Grumble:
It never fails. I do my best to set up my week so I can take Friday completely off, and something goes wrong. Jeremy learned the hard way that all crises in my industry happen on Fridays. Well, today they happened on Thursday afternoon, actually, but the result is still that I have to spend Friday dealing with it. Argh!

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Grumble:
I’m still sick. I thought it was sinus, but it’s all in my lungs, which HURT. As does my throat. The good part of this is that, even though I’ve been living on orange juice and milkshakes all week, I’ve lost two more pounds.

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Blush:
I’ve spent much of the last week lying in bed with my laptop and the dogs, watching all 19 hours of V: The Series. You may all commence mockery, but not til AFTER this bit: I’ve been reliving my teenaged crush on Robert “Willie” Englund (The first miniseries was made BEFORE he played Freddy Krueger the first time, btw.). Those of you who’ve met my husband will smile knowingly when I mention that I have a thing for geeky, blue-eyed, blond men. (And yes, I’ve totally added the complete Nightmare on Elm Street movie collection to my wishlist.)

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Hmmm:
If you have Napster and like intersting blues fusion bands, check out a group called Leftover Salmon

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Hmmm:

Tomorrow is Bubbie’s funeral. Flaunting their utter disregard for the three-day law, they moved it to Friday, so that my parents could get there, without having to stress over the reliability of “Aero Maybe.” I FedEx’d their anniversary card and some papers to my stepbrother, for them. Yeah, that’s how good a daughter I am. Thanks, by the way, to all the people who offered condolences. It’s appreciated. Sorry I’ve been so silent since then.

I’ve been in major cd-acquisition mode this last week, purchasing three new cd’s in addition to a bunch of new downloaded tunes. The first was the soundtrack to the movie Mona Lisa Smile because the covers of the old songs were fun.

The second, purchased at the same time, is the lastest from Tori Amos, the Beekeeper. I was never a huge fan of Amos’s work, but lately her music has fit my moods more often than not.

Finally, I picked up the cd Careless Love, by Madeleine Peyroux, which is a delightfully retro bluesy collection of covers and original work. Typical of much of my music collection, this one is from Starbucks, where – I swear – I only go for the coffee.

No, really.

I woke this morning with a stuffy head, ear ache, and a sense of something being ‘off’ though I couldn’t pinpoint what. We skipped Easter services at church, and I slept til late in the afternoon, then woke, tidied the kitchen, and watched a few episodes of Stargate SG-1 (season one) because I wanted to watch something familiar and comfortable.

And then the phone rang.

There are times when a ringing phone is completely innocent, and then there are times when you know, even before you pick it up, that it will not be a happy fun call.

Today’s call from my mother was to let me know that Bubbie – my grandmother – technically my step-grandmother – had died. She was ninety-five, and on a pacemaker, so it wasn’t a surprise, and yet…it’s ALWAYS a surprise.

She was Jewish, and often lectured my stepfather for not practicing his religion. I remember once, shortly after my mother and stepfather got married, she and my grandmother had a conversation about the differences between Catholocism and Judaeism.

She loved music, and at the age of seventy-five bought herself a piano, and took five semesters of piano at the local city college. We joked that if there was a doctorate in group piano, she’d have one.

She was the quintessential Jewish grandmother – if you offered her tea or a cookie, she’d sort of sigh and shrug and say, “If you make, I eat.”

When she was 90, she took my mother and me aside and said, “Now…now I’m old.” As if, before then, she was ageless.

In her honor, and out of curiosity, I looked up an English translation of the Kaddish, and noticed that this prayer of mourning never mentions death, but celebrates love of God, instead.

In her memory, we’ll be having trees planted in Israel, because she always wanted to travel there, and never had the opportunity.

Her name was Miriam.
May she rest in peace.

We went to the Great Vigil at St. Andrew’s tonight, and my breath caught when I saw the altar covered in spring flowers – lilies of course, but also glads and carnations and roses, and I think an iris or two. I hadn’t realized just HOW stark the altar was, during lent, until I saw it restored tonight.

Happiness tonight was both personal – hearing Fuzzy singing beside me during the service – and universal – a very young baby (who was baptized during the service) added a personal affirmation in the form of a screech at the end of every song. I love that this congregation includes the very old, and the very young, and all in between. It truly is a community.

Happiness is warm wax oozing onto your skin, and being removed by a gentle technician, and the snotty eyebrows that result.

It is also having OPI red toenails and pale passion pink fingernails.

It is walking in the rain to the bookstore, and finding a cd by an artist you never thought you’d like, and then having your husband sneak up behind you, and tell you your toes are cute.

It’s warm lasagna on a cold rainy day, and an afternoon browsing dvd stores, and not finding what you wanted, but not caring, because the act of browsing was enough fun.

I love rainy Saturdays.

We spent our anniversay indulging our not-so-inner geekness – lunch at Benihana in downtown Dallas, then a few hours at the art museum, gazing upon the art from the Quian dynasty (“Imperial Treasures of the Forbidden City”) – I especially loved all the jadework, and of course Fuzzy loved the swords, daggers, and bows.

We visited the European art wing of the main museum as well, so I could visit my favorites, the Impressionists, but their collection isn’t very vast, and I was feeling overheated and parched.

We came home, I changed, and we went back out again, to Barnes and Noble, where I bought several greeting cards, a few books (which involved a long distance plea for help to Jeremy, when I spaced on an author’s name), and the dvd’s of V, and V: The Series. (We still need V: The Final Battle).

It doesn’t get much geekier than spending the evening eating smothered enchiladas and watching 1980’s sci-fi, then blogging about it the next day.

Tonight, we’re going to make a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Perpetual Caffeination (aka Starbucks), and then head to St. Andrews for Good Friday services. Tomorrow I have a salon appointment at nine AM (brow design, manicure, pedicure), and in the evening is the Easter Vigil, and then Sunday they’re doing a late-morning service with the flowering of the cross.

I think I’ve had more church this week than in almost my whole life up to now, but when you’re going because you WANT to and not because some old lady is exhorting you, it’s very different.

And singing the Alleluia is always fun.

On March 24th, 1995, Fuzzy and I were married in a civil ceremony in the courthouse at Brookings, SD. We wanted to avoid familial arguements over religion and money, so we eloped on a Friday in the middle of Lent, though, at the time, neither of us practiced any religion that observed Lent.

Our friends did, though, and the attempt at finding enough meatless dishes at a midwestern Chinese restaurant proved so fruitless that one of them said, “You know, let’s just all pick a different day, and go meatless then.” I have no idea if they honored that or not, but thought it was good that one of them had a solution.

Ten years later, we’ve bought three houses, sold two, been through a miscarriage, an epileptic dog (he’s stable these days), months where we had to choose between groceries and bills, and months where we were doing just fine, thanks (many more of the latter than the former), and it’s all been this incredible experience of learning to love and trust each other, of making each other mad, sometimes, and happy others (again, more of the latter than the former), and mostly just occupying the same space, a lot of the time, without having to talk.

We still have our contentious moments – we always have a pre-trip fight for example – although over the last ten years instead of letting it stress us out, we’ve learned to identify it. “This is our pre-trip fight,” we say, and we finish it, and move on. And then there is the never-ending issue of my addiction to change – I like to move furniture around every few months, and Fuzzy finds this distressing. I’ve gone through more hair colors and lengths in the last ten years than most others have gone through underwear. And unlike my beloved husband, I have grown beyond a fourth-grade palate.

It’s fitting, somehow, that even though it’s eleven in the morning, I am blogging this from bed. Fuzzy is snoring gently beside me, in his typical non-work-day laziness, and the dogs are curled at our feet. Our family, intimate as it is, begins its next decade together, unified.

I’m not sure what the next ten years will bring. We’d really like a child before I’m too much older (I turn 35 this summer), but if that doesn’t happen, that’s okay. We are enough.

And really, that’s my version of bliss. Not necessarily to be rich, or famous, or have a perfect over-achieving child, but to have enough – a house we love, dogs we love, each other to love, enough money to do mostly what we want, though some things require more planning than others, enough time to explore our own interests as well as joint ones…just…enough.

Fuzzy: Happy Tenth Anniversary. I love you.

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Effective today, there’s a new feature in the sidebar. It’s called Time Machine, and it offers and excerpt from and a link to, posts from a year ago on this day.

I have no catchy title tonight, and so I’m resorting to using the day of the week. It works, I suppose.

I’ve gone to the gym every morning this week, and plan to go tomorrow. This is difficult for me, but the more I go, the more I want to go, and going every day they’re open from now to April 1st is sort of a personal ritual. I wonder if I can make it a permanent thing.
(It should be noted that they’re closed Friday-Monday, this week.)

We went to the Tenebrae services at church tonight. It was stark and beautiful, intense and moving – entering in silence, chanting the psalms, engaging in silent meditation and prayer, leaving in silence and darkness. I’ll be writing about it in more detail in my other blog, one that I’m not advertising, and NOT setting up with an RSS feed to LiveJournal. If you really want to follow some of the personal changes I’m going through, the ones that don’t really fit my chatty day-to-day blogging, please comment here (or via the LJ interface) or send an email to Ms DOT Snarky AT gmail DOT com (yes, there are two dots in there), or to my regular email, if you know it, and I’ll provide the address.

Thursday is our (mine and Fuzzy’s) 10th anniversary. Ten years seems like nothing some days, and forever on others. More on that tomorrow.

I say… And you think… ?”

1. Stink:: dog breath
2. Renewal:: urban
3. I remember…:: Mama
4. Loneliness:: is not the same as solitude
5. Ooooh:: Aaaaaaah
6. For real:: blue eyeshadow should be illegal
7. Titanium:: strong
8. Get down:: with your bad self
9. Rupture:: ozone layer
10. Dramatic:: interpretation

Like this meme? Play along here.

I spent about half an hour reclining on a comfy chair in my back yard, watching the grackles and the jays, earlier this afternoon.

It’s a sunny day, mostly, but then the clouds cover the sun and I’m reminded that it’s really only 60 or so out there. Sweater weather. It’s very windy, though, so the sunny bits feel perfect, but the cloudy times feel colder than they really are.

But back to the birds.

Grackles are surprisingly pretty. While, at first glance, they are jet black, like their cousins, the blackbirds and crows, when the sun hits them at just the right angle you can see iridescent blue, or striations of grey. This is natural coloration. And it’s quite stunning, but then, I can find beauty even in common pigeons.

While we had birds in California, they were rarely identifiable, except for the ubiquitous pigeons, and the odd stray gull. Here, though, I feel like a microcosm of the Audobon books, because, as well as the grackles, we seem to have a robin or two feeding on the front lawn, and a few blue jays who try to usurp the grackle’s territory.

I love that the back of my house is all glass. It gives me the bird equivalent of the sea otter tank at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Here in my office, I’m at tree-top level, and when I look out I can see them pausing on the uppermost branches, or climbing higher and higher to clear the trees and check out someone else’s yard. But from the living room, or from the breakfast nook, I watch them at ground level, playing follow-the-leader through the various tree trunks and low branches, taking off to flee from Cleo’s pathetic attempts to catch them (I wonder what she’d do if ever she succedded in this), sifting through the lava rocks and fallen leaves for bits of sunflower seed bread I left them (I’m shameless, I know, but I feel it’s an apology to them for having to deal with the dog), and, witnessed today, perching on the cement edge of the pool deck, and dipping up water.

I’ve told Fuzzy we need a bird bath, because I don’t want bird mites in my pool, and I really don’t want the birds drinking chlorinated water.

His response was a typically midwestern “We’ll see.”

And we will, because outside my window, it’s all bird, all the time.
Nature’s so very entertaining.