y'know, i really tried

i really tried to the best of my ability to keep this whole signing professional. i really did i was willing to say that we lost a baseball battle to the yankees and we lost an effective leadoff hitter. but i can't do it any more. Now i know, we surely didn't lose a spectacular centerfielder. and we surely have not lost an irreplaceable man in the clubhouse. and i can't keep it in any longer.

johnny damon is an arrogant prick and the reason he fits in so well as a yankee is because it takes one to know one. obviously keep snapping photos.

trimmed damon unveiled

pardon me, but fuck off johnny damon. you go take yourself and your rag arm and go fall down the steps at your new dugout. you better believe i'll keep snapping pictures of you then. Why should we continue to kowtow to you when you have walked into new york and essential slammed your former employers and your former fans? now we really see your true self, spineless.

have some fuckin stones and say you had a good experience here, you fucking sally. stand up for yourself and what is true, and tell everyone that it really was a magical year in 2004 and 2005 was magic too. that you are looking forward to life in new york is also true, and i would be ok with that if you weren't so dismissive of your work here in boston

All that you are now is another one in a long line of moronic zombies with glassy eyes and short hair. come on, tell the truth, it will take some adjustment to go from hands off management to an owner that wants to schedule your next shit. you fit in so well with the yankees, because you have no gumption. no stand up. you talk that talk about being your own person, and having a great idioc personality, but face it buddy, you buckled and you folded and you cracked under pressure. and now you look just like every other centerfielder who played at Yankee stadium. you have no originality whatsoever any more. there's a reason why nobody oustide of the 718 area code likes the yankees, because they are irritating, obnoxios, arrogant and dumb. and you are one of them now too.

so good on you man, sure. win your games with the yankees, you got more money and more of whatever you were looking for but make no mistake, you are nothing more than a yankee now. not a superstar, not a shitty player. you're simply a yankee. you're the same as all the other ones. whoopee.

So the gang of three

Really are like the three blind mice. Lets have a brief overview. We have no shortstop. We have one Major League catcher; we have no second baseman. We have no actual "this is my position" first baseman. Now we have no centerfielder. At this point I would take shitty players. Oh, and our rotation has question marks and our bullpen really isn't the shiny coin we all dream about. And that isn't even considering out batting order.

so it would seem that the sox management team (who knows how many there are or who calls the shots) really don't have a clue about negotiating a contract or running a team. For crimminy's sake, they couldn't even manage to come to an agreement with one of their own, how can they possibly think they are going to be able to deal with the hardball that scott boras plays. Clearly they had no idea what they were getting into.

We have made some spectacularly bad moves this off season, and personally (and this is complete speculation) I think that the next one out is going to be curt schilling. He isn't going to dig the idea of playing with half wits and guys culled from the scrap heap. And lets be real, nobody likes to work for dumb bosses either. On top of it, the gang of three really have mismanaged the media. As of today I've heard rumors that trot Nixon, bronson arroyo, kelly shoppach, and even tim wakefield have all been discussed for trades. Hello? Is there anyone home? Tim Wakefield? Trot Nixon? That's the sort of shit you keep secret!

it really is like an episode of the keystone cops. It just gets worse and worse. Here is a funny article by Dan shaughnassy, who generally is a prat, but today it's good.

for sox, a little off the top

besides the loss of Damon, he goes to the effin evil empire. So we really look like country bumpkins. Remember when Nomar found out they were shopping him from espn? Well, lucchino found out about Damon from them too. Exactly why wasn't that cell phone glued to his ear with boras on the other end? I'll tell you, because they are not good at being general managers.

the whole thing simply smacks of inaptitude! So now we see that it wasn't the number of years Damon wanted, it was the money. A skilled GM would already have realized that Johnny Damon is as shallow as a puddle of spit and conceited and greedy. For crying out loud, we all knew that, how did management miss it? How could they possibly have been ok with the idea that no news is good news?

we are in deep sneakers for next season. The only silver lining is that Johnny Damon is never going to have an assist on a put out at his home field for the rest of his career. It's roughly seven miles from center field to second base at Yankee stadium, and he can't throw out the trash.

it's really a good idea...

to stay sober at your company holiday party.

so i was at my work holiday party the other day. and there was beer and wine. some of my coworkers indulged a bit too much shall we say. here's the thing, it really puts your coworkers in a moral dilemma and conundrum. how do we react when a member of staff is dancing like julia stiles did in 10 things i hate about you? (please note, Julia Stiles is, after all Julia Stiles. when she dances to the Notorious BIG it's sexy. when coworker does the same, let's say it hasn't got the same charm)

how does one expect their coworkers to deal with the fact that they are clearly bombed. Do we try to cut the person off? Do we drive them home; miles out of our way(in this case two hours out and back)? do we stick our head in the sand and hope to hell they get home safe and don't kill anyone?

Asside from those quandries, let's move along to monday morning. Assuming they've recovered from the superstar hangover they must have had on sunday. Now the level of respect between coworkers has declined substantially, just for the nights foolishness alone. But to ice that cake, we all know they drove home drunk.

at the risk of being a wet blanket, just stay sober. at least then you'll be able to make fun of people, you won't be the butt of the fun. it's like that beer ad i saw in rolling stone a long time ago. when you are sober, you get in on 100% of the fun, and 0% of the bar tab.

If you can't handle your booze, or if you know you like it a lot, then skip it all together.
Stay sober. don't drive drunk.

think this will work?

ok, so i tried to like the pdf to my yahoo brief case, but i have to be a premeir member to make the briefcase public. i'm not a premeir member yet, and i haven't decided if i want to go that route, but in the mean time i'm going to see if blogger opens large photos in another window at full size.

let's see....

ok, so blogger will link to a larger picture, and that is a start, but when your download it and print it, you'll have to enlarge it somewhat. so print it to start on legal paper, then bring it to your local kinkos (or your local work copier) and monkey about with the settings til the measurements fit the actual size.

I'm still working on an actual pdf that's printable at 100%, but i need to figure out a way ot post it publicly. more on that later!

so i'm trying to figure out

how to post a pdf for download on this site. because i want to offer you a pattern on how to make these super bags i made.

they are tote bags that i made for my friend sofia and ana for their trip home for the holidays. thay have a 5.5 hour flight ahead of them, and that can be slightly boring. so i'm going to put fun entertaining things in there. spin magazine, tootsie pops, cheeze-it's, a bottle of water, word finds and things like that. i'm also going to put a nice zipper pouch like the ones i posted before in there with a wash cloth and face soap and lotion and a toothbrush and toothpaste.

there really is nothing nicer than getting up right before final approach or even after you've landed when the rest of the passengers are going mental; and washing your face and cleaning your teeth and putting your contacts back in. that is one of my favorite travel rituals. sometimes i do it in the airport sometimes on the plane.

where was your worst cup of coffee?

so over the past few days i have been drinking coffee away from home. and i have to tell you, i have a list of places that make terrible coffee. and i'm going to share them topping my list- starbucks. for all they think they are so smart, and are looking to take over the world; they make horrid coffee. not only do they use two tablespoons when one is sufficient, they burn it. i don't go in for the super cute status symbols, i just want a cup of coffee with cream. how hard is that? the starbucks on route 9 at the lyman streeet intersection gave me the most awful cup of burned, yet cold coffee i have ever drank. it was so bad.

fast forward to yesterday. i was at the alewife T station. the dunkin donuts got the coffee and cream balance correct, but the coffee was just old. it was burned. i wonder if the coffee palaces realize just how profund and distinct burned coffe taste is, and how easy it is to achieve. it really doesn;t take long for a pot to turn into 10w-40 motor oil.

I tried my luck at au bon pan on berkeley street yesterday afternoon. nothing doing. the coffee was so strong and acrid that it curled my hair. acrid is a good way to describe it. like when you get that beer you aren't expecting to be so bitter, and you make that funny face. so i shelled out a total of 7 clams these past few days and got swill in return.

on the flip side, the best cup of coffee i've had in a long time was at cumberland farms on central street. go figure that the gas station coffee would be the best. but you can add the correct amount of cream, and nuke it if it's too cold. and they don't even make it too weak anymore. weak coffee is as bad as super strong coffee. but lately they've not been so skimpy on the gounds. Honey Dew on washington street also makes a first class cup of coffee, always. very dependable.

what about you? where is your favorite java? and your horror stories?

my first quilt

and it's not even a very challenging one at that. But the problem is that the ideas just keep coming, and I have to try them out before they vanish, so that means that projects sometimes have to be set aside. Then regular life takes place, and my weekends free for crafting and sewing are taken up by more mundane things like putting snow tires on the car, going away on vacation (which was one of the greatest trips i've been on) and before i know it, months have gone by.


so this is the whole thing, it's for my college roommate's little boy. I'm pleased with the fabric choice. It's cushy flannel on one side, and on the other it's flannel-y calico that looks like river weeds, like where snakes and tigers live in Africa. The piping around the edge gave me a few fits and the next one will be better I think, but I think that he'll like it.

This is a detail of it.

I'm quite pleased with it, even if it did take me months to actually complete it and ship it to him. hee hee hee

medicare and me

So as a type A personality, I have been spending lots of time mulling over this Medicare Rx. Now I know, you're thinking, what do you care, you're only 30? well, I care because the only way this is going to work is if people try to understand it. That and the fact that soon enough Mary Mary and my dad will have to start looking into it. Add to that my employment at a pharmacy, and people expect us to be knowledgeable in it.

So the inherent problem is that there are private companies involved. Just as Geroge Bush wants us all to be in charge of our govt social security plans (a clever ruse to get us all to unwittingly funnel money to people he has associations and interests with) he wants us to figure out the prescription plans as well.

This is fine, really, it makes sense that we should be the masters of our destiny, BUT, the selection is simply too large. It's daunting. Add to it the fact that the plan companies are marketing it, like sales items. This too is ok, but as we all know, there is far less truth in advertising than we would like. Not to mention the fact that the tools that can be useful in figuring out the plans are not really easy to find online, and, they are not readily available in person. So unless your gran is a fairly advanced web user, she's in trouble.

So I have done my best to figure it out and break it down into manageable steps.

1. Calculate the cash prices for current meds.
2. Determinte the total cost of the current Rx Plan (include premiums, deductibles, and copays). Also be aware that some of these items are only charged if the plan is used.
3. Be sure you know the duration of current plan, and if it's likely to change.
4. Review the Medicare plans available in your area and compare their benefits versus their charges. keep in mind that each plan is different, and that plans may include premiums, deductibles, and copays. They also have specific formularies, or lists of drugs they will cover and not cover.

The trick of course is tracking down the participating plan information. Webmd has a good medicare page.

WebMD Medicare Page

and a Medicare Rx Tutorial page too.

WebMD Medicare RX Tutorial

They also have a link to the feds plan lookup tool, but here it is also

Rx Plan Lookup Tool

A columnist on boston.com said it best, the new plan is called Medicare Part D. D says it best; D stands for disaster.

half.com

i like half.com. i think it's very affordable. and dufflebag.com too. i like buying used music, and tough on the record company. it is too bad the band might lose out on money, but the simple fact of the matter is that i don't want to pay the full price.

so over the weekend i went shopping and blew through too much money, and i stopped at newbury comics, a good place to get music on the east coast. i purchased two weezer albums, an old bad religion album, the lost in translation dvd, and a cd by a guy named butch walker. do you remember him? he used to sing for a band called marvelous 3. they were quite good in the 90's. you know when we were getting overrun with the terrible sounds of spin doctors, sara mclaughlan, the indigo girls, ugh, and hootie and the blowfish and bare naked ladies, Marvelous 3 was a breath of fresh rock and roll air. the stinky, sweaty jump up and down kind that you get drunk and flirt shamelessly with strangers to. it was fantastic.

But then the record company turned terrible, as frequently happens, and they split up just to spite the execs. so then he went solo, and has since released two albums. i just got the most recent, Letters. it's full of great songs, though i must confess, one sounds EXACTLY like everlong, by the foo fighters, but what do i know? so what i like about marvelous 3 and walker's stuff is that the lyrics seem really heartfelt and emotional. it could be that i am a romantic, and i have a wild imagination, but the songs are really like poetry; rockin poetry, but poetry none the less. sometimes they are silly, but sometimes they are really profound. really!

so i just purchased Math and Other Problems from someone on half. they better get on the stick and send it out already!

on line communities

i am a member of an online crafting community. i was slightly nervous at first, what if i didn't have anything to contribute? but it became apparent soon enough that of course i have something to contribute, just like all the others do.

i like it very much. one thing i think is very interesting is how you get to know a person online. you get to know a little bit about their likes and dislikes, their personal philosophy and of course their talents. Also in this community you get to know who is a control freak, and who is more laise faire about crafting. it really is interesting to see the two interact and converse.

i find it very remarkable, also that people can be so alike and yet still come from very different cultures. for instance, there are knitters in every corner of the globe. facsinating. of course there would be, and why wouldn't there be? knitting is not for a specific group of people, americans, austrailians, or portuguese; rich, poor, or median incomes, it's just for knitters.

yet there are also differences, the colors, the yarn or fiber, the culturally favored patterns. i think that is so interesting. it's like an anthropology thesis just waiting to happen.

i wonder if i could do that, be an anthropologist.

how does that sound?
hi. i'm kristine, i'm an online anthropologist.

i think it has a good ring to it.

bollocks, that!

bugger all! manchester united beat chelsea over the weekend. i love chelsea. Forgive me if i am just a silly american with not too much knowledge. I try not to jump on bandwagons just for the sake of it, I love watford too. that is a no no, i know, to support two clubs, but that is the luxury of being on the outside. english people can watch the red sox and also follow the orioles (never the yankees); but sox fans are sox fans, and that's just how it is. (not unlike supporting a football club) it just seems to me that man utd are the yankees of the FA. and bollocks to the yankees, so you can imagine my view on man utd.

one nil. i haven't read who scored, so i don't even have my facts straight yet, but this is terrible. Bah! Darren Fletcher scored the only goal. Darren Fletcher? who the hell is he? he's only got one goal all season! fooey! I hope he stubs his toe.

here is the report.

chelsea/manutd report

egads, look at all those yellow cards awarded.

I'll have to keep a closer eye on the tables from here on.

i am an organized person!

i simply cannot believe that my dad doesn't think i am organized! i'll have to work on that. i'll have to clean my house and my desk properly this weekend. and my car with 100,015 miles on it (it clocked over the day after i posted that post. i guess i drive more miles in a day than i realized).

I like being a control freak. it's comforting. i am nothing if i am not planning something. i do try to roll with the punches, and not be cranky if i don't get my way, but i like to plan for every possible scenario in life. for instance i am currently planning my christmas shopping. i am going to get Easy Rider for one brother in law, and music from the TV show Globe Trekker for one of my sisters.

I mean just because i shreded everyone's paycheck and none of my cd's are in the correct jewel case, doesn't mean that i am not organized. just because all my laundry is still in baskets doesn't mean i am not organized!

ah, perhaps all these things do indicate a lack of organization. i guess i'll start getting my to-do list for saturday ready now.

midlife crisis!

so my car has 99,962 miles on it. i expect to break 100,000 before the end of the year. maybe even before the end of november.

this is having a more profound effect on me than turning 30 did. I have a car that has 100,000 miles on it! when did it get so old? i won't even be able to trade it in an get one with fewer miles on it, because i'll need to keep it after the loan is paid off, to save some money! oh gaah! what a revolting development!

it's a very good car, it's a pickup truck, and the only bad thing about it is that i need concrete blocks and snow tires in the winter. but that's ok. people with mustangs do too. it's dark blue. when i've washed it and vacuumed it and used armour all it's a very nice looking car. shiny and blue.

what i would love to have is a bmw. a black one. hard top. two door. tan interior. if this were a proper midlife crisis, i would go and get one, but it's not, so i can't. i'll just have to dream about my beemer, and make plans for what cd to listen to first!

zipper pouches!

these are three of the zipper pouches i made for a co-worker.



i have lots of the cherry and sleeping cat fabric left over if you would like one. the price for one of these great pouches is a bargain at only $7.

they are 7 x 4.5 and the bottom is 2" wide. you could give one to your girlfriend, or one to your mom or grammy. they are perfect for holding makeup, or a notebook and pen, or a package of crayons and a small drawing tablet for children.

they are also good to use for a little craft kit, if you need one of those for a gift. you put a few skeins of embroidery floss and a sewing needle or two, some small scissors, and a little square of cross stitch canvas, and you have made a gift that is sure to score you some points with its recipient!

Post a reply if you're interested. I'll post some more as they become available!

what a busy weekend!

well, the weather men all said it was going to rain all day on saturday, so i decided to sleep late. it was very nice. but also i had a super long list of things to do. chores and all that fun shit. i had to take the garden out before it took over the world, and harvest the last few stragglers of gourds. then i cleaned the fridge. what an adventure. i live more and more like a bachelor every day. i eat nothing but crap, and there are socks all over my apartment. but i cleaned everything well and truly, and i'm going to give it a go to be less bachelorlike. also, i cooked a proper dinner for myself for the first time in months. barbeque pulled pork and smashed potatoes and cornbread!

but it's beginning to be evidendent that i am in trouble in the cat department. whilst i was clearing away weeds, there was a gray furry thing that sneaked back into the brushes. i shrieked like a little girl! at first i thought it was a ferret; but then i could see that it was another cat. a little tiny one. perhaps two or three pounds. this one is much more wild. very scaredy cat. can you believe he spit at me and took a swing? dopey thing! i think it's one of the striped cat's kittens.

see the thing is there are getting to be too many cats. one cat is nice. two cats are bearable, but three cats? too many. and besides, there are probably more kittens to go along with mini stripe. so i'm going to have to enlist the aid of a cat rescue league i think. they can't stay ot next to the river all winter, and they can't stay with me.

it's too bad, because i like cats, but i don't want to be that old lady with hundreds of cats!

woo hoo...The Foo

so matt and I went to the foo fighters show two weekends ago. Firstly can I just say that the guy from hot hot heat needs to keep his hair shorter? The crazy curls just aren't cutting it. He looks like the guy from that awful band firehouse.

Then next up was weezer. I have to admit; I wanted to not like them. I have never been a weezer fan and I was slightly disappointed when I saw that the Foos were going out with them. But ok, what can I do. So we paid 45 clams for the tickets (more than a 100% increase since the last time the foos were in Worcester, but ok) so I wasn't going to skip the openers. I wanted my money's worth dammit!

Well. Did I get my moneys worth. Weezer was so good. So good. They totally rocked. They played all the songs I knew, and the songs I didn't were bearable. And even my most unfavorite song; the sweater song was super! The lights were tremendous, and they didn't screw around with talking or being funny. They simply played great stuff, and they played it loud. They even played a bit of Blur's Song 2, also a favorite of mine. Really good. I was really pleased with them.

So then the foo fighters came out. Rock on. The title track from In Your Honor has concert opening song written all over it, and so they did, and it never looked back from there. They had super cutting edge screens and lights, I mean from a design standpoint they were really good to look at. The Centrum is a small stadium, large enough for Farm System Ice Hockey, but the sound is terrific, and it wasn’t so big that we couldn’t see the bands. We had floor seats, but I am a short person (bollocks) so we have to stand kind of far away from the crowd so I can see. Well, that's ok, because in the middle of the set, doesn't Dave Grohl run through the crowd to the back of the floor and hop up onto the piece of scaffolding I was leaning on? Yes, he does!



Security was going mental; You can see me scurrying away from them. I’m the one turned around in the blue tee shirt over by the fence on the left. Matt is the one in the gray and black tee shirt between the two yellow shirts. That was so cool when he did that! He slapped high fives as he went by. He’s not really that tall either. But he is skinny and rock and roll looking, so that’s good.

They whole show was just so good. It had the energy of Avalon, but with 10 times the number of people.

$45 clams was a bargain.

my latest bag

here's the bag i made last night. it only took a single fat quarter for the outside, and the lining was leftover fabric from my sister's house. i need to start making things with the supplies i already have. i really have to stop goingt othe fabric store and getting things that take my fancy, because i have so much fabric that it is taking over my life.

I am interested in unloading some of my wares. if you are interested in purchasing one of my bags, post a reply!

On reading

i sometimes wonder if reading is the same for other people as it is for me. i love to read. i just love it. I don't usually read anything of real validity, i mostly just read murder mysteries. but occasionally i'll read something romantic or funny. my favorite books include the Bourne Identity, No News at Throat Lake, Eureka Street, nineteen seventy-seven, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Neverwhere, Maise Dobbs. All of these books i could read over and over again.

notice that most of them are mysteries of some sort. but not all of them. throat lake is just a hysterical book about a Guardian journalist who splits his job and moves to a tiny village in ireland to write for the village paper. and Neverware is about a London man who gets involved in a surreal underworld based on the underground system, it's such a clever book. Masie Dobbs is about a woman detective shortly after the end of WWI and it's heart wrenching. it really is. Jacqueline spears has written three masie dobbs novels and they always make me cry.

Currently i am reading a book by victoria blake. it's called Bloodless Shadow. it's kind of an ugly name, but it's a fabulous book.

I like to read and imagine all the characters, and what they look like, and how they act. i love it. I love to imagine the location and the weather and the smells. some times of couse you get to know the characters and then you can empathise with them, and other times you get to know them and they are just awful people. i love books like that. i just love them.

sometimes i wish i could just read all day. i would like to skip work and finish my book. wouldn't that just be so great?

a funny thing happened to me at work the other day:

i shredded everyone's paychecks.

but it's not all my fault! it's only mostly my fault! so now to set the background, i work at a retail store. We recently switched over management. our previous management used to make us sign for our paychecks. our new management doesn't make us sign, and neither do they hand them to us. they are left in the office until we come and get them.

now, i get paid with direct deposit. so i don't actually need to get my check, because it's not a check. so i am hopelessly delinquent about going to get my check- even the previous management had to seek me out to sign for my check. the company pays weekly. i haven't gone to get a check for weeks. i mean weeks. possibly even as long as this new management has been on board. i would guess somewhere around the first or second week of august. so the checks for me have been piling up since then.

so when i got in to work on friday, a coworker said to me, oh, kristine, your checks are here. and there was a pile of them at my workstation. i don't keep those things, they just clutter my life, while i know that is bad financial practice, i just can't stand the dumb things. so, i shred mine. well, i figured the whole pile was mine, and i shreded the lot of them.

WELL.

you can imagine my dismay when i found out that the entire department's check was there. i called my friend from work and said: oh my god! samantha, i am in so much trouble i could puke right here. Elizabeth hates to work with me, she thought i was dumb to begin with, and now she's sure of it. what'm'i'gnnu'do?" all the words slured in to one.

it was very funny after the fact and after i sorted out with my manager who gets D.D. and who needs a reissued check. but at the time i wanted to quit. i just wanted to go home. i was so embarrased. i turned so red. it was terrible. but i have learned from this disaster.

no matter how busy you areat work, you shold only go as fast as your brain can allow.

sigh. but at least my drawer balanced at the end of the night.

on being alumni

so every year around this time there is the alimni game at my college. it's when all of us greaduated softballers go back and play the current team. it's really quite fun, then we all get together and eat. (the alumni get to reminisce, and the current players get to have a suitable meal for a chage)

so when the alumni game takes place, i dread it. i always dread it. i get these attacks of anxiety and self doubt, even though it's easier to go to the alumni game than it was to go to college. college for me was very lonesome. and it's funny how even just walking onto campus makes me feel profoundly all by myself. then i get there and i have fun and i chuckle to myself that i was nervous to go.

so anyway, i love to go the alumni game, except that even though we are old and mostly retired players, it is still NOT ACCEPTBLE to make errors. so we still need ice after the game.

but when i do go back, i get to reminicsing and all that fun shit.

but i want everyone to go to the website, and if you live in the area, go check out a game, it really is top drawer sports.

softball

and there are big shake ups in the soccer program there too. i'm pleased that coach McGuigan is still there in the men's program, but i am slightly surprised that he's an assistant now. Still it is good that Coach barosso is now the head coach of the men's program, because those two would make a good coach combination.

women's soccer

far away places

I love the idea if travelling. if i had even a tiny bit moremoney, i would use it to go places. i've been to london, scotland, ireland, Lisbon, and spain. i've also been to california, nevada, arizona, hawaii, and up and down the eastern coast. i just love to go to places that are not where i live. i'm not sure if its because being on holiday is better than being at work, or something else, but i love to go to see new places, and get a map, and learn the culture and personality of the the place.

i like to go to a far away place, and insert myself into its every day life. i imagine it's some sort of escapism, you know anywhere is better than here sort of thing.

in any event, i like to check up on the places i've visited to see how they are getting on without me. so here are some snap shots:

this is in dublin, where my mother and i had a row because we couldn't figure out where we were and were and how we got to where we wanted to go.



also in dublin we heard the word that a-rod had agreed to the trade to the Yankees. we were just like americans- shouting and shouting more about how the yankees made us so mad!

this is in london, my friends and i stayed in a slightly sketchy hotel down the street from bayswater road, right by hyde park. it was not many stars, but who cares? a seven night stay including air fare and taxes cost just $400. you can't really beat that.



in london i dropped a mitten on one of the double decker buses, i didn't notice it until i was off in picadilly circus. i was so upset! but then there was a tap on my shoulder, and there was a man there who had gotten off at the next stop and doubled back to find me (clearly i was a tourist, in a bright blue jacket) and return it to me. that one single gesture reinforeced my belief that people can be good if they choose to be so.





and here is lisbon, i had a fantastic time in lisbon with my friend and her family. such a good time.

take a tour of beautiful lisbon

heart wrenching story, really

so here is the terrible story of the baby who was accidentlly poisoned at a cook out a few summers ago.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2005/09/20/case_of_babys_arsenic_death_brings_wrenching_testimony

i read this this morning and my head began to swirl with thoughts. really, how could he mistake rat poison for spring water, wouldn't it smell? but then i thought, but why would he do that? did those parents make him so mad that he would want to kill their child? oh god, but it gets worse and worse! they lost their child by taking him off life support. how awful. but this guy is an old man, and he made this terrible mistake. how equally awful. there is no happy ending possible for anyone involved in this story. just considering the possibilities makes me almost sick with sadness.

but then, as if that weren't bad enough, i have to worry about how i would react if something terrible like that happened in my family. oh gosh, i could worry myself right out of productivity at work if i am not careful.

i guess all i can do is pray for these people. all of them. If prayers were ever needed, this is the situation.

hoo hoo hoo!

yay! i got tickets to the Fighters of Foo on friday! Yay! i had to settle for seats. I really wanted to get the General Admission section. but no luck. a friend of mine has GA Tickets, and i'm hoping to convince him that i should go with him, and i'll unload my seats. I got the seats because i wanted to be sure i would get to go. last year they came to the Fleet pavilion, and i wasn't able to score tickets, so this year I said self, get those tickets no matter what the cost!

I love the foo fighters. i like to think i have outgrown my facination with rock and roll stars, but come on, the foos, man! i saw them once at the paladium, and it was rockin. i just love how clever and crafty and rockin and they are. just enough rock, and just enough slow, and just the right amount of politial soapboxing for me. i dig them.

plus they're easy on the eyes. i realize that they look slightly unkempt and like they haven't taken a shower for a few days, but that is a carefully crafted look, and i dig it. think of joe strummer in 1979. he was dead sexy. and consider trent reznor, even though he's looking a bit older than i remember, he's dead sexy too. and there's the guys from the bouncing souls, and pete yorn too! and jakob dylan.

sigh.

i guess i haven't outgrown my facination with rock and roll stars.

i love internet radio

so here is my unsponsored advertisement. you should check out www.radioiorock.com it's an internet radio station. this guy robert goodman streams radio. i can't tell if it's pre-recorded and he just uploads a zip cartrdge, or if he's got some sort of real elaborite studio or what, but he plays good music. it's really alternative. lots of smiths, and the cure, franz ferdinand, and emo like crazy. but he mixes in some real good brit pop and weird and wacky stuff like paul anka's rock swings album. he's got some real good stuff on there.

tuth be told i would like him to play some stuff he hasn't gotten to yet, like more bouncing souls, the explosion, millencolin, clash, flogging molly and the like, but i really can't complain. it's easily as good as my beloved 'fnx. (they stream too, but it doen't work so well on this workstation www.wfnx.com) i never ever hear the same song twice, the same artist sure, but never ever the same song in one day. it's really quite good.

oh, right now it's Johnny Cash's Personal Jesus. a really good mix of alt stuff. i dig it.

three games up

ah, baseball in september. yesterday tim wakefiled was poetic. he struck out 12! twelve! and that home run that giambi hit was ugly, but it went out, and so it counts.

you can't even know how badly i wanted wakefield to win, and how badly i wanted Randy Johnson to lose. he's a prat. sure he pitches well, and the yankees play well, but i cannot stand them. the same way many NY fans cannot stand the Sox. it's just how it is. and that's ok.

so now we're three games up in the AL East, but i'm nervous for the yankees to play Tampa. Tampa has owned them all season long, and it might be that they are tired of playing the laughingstock against the Devil Rays, so they just might sweep them. that could be very problematic for the sox.

the sox are going to toronto, where we have not really played well this season, so that could be problematic too. but schilling was lights out over the weekend, and for that matter so was wakefield, so i'm begining to be less concerned with the pitching than i was a week or so ago, i just hope that we don't go into a terrible hitting slump, because that will be the kiss of death!

go check it out!

boston globe sox report

update!

so remember a few weeks ago i was whingeing on about my grandmothers purse? well it's been found! i guess i have to take back some (not all) of the naughty things i said in that post. the purse isn't really very beautiful and she used it so much that it really is quite worn, but she loved it so much. it even smells like her old apartment. it's quite sweet really. it's totally not my style, so i can pretty well honestly say that i'll never use it, but if i do a craft fair to sell my made bags, then i'll use it to keep the money in.

reminiscing

when i was in college there was a small circle of people that i considered my friends. there were not too many of them, and that's ok, i don't mind. they were all very important at the time. whether they are now or not is irrelevant, they were very important to me at the time. i think that college in general is a time of life that is taking place without you even realizing it, and before you know it, it's gone, and you don't even realize how important people are, or events and non-events for that matter.

in any case, my friend russ is of italian and scottish decent. he was fiercely protective of both his parent's geaneology. but in a way that only college kids can be- slightly chip on the shoulder, slightly informed, but not totally aware. so he would sprinkle the limited italian that he knew into his slang. the swears and the things like that. many of the rest of the circle were frequently referred to as Stoonod.

so fast forward to today, and i was at work at the pharmacy with paul, and we were generally complaining about people, and lo and behold they are stoonods! i asked if that was a real word- he said of course! it's italian!

so it got me to thinking about how thre are lots of things you learn in college that are so much more useful than you learn in class, or than you can imagine at the time.

:)

women drivers, no survivors?

Here it is, my complaint against drivers of the world. and all those people who say women are bad drivers (i.e. men) can go screw.

so yesterday i was driving home from work, after a particularly crummy day, and i see in my rear view that a fire truck is on its way up the street. well, i arrive at the red light as it's about a 1/2 mile or so behind all of us. but then the light turns green. and what does prick-boy in the car behind me do? he waves at me and creeps forward and then, passes me! he passes me! jerk. Of course i rightously stay where i am and allow the F.T. to go by, and then i continue on my way. The man in the super cool sedan is now in front of me. so i take this opportunity to let all the shit from the day at work wash over him in a wave of blue words and waving hands and Larry Glick salutes. it was very therapeutic.

so what is the moral of this story? i'll tell you: Probably there's no survivors with any drivers. we are a society of careless drivers. myself included. probably if you are reading this at work, you drove too fast to get there, or you didn't really look twice at that left hand turn. i drove too fast to get here this morning, and my tirade against super cool sedan man involved lots of emotion and not much control. i don't know what is the solution, considering that sometimes it seems like the very people assigned to protect us while traveling (the fuzz) are not around when those people are racing up 495, or that jerk passed us on the right in a right turn only lane. or even when that crazy girl is sending lemon faces to the guy in front of her.

i guess i can only start with myself, and be more careful when driving. how about you? are you up to the challenge of more careful driving?

the other cat

well, for a day or two i haven't seen the cat. i have to admit i was a bit disappointed. but last night my brother sean came over to chat for a minute after work, and he said, here's your buddy the cat. Really? Yay! i haven't seen him- wait; no, that's not stripe. that's a different cat! this one is little too. and it's a long hair. i wouldn't really place an order for a long hair cat, but it's very cute. it's got gold eyes. stripe has gray eyes. I would like these two cats to stay. if i'm completely honest, i would say that i am a lonesome person a little bit. and besides heating oil is going to be a remarkable expense this winter and i might be nice to have a cat at my feet. i think i would settle on calling stripe Stripe, but what to call the other one? i could call him ink, but then people might be mean and call him dink. that's no good. perhaps i'll call him olive. like black olive. i think so.

i hope they stay.

my latest bag

i love bags. i make them all the time. i don't even use all of the ones i make, i just make them, and make them, and make them! I get all sorts of fabric, and just hoarde it. i love it. it might just be becoming an obsession. i'll have to get a craft fair table this year, just so i can unload some of them.

this one is a japanese sort of fabric. I love the black and red together. I was going to use a fabric with kanji (i think that's the word) characters for the lining, but i think this looks better- the kanji would have been much too busy.

the striped cat

There's this cat that comes to visit my apartment. he's striped, and he's got a long tail. i confess, i hope he's homeless, because i wish him to be mine. i used to think of myself as a dog person, but i've come to the decision that i don't want a dog. i'm not afraid of them, they just drive me nuts. I cannot stand a dog that has bad manners, or barks all the time, or shits on my lawn, or chases after people and acts generally discourteous toward visitors.

But worse than rude dogs are rude owners. Exactly when did the shift take place making the non dog people have to put up with the dogs that do things like that? Why is it wrong for a family to call the dog officer on an incessantly noisy dog? or why should i be made to feel guilty when i visit my mother and the resident dog barks and growls at me? Why should a dog be able to attend a cookout at a cousin's house when more than one other guest is genuinely afraid of dogs? and for that matter, why is said phobia dismissed as non-existent and thus not important?

I want nothing to do with dog owners of such ilk, and therefore, i want nothing to do with dogs.

but in any event, i want this cat to stay. i will be very upset if he belongs to someone. but he comes over at night, and he's kind of wily, you know with the tail whipping back and forth; and he's never really calm, he's always on the lookout. he's super skinny, and he's kind of dirty.

i usually just call him Guy. but i have considered the name Fungo, and Fenway. i like fungo, because only baseballers and softballers will get it. But then i like fenway too, but i don't want people to think i jumped on a band wagon (i've been a fan for many years). sometimes i call him stripe.

I hope he stays.

it's a four alarm fricasee

boy this heat is killing me!

so what do you do when it's 100˚ and as muggy as you can remember?

well, you make things with swirly velvet fabric of course! so i made this great purse this weekend. It's for a swap, i hope my partner doesn't see this before she rececives it, i haven't posted this blogspot on craftster yet, so i think it will be ok.

this sort of fabric usually would turn me right off, but i have to reluctantly admit that i'm beginning to dig it a little bit. it's got tons of texture, and all those colors are really cool. i wish that it came in black, because it would look really great in black with some color accents. it would look like that hand bag that my grandmother used for best special occasions. i think it was made of sheepskin. I'm pretty sure my dad gave it to her when he was a senior in high school, all those years ago. I wonder wht happened to that handbag, i hope that my cousins didn't get their hands on it when they were clearing out her apartment. They threw whole rooms right into the trash. there wasn't too much that was actually monetarially valuable, but there was lots of stuff like that handbag that shouldn't have gone in the trash, but it was done and gone before we even knew about it. sigh.

so here is the purse. it's a good purse, with a zipper pouch to go along with it.

continuing education

i'm shocked at how we've become such sheep. if we don't peg ourselves correctly upon graduation from high school we're screwed. foolishly when i was in high school i didn't think i was smart enough to be a scientist. and nobody ever told me i was. so now that i'm 30 it occurs to me that i am too smart to be only an artist, and yet not creative enough to be only an artist. but i'm screwed because i have wasted so much time in an industry and a job that has no real chance for progression and advancement. but it's hard to go back to school, not least because i've learned to like not being a student, but also because i've developed a real tie to having a job. it's not just that i would have to give up cable and my cell phone- i have a mortgage, and insurance and a car payment, and all that happy horseshit that happens to a person after they rushed to graduate from college.

how am i going to go back to a full time college program, and yet still afford to pay all those things? the answer? i'm not. i can't. it's almost impossible. i could cry right now. i mean really cry. i am so screwed and stuck in a dead end situation and there is really no hope of getting out of it.

i think i might be having another midlife crisis.

so this is a blog

it seems strange to have a blog. and in fact, i think i really hate that word blog. it doesn't really roll off the tongue any easier than web log does. but in any event the whole world has a blog, so i think i should get one too. so here it is. as i am at work right now, i need to hurry up and post this so i can get back to work.

grumble

so now i keep getting a 404 error when i try to look at this dumb thing. sometimes i hate technology, i feel so trapped by it!