On my way home from work today I ended up walking behind this seriously badass-looking person - she was wearing this great short black trench, gray glen plaid trousers, these great shoes that looked like what you'd get if Doc Marten made a gray snakeskin Chelsea boot, and she had super-short hair, and big spacers in her ears (normally not a look I like very much, but with the dressiness of the rest of her outfit, it looked kind of fab). To top it off, she was carrying a little Coleman playmate cooler with a biohazard sticker on it (this is actually pretty common in the area where I work, since there are a lot of research and medical facilities within walking distance of each other). She looked, as they say, fierce.

Anyway, I felt very frumpy walking behind her. Today I look a bit like a chorus member in a high-school production of "Little House on the Prairie: The Musical!" in my slightly too puffy-of-sleeve shirt and my overly-long beige corduroy skirt. The plain black knee socks and clogs are not exactly pulling the outfit together, and when I was outside I was wearing a hooded rain parka shell thing over the top of it all. Ah well. To paraphrase the immortal Rumsfeld, we go to work with the clothes that are clean and dry and non-holey, not the clothes that we want to be clean and dry and non-holey. Tomorrow is another day, and my laundry really ought to be dry by then.

Oh, also on the way home today I saw this very strange looking dog. I think he was a puggle that had gotten really fat and then lost most of the extra weight. Big folds of skin all over the place, like a Shar Pei, but strange long skinny legs. I should have just taken a picture, but that would have been a little odd.

And another thing! I saw a guy riding a bike and he had a rearview mirror attached to his glasses, but he wasn't wearing a helmet. This seems like backwards safetying to me.

I recently made the dangerous discovery that I can watch old Murder She Wrote episodes on the TiVo via Netflix Watch Instantly. This simple, relatively harmless gateway drug led me, last night, to watch two episodes of The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries. And worse, I dragged kmusky into my delinquency!

The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries is a pretty terrible show. It stars Shaun Cassidy as... one of the Hardy Boys (the younger one? I think?) and some other guy as the older Hardy Boy, who may or may not be named Frank. The girl who plays Nancy Drew is pretty terrible, and apparently in the third season (there were three seasons!) they just took her off the show and made it The Hardy Boys Mysteries, thereby getting rid of the slash in the title, which was probably a good call.* The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries is a pretty unwieldy title, so from here on out it is going to be THB/NDM.

We watched two episodes because it was a two-parter - the kids all went to some private investigators' convention in Los Angeles and quickly got wrapped up in a spooky mystery at a movie studio. I am going to include spoilers here, because I can't imagine that spoilers would influence your enjoyment of this show one way or another. The mastermind kidnapper (it was a kidnapping mystery - I am guessing that THB/NDM stuck to kidnapping, fraud, smuggling, etc., so as to keep it family-friendly and in the spirit of the books) was one of the PIs at the convention, and his accomplices were a studio security guard and - this is so weird - a guy impersonating Peter Falk as Columbo, played by Casey Kasem. I don't even know.

Anyway, this Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew experience left me simultaneously thinking, "Geez, there's an hour and a half of my life I'm never getting back," and "Hmm, which episode should I watch next. If you have Netflix Watch Instantly and you need something to play in the background while knit or repair your toaster or alphabetize your DVD collection, you could do worse than The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries. Sadly, all the best-sounding episodes, like Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew Meet Dracula, and the ones with Ned Nickerson (played by Rick Springfield!) in them, are DVD-only. Bummer.



*The only other TV show with a slash in the title that I can think of is Nip/Tuck.

Oh my goodness I just remembered there is Halloween candy in my pocketbook! Yay!

OK, I've taken care of that now. There is no longer any Halloween candy in my pocketbook. Or indeed anywhere else in my possession.

Behold, my tale of several weekends with perhaps one or two weekdays thrown in for fun!

( This very (spooky) weekend )

( Last weekend, in which I go to my 10 year university reunion and am vaguely ambivalent about things. )

( Columbus Day weekend, or as you silly Canadians call it, Thanksgiving )

What else is going on? I'm experimenting with not using sulfate-containing cleansers on my hair, to see if I can cut down on the frizz. I've been doing it for maybe four or five days now and I may not be able to go on any longer. My hair feels super-heavy and it hardly moves, even though I haven't used any styling products on it. It does feel nice and soft, though. All in all it kind of feels like my hair when I go camping, except it doesn't smell awful! But anyway this experiment may be nearing its end.

I have been sick for a week now, which is GETTING OLD. It started last Monday night, when I had a bit of a sore throat, then by Tuesday afternoon I was really feeling like crap (possibly partly the result of my first flu shot ever - they were giving them out free at work, and I can't resist the power of Free), Wednesday I stayed home from work and watched bad movies, Thursday I dragged myself back in to work for some reason, and Friday I went home early to play bad computer games and read mystery novels. I have definitely been improving steadily since Friday afternoon, but I would really love it if my nasal mucosa could calm the heck down. How much snot can one 150 pound woman produce?! I feel like I should have run out by now.

( Movies I watched while I was sick: )

This weekend I finally bought a new bike, which you may recall I've been intending to do for a while now. I ended up going with the Trek 7.3 FX WSD, and I think I'm going to be very happy with it. It is white and pretty and fast (enough) and comfortable. So far I've only ridden it home from the bike shop (5-6 miles) but I can't wait to take it out again. I need to find a good way to store it in the apartment, though. I may end up buying a bike rack that lets me hang it from the wall, although that means finding studs and annoying things like that. I'm very sad that I'm not going to be able to ride it again until Thursday (I'm having a surprisingly busy week). Looking forward to riding to the museum on Saturday!

I just read The Queen's Man, a mystery set during the reign of Eleanor of Aquitaine/Richard Lionheart/Bad King John by historical novelist Sharon Kay Penman, and i don't really know quite what I expected (I just picked it off the library shelf for no particular reason), but I was still kind of disappointed. For one thing, characters are constantly using the phrase "for certes". No, just no. No. Also, why? I guess the idea is to set the Medieval Times mood, but I found it very distracting. Not least because I don't know how I ought to pronounce it - I can be all Chaucerian and pronounce "certes" with two syllables and maybe a flipped R if I'm feeling frisky, but the rest of the book is not in Middle English or even an approximation of Middle English. The only other natural way I can find to pronounce this phrase is in a vaguely Valley-Girl-ish accent, probably influenced by the phrase "for reals". Also, half the time the characters using the phrase "for certes" (however you want to pronounce it) they are understood to be speaking French. Come on! That doesn't even make sense!

So that little tic annoyed me rather (and there were a few others, including the phrase "but in their world..." used to explain the social circumstances in which the characters lived - show, don't tell, Sharon Kay Penman!). But this was a murder mystery, and there was a murder to be solved, and perhaps that part was good at least? ( Alas, it was not, for reasons which are spoileriffic. )If a book is billed as a mystery, and over the course of the book a detective investigates a crime and turns up suspects and searches for clues, I expect certain things from that book - either a mystery that gets solved by following said clues in a reasonably fair and satisfactory way, or a book that subverts the conventions of the genre in a sophisticated and/or interesting way. This did neither - I have no idea what the point of this book was, other than to set up some fairly boring characters so that they could "solve" more boring and pointless crimes in the future. I've read worse books, but this was a pretty bad combination of mediocre writing, unsatisfying plotting, and just plain boringitude.

If anyone has some good mystery series to recommend to me, please do. I prefer amateur sleuths to the police, but I like the Wexford books (I think I'm actually a bit behind on those - that could keep me busy for a bit). I like detecting-focused stories better than suspense.

Ha! Today's LJ writer's block prompt is something about whether you would rather camp in the woods or stay at a luxury hotel. With me, it depends on the day. And where the luxury hotel and the woods in question are located.

Last weekend, though, was a camp in the woods kind of weekend. I went up to Baxter State Park in Maine with a large collection of family members. We stayed in cabins, not tents (yay! I do not like sleeping in tents, though I will do so if there's a good reason for it, like if I want to go somewhere that is more than one day's hike from the road), but there is no running water and no electricity to be had in the park (unless you're a ranger), so it's still very rustic.

And gorgeous!

From Baxter

That's Mt. Katahdin, the tallest mountain in Maine at just-a-hair over one mile high. That was the view from the fireplace area of our cabin site, so it was pretty sweet. There were lots of animals in the park, too - gray jays (aka whiskeyjacks, after the Algonquian trickster god) came and ate food out of our hands and off our hats, and we saw loads of chipmunks and red squirrels, and on the way out of the park we saw two moose! At 12:30 in the afternoon!

From Baxter

A bull and a cow. They were not at all far off the road. There were some people fishing out of a canoe not ten yards away from the moose, and they just had their backs to them! Maybe they had been out there with the moose for a long time and had gotten bored with them. I'm not super afraid of moose but they are very big wild animals and I'm not sure I'd turn my back on them.

Anyway, some of the family hiked Doubletop Mountain (Katahdin was closed due to weather), and the rest of us hung around camp and took a quick hike up to Big Niagra Falls and Little Niagra Falls, which were nice little waterfalls. I kind of wish I had done Doubletop, but they had a long hard day of hiking and they said it was cold at the top, so I didn't totally feel like I'd missed out.

The mountains in Baxter have great names - my favorites are Jo-Mary Mountain and Mount O-J-I (named after the landslides on the side of the mountain that used to resemble those letters - now they look more like a bear claw).

The only problem about Baxter is that it's pretty remote (although its remoteness is part of why it's beautiful - it really feels like wilderness, more so than any other place I've ever been in New England). It took me about eight hours to get home from the park, which is to say longer than it took me to get home from Reykjavik. And it's only halfway up Maine! There's still another half the state to the Canadian border! And Maine is only the 39th biggest of the US states! I live in a big country.

So, I work 7AM to 3PM, and my coworker M works from 3PM to 11PM, and our duties overlap a lot but I end up doing more work, which is fine - most of the time I would *rather* work my hours and have contact with other people than work her hours and have no contact with other people, and I would rather keep busy at work. This is a really, really busy time of year, though, where I'm hiring and training new workers and there are some library book-intensive projects going on and the printers are jamming and running out of paper and toner constantly.

Anyhow, last night M posted to facebook about how bored she was because she had forgotten to bring her book and her iPod to work, and when I saw it this morning while I was all plowed under with work I could not resist and I commented, "Maybe next time you're bored you could try shelving some books! :)" The smiley face, you understand, is to show that I am only joking. Mostly. Probably should have restrained myself and not commented! Hopefully I will not end up on passiveagressivenotes.com. I worked her shift before I switched to days, so I understand that it's hard to maintain your motivation when you're working by yourself and you have a lot of down time, but seriously, sometimes I get very frustrated with her.

My electronics have been turning against me this week. I don't think I mentioned in my entry about the lobster picnic that my camera also got a little bit broken that day. A dog knocked it into the sand on the beach (I had left it in a very precarious position for much longer than I intended, so it was entirely my own fault, not the dog's) and the lens cover wasn't snapping closed and it was zooming in and out only with difficulty.* And then yesterday my computer was acting very crazy and then wouldn't turn on at all. Now, a microwave I can do without but a camera and a computer are sort of essentials for me.

Anyhow, my camera had been acting a little funny since I came home from Turkey. It's pretty clear what the problem is - there is sand and grit in the spaces between the parts of the lens zoom mechanism dealie, and it's stopping the lens from moving as freely as it should. So today I bought a couple of cans of air at Staples and hosed the little mother-f out. With some success! I'm not sure it's working exactly as it should but it's working, which is the main thing. I have also downloaded a copy of the service manual with instructions on how to open it up and poke around in its innards, in case it gets worse or something else goes wrong with it. I really love my camera but I suspect that having it fixed by a professional would cost more than it is worth.

My computer actually ended up being a much simpler fix. The battery I bought for it last year (not from the manufacturer) up and stopped working. This probably should not be a big surprise. Observe what is written on the battery:

CAUTION!Do net sxpcse battery to temperalureableve 60°C(140°F). Do not disassemble. or miatreat battery, Replace only with failure to follow those instructions may present risk of explosion fire or high temperatures, See owner s manusl for additional safety instructions

As near as I can tell, the French and German are equally creatively spelled and punctuated. Anyway, once I put the almost-five-year-old factory battery back in, it worked fine (though presumably it will only work for about 40 minutes on the battery, which is why I got the new battery in the first place). So that was great. It reminded me, though, that my computer is nearly five years old and even if I were completely satisfied with its performance, it is not going to last forever. I'm thinking about replacing it with a combination of a netbook and a Mac Mini hooked up to the TV. We shall see.

The microwave, though, is still dead. I'll put it on freecycle - I'm guessing it's fixable, but not by me.


*My camera is a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ3, and I love it dearly. It is a really versatile compact camera, great for traveling especially. My favorite things about it are the 28mm-280mm 10x zoom and the pretty blue metal case. I think it has been replaced by a newer version now but it's still a great camera!

Yesterday I went on a bit of a cleaning jag - I did a major top-to-bottom cleaning of my kitchen a few weeks ago and I'm actually doing a reasonably good job of maintaining the clean, but the downside to cleaning routinely is that you pay enough attention to the cleanliness of your house that you start to notice all the other gross unclean bits that you haven't gotten to yet. Which brings us to the microwave. It was kind of gross, though I've seen much worse. We don't use the microwave all that often, and when we do it's usually not for anything too messy, but I don't know when I last cleaned it, and if kmusky had cleaned it recently there was very little evidence of this.

So I figured I would clean it! It would only take me a couple of minutes! I took out the spinning plate part and squirted in some all-purpose cleaner and I washed the spinning plate part while the cleaner was sinking in, and then I wiped out the cleaner (nothing was particularly stuck on, which was nice) and left the door open for a while to air out. It was simplicity itself! Why hadn't I done it sooner? Then a few hours later when kmusky tried to warm up some meatballs, the buttons didn't do anything. Perhaps the grease was the only thing holding the poor microwave together. I have decided to give it a few days to dry out and see if maybe it comes back to life, but I suspect it has given up the ghost. I think we're going to go microwaveless for a while. It takes up a lot of room in our kitchen (well, actually it takes up a lot of room OUTSIDE of our kitchen, because it would take up a good quarter of the counter space in the kitchen if we kept it in there).

Now the question is: should I just put a microwave out by the curb? If I freecycled it, would someone take it,and if they took it, would they actually fix it? Pretty sure Goodwill will not take non-functioning appliances. It cost me $40 on sale six years ago, so I've definitely gotten my money's worth out of it, but it worked fine until I got cleaner on it and I can't believe it's really completely broken - I suspect there's just something wrong with the connection between the buttons and the little microwave brain, like it's got microwave locked-in-syndrome. Anyhow, if you know someone in the Boston area who's looking for a broken microwave, let me know because I can hook them up!

Two lj entries in three days! It's a rarity nowadays but I am choosing not to feel self-conscious about it, as much as I might like to.

Went up to Camp, my family's summer lake place on Monday for a big family cookout with a really large number of family members and dogs. All in all an excellent day, although my uncle spilled lobster juice all over me.


Those of you who do not eat whole boiled lobsters for religious, ethical, health, or geographical reasons may not know this, but when you eat a whole boiled (or steamed) lobster, a lot of liquid comes out of it, so you end up with a plateful of cloudy orangey-gray-green liquid (to be sure, this is one of the less appetizing aspects of lobster consumption). This lobster juice is one of the reasons it's better to eat lobsters outdoors with family and close personal friends rather than in fancy restaurants on first dates or business lunches (other reasons: it's much cheaper, and usually more fun).

One of the problems, though, with eating lobsters in a casual, paper-plate sort of setting is that paper plates are ill-equipped to retain lobster juice. And my uncle is missing one finger on his left hand. And I was sitting to his left. I saw it coming and I was not surprised, but I was, shall we say, less than thrilled on account of I had not brought any extra trousers (one so rarely packs a second pair of trousers for a family cookout, though I really ought to know better) and I was wearing jeans. And it was a lot of lobster juice! I was uncomfortable and smelled like the back of a fish restaurant. So I borrowed one of my cousins' sweatpants for the rest of the afternoon while my lobster pants dried off. I complained to my other cousin, daughter of the juice-spilling uncle, and said "Your father just spilled lobster juice all over me!" and she said, "Did he apologize or laugh?" and my sister said (with great accuracy), "Both." Juice aside, the lobsters were delicious, and I was very glad when someone else didn't claim one of their lobsters and I got to have an extra half-lobster. Half of a sweet soft-shelled lobster from Matinicus Island is nothing to sneeze at.

Anyway, the cookout was just generally lovely, and it was nice to see everyone, however briefly. We all left pretty early to try to beat the traffic, but the Labor Day traffic coming home from Maine (state nickname: Vacationland) was pretty ridiculous. About 20 miles of stop-and-go traffic on I-95 (aka the Maine Turnpike) from Wells to the New Hampshire border. I have never seen it so bad. I actually had a pretty good time though, hanging out with my sister and her husband (who were driving me to the train station near their house). After all the traffic we ended up hitting every traffic light after we got off the highway to head to the train station but we just barely made it, and I caught the 6:16 train which was especially good because the next one was coming until after 8:00! I mean, the worst case scenario was that I'd go back to my sister's house and have dinner with them and then they would drive me back to the train at eight, but there's something really unnecessarily exhilarating about just barely catching a train, especially when it's the last train for a while.

I see that I've talked about my fun day and mentioned 1) getting crustacean offal spilled on my good jeans, 2) being stuck in traffic, and 3) nearly missing a train, which gives you some idea of my idea of fun. But it was a lovely day and I'm glad of all of it, or I will be once I wash the jeans anyhow.

O livejournal and livejournal friends! I've missed you, and I'm not sure exactly why we've drifted apart. Perhaps this entry will represent the turning-over of a new leaf and the renewal of our relationship. Perhaps not. Anyway!

I've been shopping for a bicycle. I want a hybrid that is at least kind of fast, and I have so far been to two bike shops and REI. Today I made the grave error of trying out the bike two notches up the expensiveness ladder from another bike I had tried. Ooh, it was nice. Was it $350 nicer? Probably. But given that I haven't ridden* a bike regularly in years and years, it's rather a lot more than I want to pay and I think I'm going to stick to my original price point. Or possibly go up *one* notch rather than two. I think I'm going to go to one more bike shop on Tuesday and then make my decision.

Here is my not-so-secret bike goal: next summer, I want to be able to take the train to the train station 25 miles from my family's summer place and ride my bike there. We shall see how that actually plays out. I am going to start by riding to and from the museum (about a 10 mile round trip) and taking trips on the commuter train with the bike to visit my family (they're about 5-6 miles from the nearest train station). Hopefully by next summer I'll be able to make the whole trip! Of course this means that I have to be in shape enough to be able to ride the bike 25 miles twice within a few days. So I have some work to do there. And winter's coming (it was chilly today!). But I figure I should be able to ride some of the time in the winter, basically as long as there aren't snowbanks.

Before I went bike shopping, I watched Project Runway and cut off some trousers and made them capris! I had put them in the wash with a skirt I bought in Turkey than promptly ran all over the place and stained the ankles of the pants (in addition to a few t-shirts and other articles of clothing). So I decided to just cut the ankles off and hem them. And they look great! I'm totally pleased. Although of course once I had sewn them all up I realized that there was also a stain on the front top part of the pants. But as long as I wear them with a longish shirt it will be covered up. I was VERY pleased with myself. So pleased, in fact, that I wore them out bike shopping. Unfortunately, I forgot to wash off the tailor's chalk that I had used to mark where to cut and hem them before I left the house. Alas.

Also, I finished my book-club book, Pharmakon, on the bus today** so I started reading Rainbow Valley which I have on my iPod. Apparently I've never read this book! Which is weird, because I'm pretty sure I owned it, along with all the other Anne of Green Gables books. I totally know what the cover looked like and everything. But I am pretty sure I have never read this book in my life. Elements of it are familiar, but I think that's because L.M. Montgomery is re-using plots from her short stories. I'm very surprised that I never read this. It's a nice treat, though, even if it isn't exactly one of her greatest hits.

*really, ridden? Is that right? But "have rode" sounds just as bad. I even thought about reworking the sentence to get rid of that construction but can't quite be bothered.

**it had some good parts, but unless I was missing something it really didn't seem to make sense or come together at the end at all. A big Meh for Pharmakon by Dirk Wittenborn.

Hello! I am still here! Sometimes!

The weather has finally turned nice in Boston and so I have been spending a lot of time outside, which is great. Here are some of the things I have done outside recently:

• Gone to a Red Sox game (they lost to the A's 6-0, but we at least had great seats on the right field roof deck, and the weather was amazing), and we ate various kinds of disgusting stadium food including some horrifyingly bright-green "margaritas".


• Gone for a hike in the Middlesex Fells, a largeish wooded park/conservation area a little ways outside of Boston - there is lots of hiking and scrambling, and there are wild blueberries all over the place! I ate loads, and I may go back on a dedicated blueberrying trip and make a pie or something.


• Walked to and from work every day (except when I had to go somewhere else on the way home from work).


• Walked along the waterfront to see the Tall Ships, which actually I wasn't crazy about, but while I was there I visited the ICA and saw me some contemporary art, which was good.


• Watched fireworks and saw Revolutionary War re-enactors on Independence Day weekend.

And probably various other things I'm not remembering. I went to the Arboretum, but that wasn't due to the nice weather; I wanted to try out my new rain pants in some rain (they worked!). Now that the rain has stopped, I am actually really loving this cool summer we're having. Although it is way too cold inside at work - I have been wearing sweaters (sometimes multiple sweaters) and right now my fingers and legs are still freezing. I may bring in some tights to wear just while I'm at work.

Next week I'm going to the Cape with asvern, which should be nice and will involve additional good outdoors times. Which mean, yes, I'm taking another week of vacation. According to my pay stub, I still have more than three weeks of vacation, but this is due to some kind of mistake (which I have not gone out of my way to correct). Still not sure what I am going to do about that. I think I am just going to sit on it and try and use it up a few days at a time, whenever I can. But I think I will have to work all of August at least to divert suspicion!

Interesting day at work! I spent a bunch of time in the archive today pre-cataloging (if that's a thing) and packaging books. A lot of that just meant deciphering titles printed in old German Fraktur fonts (useful guide to transliterating said Fraktur fonts here, which I'd printed it out before I started instead of halfway through), but there were some cool oddities up there. We have a lot of old pharmacopeias (or pharmacopoeias, or pharmacopoeiae, or pharmacopoeen, or you get the idea), which you would not think would be particularly interesting, but I ended up getting to play with the Pharmacopoeia Pauprum Edinburgensis, i.e. the Poor People's Pharmacopeia (!) from sometime in the 18th century. I got to touch the oldest book I've ever touched, a London pharmacopeia from 1720.

That's not all I got to see and learn, either! My boss was looking at a modern German book, and it had a picture of what appeared to be Jesus in an old-fashioned apothecary shop. "Look, it's Jesus the pharmacist!" she said. "No, it's got to be the patron saint of pharmacists or something. It's not Jesus," I said. Then I had to go do some other things outside of the archive, but before I left, my boss showed me another German book, this one called... "Christus als Apotheker"! Apparently paintings (and stained-glass windows, and wood-carvings) of Christ as an apothecary were very popular with 17th-century Lutherans. Very, very popular. I was fascinated. This whole (admittedly short) book was just images of Christ as an apothecary.

Anyhow, had lots of fun in the archive. Almost makes me wish I did archives stuff.

So. You guys. I have been seriously busy! First, weekend before last, I went to Iceland. Which was great. It is a lovely weird quirky place, very beautiful in an aggressively austere kind of way. I give Iceland two thumbs up and intend to visit again. I bought loads of yarn but I should have bought more. Delicious food, especially the fish, butter, and lamb.

Second, this past weekend I went to New Hampshire to go mountain climbing and sledding. This is something that my dad's wife and her friends have done for at least the past ten years - they climb halfway up Mount Washington (the tallest mountain in the Northeast US, which is to say not a particularly tall mountain in the grand scheme of things - it's something like 6000 feet - but still a pretty good climb, especially in April), then they sled (or ski, sometimes) down a different trail (the Shelburne Ski Trail). Some of the group members also sometimes ski the Tuckerman's Ravine bowl (this is where my dad rescued some girl who had been buried in a not-really-avalanche last year). My stepsister has been going since she was about 8 years old (she's 21 now), and my other sister's husband proposed to her in the bowl (and dropped the ring in the snow, wow). But I had never been on this trip before!

It was, in short, loads of fun. The hike up took two hours, maybe just over, then we hiked a little way towards the bowl but turned back because it was cold, windy, and foggy the higher we got. Then we sledded down. I need to work on my sledding technique. Basically you can either sit in the sled or lie on your front (do I mean lie? or lay? anyway). On your front, you either have to keep your pack on your back, which made it hard for me to lift my head to see where I was going, or you have to lie on top of your pack, and my pack kept wanting to sneak out the front of the sled and get caught underneath it. Pros of lying on your front: you can steer and brake with your feet, elbows, or hands. Sitting, you don't have any pack problems, but you have to either steer with your feet (and kick up loads of snow into your sled) or steer with your hands (which felt like a wrist injury waiting to happen). I experimented with both, but never really came to a satisfactory conclusion.

As I say, it was loads of fun, though it felt incredibly dangerous and stupid. By the time we got down Pinkham Notch (concessions, restrooms, parking, etc.), I was soaked through three layers of trousers and long johns and underwear, and I'd managed to get the shirt I was wearing under two layers of fleece and a water- and wind-proof shell covered in dirt (there were a lot of bare patches on the trail). We had beers, candy, and cherry pie in the parking lot, and then I went home. I think I went to bed at about 8:45PM, having taken a couple of handfuls of ibuprofen beforehand. I am still covered in bruises, but my climbing muscles aren't sore anymore, which is great! Looking forward to doing more climbing this summer, though of course that's what I said about skiing this winter.

Seriously, though! I might even join the Appalachian Mountain Club!

So, I had a busy weekend.

Friday: Opera! Went with kmusky to see Rusalka performed by the Boston Lyric Opera. We were up in the balcony (at the Schubert), which is about as steeply raked a set of seats I have ever sat in in my life. Not for the vertigo-prone! Or anyone who has any trouble with stairs - there is no elevator to the balcony, and I think it is probably the equivalent of four flights of stairs to the top. We were above the chandelier (sightlines were perfect, though, except we couldn't see all of the orchestra pit).

As for the opera itself, I enjoyed it. Rusalka is a mermaid/water nymph story that borrows a lot from The Little Mermaid (Hans Christian Anderson version) and some assorted other water-nymph stories. It actually ends up being a little bit darker than even the Anderson Little Mermaid (Rusalka is doomed to drag men down to their dooms and the Prince dies!). The tenor who sang the Prince was fabulous - and very loud, especially in his death scene. The soprano who played Rusalka didn't really wow me in the first act, and then she doesn't sing for most of the second act since she's been rendered mute (who thought The Little Mermaid would make a good story for an opera?! besides Dvorak and his librettist, I mean). But she mostly won me over by the end. She seemed to have a lot of difficulty moving around, though - I don't know if she has arthritis, or was recovering from an injury, or has a bad back or something? Not to say she shouldn't have sung the part because of that, but maybe they could have blocked her so that she wasn't kneeling down and getting back up so often. It looked a bit painful.

Saturday I worked at the Museum, but that was actually also a sad day in our apartment because kmusky had to put her old cat Watson to sleep. Poor old kitty; he had taken a real turn for the worse over the past week or two. He was 18, so it wasn't exactly a surprise, but it was still sad to see him that way. He always liked to sit on your lap and have you slap him on his sides like he was a drum, but he had lost so much weight and was getting so frail that you couldn't do that any more. Farewell, Watson! You will be missed.

Sunday, I went to the Women's Frozen Four NCAA Hockey Championship at BU. Wisconsin was playing Mercyhurst, a school I had never heard of but which has an excellent women's hockey team (full of Canadians!). There were several New England girls on the Wisconsin team, including one girl who my stepsister used to play soccer with, so that was the main reason we went (I went with my dad and his wife, who had extra tickets), and although Mercyhurst had sent a pep band and a little cheering section, there were more people in the arena rooting for Wisconsin (and Wisconsin won, as apparently they usually do). It was a really good game! I think it was the first women's hockey game I ever attended, and the quality of play was excellent and subtly different from men's hockey in a way I couldn't quite put my finger on. I will definitely watch the women's hockey in the Olympics next year.

After the game we tried to go to the Publick House for moules frites, but they don't open the kitchen until 4:30 on Sundays, and it was 3:00 when we got there and we were hungry. So we went to New Rod Dee for Thai instead, which was excellent.

Also Sunday, I went to the Handel and Haydn Society concert with kmusky and her mom. I don't know if I was just activitied out or what, but it didn't make a big impression on me. The concert was called "Romantic Brahms". The Brahms was his 1st Symphony, which, eh, it's OK. There was also a Mendelssohn violin concerto that was very good, with a really exciting violin part. I'm predisposed to like Mendelssohn right now because we're singing his Elijah on May 9th at Sanders Theater - bring your friends! ask me for discounted, no-fee tickets! The violinist was also very fun to watch, a skinny little man in a frock-coat who actually physically jumped around during the exciting parts. There was also a modern piece at the beginning which didn't really do anything for me... it sounded like the kind of modern piece that a college choir sings just to show that they can do modern. But one of the paid members of my chorus was also singing in the choir for that piece, so it was fun to see him (I hadn't known he would be there). If you want to see him again, come see the Brookline Chorus's production of Elijah, May 9th at Sanders Theater, student, senior and group discounts available (contact me for details and tickets)!

One thing about Handel and Haydn is that it attracts kind of an old audience. An old audience that prides itself on constantly unwrapping candies and cough drops. CONSTANTLY! Or maybe only during the quiet parts, it was hard to tell.

Tomorrow I'm leaving for Iceland - I will probably be updating the travel blog and definitely tweeting while I'm gone.

( Of course there are spoilers, so I'm putting this behind a cut but it's really quite short so don't be scared off... )

In other exciting TV news, The Mighty Boosh is going to be airing on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim starting a week from tomorrow! I could not be more delighted about this, really. I so very highly encourage my American pals who have not already seen the Boosh to watch the heck out of it - Sunday, March 29th at 1AM. If you're old and an early bird like me, you will be setting your DVR, but seriously, just watch it! I love it to death, and I can't guarantee that you will love it like I do but there is nothing else on TV even remotely like it, so give it at least an episode or two of your time.

So, moderately good things have been happening since last I posted! I had that phone interview, and I don't really know how it went. I haven't heard back (the interview was on Friday) which is not terribly auspicious, but I am doing my best to neither get my hopes up nor lose hope.

Also, I got an email from Jeopardy! and I have an audition in a month (that's my Plan B, hee). Which will likely lead to nothing, once again... I wish I knew what went wrong last time - did I do poorly on the test, or did I just not get called through luck of the draw and not fitting in with the contestant pool? This time I will note down all the questions I'm not sure about so I can at least know how many I get right. That's my evil plan.

My cousin had a baby on Sunday! This is exciting because she's my first first cousin to have a baby. I am making the baby a tiny vest with a kangaroo on the front. It is adorable, and I spent WAY TOO MUCH on the yarn. Dang. See, I thought I had a ball of the yarn I was going to use for a contrast color at home, so I bought yarn to use for the main color. But then I got home and found that I no longer had said contrast color yarn. So I went out and bought another ball. And I had to pick a Rowan yarn. In short: Phoo Eeee. Fortunately, there are no other knitters in the family, so when I dial it back to less expensive yarn for future babies, no one will know the difference.

The baby's name is Alfred (after my grandfather) Wilder (who knows) and apparently they are planning on calling him Wilder. I can't quite imagine actually calling a baby Alfred, although I suppose you can call him Alfie or Freddie or something. Was very pleased to learn that the baby was born 30 minutes after they arrived at the hospital, since said cousin is a blood relative and I figure if I ever have a kid of my own I will find the quick-labor genes useful. Wilder is a peanut, only 5 pounds 9 oz at birth.

What else? On Tuesday night I made the unfortunate discovery that I stay out just as late when I order half pints as I do when I order whole pints. On the plus side, I still love Brooklyn Brown, and the frites at Publick House, though much shorter than they used to be, are still hella good.

I took a half-day at work today because I need to burn some vacation time before I max out again. That was nice. Also there is not much going on at work, what with all the students being on break.

Maybe it's Tuesday still catching up with me or daylight savings or I don't know what, but I swear I could go to sleep right now at 7:30. Maybe I will!

Good heavens, it's apparently been a full three weeks since I posted to livejournal. Clearly I should not ever complain (even in my mind) that other people are not posting enough.

I've got a snow day today, hurrah! There had been some talk about being open until midnight tonight because of midterms, but I guess that is off now. Sadly (?) I left my phone at our concert on Saturday night and have been too lazy to go pick it up (even though the person who has it is mere blocks away), so if anyone wants to change their mind about the library being open when the campus is closed, it will be hard for them to get in touch with me.

Yesterday it was snowy too, which I used as an excuse to putter around the house all day (I didn't go out even to get the aforementioned phone, which I regret a bit now that there is a great deal more snow on the ground). Other than being all house-bound I was really good though - I made bread, cleaned the heck out of my bedroom, started making a braided rag rug out of an old bedsheet with holes in it, lifted weights, read Anne's House of Dreams (I've been rereading the Anne books, or at least the out-of-copyright ones... I don't own Windy Poplars or Anne of Ingleside), watched last week's "Chuck" and a couple of old episodes of the Simpsons and MST3K (a lot of consumption of media I had seen before!), and all-in-all just had a very nice day, albeit one in which I never left the apartment.

Anyway, I have similarly big plans for my snow day today, possibly adding in a trip to pick up my phone. Hey, this is the third week in a row that I've had Monday off! First a holiday, then a vacation day, and now a snow day. Excellent stuff.

All right, time for coffee.

I just spent an hour taking journals off the shelves and cutting them out of their covers so that they can be recycled. I have already spent about 10-15 hours doing this and I will probably need to do another 10 hours or so before I am done. In many cases, these are journals that I myself prepared for binding a year or two ago (this took many hours as well).

It's like an illustration of how completely I am wasting my life energy working at this job. Days like this I really regret not taking one of the job offers I had a couple of years ago.

Also I broke my work mug and lost my work water bottle, so I am thirsty. And I think I'm probably coming down with something. Argh.

You know, I am trying not to pay attention to this octuplets* thing, but I can't help myself. I mean really, what the hell? Are there actual licensed fertility doctors out there who will implant eight IVF embryos into a 32-year-old woman's uterus? I'm no medical ethicist or anything, but that is wrong. I hope that that fertility center is shut down. I'll resist the temptation to be publicly judgy about the mother right now (although seriously, what was she thinking? with six other kids already?), because plenty of people try to make stupid and/or ignorant decisions about their health, reproductive or otherwise, and just because 14 children under the age of 8 living in a 3-bedroom house is not my idea of a perfect family doesn't mean it can't work for someone else. But I think that board-certified medical professionals should hold themselves to a higher standard, and practice scientific medicine, and not perform procedures that are contraindicated by all the evidence.


* or, as I like to say, "octopuslets," which I thought was a laugh riot when I first heard it on Mr. Belvedere (I think) circa 1988, and which has never stopped being funny in the 20 years since.