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Cleanup in aisle 5…

February 8, 2009 by

Weekends around here aren’t complete without a typical, American-style visit to the grocery store to stock up on the things we need for the week.  This morning, after a breakfast at a Cajun joint in Bethesda, we stopped at a grocery store outside our usual orbit to do a quick shop.

John was at the deli counter and I was sort of spacing out when I suddenly recognized the body language of a woman who was saying something to John: she was pretty clearly in the early stages of trying to chat him up.  At about the moment I realized this, she happened to look over at me.  Since I have one of those faces that when at rest communicates something akin to severe disapproval, she was a bit taken aback.

I wandered over about 30 seconds later, since I was intrigued.  The woman had a small daughter.  What’s going on here?  Ah – no wedding ring.  John, by the way, wears one.

However, this didn’t stop her from continually throwing herself in John’s way as we continued around the store.  Had I had the foresight, I would have visited the snack aisle for popcorn, because her efforts and John’s obliviousness was grand guignol.  When we finally reached the checkout and I mentioned the woman’s determined efforts in John’s direction, he said, “Oh – is that why she kept getting in my way?”

What a man I have. I could have told this woman what it took to get John to realize I was interested in him all those years ago. It took more than some flirtatious body language, I can tell you.

The episode also reminded me of the last time I wrote about John’s babe-magnetude. The original version of the following ran on November 8, 2004:
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I live in a house full of male creatures. My husband: John Smith, International Terrorist, MacIntosh (aka Mac, Toshie, Dogface, Fuzzy, etc.), Simon, and Dash. Simon and Dash are stay-at-home types, enjoying (we hope) the lazy, safe existence we have foisted upon them. The rest of us venture out into the world to suffer its slings and arrows. Or, in the case of MacIntosh, to enjoy the love and adulation that is your rightful due when you are fuzzy and cute and have fur that a guitarist in an 80’s hair band would give his eye teeth for.

When John and I first moved to Maryland, we lived in a temporary apartment and got Mac after we had lived there a scant few weeks. Mac was a babe magnet from the beginning, all lollopy paws, big brown eyes, and snubnose curiosity. Walks around our temporary apartment tended to be extended enterprises, with Mac’s fan club stopping us to chat, pet, and play. John and I have spent the last two and a half years knowing our place: we are the roadies, there to serve. Mac takes all the attention with a blasé attitude – he has always been a babe magnet and he knows no other way to be.

My husband is also a babe magnet of a specific variety. For those of you who like your men flashy and trendy, John is not for you (well, he’s not for you anyway – he’s for me, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves). For those of us who like quiet capability, thoughtful intelligence and good sense, and a certain wild-card sense of humor (not to mention, as I lapse into the New England vernacular, wicked cute big brown eyes), John is terribly appealing.

But we have been together for a long time – about five years in total, and while our familiarity does not breed contempt, it does breed comfort. So I was surprised and amused yesterday as we made a stop into Hudson Trail Outfitters and I suddenly found myself to be invisible.

Being on the brink of leaving the store because we couldn’t find a mechanic in the bike section, a young female employee offered to help us find someone.

I should rephrase: this Siren of the Bohemian Outdoors offered to help John find someone. Depositing some clothing on a rack, she deplored her clumsiness – veering precipitously close to a giggle, and flashing John a sideways glance.

I stood behind him, realization of my sudden invisibility starting to dawn, amusement starting to spread. John replied with a somewhat sharp joke, and she flashed him another glance, saying in an admiring voice (and I kid not), “You are direct, aren’t you?” It was all I could do not to start giggling myself.

The best part of the joke is that when I batted my eyes at John later and teased him for being such a babe magnet, he had no idea what I was talking about. Either that, or he’s even smarter than I thought he was.

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Megeve

January 27, 2009 by

Though written in the present tense, the description below is my memory of a trip that was taken 27 years ago. Adjust your expectations of reality accordingly (the dog was real though – a fixture in the town).

The mountains are high and craggy – without any of the many-layered safety gates and warning signs of US ski areas. Chamonix is a stately cone in the distance. The air is clear and the sun is warm when you stop in a hollow for a bite of chocolate. The snow is a thick layer of powder, making skiing effortless.

Down in the village, a dog follows his master, helping with the daily errands and looking like something out of a hokey French film: there is even a baguette poking out of the basket he carries.

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My road-trip mix tape

January 23, 2009 by

This is my first tryout of the web service “Plinky,” designed to get people to answer questions every day and, I guess to promote dialogue. This first set of questions kind of seems more like a meme than a conversation generator, but I guess I would really be interested in other people’s answers to this question (which isn’t always the case with the what color socks are you wearing/where would you be now if you could/what the hell did you do with my monkey memes).

The first Plinky question was essentially “name three songs you would add to a road-trip mix and say why.” What are yours?

Someday, Someway by Marshall Crenshaw

It moves – as hopefully your car does. If your car isn’t moving, it’s fun to sing.

Keep the River on Your Right by Jonatha Brooke

It’s determined and fierce – just what you need when you get really tired of driving. It’s also about keeping moving.

Boston and St. John’s by Great Big Sea

While this one is slower and more melancholy, it’s about needing to keep moving.

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Yes we can… haz bukkit

January 20, 2009 by

John, Mel, Yvonne, and I made a snowy trek into Frederick, MD yesterday.

Frederick - snow.

(Yes, for all of my northern friends – that is a piddling amount of snow. But it’s the only snow we’ve had here all winter).

Our mission? Beer and yarn. We visited The Flying Barrel for brewing supplies and Eleganza for yarn. John picked up a brewing kit:

We can haz bukkit

Basically, some specialty equipment and two very big buckets.

I picked up some lovely blue and green yarn. I’m pondering a scarf pattern.

And that’s pretty much us today. We have friends out on the Mall in the scrum of the Inauguration, but my crowd-phobic self isn’t really interested in standing in the cold to watch the JumboTron. So instead, we have me baking bread and John brewing liquid bread.

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Well, it only took a month and a half…

January 18, 2009 by

…actually, it took about two weeks of knitting in the evenings and then about a month before I had the opportunity to go to my friend Mel’s to use her superior little machine for felting.  (It’s superior for felting in that it’s a small-volume, aggressive little beast.  Probably not superior for gentle care of clothes, but everyone has their own special talents.)

My hair has gotten significantly longer in the last month and a half, but it still has the flapper-esque look I was going for:

New hat

Pattern: Dietrich, from Twist Collective. Mods on Ravelry.

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Early riser

January 14, 2009 by

Tosh and I take a short walk every morning at around 5:15 – we move out, with a sense of purpose: just long enough for Tosh to do his doggy business, but just short enough that I don’t freeze in the winter mornings.

The moon was bright this morning.  Not bright enough for me to completely see by (some less-fastidious dog walkers are not as courteous as I would like on our suburban woodland paths), but bright enough to marvel at, especially since it is past full.

Our path brings us into the sheltering woods and then out into an field of sorts – not a mowing field, as we had in the country, but green grass covering a suburban earthworks: a drainage pond fronted by a high, dramatic berm.  But the sky is a field’s sky – it is wide and open.  Coming out of the woods, my eyes played strange tricks on me – the expanse of sky was piebald with dark and light patches, but my brain could not make sense of them immediately.  The dark – clouds?  But the moon was so bright – aha.  The bright was reflection on the clouds against the dark, clear sky.  After this moment of disorientation, I snapped off my light to stand in the freezing air and watch the clouds.

Ever have that moment where you’re looking at a piece of art and you say, “Yes, very pretty – but not realistic.”  And then, months or years later, you see that “unrealistic” thing happen in nature?  Like the deep purple skies of a twighlight Maxfield Parrish painting.  “Maybe on Mars,” you think, “Or a place in a book – I’ll bet Narnia had twighlight skies like that in C.S. Lewis’ imagination.”  And then you’re out on a country road, and the molecules have lined up just right to give you a radiance-drenched, deep purple post-sunset sky right here on Earth?  These clouds were like that.  They looked like anime or the woodblock animations so often used to depict Native American legends.  Stately and stylized, they moved swiftly, like great cutouts of tissue, never changing shape in the predawn sky.

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Crazy Aunt Purl: the sanest woman around

January 12, 2009 by

I really hate worrying about things I can’t control, and as a general rule I don’t.  So it’s not surprising that I find the following incredibly sane:

The economy doesn’t call me each day to see how I feel about it. If I choose to think about something else, like green beans and herb gardening and vacuuming the house, the economy doesn’t get worse. It doesn’t get better either, in fact I have no control at all over any of this! All I can control is how I choose to see this whole thing. So I am choosing to opt out of all of it. Whatever’s going to happen is going to happen whether I freak out or not.

Truer words were never spoken.

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Fun with Metro

January 11, 2009 by

When the DC Metro works, it works very well.  When it doesn’t, well, like any other complicated piece of machinery it tends to fail rather spectacularly.

Friday’s commute home started rather normally – I lucked into running directly on to my first train, which is usually a sign that I’ll get home a full five minutes sooner than usual – whooopeeee. Then I manage to get my connection seamlessly as well (can we hope to be home by 20 after five, rather than the usual 30?  Dream big, kid).  Then my train… just sits for a bit at Metro Center, getting more and more full by the passing minute (she who snagged a seat sits and reads Mrs. Astor Regrets* and tries not to feel smug).

At Dupont Circle, we sit again.  And sit.  And then the train driver tells us that, due to a track problem, this particular train won’t probably move for a while.

An HOUR, in fact.

At this point, I make a fast check of my watch and hurl myself off the train as fast as the sardine-packed humanity will allow.  Dupont Circle has an escalator so long it has been known to give my friend Alicia vertigo, and by the time I reach the top of it, I have lined up Mobile Wife Rescue Unit 1 to get me – as long as I can get myself further north than my current position, which would be a real pain to get into and out of at rush hour.  I see a couple of older gentlemen getting into a taxi and ask if they are going north by any chance.  They are, they agree to share their cab with me (sometimes, looking like a dumb blonde can be an asset), and off we go to Bethesda, where John picks me up and takes me home.

*This book is, well – it’s kind of a mess.  The first couple of chapters make the whole point of the book several times – that the aging Brooke Astor was ripped off by her son, that families are still whacko no matter how much money is involved, and that Brooke Astor was a rather complicated person (all huge surprises, you will no doubt agree).  Then the meat of the book starts to bounce back and forth in time, relating anecdotes in an almost random manner that don’t create a very clear or cogent picture of the people involved or how they all converged in a Manhattan courthouse to figure out how a very wealthy woman ended up living in squalor and who should be responsible for her.  It’s as if the writer did a few magazine articles, then decided to write a book and used the magazine articles as her first few chapters, without tailoring them to fit the longer work.  As a result, this book is work for the reader, which is too bad, because it is an interesting story.

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Mom thinks we should be able to see the bend from our rear-view mirror

January 6, 2009 by

….because we’re that far around it.  This is based on me telling her that John and I made up new words to the Harry Belafonte classic this weekend:

DO-nut

DO-oh-oh-oh-nut.

–daylight come and me want fried bread–

DO-misa-doughmisadough-misado-o-oh-nut

–daylight come and me want fried bread–

Hey mister dunkin-man, fry me up a do-nut.

–daylight come and me want fried bread–

–with glaze!–

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Archetypes

January 4, 2009 by

Like I said in my last post, I don’t do resolutions.  I also don’t usually find solace or meaning in ceremonies.  The big, grand statements of life do not move me.  The small moments, compounded together – the quiet moments of everyday life when you realize what they have added up to: that’s what creates meaning for me.  Change can happen any day – it doesn’t have to be the first of the year, or a big birthday, or any other artificial point on the calendar.

So why is it that in the first few days of this new year we have rearranged furniture, I have made moves toward brushing up my French, and I have this overwhelming awareness of the fact that I’m turning 40 in a few months?

Oh, and of course, I have had strong thoughts about rejuvenating my barely existent yoga practice.  Naturally.

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