August 18, 2008 at 10:28 am (Hooray for Hollywood, Once a New Yorker, That Darn Cat, family matters)
Tags: skee-ball
- Two days is not enough time to be considered “time off.” If you’re planning on going out of town for a weekend in the month of August, just take Friday off. Everyone else is doing it, so it’s not like you can reach anyone you need to anyway.
- SisterAlyson has definite ideas about music that she likes. On Friday morning, I picked up my little sister at the train station and drove her to Boston with me so she could visit her friends while I visited mine. My iPod, which is loaded with about 600 songs was in the car, and she played DJ, which meant that she rejected most of my music for being too slow, too weird, or “good, but I don’t want to listen to that right now.” At least she stopped and listened whenever Springsteen came on.
- The black plague started in India in the 1340′s. On Friday I met up with Nancy Pearl Wannabe, and we went to the Boston Museum of Science, a place that she’s been many a time with her middle schoolers. We had some fun taking shadow pictures, flattening pennies, and generally making things go. I’m no scientist, but I knew a lot of the science stuff already, because the museum is not exactly dealing with quantum physics. But there was a display about the history of the world, and it included that little snippet about the plague, which I never though of existing before London in the 1600′s. Now I know.
- I should have seen The Lost Boys a long time ago. It would be a damn shame if I went all the way to Boston and actually went out and saw any of it, breaking my near-perfect record of going there for short work trips, swim meets, and religious functions (in my past life…) So while NPW and I were thinking of something to do, we ended up staying in, drinking Margaritas, and watching The Lost Boys because I never had before. When it was over, I told NPW that watching it is a lot like swimming the butterfly. If I had just done it fifteen years ago, it would be a lot easier to deal with it now. But wouldn’t you know it, knowledge of the movie gave me a little edge when we played Scene It later that night! Speaking of the fly…
- Sometimes it’s better to do a half stroke than to glide in. 1/100th of a second! Crazy.
- It turns out that I’m actually kind of good at skee-ball. I was a bit nervous, going all the way to New Hampshire for Beej’s birthday, where I would meet Aaron for the first time, after this long, arduous internet flirtation we’ve had. I knew that skee-ball was going to be involved, and the last I remember, my skee-skills were equivalent to my mini golf skills, which is to say not skillful. But NPW, Chris and I got some practice in while we were waiting, and I scored 300 points not once, but twice! So when Aaron and Mara finally came back from their trip to Massachusetts to put money in their car meter (how did that take such a long time?), we were all on a level playing field. Sadly, I had to leave after only a couple of hours, but when you have that much awesomeness in one arcade (me, NPW, Chris, Aaron, Mara, Beej, Beej’s gal, Beej’s offspring, and Ted, who I didn’t realize was an actual person until I saw him in person) it’s hard to contain it. Because they’re such great hosts, I gave my skee-ball ticket winnings to NPW and Chris so they can put it towards their dream of winning the lobster salt and pepper shakers. You can see photo evidence of the skee ball on NPW’s blog.
- I’m still pretty great at driving cross-town. On the way back from the beach, we picked up SisterAlyson, and the two of us went to Queens via the LIE and the most beautiful sunset I’ve ever seen over Manhattan. I was Jersey-bound after dropping her off, and instead of taking the FDR uptown, I decided I had enough time to drive across 57th St and take the West Side Highway to the GWB, just for old time’s sake. I love driving cross-town (espeically in someone else’s car,) because there’s a trick to changing lanes quickly so you never get stuck behind someone who’s trying to turn uptown or downtown. It makes for a thrilling ride, and it was good to see the city at the street level, however briefly.
- Babies are cute, and they don’t all hate me. My friends and their 6-month old son just bought a new house in Jersey, and they put out an APB for friends to help them paint and get the place ready for their move-in at the end of the month. So I went over on Sunday to help them out. In between edging the doorways, I went upstairs to chat with my friend and play with the baby. That’s when I got put on babysitting duty for a few minutes, with the instructions to pick him up if he fussed. I did it, and he even stopped fussing! I even enjoyed it and his little baby smell, but I was totally happy to give him back and continue my edging after a short period of time. Verdict: not ready for motherhood, not by a long shot.
- It’s very easy to hook up a Mac to my parents’ wireless router. I spent about an hour trying to figure out how to get my new computer or my old computer, which is now my mom’s computer, hooked up to their wireless connection. The only success I had was when I was able to hook up their PC laptop to the wireless network, which is pointless because that computer does not having working “shift” key, and makes a scary whirring noise when it does anything. I called The Man of Action for help, but he was MIA until I was driving home, when he was totally available, but I was exactly half way between both places of computer trouble. By the time I got home, he was already on his way to Scotland, as always happens when I need technical help.
- My cats really, really do not get along. The Dutchess of Kickball was brave enough to potentially encounter the landlesbian in order to feed my cats for me while I was away. But being well-fed did not stop them from fighting, as evidenced by big tufts of Lucy hair all over the bathroom and living room, adjacent to the piles of cat puke, and best of all, the big old puddle of cat pee on the loveseat where Lucy likes to hang out cower. It took me about an hour of clean-up last night, and Lucy is not smelling so great at the moment. I fear that there is not enough pheromone spray in the world to keep Micki from being a nut job, and I’m not sure what I’m going to do when I go away for a full week in September.
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