. . . supposed to wear makeup in weather like this? I mean, at 35% humidity, I'm basically powdering over a wet surface: one mistake and I can't just "blend" the eye shadow or whatever to cover my mistakes. I suddenly realize why people talk about "powdering their noses" to cover "shine." I try it. My face is immediately wet again, and I realize that if I keep powdering I'll soon have about an inch of yucky solidified sweat-powder on my face.

OTOH, my hair is curling a bit on its own, like it did when I was on the East Coast.

The only thing worse than living in California would be living somewhere else.

UPDATE: Well, okay. Thirty-five percent is probably not record humidity for anyone living in the South, Midwest, Northwest, or Northeast. However, it does change the usual formula for converting California temperatures into those in these other regions. Usually 100 degrees in the Southwest is like 80 degrees elsewhere. But when it's 95 degrees here and there's some water in the air, it's pretty uncomfortable. Especially when I have sensitive skin, and thre are pools of salty sweat on it for long periods of time: yesterday I had a heat rash so bad, it looked almost like a tan, from scratching my legs all night long.

On the other hand, there are the enhanced waves in my hair, and there's the fact that I have to gulp down less water on a regular basis. And I don't have to keep picking my nose, since normal California weather generally makes me feel like someone has shoved pieces of plastic up into my nostrils.

And there's no worry about forgetting the water bottle somewhere and having people come across one's parched bones in the supermarket parking lot or outside the dry cleaner. Visitors here are always so disturbed when they see sights like that.

Posted by: Attila at 07:01 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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1 Ummm...I take it you mean the 35% is high humidity?

Posted by: k at August 30, 2005 12:00 AM (ywZa8)

2 Um. It's all relative, right?

Posted by: Attila Girl at August 30, 2005 12:37 AM (EtCQE)

3 Here in Tucson, we start moaning when the dewpoint crosses 50 degrees Fahrenheit. I don't know what that is in %RH at 105 degrees air temperature, but it is not a high number. All joking aside, there is something to be said for "dry heat".

Posted by: Desert Cat at August 30, 2005 11:15 PM (xdX36)

4 35%? That's like wintertime in NC.

Posted by: William Teach at August 31, 2005 07:12 PM (Pzlrt)

5 If it's a dry heat and the wind is blowing, all is well.

Posted by: Attila Girl at August 31, 2005 11:04 PM (EtCQE)

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What's the cheapest way to do this? We have a small inheritance sum from one of the husband's relatives in Ireland, but our bank wants hundreds of dollars in service charges to cash it, which seems obscene.

Let me know if you have any ideas.

Posted by: Attila at 02:28 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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. . . with Mr. Linguistics, Scanmaster, and Mahatma. Mahatma's wife and kids are in the house: his sons keep sneaking out of bed, because they are under the impression that it's their God-given right to stay awake until the party's over. Mahatma isn't impressed, and calls out to them periodically to go to bed and stop trying to spy on us.

The rest of us were convinced as the day began that we'd be kicked out at around 11:00, but it doesn't happen, and instead we keep taking snacks off the table and eating them under the stars. I get water for Scanmaster, "water" (vodka) for Mr. Linguistics, and tonic water for myself that sometimes contains booze and sometimes does not. Ms. Mahatma, the enforcer, pretends not to notice that there's alcohol being consumed by hot tubbers, and even jokes at me about "avoiding dehydration" as I hand Mr. Linguistics a robust shot of Three Olives, served in a child-size plastic cup.

Ms. Mahatma points out Mars in the sky. "It's red," she asserts, but I can't tell: it just looks like a blobby bright bit of light to me. She goes back in and finally carries the last sleepy child off, protesting, to bed. And she herself crashes—probably letting us have some college-days gossip in honor of Mahatma's upcoming birthday at the end of the month.

Suddenly the three guys I'm with are talking about how maybe instead of marrying women, they should all have simply married each other way back when. "Linguistics Guy would cook, and Scanmaster would do the dishes. I'd read Steinbeck, and pitch in with a little light housework, plus childcare duties. It would have worked out great," Mahatma sighs.

I could have pointed out that they would all have been living an unacceptable, zero-booby lifestyle, but it would have been too easy. Instead, I proclaim "I can see the romantic appeal, but which one of you would have produced human eggs?"

"We would have hired a surrogate mother," he explains.

"Okay, then: who would fix your car, without having your engineer wife around?"

That stops him in his tracks. "Oh. That wouldn't work, would it?"

"No, not at all," interjects Scanmaster. "One has to have a wife who can fix cars. I want one too, just like Mahatma's." Suddenly, I'm glad my husband can't hear this conversation and know what he's missing.

"Are you going to divorce your existing wife, or just keep going?" I ask Scanman lazily, bringing my feet up to the surface of the hot tub, where the guys' feet have formed a sort of tangled nest in the middle. I perch mine on top of the pile, which brings my butt up, so I'm halfway floating in the tub, suspended between the rim of the pool and the foot-island in its center.

"Oh, Catlady the Poetess won't mind," he tells me. "She'd be happy if I got another wife."

"Then go for it," I tell him. "But make sure the second wife wants kids, and knows her way around an engine. Then you can have a house full of cats, and a separate one with real children in it. And healthy cars."

How hard could that be to find? I think. Especially in L.A.?

I climb out of the hot tub and go inside, putting my street clothes on and throwing the wet swimsuit into my carryall bag. Then I go back out and tell the guys I've got to head back, so I can be home within an hour or so of when I told my husband I'd arrive here.

"But he's asleep, right?" enquires Mahatma.

"Yup. He's getting up early to work on that project I told you about."

"So he won't know," he presses.

"I'll know. And these days I'm trying to do my best impression of adult behavior. Besides, your boys have piano lessons tomorrow, and I have to put my game plan together for the coming week." Not to mention church, of course—and my latest greatest grilling adventure on the patio (lamb for me and and salmon for the husband; thanks for asking).

Mr. Linguistics, Scanmaster and I head out into the starry, starry valley night, hugging Mahatma on our way out the door.

There's nothing more delightful than gossiping in a hot tub with your high-school friends, and going home to plant a very light kiss on your sleeping husband's hair. Then eating a very ripe peach, and going to bed.

At this moment, things could not be more right in my world.

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I spot my husband in the hallways, but I don't look at him. I keep my head down, and pretend not to see him. He's engaged in the same game, and starts whistling.

As I brush by, I "accidentally" graze my arm along his butt. I know retaliation will be an attempt to tickle me, so I draw back and my hands come up into the defensive position I learned in jujitsu (which has been refined by two years of T'ai Chi). Attila the Hub uses both, along with Okinawan Karate, his hand-to-hand combat training, some Push Hands (a Tai Chi offshoot) and good old-fashioned street fighting from his teenaged years.

"Oh, hey, Honey. I didn't see you there," I exclaim.

"Are you all right, Babe? You seem a little jumpy."

"Me? Jumpy? I'm just trying to get into the bathroom there."

"Well, go ahead."

"I'm tired. You can move past me first. Because you trust me, right?"

"Right." Immediately, his right hand comes down toward the ticklish part of my ribs, but I know his moves and offer only a token defense against that hand. The real assault, I know, is going to come from his left one, and I'm ready to block it hard.

I break free, untickled, from his attempt at grasping my two hands together in one of his (it is, of course, fatal to let him accomplish this). I walk quickly to the dining room, the husband in hot pursuit, coaxing me all the time to let my guard down. "Honey, why are you running?"

"I'm not running. I'm walking briskly. I just remembered something I had to get out here," and I roll under the table. I always go low when I can; it's one of my best weapons.

Suddenly, he straightens up and says, "Babe, and you sure there's nothing wrong? I mean, you seem to be crawling around under the dining room table."

"Well, you know. I dropped an earring under there this morning, so I was just retreiving it."

I emerge from the other side of the table, but he's around to that side in an instant. He moves on me then, pinning my arms and tickling that spot between my ribs that makes me squirm. I let him, but when he's done I lead him to the spot at the top of the stairs, place him one stair down from me (so we're closer to the same height) and kiss him long and slow.

"Kato Kato! Not now!" he murmurs in his Peter Sellers/Pink Panther voice, and I give him one more peck on the lips. Then I go off to the bathroom, and he goes downstairs to his den.

When I was in my jujitsu class they always marvelled at my ability to "think on my feet" and perform maneuvers that weren't official jujitsu moves at all.

I wonder how I got good at that.

Posted by: Attila at 01:42 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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This is an ooky girl stuff post. Reading it constitutes consent to hear about the female reproductive system, and not in that somewhat arousing chick-blogger's-lesbian-fantasies way, either.

Having been through fertility treatments and assorted other examinations, I'm starting to consider myself a Sonogram Veteran.

This last time it was because I had some kind of strange occasional pain in my right ovary. "If we want to be safe," the OB-GYN had cautioned, "we should have an ultrasound."

"I'll check to see if the insurance will cover it," I replied. I was assured that it would, so we went merrily ahead.

I can never help asking them to identify my organs, but have you ever looked at those little screens they use?—the shapes that are pointed out don't look like anything on those charts the grade school teachers show us when they want to explain how our menstrual cycles will work. The images on the screen aren't even shapes, exactly: they're lines and little bits of light, harder to see than a spider's web in a dark hallway.

As the doctor works the probe around he points out the uterus (one curved silvery line) and the bladder (a dark speck) and the ovaries in turn (they look like tiny little round spots of television static, as if you were watching TV in the old days and turned to a channel that didn't exist: just white-and-black "snow").

Every time I go in wanting to believe that I'll see real reproductive organs, and every time I feel as if I'm trying to see the animals someone else envisions in random cloud patterns. But the guy who imagines he can see my uterus and ovaries is wearing a white coat, and I don't want to seem like an idiot. So he says, "here's the uterus, here's your right ovary," and I exclaim, "how fascinating" and sort of nod.

There's nothing there. There's never anything really there. The emperor is wearing less than I am, lying on that table.

This time, he suggests that they need an "overall view," so of course they put some more lube below my belly button and he rubs the wand around on my lower abdomen to appease whatever spirits live in the machine behind the little dark screen.

"See? The images are less distinct, but you can see them in relationship to each other."

"Isn't that interesting?" I respond, hoping that the Sonogram Spirits are now happy and I can put on my clothes. And, yes, of course: The images were so clear when the wand was inside me.

Finally, he pronounces my reproductive system "perfect," and I tell him I always knew it was, deep down. And then he lets me know that ultrasound doesn't always spot ovarian cancer. Naturally, I want to shriek that there's no point in undergoing this silly exercise if he can't promise, Scout's Honor, that there aren't any icky yucky cells inside me. But I'm in my 40s and know things don't work like that: even the professionals who talk to the Sonogram Spirits are fallible sometimes. So I thank him, wait for him and his assistant to leave, and put my clothes back on.

Before I leave I look one more time at the machine. I'm severe with it. I raise one eyebrow ever-so-slightly. "Don't fuck with me, Spirits," I warn. And I sweep out the door.

I feel that I was fairly clear.

So now I'm safe. I faced the Ovarian Cancer Spirits down, and they blinked.

Posted by: Attila at 11:46 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Sorry; I have the winners all picked out, but I haven't had a chance to post them, between preparing for Siggraph and completing trip preparations. I'll post 'em tonight.

UPDATE: Spoke too soon; I need to crash, get up, finish packing, and get out to New England. So I'll hope to get web access and post on that while I'm out of town.

Posted by: Attila at 12:26 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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