Cranky pants

Things have been going pretty well of late. My foot is on the road to recovery, and I have resumed some of my exercise classes. Summer is near, etc. etc.

Even in the face of “going pretty well of late,” sometimes I accidentally put on my cranky pants. I don’t even realize I’m wearing them. Perhaps some older ladies at the gym are sitting on a bench right next to the locker where I’ve stashed my stuff. They’re fully dressed in their street clothes, but they’re just chatting, oblivious to my needing to scooch around them in a cramped space to get to my towel. When I return from the shower and see that they’re still there, I let out one of those exasperated, “what-ever” sigh/snorts. Even though they don’t actually hear this, they do leave shortly thereafter.

Or maybe I’m recounting a challenging work situation in an instant message window, and I find myself wanting to use more profanity than is my usual. I don’t catch on at this point, because I’m not actually mad at anyone. There are some people who are sort of mad at me, but even this doesn’t really bother me, because what they’re mad about is something over which I didn’t have a whole lot of control.

Could be that I’m pulling into the parking lot at my lunch spot and become inordinately annoyed with people who creep along, waiting for someone else to vacate a spot, even though there are plenty of other spaces.

That was the moment of realization for me today, when I uttered something derogatory and profane about a faceless driver in front of me, for a pretty insignificant offense.

Oh, shit, I’m wearing my cranky pants today!

Nothing an 84-gram organic orange dark chocolate bar won’t fix. That’s a single serving, right? 84 grams?

Bookclubbing

I seem to have gotten my “young folk” book club off the ground. First we read Infidel, because I had read it and was dying to talk about it, but couldn’t attend the discussion at what I lovingly call my “Mature Women’s Book Club.” Our second book was Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches. I didn’t care for it because a) it’s not narrative and b) it was an old white guy’s anthropological opinion of other cultures.

Our next two books are Water for Elephants and The Road. I finished Water for Elephants last night, even though we won’t be discussing it until mid June. The Mature Women’s Book Club will be discussing it at the end of June.

I was accused of “cheating” by getting the young folk to read the same book as the mature women, but I was encouraged that the men in the young folk club would like it for two reasons.

  1. The first time I heard of the book was when I saw the audio version in the fish stock assessment lab at one of my tribes. The lab technician (a dude) had listened to it during his long days alone in the lab.
  2. When I got my copy at the used bookstore downtown, the sales guy raved about it and said he read it in its entirety on a flight between Denver, Detroit or Dallas (I can’t remember) and Seattle.

Water for Elephants

Sex, violence and circus animals. What’s not to love?

I enjoyed Water for Elephants from the start, but as it neared its conclusion, it just kept getting better and better. On my scale, it went from four stars to five stars in the final chapters.

There’s a technique I’ve been seeing too often in television shows, where something terribly dramatic happens in the opening scene. Then we see a title that says “24 hours earlier” and we find out the events that led to the dramatic circumstance.

Water for Elephants opens with a dramatic prologue that introduces us to Jacob (our hero), Marlena (his love interest) and Rosie (an elephant). Then we’re introduced to Jacob as a nonagenarian in a nursing home. When the circus comes to town, he reflects on the events that led to his becoming a circus veterinarian and falling in love with both Marlena and Rosie.

I started asking myself why the writer felt the need to start with that prologue. I felt like it detracted from the story because I thought I knew where the characters would end up. Without giving anything away, I will say that the prologue is, in fact, masterfully written and enhances an already powerful climax.

For some reason I want to compare my experience reading Water for Elephants with another heralded book about animals, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. I found Sawtelle enormously disappointing, after being completely entranced by the dogs in the early chapters. I learned later in his interview with Oprah that the author didn’t know why his characters did the things they did. Sawtelle also had a deliberately mysterious prologue, but none of the questions it raised are answered in the story. As the story started falling apart, I kept reading, eager to find a satisfying conclusion, but found none.

So I was thrilled last night as I read the last 150 pages of Elephants, to feel it going somewhere and have it arrive with all the pieces intact. It’s not a perfect novel. I had some criticisms along the way, but I can’t remember what any of them were, because I so completely enjoyed the dénouement.

I just love a happy ending

I really thought I’d nailed this whole pest control thing. I solved the mouse, nay mice, in the car problem with a thorough cleaning and scented dryer sheets.

About a week ago, I discovered mouse turds on the kitchen counter. No problem at all. We’ve been here before. I set a trap.

The next morning, the peanut butter had been licked from the trap, with a little pile of mouse poop next to it, mocking me. The trap had not snapped.

I set it again, this time with almond butter, since that’s what we’ve been eating. Oh my gawd, is it delicious. I just want to eat a whole jar of it with a spoon. (Incidentally, we don’t pay $17.99 for it.  Fred Meyer sells it for $3.99)

The next morning, the trap was licked clean.

I set a second trap and tried to position the two strategically so the mouse couldn’t get to one without snapping the other. Upon the advice of a coworker, I replaced the almond butter with cheese. For two more nights, the mouse nibbled the bait from the trap and left taunting little turds beside it.

Last weekend, we awoke in the night for whatever reason, and I saw that cheese had been nibbled from only one of the traps. I moved an electronic trap, which so far has never caught a mouse, next to the two traps in a formation I was sure would lure the mouse to his snappy demise.

A short while later, we heard a great clang.

“Go get it, go get,” I told Rob.

“No, no, it’s freshly dead,” he said.  “You have to let the rigor set in.”

“Go look at it, go look at it,” I told him.

From the kitchen, I heard, “Aaah, Kari, come here, come here, come here!”

Evidently, the mouse had been lying on his back, looking dead, when it and the trap suddenly started scooting back behind the oven. I wondered later if the mouse had a buddy who was trying to save him.

When I arrived, I saw the trap turned over, with a little tail sticking out. I checked back later and I couldn’t see the tail. I reached for the trap which had a little foot in it, but when I pulled, the little leg stretched, and then the mouse was gone behind the oven.

A few more nights of cat and mouse went by and last night, Isis woke me up acting very strangely. She wasn’t whining, but I could tell she was really freaked out about something. I’m highly attuned to this dog; I knew a trap had snapped.

Indeed, one of the traps was upside-down on the stove top. The other was nowhere to be found. Rob pulled out the oven this morning and didn’t see anything.

I resigned myself to get a glue trap. Sure it’s unseemly and inhumane to have to deal with a live mouse stuck to one of those things, but enough is enough. It’s him or me.

However, they didn’t have glue traps at the store. At the very least, I decided we (and by we, I mean Rob) should climb behind the oven and fill the space around the gas line with that expanding foam stuff. No more mice will get in and eventually I’ll get a glue trap and the ninja mouse can die a slow, painful death.

As it turned out, Rob hadn’t looked carefully enough this morning, because when we pulled the oven out, the little sucker was just hanging out by the hole in the floor, with a trap stuck to his tail. (You can see how the trap blends with the color of the floor.)

This was no ordinary mouse. He either really deserved to live, or really deserved to die.

We chose life, and set him free in our neighbor’s yard.

His right hind leg looks a little funky. I wonder if that’s the one that I pulled the other day. He’s probably not long for the woods anyway, but at least I didn’t kill him.

These streets will make you feel brand new

I’ve been to New York at least 10 times in my life, but Rob had never been. I hadn’t done any of the “touristy” stuff since my first couple of visits, but I was happy to do it all again with Rob. We bought $79 City Passes, which included entrance to the Met, the Natural History Museum, MoMA, Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and the Top of Rockefeller Plaza.

We supplemented the City Pass with a pedicab through Central Park, the Broadway Show Rock of Ages, and a taping of The Late Show with David Letterman.

We were smart enough to go to the Top of the Rock on our first day, which turned out to be the only sunny day.  We took lots of pictures with the Empire State Building in the background. On our last day, it was so overcast and rainy that we were strongly encouraged not to bother going to the top of the Empire State Building. But since it was already paid for, and we were leaving the next day, we did it anyway. They weren’t kidding. There was nothing to see.

They gave us half-price on the flight simulation NY Skyride, which takes you on a virtual helicopter tour over New York. And there was no line, so the terrible weather was actually a bonus.

The City Pass allows you to skip long lines, which was hugely beneficial for our visit to the Museum of Modern Art. The lines there were so long, we probably wouldn’t even have gotten in before we needed to leave for the Letterman show. But because we had the City Pass, we just breezed on in.

I prefer MoMa to the Met, which is very overwhelming. We saw the controversial “The Artist is Present” exhibition, with live nude models, but my favorite part was seeing a group of very young schoolchildren being asked what they saw in a Mark Chagall painting.

A proverbial random thought that has bothered me, literally, forever

There is no hope for hopefully

I heard a caller to a radio show yesterday talk about meeting his wife. He referred to himself as “The proverbial bad boy.” How does that proverb go again? Something about a bad boy in good fortune being in want of a wife?

It reminded me of another oft-misused word, literally. Unlike “proverbial” or “random,” but rather like “hopefully,” there is a “literally” entry in a book called 100 Words Almost Everyone Confuses and Misuses.

Literally: 1. In a literal manner; word for word. 2. In a literal or strict sense. 3. Usage problem: Really, actually. Used as an intensive before a figurative expression: He was laughing so hard his sides literally burst.

What’s wrong here is that literally is being used to mean the exact opposite of what it should. His sides didn’t literally burst. It also bugs me when people use literally when there is no figurative expression involved. We literally went to, like, five bars last night.

The word use that bothers me the most, for some reason, is random. Since my era, teenagers have been declaring awkward or unusual social moments to be “Ran-dom.” It’s gotten more pervasive. Look at your Facebook photo albums right now. Do you have one called “Random photos”? Did Facebook select those photos for you? Did you take a bunch of pictures without looking? Didn’t think so. You are an offender.

Back to therapy I go

Physical therapy for my sore big toe. Sounds crippling, right?

It’s really the ball of my foot. I should call it by its medical name: sesamoiditis, with a trace of tendonitis, caused by so much enthusiasm for step aerobics that I participated before I had a chance to buy the proper shoes, compounded with an inability to stop going to the good Zumba class.

Two months later, my foot still bothers me. Can’t even walk the dog. Although the pain is only about a 3 on the pain scale, I realized how debilitating it is when I filled out the questionnaire asking how my disability has interfered with my physical activity. Do you know how skinny I would be right now if I had been able to continue going to step and Zumba 3-5 times a week?

I had great success with physical therapy a few years ago when I had a neck injury caused by letting my heavy DSL camera hang around my neck all day at a clam bake. Seriously. That’s what happened.

I liked that therapist a lot. I had several weeks of sessions where I was ultrasounded, stretched and taught to do exercises. They had me do the exercises right there in their little gym.They gave me free exercise bands and had Halloween candy on the counter.

That therapist moved to a larger practice by the time I needed therapy for my tight-shoulder-induced headache. For various scheduling and insurance reasons, I wasn’t able to see that therapist at the larger place. They also didn’t have me do the exercises there. They just showed them to me and sent me on my merry way. I didn’t like any of the exercises, because I felt myself tightening my neck and shoulders to do them. So I didn’t do the exercises. Then I quit going. My shoulders and neck are still very tight, by the way.

I returned to this place today for therapy on my foot. I thought there was a stronger likelihood of getting massaged and ultrasounded than being assigned annoying exercises, because really, what can  you do to strengthen the sesamoid bones?

I lucked into getting scheduled with one of the Big Guys. He put a carbon-fiber insert under my orthotic and told me I should flex the ball of my foot as little as possible. He had a physical therapy student ultrasound me underwater (just my foot), ice me and hook me up to an electrical stimulation dealie that I couldn’t feel at all, but was assured was working. The Big Guy told me to come back twice next week before my trip to New York and “we’ll try to get the pain to stop before you go.”

I’m in good hands, right? Except, when I check out, I find out that my appointments next week aren’t with the Big Guy but someone else. I remember now that this is my problem with this joint, and it annoyed me during my last series of physical therapy treatments. No continuity of care.

Game changer

OK, so this won’t affect my inability to eat M&Ms or Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups without breaking out, but I had a revelation this weekend, during a tour of the Theo Chocolate Factory in Fremont.

Unlike the pure, organic, fair trade Theo, most “chocolatiers” mix additives with their cacao. Additives such as SOY LECITHIN. I’d already made the connection I have some kind of allergy to soy … but it had not occurred to me that soy was the culprit in M&Ms and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

So far, Sunday’s sampling of many delicious varieties of Theo, my favorite being coconut curry, has not resulted in any disfiguring acne. My experiment may be flawed, because I was served a black bean and chipotle Gardenburger for dinner last night (containing soy protein, but way down on the list of ingredients) and I made a stir fry with some low-sodium soy sauce last week.

It seems that small quantities of soy are OK. Edamame and tofu are out. Of course, it’s very difficult to consume only small quantities of chocolate, which is why I don’t know if it would be safe to eat, say, 10 M&Ms.

I really would have liked to have eaten a Reese’s Peanut Butter Egg this Easter, though.

Souls of many mice

I’ve come a long way since my first murder. About once a year, usually around February, we find evidence of a mouse in our kitchen, trap it and kill it, and don’t see another until the next year.

I’m more comfortable with the traps, and even will dispose of the carcasses myself. Killing one mouse a year hasn’t weighed too heavily on me.

We had two or three inside the house this year, actually, but they were spaced out enough that it wasn’t too traumatic for me.

However.

A few weeks ago, I reached for a bag of dog treats I had in my car. Little shreds of the foil bag rained on my lap like confetti, and for a moment, I thought Isis might have chewed through the bag herself. Then I found the turds.

I don’t know why it took me a few weeks to set traps inside the car. I stupidly thought the mouse would just leave on its own, despite the fact that I knew I had a ton of spilled kibble under the seats. (Since I started feeding raw, I use the kibble as training treats.)

After the discovery of more turds, I smartened up and set a trap on the passenger seat. The next morning, I was startled to see a dead mouse riding shotgun.

I set another trap under the back seat and a few days later, got another one. I’m surprised it took that long.

Yesterday, I Shop-Vac’d the hell out of my car, getting rid of all remnants of dog treats and kibble-colored turds. I looked around for any sign of their lair, or live mice, and found none.

Set a trap anyway, and goddammit if I didn’t find another little carcass this morning.

I don’t eat mammals. I feel very bad about killing all these little mice, meaning no harm. They haven’t done anything to me except creep me out. It’s my own fault for creating such a wonderful buffet.

But I need to keep them out! And kill the ones who refuse to leave.

Update (April 12): No new mice have been killed since I cleaned the car and have been covering the vents with scented dryer sheets at night. Apparently, mice don’t like the smell.

Don’t come around here no more

I had a “You don’t belong in Hollywood anymore” dream last night.

I was visiting an old friend at a studio. I couldn’t remember where to find him, so I kept getting lost and seeing big groups of movie stars wandering around together. I’d see them and think, “Oh, there’s the cast of Aliens. Rob’s going to be sorry he missed this.”

I left my purse on an elevator and went to a lost and found to get it back. They told me there would be a $13 charge to get it back. While I was waiting for the woman to come back with my purse, some comic actors (Jonah Hill was one of them) came in and I started cracking jokes with them, feeling very cool. But when I got my purse back, and reached in it to get the $13, I realized that I must have gotten my change back somewhere in Canadian money.

I didn’t even have the right currency.