointing at one of the baby liligers.
“Strots?”
“A mixture of stripes and dots.”
The liger and her liliger cub at the Novosibirsk Zoo in Russia
In other animal marking news, my current favorite eye makeup look is sparkly pink shadow with a matte black overlaid on the lids:
Can you see it? (Don’t mind the hair. I had the front chopped and deep layers cut all around for growing-out purposes.)
While I’m at it, here are some pics of us goofing around before we left the house this morning:
A bonus cool thing that happened today – our state ID and drivers license arrived in the mail! Texas state residencies established, check.
We’re all happily ensconced in our place now, but the getting here was not without its perils. The Ronnie James kitty almost got abducted by a UFO the second we stepped over the threshold into our new apartment.
To begin with, it had been a long journey for the little guy. First, the morning we left France, he fell terribly ill as a result of the vet-prescribed sedative – NEVER AGAIN, by the way – we gave him and his brother, Nounours, in preparation for travel. (Thankfully, Nounours did not have this adverse reaction.) Next, there was the cramped, cold and damp taxi ride to the airport in Lyon two hours away, where we boarded a flight to Frankfurt, Germany.
At the Frankfurt airport, kitties sat patiently in their pet carriers while Mommy and Daddy sucked down beers, waiting to board our next plane. (What. It was Germany! Having lived there for two years, I’m incapable of stepping foot in that formidable country without imbibing their ambrosiatique – there, I just invented a word – brews.) Then there was the long flight to Houston, Texas… trans-Atlantic, halfway across America, non-stop. It was a 10-hour flight, but we were actually on the plane for 12 hours, since bad weather in Frankfurt caused a two-hour departure delay. Two hours sitting on the plane on the ground, 10 hours in the air. Our boys were beautifully behaved the entire time. No one even knew they were there. We were so proud!
We’re American kitties now! Rah Rah Rah! Now let us out! **NEWSFLASH**: the inside of these carriers look the same here as they did in Europe.
We spent the night in a motel in Houston. Ronnie James and Nounours knew exactly what to do… I opened the kitty suitcase to bust out their litter box, and they used it immediately after I set it up. They drank water and gobbled down their crunchies and the canned food we set out for them. They raced around the room, took flying leaps through the air onto the sofa, bounced around on pillows and cushions, got more cuddles and kisses and praise than they knew what to do with, and slept. The next morning, we packed them back up in their carriers, buckled them into the back seat of the rental car (being the responsible parents that we are – “BABIES ON BOARD!”) and hit the road for the three-hour drive to Austin.
A friendly sign along the way.
In Austin, our final stop was supposed to be our new home, but there was an unforeseen problem with the apartment. We found ourselves pulling a fast Plan B out of our ass and checking into another motel room, where we stayed for four days; thankfully, that was as long as it took to find and move into our ideal new place.
By the time we’d secured that new place, though, Ronnie James and Nounours had already decided that they were home. In the motel room. They had a double bed all to themselves, courtesy of the large, gruff-looking man behind the counter who’d kindly insisted that we take a free upgrade since kitties “might be more comfortable in a larger room.” They might enjoy a bed to themselves, he reasoned. (It turned out that the motel staff loved cats. We were told the story of how the night shift guy’s cat followed him to work every night, lording over the front counter with Daddy.)
How right he was! Kitties did, indeed, adore having their own bed.
Our own bed? THANKS NICE MOTEL PEOPLES.
They also enjoyed the maid service. We straightened up the room every morning and always made sure to leave the “Do Not Disturb” hanger on the doorknob before going out (me being paranoid that kitties would slip out and get lost if someone went in), but at the end of each day, the room would be immaculate, and there kitties would be, lounging like little princes on their bed, looking suspiciously as if someone had brought in silver platters of caviar and sea-brine champagne while we were gone. They probably got smothered with complimentary kisses and attention while we were gone, too. They were as content and purring as kitties could be. Ronnie James looked particularly blissful.
Maid came to change mah sheets!
So when the time came to check out, Ronnie James balked. Because, you see, not only were kitties being treated like royalty by the motel staff, but there was an armchair in the room. As far as Ronnie James is concerned, home is where the armchair is… especially if said armchair gets daily catnip treatments, as that one apparently did. Throwing everything back in the suitcases and approaching Ronnie James with his empty kitty carrier earned me this expression:
What is that you have there OH HELL NO I am NOT getting back into that carrier. There is nothing wrong with this armchair, see.
For the first time in the whole five-day ordeal, he resisted us. He cried all the way to the new apartment. And when we brought him inside and released him, his world blew apart in a mist of terror when he stepped out, looked up, and spotted the Unidentified Flying Object from hell:
Spinning black blades. Lights and flickering shadows. Wind. WE COME FOR YOU NOW.
It was unlike anything he’d ever seen before. Adding to the problem was the fact that, being in his carrier, he’d seen nothing between his cozy motel room and this.
He did not get to see our harmless-looking apartment from the outside.
Not scary. Top floor, corner unit. It’s peaceful. Summer quiet (students gone) or all the time quiet, I don’t know, but it’s lovely!
He did not get to see our completely innocuous front door.
Not scary.
And he did not get to see the benign view from our breezeway.
Not scary.
He only saw this:
The menacing, spinning bladed aerial beast lies quietly in wait.
His level of alarm took me by surprise. It hadn’t occurred to me that the sights and sounds specific to a warm-weather place would concern the kitties, but of course… duh! In France, kitties never knew the low-grade hum of an air conditioner, and they certainly did not know ceiling fans.
It took almost a week for Ronnie James to adapt. The first two days, he huddled alternately under the bathroom sink (having quickly learned how to open the cabinets) and in the corner of the kitchen counter, where we brought him food and water. (Meanwhile, Nounours was fine. As Callaghan put it, you could drop a piano in front of him, and he wouldn’t blink an eye. He is, however, terrified of garbage bags.) On Day Three, Ronnie James ventured out to use the litter box. I picked him up and held him close in his favorite cuddly position. His eyes widened to the size of CDs and he shook violently with fear in my arms as he watched the flickering of shadow caused by the ceiling fan in the next room. My heart broke.
Finally, he realized that the rest of us were still alive after four days of normal life activity under the ceiling fans, and he started to gradually lower his guard. This process was helped by his discovery of the beat-up old armchair we’d found just for him on Craigslist:
Mine! Mine mine mine.
He’s all fine now, our little Wrah Wrah James, wandering around and making his little “wrah wrah” happy noises.
UFO? What UFO? I’m chilling under my ceiling fan!
Belly rubs pleeze and thanks sez the Ronnie James
Too much excitement around here. I’m out.
And Nounours (AKA “Mr. Sheds-a-Lot” – no need for the year-round winter coat here!) has been enjoying the company of his brother again, whom he’d missed during his week of hiding.
I’m eager to settle into a writing schedule now that we’re here and moved in. Thursdays had become standard for blog posting. Today’s Friday. The last time I posted here was Saturday, and it was mostly pictures. But I’d love to start writing, for real, and writing regularly on a more frequent basis, like twice a week. Let’s see… I started this blog at the end of November. In January, we decided to move, and it’s been chaos ever since with one thing or another going on, plus packing and other move preparations. Now, for the first time, there’s nothing major happening. We shall see!
I’m sitting on the bed wearing a short little dress, feeling perfectly comfortable – neither cold, nor warm. We have a fireplace, but it’s blessedly unnecessary. Callaghan’s in the other room. The bedroom door between us is halfway closed. The bedroom door. We have doors in our apartment! It’s a small, one-bedroom apartment, but it’s bigger than our house in France, and the vaulted ceiling makes it feel even more spacious. We have doors. We have closets. We have drawers in the kitchen, and we have a bathtub and a shower! There are screens on the windows, and there’s plumbing. (There was no plumbing in the house in France the first six months we lived there.) There’s a disposal in the sink, and we have a dishwasher. All the things I took for granted before I left the States.
Fully-loaded. Have oven, WILL BAKE.
Also, we have an oven that works, and this… well, let me tell you. This is a huge deal for me. We did not have a functional oven in France, so for almost two years, I couldn’t bake, which is one of things that I love to do the most. Baking has been a favorite hobby and profound source of joy for me since I was like, I don’t know, thirteen. So I made a loaf of whole wheat banana bread yesterday; it was the first time I’d baked since I left Arizona almost two years ago, and I was ecstatic. Callaghan appreciates the oven, too, as evidenced by the fact that there’s only three slices of banana bread left.
Whole wheat banana bread… the first thing I baked in almost two years!
Today is our two-year wedding anniversary. It’s weird to think that yesterday’s banana bread was the first thing I’ve baked for him. Right?
We attended an interesting 3-D art exhibit gathering with our friend Joe
Our first venture out started here, with Joe. Good company, delicious cocktails. Thank you, Joe!
It’s early Saturday morning, and we’re in our apartment drinking Peet’s coffee (how I’ve missed it!) and catching up online now that we have internet (as of last night). Next week, I’ll tell you about the Ronnie James kitty and his UFO crisis.
I can be a vainglorious beast when I have a camera in my hand. I mean, I can get overly serious about taking pictures. At least I recognize this distinction: You have your real photographers, both amateur and professional, people equip with raw talent, people who are visionary and intuitive with their cameras, hard-working and trained artists. Then you have people like me, the pointers-and-clickers. But I am quite the pointer-and-clicker, if I do say so!
All of this to say that yesterday we returned from a road trip (14 hours, total) through 7-8 départements to the center of France (to visit a friend), and here are pictures – a little bit of atmosphere from the passenger-in-the-moving-vehicle perspective.
That Asian-Looking Chick 