With the exception of all manner of fuzzy, feathered, or fishy critters, there’s very little I won’t eat. I love food, all manner of tastes and textures. But there are certain foods that, though I enjoy them in certain dishes, completely gross me out on their own. Here they are:

1. Hard boiled eggs: Tasty on a salad, ghost of Easters past on its own. Remember how you’d eat all the jelly beans, all the chocolate rabbits, and then crack open the egg, only to find that it had turned green? Yeah.

2. Mayonnaise: Fabulous when home-made and served with roasted beets. Delicious in moderation on sandwiches. On its own, in a jar? I can barely look at it.

3. Gum: I had a friend in high school who used to put gum balls in rice krispy treats. As far as I’m concerned, it’s gross no matter where you put it. And does it even count as food if you’ve got to spit it out when you’re done with it?

4. Avocado: I love it in sushi. Even more in Guacamole. But on it’s own, slowly turning brown in its reptile shell? Ew.

I went grocery shopping with my grandmother and her caregiver today. As we were unloading bags from the car, I was struck with this sudden memory, a full on flashback of the time Brian and I visited grandma back in 2003, when we first moved to the West Coast.

I guess grandma must have been about 81 then, and she was oh so much healthier. A little prone to worry, maybe, but not nearly as bad as today, where the gaps in her memory get filled in with imagined illnesses and tragedies. She was always so active, my grandmother, and when Brian and I came back from the grocery store with her, she refused our offers of help, piling her grocery bags into a wheelbarrow she kept by the garage and wheeling them up to the back door with casual ease. Brian and I stood by helplessly, a little stupidly, watching grandma and the wheelbarrow moving towards us in the twilight and waiting for our chance to swoop in and grab the bags so we could at least carry them up the steps.

“When we get old, let’s be like your grandma,” Brian said.

“Agreed.”

Today grandma woke up confused. This morning she sat at the foot of my bed and wondered if my Aunt Carol, her youngest, had taken an overdose of pills, or maybe had a bad fall. She agreed with me that it was probably just a bad dream, but still she couldn’t keep from crying.

At the grocery store, too, she was muddled, and when we got home she was convinced the alarm was still on, even though she’d turned it off herself. “I think Carol lost a lot of money,” she said. “She left it in her classroom and forgot to lock the door.” Carol laughed when I called her. “If only I had a large sum of money to lose.”

As the day wore on, grandma got better. We went for a walk, and admired the architecture of some nearby houses. “Like a castle!” she said. “I bet it costs a fortune to heat,” I replied. I guess I was a bit gloomy from the morning, too.

After we got home, we looked through a picture album while we drank our tea. “Where do they live now?” I asked, pointing to some of my father’s cousins.

“They moved to California.”

“Oh!”

“And then there was a huge fire that raged up the coast, and they were trapped.”

“Really?”

“Oh, but first they got tuberculosis.”

Everyone gets tuberculosis in my grandma’s stories lately. I don’t know what that’s about.

Anyway, then we had dinner, and then we settled in for a night of PBS, first the Human Spark and then the Audition. The latter programme (see that extra ‘me’ there? I’m in Canada) chronicled the Metropolitan Opera’s annual National Council auditions, where young opera singers from around the country compete for a cash prize, a chance to sing at the Met, and a jumpstart on their opera careers.

Grandma’s not a huge opera fan, but she seemed to enjoy the show for the most part, making comments about various singers’ abilities and mannerisms and watching fairly raptly. With about a half hour to go, though, she’d had enough and decided to go to bed.

“I’ll be up in a bit,” I said. “I want to see who wins.”

“Oh yes,” said Grandma. “The ghost!”

Seems like the ghost always wins.

Hello! I’m afraid I’ve been neglecting things over here, along with everything else that’s not a paper on database systems or intellectual freedom. But the semester’s almost done, which makes this a great time to explore the hotses and notses of the week a la Loobylu.

Brian's most recently-finished piece

Hot!

1. Backyard Astronomy: Or in our case, Duboce Park astronomy. Over the summer, when I was visiting my folks, I asked my dad for advice on telescopes after Sweetney tweeted a question about telescopes for beginners (File under: sentences that would not have made sense in the Twentieth Century). Dad did some research (try and stop him), and found that one of his favorite telescope-vendors offered a relatively inexpensive option, good for city-viewing and simple enough for inexpert astronomers.

Fast forward to yesterday, when Dad’s itchy Xmas trigger finger resulted in an early-December surprise telescope at our door. Brian and I braved the cold (and clouds) and spent a happy if frigid hour in Duboce Park looking at the moon before toddling home for some hot chocolate. Hurrah for astronomy! The moon is pale and lovely, especially up close.

2. Brian! The boy is all sorts of hot. He finished his latest piece Monday, and he’s just put a show up at Bean There, a cafe in our neighborhood. It’s got high ceilings and loads of morning light, and his pieces look great. We’ll be hosting a reception at 7 o’clock this Friday (tomorrow, that is). Stop by if you live in San Francisco! I might invite you to go moon-watching.

Here's a picture from outside at night. No morning light, but look at them windows!

Not!

Mess. The house is in chaos, and it’s 99.9% my doing. I need to clean my closets, but first I need to sort through the piles of things piled in front of the closets because the closets are in such chaos.

Money. Being in grad school ain’t earning me any. In fact, it’s costing money. Whose bright idea was that?

Alright. Enough with the notses, back to the hotses! Here’s another look at Fixed Landscape #4:

I found my cellphone (it was in my bathrobe pocket).

I stayed up til a little past seven this morning, working on the final paper for one of my classes. I got up three hours later, and I swear all I must’ve done while I was sleeping was dream my way through the paper and wander some dreamscape paper cut-out of my house, because all day long I’ve been plagued by deja vu.

My darling seester likes deja vu, because she thinks it means she’s on the right track. And so all day I’ve felt oddly reassured, even though part of me worries that this is some sort of Donnie Darko scenario, where I’ve already been squished by a plane toilet in some alternate reality, and the reality I’m experiencing is just some faint echo of my last days.

Or maybe I just need a nap.

Brian and I have just gotten back from a gallery talk, and are hanging out in his studio, settling down for a long winter’s paper writing and sculpture carving. All of a sudden, we hear voices in the alley. Drunk voices, yelling “Whaddaya doing?” “I’m peeing!” “We’re all peeing!”

In unison, we spring in to action. Brian goes for the door, I hit the lights. Two women are squatting in the alley, pants around their ankles, their bottoms glowing in the moonlight like the face of the Timex watch I used to wear back in college. “Uh oh,” one cries, her bare bottom disappearing around the corner and into the darkness. “Uh oh!”

Here it is again, the hotses and notses for the week, inspired, as always, by Loobylu:

Hot:

Library school: Like, sizzly hot. Like water sputtering across a hot pan hot. Like, too much work to even think about hot. Plus it’s time to select courses for next semester. How much can I realistically put on my plate? And the reference class I wanted to take is all full up. Poop.

Not:

Communication: My cell phone’s still MIA (I’m sure it’s around here someplace, but where?). I can’t access one of my email accounts. Seriously, how much more out of touch with my life could I be? And speaking of which:

NaBloPoMo: As you may have noticed, I fell off the blogging wagon for two days running. So much for blogging every day in November. Oh well. It’s not like I ever win any of the prizes anyway.

More from the Social and Cultural History database:

Letter from Lydia Maria Child to Anne Lynch Botta, 1839

Providence, R. I., 1839.

Dear Miss Lynch: I thank you for your kind invitation to visit you, with Mr. Furness. If I ever went anywhere, I certainly should have come. But for ten years past I have made no visits and formed no new acquaintance. I am considered a very odd woman; but my only oddity consists in an unaffected love of seclusion. I have not the smallest particle of social ambition. I would not take the trouble to go to two parties for the sake of obtaining the most flattering honors society could confer. It would, in fact, be taking what I do not want; for I have the most sincere aversion to being conspicuous in any way. To this natural love of keeping out of sight, is added weariness of spirit. Life has been to me a hard battle, and I would fain rest by the wayside. I am careful to do injury to no one, by act or word; and I strive to do, in a noiseless way, as much good as my limited means will allow. From what I am told of your independent character, I think you will admit that I have an undoubted right to live in retirement, since the choice springs from no imagined superiority and no deficiency of kindly social feelings.

The world has tried hard to fasten its fetters somehow upon me, but it is quite as much to the purpose to pour water on a duck’s back. I wish well to everybody; I delight in beauty wherever I meet it; I am thankful I am poor; and I do not want a single thing that the world can either give or take away. With the most cordial wishes for your happiness, I am truly your friend,

Lydia Maria Child.

May I present: Owl in a Box! (Found via the ever-enlightening Mimi Smartypants).

And can I just tell you that the first owl photo looks disconcertingly like Brian when he’s annoyed? (And how is it I never noticed that I’ve paired off with X the Owl? Does that make me Henrietta Pussycat, meow meow? And while we’re comparing people to puppets, have you seen this?).

I’ve got three assignments due this weekend, and I still can’t find my phone. Over and out.

I think he must have rolled in something at the park. OOoo-eeee!

In other news, I haven’t seen my cell phone in two days. And my (main) computer up and died on me. Reviving the computer and recovering the  therin looks to be a bit spendy, so I’ve decided just to sit on my dead computer for now (not literally. That’d be weird). I’ve got my cheap and tiny pc, and right now nothing’s on my Mac that I need too desperately. Luckily, it died at just-the-right moment in the semester: there’s nothing on it that hasn’t been turned in or can’t be recreated quickly and easily.

And there’s a scrap-it-all luddite inside me who feels kind of liberated. Computer breaks? Computer gone!  Ha!