Year: 2013

Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes: August 31 2013

Johann Georg Hainz's Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Johann Georg Hainz’s Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

During the Renaissance, cabinet of curiosities came into fashion as a collection of objects that would often defy classification. As a precursor to the modern museum, the cabinet referred to room(s), not actual furniture, of things that piqued the owners interest and would be collected and displayed in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes is my 21st century interpretation of that idea.
 
Dear Internet,

Writing

The Lisa Chronicles

Listening

  • Neverwhere
    The new radio adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s book stars Natalie Dormer, James McAvoy, Benedict Cumberbatch among the rest of the stellar cast.  I’m only a few episodes in but so far I’m really enjoying this.

Reading

Watching

Weekly watching: The Bridge (US), Project Runway, The Newsroom, Sons of Anarchy, Burn Notice,  DaVinci’s Demons,  The Vampire Diaries

Links

x0x0,
lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe in:

Cabinet of Curiosities

Johann Georg Hainz's Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Johann Georg Hainz’s Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Dear Internet,
This morning I met with my neurologist to confirm if my epilepsy has returned.
For this to make better sense, we need to go back to 1975 where Lisa, age 3, has a grand mal seizure. Over the course of the following decade, we would head to Detroit Children’s Hospital, where I was poked, prodded, and EEG’d to death to see what was the status of my brain. Drugs were taken, phenobarbital, mebaral, and lord knows what else. It is during this time it is discovered I’m allergic to the aforementioned drugs as well as penicillin.
Sometime in 1982 or 1983, the visits stop and I’m declared cured? Better? Healthy? Something? All I know is that at the age of 11 or 12, there are no more drugs or visits to Detroit’s Children’s Hospital.
In the later years, the stigma of being epileptic follows me like a lost dog. Some of my medical records have it listed and if it is missed in any kind of interview, it comes up with my drug allergies (“Why are you allergic to anti-seizure medications?” “I had seizures when I was a child.” “This could complicate things.).
It’s a shadowy grey area. Am I epileptic? Am I not? How much do I disclose when asked and do I make mention of this at all to anyone – employers, lovers, friends?
Over the years,  I disclosed on when necessary and when warranted.
I did not have any seizures, that I can recall, in the intervening years.. That changed a few years ago, long before I started any of my second round of bipolar drugs, I had two of what I termed as seizure within six months of each other. One when walking through a tunnel in a fun house that had the pulsating lights and the second when watching the Kanye West video for “All of the Light”1 .
This was in late 2011 and early 2012.
When I had the first ankle surgery in June 2012 and the follow up surgery in January 2013, the triggering EPILEPTIC on my medical history was potentially problematic with anesthesiologist.2 And it was because of this that I decided to finally make an appointment with neurologist this spring, but there was nothing available for nearly six months.
Which brings us to today. I was so nervous, I showed up 25 minutes early.
I walked Dr. T. through all of my issues, matters, and concerns. After the interview, Dr. T. then put me through a series of neurological tests, which some of them made me giggle. After the tests were done, Dr. T. explained that he believes I did have epilepsy when I was younger, for there is a type where it starts out in very youngs kids and as you age, it starts to dissipate. By the time you’re late teens / early 20s, the epilepsy is gone and typically never comes back. He thinks this is what I had.
But do I have epilepsy now? Unknown. What he does think is what I thought to be seizures were actually migraines triggered by stress or other factors. Since I did not smell anything or get auras or get a build up, then I never associated with what was going on in my brain, in addition to the brain freezes (tremors, sometimes loss of feeling, sense of deja vu). I never thought of them as being migraines. This was news to me. When I told Dr. T. I didn’t take drugs for my headaches, he seemed incredulous.
What’s next? EEG to confirm the epilepsy (or not). That will be good times!
The most interesting thing out of this whole experience today was the discovery that phenobarbital and mebaral cause bone density problems. I have bones like a 90 year old, and they are so fragile at my first ankle surgery in 1994, they were surprised I had not broken anything before that. So drugs make my bones brittle, I have a double fracture in my right ankle, which then sets in arthritis that is the worst my orthopedic surgeon has ever seen.
It’s all goddamned connected.
Dr. T. is also ordering a bone density test and then depending on the results, vitamin therapy will be applied.
Can I get a new brain please?
xoxo,
Lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe in:


1. The video was tagged by Epilepsy Action to potentially trigger seizures and I ignored the warning.
2. My neurologist says this is a teaching moment – anesthesia does not trigger seizures so riling me up before the surgery was unnecessary.

Magnificent men and their flying machines

South Eastern Wheelers
South Eastern Wheelers from Waterford Bicycle Club circa 1909, via National Library of Ireland. Courtesy of The Commons, Flickr.

Dear Internet,
Unintentionally, yesterday was one of the laziest days we’ve had in a long while. I woke up around 8:30A to take Wednesday out and do her mourning rituals. TheHusband was still asleep when we came back to the bedroom, so I grabbed my laptop to start working on the archives while he slept. I made a lovely cup of tea to keep me warm as our house is freezing.
After a couple of hours, TheHusband finally awoke and we were quiet for a few more hours while he checked the interwebs on his tablet and I continued to work. Sometime around 1PM, we wandered downstairs for food and to plan our meals for the following week.
As we’ve been to-ing and fro-ing to the cabin every week, we haven’t had a grocery shop, like  a serious one, since June. Maybe even May. When I’ve been alone at the house, I graze so chips and dip it is!
Because of all our to-ing and fro-ing, we haven’t had time to do much shopping at any of the local farmer’s markets either, which has kind of bummed me out. I discovered, by happenstance, a local version of Door to Door Organics called Doorganics, with most of the food certified from local farms. Our biggest problem when we were with Door to Door Organics was the food was almost NEVER local (though they claimed this to be so). With Doorganics, each item is marked with what farm it came from, which is awesome. The ultimate goal is to shop at the Downtown Market once the interior is finished, use Doorganics, and use local shops for missing items. While we’ve gotten good use out of our Costco card, we’re not renewing it but I should add, we did get a Sam’s Club membership for when we are up near the cabin, so losing the club membership isn’t really a tragedy.
With food and meal plans organized, instead of taking a shower and getting our shop on, we wandered back upstairs where I continued with working on the archives and TheHusband read on his tablet for awhile. He ended up taking a nap for a few hours, while the dog and I continued on with what we were doing. Sometime around the dinner hour, I walked the dog for her afternoon constitutional, refreshed whatever I was drinking, and came back to bed. TheHusband snored on.
Dinner plans were thrown about but only if the place delivered, both feeling too lazy to put pants on to pick something up. Not having take out delivered in months, I was hoping there were new places available to try.
I would be wrong.
I’ve been cheating like a mad woman on eating dairy and I was tempted to order pizza but I couldn’t chance what would happen if I actually went into anaphylactic shock.  Eating Cheetos is one thing but solid cheese is a whole nother piece of business. In the end I ordered from a local Chinese place, while TheHusband ordered pizza. I eventually fell asleep sometime around midnight.
I calculated with walking the dog, bathroom breaks, and some to and froing to getting drinks or bugging TheHusband in his office, I was out of bed maybe only 2-3 hours out of my 16 hour day.
I didn’t even bother to take a shower or brush my teeth.
If you think this is unusual, you would in fact be wrong. The sheer amount of time I spend in the bedroom when I’m not sleeping is kind of frightening. After I get up, and rouse TheHusband out of bed, the bed is then made. So I’m not snuggled up in the bed itself, instead I treat the bed like a giant desk. Everything I could possibly need is in this room: 37″ HD TV with all the accoutrements, all my electronics, portion of my books, even an en suite for when I need to use the loo! With the kitchen located right off the stairs, everything is within reach.
I live in a beautiful house that is 3200 SQFT, I have my own private office with an Aeron office chair and a desk that dates back from 1923 and came from a college library that we picked up at an antique show. I don’t utilize any other room in this house (which only furthers the notion we definitely need to downsize) and to be fair, neither does TheHusband but I’ve taken it a whole new level.
So then why?
The explanation we’ve come up with dates back to when I had my surgery last year. For three months I was bed ridden. When I started becoming weight bearing, I had to constantly elevate my leg whenever possible. So when I came home from work, on the bed and up went the leg. Then there was surgery #2. Laid up for nearly a month, then back to partial weight bearing, then finally I am free.
For a year I have spent most of my non working, waking hours on the bed with my foot propped and a dog who thinks it was an extension of my left hip. So it makes sense, then, this has become my base for all things.
It doesn’t help the bed is a king and extremely comfortable.
It also doesn’t help my excuse for not working in my office is that computer is old and too slow.
For the last couple of months, I’ve been trying to move myself to a place where I could feel inspired, was outside the bedroom, and was comfortable. In June I created a work area in the solarium.
And then promptly never used it.
To be fair, the to-ing and fro-ing to the cabin this summer has impacted how I work, but now that is over, I’ve been putting a lot of thought into how organize myself so that I can get things done.
As much as I adored my lovely king size desk  and the great distractions around me, work won’t get done while I’m set up this way. I’ve had a year to make this work, and granted a good amount of time was because I had to, not because I wanted to, but in this configuration is not conducive.
Forward on to finding a work space!
x0x0,
Lisa (Day #30)

This day in Lisa-Universe in: 2003

Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes: August 24, 2013

Johann Georg Hainz's Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Johann Georg Hainz’s Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

During the Renaissance, cabinet of curiosities came into fashion as a collection of objects that would often defy classification. As a precursor to the modern museum, the cabinet referred to room(s), not actual furniture, of things that piqued the owners interest and would be collected and displayed in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes is my 21st century interpretation of that idea.
 
Dear Internet,

Writing

The Lisa Chronicles

Watching

  • True Blood
    Season finale this week, which has Tumblr and Twitter all enflamed. I’ll leave you with this:
    alexanderskarsgardbookchaise

Weekly watching: The Bridge (US), Project Runway, The Newsroom, Sons of Anarchy, Burn Notice,  DaVinci’s Demons,  The Vampire Diaries

Links

  • Elmore Leonard, writer of over 40 books such as Get Shorty, dozens of short stories, and movie work including Jackie Brown and Justified has passed away at 87. If you have not gotten a taste of Leonard’s work, the short story Ice Man is available for free from The Atlantic.
  • If you’re familiar with monthly club subscriptions, like Birch Box and Bark Box, there is now one for geeks called Loot Create. Sign up here and check out the awesome.
  • This Ancient Egyptian Jewelry Came from Space – ALIENS.
  • Dame Barbara wrote an astonishing 728 books, of which 664 were romantic fiction. Ian says he has read about 350. When she died she left 160 unpublished manuscripts
  • Engravings from a French Skating manual, circa 1813
  • Introducing The Bullet Journal, an analog method for TODO, lists, and the like. I think I’m in love.
  • GrokLaw is closing and recommends you take a course (free) in online privacy.
  • Doomsday Castle: The Real World meets Game of Thrones prepper show
  • Ben Stiller apparently wooed NBC with his extensive knowledge of mineral water for Reality Bites is coming to TV
  • On the other hand, the trailer for the new Salinger documentary looks fabulous

xoxo,
Lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe in: 

In which I’m dreaming dreams, I’m scheming schemes, I’m building castles high

[The beach, Scheveningen, Holland] (LOC)
The beach, Scheveningen, Holland circa 1890-1900, via Library of Congress. Courtesy of The Commons, Flickr.
Dear Internet,
Tonight is my last night as a free person for tomorrow I head back to work. The nostalgia factor in my jobs doesn’t escape my attention, and in fact, we relish all the opportunities it gives me such as long holiday breaks, mostly summers off, and a bit more freedom than if I were a librarian somewhere else.
The bittersweet component I keep close to my bosom, trying to not let it suffocate me or me suffocate it. The proverbial question of what did I do this summer and what I wanted to do this summer, always separated by miles of truth.  I had a lot of questions I needed to get answered, plans I wanted to put into action, and places I wanted to be. While I never got the opportunities to do the things I wanted to do or fuck, even have the vacations I wanted to have, I don’t regret the outcome of this summer at all. A lot of digging deep into my psyche was achieved and its given me a better handle on what I need to do for the future.
The one thing I learned this summer is I work much slower than I had envisioned myself to work. Meaning, I had plans in place to do X things at X times and never factored my actual TIME to do the thing so it was always a mess. Now I know.
This morning I did some work work from home and in the afternoon, worked on getting more content from the archives back online. I’m almost done with 1998 and there is a variety of adjectives about that jaunt down memory lane. 1998 is a good year to illustrate my maniaism. The primary descriptors of me at 26 would be whirling dervish. But I know that all changes in the following year, when depression comes and smacks me about like an angry Frenchman. I wasn’t on drugs in 1998, other than birth control pills, and it wouldn’t be until 2000 when my primary descent into my imaginary mental ward would begin. I smile a lot at Lisa at 26 (and TheHusband too since he and I were living together then), but I’m afraid for what happens after.
So let us talk about the good things then, rather than stew over what we cannot change.
Wednesday was back to the vet again for yet another UTI. She’s a low riding pee-er and this will apparently be the source of discomfort for her until her death. She’s two days on her drugs and so far, no more accidents in the house, no blood in the urine, and she’s not peeing 19 times a day.
This weekend is the kickoff for the 2013/14 EPL season and I am beyond giddy to find out a local pub is opening up early to start serving for the matches (Arsenal starts at 730A). I support West Ham United, whose game starts at 10A and which I’m dragging TheHusband to. TheHusband and I have an agreement: He’ll come to the pub with me for the games and I’ll sit through a basketball game.
I’m not quite sure which one of us is going to be more bored.
I also found out today the city’s rec department has an adult fencing class offered this fall, which I hope to get signed up for. I’m also going to sign up for swimming, starting with beginners and see how I do.
Also, the other big news is next week I’m going in to see a neurologist to talk about if whether or not I have epilepsy. I was diagnosed when I was a wee lass when I had a grand mal seizure, and until I was 12, I was carted to Children’s Hospital of Detroit to find out what is going on. So nearly a decade after it happens, I get the “eh” clear from the doc, who my mother laments now she should have sued him for malpractice.
I’ve had small seizures infrequently over the years but I haven’t seen a neurologist in over 20 years.  I need to make sure my i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed in case anything happens to me. Maybe THIS will explain it all?
Lastly, I got a bit of fiction writing done today but no major word counts to even worth mentioning. My Scrivener project for notes and ideas grows, so just as in all things, baby steps.
x0x0,
Lisa (Day #26)
P.S.  I forgot to mention EPbaB finally has a working contact form again which has been out of commission for most of the summer. Thanks to TheHusband’s nimble BOFH  skills, and my bitching, he finally got it working.

the world is created from his body, or a quiet little revolution

Dear Internet,
If you are following Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes, which is posted every Saturday morning, you may have noticed a subsection under the Writing section entitled, The Lisa Chronicles. These are entries that had been offline for years for whatever reason and I was finally incorporating into the grand scheme of  EPbaB.  This weeks CCC will have over 50 entries of old-new content that has gone up. I felt like it was time to explain why.
This is the project I’ve talked about for a very long time, dating back to at least 2006 or so when TheEx and I had gotten together. With him, suddenly, I didn’t feel the need to write so much anymore. Without him, I had a whole lot to stay and I’m still trying to play catch up.
The whole process is basically a jumble of the following:

  • Incorporate entries from LiveJournal
    • Started the import process and it turned into a huge colossal mistake. The import was not cohesive and skipped many months (and years). Will have to import by month or few months, slowly at a time.
    • No decision made on what to do with my LiveJournal account, if any, once this is completed.
  • Import old entries from previous website databases
    • Done for the ones that could be imported. Currently doing a lot of hand entry work for ones that could not be imported.
  • Import from old hand coded entries that were neither in LiveJournal or database driven.
  • Usual admin work: Make sure tags, categories match. Update links, if possible. Replace images, if possible. Spell check, if possible. Things that are obviously missing or broken, like likes, images, and URLs I have fixed. But the rest I have left alone: grammar errors, stylistic choices, all left just as the creator intended.

Getting this project off the ground feels good and to see the content fleshing itself out as the years start to fatten up in the archives is thrilling.
The archives are stored on my main hard drive and backed up to two different cloud services. Since this is all text, despite the sheer amount of files, the weight is tiny. Plus the bonus is I can do this work from anywhere.
This weekend I found a gorgeous plugin that allows me to have true, easy to use and navigate archives page. Better than any widget that collapses or piecemeal summary on the archives page (whether by category, tag, or month), it’s brilliant. Clicking on by month still gives you the monthly entries on a single page in all of their glory, but at least with the landing archives page, it is much more inviting now to read the past. And it’s easier, for me, to see what months and years are not quite filled out.
Also, a discovery! While entries exist back to 1995, it was on July 16, 1998 I decided to buy a domain and turn this into a THING. So now I have an anniversary, of sorts, and it feels incredibly intimate to have shared my life online for 16 years.
In the past, the arguments I’ve made for this project, this getting all of the content together in a reasonable archive (even if I wasn’t working on it at the time) was for curation, preservation, and historical access. I now I’m going to add postmodern literacy to the mix.
For the last couple of years, at least, I’ve noticed the tipping point of the web becoming heavily in favor of multimedia over written content. Twitter has 140 characters. Instagram is about pictures. SnapChat and Vine are about videos. Tumblr and Facebook is about all of those things as long as it is done in a microformat. These are social networks and their brevity is accepted and expected.
On the flip side, in terms of written content supposedly not attached to flash whiz bang, massively popular websites like BuzzFeed, Thought Catalog, Jezebel, and their ilk who should be writing engaging articles or pieces anymore, are not. No, it IS about an image, a GIF, a video, or the hated listicle like  “9 Things To Torture Your Cat With While Standing Naked On A Balancing A Ball.”  These sites are typically peppered with ads in the article, before and after the article, in the header and the footer. All of these articles come with bylines, the text is usually under a 100 words – and that’s a long article in their world. The longform content has now become quickie.
The question to me is: are these really articles? Sure, not all pieces should be Joycean in nature, but at the same time, do they all need to have the brevity and abstraction of cummings? If it contains image macros, preferably of a cute animal, a witty tagline, and a line or two, it is an article and why is that enough?
Best of all: someone got paid to do that work and put their byline on that piece.
MTV Geek has a call out for an editor for their blog requesting, Build and edit approximately 15 blog posts per day of no less than 300 words each. That’s 4,500 words. A day. And their ad requirements are a glimpse into what we get when we read our RSS feeds: dozens of articles a day from various sites around the web that are almost all brainless and thoughtless. Why post 12 articles on upcoming movies when you could have ONE article on upcoming movies. Because then you wouldn’t get the clickbait. Clickbait is what brings in the money, honey.
Not all sites treat content as a commodity to be brokered. Longform, McSweeney’s, PaidContent, and to some extent Salon are several notches ahead of the aforementioned link bait sites, but even they have their own problems. And don’t get me started on Huffington Post and how I do wonder, everyday, we’ve decided that site was fine and acceptable for news retrieval.
My point, as I wander around about shaking angry fists at everything,  is that the days of writing on the web, for the sake of writing, seem to be disappearing quickly. A look through WordPress’ themes  directory is filled with responsive, light, minimal themes. But only if you do video or photos. Dig around looking for a theme to showcase written word and you’re hard pressed to find anything worth using. Or you could hack apart a theme, as I often do, and make it bend to your will but that isn’t the point.
So I decided I’m going to have a quiet little revolution. In addition to rejecting the type of so-called journalism listed above, I will continue to write about my fancy, fill in my archives when I can, and present a pleasing text choked content filled site. I may not get the hits, or the money, or the fame from what I’m doing but when the rest of the world remembers only cat videos and fake Twitter accounts, this will be an always on reminder of the time we text used to exist.
x0x0,
Lisa (Day #25)

This day in Lisa-Universe in: 2003

Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes: August 17, 2013

Johann Georg Hainz's Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Johann Georg Hainz’s Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

During the Renaissance, cabinet of curiosities came into fashion as a collection of objects that would often defy classification. As a precursor to the modern museum, the cabinet referred to room(s), not actual furniture, of things that piqued the owners interest and would be collected and displayed in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes is my 21st century interpretation of that idea.
 
Dear Internet,
I’ve been sick with the plague half the week and traveling a lot the other half, so not a whole lot of what I wanted to do got done. There was also a lot of sleeping involved, and it’s hard to consume media when you’re dreaming of living in a villa in Italy.

Writing

The Lisa Chronicles

Listening

  • Cabin Pressure
    Still working my way through the series, but I’m now at the beginning of season 3, which means it’s only a few more short cabin commutes before I’m done again. Thankfully, I’ve got a few things lined up to take its place.
  • Night Vale
    I mentioned this last week and a few days prior to that and finally got a chance to listen to 5 or so episodes of the show. It is delightful and reminds me much of our little village in northern Michigan. It’s especially poignant when reading the police blotter of the weekly newspaper.

Reading

I cannot tell a lie Internet, reading has been poor but in so far as books have gone. I’ve been consuming more content via my RSS feeds — even bankrupted the count to 0, which was glorious, and have been keeping up with feeds instead of shunning them like the pox. I’ve also been keeping up with my magazine subscriptions (Vanity Fair, New Yorker, JASNA, American Libraries) and work routing magazines (BBC History, Computers in Libraries, Library Journal).
Books currently in rotation:

Watching

  • Miranda
    I binged watched this again while I was sick this week and I still love every moment of it. Rumours are that it will be back in 2015, which seems awfully far away but isn’t. My next goal is to pick up her book, Is it Just Me?. in audio format as that is apparently the only way to consume it as Hart herself narrates.
  • Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England
    Based on the book of the same time, Ian Mortimer takes you through a time period but as a travelling guide. Interesting concept, and in written form it works quite well. In visual form, some of the effects were off putting and I found myself mind wandering in some spots, but overall very interesting. The two biggst issues I had were of the constant shots of Mortimer walking through desolate fields and the CGI drawn in effects how things might have looked. It felt a little too flash bang.
  • The Bridge (US)
    Based off the Swedish/Danish series of the same name, the US version places a murder on the Bridge of the Americas, joining El Paso, TX and Juarez, Mexico. Crime solving with one main character from each state department entangles, hilarity ensues. Not really. While the show as a lot great moments, some of the characters seems a little wooden. We also found that while we have watched all the episodes, the catch up of the previous week’s episodes we never saw or remember. Despite its quirks and often sloppy dialog and plot lines, there is enough to keep us entranced each week.

Weekly watching: Project Runway, The Newsroom, True Blood, Sons of Anarchy, Burn Notice,  Da Vinci’s Demons,  The Vampire Diaries
xoxo,
Lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe in: 2011, 2010

 

In which the dog hate pees, my boyfriend shows up, and thehusband admits he has no sense of humour

Hercules vacuum cleaner, 1930s; State Library of New South Wales. Courtesy of The Commons, Flickr.
Dear Internet,
First I must tell you it’s much later than what the time stamp says on the entry. The second thing I must tell you is that I’m fairly high on Klonopin, which is in part thanks to having a physical anxiety attack this late evening. One pill couldn’t  cut it, it seems, so I took two.
This week was kind of adventurous, which I’ve got started as another post-dated entry, but to bring you up to speed, we’re up at Throbbing Cabin which was solely to be for our vacation and not for renovations. Yet instead,  it has turned into a comedy of errors.
As some of you may know, earlier this week I had a round of The Plague which changed everything, namely this entire week was to be our vacation week where the cabin was to be our actual vacation home and not a money pit of despair. The hope was to have day trips all over the area and see things we haven’t seen yet outside of our little 10 mile area.
We were obviously too ambitious.
We came up to Throbbing Cabin late Thursday afternoon, two cars packed with goods. After getting unpacked, it is discovered I left the non-perishable groceries on the counter in the kitchen back in Grand Rapids, which leads us to quick on the fly thinking of where to do for food, ending up having dinner at Little Traverse Inn, where their gastropub specialize in British foods with a twist. I really enjoyed the haggis parcels.
After a marvelous dinner, we head into Glen Arbor to grab the missing dry items left in Grand Rapids, head to the cabin to get ready for bed and sleep.
Except that didn’t quite happen. Wednesday had been acting odder than usual since I picked her up from the bordering place earlier in the day. I had thought it was their off her schedule walking that twas giving her troubles, but even after we right the wrong she decides to do two things:

  • She pees on the new wood floors right after we arrived
  • She pees on our bed at the end of the night, soaking through the duvet, sheets, and the mattress pad

Even better? TheHusband had been laying on some of the pee.
Thankfully we had back up sheets and comforters on hand. Also thankfully the mattress pad was designed for just such an occasion so the mattress itself never got wet.
Now I can speculate for as long as the day as long as to why both instances happened:

  • She’s 13 (or 101), and she’s incredibly picky how things are done. If they are not done just so, she gets upset
  • Boarding place said they had walked her twice before I picked her up at 11:30AM that morning, yet she almost immediately shat and pissed in my car. So see point the first.
  • We walked her more as soon she got home and after, yet our punishment was the peeing in the house.

It’s worth nothing that today she’s been fine. As a precaution, we’ve removed the water bowl we kept for her in the bedroom (since we’re upstairs, and she cannot get up/down stairs).
With that incident having now occurred, we knew we were going into Traverse City to do emergency laundry and then the thinking went, well as long as we’re in Traverse, might as well run a few other errands since we’re in the city.
Which completely shot our damned day. We were thinking beach! Hikes! Things! Not sit in a laundromat, watching DEAL OR NO DEAL.
My boyfriend, as he’s referred to, is the contractor who laid down our flooring and also builds homes. We’ve been getting price quotes from him to do work beyond our means, like rip out the second bathroom and redo it properly. We’ll also be contracting him further down the road to gut out and redo the kitchen (hopefully via IKEA).
He’s called such because it seems he only calls me, not TheHusband, for anything and we’ve now moved on to texting. The luck of the draw is that he looks like someone I would date. And there might be slight chemistry between us. But it’s kind of hard to feel the allure when the only times he’s ever seen me is when I look my not so very best.
After TheBoyfriend had come and gone to drop off some contract work, breakfast was made and consumed, we spent time putting together yet even more IKEA items from our haul this week. I prodded TheHusband to call a pest control person for we were finding little piles of dust in the master bedroom area and as luck would have it, the pest control could be out there early evening.
With our chores and bathing done, we started the slow trek into Traverse as we had stops such as at the recycling and gas station to embark on.
The bane of my existence during our courting years was TheHusband’s obsession on finding the perfect engagement ring. I looked at hundreds, if not thousands, of rings that all began blend into the same one.
Shopping for floor rugs with this man has the exact same experience. Online or off, there is always something not quite right about anything we have seen. We stopped at a rug showcase on our way to the laundromat and one after. My eyes were glazed over with all the seemingly same choices. My final threat was we were going to pick up something from Target, which turned out how our search ended with two area rugs thrown into our cart. Now we’re finding ourselves saying things like, “Well, if we don’t like it, into the guest room it goes!” which was also our mantra for Throbbing Manor.
Which explains so much about our decorating process.
Errands done, finally, headed back to the cabin, we meet up with pest control guy who showed up a little early. After poking and hunting around the cabin, he can’t quite find any trails to suspect carpenter ants are eating at the cedar. Since it’s either them or carpenter bees, and the bees are not here, then it’s got to be the damn ants. Traps were laid about the house and the outside perimeter was sprayed with poison. We report back to him in a week.
After all of this is done, it’s now closing in on 8PM. We wolf down dinner, grab the dog, and head to the local beach to watch the sunset and ended up staying for little over an hour. I was hoping to see more stars, with zero light pollution, but we were woefully unprepared for hanging out on a darkened beach.
We headed back to Cedar and got slushies before heading home, and here we are.
Mood update: Mood update has been pretty chill, though I’ve been sick for the better part of the week. I skipped a few days of the klonopin because I didn’t want to have an interaction with Day/NightQuil. I have not started Wellbutrin but several friends are reporting they are feeling good things about it, so that is still a  might see.
I cancelled my appointment with Dr. H. on Monday because I had completely spaced on the appointment AND I don’t have the ready cash. Dr. P. and I have been unable to connect for a few weeks so hopefully I’ll get to see him soon.
x0x0,
Lisa (Day #21)

This day in Lisa-Universe in: 2003, 2003

Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes: August 10, 2013

Johann Georg Hainz's Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Johann Georg Hainz’s Cabinet of Curiosities, circa 1666. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

During the Renaissance, cabinet of curiosities came into fashion as a collection of objects that would often defy classification. As a precursor to the modern museum, the cabinet referred to room(s), not actual furniture, of things that piqued the owners interest and would be collected and displayed in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Collectioun of Cunnynge Curioustes is my 21st century interpretation of that idea.
 
Dear Internet,

Writing

The Lisa Chronicles

Listening

  • Night Vale

Watching

Weekly watching: Project Runway, The Newsroom, True Blood, Sons of Anarchy, Burn Notice,  DaVinci’s Demons,  The Vampire Diaries

Links

x0x0,
Lisa

This day in Lisa-Universe in: 2012, 2010

receives wicked men after their death

Houten badpakken / Wooden bathing suits
Wooden bathing suits, supposed to make swimming a lot easier. Haquian, Washington, USA, 1929. Courtesy of The Commons, Flickr.

Dear Internet,
I don’t have much time this evening to write as I’m due to leave in about 15 minutes to pick up Beth from their airport. Tomorrow morning, she and I will head up to Throbbing Cabin where five other of our friends will meet us for a long girls weekend.
Seven girls.
All librarians.
Drunk.
In A Cabin.
In the Woods.
What could possibly go wrong?
Don’t be terribly surprised if communication from me is slow this weekend, namely here on the blog. And I’m not quite sure what the protocol is to tweet from jail.
(If you’re into that kind of thing, you can always follow me on the twitters or instagram to keep up with the antics.)
I was feeling pretty focused on work today, but some of the problems with MPOW’s website upgrade is trickling down to me and that is causing me some frustration. The frustration stems as student report vague web issue to library staff, library staff reports that to me long after the student has left so I can’t trouble shoot or fix the issue. I’ve been dragging my own laptop in to test the complaints but I can’t apparently duplicate them and as the student has long gone, I can’t work with them directly.
See. Frustration.
The problems all stem from students who have their own devices, and I have been walking library staff through asking a series of questions to narrow down at least the general problems but something in the communication either from me to them or from them to the student or somewhere else is getting broken. I just feel like I’ve been repeating myself A LOT.
Today is day #3 of no sleepiness and to test out my theory, I refrained from caffeine long after my morning Red Bull was gone. I drank water for the rest of the day and felt fine. Later in the afternoon I had a ritual Coke slurpee while I ran errands as I needed the extra push to make sure I was up when to I went to pick Beth up.
Much later.
It’s long after midnight and I’m still up. Beth’s plane was late by an hour, which turned out to be a boon to me as I was able to complete some packing and writing before I needed to leave. I smushed  her face off when she came out of the gate, whisked her back to Throbbing Manor, gave her the abridged tour of the house and finally got her tucked into bed.
Mood ring says: Feeling pretty good. Pretty even. I’m gloriously enjoying the lack of sleepiness during the day. I’m also absolutely luxuriating in my morning routine, which is now including reading a short story while I eat my breakfast.
And if there is anything I’ve been discovering these last few weeks, the little things are everything.
x0x0,
Lisa (Day #14)

This day in Lisa-Universe in: 2012, 2012, 2012, 2012, 2011, 1999