Nice looking site. Unfortunately navigation is a little fiddly.

This, I think, is one of the sexiest songs The Smiths ever did.

How Soon Is Now?
(morrissey/marr)

i am the son
and the heir
of a shyness that is criminally vulgar
i am the son and the heir
of nothing in particular

you shut your mouth
how can you say
i go about things the wrong way
i am human and i need to be loved
just like everybody else does

i am the son
and the heir
of a shyness that is criminally vulgar
i am the son and the heir
of nothing in particular

you shut your mouth
how can you say
i go about things the wrong way
i am human and i need to be loved
just like everybody else does

there's a club, if you'd like to go
you could meet somebody who really loves you
so you go, and you stand on your own
and you leave on your own
and you go home, and you cry
and you want to die

when you say it's gonna happen "now"
well, what exactly do you mean?
see i've already waited too long
and all my hope is gone

It's not so much the lyrics as the sound of the song. And the way he says, "the son and the heir of . . . nothing in particular . . . "

I'm listening to The Smiths a lot lately. Smiths Cover Stars is a really cool page for finding out about their album and single covers.

I just loooooove petulant Morrissey, despite the fact that he deserves to be thwapped across the buttocks with a hot water bottle. Repeatedly.

What the hell??? Can anyone explain this RAVER stuff to me? Check out this eBay auction: ELMO RAVER DINOSAUR FRINGE PHAT PANTS. Now, for an even stranger look at this whole thing, just look what comes up if you search on raver. Hello Kitty, candy, 80s cartoons, vibrator toys, glow-in-the-dark everything, baby tees, and on and on. Can someone do an old lady a favor and explain what this is all about?

I'm thinking I could make those ugly pants too and sell them for $30 on eBay. How hard could it be?

Is this what all the guys are doing in Canada these days?

I realized recently that an inordinately high percentage of the online journals and weblogs I read are written by Canadians. Pretty strange, eh?

Good Morning. Here's something to check out: Chia Pet Zoo.

We are off to a picnic today (our potluck group) and it's raining a little right now. I will make the unhealthy broccoli salad and hope the sun comes out.

Folded 2 more cranes this morning and I think I've just about got the hang of it. Yeah!

I just folded my first two origami cranes. The second one looks a lot better than the first one. :) I started teaching myself origami a few weeks ago. I love paper of all kinds, and I have always wanted to learn origami.

Today I cleared out a bunch of old folders from my grad school and undergrad days. I decided to throw out all my class notes. I just saved my term papers, response papers, and exams. I can't believe how much stuff I had to get rid of! Next on my list is the filing cabinet where I kept all my research about different writers. It feels good to get rid of this stuff.

I am amazed that people still ask me about my PhD and whether I think I'll finish it. Good god, what do I have to do to make it clear it's not something I want? I mean, what else do I have to do besides officially quit school, which I did over 2 years ago? Just this week my boss was asking me how far I had to go on it and whether I thought I'd do it. No thanks. I think I can do without another year of being clinically depressed. I like myself better when I have some self-esteem.

I think it's wonderful that so many of my friends were able to complete their PhDs. I'm glad I realized that it wasn't what I wanted before I pushed myself to the end, though. Never waste your life doing what you don't want to be doing!

This is a good idea. Napster's having a "buycott" where they're asking people to go and buy CDs by artists who support Napster. And they want you to let the record stores know that Napster sent ya.

Update . . . looks like Napster is going to be around for a little bit longer. I'm glad.

Saying that it encourages people not to buy music seems like so much bullshit to me. Maybe I'm different from all the other people who use Napster (although I doubt it) but my music-buying has stayed at a pretty high level since Napster came on the scene. One reason is I'm a person who likes music (duh), which is why I like Napster and why I buy CDs. They're not mutually exclusive.

I guess if people have really fast connections they can download whole albums. That's fine for people who don't care about liner notes and all the rest. But if I like the music I would soooo much rather have the real CD. I love the cover and the artwork and all that.

But I do know lots of younger folks (people who were in college during the 90s) who don't care as much about that. Lots of them leave their CD cases at home and take their discs off to school in these binders/CD holder things, so I guess they get used to not having the covers. I can't do without them, myself.

When I thought Napster was going down I downloaded as many Bob Dylan songs as I could. Hee hee.

No! No! Noooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ooo, cats are fighting outside. They sound so creepy.

Yeeee-haaaa! Sonal is updating!!! You go girl! But you gotta get a blog, it makes it so much easier to update from anywhere and everywhere. (Not that I ever update from anywhere except here, ie home. Don't think my employer would understand. Plus there's that whole firewall thing.)

Well, my life has taken an interesting turn today. My co-worker resigned to take another job. Her last day is 2 weeks from today. So now I am the only person left in a department of 4. This is going to be a very interesting experience.

Yet another house project is mushrooming out of control.

We started off needing to replace a couple of tiles in the bathroom. I already talked about what we discovered when we tried to do that. So we decided we'd have to replace the walls around the shower and retile them. Okay.

When we got all the old tile and old wall material down, we discovered a lot of water damage that we thought we'd better repair before doing the tile. Nothing we can't fix, probably, but it would involve taking the bathtub out of the bathroom so we could reach all the areas behind it. Uh-oh.

Next thing we know, we're talking about a whole new bathroom. Put the tub down at the other end of the room, change all the fixtures, get rid of the sparkly orange 1969 countertop and the blue tub/toilet/sink, etc. Well, if we're going to do all that work, we may as well get what we want. We'll have someone come in to do an estimate so we can pick his or her brain.

Our projected timeline for this is going to be a year.

And you wonder why I'm stressed.

I've been doing a lot of health-related research for articles I'm writing at work. I ran across this yesterday and just thought it was interesting. It resonates with some of the things I've been thinking about lately.

Took a stress management class the other day at work, and it was very interesting. We did a bunch of self-assessment personality test thingies and I learned that on the "A/B" scale I am waaaay over on the "B personality" side. What this means is, I probably experience a little less stress than the average "A personality" person, but mine tends to come from within rather than from outside myself. I don't know if that's really an improvement.

The other thing I learned is that someone who has a very strong B personality (which I do) probably spends way too much time thinking about stuff and analyzing it. I know I do.

This was really enjoyable. And the next (ie, previous) entry, too. :-)

Spent an hour or so today learning to use my new hedge trimmer (yes, the Hedge Hog). It worked wonders on these dreadful overgrown yews along the back of our house. It actually worked so well that it gave me ideas. I decided I want to get a chainsaw and cut all the yews down.

Yew saw what?

We're having something of a disaster with the bathrooms around here lately. Several months ago the upstairs shower started leaking through the kitchen ceiling, so we started showering in the downstairs shower while we tried to fix the one upstairs. Well, we have tried and tried, and every time we re-caulk the upstairs shower it just keeps on leaking through the ceiling. So we've been showering downstairs for months now while we cut holes in the wall behind the shower to try to figure out where the water is coming from.

Fixing the shower was also put on hold while we finished up building the bookcases in the living room (which, by the way, are finished now and gorgeous). One project at a time, right? Well, a few weeks ago some tiles in the downstairs tub came loose, right near the faucet. Uh-oh. So we decided we should fix those tiles since we're showering in that bathroom every day. But guess what? When we went in with the adhesive to stick the tiles back on the wall, we noticed a big old HOLE where the tiles are supposed to attach to the wall. It's all black and gross in there, and the wall just seems to be disintegrating. Why, you ask? Could it be because some previous owner attached the tiles to dry wall instead of concrete wall board? Why yes, it could.

Some of you won't be surprised to hear this. After the saga of last summer, when we discovered our hardwood floors were full of holes that had been patched with everything from dry wall scraps to mortar, you simply have to expect the unexpected. But still, I really didn't expect to discover that the tiles in the bathroom were attached to a surface little better than cardboard. Gee. I wonder why I never thought of that?

So now we are embarking on a bathroom project, but a different one from the one we thought we'd be starting on. Instead of fixing the upstairs leak, we have come up with a quick fix for that one (it involves an extra shower curtain, some hooks, some wire, and a lot of imagination) and we're going to work on re-tiling the downstairs bathroom.

In other news, one of our grad school friends stopped by today for a few hours. It was really good to see her again. We looked all around the yard and talked about the plants and bushes. After she left I got inspired to trim the hedges, so we went out and got a Hedge Hog hedge trimmer (I just like that name) and I plan to learn to use it this week. It looks a bit like a mini-chainsaw.

I was interested to read about Viv's fretting, because I've been fretting an awful lot myself lately. Not so much in the past few days, but in the last month or two. I am often not good at separating what I need to fret about from what I don't need to fret about. Although it's probably better not to fret at all; I mean, if something's worth worrying about it's probably worth just getting up and taking care of.

My problem is that I tend to take everything very, very personally. If Marty is stressed or upset about something, I often assume I'm doing something to cause it: spending too much money, not doing my share of the work around the house, etc. These are things he rarely, if ever, complains to me about. He is really not a very critical person, and I don't have any reason to think he's thinking critical thoughts about me . . . but still, my first inclination when he is silent or stressed is to wonder what I'm doing to cause it.

It's not just with Marty. I do this at work, too. I do this with my friends. I internalize a lot of negative stuff and sometimes suppress my own anger, and it builds up until I start feeling really, really stressed out.

This is not news. I've known I do this for awhile. I've been dealing with it for years, but things had gotten a lot better and I guess I'd stopped thinking about it. Lately I've felt knocked out by it, emotionally and physically. It's sometimes hard for me to recognize when I'm putting this kind of pressure on myself. Other people can see it better than I can. Luckily there are people in my life who will tell me when they see this happening.

So I've been going to the gym to get rid of the physical stress. Talking stuff out with people to get rid of the other. Thinking a lot about how I want to be, and how I deal with stuff, to try to cut back on the fretting.

Now I'm going to go fold some laundry.

I got a kick out of this recent article from the Washington Post. I wonder if women are checking me out on the road when I'm driving my Subaru Impreza Outback? :-)

Hee hee heeeeeeee: Obscene Interiors. Well, I guess if you're gonna put stuff like that on the Web, you have to take it when people critique it.

Weekend weekend weekend. That's a good thing. For some reason this week at work was nigh unbearable. Seems like my job at the moment is the same damn thing over and over and over and over again . . . I am a person who needs to have lots of different things going on. Ugh and agh.

Don't get me wrong, most of the time my job is pretty okay. Much better than it was 6 months ago. But just lately it's been less than interesting.

Today we are going to a picnic with the Skeptics. Steve Mirsky will be there. I feel like I should take something for him to autograph. He's the coolest. Marty is a member of the New England Skeptics Society, and once in awhile they have the greatest speakers. John Rennie, the editor of Scientific American, was just great. James Randi was also good. And now Mirsky. So I'm looking forward to that. Of course we'll also have to deal with the whole picnic/social part of it, so I'm gearing myself up for facing that. I'm just not feeling very social lately.

I was thinking of updating my cheese page and ran across these poems. Only one of them has cheese in the title, but it features prominently in many of the other poems as well. Some of these really had me laughing.

I'm not a big fan of poetry but I also enjoyed Take 2. The explanations of how they came up with the poem titles are actually just about as good as the poems.

Heck, while I'm at it, I may as well link to the Periodic Table of Poetry.

If you laughed at the Lacanian Britney Spears article yesterday, check this out:Discipline and Dilbert. Yes, it's a Foucauldian reading of Dilbert. Of course Dilbert works in the panopticon, it's completely obvious!

Well, if you couldn't be there yourself, reading the review is the next best thing. Ricky Martin rocked Value City Arena in Columbus, Ohio last week, and this is one of the best (and funniest) reviews I've read of his tour yet. A taste:

Ricky seized every down moment to thrust his pelvis. A conga slap here, a Ricky thrust there. A burst of brass here, a thrust there. Ricky could shoot skeet with his pelvic thrust.

Want more? Check it out. Embrace the Fruity Pebbles!

Have you heard about Pat Metheny's recent attack on Kenny G? I'm a little embarrassed to admit this story had me snickering. Despite my usual live-and-let-live attitude where music is concerned, I love the comment that Kenny G and Michael Bolton should be locked up together until the end of time. Hee hee.

If you're like me, you've been looking for a Lacanian review of Britney Spears' biggest hit. Well, good news. I found one. Get on over to Postmodern Village and read Passivity & Victimhood in Britney Spears' ". . . Baby, One More Time". It's funny and frightening all at the same time, especially for former English major types.

Cute, Inc.
This is an interesting article about the Japanese fascination with cute. I am, at present, in the middle of a Sanrio/San-X orgy which I'm trying to keep from becoming a full-fledged buying frenzy.

Orange/Peach Smoothie
I updated the recipe page today. Raspberry World has been getting tons of hits ever since the last week in June, and almost 95% of them are from searches for "raspberry recipes." So I added some links to raspberry recipe pages.

The orange/peach smoothie is actually the only new recipe I added -- but it's really delightful.

Busy busy here. Just haven't had a chance to sit down and update the page. What's new? Well, the bookcases are built and painted. I'll scan some pictures in soon. We may be putting the books on them later this week or this weekend. And . . . Marty fixed the freezer so it no longer makes that weird Star Trek noise that keeps us up at night. I got two new toe rings. I'm swooning with excitement!

Puppy Love
Yesterday afternoon I was standing in Rockefeller Plaza checking out the Puppy with Marty and our out-of-town guest, Laura.

We spent the day in New York City, doing typical tourist things: riding the subway, visiting Battery Park, walking through Times Square, taking pictures of the New York Public Library, shopping on 5th Avenue, strolling in Central Park, eating at the Hard Rock Cafe, and buying books at Coliseum Books. Well, that last one might not be what all the tourists do in New York, but I like to end any day there with a few book purchases. :-)

We were planning to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but it's closed on Mondays. We did get to the Met Store, though. Which, of course, is the next best thing.

Anyway, about that Puppy . . . it slightly resembles a monstrously large Chia Pup. I'll post some pictures we took of it soon, but until then, check this one out.