Fortunately, unlike others, I didn’t promise I’d shut down the blog if I didn’t manage to meet the challenge. Unfortunately, the only people who would care are a bunch of people who want to get rid of U3 software on their thumb drives. (I get about 200 hits a day on that alone. Sad.)

I’d say I had an excuse, but I don’t, mainly because I suck I just got tired and behind and sort of gave up. We’ll see if anything comes of it, or if I decide to do it again when I’m more inspired (though I suppose the point is to grab inspiration and run with it even when you don’t have it – sort of like NaNoWriMo).

Just wanted to ensure that the 6 people who read this blog regularly don’t think I’ve been hit by a bus.

When we rented this house, one of the perks was that the backyard was so neglected and barren that the landlord said we could make half of it a garden, as long as we put grass on the other half. Anything would be better than what was there.

Denver, being a semi-arid and extremely sunny place, is a city where the soil gets baked to the consistency of hardened concrete not long into spring, the surface effects of any melting snow/spring rain quickly gone. This makes pulling weeds, tilling soil, planting grass, etc, a daunting sort of nightmare in, say, mid-August. It probably took us a good week to get four raspberry canes and the eight berry bushes we bought into the rock-hard ground, any soil moisture being at least a foot into the ground. We’d taken to using a pickaxe to trying to get into the soil, and it was painful. The soil was so baked that trying to wet it only led to water running over the surface and sitting there, unabsorbed. And then, to try to prepare the soil for the lawn, there was the Weeding From Hell ™. The previous tenants had just not bothered to water the back lawn at all, so we were told, so there was no lawn. No nothing except for very evil weeds. This is not to say that all of the weeds are not gone, but I did manage to remove, to the roots, all of the enormous and well-established weeds from the third of the yard we planned to put grass back onto. Try pulling huge, woody weeds from sun-baked soil when they have thick taproots which go all the way down to the deep moisture below. It’s fun. It’s a Hell of a workout. And it took me days upon days. And then… there was prepping the soil for the grass, which involved breaking it up. Also using various shovels and pickaxes. We only got about 1/4 of the lawn done between the two of us before winter, it was so hard. I wanted to cry.

The only thing other than the bushes, raspberries, a few strawberries and herbs we got planted were a few crocuses and tulips. By the time winter hit, the backyard basically still looked like a vacant lot with a small strip of grass, 3 overgrown half-dead rosebushes, and 8 scraggly skeletons of drought-dead bushes. Oh, and a shitload of evil weeds in the future-garden area. And a tiny parched tree in the middle of it all. It was horrid.

I remarked to my husband that our backyard had never looked prettier than when covered with the snow drifts from the repeated blizzards that persisted all winter. Of course, those drifts, which have only now melted, badly damaged some of our struggling bushes too. But at least it hid the wasteland.

It was a really depressing backyard. I expected some crack dealers to take up residence in our pseudo-vacant-lot area, just to accessorize.

So that was then. Fast forward to now. Snow just melted, and soil still vaguely moist.

We’ve been outside, trying to start again.

And today I had a good look at the progress. Rose bushes pruned. Crocuses blooming and tulips emerging from the ground. The barren lawn soil which required at least a week to prepare a quarter of last fall took two days last week to finish the remaining three-fourths, leaving rich brown seed-covered soil. The strawberries are flourishing, a couple of the almost-dead raspberry canes are showing leaves, and every single damned one of those bushes that we struggled to get into the ground last year – the bushes that were covered in 5 feet of snow all winter, that were so parched last year we thought for sure they wouldn’t survive (in fact, we were sure they were all already dead) – every single damned one of them shows new green growth. Even the formerly-2-foot bush which is now about 5 inches tall has a bud or two. And some of them look positively healthy, ready to burst into bloom. Oh, and the rosebushes are doing just fine, and the mint appears ready to take over the middle of the herb garden.

It still looks a lot like a vacant lot due to the huge number of weeds I need to pull in the garden section, but there are flowers and leaves and the promise of a lawn in a few weeks, and there will be vegetables a few weeks after that, and berries and blossoms and all that good stuff. And most of it will be our doing. I can actually see it ceasing to look like a crack-dealer’s paradise not too long from now.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited about spring.

(Just don’t ask me about the front yard… I might cry.)

Listening to: Marco Borsato – Het Einde van de Lijn

(N.B.: extra snuggling worth it)

I should have done a lot of things with my day, like clean the house (which desperately needs it, and it’s totally my fault), but instead I did something ridiculously satisfying and totally useless. (Also, I took a nap on the couch.)

Today, I finished writing a bad novel. A very bad novel. One that I put away after the 2005 NaNoWriMo fiesta where I “won” by hitting 50,000 words in 30 days, not by finishing the story. And it’s one bad novel. It was never intended to be a good novel. It’s a horrible science-fictiony romance that, if I ever printed it out, would have to be burned immediately. But…

I decided to pull it out and read it sometime last year. And I found myself really ticked off… not because it sucked, but because I wanted to know what happened. So I’ve finally been hacking at it off-and-on the for last week, and today, I finally finished it. 83,000 words of crap, but now I finally know what happens (for those of you dying to know, the psychopath and the evil professor go to jail! the hero and the heroine live happily ever after! the author puts the story away for another year to hide her shame!). And secretly, I know it’s not actually half-bad. (It’s also not half-good. Don’t get any ideas about reading it. As I said, I never had any intention of writing it for anyone else.)

Unlike most of the NaNoWriMo participants I knew in L.A., I never had any intention of trying to publish it. Maybe, someday in the future, I’ll try and write one for someone else, but this one was for me, and I enjoyed it. And to have finished it, as I said, was profoundly satisfying. It was a creative exercise, and it turned out something that it turns out I care about, even if it’s for me alone.

Kurt Vonnegut, in his excellent book of essays, A Man Without a Country, says the following about the arts, and I suppose he’s right:

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or how badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

And so I have created something. And maybe someday soon, I will create something else. For now, I put my characters to bed in the Happily Ever After, and I put me to bed in my bed.

Listening to: Rob Thomas – Lonely No More

Now, I should have known this was going to happen from the very beginning – a couple of months after we started dating, he made me watch The Cube. I’m not saying The Cube isn’t an interesting movie, but… let’s put it this way. In the first scene, someone gets cut up into tiny meat cubes before the audience’s eyes. It gets worse from there. (And my husband is still in trouble for not following appropriate scared-girlfriend snuggling procedures with that one.) But it’s not just the gore that gets me. Let me just say this out loud right now: I don’t like scary movies.

Can I say that again? I don’t like scary movies. At all.

Ever since I accidentally walked in on my parents watching Alien on HBO when I was 8 (and you know which scene I walked in on – that’s right, the stomach scene), I have hated scary movies. I had fears of that damned alien in my room at night off and on until I was in high school. These movies are not for me. I saw one of the Friday the 13th movies in middle school, and was afraid of the dark for a long while afterwards. Skipping school in the 8^th grade to go see Nightmare on Elm Street? Really bad idea. And after that, I just knew better.

I’m less squeamish now, but there’s a message here: I don’t get off on being scared. Or grossed out. At all. I’m not kidding. Even a little bit.

Knowing this, my husband, bless him, will occasionally pop in a movie like Pitch Black, or tonight’s film, Oldboy. And I end up leaving the room 5 times, or as I did with Pitch Black, going into the kitchen and putting my headphones on and trying to ignore what’s going on in the other room.

Oldboy features tooth and tongue extractions, stabbings, and beatings among other things. I mean, the film has a neat concept (and a very disturbing ending), but… step back. Tooth and tongue extractions, kids. Nasty. No way of knowing this upfront, mind you. And halfway through the movie, bam… there I am, covering my eyes and leaving the room. Remember that bit about not liking to be scared or grossed out? I think this qualifies. Next thing you know, there’ll be another documentary in the queue which sends me to bed weeping and despairing of the fact that I am American/Caucasian/a Westerner/a human being who does not live in a log cabin in the mountains miles from civilization.

So the man can’t be trusted. Clearly, one weekend soon, I’m going to have to make him watch Pride and Prejudice (both the A&E and the big screen versions), Sense and Sensibility, Chocolat, The Truth about Cats and Dogs, and any other girlie movie I can get my hands on. Some extremely sappy fare would be appropriate, if I can find it. The more kissing, the better. And afterwards I’ll make him watch MST3K, which is particularly painful for those with no American cultural background. And then, well…

Someday I’ll get my revenge!

In the meantime, I suggest a new addition to the ratings system: Rated WSTELCOOK (Will scare the ever-living crap out of Krista). I’m sure the MPAA will go for it.

But for women, even the trying has its own special scariness, namely, that it’s the first time most of us have paid careful attention to the more… feminine aspects of our bodies (beyond care not to wear white pants once a month) since, oh, ever. All sorts of things happen – the humiliating realization that your hormones have more to do with your moods than you ever want to admit (lest you give ammunition to chauvinists everywhere), knowing when you ovulate (I mean, who knows this unless you need it???), abject fear when something that happens which shouldn’t (like bleeding when you shouldn’t be), and, of course, the realization that you’re pregnant (which I’m not).

All of these things are disturbing, but there is a special sort of disturbance out there which awaits any woman fool enough to venture onto the Internet looking for information about what’s going on with her body, or worse, about the whole process of trying to get pregnant. This disturbance is collectively called… The TTC Boards (**insert terrifying music here**).

Now, I’m not much for excessive use of Internet acronyms, really. I was a hardcore Internet gamer as of about 1992 (long before people got AOL and the Internet was flooded with everybody and his mother (read: dorks)), and we tended to use full sentences with the occasional acronym thrown in here and there (rofl, lol, wtf, brb, etc). Once the Internet became a big commercial entity, though, I guess the art of using full sentences fell into decline, the end result being that any time you end up reading an unfamiliar forum, you can be stuck trying to decipher strange acronyms until the cows come home. But the TTC boards bring this to a new and special art.

What are these mythical TTC boards? The “Trying to Conceive” boards, of course. Now, in this disjointed day and age, it’s nice to have some place to get advice from people who are in the same boat you are. On the other hand, some of the people on these boards have some ideas about reproduction that were clearly passed around on the short bus (like the lady who decided she needed to warm her uterus so it would feel cozy and cuddly to make the baby “stick”), so I’m not too sure about the advice. And their use of acronyms… it’s like someone told them about the Internet and how you could use even fewer letters than with real writing and they just went fooking bananas. So you end up with a bunch of posts like this:

I’m 10 DPO and on CD17 BBs were really sore, so I checked CM – no EWCM, but DH and I BD ‘d anyway – no AF yet, so hoping for a BFP!

They get much worse than that, but I’m trying not to make myself sick. What’s really disgusting, of course, is that I actually understand those posts by now, though I don’t have to like it. On top of that, everybody’s always sending each other sticky baby vibes and sprinkling baby dust on one another. I swear to God, I found a site selling various pregnancy-related items and they were offering free Baby Dust with purchase. What the Hell? Do they freeze-dry babies and grind them as a free gift? I mean, um, WTF?

I realize I’m being a big meanie, but seriously… I feel like I lose I.Q. points every time I read one of these things (which is why I mostly don’t anymore). Now, my guess is that most of the cutesy crowd doesn’t really want me in the forums, but in case they do, here are some suggestions that might make me slightly less ill next time Google steers me into one:

1. Try using full sentences. It doesn’t take that much more time, and it might keep people from thinking you’re stupid.
2. Quit using the cutesy euphemisms! “BBs”? Just say “breasts”, for God’s sake! Say it with me ladies: BREASTS! The Lord is not, I promise you, going to strike you down for using the word breasts – or even boobs – online. Or even offline! It’s amazing what doesn’t get you struck down by the Almighty. The term “BBs” reminds me of Dana Abernathy trying to explain male anatomy in hushed tones in 3rd grade ballet class by using the word “Tallywhacker”. I mean, c’mon guys. We’re grownups here and all.
3. Also, speaking of cutesy, the only thing worse than using the acronym “BD” for sex is what it actually stands for – baby dancing??? I saw some post where someone actually had a flashing little “blinkie” button with the words “Baby Dancing!” all lit up in flashy green. I mean, I’m sorry, but if you’re going to advertise, you might as well have a sign that says “I’m having sex!” – it sounds much more impressive, and it might make your husband feel less cheesy.
4. And on the subject of BD, there’s the issue of DH (dear husband, for the uninitiated). Now, I realize it takes two, and so if you’re going to talk about it, it’s hard not to include him, but seriously… did you ever think about limiting the personal information you give about the other party to this relatively private act? I mean, I’m sure Bob from IT is really interested in the positions DH enjoys and that his Viagra prescription ran out, but… I’m not so sure DH is interested in Bob from IT knowing. Because Bob from IT has a big mouth, and pretty soon, half the department’s snickering in their cubicles and sending DH unsavory “helpful” websites.

(Ok ok, I got carried away there with that last one. Usually it’s not all that bad, but I often find I’m faintly embarrassed on behalf of the partners.)

I could go on and on, but even I am getting bored with this, and mocking people is my favorite thing ever.

Anyway, so this is what happens when the AOL generation tries to reproduce. I’d almost pay money to see them try to teach their future kids to write, and I’d definitely pay to hear the birds and the bees talk (“Well, DD, a DH and DW really love each other, so they chart the DW’s BBT and maybe use a FM or OPK, and at around CD14, the DW O’s (with plenty of EWCM), so the DH and DW BD. Then there’s a TWW – if the DW doesn’t see AF, she can buy a HPT and POAS and will hopefully get a BFP!”)*.

I feel dirty just writing that. I think I’ll go take a shower now.

—–

*Translation after the cut, to avoid total hypocrisy (click Continue Reading below, or visit the actual blog entry page if you’re reading via a feed))

Translation: “Well, dear daughter, a dear husband and dear wife really love each other, so they chart the dear wife’s basal body temperature and maybe use a fertility monitor or ovulation predictor kit, and at around cycle day 14, the dear wife ovulates (with plenty of eggwhite-quality cervical mucus), so the dear husband and dear wife baby dance. Then there’s a two-week wait – if the dear wife doesn’t see Aunt Flo, she can buy a home pregnancy test and pee on a stick and hopefully will get a big fat positive!”

It’s nearly always cool at night, and even when it’s hot, it’s dry. The mountains are nearly always visible to the west, from almost anywhere in the city, and… my God, the stars.

Even in the city, even with light pollution, we can nearly always see the stars as we cuddle on our front porch at night. Now, I know it’s better up in the mountains, but it’s been a long, long time since I could even see enough stars to point out a constellation. When I was a little girl, when we lived in Salt Lake, my dad and I would lie on the front lawn and look out at the stars, just like this.

And tonight, in the little park near our house, my own dear heart and I cuddled up on a bench and looked up through the enormous pine trees to see a clear dark sky and the stars. Just for a moment, I could feel the same wonder I felt as a little girl, looking up at the great big sky with someone I love.

And it was good.

Listening to: Don McLean – Vincent (in my head, anyway)

I am a nomad. I didn’t particularly want to be one, but I am. I lived in my birthplace for less than a year. I’ve lived in nearly as many houses and apartments as I have years. I went to five different elementary schools (six if you count kindergarten), and have lived in 10 different cities just since I left high school (and many more before that). Aside from being cursed with wanderlust everytime the going gets rough, the major impact of this is that it makes it so much harder to make friends and find a social group each time I pack up and go somewhere new. Some of that’s age, but most of it is having lived through the mourning of old friends and the uncertainty of acquiring new ones over and over and over again. The idea of just waiting your time out in solitude in each new place becomes seductive, if not particularly happy or healthy.

Every time I move to a new city, I have to start over. It’s easier when you’re younger – you have a built-in peer group at school or in college, even if you do have to find a way to fit in with them, but it’s still starting over from scratch. Sure, you keep some of your distant old friends – for example, my dearest friend is a South African living in Bahrain who I met in Holland, and I still keep in touch with my best friend from high school – but it does become something of a burden to have to find like-minded individuals (since you can hardly depend on the bonds of shared past experience) to go grab a beer with.

Finding new people to hang out with, to be comfortable with, has its share of dangers too. At best, when it goes wrong, you just can’t find anyone you click with. At worst, you end up running into someone who shares a common interest, and who seems nice enough, but three weeks later is clearly desperate and wants a copy of your entire minute-by-minute schedule for the next month and starts getting pissed off if, you know, you want to spend time with your boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse. Neither situation is much fun, and I’m finding that the older I get, the less I’m inclined to risk either.

It gets really hard, and it seems like too much effort.

Now, I know that for me personally, it’s really a matter of just giving in to the permanence of my current situation and biting my lip, ignoring my (covertly) introverted nature, and getting off my butt to do social things. Nothing pitiful about it, it’s just a matter of being less lazy about it. It’s just that the inertia is a bitch. It’s something I always remedy over time, but it does kind of suck. It’s hard not to envy some of those people I know who’ve stayed relatively close to home for most of their lives, who have the benefit of old friends who know all of the old stories, and who are comfortable parts of the new ones. Us nomads get a little sick of trading our life stories with virtual strangers each time we’re transplanted, I guess.

So, anyway, the upside of being a nomad is that you get to see new places; the downside is that you end up with a massively dispersed social group, and finding a new one every couple of years is a pain in the ass. I am really glad we’re staying put for the foreseeable future – maybe that will help this time. But I do really miss my old friends I used to go grab beers with, whether in Indiana or Amsterdam or New Orleans. E-mailed beer just doesn’t cut it.

Listening to: Marillion – Kayleigh

When I was a kid, I lived in two (different) fundamentalist communities. When I was really young, I lived in Salt Lake City, which is more dilute than it was 25-30 years ago – it was great fun *cough* for what the Mormons rather comically term “gentiles” at the time. As in “get beat up at school” and “have local teenagers flip the bird at your 7-year-old form on the way to school” kind of fun. We had our housed egged once or twice. It was the best display of wholesome family values ever.

(At least it gives me a good story to get the missionaries to back off with.)

Then we moved. Salvation, at last!

Well, not quite. We moved to rural South Carolina. And there, in the first week of class, my parents found out I was having to pray before lunch in the local public school. And my father, having grown up persecuted for not being a Mormon, was not about to let the local Southern Baptists make his daughter pray. He came to the school and mentioned “separation of church and state.” Let me tell you, those are words they just love down there, right along with “the Civil War is over – you lost.” I got to sit down while everyone else prayed in class after that, and as you might imagine, this made me wildly popular with both teachers and students. I distinctly recall, in 5th grade, Michael Grishaw telling a friend and I that his mother said we worshipped the devil because we didn’t want to take copies of the New Testament the Gideons had kindly brought in bulk to reading class.

Fine, upstanding members of society, these fundamentalist evangelical kids. Always giving the other kids a nice, Christian welcome. I wonder if their parents ever think, “hrm, I wonder… maybe telling my kids that these kids are scum and deserve scorn is not a way to win souls for Jesus.” Nah, wait, I don’t wonder. Clearly they don’t.

It was such a relief to move to Milwaukee, I tell you. It was the first time in my life where the question “What are you?” was reserved for charades rather than used as a question about what religion you were. Since then, I’ve managed to avoid insular communities where every day is like Jesus Camp, but movies like this are a reminder that it’s all still out there. It’s nothing new. And it sends chills up my spine.

And dear God, these poor kids. When they finally get to the age where they have to figure out who they are, it’s going to be a rough ride.

N.B.: As part of my 30 in 30 rules, I said I’d admit to whatever I was listening to when I wrote the posts. Right now, it’s nothing but the laptop fan.

Everyone else has posted ground rules for themselves, and since I’m such a bloody follower, here are mine:

1. No Britney Spears. Not that there would have been anyway, but it seems like a good rule.
2. No rants from anything I’ve read in Mother Jones. Even if it’s really good and enhances the accuracy of my Dick Cheney Voodoo Dartboard.
3. At least 4 of the posts will include photos, because my camera backlog now extends back to our honeymoon – in 2005.
4. No more than 1500 words in any post, even if I think it’s really important to rant and get something off of my chest. If you think that’s easy for me, you’ve never read my blog.
5. At least one of my posts will be in German. If it has more than 100 actual, non-made-up German words, I’d better get free chocolate from somebody.
6. At least one post from something social I do in Denver. Which means I have to do something social in Denver. Be afraid.
7. There is no 7.
8. I’ll admit to whatever I’m listening to at the time, even if it’s John Denver.

Not very exciting, but who cares. I write for me

I think the sunscreen’s ready. Out to brave the Colorado sun.