I'm driving up to Shell Beach this afternoon to see my grandmother, aunt, and uncle. The dad/stepmom will also be in evidence, and the have "dibbsed" the guest room at my uncle's house, so I'll be at the local Oxford Suites once again. (I do love the Oxford suites: they'll give you a glass of wine before bed, and feed you a real breakfast in the morning, complete with eggs, bacon and hash browns.)

But now there's some guilt emanating from those who have benefitted from the "first come, first served" approach to my uncle's den:

My baby

now looky here

you have to call me late Friday or early Sat

Q1: do you want to ride with Wendy an I??

Q2: do you wish to save $ and sleep in the Shell Beach suite and

Wendy and I camp at Oxford with no Tivo???

love dad

I believe that is what they call "noblesse oblige." This is what he got back:

I'm not gonna call tonight; I'm going to bed early. We just put a bid in on a condo, and I'm stressed out. I may be in double escrow by the end of the weekend.

1) no, thank you; I have errands to do on the way there and on the way back, and I need to come back early-ish Sunday for the home inspection [I want to be on hand to answer questions];

2) no, thank you very very much; I have some work to do for a client, and I need silence/the internet/no one around to do it. So this isn't the right time. But perhaps I can take a rain check and make the swap next time I'm going up solo? (The husband would NOT get along with an air mattress.)

Your son (1) has a racquetball tournament this weekend, and (2) is engaged in his annual happy-birthday overtime extravaganza at work (those stupid performance reviews they want to all be done at work). I'm sure you know this; it always seems to wrap up around his birthday.

But surely we could all get together sometime after that?

It might also be cool if you could get my half-sister out here in the fall or something; I'd like to meet my youngest nephew.

If you let all my scheming slip to the enemy, you will be executed.

Love,

J

He likes being addressed that way; he really does.

Hi Executioner:

I've always wondered what stress is!!

Unless you call me to the contrary--you will drive independently??

You will sleep at Oxford Suites and my wife and I will air-mattress it!!

If you sleep so late--why do you go to bed early??

I really look forward to seeing you!!

love dad

He ought to know that I don't really go to bed early; I'm always just trying to go to bed early.

Dad:

I will drive independently; I cannot be harnessed to another person's gasoline-powered conveyance. I'm a free spirit. And stuff.

I'm sorry that life is giving you a hard choice like: (1) air-mattress, but TiVo and no little doggie on the trip, vs. (2) real mattress and little doggie, but no TiVo.

I'm sure our ancesters are crying over what we've come to in this family. Shall we hold a seance and hear how sorry they are for us?

--J

You'll see what I mean. He loves my edginess. The most he ever says is "did your parents not spank you enough when you were a child?" This line is usually employed at dinner parties.

My baby,

I am very proud of your command of the marvelous English language!!

Go to bed. Go to sleep. I really really look forward to
seeing you up in Shell Beach with the rest of the family.

Happy traveling

I have great feelings about the weekend!

love--dad

But he does have a point; it could be that in a few select senses I'm a spoiled brat. I can't imagine how a thing like that could happen.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 10:31 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Attila the Hub is sitting down to a slice of sumptuous strawberry-infused white cake, with whipped-cream frosting. "More like the lunch of champions," he informs me."

I check my watch. Of course: It's 1:30. That is "lunch" for a sane person. For those like me, however, it isn't really lunch until 2:00 p.m.

"Vaya con dios," I tell him. "Save some for me. Might make a great supper of champions."

Posted by: Attila Girl at 12:17 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I've got 25-30 pieces of spam to clear out of MT, but I'm just so . . . tired. It was a big day: I went to the gym for the first time in eight years or so. Saw the family. Madly straightened up, and then vacated the house in the middle of the day for a few hours, as usual, in the interests of obtaining a "backup offer" on same. Took a first pass on a fresh pile of paperwork from our real estate agent.

Tired.

Just don't feed the spammers, mkay? I'll get to it when I get to it. Best I can do.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 10:48 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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. . . that gin is supposedly bad for the eyesight. And something inside me died.

How is a girl supposed to choose between her two truest loves? She cannot, of course:

Sonnet XXV

That Love at length should find me out and bring

This fierce and trivial brow into the dust

Is, after all, I must confess, but just;

There is a subtle beauty in the thing,

A wry perfection; wherefore now let sing

All voices how into my heart was thrust,

Unwelcome as Death's own, Love's bitter crust,

All criers proclaim it, and all steeples ring.

This being done, there let the matter rest;

What more remains is neither here nor there.

That you requite me not is plain to see;

Myself your slave herein have I confessed.

Thus far, indeed, the world may mock at me,

But if I suffer, it is my own affair.

I weigh the matter out in my mind: my livelihood, or gin? Cannot one have both, with judicious applications of raw carrots and Bausch & Lomb vitamins?*

I decide that Edna St. Vincent Millay was not simply pathological, but clinical, and mentally prescribe her some antidepressants.

And yet I am not yet at ease. I come home, and see that my roommate has brought some cake back from an AA meeting. I cut myself a slice, and discover that the local bakery whose name adorns the box did not use Miracle Whip in the frosting. Oh, no.

But how can I be sure? I make sure. Two slices later, I sit down, open up my book, and make myself a classic Martini.

Very dry. With an olive.

There is a subtle beauty in the thing,
A wry perfection.

Within a week I expect to be in double-escrow: as a seller, and as a buyer.

* No. I do not take them. But only because (1) I can't afford them; (2) if my father caught me taking vitamins, he'd kill me, because he has decided that all supplements are a racket. [The dad and nuance are not the best of friends.] (3) My rather wistful desire to never lose my eyesight is related to my rather wistful desire to never lose my teeth, which is in turn related to my rather wistful urge never to die. If I were to be caught taking vitamins and killed by my dad, that would rather pervert the whole project, no?

Instead, I'm taking Braille classes, memorizing my favorite poems, and buying books on CD. I am not, after all, stupid.

I may learn sign language, just to hedge my bets.

* * Whaaaaaaaaat?

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:10 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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"What, because of your walk yesterday? Aren't you used to that one?"

"I thought I was," I told him. "But apparently I hadn't been out on the hills in months. I just remembered that I should take advantage of 'em, since we'll be out of here in June."

"Well, we'll be closer to Griffith Park, then," he remarked. "You might find a trail up there that you'll like even more."

"I'm, like paralyzed. Don't you have any stretches I should do? How could three and a half miles do this to me, even with the incline?"

"You want my advice?" he asks.

"Of course I want your advice. You're a coach. Help me. I won't be able to take the stairs normally for, like, two days."

"Ice your legs," he suggests.

"I can't understand you when you use those big words," I tell him. "What is this, an SAT-preparation course? You're supposed to be helping me."

"It's a small word. There are only three letters in it. And they are little letters."

"Yes." I flounce out of his office, calling over my shoulder, "and, by the way: it's a noun. You're using it as a verb. But I don't know what you're talking about. La la la la la!"

And then I look at the staircase. I bite my lip, and I step.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:42 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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(Via Eric at Classical Values, who has a few more details about this walkway in Spain; hop over there for a bit of background, but please mind your footing.)

I'm the caves/enclosed places/feeling of entrapment or engulfment -phobic person. Not heights; not generally. (I was afraid for a moment that the person with the "helmet cam" was going to go into the passageway within the mountain, and that might have upset me. But she or he didn't, and all was well.)

Still, I don't quite get this. If we can maintain the paths that go up to Yosemite Falls or Half Dome, why can't the Spaniards just fix this?

I mean, I hate to sound like a Gringo—and I hate to upset Jonah Goldberg and go all fascist/CCC—but just fix it. I mean, well-maintained hiking trails are a goddamned human right. Sort of.

(Sorry. My brain isn't functioning well. I might be having a statist moment; I get that way in Tijuana, when I see the gaping, dangerous holes in the sidewalk, and wonder why they can't just charge some taxes to the people who sell me my cappuccino, cigars, and tortilla soup, and fix the fucking sidewalks with it. I mean, how many stupid college kids go down there for spring break, get loaded, and bust their freakin' ankles? Fix the sidewalks! Fix the walkways! Fix the trails! Just fix it!

Sorry. I think I'm done.)

Of course, it's easy to die in Yosemite; the code words are granite, water, and wildlife. Ultimately, one has to have some respect for Mother Nature. For gravity. For slippery surfaces. For human fragility. And for oneself.

I climbed those same cables up to Half Dome as a child. But it was hard. And I was concentrating; not laughing.

I don't want to blame the victim, but that's part of the secret, I think.

But Spain should fix their fucking trail; did I say that?

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:21 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Or is that what we might call a "date-sensitive posting"?

If she's serious, she should just get either a belly pack/fanny pack, or a wallet-on-a-string. (Brighton makes some good wallets-on-a-string, or cell-phone-holders-on-a-string.)

In my twenties I tended to carry my wallet on my body, to avoid losing it to muggers. Or I'd take my money, ID and anything else essential and put it in a pocket so as to deprive any muggers of my valuables.

And, of course, when I'm a student I carry a backpack, so throughout a lot of my 20s I was doing that during the week, and only carrying a purse on the weekends.

In general I have trouble packing lightly at all, and I drive an overstuffed car. I carry an overstuffed computer bag and an overstuffed purse—and, usually, an overstuffed bookbag, as well. Usually it's a question of time: when I run out of time I just start throwing things into bags in the interest of getting out the door.

I hate having to plan for an outing as if it were a backpacking trip. On the other hand, a person can take the mega-cluttered lifestyle a bit too far. And she generally does.

It's harder when I'm travelling in some offbeat way (that is, without a car): at that point, not only do I need to "edit" my possessions to keep the weight down on my luggage, but I need to plan ways of getting around Real Cities (places other than Los Angeles) without everything I own close at hand.

The impulse, of course, is to start throwing into the suitcase every possible means of conveyance (purses, bookbags, backpacks), so that I can schlep stuff around with me while I'm sightseeing. Of course, then I realize that if I want room for my stuff, I need to pack fewer carrying devices in which to put that stuff. Or, perhaps, a bigger suitcase. Or a travelling trunk like those that women had in centuries past.

But the main thing? Pants need to have pockets. Especially back pockets. And then, one can travel light: In a pinch all you need is a phone and a pen in one back pocket, and Kleenex in the other. Left-front pocket holds I.D., money, and maybe an extra business card to write on; the right-hand front pocket contains lipstick and/or chapstick. Most keys stay in the hotel room, at home, or in the car. One key (the car key or the home key) goes in the watch pocket on one's jeans. And that is it.

UPDATE: Oops! Forget the hat tip for Dan Collins over at Protein Wisdom.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 03:23 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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The husband and I were comparing notes on the Bookstore/Coffee Shop near us that has all kinds of yummy features (free WiFi! Book clubs! Visiting author/lecturers!) but . . . a leftist tilt beyond what the chains display.

"Have you seen the "Current Events" shelves?" I asked him, horrified.

"It's like ten or eleven to one," he replied.

"Even the chain stores are only four or five to one," I responded. "The whole section is listing . . . badly."

After escrow closes I'm going to go "pay rent" at the store [for hanging out there all day every day this week and last] by buying . . . Goldberg's Liberal Fascism. Then they will have to go get a second copy of it! They might even take it off the bottom shelf in the nonfiction section.

Might.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 12:05 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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[The first segment of this was written today at 12:02 p.m., when the internet connection was not functional at Camp Lefty, and I therefore wasn't able to post from the coffee shop next door over my breakfast burrito. As Charleton Heston would say, "darn the luck!"]

I'm sitting in a coffee shop here on Foothill Blvd. in La Canada. There are a couple of firemen having lunch two tables over.

They are discussing what firemen are always discussing: home remodeling, coubustile materials, and food. But, of course, mostly food.

Good Lord: firefighters are even dishier than cops. And they cook as a rule; I can only advise young ladies to stay away from 'em. I can't imagine that it's easy to break things off with a fireman.

(Now someone is going to point out to me that the average firefighter cannot converse intelligently about the Bloomsbury Group. Which is fine. They cook. Did I mention that?)

* * *

Note to Professors Purkinje and Fractal: Speaking of famous late-20th Century Angelenos early 20th-Century Londoners, A Space Child's Mother Goose is back in print!

Here's the only rhyme I remember somewhat-accurately therefrom; will someone fact-check me on this?

A Pimlico dream
Of the Bloomsbury Group
May have made Mayfair
A Keynesian soup.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 07:51 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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"Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were done eating. I shouldn't have left a mess in the kitchen."

"I am done eating. I'm just not done snacking."

Who knew those were different activities?

Posted by: Attila Girl at 08:46 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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And it's a "Word Court" month. So it's off to bed with a magazine. A little reading, a little napping, the husband off at the gym . . . and Wilderness were Paradise enow.

I believe that's the literary chick's way of saying . . . I'll be in my bunk.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 02:30 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Light blogging for the rest of the day; we're putting the house on the market this weekend, and the cleaning woman will be here tomorrow morning. It's been delicately suggested to me that she may want to mop the floors when she gets here, and that it might be best, therefore, if the floors weren't covered in boxes of books.

So, sometimes one has to do what one has to do in order to avoid the whole "spousal homicide" dealio—'cause it could be a bummer, whether I'm on the receiving end or not.

Open thread! Subject for discussion: is light cracking along a stucco wall a serious sign of earthquake damage, or merely a reflection of light shifting that might occur in a building over a process of years? How would one know the difference? And what if the wall were made of concrete?

(Do I know my readers, or not?)

Posted by: Attila Girl at 02:45 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I feel stupid—and contagious.

No, no: not Nirvana. And not, for crying out loud, Paul Anka. Tori Freakin' Amos.

And, just for the record—I do, indeed, have enough guilt to start my own religion. With plenty to spare.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 08:26 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Well, it turns out that there are nice places out there in our price range, though if I want to live in a neighborhood that doesn't feature gang tags, I'm not getting my own office. I'll either have to share one with Attila the H, or carve out a small workspace in a corner of the dining room.

My forbears in the covered wagons . . . used rice-paper screens for that purpose, I'm pretty sure. They coped. Note to self:

On days that there will be open houses, or showings of the house to realtors and/or buyers, do not—

• fry fish in the kitchen;
• leave old furniture lying around outside;
• have a broken doorbell, thereby forcing the buyer's agent to knock on a heavy "screen" door (the security type, made of thick steel);
• leave the bathroom filthy;
• leave overripe fruit in the kitchen;
• cram twice as much furniture into the space as it was designed to hold;
• leave the drapes closed, and the lights off; or
• leave the television on.

The dress-rehearsal is on Friday, when our agent will come by with the papers for us to sign in the afternoon. I'm planning on losing my heroin virginity that very morning, just to be safe.

When we got home I informed my husband that he should order pizza. He did so, and then informed me that my life would be simpler if I wouldn't think about politics and economics quite so much.

"Just blog about . . . recipes, and stuff like that," he told me with a wink.

The scary part is that for just a moment that sounded pretty good.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 07:08 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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The neighbors seem to have figured out that we're leaving: they smile at us, and wave. Once in a while I catch one of them humming "Ding Dong, the Witch Is Dead," or the theme to <>The Beverly Hillbillies.

We've lived in this house eleven and a half years or so. A/H hadn't resided anywhere that long between the time he left his parents' place and now. And I had never been anywhere more than seven years in my entire life. (Hometown #1, Whittier, I lived in from birth to the age of six or seven; in Hometown #2, Santa Monica, I was in the homestead north of Carlyle from the ages of twelve to seventeen, and then endured another six or eight months of purgatory sharing a condominium six blocks away with my mother before I bolted for real, and for good.)

I just want to cry all the time, and I'm not even sure it's because I'm sad, exactly: it's just a sense of being overwhelmed by the upheaval and vaguely anxious about the future. I'm seeing the moment of my greatness flicker, and the eternal Moving Van is about to pull up, and snicker. (And moving vans do snicker; I've heard them doing it. Don't contradict me.)

And now I'm in my den, typing away at my new computer, for which I must:

• re-install the evil MS office suite;
• re-install my camera software;
• figure out why it has these slow moments, which are particularly odd given that it has four times the RAM in my old machine. This might be a job for Mac-stud Adam, though I'm loathe to give up too quickly. As I said, the "slowness" phenomenon only seems to occur with MT and Gmail. Unfortunately, most of the time I spend online I'm using one of those two programs.

It's certainly nice not to be using a machine that's on death's door; that was crazy-making.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 05:06 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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And yet I'm still blogging from the husband's laptop, because on the new machine there is an unholy non-alliance going on between Safari and Gmail, and between Safari and Pixy's server in Australia.

Which doesn't make sense; I'll check with the guys at the Mac store on why certain sites take forever to come up. But I may need to switch over to Firefox, or reconfigure the settings on the new Mac. (Interesting little datum: the MacBook doesn't think it's getting great reception from the modem, even though all three computers are in the same room with the modem, and the other two are doing just fine.)

I would say I know just enough about this stuff to be dangerous, but I'm not even sure that that is the case.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 07:03 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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It feels like there's been an earthquake or or a riot or something: most of the house is under plastic.

I've slept on the loveseat the past two nights, since the futon here in my husband's office is so small. We're the hunters/gatherers of the two-room lower level, here, foraging for clean clothes. Sharing a desk. Sleeping on the floor, or (in my case) curled up on a loveseat.

The television doesn't work, and I don't watch it when it does. Though it doesn't help my husband's mood not to have it. He's asleep, which doesn't seem like an irrational reaction to the stress of the situation.

I need to get up early to rescue some more essentials from the kitchen, where the Highly Competent Koreans will be stripping wallpaper and painting tomorrow.

And I don't get my new computer until late tomorroe, either. I'm working right now on my husband's laptop, and I won't have access to my client files, billing records, books, stories, journals, poetry, music, photos or Safari bookmarks until the files from the old drive get switched over to the new Macbook. (And of course I won't have my text files until I re-install Microsoft Office on the new machine.)

This is just like when my forbears crossed the Oregon Trail on covered wagons, except that as I recall it was even worse: there were entire families sharing MacBooks in those days, and the machines were shy on RAM, too.

But still . . . the situation does make me cranky.

I hope there is an afterlife, because if there is my grandparents are laughing themselves silly right now. (She's sharing a bathroom with her husband! The horror! Does she know what it's like to live without indoor plumbing at all?

As a matter of fact, I do: I went without it for a number of months when I lived on a farm in Maryland as a kid. But I don't miss it much.)

Posted by: Attila Girl at 06:34 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Well, not until later on in the afternoon, anyway.

My laptop died yesterday, so we're off to get a replacement. That is, after I finish clearing out the dining room so the painters can finish stripping off the old wallpaper.

This Sunday, we start looking at condos, which will help me get my equilibrium back.

"Change is inevitable." And it sure beats the hell out of stasis.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 10:10 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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