In the past, the Snarks' luck with garden has been rather spotty. One year all they grew was a ginormous basil patch (about 36 Genovese basil plants purchased from a guy who called himself the Basil King (though he isn't this Basil King - see August 14th entry which kinda distracted me from this post for about half an hour. Why do we no longer have the Black Mountain College?!)) and made pesto all summer long and had enough left over to freeze and enjoy all through winter.
So they are quite pleasantly stunned to find that the mere seven basil plants, five tomato plants (gold nugget, an heirloom plant called "Dancing Bonnie", Early Girl, roma, and cherry tomatoes), and one each of eggplant (Japanese "Black Beauty"), cucumber (some sort of slicin' cuke) and zucchini are not only not dying, but bearing some fruit!
Wee ickle first harvest!
A recent photo of the garden, taken in the early evening.
Due to the dry (whoda thunk it?) weather, we've had to water the garden. Here's the tomato/basil/eggplant patch.
So far we've gotten two zucchini plants out of this monter. One was regular sized, and the other one we didn't get to until after returning from NC. Behold zuke-zilla!...
We've used about 2% of this thing so far.
The Snarks did end up having a good time with the Darkity'rents. Snarky starts her new job tomorrow (!!!) and the immediately after her first five days on the new job, they are flying out to TX to join up with the DarkityFam (including DarkityBro) to go on a five day cruise. (more !!!'s) At some point the Snarks will need a vacation to just sit at home and do absolutely nothing with nobody.
Today the Snarks hit four different Goodwill stores in the area for state plates and other curiosities. She has so much to show y'all (including the cow head they got for the living room!) (Don't worry, no real living bovines were harmed in the making of this particular piece of kitsch.) (Oh, and the Donut Barn! But... that's for another post.)
Until then, she will leave you this. Proof that Snarky comes from a cute short peoples.
Darkity'Rents at Multnomah Falls. Check out DarkityMa's new curly hair!
Snarky's office smelled of gas earlier today, and since then she and her co-workers have been experiencing moments of giddiness and short attention spans.
Of course, the spicy hot cocoa mix Snarky has been downing (with hot, strong coffee as the re-hydrating agent) probably is adding to the giddiness.
She is finding herself in a very weird and easily distracted head space this week. The Mister continues to fight the last bits of this horrendous monster cold they've both been fighting (Snarky still gets occasionally froggy, but is otherwise Back to Normal) and has been coming down from Host Mode (the Darkity'Rents are safely back in their home five states away). He's been feeling very worthless and lost this week since he isn't currently working, but is too sick to really explore the possible employment avenues about which he was most curious.
Snarky is Queen of Sloth and hopes to be able to encourage a few good days of solid down time for The Mister through example. Monkey see, monkey (don't) do, as it were.
There is also a weird undercurrent of Impending Doom circulating around the office today (along with any brain cell killing gases that might be wafting). Next week is going to be insane with an annual sale that will require the man power and time of everyone on staff. This is a huge event every year that traditionally gives the company a start of the year boost upon which all sorts of annual projections and planning hinge. And some of the veterans of this melee are feeling that Something Will Go Horribly Wrong.
All in all, the year has started off strangely. There is a feeling of restlessness and unease but also a kind of exhilaration - very reminiscent of the pit-of-stomach feeling one gets while being inexorably dragged up up up toward the payoff of a large, menacing, candy-colored roller coaster ride.
The Snarks went house shopping this weekend.
And it was good. No, no future home came out of it, but they've made a connection with a realtor who seems honest enough. He might have laughed a little too hard at some of Snarky's jokes, but they were pretty damn funny.
They went to eight houses in about four hours. It was good to feel them all out, interact with them. But it was also very tiring. Walking through the empty spaces, voices echoing off of outdated tiles and fugly cabinetry. Each room demanded five alternative placements for beds, sofas, coffee tables (Yes, the Snarks own two. No, they don't exactly know how that happened.)
Each house was the setting for a new part of their lives together. Each house was the beginning of a different path. Their minds bloomed, unfurled into these eight different paths. Lifetimes bubbled forth like kudzu, trying to cover every inch of possibility.
But none of the stories were quite right. The corners were too sudden, the proportions grating against some invisible outline. They reeled back in all the strands of possiblity. Wrapped them into loose hanks to hang at the ready for the next throw.
Later that night, Snarky stood naked in front of the half-mirror in their tiny apartment "walk in" (more like, "side-step in and pivot") closet. She looked at herself, tried to prognosticate. Perhaps it was the morning's house-hunting exercises that gave her flickering future-visions. She saw herself whole, hearty, healthy. She saw herself shriveled, diminished, in pieces. She touched her chest and tried to find a clue to what the next chapter would bring.
Snarky has lost her freaking mind.
Case and Point
This is the flooring she wants for her bathroom. The Mister wanted something more neutral, but this just spoke to her.
Maybe it's because the colorway is called "Asian Tiger". Snarky is just a complete sucker for names of colors that say nothing about the color. (Then again, The Mister's choice was something like "Picasso Splash" or somesuch.)
Send help. Preferrably in the form of beigy, calming tones.
Oops. Wrong show.
Recall the comic/histrionic tableaux competing families assumed at the beginning of that old gameshow mainstay, The Family Feud. If the DarkityFam were to pose thusly, Snarky believes she and her mother would be in the shouldn't-be-funny-but-really-is Mexican standoff mutual strangle-hold position.
Of course Snarky loves DarkityMa. She is cute (her hair grew back with a vengance and is curly of all things!) and cuddly and has a wicked sense of humor. She also can't stay still without cleaning and can hold on to grudges for decades. After some of the stories her parents have told the Snarks this past weekend about DarkityPauPau (DarkityGrandma) Snarky understands where the grudge thing comes from (and is starting to understand her own inability to just. Let. It. Go.)
Still, DarkityMa made Snarky cry. Snarky is considerably quick to tears (just watch her during holiday commercials), but these were bitter, angry, angsty, uncontrollable tears that Snarky hasn't cried since probably shortly after the onset of puberty. How does she do it?
Tonight is the Snarks' last night with the DarkityFam. Right now DarkityMa and Pa are meeting with the Snarks' realtor to discuss the local housing market, and to decide whether they want to move here sooner or later. On the balance Snarky would love for her parents to move closer. But there is the niggling, teenaged part of her that chafes a little at the idea -- it is all for entirely selfish reasons. Both of them are shockingly older than Snarky remembers them, and she wants to be able to take care of them without spending a day flying down to get to them.
Another enlightening revelation from this weekend is the fact that even Snarky's parents feel a sort of disconnect with the Chinese-American communities out there. They all have a healthy appreciation for the food and culture, but don't really care so much for the people... if that makes any sense at all. Snarky has found many of her "racial" contemporaries to be rather materialistic and overly driven to max out the monetary measuring stick. The Darkity'Rents moving to Portland would appease the rest of DarkityMa's clan in the Bay Area enough (hey, they're in the same time zone at least!) and still give them enough cushion from all the daily drama. Not to mention the $$$housing costs$$$.
Along with all these eye-opening conversations have been wonderful retellings of family lore. Snarky's mother and father both come from families that were greatly affected by the Japanese occupation as well as the Cultural Revolution. Both families were at some point split up during their exodus to Hong Kong, and the struggles and horrors they faced have left scars that decorate their combined pasts just as prominently as weddings, births, graduations, and other accomplishments.
Most days Snarky lives her life in the now without any sense of her history or the larger picture. Perhaps it would be good to have the touchstones of her parents closer by so that she can keep all of those lives and stories in mind. She just needs to get thicker skin first.
The Snarks are homeowners!
Snarky = ecstatic, The Mister = Already Thinking...
To commemorate this life-changing event, Snarky is tweaking her blog a bit to include documentation of the ongoing process of turning This Old House into their Home.
Snarky is still planning to keep with the third person format. She will most likely still throw in random fits of writerly aspiration. But the focus has shifted enough to warrant a re-chistening of this blog.
The Snarks are really, truly happy to have gotten through this first major hurdle toward housedom. Unfortunately, their new status started out with a Snakes on a Plane shakedown in the form of a break-in to their new house.
Apparently some bored, only mildly motivated hoodlums noticed the "SOLD" sign in front of the house and the fact that the previous owners had recently vacated. They took advantage of the occupancy lull and crowbarred their way into the empty house. After unsuccessfully attempting to wrench the sink disposal out of the kitchen, it appears they left empty handed. They even left the crowbar behind.
The Snarks are feeling a bit shaken by this. They've had car break ins in the past, but their home? Never. After talking with the neighbors, they feel a bit better. They're a (usually) watchful, mindful bunch.
Besides the obvious changes to the game plan (having the sellers purchase a new side door, installing anti-theft systems) they are now thinking that a Whole Hog style move in (rather than a piece-meal, dribs and drabs approach) would make them feel more secure about their few possessions.
What a way to get started! Nevertheless, The Snarks are determined to make crudites out of cruddy human nature and plan to gather fluff and twigs so that they can fuss and fidget until their nest feels Just Right.
The tenative plan for this weekend is to possibly purchase a nearly-new commercial grade elliptical machine for their gym/entertainment area in the basement. Though this fine piece of machinery is an amazing find on the Craigslist Portland site, it still is pricey enough to cause Snarky to reconsider her gym membership. If they can also find a decent set of free weights for cheap, she will hang up her wee courtesy towel for good and Sweat to the Oldies (or the Emos, or whatever else The Mister has going) at Home.
Snarky is also thinking about taking on the somewhat daunting task of refinishing the hardwood floor in the upstairs master bedroom suite. This might be as little as scruffing up the finish with steel wool and adding two coats of poly... or as much as renting a belt sander, floor buffer, and edger and spending two days stripping, scruffing, and recoating.
Either way, she thinks it will greatly improve the feel of the room and it will also be much less than the bamboo overhaul The Mister has been craving.
And with that bit of good/bad/good, this sleepy new homeowner is going to collapse into bed.
Snarky's still in that purgatorial "will they or won't they?" place, but the expected immediate dismissal of the Snark's addendum to their offer on the house did not happen.
So they've entered a counter-counter-offer suggesting a credit for all the little fixes they listed on the addendum.
She hasn't dared to look at the 70+ photos she took of the house during the home inspection. She's been trying to let go already of all the future days she was projecting into all those fanciful rooms.
It didn't help that Snarky had the whole day off to wallow and sulk. She did manage to get out for a walk to the library (and, ahem, the LUSH store) but now she's back at home with an hour to burn before The Mister makes it home.
Must. Be. Strong. Don't look at the pictures!
She's going to go and knit in a corner.
Snarky's feeling very torn today.
The house inspection was mostly good, with a few somewhat glaring Need-to-Fix-Before-Moving-In issues (leaky faucets, bad wiring).
She and The Mister have been left to marinate in the juices of an extremely thorough inspection report and whatever else that $1000 got them until Thursday evening, when they will meet with their agent to discuss any addendums to their offer.
Since another offer for $20,000 more is waiting in the wings, odds are the sellers will simply back out of the deal and move on to the next fish. Snarky is working hard to be OK with this, even though she's spent the last week mentally placing furniture and having Special Moments in every nook and cranny of this house.
She took over seventy pictures of the place during the inspection, for goodness sakes.
On the upside, her boobies have been deemed perfectly healthy (if maybe just a wee bit lopsided) and she is fairly confident that her lovely "modesty mole"'s (by which she used to determine the level of raciness of various necklines) biopsy will also come back clean.
Snarky was going to extoll the benefits of an anxiety based weight loss plan... but she just succumbed to the siren call of chocolate chip cookies, so apparently that point is not only moot, but revoked.
Snarky never claimed to be "goth", but she apparently ended up that way.
Black just suited her better, and while her musical tastes have always been on a diet, she enjoys what little genre music does happen to wander past her plate.
Oh and there's the poetry. The breadth and depth of which must surely qualify her for some sort of angsty, navel-gazey, inky black award.
It was on Glampyre's suggestion that BPAL would appeal to more "gothic" tastes that brought Snarky into the fold in the first place. But instead of finding a more delicious brew in which to wallow Snarky has found mostly happiness and resonance through BPAL.
Better living through (esoteric, alchemical) chemistry, as it were.
This morning's judicious application of Danse Macabre has eased Snarky out of her Existential Funk. She's now contemplating dinner with The Mister (another date-date!), a minor sandwich cookie binge (probably not, though, because of aforementioned date-date), and (hopefully) impending landed gentry-dom. It feels good to be grounded in the here-and-now again, rather than the shoulda-woulda-couldas.
However, Snarky will endeavour to honor her inky black roots and try mightily to contemplate something deepy dark and morbid. Possibly the wretched demise of this damned intranet site she's been trying to build for the last two months. Surely therein lies a tale of woe.
The living room, formerly a sort of cranberry red - which was lovely when the living room was a cool grey but clashes badly with the candy apple green, is currently a decidedly horrid first-coat shade of yellow-orange papaya.
It's a fun shade. Festive, even, but just not what should go next to such a bright, vibrant, glowing green. Just... no.
So The Mister just got off the phone with Snarky to propose... black.
His reasons:
1) the Snarks already have a gallon matte black (not because they are goths, but because they wanted to use it as the base coat for the gumball red going up down in the basement... because they are goths)
2) the ultimate wall treatment for the living room will be nothing more than a framing device for all the state plates (The Mister's new Goodwill scavanger hunt obsession) large art posters (Mucha and other Arts & Crafts/pre-Raphaelite/etc. type work) and other various arty things. The walls will be crowded with stuff, and any color will be even less than background in the end.
3) the tenative theme for the living/dining room is "chinoiserie", with the brilliant green accented by laquered blacks, clear reds, and crisp whites. Using black in the dining room would in the end clash much less than the Bango-Mango-Madness currently erupting along two-thirds of the dining room (and ringing the windows and trim)
4) resale, schmesale.
So... Snarky's convinced. Worst case scenario: they end up using a gallon of Kilz to remove all proof of their folly. Best case: they continue to make this house truly and uniquely ChezSnark.
Still, yikes!
Snarky in Winter
If she would just stop burning and cutting them and tried to moisturize every once in a while, Snarky would have a fairly pretty set of hands. Given care, they can be delicately expressive with long fingers and long, tapering nail beds. She inherited them from her father's side of the family. Her mother has always grumbled about her own "farmer's hands", but as the rest of her is delicate and expressive (she was a traditional Chinese dancer in college), her hands come across as such too.
Snarky does not treat her hands well at all, though. They want to be long-nailed and idle... the hands of some pampered concubine. But she treats them like meat. On the rare occasion that she gets them "done", they become undone within a week's time. Nail polish barely lasts two days (even the good stuff). Her cuticles would break any aesthetician from sheer mental trauma.
Currently Snarky is struggling with her suddenly long nails. They get caught in her keyboard (upon which her typing sounds like a puppy scrabbling across a hardwood floor). They mess up her ability to dial her cell phone. She has poked herself in the eye countless times. The Mister has been inadvertently scratched in very unsexy ways.
So far, only the cats seem to enjoy these new accessories.
Along with her enlongenating nails, Snarky is trying to re-learn how to handle longer hair. She is also doing what she playfully calls "Winterizing" - a sort of seasonal shortening of her personal grooming habits which allows her to sleep in a bit more, but which also makes winter The Mister's least favorite time of year. Apparently it's OK for him to have hairy legs year 'round, but she must remain pre-pubescent (at least in that one aspect.) She will make an exception for Valentine's Day, though, which brings much rejoicing to ChezSnark.
Snarky really has a problem with the whole body hair issue, actually. She finds it yucky and gross in all practicality (tank tops, swim suits, shorts) but in principle wishes she could just let it all go. So this "Winterizing" thing is sort of her annual foray into protesting the unrealistic expectations set by the beauty industry and society in general. (She's also normally a waxer, not a shaver, so this is a bit of a reprieve from all the ouchiness.)
Strange how laziness promotes old stereotypes (longer head hair and finger nails) whilst stomping like a giant hairy Sasquatch on others.
Snarky mishears and misremembers lyrics with enough frequency to almost make this flaw an endearing character trait.
"By why would anyone want to play Twister in the sun? And what has that got to do with auto-erotica?" (Not that blisters in the sun make any more sense, really...)
So this morning her brain radio was going "chay-chay-chaaaaaange.... change of fools".
Snarky has been having some slightly disturbing dreams, no doubt because of the mild turmoil swirling around her lately.
A few nights ago it was another one of those school dreams - the ones where you either have missed half of the semester, or campus has reconfigured itself overnight, or the paper is due this afternoon and you don't have anything but the abstract completed. That dream wasn't so awful, but Snarky woke up in a state of near-panic for not having her graphs in order.
Last night Snarky dreamed she was on a school field trip (her old nerd school used to ferry students around in stretch vans that were like rolling perpetual-motion experiments fueled by that heady melange of teenaged angst, lust, irrational exuberance, and anxiety) that was held up in traffic because a large commercial airplane had exploded on the freeway.
There wasn't really any sense of panic - except for the fact that Snarky was going to be late to class again. Weird and kind of... misanthropic?
Snarky hit a bad funk-patch yesterday. The Mister has returned to work today, and she had trouble mustering up supportive enthusiasm for him. She has settled with hopeful, yet cautious stand-by-your-manism.
She has also been working long hours the last two weeks, which can't be helping with her internal rhythms.
Tonight she'll probably self-medicate with a hot, frothy bath and some deep dark chocolate. Sometimes the old stand-bys are the best.
Xena knew something was up the way She was calling to her with that nearly-falsetto voice. She never called to Xena like that unless Something Bad was about to happen. Last time it had been twenty hours in that blasted carrier in the loud growling metal box, Junebug mewling plantively like the little whiny bitch she is. Xena had saved up her displeasure to generate one particularly foul poop that filled that metal box with the smell of her indignation.
Then they had been moved into a larger metal box that roared enough to shake the ground. By that point even Junebug was too terrified to make a noise. They were finally freed by Him into a small, carpeted room. Xena found all her new hiding places within the first few days.
After a while, it seemed perfectly normal to be two cats and two humans in a small carpeted room. There were three windows that opened out to trees and crazy talking people down below. The food stayed good, and the litter box was (mostly) fresh. Xena and Junebug got used to it and began to forget about their ordeal.
And then one day She came back from Outside, talking in that cracking, anxious voice that should have rumbled with impending doom. Xena recalls with horror how She resorted to using half of a wooden paddle to sweep her out from underneath the coffee table. A paddle!
Oh she hissed. She hissed and did that low, lingering growl bourne from sheer panic. She even released her bladder a bit, which only made Her voice go even higher.
Then He got home. He that was usually their saviour. And He stuffed her in the hamper. Traitor.
She was too frazzled to even muster a good protest poop as they rumbled in another metal box. Junebug still found the air to yowl a few good times, and Xena tried to answer back with her own timid "meh-reow?"s.
When the world stopped rumbling and lurching about, they found themselves in a small room that stank of laquer. The windows were too high to reach, and there was a lone lamp on the floor. The litter box was not where it was supposed to be, it was in the corner. There was food, but it tasted of ashes.
Xena nudged the litterbox out of the corner and created another slender hiding space. She stayed there for two days.
Junebug, and Xena is convinced that she might be a little damaged in the head for this, hid in her carrier every time they heard the clomp-squeak noises in the ceiling. Who hides in that place of impending anguish? Only cats who are Not Right in Their Heads, Bless Their Hearts.
Finally on the third day the door cracked open and He released them into... into what? There are too many places. There are windows to look out to trees, there are windows where they can see Them coming and going in their metal box. There are old familar smells behind the doors Xena has already figured out how to open, smells of His feet and Her perfume piled up and hung down like layers of comforting curtains in the dark. There are new smells and strange, smaller metal boxes. There don't seem to be other cats in these boxes, but They seem to spend a lot of time cooing at them anyway.
He has been gone for a few days. She seems to be quieter, less active because of it. She is giving lots of belly rubs, though, so Xena thinks it will all be OK. If not now, then soon.
She is still keeping an eye out for the carrier though, and a cautious ear for any change in register in Her voice.
First the semi-tragic ordeal of the Kim family, and now the climbers on Mt. Hood.
This has not been a good season for hope.
Snarky finally hit her bummed out wall yesterday early afternoon. She and The Mister had been fairly functioning up until then, completing last minute holiday preparations for their trip Back East, s-l-o-w-l-y cleaning up ChezSnark for the impending white glove inspection from DarkityMa, generally acting as if life was going on without a hitch.
Then yesterday afternoon Snarky fell hard into a funk and didn't really recover until late in the evening. She just could no longer pretend that Everything Was OK.
She's fine now, but this morning The Mister, as he prepared for work, came into the bedroom (in which Snarky was determinedly NOT preparing to work out before work, but rather trying to discover just how much of her could be covered up before suffocation would become an issue) and started to hyperventilate and repeat over and over "I can't go in, I just can't go in, I can't go in there, I just can't go in....".
She took some time off of work to make him some pancakes and get him in bed and talk to him. Assure him that it would be OK eventually, that they were on their way to finding a better path.
And Snarky does believe this, firmly and with a steely resolve she doesn't normally feel for anything in her life (except for the Big Stuff). But she just wishes she could make The Mister believe it as thoroughly as she does right now too.
In the meantime, she continues to do little things for him. Tell him how proud she is of him, all the things she hopes will help him to regain some of what he was before all this stress wore him down.
I choo choo choose you!
Snarky has been up to her eyeballs in work. Lots of time-sucking, mind-melting office monkey duties that leave her with little time to do things like post coherent blog entries and string more than three related concepts into a happily trundling train of thought.
So here are the boxcars that are rattling around at the moment:
* The Mister has decided on a Major Career Change.
He made an attempt to return to his old soul-sucking, life-draining, anxiety-attack-making job for two days last week and has not been back since. Snarky is absolutely OK with this (beyond OK, more like -leading and just about to start a stadium-wide wave) and has already seen how much better he has been for having turned this corner on his own.
The Snarks are getting The Mister signed up for massage therapy school this afternoon. To be honest, Snarky does not consider The Mister the most adept masseuse. But he is an excellent customer service guy and a very quick study. His research into successful careers for his Myers-Briggs personality type (INFP) all point to some sort of one-on-one therapy (be it psychological or body work-related) and so... this is the direction they will be taking.
They attended an orientation at one of the local LMT institutions and got to take a class (with actual partial nudity and the touching of bodies!) and even with the clinical setting, circulating teacher, and random other nekkid and touchy people in the room... it was a really positive, instructive, and decision-making experience.
She hasn't seen such a shine in The Mister's eye since they first started casting their gazes Westward, wondering if they could make a life in the Pacific Northwest.
* Snarky has started to work out, again. This time she's focusing more on her (languishing) yoga practice. Today she feels five miles long, as if her arms could encompass whole attitudes of thought rather than just her gradually de-cluttering desk.
* Oh, and Snarky started knitting again. She is sort of doing a tangential KAL with the BPAL knitters (with whom she has regrettably lost track) and has been cranking on the Rona Lace Shawl from Knitpicks (using the suggested KP Alpaca Cloud in a Midnight, which is maybe not the best color choice given her current extremely poor lighting conditions at home). There have been numerous errata already in just the first 50 rows. This is apparently the week for Snarky to be OK with normally crazy-making things, though, because she is absolutely OK with this. She isn't even putting in any lifelines as she galumphs along on this shawl.
* Textured Vegetable Protein is amazing stuff. The Snarks will never be vegetarians, but the consumption of meat has gone way, way down on their dietary habits -- enough so that they will probably make it a luxury item (which will allow them to focus more on local, organic, "humane" (or at least as humane as possible while still being, you know, meat) options).
There were probably more boxcars to add to this train, but lunch is calling (The Mister's Magical Sweet Potato Quesadillas). Snarky hopes all of your trains are also enjoying the downhill side of this week.
Blogs abound. Snarky regularly rocks three (count 'em, three!) of her own (the prerequisite LJ discourse, the demographically behooved knitblog, and a fairly young SparkPeople weightloss rumination), so why another one?
Because this is so. Damn. Cool.
But, Snarky has to make it interesting, different, somehow equally relevant to the other virtual dumping grounds to her massive ego. Ergo, this experiment.
Once upon a time, she had delusions of literary grandeur. Through some overworked and convoluted logic, the BPAL Blog is going to be The Writing Blog.
And if the Hat Trick of "Snarky-Centric Script", "Aspirations of Artistry", and "Grabby Gimmick" is to be acheived.... well, ya gotta have a gimmick if ya wanna have a chance. Snarky is going for the time-tested, Bob Dole approved method of third person narration. Also possibly horrible grammer, passive (aggressive) sentence structure, and major conjunctivitis (in this case, swelling and overuse of conjunctions... not pink eye). But not dangling participles! That is something up with which Snarky will not put!
Finally, depending on mood, your humble narrator might be "Darkity" or "Snarky" or just plain little Miss Universal "S/he®".
So. All of this, plus the occasional mention of smellies to keep the blog relevant to its gracious host-body. Groovy.
This has been a year of body horror. Turning thirty, while not nearly as traumatic on the very day back in January as expected, has become a bit of a milestone despite her best efforts to avoid cliche.
Thirty was when she had her first (and hopefully last) root canal.
Thirty was when she had her first (again, she hopes last, but fears this is really the first of many) cancer scare.
Thirty was when she not only looked at her own changing body, but also The Mister's with a bit of shock, a bit of revulsion. Just a bit.
Her uneasy truce with her skin shattered. She now feels like a dying tree trapped in the tightening grip of some parasitic growth that has managed to encase her in its foreigness, its utter otherness.
She's caved in in a mountain of puss, bile, shit, saliva, and tears. It moves and shifts at the whims of Nature and she must move along with it to avoid suffocating.
A puppet mistress tangled up in her own skeins of control.
She's glad she only has to see the dentist twice a year if a routine cleaning unearths these kinds of thoughts every time!
Unfortunately, the Snarks did not keep a food journal during their five days on the boat. Perhaps it is better that way, as Snarky will not be tempted to calculate the calories consumed (and therefore realize that she will need to climb the equivalent of three Mount Hoods in order to bring her Calories In/Calories Out equation back to equilibrium).
She can recall a few memorable standouts: foie gras souffle (served with fig preserves and a slice of candied citrus rind); deliciously spicy gazpacho that had more than a passing resemblance to a very good, chilled Bloody Mary; so many dishes that should have been served en flambe but weren't, but were still good nevertheless; schooling DarkityBro on the concept of a Baked Alaska (he was deeply shocked that he had not heard of such a thing in all his twenty seven years - this is surely the sign of a die-hard foodie); ordering the Chateaubriand and then annoying The Mister for the rest of the evening by slathering on a heavy, horribly fake French accent; and vienerschnitzel (Which, yes, was made out of veal. Snarky had a long conversation with DarkityBro about foie gras (a recently very hot topic in Chicago, where he lives) and veal. DB has come from a much more radical animal rights POV than the emotional topics of baby animals and force-fed ducks and geese, but organizations like PETA's overzealousness has caused him over the years to consider all sides of the many issues in this debate.)
Oh.. kay. Snarky didn't mean to veer off like that. She'll just wrap up this tangent by saying spending some time with her brother and recently reading Heat by Bill Buford has really caused Snarky to think about just where her food comes from... and how she goes about consuming it.
Having said all that, on to the food pics!
The Orchestrated Big Food Event was the Midnight Buffet. It is such a big deal that they open it up half an hour early just so people can shuffle past and take pictures. Snarky did not stay up to partake (she had, afterall, just stuffed herself on a four course dinner only a few hours before) but DarkityMa reportedly threw down, later swearing that she would never eat that much ever again.
Snarky apologizes for the poor quality of the Midnight Buffet pictures. She could have used a flash, but didn't want to blind the people on the other side of the table...
... such courtesy was not extended to the ship's staff, however, during the Galley Tour. Oh no, Snarky didn't mind at all shoving a camera practically up this poor guy's nose as he tried to carve up a similar melon for the next Midnight Buffet.
DarkityBro, Snarky, and The Mister went to a little wine tasting seminar during the first Day at Sea. This was definitely more for fun (no spit buckets!) but was also educational. DarkityBro gave the Snarks all of his little pieces of cheese that were to accompany the selections. Bonus! (The Snarks still resolutely drink wine out of a box, but can now at least understand what the labels mean on those pretty pretty bottles... sort of.)
The Mister's last dessert. Some sort of (non-animal cruelty) souffle. The woman hiding in the background was the eldest of the group of three women that were seated at the DarkityFam's table for all of our dinners. It was a daughter treating her mother and grandmother to a cruise (the first night was the grandmother's birthday -- we all got cake!) Grandmother is from Peru and speaks little to no English (and reminds Snarky of her own maternal grandmother), mother speaks Peruvian, Spanish, and English (with a heavy accent), and the daughter speaks unaccented English and translated for her mother and grandmother when needed. They were excellent company.
Snarky's last dessert. Why do chefs insist on stacking food? This looked like a crime scene when Snarky was done with it.
After the cruise, the DarkityFam stopped off at a Buddhist/vegetarian restaurant and had plates and plates (and plates) of analogous foods (Peking "Duck", "seafood" stew, roasted "pork", etc.). And since all those eleventeen dishes didn't fill up their newly stretched stomachs (Snarky wonders if her own liver will be ripe for harvesting soon) they also went to the best boba tea place in Houston. At least, according to that one chick they asked. It was pretty good!
Snarky has more to post, but when the Snarks got back to Portland, they discovered another monster zucchini in the garden, so she need to go make about three loaves of chocolate zucchini bread right now.
Snarky is mostly blind.
Granted, she's still a few (scant) steps away from being legally blind, but her eyesight is bad enough that sans glasses or contacts, she's pretty much waving her arms Frankenstein style and doing the nervous Don't-Crush-My-Toes-Slow-Dance/Tippy-Toes-Sweep-Walk that extreme myopia choreographs.
Given all this, Snarky just wanted to take a quick moment to praise Chez Snark to it's blessed little rafters for having just enough square footage to allow for all the Snarks' crap to be spread out all over the place and still have enough room left over to maintain clear, blind people walkways.
It has gotten to the point that The Snarks can't remember a time when All This Stuff fit in to a less-than 800 square foot apartment. How'd they do it? Maaaagic!
Snarky also wants to bless Chez Snark's little anthropomorphized heart for having an added bonus accessory of an old charcoal grill. The Snarks enjoyed beef kabobs, roasted corn, and 'taters, followed by more-or-less successful dark chocolate s'mores for the Fourth. Unfortunately, they could not motivate their lazy behinds into making a nice pitcher of Sangria but there's plenty of time for that yet.
(Translation: busy work. Snarky has no idea why she suddenly went German.)
(Huzzah! for making it back onto page one, by the way.)
Snarky had the realization at the end of last week that she had turned into an internet taker, rather than a giver. She was reading blogs and posts and doing the general surfing about she could squeeze into her new schedule, but she wasn't making any contributions. Selfish Snarky!
Needless to say, the thing that is worse than de-Garboing oneself is regaining any sense of flow and light-footedness in one's prose.
Referring to oneself in the third person definitely sandbags that whole "light-footed" effort. Still! Snarky shoulders on.
Work is fantastic. Well. Today it isn't. But that's not too horribly bad considering Snarky has been here for sixty days (she should know, her 60 day review is this Friday). Today has been diminished in fantasticness simply because Snarky is a problem solver and her problem was not. Getting. Solved already! Her addiction is more to the sense of accomplishment rather than the journey, and this particular journey was starting to feel like an endless turn on a traffic circle rather than the euphoric A to B that usually measures her day.
"Big Ben!"
"Parliament!"
"Big Ben!"
... you get the picture.
On top of the slightly stuck feeling Snarky is having today, she's also slightly sick. The atmospheric controls for her office don't, so she and her co-workers have been running between the extremes. Some days they keep their jackets on and wrap scarves around their faces. On these days Snarky looks like a technicolor urchin with her turqoise and rainbow arm warmers and slightly haunted expression. Other days the office becomes a sort of greenhouse/sauna. Heavy, humid air hot enough to warrant short-sleeved t-shirts (yesterday one of the supervisors was wearing what amounted to a nice tank top. In November!). All this wishy-washy weather (interior and exterior) has caused the quick dissemination of Seasonal Crud that runs the gamut from tickling cough to full on phlegm attacks.
Snarky has yet to succumb, but today she feels the closest to "unwell" that she has felt since starting work here.
Ah, but the fantastic stuff! It truly is fantastic. Snarky is surrounded by passionate, funny, educated people. The industry is very different from The Cracker Factory. Snarky gets to work with manufacturing types and artistic types and IT types and sales/marketing types. She gets to type really, really fast, and is apparently the heir apparent to the new CRM system they are trying to implement. What does CRM stand for? Hold on... Snarky needs to look it up.
Customer Relationship Management
Of course! Anyways.. what Snarky knows of the CRM is that she is trying to merge four different databases into the one thing... and also train herself up on the new system in order to train everyone else up on the new system... and also customizing and reporting and data crunching and... um... yeah. Just a little bit of everything. If Snarky was the Office Monkey before, she's more like the Office Gorilla now.
Along with all the newness of being in a different work environment working in a completely different industry, Snarky has the added bonus of tests! Product Recognition Tests, that is. She finally managed to pass Test One (correctly identifying 82 samples) after two tries. Next up: Test Two, which requires the mere memorization of about sixty-some-odd pieces. No big whoop. Test Three (and this is the final test) Snarky hopes is under re-configuration... as most of the test is over soon-to-be-discontinued product. Snarky realized, after failing her first go at Test One, that the last written test she had taken prior was for her driver's license. This definitely felt like a return to the days when one's value hinged on the passing of a test (though to be fair, Snarky would not have been fired had she failed the test again... she would have just been stuck in test limbo, having to re-take the test every two weeks until she got it right).
Beside the failing her first test ever part of this experience, Snarky is really enjoying this whole "learn the product" process. She is starting to feel a bit nervous about her performance review on Friday because it has been so long since she geniunely cared about her job that she just might cock it up. (Snarky has been dying to use that term all week. Sorry if it abruptly offended/shocked anyone. Snarky seems to be good about cocking up the flow of things today. Hee!) (From where did that term come anyway? Is it gun related? Or just more blatantly phallic?)
Snarky hopes things go well and that she can remain the resident office monkey gorilla. Bananas are good.
Darkity never really got in to music. Even as a fledgling hedonist, she has managed to neglect that one of her five or six senses, hearing.
She listened to talk radio when her contemporaries were tuning in to the 80's oblivious bubblegum pop and/or nihilistic (yet also oddly poppy) electronic underbelly. She did manage to catch a bit of that hair metal infection like everybody else, though.
Then she met The Mister, who as an opening salvo to their courtship, compiled six mixed tapes to express his past, present, and possible future. He has been instrumental (har-dee-har-har) in opening up her ears to the world of sound.
Still, even with his admittedly diverse tastes, she finds herself floating passively along in the wake of whatever catches his interest and can't help but feel... a bit lost and sort of back where she started, musically.
Tonight the Snarks are going to see Thomas Dolby perform. Besides his one song she can think of ("Sah-sah-SCIENCE!") she couldn't remember anything else by him. After The Mister's hilarious recreation of "Europa" she's still stumped. They have one album (probably a best of) that she will cram with before heading out tonight.
Later in the month they will also see Sigur Ros (whom they have seen before, to great effect) and The Editors. Darkity suspects that the audiences will get progressively younger at each concert.
The Snarks are now in a city known for its diverse and rather indy music scene. The pace of trends here (in fashion/lifestyle/food as well as music) is breakneck, yet oddly retro. Darkity wonders if she'll ever get the hang of this.
The Snarks have been unbelievably sick these past few days. Snarky began showing signs of not-quite-rightedness during the Asheville leg of their North Carolina circuit of Ought Six and has since gone through losing her voice, running a mild fever, eye-watering sinus pressure, and persistent, hacking, non-productive coughs (the worst kind!).
The Mister's symptoms appear to be on almost exactly a 48 hour delay from Snarky's.
The biggest problem, besides having slept for almost three days straight (what New Year's celebrations?), has been the phelgm induced anosmia. Even if the Snarks were to get hungry (which is a rarity given their complete lack of activity as well as their sneaking suspicion that snot has been draining directly into their stomachs this whole time, which, yeah, ) they can't smell anything well enough to taste it.
This is a great and terrible curse for foodies, which is just a less sexually suggestive name for what the Snarks really are, which are hardcore, dyed in the wool sensualists. (Snarky doesn't really know what "dyed in the wool" sensualists are like, but she is enjoying the mental image of drifts of alpaca fleece being soaked in a vat of deeply crimson dye)
What did the Snarks eat this weekend? Two frozen pizzas. With nothing added to them. It just seemed like a waste to add the usual tangy/zesty/cheesy additional toppings they usually do with their "cheat, heat, and eat" meals. Why bother? It was all just so much texture in their mouths, and nothing more.
So sad!
Which reminded Snarky about the last years of Michael Hutchense's life. He was never a role model for Snarky, but she felt a certain affinity with his public image. He was probably the prettiest man at the time to give her funny feelings in her tummy. When she found out about his head-trauma induced anosmia, she couldn't imagine the anguish he must have felt.
Side note: the step-sister-in-law's new boyfriend earned points with Snarky by going into a rather detailed discussion of how he possesses a very particular kind of synasthesia - he smells in colors. She left him an imp of Tombstone to see if it came up as a rusty cream with evergreen edging.
Anyways. The DarkityFam is still scheduled to begin showing up starting tomorrow night. Snarky thinks she'll be almost human enough to host, though the house is an utter and complete shambles (which will give DarkityMa something to keep herself occupied, if nothing else). The Mister will probably be pretty wrecked, but they will manage. Interesting start to the new year, indeed.
Oh man, the Thomas Dolby concert was AWESOME. Even if "She Blinded Me with Science" is the only song you know, Snarky highly recommends this! There won't be any body slamming or sweaty zeitgeist communion, but there will be a definite bond of geekitude, nostalgia, and just "ain't it cool" gee-whizzedness.
And now Snarky has this song stuck in her head:
"One of Our Submarines"
One of our submarines is missing tonight
Seems she ran aground on manoeuvres
One of our submarines
A hungry heart
To regulate their breathing
One more night
the Winter Boys are freezing in their spam time
The Baltic moon
Along the northern seaboard
And down below
The Winter Boys are waiting for the storm
Bye-bye empire, empire bye-bye
Shallow water - channel and tide
And I can trace my history
Down one generation to my home
In one of our submarines
One of our submarines
The red light flicker, sonar weak
Air valves hissing open
Half her pressure blown away
Flounder in the ocean
See the Winter Boys
Drinking heavy water from a stone
Bye-bye empire, empire bye-bye
Shallow water - channel and tide
Bye-bye empire, empire bye-bye
Tired illusion drown in the night
And I can trace my history
Down one generation to my home
In one of our submarines
One of our submarines
One of our submarines
One of our submarines is missing tonight
Seems she ran aground on manoeuveres
One of our submarines
Today Snarky's wearing what's left of her Tombstone/Sweet Cove SN combo from last night and the zesty fragrance of Pangea Organics Chilean red clover with geranium & grapefruit lotion (she got a free sample).
Much to her (and her checkbook's) chagrin, Snarky has developed a taste for LE's.
In keeping with her sporadic - if not downright sparse-to-non-existant - BPAL purchasing/swapping habits, she's probably a couple-three updates behind everyone else in the taste testing. Case and point? Her current go-to scent is Bearded Lady. Her first great love was French Creole. Luckily her day-to-day scent is the comfortably GC Tombstone (albeit combined with a breath of single note sweet clove thanks to minilux).
The Mister insists that all of her BPAL at the end of the day smells like band-aids, so this is purely an exercise in selfish hedonism for her. (Though he does respond positively to just-applied Bearded Lady. For a man indifferent to most BPAL, he sure does have rarified taste!)
Snarky's new job (which, IEEEE! ) comes with many benefits. She keeps herself awake at night just imagining how it will feel to actually look forward to work - something she hasn't honestly done in years. But the job comes with a substantial pay cut. This is admittedly made up for by the inherent awesomeness of her new company and the possibilities that will be open to her in this new field of work, but at face value less moolah is less moolah.
And with less moolah (and the Snarks' joint checking account) Snarky is feeling the pinch on her already fairly anemic impulse buying budget.
The emergency flight Back East, her parents' impending arrival (tomorrow night!!) and the upcoming five-day cruise have and will also drain their resources a bit.
But Snarky has perspective: they are not hungry. They are not drowning in debt. She has plenty of clothes and yarn and, to be honest, BPAL to last quite a while. She could make a large (for her) order and not break the bank.
Still... she wants to celebrate her new direction. So she's going to make a list. It isn't a wishlist so much as a... well, it's just a list. Sometimes Snarky just has to indulge her Cappy tendencies and organize her pipe dreams.
slipped through the fingers
-Hungry Ghost Moon
-Chrysanthemum Moon
constant craving
-Faustus
goin' a-courtin'
-Mme. Moriarty
-Organ Grinder
-Pumpkin Queen
-Count Dracula
-Wilhelmina Murray, maybe (Snarky is, after some fashion, named after this character, afterall - but currants + Snarky = weird fruitiness)
-Dr. John Seward
Ugh. Snarky is really not trying to make this some whiny-pantsed post. She is thrilled to pieces that the Lab continues to mesmerize and delight (exponentially it seems lately). So she'll settle for being happy for everyone who is taking part (and maybe she'll sneak in a wee ickle order of her own under The Mister's nose... so to speak.)
Perhaps in the midst of the hair-and-dust-raising activities of "packing up", Snarky will think back on her and The Mister's history together. Like many couples these days, they met online. The first month of their acquaintance was spent practicing the simultaneously high and low tech tradition of courting over email.
Their exchanges were refreshingly open and honest from the get-go. She was finishing her degree in a field she did not respect, and he was working in an industry that no longer interested him. They found a kindred spirit in eachother's restlessness.
Sometimes they made simple poetry challenges to eachother. One day The Mister asked Snarky to compose a quick poem using words no longer than four letters. Here's what she came up with:
soft paws
pad pad pad pad
purr
cat eyes look at you
a grin? (too fast to tell)
now she goes
zoom!
on your lap
pad pad pad pad stop
"mine"
say her eyes
you nod, "yes"
