My house is a total mess right now.  Actually, it’s not really a mess at all, but it’s far messier than it has been in months and it will take a couple of hours to get it into house-showing mode, so it feels a little decadent to have it so messy when I know there will be hell to pay if I get a call from the realtors today.  But I am counting, probably erroneously, on the fact that it is the first week of school and no one is in a blind panic to go look at houses during the first week of school.  And the house will have to be cleaned by tomorrow night for the party, so it will get cleaned again.  For now, right now, it’s a mess.  But not for long.

It’s been a mess all week.  I went to my parents’ house on Sunday and had a lovely time.  I took the dog and she had a lovely time.  She found something horrible in the woods somewhere and rolled in it to her heart’s content.  The smell was awful.  I had to ride home with all of the windows rolled down because it was just an overwhelming stench.  I had to meet up with some people immediately on my return home, so she had a couple of hours to permeate my house with the smell.  When I got home, I had to give her a bath.  This means that the whole house is covered with dog fur, because she sheds like crazy after a bath, no matter how much hair comes off in the bath itself.  It’s impossible to avoid it.  But the bathroom is always just disgusting after a dog bath.  I did clean the bathroom, but there are plenty of dog hair tumbleweeds around the house now.

That wasn’t the end of it, though.  The dog kept waking me up on Monday night to tell me something, but wouldn’t go outside for any length of time.  First thing in the morning, she vomited all over the living room rug.  I wasn’t feeling very well myself, so I stayed home for the day.  She looked miserable and was lethargic and ended up vomiting several times during the day.  I finally took her to the vet in the late afternoon.  The doctor diagnosed it as ‘garbage gut’ and the dog got a shot to settle her stomach.  She’s fine now, but the rug had to be put in the wash and there are a few spots on the floor where she vomited.  So that’s just another reason why the house is a mess.

But I DID finally get a replacement clock works for my beautiful blue starburst clock, so it actually works again.  It hadn’t worked in weeks and weeks, but now it does.  Yay for that!  I love that clock so much and it makes me sad to see non-working clocks.  I had to make a trip to Hobby Lobby… two trips, in fact, because the first one I bought was the wrong size… and I hate Hobby Lobby.  I hate that place so much- the Christian overtones, the passive-aggressive note on the door that’s all like “Well, *we* close on Sundays to give our employees time with family and God and Jesus and ham and that’s the way everyplace should be but only we are God-loving enough to do right by our employees other than paying them more than minimum wage and giving them reasonable benefits”, like it’s not actually a National Fucking Law to let your employees have time off during the week.  Fuck you, Hobby Lobby, and that kind of backhanded bullshit.  I loathe Hobby Lobby.  Crappy furniture and tchotchkes and Christmas in July.  It drives me crazy.  But they had replacement clock works and Ace Hardware did not.  So they got six of my hard-earned dollars.

I haven’t done much housework this week, but I have watched several documentaries and I want to recommend some of them.  They’re all on Netflix Watch Instantly.  Man on Wire was great.  Helvetica was really good.  I also watched Objectified, which is in the same lines as Helvetica and very interesting but not as good.  I also watched Moog with my boyfriend; I am getting an education in synthetizers and pop music, but there’s a lot to learn.  We also watched a thing about Frank Zappa recording his Apostrophe and Over-Nite Sensation albums; I think it was part of a series of documentaries called Classic Albums.  That was really good and I was actually disappointed when it ended because I wanted it to keep going.  When does that ever happen?  I think that’s all the documentaries I’ve watched, but it’s still a lot of documentaries for one week.

I have also been working on photos for the first time in months.  I am almost caught up on everything that I’ve shot for family and friends- mostly holiday pictures- and I’m now back to working on pictures from my June 2010 trip to Yellowstone.  It’d been months and months since I’d worked on photos from that trip, and mostly it’s because so many of the photos are from days when I was shooting in the rain and under clouds.  There are lots of great photos, to be sure, but there are huge amounts of so-so photos, or photos that need some work.  I’ve been trying to tackle those now, and eventually I will get to do the great photos again, but it’s good to work on some of the less interesting ones.  Turning them into monochrome images or putting a vintage tint on them helps a lot.  There are very few truly shitty images.  It feels good to work on them!

Undine Falls, Yellowstone National Park

Yellowstone Lake, Yellowstone National Park.

Lewis Falls, Yellowstone National Park

Hello!  Happy Friday!  It has been a nice week of weather here, not terribly hot, though my friend who has been without a/c this week would probably take exception to this.  Well, I was out mowing and weeding on Wednesday and it really wasn’t terrible.  But temperatures are climbing again this weekend, making it likely that I will need some ice cream to make it through unscathed.

I have no plans to see Harry Potter this weekend, though probably eventually I will go.  However, Cave of Forgotten Dreams is starting at Ragtag this weekend and I do want to see that.  But instead of doing either, I will go to the New Music Festival that they’re holding right now at the Missouri Theatre downtown.  I went last night to one of the performances and will go again tomorrow night.  I enjoyed some of it, but one of the works was atonal, and I don’t think I’m really experienced enough in the form to appreciate it (which is meant to be a diplomatic way of saying that I didn’t like it at all, but I’m willing to admit that it was probably above my head).

I finished some books over the last month, after a few months of not really reading.  (By that, I mean not really reading anything in traditional paper book form, because all I ever do is read stuff online.  Some of which is pretty interesting and that is what I am linking in those shared posts, if you take a look at ‘em.)  I finished both the Columbia One Read Program book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and the Mizzou Reads book, Zeitoun, and also Bossypants by Tina Fey.  I am a new member of the MU Libraries Diversity Action Committee and I’m doing book discussions with library staff on both of the first two books.  I am excited about both parts of that sentence.  While I am not putting together any kind of group discussion for the Tina Fey book, I did find it entertaining.  But the more interesting part, to me, was that I read it on a Kindle that I borrowed from my sister.  I’m not sure I want to buy an e-reader, though I like staying on top of the market and knowing about them, but I did enjoy reading a book on that one.  I liked having a book with me that fit easily into my bag and didn’t get all bent up.  It was quite convenient for traveling.  So maybe I will think about getting one in the fall when the new one comes out, hopefully with a touchscreen.  (Not having a touchscreen is annoying if you like books that have lots of entertaining footnotes.)  So, me?  I liked the Kindle but am not currently in a big fat hurry to buy one.

I like to keep you abreast of the ’90s music videos that I happen across in my life.  Memories are made of this, for those of us who came of musical age in the MTV2 era.  (The first iteration of MTV2, anyway.)  Enjoy!

Mardi Gras!  I swear one of these years I am going to make it to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, or at least one of the earlier parades, or St. Joseph’s Day to see the Mardi Gras Indians.  Also, in related news, I need to remember to make my dad record Treme for me when it starts up again next month.

Do you need a Mardi Gras soundtrack?  The Awl helpfully provided one for today, so you don’t even have to have the soundtrack to season 1 of Treme.  I do, though!  I have that soundtrack and it’s probably my favorite new album of 2010.

Later I will put on my Mardi Gras shoes (purple Doc Martens with green laces, which are now old enough to be considered retro) and eat pancakes with my family at IHOP for dinner.  Maybe I will wear my pink beehive wig as well!  There’s something about family IHOP holidays (there are more of them than you’d think!  St. Nicholas Day, St. Lucy’s Day, and Mardi Gras are three of them) that makes me want to dress flamboyantly.

The March March parade happened on Friday afternoon despite tornado

warnings and heavy rain.  I was listening to the weather radio as I applied my heavy green eyeshadow, and though there were tornadoes, they were all east of Columbia.  So I put on my pink wedges and blue fishnets and went out to meet the crowd.  And it was the best time!  I was right out front in my ridiculous costume, in front of a brass band playing some New Orleans standards, so I was doing a second line strut down the street with my umbrella.  The rain was heavy for awhile, but it was great fun.  I am already trying to decide what my costume will be for next year.

The rest of the True/False festival went well.  I saw four films in total, which isn’t much in the context of my festival-going friends, but I also volunteered about sixteen or seventeen hours, all of which was on my feet (sometimes in pink 3″ cork wedges), so I’m giving myself a pass.  But the films that I did see were great!  My favorite was Buck, which I am sure will make some big rounds this summer because it was well-crafted and moving and fascinating, but I really really enjoyed Troll Hunter as well.  That was a good and fun mockumentary, if a little poorly paced.  And then I saw Benda Bilili! and Blood in the Mobile, both of which were about the Democratic Republic of the Congo (albeit about very different subjects).  I also attended some parties and tried to listen to some music.  I ended up needing a lot of time to recuperate- I was generally exhausted most of the time.  But after taking off the morning yesterday and sleeping in, and then another early night last night, I am doing pretty great.  I can’t wait for next year!  I hope I can take on more of a leadership role next year.

Here’s me as a talking head in a video from the March:

The guy who filmed me clearly had no idea what I was talking about when I told him I was a ‘hon’.  He spelled it ‘hun’ instead, which makes me a very strangely dressed Attila, but of course I was a Hon.  As in Honfest.  But he seemed to get the Disco Minotaur correct.  What’s that about, sir?

So now it’s post-True/False!  It will be a mostly quiet week, I think.  I am excited about the Scissor Sisters concert on Friday in Columbia, but otherwise not much going on except cleaning for my party on Saturday night.  I started the process last night with the hope of doing one peripheral room every day this week and cleaning the big central rooms for Saturday itself.  (That makes it sound like I live in castle, which is really kind of true when I’ve just spent the weekend watching movies about poor children living on the streets in the DRC.  I am so fucking rich in comparison to so much of the world.)

As for the rest of the month, who knows?  I have started keeping a Google calendar to remind me of things going on that I hear about, and it’s amazing how quickly it fills up.  It will be April before I know it, and then it’s just a few weeks until school is out for the summer.  How does that even work?

There’s not much that I love as much as great pairs tap dancing.

I saw this next one on TCM last February- it’s Christopher Walken on Gene Kelly:

The scene with Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor is here. It won’t embed. Go watch it, though. It’s great.

Currently, I be watching Everest: Beyond the Limit season 2 on Netflix, and eating vegetarian chili.  I like this show.  I’ve read a lot of mountaineering stories over the past couple of years.  It was mostly well-written, so it was easy to imagine, but it’s also cool to see it on screen.  A couple of weeks ago, I saw North Face at Ragtag, and that was very similar.  I’d read something about the Eiger North Face, so it was cool to have some background knowledge and put a real picture with the features I’d already heard about.

Things are going well.  Despite seemingly insurmountable odds, I have managed to make it to the gym every day since I wrote the post about wanting to go to the gym every day.  Magically, it is somehow working for me.  I am very proud of myself for sticking it out for six whole days.  I have eleven more days until I leave for the trip, and I hope to go every single one of those.

Tonight is photo club.  The contest theme is ‘antique furniture’.  I am submitting some photos of my own furniture that I took a few months ago, in lieu of new photos taken for the contest.  The furniture is fifty years old and modern in style.  The question is whether people who are older than fifty will consider it antique.  I am guessing not, but they did not put an age or other qualifier on it, and ‘antique’ is subject to interpretation, so I am submitting my images.

So, despite the fact that it’s chilly and rainy, I have had a lot of sinus headaches this week.  I tried switching to generic Zyrtec to save some cash, but it ended up being a waste of money.  Those pills made me drowsy and then didn’t actually do much to fix my allergies.  So frustrating.  But I can recommend Excedrin Sinus Headache.  Those are pretty good.

I had a really unbalanced weekend, not doing anything of particular note on Saturday (except watching a Netflix movie almost exclusively so that I could return it- anybody else do that?  I mean, I wanted to see the movie [Marathon Man] or I would have just sent the DVD back unwatched, but I had to watch it so that I could get it out of the house) so I had to run around on Sunday to get things done and take advantage of the time.

I did manage to finish my first book in months, Adventures in Yellowstone: Early Travelers Tell Their Tales, which I ran across on the shelves of the local library while looking at guidebooks.  This was a collection of diary entries written by visitors to the Yellowstone region between the 1840s and 1905 (beginning with mountain men and ending with early tourists).  I read a similar book a few years ago called Worlds to Explore: Classic Tales of Travel and Adventure from National Geographic.  It was a much larger collection, with essays from all around the world, but I enjoyed it quite a lot.  It’s fascinating to read about how difficult it was to do what is now considered fairly minor traveling.  Anyway, I’m glad I finished the Yellowstone book.  It was good background reading.  And many of those earlier travelers referred to the area as Wonderland.  I like thinking that I’m taking a vacation to Wonderland.

My trip is coming up- I leave two weeks from Saturday, and I’ve finally nailed down more plans in my itinerary.  I had to make lodging reservations in the park back in February, but I didn’t make any other reservations until this week when I discovered cabins for rent in a nearby state park in Montana.  Yay!  So far, I’m only staying in places where ‘electricity’ and ‘lights’ are considered amenities, and restroom accommodations will involve sandals and flashlight.  Headlamp, actually!  I am trying not to buy anything much for this trip, to keep my costs down, but I did get a headlamp, bear spray, and a bear bell.  Well, I’d rather have them than wish I had them, too late, right?  I also need to figure out whether I am going to take plates and cups and silverware or be wasteful with paper & plastic (well, the compostable stuff made of corn, anyway.  Still wasteful, but less hassle than washing and drying after every meal, I guess).

Went to see Iron Man 2 last night and quite enjoyed it.  (I like that they didn’t fuck around with a subtitle, you know?  Another movie would put a colon after the 2 and follow it with a pithy pun.)  All due to a well-written script with a nice amount of humor, good direction, and, of course, stellar performance by Robert Downey, Jr., in a role that is perfect for him.  Sam Rockwell was good, too.  Unfortunately, he does the same kind of evil manic energy thing that Robert Downey, Jr., does, only not quite as well.  They kind of clashed in that regard.  But I love both of them.  My only complaint is how stupid the female characters in this franchise are.  Both Gwyneth Paltrow and Scarlett Johansson only exist here to be eye candy.  The worst action sequence belonged solely to Scarlett.  Robin Hood comes out this weekend, and I will probably see it, but I am torn on whether it will be any good or not.  I don’t hate Russell Crowe and I love Cate Blanchett, but they both seem kind of old for the roles.  And if Maid Marian is turned into some kind of deadly assassin on horseback, I will be irritated.  I’m sick to death of recent movies rewriting historical characters as more enlightened than they were back then.  There is a line somewhere between making Maid Marian a warrior princess and letting Gwyneth Paltrow do little more than squawk and bitch and look pretty.

I’m a little prickly about this because I couldn’t mow last night due to the sogginess of the yard, and I am busy busy with a full busy-bee life until Saturday, and I am certain that my neighbors will not be pleased if I wait that long to mow.  Dammit!  I may have to take off a couple of hours of work tomorrow or Thursday and go home to mow, but that will mean that I will have to hurriedly clean myself up to go off to do whatever it is that I am supposed to do later (on each day, respectively).

I forget how much work lawns are.  Seriously.

Headed to a Ragtag movie now with some friends.  They have a series called Ragtag 101 in which they play classic films.  Tonight is L’Atalante, which Roger Ebert lists in his book The Great Movies.  I am excited to see it.  I have wanted to see other Ragtag 101 films in the past, so I’m glad I’m catching this one (even at the expense of the yard).

I went to see six movies, all of which were great.  My favorite was probably The Red Chapel, about two Danish-Korean comedians who enter North Korea to do a comedy show with a documentary team.  But it’s a hard call.  I also liked Smash His Camera, about Ron Galella, a famous paparazzo, and Waking Sleeping Beauty, about Disney animation in the 1980s and early 1990s.  I wasn’t familiar with Spalding Gray but enjoyed the Steven Soderbergh-directed And Everything Is Going Fine quite a lot.  The most depressing of all was Disorder, a Chinese documentary that took footage of crazy events happening on the streets in Beijing and put them together without context.  It was fascinating.

So, great movies!  And I volunteered about twelve hours, six each on Saturday and Sunday nights.  My extrovert side really shines during times when I can be helpful to people like that, pointing them in the right direction, etc.  The other volunteers were also a lot of fun, and I went out with them both nights after the work was done.  I saw Capybara and Mahjongg (and a klezmer band while Mahjongg was setting up) at Mojo’s on Saturday night, and then there was a big party for all the volunteers last night.  It was pretty awesome, enough so that I wished I had had the foresight to ask off work today.  But I didn’t!  So I am here, and it is going to be a long Monday with not enough sleep.  I am also scheduled to work at the food bank tonight.  Between all the running around I did this weekend and the work I’ll do tonight, I do not feel guilty about skipping the gym today!  I was far too tired.

And now it is March!  St. David’s Day!  Less than two weeks until Daylight Savings Time begins.  And I was on the Columbia College campus last week, and the daffodils were already several inches high.  Within just a few weeks they will be blooming and the grass will turn from dead yellow to spring green virtually overnight.  I love spring in Missouri!  You don’t even realize how dead the world is now until it starts coming to life in March.

On the flip side, I was having a guy come mow my lawn for the past few years, and this year I had to cancel that.  So as soon as the grass is green, it will be time to start cleaning out the garage, taking a look at the condition of my lawnmower/weed cutter, and begin the very time-consuming cycle of yard maintenance.  I am hoping to start a little early this year so that I resize some of the flowerbeds, which get unruly fast if not kept up.  I am such a bad gardener.  I have no follow-through.  Or, at least, I have not had any follow-through in the past.  But I have had time for many new activities in the past few months, so maybe I will give myself more time for gardening this year.

I don’t know what plans I have for March, except that I have one more month for my quarterly resolutions, and I have not been doing very well on my reading again.  I will need to review those and see what I need to get done.  I am hoping to take a road trip to Iowa later in the month, maybe the last weekend, if I can get schedules sorted.  I will be volunteering at the food bank through the end of March, but I am not sure that I am going to continue after that.  It is great to work there, and I definitely feel that I am working for something big and important that helps real people, but I’m also trying to meet new people in the process, and I’d like to find another place that might help me do that while still being big and important in a real-world poverty-and-hunger sense.  I know it shouldn’t be a social hour.  I might do the food bank again later in the year, but I’d like to see what else I can find.

I am freezing in my office right now.  I know, I hate it when people complain about being cold, because “put on another shirt!” is always the answer.  But I don’t have any more shirts with me.  And I have two shawls that I keep here for these occasions, and they are both draped over me.  It is really chilly in here, and playing with the thermostat never seems to make any difference.  But that is a fact of office life.  I should wear thicker socks and stock more blankets in my cubicle.

Anyway, it was a great movie.  Scott Tobias, one of the AV Club’s better movie reviewers, quoted this from the film:

There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make. You can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won’t know for 20 years. And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out.

I love that quote.  Tobias called it grim, but I don’t think so.

But there are a lot of things in life that other people think are grim and morbid, things that I consider to be pleasing and interesting.  I don’t know if I’m an incurable Pollyanna or what, but my view of that quote above is seeing all the millions of strings that I didn’t pull during my life, that didn’t destroy my life.  I see only that it has worked out pretty well so far, what there has been of it.

What a great movie that was.  I need to rewatch it.

I am coming within spitting distance of finishing off these lists!  I may leave The Wild Bunch to the last, because it’s on both lists.  I’ve already tried to get through it twice without success, so I might need to have a party and invite others to watch it with me, so that I don’t have any excuse for stopping it in the middle and never starting it again.  Anyway, it would be nice to finish off both lists with one movie, so that may be the goal.