Deviant Dispatches

One morning earlier this week, I drove to work and it was decidedly fall all around me. Leaves started changing overnight, the air was crisp and refreshing, yellow and brown blew across the street in time with a dancing breeze, and there were Macintoshes and caramel dip in the fridge. I'm now starting to feel the last comforts of returning home again. The immediate comforts of friends and family and greenery were spectacular to experience, and the shifting of seasons is kind of the icing on the cake - a final reassurance that yes, I am home again. I have big plans for October. Plans involving corn mazes and pumpkin patches. Plans for more apple cider, long walks in warm clothing, cuddles under a homemade blanket. The more I think about it, the more I'm committed to starting October early.

Last night, Spousal Unit, Kaelin, and I were watching a movie, and I heard a very loud... thing outside. I was fairly certain it was a bird. After its first few calls, I tuned it out, and we watched another twenty minutes of the movie. But during a quiet segment, I realized it had been making noise the entire time. I paused the movie. "Do you guys hear that?" They most certainly did. It sounded kind of like a tiny horse - the noise was very akin to a whinny, and very loud. Being the Adventure Squad that we are, we went outside to investigate. Lately, there have been many cars parked on our street because of nearby construction. For some reason, I thought maybe one of them had a trailer and had left a foal in it overnight. But this is Madison. Even though we saw a guy use the bike lane for his horse one day, I'm pretty sure there aren't people with horses in the nearby area. (But there are cows who contribute to Babcock Hall ice cream .) I went outside expecting to fin...

When Spousal Unit and I were getting ready to leave New Mexico, the bookstore manager, Michael, came to work one day with a box full of tea as a going-away gift. And by "a box full of tea," I mean a box with at least ten packages of tea, about a quarter of a pound each. A lot of friggin' tea. He said it's from a place he and his wife love, near where they lived before New Mexico - Willoughby's . If I remember right, there were five different kinds of tea in the box: Earl Grey with Blue Flowers (black), Gyokuro Jade Dew (green tea), Gardens of Provence (herbal), Ti Kuan Yin Oolong , and Russian Caravan (a blend). "It's for you, but if Spousal Unit likes it too, that's a bonus," he said, and went on about his work. As though he hadn't just given me a two-year supply of tea. I was incredibly touched. I hadn't expected anything at all from him, and his sincere, thoughtful gift spoke volumes. I've thought of him and his wife every time ...

You may be wondering where the sunsets have gone. Honestly, it's been several weeks since I last saw a sunset, which is why I haven't posted any pictures of them. My new work schedule has me on duty until 7 p.m., which, seeing as I asked for early shifts, makes perfect sense seeing as it's the second latest one. Nothing screws up my day more than having breakfast at 7:30 and "dinch" at 3. So. Having to work until 7, now that it's fall, means I don't get to see the sunset anymore. And on my days off, it's been rainy and cloudy. I miss the sun, and it's not even winter yet. Several years ago, when I lived through the Wisconsin winters on a regular basis, I often got SAD - seasonal affective disorder. It's basically weather-induced unhappiness , caused by lack of sunshine. Yes, living without sunshine can really mess you up that much. (Although, it apparently has summer effects, too.) I've been toying around with the idea of getting a high-in...

You deserve an introduction here. Or a warning. Or something like that. The book covers that you are about to see are items removed from our clearance section at work. Whenever books need to be clearanced, the older titles are pulled to make room. The spinny display is full of rejected romance and mystery titles; therefore, the ones I pull to make room are the uber-rejects. And they're really, really horrible things. I now present to you the worst book covers I saw last week. I hope you can survive these. Good luck. Lois Greiman's An Accidental Seduction is apparently a really bizarre book. Check out all the Amazon customer comments - apparently, her regular readers think she writes "historical" novels. This book is a Prince and the Pauper situation (you can read it here ), with two women switching places and (surprise!) there's a handsome guy involved. And he apparently tends to not wear a shirt. The book's tagline: "When she submits, heart and body, t...

A few weeks ago, we went to Spousal Unit's parent's for his birthday. You remember when I told you about it: the cake, the new t-shirt, the destruction of the cake because a tipsy Spousal Unit had a knife... Anyway. When The Great Migration happened earlier this year, we knew we wouldn't have room for our books in our cars during the move. So we mailed them to Spousal Unit's parents, who have kindly kept them in the basement, waiting for us to get a room of our own. After things settled down after Spousal Unit's party, we went hunting for books we've missed and needed, like our cookbooks and The Hunger Games series. As we settled the boxes back into place, Spousal Unit suddenly turned toward a pile of stuff behind him. When he turned around again, he was holding a mandolin. Playing mandolin has been on my "things to do" list for quite some time. I knew I wanted to play either that or a ukulele. I like the sound of smaller stringed instruments, and I...

Some heavy issues have been running through my mind lately - including the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. I'm thrilled with the repeal of DADT (which, when I see it abbreviated like that, reminds me of a certain very harmful chemical that was also banned for the good of the world). I think it's about time the military has the same equality as all other American jobs are supposed to have. (I say "supposed to" because I'm sure plenty of people at equal-opportunity jobs have been fired for their sexual orientation.) I'm really glad to see recognition that DADT did no good and is, in fact, harmful. You're clearly not required to be straight to be a military presence , so why should we discriminate? No good reason other than homophobia. Which is why the repeal of DADT makes me a little bit nervous. This is an incredible breakthrough for gay rights in the U.S., but my concerns are in the retaliation we might see. The fact remains that many people stil...

It's that glorious time of year again, when everyone starts decking their halls, hanging their stockings, and thumpety thumping through the snow to find a Tannenbaum of their own. "Wait, what?" you must be asking. "It's September, right? As in, still-technically-summer, leaves-haven't-really-started-turning, still-need-my-apple-cider-fix September?" Yes, out here in the natural world, it is the end of summer. Geese occasionally honk obnoxiously overhead. Squirrels are becoming fuzzier nut-cheeked fatties. Humans dig through attics and basements for last year's sweaters, made holier-than-thou (literally) by mentally unstable moth hordes. Out here, it is summer. But a department store is about as far as you can get from natural, and in there... In there, it's madness. Red, green, tinselly madness. In there, it's only 64 days till Black Friday . Terrifying to think of, scarier to visualize. Yesterday at a Hobby Lobby, I had to walk by aisles and...

This is a poem from after my writing started to improve in college. Yes, I wrote plenty of poetry in high school, and some of it was okay. But most of it was bad teen poetry (BTP), and luckily, I was cured of this affliction (I think). If you or someone you love has BTP, please head to the nearest library and read, read, read. And please, don't ever write about how your life is like a black hole. Homage to My Butt My butt goes out and decides not to return. Little clump of fat, wandering ill-lit streets, searching for a dry muskrat den of its own. The toilet seat, the sunk-in couch, a scrap of celestial rug, even granny panties. We all confer, in shambles, hoping to suck it back home though I am most alone now. No butt to call my own, no way to sit or dance or fall flat on my ass which went out for a smoke and hitchhiked to Montana. I hope some dumb goat eats it.

Today, I freely admit that I have nothing new to write about. My one-day weekend was delightfully lazy, my last day of tux work was incredibly lame (despite free pumpkin pancakes), and I have nothing exciting to enthrall you with. So instead, I've dug up some of my favorite photos from good times past. Some of these are my photos, some belong to others. Enjoy - I'll share something exciting tomorrow.

Dear Management/Owners, Your attempts at making retail classy are not working. You seem to be under the extremely mistaken impression that changing the language we, the workers, use will change everything about the place in which we work. Carefully chosen words, to you, can make or break the business as a whole. While I agree that language is powerful, you're overlooking something very important: language cannot change facts, only disguise them. And sometimes, not even that. For example. At the tux shop, I've not been allowed to say the common retail phrase, "Can I help you?" The supposed reasons for this are that it's a yes or no question, and that it's very "low-end" retail. Instead, employees are supposed to say, "What brings you in today?" News flash: eliminating the phrase "can I help you" does not change the fact that even if it's expensive, it's still retail. We are still selling useless crap to people who could eas...

So remember back in the day when I was planning to knit some lace ? I started the project not long after I blogged about it, at the beginning of May. It's the Heartland Lace shawl pattern, downloadable here for free. If you have a Ravelry account, you can see it here . To be fair, it didn't actually take me four months to make this. I finished it about a month and a half ago, and then it sat in a ball in the corner till I got around to blocking it last night. It didn't take all that long, but weighing down the corners of the towel was a little obnoxious - I ended up with three stacks of books, a CD case, and a picnic basket holding it taut. For those who don't know, "blocking" means stretching the finished piece into the desired shape, and then steaming it with an iron. This means pinning it into place, usually on the ironing board or on a towel. I actually didn't have enough pins to block this whole thing at once, so I did it in halves, with pins down the...

Weather-wise, today is a delightful victory. The high is 60, as it will be tomorrow, meaning Autumn is finally wrenching away Summer's grip on this hemisphere. Soon, the leaves will start turning gold, persimmon, and toffee, making our outdoor walks a symphony of color, a concerto of crunching. It's almost time to break out the scarves and sweaters. This is usually very exciting to me - the sweaters in particular. But this year, it brings on a moment of silence from me, because I left all - all - our winter clothes in New Mexico, believing Spousal Unit would be back for them at the end of September. Alas, he is going back, but it's likely to be on the train, which means no room for him to carry an enormous box of fluff. A few sweaters will be returning so I can avoid freezing my butt off, but most will sit in storage, wondering why they've been abandoned to that cold, dark corner of the universe. Since I can't revel in my fall sweaters quite yet, I'm enjoying f...

Everyone who knows me knows how little I care about appearances on a day-to-day basis. I don't wear makeup. I wear white whenever the hell I feel like it, even if Labor Day's come and gone. My favorite shirt features a cartoon character . My favorite shoe designer is whichever one happens to be most comfortable (and I never care enough to remember the name). With that in mind, let me tell you how glad I am to be leaving the formalwear industry of DOOM. In the last month, I've felt my soul be squished, twisted, and crushed by having to memorize vest patterns and coat styles. Honestly, I don't think there's anything in the world I care less about. Telling the difference between and remembering the names of four different dot patterns? Not high on my list of priorities. Being able to tell a customer why this notch lapel with two buttons and a satin collar is different from that one, with the same description? I don't care, and I can't tell them the difference w...

This was one of many adventures on yesterday's sunset excursion: a box full of galoshes on the curb. The sun picked one little patch of marigolds to illuminate. They looked like they were on fire. This sunset was from earlier in the week... This one was from last night. Spousal Unit and I walked to a new place we found for sunset pictures - more directly across the lake from the Capitol. I took a video of the sunset, so you can watch it with the sound of waves anytime you want. Unfortunately, Blogger is once again a really crappy blog host and won't let me upload the video, and YouTube is also being a jerk and wants to take 70 minutes to upload a two-minute video. If I can ever get this video up, I'll repost. But it might take a while.

This weekend, most people are remembering ten years ago. They are remembering a time when they were different, when the United States was different. They are remembering the choking terror as smoke billowed from two buildings in New York, another building a mess of rubble, an airplane crashing into nothing, far away. I am doing the same. I think, very often, that September 11 seems to mean something different for my age group - those now ages 20-30 - than for many of the older adults I know. For them, yes, it was horrifying and a catastrophe. But the difference is in how we've lived after it. I'm not saying this event didn't affect older adults - those now 50 and older. It certainly affected everyone in the United States deeply. I'm not discounting their reaction. But for those who had less life experience at the time of the attack, it is a pivotal moment in our lives. That day, everything became starkly Before and After. It is not a far stretch to say September 11 is o...

Part of my reason for choosing these two books is that I've missed me some good YA lately. I started re-reading The Hunger Games a couple of days ago, after seeing the short trailer for the movie (goosebumps!). It's made me crave more, and these are my choices, should I be able to get my hands on them. Oddly enough, I decided to write about this book today before I realized John Scalzi posted Merrie Haskell's Big Idea about it last night. Weird. Based on the fairy tale of the twelve dancing princesses, The Princess Curse is set in Eastern Europe and focuses on Revka, an herbalist who's determined to break the dancing curse. I love fairy tale rewrites, especially when they involve a strong heroine and a realistic, tough setting. I don't know that this book is exactly like that, but the Big Idea post (which is about the underworld and outhouses) suggests it might be. I hope it's similar to Plain Kate . In many ways, this book reminds me of White Cat by Hollie ...

Spousal Unit's birthday was this weekend. We went to his parents's house, and I was all prepared to make his delicious birthday cake - with a TIE fighter , as requested. Then, I found out he'd told his mom I was making pizza. I did make pizza for his birthday dinner the previous night, but hadn't planned on making it for his party. But his mom had already bought a cake. What to do? Spousal Unit reasoned that you can never have too much cake, so I went ahead with my original plan: a melted ice cream cake. The recipe calls for a cake mix, three eggs, and a melted pint of Ben and Jerry's. Spousal Unit wanted red velvet, so I used a red velvet cake mix and vanilla ice cream, but there are many more interesting combos out there. Mix everything together, and you have the moistest cake in the world. I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be baked at 350 for about 35 minutes, but having two cake pans for a layer cake made it take much longer, so I was in a rush by the end...

It's always nice to take the walk down to the dock and watch the sunset. It's a good moment of relaxation before the rest of the crazy world kicks in and everything speeds up again. I wish I could watch the sunset every day. But there's that thing where I need to earn money in order to one day afford an apartment, and right now the pickings are slim. I'll probably never be as lucky as I was with my last job, so I enjoy the moments of sanity that I can get before rushing back to an insane world. May this sunset give you peace as well.

Picture from an anonymous source MADISON, Wisc. - The truth behind red velvet cake was finally revealed at One Egg, Two Egg bakery this weekend: the red color is not caused by chemical reactions, as many believed, but by a special blend of red caviar. "I had to come out about this," said Pete Stieke, head chef at the Madison bakery. "I knew if I made this cake one more time without fully informing the buyer, I'd never be able to sleep at night again. I've been living a lie." Stieke's red velvet cake follows tradition dating back to the cake's eggy conception: rather than including a necessary fat, such as oil or butter, this blood-red cake uses salmon eggs to get its unusual tint. Stieke also mentioned the backstock of eggs in his cellar is running low due to the recent salmon strike. "If they don't stop this strike soon, I won't be able to make red velvet anymore," he said with a shake of his head. "I sympathize with their pli...

In high school and early college, I was a punk rock girl . At least, to a certain degree. I had (still have) spiked black leather bracelets and a matching studded necklace to go with my studded belt. I had an awesome pair of pants that I wrote all over: quotes, phrases, and individual words that reflected who I was. And I was never without a great pair of knee-high boots to top it all off. Spousal Unit mentioned my former sense of style not long ago, and I've been thinking about it ever since. I miss dressing like that. Yes, I love the beautiful skirts I have now, but I still long for the boots, especially. And I've been keeping an eye out. Unfortunately, many of the skirts I now own are not compatible with buckle-ridden motorcycle boots. The skirts have all of these delicate threads underneath, holding various sequins and embroidery in place. Boots often catch on those threads and end up tearing the pretty decals from the skirts - not pleasant. I learned this u...

This weekend, Spousal Unit and I returned to my beloved homeland in the Northwoods to visit family. It was a delightful time. Mom and Neal took us to Nelson, Wis., to visit the cheese factory . We had fun and ate food (this includes ice cream, of course). Later, we visited a winery in Alma which had really sweet wines - I don't think I could've handled a full glass of any that I tried. But before we visited the winery, we went on a short trip to Minnesota. Alma and Nelson are right along the Mississippi, lining the river with gorgeous bluffs, lush greenery, and delicious cheese. Across the giant bridge, Minnesota offers a chance for gas at a cheaper price, due to lack of sales tax. We've done things like this before to pinch a few pennies, but rarely has it been such an adventure. I must first add that this was entirely Neal's idea, so we owe him credit for suggesting this wonderful venture, which started with backed-up traffic in Nelson , a town of 400 people. It seeme...