Bye Bye Nelly

I sold my car last night. This guy called me yesterday and insisted he had to see it TODAY, then he came over and paid cash for it without test driving it. Sounds ideal, right? Until he drove it on the freeway and didn’t like how it doesn’t accelerate very fast and then called back at midnight to say he wanted his money back! We told him he had the chance to test drive it and didn’t want to, and now that the title is signed over to him, I can’t take it back. Sorry Charlie!

It feels weird to have sold my car before I have my new one. I am driving Martin’s old Saturn this week, but how nice to have gotten that overwith before the holidays. I love Craig’s List. Have I ever mentioned how much I love Craig’s List? One time I was trying to post ads from Poland and they were rejected. I thought it was ME being rejected, banned for double posting ads, and I was frantic. (It turned out to be the computer I was using that was rejected.) I can’t imagine life without Craig’s List! How would I get new students? How would I find editing jobs? How would we find new roommates? How would I sell my bread maker? How would I advertise my yard sale? How would I look for my lost cat? How would I find a used surf board? How would I sell my car? The list goes on …

I had a really hard time parting with Nelly, almost didn’t take the guy’s money. I had her for 10 years, bought her new from the Thousand Oaks Auto Mall with 23 miles on her and sold her with 148,224. She has taken me to Colorado and all over the Southwest (Zion, Bryce, Arches, Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, Lake Powell, Monument Valley), up through Seattle to Banff, back and forth between SF and LA and SF and SB, down to San Diego and Mexico, and on many trips to Tahoe and Mendocino. I named her Nelly because that’s what my nieces were listening to on the CD player when she hit 100,000 miles three years ago. She still looked like new but the CD player, air conditioning, two windows and driver-side door spring no longer worked. I will miss her!

Poltergeist

There isn’t really a ghost in our house (except the one who stole my things), but there IS a short in our stereo, which makes it feel like there’s a poltergeist living in the corner of our living room. When the stereo is off, it defaults to tuner, and on tuner, the volume is about 100 times as loud as when it’s on video. So when we want to watch TV (Lost) or a video (A Mighty Wind), we have to turn the the stereo to video, then crank up the volume. The key is remembering to turn the volume all the way off when we’re done. Otherwise what happens (which just happened and nearly gave me a heart attack) is the stereo turns itself on, defaulting to tuner, and I’m sitting here in a nice, quiet room working on my thesis when all of a sudden, Radiohead’s Creep is blaring at about 80 decibals. (Creep is one of my all-time favorite songs, but not that loud, not while I’m writing, and not without warning.) So I get up and turn off the stereo and turn the volume all the way down and five minutes later, the stereo goes back on, but this time no sound. Our stereo has been turning itself on and off dozens of times per day – oh, there is goes again – for the past week. It’s only bothersome when we forget to turn the volume down, so we continue to try to live peacefully with the ghost in our house.

Gobble Gobble

An article in the New York Times yesterday said the average Thanksgiving meal is 3000 calories and that it would take a 160-pound person more than four hours on the treadmill to burn that off (it also said the elliptical machine is better for you and will burn it off faster, maybe even in four hours flat!) I have been on somewhat of a diet this past month, but broke it (uh, more like totaled it) yesterday. After a mushroom omelet and veggie bacon for breakfast, I went to Martin’s mom’s for dinner and ate:

Hors d’oeuvres:

Bread with pate – lots of it
Shrimp and cocktail sauce – quite a few
A deviled egg
Two glasses of red wine mixed with 7-Up (Eww, I know, but it’s a Thanksgiving tradition for me)
Lots of almonds
Bread with cheese – just one slice

Dinner:

Beet salad – Polish specialty
“Spring salad” – another Polish specialty
Carrot soup – made from scratch with grated carrots in it
Bread torn up into cubes and drowned in my soup
Turkey – white meat only
Stuffing – home made, very delicious
Stuffing – Polish style – mostly fruit, kind of weird
Cranberry sauce – mm mm
Mushroom gravy – on turkey and on mashed potatoes – mm mm
Mashed potatoes
Sweet potatoes
Green beans with bread crumbs on top
Bok choy and shiitake mushrooms
Two glasses of red wine

Dessert:

Pumpkin pie with whipped cream
Pumpkin bread with cream cheese filling
Marzipan torte
Fresh fruit
Champagne
Cranberry/black cherry jello
Three cups of tea – one decaf black and two peppermint

Then we played Dominoes. Then we went to sleep.

Death Cab for Cutie

Saw Death Cab for Cutie last Monday night. It was a good concert and I’ve got the T-shirt to prove it. They played from their their new album, Plans, their previous album, Transatlanticism, and the one before that, The Photo Album. My favorite part, though, was their introduction by Daniel Handler. I didn’t recognize him or I would have payed closer attention to his story about eighth grade, something about having a bad year. I love Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket, who writes A Series of Unfortunate Events, the best kids books I’ve read in a long time). The scary part was when I wore the T-shirt to school and one of my 18-year-old undergrad students said, “I have that same shirt!” And I’ll be double her age next year!

Bustopher dreams

I had a dream about Bustopher the other night. I have one every couple of months. I dreamt that Bustopher came home after my mom inadvertently gave him to the pound. Despite his hardships among strangers and cat killers, Bustopher found his way back to me and we lived happily ever after. In case you’ve forgotten what Bustopher looks like (yes, I believe he’s still alive, living in the Berkeley/Oakland Hills, where he is served tuna, sparrow heads and rat torsos on silver platters while he lounges on a stack of newspapers inside a cardboard box), I have included a picture. And here is the poem by T.S Elliot that inspired his name:

Bustopher Jones is not skin and bones–
In fact, he’s remarkably fat.
He doesn’t haunt pubs–he has eight or nine clubs,
For he’s the St. James’s Street Cat!
He’s the Cat we all greet as he walks down the street
In his coat of fastidious black:
No commonplace mousers have such well-cut trousers
Or such an impreccable back.
In the whole of St. James’s the smartest of names is
The name of this Brummell of Cats;
And we’re all of us proud to be nodded or bowed to
By Bustopher Jones in white spats!

His visits are occasional to the Senior Educational
And it is against the rules
For any one Cat to belong both to that
And the Joint Superior Schools.

For a similar reason, when game is in season
He is found, not at Fox’s, but Blimpy’s;
He is frequently seen at the gay Stage and Screen
Which is famous for winkles and shrimps.
In the season of venison he gives his ben’son
To the Pothunter’s succulent bones;
And just before noon’s not a moment too soon
To drop in for a drink at the Drones.
When he’s seen in a hurry there’s probably curry
At the Siamese–or at the Glutton;
If he looks full of gloom then he’s lunched at the Tomb
On cabbage, rice pudding and mutton.

So, much in this way, passes Bustopher’s day-
At one club or another he’s found.
It can be no surprise that under our eyes
He has grown unmistakably round.
He’s a twenty-five pounder, or I am a bounder,
And he’s putting on weight every day:
But he’s so well preserved because he’s observed
All his life a routine, so he’ll say.
Or, to put it in rhyme: “I shall last out my time”
Is the word of this stoutest of Cats.
It must and it shall be Spring in Pall Mall
While Bustopher Jones wears white spats!

New Climbing Shoes

I bought new climbing shoes this week. The only reason I got them was because I am a tester and get them cheap. I bought a pair of Evolvs earlier this year and I love love love them, so I decided to get a second pair, this time Velcro. I tried them on once and they hurt too much. I can’t decide if I should send them back for a bigger pair or just endure the pain. Ah, the dilemmas of a climber …

Missing

So add spice grinder and fake Christmas tree to the list of “missing” things. Call me paranoid, but I think someone who has had a key to our house in the past (could be one of MANY people) robbed us. I don’t see any other explanation. Too much missing. Too much of a coincidence.

UPDATE: We found the Christmas tree, so I now have hope that my other things are just misplaced and not stolen. I mean, only the fake Christmas tree, the one with about eight branches, was really worth stealing.

Fauchon

I am on the last drops of my Fauchon fig confiture! I have a backup jar of milk jam (which looks like spun honey), but I still wish I’d bought an extra jar of fig jam when I was at Fauchon in Paris this summer. Fauchon was my favorite gourmet store when I lived in Paris. (Except for tea, for tea I would go to Mariage Frères. Ah, c’est la vie!

Lost

One of my goals this past summer was to clean out the basement, a tremendous job because Martin is a (pack) rat. I also had a lot of stuff I’d been lugging around for years, namely multiple copies of every news article I’d written (six or seven in some cases) and several other boxes of papers. After we cleaned the basement (it needs a second pass, but we did make a lot of progress), we had a yard sale, then I called the Salvation Army to cart away the remaining kitchen appliances, bedding, console TV, etc. Once that was done, I had a line of boxes in the guest bedroom of all the paperwork I needed to sort through. I left them until the last minute, the day before my nieces arrived to visit from Michigan, and spent a day in there going through those boxes. I decided to throw out all my reporter’s notebooks that I’d been hanging onto for three or four years since I had all those notes on discs anyway and what I really valued was the newspaper articles themselves.

So two weeks ago I wrote a short story for school (first short story as I mentioned in a previous entry) about three homeless kids based on a story I’d written for the paper I worked at in LA. It was a big cover story and, I had a great photo of the three of them (which I still have). I didn’t have time to find the story in time to write my short story, but decided to dig it up to help with the revision. I had interesting details in the story like what they carried in their backpacks and what their philosophy on life was. I went downstairs to get the box and couldn’t find it. Long story short, I searched for three hours, cried for an hour, and finally became resigned to the idea that the box is probably gone. Martin is convinced it’s “down there somewhere” but I’ve really hunted high and low in every box I could find. Still, he’s right that when you’re upset it’s easy to overlook things and I may have looked right at it and not realized it. So I decided to let it go until January, when I’ll have time to tear the basement apart a second time. Today I have an appointment at school, so I decided to go downstairs and get the old Mac discs that my LA articles are on to open on a Mac floppy at school so I can get the notes from that story about the homeless kids. No discs. The box that held the discs, which also held a bunch of bottles of ink that I used to refill cartridges, is also gone. I looked and looked and looked. And yes, it’s possible that it’s down there somewhere and I have more hope for the discs because they’re smaller and more easily confused with all of Martin’s discs, but for now every trace that I was a reporter for three years – every article I wrote, every photocopy of those articles, and every electronic copy – is gone. Yes, a few are online and yes, I can probably get photocopies of many of them from the archives at the newspaper, but that will take a tremendous amount of time, and I will never have the hard copies again, unless I find those boxes. I have already taken desperate meaures: I have prayed to St. Anthony. If I don’t find them, I have to wonder what lesson is to be learned from all this. Be super-organized so you don’t lose things? (But wasn’t that what I was trying to do?) Never throw anything away so you don’t accidentally throw something valuable away? (But I find it impossible to believe that I would have thrown away one of those boxes, let alone both. Even if the papers got recycled, that doesn’t explain the binder with all the photocopies, and all the discs. I’ve already asked Martin when he last changed the locks, and wondered if his ex-girlfriend could have broken in and thrown all my stuff away. Call me paranoid, but that would at least explain the strange coincidence that both boxes are missing. Then again, for a while I couldn’t find my journals, and then one day there they were sitting in a big box in the middle of the basement. Maybe that will happen with my articles, the binder, and the discs. You never know.

Short Stories

While I’m sitting here on the phone with Apple tech support, both of us waiting for my 12,000 photo files to copy onto my desktop, I figure I may as well blog. Short stories! I fell in love with short stories, at least short story writing, this week. How rewarding to write a story in just a few days and FINISH it! Finishing chapters of my book isn’t quite as rewarding because for every one I write, I have 10 more to go. It seriously feels like it will never be done. I have just 150 pages and I need to spend the next couple of months revising the first 75-90 for my thesis, which doesn’t give me much time to write new pages. I would like to have 200-230 done by the end of the school year, which isn’t that daunting, but then I have to write the rest – another 100 pages or so – then rewrite those pages, and then rewrite the whole thing again, and maybe again. It feels like a lifelong project. So I’m in love with short stories now. 15 pages! 20 pages! 25 pages! And you’re done! Done forever! I bought four short story collections, recently: three of them are my professors’ books: A Thousand Years of Good Prayers by Yiyun Li, War by Candlelight by Daniel Alarcón, Slapboxing with Jesus by Victor LaValle and The Best American Short Stories 2005.