Alien Spouse

Public Service Announcement.

I noticed that someone had used the blog's search bar to look up "Not about the baby", which, you know, is fair enough I suppose.  My suggestion would be going back in the archives to before I had the baby, so about 6 weeks; or 10 months ago if you want to avoid all the pregnancy stuff as well.

Honestly though, it is very difficult when you have a new baby to talk about much else because they take up most of your time and demand virtually all of your attention.  It is really difficult to come up with another subject to blog about right now, because Eva just sucks up so much of my brain one way or another.

The plan is that Doc C will be taking paternity leave next semester, so he'll be at home with her from December onwards and I'll be working (with any luck anyway!) so hopefully that will help me get over the worst of the baby brain syndrome - Until then though I think we all have to just accept this is going to be a blog that features a lot of stuff about my brand new kid.  Sorry about that, but I'm hoping it's not a permanent condition.

The Most Comfortable Thing in the Apartment.

This is a point of view shot of how I seem to be spending a lot of my time at the moment.  

What happens is that Eva falls asleep on me, usually after tiring herself out with a screaming fit, so I'm reluctant to wake her by moving; Edith then senses her opportunity and jams herself onto the available remaining lap space. Thus I am pinned down for hours at a time.

I have taken to arranging everything I could possibly want within reach of the sofa, but there is always something that I've left *just* slightly too far away.  This morning it was my water bottle, and that was really quite tantalising.

Oh, also I spoke too soon yesterday about my small victory.  Shortly after writing that Eva turned into a human milk fountain and covered me, herself and the floor in milk.  She managed to get both the front AND the back of my khakis, I have no idea how she did that.

An Imperfect Platform.

So I can't post from an iPad, e-mailing posts from gmail doesn't work & @typepad haven't responded to my last two tweets.

Hello... Hello... Is this thing on?..

Technical iSsues.

For the past few days I've been coming home, writing a blog post on the iPad, hitting publish and watching as absolutely nothing happens.  It doesn't save the post, it doesn't publish the post and the rest is silence (or blank screen to be more accurate). Inevitably I forget that until the next time I sit down to write a blog post and... Nothing happens... I think it must be something to do with the iPad's Typepad app since I can publish from other computers, but I don't know what that problem might be or how to fix it.

Not to worry, you haven't missed anything earth shattering - Last night's lost blog post was all about FINALLY finding a book of knitting instructions that could coherently explain Kitchener Stitch (why is this so difficult? Mostly the other instructions I found never mentioned when I was supposed to drop the damn stitch I was working on and move onto the next.  ugh.) and I know how desperate you must be to read all about that!

Still, it's annoying.  After sitting at my desk all day, I don't want to go into the study to turn on the desktop and sit in there - I want to be blogging whilst I recline on the sofa with at least one cat settled on me and a police procedural on the television.  That is how you are supposed to blog. It is the industry standard, damn it!

Please Be Patient.

I read a few different blogs, and they have all gone through the occasional fallow period which is kind of annoying when you want something new to read every day.

One of the very few celebrity blogs I follow is Wil Wheaton's, and from time to time he will write a post that essentially says "I have something to blog about, but it's a secret for the time being, so I can't blog about it right now, ok?" 

Well, that's where I am right now - I have STUFF to blog about, but, for some quite excellent reasons, I'm reluctant to for a few weeks more and nothing else is really interesting me quite as much (Ooh, apart from "Mod Nation Racers" on the PS3. Doc C and I have been racing each other every evening this week and I even beat him once! Amazing!) 

So, um, stay tuned and I'll hopefully get more entertaining in a little while! Thanks!

The Miniest of Breaks.

At about lunch time yesterday I spontaneously decided to take the afternoon off, because there was really nothing happening in the office and Doc C has had a paper provisionally accepted by a journal that is, like, a really big deal in his field of philosophy so I wanted to celebrate that with him.  It was a lovely day, not too hot but with beautiful blue skies; so we went for a walk around a lake, had some from frozen custard and then went home for a cup of tea and a nap. It was very pleasant indeed!

What with one thing and another it's not been a particularly great summer (Note to Self: A great summer involves me having at least a week off from work for starters), so I am very pleased that I decided to take three hours of my holiday time on the spur of the moment to actually do something nice.

Of course I still wish I'd had days and days and days of walking around lakes whilst chatting with my husband and eating delicious food before having a nap in the afternoon, but one takes what one can get and tries to preserve that nice afternoon in mental amber to be enjoyed again later.

Unconscious Repetition or Homage in Blogging.

The post I wrote yesterday about quickly skipping through a book you don't really care about seems oddly familiar. I mean I know I wrote it so it shouldn't feel completely alien to me, but it feels like maybe I've written it before maybe, or perhaps that someone else wrote something similar that I read ages ago.

Of course if I've written this before that isn't a huge problem, because it's the nature of blogging, and writing in general, to re-visit ideas; but if it did come from somewhere else then I want to be able to properly attribute it with links or something. I'm usually pretty good at remembering were I've read something, because usually I can place the authorial tone of whatever snippet I remember; but I have no idea where this might have come from if I did read it somewhere else first.

Where would I have read about a sort of messy speed reading though? It's most perplexing.

The Annual Good-Intention-Failed-Execution.

Last weekend, or maybe even the weekend before that, I dug out the Christmas cards to write address and send.  They have just been sat untouched in their boxes ever since; so once again I have failed to send anyone a festive card, cue the festive guilt.

Actually when I got the boxes of cards out, I found several cards loose on top.  Which was odd, then it turned out I'd already written the cards, and completely failed to send them.  What's more I couldn't then whack them into envelopes and send them to the intended recipients under the guise of their being freshly chosen and written cards, because I'd put the date in them.  Christmas 2008?!?

Who keeps unsent Christmas cards for two years?  And what should I do with them now?  I am just hopeless at this, and I need to either accept that, or damn well get my act together in Novemeber next year.

For this year though:

Dear friends, please know that I often think think fondly of all of you, especially at Christmas, and if I lived closer then I'd bake you all mince pies with stars on the top.

A Purgative of Mental Objects.

Edith woke me up at 5 this morning by miaowing pitifully, which she never does, so I went downstairs to check she was ok (she was totally fine, I don't know what that was about at all) and then back up to bed; but I couldn't fall back to sleep.  I just did that dozing thing, where you have your eyes closed but your brain is churning away.

Mainly I was thinking about life, the universe, and, you know, everything.  A recurring theme was blogging and what exactly I'm trying to do in this little bit of of the internet.  I read a lot of blogs, web comics and cyber-zines so I've observed there are as many approaches to maintaining an internet site as there are people on-line.  I've never wanted to stick to a particular theme, because my blog was more about keeping an open diary.

When I wrote about going to the hospital with Doc C on Wednseday evening he wasn't very pleased that I'd done that, but it was in defending those 2 posts that I came to the conclusion that I haven't been writing about the things I've been actually thinking about.  I don't really know why I'm censoring myself so heavily because all it means is that when I open the compose screen I'm stuck with a very limited selections of topics to write about, and it sort of feels like I'm making endless small talk.  Which is exhausting.

So I think it's time for a cathartic blurt of my current recurring thoughts:

• Doc C and I are going to try and get me pregnant in 2011.  This is a very weird thought.
• I haven't been home in over three years and I just have a small but constant lump of homesickness in my throat that I have to try and ignore or I'll just wallow in it.
• I've been on anti-depressants for 18 months mainly to cope with the homesickness, and that certainly helps, but it's still there.
• I don't like living in a small town, because I really miss being in a big city.  The job market means we are unlikely to move anywhere soon, so I'm trying to make the best of it all but it's not my ideal lifestyle.
• Only one person seems to be talking to me from my last office here on campus, and that makes me really paranoid.  Did I do something awful or are they just cross because I changed offices?  No one's actually mentioned anything to me, but it's a hard feeling to shake.
• I like my current job but I always planned to have got somewhere in an actual career by this stage in my life, and I'm getting a little bit panicky that I'm in my mid-thirties without any idea what the hell I'm going to do next. Part of the problem is that the only career option that seems viable in a small university town is becoming a university lecturer.
• I'd need to complete at least an MA, which would involve taking classes, researching and writing essays and doing student teaching whilst working a full time job.  I need a nap and a large gin just thinking about that. 
• I would like to start a small business but I'm not sure what I should try to do.  I'm always being told I should sell my Amigurumis or other stuff I make, but I'm just not sure if that's really what I want to do full-time.
• I'm not a very good house keeper, because I honestly don't notice that stuff until it becomes clear that it really needs to be done.
• I don't like my wardrobe.  The only place I ever seem to buy clothes here is Old Navy, which is fine for jeans and casual tops; but all of their skirts are too short.  I'll never be cool and that's fine, I just want to look smart and sensible, but also a bit funky or at least interesting.  
• I can't find time to exercise regularly.  Going to the University gym is free, but it opens at 7 so I can only fit in 20 to 30 minutes in the morning before I have to get ready to start work at 8; the gym then closes at 3 and I finish work at 5.  I can't run because my plataar fascitiis flares up again.  I want to take Pilates, but one studio just won't get back to me and the other isn't offering classes until next year now.
• I'm a natural blonde and, as is natural, my hair is getting darker.  I occaisonally think that I'd like to dye it a fun colour, but I've never bleached or dyed my hair and I'm not sure I could really be bothered with the necessary upkeep to keep it looking good.  Plus that sounds expensive.
• We will be in Boston for Christmas, which means we will be seeing the Doc's family and he hasn't even begun thinking what we could do for presents for all of them.  Actually when I mentioned it this morning he said he would tell them not to give us any, so we shouldn't need to get anything for them.  This strategy never bloody works, and I find it mortifying to be given gifts when I don't have anything to give in return.
• Edith keeps pooping on the bathroom floor, I'm trying not to get angry with her because I know she's just trying to tell me something, but I don't know what she wants now. This makes me feel like a bad cat owner.

Ummm... Yeah, there's other stuff too I'm sure, but that'll do for now!

Found Poetry

There is a house on our way into town which is a shop, and we know this because of the large yellow sign outside advertising it's wares. I took a photo of it, so I could accurately repeat the wording to you.

Gifts * GIFT BAZAAR * Gifts

Huge * Persian Rug Liquidation * Huge

Bird Houses * Bird Feeders * Table Lamps

Wind Chimes * Wind Bells * Candle Lanterns

Furniture * Chess Sets * Eagles * Fountains

Majolica * Chintz * Oriental Gifts * Pictures

It's like found poetry, and it just gets better every time we drive past it.  Doc is very fond of the red line with it's bookending "Huge"s, where as I like the stream of consciousness feel to the whole thing.

What are your favourite lines? "Bird Houses * Bird Feeders * Table Lamps" is quite wistful, don't you think?  The longing to house and feed birds, perhaps the ultimate symbol of freedom, whilst oneself is shackled to the ground by material possessions such as the evocative "Table Lamps".  Gorgeous.

Even without the conceit of reading it as poetry, it's still really funny because it's such a massive sign and yet the information is so confusing.  I for one had no idea there was such a vast difference between Wind Chimes and Wind Bells that they both need to be name checked. Given the specificity of that line it seems odd that there is so much vagueness in the rest of the sign; I mean they sell Eagles?  In what sense?  Live, stuffed or objet d'art depictions of Eagles?  Ooh, maybe that's a typo that should actually read "Eagles Fountains"?  A very large bird bath for Eagles?

We have yet to actually stop at this shop by the way, because that would ruin the whole thing for us I think.

Say What You See.

Doc C was early to pick me up yesterday, and took to messing around with post-it notes.

It says

"Department of the English Lady".

The Original Constant Reader.

The second hand bookshop that we really love in Asheville has a small bowl of badges (American Translation: Buttons or Pins) next to the till, and all these badges have photos of authors on them.  I usually take a moment to rummage through the bowl, and usually only recognise a couple of the portraits, and then it's never anybody I enjoy reading.

Except, on this last visit, I found Dorothy Parker.

 I did double-check with the booksellers that it was actually Miss Parker before I bought it, although who else could it be really?  She looks both hungover and world weary, with a distinct air of sarcasm in her pose.

Did you know that D.P. left her estate to the Dr Martin Luther King jr foundation?  And her ashes were not officially claimed for 17 years and were just sort of kicking around the place, including being stored in a filing cabinet in her attorney's office, until the NAACP claimed them in 1988 and designed a memorial garden for them outside their Baltimore headquarters.  Isn't that great?

Slogans I Have Noticed.

I think the choice of vineyard name and logo was inspired on the part of Cupcake Vineyards; and their website features the phrase "Go ahead, live deliciously", which I think is quite appealing and, again, perfectly pitched for the product and the target demographic.  Company slogans are something I've been noticing a lot recently, usually because it's odd and I can't work out what the marketing executive who signed off on them was thinking.

And, of course, I have examples for you!  Three of them!

• Melita Bread - "Baked whilst you sleep".  Please note that the underlining of "you" was part of the slogan, not my emphasis for comedy purposes.  Is it just me or is that a bit passive aggressive?
• Fry's Turkish Delight - The slogan used to be "Full of Eastern Promise", which I can see the issue with I suppose, but I'm not sure "As Good as Ever" is actually a good replacement. 
• Charmin Toilet Paper - Whoever came up with Charmin's "Enjoy the Go" needs to be sat down and given a stern talking to, but whoever approved it really needs to be given a written warning at least.

Found Object, Found Literature.

Today's work desk drawer treasure is a pink paperclip shaped like a guitar.

That is all.

Actually I also found the plot synopsis of a vampire novel that my predecessor had written and was in the process of submitting to publishers.  I have to say I really hope it gets picked up, because the treatment I read was quite fun!  Not least because it is set in the very area in which Doc C and I currently live!  Spooky!

Links and Notions.

I've noticed that I tend to post links to interesting things on Facebook, rather than here or on Twitter.  On the one hand this is usually because I wish to draw something to the attention of a specific person, but not always.  In a similar way I'm also tending to jot ideas down on Twitter, rather than here.

Which is, you know fine, except that Facebook and Twitter don't have terribly useful search functions for going back through your own posts and I find my blog really useful for that.  I mean imagine if, for example, I forgot my wonderful idea for a faux vintage t-shirt from Manderlay and I couldn't search for "That great T-shirt idea I had"?  How awful would that be?  

Because I really do want to put that t-shirt together somehow, I can picture it exactly.  It will be a very light blue distressed t-shirt, with a centered print of a black silhouette of a impressive country mansion against an orange-and-yellow sunset, and say "A Present from Manderlay" in sweeping white lettering.  And yes I know that a t-shirt from Manderlay, however distressed it may look, will be terribly anachronistic, but I still think it would be really funny!  And elitist!  And geeky!  And I think I could get away with wearing that to work, don't you?  I mean it's a literary reference for crying out loud!

Yeah, so my not-new-year's resolution is more links and jotting down of notions here on this blog.  it'll be good, trust me.

Delicate Little Birds.

A friend of mine from University has started a blog which she has entitled Delicate Little Birds. 

It's a lovely name, and a lovely blog too.

The Only Opinion That Matters Anyway.

I wonder how many people those last two posts might have offended?  I am confident that my Mum won't be one of them, so that's alright.

Mum, I only know those bad words because I saw the film last night.  Cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die!

Three Nights in Tribeca.

Can it be? Is it true? Yes! Doc C has found a hotel on Manhattan Island with free wi-fi in the rooms! It's incredible, but true.  Do you know that the hotel in Washington wanted $12 for a day's worth of internet?  Outrageous!  I think we need to stand firm on these sorts of charges, and work towards making hotels understand the importance of being able to browse the internet in the comfort of one's own room.  This is ofcourse the only reason that I broke my run of daily blog posts, I managed over a year but in the end that's what got me.  Ah well!

Fortunately, our hotel in Tribeca is much more progressive on the internet front; AND they have a cafe downstairs.  They thoughtfully provide a copy of the menu in the rooms, which I have perused carefully and tomorrow morning I intend to eat a breakfast of porridge with maple syrup & fresh fruit, most likely with a pot of tea. Lovely.

Oh, and there is a detective novel shop just round the corner.  This place is perfect.

p.s. I will be posting my Christmas Day report at some point soon, hopefully before the start of the New Year but we will see.  You can't rush comedy.

365 Plus Some More.

This is my 2050th post, and with it I have successfully completed over an entire year of NaBloPoMo, which means I've posted at least once a day since the 1st of November 2008.

That is a lot of blog.  However, I seem to have fallen off the blogroll for November, which is weird because I could have sworn I was on there, so I'm not eligible for a prize. Le sigh.

Oh well, I bought my own prize!  Some really cute badges (American translation: Pins) from Nut and Bee, which I found today and I warn you now everything is just lovely.  All this stuff is so adorable, and there is even a little Happy Crochet badge, it's so difficult to find crochet stuff!  Everything's always knitting, and you know I like knitting too, but crocheting deserves some cuteness too.  After all, without crochet there is no amigurumi, and that is the very epitome of cute in crafting.

Current Book: Arthur Conan Doyle - A Life in Letters

I'm reading "Arthur Conan Doyle - A Life in Letters" which is just fascinating. I particularly loved the letters he wrote as a school boy; they are so hilariously Victorian in tone with their fascination with health and mortality, mixed with the abrupt changes of subject that you can expect from any 8 year old.  It's all, and I only paraphrase very slightly here, 'Sadly two boys died last week of the croup.  50 new books were bought for the library which is very jolly now'.  Brilliant!

At present I'm reading the letters he wrote as a struggling young doctor trying to earn some extra money by writing short stories for magazines whenever he had a spare moment.  He hasn't created Holmes yet, but he is en route.

I only bought the book because it was on the sale table last time I had the pleasure of being in a large book shop, and I wasn't sure what to expect from it.  So far my affection for Conan Doyle has remained untarnished; even though I'm completely sure we would disagree on any number of subjects my impression of him remains charmingly avuncular.  Of course I'm not even half-way through the book yet, I may still end up throwing it across the room in disgust.  (I'll try to remember to update this post when I've finished it.)

NaBloPoMo '09.

It's the first of November, which means to bloggers everywhere it's time for (Inter)National Blog Posting Month!  As it happens, I started posting daily on the first of November 2008, and I didn't drop the ball for a whole year.

So what's happened in the past twelve months?  For those of you joining us now, lets have a quick recap:

• November '08: America got a new president, and I got my beloved iPod Touch.
• December '08 : Bettie Page died, and I discovered Constant Comment tea.
• January '09: John Mortimer and Patrick McGoohan both died, and I gave up trying to train the cats to use the toilet like humans.
• February '09: Edith killed our romantic Valentine cupcakes, and I ran the first Alien Spouse Mystery Crochet Contest.  I must do another one of those sometime...
• March '09: We began to go to the gym before work, and I discovered the internet wonder that is Hulu.
• April '09:  Doc C learnt to make crumpets, and we went to Philadelphia.
• May '09: I went whale watching in Province Town and got a tattoo of a key on my right wrist.
• June '09: Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson died.  The media went insane, I'm just surprised no-one's yet claimed it wasn't all an elaborate hoax to jump start Jackson's come back.
• July '09: Doc got his iPod Touch and a new bike.
• August '09: I passed my learners permit test (first go and no wrong answers) and signed up for my MA course in English Literature.
• September '09: Keisha left the Sugababes and I went for my two year anniversary of coming to America to be Biometrically Tested
• October '09:  I got Mono and slept through October.  No really, I did, and I still blogged every day, that is commitment.

I suppose the biggest change was that I started calorie counting, using a free app on the iPod called "Lose It!", and since November last year I have lost around 45 pounds (That's over three stone) and two dress sizes.  That makes a huge difference to my body shape, and I really wish I'd bought that iPod sooner, so I could have done this ages ago!  Seriously, I LOVE my iPod for this; not only does it count all my calories for me but it keeps me motivated on the eliptical in the gym as well.  The iPod Touch seemed like an indulgence before I got it, but really it's been very useful.

That was 2009, at the beginning of the NaBloPoMo cycle I taught myself to crochet and for 2010 I'm teaching myself to knit.  Well, I actually could already knit never ending scarves, but this time I intend to knit actual things.  To your left you will see the first few rows of a red cotton circular thingy, which is going to be a cowl, assuming that I've actually made it big enough to go over my head.

I Dream of Sleeping.

Still no news about my blood tests, but I can report that I was at work for a grand total of two and a half hours yesterday.  This was just enough time for four colleagues and two students (one graduate, one undergrad) to tell me I looked terrible.  Mainly they thought I looked pale, which considering I am a blonde who avoids the sun isn't exactly news, but apparently I was even paler than I usually am. Imagine, I must have bee practically translucent.  Doc brought me home, and I napped for a couple of hours, before setting up my work computer laptop so I can access most of the software I need to do some work from home.

Not exactly a strenuous day, but I was so tired by the time I went to bed that night I actually dreamt about settling down to go to sleep.  It's quite something when even your sub-conscious is nagging you about accepting you need to get some more rest.

Apart from making sure I can keep my job, I'm also trying to keep up with my class work.  I have a 2-to-3 page paper to write, which is a close reading of a quote from "Frankenstein".  I've chosen the description of a painting in the Frankenstein library, which is only two sentences in the seventh chapter (page 76 for those of you with the Bedford/St. Martins 2nd edition), but I think it explores a lot of themes of the novel as well as indicating a much darker possible reading of the romantic relationships within the text.  It sounds quite good in theory, doesn't it?  The problem is that it seems to be coming out like that weird post I wrote the other day, I just can't seem to articulate my analysis clearly or, more to the point, provide solid textual evidence.  I am going to go through an look up each and every word in the OED and hope that gives me something to hang the whole essay on.  Keep your fingers crossed.

It's Alive! Alive!

Today was a very good day!  Doc made crumpets! And I read "Frankenstein" from beginning to end! 

Actually my personal best is still having read "Wuthering Heights" cover-to-cover in a single day, but that's not the point here.  Whilst reading Mary Shelley's best known work I was also underlining lots of passages in the novel and made a couple of pages of notes, which is guaranteed to make a girl feel like she's been doing some serious thinking.

One of the best things about buying second-hand text books is when the previous owners have already underlined bits, or made notes in the margins.  Whoever it was that owned this book before me started off annotating the text quite emphatically, for example there is a star in the margin that was drawn in ballpoint pen with such force that it's impression goes through the next three pages; but that kind of intensity is hard to maintain, and the notes stop a third of the way into the book.

Still, the last note is particularly pleasing:

"The Monster Lives!" Yeah, it does!  Wooh!

Move Along... Nothing Here To Snipe At Here...

It turns out I am, like, totes naive when it comes to the world of blogs.   Recently Dooce has started an archive of her hate mail  Most of it is has been attributed to one particular woman, which piqued my interest, and a quick google revealed that this one particular woman also had similar issues with a few other "mommy-bloggers".  It was at this point that I went through the self-reflexive looking-glass of blogs.

It turned out that a lot of the poison-pennings were originally posts and comments from a blog that's whole purpose is to be scathing and critical of a few other people's blogs.  And, AND, it's not the only snark-fest out there!  This is a self-cannibalising blog trend that I was completely unaware of before today, and I'm sort of bemused by it.  It seems like a lot of mental and emotional energy to expend on extreme snarking.  Can't we all just post photos of kittens and unicorns?

If you are even considering starting a blog I would not go looking for these web critics, not because they aren't amusing some of them are very funny, but because some of it is pretty vitriolic and quite depressing really.  If I'd seen this stuff before I started blogging I would have been trepidatious about publishing that first post.  Now I'm just hoping to never do anything to draw any ire from that quarter of the web.  I cry really easily.

Geeky Web Discovery, Which May Actually Be Useful.

About five minutes ago I found a really simple organising website called Now Do This (via Stumble Upon, which is also dead good).  If you click "Edit" under the latest task, you can add or remove tasks, as well as putting them in order of importance.  I also went to their blog and it's REALLY easy to add in tabs so you can have several lists on the go.

Plus you can have "Now Do This" open in a sidebar on my homepage, so it can sit there quietly all day.  This is going to be SO useful, or I could simply add "Look at Pictures of Kittens" for every other task. 

It's a win-win either way!

Agatha: Novel (1978), Film (1979).

When I was 9 I suddenly developed a taste for Agatha Christie novels.  I'm fairly certain the first one I owned was "At Bertram's Hotel", but I don't remember if I got that before or after seeing the BBC adaptations of the Miss Marple stories.  I could still hum you that theme tune, and for me Joan Hickson is the definitive Marple.

I must have been about 12 when the film "Agatha" (1979) was shown on TV, but I was thrilled to be allowed to stay up and watch it with my parents because I was fascinated by Agatha Christie's 11 day disappearance in 1926, which she never really gave a proper explanation for.  Dad teased me that there was bound to be a sex scene in the film because it starred Vanessa Redgrave and Dustin Hoffman, and, as I was a very pure minded 12 year old, the mere suggestion was completely outrageous to me!  I don't actually remember much about the film now, except for the main plot twist, and it being the main reason I developed a distaste for Timothy Dalton that I've never quite got over.  He's probably very nice in real life, but as Archie Christie he was a cad and a bounder so I could never buy into him being a romantic lead after this.

Last week I spotted the book that the film was based on.  It was published two years after Agatha's death, so she didn't have a chance to respond to the solution posed by Kathleen Tynan.  I'm only on chapter three, so she's only just vanished mysteriously and there isn't any indication of where she might have gone.

The art work on this is particularly 70's film tie-in, isn't it?  Hideous, yet intriguing.  Those are great portraits of Redgrave and Hoffman, but it's a weirdly composed image and I have no idea why they are peering off in different directions through wet glass.  I'm pretty sure that doesn't end up being a plot point, but I could be wrong there.

Serendipitous Questionable Content.

During orientation schedule building one of our advisors used the phrase "...smiling from ear-to-ear", and the student he was talking to said, entirely dead pan, that she thought that if one did that "...it would be very painful, and possibly the top of your head would fall off".

So today's Questionable Content was too good a gift not to share with the group.  It made my entire office giggle, after I'd tweaked it a tiny little bit.  I do hope J. Jacques doesn't mind me changing the first speech bubble, and chopping off the last panel to alter his strip so it would fit the anecdote more closely.

Two Years of Spousing in an Alien Manner. Like, Two Months Ago.

Anyway, I totally missed my second blogging anniversary.  It was back in April!

I believe I shall have a nice cup of tea to celebrate.

Stinky, Stinky, Stinky.

Today's top tip, should you be about to drive route 81 through Pennsylvania, is to bring gas masks and some sort of air freshener because OHMIGOD there is a stretch of about fifteen miles that stinks to high heaven.  I am not even joking.  I found myself hoping for a skunk to become enraged at one point.  Funnily enough this stink was very close to the town of Hershey, I will say no more. *cough* chocolate-should-not-taste-like-that *cough*

Our trip was further enlivened by Doc C noting that his beef jerky purchase, far from adding to his manliness, in fact indicated that he was "...not a real man of the road...I went for the low sodium option."

To round up this post of dubious taste I'll just add that I have been reading "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" which combines the classic tale of romance with a plague of reanimated corpses.  It's very fun, and the conceit does explain why there is a garrison of soldiers permanently stationed by a sleepy English village.  Unfortunately Miss Austen's co-author rather stretched my credulity by adding a scene in which chipmunks scurry across the Bennet girls path, followed by several other animals, including a skunk.  That's just taking things too far!  Zombies? Yes. Misplaced wildlife?  No.  You have got to have limits and that would be mine, it's exactly the same issue I had with the live version of "101 Dalmations" frankly.

The Ups and Downs of Being an Academic.

Doc is in the middle of a end-of-semester final paper grading frenzy.  This is usually unrelenting misery, but occasionally his face will light up with pleasure at what he's reading.  

As happened yesterday evening, when he turned to me and said:

"I love it when a student uses the word 'biaatch' in an essay!"

Which is actually justified in this instance, because it was used in the context of a paper on the aesthetics of hip-hop culture.  That particular essay made him considerably happier than the one page paper that was written in what amounted to text message speak, and should have been ten pages long.

A Most Varied Saturday.

 This morning when I came down to feed the cats I immediately noticed that the cat tower had been knocked over, because I am perceptive like that.  What I don't understand is how the thing fell on it's side without waking me or The Doc up.  I mean it's pretty big, wouldn't it have made some noise?

Anyway, then Doc made me crumpets for breakfast.  This time I had jam on mine.  It was nice.

Then we went food shopping and on the way we stopped off at the pet shop.  We wanted a food container, but they had none in stock.  However they did have cat harnesses and leads.  More of that later...

On the way to the supermarket we were walking passed a small bookshop and I spotted Tori Spelling's autobiography "Stori Telling" on the sale table.  It is now mine.  It turned out that it was actually a bookshop, newsagents and cigar shop.  We browsed the magazines, and Doc asked me who the little old lady sitting outside was doing out there; on the way in I'd seen that she had a stack of books and a sign saying she was doing a signing.  Doc went back outside to chat with her, whilst I was asking about the empty cigar boxes they had on top of the shelves.  It turned out they were all for sale, and I have found a fantastic square box with a open front to it for $3.  I have no idea what I'll do with it, but it just looks really useful for something.  When I went back out, Doc had decided to buy two books from the author outside, she was a Russian emigre who had moved to the US when she was 8.  Her first book was about that experience, and the second book was a collection of the letters she and her husband wrote to each other before they married.  Doc asked her to sign the second book and bought it for me; she also gave him a copy of her husband's poetry, I think just because he was interested in it.

After doing the food shopping we came home, and put the harness on the cats one at a time.  They had no idea what the hell was going on, and as you can see Nancy looked particularly comfortable in it.  Poor Nance liked the going outside part, but hated the harness, so she kept walking backwards to try and get out of it.  Edith mainly just rolled around on the front path.

Then I came back in for my movie marathon.  "I Married A Monster from Outer Space" was fun, Doc went so far as to say it was "Rocking", mainly because of the surprisingly good special effects and some good solid performances.  As planned I then watched "Cheaper by the Dozen" which Doc wasn't interested in, so he cooked and just caught the odd scene.  Straight after that on TCM was "Funny Girl" OMG!  Doc lasted about 15 minutes before declaring he had enough.  I can't think why.  I mean I'm not a huge Barbra fan, but her early movie career was pretty good, so I watched the start and end around the "Ashes to Ashes" finale.  It was a very good evening for film and TV.

Oh, That picture in the bottom left hand corner?  That would be Edith killing her crinkly shiny ball toy, because I think it's hilarious when she does that.  She takes it so seriously!

Was Philadelphia's Gravity Different in the Late 1700's?

I am a big fan of Picnik, today I thought I'd see what treasures the fancy collage package has and I found the perfect backdrop for my photos of The Signer.

This statue commemorates the signing of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, but it is not of one specific person.  Bearing that in mind, and with all due respect to those makers of history, I would love to know how the man depicted here is intending to sign the thing?  For one thing he's going to get ink all over his sleeve if he is not careful.

Does Anyone Know When I'm I Legally Required to Start Talking Like Katherine Hepburn?

Ok, so Doc has finished messing around on the laptop and looking up his silly conference stuff, so I'm back now to give you a longer post.

Now usually I would just have cobbled something together on the iPod, and then gone back into the post from the laptop to edit if necessary.  I can't do that though because the hotel doesn't have wi-fi.  I know.  We actually have been forced to connect the computer to the internet via a cable.  What is this?  The dark ages?  It's just barbaric.

True, the room is comfortable, there will be a free breakfast tomorrow and they do serve complimentary afternoon tea with cookies every afternoon at four, but if we can get wi-fi three thousand feet up a mountain in a place that doesn't even have a Starbucks for crying out loud (which is good, I know, Starbucks are corporate bullies blah blah blah) then I really do not know what Philadelphia's excuse is.

Anyway, the main problem is that without wi-fi I can't use my iPod to blog, or Twitter, or check my e-mail, or the weather, or look at maps, or breathe.  I've set up my Twitter account so that I can send updates to it from my mobile phone, and I will just have to wrestle the laptop from Doc C occasionally to blog, because I am not going to drop the Nablopomo ball now just because I'm on a city break.  You don't get me that easily Philadelphia!  This is one British woman that you shall not defeat, whatever your history books may lead you to believe!

By the way, because of the difficulties of being a vegetarian when on a road trip, today I have eaten carbs pretty much exclusively, which also happened to involve a fair amount of sugar and caffeine.  Can you tell?

Linkings.

I have some exciting new additions to the links category in the sidebar, which I'd like to bring to your attention.

First of all I added Mental_Floss a few weeks ago, and I think it's a very interesting web destination.  It's full of great nuggets of geekitude, with some fun quizzes.  You can easily convince yourself that it is in fact educational, and it must be helpful for your Trivial Pursuit or pub quiz scores.

I also recently discovered Questionable Content, via Cuteoverload (I don't need to link to that do I?  It has to be in your favourites, and it's in the sidebar anyway), which is a web comic.  I first visited on February 26, and I finished reading my way through the complete archives about a week later.  This is an archive of 1362 posts, representing a new strip every weekday since 2003 and it may be addictive.

Most important of all is Brokeback Monkey, which is written by someone who I may possibly think is one of the loveliest and most talented people I know.  I will warn you though, he's just started posting installments of a short story. and the prologue gave me very surreal dreams about a sinister inner city windmill.  Like you do.

A Picture Paints A Thousand Words.

Instead of a photograph today, I have made an Alien Spouse Wordle!  It was fun!

Twilight (2008)

I have just got back from seeing "Twilight" (2008) which I enjoyed immensely, because it was so very very bad.  It's hard to know where to start, but I think the plot and the dialogue were probably where the problems began; you know according to IMDB the script was written in six weeks.  And, even though it was based on a book, that time frame explains a fair bit actually; however I think the director took that half-baked mess composed of equal parts creepy teenage obsession and flawed reinterpretation of vampires, and really made something special out of it.

Of course the director is only one part of the creative team and she was very ably supported in her efforts here.  I particularly enjoyed the quite appalling pale vampire make-up that made the entire audience at my screening laugh every time a new vampire was introduced, and that Jill pointed out actually stopped at the chin, and left a nice tanned neck on all of the vampires.  I also feel I should mention some very fine smell-the-fart acting on all counts, but with special mention to Robert Pattinson in the first biology class scene and Cam Gigandet in the decoy chase scene.  I was slightly disappointed that the vampire stand-off during the thunderstorm didn't turn into a Jets Vs. Sharks style choreographed rumble, because for a moment there I was fully expecting it too.  That would have been spectacular.

I can't wait to see it sweep the boards at the Oscars tomorrow.

Three Men on a Blog.

When writing a blog you also tend to be a regular reader of other blogs, and then you tend to find yourself experiencing post envy.  Sometimes the blog you are reading is about a lifestyle that you wish you had, but more usually the envious reaction is triggered by a nicely turned phrase, or a particularly good observation, an excellent joke or even just a well chosen subject.

The reading blogger then thinks to themselves "Damn it!  I noticed [...Fill in suitably fascinating observation here...] too, but did I write about it?  No!  I wrote a post about how my cat chatters at the birds when they land on the bird feeder, as if no other cat has ever exhibited this behavior!"

To add to my feelings of blog envy, I have recently been reading "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" by Jerome K. Jerome.  It is a damned shame that man died in 1927, because that necessarily means he couldn't have even considered the possibility of the existence of blogs, and yet, I firmly believe, he would have been a phenomenal blogger.

It's quite something to be envying the blogging capabilities of a man who has been dead for over 80 years, especially as you'd think observational comedy from 103 years ago would lose a little something, but it is still hilarious.  Not to mention free to download from the Guttenberg Project (if you are in the USA, if in other countries your copyright laws may vary), which is another distinct point in it's favour.

Extended Sentence.

Recently I've been getting breathless letters from domain name providers letting me know that my registration of Alien Spouse was due to run out!  In March!  That's only three months away!  Oh My God!  Hurray!  Sign up with us now!  Ignore the fact that this letter came completely unsolicited from a company you never heard of before!  Send us money!

I waited until my actual domain name provider sent me a polite and calm e-mail reminder, then I popped over there and registered Alien Spouse Dot Com for another two years.

Looks like you're stuck with me for a bit longer.

2009! Let's Go!

Hello, and Welcome to 2009!  If you will look to your right you will note the new NaBloPoMo badges in the sidebar; one announcing that I successfully blogged everyday in December, and the other indicating that I fully intend to do the same thing in January!

So far every time I've put those buttons up in the sidebar I have had a small panic because I can never remember how I did it last time, but when I put the new ones up this morning I couldn't find the instructions and I just worked it out for myself.  Hoorah for trial and error!

Other projects for this year include learning to drive on the wrong side of the road, crocheting a creepy/cute amigurami, and making a short video of Edith to record one of her more eccentric but definitely charming habits.  We shall have to see if she feels like performing to command, but since she adores getting any sort of attention I am fairly confident she will.

Today I plan to get to know my new phone better (I will be posting the story behind how I finally got it, but I didn't want to start the new year on a rant), and maybe try to work out a way of making my own non obnoxious ring tones.  So there will be a lot of tinny electronic music in my house today, which will absolutely delight Edith if no-one else.  My favourite ever phone let me record a sound-bite with it, and then set that as a ring tone, so I had Fred Astaire tap dancing as my ring tone for ages.  I can also highly recommend having the sound of the TARDIS as your ring tone, which I downloaded it from the BBC website, but I'm not sure if you can outside of the UK.  That was a great ring tone because every time my phone rang people would literally stop in their tracks and look around hopefully, it was as if for one split second they believed Dr Who might be real.  Which would be brilliant!

Blogger's Lament.

It's New Year's Eve and as we are approaching 2009 it's a time to take stock and, I have to be honest here,  I'm not particularly chuffed with how Alien Spouse has been over the last few months. 

What happened was that I mentioned that I blog to someone I didn't know particularly well, and I sent her a link.  She then proceeded to tell a bunch of other people.  Who I work with. 

Actually she told them before I even got the job.  She suggested they read my blog when they were, in fact, preparing to interview me because my blog is just "so funny!"; I only found this out after I got the job, when they all assured me they hadn't read it.  When one of them first mentioned it to me I honestly felt my heart stop for a moment as my mind raced to think of anything that I might not want them to have read and I did go back and edit some of my archives.

Now it's always been a rule of mine that I don't blog about work directly anyway, but somehow knowing that your Departmental Director might just be bored one day and decide to check out what you've been blogging about recently really makes me think twice about sharing my thoughts on some subjects.  I'm pretty sure she wouldn't do that, but I can't know for certain, particularly as I must admit that if I knew one of my colleagues had a blog you can bet your bootstraps I would read it.  And please don't think for a moment that this is because I don't like any of the people in my office, they honestly do all rock!  But since knowing they are aware of Alien Spouse I have felt slightly uncomfortable, purely because I don't really know them very well yet, and I would have preferred to be the one who told them about my blog if I wanted to.  I suppose it's mainly that I am wary of offending anyone inadvertently, because I make a joke on my blog that they don't find funny, or that I'm having a bad day and rant about something that I don't think is in any connected to them, but, because this is a very small town, it turns out I'm actually saying something rude about their cousin.

Of course I know full well that this isn't controversial blog by any stretch of the imagination, it's written mainly for my mother's entertainment after all, but I certainly never meant for it to be primarily about my cats!  I was envisioning the odd cameo when they did something particularly cute, but lately they have taken over and  I don't want to write a crazy cat lady blog  (Although Nancy actually just play fought with me!  It's a breakthrough!  She even rabbit kicked!).

I'm not sure what to do about this situation, hence this slightly passive-aggressive post on the subject.  I haven't told anyone at work that I would feel uncomfortable knowing they read this, because that would probably be the quickest way to raise their curiosity about it, but I've kept an eye on my stats and there don't seem to be any new local readers lurking so I'm assuming they've simply forgotten all about it. 

It's funny how over time the sense of anonymity has become something I really wish I had protected more.  At first it seemed restrictive, but now that a large chunk of it has just been removed without my being able to do a thing about it, I realise how liberating it really was to have the opportunity to say pretty much anything I wanted.  It's most frustrating.  So much so that I have created a secret side project blog where I go off to scream rude words occasionally.  And, no, I'm not telling anyone where it is.

I may have said too much already.

Silver and Gold.

On an old episode of "House" (I don't know what season, but Cameron still had brown hair and was lusting after House, and Stacy's husband could still walk) Dr. Gregory House noticed that an elderly couple, who had come to him with a matching set of medical complaints, were wearing wedding rings that did not match and he therefore deduced that they were lovers who were married to other people.  This is odd, but even odder, I've seen exactly this plot device in "CSI:Miami" too. The non-matching wedding rings again denoting an extra marital affair.  I realise it's just a bit of business to indicate that the central character has amazing powers of observation, and that even a detail as tiny as rings that don't match can have significance to these deductive geniuses that mere mortals cannot divine.

I hope that this fairly weak plot device doesn't become an urban legend, or recognised bit of folk lore because Doc C and I wear totally different wedding rings; mine is an lovely antique gold band, whilst Doc's is a silver ring he bought for ten bucks after his original wedding ring started to turn his finger green.  There are excellent reasons why we have different rings; both my wedding ring and my engagement ring have histories that are important to me personally, and Doc C just doesn't like wearing gold.  That's all there is to it, no hidden drama.

Really I hadn't thought about the fact our rings don't match until I saw two quite different TV dramas put such significance in it.  Does this mean that all other married couples always have taste so similar they will be easily able to agree an matching jewelry that they both want to wear every day for the rest of their lives? Isn't it more likely that people usually don't always have the same taste in jewelry, which would mean that one of our hypothetical couple would be secretly unhappy with the symbol of their relationship?

No-one has ever commented on our lack of matchingness, but maybe they are just being polite.  I wonder what the script writers of "CSI: Miami" and "House" would say.

Not So Constant Comments.

On a blog housekeeping note, I've been beta testing the new Typepad Connect comments accounts and I had some feedback asking what the heck was going on!

Well the idea was that you could sign up for a Typepad Connect account which keeps track of your comments, and when people click on your user ID it takes you to a profile page.  If you comment on my blog when signed in that way anyone can then click on your ID and see where else you have commented, and that might introduce them to a new blog or just give them a better idea of who you are (Not your name and address or anything like that, just a better idea of your personality).  Setting up an account also means that you can select an image to have next to your comment instead of those spirograph images, although I do think those are pretty cool.  Essentially it's a way of creating ownership of comments, and making commenting much more of a community thing.

However I found that people didn't like having to set up an account, and it seems a bit buggy in relation to non-typepad blogs, so I've played with the settings so that you don't have to sign in to a Connect account anymore.  I mean you can if you would like, and I do use mine because it's just a really nifty idea, but it's not mandatory on Alien Spouse!

Comments will still require a name and an e-mail address, but I have also decided not to moderate so  they should now come up straight away.  Although, please note, any comment that doesn't meet my strict guidelines (on both commenting and chocolate) will still be smite down with a stroke of the mighty delete key.

Abby, I'm looking at you.

Greetings Cards - The Bain of My Existence.

When I got up this morning at 6:30 (EST) the first thing I did was to call my mother to wish her a Happy Birthday.  She was a bit surprised by this because her birthday is actually tomorrow.

Which is good because it means her birthday card has a marginally better chance of reaching her.  I posted it yesterday.

Add to that that I still haven't posted any of my Christmas cards that need to reach the UK in less than a week and you could accurately conclude that I'm just not on top of things this festive season.  My apologies.

How Bettie Page Saved Christmas NaBloPoMo.

Bettie Page saved me from skipping a day of NaBloPoMo posting because I was so sad to read that she had died that I posted first thing in the morning, which is unusual for me.  I meant to post after work as well, but we were going for drinks at a friends house, and I was so tired (is it just me or has this been a really long week?) that before we left I opted to take a nap.  Doc said he'd wake me in 10 minutes, but acually I got in 25 minutes of Zzzz Zzzz Zzzz before he came to get me.  It was a lovely nap.  

In case you have ever wondered about my position on napping I can tell you that I am in favour of them, and I particularly like to curl up fully clothed on top of of the bed covers with an extra pillow and a light cotton throw for maximum napping efficiency.

I read a very interesting article about napping here.  I have since taken the advice to heart and will nap on the sofa in Doc's office at lunch time occaisionally.  It's not ideal, because it's a two person sofa, and I really am more of a three-to-four person length woman so there is some small difficulty in getting optimum comfort.

Anyway, so after my nap I just had time to get changed, put on some lip stain (Benetint: Making me look less washed out since 2006) and rush out of the door.  It was a great to be out on a Friday night and we were introduced to some really nice people, who I believe I will be facebook friending later today.  It was so much fun, but by the time we got home it was almost one.  So if I hadn't posted that morning, this experiment in blogging keepie uppie would have ended in failure.

And that is how Bettie Page saved Christmas NaBloPoMo.

CSI: Le Singe Est Dans L'Arbre.

Wait, Grissom proposed whilst covered in bees?  Who wrote this episode?  Eddie Izzard?

Damn You Phone! (Shakes Fist At Sky)

Ugh.  What is it with mobile phone companies?  Why must they go out of their way to be annoying?  And when will they learn that I am more than happy to send scathing e-mails to them should I deem it necessary?

So, as I believe I may have mentioned, I do not like my phone.  When I went to the local shop for our network to get my number changed a couple of weeks ago, I asked how long it would be before I could change it, and I was told it would be another six months.  Not really what I wanted to hear, but fair enough.

Then I got a text telling me that I was eligible for an upgrade, and urging me to log on to the phone company's website to do so.  The website said I was not eligible for an upgrade.

Again fair enough, one might think.  Except that since then a bit of my phone's hinge just snapped off, without any provocation I might add, and it's now difficult to open the thing.  Meaning it's essentially becoming an even more useless and annoying collection of plastic, wire and glass.

So we went back to the shop and showed them both the broken hinge and the text message, and they told me I could not upgrade but I could either pay the full retail price of a couple of hundred dollars for a new phone or $50 for the same model of phone that I have and hate.  Hmmm.  Add to that the saleswoman told me it was one of their best phone, but when she called head office to verify things I actually heard her say that this particular phone is prone to this type of problem.  Double Hmmmmm.

Personally I think it might be worth a slightly snippy e-mail to my network provider, don't you?  I mean they don't even pay lip service to the idea of honouring the text that they sent me saying I could upgrade, AND they know this phone has a design flaw and they still wouldn't let me change the model even if I did make an insurance claim.  I call that pretty poor customer service personally.

NaBloPoMo: Complete!

I have completed NaBloPoMo 2008!  Look I've even got the badge in the right-hand side bar.

In fact you may also have noticed the yellow and pink NaBloPoMo December badge just above that, well that is because November was just so much fun, that I think I will keep going.  Let's see how long I can sustain it for!  It'll be like blog posting keepie uppie!

I'd love to manage a whole year, but that might be a little ambitious; my main hope is that the cats really step up and start doing something very entertaining.

The theme for December is "Thanks!" and let's kick off by saying thanks to my Mother, who I know read every single one of the November posts.  That's one of the things they don't warn you about before you have kids.

Idea: Range of Exercise Clothes for Intellectuals.

Sometimes I have great ideas that I am just not in a position to actually implement, the oft quoted example being the lavish mini-series of "Mame" and the sequel "Around The World With Auntie Mame" starring Megan Mullally (I'm going to keep mentioning that one, until someone steals the concept.  Unless McG is reading this. In which case: Yikes).

It's mainly casting, which would have been my dream career, but I do also develop product lines in my head sometimes.  Most recently I've been mulling over an idea I came up with when I was a teenager that I still think would be a winner.
When I was studying "Hamlet" for my Eng. Lit. A-Level I thought that work-out gear that had the quote "Oh! that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew", would be great.  I'm sure I've seen that phrase on t-shirts before, but I am thinking of a whole range of clothes specifically designed for exercise with that and other appropriate literary quotations.  You know track suits or yoga gear with lines from Dostoyevsky on, that type of thing.

The market would be intellectuals, or just people with intellectual pretensions, to wear their brains on their sleeves whilst on the elliptical machine.  Of course the range would also accommodate those people who want their tracksuits to say more than "Just Do It" whilst they are slumped on the sofa watching telly.

It would be cool, right?

I am iBlogging!

The first application I downloaded? Typepad, naturally!

Even Though, Really, Blogging is It's Own Reward.

Just so you know I have signed up for this year's NaBloPoMo.

That means I will be blogging every day through out November.  Which is pretty much what I would have done anyway, so there should be no perceptible change to our scheduled programming; although I am hoping that being part of a big group blogging event like this inspires me to write about something other than cat poo, and I am reasonably confident that you are hoping that too.

You may already be aware of this, but you can do NaBloPoMo any month you like now, but November is still the big one with prizes for different categories.  I'll be brutally honest here and say I would absolutely love to win a prize for blogging, that would be brilliant! 

Actually I'd love to win something full stop; I spent ten minutes filling out a questionnaire for the University's library last week, even though I have yet to check out a book from it or use it to do anything except attend meetings.  I did it purely because they e-mailed the thing to me and said I would be entered into a prize draw for an iPod Touch if I graded their performance on a scale of one to ten. 

Alright then, I'd say you were, oooh, about an 8 as far as Libraries-that-I-don't-use go.  Could perhaps do a little bit better, but you're not bad at all really.  Carry on!