Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

Better late than never to join in! Since David Nunez says I’m not allowed simply to say “sleep” when asked the question, “What would you do with four hours free in Austin?”, here are my thoughts.

Geocaching – I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time, but never gotten around to it. Looks like Austin is a real hotspot for caches, and seeing as how there’s one practically in walking distance to my house, it’s crazy that I’ve never done it.

The Capitol – I’ve never been. Can you believe it? Bad Texas. Bad, bad, no biscuit.

Revisit my past – see what’s the same and what’s different on the drag. Maybe stop at Dirty’s for a burger and some tots.

Zilker park – I’ve only ever been a few times and really enjoyed it each time.

The lake – hang out by Lake Austin or Town Lake or Lake Travis (all the same body of water, really one big river, just delineated by dams). Especially in the summer, the water temperature is really nice and much balmier than chilly (and overrated, IMO) Barton Springs’s year round 65°.

I think that the trick is to take the tourist point of view of the city in which you live. If you have four hours free, you may be tempted to take a nap, or do the laundry, or yard work, and miss out on what your city has to offer.

On a side note, it’s sleeting like mad here right now and the power keeps trying to go out. Yesterday it was in the 70s and we were all wearing shorts. Hub and I are charging up our laptops and cell phones so that our net access won’t be affected if the power goes out. Nerds!

The other day we took delivery of our new Louis Phillipe panel bed, and I ran out to get a dust ruffle and a new mattress pad and hub went to get our Oriental rug (which looks an awful lot like this) out of storage and I washed the new sheets and cleaned up the bedroom and we started to put everything together. I spent half an hour trying to get the Kool-aid barf stain out of the rug until we decided just to put that part under the bed. When I tried to put on the bed skirt, I realized the package was mislabeled and it was the wrong size. The mattress pad (viscose foam) stunk horribly, so I lit a nice soothing vanilla candle and put it on my nightstand, then curled up in the new bed in the new sheets on the new mattress pad and read a nice murder mystery book.

At this point the cat jumped up onto the bed, purring madly, and started bumping me for attention. She does the “pet me” dance for about 5 minutes before I notice the smell. Burning hair. The dumbass cat had apparently dunked her tail into the candle and caught her fur on fire, never noticing. After giving me a puzzled look because I started madly beating on her tail, she ran off.

We ended up taking off the mattress pad anyway, because it was too hot.

I’m sure you’re all dying to know how my boob’s doing. For those playing at home, I had a biopsy in 9/02, then a cleanup surgery in 10/02, then have been battling the wound since.

Last week it was completely closed and relatively pain-free. Tonight it’s opening back up and hurts like hell. I’m just a wee bit bummed, but will save the foulest language for my pillow, since it doesn’t care how many times I holler the F word at it. My doctor, on the other hand, probably would mind… but I’ll call him tomorrow and try to be coherent.

3/10/03 will mark the six month anniversary of the first surgery. I’ve been fighting this for damn near half a year. I can’t help thinking that it’s my own fault it’s happening; if I hadn’t been so dumb and gotten the worthless breast reduction, I might actually have some blood flow (and feeling, and function) and I wouldn’t have a damned wound for half a year that should have been healed up in under a month.

Kids, please take it from Auntie Addlepated. Think long and hard before getting a reduction. Or implants. On the BFAR (breast-feeding after reduction) mailing list, the stories of heartache outweigh the stories of people who are happy with their surgery by about 3 to 1. If you’re considering a reduction, go to the BFAR webpage and sign up for the BFAR info list and talk to women who have actually had the surgery. Talk to a lot of them – do not form your opinion based on what just one person tells you. I wish I had. And if you have reduction questions, don’t be shy – feel welcome to ask me.

I found out how to say “I love you” in babyese, since a baby told me she loves me.

“Eh suvv sum!”

You know what, don’t even bother explaining to me the antipathy that straights have for gays and gays have for straights. I don’t understand it, I never have, and I don’t think I ever will.

Straights: gays aren’t going to make you want to wear lavender and arrange flowers, unless you like that sort of thing to begin with.

Gays: if you enter a straight conservative (like Baptist) church, you’re not going to be struck dead by God, nor dragged to the altar and sacrificed, nor even stoned to death. If they even know you’re gay to begin with – and why is it anyone’s business who’s sleeping with whom?

Yeah if you go around announcing details of your sex life, you’ve opened a gossip door. You’re showing that it’s ok to gossip about your sex life, so others probably will too. This is the same case with both gays and straights.

And if you’re sitting over there on your high moral ground, looking down your nose at those who don’t subscribe to your point of view, you can go to hell.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

-William Shakespeare, a Very Smart Man.

(this post is mostly based on overhearing a guy last night tell his friend something like “Can you believe it? Me! I actually set foot in a Baptist church. I was terrified!” What the hell did you think they’d do, eat you and then go play with their rattlesnakes?)

I was reading someone else’s blog and I felt that I needed to comment here, without naming names, because I think it’s pretty rude to go incite a comments war.

The post was about the recent anti-war demonstrations in Austin, with pictures. The caption was something like “This is what Texas looks like”. A commenter posted “I wish Texas looked like this every day”.

That’s got the be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard – unless the commenter likes thousands of protestors campaigning against possible global war, as well as complete disagreement with their government.

Protestors are out there on damned serious business. They’re out there protesting a potentially greatly damaging war. They don’t want to see all the cost in lives, equipment, and money. It’s not all about holding hands and singing Kumbayah. If you want Texas to look like that every day then you’re just a sadist.

Perhaps I’m too utopian. What I’d like Texas to look like every day is a pro-rally, not an anti-rally. Why revel in negativeness? Can’t anyone find something they like and march en masse, educating people about it? That’s what I think it would be nice to see every day. No name-calling, no flaming effigies, no ugly caricatures.

When I’m queen of the world…

The meetup tonight was very nice. I didn’t like the venue at all. Parking was non-existant, they were out of half-and-half, and the coffee and service were cold. It was nice to put some faces with names, and the political talk was scarce. There was plenty of talk about Christina Aguilera’a nipples, which was amusing. The giant whooshing noises that kept happening were things going way over my head, but that’s ok. Perhaps I’ll pick something up by osmosis. In any event it got me out of the house and away from the kids for a little while, even though we were sitting outside in the 53 degree weather and I didn’t even bring a jacket. (which goes back to my pisstivity about the coffee being cold)

The elm trees in my yard are already budding little leaves. Spring comes so early in this part of the world.

I’m going to the Blog Meetup here in Austin tonight. I’m a little nervous because upon reading the blogs of the others hwo have RSVP’d, looks like they are all extreme Bush-bashers and active participants in anti-war protests. I really don’t want tonight to turn into a big political discussion.

I’m not pro-war, but I’m definitely not anti-war either. Like hub explained to the three year old, sometimes there are things we don’t want to do, but we have to do them anyway. I don’t know exactly why we have to go after Saddam Hussein right now; seems like we’d be better of finishing the hunt for Bin Laden and taking care of his sorry ass before we declare war with Iraq, but all American presidents seem to think it’s cool to take on more than one major project at once. Not just this one.

I was raised that you may have disagreements within your family, but they stay within the family, and even if you’re in the midst of a mortal battle with a family member, you still show a united front to someone who’s not a family member. This may not be the most enlightened way of doing things in the world, but it’s mine.

Anyway, I hate being outnumbered by people with such different viewpoints at a social event, especially if they all start in on me because I think differently. It makes me really uncomfortable. I hope the conversation doesn’t get any more heated than Movable Type vs. Blogger.