08.30.09
Posted in Personal, Writing at 4:55 pm by JC
So, I’m doing research for a potential short story, and I was thinking about using the old European witch hunts as part of the background, and then I’m thinking about handsome immortal Spaniards and then I started doing some research and… wouldn’t you know it? The Spanish Inquisition was about Jews and to a lesser extent Muslims, not witches. The worst of the actual witch hunting was apparently done in Germany, France, and – get this – Switzerland, with a couple notable Scottish outbreaks. All of a sudden, the Malleus Maleficarum (the infamous Witch’s Hammer which was the witch hunting manual of choice) being written by Germans suddenly make a lot more sense. But this just doesn’t fit well with my current short story plot. *sigh* Must replace handsome Spaniard with handsome…. Frenchman? Scottsman? But I was really diggin’ the curly black hair…
In other news, I figured out why Morgan is scared of the upstairs. In yet another attempt to get Morgan to watch a movie with us, we fed the cats upstairs. Morgan, who has in the past shown that the one thing that will make her overcome her fear of the upstairs is food, flipped out and refused to enter the movie room (which is at the top of the stairs). She rounded the corner, saw the Cowboys game playing on the wall, and low-tailed it out. And then I realized that we’d never fed her upstairs while the movie screen was on, and now there she was, hunched over three steps from the top where she usually hangs out while we watch movies. Scott had to pick her up and carry her to her food bowl. She was panicking the whole time, staring at the screen like it was going to eat her, and I sat there and pet her while she downed her food keeping one eye on the behemoths onscreen.
I explained my theory to Scott that Morgan believed the movie screen was like a door and that the images were real. Scott laughed. And when she was done eating, he picked her up and she squirmed while he took her to the screen and bumped her lightly against it, proving that it was not, in fact, a portal to another world, and the football players were not, in fact, in her living room. We started 300 (good movie, btw, if you don’t mind a lot of violence), and she turned her back to the screen and hunched by the couch. Every now and then I leaned over and pet her. After about 30 minutes, apparently deciding that nothing was going to jump out of the screen and eat her, she hopped into my lap, and we continued our old trend of Morgan purring in my lap while we have family movie night.
She seemed very proud of herself, purring extra-loud during the film, making sure she was the last one out of the room when it was over, and she hung out on the stairs and batted at us playfully after we’d descended. And voila! Maybe not her favorite place on Earth, but Morgan may actually join us upstairs now!
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08.29.09
Posted in Personal at 5:18 pm by JC
Day 30 was yesterday, and I have successfully completed a month of Paleo! I know that there were times when I was eating out that I’m sure a little butter/salt/vinegar snuck into my food, but other than that I was totally with the program. The run down:
- Not that this was the reason or plan, but I lost 10 pounds, and all my jeans now fit. Yay!
- I ate guacamole salad on Wednesday with no ill effects, and had cheddar with lunch today, also with no ill effects. As getting ill every time I ate certain foods actually was the reason that I did this, WOW! Maybe on Sunday I’ll try a glass of red wine. Yum!
- I had them take the bread off of my sandwich at lunch today ’cause why not. I’m actually starting to think that food tastes better without bread. It was a little messy, but it worked. And I’d really like to keep the ten pounds not on. It’s been like 10 years since I was under 150, and I think I’m going to shoot for 145, which has been my long term goal. And now I think I can do it. I’m even thinking about excercising… (but maybe that’s going too far…)
- This morning I had my first Scotte (Scott made latte), and it was sooooo fabulous. Today I’ve been a little more alert than I have been lately, and I’m wondering if it’s the coffee.
I’m so glad I did this. A month is really not that hard, and the benefits of how I feel about food (and how I look!) have waaaaay outweighed the cost of a month of cheese and wine (and bread, but I just don’t miss that that much – though I do gotta say that I am looking forward to a pastry treat one of these days, but only if it’s really good!!). I’ll probably continue posting notes as I slowly reintegrate some foods (mainly dairy, wine, and salt) back into my diet, but overall I highly recommend 30 days of Paleo to anyone who has questions about their relationship with food.
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08.24.09
Posted in Personal at 1:51 pm by JC
I’m almost half-way to 33 and everyone’s having babies, and Scott and I are starting to think about that ourselves. And I guess that sort of thing makes you consider your life and what you’re doing with it. And after devouring National Geographic’s travel website, longing with a fierce intensity to see with my own eyes the awe-inspiring wonders it portrays, I realized something: I don’t travel enough.
I mean, I knew this. If you asked me what I’d like to do more of, the answer is always: travel, but looking at pictures of all these places brought tears to my eyes, along with this clawing fear in my core that I would never get to see it for myself. I know you can’t see the whole world, I know that. But I have seen so damn little of it, and mostly places that I have a firm point of reference for – foreign, but not that foreign.
But I look at the things I’ve decorated my office with… there’s my college diploma which I haven’t quite managed to hang up, and then on the walls there’s two paintings of the beach that I got in Antigua, a colorful mask from my trip to western Mexico, 3 Quexicoatl masks – one from ChichenItza, one from Tulum, and one my friend brought me from Guatemala, a papyrus of Bast that my best friend brought me from Egypt, a mask from Singapore than my parents brought me, a long Jamaican face (along with the good luck beads the man gave me when I bought it), my other leather mask that I got in a gift shop in Barbados, a mermaid fetish a friend brought me from New Orleans, and photographs from Switzerland and Seattle. There are three things on my wall – three total – that are not related to travel: my signed photo of Harrison Ford, my award for Best All Around Girl for the BHS class of ‘95, and Moon Baby, a piece of art I won at a silent auction supporting Zach Scott Theater. These are my cherished things that I have chosen to surround myself with, the things that provide the most inspiration in my sanctuary. Even for my walls, I chose a soft, earthy green and did a finish on it that reminded me of woven bamboo. I obviously wanted my office to take me somewhere.
Now travel is expensive, and that’s a big issue. And people say all the time, “Oh, it’s not that much,” but when getting airfare across the ocean starts at over $2000, well, I’m not sure I share their definition of “not that much.” I know it’s a priority issue, but I can’t have 100% my own priorities when I’m married, and saving for the future is important, as is paying for our house and…and…and… the eternal and.
But the fact remains that if I don’t get out and be in other places with other people, and see and eat and walk their streets and touch their spot on the planet, when I look back on my life, I will feel like I failed. I can never get published, and I will be disappointed, but not feel like I failed. I would love to have a family, but if for some reason Scott and I can’t, I will not feel like I failed. Hell, I would love to get my house in order and keep it clean for two days in a row, and I feel like I kinda fail every day for not doing that, but not on a global cosmic, life path sort of way. Just in a… minor personality disorder sort of way. I don’t want a vacation – I have no desire to sit on a beach or ski down a mountain or get on a cruise ship (unless it’s taking me down the Amazon). The world has this; Mila Zinkova (who took the photographs) went there. That means I can, too.
If you see me, don’t encourage me. I think that would upset me; definitely don’t tell me “well, if you just…” This is something that if I fix, I need to fix on my own. You’re welcome to remind me of my cats and how they would hate it if I was gone all the time (that actually works better than finances to calm my wanderlust). But I do post this here as a statement to the world that I have life goals that I have been ignoring, and I need to fix that.
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08.23.09
Posted in Personal at 5:52 pm by JC
Mason Lerner wrote an interesting and sad but true article on pro sports called The Dirty Secret and the Double Standard. I don’t know a single person who wasn’t outraged by Vick, so why don’t we have the same outrage for our fellow man? Why is it in movies that the pet dying will make me cry more than people dying?
And now that you’re depressed and philosophical, if you haven’t been to Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, you are missing out on one of the joys of the internet. My favorite thing they do is a cover thrashing, where they take the most hideous covers of romance gone by and caption them. Do not drink liquid while you read. You will spit it out.
And for those of you who also dig Urban Fantasy novels, here’s a cover montage from SciFiGuy that shows how the cover artists for this fine genre… may need some new ideas. I like covers, though, even the uber-generic ones. That’s one of the few things that makes me sad about my Kindle (otherwise its PERFECT) is that the books rarely have covers, and on the list that you scroll through, there’s only titles and authors to help you figure out what you want to read next. I didn’t realize how much I relied on covers to help me remember a book until I no longer had them.
Day 25 Paleo going strong! I’ve lost a chunk of weight and I’m really excited about it (not that I was like fat before or anything, but I’m heading towards thin!). I’m going to have to make a big decision after the month is over to keep it up or to get off my ass and excercise, ’cause dang… I’m under 150 for the first time in like ten years (OK, daily fluctuation between 148.5 and 151, but in the morning before I eat but after I pee, it is consistently 14something, and I have hope that in the week I have left, it’ll be ALWAYS under 150) and I am so determined to keep it there. Wish me luck!
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08.21.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:58 am by JC
Fall is my favorite season of the year, no question about it. There’s something about the start of school, a fresh breeze with a hint of chill, the leaves thinning and the night growing that is like… I dunno, wiping away the old to make the world clean again. Anything is possible in the fall. I can start fresh in the fall.
This might have something to do with being a Texan. If you were going to ask me what the deadest month of the year is, I’d likely say August. February is cold and blustry, but August kills with heat. The world around here is a dehydrated wasteland, and I can’t bring myself to step foot outside in it. In February, you can put on a coat. In August, not matter what you wear, the heat gets under your skin and burns you dry. But just when I think I can’t take it any more…
Dai Due (if you’re in the Austin area and aren’t familiar with this foodie gold, check it out… and get ready to put forth your paycheck in whole) has a weekly butcher shop offering that rotates with sausages and terrines and all kinds of goodness. I just got this week’s mailing, and it’s filled with apples and pork, and it just made me smile so big. The best tastes of the year, in my mind, come in gourds and pork and glorious, glorious apples! Maybe when the my month of living Paleo is up, I’ll break the fast with a cider. I will have made it through August as a primal gal, and can be proud that I’ve done something healthy with my arch-nemisis month.
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