Ayse: November 2004 Archives

My friend Christo sent me this today, and I felt it was worth reposting (one of these days I'll get off my ass and actually design him a blog or something):

Whenever you hire anyone to work for you, go to the local store, book shop, whatever... you might start to ask about their feelings about policy issues. If they are more or less in line with you, go ahead and give them the $$ patronage. Otherwise, find someone else to provide the same service in the future.

I'm back in SLO after what feels like a very short holiday break. Rosie came back with me because Noel has a conference this week, and we had a good talk on the way down about how too much traffic sucks, and how we're not going to get to play as much this week as we did last week, because it's going to be very busy.

I did all the talking, of course.

Yesterday we took Rosie to the beach at Morro Bay to play. We do this every time she and Noel come down to visit, and she loves it more than anything. So much so that she refuses to do her business anywhere else, because she wants to force us to take her there sooner out of concern for her insides. A little later today, she and I will go back, because although Noel left this morning (to get to an afternoon gig in Sebastapol), Rosie stayed behind to spend the next couple days with me before I go home for Thanksgiving break.

You want pictures, you say? Allow me to oblige.

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Showing the back and shoulders of a woman is pornographic, but the nearly-nude bodies of the women below aren't?

Give me a break. People in this country need to step away from the TV set and stop pretending entertainment is real life.

I've been reading pie recipes this evening, and one thing I will say in Martha Stewart's favour, even though almost everything I've made from her recipes has come out strangely due to some gross error in the directions, you will never, and I mean never, see an MS recipe that calls for frozen dessert topping in the ingredients list.

Seriously. I'm aiming for edible. Quick and easy are bonuses but not ends in themselves.

I stayed up until about 2am finishing some watercolours that are due today in studio. The thing about watercolours is, you really can't rush them. So I have one watercolour that took three days and is very nice, and six that took several hours each and are OK. Looser, to be sure, but workable. One is drying as I type this from a final layer of paint. Of course, they're all of the same basic thing: the Arizona desert.

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I finished crocheting my sheep tonight. Once I was done with the main body, it went very fast. The legs were a bit of a pain, but I decided to soldier through and now it's all done. Check it out:

OK, it kind of looks like a pig. And I didn't have the right yarn for embroidering the face on. But it's mostly done, done, done, and ready to be off to a baby in the midwest. I'm thinking of doing a lace shawl for my next project.

There's a new craze among the "allergic" to everything crowd, and it's the elimination diet. The concept is pretty simple: you remove all possible irritants from your diet and slowly add them back in so you can tell which one is causing the trouble. The problem is, from what I can tell from a discussion with one of these people over the weekend, they're going about it all wrong.

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I've never been sick in quite this way before. Usually, sick for me means mounds of used tissues following me around the house. This time, it's relentless coughing and what feels like an ear infection. In fact, my hearing in my right ear has changed so much that everything is out of tune, which makes listening to music unbearable.

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If I'm totally honest, this is not a time in my life when I should be whining. I had a great weekend.

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I've managed to avoid all the various bleurgs that have hit friends and family for the last couple months without getting sick. So of course now I find myself feeling that achy flu feeling, and coughing, and having a sore throat (which at first I chalked up to having burnt myself eating too-hot brownies). Because of course I have two midterms and a vacation next week.

I mean, I knew I was irrationally lucky in avoiding the illness, and I knew I wasn't allowed to get a flu shot this year even though I should have one every year until 2006 because of that pneumonia episode, but it still sucks.

I've been crocheting a sheep.

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The other day a bunch of students put black plastic over the Dexter Lawn, with white stripes painted on it and statements about parking lots around the edge. As it happens, I've been thinking about parking lots and storage space lately, and how they relate to each other. And they relate to each other strongly, as random as that seems.

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I'm finding all sorts of things to do tonight to keep my mind off the election and my hand off the mouse refreshing CNN.com.

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