Look, Miami/Dade government, this isn’t rocket fucking science. It isn’t like the MetroMover has never failed before and you have’t had to put buses on the street to take riders along the routes. And it is hurricane season, which increases the possibility that this service failure might actually take place. And you (and the high cost of gasoline) have done a great job of increasing ridership. So.

So why the ever loving fuck are you incapable of updating the public (hey! I have a radical idea! Use your freaking website!) on where the shuttle stations are and which routes they are servicing. I’m sorry. Is that so much to ask of my local government? Yeah, stupid question for a body that just voted to raise my property taxes by twelve fucking percent next year so that they can mow the street medians less often, repair the streets less often and cut hours of park and library services.

Yesterday, as readers of my Twitter feed are well aware, it took me forty minutes to go six blocks across town, because there was only one bus and it was servicing the Omni route. This meant I was treated to a tour of various halfway houses and homeless shelters (and in intimate proximity to their residents who were on the same bus, and frequently leaning into the same seat) during my 20 block detour north and then back south.

This morning, despite promises by the Miami Herald and the update on the MiamiDade.gov website, the MetroMover was NOT back in service, and there was just the one Omni bus again. Since we were going in the opposite direction, it only took me 15 minutes to get cross town. Tonight, as I left work, the government website informed me that the MetroMover will be out of service until further notice and to allow for longer travel times. Fair enough.

I crossed the street and took my place under the “emergency bus service for when the MetroMover is out of service” sign. And waited. And waited. I got on the first Omni loop bus, resigned to the ride from Hell, but was told, rudely I may add, that there were now two buses and that this wasn’t the one I wanted if I wanted to get to Government Center. I got off and waited some more. Another Omni bus. Two Aventura Mall buses.

Finally a random Transit Authority Person pulled up in a car. Huh, am I getting private car service, I wondered? No, he’s just there to tell me that I was standing in the wrong place for the Inner Loop bus. That bus stops on the other side of the street. In front of my office. Where there is neither a regular bus stop nor any indication that it is an emergency stop.

I am sweaty, pissed off and now at the end of my travel, waiting for the RLA to pick me up for a hot date with the Urgent Care Center to get my stitches out.

The RLA and I celebrated our 19th wedding anniversary on Wednesday. Yes, we wed on Bastille Day, but that’s another story for another day. The RLA gave me a wicked cool hand-made bamboo case for the iPad, a set of professional class ear buds and strict instructions to load some music on this thing. So I did.

Oh, gentle readers, I am forced to confess that for the inveterate music junkie that I am, I have never used anything more than cheap, but cool-looking ear buds on any of my music-playing I-devices. Holy shit! These things are awesome! I had some nitwit sitting next to me on the train yesterday, yapping away on her phone about random, and inane shit and once I popped these bad boys into my head, I couldn’t hear a fucking word!! Sweet!!!

Today, same thing. I can’t hear any of my fellow passengers, and I have pure, sweet, crystal clear rock and roll pouring in my head.

The only downside I can see is that the music is so loud, and so pure, that I feel like I’m all alone and tend to start singing (or at least humming and finger snapping) along. And that has to be as annoying to my fellow train riders as their mere existence is to me.

Miz Shoes ankle receives a two-inch gash. Damn, she thinks, this isn’t good. Perhaps she should take a quick drive over to the Urgent Care Center. But first, a little reality check. Honey? Do you think this will require stitches?

The RLA threw me in the car and asked if I had any preferences as to which UCC we visited. No, not particularly. Less than an hour later, I was laying on my side, having a pleasant conversation with the PA who was practicing her needlework on my ankle. She loved that it wasn’t a straight line and she got to do something or other fancy involving the triangular rip in the middle. She had a light touch with the Novocain or whatever it is that is used on body parts other than one’s mouth. So light, in fact, that by the time we got to the last stitch that what had been a slight prick and tug was a distinct piercing and pulling, prompting the following exchange.

“Motherfucker”, I said, in a totally conversation tone of voice, lacking all affect, “That hurts. I do believe the Novocaine has completely worn off.” Apparently, that was an unexpected remark, at least in that tone of voice, because both the PA and her aide laughed. They did apologize, but your narrator didn’t mind if they found humor in her suffering. After all, I said, you’ve given me enough content for a week of blog entries. 

Or, you know, my bandwidth. The RLA and I have been having excruciatingly slow download times at the Casita de Zapatos, and when researched, turns out to be poachers on our unlocked wi-fi network. This blows for me, because I hate passwords that are impossible to remember. But there it is. Intruders in the virtual house.

I spent a part of last night with the Number Three Surrogate Daughter. She turned 21 last week. She is emancipated and finally able to control her own choices. She is finishing her undergrad and wanting to get her Master’s? Her Doctorate? In psych. By joining the Navy as an officer/doctor. The Military will pay for the degree in exchange for six years of her life.

I love her dearly and want to be proud that she is capable of considering this choice. But I am afraid that I have become an old woman, set in her ways, and those ways were forged in the 60s. I was too young to have participated in the televised youth movement; I watched it on tv from my living room in a tiny, coastal sub-tropical town, so far removed and yet so far ahead of that movement that I can never vote Republican, nor embrace the concept of the military. I knew the last draftees and the first young men to die (in droves) of AIDS.

I know that this is my problem, and I have no right to try and pass them on to her. She’ll just be one of that tiny minority of good people who enlist for the more noble reasons. And I can be proud of that.

Part the first: this is an experiment to see how the iPad works as a mobile blogging device. If it works well then the chance exists that I’ll be able to do better with poor old Girlyshoes than once a month.

Part the second is a meditation on rock and roll. I had a conversation with someone from work the other day and she commented on my relationship with music, or at least with rock lyrics. She said that I quote them and read them like poetry, while admitting that they are poetry. I went home and thought about it for a while. Not poetry, scripture.

I often see people on the train reading dog-eared bibles, sprinkled through with underlines, highlighted passages and post-it notes. While this does not reflect well on me, I find myself mystified by this behavior. Having read the old testament, there is very little I would read over and over. And once you’ve grasped the concept of do unto others, or thou shall not, really, how many more times does one need to read it? But then I had an epiphany: scripture is scripture and it is a comfort and an affirmation. Those folks I see are doing no more than I am when I listen to “Badlands” for the hundredth or more time. For them, the words are, you know, something about the meek or whatever. For me, and other disciples of the Church of Rock and Roll, it’s the more immediate satisfaction of “I want to spit in the face of these badlands, let the broken hearts stand as the price you gotta pay.”

So last weekend, I spent a few hours at the laptop and created a short form proselytization for my co-worker. I had to include some variations, sort of like multiple translations of King James… Because there is the studio version of “Rosalita”, and then there are many, many, many versions of it live. She needs to hear the words, hence studio, but she also needed to feel the energy of the live version. With the intro of the band, during the heyday of the song, when it was the centerpiece of a concert? (Which is, by the way, what was playing when I saw the lights swinging from the rafters at Madison Square Garden, from the rhythmic stamping of feet of a full house.) Or without the intro, but with the happy shrieks of the crowd when they recognize the opening riff and it’s a rare treat during the encores?

Then there is the flip side of affirmation, those songs I go back to when I am so depressed that even killing myself would require more effort than I can manage. Those are the Leonard Cohen dirges, and Dylan’s “Desolation Row”. For the record, when I was a senior in college, “Desolation Row” was in constant rotation on my turntable. My shades were kept closed and the AC down low. My house plants never grew better.

I’m back on the Gulf coast, the part of it that is still pristine and unaffected by the colossal cluster fuck that is the Deepwater Horizon spill. The sunsets are gorgeous. The sand is powdery and white. The herons wander right up to you on the beach to see if you might possibly have a little fish or two. This place is bliss. The only complaint I have, such as it is, is that the wi-fi in the timeshare is the extreme opposite of robust, and the only place I have a chance of connecting is on the balcony overlooking the beach. Tough. Except that in the course of typing this entry, the connection has dropped three times.

Over in Ravelry the other day, someone started a thread about food memories. Here are mine…

One of my earliest memories at all is sitting in my high chair, and my mother (who was left handed) feeding me. I didn’t like the direction the food came from, and took the spoon from her hand, dumped the food out, refilled the spoon and announced “SELF”. The number of jokes in my family about how the twig is bent, yadda yadda yadda….

I remember being about 5, and my mother took me to see my Grandma D* in the big house on the river. She had made potato pierogi, and Mom was going to pick some up for us. She asked me to come in, but I didn’t want to get out of the car (tiny town in 1959, it’s ok to leave a child in an open car on the street). So she came back out and stuck this pasty, white thing through the window and said, “Try this” and before I could clamp my mouth shut or turn away, I had had my first taste of Grandma D*’s legendary pierogi. Mummy had to go back and get more. I still wish I could duplicate her recipe.

My father could only make one dish: fried kippers and onions. He’d make them on Sunday mornings for us. My mother found the smell repellent and would gag, but my brother and I adored them. Stinky, salty fish and almost burnt onions. Served for breakfast with garlic toast. When he was dying, he still insisted on making them for us when I would go to visit him. Only Star ever loved them like I did, and she’s Swedish.

My Grandma K* made rice pudding. Not all soft, and fluffy, but baked in a casserole, with a sort of layer of custard on top, and cinnamon, lemon zest and raisins all baked in. That I can duplicate.

And of course, the raspberries. My K* grandparents had a summer home in Newport, RI, and the whole length of their back yard had a double row of raspberry canes. We’d go out first thing in the morning, and pick all the ripe ones, and still have enough for Grandma to make jam. Then we’d go out in the late afternoon, and eat all the ones that had ripened during the heat of the day. Also in Newport, Grandpa would take my brother and me for a walk in the morning before the fog/mist burned off. We’d pick wild mushrooms, and Grandma would fry them up in butter for breakfast.

Other memories: the old Korean gentleman who had an Asian vegetable farm in the glades and would come to the store with a box of samples for my family. Yard long beans, and cukes and chinese cabbage. My uncle, who was a produce shipper would come from the glades with sugar cane. We could just strip off the outer peel and chew the canes. Sitting in my Grandpa A*’s lap in his packing house, watching the oranges get packed into crates. My father cutting a cone-shaped plug out of the stem end of the orange, so I could suck the juice. Picking Surinam cherries off the hedges and eating them. Climbing in the mulberry tree, and picking enough that I could eat them to my fill and still have enough for Mummy to make a pie. Daddy opening coconuts with a machete. Sitting double, bareback on the SisterGirlFriendGirl’s horse, so we could reach the REALLY big kumquats on the tree in her front yard.

There was an A&W drive-in in my hometown (the only fast food shop in the whole town, BTW) and it was always a huge treat to go there and get a baby burger. They had momma burgers, daddy burgers and baby burgers. And waitresses who’d hang a tray on the car window.

Learning to swim at the pool at the Anchorage Hotel, and the coke machine (cost a dime and you could watch the bottle roll down the ramp) had banana soda. Bright yellow, tasted like banana popsicles only carbonated. I LOVED it. Haven’t seen it in 45 years, but recently someone brought in soda from Haiti and it was that: banana soda.

Every year, when my grandparents returned from RI, they would drive home with bushels of apples from their backyard trees. And jars and jars of Grandma’s raspberry jam.

Driving up to RI, we stopped for lunch on the first day at Cape Canaveral, at a pavillion on the St. John’s River. We’d have hard boiled eggs, and my mother would have put salt into a little twist of waxed paper for us to put on the eggs.

Then, later, when we drove through Georgia, we would buy fresh peaches from the side of the road. They had the thickest velvet on their skins. You had to rub it off on a napkin to be able to eat them.

My dad showing me how to pull a heart of palm from a young palmetto and eating it. Then trimming a bigger frond to a point to stick hotdogs on and roast over the camp fire.

Eating the following fresh from the tree: loquats, kumquats, mangos, oranges, calamondins, mulberries, lychees, avocados. Eating fresh smoked king fish.

The day I learned “tongue” at the deli was exactly what it sounded like, and it wasn’t Yiddish for something else.

And buying fresh garden peas, and sitting on the floor in front of the tv shelling them into a colander. And eating them by the handful, raw.

Going to the cranberry bogs in Massachusetts. AND OMG!!! the pecan rolls at the Stuckey’s on the highway.

How about you? What are your early food memories?

Listening to Little Steven’s Underground Garage, sequestered in my studio, pounding out code. Today’s to do list: create a contact page on Mild Burning Symptoms, tweak the item code so that once sold, the item either disappears or has SOLD appended to the item name, tweak the additional photos code so that it displays correctly, bake a peach cobbler, visit Mummy. There are at least a dozen other items on the to do list, but they won’t get done.

One more cup of coffee, and then I am chaining myself to the laptop.

Mild Burning Symptoms is now live, and we’ve had our first sale. This has shown me how much more code I need to write.

I spent last weekend in Sarasota, at the Number Two Surrogate Daughter’s graduation from New College. After seeing that graduating class, I have some small hope for the future. These are the best and the brightest of their generation, and I hope that they will live up to their promise and change the world. Maybe my generation did their part by raising these kids. Maybe we totally fucked up and are leaving them even more of a mess than we inherited from the generation before us. These young men and women are fascinated by the 60s and 70s, and what I did in my twenties, and what I really don’t think of as all that boho, or dangerous or even edgy, they love to hear about. Let Miz Shoes assure her readers that I played up my role as an antedilluvian Auntie Mame to the best of my ability, swishing my hot pink glow stick around like a fan, and trying not to scare the children when I joined them in the rave room.

I joke, but being with her and her friends, no, being included with her friends at that last party of their undergraduate careers was a gift that she gave to me, and it will carry me along through many dark days.

I’ve decided to start exercising every morning, doing a little workout in the pool, and although the spirit is willing, the flesh has decided that every other day is enough, thank you.

I have also joined the evil empire that is Facebook, although not entirely willingly. I keep telling people that I have a blog, you know. And I Twitter. Really, anything you want to know about what I’m up to can be gleaned from either of those two sources. But still, here I am, updating my status when I should be reading about how to automatically take posts down when the item sells. Or how to incorporate an actual blog page into MBS, so that we can have a little more of a dialog.

Feh. Enough of this idle frivolity. I’m off to make myself a martini and enjoy the fact that the RLA is out with his friend for the evening. Mmmmm, mud mask and fuzzy bathrobe, here I come.

Someone found this blog today by searching for a specific quote from Thom McGuane. I forget how much I love this passage. It’s been at least four years since I last posted it, so I give it to you again. One of the greatest soliloquies ever written, in my opinion. YMMV.

From “The Bushwhacked Piano” by Thomas McGuane copyright 1971.

“What I believe in? I believe in happiness, birth control, generosity, fast cars, environmental sanity, Coor’s beer, Merle Haggard, upland game birds, expensive optics, helmets for prizefighters, canoes, skiffs and sloops, horses that will not allow themselves to be ridden, speeches made under duress; I believe in metal fatigue and the immortality of the bristlecone pine. I believe in the Virgin Mary and others of that ilk. Even her son whom civilization accuses of sleeping at the switch.”

Missus Fitzgerald was seen to leave the room, Ann to gaze into her lap.

“I believe that I am a molecular swerve not to be put off by the zippy diversions of the cheap-minded. I believe in the ultimate rule of men who are sleeping. I believe in the cargo of torpor which is the historically registered bequest of politics. I believe in Kate Smith and Hammond Home Organs. I believe in ramps and drop-offs.”

Fitzgerald got out too, leaving only Payne and Ann; she, in the banishing of her agony and feeling she was possibly close to Something, raised adoring eyes to the madman.

“I believe in spare tires and emergency repairs. I believe in the final possum. I believe in little eggs of light falling from outer space and the bombardment of the poles by free electrons. I believe in tintypes, rotogravures and parked cars, all in their places. I believe in roast spring lamb with boiled potatoes. I believe in spinach with bacon and onion. I believe in canyons lost under the feet of waterskiers. I believe that we are necessary and will rise agian. I believe in words on paper, pictures on rock, intergalactic hellos. I believe in fraud. I believe that in pretending to be something you aren’t you have your only crack at release from the bondage of time. I believe in my own dead more than I do in yours. What’s more, credo in unum deum, I believe in one God. He’s up there. He’s mine. And he’s smart as a whip.”

“Anyway,” he said melifluously and with a shabbily urbane gesture, “you get the drift. I hate to flop the old philosophy on the table like so much pig’s guts. And I left out a lot. But, well, there she is.” And it was too. Now and again, you have to check the bread in the oven.”

It took two years of coding on the weekends. It took a major fight with the RLA. It took more time and more sweat and more tears than I ever imagined, and I’m still tweaking the code. But today, not ten minutes ago, I threw the switch on our virtual garage sale. One box of crap at a time, we’re clearing away the excess of our lives. I give to you: MILD BURNING SYMPTOMS. Stock up, babies, because when it’s gone, it’s gone.

I’m just testing the code here. We seem to have a glitch in Mild Burning Symptoms. It’s minor, and as soon as I figure out what is wrong, we’ll be live and selling off our worldly possessions, or as much of them as we can. This lovely portrait of someone you don’t know can be an iconic (or ironic) beach painting on YOUR wall. Stay tuned.

Today I went back to the canal with the Nikon and the short telephoto and took pictures of the guardian and his flock. Came home and proceeded to not find him in the Audubon Guide to Birds of North America. Did not find him on Ducks Unlimited. Finally, though using the Google-fu, of which Miz Shoes is justifiably proud, I discover what was at the local watering hole: I present to you the Egyptian Goose. Is he not lovely? Is his flock not beautiful? What they are doing in South Florida is a mystery, but probably just another story of an illegal alien who found the weather to their liking and a mate from the same long way away.

Last night, as we were coming home from the grocery store, I saw a clutch of ducks at the pond that I’d never seen before. They had blue? bills and red? eyes and were buff brown and darker brown. The RLA refused to make a detour for me, but this morning on the way to work, we pulled through. I only managed one blurry photo on the i-phone, but I think, possibly, this is a ruddy duck. Something new for my life list. But IS it a ruddy duck? Can anyone out there recognize this fellow?

And on another note entirely, is anybody out there surprised to find Halliburton’s dirty fingers in the oil rig disaster in the Gulf? I thought not.