Author Archives: admin

Q: what’s missing from this picture?

{16 January 2008}

A: my car.

because it had been towed.

i swear these signs are new:

i’ve never had my car towed, because i am a responsible adult who reads street signs and evaluates the risk of possible ticket and/or towing before deciding to park illegally (which, come on, we all acknowledge sometimes has to be done in the city). apparently my tired brain was unable to process the if-then clauses of this particular set of signs when i came home on saturday night. and at 1am there were still lots of other cars (okay some other cars) parked on the street.

lucky for me (in retrospect only), i’ve taken other people to get towed cars enough times that i knew the retrieval routine, and also had some good friend karma coming my way. all my plates/stickers/tags/insurance/registration/paper trail etc were in order, so it simply took waiting in line for an hour and paying the $160 Idiot Tax to restore my car to me.

c, to whom i am eternally grateful, dropped whatever she had planned for her sunday afternoon to drive me to the tow lot, waited with me in the grimiest cold drafty smelly sorry excuse of a towing office to get my car back, and then took me to brunch afterwards to cheer me up. friends are good.

if the city would just use my Idiot Tax to pave ONE POTHOLE in lake shore drive, i wouldn’t mind so terribly much.

{07 January 2008}

there is a world in which common math equations aren’t just numbers, they have a physical manifestation and even a poetic nature. i am not one of those people who looks at numbers and sees anything besides the raw data. i can’t see down the path, into the dimensions, around the corners. but i love that there are minds that do work this way.

thus, solitude is derived by the expression: x2yz +xy2+y3+y3z=x2z2, and twilight is described by: (z3-2)2 +(x2+y2-3)3 =0

i have a pair of fang marks on my forehead.

{05 January 2008}

Worst. Way. To Wake Up. Ever:

last night, 20 minutes after i fell asleep, my cat attacked my head. he gave no warning, was completely unprovoked, and it was no rough-play, it was vicious. it was a strike and retreat (he didn’t sink his teeth in and hang on or anything), but he left claw marks on my scalp and a pair of puncture wounds on my forehead. i have a pair of fang marks on my forehead. i look like a vampire has been nibbling on me. it’s gross. also, cat bites are notorious for getting infected, so despite washing the wound with soap and water and antibiotic anointment, in the morning i called the weekend answering service for my doctor’s office. the nurse on duty, upon hearing the words “cat bite” promptly paged the on-call doctor who recommended a course of antibiotics.

needless to say, the cat and i are not friends this morning. he was grouchy about being locked out of my bedroom for the remainder of the night, i was grouchy about the fact that i have a pair of fang marks on my forehead. also, the sheer adrenaline rush brought on by being attacked in my sleep (not to mention the betrayal of being attacked by a cat i’ve owned and (mostly) trusted for seven years) kept me awake for another hour and a half, leaving me a cool 4 hours of sleep before i had to go back to work.

will this be funny at some point? i kinda hope so. it’s not right now.

a handy list of the various reasons that cats are aggressive towards people.

fresh start

{02 January 2008}

happy new year!

here at slithy tove we are starting the new year off with a new marathon training plan. i’ve been in tech this week (ie, at work A LOT) and in spare moments at my desk have put together a training plan that is…ambitious, to say the least. in the process, i’m tackling a number of 101 tasks (fear not! the 101 in 1001 project has not been abandoned; the blog page is just waiting to be retooled). i’ve been training in aikido for the past 12 months now, so i think we can consider that task checked off. next up is passing my 5th kyu exam in april. so aikido is going to be the main source of cross training for the first part of the spring, switching the focus back to running just in time for the warmer weather and peak marathon training. all of which is leading up to the stockholm marathon on may 31.

all this training means that it’s a good time to focus on eating better, so we’re starting the month of january off with a couple of food-related tasks:11. go complete veggie for a month, and 37. keep a food journal for 40 days. and, since i’ve decided to devote this month to being more conscious about why and what i eat, i’m reading a couple of the books that have been in my to-read stack for a while: the omnivore’s dilemma and animal vegetable miracle

how are you starting 2008, internets?

come here/go away to wrap up 2007

{31 December 2007}

so there were a lot of half-finished posts that fell by the wayside, and treading water backwards is not worth the effort. so we’ll summarized the busy past couple of weeks with an installment of come here/go away and then move on to thoughts of 2008.

come here: dr. atomic. H and i caught this at the lyric the week before christmas. i have almost no experience with opera, so the whole process was impressive – the grandiose opera house, the scale on which everything is done. however, sitting still for a three hour anything is not really my specialty, and i found myself getting antsy during the first act (okay, i get it: it’s the night before you test the first a-bomb and you don’t know if you’ve invented something that will ignited the atmosphere and kill us all. an intriguing question but not really three hours’ worth of plot, and i’ve seen the same material treated much better by the excellent Carson Kreitzer). that is, until i reminded myself that plot isn’t the point of opera. the audience is meant to sit back, listen to the music, look at the big pretty stage pictures and just be. as a sometimes-play-goer, full-time-play-maker, i’m used to being very actively engaged in a production. it took me a while to realize that i needed to actually disengage a bit in order to fully appreciate the experience, but once i did, it was lovely. still, it’s sad that my total lack of musical talent/education means that there were probably many levels on which i failed to fully appreciate the work. it did look pretty, tho.

go away: aimee mann holiday spectacular. it pains me to have to give aimee mann a “go away” because i totally dig her, and her band sounded really great live. a “holiday spectacular” however, is not a concert. there was too much standup riffing with guests who are probably people i’d know if i had cable or ever watched tv but who really weren’t that funny, and guest spots for off-beat musician friends who were quirky but totally NOT AIMEE MANN. also: aimee mann fans are OLD. and suburban. when did aimee mann stop being hip? maybe i was just feeling curmudgeonly that night. still, the ticket was free, courtesy of my roommate who works at the concert house, so i should really shut up and stop complaining now.

come here: sweeney todd. i’m pretty emphatically not into musical theatre and so i didn’t know sweeny todd particularly well. the sondheim purists i saw the movie with objected to some of the changes (songs deleted/rearranged, mr. todd’s part transposed from a baritone to a tenor for the tender vocal cords of johnny depp), but i totally dug it. the production design was so excellent, tim burton just keeps getting better.

come here: christmas with the family. it snowed and snowed and snowed, and provided for skiing and snowshoeing in the meadow, and there was a cute baby (my brother’s wife’s sister’s baby, which we decided still makes him my nephew, for simplicity’s sake). i cooked christmas dinner (turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, sweet potatoes, salad, and chocolate chip oatmeal cookies – everything from scratch) without any major disasters (with the help of a rotating cadre of sous chefs, it must be noted, some of them more helpful than others).

go away: food poisoning i got from the denver airport. for two days, i wasn’t sure what my own name was. on the upside, by the time i recovered, i’d lost those pesky holiday pounds and started the whole eating-well-in-the-new-year with a fast. food poisoning and breakups are the most effective weight-loss tools i know.

come here: visits with old friends. had the nicest visit with A’s parents when i was in boise last week, the odd circumstances of our relationship notwithstanding. i hadn’t heard news of any of his siblings in more than a year, so catching up with the doings of the family was nice, and they are such gracious, lovely people that we navigated around the obvious social land mines without trouble. why do i bother to keep up with my former in-laws? i’m honestly not sure. i don’t do it out of a desire to maintain any sort of connection between me and my ex. if anything, it’s because in the past year i’ve learned to appreciate the myriad of forms that interpersonal relationships can inhabit, the blurred distinction between family and friends. there’s no substitute for having good people in my life, and cutting people off out of a sense of injured pride brings a hollow sort of satisfaction.

when i got back home a number of college friends passed through the windy city, including the lovely wabes and entourage, also p & j, and db. (ha! nicknames and initials for everyone!). catching up was good.

come here: good jobs & engagements & baby news. lots of friends with news this holiday season. it’s all happening to the right people and i couldn’t be happier for all of them.

go away: cold cold cold! as i write this, the windchill is -6. this is the cold when homeless people freeze and poor people can’t heat drafty apartments. it’s no good. also, where do the wild bunny rabbits of chicago go when it gets this cold? wikipedia informed us that rabbits don’t really hibernate but they sort of hibernate, but it didn’t really answer the question, where do they go in the winter?

come here: chicago smoking ban! hooray! as of jan 1, the smoking ban finally goes into effect for bars. i intend to invest more time holding up a barstool at my local now that i can do it without stinking like an ashtray. i should be more sympathetic to the smokers shivering in their boots out in front of the bar, trying to hold a cigarette in mitten-clad fingers, but i’m really not. now’s the time to quit! then you have more money for the other vices! our own cold turkey wonder woman inspires many.

come here: the ginger people’s ginger chews. my tongue is on fire and i’ve eaten about half the bag while writing this. mmm, ginger candy.

my street, 10:15am

{16 December 2007}

possibly the only thing more magical than a heavy blanketing snow fall late at night is waking up to 8″ of deep fluffy snow under blue skies and shimmering sunlight.

it was *perfect* snow frisbee conditions, but unfortunately arrived a day too late for this week’s game. still, i went running along the lake, and it was supremely beautiful.

my street, 1:15am

{}

this kind of snow – 6″ deep, powdery fluffy, relentless – it delights me in a way that makes me laugh out loud like a little kid. i have knee-high wellingtons that let me stomp through the drifts, shuffling, because they are too big (i bought them, the smallest men’s size i could find, at a k-mart one night after experiencing my first buffalo blizzard). the blanket of snow muffles the sounds of the city, softens all the sharp corners, hides the dirt. everything is clean, draped in graceful white curves, the little architectural details on old buildings and iron fences highlighted.

(also, coming home from work at 1am, i won the parking lottery my first trip round the block — so that probably helped my outlook. that, and the fact that as i approached the house, i could see our christmas tree twinkling in the window, and knew the radiators would be clanking away, a sleepy cat waiting to greet me, and i have the time to sleep late tomorrow.) home is good.

jungle on the Dan Ryan Expressway

{14 December 2007}

the weird things i do for my job…

like driving 60 mph down the expressway in my own personal jungle…

back away from the starbucks, fake ficus tree!