Float on
I just had a very boring week. It was so boring, it could win awards for how boring it was. It outdid itself. I had a lot of insomnia, which I don’t actually mind. What I do mind is how it makes me have to sleep in, and then I go to work much later than I wanted to. Then I come home and try it again: go to bed early so I can get up early.
See, I usually fall right to sleep when I stick a movie on, or a TV show, on my laptop. It puts me right to sleep and I love it. Then it ends, and the computer screen goes black after ten minutes or so, and I’m able to stay asleep without the interruption I might otherwise get from falling asleep in front of a TV. Lately I haven’t been falling asleep very easily, and it doesn’t bother me at all because I can just lay there happily watching TV, or a movie. I’m sure TV is not the best way to put oneself to sleep, but I come from a family of insomniacs, and I’d rather just accept it as a part of life, rather than struggle with it. I have seen 3 a.m. way more times than I’d ever care to count. I hate lying there staring at the darkness with only my thoughts. It’s fine for the first half hour, but then it gets boring.
On the up side, in an effort to keep myself from getting too bored, I dialed myself into the free podcast thing on i-tunes. I am now subscribed to like 5 different podcasts, including spanish lessons, A Prairie Home Companion, This American Life, Hip Tranquil Chick, and James Lilek’s “The Diner”. A Prairie Home Companion is my favorite, because nobody in the world tells a story like Garrison Keillor tells a story.
Alaskans are like people but with different blood
Yesterday’s tide was extreeemely low. Not low enough to worry about tidal waves, but lower than I’ve ever seen it. I walked down to the beach from my sister’s house and perched on my favorite rock, the one that has a great vantage point and you can see into the water in two separate coves from it. I like to stare down into the water and watch the shifting sands below me, and see the fishies and seaweed and the water as it fades from clear to light blue to dark blue as it gets deeper. This time though, it looked like it was clear for quite a ways out, and I was drifting into thoughts of next summer, and skimming along the bottom with my goggles on so I can check out the shells up close. There were people there, too, who were swimming and playing in the surf. I’m assuming they were from Alaska, because I was barely warm enough just sitting there in the sun and wearing a sweatshirt. I climbed down to the smaller cove and walked south, marveling at how freaking far out the tide was. I could see things I’d never seen before, and also I couldn’t believe how easy it was to get from one cove to the next. These are places where I’ve been severely bruised while trying to get from one cove to the next, getting knocked over and scraped against the rocks by the waves. The next cove had Alaskans in it too, just out there in the water like it’s not freezing or anything.
The caves that I like to explore at the end of 10th street beach are different every time I go to them. They sometimes have sand all the way up to their opening and all the way through them. This time, they were cleared of almost all of the sand and just had deep blue tidepools with fish in them. I was of course compelled to climb all around in the caves, and found myself wondering why I’d wandered so far when the first cove was just as interesting. I guess that’s just what you do at low tide.
The Great Park Balloon Ride
The Great Park in Irvine, that they haven’t really started on and won’t be done for several years, has balloon rides and a visitor center. The balloon rides are free for the rest of the year, so we went down there this morning and took a ride. It takes you about 400 feet up into the air and you’re leashed to the ground, so it just stays in that spot for a few minutes and then you go back down. Great view of Orange County, and if the visibility were better, we would have been able to see the ocean.
Domesticity
Has anyone ever gotten one of those little vacuum robots? The kind that continually cleans the house all day while you’re gone or are doing more important things like downloading videos? It fascinates me that something can do that. I can’t wait until there are more of those types of inventions, like the bathroom monkey. And don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t require a lot of technology to impress me. I am still fascinated by coffee makers that can start your coffee before you even get up. In my sleepy morning state, I am compelled to start talking to the coffee maker and thanking it, and then if I’m feeling really chatty, bringing it to the table with me so we can keep talking. Because if you make my coffee, you can have my morning.
We got a clinger!
There’s a baby on the way! I got the call from Jeannie today that she’s 12 weeks along, not the previously guessed 6 to 8 weeks. It’s 5.5 cm, and probably looks like a polliwog. At any rate, it acts like a polliwog. I would have rearranged my day and gone down for the ultrasound, had I thought about it at all. We were all focused on the blood test being the big news carrier. She’s due in June.
As they say in Canada, life’s aboot to change.
I am now wanting to go to Babies-R-Us.
Off topic, I went to REI yesterday and am still carrying with me that REI feeling. I love that store. I walk around staring at all the adventure gear and think about all the places those things will go, mostly garages but still, the potential. I picked up a copy of Krakauer’s “Eiger Dreams”, his first book and the only one I haven’t read. It’s a collection of his mountaineering essays. I am currently having difficulty putting it down.
Wait, what?
I did NOT know that Led Zeppelin mentioned Mordor and Gollum in the song “Ramble on”. That’s just one of those songs that’s played in the background of life on this planet, pretty much since the last ice age. I never stopped and listened to the lyrics. And then yesterday at work I was listening to KLOS, and I’m like, wait, did he or did he not just say “Mordor”? It was like hearing the song for the first time. And I wasn’t even stoned.
Also, whenever I’d hear Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams”, in that line where they say, “Players only love you when they’re playing”: I heard that song so many millions of times when I was a kid, and my mind just wrapped around the idea that she was talking about someone playing, you know, with a toy. I had to stop and reprogram that when I hit age 30.
On a computer with icons the size of your hand
Check out the world’s oldest blogger, 108 year old Olive Riley. Equally adorable is the world’s second oldest blogger, María Amelia López, but she blogs in Spanish, so unless she spends a lot of time talking about red dogs, I wouldn’t understand what she’s saying. Here’s an article about her in English. She’s actually tied with Don at Don To Earth, in Canada.
I’m sure I’ll be blogging too when I’m 100, even if I stop sometimes. I’ll always come back to it. I’ve journaled regularly since I was 12 years old.
Pink Chiffon is very serious
A long time ago when my niece was about three or four, and I was twenty-one, she pointed at me one morning and started bitching me out. She furrowed her little eyebrows, and her blue eyes had fiery sparks coming out of them as she yelled, accusingly, “You’re silly! You’re always so silly you’re never not silly you’re the silliest aunt ever you’re always silly!”. This lecture went on for about twenty seconds, with the finger pointing hard and angrily. She was either wearing a miniature pink chiffon prom dress at the time, or was on her way to put it on.
I don’t know where that came from, but apparently she needed to let it out. She cooled off and we went on with our summer, mooning trains and playing slug bug and drawing cartoon-ey pictures of people and singing obnoxiously in the car. Never ever ever being not silly.
Happy 18th Birthday, Samantha. We’re very very very proud of you.
Random apology #374
To the people who live in that one neighborhood just outside of Big Bear, with that one dead end street:
I’m sorry I drove by your house(s) while blasting Billy Joel’s “Only The Good Die Young” at 7 a.m. I was just lost, and excited about snowboarding, and that song is best heard at full volume.
-Blonde in Toy Corolla, early January of 2007.
What’s a girl to do?
Did I already mention I can’t drink coffee? It makes my ear “close” and I won’t go into the boring details on that one. I can’t even drink decaf. I recently discovered that I can’t even have a glass of wine, because that, too, makes my ear do that thing. I was taking Sudafed, but you can’t take that too often. I did that last week, and not only does frequent use render it ineffective, but it makes you buggy-eyed and compels you to wander around with the vacant facial expression of a homeless person. You might even start a conversation with a piece of furniture. This is all normal behavior for me, with or without pharmaceuticals, but I’m saying that YOU might not like feeling that way.
I read somewhere that eating an apple in the morning wakes you up better than coffee, so I tried it this morning. I wasn’t sleepy after I finished the apple, but then I’d just slept for 12 hours. In the absence of coffee, time goes by in these even, slow increments, and everybody talks slow and yet too fast for me to follow their words. It’s a good thing I can just put a headphone in my good ear and listen to music.
D o you feel sorry for me now? Don’t. Just enjoy your coffee (sigh) and please, I mean this, send me an e-mail after your next cup of coffee and tell me about it, and how much you’re enjoying it. I can only live vicariously through you guys. You’re all I’ve got, kind of like Mary Ingalls in the Little House series, when she went blind and Laura had to be her sight for her.
I may just become the world’s first apple junkie.
