It is really pretty out today.  Nearly 70 degrees, sun shining.  I am wearing a dress and spending the whole day… indoors.  Indoors.  I didn’t even bring my camera to work.

I will get a chance to take a walk after work, before the weekly Wednesday night trivia game, but it won’t be long and it won’t be really taking full advantage of such a beautiful day.  Oh well.  It’s spring.

I know it’s spring because I have crocus blooming in my yard, and I have heard the siren call of the spring cleaning bug.  I cleaned my desk at work.  You would not believe how long I’ve been living on a pile of papers in my cubicle.  Months and months.  I threw out (read: recycled) stacks of papers with dates from 2007 and 2008 and these were not important papers.  I just live on top of crap sometimes, because it makes me feel comfortable.  It’s not a good way to be.  But I cleaned it all, threw a lot of stuff out, filed a lot of stuff that should have been filed way long ago, and now it is clear.  I can see the whole top of my desk.  It is a miracle!  It is an International Women’s Day Miracle!

I have had heartburn all week.  I took another step closer to the grave last summer, when my once-a-day Diet Coke habit finally caught up with me and started giving me heartburn.  I gave up on it at the time and weaned myself off, and the heartburn went away (after a 14-day course of Prilosec, of course).  Then I slowly started adding it back to my diet and, a few weeks later, the heartburn returned.  It’s been like that for months, a cycle of heartburn and Diet Coke addiction.

It’s stupid too, because I think Diet Coke makes me crave sweet things more often than if I don’t drink sweet drinks all the time.  I went through a tonic-drinking phase for a few weeks in January, and I didn’t eat nearly as much sweet stuff during that time, because the bitter taste of tonic water does not mix with sweets.  It doesn’t help if I then eat a whole bag of chips, but honestly I don’t fear the chips as much as I do the cookies.  The cookies have more calories, and they disappear at a much faster rate.

Anyway, the point is that I should be smarter about the Diet Coke, but I love the carbonated pop form of caffeine.  I like tea as well, but generally I won’t make tea for myself, and buying it gets expensive even though tea bags + hot water at the nearest coffee shops are the cheapest option there is.  Diet Coke is still cheaper, fits in the bag, pops open with a satisfying snap, and is fizzy and refreshing.  Thus, Diet Coke.

Other than cleaning my desk at work, and trying to bribe myself into doing my taxes, I have not done all that much spring cleaning.  I did clear out the birdhouses and put all the bird feeders in the dishwasher (this worked very well, in fact), and then moved the bird feeder stands around the yard and refilled all the now-clean feeders.  That was a chore, and it worked out pretty well.  Unfortunately, I’ve been neglecting the feeders for months and it will take a few days to lure the birds back to the yard.  It is time to start thinking about gardening, the time when I am under the impression that I will be able to get a handle on the whole yard this year, and it will turn into a lush and lovely garden full of fountain grass and lavender and a canopy of tree limbs, when in reality I will have given up by mid-June and will be barely fighting the six-foot-high goldenrod by September.

Hello, me.  You suck at gardening.  Come up with a new dream, ok?

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.

I had a good weekend- went to see Reservoir Dogs and Shutter Island, saw a couple of bands downtown, and had lunch on Saturday with my grandparents (who showed me slides of their trips to Yellowstone/Tetons in the 1960s and 1980s), and lunch on Sunday with my parents (and my mom & I watched Synecdoche, New York).  So I spent the weekend running around, I guess.  It was fun.

This weekend is the True/False Film Festival, and I’m really looking forward to it.  I am hoping to take advantage of it completely and totally this year, while in the past few years I ignored it.  I am making up for lost time, I guess.

Tonight is my first Tuesday night off in a few weeks, which may sound a little weird, but since I have scheduled plans on Mondays and Wednesdays now, it’s nice to think that I get a little breather tonight, because running around every night makes Thursday seem very far off at this point.  But I have plans for Thursday this week!  And then all weekend!  So I am going to yoga after work and then home to crash and stare at the television for a few hours.  It is well-earned!  I have been getting out and being very social for weeks and weeks and weeks.  And the house isn’t even that messy, either!  Sure, I haven’t worked on any Christmas pictures of the family, but whatever.  Lost is on tonight, and maybe I will get closer to finishing the book that I’ve been working through for weeks.

I have been listening to a lot of Split Lip Rayfield and Old Crow Medicine Show the past couple of weeks and googling “Missouri fiddle contests”.  I know!  Bizarre.

I don’t recommend Shutter Island.  Can we call Leonardo DiCaprio a muse?  After four films together, he’s clearly Scorsese’s muse.  Can we just call him that?

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.

Anyway, the acrobats were entertaining.  The audience was about 50% kids under the age of 10.  The show started with a disclaimer: “These stunts take years of practice.  Please do not try them at home.”  Which I felt was woefully inadequate when then presented with balancing acts like men on pointed spears, roller skating women on tables, 15-20 people on one bicycle, and a man doing a handstand on top of six stacked chairs (the last one was done off the side of the stage because there wasn’t enough height on the stage for all the chairs).  My friend and I giggled throughout the intermission at the idea of these kids running home to start their ‘years of practice’ by balancing their kid brothers on the top of a couple of rakes.  I lamented that I know no families of young boys to whom I could give the DVD that was being sold in the lobby.

Today I am making reservations for my upcoming trip!  I’m going to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks in early June, and now I’ve got confirmed reservations, so it’s set.  I realized yesterday that if I didn’t start researching, it would soon be too late to get reservations for lodging inside the park.  And once I started researching, it soon became apparent that my tardiness at beginning the process was going to be the limiting factor as to what I can visit and when.  But I am happy with the plans so far.  I spent some time trying to decide if I felt ready to stay in a tent cabin for two days when the weather in early June in that part of the Rockies can be anywhere from warm & sunny to snowed-in.  The decision was only made after I realized that the tent cabins, while equipped with electric lights, do not have electrical outlets.  I am all for walking to bathrooms and paying for showers and heating with a wood stove, but being without a power outlet to charge my camera batteries is pushing my sense of adventure.  (It did occur to me to get a power converter for the car.  But then you get into the issues of locking up tent cabins too, and the idea of being in an unlocked tent cabin, alone, for two nights in the mountains, seems to be beyond my idea of a reasonable risk.)

There’s nothing like making some definite vacation plans to get me excited about a trip!  Remember when I tried to go on that trip to Nebraska without making any plans?  I didn’t even go!  I helped somebody move instead!  I am really going!  (Unless something major comes up, of course.)

I am older than the college students, and they know that, and they don’t tend to want to interact with me as far as I can tell, so I’m cheerful but silent around them.  I’m not quite ready to be the old person peppering the younger one with questions.

I am younger than most of the church people, which switches up the dynamic.  They are never sure how old I am, and always ask if I am in college.  Weird, isn’t it?  The college kids know immediately that I am older than they are, but those who are middle-aged are not sure where to place me.  The church people are far more interested in talking to me and ask a lot of questions and are generally very friendly but slightly bossy about how we do the project that we are supposed to be doing.  (Which, so far, is taking bulk amounts of one kind of food and breaking it into 20-30 smaller bags and packing those up again so that redistribution is easier.)

Last night, I got to work with some kids.  I don’t know how long it’s been since I interacted with a 10-year-old, and there were actually two of them.  I think I did pretty well- they wanted the harder jobs that were more prone to spilling popcorn everywhere, which they did with some enthusiasm.  And I let them!  I tried to maintain a nice balance of staying involved without being too managerial.  Anyway, it was cool to be around kids.  My life is mostly adult-oriented at this point.

• Trying desperately to talk myself out of going to Main Squeeze for lunch.  I brought a sad little burrito that does not stand up to the tofu salad sandwich (today’s Main Squeeze special).
• Trying to talk myself into walking around the corner to the mailbox because I have a stack of mail on my desk that I failed to remember to put in the mailbox at home this morning.
• Feeling insanely jealous of all the snow that DC has received this winter.  Columbia has gotten a nice amount of it, and DC certainly can’t beat us for cold temperatures, but I would love another couple of feet of snow before this winter peters out in a few weeks.
• Feeling grateful that we are actually getting snow today, though it should only be about 5″.
• Looking back on the weekend with some amount of pride and satisfaction.  I didn’t get my taxes done, but I did get to the bottom of the laundry pile, watched some movies, took the dog to the dog park twice (despite crazy amounts of mud), wrote terribly belated thank-you notes for Christmas presents, paid bills, went to the gym, attended a volunteer meeting, ignored the Super Bowl, got caught up on 365 photos, ran a few (well-planned) errands, and did some cleaning.  Productive!  I am pleased.  I didn’t quite achieve that level of super-cleanliness that I described a few posts ago, but I went to bed with a definite feeling of accomplishment.  I love that.
• Looking forward to volunteering at the True/False Film Fest after the weekend’s volunteer meeting.  600+ volunteers showed up at the meeting, which was really well-organized and smoothly run.  They told us it would be 4 hours, but they managed to get everybody checked in and schedules confirmed and training information imparted and I was out of the door by 1:30pm.  That’s a well-run group.  I am looking forward to the weekend of the festival now!  It will be fun to be involved.  I volunteered at the Reel Affirmations Film Festival in DC a couple of times and have good memories of that.
• Disappointed that the True/False Fest is the same weekend as an event in Chicago that I had been kinda planning to attend, but glad that I’m ultimately choosing the local event over the far-away event.  It was a vintage bazaar, and I don’t need to be buying anything at all, so it’s really just fine.  And I’m looking forward to True/False.  Did I mention that?

And this weekend is Valentine’s Day.  I like Valentine’s Day in Columbia for one reason: chocolate-covered strawberries.  These are sold by a few vendors around town and are kind of a local specialty of the holiday.  They’re not as common in other parts of the country, as far as my limited knowledge goes.  And I’m convinced that they’re healthy.  Well, healthier than inhaling a bag of Lindor chocolate or a Green & Black white chocolate bar or any of the other chocolate-related activities that I’ve been known to pursue.  There’s plenty of strawberry in relation to the amount of chocolate, and it’s fresh strawberry, and, look, I don’t want to hear it.  That’s the pro side to Valentine’s Day.

The negatives of Valentine’s Day are extensive, but they begin with the bullshit TV/radio ads that permeate our airwaves all the time these days.  I am sick of being told that all women require expensive presents, and will mope about if not gifted with jewelry or candy or flowers or whatever.  I am specifically befuddled by the entire business model of the Pajamagram people (who are going overboard with advertising this year), and therefore any actual person who would delight in receiving an overnighted shipment of cheaply-made pajamas in an organza hatbox, especially if it’s considered a romantic overture on the part of one’s spouse.  Pajamas, I get that.  Pajamas are great.  It’s the overnight shipment, the fact that one has no idea about the sizing or quality of the pajamas, and especially the inclusion of the organza hatbox that confuses me.  I refuse to link to that site, but if you go there you will find out that the cost of this kind of thing runs $50-$80.  $50!  And you probably could get a much better deal at Target with the same kind of quality, as long as you’re not dealing with the kind of person who would be disappointed in the lack of the organza hatbox packaging.

Personally, this is the first Valentine’s Day I’ve had in a few years that didn’t involve some kind of inherent household strife, so the fact that I’m single this year is perfectly fine with me.  It’s also Chinese New Year (though my Chinese friends call that holiday Spring Festival), and I think that one of those is far more entertaining to celebrate than the other.  So: chocolate-covered strawberries, Chinese food, and perhaps a nice romantic screening of Lawrence of Arabia.

Wow, thinking about Chinese food and reading this Wiki page about chopsticks (did you know that it is not authentic to eat Thai food with chopsticks, because traditionally they haven’t used them there?), I am now craving Thai food instead of tofu salad sandwiches.  And it’s lunchtime!  What will I do?

I did go to my volunteer gig on Monday night at the local food bank.  That went well.  I decided last fall that I should volunteer more time, but it was hard to find an organization that would take me in the evening hours.  The local food bank does, though I have the feeling that it’s uncommon to have individuals volunteer, rather than people who volunteer as part of a church group or Scouts or something, unless they’re fulfilling a court order for community service.  So I am wondering if the church people on Monday thought I had a lot more edge than I actually do, being some kind of bad person with a criminal record.  Maybe it would disappoint them to find out that I am actually clean.  Hmm.  I should work hard to hone that bad-girl image there.  Do bad girls still smoke and wear leather jackets?

I also signed up as a volunteer with the True/False Film Fest, which is at the end of February.  I didn’t know that they sign up more than 600 volunteers for the festival, and that they get even more responses, enough that they have a waiting list for volunteers.  But I have actually never been to True/False, so I wouldn’t know any of this, including how it works or what films they will have.  I just thought it would be fun to do.  As usual, the question to ask me is, “Why have you never been to the True/False Film Fest, since you love movies so much?” And the answer to that is, “I hate crowds.”  But this year I have decided that this is a bullshit excuse, and I’m not taking it from myself anymore.  I am considering even buying a pass this year so that I will attend several movies over the weekend and not just show up to volunteer, but I will wait until next week to decide that.  There is a volunteer meeting this weekend so I will learn a lot more!

Anyway, so that’s the story of me getting out of the house and doing something interestingish with my life.

I went to see a movie this week, A Single Man, which starred Colin Firth and was written/directed/designed by Tom Ford.  You can be forgiven for not knowing who Tom Ford is, and this movie was not very good… story-wise.  In all things visual, it was spectacularly beautiful.  It was right up my alley, 1960s, perfect clothes, perfect hair, perfect architecture.  I enjoyed looking at it.  I thought it was a shitty story.  So I rated it 3 stars overall.  Colin Firth and Julianne Moore are both good, and it was fun to see Nicholas Hoult, a young British actor, doing an American accent as a gorgeous young college student.  It does not seem very long ago that he was the dorky middle-school kid starring alongside Hugh Grant in About a Boy in 2002.

In other news, this was Baby Week in my life!  A few years ago was the Wedding Boom, and this is the middle of the Baby Boom years.  Tracy’s sister had a baby boy on Tuesday, and my brother’s wife’s sister (my sister-in-law’s sister, whose wedding I shot last summer) had a baby boy yesterday.  And my co-worker, whose wife gave birth to their first baby a couple of weeks ago, brought his new daughter in on Wednesday.  She was pretty cute.  So three babies, born days apart, whose parents are/have been involved in my life, and they may never even meet each other.  What a weird world it is, you know?

Gah.  I’m exhausted.  I have a few things going on in the evening this week, or else I would be tempted to go home and sleep tonight, even though I had fairly lengthy naps both days this weekend.  Both naps were the sort where the wake-up is disorienting, and you don’t fully recover from it for another few hours.  I hate that kind of thing.

But the weekend itself was pretty good, involving a lot of junk food and family and fun stuff, even if I didn’t clean the house properly for all of the above to happen at my house on Saturday night.  I could use another couple of days right now, just to catch up on sleep and find the bottom of the laundry pile and generally get a handle on life before the start of another week.  I need a weekend with a Productivity Sunday, a Sunday filled with Getting Things Done, which finds me, fresh from a shower, climbing into a clean bed with a clean house all around me.  I haven’t had one of those Sundays in a long time.  I love those, but I rarely make time for them.  And this weekend may be no exception, because I think I am taking a road trip.  But I will see how that all works itself out.

Last week, I spent quite a considerable amount of time making spreadsheets of all my spending since about September of 2009, complete with categorization and pie charts.  It was, weirdly enough, a lot of fun.  It was also way illuminating, just like counting calories a year ago was illuminating.  In both cases, I was worried about the big items (in terms of cash and in terms of calories), but it turned out that it was the little things added up that were my real issue.  I give myself guilt fits over the big stuff (the macaroni & cheese at Noodle & Company, the repair bill for my big camera), but it’s the shopping/eating when I’m bored that really causes me trouble ($25 at Etsy here, a bag of chips at 4pm there).  Honestly, my spending isn’t nearly as bad as my eating, if we’re going to compare.  I’m not in debt, but I can certainly be saving more money.  I think that if I keep track of my spending for the next few months in the way that I kept track of my eating for several months last year (at this time), I can probably get a much better handle on it.  That would be great!  And I get to make pie charts.  I LOVE pie charts.

Tonight I start a volunteering gig!  I hope that it works out.