Things to live for...

A rockin' cool Canadian friend of mine has a great blog. My favorite part is a list of things she lives for. I think it's a good idea to keep a list like this, to help remind us of good things when we are depressed about all the bad.

My dog is a buckethead.

Poor Twinky the kid. She has an eye injury that won't heal. I'm told it's a problem Corgis have. I guess if they can't break their leg (hard to break something you don't have) they have to have some sort of issue. This afternoon I took her to a veterinary optometrist who numbed her eye, used a metal clip to hold her eye open (reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange), peeled off a layer of tissue with a swab, stabbed her eye over and over again with a needle (theory being that the divots would give the new cells something to hold onto) and now she has to wear her E-collar for the next ten days. She acted like a doll, I was a squeamish wreck.

Such a good pup.

Still practicing Earth Day

My clothing green rating today: 3.75. Hemp/recycled/organic shoes, organic cotton socks, second hand recycled belt, second hand shirt, bra and earrings. Only my pants and jacket have no green value.

Everyday is Earth Day in my world but I love hearing mainstream folks take a little interest, even if it is only once a year.

My friend Amy and I spent Earth Day with David Sedaris. I laughed so hard I almost forgot about the diminishing ozone.

Rabbit food.

I've eaten healthier this week than I have at any other time in my life. I have amazed even myself. This home delivery of produce (which now contains fruit as well as veggies since I have upgraded my bin) has been very benefical. For instance today I had a homemade smoothie with freshly squeezed orange juice, mango and frozen raspberries as well as a bowl of oatmeal (more nutritious than you might think). My mid morning snack was celery with peanut butter (peanut butter being an excellent protein source). Lunch consisted of a Tofurky (pre-cut slices are the only way to go and I prefer the peppered variety) sandwich with Tofutti cheese slice (not healthy but I like it), tomato and lettuce along with a salad containing radish, carrots, red onion, snow peas, mixed greens, celery and diced Field Roast (a lentil based fake meat that rocks) and a mock chicken meat (both good protein sources as well). My mid afternoon snack was going to be a Larabar (raw nutrition bar with nuts and fruit as the only ingredients and fascinatingly good) but instead I'm going to eat the diced apple and pear I brought. Tonight I have a lot of things to do so dinner will be light, probably the left over dinner from last night which was new potatoes with chard, garlic, carrots, celery, mushrooms all sauteed together and frankly way better than I even expected. I had forgotten how much better fresh vegetables taste!

So, this week of nutritionally sound eating has given me a base for recognizing how I can feel when I eat right (in other words when I don't eat tons of sweets, drink alcohol or soda). It's not a bad feeling, I must say. Of course I am more than ready to blow it to Hell this weekend but this is progress. All of the prepackaged food (I may be vegan, but historically I have been a junk food vegan) that I would normally consume still sits in my freezer and on the shelf in my pantry which shocks me. The $45 a week I am spending on the fresh, mostly local, organic produce is making it's way into my heart.

It's easy being green.

Not to toot my own horn or anything (and what a cute little horn it is) but check out #7 on the top 100 green cars. And you might as well notice while you are at it that the list price (much more than what I paid) is half of a hybrid. Just buy a Yaris and give $10K to your favorite green charity.

It's easy being green.

Peeps Research

So Easter has come and gone and I nearly forgot. As an atheist vegan, Easter doesn't hold a lot of appeal for me. I like rabbits (and chicks) but don't like that many people buy them for their kids this time of year and I can't eat most of the candy either. The one thing I like about Easter though is memory of Peeps. Some of the best sites I have ever found on the internet are ones related to Peeps. There used to be one called "Peeps gone bad" which had Peeps hijacking a pink plastic Corvette leaving Barbie and Ken behind. That same website had a story about Godzilla versus a Block of Tofu that doesn't seem to be available anymore either. My favorite Peeps product this year (known by observation from looking at the shelves...I can't eat them because they aren't even vegetarian, much less vegan) and what I believe to be a brilliant marketing technique is the "Paint Your Own Peeps" which come in white and have food coloring kits inside to decorate them as you wish. I can just imagine craft circles decorating their marshmallow candies in intricate fashion, similar to one particularly graphic evening I had with roommates years ago while frosting snowman cookies.

So in spirit of the holiday I offer you this link. This website has been tested on Peeps.

good to go

You know those times when you are listening to a record and the music just grabs you and makes you a part of it? I am having one of those moments. I bought a copy of the The Hot Rock by the no longer Sleater-Kinney for a buck over the weekend and haven't taken it out of the player since. It makes the cats hyper, it makes me dance and bob my head up and down (the dog seems unaffected by it although she gets excited when I dance). I have this record on cassette and I haven't listened to it in years. Seven or eight years ago my friend Kattie and I took it on a trip we made driving across the country to my friends Eric and Heather's wedding in the Maine woods. When you drive across country you tend to bring a lot of music and think "Oh, this will be plenty" and you are wrong. The cds we took on that trip will forever be burned in my memory because we played them over and over and over. This was one of them. As was Elliott Smith (the Kill Rock Stars one with Southern Belle on it as well as XO), Mazzy Star, Citizen Fish, Radiohead, Grant Lee Buffalo, Lois (Bet the Sky) and others. There are many moments of that trip where I can't tell you what day it was, what state we were in or how fast we were going but I remember the moment of listening to each song on the disc. By the end of the trip we both knew the lyrics to nearly every song on every cd. We sang along more than we talked to each other (no matter how close you are as friends, driving day in and day out across the country with no money for a hotel room it gets very difficult not to be sick to death of the other person). We created routines. Elliott Smith was played often throughout the day and was mandatory at night when we were tired and one of us would sleep while the other drove because he was so intoxicating and distracted you from the long stretch of highway.

I get into routines with my music. I have a few cds stacked on top of my stereo and tend to just go back and forth between a few until I clean house, file them all away and then slowly develop a new stack. Picking up random discs I find at thrift stores is a good way of remembering old friends, road trips I've taken and memories that have taken a back seat to current events.

Mushrooms, the other white meat.

My veggie guy and I kissed and made up so I'm back in love with him again. He gave me extra veggies today to make up for the few that were lacking last time (and the majorly poor service that he has since apologized for profusely actually leaving me feeling a bit silly for being so uptight about it in the first place). I came home to a box on my porch tonight that was so heavy I almost couldn't lift it. Inside I found: mustard greens, 4 tomatoes, 4 onions, 3 small heads of lettuce, 3 beets, 2 heads of garlic, 3 small avocados, 1 bag of mixed salad greens, 2 lbs of carrots, basil, a head of celery, a bowl full of snow peas, 3 leeks, 3 zucchini, a cucumber, a bunch of mini asparagus, 5 little sweet potatoes, 20 small purple potatoes and a small bag of mushrooms. Whew!

I made it through all of the veggies last time except for a little of the lettuce. I roasted the leeks with other veggies (including a turnip which didn't do anything for me so the dog ate it) and I liked the result. I think I'll try doing the soup this time. The only veggies in my box that I don't regularly consume are the beets (like em just never buy em), mustard greens (will go in with the salad greens) and basil. I already composted the basil because I don't do pesto and didn't want to bother with it. Now it just comes down to eating things which have the shortest shelf life first so nothing goes to waste.

And what did I have for dinner you ask? As silly as it seems, I had a few stalks of celery and a bowl of cereal. I'm doing this dinner for breakfast and breakfast for dinner thing (the theory being that your heaviest meals are in the first part of the day) and by the time I finished preparing all of the veggies for storage (clean and drain celery for example and store in fridge in an open plastic bag) it was a little late for dinner anyhow (I try to be done eating by 6:30 p.m.).

If I am going to continue this box of veggies delivered to my door for $30 bucks thing (and I fully intend on doing so) I am going to have to do something about this damned rose bush that stands between me and my composter however. Yesterday I was trying to sneak by and the bush grabbed hold of my hair. I was convinced I was going to have yell for my neighbors to come release me but managed to yank myself free.

At Norma's Request.

Went to as-is (discount Goodwill store...last stop for goods before the landfill) yesterday. It was the first time I had been there in about 6 weeks (which is forever for me) as I have been more interested in organizing what I have already purchased than buying more. I had a mission yesterday though as I was looking for a doll sized bottle of water (yes, they do exist and suffice it to say I'm teasing one of my coworkers about the amount of water he says he drinks) so I used that as an excuse to go dig through bins of random items.

I spent $8.58 and came away with this: several rubber stamps (since I've redone my craft room I have already begun using my stamps way more than before, plus they sell well on eBay and Etsy), a few pages from a German music book for collage (I'll save some for you Norma), a toy waffle (to sell on eBay), a glittering glass wand thing (I collect these), a good handful or two of French word magnets, which I will add to my huge Tupperware container filled with other word magnets, an old picture of a group of ladies from the 40s or 50s with the best cat eye glasses I've ever seen, an older photo of a woman in her wedding dress, a lovely crocheted doily, several little ornamental soaps, an accounting ledger book (for balancing my bank account online), a plastic child's school pencil box (I use these to separate out different fonts of my letter rubber stamps), a foam Christmas gift attachment that I'm going to use in a shrine for my cat "Jingles," a brand new cassette tape (yes, I still make mixed tapes), a felt calligraphy pen, mechanical pencil lead (for work), a vintage Christmas ornament, a Lego Duplo race car driver (to sell on eBay), a brand new denim bag, Barbie stickers (I have a lot of Barbie stickers. Some I sell, some I use to decorate boxes of Barbie items I sell on eBay and some I keep to deface although I haven't gotten around to that yet), a never been used Seal-A-Meal and two sets of bags to share with a friend as I already have one (these are the best for crafts. My favorite is to fill with sequins and a note and send through the mail like a postcard), a brand new little book with an ink pad and pen and instructions on how to create characters out of thumbprints (of which I will undoubtedly send to a friend with a child who might appreciate receiving such an item randomly in the mail), a Flaming Lips CD, a Sleater-Kinney (RIP) CD, the cover of a vintage pattern (pattern ladies are one of my favorite craft supplies), most of a set of travel Scrabble tiles (smaller, thicker pieces of wood than the norm), random Barbie and Ken doll shoes and a GI Joe or Ken knockoff head that had been decapitated from the doll (I've been collecting boy doll heads for awhile to use in a project but I refuse to actually decapitate them myself--unless only part of their neck is connected--so I buy them as I can. I can't wait to jar those puppies up on the shelf in my craft room, ha ha), a few playing cards (for making ATCs) and a couple other little random supplies for crafts. A pretty good shopping day really. No water bottle though. So I searched through my mom's bag of Barbie food (her and I should be contestants on Let's Make a Deal where Monty Hall used to ask people if they had "blah blah blah" in their purse and if they did they won a prize, although instead of a purse it would have to be my basement and my mom's spare bedroom) and found a perfect one which tomorrow will be sewed to the hand of a certain teddy bear in a certain co-worker's cubicle while the said co-worker is at lunch.

Also ran into an old sort-of beau, (Hi Brian, if you are reading this) who I had no idea shopped at as-is. He looked really good which of course sucked because I looked really bad (had gotten up early to take the dog to the vet--infected eye from a cat scratch--and go to the laundrymat to wash my comforter). Always happens that way. Always.

It's that time of year again.

Spring has sprung which means it is now time to mow the lawn, find treasures hidden beneath the long grass like dog toys in the shape of donuts, forgotten craft projects of the previous year and wake up in the morning with hay fever and a sore back.

You are as funny as you think you are.

I went to a local improv show last night, I think for the fifth time in the last six months. Perhaps I am seeking inspiration? I turn 40 in roughly 100 days or so and as many of you know I have been declaring for several years now that by the time I turn 40 I will have attempted stand up comedy. Mind you I have no desire to do this as a regular gig, I by no means expect to necessarily be good at it and frankly am not altogether sure why I started saying that I would do it but I think I just might go through with it. I believe that I have purposely told a lot of people about it so I'll feel more uncomfortable not doing it then I will find fear in doing it. I am fine with disappointing myself (I do that all the time) but I'm not overly fond of disappointing others and in fact pride myself on being reliable and trustworthy. So as the day draws nearer (I've said I would do it by the time I am 40 not necessarily when I turn 40 and of course procrastinator that I am I will no doubt hold out until the very last minute) I am starting to feel that I am walking on a beam that borders both panic and excitement.

The act of performing isn't necessarily my biggest fear. I have done a fair amount of public speaking by talking to the press as an activist and I have been interviewed on the radio more times than I can count. I did two local cable TV shows (one was literally just 20 minutes of a close up of my face talking about the fur industry--the next day after viewing that show I went out and got bangs as my forehead seemed way too pronounced) and the second was on a show where I was sitting in between a guy dressed as a butcher and another dressed as a pig. I also took two improv classes where our final project was to perform with the comedy troupe, on stage in front of a crowd. I have done numerous presentations in front of people for work as well, so standing up in front of people may not necessarily be my favorite thing in the world but it certainly isn't the drama for me that it is for most people.

I suspect the biggest motivator and fear producing element for me about trying stand up is the writing (public speaking about an ethical issue is a much easier task than expecting people to listen to you just because you think you are funny). I love telling stories (a blog for someone like me is candy), I love pointing out the absurdities of life and I like making people laugh. So since I don't have my own radio show I guess I am forced to try my hand at comedy. Time and time again I think of things that would make great comedic material and think "I should write this down!" But it isn't always convenient to whip out a pen and pencil and start writing something down while you are in the middle of a pap smear with your gynecologist. So then I got a little portable tape recorder from my mom (she used it to tape and receive messages from my brother when he was a Marine in the "first" gulf war) thinking I would carry it around with me to record my brilliant revelations as they occurred. Problem is you have a tendency to get stared at when you are in your cubicle at work whispering into a handheld recording device and on the bus there is too much risk that the person sitting next to you will be so inspired by your humor that they might steal your jokes and perform stand up themselves. So I try to just remember funny things and then write them down when I can. This has led to me losing a bunch of my material, both because by the time I can write them down, for the life of me I can't remember what I thought was so funny and secondly because little Post-It notes have a tendency to stick themselves to things they shouldn't.

My point in bringing this all up is to give you fair notice that I am indeed giving serious thought of going through with my intention. I don't necessarily know where or when or in what format (Maybe I'll just film myself and post it on You Tube? Maybe I'll rent out a theater for my five minutes of fame? Maybe I'll make you all pledge money to a particular charity like a telethon and perform one minute of comedy for every $100 raised? Maybe I'll sneak off on a Wednesday night alone and take advantage of a 3 minute open mike spot at a biker bar on 82nd?). Who knows where it'll happen, or in fact if it'll happen but consider yourself warned that I am looking for material so if I am out with you and I suddenly whip out a pad of paper and start scribbling notes or if I duck under the table and start talking into a recorder you can be assured that it is just research, I haven't lost my mind. Or maybe I have.