ghosts are good company

on tuesday my mother and i went to disneyland. we had a surprisingly delightful time. i know that politically, maybe not so much with disneyland, but… it’s fun. they’re nearing the end of their wildfire heroes salute so we decided to go - and i’m always a fan of wintertime at disney.

for christmas, my mother surprised me with a sister for aviva alexander. i decided (predictably?) to name her beatrice bartholomew, after the “darling, dearest, dead” love of lemony snicket. i decided that this trip would be nice for her first pictures.

perhaps the best thing during the trip happened while we were on tom sawyer island. there were two adorable kids charging around with their dad - maybe three and five? the five-year-old was wearing an awesome punk shirt.

another kid, maybe four, was there with his dad, and i just happened to be there at the right time to overhear, as the other family headed off, “do you know who that is? on his shirt? come on, you know, daddy has that shirt! it’s sid vicious!!”

there was also a group of pirates on the island, singing sea shanties. of all the ways to be an ambiance musician, it might not be the worst. they got to heckle the audience, and make… family friendly references to rum?

anyhow, twentysome more pictures and a bit more narration can be found in the flash gallery i put together here. extra credit if you can find the ghost of puck in one of the pictures! ♥

[[i just came back to add tags to this, because i forgot earlier… i was quite glad to realize that i already had a “pirates” tag.]]

yet again, patches emulates life. tomorrow is the “monsters of accordion” tour (well, two days from now - there’s still all of thursday to go), and i’m sourly tempted… but there’s the whole way that even though my last post was about not spending money? i’ve been spending money.

on:

• the patches book (mentioned in the past post)
• both anna oxygen albums, because i have found that her music makes me immensely happy.
• wreck this journal. there’s a grammatical error on that page. perhaps it is not the best journal for me after all. but, to quote strongbad, “oooh, if you want to be possessive, it’s just i-t-s, but if it’s supposed to be a contraction, then it’s i-t-apostrophe-s. scalawag.”

i’m feeling self-conscious because maybe two new people have said “hello, i am reading your blog!” and that makes it so many more people than the one person who was reading it before. i’ve been blogging since (this is the part where i count on my fingers) 2000? but i’ve been doing it mostly privately until last summer, when i took a class called “art of the blog” which was pretty awesome, but also really scary. the class was mostly blog design, truthfully, but it also asked me to step out of the protected space bubble and take credit for my thoughts and opinion and overabundant rambling on google, which i’m still rather afraid of (speaking of bad grammar).

i took another class with arlen this summer, and faced somewhat the same challenge - this time it was just basic web design. it was different for me than the rest of the class, because i started designing web pages in (finger-counting again) 1998 or so? maybe 1997? and they were crappy. i was very young, and this was right before/at the very begining of css, so all of the resources available were all about table-based layouts and… it was messy, is the moral of the story. still i lean toward the very simple design, so it was somewhat embarrassing. i ended up making that page and this mini-site for my ex-boyfriend, cubbie.

cubbie and i went to see the simpsons movie today, speaking of cubbie and spending money and evergreen (when i was a tour guide at evergreen we were always encouraged to mention groening. i was always kind of embarassed, not by his work but by how proud evergreen was of him). the movie was surprisingly good - i’m always afraid of things like that (vague, um, tv shows that are pretty good turning into movies? the simpsons’ potential for either greatness or sludge? things that are marketed explosively?), but i laughed a lot and waved my hands gleefully even more.

we were at the grand lake theater, where the matinee was affordable and the popcorn was free (mon.-thu. for the summer)! it feels like a good deal, even if i did have to pay seven dollars to cross the bay and back - one of us would have had to anyway. ho hum.

the theater is absolutely beautiful. we sat in the balcony of theater three (balcony because it reminded me of the capitol theater in olympia), which is decorated in a faux-egyptian theme, with paintings on the walls and statuary. all of the entrance wall has hieroglyphics stenciled on to it - i wonder if they say anything. my favorite part of the theater by far, however, was the ceiling. i looked up and… stars! cubbie’s analysis was “that’s how they do stars at disneyworld,” but mine was just “ooh, shiny.”

after the movie we walked around for a while, exploring, and found many places to have our nails done. had we, you know, wanted to get our nails done. eventually i came home and procrastinatorially puttered, although i was successful in emailing the derby dolls about my interest in them.

also i was successful in pouring a whole glass of water onto my bed. i had thought i would get to bed “early” tonight, too.

i’ve somehow managed to become nocturnal again. it’s interesting, rather like the world is hanging upside down. it’s not very good, though, because by the time i’m ready to be productive, it’s late and my mind tells me that i should be going to bed, so then i’m not productive in hopes that i’ll go to bed, but i don’t.

today i made gross scones out of strange mexican pancake mix (it was “tres estrellas” brand; i should have held out for cinco estrellas) and pumpkin. i ate one, but i still have two more sitting there and leering at me.

i also made quiche. i think that quiche is somewhat the perfect food, as it combines lots of different foods and also has protein! which is important and i don’t get enough of. however, my pie crust skills are currently lacking (they used to be good, but have declined for want of materials such as real butter). this is the second quiche i’ve made since getting home from seattle - i bought a dozen eggs and distributed them evenly. hurray quiche.

there are twelve days left to pack up my house, after which i will be moving to san diego. i’m getting panicky because i’m having a very hard time getting started. i’ve been acquiring boxes and i’m pretty sure that i have enough, and most of my stuff is actually already in boxes, but i’m still super-overwhelmed.

i started a savings account for my amsterdam trip. i’m getting 5.27% interest or something, so that’s nice - and also it’s preventing me from giving in and buying these amazingly attractive shoes that happen to be on sale and only available in my size. i love fluevogs and don’t currently have any particularly femme ones - just these boots and these in pink and black. i might still have them in white and black as well, but i wore those out pretty quickly my first few years of college. oh fluevog, you do hold claim to an extensive piece of my shoe-loyalty heart. when you’re on sale. and now you’re working on lovely vegan shoes as well? quite tidy.

that was an extensive shoe-related tangent. i have a lot of shoes. this is a problem that comes with being deeply invested in many gender presentations and having an obsession with shoes. perhaps if i picked just one gender presentation, i would have just as many shoes pertaining to that one as i do now. of course, i could just have more (of course we would, we’d just eat more).

i’ve recently come to adore this comic. usually when online comics release books i manage to convince myself that their online presence will be enough for me, but here… a bit of me aches to hold suspenders and glasses tangibly in my hands. i’m a little bit too much like suspenders. seriously. the author has an art show in san diego that’ll still be running for two or three days that i’m there. maybe i can go.

i have to decide if i want to, on saturday, go to a blythe doll meetup in san jose or to a flashmob dance party at the ferry building or to watch clueless at cubbie’s house. i’ll probably end up at the latter, because (can you have latter if there’s more than two items? if not, final) it’s people i know, but it’s so so weird trying to be his friend.

recap since last entry (if just because that’d be a sad note to end on): i did not go to ground kontrol, instead i went to a store called collage (i think), where i purchased things to make a thank you card for the folks’ at whose house i spent the night. i did go to see the bishop allen show, and it was delightful. i am still obsessed with roller derby, and the san diego derby dolls have their bouts a mile and a half from where i’ll be living. hurray!

i hope you all are doing well. recommend me good podcasts, if you want to.

well, let’s see. i’ve had a fairly lovely, if odd, birthday so far - i’ve been sent many well wishes, as well as treats and surprises.

one of the sad surprises, though, is that the tonga room - where i told everybody to meet me - is closed for a private event. le tear. so i’m not sure what to do now - cubbie and i might go out and hope that people who have my number actually use it, or we might stay in and do something nice here (that would be nice for cubbie, who hasn’t really had any time off lately). he’s on his way home, so i guess we shall see.

if we stay in, it’ll be kind of sad, because aviva alexander and i are all dressed up!

i haven’t updated many things in the back end of the blogs recently - nor the front end, for that matter (this is the part where i look shiftily at my “it is beginning to be autumn!” image). but! today, tonight, i updated wordpress to 2.13 (apparently 2.2 is coming out very soon and has tags…) and i created a tag cloud… list… for our categories. hooray! while i was turning off all of the plugins so that i could do the installation, i got seven spams in two minutes! insanity. thank goodness for the amazing spam filtration of akismet.

so, those are things.

also, i made a marble cake today. except that i don’t know where the baking powder is, and the molasses/baking soda suggestion… worked, but not so much. so it’s a half-risen cake, but that’s *much* better than my not-risen cakes of late. i substitute things much, and it’s a bad plan. i need to either recipe or not, i think. at least when it comes to baking.

do any of you want a blog here? especially those of you without blogs - i keep meaning to ask. there’s plenty of space.

what else? oh! i’m almost done listening to my music in alphabetical order by song. that means that i can return to listening to biased random mixes. i’ve been missing some of my favorite artists, who just don’t have as much music out as other folks.

i really want to go to daiso! my mother trained me to adore asian things by first doling out infrequent trips to uwajimaya, and then moving us into the fringes of an asian neighborhood in san diego (not *the* asian neighborhood, although i spent time there after school sometimes, but definitely a neighborhood that had lots of asian groceries). so, i miss mostly the shiny cookie aspects of these communities, and chamalyn, although amazing, isn’t doing enough - it’s too tiny. besides, where else could i get dinosaur origami paper? or mini bamboo furniture for aviva alexander?

i’m glad that you understand.

we have been working on the Getting Getting Things Done project with our household, and while some things have been highly delightful, others have stalled.

we went to ikea last week and bought a handful (truckful, actually) of shelves from the gorm ’system,’ and i’ve been putting them together bit by bit. i have one shelf constructed, except for the top extender piece - because i really need a drill to do that. also, a drill would be optimal for the brace which will keep it from… slumping over. kind of important. i could just drive the screws into unscrewed holes, but i don’t trust myself in that being secure. another challenge in our gorm experiment is that our favorite piece in the series, the hangers with five knobs, apparently have been discontinued (and are missing from the website, now?). as have the hangers with three knobs. this is super disappointing because 1) we need to hang things up and 2) one end of the shelving is next to the heater, which would have been great for hang-drying clothes.

speaking of drying clothes? i did laundry. well, 2/3 of the laundry. which is an awesome start! i also cleaned out the closet. the next step after that was to install the hand-shower that we got for christmas, but… our waterpik mist and massage showerhead leaks from its “control ring.” it works, as a shower, but it doesn’t work as a mist and massage shower - it works as a spray and dlub shower. dlub being the sound and experience of water dripping in masses from the showerhead. apparently, according to the, hugely obnoxious automated assistant, i will have to get a replacement - however, the website failed me after that step, so i was forced to ask her “how can i contact a real person?” after filling out the form, they will get back to me in three days. maybe.

i just deleted my account with flickr because they insisted that today i merge my flickr account with my yahoo account. which is difficult for somebody who really doesn’t want a yahoo account. i need to figure out a way to easily host and display pictures hosted on my own webspace. thoughts? i could write something myself, but the moral of the story is that i’m lazy (which is why flickr was so nice!). i’m tired of big companies (yahoo, six apart, etc.) buying things that i like and “making them better” but actually making them not so good.

which reminds me that my friend taylor posted a link from her music blog informing folks that it’s boycott the riaa month. the most useful thing i’ve learned about from this (i don’t have money to spend on music pretty much ever) is about the riaa radar, which will tell you if your favorite artists (or their parent company’s parent company’s parent companies) are controlled by the riaa.

and again a speaking of - wanna get me a present? no sweat’s high tops in pink are on sale for $10.71 here, and $5.00 of the sale goes to benefit code pink for peace. i approve of that. civic center blog has been posting some good imagery about war protests recently - both the peace march about how we’re in the fourth year of this war now, and almost weekly coverage of the weekly quaker vigil.

this has been quite a tangental post. hi folks. how are you? oh! and don’t forget to celebrate st. cuthbert’s day! it’s today. my own cuthbert is sleeping to get ready, and i should do my best to join him now.

hi ducklings! i’m sorry i’ve been gone so long - christmas travel, of course, but now that i’m home i’ve been trying to stay offline and work on unpacking. which has worked a little, but not so much now, as i have a new distraction in my life.

yes! dolly!

i got a green dinosaur for christmas, but not a dolly, so i decided to acquire one with my christmas money. this is aviva alexander. she’s a little shy and nervous about these pictures because 1) i couldn’t find a camera, so they’re macbook shots, 2) she’s wearing the clothes that came with her, which the other blythe dolls tend to make fun of, and 3) she’s an adg (ashton drake girl?), which a lot of dolly-parents tend to frown upon. BUT! i am delightfully happy with her, and am currently working on sewing in new hair (hi, welcome home, i chop open your head!). soon it will be all red and pretty. hurrah!

i’m not going to have as much time soon, as school starts on wednesday (i’m still pretending that it doesn’t), and we have visitors coming monday, one of whom might be staying a while (i’m not sure). still! visitors will be delightful, although that means i have to clean the house and maybe i can feed them some of the soup that i made last night. num.

anyhow, back to all of those Things!

when i was buying my coat, there was christmas music all around. it’s crazy how much the stores with their muzac can whet your consumerist urges - i don’t spend much time in stores, is the thing. so i’ve been thinking a lot about gifts to give people (and would love your input on what you’d enjoy), and since i’ve been asked, here are some things that i’m interested in.

mmm, things. these are the computery expensive ones. less expensive things are at the bottom of the next list.

• the thing that i would be exceptionally happy about would be a memory upgrade for my macbook - i currently have one gig of ram, and two would make my computer so much happier. that’s $350 in the mac store, but might be found cheaper eleswhere - i haven’t done much research.
• on a similar note, an external hard drive would be delicious.
• speakers and/or a wall-charger for my ipod, i just remembered, would be helpful

as for other things, i’m all about pirates and dolls and dinosaurs. because i’m secretly four years old?

• doll-wise, i’ve been all about blythe dolls for the past few years. based on a big-eyed doll that was sold in 1972 and brought to fame by a photographer using one as her model, they’re now being released by takara, in japan. my favorite is the star dancer, largely because she reminds me of one my favorite friends. i also love the night flower and rosie red encore. one of the things i love most about blythe dolls is the ability to customize them - i’m thinking about giving one new hair - and the most afforable for that is the new prima doll.
• dinosaur-wise, i’m loving a lot of dinosaur-themed things that are for sale on etsy, a list of which can be found here.
• as for pirates, it’s all about archie mcphee, as always. there are things from there linked in the above list as well.

soooo, those are my wishes. they’re random and silly. cubbie works at a bookstore, though, so all the books that i want i can get for cheaper than… most of the world can. music… is expensive. oh! theatre! local stuff is exciting and intriguing, but i have no idea where to start looking.

anyhow, those are the random things that i like. what do you like? leave me a comment! tell me about your favorite things! tell me about how christmas is a christian holiday, rather than a consumerist holiday! tell me anything!