a little nastygram

Since the inception of this blog, it has contained a fair bit of consumer protection nastygrams.

This wasn't really suitable for Creepy Uncle Mark, so here is my (physical) letter today to California DMV:

Re: License plate # ********

VIN # *****************

20** Subaru *******

To whom it may concern:

I DO NOT OWN THIS VEHICLE ANY MORE. I do not possess it, I do not drive it, I do not know or care if it is physically present in the State of California. It could be crushed in an auto yard, or it could be in Antarctica, for all I know. The people who purchased it, shift.com, should have already registered it. I have asked them to do so.

I will not send evidence of liability insurance for this vehicle pursuant to California Vehicle Code Section 4000.38, because I do not have such proof: I do not insure this vehicle any more, and I never, ever, will again. Please, pretty please, sugar on top, stop asking.

As far as I care, you can keep this vehicle registration suspended forever, and ever, and ever, and ever. Send the registration suspension notices to the moon. Shred them. Put them in a box under your desk. Make paper airplanes, or origami cranes from them. Please just stop sending them to me. I don't need or want to see them.

I personally apologize to whatever human being has to read this extremely frustrated letter, and I'm sorry that the last one was ignored, unless it was you that ignored it. I'm sorry that you work for a governmental agency that sucks and ignores prior contacts and has ridiculous websites that aren't useful. But please, for reals: can you make your system stop sending obnoxious threatening letters about a vehicle I no longer own? Please?

Thanks.

Been a hot minute

Dear friends: In recent months I've been largely providing my limited social media existence to Creepy Uncle Mark instead of Creepy Uncle Google.

So if you do that EffBee thing, and we know each other in real life, and you want Creepy Uncle Mark to be able to monetize our friendship, get in touch! Like here, you won't find me there unless you know what to look for, so it'll be easier if you tell me how to find you. And there you can see semi regular photos of food and bikes and an adorable little stuffed monkey. I'm fairly picky about accepting EffBee friend requests, so if I would accept it, you already have my email address.

I'm not planning to take this blog down, but it will continue to only be rarely updated.

In the interests of entertaining the perhaps four and a half of you who still occasionally check this blog, here is a photo I'll file under "Things the Director of Operations Does Because It's Far Easier Than Calling the Head of Maintenance":

Because, who knew, it's not a good idea to pour almost a gallon of soupy liquid with semi-finely chopped vegetable mush down the sink at once, disposal or no. Hint on who didn't know: it wasn't me. Thank god it was all vegan and fresh (no, I don't know why my apartment-mate was getting rid of it.)

Birthday breakfast

One guess where my birthday breakfast is (in addition to Rolla, Missouri.)

mural

A wall mural that I made almost 25 years ago is still here.

And I'm here.

And I just saw a friend who was one of my first professional supervisors.

It's a really good day.

Moving along

As I'm packing to move yet again, I came across this nearly twenty year old list of places to live.

A couple took longer than the ~10 years allotted, but I've managed to check off six.

Movies

I posted last December when I first got the moviepass. Below is the list of movies I've seen since then. Without a doubt, I've seen waaaaaaay more movies in theaters than I normally would. I mean, I really like seeing movies in theaters, but really hate the cost. But when you live in a little teeny town (pop 1,100), there is often nothing much better to do than go to the "big city" next door (pop. 3,900) and see a movie, so the moviepass was a great idea for me.

* Some favorites: The Princess Bride, Lady Bird, The Disaster Artist, and Love, Simon. 

All pretty much excellent. I honestly had no idea what to expect going 

* Least favorites: The Greatest Showman, Justice League, The 15:17 to Paris, Red Sparrow

Okay, look: I really don't like superhero movies as a genre, I hate musicals, the 15:17 to Paris was rah rah fuck yeah 'murika bullshit, and Red Sparrow was full of toxic femininity and a ridiculous plotline to boot. And I have a hard time with movies set in foreign countries, with mostly supposedly foreign characters, speaking mostly fluent English, with bad accents. 

* Seriously meh even though many people raved about them: Black Panther, The Post, Call Me By Your Name.

The Post was kinda boring and overwrought. Call Me By Your Name tried hard and meant well but was really overdone and regularly silly (let's not even talk about the masturbating into a peach scene.) And Black Panther, while an important social phenomenon, was just a shitty movie, full of bombastic overdone silliness, and brimming with hyper toxic masculinity. 

* Movies there is no way I would have seen if not for Moviepass and living in a little teeny town where there is often little better to do than drive to the slightly less teeny town nearby: at least 7/8 of them.

* Approximate amount I've cost Moviepass in the just over four months I've had it: at least $300 (a number of the below movies were in Boston and DC and the ticket price was as much as $16.) Their financial model is a mystery to me, so I'm getting as much out of it as I can before it collapses. 

Note that my theater options (when I'm not traveling) are limited by the fact that I have one first-run theater within easy driving distance (and that's still a half hour each way.) And it kinda sucks. Right now it's playing two bible thumpers (and it plays EVERY bible thumper that comes through), it was playing Jumanji until last week, it had Peter Rabbit on two screens (out of fucking eight screens!) until last week. The upside is that at least five or six times I've literally had the entire theater to myself, and there are rarely more than five or ten other people in stadium style theaters that seat over 100 easily. 

An aside: why do almost all of the movies about queer people have to be about very very privileged, very very white, queer people? I know: Love, Simon ended up having a person of color be one of the heroes in the end, but he notably wasn't featured in any of the pre-movie publicity, and in fact no queer POC characters were in the promotional materials (and fuck you if you say "well, it woulda been a spoiler...") 

Anyway, here is the whole list as of now: 

Chappaquiddick

A Quiet Place

Foxtrot

Annihilation

The Forgiven

Love Simon

Hurricane Heist

Red Sparrow

Death Wish (2018)

The 15:17 to Paris

Game Night

Black Panther

Winchester

Call Me By Your Name

I, Tonya

Proud Mary

Insidious

Darkest Hour

The Post

The Princess Bride

The Greatest Showman

Downsizing

The Shape of Water

Lady Bird

Star Wars Episode VIII

The Disaster Artist

Coco

Wonder

Justice League

Summary: I'm getting plenty of use out of moviepass, and will continue to do so while it lasts. But I'm not super optimistic. 

Movies

Knives and tinysizing

This is (most) of my current knife collection, trotted out last night for a good thorough cleaning with q-tips, cotton balls, and rubbing alcohol while watching netflix. As longtime readers know, I like to keep my tools clean.

It's kinda like your kids: you love them all, but if you're being honest, you love them differently. Each one of these has a specific role and purpose. Yes, there's a little redundancy with the three Leatherman Waves, but one lives in the car, one is EDC on my belt, and the middle (with the lanyard) is both a really nice tool, and has some sentimental value.

While it's a lot of knives, it doesn't add enough meaningful bulk to my tinysizing project to worry about it much. What's this tinysizing project, you ask? Making everything I own fit in, or on, my car. Used to be everything I owned fit in a two door Ford Festiva. Now the project is to get somewhere back close to that.

In case you're wondering about any of these, you should ask! The weird looking pull knife, second from the right, is the largest blade I could legally carry in Boston, and is pretty wicked looking open:

The pristine waters of Lake Tahoe

Since the statute of limitations for N.R.S. 444.630(2) has passed:

Yep, that's me dropping trow in Lake Tahoe, probably about ten years old, to take a shit. (Hey, loogit: I really, really had to go, and we were hiking in the woods around the lake.) Let the reader who has never urinated or defecated in public cast the first stone!

I'm not sure who took the photo; probably my dad. That's my mom in the upper right (inexplicably) encouraging me, and my sister with the blonde hair and white t-shirt, supervising.

I have no idea why they didn't have me crap in the woods. Maybe implementing the old saw from toxicology that "dilution is the solution"?

Thanks, mom, for making at least a half dozen copies of this gem, so that it has survived the ages!

Pro Tip to parents everywhere: make sure you have a few choice photos of your young kids for blackmail when they start mouthing off as teenagers, or for their partners and spouses to be. My mom was also a big fan of the "naked in the garage holding a broomstick" genre.

Just for W, my most loyal blog reader!

(Well, maybe tied with my mom.)

Potatoing along! 

Tempeh

The. End.

Bartholomew goes hiking!

We went hiking in Greenbrier State Forest with dear friend K, and Rhodi, who tolerated a brief photo shoot.

Walking

This represents about a third of my day. It's less impressive of you don't know that it involves about 25 stairs each time I go south to north and back.

These dogs are barkin!

Avocado. Toast.

Because who can get enough? (As long as the avocados are $0.99 at the supermarket.)

Avocado toast!

🥑 🥑

What's all this bother about $18 avocado toast? This cost about a grand total of $1.07

(Yes, okay, FINE: I mashed it up. I'm not an animal. And added salt and pepper and tomato. So maybe $1.15.)

tattoos and memories

Thanks (but kinda no thanks) to Creepy Uncle Google for reminding me how my day was going three years ago today.

Freedom

I recently watched a really amazing cover by Pink of Janis Joplin's classic Me and Bobby McGee. I really had no feelings either way about Pink before this, but the cover was fucking spot on. Pink was sweating raw energy.

"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose..."

Right now, freedom is being able to openly pick the boogers from my nose ring on the BART train because everyone around me is so buried in their phones and devices.

Headed to play indoor putt putt golf with K and 3+ year old niece V!

Yard decor

Bartholomew enthusiastically approves of Mom's yard decoration!

Delightful visit with family, now headed to the Bay Area to see A1, hopefully more family, and be interviewed for one of my favorite podcasts!

Fried tofu wingz for the sooper bowl!

Res ipsa loquitor!

Amtrak #51

How is it that the Republicans manage to fuck everything up so badly? Do they try? Or are they just that stupid?

Can't fix stupid.

Sigh.

Train snack

Bartholomew would prefer banana flavored, but accepts that long distance Amtrak trains are a culinary captive audience situation.

Blowing Snow:

A Story:

I live in a big house at the bottom of a big hill, with a window that looks out onto a driveway and parking lot at the bottom of said big hill, in a valley, near a river, in a Mountain(ous) State. Well, at least the ones they haven't blown up yet.

This makes for very interesting wind and weather. When snowflakes flutter and swirl and float around, it's so beautiful, sometimes nearly hypnotic. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately?) video and photographs really don't capture it or do it justice. So I usually just look out my window every few minutes and take it in for a while. It's truly lovely.

And then a someone with a "Friends of Coal" license plate shows up and parks like an asshole and roars their tricked out Mustang's engine.

But then they go away, and the snowflakes remain.

The End. 

Books: 2017 report

Well, so, 2017 was a kinda busy year, in multiple respects. My books and pages read this year were markedly down from many previous years.

14 books read
4,252 pages read

Best book: eh. This is tough. I read a number of mediocre to crappy books in 2017. Best? I guess I'd say A Man Called Ove, by Fredrik Backman.

Worst book: this is easy. Without question it was Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance. An absolutely piece of garbage. You can read my rant here about it. J.D. Vance is a tool.

Okay. On to 2018 reading!

I miss you already.

Alaska. Gosh.

Bartholomew:

Saga of a Bold Monkey

Toot Toot! All Aboard the Tofu Express!

Making hippie slop for wraps for tomorrow (and potentially the next day).

Nom nom nom!

Sittin' On Darwin's Theory

With a tip of the hat to the Indigo Girls...

(Bartholomew is all, "Seriously?!? I got that all figured out in undergrad.")

Banana banana banana!

Bartholomew is King of the Bananas.

Sammich!

Having a little open faced sandwich for lunch. Tofu, zucchini, spinach, hummus, sourdough, a pickle, and ONIONS!

Avocado Toast

Confidential to W: I think your overall assessment is jaded, BUT: there IS avocado toast in Anchoragua!

Finished product

Reasonably strong lines, right?

Part II

The collards (with garlic and soy sauce) and avocado. Yum!

Cooking up a storm

In anticipation of a dear friend's visit. Onions, sauteed collards with garlic, and do on.

Goodbye to another old thing

Well, buddy, this is farewell. You've been reasonably faithful over the years, and I kept you around long after one of your front wheels broke off.

Perhaps your finest moment was carrying a laser printer (and a whole pile of other heavy crap) to and from Puerto Rico.

You flew to and from at least a dozen states, and drove through at least a dozen more. You got to live in four different time zones!

But when your side handle broke off, you got really hard to manage, and I always had to find a wall or pole to lean you up against due to your missing wheel, and one of your best features, spinning, wasn't there anymore.

I know that (literally) curbing you isn't the most dignified exit, but I just can't see the thrift store accepting you in your current condition, and don't want for that kind of sadness to be your end.

You lasted much longer than your 22" sibling, whose telescoping handle got unfixably stuck halfway up, and also got bashed to hell and had to be repeatedly repaired by duct tape.

(Anyone remember when Samsonite used to be really fancy luggage?)

Travel well to that great baggage claim in the sky!

UPDATE: As I tried to pull your telescoping handle up to move you out of my very cramped room, it's also not working. Is this in solidarity with 22", or are you just sad? 

My tum tum, and hallucinations

I'm not normally one to blog with status updates, but this one has a couple interesting twists.

I have a moderately bad stomach bug of some kind. Not too hard to believe, since I spent three days in court with all sorts of people, visited a museum, saw a movie, and the lovely household that was hosting me included someone who had just gotten over a bad stomach bug. I projectile vomited yesterday evening, and have had diarrhea x36 hours. Cold sweats all night, aches, low grade fever, the usual.

So I'm hydrating, only consuming water, tea, broth, and electrolytes; might introduce bananas or applesauce tonight or tomorrow, depending on how I'm feeling (right now that sounds unpleasant.) I'm also tracking all of my input and output (which might make for a really disgusting blog post soon. We'll see.)

That's the boring stuff.

The much more interesting stuff to me:

1) the human body is a pretty amazing thing. I had a seven hour Amtrak trip home yesterday. While I didn't feel great, it wasn't horrible. But then within about two minutes of being home, as I was beginning to unpack, my body immediately told me it was time to vomit. I literally ran to the bathroom, and did so rather explosively. It pretty amazing that the body and brain can communicate in this way.

Confidential to my body: THX THX THX for not making me worship the porcelain steel god on a long distance Amtrak train! 

2) even more interesting, both last night, and this morning, my sense of hearing, and sight, are both significantly more intense than usual. I mean, I live in a big old 120 year old house, so there are always house sounds. But I mostly tune them out. I heard creaks and stuff so much more last night, to the point it was a little scary. Saw stuff that is always there, but it was so much more vivid. Last night it was to the point where I was beginning to wonder if I was having auditory and visual hallucinations. I thought I heard music playing, though the only other person in the house who could have been playing it, I've never once heard music from that room (it's down the stairs and behind two doors.)

There is one shower that I use almost daily, and there is a particular shampoo bottle in it that makes a single, slight popping noise every morning when it warms up from the warm water. This morning it was a sharp crack, to the point where it actually startled me a little bit.

Folding my laundry last night actually winded me a little bit. So I'm taking today very easy, which is a good excuse to listen to podcasts and catch up on sewing projects and the like.

Needed apps

I want an app that warns me against parking next to Pokemon Go spots when I want to sit in the car in the dark and listen to podcasts.

movies

Okay, so I have officially drank the Movie Pass Flavor Aid. At $10 per month, for as many as a movie per day, it's a screaming deal. Their revenue model is highly doubtful, but whatever: not my circus, not my monkeys.

It came yesterday, and I immediately went to see a movie with it. Justice League. Then today I went to see Wonder.

Justice League: I was (literally) the only person in the theater. It was atrocious. Loud, stupid, badly done, silly, and minimally entertaining. So fucking loud at so many points that I literally had to stuff my fingers in my ears. I kept looking at my watch to see how much longer I had to endure.

Wonder: I was, again, (literally) the only person in the theater. It was: pretty kinda okay. Overwrought and overdone, often trite and predictable, but cute in places, and definitely a tear jerker.

Renwick

Bartholomew receiving light therapy at the Smithsonian Renwick Gallery.

This year's version!

I like to think that mine stands up pretty well: