St. Catherine of Sienna

Sometimes I look around me, and realize that I have a pretty cool life.  Friday night was one of them.  I was sitting in the passenger seat of Pippi’s Jeep, exchanging flirty texts with a total stranger whom I devoutly hope I will never meet (one of the odd side effects of the even odder weekend I had last weekend), driving through one of the tiny, intensely Catholic farming towns you find about an hour north of here, scanning the countryside behind the houses for signs of a bonfire to attend.  And I thought to myself, you know, I could not make this stuff up if I tried.  And I am a lucky girl.

The deal is that Crafty Chick (one of the few people I know who has a crafting room almost as messy as my own), had invited us up there for a Holy Hour followed by a bonfire at her new house, and while Pippi and I left town far too late to make the praying part of the evening, we were determined to at least be social.  The problem was that although we knew where Crafty Chick used to live, neither one of us had ever been to her new place, the only address on the invitation was for the church where the Holy Hour was, and we had no idea where we were going.  None of the people we knew were already there were answering their phones, so we started just driving around town looking for bonfires.  The town was small enough that we thought we had at least a 50/50 chance of finding it.  We did find one bonfire, but we didn’t recognize any of the cars parked there, and Pippi wouldn’t let me get out of the car to check (horror movies never start that way, no…).  I suggested just looking for the fire house, since the guys there would probably know about all the bonfires in town.  Ironically, soon after that we happened to drive past the fire house, and right next door found a bonfire with cars we recognized.  Even then Pippi wouldn’t let me get out of the car until she recognized one of the people standing around it as Flo’s brother.

The bonfire itself was fun – PM decided that he needed to show me what he remembers of his ballroom classes, so I got to dance a little.  One of my friends made me text The Duchess to suggest Moneypenny as a name for her unborn child, should she turn out to be a girl.  I got to see Crafty Chick’s craft room, and her awesome 1940s turquoise tiled bathroom (she doesn’t like it, and I’m totally jealous).  And then I was back in Pippi’s Jeep, heading out again across farm country, this time heading for Flo’s house.  It was time for a sleep over.

You see, back in February I promised Flo that while she was recovering from reconstructive ankle surgery I would come to her house and show her Star Wars.  She had confessed that she had never seen any of the Star Wars movies, not even the awful ones released in the 90s, a state of things I found tragic and wrong.  Surprisingly, Flo turned out not to be as enthusiastic about the prospect of watching science fiction classics as I was, so it took a while for this to finally happen.

Sleep overs are an odd concept for me.  Johnsy used to be a big fan of wanting to get a bunch of friends over to stay the night, but I always resisted.  I know there’s the traditional girl-bonding activities of watching soppy movies, painting toenails, eating unhealthy food and oversharing.  But the whole concept is still somewhat fraught for me with too many memories of childhood sleepovers full of pre-teen angst and the certainty that I could not escape betraying in some humiliating way my total social awkwardness.  Now that I’m a grown woman, I like sleeping in my own bed.  Staying over at another person’s house for no particular reason never seemed like, I dunno, fun.

All that being said, I think this may be one of the first sleep overs I have ever really, truly enjoyed.  There have been some that were fairly pleasant, but this one was just fun.  Flo has two very comfortable guest beds, so there was no need for sleeping bags or getting stiff sleeping on the floor.  We all fell asleep pretty soon after we got there, and slept like logs.  When we woke up we sort of lounged around and talked for a while.  There was a very lazy attempt at a pillow fight that didn’t go very far.  The words “french toast” began to be mentioned with greater and greater frequency, and after a while we gathered up the momentum to actually go into the kitchen and make some.  We had that for breakfast, with fresh pineapple and strawberries and Greek yogurt.

After breakfast we put the first Star Wars (Episode IV, if you acknowledge the existence of those other films released in the 90s, which I don’t).  Flo and Pippi both had never seen it before, and were not really sure they were going to like it.  I did my best not to say all the best lines along with the actors (not sure how well I succeeded).  Afterwards, I was ready to grab my stuff and go – Pippi had a thing she was supposed to be back in Dayton for, so I thought we had to leave.  But to my surprise, suddenly Flo was talking about the pizzas she had in the freezer, and saying that, since we had all of the movies here, we might as well put in the next one, and Pippi’s thing she had to be back for turned out to be not so pressing after all, and to make a long story short, we watched all of them.  All three movies.  A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi, back to back.  We did nothing all day but watch movies, getting up only for food or drink or to go to the bathroom.  It was fairly epic.

It was funny watching the movies again.  I hadn’t seen them in a long time, though they were so much a part of my childhood they’re sortof just part of my subconscious.  It was odd watching what I remembered as intensely romantic sexual tension between Han and Leia, and thinking “Man, Han sure is a jerk.”  I also hadn’t remembered how much C3PO whined.  All the time.  On the plus side, I hadn’t completely remembered how utterly adorable R2D2 is, or how much I really, truly love these movies with all my heart.

After we had finished all three movies, Flo wanted to show us a Darth Vader cameo in Night at the Museum 2, and then we were watching the outtakes, and then Pippi saw Hank Azaria’s Arms of Total Manly Hotness, and somehow before I knew it we were watching another movie.  And it was awesome.  My favorite part?  ”How about you shove your hands in your pockets, take your attitude way down, and also, be nice to people.”  (Not that there’s anyone in particular I’m dying to say that to.  Or anything.)  And I have to admit, Hank Azaria’s arms really are something.  It doesn’t hurt that the brain animating those arms belongs to a hilariously funny man.  If my heart weren’t already given to Ryan Gosling, I’d be tempted to switch my allegiance (Pippi: “No!  He’s mine!”)

Speaking of which, Ryan Gosling is now also apparently Catholic:

Perfect. Man.

Bl. John Alcober – the 5th day of Christmas

The past few days have been full of Festivity.  First there was my parents’ Anniversary (they’ve been married now for 41 years).  It was a laid back sort of affair – hanging out at the Family Homestead and watching movies all together.  Mariah brought over most of her truly impressive alcohol collection, and we mixed Gin & Tonics with St. Germaine, and concoctions of ginger liquer mixed with Creme de Cacao or orange juice, plus many, many Shirley Temples for Fleur.  We watched A Muppet’s Christmas Carol together (I cried at the “Life is made up of meetings and partings. That is the way of it. I am sure that we shall never forget Tiny Tim, or this first parting that there was among us. “ part, and so did Mariah), and then we watched Raising Arizona, which was much more cheerful.

On Wednesday we had our Family Gift Day, which was mostly lovely, the first part, anyway.  This year AnniPotts and Boy-O collaborated on their presents, which included cleaning out the used book store.  Apparently they found a whole series of really ridiculous romance novels with nerdy heroes (The Nerd Who Loved Me, Nerds Like It Hot, Talk Nerdy To Me, My Nerdy Valentine, etc.), and gave one to each of the girls in the family.  Except Fleur.  She’s not old enough for even the most ridiculous romance novel.  Mariah had already given me my Christmas present (two very nice cardigan sweaters when I was freaking out about not having an office-y enough wardrobe), but she threw in a license plate cover from Fiber Works that says “I’d Rather Be Knitting.” I thought that was pretty cool.  I gave up on trying to finish Mr. T’s cabled socks, and instead gave him a gift card to Olive Garden.  I figure the socks will have to be a birthday present after all.

The hard part was that after we’d done all the fun present giving, Mariah brought out the last of the boxes of Jacob’s stuff, the ones that have been sitting in her living room for months, ever since we moved them out of Sae’s basement.  It seems like no matter how much of Jacob’s stuff we go through and distribute, there’s always more.  Or there was.  I have it on reliable authority that this was the last.  And it better be.  It took us five and a half hours.  It felt like infinitely longer.  At one point I thought we were never going to get out of there.  But we did.  I now have custody of what was Jacob’s stuffed R2D2, his George R.R. Martin books, the letters I wrote him while I was on NET, his The Tick figurine that used to balance on a bit of plastic wall until somehow we lost the wall, and his Baptismal candle, among other things.  And now we’re done.  I think.  I hope.  Please, God, let us be done!

Thursday was better, though I felt like I had a hangover most of the day from the emotional overload the day before.  I kinda just wanted to go home, crawl into bed, and not come out again until the next day, but CO2 was in town for Christmas, and had volunteered to lead our Catholic young adult group in a Posada.  This is a Mexican (and other Spanish speaking countries) tradition in which you act out the journey of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem.  Afterwards you have a party, complete with a pinata.  I love pinatas!  So I packed up the vat of Buffalo Chicken Dip I made in my slow cooker, crackers, napkins, rope, and a whiffle ball bat to hit the pinata with.  And I was glad I did.  There’s nothing like whaling on a pinata to chase the holiday blues away.  And our pinata, a very jaunty blue pony, put up a fight!  Everyone got a turn blindfolded, and then we started whacking on it without the blindfold.  It was pretty sweet.  Once it was finally eviscerated we cheerfully adjourned to our meeting room for food & hanging out.  And it was good.

Tonight, in a few minutes I’m heading out to the Welcome Back Dinner for PM (my long lost Minion).  After dinner people are heading over to Tank’s, but I don’t think I’m going to.  I’m just tired.  I want to stay in and, I dunno, paint my nails.  Or something.  Tomorrow is Mariah’s Big New Year’s Eve Party, and then New Years Day is another family day.  We’re not having our Huge Family Party this year.  (We’ve thrown three weddings this year.  That’s enough parties for a while.)  But we’re still going to get together and hang out, and probably go watch Tin Tin.  And somewhere in there I swear I’m going to get some sleep.  Really.

St. Ambrose

First of all, I would like to start by thanking all of you for your amazing response to my last post.  I even got a few e-mails from friends & family members weighing in on my situation!  In the end I decided to go with the hospital job.  It was a hard decision, and I worried over it all day Monday.  I decided to sleep on it, and when I woke up Tuesday I knew what my decision had to be.  As soon as I made up my mind, all of the trouble and doubt of the previous day cleared away, and I was back to feeling pleasantly excited about the new job.  It seems like such a great opportunity – I feel a little like a child waiting for Christmas when you know a particularly delightful present is going to be under the tree.

Today and tomorrow I’m working out at the construction site for the new hospital making badges for all the contractors and others who are working on the building.  So far it’s been rather slow.  It was busy for a bit this morning, but that finished off with two really, really cute construction workers, and since then I’ve had no one.  Hopefully tomorrow will be a bit busier.

It’s been a rather exciting week at our house.  First there was my dilemma over jobs, and then Rosie seriously injured her back.  She was lifting weights, and decided to do some squats even though she knew her back has been extra sensitive lately.  Sure enough, her back went out, and since then she’s been confined to the futon in the living room.  This has proven problematic when it comes to things like, say, making it to the bathroom on the second floor.  However, we’re enormously lucky that The Absent-minded Professor just finished his college term and is home for the holidays.  He’s been waiting on Rosie literally hand and foot.  (“AP, could you put my socks on for me?”)  Little by little, with the help of ice packs, muscle relaxants, and pain killers, she’s been starting to regain a little mobility.  This afternoon she had a doctor’s appointment, which I hope will help even more.

Funnily enough, one of the side effects of Rosie’s injury has been a major uptick in the number of movies I’ve been watching.  Monday night when I came home from swing club to find Rosie incapacitated on the futon, AP had just put in Sweeney Todd to help distract her from the pain.  And while Sweeney Todd is an excellent movie, it’s maybe not the wisest choice for a situation like that.  Fortunately, I had just gotten Crazy, Stupid, Love. from Netflix, so we put that in instead, and all of us in the house, even Johnnycakes, ended up sitting around watching it together.  Just about every movie with Steve Carrell ends up being awesome, but I also have to say that I now see why Ryan Gosling inspires internet memes.  Then last night Cinder brought over Attack The Block.  I only meant to stay up a little while I finished up some internet surfage, but I ended up staying for the entire movie, and really, really liking it.  And, well, this has been fun, but I gotta start getting some sleep!

St. Onesiphorus

I’ve been watching movies lately.  This has been a change.  I haven’t really watched many movies since things got crazy before Sae’s wedding.  I used to put movies or TV show DVDs on while I was working on a knitting or hand sewing project, but though I’ve been very busy in the months since then, it hasn’t been with things that allowed for movie watching.  But somehow this weekend I ended up watching  a movie almost every day.  It was pretty sweet.

The first movie was at work on Friday.  It was the last day of the second in command at my new work, so they were having a good-bye luncheon.  They invited me to come, and I cheerfully said I would, though I figured it would be the usual awkward speeches, etc.  But I was so wrong – it turned out to so much more than I ever would have dreamed.

You see, it seems that they and this guy had a running joke going for over a year about the movie Iron Eagle.  It’s a ridiculous 1986 teen flick that’s something like a low-budget mashup of Star Wars and Top Gun.  Very low budget.  Apparently he saw it when he was a teenager, and it made an impression on him.  So for his going away luncheon, the department ordered in pizza, and they watched the movie.  With commentary.  And fast-forwarding to the best scenes.  And rewinding the most ridiculous bits to watch again.  It was wonderful.  I laughed until I cried, then I laughed until I cried again.  I don’t think I’ve ever had so much fun at work.

Then on Saturday AnniPotts and Indy came over, and we ended up watching You Kill Me, and obscure movie populated with a breathtakingly star-studded cast.  It’s all about a hit man for a small time mob family in Buffalo, NY, played by Ben Kingsley.  He’s also an alcoholic.  When his drinking makes him miss carrying out an important hit, he gets sent out to San Francisco to dry out and get his life together.  It’s a gorgeous black comedy about addiction and recovery and living an imperfect life.  I loved it.  Not only did it give me a new favorite quote (“Here’s to granting others the serenity to change the things you cannot accept.  And the courage to accept large amounts of change serenely. And the wisdom to know the difference.”), but it led me to discover a new favorite jazz singer: Molly Johnson.  Her song If You Know Love was played over the credits, and has been in my head ever since.

Then yesterday, I decided to finally sit down and watch the movie I’ve had out from Netflix forever: Les Visiteurs.  It’s a very silly comedy starring Jean Reno about a medieval nobleman who gets accidentally transported 1000 years into the future where he meets up with his descendants and has mad hijinks.  They remade it as an American version a few years later, but the remake was never as good as the original.  I watched it long ago, but I was wondering if it really was as good as I remembered.  And it was.  Jean Reno is one of my favorite actors at any time, but the utterly transcendent glow that he brings to his face when his character sees his precious descendants just makes me go all gooey (and also think fondly of Sae’s Baby Schmoo – yes, I know I’m ridiculous).

In other news, autumn decided to descend on us this weekend like a ton of bricks.  It’s ridiculous.  Going from heat warnings to needing a sweater within 24 hours?  Good grief.

St. Scholastica

So before I get to the regular news portion of this blog post, I have a question I’d like your opinion on.  You see, in the latest episode of Glee, the bad-boy, mohawk-sporting, totally hot character Puck falls in love with Lauren, the fat girl.  And she’s not the attractively fat girl, she’s the really, really fat girl who is a championship wrestler.  Now, to begin with, it’s rather amazing that the show seems to be treating this story arc fairly seriously.  Usually in TV shows or movies fat girls in love are portrayed as the comic relief.  For example, in the 1995 version of A Little Princess, there’s a subplot about the evil school mistress’s sister (who happens to be rather overweight) falling in love with the normal sized milkman.  It is played almost entirely for laughs, culminating in their comic elopement where the sister crushes her lover, first by tossing her large trunk out of a window for him to “catch”, and then by tossing her even larger self.  The only counter-example I can think of where a fat girl gets the guy without being an object of ridicule is the various iterations of Hairspray (and possibly Shallow Hal, but even that mocks fat people fairly harshly, and posits a situation in which the only way the guy even considers the fat girl is because he’s hypnotized into thinking that she’s thin).  So the plain fact that the show’s writers are willing to write a romance about a fat girl without playing it for laughs is really something.

However, my question is this: while Puck (who tends to be a bit clueless) is trying to court Lauren, he serenades her with Queen’s Fat Bottomed Girls.  You can watch it here. Later in the show, Lauren repeatedly describes the song as offensive.  And, well, I dunno.  I mean, yes, the song is pretty crude, but then, it’s Queen.  I’ve always been fond of it simply for its whole-hearted appreciation of, you now, lush female forms.  But Lauren has a point.  Regardless of how big or small your body is, you want to be appreciated for more than that, especially if you’re sensitive about what you perceive as your physical shortcomings.  I mean, a woman with a large chest (particularly one who isn’t comfortable with it) wouldn’t want a man serenading her with a song all about her breasts.  So my question for you is this:

In other news, I believe we have found a solution to the great Wedding Veil Yarn Shortage Crisis of 2011.  While I was discussing options and showing Sae the yarn alternative on Sunday, Mr. T offered to finance the acquisition of more angora yarn from the little yarn shop in Wisconsin.  So Monday I started trying to get in touch.  It took a little while.  It seems that the yarn shop has been sold since I visited there last summer, and once I’d tracked down the new owner she still needed to check whether she still had enough of that yarn in stock.  In the end, all was well, she had more than enough, a package with 800 more yards is on its way to me, and knitting on the veil will hopefully recommence very soon.

Also, I’m starting to get excited about Valentine’s Day.  I know that this is not a popular attitude, particularly among single people in our culture.  But I rather like Valentine’s Day.  I view it as a celebration of the fact that love exists, that true love does happen, that some people really do find their true loves, and that this is a good thing even if it isn’t currently happening to me.  In the past I used to buy a pack of the cheap valentines they sell for kids, and inflicted them on everyone and anyone I met.  It was awfully fun.  I haven’t done it the last two years, but this year I’m back in the game.  Yesterday I printed off a bunch of the free knitting-themed valentines from Mochimochi Land, and gave them to everyone at dancing.  (My favorite is the one that says, “I want to knit you things!” Now that’s an expression of true devotion if I ever saw one!)  It was a lot of fun.  Also, one of the reasons I know Swing Snark likes me is that she lets me give her valentines even though she hates them.

However, the real reason I’m starting to get excited about Velentine’s Day is because of Operation Valentinus.  This is a project sponsored by Seraphic of Seraphic Singles (also Seraphic Spouse) to help make Valentine’s Day not nearly so painful for singles.  She’s encouraging single women to pick three other single women to send special Valentines packages.  It not only distracts you from your own dread of the great rubbing-of-salt-into-the-singleness-wound that Valentine’s Day can be by focusing your energies on making another person happy, but also improves your chances of getting your own sweet surprise in the mail.  Personally, I’ve been have a wonderful time scheming up various packages for a few dear friends and relatives (though I don’t have nearly so many single relatives anymore).  I’m hoping to get them in the mail today, and can’t wait until they reach their destinations.  Surprises are so much fun!