I have so many things to talk about that I can easily make this post ten pages long. I don’t like making separate posts for each story–I just want one long post for each day, if I have a lot in my mind. Today, I do. And to make things easier (did I just start a sentence with “and”?) I’ll once again use Chris Brogan’s suggestion and use bold subtitles to make this post easier to read.
Natasha Bedingfield
It’s Friday, and I generally listen to music to/from work on Fridays instead of podcasts. On 106.1, with Kid Kraddick (which I almost never listen to), they had Natasha Bedingfield. I didn’t realize she was Britist–and she for some reason reminded me of Victoria Beckham, in a good way. I was lucky enough to catch her sing live an acoustic version of “Unwritten,” and can I just tell you that it was completely awesome. Like the Adam Ezra lyrics sing, “she sings it different every time…” It was so original, and had a touch of grit to it… I loved it. I just wanted to share that with you. To me, an artist isn’t really an artist unless they can sing live well. Natasha Bedingfield can.
Reader Feedback
I had a real-life reader (meaning someone who I know in real-life that reads my blog) ask me how I find time to write the astronomical posts you see here in my blog. Well, it’s a matter of timing and brain-dumping. First of all, if you are a blogger and afraid of writing a very long post only to use it, may I suggest Google Notebook to you. It’s possible you’ve never even heard of it; but you can install a Firefox plugin, and you can write a blog post and have it autosave every umpteen seconds, and you can access any half-written blog posts from any computer you have web access to (after you log into google, of course). The other element of Google Notebook that I use is that I don’t write my whole blog post at once. What do you think, I’m nuts? I don’t have an hour to sit down with this stuff. So I write a couple sentences here, a couple sentences there, and just keep my Google Notebook minimized in between. It allows me to deliver great content to you, the reader, and keep my day job at the same time. I’m a massive multitasker; if I’m not doing six things at once, I can’t get work done. Now, all that said, I’d love to get more reader feedback. If you write to me, and want me to answer your questions publicly, I’d be happy to include them in my blog post the next day.
Gato Enfermo
Jabba has been really sick lately. He’s no spring chicken–I figure he’s about 12 years old, though I don’t know exactly when he was born. He’s been losing lots of weight and losing some of his longer fur, leaving patches of short gray hair behind. I finally took him in Thursday morning, the day I work from home, and left him for the day for tests and observation. “Tests and observation” by default is over a hundred dollars, no matter what vet you go to; but he was bad enough that I knew I just had to spend the money. While I was dropping him off, I realized I had left my purse at home, which wasn’t that big a deal since I didn’t have to pay until I picked him up, and the vet is just down the way from where I live. No big deal, right? Wrong. On the way home, less than two blocks from my house, within view of my house, I got pulled over. It was the first time I had been pulled over in years. I was distraught about Jabba, I knew I didn’t have my purse, and I was just about in tears when the policeman came to my window. He asked me politely for my license and registration, and I said, “You see that two-story house right there? That’s mine; I left my purse on the front table.” He asked me where I was coming from, and my voice wavered when I said I had just dropped my cat off at the vet. He told me I had sped through a school zone, but the flashing light went off for the morning while I was halfway through it, and he told me to take it easy and let me go, and I was so, so thankful. Not only did I not have my license with me, but my inspection sticker is out, and the guy could have been a real asshole if he wanted to… but he didn’t. Let’s all say it together again… I am so thankful. Anyways, a few hours later, the vet called the house. (My iPhone is gone–that’s another story.) They said they weren’t going to bother running a couple tests, but they did want to run this other test–a thyroid test. She said his kidneys weren’t failing, and I was so thankful, because I was really starting to worry he was going to die on me. I told her I had to pick him up around 2 since I was taking the kids to the State Fair, and she said she’d have him ready. When I got there at 2, I walked in and noticed one of the nurses holding a big fat ice pack on her hand. Apparently she had been bitten by one of their patients. To make a long story short, I finally figured out it was Jabba. He had gotten pissed about being poked at all day and finally snapped. If you’ve been reading this blog long enough, you know he’s snapped before. He’s been in the clink twice. They asked me to go back and get him out of his cage, and I did, and he came right to me and clung to my shoulder, and made that deep-throated don’t-fuck-with-me sound. I told him to shut up, that we were going home; then I paid the $150-bill and left with him. Just a few minutes after I got home, the vet clinic called; Jabba is under home quarantine for ten days. She had been nice enough to call the city pound or whatever before the ER did (that’s where the girl was going with the nasty, bitten hand) and had told the pound he was current on his shots, and they basically said fine, I could keep him under house arrest. So basically, my cat is on probation now. He’s had quite the crazy life, man. Still not 100% sure what’s wrong with him, still don’t have any medecine for him. That will be even more money.
The iPhone Tragedy
Since we were on the topic… I’ve been without an iPhone for about 48 hours. On Tuesday, whenever I would push the home button, instead of getting the home menu, it would flash white then reboot. I tried everything concluding with a “restore to factory settings,” but nothing worked. The next morning, I took it out of my purse, and it was flashing black horizontal and vertical lines, and it was very hot. By the time I got to the Apple Store, waited half an hour after my appointment time (the guy I was with said that was so unusual for them), and gave my phone to the Apple guy, the iPhone was so completely dead that he couldn’t even get it to power on. He tried three or four different power cables; nothing worked. So he told me he’d order a replacement–they didn’t have any in stock. Me, without cell phone, for a couple days, spells disaster. Well, I’ve lived, but it hasn’t been fun. I even brought in my home laptop to work so I can sync up the new phone before I get home tonight.
The Texas State Fair
Did I tell you about scraping the wet-then-dried ticket off the kitchen table? Well, the kids got two free passes to the state fair, but you had to take them on a weekday. So I told my boss, and planned on picking the kids up after school to take them to the fair. Wow… come to think about it, the story gets deeper than that. When you drive up, you tell them what kids you’re picking up. I told the lady, and they found Rain, but they couldn’t find Dylan. I was freaking… out. The lady was a numbnuts. I said, are they sending Rain out? Because I don’t want her walking into the parking lot while I’m parking my car. Finally, I saw Rain, and told her they couldn’t find Dylan, to wait on the curb while I parked. My heart was racing as I whipped my car into a parking spot facing the street. As I was turning off the engine, I looked up and saw the kids’ normal bus to their daycare. The teacher driving was waving at me wildly as she sat in traffic. I leaped out of the car and made a mad dash across the grass separating us. I could hear rustling inside the bus, and as I opened the door, Dylan hopped out. “Sorry, I forgot,” he was telling me as he got out. I shut the bus door and just kneeled there for a minute, hugging him. See, I had no cell phone, so I had no easy way to call the daycare and see if they had him. The teacher had gotten the note that he was going out with car riders but had apparently forgotten. Ugh! I was a little wound up, but just glad that everyone was okay. We stopped at a gas station, got three Cokes, and hit the road. Traffic was pretty crappy for 4pm, but we got an okay parking place at the fairgrounds. The kids were reading the Guiness Book of Records on the way, and they found out that the ferris wheel at the Texas State Fair is the largest one in the U.S. They just couldn’t get unstuck from that–they were so excited that it was the LARGEST in the COUNTRY. It’s twenty stories high. As much as we talked about it, we didn’t go on it. But we did go on the Texas Skyway, a kind of sky-cable-car that kind of made youf ee like you were in an enclosed ski lift. It had a spectacular view of the whole park. We also went to see a couple shows–”Dancing with the Dogs” with dancing doggies, and “Birds of the World” with dozens of huge birds that WHOOOSH flew right over our heads. The kids absolutely loved the bird show. We caught a night time light-up-float parade, which the kids thought was okay but they weren’t mezmerized by. Rain commented that the Disney night-time parade was much better. I told her just to enjoy it while we were there. We did escape the fair without any fried-anything, and I was pleased by that–the kids each had a corn dog, and I had this steaming vat of chips, chili, and cheese. I could only eat about half of it. The kids each made a bottle of sand-art–little glass bottles that they filled with layers of different colored sand. Rain always has a huge blast doing that; in fact, she was begging to do that before we even got to the fair. The last thing we did there was play one game–and I told Rain, the game they picked had to be one that there was a “prize every time” because I wasn’t wasting all my money–so they picked the ducky-in-the-water game. I paid $5 for three duckies (I pulled one out myself) and we all got “small prize” duckies. I got a green frog, Rain got a blue frog, and Dylan got a green dolphin. We pulled them out of this barrel of small toys, and the man there said “wow… I have never seen a green dolphin in there. That’s the only one.” Dylan was pretty thrilled by that–to have an original green dolphin. We walked out of the park, into the dark towards my car, with our frogs and dolphin flying through the air, saying the line from the Animal Planet TV channel: “Imagine a world… full of little green men… that flew.” It was an Animal Planet commercial that played that “ground control to major tom” song, was talking about flying green frogs, and the three of us sang loud, “FOUR… THREE… TWO… ONE…”
We don’t know any of the other words.
