Tuesday, January 29, 2008

It's Snowing in "Paradise"

Yeah, so Sunday it snowed enough for the kids and me to have a snowball fight, and I don't mean like a sorry excuse for a snowball fight either. It was a full fledged down and dirty knock 'em out snowball fight. And those of you who know me realize this means that it was a completely unfair fight that I only didn't lose because 1) I know how to outrun Kaya and Josh on slippery ground and 2) I used my umbrella as a shield.

It snowed for much of the day and the snow actually stuck. I'm pretty certain I was the only person in the entire town of Blue Lake, where one of Mike's glass studios is, who had an actual ice/snow scraper in the trunk of my car. Yeah, everybody was jealous. Everybody was also making a very big deal out of it, like they had never seen snow before in their lives. While I appreciate that Josh and Kaya, who have lived in Humboldt County for most and all of their lives respectively, don't recall ever having seen it in person, my being from Wisconsin sort of colored my personal experience. Let's just say I wasn't too pumped on the snow situation. Especially since Saturday was warm enough for no coats! It's like the weather taunted us with what it could be like, and then BAM! SNOW. Ew.

Yesterday it alternated between sun and rain, no snow that I can tell, but looking up in the mountains I can see they have been dumped on with snow up there, and the weather forecast has predicted that the mountaintop communities should expect another eight inches today/tonight! That is a lot for around here. Heck, I think that's a lot for anywhere.

OK, apparently, I'm a snow scrooge. Whatever. Mike scolded his kids for getting all wet playing in the snow and then being cold because they didn't have the proper winter wear, and I stuck up for them: "They are just kids. None of us knew to have proper winter wear because it hasn't snowed here in years." Yeah, OK, he said. And then we went home and huddled under blankets with cups of hot chocolate and watched The Family Guy. The way it should be on a snowy day.

Friday, January 18, 2008

Three, Count 'em, Three Excellent Things About Today

1) I have Fridays off so I get to do fun things like rearrange my living room and clean stuff and run important errands (well, rearranging my living room is fun).
2) The sun is out! And there's no wind, so it feels like almost 50 degrees! I had the front door open while I cleaned this morning and I was only wearing a teeshirt (and pants) and wasn't cold at all!
3) I bought a couch on Craigslist (for cheap!) on Wednedsay and Mike helped me move the living room around today and now my apartment is finally cute and comfortably livable!
4) I know I said three but I just thought of another thing! I have the internet at home now! That could also be bad.

Yay!

Here are some pictures of my insanely tiny but (finally!) cute apartment:
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The outside still needs a little work, but...
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Here's where my car is parked, next to the barn where the cows hang out:
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Edited 1.19.08 to add a few more pics:

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Trying to keep the main living area warm with a space heater, these are the doors to the bathroom, our bedroom, the linen closet (uber skinny door) and the "spare" bedroom (aka walk-in closet). I just thought it looked sort of cool:
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(The angle is from sitting at our little eating "nook".)

Hope you enjoyed this episode of our tiny adorable apartment as much as I do.

OK, fine, here's what I have to say about my stupid hamster

I wrote this yesterday:

My two-year-old dwarf hamster, Smalls, died. I think he got too cold. Or maybe two years is his life expectancy. I have no idea. All I know is that I fed him and gave him water and tried not to hate the boring little sucker too much, and then yesterday amidst my running around between work and errands and life, it suddenly occurred to me that his food bowl, which usually remains empty, not because I don't feed him but because he eats his food the second it hits his bowl, was the same level it had been for days, and his water too. Suddenly I'm driving down the road about to pick up a sofa I purchased off Craigslist with my borrowed SUV and I have this thought: My Hamster Has Died.

I got home, moved the couch in, made some dinner, it was late and I was hungry, had a beer, it was late and I had been working all day, and then... I couldn't stall anymore. I took off his lid and yelled and rattled his food bowl. The little bugger always comes out when I call to him.

He didn't come out.

I found him curled up in a tight little ball in the corner under his bedding. The poor little thing just curled up and died. I feel like a terrible hamster mother. I didn't even much like him, because he's a poor replacement for the dogs in my life I've had to let go as relationships come and go, he just eats and smells funny and bites me. I usually called him whatever random name that came to mind and occasionally I would reach in and pet his back while he was eating and too preoccupied to pull away and turn his sharp little choppers on me.

But when I found him curled up there I cried. OK? I cried for my dumb little hamster and my apparent inability to keep even a dumb little hamster alive.

My sweetest ever boyfriend held me and didn't make fun of me even once. He said it was OK to feel sad because it was my pet and a life and I was taking care of him. He said he probably died of old age. Or coldness. But that it wasn't my fault.

You know, the sweet things good boyfriends say when their girlfriends are sad.

He also said we'll give Hammy a proper burial in the redwoods.

I feel so sad, relieved, guilty, and curious. I just hope he didn't suffer too much. I hope it was his time to go, that he died of old age, and that he was remotely happy in his short meaningless little life.

RIP, Smalls, April 2006-January 2008. I will miss you when I think of you. You didn't even eat all your gourmet hamster food I bought you, you little punk. I'm glad I didn't let Mike feed you to the owl that lives in the barn by our house.

Thursday, January 17, 2008

The details of this post are peculiar.

President Clinton came to town yesterday. He spoke to the 400 "elite" people of Humboldt County, whomever that may be (in this case it was the 400 people who managed to fit into the building). Most of the thousands of people who waited for hours in the cold went home dissatisfied.

I spent my evening purchasing a couch for my living room (finally!) and transporting it home. Although it would have been nice to catch a glimpse of the celebrity that is Bill Clinton, I have a fair-weather interest, and that means taking off half a day's work to wait in the very cold wind for hours on end only to have to either push my way in or to have waited in vain did not fit within the parameters of my curiosity.

Some people would call that lazy. I would call it smart.

In other news, the worst part about this week is that my hamster died, and the best part about today is that I brought my super comfortable office chair from home into work and it is awesome.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Humboldt Has a Visitor

Former President Clinton may or may not be coming to Eureka tomorrow to advocate for his wife, but I can neither confirm nor deny this is true.

I will have to get back to you. (I just think this is interesting because Humboldt is so rural and off the map in so many ways.)

Monday, January 7, 2008

The Crazy Weather

Here it is raining and storming so much that many people (last I heard on the radio, 1/2 a million in California alone) are without electricity. I'm not one of those people. But I feel for those who are affected by this.

Back in Wisconsin there was a 50-car pile-up on I-90 because of the intense fog, combined with the snowy weather conditions.

Here they warn you not to leave your house if you don't really have to on account of the pouring rain. Being one who drove on a regular basis in snow back home in Wisconsin, I thought this was being a bit overly cautious. But the climate here seems to lend itself to ultra slick roads when it's raining a lot. So it's really not a whole lot different than driving in the snow. Combine that with the fog. The fog here is intense.

I hope everyone is being careful. The forces that be are beyond our control. Respect the weather. That's my hippy dippy speech of the day. I won't call it Mother Nature, OK, but just respect it. The road by my house was closed last week for a little while because the river jumped the bridge. The (happy) cows by my house could go swimming if they wanted. Somehow I don't think they want to go swimming.

My Monday workday is over now so I am going home. Today the weather was so strange that I didn't know if I should bring my sunglasses or my umbrella. By the end of the day I had used both interchangeably. Never a dull weather moment here.

P.S. Snow may be cold, but you can't go sledding in the rain, you can't go ice skating in the rain, or skiing in the rain. My BF likes to say you don't have to shovel the rain off the car, but I'm cooped up inside a lot, and right about now I think I could go for a little bit of snow. At least snow is fun. Cute umbrellas and rain boots lose their appeal pretty quickly.

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

A Bloggy Year in Review

I borrowed this idea from my friend's blog (the word blog came from "web log" and then was shortened over time); she borrowed it from some other blog she reads.

The idea is that you take the first sentence or two from the first post of each month and that is a [hopefully] interesting way to sum up the year. (Sometimes I had to take a tad more than that for the sentences to make any sense at all; my mother never accused me of being pithy, folks!)

I didn't start this blog until I moved to California which was in March. But that's close enough:

MARCH
Driving to Cali took 3 days-ish from Friday night to Monday night. We slept in the car for a few hours Friday night/Saturday morning 130AMish to 530AMish, drove all day Saturday, stopped Saturday night @ Little America, Wyoming, less than an hour from the Nevada border...

APRIL
Sunday the weather was beautiful. It was sunny and warm and amazing. I packed us a couple sandwiches, one PB and honey on this really good 9-grain-or-something bread that Mike likes and one mild cheddar cheese and cut them in half and wrapped them up and put them in my shoulder bag. That was a really long run-on sentence. But anyway.

Then Mike and I put on our walking shoes and walked. We walked down the big hill, past the grocery store, turned into a residential area and walked about four more blocks to the Sequoia Park Zoo! It's a very tiny, charming, free zoo with amazing scenery of lots of huge trees and trees full of flowers and foliage and of course animals!

MAY
My plates have expired on my Nissan. This means I have to go get California plates now. I wonder if I could get a vanity plate that says Made in WI. I wonder if I would really want to do that. I'm rather proud of Wisconsin and always have been.

JUNE
I got another job!

JULY
Well, Hayley and Dan are back at home. They left yesterday on a red-eye home to good ol' Wisconsin. I was very sad to see them go, but relieved that they got on the plane without a hassle.

AUGUST
Today, we signed an apartment lease! So regardless of my homesickness, I'm here for at least another year. We are moving into our new apartment, in Bayside, this weekend.

In other news, Mike and I are going to make a road trip as soon as time permits. Mike has been doing really well making aquarium scenes and butterfly garden scenes in glass, and his latest is jellyfish. Those things are so popular. We are going to drive up the coast and sell them as we go.

SEPTEMBER
OK so I have finally moved. It has taken much longer than we had anticipated and hoped. But now it is done (except for all the unpacking but we are working on that day by day, slowly but surely).

OCTOBER
Two Weird Things About Yesterday:
1) The internet went down in the entire county.
2) There was a 100% chance of rain according to the forecast for yesterday and it didn't rain at all.

NOVEMBER
In the past three-ish weeks I have:
*quit my job
*started a different job
*unpacked a lot more boxes
*got rid of stuff I don't need
*cleaned a lot
*rode my bicycle a significant amount
*read a lot
*worked on growing my hair
*sang to music and danced around my house
*went for loooong walks at the marsh and by my house - it's been so strangely warm
*mostly worked a lot as job transitioning is really energy- and time-consuming

DECEMBER
It started on Saturday. The wind has been blowing so hard that it sounds like waves crashing outside my window while I try to sleep at night. I live close to the ocean but not THAT close.


Well, that's it. Though I do think some of my best work was in the two months (March and April) that I was unemployed and had nothing better to do than think up things to post on my blog. As fun as that is, it doesn't appear to support the hobby of living. So what that means is that anyone still reading this blog by now is suffering in agony at how downhill it has gone, but I do have a bit more of a life than when my blog was really good. Maybe one day I'll learn how to balance the two.

Then again, probably not.

A Year Change is a Natural Time to Reflect

So here are my lists off the top of my head:

THINGS I'M PROUD OF:
*moved 2000 miles out of my comfort zone to try something completely different
*have stuck out the hard parts of the above decision and have been rewarded for it
*earned not one but two good jobs in a really tough local job market
*successfully negotiated a job that has only been temporary in the entire 20-year history of the organization into a permanent one on my terms

THINGS I'M NOT SO PROUD OF:
*haven't talked to my older sister since moving away
*don't call my family often enough
*wasn't able to handle tough situations with former roommates as well as I would have liked (though I do feel I did the best I could at the time)
*still trying to break that impulsive nature of mine: impulse buying (Can you say Us Weekly - EW!), impulse moving across the country, impulse eating a pizza when I'm supposedly trying to eat healthier (oh, but see now I can add "being able to admit my weaknesses" to the "things I'm proud of" list!)

MOVIES I SAW IN THE THEATRE (this would be a "best of", except that these are the only two movies I saw in the theatre in 2007):
*Across the Universe
*Pirates of the Caribbean 3

BEST OF THE MOVIES I RENTED:
*Waking Life
*A Hard Day's Night
*Pink Floyd's The Wall
*Fast Food Nation (OK, this is debatable, but it IS the last movie I rented in 2007)
*The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Mos Def = Ford Prefect = awesome)

BEST OF THE BOOKS I READ:
*The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
*The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
*Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
*How I Became Stupid by Martin Page

BEST OF THE BOOKS I REREAD:
*Chocolat by Joanne Harris

BEST OF THE NEW (to me) MUSIC I HEARD:
*Cat Power
*TV on the Radio

MY ALBUMS OF THE YEAR:
*Across the Universe Original Movie Soundtrack, Deluxe Edition
*Joyful Sign by Girlyman

How about you? How was your 2007?