Questions from a friend's post on an antisocial network. Answers all mine.

1. Do you make your bed every day?
My sweetie does, so I almost never do.

2. How many hours of sleep do you need to be great?
Highly dependent on the environment and context, but average 8-9.

3. What two grocery items do you never run out of?
Peanuts and tea.

4. At what age did you start doing your laundry?
I started helping with household laundry in childhood, and didn't separate my own from the family's until I moved out at twenty-one.

5. If you could, would you go back to high school?
Hell no.

6. Can you parallel park in under three moves?
I doubt it.

7. A job you had which people would be shocked to know you once had?
I'll go with nude model, which seems to surprise most people. Others might find it odd that I was once a Kelly girl (temporary administrative and secretarial help through an agency).

8. Do you think there are aliens?
I think there's intelligent life we will never have contact with.

9. Can you drive a stick shift?
Yes.

10. Guilty TV pleasure?
Haven't watched TV in many years. My guilty movie pleasure is chop-socky.

11. Tattoos?
In the planning stages. I have a studio in mind (three possible artists on their roster) and am working on the design.

12. If the world ends do you want to be one of the survivors?
It would be an interesting challenge to make the best of an entirely changed environment, so yes.

13. Sweet or salty?
Salty. Bitter or sour would be more of a toss up.

14. Do you enjoy soaking in a nice hot bath?
Of course, though only on special occasions to unknot and relax.

15. Do you consider yourself a strong person?
Others consider me a strong person. I consider myself stubborn, which I will grudgingly admit requires a lot of strength. I am also brittle and need friends who help me avoid breaking.

16. Something people do that drives you nuts?
Judge (look down on) people based on their appearance. I know I do this myself, albeit with different parameters.

17. Do you have any birthmarks?
Yep.

18. Favourite childhood game?
Kick the can.

19. Do you talk to yourself?
Not out loud (usually). I do some of my blog and speech writing by talking to myself in my inside-my-head voice.

20. Do you like doing jigsaw puzzles?
Have enjoyed them in the past. It's been a few years.

21. Tea or coffee?
Tea first thing in the morning, coffee mid morning, then tea. I'm mostly a tea person.

22. First thing you remember wanting to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be an astronaut.

Random thought:

I was thinking about all the people who have played The Stage Manager in Our Town. Fred Gwynne, Henry Fonda, Paul Newman, that gangly, folksy archetype. Then I thought, yeah, like James Comey. 

Holy shit. What if we’re all extras in an Our Towniverse, a Thornton Wilderness, and the Stage Manager is James Comey? 

I thought, this is a thought for Brett Heller.  He said, “can we go back and look at a single day in our lives? Lordy, I hope there are tapes.” 

If we’re living in the Thornton Wilderness, I guess I have to start liking Hello, Dolly. 

I bought a 2l jar of Bick's pickles at costco, mostly for the jar, for later use with our own pickles. 

I'm having one of these store-bought pickles with lunch. Man, these are some weak-ass pickles. Decently crispy but they just don't taste like much of anything. I like a pickle that will fight back. Like if you drew a mascot for the kind of pickles I like, it would be like one of those "fighting Irish" things but it would be a pickle with a mean jaw, furrowed brow and angrily cocked hat. 

Fortunately, the pickles we're making are all still coming along just fine. About half of the bins have settled down into just fermentation, the other half still have a bit of residual nonsense on the surface to be spooned off. I believe we're through most of the dangerous period where infection might have set in so confidence is pretty high that they'll all turn out just fine. 

I'll keep checking them every week or so and we'll do an initial taste test at the beginning of October. (Sorry, no photos, they look the same as last week.) 

A local store was having a sale on Roma tomatos, $7 for a 25lbs, half bushel. Like, fuck yeah. d went out with the wagon. Except they had none. Produce guy says when they put them out on the floor, they disappear right away. Well, of course! 

Other store was having red peppers for $8 also for a half bushel. Which, holy shit. So, okay, fine, we can do that. d brought home a box and cored them and cut them up into half inch strips and we put them in the dehydrator, where they'll sit on the balcony overnight at 130F. And in the morning they'll be crisp.  

Yes, a dehydrator is a thing we have! The tomatoes would have gone into the dehydrator too, sliced into 1/2" thick discs. Maybe we'll get lucky tomorrow. We forgot pictures. Maybe pictures of the dried peppers tomorrow.

So it looks like I may get a new P/T job to supplement my job at TomTom. It’s still a bit of a long shot, but my buddy Brad said there might be an option where he works. We were talking about it last night, and I said that I would love to get some hours there if they would be understanding about my weird “it would have to be on rainy days” thing.

He apparently had some turmoil there this morning including the firing of a beloved coworker. They were already understaffed. They normally have paid interns, but those positions had been frozen until recently which threw them out of the school seasonal hiring schedule.

So we will see. I’m hopeful. I could use the extra hours and the extra money. What’s more, the position, while not anything like any ‘illustration’ gig I would ever think of, does have the word illustrator in the title, so it might be a bit of a resume builder. What’s even more, I know that I will learn a lot - which is enough to be enticing all by itself. I’ve been so stagnant in recent years when it comes to learning anything. I feel like my brain is turning to mush.

Anyway - this all has me looking at my resume and touching it up / adding the TomTom relevant information. That, in turn, had me wandering down my work history in my head. I’ve long thought I need to better document the jobs I’ve done in my past. It’s a pretty broad spectrum and it would be nice to reference them.

Keep your fingers crossed for me and the potential new side gig!

[ x - posted this to my DW account ]

Our small green children are doing fine. 

We’ll look in on them again next week!

Apple changed the way it categorizes its podcasts. Instead of audio fiction/audio drama being buried in "personal journals" or "performing arts," it now has a category, Fiction. It even has subcategories: Fiction>Drama, Fiction>Sci-Fi or Fiction> Comedy. 

WELL, LOOKIE HERE:

At 5:53 pm on August 21, 2019, Jarnsaxa Rising is 58 out of 60 on the Fiction>Drama chart for Apple Podcasts. 

I know it's highly subjective, but after not being visible among my peers for so long, this is flippin' HUGE. 

Here's another thing that's cuckoo-bananas. Last week we were the #3 podcast in Fiction in South Korea. 

Hey rone ​​​​: Did you ever get your f(x)tec Pro1? If so, how do you like it?

Here are some random links I have saved for things I found cool or interesting:

1) Sean Ono Lennon's band, GOASTT, and their song "Animals." The video is also mesmerizing. It is clear that he is the son of two brilliant artists. If anyone's gonna have an unlimited bankroll to create art, I'm happy it's him. (GOASTT stands for "Ghost of the Saber-toothed tiger.) NSFW (bewbs).

2) Lizzo's Tiny Desk Concert. She has an impressively filthy mouth, but she makes it so endearing. And holy craaaaap does she have chops! She is unfathomably cute and quick-witted, and so comfy being in the spotlight. NSFW (language).

3) If you don't have time for the Tiny Desk Concert above, enjoy Lizzo's hilarious 3-minute parody of Anchorman. She's such a star, and her comic timing is perfecto. (I love the idiots in the comments saying "Um, she's not playing the flute here." No, really? She's not actually playing the flute when it has flames shooting out of it? You think that might be lipsynced? Thanks, Mozart.)  NSFW (language).

4) The "Satisficing" subreddit, containing gifs and videos of cake and cookie icing and piping... so soothing, so magical. It's visual xanax. 

5) The New Voice Studio run by Lisa Paglin and Marianna Brilla. I would give a kidney to study there with them... good GAWD. They say everything I have felt over the years, and I wanna go there and learn every single thing in their heads. Oh lordy lordy lordy lordy. After I win the lottery or something. The YouTube video on their home page (ya gotta scroll a bit) speaks right to my soul.  (A zillion thanks to Michele Grant for indirectly turning me onto them via this article about Adele and other singers blowing their voices out only to have miraculous vocal surgery performed on them, only to have them blow it out again, because they never fixed their shitty technique.)

Parent Update

In other news, we just visited my folks and had a really great visit. Everyone was chipper, we genuinely all enjoyed the visit, we went out to eat, etc.

It's pretty clear that my mom is mentally slipping... her short-term memory is really going bye-bye. She forgets to play the bills, and gets lost driving pretty consistently now, so my dad now handles the finances and drives her everywhere now, which I guess is not the end of the world.  But other than occasional short-term forgetfulness (she watched me and Matt eat english muffins; about 20 seconds later she asked if we ate breakfast even though she was looking at our plates, and she even took a bite of one of our muffins), she is pleasant, fun, on-task, engaged in conversations, and overall pretty OK. My dad is terrified, OTOH, and exahusted, of course, because he has to stay on top of everything... so it was nice to give him a little break.  Her blood-sugar is also considerably more under control, which is awesome. She looks and feels better, and she says she has more energy.  Her diabetes doc (the one who was delaying approving her  much-needed knee surgery because her blood-sugar numbers were too high) now says he'll approve the surgery in 3 months if she keeps up the good numbers.  The sad irony is that in 3 months she'll be that much farther gone mentally, she won't be able to enjoy her new knee and the freedom it affords her due to her cognitive decline. Dad worries with a fixed knee she may even wander on foot. We'll cross that bridge when we get there.

This all sounds grim, but I'm still strangely optimistic.

The usual scum and mouldy bits of detritus on the surface of the water to spoon away. The mould is aerobic, that's why you have to submerge the pickles, so only the anaerobic fermentation bacteria can eat them. A few bins needed topping up water. A couple had white snowflake colonies instead of the usual green mold. I dunno what that is, but I just spoon some of it out and make sure the pickles are underwater.

So far so good.