A fact that everybody in the known universe seemed to know except me and the people who printed my calendar, where today has printed on it "Superbowl Sunday." This calendar has all kinds of holidays printed on it, and I am now wondering if any others of them are wrong.
So here I am planning a party and making menus and pestering the RLA to let me buy a widescreen, big screen, HDTV to watch the big game... a game where I am forced to admit I haven't a clue who's playing, but you need all that for the commercials.

It's next week. Next week. February. Since when does football season run all the way up to spring training?

Oh well, it just gives me that much more time to work on my menus.

I'm planning on making orange marmalade sometime this week, since the sour orange tree in the front yard has outdone itself with fruit this year, and I can only marinade so much chicken, and even my housekeeper is giving me the fish eye when I ask if she'd like any more sour oranges.

Either the meds are working, the weather is conducive to creativity, I've turned a corner on my depression, or my naturally ebulient personality has finally quit hibernating.

For whatever reason, this week I have been bursting with energy and creativity.
Yes! It's true. I've been cooking up a storm, and just for the RLA and myself. It started with chocolate chip cookies to take to the (spit, spit) art show, continued on to yellow pepper soup (from the Silver Palate Cookbook, the one book that all cooks should have in the kitchen, in my not so humble opinion) accompanied by two loaves of Irish Soda Bread, and on to a delicious concoction of marinated chicken breasts last night.

The chicken dish is one of my own inventions, and I never make it the same way twice. Yesterday I marinated the chicken for a couple of hours in a mixture of fresh sour orange juice, chopped garlic, some of the mystery spice from Israel, olive oil and thyme.

The mystery spice from Israel is just that. I have no idea what is in it, exactly. One of my friends who was living in Jerusalem used to bring it to me when she visited the states. She'd buy it in a street market, and had no idea what it was, either. I've since found it in a Middle Eastern market locally, but they can't tell me the ingredients, either, and I found it by look and smell.

I'm pretty sure it includes cardomom. Maybe a little cinnamon and dried ginger. Maybe not. It's savory, and goes well in anything, especially brewed with coffee. I get this little frission like I'm drinking spice coffee from Dune. But that's just me.

Anyway, back to the chicken. I sauted onions and garlic in olive oil and butter. Added the chicken breasts and browned them. Added the marinade (I know, bad cook) and water to cover. Then added a little saffron and a little chicken stock granules. Covered and simmered until tender. Halfway through I added a handful of green olives. Served it up over a big heap of brown rice.

In addition to the cooking, I have finished a quilt for the RLA, and am finishing up another that's been in process for half a year.

I have two commissions in the pipeline for tallitsim.

I think, and it couldn't have happened any sooner, that I'm over the hump and into a new cycle of creativity.

Yippee.

The RLA did a street show this past weekend. It wasn't on a street, though, it was in a garden. Specifically, Pinecrest Gardens, or, as it was formerly known, Parrot Jungle. The parrots are gone, as are the flamingos and cockatiels, but the giant feral iguanas are thriving. It is mating season for iguanas, because they were turning bright orange. Nothing like a six-foot long bright orange lizard to make your day. No, I do not have photos. Please.
The RLA sold three pieces of work, to R&MJ, which we could have done without the additional cost of a booth fee. The hottest seller at this show was Cuban art. Each artist was more Cubanisimo than the next. We were between a woman who painted very vividly colored canvases of Cuban coffee makers and conga drums, and a man who painted Cuban markets and cigar-rollers' houses.

Mostly they weren't selling their original paintings, though, they were selling prints of their paintings. Not just any prints, mind you, they were selling Giclees. I kept hearing the patter, as one or the other explained to their buyers that Giclees are like modern lithographs, or serigraphs.

For the sake of clarity, I'd like to give you dictionary definitions of those three terms.

Serigraph: Silk-screening, which is also referred to as serigraphy or screen printing, is a centuries-old process that originated in China, It is, in essence, a refined version of a hand stenciled process. The image is divided, as it were, by a color, with a screen corresponding to each shade of ink that will appear on the final surface-paper, canvas, fabric, etc. The ink is applied to a screen, transferring to the paper only through the porous segments. A separate screen must be created for each color. On average, it takes between 80 to 100 screens to create a serigraph. The elements are hand-drawn onto mylar and photographically exposed onto each screen. Inks are matched to the hues of the original and custom mixed. Each edition takes approximately eight weeks to complete: four to five people handle the several stages of the process, and 80 to 90 percent of the production time is devoted to making color separations and the screens.

Lithograph: The process of printing from a small stone or metal plate on which the image to be printed is ink-receptive and the blank area is ink repellent. The artist, or other print maker under the artist's supervision, then covers the plate with a sheet of paper and runs both through a press under light pressure. The resultant "original print" is of considerably greater intrinsic worth than the commercially reproduced poster which is mechanically printed on an offset press. Color Lithography or Chromolithography is the process of using several stones or plates (usually one for each color). The result is a color lithograph, which differs from a print which is hand-colored after printing.

Giclee: A computerized reproduction technique in which prints are created using a very high quality inkjet printer. The word Giclee itself is French, and means spurt or squirt, however the spray is more like a mist, each droplet being the size of a red blood cell. The inks come in various grades of water-based dyes. It is very important to use UV glass with these prints, because being printed with dyes, which historically are not very colorfast, they can fade quickly.

Do you see the difference? Lithography and Serigraphy are both hands-on, labor-intensive techniques requiring time and skill. Giclees are INK JET PRINTS people. INK JET PRINTS!! Like, from that $99 Epson printer on your desk. And most of these guys don't even use archival inks or paper, which means that that reproduction you just shelled out $250 for is going to degrade and fade.

Unlike, say, the $90 original, hand-drawn, ink on paper that the RLA did and had framed in a museum-quality frame which you did NOT buy.

I started getting a little snippy about it by the afternoon of day two, telling prospective buyers that everything in the booth was an original, never reproduced, no Giclees, and once it was bought, it was the only one of its kind, period.

Nobody got it.

There was one guy who came in to the booth, and just raved about the RLA's work. He spent a lot of time looking. Then he went next door and bought a painting of a conga and another of a cup of Cuban coffee.

This was going around on the internets the past couple of weeks. The concept of not spending one damn dime on inauguration day as a means of protesting the war in Iraq and the Bush administration.

While I applauded the idea, I fell to the side of Snopes.com as to the effectiveness.
In the event, however, I managed to go the whole day without spending any money, so I did participate, not that anyone or anything would have noticed.

I also managed to watch not one damn minute of Bush2.0's inauguration. At least, not intentionally. While I was at the home visiting Mummy, the TV was on, and I was subjected to the sight of "this is NOT a coronation" his new, multi-bajillion dollar, fully armored, 2006 Cadillac limosine. Even the loonies at the home were unimpressed.

Which reminds me of a story, possibly apochryphal, possibly not, where in mentally ill persons were shown silent footage of Ronald Reagan speaking, and they all laughed at him. It had something to do with lying, but I don't remember the details.

Anyway, RJ is spending the night watching the first three seasons of The West Wing, or, as she says: a REAL president. I'm going to visit the sistergirl and her new puppy.

I go to the gym several times a week, to work out with the Marquis de Steve AKA Nic Cage, my trainer. The gym has a very small area for parking, and so people end up around the corner, down the street, whatever.

But some people are too good for all that, and so the gym has a valet. A valet, people. For the gym. Where you go to work out. So, like, doesn't that mean that you could hike your skanky ass a block or two to get into the gym to work up a sweat?

Am I missing something here?
Something else that I don't get is how women with no body fat anywhere else, can think it looks natural or even remotely attractive to have two huge canteloupe halves on their chests. You can't have tits without ass. Not naturally, at any rate.

For more information about that and why you should have a hand lift if you are going to have that many face lifts, go to one of my favorite guilty pleasures: Awful Plastic Surgery.

I have been noticing more and more of those damned W04 bumper stickers around. Before the election, nobody seemed to want to state out loud that they were going to vote for that goober. All I saw were Kerry bumper stickers. Believe me, I was looking and seeing what was out there, because it was my own sort of market research. To go by bumper stickers, Kerry was a shoo in.

Now that the fix is results are in, everybody and their dog has a Bush sticker somewhere on their vehicle, be it gas guzzling Hummer or rust bucket piece of shit.

Beats me.

I was out and about today, and everywhere I went people were asking me to contribute to charity. Which is all fine and dandy, and I do give, but on my own time, and with my own dime. With my own dime being the operative word here, because most of the people asking for my help today weren't people at all, but corporations.
The clerk at Marshall's asked if I'd like to contribute to tsunami relief, because I could just charge that extra amount along with my purchase of towels and gym clothes. Of course, I couldn't take it as a charitable deduction on my taxes, because the bill would just say Marshall's. Marshall's, by contrast, could then use my contribution as part of their overall expenditure and claim that they, Marshall's, had given x millions of dollars to the relief effort. They could, and they would, and they would never mention that the money came from their customers' pockets and not the corporate bottom line.

You want to donate to tsunami relief? Send clothing and linens and cold, hard cash from the corporate coffers. Use your own net worth to do good, not mine.

The same goes for the grocery store. I'm buying food for my own table, and they are asking me to chip in a few extra bucks for their corporate charity. No. No, I won't. Let your corporate VIPS unlock their own wallets and do the deed.

When I was at the hospital, we were big on the United Way. Every body had to cough up for the public good. Except, I worked on the campaign and I could see who gave what, and let me tell you, those VPs who are still there, collecting their big old paychecks, while I'm out on the street looking for my next job? They didn't give a third of what I did, and they made twice as much. Some of them didn't give at all, or gave a check for a Franklin. But down the line, they were giving orders that the rank and file under them should be giving it up for the poor.

Now that I'm one of the poor, or at least one of the unemployed (and just for the record, I work in one of those fields that the Shrub suggested unemployed people learn how to do at their local community college when they lose their factory jobs) it really rankles me that I'm being asked to foot the bill for corporate America's purely cosmetic acts of charity.

My Sony handheld blew its backlight, so I sent it to Sony to be repaired. The system worked wonderfully: I made the repair request on-line, they e-mailed instructions for sending it back, the UPS store knew what to do, the shipping tracking worked flawlessly, and I was sent updates on when to expect the delivery of the repaired product.

Except, the final update said that the handheld had been delivered to my front door at 6:23pm the prior evening. Which it had not been. I should know, I'd been home.
So I called UPS to ask where, exactly, did their driver think he left my Clie? They couldn't tell me, but told me to stay in touch with Sony for further updates. Now, it wasn't in Sony's hands anymore was it? Why is UPS' fuck up Sony's problem? Not to mention my own problem, since I'm the one missing a handheld.

I told the RLA about it, and he wandered off to walk the dogs. Came back with two dogs and my UPS package. The driver had left it on the front door step of the house next door. The driver had also written the address of the house next door on the box.

I haven't bothered to tell either UPS or Sony that I found my own missing package, because I feel like someone else should have the pleasure of figuring out that the UPS driver is an incompetent idiot.

This guy has thrown packages marked "Fragile" over my fence, pitching them a good six feet into the yard. Then I've filed claims for the broken goods. This guy delivered a clearly labeled package to a house that looks, for the most part, abandoned.*

Today, the RLA and I were out buying frames for his upcoming show. We tried to shop at Pearls, but the clerks were rude, the gumball machine ate my quarter, and the service desk employee refused to make eye contact with me. So we put the pile of merchandise we were going to buy on the nearest horizontal surface and left.

Not making eye contact is a huge annoyance to me. I don't care if you are busy, and I'm going to have to wait for twenty minutes until you can take care of my question: acknowledge that I exist, and tell me how long the wait will be. I can deal with that.

The pharmacist at the local CVS turned his back on me, and refused to talk to me, even though doing so would have solved the mystery of my mother's medications. I had nothing better to do, so I refused to leave the desk until he waited on me. It was a stand-off that lasted two hours. Really. Two fucking hours. He even helped some Pinecrest Princeling who wanted advice on what over-the-counter anti-itching cream he could use for his cat.

When I finally got my mother's meds, I stalked off to find the manager, and told her, in no uncertain terms that this was the first, last and only time I would ever be doing business with her establishment. I also said that I didn't know if the pharmacist was a dick to everyone, or I was just special, but that his attitude was not conducive to her bottom line, thankyewverymuch.

Finally, I'd like to say this about the job market today: what ever happened to a note that says thank you for your interest, interviews will be scheduled blah blah blah, or thank you for your interest, but not a snowball's chance in hell... Or even a phone call. An e-mail that says your application has been received, the process will take
yaddayaddayadda amount of time.

None of the above. I could be sending resumes into thin air, for all I know. Really. America is becoming a service industry country and we have all the service skills of roadkill.

I'm done complaining. For now.

*OK, so I'm being judgemental about the neighbor's lack of yard care and piles of construction rubbish where his front lawn should be. So sue me, I live in the fucking 'burbs, OK? Lawn care is a big issue around here.

I've collected miniatures since I was one myself. My mother collected art glass, and when I was just a mere prat, she'd take me to the antique stores with her, teaching me what was what and sending me to scout the nooks and crannies.

The first piece I got for my own collection was a hand-blown pill bottle, from an antique shop in Newport. I held it in my hand as we made our way to the counter. The gentleman proprietor asked if I had found something I could not live without, and I showed him the bottle, and the pontil mark which made it so valuable. He gave it to me, starting me on a life of collecting.
Right. Like I wasn't going down that road anyway, what with the family of origin and all.

Thank all the gods and goddesses that that little bottle wasn't on the shelf that collapsed today, sending my tiny china and glass animals to the Cuban tile floor, and from there into a million shards.

They are irreplaceable things, of course: the set of glass cats from Venice that my mother brought back to me one year, but not, again giving thanks, the set I carried around Europe the summer I was eleven. The set of Hagen Renaker bear cubs that I've had since I was very small shattered. I've seen them on e-bay, but not in the dark matte finish that mine were.

A porcelain horse, no more than half an inch tall, with legs no more than a sixteenth of an inch in diameter had no chance. Even the doll-house scaled sewing machine made of metal broke when it hit the tiles.

I couldn't bring myself to photograph the carnage. All the pieces are in an ashtray, waiting for me to sort through and salvage what could possibly be salvaged. The rest will go into the graveyard of broken toys, either in the RLA's miniature Halloween Village, or my mosaic on the koi pond surround.

When the sistergirlfriendgirl and I were little 'uns, we used to play make believe in the ferns beside the house. We played Greek Goddess Warrior Princess Barbies (many decades before Xena Princess Warrior) and made houses in the ferns and moss.
It wasn't much of a stretch for us to imagine living in those mossy caves, and we spent hours and hours doing just that.

The garden I'm building around my koi pond is my homage to those fairy caves and moss gardens, and I'm doing my best to create a life size recreation of what we imagined.

Yesterday I was laying the jigsaw puzzle of Miami Oolite that I'm paving the sitting area with, and I misjudged the weight of the hoe I was swinging. In my own defense, the hoe in question had had its wooden handle replaced by a length (a long length) of steel pipe.

Said steel pipe took a nasty bounce back and this is the result: what looks like a swollen blood sausage where my left thumb used to be.



Let me tell you that the scan doesn't to justice to the color of my thumb, a sort of half-ripe aubergine.

The dogs were helping me dig.

I spent the day with the RLA yesterday, and most of it went along these lines: I'd watch him doing something and think, hmmm, that would make a great entry for my blog... if I wanted a divorce.
No, really. I mean, we're walking the dogs in the dead of night, and first one dog pees, then the other dog pees, and then the RLA takes a piss in the trees.

Just marking his territory, he says. But. We live in the suburbs, for chrissakes. With lights and stuff. And people driving by. Granted, not at eleven at night, and we were in a particularly dark part of the street, but just the same, I have to ask you: Does your man piss on trees to mark his territory?

For whatever it's worth, the dogs in the neighborhood seem to respect it, because the really big dogs do not poop on our lawn over by that particular tree, so maybe he has a point. But. It's the twenty-first century. We are (allegedly) civilized people. Pissing in the bushes?

On another note, living with two dogs of such disparate breeds is like having my own private Westminster Show on a daily basis. There is the noble dog Nails, a Jack Russell Terrier, not AKC, but Jack Russell Terrier Club of America registered, which means he's from before the AKC accepted and standardized the breed. He is a dog's dog. He barks at squirrels. He chases things. He is (for a Jack) Very Well Behaved. He goes for a swim in the pool after every walk. (His choice, by the way. He does doggies laps, too. He jumps off the steps and swims in 4-foot circles, then goes back to the steps and sits down, like a little old man at the hotel pool.) He plays with gravity by pushing balls off the couch, or into the pool so he can chase them. He will watch the ball floating in the pool and wait until it gets close to the edge, then paw it in to within mouth distance. You can watch him calculate the time it will take to float to him. If he doesn't like the distance, he will bark at me or the RLA to push the ball closer to him. For a dog, the animal is a genius.

And now we have Miss JoJo. She's a flopsy puppy. She never barks, except when Nails is barking at another dog, and then she'll add her two cents, and stop. Nails will bark until the other dog has passed beyond his sight.

JoJo is a digger. I have gopher holes all over the yard, now. She chews on all the toys that Nails disdained. She loves her Frisbee, where Nails is afraid of them. She digs. All. The. Time. She never makes any noise. If she needs to go out, she pokes me with her nose.

Watching them play together yesterday was a hoot. Nails is clever, stealthy and plots ahead. JoJo is a gonif, and will wait until Nails is distracted, and then steal his toys. Nails, knowing that JoJo doesn't go in the pool, kept dropping his ball in the pool to keep it away from her. Then he'd pull it out, and tease her with it.

There should be a groove in the pool deck by now, from the number of laps they ran around it. Fist JoJo in the lead with Nails' toy, and then Nails playing keep away with her.

This is why I got a puppy. I laughed until my cheeks hurt.

I've been reading the surrogate daughters' blogs. Number One is in her junior year of college, Number Two is in her senior year of high school, Number Three is in high school too, and I've lost track of the year.

Number Three is all about boys and friends and I have to bang my head against a wall when I read it. It's just so jejeune and sophomoric and mostly so badly spelled that it takes all of my loyalty to her mother to read it. Cause, you know... Mom can't read it, and someone has to keep track.

It's Number One who makes my heart hurt so much. I am reminded of the story of Gertrude Stein telling F. Scott Fitzgerald "Oh, we are ALL a lost generation."
My N1SD is wallowing around in those deep and heady days of being away at school, drinking and getting stoned. She thinks that her generation invented ennui and depression and philosophical angst. "Oh," she laments "The world is so lousy, the job market is so lousy, what's the point of it all?"

Imagine, if you will, this being said by a facially-pierced young woman with fuschia streaks in her hair and an English major, whilst posturing with the back of her wrist against her forehead, and you will know why her mother and I want to slap her senseless... except that she's pretty senseless right now anyway.

Don't get me wrong, I love this girl. She is smart, and talented, and utterly, utterly lame at this moment in her life. She is cynical and jaded, only without the experience to back it up. She is scornful of her peers, but exhibits the same lax habits and mental shortcuts she disdains.

I love her to death, and I want very much to slap the bullshit out of her. She is, and it pains me to my core to say this, turning into a female, less libidinous version of her wasterel father... a companion of my own salad days, when I was young and green.

Except, stoned as I was, drunk as I was, I maintained my GPA. I graduated cum laude and was in an honors fraternity. I rarely, if ever, skipped class and I never, ever went to class high. I worked enough to pay for my own bad habits, and never had to call my parents for more money. I lived in the dorms, despite that I rather would not have. I ate in the cafeteria, and managed just fine on tuna melts and gallons of coffee.

I was not, nor do I pretend to have been, perfect, or even good, but I was always punctual about turning in work and getting to class, and meeting my deadlines. I learned a lot in school, and being responsible for my own vices was one of the most important lessons. I hope N1SD learns that one thing before she graduates.

I have come to the realization that if I'm not bitching about the idiots I work(ed) with, or the stupidity of mankind in general, or yapping about food, that I have nothing to say on this blog.
Which is absurd, of course. Ask anyone who knows me personally, and they will tell you that I am never, ever at a loss for words. Maybe for true content, but not words.

In any event, I only have three paychecks left before my severence package runs out, which means that I really should be thinking about a new job.

Or a new career. The problem as I see it is this: I have absolutely no desire to go back into the work place. In fact, I can't wait for the RLA to end his winter break and go back to work. The idea of being home alone (well, not counting the four-footed inhabitants of the Briarpatch) is enough to make me swoon.

My studio is calling me. I want to make quilts. A lot of quilts. ALl the fabric I've collected over the years, all the patterns that I've marked in all the books....

Well, now is the time to sew.

And I promise you all, I'll have plenty to say when I start that project. I also have promised myself to completely redesign Girlyshoes... you know, the rest of the stuff that makes up this site.

Gotta go. The gym is also a jealous mistress and it too, is calling me this morning.

I received a call today from one of the guys I used to work with. They couldn't wait to tell me the news. The PR director from hell has resigned to take a new position with AvMed. To which I can only say, pull your money out of AvMed now, before she wreaks havoc on their image.
I hope it was as voluntary a separation as mine was. I'd like to think that someone finally told her that things DO have to be done right, and not just done. That it was about the quality of her work, that it was about her, personally.

I'd like to think that, but I doubt it happened that way. No, it happened like everything else has happened at the hospital: ass backwards and inadverdently.

This woman, this incapable, ignorant bitch managed to ruin lives and destroy institutions that I worked hard to build (the publications office, the web) and now she is simply walking away, with no compunction and utterly no comprehension of the harm she did to the hospital with her incompetence.

Ah, fuck 'em anyway. I have a new puppy, and a new batch of lox brining away in the back of the fridge. On Friday, this miserable year will come to an end, and I can pin my dreams on 2005.

My sistergirlfriendgirl sent me a LoxBoxTM for my birthday. Looks like a plastic shoe box, contains a small slab of granite, an instruction book and a bag of bags. Turns out to be a do-it-yourself kit for making lox.
OK, I'm game. Publix has salmon on sale for 5 bucks a pound, and lox is going for close to twenty. I have Kosher salt, water, pepper and sugar. Pick up fresh dill, and I'm on my way home.

It took all of ten minutes to put the ingredients together, and that included rinsing the salmon.

Two days later, I look in the back of the refrigerator, and damned if the box doesn't contain something that looks like lox, as opposed to raw salmon sitting on a bed of salt and dill.

The RLA and I cautiously sliced up the salmon, and it did indeed look like real lox. A schmear of cream cheese later, and we are eating the best damned lox I've had in years. How about that?

Next time I'll use a little less dill and a hair less salt and try the Julia Child version with a little cognac.

This is so cool, I'm going to have to give them to my cooking friends, and you all know who you are.

The LoxBox can be found here.