Music!

I don't know how I've never heard this Queen song before. In case you haven't either, I'm here to help you out.

And in case you've never seen Mulholland Drive:

Speaking of Mulholland Drive, I don't know anyone who really liked this movie. It's hard to follow and it's like two completely different people wrote and directed the first and the second half and it's weird. Weird. But you should watch it, if only for the Club Silencio scene. You are told directly that "there is no band", that it's all a recording, but when that woman gets on stage and starts singing, the song hits you in the gut and you still feel shocked and a bit betrayed when she falls to the ground and it turns out, hey...it was just a recording, an illusion. And then you get to thinking about the illusion of movies in general and the illusions in your own life and then you get a headache and take a nap.

Russian literature

I already have my major picked out for the alternate universe where I am able to go to university just for the joy of learning, and there's no need for anything I learn to have a practical career-type application. It's Russian literature! Whoo!

It seems like every time I read a Russian novel it rocks my little world. I don't know if I'll ever read anything as relentlessly witty as Pushkin's Eugine Onegin. And it's a novel in verse, so I'm sure there are things that were too subtle to translate well from Russian to English  and it is still extraordinary. I started to slow down when I was reading it about a third of the way in, because I already knew I was going to be sad when it was over.

Anna Karenina and War and Peace both had such terrific character development. I always believed in every decision that each character made since they were all so individual and their motives and desires were distinct. It seems simple, but it's not. Especially, when you have as many characters as Tolstoy insists on having.

Anton Chekhov's short stories devastated me. It was as if the author would take you into a world and then end the narrative when the characters were at their most desperate point, leaving you to fill in their future. Certain passages of In the Ravine were just like poetry.

Now I'm reading The Brothers Karamazov and I'm really enjoying it. If you have ever wondered about the meaning of life or the existence of God, it seems like Dostoevsky has already thought of every possible argument and is hashing it all out between four brothers, so you should just read this book instead of lying awake at night agonizing over why you're here.

Farewell, Fence. I hate you.

I feel like my days off this week have been eaten up by one project: taking down the wood fence around the house. I wasn't planning on tackling this until the spring since fall is normally when I paint a side of the house. However, it's still been a bit too hot for me to want to start painting yet. Oh, and this happened last week when we went to close the gate:

The wood just gave away at the hinge. I have hated this fence for the past year, so this was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back. I was ready to have this thing gone. Since it was just a demolition, I figured it would be fairly easy. However, I should have learned by now that most home improvement projects take twice the amount of time and money as you predict. That was very true this time. It started off fairly easy; I bought a small reciprocating saw to saw the fence panels down, leaving just the posts, which the boyfriend pulled up later. Since the posts were only a foot in the ground, it wasn't that hard, but they were fully encased in concrete, which necessitated us buying a sledgehammer to break them up. Then we had large holes where the posts were, which necessitated another trip to the local home improvement store to buy some fill dirt. We did take one truckload of fence panels to the landfill, but we still have this in a pile in the back of the yard.

I'm hoping that my dad will be able to come buy with his trailer the next weekend I'm off of work so we can take the rest to the landfill in one trip, versus the 2-3 trips that this would take us with the boyfriend's truck.

I was planning on just living without a fence for a while, to see if I even wanted a replacement for it. We don't have kids or pets we need to keep in the yard or anything, so a fence would pretty much be for looks. However, I didn't really like how the end of our yard and the alleyway blended into each other in one particular section without the fence. Everywhere else the fence was, the end of the yard is marked by the road but after our driveway, the alley turns to just grass, no gravel or pavement. So, the boyfriend came up with the idea to plant some shrubs there just to deliniate it a bit better. They're Nellie R. Stevens holly and they are pretty small right now, but these are supposed to grow to 15 feet wide and 30 feet high. There's no way I want a hedge that high, but it will take a while until we have to prune it to keep it in check. Since they grow so wide, we only needed to buy four.

before:

after:

And hey, check out the progress that they made on the newly constructed house the next lot over. There's a roof now!

I still think I have to get used to the way the yard looks without the fence. I feel oddly exposed even though that three foot picket fence wasn't exactly for security. On the plus side I do feel like I have a lot more space for planting new things now. I think I'll restrain myself until spring though. I already had to resist the urge to buy some flowers when I was at the store picking up the fill dirt. Now that the weather is cooler, it seems like all the home improvement stores have restocked their plants.

before:

after:

After spending so much time in the yard, I have numerous bug bites and bruises on my arms and legs. I also managed to break out in a rash on my arm. I think it had something to do with the fungus growing on some of the rotting boards. However, I did not re injure my back, so I win!

Grandmother

My lovely grandmother's birthday is coming up soon, so I decided to have some flowers delivered to her for the occasion. I found out a few days after I placed my order that my grandma had just learned that she has colon cancer. She is going in for surgery the day after her birthday.

It is times like this that I wish we didn't live so far away from our relatives. We're the only offshoots from our clan living in Texas. Everyone else lives in Michigan and Wisconsin. We made it a tradition to drive up and visit my Grandmother every summer about seven years ago. Sometimes someone couldn't go because of work or school, but a group of us always went up and it always included my father. He will be taking some time off of work so he can drive up and be with her during and after her surgery next week. It feels selfish to say, but I am just as worried for my father as my grandmother.

Second lust

I have come to admit to myself that one of the reasons I stayed single for so long was that I had  become genuinely afraid of being in a relationship again. As far as I was concerned, I was bad at relationships. I let myself get used financially and emotionally. The easiest way to prevent this from happening again was to just not date. To my credit, I don't think I repeated any of my past mistakes in my second relationship. However, many new mistakes were made with Guy#2.

I will call him Guy#2 because I don't even think that he qualified as a boyfriend. We only met up six times. But the psychological damage was significant enough for him to get his own post. So, by now I guess you're getting an idea of how this went, right?

After texting back and forth a bit, we met up at a restaurant. He was attractive but he wasn't the type of guy I would have imagined myself dating. He seemed like a late 20's version of the kind of guy you knew in high school with rich parents, a nice car, and a letter jacket. Our relationship was mostly physical and very shallow. At the end of it all, I felt like I still hardly knew him. But I think that was the way he wanted it.

After seeing each other three times in five days, he didn't contact me for almost two weeks. The following week he wanted to see me almost every day again. He would never plan ahead our meetings; he would only text me the day he wanted to see me. I did not need to have that much relationship experience to get the impression that he was seeing at least one other girl. I never asked him directly because I think I was afraid of his answer. When I went to leave the last night we saw each other, I was surprised when he asked me to stay and sleep with him in his bed. And he meant that quite literally. Just sleep. So I did and he spent the rest of the night using my stomach as a pillow. Right before I left in the morning, he had the strangest look on his face, like he was starting to say something but stopped. And when we kissed, it was a goodbye kiss. I had had one before, so I recognized it. When he fell off the map for the next three weeks, only texting once to apologize for being so busy lately, I let it go. I say I let it go like it was a simple thing or an easy thing, but it wasn't. It was very complicated to me at the time and very difficult. I let go because I knew it was what I needed to do, not because it was what I wanted.

My ego took a bit of a bruising because ultimately, he was the one that ended it, not me. And more than likely he had ended it because he had chosen someone else. Also, I had to fill in a lot of blanks for myself and on bad days I filled those blanks in with the worst scenarios possible. We didn't "break up"; we were hardly dating so there was no finality to it other than what I created myself.  All of these things combined with me never really getting out of the initial infatuation stage of the relationship, made it hard to get over. The whole thing had only lasted for two months in the summer, but it took until the winter for me to recover. I did learn one thing from all of this, which is that I don't do casual relationships well. At all.

After my second very much failed relationship attempt, I felt pretty discouraged. I know it was foolish now, but I became worried that I would never find someone I was compatible with. Someone I could talk to and understand and be understood. Someone like my brother's friend.

First love

Now that my work week is in full swing, I don't really have much to write about since my days consist of wake up, work, sleep, wake up, work, etc. So I think it would be nice for me to tell a little more about myself. I love reading/hearing about other people's past romantic relationships;I find them to show a side of people you wouldn't have guessed otherwise, so I thought I'd tell a bit about my own.

I have had three relationships in my adult life. The first began when I was in high school. We dated from my junior year of high school until about six months after I graduated from university. Looking back on it, I feel that we should have broken up after high school. Boyfriend #1 wasn't a bad person. He was funny, attractive, smart, and a great guitar player. But he was also self centered, lazy, possessive, and cheated on me more than once. He would have made a passable high school boyfriend; someone charismatic that you fall for, but who is too immature for the long run. I blame myself for letting it drag on the way it did. He was my first love and I didn't want to end it even when I should have. A few months after I graduated we were at the mall together and he wanted to stop in a jewelry store to get an idea of the kind of wedding rings I liked. Wedding? We had been dating seven years, we were "that" age, it seemed the next logical step, right? When I held that ring in my hand, everything felt so wrong to the point I felt physically ill. After that, I couldn't ignore my feelings anymore: I couldn't bear the idea of marrying this guy. After seven years together, I loved him but that didn't change the fact that he made me miserable almost on a daily basis. It was wrong to let it go on any longer. For the both of us. So I broke up with him. It took me a few more months to finally get the courage and will power to do it, but I did.

After boyfriend #1, I wanted a break from relationships. I had been dating from age 16 to 23. I was exhausted emotionally and ready to start the next phase of my life alone. At that point, to me relationships seemed like a burden, an obligation, a source of stress, and I wanted none of that any more. And I stayed single for the next three years with relative ease. In that time, I moved back by my family, started my career, and bought a house. It was a renaissance for me. I was free financially and emotionally for the first time in my life. I was very happy.

However, as the years went on and I had not gone on anything resembling a date I became worried that my singleness was no longer a choice, but a sign that something was "wrong" with me. I was surrounded by family or coworkers a vast majority of the time, but I felt that in three years I should have accidentally stumbled upon a suitable potential romantic partner. I felt I must be getting lonely because at 26, I was crushing hard on my brother's 19 year old friend. What was that, if not a symptom of desperation? The crush had been going on over a year when my boss took me aside at work. She wanted to know if I was single, since her daughter knew a great guy around my age that was looking, and she thought we'd be a good match. She wanted permission to give him my number. I said I'd think about it, but a blind date seemed like an unappealing relaunch of my dating life. However, when she asked me again a few days later I agreed. I had rationalized it as a way to get my mind off of this crush I had and get back in the game at least.

It's time for bed now, but I'll finish tomorrow.

potsticker

I don't really cook. With only one person eating, most recipes seem to result in me having leftovers for the next week. I'm also not a big fan of the mess/dishes it creates. I'll bake for special occasions like birthdays or holidays but that's really the extent of it. Every once in a while I forget the work involved in food preparation and I get the urge to make a meal. And I do. And then I don't cook again for four months. I'm fortunate enough to live close to some very fine eateries, so whenever I get tired of microwave meals, noodles, or cereal I have some great options.

All of this being said, I am working on amending my ways. Since my boyfriend officially moved in this summer, the household food consumption has gone up, so I don't think cooking will be as much of a waste of energy. There's normally only one days worth of food left over and that makes for good work-lunch material. However, I'm still not in love with the art of cooking, so I've decided to make one meal every week I'm off of work. That's two meals a month, folks. Which is still two more than I made otherwise.

This was this week's meal: pork pot-sticker dumplings and fried rice.

I made this recipe once before and what I remembered about it was that it was messy, time consuming, and delicious. The messy part is the inevitable oil splashes from frying and the time consuming part is filling and sealing 160 wonton wrappers one by one and then frying them in a pan in batches. I think the number is more around 50, but it feels like 160.

This time when I made them, I was smarter about the time consuming part (not the messy part, that was just as bad as I remembered) and I watched Bleak House on amazon prime while I filled my potstickers *side note: I didn't think this latest adaption was that great but I still have a girl crush on Gillian Anderson from her X Files days and Dickens seems to have intentionally made most of his characters caricatures in this novel, so how can I blame the actors for hamming it up a bit?*

Anyway, Bleak House made the time pass a lot more quickly and made the gains outweigh the cost a bit more. I recommend watching something to pass the time if you ever want to try these. There's not a lot of ingredients and it's pretty tasty, so basically it's a winner.

Here's a link to the recipe in case you ever want to give it a try:

http://www.kraftrecipes.com/recipes/potsticker-dumplings-92007.aspx

all domestic up in here

My work schedule is like this: I work seven 10 hour days straight and then I'm off for seven days straight. It's a pretty nice setup, but during those seven days of working, I don't get much done around the house. Besides a bit of laundry or dishes, I generally lack the energy or motivation to do anything else. That's why on my days off I like to tackle most of the household maintenance, chores, run errands, etc.

On the agenda this week was cleaning the carpets. We were finally done with dog sitting for a while and I had gotten a carpet cleaner as a birthday gift so I was ready to try it out. I know. I don't know which makes me older: getting a carpet cleaner for a present or being excited about getting one. Anyway, I cleaned all of the carpets in the house which is thankfully just in the three "bedrooms" (which are in actuality, one bedroom, one video game room, and one office). The little carpet cleaner worked like a pro. It was perfect for my small rooms and easy to maneuver. I've rented a carpet cleaner once before and the thing was this big clunky behemoth. I can see how if you had a larger house with bigger rooms how my carpet cleaner would get to be a pain. The power cord isn't very long, and even between cleaning my small rooms, I had to dump the dirty water and refill the clean every time. Anyway, it was great for my house and easy to operate. I got the job done in under a hour. There were some very bad things lurking in my carpet apparently. I was a bit shocked by exactly how dirty the dirty water was when I dumped it in the sink.

I think I'll clean my carpets more than once every four years now that I have my own cleaner.

This week I also decided to look for a new comforter for my bed. The one I had was three years old and looking a little raggedy. I envisioned a new plain white comforter, since back when the video game room was a guest bedroom, that bed had a white comforter and I really liked the look of it. There's something very clean and inviting about a bright white. I was planning on just looking and not buying quite yet since most of the comforters seemed to be in the $100 to $150 range and I guess I'm just cheap, because that sounded kind of expensive to me. However I did find a white comforter that was just $50 while I was grocery shopping so I felt compelled to throw it in the shopping cart too. When I put it on the bed I felt there was a bit too much white, so I bought a light green flat sheet and pillow cases to break it up a bit. I do wish the green sheet was a bit softer, but all of the higher thread count sheets weren't quite the shade of green that I was looking for. I guess I can just try dousing it with a bunch of fabric softener the next time I wash it. All in all, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Here's the before bed:

and after bed:

I don't know if I like it better than the one I had before (I really liked my old one) but I think it's just as nice. The main thing is that it's new, which means it's fluffy and snag free, unlike the old one.

fall

Fall blew into town last night. I was over at my parent's house and after dinner everyone sat outside on the back porch to wait for the 20 degree drop in temperature that was supposed to happen from 8 to 11 p.m. That may sound a little nuts or a bit of a redneck way to spend a Friday night and you'd be right on both accounts. However, the summer's so hot here that there normally is a definitive moment when you can feel fall starting and summer ending and it's actually pretty neat to be outside when it happens. The wind really picked up around 9 and dead leaves and upset insects started flying through the air. This guy also ran up the the patio, seeking shelter

I have a problem at my house with geckos and ants. My parents have a problem with tarantulas and scorpions. I guess I don't really have a problem.

I also brought a pinata over since my nephew missed my brother's birthday last weekend. I think the adults enjoyed the candy more than him. Here's picture of the aftermath.

When I went outside this morning it felt great. There's only really three weeks out of the year that I can open the windows in the house so I'm taking advantage of it right now.

Divine Fits - Baby Get Worse

I feel a lot better today: I've been productive and uncranky. I bought three albums on amazon today. I know mp3s are the way to go nowadays, but I'm still in love with physical C.D.s. I guess it's because that's how I first started listening to music. I like the artwork, but mostly I like listening to an entire album at a time, not a random mix of songs, and C.D.s are more conducive to this. I still like the idea of themes within an album: a definitive mood or story being told among the songs as a collection. I'm a fan of just straight catchy songs too, but the bands I fall in love with seem to be more of a storyteller type.

Here's a song from one of the albums I just purchased. It's very catchy. It's got an 80's vibe but not too much so.

?

Today was not a good day. It was my first day off of work and I didn't feel excited about my upcoming freedom and leisure. I felt tired, cranky, and unmotivated. Everything seemed so...dull and tedious. It was the exact opposite of how I feel during the start of my days off. I'm normally energized, excited, running errands, making plans for the upcoming week, scheduling projects and catching up on chores. When I have a weird day like this I like to attribute it to something that's going on in my life, but I'm not coming up with anything clear cut here.

construction

Today is my first day off after seven days straight of working. Yay! I had big dreams about sleeping in until noon, but this happens to be the view from my back door right now.

After being empty for over five years, they have started building a house on the lot adjacent to mine. Which means, a lot of concrete trucks rolling through the alley, hammering, and drilling. On the plus side, they seem to have built almost half of the house in the past five days, so here's hoping it will all be done soon and I can once again sleep past 7 a.m.

Jack White - Freedom at 21 (Live Jools Holland) 2012

I like this live performance a lot better than the album version.
Why? The increased tempo helps, but really it's DEM DRUMS: bangier, more thudtastic, awesome!