Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

1. What is an interesting object you have out on display in your house somewhere? Why is it interesting, and where did it come from?

On the mantelpiece in the library, we have: three star-shaped crystal candleholders that were in my grandparents' house from before I was born and that only came here when Grandpa died and Grandma moved up here; a vase ladysea made for us; a three-vase dealie that looks like a Miyazaki thinger (purchased at the Eagan Art Fair); a blown-glass ship in a blown-glass bottle, imported from Hungary; a rosmaled box made by my grandmother who died before I was born; and a chunk of salt (I forget what kind of salt) that lights up interestingly, purchased by markgritter's father.

We are full of cool stuff. I promise.

2. Why is five the canonical number for LJ? Five questions, five things make a post, five times such-and-such a character did X.

I don't know about the other ones. But five things make a post was my friend wilfulcait's originally. This is why all my "five things make a post" post are tagged "missing rise," because I do miss Rise every time I do a post like that. We lost her far too young (breast cancer that metastasized), and I am still wistful about the absence of this true and good friend whose face I never saw in person.

Sorry, bet you didn't see that one coming.

3. What is the most recent bit of art you've traveled somewhere (a museum, a theater, a freeway overpass) to see? What is the most recent bit of art you've stumbled upon accidentally? Which approach do you generally prefer?

Well, markgritter and I went to the surrealists exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery more recently than to the Inuit Prints exhibit at the Museum of Anthropology. I always think I like surrealists better than I do because I like Rene Magritte enough for all the rest of them. People: painting an eyeball on things does not make them surreal. It makes them eyebally. We are all done with the eyeballs now. You can do something else. (Hint: not the old-fashioned diving suit.)

As for the stumbling, I don't know--do people's homes count? Or foodstuffs? Usually foodstuffs are sought out, but knowing that they're art in advance is not always possible...anyway, I enjoy the things I look for but also things unsought. I wouldn't want to pick just one.

4. Do you any particularly cute/funny/dramatic Ista stories?

Oh yes. Ista is me in a dogsuit. She is frequently quite opinionated, and this translates well into monkey tales. Just today I have generated an interpretive dance of what Ista is like when she doesn't want me to disturb her by printing out my book.

(I do more interpretive dances than people expect, I think.)

And I'm going to steal one you asked me, because it was interesting: 5. What part of your life would be hardest to explain to your 20-year-old self? your 10-year-old self?

I think my 10-year-old self would be more surprised at the inability to do all things simultaneously backwards in high heels, so "here is why you are not a physicist" would take more doing. "Why there is essentially no math in your life at the moment" would take a lot of doing. My 20-year-old self had actually overcorrected in a number of ways there, so it would be very nearly the opposite explanation from the one my 10-year-old self would need. Which somehow seems to imply that my 33-year-old self has found a lovely balance. I chuckle quietly at the thought.

1. I don't have my singing voice back, but I have most of my speaking voice mostly back. So that's a good thing. I have this stupid cold on the run enough that I can, y'know, do stuff. I like stuff and the doing of it. I'm crazy that way.

2. In other news, the electricity is back to all parts of the house, and the mistakes of the last electrician have apparently been rectified, hurrah. This basement-finishing job: it looks to me as though the bits we will see take far less time than the bits we won't see. I hope I'm not wrong on that, or we will be another twelve million years in getting the drywall up.

3. It's been snowing here since before I woke up. A few hours ago, the plow and the mail delivery came through at the same time, attempting to pass each other multiple times within our small cul-de-sac. They looked like a mechanized Three Stooges routine. I do not mean this as a compliment. Our driveway guy has not been here yet. That is such a hopeful "yet," sitting right there. I don't really know how to articulate how I want him to do his job differently. Perhaps he'll come along and clear just around the time the snow is stopping, and I won't want him to do his job differently at all this time. One can hope.

4. When I went to let the dog out, she looked out in the snow, and then she looked up at me like, "Okay, monkey, there's a difference between funny once and funny all the time."

5. We are now owners of a startling share of the world's supply of chocolate, hot (or, more to the point, potentially hot) and otherwise. Eeeeexcellent. Now with only four hundred and six more steps, my plan for word domination will be complete.

Oh, there's supposed to be an l in that? Hmm. This may require substantial alterations to the said plans.

Thanks to all of you who wished for health and comfort for the Ista-bop; she had a quiet evening and was made much of, and she got her antibiotic pill in some cheese and got to sleep on markgritter's fleece. I expect she'll be perking along today.

Those of you who've known me for awhile may remember that Christmas Eve is my holiday, the holiday of choice for me, the one that has to be observed on the proper day. Fairly soon it will all begin. We've had to shift a few things to account for the health and age of various family members, but all the right elements are here and waiting, and I have promising theories about lunch with my father (which is one of the things that's shifted: lunch rather than snack). I hope you all have a wonderful day. I certainly intend to.

1. I have only two people left to buy Christmas presents for, and I know what I'm buying, it's just a matter of doing it.

2. All of Mikulas morning has passed, and I have the appropriate toys and candy for the good folks who live here, and Krampusz has not eaten me. Therefore I was not completely horribly bad this year.

3. I have used my powers of mind-control to convince the aforementioned good folks who live here to have pizza for dinner. (Here is how my powers of mind-control work: I say, "Hey, how about pizza?" And they say, "Yah, okay." And then we have pizza.)

4. I am being power-snuggled by a poodular unit.

Remember the sneakiness? And that was in September, and then some of you were asking how it turned out, and I had to say that it was longer-term sneakiness than that?

Now it can be told: we had a surprise birthday party for matastas last night. dlandon and I are the Queens of Sneaky. (Several other people are Grand Dukes and Duchesses in our Realm of Sneaky.) He thought he was coming down here for dinner. And there was dinner! in a nibbly party sort of way. Just with a couple dozen more people than he expected.

Keeping the secret in person was no problem for me. I have a really good deadpan, and while matastas has many fine skills, he will be first to tell you that reading Scandosotan deadpan is not on the list. Also I don't live with him; dlandon was completely awesome at seeing him every single day and never letting anything slip (except that I was making meatballs for dinner, which was not exactly a huge secret). Oh, and since enough surprise party novices asked about this: no, the cars aren't a problem--you have people park around the block or down the street where the neighbors' bushes block the view! Silly monkeys.

No, the hard part for me was lj. I would have lj'ed a lot of stuff in this last week about the iterations of the lamb meatballs and other proposed food experiments and accomplishments and difficulties getting there with the vertigo stuff. Under ordinary circumstances, I almost certainly would have talked about the gigantic bundles of mint and dill Byerly's delivered to my house, necessitating mojitos last night (oh noes, oh noes) and company chicken later this week (wailie wailie woe) because four pounds of lamb and a huge batch of tzadziki only accounted for half of the mint and dill they brought me. But if I was talking about that much food, there was some chance that matastas was going to think there was something odd going on with me, even if he didn't guess that it was a surprise party for him. And creating a no-Matt sneak filter did not really seem like the thing somehow.

The meatballs are all gone, but the tzadziki remains, so I guess we're figuring out what we're going to do with tzadziki on a different night than we have company chicken. Or a different two nights. Or possibly a different three nights and every day for lunch. On the up side, it's good tzadziki. We are also well endowed with pita bread, mulberry cream cheese dip, fancy olives, and apple crisp, among other things. Also there are spare carrots and apples and frozen mini-quiches that never got put out. I just didn't want anybody to go home hungry! timprov managed to talk me into saving my new stuffed mushroom recipe idea for later, on the theory that matastas would rather have me awake enough to form complete sentences than have mushrooms, and on balance it looks like this was the right idea.

Also we seem to have once again had a net gain in beer rather than a net loss in beer over the course of the party. I am wandering around this morning singing, "My kitchen is full of beer," to the tune of "In Heaven There Is No Beer (And That's Why We Drink It Here)." I don't like beer, but I know people who do, so that should be all right.

dlandon and I had a really good time planning this and a really good time executing it, and I think others did, too, from what I could see.

Key bits of sneakiness: last weekend we went out for dinner with matastas and dlandon, and I insisted that it should be Matt's birthday dinner "because we won't see you on your actual birthday." (We didn't. His actual birthday was last Monday.) At that dinner, markgritter was musing aloud about whether we should have an Election Day party at the last minute, which we decided not to do because two parties in four days was too much. And then porphyrin delivered the coup de grace by having Matt come over to get his present on his birthday "since it sounds like you have plans this weekend." What did I tell you? SO SNEAKY.

Ista handled the monkeys very well. The first monkeys here were her baby and her boy and their parents (porphyrin and crew), so that was a good thing from the dogly perspective, and then there was 1crowdedhour, whose fine traits are not only readily apparent to monkeys, which we knew, but also to my dog, which we did not: Caroline got wagging right away, which is pretty unusual. And as I told matociquala already this morning, I was worried about the everybody gathering around the kitchen door to yell surprise, whether the dog would fuss, but in fact she thought it was the most sensible thing monkeys had done in a long time, gathering to bark and sniff at the incoming monkey as a pack, and if we behaved that way all the time, she would be somewhat more satisfied about our sanity. She did decide, around 11:30, to go upstairs, lie down on the bed, and bark quietly to let us know that it was late and she was tired and it was time for these other monkeys to GO HOME. But when they didn't go home, she came back down and snuggled the birthday boy and slept with her head on his shoulder. So it was a pretty fine night for the dog as well.

My dog really likes Inuit cloudberry tea.

I've been going through the fiction on my library list at an alarming rate, because I'm not interspersing it with nonfiction at the moment. Don't know when I'll get my ability to read nonfiction back, but it doesn't seem to go well with the vertigo. So in the meantime: what fiction should I read? Recommend something, or more than one something. If I've already read it, that's okay; I'll tell you, and you can recommend something else, or not, as you like.

I read books aimed at any age of person. The main genre constraint I have is that I tend to bounce hard off genre romance, and horror and traditional westerns are not generally my cup of tea.

In other news, Ista is really not at all thrilled with this entire holiday, and she's alternating between running around wanting to figure out what those noises are and trying to stay hidden and safe behind the living room couch.

I watched the first half of Good Night and Good Luck with today's workout. Seemed appropriate. Happy Independence Day, all those of you who celebrate it today.

Ista's birthday was Friday. Mark picked out a birthday present for her. It is a soft toy ring. It's so cute one might even say it's precious.

....oh dear.

This particular Ista story was a comment under someone else's friendslock, so I thought I'd reproduce it here:

It is very sad to be Ista. Three times a day the alpha monkey has started behaving incomprehensibly, doing things like standing in the corner with her eyes closed or nodding her head up and down very slowly. And not paying attention to the dog. It's all very strange. She spent about ten minutes complaining to Piggy last night. Not barking, just a very quiet, "Arrorrorrhuhhhhhh. Arrarrfffffft. Romromromrom." She flopped down at the top of the steps with Piggy held facing her in her front paws and held forth for quite some time. I mean, it's a good thing Piggy's a good listener, but we didn't want to laugh out loud and interrupt because we wanted to see how long it would take, and we nearly ruptured ourselves.