Feminism is a Danger to us ALL

The Catholic Church felt the need to tell us all that Modern Feminism is dangerous for the family. Especially this pesky habit women have if asking why women can't be priests:

The Church teaches that it cannot change the rules banning women from the priesthood because Christ chose only men as his apostles.

Which is interesting, because one of the apostles who went around spreading Christianity after the crucifixion was Mary Magdalene and she would undoubtedly be considered an official apostle except that she was female, so obviously she couldn't be one. So it was the Church itself who chose only male apostles, not Jesus. You'd think the Church would be willing to acknowledge the work of somebody so devoted to spreading the Word, but instead they'd rather cling to modern tradition and alienate young women.

Their loss.

# Posted by ayse on 07/31/04 at 8:39 AM

Club of Hillbillies

I bought a cheap mandolin this week.

It was $80 from Musician's Friend, with a carrying case and a couple books. I figured it would be a nice way to spend a few minutes doing something other than art over the next several years. I don't really have any goals except to be able to play a few pieces of folk music. I'm not interested in performing, but it would be fun to play music with Noel.

Noel gave me a pitch pipe and we began tuning it; it's brand-new, so it goes out of tune really fast, but last night it stayed in tune for hours, so I don't think it's a problem with the cheapo construction. Lucky me.

I can play for about five minutes before my fingers are in agony.

When I was playing guitar, there was this cream we would put on our fingers to help them build healthy callouses. I can't remember what it was. So instead I'm just going to play until it hurts, stop for several hours, then play again.

It's really interesting to learn a new picking style.

Mandolins have doubled strings: there are four open notes, but eight strings, two tuned to each note. You play with up-picks and down-picks across the two strings tuned the same, or with the guitar-style swoosh across all the strings, when you're playing chords. I'm practising the picking thing, because it's more complicated. Also, I prefer a picking style on the instrument. So there you have it.

Mandolins have the same fingering as violins, so you'd think my years of violin would help, but in fact they do not. The only thing is that now I remember just how painful it was to play that E string (the highest open string on the violin), because it's thin and sharp and wire, stretched tight. It literally cuts into your finger.

The book I have on mandolin starts off with exercises on the E. This is less than optimal for helping a student begin playing, but it makes sense, musically. It's just that it's painfully (very painfully) obvious that the author doesn't remember how callous formation happens, and didn't take that into account when making his lesson plans.

So I play for five minutes at a time, and I actually feel like I'm making progress. I'm trying to play looking only at the music, but it's hard to find the frets. Practise, I guess. Eventually I will have touched the mandolin enough to just know where everything is.

I've played Twinkle Twinkle Little Star with one string. Bow down before me.

# Posted by ayse on 07/31/04 at 8:24 AM | Comments (2)

I'm the Most Frugalest

I had a bunch of spiral-bound notebooks which I had used for various classes, and each of them had about 25 remaining clean sheets out of the original 100. I would not be able to use the remaining sheets for another class easily, and it seemed a shame to let them go to waste, so I just did some surgery.

I snipped the coil locks with dykes, twisted the coils out, and assembled the clean sheets into a new notebook shape, with the back and cover from one of the disassembled notebooks. Then I twisted the coil back in through the holes and used pliers to make new coil locks.

Viola! A stringed instrument! And voila! A new notebook!

I'm now trying to decide if this makes me resourceful, crafty, and smart, or simply a huge lame-o loser who rebuilds notebooks in order to save $3.

You may wonder what happened to the notes from the classes. I've got them in file folders for now, but once I don't need them any more for school, they're going in the recycling bin. I learned that lesson the first time around: the only school notes I ever used after I finished school were my Shakespeare notes, and that was because I hadn't yet bought my trusty summaries of the plays that's ever so much better than my notes. Yet I toted that crap around with me for five years.

# Posted by ayse on 07/29/04 at 12:18 PM

No More Funny Smell

There's been a funny smell at my desk for a while. At first I thought it was coming from something I had spilled on the chair, then from the monitor, then from some mysterious item on the desk, although there didn't seem to be anything terribly toxic on there; just a gigantic pile of school papers and reports from my stockbroker.

Today, I was blazing through the paper pile with sword and flame (better than filing, I assure you) and I found a small envelope of vitamins that stank to high heaven tucked into a quarterly report as a bookmark.

Now it smells nice at my desk again.

# Posted by ayse on 07/28/04 at 5:55 PM

A Walk in the Park

I forgot it was Wednesday, and most importantly, the other Wednesday when the housekeepers descend upon Casa Decrepit like a mighty avenging army of cleaning angels and remove the fur and dust and grime of the previous two weeks.

So I was startled out of my shower by a loud knock.

Rather than stick around the house, I leashed up the dog and took her on a walk down the street to Littlejohn Park.

We sat on a bench (well, I sat on the bench; she sniffed around on the ground) and watched some Carniolan honeybees snuffling about in the clover, then both the dog and I were stunned to see a swarm of dragonflies appear. There were twenty or so of them, swooping and diving and hovering above the playing field.

We watched until they swarmed off, then walked the rest of the way around the park, stopping briefly to say hello to a man in a hole doing plumbing work.

# Posted by ayse on 07/28/04 at 1:40 PM

San Luis Abyssmal

I spent the last couple of days down in SLO, meeting with my advisor, looking at places to live, and locating hardware stores and hobby shops (the basic needs of an architecture student).

Downtown SLO is kind of twee and slightly yuppy for my tastes, but workable. There was a shoe repair shop, which bodes well. I don't think much of people who can't support even one shoe repair shop.

The countryside out of town is breathtakingly beautiful, and reminds me of the countryside outside of Ithaca, with slightly different vegetation overlaid on it. Last night I went for a drive through the fields and got to watch a sunset through the fog, that brilliant orange light streaming across the crops horizontally, diffused by the fog and occasionally cut out entirely by the hills.

I liked one place I saw: a tiny bedroom, but lots of common space, a usable garage, and a house dog who is charming and well-behaved. If I lived there, Rosie could occasionally visit for short periods, as long as she was well-behaved. That has a great appeal. Also, there would be a small private patio that I could fill with plants.

I looked at a couple of more generic places, but they felt very dormitory-ish, and I really dislike the feeling that I would be asked to buy alcohol for my underage roommates all the time. Also, they were much more expensive.

My meeting with my advisor went well. I worked out a schedule for next quarter, but a longer-term schedule will have to wait because there was a mixup in the admissions office and they didn't realize they had to do transcript analysis for all of the transfer students. So I probably won't get my analysis until mid-fall. I was a bit surprised to find that I'd be taking 18 credits rather than the expected 15, but they're in the middle of curriculum changes, so in a way it was to be expected.

I register on Friday afternoon.

# Posted by ayse on 07/27/04 at 4:54 PM

The Other Face of Infertility

After about the eightieth person asked me about this, I figured it was time to write it down somewhere where I could reference it rather than re-tell it time and again.

Going off to school has brought up a bunch of weird issues for us, problems to solve, things we need to change about our lives. We'll be getting a roommate for the house in Alameda, who will help with animal care in exchange for part of the rent. I'll be getting a room in San Luis Obispo, and commuting home every other weekend. This is a lifestyle change, and one that very obviously would not stand up to the stresses of having a child.

Which is fine, because I can't have children. Which is fine, because we're not planning to have them.

Usually, when you hear about infertile women, you hear about the heartbreak, the pain, the loss, the suffering, the multiple miscarriages and grief and all that that they go through. You hear about medical procedures and doctors and how much they have always wanted to be a mother but how they feel cursed by god for not being able to do that. You hear about how they hate themselves for their condition, how their lives begin to revolve around the condition until nothing else seems to matter.

I have a lot of sympathy for those women, I can understand the pain and the hurt, but I'm not one of them. I'm an infertile woman who is completely fine with that condition, for whom the condition is not at all about heartbreak or hurt. It's just part of who I am. Planning not to have children makes it a lot easier, but even if I did want children, it's my opinion that it's not the bearing and giving birth that makes you a mother. It's the mothering. So being unable to bear children would not, for me, make me feel inadequate or less of a mother.

(Yes, I understand the desire to give birth and how some women feel that that is critical to their self-image as women, and if you read into this a condemnation of your own choices on this matter, you're a self-absorbed bitch. I'm talking about my own choices and feelings, not yours, so get over yourself.)

When I was in my mid-twenties, the pain from my period had reached unmanageable levels. I was nonfunctional for at least a couple of days out of the month, in so much pain that bright flashes were appearing behind my eyelids. I spent those days curled up and vomiting up anything I ate, and shoving fistfuls of ibuprofen down my throat, so much that I developed an ulcer. I had excellent health coverage, so I went to see a doctor, and she did some diagnostics. A couple of months of medical procedures which I won't go into.

One afternoon I left work early and went into her office to discuss the results. She'd asked me to come in, refused to talk about them over the phone. "What I have to say should be said in person."

Ominous.

As I drove over, I thought about what could be wrong. Cancer, I thought. I'm dying from cancer. This is uterine cancer and I have a month to live. I am such a drama queen. I was already picturing my deathbed scene, mentally working out my will. Dividing up my possessions. I walked through the bright California sunlight to the doctor's office in a daze. It didn't seem real.

"I have good news and bad news."

"I want the bad news first." I always want the bad news first. It reduces the time spent dreading it.

She looked me in the eye, with her Sensitive Doctor look on her face (they have to practise that in med school) and said, "You're probably never going to be able to carry a child to term."

Bear in mind that in my mid-twenties, I was hardly planning my future children. I didn't even know what I wanted to do when I grew up. I didn't have the kind of relationship where that would really be a possibility, anyway.

I stared at her. I didn't know what to say. I tried to think about how I should respond. My overwhelming response was, "and so...?"

There was my answer. Having had the possibility taken away from me, I found I wasn't all that damaged by it. On the other hand, I was deeply relieved at not having cancer.

She was waiting for me to speak. I said, "Was that the bad news or the good news?"

The good news was that there were a bunch of hormonal therapies I could go on to make the pain stop happening, and indeed that was good news. Five years later, the pain was reduced to a mere crampiness, and things were looking much better.

I'm not going to go into medical detail about this. I don't want diagnoses, cures,
work-arounds. It would be significantly dangerous to me or a potential child if I were to get pregnant and try to carry to term. No, I'm not a DES daughter; this is a naturally occurring genetic twist that appears now and then, and it may run in my family. That's all you need to know. But I'm not having any children, so there's not a problem.

So I can't have children. Or, I possibly could, but it's a high-risk scenario. And I'm not a big fan of major medical intervention in pregnancy. I decided that there was a good reason why people like me can't reproduce on our own, and I was not going to mess with that. I wouldn't want to wish this pain thing on a daughter, so if I got a yearning to raise a child, I figured I would adopt, maybe an open adoption like my cousin. That felt right to me at the time as a plan of action, should I suddenly be siezed by the urge to have a child.

But I've never had a yearning for a child. Years later, I met a man who also didn't want children, and he liked the fact that I didn't, either. We did both have a yearning for a dog, and we got a dog together. We got married.

Now we're going to live apart most of the time for four or maybe five years. We have our marriage, and we have decided that that is the most important thing for us. More important than my schooling (if it's not working, I will drop out and reapply to UC Berkeley), more important than his job (or maybe he will quit and come live with me in San Luis Obispo), more important than details of everyday life. The fact that our living situation makes it tough to have a child is unimportant, because we're not planning to have a child. We've taken steps to make that extremely unlikely, because my health is important to both of us.

Some people think we will change our minds, but for something like this it doesn't matter if you change your mind. Even if I wanted to have a child from my own body now, I couldn't. And going to architecture school for four or five years makes it pretty much impossible to adopt. So there will be no children.

There you have it.

# Posted by ayse on 07/22/04 at 11:30 AM

Fun With Web Logs

More weblog analysis:

Students are on summer break, so the portfolio renderings of various famous buildings (particularly the Schroeder House) are no longer the most popular.

Now it's "honeymoon photos" (you are all a bunch of perverts) and "joanne milito."

Who is Joanne Milito? She's this incompetant jerk of a supposed customer-service rep I exchanged e-mail with months ago regarding insulation. And my page about her is the number one hit for her name. I hope she's soaking in it.

I'm now working on a world-class rant about the painters who turned from great people to work with into world-class assholes as soon as the boss-man got tired of delivering on the quality the contract promised.

# Posted by ayse on 07/21/04 at 10:36 PM

The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow

Or at least, Noel will come home from the English Country Death March.

We had a gorgeous sky today, and a spectacular sunset over the houses.

I barely saw any of it.

It's been a while since I pushed myself this hard for this long. I've been working at least eight hours a day on the bedroom, in addition to school and house care and animals. Just about everything else has fallen by the wayside. One of the consequences of this is that I'm actually in a lot of pain.

Every now and then, when it's been a while since my knees acted up, I get all disdainful of my teenage self and my knee problems back then. Then I do something stupid like work non-stop for a week through twinges, then through actual pain, and I get a good solid reminder of what the pain was like back then. Only I was far more stoic than I am now.

I had intended to go to the gym tonight and sit in the hot tub there to relax for a while, but I'm just so damned sick of having the bedroom in chaos that I didn't do that and worked straight through. I would not have been able to restart work after hot-tubbing, so I got more work done, but I'm incredibly slow now, with every part of my body protesting this treatment and writing letters to the Red Cross.

I'm almost done patching the plaster. I will finish tomorrow morning. There's not so much to do now. I'm just too damned tired to do anything more, and I want to take a nice hot shower and then get into bed.

You may wonder what Rosie has been doing through all this. She's been a very good dog, despite being completely ignored and not allowed to do anything fun because that would cut into scraping time. She doesn't mind construction scenes, although she is not fond of the Shop Vac (she follows the nozzle around, biting at it when it comes too close). She spent most of today lying on the floor while I worked, picking at her toes.

It's nice having a dog who is relaxed about stuff. Sometimes she's a bit too relaxed, but for the most part, it's reassuring to know I can tear the entire house apart and disrupt her sleeping arrangements and serve her meals late and not take her on walks and barely throw the ball for her in the yard, and she will still be her usual calm, assured self. She knows it's not going to last, and that nothing bad will happen.

The only thing she doesn't know is where Noel has gone. She's been looking for him for days, and it's not funny any more. He better show up soon, or the dog is going to have some words with him. Either that, or when he does show up she will wag her tail right off.

Now I'm going to go have my hot shower, a couple ibuprofen, and six hours of sleep.

# Posted by ayse on 07/16/04 at 11:59 PM

Arrr

My recurrent tendinitis in my right knee has flared up again with all the climbing up and down of the ladder I've been doing in the bedroom. This has two consequences:

1. I'm going a lot slower than I would prefer because it takes me three times as long as normal to go up or down the ladder
2. I'm definitely not going to get everything done before Noel and Paul get back from Mendocino

Oh, well. With luck and aspirin (the drug of choice for itises), I will have all the plaster repair done and perhaps a first coat of primer. Then Noel can help me do the painting like a good, obedient husband.

# Posted by ayse on 07/14/04 at 9:29 PM

House of Chaos

I'm making slow but sure progress on the bedroom. And after talking to Noel this afternoon feeling much calmer about the mess; he must be getting plenty of sleep and having a good time, because he was completely blase about the prospect of coming home to find his bedroom a pile of rubble.

(You can read more about the bedroom project on Casa Decrepit.)

While the bedroom project goes on, the rest of the house is in chaos. I've been sort of keeping up on the dishes, but that's only because with Noel away, I keep forgetting when mealtimes are and just going hungry until I suddenly feel dizzy while climbing the ladder, and realize it's been eight hours since I've eaten. Not bright.

There's also the small matter of the laundry, still in a basket downstairs. There's nowhere to sort it, as our bedroom furniture is all over the hall and bathroom upstairs. And I really should do a load of whites before Noel gets back, so he has some underpants to wear. Or, well, clean ones.

And then there's the elephant in the living room, which is that we decided it would be a good idea for us to get a lodger to live with Noel while I'm away at school; somebody who could share housework and animal care, for example, when Noel comes to visit me. We have asked a friend to move in, and he's intersted but just wants to sit down and talk about it with us, but in the meantime, we need to figure out just how we're going to empty the front bedroom so he has a place to live. We're talking about having him move in in August, so this is far more critical a situation than I'm making it out to be.

Have I mentioned that I have to find housing in San Luis Obispo? Well, I do.

# Posted by ayse on 07/13/04 at 7:41 PM

Days of Hard Work Ahead

Noel will totally kill me if I don't finish the bedroom repainting project by the time he gets home.

And, um, it's quite a bit more complicated than originally anticipated.

Fortunately for me, it turns out that in California, an annulment based on insanity requires that the condition have existed prior to the marriage. And a divorce based on incurable sanity requires a doctor to certify it. I've been told that it's quite hard to get somebody certified as insane, so I'm guessing that destroying the bedroom by trying to redecorate while one's spouse is away at English Country Death Camp might not be sufficient.

Unfortunately for me, none of that actually gets the plaster stabilized in the bedroom, does it now?

# Posted by ayse on 07/12/04 at 11:46 PM

Giggle

I just found the most fascinating thing while tidying in the bedroom.

A chart, made by me in 1987, of my friends and acquaintances in high school, and who dated who, plus who had a crush on who.

The chart has different symbols for level of relationship (crush, one date, actually dating) and a method of showing what order the relationships happened in. It's fascinating, and I have absolutely no recollection of having made it, even though it was clearly made over a period of a year and with extensive commitment required.

Now I have to leaf through my other diaries and see if I made more of these. I guess this proves that I'm a natural information organizer. Or a psycho stalker.

# Posted by ayse on 07/12/04 at 6:07 PM

Stravinsky on the Ice Cream Truck Bells

George, Christo, and I went to the San Francisco Symphony's free concert in Dolores Park today. It started at 2pm, but we decided to arrive late because the earlier bits on the program were kind of boring.

They started out with Glinka's "Overture to Ruslan and Ludmila," then Greig's "Piano Concerto in A minor, Opus 16" with the talented Yundi Li on piano. We arrived halfway through the Grieg, and found a seat not too far from the stage.

Unfortunately, we were very close to a flotilla of ice-cream trucks (little hand-pushed ones, not full-sized), so the entire program was accompanied by the tinkling of the bells every few seconds.

After the Grieg there was a 15-minute intermission, then they started up with Borodin's "Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor," which was actually quite charming and accessible. Unfortunately, somebody made the supremely bad decision to put Stravinsky's "Firebird Suite" at the end of the program. In an outdoor concert, playing a piece that starts out very quiet and slow is a bad move. I suggested to Christo that they put it there to encourage peope to leave slowly at the end of the concert, instead of all at once, because people began to file out when they realized they would never get to hear the whole thing.

Afterwards, we walked back up to Christo and George's house, then had dinner at La Mediterranee. It was only 6:50 when we finished dinner, but I felt sleepy (I got up at 6:30am) and still had two chapters of law homework to do, so I excused myself.

# Posted by ayse on 07/11/04 at 9:02 PM

Do We Still Pretend to be the Land of the Free?

Here's in interesting little tidbit, a piece of news that makes people who already feel like paranoid conspiracy theorists feel more panicky. The government (um, that would be the government run by the guy who might lose this election) is looking at how to delay a vote if there's a terrorist attack).

No, really:

Homeland Security Department spokesman Brian Rochrkasse told the magazine the agency is reviewing the matter "to determine what steps need to be taken to secure the election."

...for George W. Bush.

One of these days, it'd be nice to see those people who drive around with American flags draped all over their cars actually do something to preserve their supposed liberty.

# Posted by ayse on 07/11/04 at 11:55 AM

Surprise!

We managed to throw a surprise party for our friend George tonight.

I did flowers and cupcakes (ie, birthday cake), and Christo did main food and inviting, and Joseph the Chef did food finessing and sangria.

Noel and Paul Sartin did the music.

The best part was that just as George was about to open the door, when everybody was gathered in the hall waiting to say SURPRISE!, he turned and greeted a person coming up to the door, a late arriver. So the door was wide open and there we all were, staring at his back as he talked to Bill about what he happened to be doing in the neighborhood.

Then he turned around and we all yelled SURPRISE! at last, and he was well and truly surprised.

A good time was had by all, and the organ didn't even get started up, which makes it rather more talkable at a party.

The sangria was the big hit; the cupcakes less so; I could have make half as many, but I wasn't counting on two other people bringing desserts.

Tomorrow Noel goes off for a week to Mendocino with Paul, and I begin The Great Redecoration Project. What shall I do, and which room shall I do it to?

# Posted by ayse on 07/10/04 at 12:28 AM | Comments (1)

Nightie-Night

We just sent our houseguest to bed.

Paul Sartin is here from England for a couple of weeks -- this is the fellow whose family we stayed with in England in April -- and he managed to stay up a full 24 hours between the time he woke up in England and the time when we finally sent him off to bed with orders not to set his fucking alarm clock because he's resting.

Tomorrow night we're having musical dinner with our dear friends George and Christo, and then Paul and Noel will be off to English week while I languish about the house for a week alone. ALONE, I TELL YOU.

Actually, as is traditional, I will be redecorating while Noel is away.

Me, the dog, a couple pots of Benjamin Moore paint, and a case of $2 Chuck. We are unstoppable.

# Posted by ayse on 07/08/04 at 10:52 PM

A Very Adult Evening

Oh, get your mind out of the gutter.

This evening, Noel and I went to the gym for a good solid workout (which was on top of the three miles of walking I do every day), as part of our July resolution to get a really good cardio workout at least twice a week, then we came home and started rooting around to figure out what to eat for dinner.

Instead of the usual pasta and sauce, or burritos, we made a classic Chinese stir-fry (courtesy of the Chinese cookbook of my childhood, on extended loan from my mother). It was a bit odd, because we didn't have quite the right ingredients (the stock was weird weird weird, and we ran out of peanut oil halfway through so we ended up using olive oil), but it was pretty good, and definitely worth another go.

We didn't have any cooking-quality white wine, so we used a splash of Navarro Chenin Blanc, which made a nice accompaniment to dinner.

Very civilized.

# Posted by ayse on 07/06/04 at 10:29 PM

My Alter Ego

I apparently have a secondary personality. This personality is answering the phone for me, which is a handy function for a secondary personality. She's even speaking to the registrar at City College, discussing the status of my transcript, which I have been unable to do (as they do not answer the phone, and apparently are not keen on calling back people who leave them messages in a timely fashion).

How do I know this? Because I finally broke down today after my third phone call, no answer, and message left on the voicemail to never be returned, and sent them e-mail. This is the response I got:

We spoke to you today and reported the status of your request. Weve never received a message from you. Maybe you didnt leave a phone # or possibly we couldnt understand the message. Both of these things happen frequently. We answer messages on the day or the next day after they are received.

Which is odd, because I have been sitting here since I got home at 1:30, phoning various registrars and so forth to try to get this stuff all cleared up in time for my transfer to get finalized.

Not only that, but if they didn't get a message from me, why did they speak to me in the first place?

And who the hell did they speak to about my transcript?

And why didn't they simply tell me what the status is in the e-mail?

# Posted by ayse on 07/06/04 at 4:23 PM

Nutcases of the World, Unite

Our nutso former landlady has apparently been served with papers by the San Francisco sheriff. I say this with confidence, because she called our house (on our unlisted phone number that we deliberately never gave to her, but which we had to put on the service papers) and left an incoherent message about how evil we are for trying to get "blood from a stone." She claimed to be bankrupt, but this is not a person who was terribly honest with us for the two years we rented from her, and who has hoped we would ignore the fact that she still owes us money, so who knows what the real story is.

Interestingly, it ties in with the lastest chapters for law. If she has mysteriously declared bankruptcy, then she has to list us as creditors in order to get her debt to us discharged. Since we haven't gotten a notice from the court about any such listing, then either she didn't really declare bankrupcty, or she did, but she didn't list us. If she didn't list us, then the debt won't be discharged just by ignoring it. It's funny how some people just want to avoid acting like adults, and think they can get away with that forever.

We drove by the old house the other day, and the FOR SALE sign was down. The big awful cactus hasn't been pruned since we moved out and is showing it; those things need pruning every three months or they fill with trash and grow badly. The Mexican sage I planted is doing well, a given as the stuff thrives on neglect, which was why I planted it in the first place. Somebody (maybe the new owners) had put up a weird fence alongside the driveway, in such a way as to make getting out of the car difficult, and to make it impossible for the neighbors to use the driveway to access their back yard (which they were given to doing, folding in my car's rear-view mirror for their convenience, even though it was not their driveway -- GOD were they assholes).

I always felt badly for that house, being stuck with such a neglectful owner. I knew that when the landlady told us she wanted to put it on the market, she wanted us to want to buy it, but I figured that if I were going to spend $200,000 (hah!) renovating a house, it had better start out with a lot more potential to be a great place, and I was tired of living on a busy street with lots of crime.

Also, with the hostile, unpleasant neighbors, there was no damned way I was paying money to stay in that house when we didn't need to. I think that when we didn't respond to her suggestion that she was ready to sell the house, that was the beginning of the "you're not my friends any more!" transformation (complete with retracted decision to sell and 25% rent hike). As if we'd ever been her friends.

With any luck, this will mostly be over in August. Collecting on a judgement is not going to be easy, though.

# Posted by ayse on 07/05/04 at 5:31 PM

Crackle Crackle

This evening we took the dog out for her first walk since she got sick (she's finally stopped coughing, so it seemed relatively safe). As we stepped out the front door, I noticed this crackling sound, and told Noel it was coming from the electrical wires.

"I think somebody is welding over there and the sound is bouncing around."

But as we walked, it became clear that the sound was coming from the electrical wires. It was kind of creepy, not entirely the sort of thing that makes you feel reassured and calm about your personal safety.

As we came home, we ran into our neighbor Michael, who was also out for a walk, and had also noted the crackling.

"I think it's because of the moisture in the air." It has been foggy lately, but honestly, it's not that much foggier than normal, and they don't usually make that sound. I think I will call the electric company (our city has its own not-for-profit electrical service, so I don't have to deal with the buttheads at PG&E) and ask them what it is.

On the other hand, Rosie was just plain overjoyed to be out and about again after a week and a half of being cooped up. And she's stopped coughing, too.

# Posted by ayse on 07/03/04 at 12:15 AM

Technology is a Wonderful Thing

I've been debating what to post in this post for a few days, ever since I noticed that I was about to reach 200 posts in this blog.

I thought about writing a nice little piece about how, walking to school in the morning, I get to see everybody's sprinklers going wild, spraying water everywhere but on the plants they want to water. There really wasn't much to say about that, though. Although I've been considering doing some photos for Life Through a Viewfinder.

I thought about writing something about preparing to go away to school next year, and how hard it will be on Noel and me, and how much I have to do to make it work marginally OK. That seemed too depressing, and it's so complicated that it really won't all fit in one post, anyway.

I've also been thinking about getting an MBA at Calpoly (in Architectural Management, not at random) and I've spent some time researching MBA programs, so I could write about that.

Then I realized that really, the 200th post is about having had 200 inconsequential things to write about. Not important enough to make into their own section of this site, but important enough that I remembered to come home and write about them.

The real terror is that if I wrote 200 posts in six months, that puts me at 400 posts in a year. That's not even including my contributions to mailing lists or other web fora. If I dedicated my energies to posting only here, I could easily bury my few readers in endless trivia.

Be very afraid.

# Posted by ayse on 07/02/04 at 8:58 PM