Off to Florida

Not that I've been blogging enough lately for anyone to notice I'm out of town, but we're off to Florida for a few days to visit Brett's nephews. We are laden with aren't-we-the-coolest-aunt-and-uncle presents, of course, and are also packing a schizophrenic wardrobe for the "60 during the day, 30 at night" climate that is central Florida right now.

I've been meaning to post more, particularly about Thanksgiving, but I've been sick as a dog for upwards of two weeks with some kind of chest ick. So I'm also traveling with cough syrup that makes me woozy and an inhaler that's supposed to soothe my bronchial tubes but actually makes me as jumpy and jittery as your average crystal meth user. Fun fun fun. All I need now is for an extremely large person to get crammed into the seat next to me on the plane and then have the person seated in front of me fully recline their seat into my lap.

Nothing like airplane travel when you're sick.

Approaching cookies

Ugly cookie party day is approaching again. I think but am not sure that this may be the sixth annual cookie party. Could it be? (For those of you who aren't up on this party, you can see last year's blog entry here.)

So, since the going notion is that we'll be having this year's party early rather than late in the month of December, I realized today that I need to get cracking on the cookie making. Only three weeks left, and I'll be out of town for one of those!

I made four batches of dough today in my brand new KitchenAid stand mixer (god, I love that thing! SO much easier than any previous cookie-making procedures) and cut out and baked about half of what we'll need for the party, using the recipe that this month's Cooks Illustrated touted as the best for cutout cookies. It's an odd recipe with no eggs at all and only butter and cream cheese for moisture, but I have to admit that the cookies held their shape beautifully with no spreading or warping at all.

Except for the last batch, which I forgot was in the stove and left in there for an hour while I went across the street to talk to Mom and Dad. Oops. Those turned black.

Catch up

I'm not blogging a lot these days. Mostly because Brett continues to have the only reliable internet connectivity in our house, and with him noveling for Nanowrimo for hours each night, I can't exactly get on his computer very often. That and I'm usually asleep, or half so, when I would normally be posting. So here's a quick catch up.

Went bowling this weekend, which I haven't done except on occasion with my nephews at a kiddie-bowl place, since about 1989, when I took bowling for a phys ed credit in college. Me and phys ed were never friends. I took the triumvirate of easy classes for my three required credits - bowling, badmitton, and golf. Passed all three.

Bowling this weekend was a whim. Two other couples we know went with us and we bowled a couple of games. It was fun, but while we were there I discovered that I am officially becoming an old fart. Why does the music have to be so loud, I kept asking, no shouting, to my companions. It was louder than many rock concerts I've been to. It was so loud I wished I had earplugs. Why the smoke machine? Could someone please just turn the volume down a little bit?

When we stumbled out of there two hours later, we all seemed defeated, like we'd suddenly come face to face with our old fogey-ness. Ah well.

I'm not as old as my cat, though. Took Phoenix to the vet on Saturday for a checkup and they gave me a worksheet where you cross-check your pet's weight and age and get their human age equivalent and find out whether they're just senior or outright geriatric. Phoenix came out to be 68 in human years, the last box of the senior classification. Next year he becomes geriatric.

Aside from that - work is hard but going well, Brett is 35,000 words into his book, I'm struggling to get over a chest cold that seems to have settled in for a long winter's stay in my thoracic cavity, Mom and Dad are doing fine across the street and Dad is happily noting that the temperatures in their former state have dropped below Seattle's temperatures, making the move all the more worthwhile. I'm glad to hear it. He's got me checking the weather map of the nation now too. It's such a Dad thing to do.

Borrowed meme

Borrowing a meme from Pagooey:

This one's making the rounds, where you enter the search string "[your
first name] needs" in Google and check out the first ten results. Mine as of
last week, lying about in a stray e-mail til now:

Mine came out this way:

1. Megan needs a lot of encouragement on the home front.
2. Ideally, Megan needs a two parent family.
3. Megan needs a theme song. (Yes, I do.)
4. The only thing Megan needs help with at this point is in the area of responsiveness.
5. Megan needs help.
6. A person like Megan needs an organ transplant.
7. Megan needs coffee this early. (Amen.)
8. Megan knows she needs to infiltrate Theo's home. (hrm. If only I knew a Theo.)
9. Megan needs specialist surgery.
10. Megan needs a fresh start.

Maddie, rain or shine

Maddie, having a long fur coat, is the only one of the cats not too bothered by the winter rain. It even gives her a sort of spiky-haired winter hairdo, as you can see here.

Rocker Grrls

Went to see Liz Phair last night, pictured at right in one of her earlier incarnations, at Nuemos in Capital Hill. I'm not all that much of a live music junkie - I've been to a fair number of shows over the years (Lou Reed, Elvis Costello, TMBG, Liz Phair, Cheryl Crow, Bob Dylan, The Ramones, Dave Alvin, etc.), but this was a particularly good show. As we classified it on the way home, she distinguishes herself by specializing in visceral, angry-girl rock without crossing the line into angry, whiny, sentimental girl rock. Alanis Morrisette, she is not. Liz could eat Alanis for breakfast.

The crowd was interesting - we were joking about how we would definitely not see anyone we knew at this show, when sure enough, who should walk by a half hour before it starts but a woman I've worked with for the whole nine years I've been at Microsoft. She looked as surprised to see us as we did her - funny how you always think of everyone else as such a grownup that they couldn't be at something like this, but somehow you yourself are exempt. Except that everyone else sees it the same way. None of us feel like the middle aged people we've become. Why shouldn't we be at a loud club? Of course, when I was twentysomething I could deal with the long hours of dancing and bodyslamming my way around the main floor for hours and hours and hours, and now I'm more prone to find a comfy vantage point in the balcony and sit out the opening act to save my feet for the real show, but still. I feel young.

Traffic

I live about 12 miles from where I work. On a low-traffic day, the drive to or from work takes exactly 21 minutes. More often, it takes 30-40 minutes. And sometimes, usually rarely, it takes an hour. Usually this happens just a few times a year, for me. Until this week.

This week, I have had two separate evenings in which it took me more than 90 minutes to make the 12 mile drive home.

Halloween night, we were stuck in traffic for over an hour at work before we even made it to the highway, a distance of perhaps three miles. We got home at just about the 95-minute mark. The cause? Everyone leaving early to get home for trick-or-treat, plus a heavy rain messing up everyone's ability to drive.

Tonight, there was a blackout this side of the bridge which knocked out all the traffic lights and screwed up all the surface streets. I left my office at 5:18, picked Brett up at his building at 5:30, and at 6:40, AN HOUR AND TWENTY MINUTES AFTER LEAVING THE OFFICE, we had made it a distance of exactly twenty blocks. We finally gave up, turned around, drove back to the office and went to a movie to kill some time and let the roads clear up. Mmm -- movie popcorn and hotdogs for dinner. And to top it all off, the movie really stank.

Bleah.

One more night like this in the next few days and I may just snap and quit my job.

Halloween, come and gone

I love Halloween. I suppose it's because it's one of the few times of year when it's perfectly acceptable to relive your childhood. I go all out - carving pumpkins, putting spooky blinky-light eyeballs around the yard, putting fresh batteries in the light-up skull that graces the front steps, and of course buying ten tons of candy, which I then proceed to eat as much of as we give away.

Mom and Dad couldn't believe the fuss everyone made around here. "We've never seen anything like this!" they said, noting how most of the other houses on the block made my paltry decorations look like amateur night. One of our neighbors blasts spooky music out of her "haunted garage" every year. Leslie, our resident free spirit, brought around her two labradors in full costume at the end of the night for their yearly visit. (They got dog biscuits, not candy.) Martin, down the street, had enough orange lights up to guide the space shuttle in for landing.

Us Seattleites, we like our holidays. Wait until they see what everyone does for Christmas!

This year's turnout was a little disappointing - the pouring rain must have kept some of the usual hordes away. As a result, having bought enough to feed last year's deluge of kids, we ended up with about three times the candy we needed. I gave a full bowl away to a couple of boys who came by near the end of the night, and another full bowl to some teenage girls. And we still have two bags left!

Best costume of the night: a girl dressed as a bottle of Scope mouthwash. On her back was a list of ingredients, starting with "Cheese." That one, I can't explain.