Amy’s Gripping Commentary

More phone camera downloads.

Last week I rode around town a bit after work, ending up at the new Keep Indianapolis Beautiful green building. The three wind turbines (as seen in the shadows) were spinning wildly, making for an odd park bench experience. A guy on a bike asked me for a smoke, and I resisted the DQ across the street.

Harrison lounges at the vet. He’s no longer limping nor sneezing, and he was neutered last week! After a testicle location complication, all is now well and as soon as the hormones are gone I can try bonding him with Vegas. Or Arliss. Or how did I end up with so many white rabbits? Joey looks tiny now by comparison.

Pippen approves of fresh greens in reusable shopping bags.

David on a Tyvek mission. This was part of the porch prep–blowing all the paint dust created by the wire grinder with an air compressor. No official decision yet made on painting the pimple. My votes outnumber his, but he seems to think his voters are stronger. I didn’t think this was an electoral college, but I may be able to filibuster with strategic planting.

The house as purchased, with unruly yews and seafoam-green interior to the porch (it could not be removed from the inside brick and the whole thing had to get painted, sorry folks)

The house yesterday, with primer (I kept calling it Powder)

The house today, with two paint colors applied. Trim work has not been done yet, which will be white where you still see the gray primer.

So do we paint that thingy sticking out from the front of the bricks? I think it’s a block put in where a drain used to be, and I won’t tell you who thinks it should match the trim and who thinks it should be brown like the bricks around it. What is your vote?

The house wall was supposed to be a gray but it came out peachy, though this picture at dusk isn’t the clearest. The brown was supposed to be darker and redder. I still like it, though! I took the paint chips out in the sun to decide but still got a surprise.

Foliage to follow, once we remove the rest of the roots.

While deleting old email, I found this article, Caring For Your Introvert. What a great piece!

Most people in my life are not overbearing and respect my need for personal time (or maybe I just hang out with busy people so it all works out). And I’ve gotten better at dealing with the general public since I do so many volunteer shifts. But this is great:

Remember, someone you know, respect, and interact with every day is an introvert, and you are probably driving this person nuts.

It’s a buyer’s market, folks, but I’m a seller so I’m screwed, and you want this house. Check it out here, where you can get dizzy spinning in the yard panoramic video view.

I spent a lot of time and a fair amount of money getting it ready, so let’s have a party before it gets dirty again! All furniture is also for sale if you so desire, though I believe the couches are spoken for. Note: push mowing in 90°F weather is not fun. I did wait until 8 p.m. so I’d kill less ozone (plus it was a little cooler).

Attack offf the Killer ToMAYtoessss: Our tomatoes are taller than we are! This is at a different house, but if you buy the first one, you can have all the tomatoes too.

I swear that is the song my neighbors (not the super nice ones to the west who I think left me perennials on my front porch this morning) are currently karaoke-singing in their backyard! They did apologize to me over the mic as I was getting in and out of the shed to do yardwork; they swore they’d be better singers when they were drunker. David thinks they bought their daughter the new red Mustang. She doesn’t seem old enough to drive. They’re nice enough and we swap who cuts the side yard between us, so I’m not too worried. Their charcoal grill smells good.

I feel like I am cutting down the backyard, and every pile of brush I create unearths old dog poo piles. The dogs are thrilled that their favorite areas will now be accessible again. I suppose that’s better than Casper pooping on the walk like she did this morning.

I have been reading more lately, but my interests in the past few years have been on topics of social justice and animal welfare, not the “classics” so much nor any bestselling novels. On the occasion that I do read fiction, I generally pick something minority-written and often along social justice lines. Must Be Motherhood (who posted the below meme recently and is apparently on blog vacation now) sent me Three Cups of Tea this week, and now that I’ve finished The Working Poor (hooray for the library) as of last night, I can move on to the next book. But I also have PQ’s Half of Me on the shelf, as well as Dominion and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, both of which I’ve been working on for awhile. So far this year I finished The China Study and Nickel and Dimed, and I keep up with one food magazine. Some months I don’t read much of anything in book form at all. (And yes, I’m too lazy to underline titles and give you links to them at Amazon.)

I read a TON of email and of course I’m usually home late every night, never finding time to sit with a book. I look forward to the times I can do nothing but read, but sometimes I have to carve that time by neglecting something else (replying to email, making phone calls, bonding bunnies, sleeping). Is it a hallmark of American culture to be swamped with stuff to do all the time? It’s not like I watch more than about two hours of TV a week, and that’s while eating dinner.

On to the meme, something from the National Endowment for the Arts, which approximates that most American adults have only read six out of the 100 titles on this list. Looks like I hit 21 of these. That number is pitiful in many ways, but there are so many other things to read. I thought almost all of the books were school assignments, but after reconsidering the list, I think a third of them were just books I chose to read. I don’t even remember many of them too well. Some of my favorite classes (note I was a chemistry major and didn’t have to take any lit) were elective literature courses, Russian lit, Gothic lit, and two semesters of African American lit.

Here’s what you do:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list on your own blog.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (parts, of course)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare Several plays, of course
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy several of his short stories, though
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath after I found out she went to and then taught at my alma mater
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker my favorite book
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom oh come on
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery one of my favorite quotes: You are responsible forever for that which you have tamed
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare but I saw the play when I visited Stratford-on-Avon!
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo if David sings this one more time… let’s put it this way: He named a foster rabbit Eponine

Now what do we do with them?

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My keyboard did have to be replaced after the wine incident a couple of nights ago; space bar and enter were casualties. Apparently while connecting and testing the new one, the blog software saved a draft! The zeroes appeared when I plugged in the USB connector, not from typing.

Then there was another wine incident tonight. I knocked over a full glass again, this time while eating dinner, and the glass crashed into an empty glass also on the table, breaking both, and splattering wine on the couch, wall, me… and one side of Casper was also purple. Then she moved around and wiped the wine on two more walls. Geez.

Dinner in our apartment in Rome. Note the wine.

Somehow I asked for this red wine and how much it cost in Italian in a little grocery…

Feel free to suggest a caption for this one.

This has been a very long day, and I’m about to climb in bed! Thankfully we had a direct flight from Rome and Dad picked us up in Chicago. Downloaded about 1,000 pictures, but I’ll just put up a couple for now.

The keyboards at the internet cafe here in Trastavere are different enough that I canàt type worth a crap.

Weàre having a great time, and the streets are bustling at 10ç30 p.m. (canàt find that key at all= ). Tomorrow is Pompeii, and still tonight Iàm off for falafel and gelato (not sure if that will be a good combo). I have not been chased by dogs nor screamed at by drunks for Bushàs atrocities, but other members of my party have!

Now to figure out how to fix my in-flight meal for the way back…

Cìao!

(a little IRC speak from ages ago)

See y’all in a week or so–I’m on vacation! It takes more time to get READY for vacation than to take one, so let’s hope it’s a good, relaxing one!

I leave you with this, watching TV with my first piggy, Frisky:

I took two foster buns and my piggy Cappy to the vet today. One of the buns is Whitney, who was found hopping about homeless in someone’s yard on Memorial Day. She’s a very pretty, plush rabbit.

While I was there, this beautiful fawn was brought in in a printer box.

She had been found down in a well near 56th and Arlington with a fox perched at the top watching her. She made cries like a lamb when the vet touched her; she was cold and in pain. If warming her and giving her fluids and pain meds can get her strong enough to stand, there are several local deer rehabbers, but young deer imprint strongly on people and tend to become nuisances when subsequently released to the wild because they are too comfortable around humans. Animal Control showed up, also having been called by the cop who brought her in, and I suppose it was lucky for the fawn that she was too ill to go with them to be immediately euthanized. Even if that’s her likely fate at the vet’s office, fewer transports to scary places are a little better. I would also expect that the vet and techs are gentler than an ACO.

David and I tried a new restaurant last week, Oishi Sushi. Would you believe it’s at 10th and Shadeland? Not an area exactly known for its exotic flavors. They don’t have their liquor license yet, but the food was very good. Someone ordered WAY more food than I did…

It was formerly a Chinese buffet that was formerly a Ponderosa (noted by the pines on the awning) but they’ve redecorated appropriately.

New computer! Which I’m not using to type this.
Assembly:

David got it up and running (with a little patient-diagram-reading from me) the same day the parts arrived, and has been kind enough to test it out on the plasma TV with his games using a wireless keyboard from the couch! I haven’t actually touched it yet.

Specs for the geeks, like Grandpa who always wants the best system:

ZALMAN 9500A 92mm 2 Ball CPU Cooler

GIGABYTE GA-X48-DS4 LGA 775 Intel X48 ATX Intel Motherboard

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 Yorkfield 2.5GHz LGA 775 95W Quad-Core Processor

mushkin 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory

Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD3200AAKS 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

SAMSUNG 20X DVD±R DVD Burner Black SATA Model SH-S203B - OEM

EVGA 512-P3-N861-AR GeForce 9600 GT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card

PC Power & Cooling S610EPS 610W Continuous @ 40°C EPS12V Power Supply

LIAN LI PC-7B plus II Black Aluminum ATX Mid Tower Computer Case

I’ll hook it up with my current monitor, speakers, keyboard, etc. I can’t believe this old computer has lasted me six years! Upgrades aren’t really worth it anymore. I shall report back once I get to actually use my new system.

Nicole and I went to the book release party for Half-Assed: A Weight Loss Memoir on Saturday. It just so happens that the author, Jennette Fulda, lives here in Indianapolis and also has a blog. The difference is that hers is internationally famous and she got a book deal! Jennette is very down to earth and Nicole and I were happy to be at the release party. We all had dinner together with Mymsie and friends a few months back just because we got in the habit of reading each other’s blogs and decided it would be fun to meet. It was the first time I met someone on the internet NOT for the purpose of dating! Much more fun to have dinner out with fellow bloggers. Anyway, congrats to Jennette for losing half her body weight, running a mini-marathon Saturday morning, and then celebrating the release of her book in the afternoon!

And here we are with the author, posing with her giant pants promo materials, Jennette signing our book (I haven’t read it yet so this post will be lacking a review!), and posing with our “Pasta Queen” scepters.

ETA: Set your TiVo to record Jennette on the Today Show on Mother’s Day!

I didn’t mean to cut off poor Jennette’s head there. The new blog software’s thumbnail feature does it automatically, and I’m not yet smart enough (i.e. I haven’t visited the help forums yet) to fix it. If you click on the thumbnail you do seem to get the real, uncropped pic, at least.

I came home to find the dogs having a meeting.

Looks like economic stimulus checks started going out this week. You can check the schedule of when you’ll get yours here.

So what will you be doing with your newfound cash? So far I’ve heard a coworker is getting car repairs and his dog’s tooth crowned, a lot of people are paying down credit cards, for many, money is going straight to savings and retirement accounts and emergency funds, and one person was buying a computer. I planned to leave it in the old checking account and it’ll just go to various normal expenses like any other directly-deposited money. I am currently on board for a trip to Rome and I need a new computer so I suppose it will contribute to those things as well. Now that I’m done paying for teeth, the next step is to pay off school loans, especially since my employer is cutting jobs and I’ve been considering going back to school! How could I ever let myself get MORE school loans?

Anyway, I liked this idea to give the money to something that supports a charity of your choice. Of course the post entertained me because it focused on giving it to charities that the current administration (of which I am hardly a fan) disapproves, but I try to steer clear of politics here since some of my readers do not share my views. I’m not sure why that should matter since I rant about everything else, but there ya go. I have, however, been known to buy trinkets for my dad celebrating Bush’s term ending. He’s always good for a political rant on the phone.

Doing anything sensible (or fun) with your stimulus?

Yesterday at Petco, Pippen was so zonked he looked very dead.

This is for you, Matt.

David and I went out for sushi last night, and then Mike and Carla invited us out to the Chatterbox, the first time I’d been there. It was incredibly crowded for awhile but we eventually were able to sit down, thanks to Carla being on top of chasing down people who were leaving and generally being willing to talk to anyone (just ask Doreen). Carla found a footless army man in the bathroom and he did not burn.

After a few drinks, David went up between sets to talk to the pianist, “Doc” Virginia Jefferson, who had him play with her for a bit. He’s looking for a jazz teacher.

BTW, I got $22.37 for my recycled crowns. I won’t spend it all in one place.