McPolack, Inc

Book sniffer

2012-02-10T09:01:00.000-05:00

Things at the LNFU have been going swimmingly, something I like to say mainly because I work with and for people who study fish.Yesterday I took a little break to visit the special collections room of one of the LNFU libraries. They'd advertised a display of old, interesting-looking books, and for a limited time only! - so I decided to check it out.

Little did I know that I would actually get to hold in my bare hands a small book published in 1553. And flip through the pages of a big book published in 1554. Its cover had small metal hinges on it, fastened with tiny nails. Without even bothering to see if anyone was looking -- because, to be honest, I was in a room full of fellow oddballs -- I bent down and sniffed the big book. It didn't really smell like anything, which when you think about it makes sense because it's been kept safe from anything that would make it stinky.

Once I'd finished examining the books, I looked at some correspondence the librarians had laid out on a counter nearby. One of the letters was from Charles Darwin, and was written in in his own hand. It wasn't a photocopy. This one I didn't touch. Or sniff. I just bent over it while holding my hair back so I wouldn't shed on Chuck.

Ripening

2012-01-30T13:07:00.001-05:00

I strolled Mount Auburn cemetery yesterday afternoon with Walnut and her bf. The bf is a tree fanatic and likes to gather seeds there for at-home tree propagation. I brought my binoculars and watched a pair of turkeys, a red-tailed hawk, and a woodpecker. Some dodo was making his way towards the turkeys. Lucky for him I am a volunteer nature cop. I told him to leave them alone because sometimes turkeys can be very aggressive.

Walnut's bf introduced me to the Kentucky coffeetree, whose seed pods are filled with hard brown beans encased in guacamole-esque green goo. Apparently the early settlers roasted the beans as a coffee substitute. Later we came upon a giant leaky maple and someone suggested I lick it. It didn't feel right to lick a tree in a graveyard, so instead I dragged my finger through the liquid and licked my finger instead. It didn't taste like anything. But I'm still pretty sure it was sap. I remember licking a maple tree at the corner of our summer fort at Grammy McQ's house. The fort was located in an alcove of sorts bordered on one side by a stone retaining wall and on another by a flight of cement stairs, at the top of which was a barberry bush with long red berries and lots of prickers. Apparently you can eat barberries. I was afraid of them as a kid.

There was a fair amount of creepiness at the cemetery; Walnut's bf found a fresh grave - I think the person had died nine days ago - behind a mausoleum. The ground had cracked in a rectangle, which I assumed was the size and shape of the cement box they tend to put coffins in these days. Earlier we'd peered in a mausoleum whose windows were dark and smeary, like plexiglass. What I saw inside made me want to wash my eyeballs. I don't really know why. It was a stained glass window of baby angels, but something about the quality of the light and the subject matter just made me shiver.

Luckily some douchenozzle who'd died a long time ago provided us with much-needed comic relief, in the form of a long epitaph extolling his many virtues. It continued on for at least two sides of an obelisk and used words like "thenceforth." But the best part was the mention of a trip to Europe, where he'd "ripened his powers." Ahem.

Reading

2012-01-29T09:55:00.001-05:00

I've been doing a fair amount of reading these days. The NYer had a fawning review of a book of collected essays by a gentleman born a year after me, and the article talked about how we're in a sort of golden age of essays. And I thought: I missed the boat on that one, big time. And I felt: jealous, and disappointed in myself.

Then I requested the book from the LNFU and gave it a read. It was pretty good. It's some of the best writing I've read in a while - a mix of pop-culture references and feelings, but with the addition of multiple literary references-a Polish poet here, a bible verse there-and a mature and unique voice that is certain but uncertain at the same time, and OK with both.

I had been expecting uber-manly or at the very least super-egotistical, seeing as how the magazine article had lauded the author as the next Tom Wolfe. But this guy doesn't come across as an asshole. Though maybe that happens over time? I don't know. Anyway, I'm glad I read it.

I then moved on to a book about a taxidermist, which I'm reading right now, along with a book about Audubon. I have one more chapter to go on Hitch-22, which has been enjoyable if a bit verbose, something which is easily remedied by skipping entire chapters.

And I'm baking. Cookies, no-knead challah, pecan sticky buns. And I'm worrying, about what at times feels like a crippling inability to support myself financially. I need to go back to basics: meditation, a day at a time, no judgment. Love.

That's all for now.

Further Christmas tales

2012-01-16T11:11:00.000-05:00

Our numbers have been dwindling on Christmas Eve at McPolack manor but thanks to reproduction there are a couple of tiny folks filling the empty seats. One of them came dressed in his holiday finest: plaid silk shortalls. With kneesocks - eek! And wee loafers. The adorable level was through the roof.

It was hard not to eat him alive. And harder still not to giggle when his father set him down on the leather sofa and little lord silkyshorts slid slowly onto his back. Because leather sofa + besilkened bottom is a gentler version of foot + banana peel.

The other tiny person was equally adorable and her pink velveteen dress had more traction. Also she is an animal lover. And by lover I mean this: when she was eating her dinner and food fell on the floor and a big, gentle, slobbery dog snuffled over to pick it up she SCREAMED with delight. She'd then catch the eye of someone near by, as if to say "are you seeing what I'm seeing and isn't it AMAZING?" Pure exuberance.

She felt this way about PolackPappy's chinchilla, Harold, as well, and asked many times to be carried to his cage, which she would smack with her little hand. Harold, btw, could have easily retreated to the man-cave Pp made for him out of cardboard, but he didn't. I think he liked the attention. Or perhaps recognized a fellow cute little package of fierceness.

Moldy Christmas

2011-12-25T15:12:00.000-05:00

I asked my brother-in-law and PolackPappy to pull an old trunk of mine out of the barn so I could go through it, finally, and maybe bring to my apartment to keep. But it turned out to be covered in mold, inside and out, and mold had permeated Babcia's party dresses from the '30s, and the exquisitely tailored handmade fripperies from the late 19th century that had belonged to an old wealthy woman whose lawn PolackPappy used to mow.

I had to throw them all away. Along with my class yearbooks, my high school literary magazine, a bunch of photographs, and Blue, my mother's stuffed dog.

Mold had gotten to the real treasures, too: handwritten letters from dead relations and dead relationships. A tiny note from Babcia began "Dear McP, I do not like to see the word 'fuck' in print." Despite her disappointment at my word choice, she'd enclosed twenty-eight dollars, enough for a year's subscription to the weekly newspaper that was my first "real" job out of college. A letter she wrote when PolackPappy was undergoing chemo started out asking "How's my girl?" and then briefly mentioned how tired PP looked.

I get the sense that I'm the memory-keeper in my immediate family, though I wonder sometimes who I'm keeping the memories for. Anyways, I'm confident I held on to the important stuff.

Bean

2011-12-18T10:44:00.001-05:00

PolackPappy brought home some Mexican jumping beans once. He kept them in his desk, and I used to pull them out and look at them. I don't remember anything hatching. But that's what happened with one of the beans in a jar on my desk at the lab. I came in after a long weekend of life and death to find a small moth had pushed open the trap door it had made when it chewed its way in as a larva.

The beans were given to me by a post-doc who's studying m on the sly - though her secret came out one afternoon when a couple of her officemates starting wondering why the envelope on her desk was rattling. I emailed her and asked her what to do; she said I could see if there were any moths in the jar of beans on her desk - there weren't - and so I went to the magical interwebs for advice.

Of course there wasn't much to be done for the moth. From what I gathered, it didn't need to eat - it would live for a few days searching for a mate, followed by mating, egg-laying, and death. Since I'm nowhere near Mexico the moth was going to fly around in the jar until its number was up. This depressed me. Surprisingly, some of my fellow lab members also felt sad about the moth. At one point we had a decent estrogen-fueled circle of maudlin going, with the moth at the center, but I was able to be the voice of reason.

This was thanks in part to experience and in part to the woman from the ornithology department I ran into by the elevator while getting the mail. She, too, felt depressed that the moth wasn't going to fulfill its life's purpose and suggested I bring it to the departmental holiday party. A fine idea if ever there was one.

And so, late that afternoon, I tucked the bottle with bean and moth into the pocket of the Lily Pulitzer pants I found at the thrift store and headed over to the natural history museum, where the party was being held. One of the finance guy's girlfriend is a professional photographer and she had a white sheet, a stool, and props. I had my photo taken with the moth and a sign that said Feliz Navidad.

Awake

2011-12-12T11:03:00.000-05:00

Drove myself out to NH for Mr. T's wake on Sunday afternoon and somehow managed to peel some of the hubcap off one of my tires while trying to park my car. I'd been planning on meeting McMumsy there and staying for the whole wake, but that was not to be. Mr. T was an insurance salesman, an active churchgoer, and came from a ginormous family, so though I was in line 10 minutes before the wake was due to start, it took a solid hour to get through the line and out the door.

It was interesting to listen to the chatter around me - there wasn't anyone I knew in my immediate vicinity - but there were a lot of what I want to call elderly men, only elderly to me implies feebleness, and they weren't feeble - they were just old. Two of the old guys directly in front of me looked at their watches, looked at the line, and decided they would attend the funeral instead. After about 10 minutes, an old guy behind me recognized the I-will-listen-to-your-stories bat signal that I emit without even trying, and he started chatting me up. He'd been in the insurance business for 62 years, with his son working alongside him for the last 25. I think that puts him squarely in Don Draper territory. He also poked the top of my right buttcheek a couple of times to get my attention, but there was no way to tell if that was on purpose.

Anyways, I was able to answer questions about Mr. T's family for him - which daughter was it that lived in town X, as he'd helped her find an apartment, and what was the name of his wife. It was good to have someone to talk to, because as we entered the room Mr. T was in I saw that Mr. T was on display, and I saw his family in a row beside him, and I realized how small I was in the face of all that grief.

The insurance guy kept chatting until we were right next to the casket, at which point I said goodbye to him and ducked behind the row of mourners to say goodbye to Mr. T.

Holy inappropriateness

2011-12-09T10:48:00.001-05:00

McMumsy called me Tuesday night with sad news: a close family friend had been killed that afternoon in a car accident. Mr. T was a member of the small group of people my parents have been meeting with one Saturday night a month for prayer, followed by snacks and dirty jokes, for thirty years. They call it "grouping." The farther I've gotten out in the world, the more I've realized what a unique and incredible bond they have.

And now, in honor of Mr. T, a fond memory: When I was a kid I had an awesome yellow Schwinn. It had a banana seat covered in pink flowers. I don't remember exactly the reason why, but it was probably after a slumber party, I was at the T household with my Schwinn but couldn't ride it home. So Mr. T did. With Mrs. T driving next to him in the Volvo with the fold-down seats in the wayback. Mr. T kept trying to convince her to let him grab onto the passenger side door so he didn't have to keep pedaling.

Everyone got home safe.

Frickin' Laser Beams

2011-12-07T10:58:00.001-05:00

Walnut came for a tour of the lab on Saturday. We visited the rooftop greenhouse and learned about the life cycle of an African acacia-dwelling lepidopteran. Then we looked at the fishes and the worms and the rays and the lasers. I still hadn't seen the lasers in action and all I knew about them was that I needed to be really careful not to jostle anything. Walnut thought the lasers were really neat. I, to be honest, was a bit meh about them as they're just a big black box covered in a black shroud.

Yesterday I finally saw what they can do, and all I can say is WOW. It's like watching a science fiction movie, only you're in the movie, and it's not fiction. It was gobsmacking.

Passing the Pierogi Test

2011-12-06T11:21:00.001-05:00

There's Eastern European man who hits on me in the gym every day. In front of his Cuban wife. They're both in their seventies. The husband is the same fellow who showed me his Polish passport, which he got in exchange for providing some sort of information when his home country, Czechoslovakia, fell under Communist rule. Anyways, when he heard I was making pierogi, he made sad puppy eyes at me and said he hadn't had any since his mother was alive. "Just bring me one, McPolack. Just one pierogi."

Yesterday I brought him four pierogi: two for him and two for his wife. Today I asked him if he liked the pierogis. "Well, McPolack," he said, "you're ready to get married."

Missed

2011-11-28T20:16:00.001-05:00

Came home to a voicemail from my friend H today in which she noted her elder child had asked after me. I immediately dialed H's number and we caught up over the sweet symphony of her two feisty chitlins, the aptly nicknamed Hella and Lucyfer. They were requesting Santa's phone number (H has told them she's going to call him and inform him of their naughtiness) and when they weren't doing that they were singing and when they weren't doing that they were shouting "A wienie is a penis!" It was divine. Earlier that day Hella gave Lucyfer an Indian sunburn and in return Lucyfer bit Hella. Last month H brought home two chocolate mousies, one for each girl. Lucyfer stuffed hers into her mouth immediately. Hella left the room for approximately two seconds. So Lucyfer made room in her three-year-old maw for a second candy rodent. Soon there was loudness. H came in to find Hella crying, and Lucyfer was crying, too, because she knew she'd done something wrong. But since there wasn't much room in her mouth for the sad, a lot of chocolate was bubbling out.

Murmuration

2011-11-22T12:11:00.000-05:00

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

I'm not online much these days. I really need to get a new laptop, because if the one I have now were a child, it would be old enough to attend elementary school.

I also haven't felt like writing, at all. Totally uninspired, and angry - that's where I've been at for a while. It sucks. I've been rolling out the old fake-it-till-you-make-it saw to get through.

Anyhoo. I managed to troll the magical Interwebs a bit this morning, which is where I found this bit of loveliness, which is sure to brighten even the gloomiest of days.

Stinkalicious

2011-11-20T13:25:00.001-05:00

The salted Hulk-Smashed cabbage on my kitchen counter still isn't stinky but I am afraid to put it somewhere warmer. Maybe a watched batch of sauerkraut never ripens.I just finished fixing up a batch of pierogi filling. It's nice to use my big muscles in the way evolution intended because - and I'm not complaining - I don't live in a world where I need to be big enough to carry a cookstove, five children, and a couple of goats over a mountain.

Hulk Smash!

2011-11-17T10:58:00.001-05:00

Decided to try my hand at homemade sauerkraut. I've got a small crock resting on my kitchen counter with what started out as two pounds of cabbage and two tablespoons of salt. You have to punch the crap out of the cabbage/salt mixture with your fists before letting it rest and (hopefully) ferment. Mine doesn't seem to be doing much, but it's only been three days.

Scavenge

2011-11-10T11:05:00.001-05:00

The person who did my qualifying exam on the 3D x-ray machine at the LNFU is one of those sci-fi/goth/punk science types you see working the computers on murder porn shows on the teevee. She's got medium-sized holes in her ears, or will when she takes out the plugs - and she will take them out one day - and she's tough.

But she's also a class-A trash picker. Case in point: on Tuesday evening when I was headed over to look at the data from a recent scan, she was walking down the hall with an armload of hand-dovetailed wooden boxes. I'd seen similar ones on my travels through certain basement sections of the LNFU.

Turns out they were one and the same. The mineral people were moving on to a more sophisticated storage system, which meant the boxes were moving on to a landfill. Most of the boxes. I grabbed three of them. I would have grabbed more, but I watch too many hoarder documentaries.

Pretty guten

2011-11-04T10:37:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I:
Learned to navigate the marble layers of an LNFLibrary

Saw one of the few complete Gutenberg bibles in existence

Had a pleasant chat with a Parisian-born Milanese fellow.

The Paritalian worked at a big financial newspaper whose name he spoke as if it were very well-known. I didn't recognize the name, which sounded something like Un Crossaint de Republique Oo Huh Huh Huh Le Monde Depardieu. Then because as everyone knows newspaper writing=make crap money doing hard work, he left the Crossaint of the World to work at L'Oreal, a much easier to remember and recognize French company. But then he left L'Oreal and went back to Croissant of the World, although currently he is on leave from Croissant to study the philosophy of communications. He was on the library tour with me and was very polite. Cold at first, but once he heard I had a journalism degree he was friendlier. His favorite philosopher is Schopenhauer. I think. This part of the conversation is harder to recall. Anyhoo, I'm more of a fan of Kierkegaard.

“Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.” ~ William Gibson

2011-11-01T18:39:00.001-04:00

Lately I cannot hide a single g-d emotion, apparently. While at some training last week the trainer was discussing an odd feature in a Web design program and in my head I was thinking what idiot executive insisted on that addition. And the trainer called my name and said I looked perturbed. Today I went to my first therapy appointment in a long, long time. Curiously, the person I saw today resembles the person I saw for many, many years. Maybe 15 minutes into the session she told me she was a pragmatic and direct person. Then she said I'd been looking at her sideways since I sat down, but that she thought it was kind of cute. Anyways, I booked as many appointments with her as I could before the end of the year.

ba-dum-bum

2011-10-27T20:43:00.001-04:00

One perk of my LNFU work is that when it's raining out or I just need a change of scenery I can walk to an office I regularly interact with by way of the natural history museum. I normally walk pretty briskly past the taxidermied fauna but today I crossed paths with a steady stream of Catholic junior high schoolers who were exiting what must be a much larger classroom than I originally thought based on how many uniformed kids came out of it. I decided to wait it out, and then trailed an older woman with a cane who was bringing up the rear. It was a slow walk, owing more to the Catholic schoolchildren than the lady.

She and I chatted briefly on our way down the stairs - she opened the conversation by saying she had two bionic knees. I told her I was very impressed, and even more impressed that she was taking the stairs in spite of them. Then she said she walks with her cane at school because she tends to topple over and she works with kids who are at an age where they're very self-involved.

When I arrived at my destination, a coworker said the next time I find myself in a similar situation I should just announce I'm an unwed mother who's had three abortions.

Me and my brainpan

2011-10-24T20:27:00.001-04:00

The cure for writer's block is not:

a. Carrying your kitty who is asleep in her wicker basket over to your sofa so you can pat her while you feel the sort of self pity which is appropriate only in those stupid vampire movies and cry as quietly and non-mucous-producing-ly as possible.

b. Roaming the basement of the thrift store you roamed yesterday, and roamed when you had writer's block before, back when roaming thrift stores cured your writer's block.

c. Swearing out loud.

d. Writing like you talk when what you are doing is (see c. above).

e. Sighing.

f. Trying five too many times to work a Miss Cleo analogy into an article about the worrisome fate of capitalism.

Independence

2011-10-18T11:36:00.003-04:00

Sometimes I think I will never make the right decision about the way I live my life, and some days I feel done in by PolackPappy's warning that a lack of decision is a decision in itself.

But enough with the maudlin. On Friday the LNFU had a members-only party for itself and I decided to attend, hoping for free tasty snacks and maybe door prizes. Alas there were neither. There was rain, and mud, and beakers filled with what I decided was the blood of all the virgins they sacrificed to ensure the LNFU's continued prosperity. The red stuff was meant to be poured over ice cream. There was also a ginormous cake, and a chocolate fountain, and a lot of booze. But I didn't want to get near the booze and couldn't get near any of the other stuff because it wall-to-wall people. You could not move, or see anything, or hear anything. I think if I were an undergrad it would have been fun, but it was no place for a grown-up.

oink

2011-10-12T11:09:00.001-04:00

Dr. Moo has been full of tales of the non-bovine ilk lately. This weekend in the cousin-and-auntie-filled bedroom of a haunted northern inn she told the sad tale of Oink. Oink was a five-year-old 250lb pot-bellied pig who was purchased from a trailer park. He had separation anxiety and would tear things up if left alone too long. He was a pretty, pretty princess when it came to getting shots. Like all piggies, he had frequent, fragrant gas.

Oink really liked to hang out on the sofa. It was a good life. But then one day he became morbidly constipated and Moo was called at midnight to send him waddling across the Rainbow Bridge. Dispatching Oink wasn't the problem. Moving him off the sofa post-dispatch was. After some amount of discussion, a sled of sorts was built (I believe a rug was involved) and Oink's body was dragged across the floor, out the door, and onto the lawn. They were originally going to try to drag him into the shed but in the end (and after consulting with Dr. Moo as to whether "anything would eat him" if they did so) they turned a wheelbarrow over on him and buried him the next day.

Woodsy

2011-10-10T19:30:00.000-04:00

I attended cousin B's wedding in northern NH this weekend and managed to work in a short solo hike. It has been long enough since I've hauled ass up one side of a mountain and down the same side that I found myself cursing its steepness. Despite all the wind I sucked I beat book time, thank GOD. Because I need a reason to be proud of my meaty meaty man-legs.

I didn't leave myself enough time to fit in a second peak but the jog I took the next morning was quite hilly and calf-satisfying. That neck of the woods is gorgeous, but there is of course a lot of poverty. I don't know what the solution is to the issue of some people having to scratch out a living in a place where others own a second or third home that they own solely for pleasure, and perhaps if I spent less time ruminating on things over which I have no control I would spend more time working on things I can actually fix. Talk is cheap, right?

RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRR!!!!!!!

2011-09-30T10:58:00.000-04:00

Ohhhhhhh where to begin?

2011-09-22T20:21:00.001-04:00

I drove to the LNFU today because it was raining, and I managed to parallel park Phyllis perfectly, on the first try. That has never happened. I did have quite a bit of space in which to maneuver, but still.

Then I had a conversation with a fellow subatomic office particle about the fantasy novel she's writing. The main characters are a teenage necromancer and her sassy gay friend. She (the author) was worried about the subject matter, given how popular zombies are these days. I told her not to worry. Zombies are very meta. Teenage necromancers with sassy gay friends are much more relatable.

Later a postdoc doing foreign-government-funded research told me he's interested in doing a micro CT scan of a leech. "It's alive," he said. "Well it won't be when after you X-ray it," I replied. Then he asked me if I wanted to see the leech. Who wouldn't?

He was keeping the leech in some water in a jar on his desk. It was surprisingly beautiful. The grad student who gave it to him told me she knew people who let leeches feed off them, because they wanted to know what it felt like. I asked how long they let the leeches feed.

"Until they were full and fell off," she answered.

Then she proceeded to tell me about how one day she was eating lunch and a girl came in with gauze on her arm and she was going to have lunch too, but then she started dripping blood despite the gauze. Public service announcement: if you let a leech have some of you for breakfast, you're going to still be bleeding at lunch.

The whole leech thing reminded me of this.

Later that day, as I walked back to perfectly-parked Phyllis, I passed a white kitty and a marmalade kitty sitting side-by-side in a first-floor screened-in window. I said hi to them. They did not say hi back, but then kitties don't speak English.

Almost a year later

2011-09-21T10:30:00.002-04:00

It's coming up on one year since my whirlwind tour of Europe with cousin B. The lovely ladyfriend he met shortly after inviting me to join him overseas, an invitation he offered in part because he had no special person in his life, is now his fiancee, and in just a few short weeks will be his wife. They are going to Disney for their honeymoon.

Goodwill

2011-09-18T13:55:00.003-04:00

When I was at the thrift store this Friday a Middle Eastern man came up to me and handed me a nifty vintage casserole dish, complete with lid and chafing-dish-like apparatus. "It is nice," he said. "And a good price."

It was both those things. I took the dish and thanked him.

Once when I was in NYC eating at a Middle Eastern restaurant the chef came to our table and asked where I was from. When I told him, he insisted I follow him to the kitchen to inspect his griddle. "It is very clean!" he told me. "You have never seen such a clean griddle in McPolacktown." Well I'd never been invited to look at anyone's griddle anywhere but I wasn't going to harsh his mellow. I told him it looked fantastic.

Anyhoo, here's the point of this post: I think we'll win over the Middle East not with unmanned predator drones but with overwomanned carpet bombing. Just parachute in thousands of sweet busty blonde ladies. The Taliban won't know what hit them.

Tricky

2011-09-05T09:48:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I went to my first yoga class in quite some time. The teacher asked me to demonstrate something, without telling me what that something was. I was game. I like the teacher a lot, partly because she is not afraid of my feet. And my feet are scary-looking.

Anyhoo, she had me lean over and put my hands on the floor shoulder-width apart. I walked my feet back a bit, until my torso was lined up with my shoulders. Then she had me look forward and raise one leg in the air.

She then held my ankle rather lightly and had me kick up with my other leg. Interesting. We tried it a second time and on this round I was able to push my hips forward slightly. The teacher kept telling me to squeeze my legs tighter and all of a sudden everyone else in the room made wowish sounds. Because I was balancing in a handstand in the middle of the room, all by myself.

It was amazing.

Turning my body upside-down tends to awaken the chicken of fear that lives in my brain. A chicken of fear is useful and important. But occasionally overprotective. Yesterday, the teacher's constant repetition to me to squeeze my legs was loud enough to drown out my fear-chicken's bawk-bawking.

Of course as soon as I realized what was going on, the spell was broken, and I fell over. Gracefully, thank goodness.

Wowzer

2011-09-03T19:06:00.002-04:00

I'm all about this today.

Which brought this to mind.

Went on a long walk with KW. Her bf works doing project management of a sort for UN envoys to Libya and Sudan; he may go to Libya at some point. He worked in Sudan several years ago; the living conditions were very primitive. He loved it. The extreme conditions and close quarters meant there was zero room for bullshit or posturing. Everyone's equal.

I had my retinas scanned at the LNFU on Thursday so I can access a machine on which I will take 360-degree X-rays of pickled fish and pickled fish parts. Upon completion of the scanning I was told "You have been identified" by a computerized lady voice straight out of science fiction. Spooooooky. Afterwards I visited my cousin T's lovely gf, who was working on her MFA in the FA library. She had her laptop in front of her but was also surrounded by books.

Must continue pulling self out of hole

2011-08-21T21:04:00.002-04:00

Finally caught up with a friend who'd moved to France and now to NYC, when she was back in town to rent out her condo. So goes my blog, so goes my life. I'm not staying connected.

Mehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Anyhoo. I did not really do much of anything this weekend, except work, and avoidance of work. Also I made out with my cat, but that's par for the course. I've got a wedding this week, and another in a couple of months, after which I will be the sole unmarried cousin of my generation, save one, and he was a surprise baby born when I was 12. Poor McMumsy has been dealing with my mixed signals quite well, offering up a possible fellow - he's divorced, has a kid and also pet cock-a-roaches - and then not getting p'oed when I told her I wasn't interested in being fixed up. Because I'm not.

Last night I went to a store that sells new clothes for once and purchased two sad, I-will-never-have-sex-again bras. They are what are called "minimizers" and at 12.99 are a fine price. These days keeping the ta-tas in line using the conventional underwire bra is akin to keeping kittens in a sack without a string. They fall out, and misbehave. But no more! Now when I bend over to vacuum the cat hair out from under the sofa, the girls stay where they ought to.

Two things

2011-08-10T19:20:00.004-04:00

First thing:
One of the students in the lab is studying hagfish. She just came back with some new ones from deep in the Atlantic ocean. Hagfish look like skinny, shiny, pickled penii. They get into dead fish and eat their way out. Sometimes the fish is not dead yet but that doesn't stop the hagfish. When you irritate a hagfish, it creates an astonishing amount of slime. You could fit the hagfish in one hand but the amount of slime it produces in two seconds is more than you can fit in both. But it's 90% water and so shrinks pretty quickly as you are holding it, which I did. Thankfully it is not like slug slime in that it doesn't stick. Hagfish slime would work great if you wanted to pretend-sneeze on someone.

Second thing:
When I emerged from a labyrinthine basement filled with jarred fish that aren't for eating I heard some odd clopping and a grandma voice but I kept walking. Away from the sounds. When suddenly (but zombie-suddenly) there was an elderly lady with a walker and a man in front of me, asking me where something was. I told her what floor the something was on, and pointed her in the direction of the elevator. At which point I saw the source of the original clopping grandma sound: A second elderly lady with a walker and a man. She was rounding a corner at the other end of the hall at the same time as the first elderly lady. Soon a not-elderly lady appeared and apologized for losing the walker twins. At which point I thought how in the heck do you manage to lose one slow-moving person, never mind two?

WTF, Heloise? (for Jane)

2011-08-07T18:41:00.004-04:00

I come across some interesting books in thrift stores. Such as a book of "hints for working women" first published in 1966, though I have the 1970 edition. Which would be the year McMumsy and PolackPappy were married. And of course McM was, and is, a working woman.

Let's take a trip back in time to see what Heloise had to offer my momma:

"The greatest thing to stuff throw pillows with is plastic bags from your cleaners. Just wad them up as you would paper. So fluffy and easy to care for. Great for making extra bed pillows for that unexpected company. (Free, too.) (Great for making sure unexpected company never shows up unexpectedly again. Or at all.)

...since perfume is mostly alcohol, try pouring some rubbing alcohol into the empty bottle and shaking it up. It mixes like a charm. This can be used for massages and is especially wonderful for the bedridden. Yes, perfume-tinged rubbing alcohol massages are especially wonderful for the bedridden. Because they can't escape the crazy person coming at them with a half-empty bottle of Jean Nate.

Heloise also recommends adding food coloring to all sorts of things. Pink canned salmon with a bit of red food coloring tricks your guests into thinking you've splurged on the more expensive red canned salmon. To stop sweet hubby's pissing and moaning about spaghetti again, why not add some yellow food coloring to make it look like pricey egg noodles? Or you could just urinate on it, which IMHO is cheaper and much more satisfying.

In the book's defense, it did come out just as feminism was gathering steam. Men really hadn't gotten the memo yet that equality doesn't just mean women doing the work of men. It also means men doing the work of women.

And Heloise offers many a helpful tip alongside the terrible ones. Like cleaning your vinyl purse with lighter fluid. Just make sure to put out your smoky treats first, gals!

Babies, babies everywhere

2011-08-03T10:54:00.002-04:00

I did my first long (24+ hours) babysitting stint in a long (15+ years) this weekend. In my heyday, I watched up to 10 kids at once, all by my lonesome, though the usual number was more like two or three.

I've lost my touch.

It wasn't that the two girlies, who are seven years and 13 months, were naughty, or needy, or even stinky. I think it's that I'm old. As in, set in my ways, tire easier, farther away from being a kid myself. I do not know how people do it. You have to keep them alive, and clean(ish) and fed and clothed. And then you are also supposed to educate them about the ways of the world, and how to add and subtract, etc. Plus keep yourself alive. And your house clean. And be patient, because it's not kids' faults that they can be self-centered and annoying, and babies know zero about the world, but you know plenty.

I do not get to be much of an auntie to the babies to whom I am genetically related. The last time I saw them my nephew turned from looking out the window and pressed his forehead to mine and gazed into my eyes and smiled, like the Babcia used to do. That and the way his deliciously chubby sister kicks her legs out and grins when you hold her over your head made me want to run out to the sperm bank immediately.

But I bet if I spent 24 hours alone with them I'd feel the same way I did at the end of this weekend's babysitting stint: like my biological clock had gotten a cold dose of reality.

Of course even though I was exhausted and a bit stinky and I had to sleep and sleep and sleep when I got home, I would do it all again, because that my friends is what love is.

Fisher Pricey

2011-07-27T19:44:00.002-04:00

Sooooooooooooooooooooo I seem to be moving from an Oprah-Winfrey-macaroni-and-cheese funk into a haunt-the-thrift-stores-both-online-and-off funk. I count this as progress because the latter funk requires actually leaving my apartment.

Except, of course, for when I decide to shop the thrift stores online. GW has an online auction site that I was paid to write about awhile back. Well last week I paid them around 26 bucks including shipping for a plastic dollhouse from 1969. Or thereabouts. Said dollhouse came with some accessories, including plastic beds with some of the original green foam glued-on mattress (this was disintegrating upon arrival, unfortunately), and a truly modern family, with three kids, one dog, two mommies...

... and their sperm donor. I put him in the closet beneath the staircase because that's where Walnut and I had decided we'd keep our men when we grew up and lived together in best-friends-without-the-sexy-kind-of-benefits bliss. It seemed the perfect solution at the time because it allowed for both the sort of emotional attachment you can only have with someone of the same gender and the physical attachment you can only have with someone of the opposite gender because you are into that and not the other, not of course that there is anything wrong with the other.

Any-HOO. When McMumsy was here I'd put some bids in on other 70s-era toys, only to be outbid at the last minute. I was relieved to be outbid. As was McMumsy, who did not think it was a good idea in the first place. And now that I have the plastic dollhouse, which I cleaned thoroughly upon arrival, I don't feel the need to buy anything else.

Except of course for Bug World, Milky the Marvelous Milking Cow, and Gobbles the Garbage-Eating Goat.

I'm still standing...

2011-07-19T17:26:00.003-04:00

...even if I'm not blogging. I just haven't been feeling it lately. McMumsy stayed with me for four nights last week, which was interesting. It was nice to have someone to take care of. I made her iced green tea to take with her to her workshop, and washed her dishes, and we walked together every morning because my gym's in the same building as her workshop.

She also introduced me to I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant. And was quite pleased with herself for doing so. Why, you ask?

Here is your answer:

FYI, they do full-on gore to accompany the stories. And yes there are mannnnnny babies born in the loo. And the accompanying reenacted shots of slimy newborns in the bowl. And of disheveled ladies with umbilical cords a-swingin' between their legs.

Also, it turns out that McMumsy knows a lady who Didn't Know She Was Pregnant. Although said lady has not been on the show (yet) she did go to the hospital with stomach pains and come out with a baby.

Kidney pie

2011-07-04T16:31:00.003-04:00

At yesterday's McFourth, with a small dash of Polack - Pp and I were the only Pole-blooded attendees - I learned that one of my cousin's kidneys shriveled up at some point between birth and age 50-something, like a raisin. This was only discovered when said cousin underwent surgery and had a bad reaction to medication. After that news set in, another cousin held up her foot so we could see her abnormally tiny toes. She's missing a joint in all of them, so they're short. The nails are tiny, too. Such weirdness!

I said I was tired of all the secrets and I wanted to know everything. At which point Pp told me my real mother was a sheep. And then as I was leaving I called out "Bye Dad" to Pp but my goat-farmin' Uncle D responded instead.

Time saver

2011-06-29T13:02:00.002-04:00

As I was finishing up round two of sunscreen application for my 1.5-mile walk into the LNFU I realized that summer is quite the time suck in terms of product application if you are, a, incredibly pasty/prone to skin cancer, and b, incredibly sweaty. I have two different deodorants, three sunscreens, and one can of monkey butt powder. You get one guess as to where the last product goes.

I have sunscreen for my face/decolletage, sunscreen for my body, spray sunscreen for the parts I can't reach, powder for certain parts, plus I put deodorant on my feet as well as my armpits because of the sweaty sweat. And you have to reapply all this stuff at least once.

So here's my idea: some sort of misting, lotioning, powdering pod that spiffs you up right quick. Or an in-house treatment team a la what the Cowardly Lion got spruced up by in The Wizard of Oz.

Fish food at the LNFU

2011-06-24T20:21:00.004-04:00

Today I fed pipettes full of teeny-weeny iggly-wiggly black worms to some river stingrays. A couple of the rays were quite shy and buried themselves in the sand as soon as they sensed humans nearby, refusing to come out even after the worms were phooted into their tanks. But one ray happily Roomba-ed his way through a bunch of them while I watched.

I also watched while someone fed an earthworm to a nine-year-old salamander. The entire process was very quick. Mr. E. Worm was dropped into Mr. S. Mander's tank, where the former sank gently down, coming to rest near the latter's maw.

And then-ZOOP! The earthworm was toast.

That salamander ate him up so fast I couldn't see what happened even though I had my eyes open and focused on the critters the entire time. It was one second: earthworm. Waaaaaaaaay less than one second later: no more earthworm. Apparently the salamander occasionally horks the earthworm back up only to re-eat him. Sort of like a dog would when he eats too fast.

After all that fishy goodness, I even got a door prize: four glass specimen jars from a now-defunct French company. They are no longer usable by the LNFU. In fact, the ones I got have never been used. Fortunately, the jars do just as good a job keeping food fresh as they do dead fish.

He puts the rr in Overrdrive

2011-06-15T19:28:00.003-04:00

Dr. Moo has decided to purchase the first sheep pictured here. Plus three ewes. My mother has suggested renaming the ram Odie Cologne after a skunk cartoon character it turns out is unrelated to Pepe Le Pew.

In other McPolack family critter news, Harold the chinchilla who will not be ignored wasn't getting enough attention from PolackPappy last Saturday night. So H. Chin. threw a slightly gnawed, boomerang-shaped apple twig at PP from between the bars of his cage.

Butt, meet chair

2011-06-14T17:46:00.002-04:00

Writing is ultimately about sitting down and doing it, whether you feel like it or not. These days I've been going through a lot of sad stuff that I just don't think is appropriate to put on here, much though it does help me to process things to write about them here.

But there's been good stuff, too. To wit: a couple of weeks ago I got a phone call at 9:00 PM on a Friday from Dr. Moo. She told me to check my email. Because she'd sent me an essay she wrote to enter a contest to win a flock of sheep. Oxfords, specifically. Those were the sheepy-deeps she'd raised from lambs, and shown, and bred, and eventually scattered their ashes on the grounds of the fair at which they'd won many a ribbon.

Well I looked at that essay and while there was a lot of Dr. Moo in it - mentions of what a nice carcass the Oxford has, dissing of the candy-ass Icelandic sheep she sees at fayuhs in Vermont - she'd buried the lede. I told her so, and suggested a rewrite. She called me later and said she laughed and laughed because I had so many facts wrong in my rewrite. Like she wasn't 9 when she got her first sheep, and it wasn't a boy sheep. Harumph, I thought to myself. That wasn't the point. The point was the story: you fell in love with sheep young, you raised sheep, you grew up, your sheep died, you went to vet school, you married and bought a home and now it's time for sheep again. Yada yada yada.

Anyhoo. Wouldn't you know, not three days later she emails me to tell me she's a finalist in the contest and it was because of my suggested edits.

She ended up coming in second out of 25 but since there was only one prize, she ultimately lost. Which meant I didn't get my wish: name the firstborn lamb Vajessica Bumbawiener. But Moo is buying a ram with enormous woolly balls so there's hope yet.

Fanny pack

2011-06-06T19:45:00.004-04:00

A lady and her cancer-sniffing dog were featured on one of the morning news programs today. Her pooch alerted her to a melanoma. Apparently studies have found that dogs successfully detect cancer 50% of the time.

Researchers think it may have something to do with peoples' breath. Which is a good thing, because I imagine the dog hit rate for bum cancer would be much lower otherwise.

Afternoon coffee break

2011-06-05T11:00:00.003-04:00

Whilst strolling past the LNFU's natural history museum on my way to get coffee I noticed a couple of people standing in front of a tree. I could hear some very distressed-sounding critters in that tree.

As I drew closer, I saw the female red-tail, on a branch low enough to touch, with a wee birdie clasped between her talons. It seems a little odd to eat you own kind, albeit a smaller version. Especially if you try and picture having the Lullaby League for dinner. But much less odd than the bird-eating squirrel I saw on a different tree around the corner.

Anyhoo, the eatee, as it were, looked like a chickadee but as I've never seen chickadees at the LNFU, I think it must have been a sparrow. I didn't want to look too closely because I was worried the little bird was still alive, which is too much nature for this lady.

I went on my way, passing a picnic table of foreign students. When I returned, a few of them had gathered around the hawk. She was finished eating by this point and was just kind of hanging out, watching them watch her. I pointed out her home to them, and told them a bit of her story. I heard her squawk as I walked away.

Squirrelpocalypse

2011-05-25T20:05:00.000-04:00

While walking back to my car on Friday I spied a squirrel in a pine tree. He was eating...something. A pregnant pause later it dawned on me that Mr. Rat-with-a-fluffy-tail was holding the body of a lifeless birdie, its beaked head stuck in his mouth. The squirrel then flipped the bird corpse around with his front paws while doing some sort of nibbling action, but not drawing blood. It was almost like he was eating fleas off it.

He was also looking over at me occasionally. It felt like I caught a dirty old man masturbating in a library. Some version of "ew ick nasty" escaped my mouth and the squirrel moved a bit higher with his dinner in the tree. When I got home I did some internet research and it turns out that yes, this is a thing squirrels do.

As it was the day before the predicted apocalypse I briefly wondered if it was a sign of the Beast. Or perhaps it was the opposite, and the sparrow was being raptured.

When I woke up on Sunday and the world was still here, I saw an albino squirrel I saw racing up the trunk of a different pine tree. The next day, I saw a Norway rat on someone's front lawn while I was walking to the gym. He had a very soft and beautiful-looking coat.

I was a little worried when I saw he hadn't moved on my way back from the gym but when I walked by a third time on my way home from work he was gone, and I was relieved. Because otherwise I would have been compelled to perform a McPolack mercy killing, and I just was not in the mood.

Sunshine

2011-05-23T19:31:00.004-04:00

On Saturday the sun came out for the first time in a week and though I have a deadline and many things to do I could not stay indoors. So I hung out with Walnut and her mom at the cemetery, paying my third visit in as many weeks to the owl babies, who will soon fledge. While there I finally learned that it's the wood thrush that makes the lovely tinkling call I've admired for many years, snuffled some delightful-smelling blossoms, and watched a bumblebee bumble.

Later Walnut joined me and a few folks from the LNFU to watch a fellow LNFUer and her mom beekeep. The first order of business was pouring a box of bees they'd ordered into a hive. They keep their bees on the deck of their condo in quite the densely populated area (though they do have a bit of a backyard). We all stood round and watched and listened and touched and smelled. Then, after part one of the lesson, we walked calmly through a light mist of bees buzzing around their new home and into the condo, closing the door behind us.

Pissing off the new bees' neighbors was the second order of business.

While we watched from behind a row of windows, my fellow LNFUer and her mom gamely pried some frames out from the established hive for us to look at. The bees had been very busy making babies, which is good news for honey production but bad news for us because when there are lots of bee babies, the grownup bees get especially angry. "Listen to the change in pitch of the buzzing" said one of the keepers, in a delightfully plummy voice. Bees buzz differently when they're mad.

Unfortunately, I got to hear the difference up close when one of the angry bees flew inside and got tangled up in my hair. Fortunately, for both me and the bee, the stinger stayed attached to his ass and not stuck in mine.

Then we had tea with honey and everyone got a jar to take home. The bees most likely fed on Walnut's scarlet runner bean flowers, because she lives close by. I don't have any plants for bees to eat but I did care for Walnut's deck garden when she was away, so I like to think I too had some small part in creating the jar of honey that's now on my kitchen table.

Hand dwyer

2011-05-19T18:45:00.002-04:00

Today at the LNFU I was shown yet another secret underground passageway. Woot! I also revisited a loo I found that has the craziest hand dryer I've ever seen. Or should I say cwaziest, as it is made by the guy who said "I just think things should work pwoperwy."

The maker claims this hand dryer does its work in 6 to 10 seconds. I haven't timed it out, but it felt like longer to me. And it's not like I have man hands.

It did do a snappy job on my feet , though, when I stuck 'em in there after a stroll in the rain this afternoon. (I also dried my flippie-floppies.) I couldn't fit my whole foot in because I didn't want to touch the sides of the device, but I am quite grateful to yoga for making me flexible enough to stick it in there in the first place.

Bird is the word again

2011-05-17T20:19:00.002-04:00

Heard from someone in the ornithology department at the LNFU that there was good news on the hawk front. The nesting female red-tail I'd been following was successfully rehabilitated. And apparently when they released her back into the wild, she immediately attacked the chick (heehee) her man had been shacking up with while she was away.

Honor among thieves

2011-05-16T17:55:00.003-04:00

On days when I think I am turning into the Babcia, I remind myself that Little Brother was the first of the McPolack siblings to purchase a chest freezer so that even if my apple didn't fall far from the Polack thrift tree, at least it's got company.

Of course I highly doubt that Little Brother haunts Goodwill with the frequency I do, if at all.

Anyhoo. The Babcia loved the GW and so do I. I took a good 10-year break from the place because it became hip to shop there, which meant there was never anything good to buy. It's no longer that hip.

It is, however, a place where desperate people hang out, and one of them stole my wallet last weekend. This of course sucked. I had to go through quite the process to cancel my credit card. Then, when I went to the police station with Walnut, she filled out the witness section of my police report, and asked me if it was OK to put "whitish" under her ethnicity. I said she should put Ritz, because that's what color cracker she is. Whereas I am more Saltine. Then she lent me 100 dollars and drove me home. What a blessing it is to have Walnut living so close by.

I got a new ID card at the LNFU and began what turned out to be an epically shitty workweek. Before I could get around to ordering a new drivers license, a package from the "loose in the mail" division of the USPS appeared in my mailbox. Inside was my wallet, sans cash but avec everything else, including the $25 Starbucks card I got from the Easter Bunny.

I felt SO grateful to get that wallet back. Grateful and warm about the world. I don't really blame anyone but myself for getting my wallet stolen. I wasn't paying enough attention. It's not that I approve of stealing but that I understand it. Especially living where I do.

Interestingly, in a documentary about pickpockets in India I saw recently, the teenage boy they followed on his "workday" took all the rupees out of the wallet he'd grabbed, and then dropped the wallet with the rest of its contents intact into the mailbox. As India goes, so goes the world, I suppose.

Stinky Cheese

2011-05-11T19:03:00.000-04:00

After our tour of the cemetery, McMumsy, PolackPappy and I stopped at Whole Paycheck (which Pp of course LOVED). We got some food and saw some more twitchers. These ones were vibrating in the direction of a hawk family nesting across the street.

Later, while drinking coffee and eating stilton, Pp waxed poetic about this French mountain sheep cheese that gets made over the course of a day and has ash in the middle that he used to buy when he visited Dr. Moo. It smelled so bad she wouldn't let him keep it in the house. Which is pretty ripe given the sort of aroma that wafts off Dr. Moo herself at the end of a busy day.

Anyhoo, Pp couldn't remember the name of the cheese. Suddenly Mm piped up, in her best French accent, what she thought it was: "diarrhea du shawn-say". Shawn-say as in Chauncey the Wonder Corgi. Diarrhea as in that's what he had last week because Dr. Moo's hill people hick hound dog gave him hookworm.

Unwed & childless

2011-05-11T18:17:00.000-04:00

When you are see above on Mother's Day and someone has stolen your wallet, and the grandchildren are unavailable, sometimes you get lucky and your mother comes to you. And so it was that McMumsy and PolackPappy drove down from the woods and picked me up for a trip to the Mount Auburn cemetery to see some super-cute great horned owl babies and some super-dead famous peoples' graves and mausoleums, and also sniff lilacs and crabapple blossoms and generally revel in the beauty of nature.

There was an owl pellet under glass at the visitors center, where a guide helpfully traced the quickest route to the home of the producer of that pellet. As we were heading out the door, my parents ran into the people who'd been sitting behind them at church that morning, an entire state away. In another curious coincidence, the husband of the couple had worked at Audobon for many years and he had a more technical term for my rhymed "bird nerds": twitchers.

There were some serious twitchers by the owls nest, including an older lady with a well-stuffed, many-pocketed vest, but what's nice about weirdos who watch birds is that they're friendly and will gladly let you look through their fancy spotting scopes and answer your questions. Unlike people who own birds, who in my experience tend to be much more socially awkward weirdos.

There are great photos of the bird babies here. Also, check out what an optimist (as Pp rightly noted) Isabella Stewart Gardner was.

Pp and I climbed to the top of a tower and surveyed the city beyond. Later Mm showed up, despite her fear of heights, and pointed out the Mormon temple off in the distance. We McPolacks are quite fascinated by Mormons. I am not sure why, but it's always nice to have a variety of common interests.

You're welcome

2011-05-05T21:11:00.007-04:00

Yesterday at lab meeting I learned about a special symbiotic relationship between flora and fauna. The flora is a pitcher plant. The fauna is a shrew. The picture shown was of a sheepish-looking shrew nestled so perfectly inside the pitcher plant that it seemed to be designed for him, and in fact it may have been.

Also I nearly peed myself laughing because here's how the symbiotic relationship works: The shrew hangs out atop the bowl of the pitcher plant, which produces sugary goo for him to enjoy. And digest. Ahem.

And then he craps di-rect-ly into the bowl of the pitcher plant, which is conveniently located below his poo-hole. And his poo helps the pitcher plant grow.

The lecture included a really great picture which you can see here. Note how embarrassed shrew looks. It's got a bit of that astronaut diaper feel.

On an unrelated note, there's this.

Craft night

2011-05-02T09:58:00.003-04:00

Thanks to my friend Amy's plugged-in journo husband who called her the second he heard, I was able to watch the reaction to news of Osama bin Laden's death as it unfolded. I was unimpressed with the drunken frat boys running around outside the gates of the White House, but thanks to cable TV, I had eight news outlets to pick from. Whenever the frat boys showed up, I changed the channel.

Sunday evening went from sitting at my kitchen table amongst a group of women making tissue-paper flowers, knitting sweaters, caging beads, felting puffins, and eating ginger muffins to sitting in my living room with some of those same women, watching history happen.

Mustydustyfusty

2011-04-26T19:59:00.002-04:00

Went on a tour of a museum attic at the LNFU on Saturday.

It was amazing.

Even though it's in the process of being emptied out-which meant I missed out on a roomful of hippo skulls and a couple of whale skeletons, among other items-there was still enough stuff in there to thrill. And the atmosphere was of course spot-on: eaves; rafters; lath and plaster; wooden staircases to trapdoors in the roof; the original roof of one building hidden beneath the one created when a new building was tacked on.

Also: dust, lots of dust. Trunks covered in stickers from foreign lands and filled with the ephemera of long-dead explorers. A motorcycle. A giraffe head and neck mounted moose-style. A deflated elephant (really an elephant skin) under a table with one meat-and-boneless but still toenailed elephant foot on top. A bequeathed collection of antlers lining the walls and floor of a room off the room containing enormous plaster-cast vertebrae. A wall of taxidermied guinea pigs. A stuffed-sea-creature-section which included a dolphin, a walrus (plus some whiskery, tusky mounted walrus heads) and a beautiful manatee whose knobby schnoz was more sawdust than skin, owing to the ravages of time.

Even the staircase we took to get up to the attic was beautiful: white-painted wobbly wrought iron. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh boy ohboyohboy do I want to go back up there. I'm hoping that somehow the sheer force of my love for that space will cause someone to pull me from my current duties for a time and make me chief trunk-sifter.

I could tell who my fellow attic geeks were when, all of a sudden it seemed, the lights went out. The tour was over. If I'd had a flashlight with me I might have just hid behind a stuffed something-or-other and continued exploring. Luckily a couple of folks had cell phones, though, and they used their glowing screens to lead us back to the light of day.

Arsenal

2011-04-18T19:23:00.005-04:00

I had a deadline last week for a new client and it took me much longer than anticipated to silence my inner critic. Also, the subject matter was tricky. Also also, it was my first attempt at balancing a 4x30 workweek with writing. I learned that when I'm on deadline I need more than four hours, which was all I had left in me at the end of working nine hours when you factor in the commute, to get through a draft. I need time to sit away from the draft and there's no space in four hours to do it.

This is all my way of explaining why I've disappeared from the blog yet again. But now I'm back! And this is despite a new writing assignment, plus a bunch of editorial work, and still the 4x30 at the LNFU.

Life has of course continued to happen, although as time passes I feel in some ways as though it is passing me by. I'm not sure what to do about this other than put it out there that I'm having such feelings.

Annnnnnnnnnyhoo, in other news, the bird at the LNFU was hit by a car, it turns out, and so she won't be back anytime soon, although she was brought to a wildlife rescue organization and is recuperating. In yet other news, on Friday I listened to a presentation on anal gland weaponry and learned much. For example: weaponry-it includes swords. Also guns. Also, anal glands.

Your present for reading all the way to the end is news that is both anal and ornithological: PolackPappy got me a dozen fresh, some-of-them-poo-speckled eggs! While they aren't from hens owned by backsliding Irish alcoholics, they are delicious.

Bird no longer the word

2011-04-07T17:12:00.003-04:00

I noticed over the past couple of days that the momma bird at the LNFU nest was spending more and more time with her fluffy bum not resting atop her future children. Last night around 5 as I was walking nearby I saw/heard both birdie parents soaring and calling overhead. Since I haven't had time to research nesting habits I thought this might mean I didn't need to worry.

To be honest, I don't need to worry about wild birds regardless of the situation. But what can I say? I love me some critters.

Sadly, it looks as though the nest and its clutch of three eggs was abandoned. I don't know anything else at this point but someone in the ornithology department did provide a link to a fascinating eagle-cam which, when I last checked, had some adorable birdie action

Mammals!

2011-04-05T18:48:00.002-04:00

I ended up in the coolest place yet at the LNFU today when, while wandering an upper floor in search of a photocopier, I ended up in the mammal area. There were bags of disinfecting hides; enormous skulls with even more enormous horns and antlers stored in cabinets, on cabinets, hanging on the wall, and laying on the floor; circular silver radiators; a great big birdie nest on a dais; and some whale parts several feet taller than me.

It can be hard to find a window from which to get one's bearing while wandering the halls of the LNFU; this, compounded with my nonexistent sense of direction, can mean it takes me a long time to get anywhere. I eventually found the photocopier, but not before finding three mysterious staircases that I hope one day to have either the courage or the permission to ascend.

Tea at three

2011-04-04T10:54:00.002-04:00

Went to an annual tea in the city on Saturday afternoon and was seated next to an absolutely delightful woman in her 70s who is as sweetly pretty on the outside as she is on the inside. She blindsided our end of the table when, while talking about her tough year, mentioned that, well, her youngest son had never gotten over the death of her husband, and was upset about her decision to sell the family home and move to a retirement complex, so he committed suicide, and she was the one to find the body.

And I put my hand on her arm and the other women murmured lovely, supportive things. And I was even more impressed by the energy she had about her. I'm lucky to have gotten to spend time with someone so smart and resilient.

After tea, my friend A and I walked to the Paulist Center for a little hippie Catholic mass. I'd promised her liturgical dance, and we didn't get liturgical dance, but we did get an adult baptism, along with a church full of engaged couples doing Pre-Cana.

Sunday evening I went to a crafts group, which is just like book group, but swap the novels for knitting, origami, and sewing. It was nifty.

And now, thanks to another writing assignment that I'm avoiding, I'm updating the blog. Yay for me!

Bird is the word

2011-03-30T18:24:00.002-04:00

While catching up on online local news, I discovered pictures of a pair of red-tailed hawks nesting very close to where I work at the LNFU. Then I did a bit more research and found out some fellow nerdy-nature watchers had set up a hawk-cam. (I highly, highly recommend reading all the way to the end of the hawk-cam article.)

Earlier today I caught a glimpse of momma hawk setting on her eggs, and occasionally redecorating by moving branches around with her beak. I had an immediate feeling of lurv for her, mainly because she reminds me of my kitty, who has great big green eyes and likes to wiggle her bum around while she's settling in to her own "nest" - a wicker basket with soft bedding inside.

This is the yoga my fatha should be doin.

2011-03-28T11:06:00.000-04:00

Elephantitis

2011-03-22T19:08:00.003-04:00

I recently commented to a fellow LNFU employee that after working there for a year, I had decided to take my relationship with the institution to the next level. I am no longer just sleeping with the LNFU. I am letting it be my boyfriend.

Today I roamed newer hallways in search of bulletin boards for posting, and to familiarize myself with a broader geographical area. I got to somewhere I'd been before, but via a different path, one that included a sweet old elevator with a door that you have to open yourself.

Later, while climbing a back staircase and trying my new set of keys in what turned out to be the wrong door, I happened upon the biggest taxidermied elephant head I've ever seen. The placard said it's a loaner, but my research suggests its owner shot it in the second decade of the last century so I doubt he's going to ask for it back. I felt pretty terrible for the elephant. Based on the size of the head, that was one spectacularly enormous elephant. I hope he went out in a blaze of glory.

Lies your children tell me

2011-03-20T10:25:00.002-04:00

I have always been a bit gullible. Despite my asshole tendencies, and the world's asshole tendencies, I still have a gooey caramel-filled heart that wants to believe the best about people. Including that people aren't going to lie to me in order to amuse themselves.

Now I am not saying that this is the reason the children of friends tell me tall tales, because I just don't think their little psyches are developed enough for it, but I do find it curious that when little kids get around me, they start making shit up. Just yesterday I was sitting next to Max, who is 3. And Jewish. (The reason for noting this will be apparent momentarily.) He was telling me all about his day, and showing me the knitted kitten with mittens he'd gotten at preschool. Our conversation continued, and before you know it he was telling me, Al-Gore-like, that he invented eggnog.

Oh, really?

The other interesting piece of being lied to by little kids is that if I try making stuff up, they immediately call me on it. And look at me with pity. "Oh, McPolack," they seem to be saying, "Nobody eats helicopter pie. There's no such thing as helicopter pie, sad and dimwitted blond lady."

Sooooooooooooooooooo...

2011-03-15T18:18:00.002-04:00

Went to a couple of museums this past weekend with a couple of friends. On Friday it was the Museum of Science with H. At one point we happened upon an older gentleman inflating sheep lungs with a hand pump. The lungs were connected to a sheep heart but that was all the sheep there was. H ably answered a question or two about the lungs, and I just managed to stop myself from bragging about her hands-on rib spreader experience.

I asked where the rest of the sheep was and was told it was on its way to somebody's dinner plate. Then someone brought up haggis, and I looked around and realized H and I were in a coffee klatch of sorts with a group of older male volunteers. They started talking about how factory-made haggis works, and one of them tried to gross me out by telling me hot dogs have lungs in them. Didn't work. H and I soon moved on to try and reassemble a supine plastic torso with removable innards and interchangeable genitalia. Next we watched a hip replacement surgery video. Surprisingly to me, this skeeved H out. I mentioned how creepily robotic it seemed to put metal pins and parts into flesh and bone, and this is what gave H the heebie-jeebies. It's interesting to learn what will do that to a person, especially a person who has spread another person's torso apart to peer inside at a beating heart.

Later I was surprised at my own reaction to a museum video, of a home birth in Mexico. It's one of four videos(fetal growth/c-section/va-jay-jay-ginal/home birth) in the museum's learnin' 'bout babies area. The movies are sort of hidden in this column in the center of the exhibit, and there are warnings that they show "actual human birth" but in my opinion (and that I had this opinion is what surprised me, given my hippie tendencies) they may have wanted to provide a bit more detail about what a person might see in that live birth. Especially if they choose the home birth option. Because what you get with that option is SERIOUS hippie. As in, Japanese sculptor married to Mexican lady, living on farm in Mexico, labor and delivery filmed by grampa, and by the end nearly everybody (not including gramps, but including two young boys) is nudie-caboodie in a dirty bathtub.

Prior to hopping in the tub, the mother announced in a voice-over that she was hungry enough, while in labor, to eat "three plates of rice and beans."

YUCK.

Lotso day

2011-03-09T22:24:00.002-05:00

Much busyness and newness today:
*Tried out Ash Wednesday service at LNFU as it was convenient length-, location-, and time-wise. Not too many people were there. Keep forgetting I went to a Catholic college, which naturally meant there were more people at church. Anyhoo, this was a nondenominational service, which was more up my alley, because while I like me some Jesus, I prefer Him without a side of patriarchy and gay bashing.

*Attempted to walk from LNFU to BH, where adorable familial babies live. Got lost almost immediately, got rerouted by parking cop who I think I weirded out with my chattiness and I know I shocked with the length of my walk. Later on in walk, randomly ran into landlord. Shortly thereafter, looked at my watch, realized the time, and hopped on the subway.

*Was sitting on subway heading home trying not to cry owing to PMS etc. when down sat the lady from the LNFU who rightly questioned what I was doing at the LNFU when first we met. Which would be a rainy day when my hair looked crazier than usual, one of my earrings was half hanging out of my ear, my glasses were more than likely half-tilted on my face, and I had a bunch of books shoved underneath my jacket to protect them from getting wet. She is southern and to a Yankee like me it is especially bizarre to be questioned suspiciously in a honeyed voice. Anyhoo, we chatted a bit, and she was the last in a long line of people today who helped me feel less alone without their knowing it.

So that was interesting

2011-03-08T20:33:00.002-05:00

Today I stood by Nabokov's desk at the LNFU, looking out the very same window he once did. There was a picture of him seated at the desk by the window, on the wall next to the desk by the window.

The desk itself looked like a set piece from the movie 9 to 5, which is troubling as it means my pictorial timeline of office furniture from the 1940s on is a skosh off, at least.

I did not think until later to ask if I could take a peek at Nabokov's cabinet of butterfly peen.

Poop chute

2011-03-07T18:25:00.002-05:00

Based on the mostly Maine Coon kitty fur shedding index (a sister-from-another-mister to groundhog replacement Ethel), spring is on the way! I've brushed mountains of fur out of my girl's coat, in the hopes of avoiding a certain digestive issue that is awkward for both me and Daphne-Moon the beautiful, soft, fluffy, bitchy princess-cat.

Well I didn't brush hard enough. When I came home from work today I noticed a small poo on the rug...then looked over and noticed a much larger poo sticking straight out of a certain gray lady's you-know-where.

Ah me.

I donned a pair of food-prep gloves (disposable, single-use food-prep gloves, thank you very much) and took care of the problem. The Daphs of course yowled at me but later I saw her looking at me with affection because while there are certainly pleasanter testaments of love and devotion than pulling a poo-covered hairball out of someone's bum, there aren't many stronger ones.

Davos Schmavos

2011-02-27T17:47:00.002-05:00

I've been transcribing some interesting things lately, including an interview with a major (not that I've ever heard of him but then I don't follow these things that closely) Wall Street player. I garnered the major bit from listening to him piss and moan about appearing demonized (my words) on the cover of a major (that I have heard of) newspaper.

He also talked about Davos, which is where the World Economic Forum is held, and four months ago I was in Davos, in a small parking lot across from a restaurant, with Cousin B, as he looked at directions.

And let me tell you something, people: Davos doesn't look like much. At least not in rainy September twilight from the passenger seat of a German automobile. I distinctly remember thinking "Is this it?" followed by "I don't get it."

Of course I blame the media for my overinflated view of a tiny mountain town. But if you think about it, it makes perfect sense: most of the wealth and power in the world is concentrated amongst a very small number of people given the size of the overall population and the amount of overall currency. Is it any wonder that they would congregate in a tiny town?

They are both things which can seem enormous and shiny from afar but which in reality are small and dank.

Targrocery

2011-02-25T20:10:00.002-05:00

This afternoon, because I needed to get out of the house and still had a 25-dollar Amex gift card, I drove Phyllis the bitchin' Honda over to Watahtown, where there's an F-21, an F's-B, and a Marshalls.

And also a Targrocery, but more on that in a bit.

I have been visiting the baby section of every store I go into lately, looking for outfits for the babies in my life. But I can never find anything, because baby outfits these days suck. Where are the sweet rompers with the snap-crotches, or the dresses with the ruffle-bum diaper covers? Instead there are leggings. Which are going to give any baby worth his salt (i.e., a fat baby) chub rub. Blech. Then to go with the leggings will be shirts that say things like "cutie" on them. Double blech. If you are a cute baby, it goes without saying. If you have to declare your good looks on your shirtfront, you're probably a troll.

Anyhoo, I bought not one thing on my trip, despite spending three hours wandering about. I bought nothing for babies and nothing for me. I'm not feeling very confident about my figure or my hair or my skin. I think I might kind of look like shit. I certainly feel like shit. But I soldier on.

Today that soldiering included a march through a Target I haven't been to in years, it turns out, since when I asked the girl at the in-Target Starbucks when the in-Target Starbucks was born she said 2009. OK then. This Target also has a grocery store, like a super W-maht. When did that happen? It was all very strange, a bit Lion Witch Wardrobe in that I was walking through a familiar place full of clothes and all of a sudden I was somewhere entirely new and unexpected, only instead of Narnia it was a Targrocery store which sold Tarcupcakes and Tarmadelines and frozen Tarcrabrangoons.

The other thing new about this Target is that it no longer smelled occasionally like farts. Because, and this is why I stopped going to this Target years ago, you might be looking at hand lotion or maybe you're checking out undershirts when all of a sudden you smell something and that something is a nasty Masshole fart.

PolackPappy and the incredible edible egg

2011-02-22T19:19:00.002-05:00

On my last visit to the McPolack homestead PP gave me a dozen eggs. But these were no ordinary eggs. They came from 18 hens owned by members of an Irish Catholic family populated by alcoholics whose taste for booze had led them to backslide from a life of education and class into one where toothlessness is deemed a-ok. There are also some sober alkies in said family, and Pp was attending a birthday party for one of them. The eggs were, I suppose, the swag.

Anyhoo, these were by far the best eggs I have ever eaten in my entire life. The. Best. And I have eaten mannnnnnnnnnny eggs. I was bragging about these eggs to OSB this weekend, and she showed me her eggs, which come from happy hens near where she lives, and were different sizes, much like my Irish alcoholic eggs. But when I scrambled a bunch of them up, while they were tasty, they weren't the same.

Could it have been due to the lack of poo smears on OSB's dozen? Because some of my eggs had chicken poo smears on 'em.

Well, yes, at least according to the PolackPappy Egg Bureau. When I asked Pp last night about the difference in taste, he said that even grade-A eggs can be up to six weeks old. Whereas the eggs he gave me had "just slid out a chicken asshole that morning, covered in slime. It's the freshness. No, wait, it's the slime."

Hork hork

2011-02-21T17:54:00.002-05:00

The NY Times sez kids these days aren't blogging anymore, which given my lack of blogging lately makes me feel young again. As does the fact that I caught a nasty sick (yellow goo is slowly settling into my chest) from a two-year-old this weekend. Her parents didn't catch it but her five-year-old sister did.

When I called their mom to yell at her, I hollered "You made auntie McP sick!" as soon as I heard someone pick up on the other end. Of course I'd dialed the wrong number, but the older-sounding lady who answered was quite gracious.

Anyhoo, I wore fairy wings and put sneakers on the front feet and slippers on the back feet of a pony this weekend. For grown-up time I snowshoed Saturday and walked Sunday. Then it was back to kiddo time, where I scrambled some eggs while singing shake your booty, hooty hooty, and shook my booty. The two-year-old shook her booty too. The five-year old busied herself with smacking my shaking booty, one cheek after another and then back to the first, laughing all the while.

Boy kitty

2011-02-15T17:38:00.003-05:00

On Sunday I joined Dr. Moo and the four-year-old child of a family friend who's undergoing treatment for breast cancer. The kiddo, who we'll call meowmeow, needed to burn off some steam, so we went to a kiddo museum. As the only child of a single mom, said kiddo is very good at playing by himself, even while navigating a crush of other shorties in the big ole shorty habitrail that's suspended from the ceiling of the kiddo museum.

(While meowmeow was clambering about in a separate museum crawlspace, Moo and I were giggling at an adorable pink-cheeked tubby little fellow who was running around yelling "I'm a big boy! I'm a big boy!")

It turned out meowmeow's momma wasn't feeling well enough to go out to an evening meeting, so Dr. Moo and meowmeow stopped by my place post-museum to meet my kitty. The Daphs is not known for her social skills, and she made her scariest-sounding yowly noises at meowmeow. He immediately informed me "I don't mind" and then gamely sniffed the dry cat chow I poured into a bowl for him. Later, he crawled down the hall to check out where kitties go to the bathroom, and then grabbed a couple of stuffed kitties from my bedroom, then sat with them in a circle that also included my live kitty.

When he left I gave him a scratch on the head and a catnip toy. He tried to convince Dr. Moo to let him crawl on all fours down the fire escape, but Dr. Moo smartly told him real kitties would be scared of fire escapes, so he let her carry him to his travel box (aka booster seat) in the car.

Birthday Daisy

2011-02-12T20:47:00.002-05:00

I went to the sixth birthday party, grownup version (though this year there is no kid version since D is being taken on a mom-and-daughter trip to Disney), of my friend A's daughter Daisy. I have known Daisy since she was in utero, and actually lived with her mom and dad during that time. She was born during the last terrible winter we had; I remember how well her Mom maneuvered a Subaru through giant snowbanks, and how we would both get all wrapped up in scarves and hats and coats before driving into Cambridge, where we both worked.

Six is such a nice age for a girl. Daisy had on a fantastic polka-dotted party dress complete with crinoline. Plus shiny pink patent-leather shoes, pink sweater, and awesome pink-and-white birthday cake party hat. When I arrived she asked me, very grown-up-like, if I was still doing yoga. Then she showed me her yoga pose, which was the one where you sit with the soles of your feet pressed together, and the palms of your hands pressed together at your heart.

Then we played with her Zhu Zhu pets pizza play set, the pizza restaurant apparently a cover for a rock-star hamster with a pink and black Mohawk. Daisy informed me that nobody liked the pizza because of the name of the restaurant. I told her maybe the real reason nobody liked the pizza was because it was full of hamster hair.

Later we clasped hands and spun in circles in front of her pile of birthday gifts. Then, because it was fun, we did it again.

I gave her a small but important gift: her very first bottle of nail polish. It was the sweetest pinkest sparkliest one in the store. And while I am all for feminism -- and many of Daisy's presents were science-themed -- I think it is possible to be powerful and smart and pink and sparkly all at the same time.

Clif Garboden

2011-02-11T20:32:00.002-05:00

Found out some sad news in my travels on the Web today. I was introduced to Clif by one of my bosses at the alternative newspaper I worked at in Vermont, and though I doubt he would even remember me, I remember him. In the process of trying to figure myself out, I went on a few interviews at the BP, all of which arose from my initial conversation with Clif. In that conversation, he treated me, a very young woman in many more ways than age, with a lot of respect and honesty.

And what's key about the latter is that while he had a no-bullshit approach, he wasn't a jerk about it. There are people in the world who seem to need to smack other people in the face with the truth with a two-by-four -- they're doing it out of aggression. And they judge. Clif just told the truth.

I am lucky to have known him.

Another fun bird of prey story...

2011-02-09T17:43:00.003-05:00

I like that this owl, though starving, was limiting itself to only one chicken head a day. Biologists nab owl taking heads off chickens

But I do feel bad for the chickens.

Hawk on Deck

2011-02-08T21:53:00.002-05:00

This story is cool for two reasons. The first is obvious - imagine finding a hawk! On your fire escape!

The second may be less so, depending on your taste in puppet variety shows.

Pudding

2011-02-07T18:48:00.003-05:00

The rice pudding turned out pretty well. I'm very close with the proportions I picked, and I managed not to burn it on the bottom, which is one thing that used to annoy me about the Babcia's rice pudding. I have to say, though, I'm not one for "improving" on recipes - it drives me crazy when people have to put their stink all over everything.

Anyhoo, this weekend I cooked a lot of sausage, and also felt trapped. The sausage was for a friend and then for a bunch of homeless men. The trapped feeling came from this endless winter. There was heavy equipment on my street for 12 hours on Saturday, removing snow. This was much-needed and I was very grateful, but I couldn't really go anywhere in my car. Then when I woke up on Sunday (after spending an hour venting my frustration by hacking at the sidewalk ice with the crap-ass snow shovel the landlord provided) the entire driveway was three inches thick with ice. I decided to go to yoga after having not gone to yoga for more than a month because I haven't any money, but I stupidly went out the side door instead of the front and soon found myself having to crouch down on my haunches and slide to the bottom of the driveway.

Some guy walking down the street laughed at me and then said I should probably remove the ice. Really? Thanks, asshole.

As you can see, I was in desperate need of yoga.

Later, I meditated, using an online meditation timer, but the "chime" they used to let you know when your time's up was a really loud gong. It was like a fat Japanese guy in a diaper crept up next to me while I was sitting, held his breath, swung his mallet, and "GOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGG!"

Psst

2011-02-03T20:42:00.002-05:00

Sometimes I think the Babcia is hanging around the edges of purgatory, whispering things in peoples' ears like Milquetoast the cockroach. Example one: Polackpappy has purchased a chest freezer much like the chest freezer the Babcia used to keep on her porch. I have not peeked inside Pp's cold storage, but I imagine that like the Babcia's it contains freezer-burnt ice cream, and fish sticks.

To be fair, when I was a kid and Babcia was still alive, PP kept a chest freezer with fish sticks in it in the barn. But that was over 20 years ago.

While the Babcia has been saying "Jasiu, stock up on Klondike bars!" to Pp, she's been telling me to make rice pudding. Which I've been avoiding, because it involves purchasing stuff I normally don't: white rice and whole milk. And because she didn't write down the recipe.

She did show me how to make it once. This involved me trailing her as she cooked up a bunch of rice, dumped it in the rice-pudding dish, sprinkled raisins on top, put milkeggssugarnutmeg in a blender and whirred it, poured that over the rice/raisin mixture, and baked until the custard set.

On my first attempt I used jasmine rice and not enough custard. It wasn't any good. I had to throw it all out. Which made me feel like I was lighting a ten-dollar bill on fire.

Tonight I decided to try again. I used Uncle Ben's this time - only to discover it had worms in it. Worms that were squirming after I'd cooked the rice.

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeccccccccchhhhhhhh.

Then I discovered I didn't have raisins or nutmeg. But I did have a surfeit of eggs AND a surfeit of nervous energy so I tossed out the Uncle Ben's and the worms, washed everything, and tried again.

I had to use jasmine rice and craisins, so it won't be authentic. I went for a 1-cup-dry-rice/1-pint-whole-milk/half-cup-sugar/six-eggs ratio and didn't measure the craisins. The custard set, and it looks more Babcia-y. It's cooling on the counter right now. I'll let you know how it tastes later.

Ethel the barn kitty vs. a groundhog

2011-02-01T20:12:00.003-05:00

I visited the McPolack homestead this weekend and took this photo of Ethel the barn kitty, who is FRIGGING HUGE with fur. She is a beast. She is the abominable snow-kitty. I tried to capture her ginormous fluffiness from several angles; this one seemed to be the best.

I think she makes a fine weather forecaster and groundhog replacement. Only instead of checking whether she sees her shadow, the way you tell the tenor of winter is by the length and thickness of her fur.

Well, people, when it comes to the rest of this winter, based on the Ethel indicator, I've got two words for you: we're fucked.

Quiet time

2011-01-30T08:59:00.002-05:00

I've been neglecting this blog as of late, mostly because I can't get out of my own way when it comes to my writing. I think about what I want to write, then I think about how it sounds, then I think about what the three people who actually read this will think. And then I'm stuck.

Sooooooooo...doing my best to forget the audience is the new plan.

On Friday I took the subway in to the MFA for my second visit to the new wing. I met my friend H there and we made our way through painting after painting of pink-cheeked, small-nosed crackahs that look a whole lot like our friend A. A is descended from Mayflower riders on one side, and the Dutch who settled New York on the other. Man is that gene pool strong.

After a disappointing lunch of brown salad and dry cheese at the new cafe, H and I retired to the basement sampler room to chat. The museum was pretty empty, probably owing to it being a weekday in winter, and this made it feel like we were sitting in someone's living room. It was lovely. I especially liked being in a room filled with the works of women, whom I'm sure would have been very happy to see how far the fairer sex has come.

H had to leave early because she had a bad headache. After walking her out, I headed back down to the basement and sat under the beams of an ancient (for this part of the world) house and used the museum's free wifi to map out a walking route to Whole Paycheck, because I was all out of broccoli and oranges.

Underground

2011-01-19T20:46:00.002-05:00

I discovered another secret passageway at the LNFU while trying to make my way back from one office to another, after having been shown a different path that required unlocking a door for which I do not have a key.

Yet.

Anyhoo, I decided to try an unmarked, unassuming door and ended up in an anteroom which led to what I think must be a paleontologist's lab given the various and sundry bones scattered about. There was a woman working in a small room off to the right who didn't even notice me, but I decided to tell her who I was and why I was there.

(When I was younger I might not have but these days I hardly do any exploring at all without permission. I just have this sense that I'm in a place where I have the wrong amount of wrinkles to get away with things. Although I was talked into walking right up to a giant white windmill on the North Shore on Sunday, and then tilting at it, by Walnut.)

The woman wasn't super-welcoming but she did show me how to get where I needed to go, which involved going in the basement, and through a hall lined on one side with what looked to be corals and other bone-y things from the sea. The other side was taken up with wooden cabinets, each with a handwritten tag reading "unknown fish" and said fish's country of origin.

In what I am discovering is part and parcel for the LNFU,when I opened the door at the other end of the fishie room I ended up in a completely different space, in feel, decor, and century. This time it was an office, complete with industrial carpeting and conference-room-style furniture.

It bloomed!

2011-01-13T19:11:00.005-05:00

My magic crystal garden looks pretty nifty! I wonder if any critters from McPolackland will come by to visit...

...oh wow, it's Veronica the vomiting cow! She looks thirsty.

After Veronica left, Rizzo from the Muppets stopped by. He's in town visiting relatives.

Garden

2011-01-12T17:58:00.003-05:00

Boy did it snow today. I got woken up by some thundersnow at around 5 AM. Normally I am woken up by a thundercat, but she was sleeping peacefully in a blankie nook next to me.

In a true shocking shocker, the landlord's kid, who moved into the lovely new and possibly illegal basement apartment built for him, got the old snowblower to work and he snowblew (hee hee) the entire driveway.

Twice.

There is a God in heaven after all. I helped out by shoveling off and out all the cars and one set of steps; later, Walnut stopped by and we pushed the landlord's kid's car out of the snow for him. Then, since today is Walnut's birthday, I gave her a sweet card I'd made this morning, plus some presents. And then she gave me some presents! Including this magic garden, which I just planted. I have wanted one of these things since I was in elementary school and I'd see them in grade-school-teacher McMumsy's educational toy catalogue. It's supposed to grow in 10 hours; I'll post pictures of what comes up.

coinkydink

2011-01-10T18:09:00.003-05:00

Sooooooooo on New Years Day I decided to walk over and pay a visit to my five-year-old friend Daisy and her thirtysomething momma A. While on my way I hesitated briefly in front of a clothing store window, and as I was about to pick my way over a big puddle of weirdly-colored vomit a man came stumbling out of the store towards me with his arms outstretched.

He couldn't have looked more homeless if he tried: unshaven, shabby clothes, all his teeth broken off at the roots. His speech was even garbled; I remember hearing "raaahhhrrrrrrr" as he made his way towards me.

Turns out he was trying to lean in for a kiss. And he was mentally handicapped. So I felt a little guilty for rebuffing him, and I let him take my hand and kiss it and we wished each other Happy New Year. Then he introduced himself to me as "Steven" and I told him my name. He put the palm of his hand on my cheek and said god bless you and I said god bless you and went on my way.

Fast-forward to this past Friday morning. Walnut and I are making our way to breakfast in a different part of town, and I am telling her all about my New Year's kiss from Steven, when the door of the dry-cleaning place next to the cafe we're about to walk into opens up and a plastic spoon comes flying out, and lands on the sidewalk. I look through the glass door from whence the spoon came and hey! It's Steven! I excitedly point this out to Walnut.

"Bit of a litterbug," Walnut remarked.

Indeed.

If I had balls, EMS could suck them

2011-01-04T20:22:00.003-05:00

KW, she of the very extended French vacation, is in town, and I met her for tea and pastries today near the LNFU. She was appropriately excited about the things I showed her at the LNFU, including the super-great trash can from the 50s, the rickety staircase, the gleaming laboratory, and the mushroom display. It felt good to have someone totally geek out over the same things I do.

A couple of days ago at the LNFU I took a mandatory tour of the stacks of one of the LNFU's non-circulating libraries. I felt terrified and exhilarated because I was sharing space-and not a very big space, considering-with one hundred million dollars worth of books. Then that night before bed I read an article about the library at the Vatican and it was grand.

Anyhoo, I have been having a LOT of trouble ignoring the supreme court justice who has built a lean-to on my soul. I judge myself all day long. I can't lose myself in writing, for all the gavel-banging.

(Regarding the title: the Eastern Mountain Sports in Harvard Square has one incompetent self-aggrandizing little weasel working there; I tried to return some yoga pants today and had an unfortunate encounter with him. I shan't be shopping there again.)

Don't fear the reaper

2010-12-28T13:31:00.002-05:00

Well I've been quiet more than chatty in a lot of areas of my life these days, this blog included. It's mainly due to my own icky feelings, ones which I hoped would just go away on their own but which, as it turns out, I need to air in order to deal with.

After a much briefer pity party than usual, I spent the rest of the time the sun was up on Christmas day walking in the woods with my new binoculars and the animal tracks field guide I bought at the remaindered bookstore. I ended up using the former more than the latter and found the expected squirrel and deer tracks, but also a nice set of male turkey tracks, and what was possibly a critter from the weasel family.

Now I find myself wanting to go the ocean to look at what the tide brought in post-blizzard but unlike walking in the woods I don't like being alone on the beach, and I'm not sure why. I miss KBH especially as I have fond memories of walking Rye beach in NH post-hurricane several moons ago and finding all sorts of neat stuff, including an incredibly ugly googly-eyed fish that KBH seriously considered bringing in to show her students.

Anyhoo. Back to Christmas. After walking in the woods, I rode shotgun beside PolackPappy in the dress Volvo out to my hometown, where we visited his one-good-eyed fisherman friend Dennis the Menace and his swell wife. (Pp has started delivering them leftover roast beast and other treats from our Xmas Eve festivities because they're alone on 12/25 and they like the company and the food.)

While Pp loaded the trunk with firewood, Mrs. D the M politely answered my questions about what it was like spending 70-plus years in our shared hometown, and then bemoaned the "people from South Boston" that had moved in in the last 30 or so years. (Pp is one of those "people" but he was a real trendsetter, showing up 40 years ago.) "They just don't understand country living," she said, as she rocked in her chair in front of the hearth her husband built by hand.

By country living she meant that sometimes - whether to eat them or to put the kibosh on things - you had to shoot animals, or catch them in traps and then shoot them. I totally got what she was saying. And I felt lucky to have had a childhood where I learned those things, followed by an early adulthood where I've been taught city lessons.

Then she told me the guy from the fire department who'd ridden around the entire town every Christmas Eve on the back of an alarm-blaring fire truck shouting "Merry Christmas!" through a bullhorn had felt ill this past fall, gone to the hospital, and died a few days later, and wasn't that a great way to go. Nice and fast, and neat. She also shared that her sister, who was the town librarian (though I don't remember her) and she hadn't spoken in 40 years, and she couldn't exactly remember why.

Before Pp and I headed back to the McPolack homestead, D the M showed me the blood-and-fur speckled sawed-off skull slice with antlers from one of the bucks he shot this year. The antlers were both snapped off almost completely owing to the buck having been in a heck of a fight at some point.

Goats are beavers too

2010-12-20T19:18:00.004-05:00

Yesterday was the annual McFamily Christmas extravaganza and it did not disappoint. Highlights included R, who is just shy of two months old, falling asleep in my arms while clutching my dress in one of his wee fists, and Uncle D, who is a few years shy of 80, telling me about how he narrowly escaped injury this fall in the woods behind his house.

He'd been working his way through what turned out to be 18 cords of firewood, all culled from his big backyard, when he heard a cracking sound. Suddenly a ginormous tree came crashing down too close for comfort! Once Uncle D recovered from the shock he noticed nibble marks around a lot of tree trunks. It was the goats! Though they get milked in the kitchen, they are wild beasts at heart.

Natural high

2010-12-15T16:49:00.002-05:00

Today at the LNFU I tried to figure out if I could get from point A to point B by cutting through a couple of buildings. I went up some stairs and around some corners and up some more stairs and through some doors and I asked a Chinese guy if he knew the way but he said I'd be better off not trying...

Luckily I did not listen to him because the very next door I went through deposited me in a wing of the natural history museum. I remember being at the same museum a few years ago and watching someone disappear through a door up on the taxidermied bird balcony and feeling jealous. And today I magically appeared near some dead mammals.

It was awesome.

Story time!

2010-12-13T19:13:00.002-05:00

Dr. Moo brought me some maple cream on Saturday.

She also brought me some stories!

Story 1: Dr. Moo and Mr. Moo went to the Unitarian church, which is where Mr. Moo's parents go. Stuffed animals were brought out for the kids' sermon. There were three stuffed elephants and one stuffed dragon. But the dragon kept insisting he was an elephant on the inside. None of the other elephants believed him at first but the the dragon trumpeted and they realized that he was in fact an elephant-in-dragon.

Story 2: One of the other vets in Dr. Moo's practice stopped by at a fiftysomething bachelor dairy farmer's place and noticed a room in the barn filled with crates of kitties. Naturally this worried him.

Turns out the humane society was responsible for bringing the cats, who were feral. The farmer already has a lot of cats and he takes good care of them; he'd agreed to let some more kitties live on his property and to feed them.

The vet breathed a sigh of relief and told the farmer he'd been worried there was a crazy old single cat lady on the loose.

"Where!?" asked the lonely bachelor farmer, excitedly.

Better than kneed buck

2010-12-13T19:00:00.005-05:00

At Thanksgiving, cousin T asked me why I never visited her and I didn't have a good answer. So I said I'd be by soon. When I mentioned this to Dr. Moo she said she wanted to come. Then cousin T invited Auntie P and some other folks and so on Saturday we had ourselves a lady-fest, save poor Trevor, who is four, and poor Jim, who is a lot older than four and therefore can drive and so spent much of the day running errands.

Aunt P taught us all how to make her Swedish tea ring and I discovered that aside from Aunt P none of the other women in that kitchen knew how to knead dough. And one of them doesn't know how to spell it either. She wrote "kneed doe" on her recipe card.

Loss of consortium

2010-12-08T18:02:00.002-05:00

I had jury duty today and I learned a new legal term.

I managed to get myself to Woburn by 8 AM, which is when the postcard said. My on-time arrival was partly motivated by my intrinsic fear of authority but also due to my spending more than an hour the night before doing research online, printing directions, packing snacks and things to do, and laying out my outfit. Because I am a bit useless in the morning. I sometimes crash into things, actually. I have my life set up right now so I don't have to do anything of consequence before 10, and my alarm goes off before 7. This means my workday runs pretty late but I do SO MUCH BETTER outside the traditional 9 to 5 confines.

But I digress.

When I got to the assembly room I almost sat right in the front row so I could have an aisle seat and lots of legroom. But this wasn't an airplane ride and I'm young and sort of fit so I sat in the second row instead, next to a jacket and a bag.

Next to the jacket and bag was a WASPy-looking elderly gentleman in a nice grey sweater. He had the aisle seat. I got the sense he wasn't interested in mingling with the great unwashed. He didn't make a peep until a judge showed up to explain the importance of the judicial process (and shame a trashy lady for eating popcorn) and then he laughed and laughed at all of the judge's jokes.

Later my WASP-y rowmate revealed that beneath his sweater beat the heart of Joy Behar. We were among the first group to be called up to a courtroom, where I ended up sandwiched between him and another chatty cathy who'd started flapping her gums at me in line for the loo. I'm pretty sure we weren't supposed to make a peep unless spoken to but once we'd been waiting, I don't know, five minutes, Mr. Joy Behar started gossiping with the guy next to him.

I was practicing my breathing but then decided to practice my doing-the-Friday-NYTimes-crossword-puzzle-in-pen skills instead. Midway through 75-across, Joy elbowed me and pointed to the short bearded gentleman having a sidebar with the judge. "See that guy?" said Joy. "This guy next to me says that guy brought a knife with him in his bag. A knife! Imagine! How stupid can you be?"

"Oh goodness," I said. I've used this term before in the crazy un-yoga Israeli army/KGB/immortality fitness class I sometimes take on Thursdays and been laughed at. It was more appropriate here.

Soon it was my turn at the sidebar, and the fact that I'd sat on a jury that awarded no damages and found no liability at a civil case 10 years ago meant there was no way the plaintiff's attorney wanted me on this jury. So I got to go home. To celebrate, I worked out at the law school gym at the LNFU before heading to work.

Happy nerds

2010-12-03T11:36:00.002-05:00

The lab at the LNFU was all abuzz yesterday as one of the former members was going to be holding a press conference to announce something big. As there have been visitors to the lab that people have gotten excited about but I've never heard of, I wasn't holding my breath.

Well perhaps I should have been, because this was what they were excited about. It was nice to be a subatomic office particle, filling out reimbursement forms and processing receipts while at the next desk over a bunch of scientists-in-training watched one of their own change the world.

I am a terrible hippie

2010-12-01T09:55:00.002-05:00

Cousin B rightly noted the above fact when I announced how much I love air conditioning. And boy do I ever. I wish I had central air. That would be a dream come true. I hate, hate, hate to be hot; hot and sticky is even worse. It's still not cold enough out for me, as a matter of fact. I walked to work Monday and Tuesday and when I got in I was sweaty. What the hell, warming trend? Where is my ice age?

Anyhoo,the walking to work was/is an attempt to fit in some meditating, some additional fitness, and quit killing my planet with gas fumes (from my car, that is, heh heh). I am 1.5 miles from the LNFU yet the fastest I can get in there is 15 minutes. Public transportation is expensive and ineffectual, the idea of riding a bike in is terrifying, and walking takes half an hour or so.

Really I suppose I shouldn't be pissing and moaning at all about this since I know plenty of people commute a long way. But I specifically set my life up and made trade-offs to avoid wasting my time. And I bet I hate wasting it more than you do!

Breaking: Pot Smells!

2010-11-30T10:50:00.004-05:00

Finally, after five years of living in Vermont, Dr. Moo came face-to-face with some Maryjane. It's safe to say that dairy farmers aren't keeping the pot industry in business in the Green Mountain State; neither are college professors, another group the Moo hangs out with on a semi-regular basis.

It's more college students and aging hippies, neither of which were around the weed that Moo was around. I'm not going to tell you who Moo was around because-well, come on.

And no, Moo of course did not inhale or even so much as touch a pipe to her lips. (Though she did say the pipe was pretty.) It's the secondhand smoke she found stinky.

2010-11-30T10:50:00.001-05:00

Thankful

2010-11-27T19:29:00.004-05:00

Another Turkey Day has come and gone and I am thankful for several things. I learned a new phrase from cousin Michelle. When she saw the big green ring I was wearing she asked if I was wearing it to keep my pimp hand strong. I correctly surmised the reason for keeping a pimp hand strong: ho-slappin'.

Despite my advanced age, I am still relevant.

I purchased a new vacuum cleaner on Black Friday at Tarzhay. It was normally $45.00 but marked down to $28.00. I'd been sucking up the incredible volume of hair and fur one long-haired kitty and one even longer-haired lady generate with a stick vacuum I bought six years ago whose handle had been twice Gorilla-Glued and whose sucky suckability meant I spent a half-hour or more vacuuming one hall and one living room but still had to get down on my hands and knees to rub the hair up from the carpet with a sponge.

But no more! The $28.00 model sucked up a whole bunch of ick, and in a see-through container for viewing the fruits of your labors and a flip-down lid so you don't have to touch them. I was so excited I started calling people but as it was a Friday night, nobody was home.

Finally, I am thankful for this:

When I was on the porch loading my plate with turkey for my nine-o'clock feeding I noticed Ethel the Spectacular Barn Kitty was watching me through the door to the barn. I went inside and grabbed one of PolackPappy's shirts because E the SBK is a bit of a violent cuddler. She likes to knead her sharp paws into your thigh while rubbing her face up and down your arm and smooshing it in your armpit, drooling in ecstasy all the while. I gave her pats for a good 20 minutes, and then left the shirt on the floor for her because it was warm from my lap and it was cold in the barn.

The next morning McMumsy informed me E the SBK had left me a gift, seen above, placement of the body courtesy of Ethel.

I need more grace and flowers

2010-11-22T17:19:00.005-05:00

It's a time of changes in the McPolack family. We are in a baby-having arc in the circle of life, the second (well, third, really, if you count when I was born) I've experienced, and I am grateful because in the next cycle my aunts and uncles, and my parents, die. That's how it works.

As I must whine about things to get them out of my system, I would like to call the whambulance because I hate the holidays right now. McMumsy would tell me that I hate the holidays every year and she is right. But this year is worse! Waaaa! I do not have a baby, and neither does my sister, and she lives in Vermont anyway, which means there are no babies nearby for me to get my hands on. And if things go as they have been, there never will be. I wish I had a husband with a lot of siblings who had a lot of kids so that I could recreate the holidays of my youth. But the past is easy to make rosy, especially when you were a kid for most of it. I know for a fact things weren't as wonderful as that jumble of family felt.

I also know that relationships can sour, irrevocably, even much later on in life.

So that sucks.

Really I think what I'm up against is a hill. Life is all about climbing hills. At the top of one hill is another one, of course, but the view gets better.

This weekend I discovered Mumford and Sons and g-d are they amazing. I like this set of lyrics especially...

get over your hill and see what you find there/with grace in your heart and flowers in your hair

Great Care Has Been Taken...

2010-11-19T10:24:00.003-05:00

...is what it says on the back of some paratha I purchased at the Indian grocery store and they are not kidding. The final thing that impressed me about the food is the writing. While the marketing department unfortunately fell victim to the Mistaken Idea That Capitalizing Every Word Makes Things Classier, their word choice is in fact classy enough without initial caps. They took the time to select adjectives like "convenient alternative to time consuming(they forgot the hyphen but it's OK) and tedious work." Or how about gentle & even pressure? Or this sentence: It Is Generally Enjoyed With Yogurt and Indian Pickles. They didn't capitalize the "and" which makes me think they're shirking a bit on the proofreading front, but other than that, wow!

Further Frozen Indian Food

2010-11-17T15:52:00.003-05:00

Had to go to the LNFU and couldn't finish the post prior to this one. I am grateful for the job but I am having a hard time making time to write. The blog, believe it or not, takes time and forethought and research. I don't like just throwing stuff up on it. Although today I considered storing my notes about the Europe trip on here just so I wouldn't lose the memories. For example, I was walking back from getting some apples from my favorite Polish apple farmer when I saw a guy with weird-looking shoes. They reminded me of some shoes Cousin B and I saw in a store window in Cologne.

Those shoes were long and flat and black and shaped at the front like pieces of pizza that suffered a McMumsy attack. On pizza night at the McPolack homestead, McMumsy will eat a couple of regular pieces of pizza and announce that she is full. But she is not really full. If you decide to eat your pizza later you may find the tips have been cut off and consumed by McMumsy. She'll go a good two inches up. It's a little infuriating.

(Her sneakeating of the tastiest morsels of things isn't confined to pizza. Sometimes when you're eating her fluffy-haired face will appear over your shoulder and then a hand sneaks in-zoop!-and the tastiest bit of whatever's on your plate disappears down her piehole. This is followed by a giggle.)

Anyhoo, I later spotted those detipped-pizza-slice shoes on the feet of a Tmobile salesguy, also in Cologne.

And now I've gone completely off-topic. I'll write more on the Indian food later.

Frozen indian food

2010-11-17T10:09:00.002-05:00

An Indian grocery store recently moved in to a building right next to the Basket. I was glad to see them, although a little nervous since apparently the Basket fought them tooth and nail-not because of the financial competition, but because of the parking competition.

Anyhoo, they seemed to have worked something out, and there are signs up saying you'll get towed if you park in the Basket spots, but I get around this by going to the Basket first.

The point of all this is that I found some really durn tasty frozen Indian food. I started off with some chapati and it was so good that yesterday I went back and bought two more bags, along with paratha, spinach pakora, and more. I'm considering checking out the pickles next.

Breaking!

2010-11-16T09:50:00.005-05:00

So, Prince William is engaged. It was, naturally, all over the morning news. Unlike the tacky, disturbing, commercialized Disney characters, the princess figure when I was a little girl was William's mother. I remember well waking up-and I was 7, so it was early-to find McMumsy and Auntie P watching the royal wedding live on the telly. And I remember coming home to news from McMumsy that Diana had died.

Anyhoo, in an interesting twist, Auntie P's own son finally proposed to his girlfriend after many years, just three days ago. I'm sure that's what prompted William to take the plunge. :)

It's getting harder and harder to come up with decent titles

2010-11-11T19:01:00.004-05:00

I'm just sayin'.

Anyhoo I am feeling rather full of feelings these days. Sadness, anger, anxiety, worry. I think it's probably time I went back into therapy. In other McPolack news, I took my third crazy-ass movement class today. It's 90 minutes of things like moves the KGB uses to prepare themselves for jumping out of the trunks of cars and shooting people, and exercises Tibetans use to promote immortality. It's a nice balance: I am prepared either for the shooting or, if I am the shootee, survival.

Everyone else who takes the class is a dancer, it seems, although there is one flabby older dude who sometimes takes off his shirt, and one slightly flabby lady in her 40s who paired up with me in partner exercises today. This made me happy because I did not want to press myself against a shirtless man's gut nor did I want to crush one of the tiny women with my gigantic Polishness.

One key discovery I made whilst doing the partner exercises is just how far I've gone into self-reliance. We were supposed to tuck our head into the side of our partner (or so I thought), who was on hands and knees, and then flip ourselves up into a handstand and over them into a backbend. (It's kind of hard to explain.) I was thinking are you f'ing kidding me and was feeling very out of shape until the teacher came over and explained I was supposed to lean most of my weight into the other person.

I don't lean even an eyelash into others these days, physically, metaphorically or otherwise, without feeling guilty and/or bad. All I can think about is how I can I stop needing anything from anybody. So the idea of letting a total stranger support very nearly all of me just didn't occur to me, and I kept failing at the exercise until I realized that allowing myself to be almost completely supported was the only way to do it right.

Animal husbandry

2010-11-09T11:05:00.006-05:00

Dr. Moo called Friday wondering when I'd be arriving, and worrying that Mr. Moo might be in a bad mood. Why? Because there was a sick calf in a Rubbermaid tub in their living room. The calf-who, if all went according to plan, would be dinner in three months' time-"keeps trying to die," said my sister. She'd had him on IV fluids, was holding his head up so he could nurse, and when she discovered his temp was low she decided he'd be better off inside by the woodstove.

Fortunately, Mr. Moo did not get mad. Unfortunately the little fellow did not make it.

But his two friends are doing just fine:

What I did/saw/learned this weekend in Addison County

2010-11-08T18:25:00.003-05:00

Did
Ate chunks off a nine-pound block of cheddar cheese that was a Vermontah's wedding present.

Saw
Watched one of Chino the cow's teats squirt milk every time her bag (this is what Dr. Moo called it) hit her back leg and she ran for the gate. Thump-squirt! Thump-squirt! Thump-squirt!

Learned
When you're loading 50 bales of hay from a hayloft into a truck and you see a clump of turkey feathers with some meat still attached on one bale, and then a mess of feathers from a much smaller bird on another, this isn't from birds getting caught in the baler. It's from owls and hawks flying on into the barn and using the hay bales as dinner tables.