Sticky, Sweet, & A Little Overdressed

Is it already October 11th? Sheesh, the year flies by. Well, anyway, that means it’s time again for National Coming Out Day!

I’m pretty swamped with work projects, though, so I’m going to cop out and link back to last year’s post, with a few quoted excerpts below:

Step 1: Coming Out to Myself
I started my coming out process (and it is a process, rather than one big step — and that process continues as long as you continue to meet new people) in 1991. [...]

Step 2: Coming Out to My Parents
I came out to my parents in 1993, just before leaving the country. [...]

Step 3: Coming Out to My Sister
I came out to my sister in a letter in 1996, just after I’d moved to California. [...]

Step 4: Coming Out to My Extended Family
I came out to my extended relatives a little bit by accident, in 1998. [...]

Step 5: Not Becoming Invisible
In 1997, I met the love of my life. He happens to be male, and he happens to be straight, and initially that was hard for me. [...]

Step 6, 7, 8, …
And so it goes. Every time I meet new people, every time someone makes a gay joke, every time I hear someone ignore the possibility of bisexuality, there’s an opportunity to out myself. [...]

Happy Coming Out Day!

Jae got me thinking (in a way totally unrelated to what she was talking about) about how I found myself thinking fondly of the U.S. a few times while we were in Paris and Amsterdam. Not of the government, mind you, and certainly not of this current administration’s policies or whathaveyou.

But just thinking fondly of some of the little cultural niceties that I take for granted and which were notably absent from many of my dealings with folks over there. Maybe some of it is my having grown accustomed to the U.S. South and the culture of extreme gentility that underlies everything else around here, but I can easily understand why Americans who visit Paris, especially, would walk away thinking the French rude. I don’t think it’s really a matter of being rude, but I think there are a few characteristics that are typical of parts of U.S. culture that are either missing or very transformed in some of Europe’s cultures.

I’m thinking, for example, of the kind of you-first-no-you-first awkward politeness, or the face-saving that goes with conversations with strangers, or the extreme emphasis on customer service and the “customer is king” mentality and expectation within retail and food service. Certainly each of these has their analogous counterpart in other cultures, but I imagine it can be jarring for Americans visiting, say, Paris for the first time to be condescended to by a waiter, to be reprimanded by a stranger, to be bluntly addressed, and so on.

Know what I mean? And yeah, I’m sure this has been studied and documented and all, but when has that ever stopped a blogger from making dull observations about anything? So feel free to add your insightful thoughts in the comments and help me class this joint up, would ya?

You may have noticed I haven’t been posting in the last week. I didn’t want to make it too obvious when exactly we were going to be gone, but Karsten and I were in Paris for our 10th anniversary and in Amsterdam for his birthday.

We were scheduled to leave last Friday and arrive Saturday morning, but as it happened, we encountered a major traffic jam en route to the airport and missed our flight. About 30 or 40 minutes before the flight was scheduled to leave, while we were still only a few blocks from home, I knew we weren’t going to make it and called Expedia. The next few hours were a grueling exercise in trying to coax compassion out of apathetic customer support specialists. The ones at Expedia tried to pass me off to Air France, and the ones at Air France tried to pass me off to Expedia. Because we’d missed our flight, there was a sense that we would not be able to rebook it, but because we’d been on the phone with both Expedia and Air France prior to the flight’s departure (thanks to the aforementioned apathy and pass-the-buck-ism of each support department), there was a sense that we might be able to be reclassified and get on the next flight out. But it took losing my temper with a supervisor at Expedia and breaking down into sobs while exclaiming how important this trip was to me and my husband before that guy finally took pity on us and helped us change our itinerary. Cancelling the trip was an option, but without having, say, a medical emergency as an excuse, we would have lost most of the money we’d already paid for the trip due to the late notice of the cancellation. So we paid through the nose for new tickets, left Saturday mid-day and arrived in Paris on Sunday morning, one day later than planned and a lot poorer. But — I kept thinking — at least we weren’t in the accident that caused the traffic jam in the first place. There’s always perspective in that.
Anyway, you might say the trip was off to a bit of a rough start. And it was costing us more money than planned, so it had a lot to live up to.

Overall, it was truly wonderful — it really was — but parts of it were also really hard. Travel can be so exhausting, you know? And between jet lag and noisy hotel rooms (our room in Amsterdam overlooked a busy alley right near Centraal Station, so it was pretty much bustling all night), neither of us slept well most of the time.

And everything was SO expensive! I couldn’t get over how much meals were costing us. We weren’t being decadent but we also didn’t want to be overly frugal. Still, a modest sit-down dinner with an appetizer, a main course each, and a glass of wine each (which was almost always cheaper than soda, for perspective) ran us €45 — or about $65! — more than once. Usually, though, we were cautious about eating very little, and my loose-fitting clothes attest to that. Well, they attest to that and all the walking we did.

But we found so much to love about Paris, even when a waiter rudely refused to serve us, and even when our hotel front desk staff wasn’t technically proficient enough to help us with printing out the vouchers for our Metro and museum passes, bless their French hearts. And we both loved Amsterdam, even with all the ignorant, boorish Americans hooting and whooping it up, and even when a pickpocket almost got me but was thwarted by a random bike near-collision that made me turn my head in time to see the would-be thief sneaking up behind me.

Paris was big and loud and busy and dirty by day, but in spite of all that, still way more charming than, say, New York, and by night it was seductive and sly. We walked EVERYwhere, and even though we walk a lot here, my feet are still recovering. It was intense. We had no agenda; we just wandered where we felt like wandering and asked each other often what we wanted to do next. The afternoon we spent in the Jardins du Luxembourg was one of the most relaxing times I’ve ever spent. I sat on a bench with my Moleskine notebook and wrote poetry and random observations while occasionally looking up to enjoy the manicured gardens and fountain pools, and Karsten wandered the grounds watching people and studying the artwork.

My Mac-loving friends will appreciate that we found out about an Apple Expo going on last week in Paris, and we decided to stop in for a quick visit on Tuesday. I needed a travel adapter for my laptop’s power cord anyway, and that seemed like as good a place as any to pick one up. It was kind of a boring expo, though, so I don’t have much else to report about that. But I went to an Apple Expo in Paris! I think that earns me some serious Mac geek credentials.

Like I said earlier, though, there were parts that were really hard. Partly, I’m sure, because we were so exhausted and overwhelmed, Wednesday evening — our anniversary — turned sour unexpectedly and we fought bitterly. We so rarely fight that it’s always extremely hard on us when we do, but then to fight in the context of this much-anticipated vacation on this much-anticipated anniversary milestone was a big hurt and a big disappointment to us both, I’m sure. And all that anticipation was no doubt a culprit in feeding our hopes and expectations for how the trip would turn out — and I’ll be completely honest: mine especially. But eventually we found some resolution, got a little sleep, and like the grown-ups we strive to be, got on the train to Amsterdam the next morning, trying to make the best of it, trying not to let this over-hyped, over-anticipated, over-priced vacation be completely ruined by all of our best intentions.

Unsurprisingly, things started out rough in Amsterdam on Thursday, since we were operating on so little sleep and still, I’m sure, a little raw from fighting the night before. But by Thursday evening, we’d relaxed and settled into a pretty good groove and on Friday we were back to our old selves, laughing and having a great time enjoying each other’s company.

By Saturday morning, when we dragged ourselves and our heavy bags to the airport to fly back home, I was starting to feel sick and sore, with a slight burn in my throat. We were both drooping with exhaustion. I took an Airborne tablet and drank a lot of water on the overseas flight. But by last night, on the flight from Newark to Nashville, I was getting sicker and unable to keep my eyes open at all.

I woke up today with a searing burn in my throat, my head full of congestion, and my body aching all over. I’m most miserably sick, but I’m very happy to be home. And don’t get me wrong: I’m also incredibly happy that we took the trip. We experienced so much that we wouldn’t have wanted to have missed. And for all the headaches, frustration, disappointment, and hurt feelings, we are genuinely more in love than ever and I sense that our relationship is stronger for all the good and all the bad we rode out together. We never lost sight of how much we love each other, and that celebrating that was the reason for our journey anyway. Some of the best moments we had were when we remembered that most clearly: making each other laugh in the Louvre; daydreaming about — and then laughing about the unlikelihood of our enjoying — selling our house in Nashville and moving into a tiny apartment in the Latin Quarter; leering tipsily at each other over champagne; reminiscing about the beginning of our relationship while looking out over the rooftops of Paris; and so on, and so on.

Those are the memories I’ll be trying to keep with me. We can grow on those. The other memories are useful to grow from, but after that they’re not helpful anymore. I hope and believe we’ll be able to get what we need out of them and move on into even deeper and more meaningful times in our lives together.

And hell, if that’s what comes of this trip, that was worth going through anything for.

[More pictures are up at Flickr.]

Since lots of folks are searching for it and ending up here anyway…

this is indeed a bee hive, but it’s not the bee hive you’re looking for. Nonetheless, I have taken the trouble to provide you the link to the pictures of those bees making their hive in a jar. At right is my favorite of those pictures. ‘Cause I mean, as a vegan (most of the time), I don’t eat honey. But I mostly don’t eat honey because it’s, like, bee vomit. But if you think of it as kissing and not vomiting, it’s a lot nicer, isn’t it? I think so.

After a lovely dinner at Rosario’s (I mean it! it was good, despite what that mean old Chris Chamberlain would have you believe), we decided to drop in to Edgehill Studios Cafe across the street to see who was playing. It was two guys who sounded pretty good so we stuck around, but we couldn’t determine what their names were — there didn’t seem to be a schedule posted anywhere. (We also spotted Karen Keely from 95.5 The Wolf hangin’ out with a “Cutie Wolf” t-shirt on.)

Anyway, one of the writers announced a song called “Makes Me Wanna Pray” by saying it was on hold with Martina McBride (and I couldn’t help but think of Lindsay). The song wasn’t bad, but I was more interested in how much he sounds like Collin Raye.

Both writers were enjoyable, but Collin Raye Guy got me curious so I looked him up. His name is Jared Johnson and it turns out he’s with Big Loud Shirt. Staff songwriter at Craig Wiseman’s company? Now that’s a gig to have. I’m betting that “Pray” song gets cut, and I’m even betting it’s a single, and heck, why not, I’ll even bet that it charts. People seem to love sad songs that make them feel all holy.

It’s hard not to be irritated with doctors in general right now.

Let me back up for a second. Ever since the rat problem in the back yard and the flea infestation in the house and all the cat sicknesses, and all the rest of it, Karsten has been having a lot of trouble sleeping. He hardly sleeps, and then when he does sleep, he’s been waking up with major anxiety attacks. You can imagine how, after a while, that would start to make you not want to sleep at all.

I’ve been trying to convince him to go to the doctor and get a prescription for Ambien or something similar. He’s willing to take something over the counter, but I foresee the possibility that this will turn into a fairly long-term arrangement and I feel like a doctor should be monitoring it.

But the problem is, doctors have had a history of misjudging and mistrusting Karsten, especially when he goes in asking for a prescription. They think he’s a drug addict, and this seems to be based partly on his somewhat non-conformist appearance and partly on the fact that he works in the arts. Once, when he was being examined for sinus problems, a doctor said “You’re a musician, so you’ve used a lot of cocaine, right?” while nodding his head at Karsten as if to encourage him to agree. When Karsten replied (somewhat indignantly, no doubt) that he’d never used cocaine at all, the doctor regarded him with a suspicious look and refused to give him any medication at all.

Another time, when our apartment neighbors back in San Jose were making our lives miserable (one actually spit in Karsten’s face) and we were both jittery wrecks, Karsten went to the doctor — a different doctor, of course — and asked for something to help calm his nerves, like Valium or something, because he couldn’t write at all. This doctor also asked about Karsten’s recreational drug use (none) and refused to give him anything stronger than what amounted to a placebo.

After all this, I think it’s pretty understandable that he’s reluctant to go in asking for a prescription for sleeping pills.

But I suggested that he explain his state of mind, explain what’s been going on, and ask the doctor for a recommendation. If the doctor refuses to prescribe something, I said maybe he should offer to take a blood test to prove he doesn’t use drugs. He actually seemed comforted by having that card to play and it sounds like he’s going to go.

Has anyone else ever received this kind of suspicious treatment from doctors? If so, what do you do to ensure the outcome you’re hoping for?

Cory & the pup in my cubicle

Originally uploaded by Kate O’
Coworker Cory with coworker MaryAnne’s puppy. This dog is so freakin’ cute. She yawned and out came the tiniest little squeak I’ve ever heard.
More days like this, please!

I finally got a decent night’s sleep last night. It’s been weeks since I’ve been able to relax in any significant way, thanks to the fleas and all the rest. But after we had the exterminator come in on Wednesday afternoon, the house is much closer to flea-free.

I think I’m going to need at least another night or two of decent sleep before I’m even close to being myself again, though. I’ve been feeling so drained and listless, and emotionally raw. That’s not an easy way to move through the world, you know?

ANYway, I’m just glad to be a little more with it this morning.

I don’t get my nails done in a salon very often. I’m fortunate to have the kind of nails that grow well, have a nice natural color and shape to them, and don’t need much grooming. But I do treat myself to a manicure now and then just for the pleasure and the tidiness of it. When I do, I’ve always tried to opt for salons that don’t specialize in acrylics. There’s always such an overpowering chemical smell walking into one of those places, and when I walk into one I’ve never tried before and it has that smell, I usually just turn right around and walk back out.

I’ve commented to friends from time to time, too, that if all those chemicals smell that bad, they can’t be good for the health of the people who work there. Now a study has shown that the chemicals in nail treatments are associated with higher incidences of birth defects, and that the intensity of exposure for salon workers is 1200 times that of the average American. But to my surprise, it’s not only the acrylics that are implicated: it’s regular nail polish, too. Three compounds regularly used in nail salons — toluene (a colorless liquid used as a solvent), formaldehyde (helps harden nails) and dibutyl phthalate (a plasticizer that makes nail polish flexible) — are known to cause cancer or birth defects.

In fact, after six Vietnamese nail salon workers in Springfield, Massachusetts miscarried and others had rashes, fungal infections, and asthma, a community group obtained a $100,000 grant to build a salon with high quality ventilation. Moreover, OPI Products, which produces the nail polish used in many salons, “announced in March that it would begin removing toluene from its products. Last year, the company said it was removing dibutyl phthalate.”

So it looks like there’s hope for improvement, but I’m still not convinced that the acrylics aren’t horrible, too. I mean, even if they didn’t cause health issues, I’m still stuck on the superficial smell issue. Seriously, can you imagine having to spend 8-12 hours a day surrounded by that stench? Those are some dreadful working conditions. Luckily, improving the ventilation in salons should help with that problem, too.

HT: Jezebel

Reading over the thread at Music City Bloggers about mortgage foreclosures and such, I’m struck by a disparity I notice in the voices of the regulars there and in other online fora.

Why does it seem that so many of the people who get most passionate when it comes to matters of personal financial responsibility and conservation of fiscal resources are not equally passionate when it comes to environmental responsibility and conservation of natural resources?

If these people can applaud and embrace the concept of budgeting dollars and curbing consumption when it is out of scale with the economic resources available, why can’t they applaud and embrace the same principle when it comes to things like water, oil, clean air, trees, etc?

Is it because they don’t think of it as a personal responsibility? Is it because no one has told them convincingly enough that it’s the right thing to do?

You know what I think we need in the U.S.? We need a pro-environment activist who speaks from a conservative / Christian basis. Sort of like — no, scratch that, exactly like the Dave Ramsey of environmentalism.

OK, right off the bat, here’s the sucky thought du jour: I can’t decide if we should go through with the trip we were planning to Europe. Though I’m in luck if I need to travel, because I’ve got bags under my eyes that could hold my entire wardrobe. Why? Because we spent the night in a hotel room with all six cats while we fogged the house for fleas.

I cannot properly do justice to the level of annoying this whole flea thing is. And it’s not just fleas annoying me. Allow me to whine for a moment.

• I’m pretty sure I saw somewhere that it’s the hottest August ever on record in Nashville. Even if it’s not, it should be. So let’s just get that out of the way right now, ’cause the extreme heat sure isn’t making anything (or anyone) easier to deal with.
• Remember the rats? Well, they’ve apparently nested underneath and in the walls in the back of our house. (One of my coworkers suspects that this is where the fleas are coming from, but I don’t know if there’s any way to be sure.)OK, and side note — this is a bad story. Feel free to skip to the next bullet — Karsten went out weeks ago and got rid of the junk pile, busted up the old deck, and started digging out the weeds around the house. He hit a nest with tiny wriggling ratlings (it’s easier to call them ratlings than “kittens” when your aim is to get rid of them). It was an awful scene and he was devastated at having hurt them but the aim is, after all, to eliminate the population from our property. So as a compromise, whichever babies weren’t already killed from the impact of the shovel got carried off to an empty lot a few hundred yards away.But anyway, even after all that there are still rats in the walls, and we’re not sure how we’re going to win this one.
• Baby Clyde is doing better, we think. He apparently had a blockage in his digestive tract so when they x-rayed him, his stomach looked totally full even after a day of intense vomiting. Not sure how or why, but the next day’s x-rays showed his stomach clear and his lower digestive tract filling up, so the vet was satisfied that things looked to be on the right track. But I’m still nervous because we don’t know why he was having trouble in the first place. Which in my mind means it could happen again anytime. But considering I thought he might be dying on Sunday night, I’ll be relieved if all we’re dealing with is a bad case of indigestion.
• And the fleas! The fleas are driving me nuts. I mean, it’s just exactly the kind of thing that really gets to me. I can’t take any kind of insect in large quantities. I won’t even release ladybugs in the garden ’cause they freak me out en masse, but individually I’ll let them crawl all over my hands and arms. A whole mess of bugs I don’t like under any circumstances invading my living space? Definitely gonna mess with my mind.
• One of the other cats, Blackberry, has had a long-standing problem with urinating where he shouldn’t. We’ve fought it for a while, but it had been getting worse recently. Took him to the vet and found out he has a pretty serious bladder infection. Uh, OK. Now I feel like a terrible cat person. So we’ve been giving him pills twice a day for weeks, and if you’ve never had to give a pill to a skittish cat, well, you just haven’t experienced life.
• Between the overages in the house renovation and the flea/rat/vet/hotel expenses, we’ve depleted our checking account to levels we haven’t seen in years. It really sucks and it makes me feel anxious. I think having had the experience of losing nearly everything we owned and getting as close as you can get to bankruptcy without actually filing, I’m having traumatic flashbacks to my anxiety level at that time. Our situation right now in no way resembles our situation then, but it’s hard to shake an experience like that.
• Oh, and I’m trying to accomplish about a million things simultaneously in the next few months at work. So there’s that, too.

I’m really trying to keep everything in perspective by remembering that we have a house, we have our health, and we’re not broke (yet). But the amount of stuff we’re having to deal with is enough to make me whimper.

So yeah, I can’t decide if we’ve now spent enough unbudgeted money on all these various problems to mean that we should hold off on our long-awaited vacation. The vacation that coincides with our 10 year anniversary. The vacation we’ve been trying to take since 1999. The vacation we could really freakin’ use right about now.

You see what I’m saying? We’ve been really looking forward to this. So to put it off, while it certainly wouldn’t be the end of the world, would hurt and would suck and and and. Yes, we’d get over it. But it would be a big disappointment.

Anyway, it’s not time to decide yet. For one thing, I don’t think we’re out of the woods with the whole pest control issue, so there may actually be even more money to spend. But also because we still have a little time before we have to make the decision, and I may yet come up with some genius plan to make everything work. Hey, it could happen.

Mais il y a peu de chances. Le sigh.

Well, we’re finishing up at the emergency vet. They’re treating Clyde’s symptoms because most of his vital signs look OK. But the vomiting has the vet concerned and he said if that’s still going on tomorrow, we should take him in to his regular vet. For now, he’s had forced hydration and an anti-nausea shot, and he has to sleep in a cage at home so he doesn’t eat or drink, but there’s hope for some sleep tonight.

Our area lost power for a while last night. Turns out it was birds. Weird.

ETA: Oh, and I also want to say that people have no freakin’ clue how to drive when the power is out. When stoplight intersections have no power, people barrel right through. We had to drive out of the neighborhood to find food, and it was a white-knuckle experience getting through the intersections. Idiots.

The ugly: we spent the entire weekend obsessing over fleas. In 8.67 years of living with multiple cats, they have never had fleas. Admittedly, our cats have been outside (on leashes) more lately than ever but I also think the flea population must be larger this year, probably due to the heat.

Anyway, we’d “treated” the cats with some over-the-counter Hartz crap a few weeks ago, but it obviously didn’t do a thing. Meanwhile, the problem was getting worse. I’ve been busy with work so I couldn’t do much about it myself and had been trying to be patient since I knew Karsten was already dealing with the rat problem in our back yard and I didn’t want to overwhelm him. Besides, he seemed confident that the Hartz stuff would work and that the fleas were minimal anyway. On the contrary, it seemed to me that if you spot one, you can assume there are dozens/hundreds/howeverthehellmany you can’t see. I regularly noticed fleas on the cats, so I printed out web pages with tips on killing fleas and left them on his keyboard. I suggested he just call an exterminator and get it over with but when he did, he only asked about the rats. He just didn’t seem to feel as much urgency as I did about having to coexist with the fleas. It was all starting to freak me out a little. Last week, when I stood in the cat room and could see the fleas jumping around, I had a major meltdown. Karsten felt bad for not realizing how upset I’d been getting about it, but I assured him that everything would be fine it we could just rid the house of fleas. So he picked up the Advantage flea treatment from the vet on Friday and we started treating the cats first thing Saturday morning.

Each cat had to be isolated so they wouldn’t lick the stuff off of each other, which meant that we could only treat three cats at a time: two of them were stuck in cages while a third got to be loose, but stuck inside a closed-off room. Meanwhile, we vacuumed the house, sprinkled boric acid powder on all the carpets and fabric surfaces and used a broom to push it down into the fibers, and washed the curtains and bedclothes in the hottest water and dried them in the hottest drier they could withstand.

By mid-day Saturday, there were dead and dying fleas all over the house. So I went around and vacuumed everything again yesterday, but they’re still dropping off. It’s gross, but it means the treatment is working, so I’ll take it.

The bad: it was miserably hot outside. I mean it. Hot. It was 104 yesterday. It makes me feel like I’m melting. And since we wanted to escape the house once we got through each day’s flea treatment, we were limited in our options.

Though actually, that didn’t go too badly: we ended up going to see a movie (”Becoming Jane”; it was OK), eating out for every meal (all the food was great), thrift shopping (I found some cute stuff), and hanging out with some Sam and Alyssa Cornett, two songwriting friends who were visiting from Chicago (which was fun).

So I guess the bad was really just that every time we stepped outside, we felt like we were about to melt into flesh puddles.

The good: even in my jangled state of mind, I wrote a few songs. Hanging around songwriters last night got me all fired up. When we got home, I dashed off two songs in fifteen minutes along with a few other ideas I’ll come back to eventually. One of the reasons I was so inspired was that, although the songs our friends were playing last night were written well and were enjoyable, they were so consistently about relationships ending badly that I felt double-dog-dared to write a heartfelt song that wasn’t about that. So I did.

When my coworker Jennifer and I went to lunch today, the parking lot at our lunch destination was totally full but we finally noticed someone backing out of a space so Jennifer pulled up and waited. At the last minute another car zoomed in and took the space, despite Jennifer’s honking to indicate we were waiting. I unlocked the door to get out, but Jennifer put her hand on my arm to stop me. So as the driver got out of her car, I rolled down the window and shouted that we were waiting for that space. The bitch snapped back at me that we didn’t own the parking lot, or some rude shit like that. I yelled back, she yelled back, whatever. I felt like smacking her upside the head at least, but Jennifer was clearly more in the mood to move on.

So Jennifer drove on, and I tried to shake off my anger, but I was left with bewilderment. What made this woman so sure we wouldn’t key her car and/or slash her tires? I mean obviously we didn’t, but how could she know that we wouldn’t? Maybe we looked too wholesome to worry about, but I don’t know: even if I were the kind of self-centered selfish asshole who felt I could do something like what that woman did, I still wouldn’t do it because the risk of retaliation seems too high.

But I’ll tell you what: I really really wanted to come up with some devious thing to do to her car that would have been cleverly annoying. You know, nothing permanently damaging (what she did wasn’t permanently damaging to us, after all), just something that would have been a nuisance for her (what she did WAS a nuisance, after all). But I guess I’m just not that clever. (Annoying, on the other hand, perhaps.)

The moment is well past, of course, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts and ideas. What would you have done? Or what would you like to have done?

I didn’t think I was in the mood to do it, but I did it. I got outside right after breakfast (which, by the way, was a waffle with diced mango and kiwi along with my absolute favorite coffee, Bongo Java Kaldi’s Dog — but I digress) and got my gardening stuff all set up.

And then went squeeing back inside to tell Karsten that the resurrection lilies had finally emerged. They grow incredibly fast — they’re already over two feet high — but I didn’t even notice them emerging before this morning.

You may recall that these are a gift from my dad. A while before he died, they were in bloom in my parents back yard and my mom cut some and put them in a vase for him to admire from his bed. I complimented him on his beautiful flowers when I came to see him that day, and he told me that he wanted me to dig some up to remember him by.

So I did. The day he died, after the day had quieted down a bit, I went out back to where the bulbs were planted. It was early November in the Chicago area and the ground was pretty hard but the digging felt good and cathartic, and eventually I managed to dug up three good bulbs. I put them in a plastic bag in my parents’ refrigerator to bring home with me a few days later. It was cold when I got back to Nashville, so I worried about putting them right into the ground, which meant that they stayed in our refrigerator until the next spring, when one day I happened to notice a little bit of green emerging from the bulbs right inside the baggie in the fridge.

So I got outside and placed them in a line of three and planted a semicircle of daylilies around them to accent them. And they continued to sprout leaves, which died back as they’re supposed to, but no flowers ever emerged that summer.

I was a little worried they weren’t very healthy after their difficult transition, but this past spring the leaves came up again and I got hopeful that they’d actually flower this year.

And there they are, beautiful as can be.

I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to have these flowers. I really can’t tell you; there are no adequate words. But perhaps you can imagine.

I did get my other gardening done, too, by the way — planting, weeding, transplanting, mulching, watering, oh my! — and took a bunch of pictures, which produced some of the better results I’ve gotten with this newish camera. Here’s one of the new dianthus firewitch plants, all up close and personal:

And then I wanted to sit back and admire it all, but first Karsten thought I should show you all how dirty I got and how “cute” (I say “dorky”) I look in my shade hat.

And here’s a view of the garden through the new fence:

Karsten: Oh! I guess I thought that was gay.
Neighbor-friend: Like, homosexual gay?

Just got back from a hot, sticky run in the hot, sticky heat, and in my delirium and shaky state, I managed to break the end of a plug off in the Treo’s headset jack. Great. I managed to get the end of the plug out of the Treo, but the headphone is shot now, unless anyone can reassure me that I can replace a plug on the end of a headset cord and have it sound OK.

him: I need to see a movie with lots of explosions and death.
me: Oh, did you call your dad?

I wonder about the organizers of Bonnaroo, and whether they intentionally scheduled the festival for the weekend of Father’s Day. You have to figure that with 80,000 some attendees, there are bound to be a whole lot of arguments about missing the family cookout or whatever.

As I am not attending Bonnaroo nor is my father living nor am I within proximity of any kind of family cookout, I have no such dilemma. My dilemma pertains more to simply getting through Father’s Day with the least amount of psychological trauma.

Here, in no particular order, are a few ideas that have occurred to me thus far:

• Stay in bed.
  Tempting. On the other hand, Karsten points out that it will be there all day. I can always keep it as a fall-back option.
• Go for a walk in a park or other natural space.
  Good possibility. It’s especially meaningful if there are a lot of birds around, since my dad used to love to watch the birds. But it might be too hot for this to be a pleasant experience, so I’ll have to wait and see how the day shapes up.
• Sit on the front steps and try to enjoy the beautiful day.
  Already getting a jump on this one. Sitting out here with my laptop and a pot of coffee. But again, in an hour or so, it will probably warm up to where this won’t be pleasant anymore.
• Do day-job work.
  Yeah, no.
• Write a song or three.
  Very probable. I did a little last night and was surprised at some of what came out.
• Clean, tidy, organize.
  I’ll see how I feel. This would be helpful to do, but I just don’t feel motivated to do it.
• Organize files on my computer.
  Same as above.
• Plan the porch party.
  I need to do this, and it might be fun. So maybe this will be a good stay-inside-while-it’s-hot activity.
• Go back to bed.
  I know, I already talked about bed. But it’s sounding like such an appealing option.

I do genuinely wish a happy Father’s Day to anyone out there to whom it applies. And I genuinely wish good alternatives for anyone who needs them.

I’ve just seen the cutest bird ever. (I tried to get a picture, but it was all a blur.) That is all.

Latest view of the porch,
originally uploaded by Kate O’.

Not much has changed in the past week or so except for the new copper downspout to the right of the porch, but it’s hard to see in this picture. I’m looking forward to the handrails, the spindles, the rest of the trim detailing, and the caps for the posts, but above all I can’t wait for the new doorway and door! That should be happening in the next few weeks or so.

As luck would have it, I needed a feel-good moment today, and my coworker Mic just happened to send this link around. He took this video of a baby panda in the Atlanta zoo, and it is soooo cute, your eyes will sting with the unbearably fuzzy cuteness of it.

Courtesy of Digg, I present to you the top 10 worst lyrics ever, as rated by BBC 6 Music.

U2, Toto, Duran Duran, and Oasis all made the list.

But are there worse examples? I can’t think of any offhand that are truly awful, but one springs to mind because of how much it missed the mark. In Dwight Yoakam’s “Ain’t That Lonely Yet” he sings:

Once there was this spider in my bed
Got caught up in her web
Of love and lies
Spun her chains around my heart and soul…

Aah! It bugs me every damn time I hear it. Spun her chains? Since when do spiders spin chains? I mean, he could have gone for the extra internal rhyme with “bed/web” and done “Spun her threads around…” or even gone suggestive and used “Wrapped her legs around…” or probably dozens of other possibilities, but “chains”? Bad. So bad.

What lyrics bug you?

It cracks me the hell up that Barbie has an RV with a hot tub. Well, it simultaneously cracks me up and weirds me out a little. Well, a lot. OK, it simultaneously weirds me the hell out and makes me a little sad. Yeah. Cracks me up, weirds me out, and makes me sad. That’s about right.