Deviant Dispatches

Tomorrow is July, which means the Fourth thereof is not far away. But honestly (at the risk of sounding very unpatriotic, which would have gotten me killed under our last president), I'm not a big fan. Earlier in the day, there are usually oodles of cookouts. Considering I don't really do meat, I'm not particularly fond of those. The only Fourth of July cookouts I've loved were the ones spent at my grandparents's. Food in general is always better at their house, even if Grandma didn't cook it. Lots of time is spent outside. I love the outdoors, but I usually end up getting sunburned, or dehydrated, or just plain exhausted by 8:00. The Fourth is always the hottest day of the year, and I always have to wear a hat. I don't do hats. When I put one on, my hair gets so sweaty and matted and gross that I can't take it off the rest of the day. The entire day is spent in anticipation of the end of the day, when the city blows its load of fireworks all at once. I

When I was 10, I decided I would grow up to be a farmer. Farming, you see, was the only profession that would allow me to tackle all of my interests in one fell swoop. Farms had animals, so I could work with them all the time, and since I loved animals, it was perfect from the start. But there were other reasons that stretched my imagination a little. I loved baseball. I figured that farms required lots of open space, so I would have room to play organized games whenever I wanted. At this point, I hadn't even seen Field of Dreams yet. Our home in the city had a comparatively tiny backyard, but I couldn't even hit the ball across it yet - I must have had pretty big ambitions. I loved art. To me, having been nowhere else yet, the Wisconsin countryside was the most beautiful place in the world. Duh , where else would I go to paint gorgeous things like trees and cows? I could set up my easel right outside the barn and create to my heart's content. (I must have planned on having

It doesn't take much for me to enjoy a sunset. They're something I've always loved and appreciated, perhaps moreso than the average bear. When I was really little - as in, just learning how to talk - my cousin was impressed with how clearly I could say 'sunset.' No slurring, no misplaced letters, not even remotely drunk-sounding. Sunsets have always been our thing, and I think of her every time I post sunsets here. I love taking the time to look at them. Sunsets are the proverbial roses that I stop and smell, and they give me a chance to find the beauty, wherever I happen to be when it gets dark. They give me pause, and in the moments that I watch them, I can forget about whatever else happened during the day, no matter how the day has gone. Today's sunset is very simple - forget about everything else while you breathe it in. And tell me what you do to relax at the end of the day.

This was a long, wonderful weekend. The home-based party for Spousal Unit and I happened, we got to hang out with lots of family I haven't seen in ages, and we really felt the love all around. I'm jumping into the job hunt right away this morning, so below are some pictures of good times and burning stuff. And the Serenity Garden. Enlarge them to enjoy fully.

This seems to be a good season for music so far. I've already got three albums on my OMG-need-this-now list, and one of my favorite bands is coming out with another. Let's review, in order of least to most excited. Oddly, I'm least excited about the new Radiohead album that came out behind my back when I wasn't watching. They've been my favorite for about ten years - basically since I heard friends gush about them and I explored their sound to find out why. I love their experimentalism and that even though, in Spousal Unit's words, they're droney and sleepy, they're not easy listening. Each album takes effort to read behind the first notes and decipher the deeper meanings. That said, In Rainbows was the new OK Computer . Those two albums are probably going to be the best they ever achieve, so I fear that The King of Limbs will be another Amnesiac - very experimental, still a good listen, but less cohesive and more a jumble of sketches thrown together.

I take quite a few pictures. Here are a few of my favorites - some old, some new. Snow in April. This isn't quite a black and white shot. A penguin at the St. Louis Zoo. He forgot to put his head on when we came by. A friend at a formal dance in college. Decor at my mom's wedding recently. Sisters, also at my mom's recent wedding. Cotton season! Dead things can be pretty, too.

The Man Who Planted Trees is a Canadian short film , based on the short story by Jean Giono . When the narrator, walking through the Alps, stumbles upon Elezeard Bouffier, the quiet shepherd has already planted 100,000 acorns. He's trying to turn the desolate land into a beautiful place again. 10,000 of his acorns have become small trees, but he doesn't stop with the oaks - he also has a nursery full of birches. The narrator, in wandering the surrounding area, shows how desolate the land really is - water is hard to find, winds are intense, the few people are crabby at best and murderous at worst. The two world wars wreak havoc on nature and people. But a single man living by himself in the mountains manages to bring joy to others and himself, just in the planting of trees. This film is one of the most beautiful I've seen in a long time. You can watch it here if you don't mind Japanese subtitles, or it's available on Netflix - it's only 30 minutes long. It's

This sunset reminds me of a neon sign.

Dear Gmail Inbox, I have been oh so patient these last two weeks, like a crabby child awaiting his or her favorite dessert of chocolate cake after a long, hot day. Okay, I guess a kid waiting for that would be less patient and more stabby, but still, I've been patient. Today marks two full weeks of job hunting, and I'd like to see some real Siegfried and Roy-esque results now. So Inbox, you'd better start jumping through flaming hoops pretty soon. Some responses to the dozen or so applications I have out in the world might be nice. Do you know, Inbox, how hard I've worked on these applications? I've gently tailored my resume for each one. I've written terrible cover letters from scratch, lauding my myriad talents in ways that make me sound inhuman . And in the meantime, I've even carefully purged the old emails from you. (Do you know how much some of those emails stank? Didn't even smell as pleasant as the Justin Bieber perfume, and calling that stuff ev

A few weeks ago, I was curious if any science fiction books had ever won the National Book Award. So far as I knew, none had. But this award has been handed out for more than 50 years, so I was unaware of several awesome titles on the list. One was Jem by Pohl Anderson (not related to the doll or subsequent TV show ). The other was The Book of the Dun Cow by Walter Wangerin, Jr. I immediately added them both to my reading list. BOTDC sounds especially entertaining to me. Based on the tale of Chanticleer and the Fox in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, this book focuses on Chanticleer and his barnyard domain. The characters, all talking animals, exist in a time before mankind existed on Earth, when there was a darkness imprisoned at its heart: Wyrm, who seeks a way out into the world. Chanticleer starts having prophetic end-of-the-world dreams, and soon encounters Cockatrice, an antichrist clearing the way for his father Wyrm. According to various reviews, good versus evil is the theme

I know what you're going to say. If I had a blog post designed entirely around that, it would stretch from here to the Andromeda Galaxy and back again, ten times, with enough left over to TP the neighbor's house. No, I'm not talking about the hardcore things, like that time I accidentally insulted a former coworker or a customer waiting at the counter while I merrily pop bubble wrap in the corner. (Can you see my face burning brilliantly behind the screen?) This is a list of the things I love to indulge in - the guilty pleasures that I don't explicitly tell people because I usually pretend to be an adult. Or something like one. Sometimes. Here are a few of the many: Those TV wedding shows. Especially the ones where the girls go shopping for their poofy white dress and the budget is "$5,000 if I really like it." Love them, but not for the reason you might think. I love watching these girls spend exorbitant amounts on chiffon and lace and freakin' crepe pape

Can I just say how much I love waking up here? This morning the sky is grey and leaking, the breeze is as close to frigid as summer gets. I sit here wrapped in a blanket, drinking my favorite tea, as birds chitter in the verdant trees. I am constantly in awe of all the life that surrounds me. In other news, I've been looking over my list of things to do before my next birthday, which I never actually finished writing. I have 21 items on my list that should number 25. But I've accomplished two more things in the last couple of weeks: one was to get paid for something I wrote or made. I sold a shawl to a friend for $20. Yay! The other thing I accomplished was moving. Though maybe I shouldn't actually count that one till we have a place to live... nah. I deserve the credit now. There are two things on my list which I will not accomplish, whose opportunity has come and gone - November's NaNoWriMo and the subsequent Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award submission. These goals wer

Nothing like water to make a sunset twice as amazing. A capitol building doesn't hurt, either. Click to make the awesomeness bigger!

This weekend was exhausting but awesome. Friday we went to visit most of my family - first time we've seen them since the wedding thing. It's good to know our dynamic hasn't changed much. We went out, had a feast at a new restaurant (as in, it wasn't there three years ago when I was living in town), and spent Saturday lazily running errands. In the evening, we played Bananagrams together. It's nice to play a game like that and be able to use all the dirty words we want, if they come up, and not worry about what everyone will think. Okay, so Mom still gives disapproving looks, but we know she won't quit playing. After everyone else got tired of it, Spousal Unit and I played an intense game, with all the letters. We each had 72 to use up on one large set. Spousal Unit won, in that he finished first, and helped me finish mine. But I still think I should have won by merit of my awesome words. Pedagogs, myopic, quixotry. Wonder how many people have ever used all of t

Yesterday I got all domestic with my bad self and made rhubarb crisp . The friends whose space in which we're getting all up (just doesn't sound right with correct grammar, does it?) have this thing where they contribute to a co-op and get veggies and health care money in return. Love, love, love this idea. They get a weekly basket of random goodness from local farmers, and this week, there was rhubarb. Hooray for rhubarbs! I decided to make it into rhubarb crisp for them (okay, it was for me too), and talked my mom into sending me a recipe so I didn't have to go hunting for my cookbooks, which are probably in Chicago anyway. The recipe is way easy and I plan to make it repeatedly now. Check out this shot of the rhubarb. If you enlarge it, you can see some of the little details. Kind of fascinating. The gist of it is you pour chopped rhubarb in a dish, coat it with sugar, cinnamon and butter, like so... Looks delightfully bad for you, doesn't it? ...Cover with a brown

A deadline extension would do her no good: Melissa was determined to spend the rest of her life with this turtle, and no lousy newspaper job was going to stop her. The paper was going under soon anyway; it was no secret. Downsizing, departmental cuts, and overwhelming pressure from the top were all making the copy editors sweat and obsess an unusual amount. Each time the owner or managing editors popped in for coffee, they had the sinking feeling that the time had come. Chaos was just around the corner and the whole copy editing department was being laid off, leaving the paper to flounder in unedited, classless headlines and accidental double entendres all the way to the final print run. So far, it hadn’t happened, but the threat was imminent, especially with the economy struggling for longer screen time in its Cyrano de Bergerac death throes. Melissa wasn’t going to be there when it happened; she was taking her pet turtle and absconding to South Dakota. She had decided to pack up the

The year 100 AD , according to Wikipedia, was a leap year. The arts and sciences section of this article makes sure to note that China began using the wheelbarrow about then (very important technology), and lions have become extinct in the Balkans. Fermium , the 100th element, is a synthetic element with a half-life of 100.5 days. Some people who read this blog might be interested in its synthesis in nuclear explosions, but I'm guessing not many will be. Here's the ALA's list of the 100 most banned/challenged books from 2000-2009. People were most offended by Harry Potter - not surprisingly, as that little devil-worshipping jerk clearly has questionable morals. (Are you all reading the sarcasm there? Good, just wanted to be sure you're still with me.) My favorite one in the top ten is The Perks of Being a Wallflower. There are 100 senators in the U.S. Senate right now, because we have 50 states. I hope Sarah Palin is nowhere near the presidency... well, ever. But espec

The first couple of pictures here are from Nebraska; the later ones, Iowa. Enjoy as I delve into the terrifying realm of online job postings.

Today so far, I have successfully not set the alarm right and made two failed attempts to start blogging. It feels like a Charlie-Brown-trying-to-kick-the-football day already so far, so here are some pictures of our new surroundings. I really hope I get it together before my interview.