January 2006

microduck death dream

i had a horrible dream a while back. i was in the backyard of my parents’ house in plano, before the pool was built. i found a baby food jar in the grass in the backyard — it was doc’s. inside it he kept some water and three tiny, 1/4″ long, fuzzy yellow baby ducks, that were his pets. they were tiny but would grow larger over time. i found the jar and it had been in the grass in the backyard, in the sun, for several days. when i found them and picked up the jar, the ducks turned immediately into black goo and disintegrated in the water. i was mortified that he’d forgotten about them. if i was going to interpret this dream, i would say that i was working through my own fear of forgetting to care for something that’s been put in my charge, and having it die. who knows why, in my dream, i projected it onto doc.

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mom’s 60th birthday party

apparently i am the master of surprises. i have pulled off my second successful surprise party in the past year and a half. i did not know i had this talent in me. the first one was doc’s birthday party in las vegas in 2004. and last saturday we threw my mom a surprise 60th birthday party. to say she was surprised is an understatement. we had been planning this since last october. 30-plus people knew about it, and somehow nobody spilled the beans! i have no idea how that happened, but i’m glad it did! in order to get her to come up to dallas that weekend, doc had a clever idea that i tell her that i had to do a cooking demo on sunday morning, and since arushi isn’t here, i wanted her to come up and help me with it. the sticky part was, i needed her to come up on saturday, not on friday night like she normally would do if she was coming for the weekend. so we told her that doc had a sleep study thing on friday night, and that we had doctor appointments all day saturday, and wouldn’t be home until about 6 p.m., so could she please come up saturday afternoon instead. she thought that was a great idea, and said that dad might come too, so he could see his parents, but she wasn’t sure if he’d come with her or not. little did she know, he was totally in on the plan too. i decided to make it a dinner party, and cooked for 25. note to self: not so much pasta next time. 3 pounds is plenty for 25 people. i furiously shopped on thursday night (sam’s club, which kathryn was gracious enough to take me to) […]

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giving the finger to sbc dsl

part of the reason that i haven’t been writing much lately has to do with the fact that we don’t have any DSL service at home. my feelings towards sbc’s reliability, customer service, and pattern recognition with trouble reports (or lack thereof) is a different rant entirely. let’s just say that while we hate the monopoly that comcast has on the cable industry, we called them up and asked them to send us a cable modem kit. there was an sbc repair dude ripping up the sidewalk this morning as we were leaving for work so that might mean that we have internet when we get home tonight. but i’m not counting on it. the sad thing is, i haven’t known what to do with myself in the evenings while our dsl has been out. i can only watch so much tv before my eyes glaze over. i did mostly complete that damn painting that i’ve been working on since, oh, october. and i got the preliminary charcoal sketch done for another one. i guess that is something. i’ve realized that reading is a habit i’ve gotten out of, largely, and that makes me sad. when i’ve gotten past the beginning of a good book then it’s easy for me to really get into it and tear through it until i’m done. but if i haven’t read in a while, it’s hard to motivate myself to sit down and begin.

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bacon weevils

so the conversation went something like this: me: i love food.doc: me too. it needs to be tasty, and in my belly.me: yeah!doc: and i say a little thank you to all the tasty animals before i eat them. “thank you, mr. pork chop, for the delicious meal you are about to become.”me: “thank you, bacon!” [thinking about how we don’t call our meat by the names of the animal that it comes from, usually] “mom, where do bacons come from? do bacons live on the farm?”doc: haha! no, bacon comes from big bacon fields. they’re like big cornstalks, except instead of a cob it has two strips of bacon reaching up towards the big blue sky.me: it grows crispy??doc: well, when it starts out they’re kind of floppy and sagging towards the ground, but as the season progresses towards harvest, they crisp up and start to stand up straight. and then it’s time for the bacon harvest.me: <drool> yes, but there is one thing that the farmers must take precautions about: bacon weevils! they have to send in crop dusters.doc: they spray the fields with hickory smoke to prevent the bacon weevils. they’re not so much of a problem these days, but people have gotten used to the taste so they bacon-crop-dust now as much for the delicious hickory flavor as for the bacon weevils.katy: [trying to think of something clever but failing]doc: and all the juices and grease run down into the stalk. you can break off 6 inches of bacon stalk and walk around sucking on it.katy: like a slim jim!

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medicinal trumpet flowers

last night i dreamed about going to the doctor with my mom, who seemed much smaller than she actually is… much more frail and older. the doctor building was on the 2nd floor of a nice office building with a parking lot out front, and nice landscaping. she was cold sitting in the waiting room so i told her i would go out to the car and get her jacket. i took a wrong turn somehow and ended up having walked an entire block down the street to the bottom of a hill. two scruffy men in white lab coats were standing at the corner with a wheelbarrow, collecting orange trumpet-shaped flowers from a lush vine that was growing on a telephone pole. they told me that they were from the doctor’s office, and that the flowers from this vine had wonderful medicinal properties, and that this telephone pole on the corner was the only place in the world that the vine grew, so they had to walk down the hill and harvest more every couple of days. i was fascinated with the guys collecting the flowers but then remembered that i was taking a very long time to get my mom’s jacket, so i had to hurry back and get it for her. just now i looked up “medicinal trumpet flowers” on google, and didn’t come up with much of anything. lots of plant websites, nothing that looked terribly interesting. so i entered the same words into googlism.com, and something on that site is broken and giving me an error. so much for interesting results.

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