OH! The wether outside's delightful...

But my family is so frightful;
His pants are pulled way down low,
Let us go
Have a blow
In the snow!




The flight was shit, but we got here alive if not well. Pirate has a nasty cold, not at all improved by 9 1/2 hours in a middle seat that didn't recline, had no legroom, and was surrounded by screaming babies. I hope he made them sick.

On the plus side, there was a foot of snow on the ground when we landed and it's been coming down almost continually since. WHITE CHRISTMAAAAAAAAS! It's fucking freezing, but that's all the better to snuggle you with my dear. The mattress in my brother's guest room is the best i've ever slept on in my LIFE. It was like sleeping on a cloud. At 5 am I got Pirate to promise to buy me one. w00t. It's a Simmon's Beautyrest.

And now we're just alternating between shovelling the sidewalk every 30 minutes and eating ourselves into a stupor.

Merry crimbo, mis amigos.

Back in the USS...A?

Pirate and I are leaving tonight for the Land of W (soon to be the Land of O). I don't know when I'll be back, because I have to get my spousal visa while I'm there, and the British Consulate give absolutely no indication of how long that takes. It might take 2 days, in which case I'll be coming home with Pirate on January 3rd, or it might take 6 weeks, in which case I'll be missing my own 30th Birthday/Innauguration joint party. I have no idea.

It's going to be an absolutely manic holiday, what with travelling to Wisconsin to visit my brother, fighting the snow on the roads and airports, PIRATE'S parents flying over from England to spend a week with my family, Bridesmaid Vi, husband Wally, son Smally Wally and Big Wally's parents all visiting from Massachusetts during the same week the Pirates-in-law will around, and my visa excitement thrown in on top of that. Blogging may or may not occur. Most likely I'll lurk and read your blogs when I get a few quiet minutes to myself, but I don't know that I'll have the ambition to write much.

Unless I'm in desperate need of catharsis, which is always a possibility.

And at FN's request, here is a photo for your enjoyment:



Merry Christmas, y'all!

Unlike this poor schlob, i AM Michael Phelps

During the Olympics this summer you may have seen the BBC news reporter who is not Michael Phelps.



I know how he feels. I've taken up swimming at Pirate's gym, mostly because 2/3 of the time I show up for weight-lifting or circuits classes they get canceled due to me being the only one HARD CORE enough to show up. So I hit the pool instead.

I used to be a really slow swimmer. A really really really slow swimmer. Then I discovered the box of flippers next to the kick boards. Now, rather than praying for the wall at the opposite side of the pool, which advanced so slowly I used to fear the second coming would happen before I reached it, it rushes toward me with such rapidity that it frightens me, and I have to slow down to avoid an out-and-out crash.

"So this is what it feels like to be Michael Phelps" I thought, the first time I swam with the flippers on. "Brilliant!"

Now crowds follow me where ever I go. I can't get out of the locker room without signing autographs. Oh well. It's all part of the price of fame.

Dances with Worms

I saw the most amazing thing yesterday. It was a seagull.

No, that in itself is not amazing. I moved away from Bristol to escape the fucking seagulls. (Don't tell Pirate; I'm just using him for his low-seagull lifestyle.)

The amazing bit is what the seagull was doing. It was dancing.



Pirate explained that it was creating vibrations in the ground which the worms perceive as rain, which inspires them to come to the surface. (You wouldn't think this would be necessary in a country where it rains every fucking day anyway, but there you go.)

I love this. I love this on several levels.
1. It's cute. No doubt about it. Seagulls suck. Dancing seagulls are cute.
2. It's seagulls doing what seagulls were meant to do, ie, act like birds. In nature. Not tear apart my garbage bags and squawk and shit all over me.
3. It's industrious. They're earning their lunch. I'm down with that.

But mostly, I love it because I love the idea of a universe where you can do a little dance and you lunch magically appears at your feet. How brilliant is that!!! I want to live in that universe! I want to, whenever I'm hungry, do a little dance, and look down, and *poof!* LUNCH!

*sings* Do a little dance... Make a little worm... Get lunch tonight! Get lunch tonight!

Now every night when I fix dinner I make Pirate stand in front of the serving hatch and do a little dance. Then I give him his dinner.

High Dorkness

Guess what we did tonight?

I don't think you lot have a clear understanding of just how dorky me and the Pirate are. We are exceptionally dorky.

As Pirate has just said to me (while watching what I type over my shoulder), "The word 'pedant' sums up our relationship quite nicely."

Yes, we listen to Radio 4.
Yes, we watch University Challenge and Mastermind.
Yes, we iron our clothes, eat our vegetables, wash between our toes, and go to bed early. But that is just the beginning.

Tonight we settled a long-standing argument. (Mostly so that one of us would have the opportunity to be smug.) We have been arguing for a while about the plural of the Toyota Prius. But tonight we settled it.

We have this argument because my parents have two of the marvelous little hybrid cars, to which we refer as the family Prii. (Pronounced pree-eye).

Pirate insisted the plural of Prius was Priuses. (I know.)

Since Prius isn't a Latin word, we agreed that the closest equivalent was "focus," and tonight, well, tonight we finally went up to my office, pulled out my Latin grammar and looked up the declension of "focus."

For the record, it IS a second declension noun and therefore the plural is "foci" (something I already knew from high school math class, but that argument didn't fly with Pirate). The only way, in Latin, to pluralize a noun ending in -us is with -i.

So I win. Thanks to Kennedy's Revised Latin Grammar, c. 1962 Longman Group Ltd.

In-laws

They are coming.

They are coming tonight.

I have 9 hours to:

• clean the bathrooms
• mop the kitchen floor
• vacuum the whole house (Pirate?)
• tidy the spare bedrooms
• rearrange the furniture in the spare bedrooms
• put sheets on all the beds
• wash a load of darks
• walk a mile to the grocery store and carry all the groceries home*
• cook dinner for Pirate
• bake Christmas cookies
• take out the compost bucket
• clean the dead leaves out of the flower beds before the stems rots
• shower
• finish sewing Pirate's stocking**
• finish crocheting Pirate's mum's scarf***

*I must remember to buy toilet paper
**I'm making stockings for both of us out of an old pair of jeans.
***It was supposed to be done for last Christmas

Feelin' Fuzzy

or
Still Crazy After All These Hairs

(This is a funny one.)
On Friday morning I put my hair in french braided pigtails while it was still damp. I wore them all day Friday (it's the most comfortable hairstyle in existence) and slept in them Friday night. When I work up Saturday I took them out, fluffed my hair, and got dressed.

I wore a black and white striped turtleneck, and because it was colder than the balls on a brass monkey, topped off my look with a tan, corduroy, flat cap (Oliver Twist-style). I looked in the mirror.

There was something unnervingly familiar about the person looking back at me. I stared and stared, and then all at once it dawned.

You know how they say that over time owners start to look more and more like their dogs? I think the same is true of music. I clearly need to update my record collection. I had become...


...some weird 21st century hybrid of Simon AND Garfunkel. (Except with boobs.)