Just checking in

Hi folks.

I can't type much right now, so this will be very short. I was in a car accident a week ago Tuesday. Don't really want to talk about it. Makes me very upset, for a variety of reasons. Not sure that I'll write any more than this about the event.

My right wrist is broken, but I had five grant proposal deadlines (all were due today) and I haven't really been able to rest the hand at all. Can't lie. I'm very depressed right now. I'll be back here when I'm feeling less crappy and have a little more hope in my heart.

Thanks to all my lovely friends who have written or called. I am grateful. Please consider this a universal hug to you all. Please know that I'll contact you when I'm feeling a little better.

Merujo

Once more, with (incredibly painful) feeling!

My bad eye decided to act up over the weekend. I've had to use drops that muck up my vision, and I've been sitting in my office this week with shades and headphones, looking like Stevie Wonder's less-talented, white cousin.

Problem with the eye is that my depth perception is even more nonexistent right now, and yesterday morning, navigating that dangerous three-inch drop from the sidewalk to the street by my car, I took a major header, full speed, into the cement. Landed on my knees, full force. Caught myself with my hands before my head could hit the pavement. I would like to blame this incident on the ferocious nature of the "Attack Pavement" in my 'hood, but, alas, it can only be blamed on me, my mucked up eye, and my general clumsiness.

I'm really glad none of the neighbors saw me face down in the road. That's just not the image you want burned into everyone's mind.

To paraphrase the narrator from "A Christmas Story", I lay there like a slug. A slug in smart work attire, clutching a bottle of raspberry seltzer water. (That bottle would be put to good use as a temporary ice pack.) A slug wishing that she hadn't just fallen off a THREE-INCH curb.

Seriously, shoot me now.

My entire body started to throb. My damn tailbone hurt! How the heck does your tailbone hurt when you've faceplanted yourself? Referred pain is, especially in this case, a serious pain in the butt!

Now, at this point, a sane person would have just crawled back to the apartment rather than go in to the office.

But when's the last time someone described me as sane?

Right.

When I got downtown, it took me five minutes to get out of my car at the parking garage. I think the valets wanted to kill me as I held up their rush hour parking work, but I just couldn't move. (Sorry, guys!) After gimping to the office, one of my colleagues noticed I was incredibly pale. When I rather ungracefully pulled up a trouser leg and showed her my ginormous, shiny knee, she almost heaved in the hallway. I hope she'd had breakfast already!

I had to get myself psyched to make the hobble down to our Med Unit in the basement of the building. Our office was in the midst of the annual Explorers Symposium, so there really wasn't anyone I could bug to go downstairs on my behalf. I was very appreciative that the Med Unit nurse had a bunch of crushable single-use ice packs for me to apply throughout the day.

I was bummed to miss the Symposium - there were a lot of cool presentations. At least I got a good amount of work done in my cone of silence, with the door closed and ice packs shifting all over the place. But, by about 4 p.m., my entire left leg had turned into an unhappy, throbbing, mottled tree trunk, and I had to take off my watch to accommodate my left hand, which was rapidly turning into a Macy's parade balloon. Yes, it was very pretty.

By the time I got home, I was a ball of misery. Took me twenty minutes to get brave enough to step out of the car onto my left foot. My knee was going in and out, and I had this horror of falling down again in the exact same spot.

Long story short (I know, too late for that) after a trip to the doc and the ER this morning: I sprained both ankles, my left knee, my left wrist and my left shoulder, and tore a ligament in the left knee.

I spent the day today at home. Not working from home. Just at home. Sleeping, icing various body parts, grumbling. I'm up now, since I need more water and the computer chair is currently conveniently located between the sofa and the kitchen.

Warning to coworkers: my sense of humor may be greatly impaired tomorrow. I will try to keep my tooth-grinding crankiness to myself.

Do they make full-body ice packs? Not sure one large enough for my person would even fit in my freezer!

Oy vey.

Huzzah for the Sasquatch!

This has been quite the eventful couple of weeks for my dear friend, the Sasquatch. After three years of balancing a full-time job and a graduate education, the shy arboreal creature received his MFA in Graphic Design from the Savannah College of Art & Design. I'm very proud of him. I think it's a remarkable achievement to graduate with academic honors while pulling down a 40+ hour week in a hectic, demanding workplace.

While I could not be down in Georgia to see him be honored in person, I was able to watch the events unfold on the SCAD website. That was very cool. I was even able to snap a screen capture of the moment of the diploma handshake. However, since the Sasquatch is a modest sort, I will not share the image here. Instead, enjoy this artist's rendering of his graduation:

With a sense of purpose and determination, the Sasquatch lumbers across the stage at the civic center in Savannah, gnarled (but talented) hand outstretched to accept his well-deserved SCAD MFA diploma...

Fine work, Sasquatch, my friend. Fine work, indeed. You rawk!

This weekend brought his birthday, and, as part of the celebration, we headed to Wolftrap last night to catch DeVotchKa and David Byrne. Truth be told, we were really there to hear DeVotchKa play. David Byrne, despite being the headliner, was an afterthought.

We discovered DeVotchKa one night on the car radio, and we were so captivated, we just sat in my jalopy for half an hour, listening and listening. The music is a blend of gypsy and Mexican, Eastern European and Latin, sung in whatever language is most appropriate. The musicians are all multiple threats, each playing at least two instruments, from mandolins and guitars to trumpets and sousaphone to standing bass and theremin. Yep, theremin. I highly recomment their CD "How It Ends" as a way to begin.

Here's a track from that recording, called "The Enemy Guns", performed live on KCRW's "Morning Becomes Eclectic" show:



Dig it? I bet you did.

We brought a blanket and a tarp for the saturated hillside of the Wolftrap lawn, and cold fried chicken and Amish salads for our bellies. The Sasquatch raced ahead of me to stake out a spot on the grass. He did exceptionally well. On a night where the lawn would become clogged with happy punters, we had a fabulous view of the stage. We also had, by chance, plopped down one blanket away from the ever-kind and cool Frank Warren of PostSecret fame. It was a real pleasure to see Frank, as always. He's a real sweetheart, utterly mellow, and we were pleased to give him scoop on DeVotchKa, whose music he didn't know.

A rare, non-blurry photograph of the Sasquatch.
He can be slowed down and recorded only when tempted
with chilled, dark-meat KFC and the promise of remarkable music.

We ate, we rocked out to the band we were excited to see (DeVotchKa got a standing O from the audience - how often do you see that for an opening act?!?), and we really enjoyed David Byrne, too. The Sasquatch would do more justice to describing the wonderfully simple, but effective design of the show (performers all in white, with revolving panels of color behind), so I'll just say it was quite good. Heck, it even had choreography!

All in all, it was a good night. There were points when I just lay down on the grass (well, on my wonderfully cheesy Moline Maroons blanket) and looked up at the heavens, watching the stars slowly come into view over the Filene Center. For a little while, the world was as small as that hillside. No back pain, no worries. Just good music and a good friend.

I wish, as grown-ups, we could have more evenings like that. Music. Friends. Cold fried chicken. It's a little piece of bliss.

Thank you, Sasquatch, for letting me be part of your birthday. And congratulations to you for your admirable academic achievement. The world is your oyster, my friend. Time for you to belly up to the graphic design raw bar!

(It made sense in my head.)

Sometimes PostSecret hits too close to home

I'm very late today in getting my weekly PostSecret fix. I've been taking it easy most of the weekend because the spine has been hurting so very badly. There's been a lot of extra power lounging the past two days, despite me having a good amount of stuff to get through. Finally did laundry today (and I'm sure my coworkers will be happy to know that) and got the dishes done. I still have a bag of cherries in the fridge, dying to be turned into another clafoutis, and we'll see if I have the oomph to get one done this evening.

But, as usual, I digress...

I went to visit PostSecret, and among the postcards Frank put up today was this one:


I actually said "awww, no" out loud and then, I nearly cried. With a little editing, that could have been me writing the card.

Longtime readers of my blog know that I had a very... challenging... relationship with my father. Put simply, he didn't like me much. When I left for college, I was sad to leave my mother behind, but relieved to no longer be living with my father, someone who disliked my presence quite a bit. Even though it probably wasn't possible, I still wanted this man to - if not love me - at least like me. It left me with a lingering, almost perverse, desire to please people - a desire I'm still fighting to leave behind today. Approval, affection... things I craved as a child and still wish for today.

My first semester in college I heard about an Irish import store near downtown St. Paul, Minnesota. My father was mildly obsessed with his Irish and Scottish heritage and listened to Celtic music all the time. He even had a multi-LP set of bagpipe music. Who buys a SET of bagpipe LPs? My father did.

Now, my arrival at college coincided with the popularity of the music of Clannad hitting American shores. As soon as you heard the ethereal sound of Maire Brennan (Enya's sister), you knew eventually you'd be hearing the group on "A Prairie Home Companion" and seeing them in concert on years and years of PBS fundraising drives. And my father really dug the first cassette of theirs he'd found in a local music shop. At this point, my hometown of Moline, Illinois wasn't exactly a music mecca (it didn't have the Mark of the Quad Cities - now known as the "i wireless Center", apparently - back then) and you had to special order more obscure music that wasn't on Casey Kasem's radar or being played on our local NPR station. I can't think of a single used music store in the area back then, come to think of it.

Yeah, in the 70s and 80s, I lived under a rock.

So, when I got to the Twin Cities in 1984, I felt like I'd reached musical Nirvana. I nearly lived at the Cheapo's record store down the street from Macalester. I went from, if not zero, ten to sixty in a very short time. It helped that I had friends whose musical boundaries were already much wider than mine. Seriously, I came to college with a cassette of Alan Parsons Project's "Turn of a Friendly Card" (store-bought) and another of Thomas Dolby's "Golden Age of Wireless" with some Michael Praetorius on the flip side (taped for me from LP by my friend HoyaMeb).

Michael Praetorius. (Not Thomas Dolby.)

So, when I heard there was this little Irish gift shop down Grand Avenue a few bus stops from the college, I decided I should take a trek there and see if they had any other Clannad music to send back home. Yet another step on my flat-footed journey to fatherly approval.

I was thrilled to death to find they had two Clannad cassettes my father didn't own. They looked pretty crappy in a "our band produced these in the basement of the family home in County Donegal and our cousin made the cover inserts on a color copier" way - these recordings clearly pre-dated Clannad's success, riding the crest of the Irish music wave in the 'States. I bought them both and took them back to my dorm room. I remember agonizing over the letter I wrote with the two cassettes. I hoped Dad would enjoy them. Maybe Dad would call me and let me know what he thought. Maybe I could go see the Chieftans with Dad if they were playing in town the next time I came home.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

I rubberbanded my letter around the two cassettes and sent off the little parcel.

I never heard from him.

Mom said the package had arrived.

But that was it.

A few years later, after Dad died, I was going through a junk box in the basement. In the middle of some flood damaged papers I found the parcel I'd sent to my father. The letter was still rubberbanded to the cassettes. It had never been taken out of its envelope. I broke off the yellowed, brittle band and saw that the cassettes were still wrapped in their factory cellophane. He'd never listened to them. Never opened the letter. Just tossed it aside.

I threw it all out.

I wonder if he would have tossed it aside had I handed to him in person. Would he have given it back to me, unopened, like the girl in today's PostSecret?

I don't know.

But I know that familiar feeling of loss. That familiar belief that I'm not worthy. When I think of my father, I often hear a song in my head. It's Morrissey, singing "I know I'm unloveable. You don't have to tell me." It's hard to not feel that way - as a little girl, as a teenager, as an adult woman - when the first man in your life, your father, finds you so unpleasant.

It would be good to feel loveable in this life. I'm still looking for someone who sees me that way. Someone who will tell me that.

I don't have much in my life. But take it, it's yours.

I hope that girl found someone who took that mix tape and listened to it.

We all need someone like that.

Yum.

Clafoutis Time!!

Yeah, I've been absent for several days. Trust me, I know. Friends have reminded me. The nice people at BlogHer Ads reminded me. But I was mentally and physically out of touch.

In advance of three days of leave, with company en route, high season kicked in for my job. I could easily stay at work for 12 or 14 hours a day and still not clear the decks. My sense of humor pretty much checked out as I was trying to pound through projects at work and engage in marathon apartment cleaning before my brother and brother-in-law arrived from Germany. I knew, of course, that these guys would make every effort to fix anything that needed fixing in the place (despite me just being a renter). And I'm always incredibly grateful not only for their presence here and their love, but that they understand how limiting back injuries can be. All the dumb stuff I've been too tired to do in ages (clean the balcony windows, rearrange shelves, cook) they dispatched in mere days. And these guys are both in their 60s! Talk about making me feel like a total wuss!

Figure 1. Slug, aka Merujo

I miss 'em already (and homecooked meals... and lots of Australian wine...) now that they've headed north to spend time with nieces and nephews in New Jersey. But even welcome and wonderful visits are exhausting, and I've been too wiped to type more than random phrases on Twitter. That said, I'm trying to catch up on naps and get my head wrapped back around the thought of work again tomorrow.

So far, the score is: Naps, 1 - Mental prep for work, 0.

Go figure.

I got the pleasure of enjoying a couple of hours of grilling time yesterday with the Sasquatch up at Seneca Creek State Park, where lovely steaks were cooked and consumed, along with grilled plantains and cherries. Raising eyebrows at grilled cherries? Seriously, they're yummy! Take some sweet cherries, pit them, then either skewer them or wrap them in foil, and leave them over the coals for a few minutes. You end up with soft cherries so sweet they taste like the center of a homemade pie.

I was very pleased that the rain gods held off for yesterday's festivities. We snagged the same cook site we had last year in one of the park's many wooded day use points. We're not sure why, but just like last year, none of the later arrivals wanted to be on the same side of the parking lot as us. My theory is that I frighten the small children. Cool by us - we get a sweet, quiet spot where we can listen to oldies radio and be as snarky as we wanna be. At moments like that, life is good.

Last night, though, my back started up with the stabbing pains again. I had two Redbox movies to return - one very good (Benjamin Button), and one truly, sincerely awful (Bride Wars) - and when I got to the grocery store to pop them back in the machine, one of the clerks asked if I wanted a wheelchair. I was hobbling like Yoda with a double hip replacement. Not great.

Today, my plan was to get up early, do some writing, get laundry done, and make a clafoutis with some of the cherries not consumed at the park yesterday. Instead, I've taken two showers to relieve some of the pain and lounged on the sofa for hours at a time.

I feel old.

I have to say, I'm not looking forward to being at my desk all day tomorrow, but I'm hoping things will ease up a bit. I'm pretty sure there's enough piled on my desk and in my e-mail inbox that I'll have plenty to focus on. Nothing like stress to take your mind off of pain, right?

I have clean clothes for work and I *am* writing now, so I guess I can count that as a victory for the day, no? And I think I'll still make a clafoutis! I can pit cherries from the comfort of the sofa, especially now that I possess a fabulous Oxo Good Grips cherry pitter. Oh, wait - don't know what clafoutis is?

I learned about these suckers from an episode of "Good Eats" on the Food Network. Gawd bless Alton Brown and his quirky TV cookery!

Clafoutis is an old French dessert - it's just fresh fruit (usually cherries) baked in a kinda-sorta custardy batter. Traditionally, the cherries aren't pitted when you bake this, but being the kind of woman whose luck runs to chipped teeth, I pit mine, thank you. Once you've washed and pitted the cherries, it's seriously a five-minute process to make this dish. I'm not kidding. I suck at baking, but clafoutis is pretty much fool-proof. And damn tasty, too!

You're supposed to eat it hot, and it's good with creme, half and half, ice cream, or just plain old nekkid. I found a recipe for a less dessert-ish, more breakfast-ish version on The Joy of Baking website, and I'm torn about which version to make. Ponder, ponder, ponder...

Eh, you know what? It's 7 at night. I'll go with the Alton Brown version. Just wish some of you could be here to share it with me!

Another time, eh?

Fun with Signage: Bethesda Safeway Edition

Bar soap... oral care... shaving needs... whaaaa?

Check out what (or who) is available in Aisle One at the Safeway on the corner of Bradley and Arlington Roads:


You know... come to think of it, I did pretty much miss out on the grandparent experience. Do you think they could find me with a jovial, old gent who's comfortable and self-assured in Depends and likes to shower people with affection (and twenties and fifties)?

So many questions... What is the return policy? Is the expiration date stamped on the bottom? Is it even appropriate to check? Do they ever run "BOGO" sales? I think it would be nice to have a set.

Somehow, I doubt the Safeway manager would find my line of query amusing...

Wow!

Hey, I'm getting a planeload of kneejerk hate from Consumerist commenters today. In response to a post today, I said that folks who are sick shouldn't get on commercial aircraft and risk spreading their cough and cold germs to others. Apparently, this makes me a totally selfish jerk in the eyes of many judgmental and fired up Consumerist readers.

So be it. I shall wear my Selfish Jerk crown proudly today.

And welcome, heap of Consumerist readers dropping by to visit. May I recommend you start with the post about my mother, a link featured on the left side of your screen. It will be more enlightening than rants from strangers about how much I suck for not wanting to share recirculated air with people hacking and coughing.

Yours,

Merujo
Selfish Travel Weasel