Category Archives: Randomness

Birds

13 Friday Jul 2012

Posted by in Grief, Randomness, Self-publishing

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A year ago Saturday my mom went into the hospital. She never came home again. This year, my dad got married on Saturday. I suppose it was a better way to spend the day than the way we spent it last year. But…yeah. Anyway, my brother and his daughter came to visit for the wedding so there were many photo op events — the wedding, the reception, dinner at my house, a picnic and inner-tubing at Kelly Park, the Science Museum, that kind of thing … but that’s not what I want to write about.

On Monday morning, I was sitting on the patio when suddenly, “thunk.” A little dark blob whizzed across my line of sight, and hit the ground. The dog immediately investigated and her level of curiosity and excitement was so high that after a minute, I followed suit, despite thinking it was a big bug. It wasn’t. It was a bird. Maybe a baby, maybe not. It had hit the spinning fan and it was sprawled on the ground, clearly hurt, its wings a mess, its feet curled oddly, but still breathing, still in distress.

What do you do with a hurt bird? I had no idea. It was the damn baby rabbits all over again. I picked it up and set it on the side of the grill, so that it was away from the dog. I watched it lying on its side, struggling to breathe, its heart beating fast, its eyes closing and going from dark beads to cloudy white orbs. The feathers were so soft, but I didn’t touch it after I set it down, just talked to it and grieved as it died. I couldn’t bear to bury it right away, so I took the dog for her walk and did my morning chores and then I went back out on the patio to deal with the body. I didn’t look at it — didn’t want to see it — until I’d found the trowel. I figured I’d bury it next to the two baby rabbit bodies — my little garden is turning into quite the cemetery. But when I finally came back to it, it was in a different position. Eyes closed, it was huddled small, but on its feet, and as I watched, I could see its heartbeat.

Huh.

Great. So it was going to take a long time to die. Lovely. Just what I needed. But I bent over it and its eyelids fluttered and then closed again, so it was clearly not ready to be buried.

I went back into the house and found a little bowl and brought out some water and put it next to the bird and then we went off to the park and did our inner-tubing and our picnicking and the whole time, I kept wishing that I’d added some sugar to the water. I’d brought out some millet, too, but it was only after we were on our way that I realized that the shape of its beak meant that it was a nectar drinking bird, not a seed eater.

We drove home, and I came into the house and I dreaded looking out onto the porch. I knew there’d be a little brown shape huddled on the grill and I knew that I would feel helpless and indecisive and miserable, not knowing how to help it. But no. No shape. I went out with such trepidation — had it fallen off? Had it tried to fly and landed on the hard ground? Why hadn’t I put it someplace soft? But I went out and looked all around and it was gone. Just gone.

It lived. It must have. It must have recovered, and then flown away.

It was such a surprise. Such a delight. A little miracle. For the rest of the day, I could be happy knowing that the bird was out there somewhere, maybe bruised, maybe sore, but at the very least able to fly.

Then two days later, I was driving home from the vet — $160 poorer but with a dog that I could stop worrying about — when the car in front of me hit a baby sandhill crane. HIT IT. The car saw it, slowed, and then fucking drove into the bird and drove away. The bird crumpled to the ground, but it was still alive. It was struggling to move, spasmodic twitches of its wings and legs.

I was on Dodd Road, which is a crappy road. Two people died in just about that spot ten days ago. There’s a curve and no place to easily stop on the right. The car next to me — a minivan — pulled over into the turn lane, but I couldn’t. Plus, I had the dog in the car. So I drove home, crying all the way. I’d never seen anything so callous and cruel. The person who hit it — they saw it. They slowed way down. And then they kept going. Who does that? What kind of sick person sees a two foot tall baby in the road and then just decides to run it over? (That’s a picture swiped from wikipedia. Sandhill cranes are a protected species, only 5000 left in the wild according to wikipedia, and if I’d been smart enough to get the license plate of the car, the driver could have been fined.)

The moment I got home, I called the vet and asked if I went back and the bird was still alive, if I could bring it to them. She told me to call Birds of Prey, a bird rescue place in Maitland, so I found their phone number, grabbed a sheet to wrap the bird in, and headed back out. 

It was gone. Totally gone. But two adult sandhills and a baby stood in the grass on the side of the road.

I don’t know whether the person in the minivan took the bird somewhere but if he or she did, it must have been alive. Or maybe that baby by the side of the road was the same baby and the car had knocked it over but not hurt it. But either way, I drove home with at least hope that the second bird of the week would survive.

Can I call it a weird week? Two birds that I thought were dead, not dead. It’s . . . nice. Also a very odd set of coincidences. One bird is just a nice small miracle. Two? Feels like a sign, except I’m not at all sure of what.

Tetrachromats

23 Saturday Jun 2012

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Ooh, so cool! They have found a real tetrachromat!! Yes, two exclamation points, I know, but I’m excited. Tetrachromats are — for those who haven’t memorized Akira’s speech about quirks and super-tasters — people with four types of cone cells in their eyes. Theoretically, they would be able to see a range of colors enormously far beyond what ordinary people can see, but they would probably never know they were different, because how would they find out? Apparently, though, they are no longer theoretical: Humans-with-super-human-vision

To a tetrachromat, the rest of us are color-blind. But there’s no way for them to explain the colors that they can see, because we have no shared language to use. It’s a completely useless super-power. But very, very cool.

Darling dog — non-dog lovers beware

02 Saturday Jun 2012

Posted by in Personal, Randomness

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I just wrote a cranky comment on a blog and actually posted it. I think that makes the second time in a week. I read a blog post recently in which a line said something like, “If you want people to take you seriously, you must…” and my immediate mental reaction was “Why would I want people to take me seriously? Why does that matter?” This is relevant to my cranky comments, because, wow, some of the commentary on self-publishing takes itself really, really, really seriously. And yeah, technically I should be blaming the people behind the commentary, but I think it’s just group-think. People read advice and accept it and then articulate it themselves without ever really saying “Why?”

But I did not come here to rant about that. The dog has been amazing me recently — truly amazing me — with her cleverness, which is pretty impressive for an eight-year-old dog. I did a really good job of training her not to make noise to get what she wants as a puppy, so she’s never whined to go out or barked much. Run-down: noisy dog gets isolated in bathroom. Noisy dog stays isolated until noisy dog has been silent for exactly one minute, at which time the door opens and companion appears, lavish with love and praise. The quick response to silence allows noisy dog to realize that noise is counter-productive and silence is rewarded. Dog becomes quiet dog, especially remarkable for a JRT. Except in the back yard, where dog is allowed to bark freely. So the dog doesn’t make noise to get what she wants. Except now she’s learned how to make mechanical noise.

She started with the bathtub. She doesn’t like still water and never has, so for years, she’s hopped in the tub to get a drink. I think she might have started that in a house where the faucet dripped. And she’s got me well-trained now, because I usually hear the sound of her claws hitting the porcelain and come turn the water on trickle so she can drink. But I need to hear her when she hits the tub, because if I don’t, she’s quiet inside it. Lately, though, I’ve been listening to a lot more music so I don’t always hear her. She’s figured out how to make the drain plug rattle in the faucet and that’s loud enough so that I do hear it.

So she’s now learned that I respond to sound. Extension of that: she used to sit and wait patiently at the back door for as long as it took me to notice her and let her outside. Not anymore. The doors are French doors, and on one side, the unused side, there are blinds that reach to the ground. On the other side, the door we actually use to go in and out, no blinds. She sits at the door we use and if I don’t pay attention quickly enough, she sticks her nose over, into the blinds, and lifts them up and down to make them rattle. Then she waits at the door again. If I don’t respond, she gets more and more energetic with her rattle, making the sound louder and louder. I’m obviously letting her train me, but I’m so impressed by how smart she is to have figured this out after a lifetime of not using noise in this way, and to have managed to extend knowledge gained in one area, ie “if I rattle this metal thing, my person will come and fulfill my wishes” to another area, ie “if I rattle this plastic thing, maybe my person will come here?” 

One more story of Zelda cleverness: she has made a connection between the sound of the phone and my preparations to leave the house. Normally, if I am wandering around looking like I might be going somewhere — hitting the bathroom, picking up my keys, looking for my glasses — she watches me with interest and a little hope, but not eagerness. And she waits in the living room to see what I might be doing. But when the phone rings and in response I start making preparations to leave the house, she dashes to the back door and waits there. She’s realized that those two signals connect to mean a ride in the car to go pick up R wherever he might be.

I think what amazes me about these things is that she’s making connections. It’s not just that she’s learned one piece of information or signal, it’s that she’s putting signals together to make sense out of larger ideas. She’s the only dog I’ve ever known well, but I think she must be a really smart member of her species.

Also gorgeous and maybe later I’ll add a picture to this post to show off how cute she is. At the moment, though, we’re sitting outside, and I’ve got no pictures handy.

Better Days Ahead

17 Thursday May 2012

Posted by in Personal, Randomness

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On May 28th last year, R and I were on the way to the grocery store, when I said, “Is that a dog?” It was a dog. A white Jack Russell terrier that had been so recently hit by a car that it was still in the middle of the road, still moving. I turned the car around, drove back, and sat with the dog for the seconds it had left before it died. It looked at me, saw me, then its eyes glazed over. I brought the body home and buried it in the back yard. We never made it to the grocery store.

The next day, I went back to that neighborhood, looked for signs. Every telephone pole had one. I called the owner. The dog was Hugo. 14 years old. And Jay, his owner, needed to see him. So I dug the dog back up and Jay came and took his body away.

Exactly two weeks later, Karen called with the news about a “suspicious nodule.” Over the next nine months, Mom died, Malcolm died, Sharon died, Michelle died.

Yesterday, R and I were on the way to the store, when R said, “Is that a dog?” It was a dog. A Yorkie in the middle of a busy road. I stopped the car immediately, annoying the people behind me. R got out of the car, annoying the people ahead of us, and managed to scare the dog off the road. I pulled over and together the two of us herded the dog back into a safer place, and started trying doors. The owners were in the second house we tried and very happy to get their dog safely back. They hadn’t even realized he was missing yet.

I think the best part is that I had made a wrong turn — yes, on the way to the store, I made a wrong turn, this is why I get lost so easily — and we should never have been on that street at all. I know that it’s a meaningless coincidence, but it feels like a sign of better things to come.

And even if not, we get to know that a dog is safe at home tonight because this time, we were there in time.

The Versatile Blogger

21 Saturday Jan 2012

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JC Piech left a comment on my last post that she had nominated me for the Versatile Blogger Award. I thought, pretty much simultaneously, ‘cool’ and ‘um, what is that?’

Turns out it’s basically a meme, the internet version of a chain letter, but an awfully nice one as these things go. The rules are:

  •  Thank the person who gave you this award. That’s common courtesy.
  •  Include a link to their blog. That’s also common courtesy — if you can figure out how to do it.
  •  Next, select 15 blogs/bloggers that you’ve recently discovered or follow regularly. ( I would add, pick blogs or bloggers that are excellent!)
  •  Nominate those 15 bloggers for the Versatile Blogger Award — you might include a link to this site.
  •  Finally, tell the person who nominated you 7 things about yourself.

I marked that bullet list to quote, but it sure doesn’t look any different than normal text to me. Well, note, please that the bulleted list is cut-and-pasted from the VBA website–I didn’t write it.

So thank you, JC, it’s very nice of you!

I use Google reader to follow blogs, so creating a list of links might be sort of arduous. We’ll see if I can do fifteen. And I suppose it would be good to pick both versatile blogs, ones with a mix of content, and blogs that are less visited. But hmm, I’m not sure I can figure that out easily either. Well, I’ll just start and see how it goes.

Bumblebee nation This is my friend Suzanne’s blog and she is not going to be grateful that I gave her this award. But I’m doing it anyway because when she blogs (very rarely, alas) she almost always makes me smile and she should blog more often.

Problem Girl I’ve been following this blog for a really long time, although I hardly ever comment so she probably doesn’t know that. But the blog owner is a surrogate mom and her stories open my eyes to a world I know nothing about.

Patricia C. Wrede’s blog probably doesn’t need such an award; she’s a much-published author and I’m sure reaches plenty of people. But hands down, this is the best writing blog I’ve ever found. She’s not blogging about the writing business, she’s blogging about the craft of writing and it’s wonderful, useful information.

I’m going to utterly fail at avoiding well-trafficked blogs, because honestly, I don’t know who gets traffic and who doesn’t. I read in Google reader and I don’t usually check the comments. I suppose I could check all their most recent posts and rule out anyone who’s received twenty or more comments, but that’s starting to seem like a lot of work when I should be writing. And this versatility thing is killing me, too–most of the blogs I read are fairly focused on one thing or another. *sigh* It’d be nice if I wasn’t so obsessive.

All right, I’m just going to quickly list a bunch of blogs that I like, and maybe you’ll find something you like, too.

An Olive Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Yummy, yummy, yummy food.

Kindle-aholic’s Book Pile. We don’t share 100% taste in books (I am over vampires, just done, done, done with them) but she’s definitely pointed out some titles that I’ve added to my wish list. 

Smitten Kitchen. Definitely tons of traffic, because everyone I know loves the recipes from this site. In fact, pretty often when someone I know has a recipe that’s so good they have to share, it’s come from Smitten Kitchen. If you like to cook, or even if you just like to eat, you should read this one.

Geek Mom This is actually lots of moms, not just one, but their chosen topics are probably obvious from the title. I actually can’t keep up with this blog: it gets a folder of its own in my RSS feed so I can read it when I have time, because they post a lot. But when I have time to look at it, I often find something interesting.

Stellar Four is actually in that Geek Mom folder, too, and again, there’s more than one blogger posting. For a while, they were kind of heavy on stuff posts–gadgets and crafts and objects to buy–which is mostly not my thing (unemployed graduate student = not spending money on anything non-essential, and my chosen craft is writing), but I’ve found some interesting links through their site.

Moody Muses is another group blog. I guess I notice these the most because group blogs are able to post more often than singular blogs. But this is a group of four writers, blogging about writing and about life, and I like reading what they have to say. 

Artisan Bread I bought their cookbook and then I created their Facebook fan group and then I stopped reading because somehow, overnight, I was ten pounds heavier. Eating bread every day, lots of bread, was not good for  me. But if you want to bake interesting kinds of bread, the recipes on this blog make it simple.

Cocktail Party Physics This is a Scientific American blog, so maybe it misses the point? But it’s such well-written science and so entertaining.

Julia If you type Julia and hippo into Google, you wind up here, which I think probably means she’s doing just fine on traffic. (I have not made much of an effort to find out how to measure this kind of thing. My blog has been happily invisible for all the years of its existence.) But I think this is the only mommy blog that I still read regularly because Julia is an incredibly talented writer who could probably make doing laundry seem like an adventure. Okay, maybe not laundry. But definitely cooking dinner.

Am I at fifteen yet? This is quite the time-consuming little project…Nope, three more to go.

Momastery is a brilliant blog. I only recently found her, so you’re probably going to say um, slow on the uptake, aren’t you? But I guess this means that I have two mommy blogs that I read. (I have nothing against mommy blogs, I used to read a lot of them. I just sort of stopped over time as I moved out of that stage of my life.)

You’ve read Hyperbole and a Half, right? I’m not counting her as one of my fifteen, although I’ll certainly nominate her for any award that there is, but to the best of my knowledge, every single solitary person I know adores her blog, so it’s not like I can introduce her to anyone. I’m just including the link in case…(and if you don’t know her, click on the link, add her to your RSS feed, you won’t see her again for weeks, maybe months, but when you do, it will be oh, so worth it.)

Aha, Glenn Bullion has a nice writerly blog.He’s an indie writer, and doesn’t post a lot, but when he does, it’s interesting.(To me, at least. But he’s got a good writing style, so you should at least give him a try.)

One more…you know, I think the hardest thing about writing this post was discovering how many blogs in my RSS feed haven’t posted anything new in six months or more. I found one that hadn’t posted anything new since 2009. I’ve been deleting them, but it feels sad. Okay, that’s the wrong emotion, though — one last blog for the Versatile Blogger Award, and I think I’ll give it to:

Kristin Cashore, This Is My Secret. She is the author of Graceling and Fire and the upcoming Bitterblue. She’s an award-winning author, so probably doesn’t need me nominating her for any new awards, but her blog is as versatile as they come: she posts about trapezes and Indian musicals and writing and Bank of America and really, just about anything. And she’s always fun to read. You should definitely check it out!

Whew…wow, that was exhausting.

So. Seven things about me:

1) I tend to be obsessive about doing things “right”. I might have obsessive personality disorder, or I might just be the kind of hypochondriacal student who diagnoses herself with everything that comes along. Speaking of which…
2) I meet the clinical criteria for agoraphobia.
3) This annoys me and I think the clinical criteria are way too general and should be made more restrictive.
4) My favorite event of the year is Epcot’s Food and Wine Festival. (<-See? Not really agoraphobic.)
5) If I win the lottery/become a best-selling author, I might like to live on a sailboat.
6) But only if I could bring my dog.

7) I don’t actually believe in ghosts. But I wish I did.

I think this might be the longest post I’ve ever written. I might have to go take a nap. Except my poor heroine is in the police station, waiting to find out whether she’s going to be charged with a crime. Probably I should get back to her and help out of her jam!

Bookmark disaster

12 Saturday Nov 2011

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Something strange went wrong with Chrome today. It kept returning errors, and wouldn’t show me any pages. I tried using Internet Explorer but found it confusing; downloaded and installed Firefox but found it frustrating. I’m just used to Chrome. It works the way I think it should. And it’s fast. And it knows all the places I like to go.

So I read some suggestions in the help pages and the simplest seemed to be to uninstall the software and reinstall it. A moment — a single moment — of thought would have made me question the wisdom of this decision, but did I pause for that moment? No, I did not. I was too frustrated.

All of my bookmarks, all of my carefully organized folders of bookmarks, interesting writing sites, college sites, links to… everything… are gone. Strangely, I feel like I’ve been robbed, that weird little shock when you open the car and realize that the glove compartment has been ransacked, that the CDs are gone, the change in the cupholder has been cleaned out, and that instead of hopping in the car and heading to work, you have to call the police. Only I’m not sure there are any police to call.

Ironically, it made me happy that I’d changed the address of the blog, so at least I knew how to find it. It’ll take me forever to recreate my bookmarks.

If I looked for a picture to represent this post, it would be a sad face.

Eureka

02 Friday Sep 2011

Posted by in Grief, Personal, Randomness

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On August 6th, my mother died and two days later, Eureka was cancelled. I had thought that I was as sad as it was possible to be, that my body was absolutely filled up with sorrow, no more room for any more, and yet, surprise, there was room. Losing a television show made me cry, and wow, did that make me feel like an idiot. Really? Crying over a television show? I should seriously get a life.

But Eureka is a special show. It’s not just a weekly wacky story, explosions and absurd science and characters taking pratfalls (although there’s plenty of that.) It’s also a weekly glimpse into a community where three lovely things hold true.

The first is that everyone is weird in their own way, and that everyone is accepted despite or because of it. I admit, I also love it because everyone is smart and smart is seen as normal instead of strange, but even without the smart, people in Eureka have quirky obsessions, obscure interests, and random passions. The rocket scientist mechanic, the felonious physicist, the cook with the PhDs in gastronomy — despite their differences, they all work together, live together, care about each other.

The second is that no one is evil.

The third is that there’s always hope. No matter what happens, no matter how bleak things look, Carter will find a way to save the day.

Eureka is the only show that I’ve ever truly loved. Oh, sure, Firefly, Doctor Who, other shows over the years that I looked forward to watching, and other characters whose fate I cared about despite their status as imaginary people living in a box. But Eureka was a window into a world that I would have liked to live in.

I’m going to miss it.

Plenty Well Enough

18 Saturday Jun 2011

Posted by in Randomness, Writing

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Sometimes a phrase just strikes me as mysterious and this is the one for today: plenty well enough. It’s got to be colloquial, right? Like “anyways” and “anymore” and “down cellar”? But from what region?

The line I was using was “I know him plenty well enough” and after I wrote it, I wondered — southern? New England? Rural upstate New York? Unfortunately, google hasn’t helped me out. I might be the first person to have written this question on the internet, which actually would be kind of cool. I like the idea of wondering something that no one else has wondered. But that still leaves me wondering.

Laziness personified

06 Wednesday Oct 2010

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My phone ran out of power so I looked for the charger. Ten minutes and all obvious places later, I realized that I had never unpacked from my trip to California ten days ago. Oops.

Bigger oops, this led to the realization that I haven’t brushed my hair in ten days. Yeah. I really don’t think anyone would notice–the joys of straight hair–but still, I can’t help being a teeny bit impressed with my own sloth.

In further laziness news, I can only find my way back to my own blog via Google reader. It’s like not being able to remember my own name. Well, or maybe not being able to remember my own phone number, which I admit sometimes happens.