Bedbugs Bite

The great plague of the 21st century has hit Val's Galorious Galaxy, and let me tell you: it is not Galorious.

On the plus side, in one week, I have become my own foremost expert on bedbugs and have never been more intimately familiar with the microscopic subculture of the biome that is my bedroom. But on the minus side, why couldn't I have become this Destroyer of Bedbugs a few months ago, before they invaded my little biome?

Early in August, my housemate casually warned me, "I think I might have bedbugs." Oh, I was a little grossed out, and I vacuumed a little more thoroughly the next time I cleaned, but after he washed all his bedding and told me he wasn't getting bitten any more, I thought no more of it. Biggest mistake of my life.

About two weeks ago, he casually mentioned that he, in fact, was still getting bit.

"Do your bites look anything like this?" I asked him, revealing a red spot the size of an apple and another one the size of an apricot, which had bloomed on my arm, followed by a smattering of smaller itchy dots up and down the arm and on select other parts of my body over the past week or so, and which I had assumed was poison ivy until my boyfriend informed me that it looked like scabies, and I had suddenly remembered that the whole reaction had started as two itchy bumps. Well, no, my housemate's bites hadn't broken out like mine had, but I always have had a knack for going into immune overdrive, and so I decided that I actually had bedbugs. Later I revised my theory to accommodate all possibilities by concluding that I had had 2 bedbug bites on my arm, which I scratched with fingers covered in poison ivy residue (I had pulled some up 1 day prior, wearing gloves of course, but poison ivy is insidious stuff).

But anyway, the point of this story is bedbugs. I cleaned a little more thoroughly after I began to suspect fauna, rather than flora, as the source of my rash, but bedbugs are just as insidious as poison ivy, and the bites didn't stop.

Early last week, I made an "indicator" out of corrugated cardboard glued to a white sheet of paper (which theoretically would provide a nice retreat for bedbugs with all its nooks and crannies, and which would show the presence of said bedbugs by all the fecal matter they would deposit on the nice white paper before scurrying into their cardboard home for the day), and stuck it under my mattress.

Well, three days passed, and when I went to check it, it was gone! Gone like my pair of Spenco insoles! Gone like my maroon arm warmers! What kind of unscrupulous creature was stealing all my stuff? I mean, usable things that both happened to be stored in the same place are one thing, but a piece of carboard glued to a piece of paper? It couldn't have been stolen! I got under the bed to look for it. I looked and looked, but it was not there. I moved all the boxes off the table under the bed (loft bed, remember). Not there. I pulled out both sets of plastic storage drawers, and then all the boxes piled on top of each other beside them. No indicator.

But while down on my hands and knees, trying to maneuver my flashlight into the crack between my bed and the wall, behind which lies the crack between my bookcase and the wall, I saw motion off to my right. Looking down, I saw its source. A tiny, almost indiscernible creature, scuttling along on a plastic lid that had fallen behind the bed. It was like nothing I'd ever seen before! It must be a bedbug! I found a plastic bag and shoved it in, lid and all.

My memory of what transpired next is a little hazy, because it seriously freaked me out! But following that I somehow found another live bedbug, which I affixed to a piece of paper using artwork fixative spray (living with cockroaches has taught me to have no mercy for certain kinds of pests) and two more dead ones, tethered to an equally dead ant by bits of spiderweb or hair.

I do recall that I finally got to make use of both the magnifying devices that have been sitting untouched in my desk drawer since time immemorial. My Fresnel lens (thank you, Sister Irene!) proved that the big bug was indeed an ant and not a bedbug, and my pocket telescope/microscope (thank you, uh, I don't even remember) revealed the dark center of the translucent insect that proved it had been feeding. Ewww.

I vacuumed like I had never vacuumed before, and when I pulled out the bookcase from the wall, I found my indicator underneath it, unmarred by insect fecal matter. Interesting that my bedbug indicator, by disappearing, accomplished what it would have failed to do by staying where it belonged.

That night, I had a great deal of trouble sleeping. The next night, I might have slept better but for waking up at the crack of dawn with two new holes in my butt. If there is a plus side to this, it is that the bedbugs enabled me to find my missing maroon arm warmers in another cleaning spree this afternoon. The insoles remain missing in action.

Contracting is for malaria

I'm noticing a pattern. I begin to hate my life and start searching for jobs. I become desperate! I will do anything for a new job! I put my resume up everywhere, apply left and right, and then when the offers start to come in, I get cold feet.

Many job offers never pass the DIRQ (Do I really qualify?) test. Flattering as it may be that you want to hire me as a Web developer, I am not a Web developer. I don't know Java from Bali. I don't know Python from Cobra. If you ask me about Oracle, I'll be just as cryptic as one. Oh, and no, I don't want to sell insurance. No matter how much my experience as a designer qualifies me for it.

So after deleting all the unwanted job offers from my inbox, I get on to replying to the recruiters who remain. Some of them are very up-front about the details of the position. Others are as informative as, "My client is in need of a Web designer. Please tell me a good time to call you, so we can discuss."

And so we discuss. Which is a big waste of everyone's time.

"This is for a position in Reston, Virginia."

Stop right there. I'm not driving an hour and a half to work every morning!

"This job is a three-month contract."

Whoa, whoa, whoa. What happens when I get dumped after those three months?

"But it has the potential to turn into a permanent hire."

Or it doesn't.

Sometimes I make it through an entire interview. One of those hair-raising interviews where you think you're just going to talk about how great you are, and you end up having to answer a pop quiz about semantic markup, the box model, and how to stop propagation in jQuery. I actually, surprisingly, made a good enough impression in that interview that the client was interested in hiring (er, contracting with) me.

And so the next day I got a call from the recruiter. "I told them you were available immediately, so if they choose you for the position, would you be able to start tomorrow?"

Um, no! You saw my resume. You saw I'm already working 2 jobs. I even discussed my current employment situation with you yesterday! I need to provide a minimum of 2 weeks' notice.

"Oh," says the recruiter, sounding surprised. "Well, they may be interested in hiring you anyway. I will let you know by the end of today."

He didn't.

And that was OK. I had totally changed my mind. I didn't want that 3-month contract for that job that would require me to work in a team! We all know I'm not a team player. Put me in a room with more than one other person in it for more than one hour, and my head might explode! Or at least I'll have an anxiety attack.

My problem is not that I'm too picky. It's just that I have too much to lose! I heart my nonprofit. I would give my soul to my nonprofit if only they could afford to pay me for it. But such is not the nature of nonprofits. So, much like an old spinster, I'm still looking for "the one:"

a) It is part-time enough that I can do it and work for my nonprofit at the same time.
OR
b) It is so awesome that it makes me actually want to abandon my beloved nonprofit, rather than making me heartsick at the thought.

Am I a sentimental old fool? Well, yes. But I just realized I have a perfectly practical reason not to leave the nonprofit for just any old job. And I made this discovery just in the nick of time. The next day, I found I had a voicemail from the recruiter, telling me the employer had actually accepted my terms. It figures. Only the jobs you don't want keep chasing you down like the hounds of hell.

So I called him back (on a Saturday, because I am also still a coward) and told him I couldn't accept. And I told him why: My nonprofit job just happens to pay 100% of my health insurance. So quitting it to take a temporary job with no benefits would be a pretty bad business decision--even if the temporary job pays a little better.

We'll see what unfolds next in this saga. Perhaps the employer will offer a permanent position and a higher pay rate. And then, I'll have to come up with some other reason why I don't want the job. Funny how I feel like I have to use all my wiles just to avoid getting hired!

You and Me, Baby

Ever since our collective second-grade teachers told us, "Don't say 'you and me' here; say 'you and I,'" well, there have been problems. Some of us got the message and use the subjective case ("I")  and the objective case ("me") where appropriate. Some of us overcompensated and now always choose "you and I," even when it is the object of a verb, causing us grammarians to cringe but appreciate the good intentions behind the error. Some of us didn't pay no attention, flunked out of high school, and continue to cause us grammarians acute agony by always using "you and me" regardless of whether it's the subject or object.

I could turn this post into a usage lesson, but I think it would be much more interesting to combine two of my favorite subjects and discuss how the "You and I" grammar phenomenon manifests itself in popular music!

It all began back in high school, when I was on my oldies kick and heard on a regular basis the Doors, singing their 1968 hit, "Touch me," complete with a "You and I" used as an object! After years of mental suffering every time I heard these miscased [neologism by Valerie!] lyrics, I started amassing a collection of their containing songs to post on my blog. Here's the song that started it all off:

I'm gonna love you [we won't talk about the use of "gonna" right at this moment"]
'Til the heavens stop the rain [we also won't talk about how it's usually not raining]
I'm gonna love you!
'Til the stars fall from the sky...
For you and I! (Doot doot dooo doo, doot doot doo doo...)

You might argue that poetic license allows one to stretch the rules a bit in order to get a good rhyme, but seriously, you're telling me nothing rhymes with stars, or sky, or me, that would allow the lyricist to rearrange the sentences a bit?

Apparently it's not just love songs that fall prey to the erroneous "You and I." Maroon 5's "Makes Me Wonder" and Groove Coverage's "7 Years and 50 Days" both suffer from it while telling their tales of tragic breakups. Oh yeah, and make-up songs, too. "Life is a highway" starts one verse by saying, "There was a distance between you and I," but implies it's not there any more.

These errors can be excused as a confusion resulting from the pronoun being separated from the preposition by "you," which never changes, but not so in "I Wonder as I Wander," which brazenly boasts the phrase, "like you and like I," and surely takes poetic license to all new heights in the process.

Sometimes all I know of a song is the part of it that butchers my language. When I heard Linkin Park's "The Catalyst," I found it wholly ignorable in every way, but my ears perked right up when I heard the lyric, "Far from the world of you and I." I then tuned out again, but noted it down as another case of terrible grammar.

So far all the songs I've listed have erred on the slightly forgivable side of overcompensation, but Lady Gaga, renegade that she is, of course takes the low road, singing, "You and me could write a bad romance."

There are a few songs that use "You and I" without using it wrong. Unfortunately, they are far between, and I don't notice them at all unless there's something else weird about them.

Take 21 Guns, by Green Day. At the end of a verse, this song blasts out with "Throw up your arms into the sky! You and I!" Great. This use of "You and I" gives me nothing to complain about—except that it's a sentence fragment! With no relevance to the rest of the song whatsoever. Read the lyrics. Tell me if you can figure out why a "You and I" was stuck in there, other than to rhyme with "sky."

And one more for the road. "You and I travel to the beat of a different drum," sings Linda Ronstadt, and I think, "Wow, someone finally got it right!" Until I listen to the rest of the song and realize that she got the rest of the sentence wrong! For years, I thought she was trying to say, "You and I are weirdos, but at least we're weirdos together!" But no, it turns out that she's trying to say that you and I are two very different people and we should go our separate ways. Hey Linda, why don't you try "You and I travel to the beats of different drums," if you want to indicate we're not traveling to the beat of the same drum. It won't even mess up your rhyme too much!

Sheesh. At least she's right when she claims, "I see no sense," and definitely right when she says, "Goodbye!"

Sad Valerie Delivers the News

I had a life changing experience last week. As you well know, I've been unhappy with my lot in life. I've been devoting a good portion of my already-precious time to revising my resume and applying to jobs.

On Tuesday the 13th, I actually received a reply. Not just any reply (such as the email which read something like, "We found you qualified for the position but not among the most highly qualified candidates"). No, this reply said, "Your resume looks great." Following this amazing email, I had a phone interview in which I learned that I was the top candidate for the job, which I daresay was the job of my dreams: 10+ hours per week, mostly from home with a weekly meeting in Georgetown (a neighborhood of DC a little under an hour from my house), doing website management. On Sunday, however, I learned there was another candidate with "much experience in publishing" and who "is local" so could come into the office more days a week. On Tuesday, I received my formal rejection.

Devastation followed. Every time I thought about it, I burst into tears. You never know how much you hate your circumstances until you think you've found a way out of them. I was so close to being free from my draining schedule! So close to escaping from the manual labor that's bringing my future of arthritis and varicose veins closer every day. So close to having the time to actually build my freelance business rather than being crushed by it!

And now, well, it's back to reality. Guess the experience wasn't all that life-changing. I'll be doing what I always do, just a little more sadly. Guess I'll console myself by buying a new pair of gel insoles.

Putting the "can" back in "incandescent"

I bet you've been worrying nonstop since I told you that Congress had effectively banned incandescent bulbs starting in 2012. I know I have.

I even went so far as to stockpile incandescent bulbs for later use. That is, I bought a 4-pack back in July, knowing that 4 light bulbs will probably last me 4+ years...as long as I don't keep knocking my bedside lamp onto the floor as I've already done twice this year.

Well, it turns out all my fears were unfounded, since at least one company is now manufacturing a dimmer-friendly bulb that complies with the new regulations!

Phew. Huge sigh of relief.

Next on the agenda: find a job that doesn't require me to get out of bed before sunrise.

Huge sigh of premonitory defeat.

The Eyes Don't Lie...They Just Tell Jokes

Sometimes, when I look at some text, I only see what I want to see. I'm sure Freud would find these ocular mondegreens a fascinating research opportunity, but I'll just use them for some good old Val's Galorious literary entertainment.

It all began when I moved to Maryland and first witnessed the state's special environmental preservation license plates.

I was transfixed by the pretty colors and the adorable bird. I was even more excited when I read the tagline: "Treasure the Cheesecake." Mmm.... Cheesecake. I could totally get down with that. Oh, it's the "Chesapeake?" Well, I guess that's worth treasuring, too. Enough that, despite their slightly less enticing beneficiary, I may still pay extra for these plates the next time I need new ones.

Ashley Bell. Who's she? I don't know, but at one point in my life, I read something about her in the news. I'm sure she'd be a lot cooler if she were actually Taco Bell, as I thought when I first glanced at her name.

It's football season again, and that means it's time for team names to appear in print all over the place. In Ohio, I see it's a pretty exciting time for "Browns Fans." But for the blissfully ignorant such as me, it's time to imagine all the hype is about brownies.

Judging from all my slips of the eyes so far, it's pretty clear that the one track my mind runs on is "food." But this next word association just might take away my appetite. The other day, my dad and stepmom attended some kind of Television broadcast. I'm not sure of all the details — this newfangled Television thing is too much for me to grasp — but while they were there, they saw the following sight:

What I saw was a little different, reading the slogan on the guy's shirt as "Toilet." Shows what I think of my hometown.

And lastly, an article to prove that federal prosecutors are really witches who turn people into amphibians. "Not guilty, but stuck with big gills" was the headline I read. Actually, the term was "big bills," and being prosecuted by the federal government can apparently do a lot worse than turn you into a frog. Don't read the article unless you want to get mad.

The Roads Not Taken

If I haven't been blogging a lot in any given time period, it's usually for one of two reasons: I'm depressed, or I'm going through an existential crisis. This dry spell, as you can probably infer from my last post, it's the latter. It's not only my career woes that have got me all befuddled, but also a crippling indecisiveness about housing. So, double mental whammy means double unproductivity! Sorry.

In order to give you something to read,  I'm going to write about something that is a little lighter than my current ruminations, but nonetheless in the same vein--thus entertaining you and saving me from having to dig myself out of my cozy swamp of stagnation.

The topic is: all the jobs that I never made into a career.

A Veterinarian
Despite spending most of my childhood believing quite firmly that I would be a veterinarian when I grew up, a few experiences near the beginning of my college career convinced me that veterinary medicine was high in funny smells, tedium, and sadness, and low in...well, pretty much anything that I enjoyed other than cute animals! And spending my high school years in a house overflowing with cute, fleabitten, hygienically challenged animals had kind of cured me of any desire to spend any more time with them.

A Teacher
When I was young, with my experience of the world basically limited to school and home, I chose a future career that I could understand--teaching. When asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, this was my answer before I really knew what I wanted. I think. It's hard to remember that far back! Ironically, this neglected career choice once again rose to the top of my list when Veterinarian dropped off of it. Even more ironically, after spending 3 and a half years of college working towards a degree in education, I changed my mind again and wanted nothing to do with it! Talk about existential crises!

A Guinea Pig Breeder
For a brief spell, shortly after my guinea pig April was successfully impregnated by my friend's guinea pig Alvin and birthed three adorable baby rodents, I harbored fantasies of engineering artful guinea-pig matings for a living. I would produce all varieties, in all sorts of colors! I would provide you the guinea pig of your dreams! This fantasy lasted long enough to be the subject of an illustration I made in fifth grade, and then I returned to more realistic plans.

An Artist
Always in planning my future, realism reigned supreme. Although I was extraordinarily fond of drawing and writing (and reasonably skilled at both), I never once wished to be a professional artist or novelist. Although even today, I longingly think of how cool it would be to be an actress, I have to admit that I'm too homely to succeed in that field even if I did have the training (of course I have the talent--it's just latent!).

An Illustrator
An illustrator is the "realistic" version of an artist, and therefore worthy of my consideration. Shortly after my teaching plans went down in flames, I seriously looked into going back to school for a career in scientific illustration. Unfortunately, educational programs in this field were few and far between, and the prerequisites for most of them required at least some college classes in art--of which I had none. I settled instead for going back to school for graphic design. Of all the career choices that passed me by, this is probably the only one I regret not pursuing. But the thought that I probably would have failed consoles me some.

A Linguist
After I took my first Spanish class, I became enamored of the language, and languages in general! I thought about majoring in Spanish in college. I thought about pursuing some language-related career, such as a linguist, or a translator. But I didn't think about it very hard.

Other
Over the years, I've toyed with the idea of other possible jobs—a technical writer in Wisconsin, an assistant to a lighthouse manufacturer in Ohio, a secretary, a college professor, a tutor, a restaurateur (of the ice-cream stand variety), a franchisee, a full-time eBay reseller, a get-rich-buying-just-the-right-stocks kind of investor, a crafter (maker of wreaths and other decorative sundries)—but out of all the options available, I still think I picked the right one.

I may only get to do my chosen work part-time, but that's better than no time. Despite what I said in my last post, I still wouldn't choose a full-time job at a grocery store if it presented itself. I am a writer, a designer, and a website manager! I am a Communications Specialist! And I am proud!

Douse me with a hurricane, cause I'm burning out.

I work 30 hours a week at a grocery store, 16-20 hours a week from home for a nonprofit, and anything from 0-10 hours a week doing freelance design. That adds up to at least 46, usually closer to 50, and occasionally 60 hours a week of work.

Sometimes I feel like a whiner, but sometimes I feel like I'm completely within my rights to be overwhelmed by my career path. Sure, some executives and lawyers and doctors put in these kinds of hours without complaint. But they're making scores of thousands of dollars every year, have sick time, personal time, and vacation time, and countless other perks that my jobs lack. My last tax return revealed my Adjusted Gross Income to be around 25,000$ (next to nothing here in the DC area), and every day that I don't do work (I try to give myself one full day off every two weeks), I am losing my opportunity to get paid.

I used to think I was fortunate that one of my part-time jobs was work-from-home. I used to be excited that I was a free lance, able to accept and decline contracts at will. Now, I look at anyone who has a full-time job — even one that requires commuting — with envy. My salaried coworkers at the grocery store start out at a paltry 30,000 a year, and are required to work a minimum of 45 hours a week, although they rarely escape with less than 50. And even though their souls are owned by a rapidly growing corporation, I am starting to envy them. Sure, they spend 12 hours a day working for The Man on a regular basis, but when they are finally done, they are free! Free like a bird released from a trap! Free to pursue hobbies or to lounge around watching TV as their personalities dictate. They don't have to clock out with sore feet and strained wrists and trudge home knowing that the rest of their evening will be occupied filling out a different timesheet. And their days off are not weighed down with guilt about the work that is piling up in their absence.

I think my work ethic has descended to an all-time low. When I was fresh out of college, my dream job was any kind of work that I enjoyed, especially if it was for a good cause! I knew I wouldn't mind if it took up all my time, because I would be making a difference! In fact, I wanted my job to be my life. Now, my dream job is one that is comfortable, close to home, and high paying enough that I don't have to have a second one.

I really do appreciate the jobs I have. Every one of them has its perks. The store is a 10-minute walk from my house and the work I do there is good exercise. I usually come home with some sort of free food. The nonprofit does make me proud to be working for a good cause—even in my jaded condition. I set  my own schedule. The work is full of variety, frequently providing me with opportunities to exercise my creativity, and even though I am only part time, it pays 100% of my health insurance. The freelancing is full of excitement. Every new client presents new challenge. Every design that I create is fresh, and every finished project is grounds for a fulfilling sense of accomplishment. Yet I am reaching the point where I would give all of these up for some stability and an easier life.

Each one of these jobs is a good thing, but all three of them together are too much of it. What would I give to have free time again? Would I take the risk of quitting one (or even 2) job(s) to devote more time to another? Would I abandon my beloved recycling nonprofit for the comfort of a full-time job? Would I give up designing the websites I love (knowing that I'm charging too little for them anyway) and all the satisfaction they bring me?

What is the price of a happy medium? And for that matter, what is the meaning of life?

Giant's XXL Chocolate Chip Cookie

If you are privileged enough to live within shopping distance of a Giant Food store, this post may be of some use to you. If you happen to live in Ohio, which most of my readers do, then you will probably get little out of it but the satisfaction of reading my gripping prose.

Giant, oddly enough, did not choose to call their bakery's giant cookies "giant cookies" (which would have given great pleasure to the part of me that loves multiple-entendres), instead selecting the descriptor "XXL."

Though I have shopped at Giant for many years, it is only recently (i.e., since I started blogging about them) that these massive baked goods caught my eye. A few days ago, I purchased one.

Unfortunately, it did not survive the trip home in one piece. In fact, it did not even survive the trip from the display case into the bag in one piece, but I tried to overlook its fragmented nature and review it objectively (even though part of the appeal of a giant cookie is that it is a single, giant, cookie!).

The XXL cookie certainly exceeded expectations regarding its size (I forgot to measure it before I ate it, but see below for a comparison with my face).

Unfortunately, in quality, it was just mediocre. Have you ever made Nestle Tollhouse cookies from their refrigerated dough? The dough itself is disturbingly delicious (especially considering the warning they place on their packages: "Do not consume raw cookie dough") but once baked, fairly unappetizing. This XXL cookie was just like that.

It tasted like a chocolate chip cookie should taste, but was fairly bland. The texture was insubstantial and crumbly.

The only thing going for it was the price. I paid 1$.29 for this big hunk of cookie, making it the cheapest giant cookie yet reviewed. But you get what you pay for. This cookie is probably best used to impress a toddler, and should not be served to people with fully developed taste buds.

The Bottom Line:
Price: 5 stars
Taste: 2 stars
Texture: 3 stars

A week in a day

Last week, I descended upon the Midwest to partake of my high school reunion and sundry vacationing activities. Here is the story of what transpired.

Friday, July 29
I got up at 5 in the morning to get a head start on work. My boyfriend picked me up at 1, and we commenced the drive westward. Being a native Californian, throughout the trip he continued to refer to my homeland the heartland as the "East Coast," much to the amusement of my Midwestern friends and family. Late that evening, we arrived at the home of my mother's husband, in which he had kindly allowed us to stay while we were in town. There we spent a rollicking night of sleeping.

Saturday, July 30
This was the day of my reunion, but I had several Ohio errands that had to come first. 1) visit my dad and stepmom and brother for breakfast, 2) go thrift store shopping (got brand new shoes for 8$), 3) show the boyfriend my third and final childhood home, introduce him to the dog, the cats, and the chickens, and find my jewelry collection, 3) take the boyfriend to Toledo's favorite restaurant, Tony Packo's (which he didn't like), 4) kill some time, 5) go to high school reunion.
     I was scared I would have to socialize (and indeed I did, but mainly I just got ignored like I did in high school), but I survived the presence of my 10 other classmates and had a good time with my high school best friend (hi, Amy!), and got some lemon bars for dessert, which made it all worth it.

Sunday, July 31
Drove with the boyfriend to the shores of Crystal Lake, Northern Michigan, where I met up with my mumsy, my stepdad, and stepsister. I had a really yummy egg salad sandwich. Some swimming occurred, and I actually participated, which is rare. There were games and dinner and good ol' family stuff. Here are some pictures of the days that followed.

Monday, August 1
At this point, all the days start blurring together because that's what happens when you're in paradise, right? I think we loafed around in the lodgings until early afternoon and then went antique shopping forever. Except that it wasn't forever, because at 4:00, we got ice cream. I think there was some more swimming after that, but my memory sure is hazy. No, there was no alcohol involved.

Tuesday, August 2
This day was particularly rainy. Yoga in the morning was canceled. In fact, any outdoors activities were nixed. Now that I think about it, this was the day we went shopping. So what did we do on Monday? Ah, yes, the lighthouse. On Monday, we went to the lighthouse and some gardens. But we got ice cream every afternoon, so that part stays the same. Tuesday night, we returned to the lodge to find a bat sitting in front of the bathroom. After a startling moment in which he flew over our heads, we managed to capture him in a wastebasket and put him outside. He did not want to exit the wastebasket, so we left it there overnight. My mother says you can't feel bat bites, and I probably got bitten without knowing it and now am dying of rabies. So if you don't see any entries here after a few days, you'll know why.

Wednesday, August 3
This was the big day, when we climbed the famous Sleeping Bear Dunes in the morning and topped off our day with a long bike ride. And of course, more ice cream. The resort held a barbecue, but since I was already stuffed with my pre-dinner dessert and was also a vegetarian, that was not a particularly exciting moment. That night, my boyfriend and I stayed at a different motel where there were cats. And a hammock.

Thursday, August 4
Tubing down the river was the plan for this day. It was accomplished, but in much more time than expected.  Reader Geoff must be informed that mating dragonflies landed on my hand during the tubing trip. I also broke my sandals, which had served me faithfully for the last 8 years or so. Early on, in fact, as soon as I was too far away from the car to go back, I remembered I had forgotten to put sunscreen on the backs of my legs, so I resolved to keep them hidden safely underneath me. But midway through the trip, I saw the fronts of my legs were burning, so I decided to turn over to prevent any further damage. Consequently, I ended up with a full-body sunburn that made me want to die that first day, make some serious resolutions about bringing sunblock everywhere the second day, use up half a bottle of aloe gel and another half bottle of Advil by the third day, and get seriously tired of the whole mess by the fourth day. The peeling started on the fifth day.

Friday, August 5
This morning, I sang "Happy Birthday to Me!" in my head. OK, actually I sang "ow ow ow" and had a great deal of trouble getting out of bed. Nonetheless, we drove back to Ohio under the influence of ibuprofen, swung by Detroit, hung out with my dad, went to the mall in a fruitless search for the perfect replacement pair of flip-flops, and had... Mr. Freeze! The best ice cream in the history of the universe!! Happy Birthday to Me!

Saturday, August 6
We drove back to Maryland, making a side trip to Cleveland to meet with one of my college friends. My boyfriend was not impressed with either Detroit or Cleveland, even though he got a free T-shirt in the former and very cheap cherries and strawberries in the latter. Then we continued driving. This took a while, because we did not time our bathroom/aloe/fuel stops very efficiently. But here I am, and here I'll stay.

And, um, sorry if you can't see the photos, because Facebook's privacy settings are still impossible.

Last blast from the past

I was on vacation the past week; consequently, I'm sure you are all suffering from Valerie- and Galorious-Galaxy- Withdrawal. Of course, while I did a lot of fun things on my vacation and will soon have a few (not many this time) pictures to show you and perhaps even blog about, right now, I am lacking in topics and yet consumed with the desire to provide you with your literary fix.

Good thing I've still got some of my stockpile of blog posts from my old Words and Images class. This is the last of them, so enjoy it. No, relish every word!

October 22, 2007
Be your own Grammar Guru
or, Making the Rules up as You Go

So, we're not reading about writing right now, but I've still got a few rants about Sin and Syntax. [Editor's note: The grammar book we were reading in class at the time.] I might as well let them out...

In our class, we've now read quite a collection of selections on trimming the fat—eliminating the pointless meanderings of writings produced in the "official style."

Sin and Syntax presents several pointers on accomplishing this feat: jettison weak adjectives in favor of descriptive verbs and nouns; avoid clichés like the plague; and for God's sake (emphasis mine), rid your prose of prepositional phrases wherever you can...the mushiest abstractions and the greatest circumlocutions tend to be expressed as prepositional phrases...

Right. We got it. No prepositional phrases. But what happens when prepositional phrases are essential to developing a "voice?" We're in the "Sentences" section now, and - surprise! - it contains several more pointers on helping your sentences succeed: Relish every word, Take risks, Seek beauty, and Find the right pitch.

Following all these suggestions means occasionally employing a "forbidden phrase." Somewhere in this class, I read something about making your sentences "sing." Nothing can sing if you always strip it to the bare minimum—then it croaks.

Behold:

I must admit I was disheartened when I read the admonition, Don't go 'visit with chums,' just 'visit them.' To visit with has very different connotations from a mere to visit. To visit implies that all the action is on the part of the visitor. I could visit my comatose sibling (fortunately I have none); or I could visit a historic cathedral; or I could visit my arch-nemesis and be chased away by security guards carrying tasers (fortunately I have no arch-nemesis, either). But if there is to be any interaction involved - if my no-longer-arch-nemesis were to welcome me into his domicile [Editor's note: "Domicile" italicized for rhetorical effect. See this post.] and have tea with me - I would have to visit with him. Huge difference. The single verb is not a substitute for this prepositional phrase. Likewise, another example from Sin and Syntax, "I'll see Fabio" may be just as exciting as "I'll meet up with Fabio," but it is not equivalent in meaning. I can see Fabio from afar. I can meet Fabio and maybe get his autograph. But until Fabio and I have a good-friends relationship, we will not be doing any "meeting up."

Shall I continue? I found other examples that raised my hackles (Reducing Put in an appearance to appeared is like replacing graced them with my presence with was there— and, eww, the dreaded is-are-was-were rears its ugly head), but I think you get the idea. Not everything can be sacrificed for conciseness.

Now that I've spent something like 3 hours on these last three posts about English, I think it's time to retire. But I do advise you read the title of this post one more time. I'm not a prose princess, and neither is Constance Hale the Queen of Communication. Every syntactical suggestion ever uttered has likely been countered by someone with credentials. Grammar is not like gravity; no one is forced to obey its rules. If I've learned one thing from Sin and Syntax, it's that rules are not so much rules as guidelines. In many ways, good grammar is a matter of getting rid of guilt. So I suggest to everyone who writes, simply try to write right. And if that's not alliteration overkill, then I don't know what is.

Zen and the Art of Bicycle Maintenance

At work, I have a reputation for outspoken clumsiness. These days, whenever I let out a squawk because I've just caught my finger in a crate or dumped an entire scoop of trail mix everywhere but into its intended bag, they say I'm having a "Valerie moment."

At home, I keep a bottle of hydrogen peroxide around to clean the clothing I'm always bleeding on. The most mundane of tasks result in injury. Yesterday, while washing my bike, I managed to put a 2-inch scratch in my forearm when I spun the wheel and spun my arm with it, straight into the gears. This morning, while putting the hose attachment on the vacuum cleaner, I whacked my hand into a sharp edge and scraped my knuckle. I also walked into a doorknob, a car door, and a wall. Just now, I kicked my ankle into the leg of my chair hard enough to remove the top layer of skin. [Edit: the next day: And then I bruised my knee while getting into bed!]

If ever there is a day that I don't have some self-inflicted injury somewhere on my body, I think angels would descend from the heavens and sing halleluia.

Surprisingly though, when working on more difficult chores, I escape mostly unscathed. Perhaps its because having to concentrate on an unfamiliar task makes me work more slowly and carefully. In any case, my mission today was to adjust the poorly shifting gears on my bicycle.

Last year, a clicking noise caused me to take old Greenie to REI, where it waited 3 weeks in the shop before finally getting tuned up. After that, the brakes worked better, but the clicking noise was still there! I took it back to REI, where they determined the source of the noise to be a loose pedal. This year, I decided not to put my bike into the incompetent, expensive, and slow-moving hands of REI employees, and do it myself instead.

The following resources were helpful in educating me on the workings and repair of a bike gear shift: http://www.ehow.com/video_4985712_fix-poorly-shifting-bicycle.html, http://www.ehow.com/how_117871_fix-poorly-shifting.html. But I still had to resort to a lot of trial and error to get it done. At one point, I was terrified that I had rendered the bike completely unrideable and would have to shamefacedly take it to REI to be put to rights. But I tried again and got it into a semblance of working order. I might have even fixed it! The gears shift now, with little of the slipping, grinding, and gabbling that plagued me before. And at no point did I cause injury to myself! My fingertips are a little raw from yanking on cables, but they'll get over it.

The moral of this story is: If simple tasks cause you woe, complex tasks are the way to go!

So this is what they do in a sweat lodge...

This heat wave has got me philosophizing.
 
What is the nature of "room temperature?" It's such a vague word. Is it the seventy degrees to which most American establishments seem to set their thermostats? Is it the 75-to-80 degree range that I and my fellow reptilians prefer? Is it the positively sweltering 93 degrees that the rooms in my house were yesterday (due mostly, I confess, to a malfunctioning air conditioner rather than any conservation efforts on my part)?

I have a recipe for a sugar paste, which is supposed to cool to "room temperature" before using. But the temperature of the room it's in now would turn it ooey-gooey--not at all the firm texture it's supposed to be. Ahh, I could ponder for hours on ambiguous standards...

But instead, I shall turn to contemplation of irrational behavior. To whit, the kind of impulse that leads an otherwise sane person (me) ... OK, OK, otherwise mostly sane person ... to decide, as the ambient temperature climbed into the 90's, that she absolutely must acquire a new winter coat as soon as possible.

I think I know where the impulse came from. On Friday evening, I walked home through a sauna to a house that was, if anything, hotter than the surrounding air. And when I attempted to inspect the ventilation center down in the basement, I found the room around it full of cat puke! And when I brought my computer down to (another, cleaner) room in the basement because the temperature there was much more comfortable, my nostrils were assailed with the odor of my housemate's neglected litterbox! I was incensed. So Saturday, I did what any sensible woman would do: I drowned my sorrows in the shopping mall!

I bought all the things I'd been putting off, one of which was a dressy winter coat. And now, I shall philosophize about clothing sizes. Women's sizes (as any man will tell you) are confusing. They are numbered arbitrarily, and a size 6 in one brand may be a size 10 in another. When you graduate out of junior's sizes, you typically go down a size instead of up! Why is it that someone who usually fits into size 8 or 9 dresses (me), ended up purchasing a size 4 coat? Are coat sizes different from dress sizes? I never knew.

And lastly, I feel it is my duty to ruminate over the nature of hot and cold. Why is the average human (me) always either too hot or too cold? While being subjected to external temperatures 85 and above, I feel quite ill and miserable and I can't concentrate and I have been known to complain I am too hot. Yet when the temperature drops below 75, I feel quite stiff and miserable and I can't concentrate and I do nothing but complain I am too cold. There will always be people who will call you out for being fickle about temperatures, and so here I would like to establish that even though I feel pretty icky when I'm too hot, I'd still prefer that to being too cold. If I never see another winter, I will be content. But in the likely occasion that I do, I will have a spiffy new coat to cheer me up!

Luscious Lemon Poppyseed Cookies

Let me tell you about my friend, the Alternative Baking Company.

They make delicious giant cookies which are individually packed for retail. This is great, because you can buy them any time, save them for days or weeks, and be confident they'll still taste fresh when you eat them. That's what makes Alternative Baking Company (ABC for short) cookies my choice for stockpiling. I always keep one or two of them lying around for when I get the giant cookie munchies. Even better, they are vegan. Best of all, they are delicious!

Today, I'm going to review one of my favorite ABC flavors, Luscious Lemon Poppyseed. This particular variety has a number of things going for it:

1. It is relatively low and flat, so it looks bigger (which makes it more appealing to my artist's – or is it just "glutton's?" – eyes.)
2. It is soft and chewy.
3. It has poppy seeds, which add interest to the soft and chewy texture.
4. It tastes like lemon!

Lemon is a great flavor! Cookie flavors tend toward the rich, such as chocolate or peanut butter, so a lemon-flavored cookie, while not exactly rare, is a step off the beaten path. While I adore these particular lemon cookies with a good portion of my heart, I think a little stronger flavor would add to their lusciousness a bit. And then if ABC came out with a soft chewy key lime cookie, this glutton would be in hog heaven!

You can find ABC cookies in natural food stores for around 2$ apiece. And considering that those 2 dollars buys you about 120 grams of cookie, I'd say they're a pretty good deal!

The bottom line:
Taste: 4 stars
Texture: 4 stars
Price: 4 stars

Technology continues to strike again.

Above, you see a picture of my floor littered with all the paper that my printer ate up rather than printing on. When I finally got the obnoxious machine to actually feed the paper out the other end, it printed on the wrong side! As you can imagine, I had a pretty frustrating afternoon.

Fortunately, I have a new keyboard to ease my computer frustrations a bit.

That's right. I have a 1200$ laptop, and I had to buy a separate keyboard for it. Allow me to retype the first paragraph on the built-in keyboard and you'll see what I mean.

Above, you see a picture of my floor littered wth all th paper that my printer ate up rather than printing on. When I finally got the obnoxious machineto actually feed the paper out the other end, it printed on the wrong side! As you ca magine, I had a pretty frustrating afternoon.

All the missing characters are the result of keys being too unresponsive for my light typing style. I tried to learn to type harder, but all that was doing was making me angry and worried about carpal tunnel and other repetitive strain injuries. So I bought a USB keyboard at the thrift store for under 2$. The funny thing is, I have to hit the keys on the traditional keyboard just as hard as the keys on the laptop, but since they are higher from the base, I guess I get enough speed on the downstroke that I'm not constantly missing characters.

So, now I can type again without backspacing for missing letters every sentence or two, but I have to listen to the loud clacking of a cheap keyboard, and I had to find a place to put it. I tried putting it right on top of the laptop keyboard, but that looked dumb, made the power key inaccessible, and made the keyboard too high. Instead, I put it in the drawer of my desk that's meant for a keyboard. But that meant I could no longer keep one of my organizer trays in that drawer, and I had to rearrange everything (which subsequently fell on the floor in a giant mess when I shut the drawer too hard whilst being angry at the printer, and then I had to rearrange it again!) I'm used to leaning forward on my desk when I'm working, but I have to lean backward to type on this new keyboard, so I either have to keep rocking back and forth like I have autism, or I have to actually sit up straight! The horrors.

The new keyboard is black as night, but unlike the equally black keyboard of the laptop, it does not have backlighting. Consequently, right now, I can not see what I'm typing. It's not too bad when you're touch-typing, but when you're looking to set down your hands to start with, or you need an obscure F-key or something, it sure is a pain.

So much stress from a couple pieces of office equipment! Well, I guess that's what office equipment is meant for.

I'm nonplussed (In my own special way)

Today instead of filling my timesheet like a good little employee, I was thinking about the evolution of languages. They do that, you know—change. That's why we have a few dozen Romance languages, rather than just Latin. Part of me – the liberal part that loves words – is thrilled by this process. I love new words. English has more words than pretty much any other language on earth, but that's not enough! When you don't have a word to say what you mean, make up a new one, or borrow from another language! One can never have too many words! The more the merrier! The other part of me  – the uptight part that loves grammar – is horrified. We have rules for a reason! They lose all their meaning when you keep changing them! It is never going to be OK to say "Billy and me went to the movies." Never!

Today the liberal part of me (that also happily seizes on every possible distraction) succumbed to a sudden urge to find out the origins of the word "nonplussed."

Ever since I saw this word used in one of my teen magazines, I had believed, based on the context of that first encounter, that it meant something along the lines of "dismayed." After all, if you are non-plussed,  you must not be having a positive experience. I always thought this was a clever word to express disappointment, but I didn't use it very often—and fortunately, because I was wrong. My search on the etymology of "nonplussed" revealed that its meaning is closer to "completely confused or perplexed." ("Non plus" is essentially a Latin phrase meaning "no further." Thus, someone who is so confused that they can go no further in their line of thought is nonplussed.)

Well, needless to say, I was "dismayed." The actual definition of this choice word is so much less commonsensical (that's a real word, by the way) than my interpretation of it. What's worse, my research revealed that in common usage, "nonplussed" is increasingly used to mean "impassive" or "unaffected"—meanings that are not only decidedly non-commonsensical (based on the root words which are familiar to everyone) but are completely contrary to the word's original meaning! This is the kind of language mutation that makes the uptight part of me that loves grammar cringe in horror.

So readers, I implore you! Even though it doesn't mean exactly what I'd like it to mean, don't allow "nonplussed" to be poisoned at the hands of the ignorant! Fight back! Use it in its proper form at every opportunity!

While we're on the subject of defending our language's honor, here's a quick aside (that will probably stretch out into a long digression as per my typical M.O.). While a draft of this post was patiently waiting in the wings, I received an email from my dad with a comment that I "write so often about grammar" and a link to this article about the writing industry's attack on the serial comma (the one that goes before the "and" that marks the last item in a list). I myself am a fan of the serial comma, for much the same reasons as the article's author is, and feel that (if you are not too worn out from campaigning for the proper usage of "nonplussed") you should take some time to educate other users of English in its merits.

Interestingly, I found some links at the bottom of the article to other works by someone calling herself "Grammar Girl." I'm fond of referring to myself as "Grammar Girl," but since the name is already taken, I guess I'll have to find a more creative title. Language Lady? Eh, I'll keep thinking.

What the DLL Or, 101 Things Wrong With My Computer

Back in February, I purchased a new laptop. It was a serious upgrade from my old system, which tended to restart instead of shutting down, would flash the Blue Screen of Death at the slightest provocation, and – worst of all – could not play Portal 2!

I invested a thousand+ bucks in my new computer and was pretty happy with it, until I noticed it was making little popping noises right before it would play a sound. And it would continue periodically making these noises the whole time when I listened to streaming music. Fortunately, the system came with a 2-year warranty from ASUS, so I sent it back and they replaced the I/O board. (I like to imagine I know something about computers, but I didn't know what that was, and I still haven't bothered to look it up!) Shortly before the machine was returned to me, I noticed that my old computer was making the same popping noises! I concluded that was something every computer does, and I probably shouldn't have sent mine back, because they reinstalled the operating system, and I had to reinstall all my software and reconfigure all the settings just so—which, me being my picky self, is the only way I can tolerate them.

A week or so after finishing with that tedious process, I was in the midst of some work when the computer slowed to a crawl and then froze entirely. Nothing I tried made it work again, except for restarting. But that only worked for a little while, and then it would recommence with its freezing-up antics. Two days of troubleshooting provided no answers, and my attempt to (again!) reinstall the operating system was thwarted when that process also froze up and, after a long long pause, told me it could not be completed. I called ASUS again; they concluded my hard drive had failed; I sent the system back to get it replaced.

Wait another week. Upon receipt of my fixed-up laptop, I carefully, painstakingly, began the steps of getting the system ready for use. I'm convinced whatever those ASUS dudes did to my system, they did it wrong. Because what followed was weeks of error messages and endless frustration as nothing worked the way it should out of the box.

One of the first things I did was check to make sure System Restore was turned on (When my hard drive failed, I first tried running System Restore, only to find it was turned off!). It was turned off this time, too. When I tried to rectify this, I was informed that I could not turn on System Restore because my computer could not find the C: drive. (Hello! My computer is the C: drive!) Fortunately, (miraculously, I should say), the next time I turned the computer on, System Restore was on and perfectly healthy.

But my antivirus wasn't. Although I had just installed it a few days before, it already thought my subscription had expired. Attempts to renew the free subscription resulted in a "Connecting to Update Server" message that never – ever – moved on to the next step. And oh, boy! Have you ever tried uninstalling an antivirus program? Those things protect themselves like they're their own Secret Service Agency. When I couldn't uninstall it using Add/Remove Programs, I foolishly deleted all of its program files (that I could find) from the computer, which did not discourage it in the slightest. I then tried to delete all of its registry entries, but I kept getting "Access Denied" errors. Meanwhile, ol' Antivirus kept running and preventing me from installing other antivirus software, but now I had no access to its controls and settings! Finally it occurred to me to check the vendor website, where I found an uninstall utility. Problem solved. But there were more problems occurring simultaneously.

Now, normally when I reinstall Windows, Windows Update runs in overdrive, downloading thousands of updates and installing them over a period of several shutdowns and days. A day or two into possession of my restored system, I noticed I was not getting any messages from Windows Update. So I opened it up to find out what was going on. Well, whaddaya know! Automatic Update was turned off, too! When I tried to turn it on, I was told, "Windows Update cannot check for updates, because the service is not running." What service, you might ask? Well, Windows Update was not so kind as to explain. Interestingly, right below the button to check for updates, I saw the following text: "Click here for more free software from [null]." I was terrified I had some sort of deadly virus. Lots and lots of scouring the Internet only confirmed this fear, telling me that the only solution was to reinstall the OS, which made me very, very angry! I had already spent days tidying up this system—twice! I did not want to have to do this again within a week of getting it back from service! Fortunately, lots and lots and lots of scouring the Internet revealed a Microsoft Fix It that, in fact, fixed it.

After Windows Update was happily chugging away on its gazillion downloads, I thought I was finally in the clear. I had several programs already installed, and I thought I was finally ready to get back to work. Then, one by one, my installed programs turned on me.

Keyboard backlighting, which was a feature that came with the computer, wouldn't turn on automatically. I had to push the button to turn off all the lights, then push it again to turn them back on. With them came the keyboard lighting. I had to reinstall the whole pack of utilities that came with the computer to make this work properly.


Then my Google sidebar couldn't load any of my previously installed gadgets. I had to reinstall Google Desktop.

Then Google Chrome wouldn't open. Clicking the icon caused absolutely nothing to happen. I had to reinstall Chrome.

At this point, you might think that Google just sucks and I should stop using their software. But the next program to fail was from Adobe. Acrobat could not convert any file into a PDF. I had to repair the installation of Adobe Acrobat.

Then I started having the MSVCR issues. One program after another would freeze up, treating me to an error message about a missing MSVCR90.dll. Some more Internet searching led me to believe that if I found this file anywhere on my file system, I should copy it to the Windows/System32 or Windows/SysWOW64 folders. Well, I found it. In multiple places. In each place, it was a different size and had a different modified date. I chose the newest one and popped it into both of the recommended directories.

The next day, my error messages had changed somewhat. Now I was getting messages like:

Runtime Error! Program: C... [Thanks for the informative file path info]
R6034
An application has made an attempt to load the C runtime library incorrectly. Please contact the application's support team for more information.

First it was Word, then it was Firefox and Dreamweaver in rapid succession. Well, then I started putting MS and C and R together, and came up with Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime. I deleted the misplaced DLL from the System32 and SysWOW64 folders, and installed the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable, which I found online. It did not put MSVCR90 back in either of those folders, but since then, I have not received any error messages.

It has been several weeks since I got my computer back the last time. I have been stockpiling all these problems, waiting for the day when I would stop running into them. Then, I would dump them on my unsuspecting readership! Since it's been 3 days since I suffered any computing catastrophe, I think it's safe to share! Don't you feel privileged?

Adventures in Independence Day Cooking!

Today is Independence Day (a holiday), and thus, I chose to make it one of those days where I don't allow myself to do a lick of work. 

OK, so I worked at the store, but only because my schedule decrees it...and in any case, I managed to finish everything in a little over 5 hours, so it was practically a day off! Following work, however, I was free to do a little celebrating. And I chose to make food. This is something you often do if you are hosting or attending a Fourth of July party. I myself am actually avoiding all the parties today (because in Valerie-Land, any excuse is a good excuse to miss a party, and having to work the next day shortly after 6 a.m. is one of the best ones!) but when holidays call, you respond with spoon in hand!

Speaking of spoons, I must say that one of the best inventions in cooking was the wooden spoon. Wooden spoons are tough enough to stir the most solidified of concoctions. And unlike metal spoons – which bend under the pressure of a hearty cookie dough – and plastic spoons – which melt at the slightest opportunity – wooden spoons, well, don't do either of those things!

On the other hand, the worst invention in cooking has to be Teflon coating. I'd rather have my baked goods stick to the side of the pan any day, than have the side of the pan baked black and scratched all up. Unfortunately, despite its annoyingly fragile nature and recent concerns about its detrimental effect on human health (oh, I can't remember exactly what it is—probably some kind of carcinogen. Like everything else in the world), Teflon does not seem to be losing its foothold in the world of cookery.

But enough of this digression. This is supposed to be about Valerie's Adventures in Cooking!

Today's adventure actually began yesterday, with another attempt at Spinach Cheese Squares, which ended with me not hearing the oven timer go off and overcooking my squares by a considerable amount. Apparently not too considerable, though, because I tasted them today, and they were just as delicious as always. With an extra-crispy edge that only added to their yumminess.

Actually, today's adventure actually began a few weeks ago, when I realized that my beloved giant chocolate Easter bunny (immortalized in the photo to the right) was actually a lot more cute than tasty. After eating a few bites of him, I decided I'd rather not do that any more. This has nothing to do with any sense of guilt over consuming an adorable rabbit bit by bit. Of course not. I decided instead to take his remains and use them as the topping for a delicious dessert. The few weeks during which the pieces of chocolate rabbit reposed in my refrigerator were a result of me having too much work, not enough motivation, and no powdered sugar.

Today, I acquired powdered sugar and cleaned out the 8-inch square pan (I had to remove the spinach cheese squares first) and filled it instead with what are known in Ohio as buckeye bars, but in places that are not Ohio are probably called "peanut butter chocolate squares" or something equally un-colorful.

Buckeye bars are simple to make: Mix 4 cups of powdered sugar with 1.5 cups of peanut butter and .5 cups of softened (melted seems to work OK, too) butter. This is where your wooden spoon comes in handy, because stirring this mixture is not unlike stirring a rock.

Once it is in a fairly homogeneous clump, spread it in a 9x9 pan (or you can improvise with an 8x8 pan plus a bread pan, as I do. By choice, of course; not because, after all these years of baking, I still lack a 9x9 pan. Of course not).

Then melt approximately a cup of chocolate in a double boiler. This is where your chocolate Easter Bunny comes in. If you lack a double boiler, you can use a microwave. Or you can do it the Valerie way, which is to place a quart pot inside a skillet, fill the skillet with as much water as it'll hold, and turn on the heat! This is almost like having a double boiler, but with the added excitement of allowing boiling water to splash all over your kitchen while you are stirring your chocolate!

Once the chocolate is melted, spread it on top of your peanut butter mixture. At this point, you will likely discover that the half-eaten remains of a chocolate Easter Bunny are not quite enough to cover an 8x8 + 9x4 surface of peanut butter. Do the best you can. So what if some of your peanut butter is bald? You can just eat it immediately because it's not fit to show the rest of the world. You win when you lose!

The last crucial step in making these buckeye bars is to place a Ziploc bag on top of the hot burner cover immediately after removing the double boiler. You don't want your burners to get lonely after this sudden separation! And of course, you want that extra melted-plastic-goopy challenge in the cleanup stage. After all, if it's not character-building, it can't be an Adventure in Cooking!

Taking back the night!

Something I've been thinking about a lot is circadian rhythms. Well, not really. After all, I quit being a biology major 6 years ago. But I have been thinking about my own personal sleep schedule. I've been thinking about how I hit my peak of energy at about 8 in the a.m. and slowly degenerate from there, and how it's unfortunate that society doesn't seem entirely friendly to people with my habits. I can't help being a morning person, and I've been thinking about how the world might be improved if schedules were tailored to Valerie Time. I also have been thinking that I've blogged about this topic before, but I can't help being forgetful either! I can't find any previous posts on the subject, so I might as well cover it again.

I've noticed, of late, and of earlier, how frequently I avoid activities that take place in the evenings. I commit myself to them with the best of intentions: choir rehearsals at 7pm, volunteer events at 6, social gatherings starting anywhere from 4 in the afternoon to 9 at night. I RSVP with abandon, and then as the evening arises, I suddenly fall victim to an array of psychiatric maladies and lose all my resolve.

I have a reputation among my social circle for bowing out of pre-planned activities. I have headed out for a game night and made it as far as somewhere on the subway before being overwhelmed with hypochondria and heading back for home. I have gone to parties and left as soon as I arrived in the parking lot, suddenly hysterical from social anxiety. I have canceled countless dates simply because I didn't feel up to it when date night rolled around. I skip choir, volunteer events, and outings with friends, because I'm feeling "icky." That's Valerie-speak for a combination of "nauseated" and "out-of-sorts."

Sure, part of this is cowardice. And part of it is conditioning, and part of it is an adventitious mélange of choice genetic tendencies. But part of it is timing!

I don't think this would happen so often if these events occurred in the mornings. In the mornings, I'm raring to go! I can take on the whole world! I could even, perchance, participate in something as terrifying as small talk! In fact, I think I could even stomach these events if they happened in the early afternoons. Directly after work, I have no problem with going out into the world. Heck, I'm out in it already—might as well stay there. But once I've had a chance to retreat to my home, I attach myself there with soft fuzzy emotional Velcro and lose all fortitude. Once I've had a chance to relax for the day, I cannot unrelax and steel myself to face the horror commonly known as "other people."

So, from now on, let's start arranging real-world events to occur in the mornings, and leave the nights open for the socially-challenged bloggers of the world to retreat to the safety of home, the Internet, and their beds.

Do you see anything that needs to be changed in this sentence?

I can't take it any more!

I've been keeping my mouth closed on this issue, but no more! Grammar Girl must speak out at last!

Why, for the love of everything true and beautiful, must recording artists insist on cannibalizing our venerable language by using Internet English in their song titles!? WHY?

In text messaging, this truncated form of English, where nearly every word is reduced to a letter and every phrase is reduced to its initials, is almost acceptable, because typing on a keyboard where every key is half the size of the fingertip trying to tap it can be too tedious to bother with protocol. In instant messaging, this is less forgivable, but still not unforgivable--at least for those who have not fully mastered the art of rapid touch typing.




But in publishing (music, written, or otherwise), we have people called editors. Every bit of media released into the wild is subjected to extensive review. If the songwriter is somehow incapable of using a keyboard (at least, the kind that says QWERTY instead of Casio), then someone else at the recording company should be able to pick up the slack and excise these deformed words from the album.

But for whatever reason, they don't do it! And we end up with mutant song titles like "We R Who We R" (Ke$ha), and "U+UR Hand" (Pink). Katy Perry is guilty in the first degree, churning out "Hot N Cold" and "Ur so Gay" one album, and taking spelling to a whole new low with "California Gurls" the next.

I would assume this was a recent trend, but for the existence of the linguistic atrocity "Nothing compares 2 U," which first came out in the mid-80's.

Somebody, explain to me what we gain by replacing real words with single letters. Does it really contribute some meaning to the song title? Do we do it because being a musician is not a creative enough job and we must compensate for it by creatively modifying our language? Or is it just for the sole purpose of annoying Valerie and grammarians like her? And am I just adding fuel to the fire when I give this rampant illiteracy coverage on my blog?

Liz Lovely Peanut Butter Classics

As promised, another review of giant cookies is headed your way! Today's subject: Liz Lovely Peanut Butter Classics.

Liz Lovely Peanut Butter Classics.
A favorite among housecats everywhere.

I first experienced these cookies when a case of them was accidentally shipped to my store. When the distributor had failed to collect them after several months, they went into the communal pot, and I grabbed a few packages. I was entranced - free giant cookies! What more could one want? - but I wasn't doing cookie reviews back then. Let's see how they hold up when actual standards are applied to them.

A bag of two, which I bought at MOM in Columbia for $3.59, contains 180 grams of cookie--a fair amount. Price-wise, I'd say these are on a par with your average giant cookie. If they are a bit more expensive, it's because they are vegan and mostly organic. But taste-wise--that's what we're really curious about.

And the answer is: for a vegan cookie, not bad. There are several varieties, but I chose peanut butter because it is one of my favorite flavors. I didn't really detect much peanut in this cookie, but that could be due to my chronic stuffy nose--a good reason why I am not a food reviewer for a living. But it was sweet and chocolatey, and tasty enough.

Texture is probably the most important factor to me in judging a cookie, and these are a bit too crumbly for my liking. The entire bottom surface is coated in chocolate, so I'd been keeping them in the fridge to keep them from melting. But even after thawing, they were more brittle than I like my cookies to be. The golden standard for cookie texture is as follows: If you can break off a piece with your hand, without much effort and without propelling cookie crumbs all about the room, then you have a perfect texture. But alas, after attempting to break off a piece of this cookie, I had cookie crumbs propelled all about the room.

The bottom line: While these cookies are an acceptable fix for one's giant cookie craving, I will not be making any special trips to Columbia to procure more of them.

Taste: 3 Stars
Price: 3 Stars

Liz Lovely does make a chocolate chip variety that boasts a soft texture that's just like eating cookie dough--why I didn't choose that flavor, I have no idea. But the next time I happen to be in a place that sells these cookies, I will give them a try.

OMG (Stands for "Oooh! Musical Goodness!")

Today I posted the following as my Facebook status: "Sometimes I want to get up and do something else, but I can't because really catchy music is playing through my computer's headphones!"

That said, I think it's time for another discussion of really catchy music.... Although you and I probably have disparate opinions on what kinds of music are catchy.... And, in fact, I myself am somewhat mystified by my selections. 


Bonus tracks = just that!
Not too long ago, I downloaded a bunch of random music in the hopes that I would find something in it I liked. Surprise! I did! Even bigger surprise! The song that I liked the best was the rap track. My song of choice now is "Girls Fall Like Dominoes" by Nicki Minaj. The aspect that originally drew me was the epic dance stylings of the intro and chorus (not another surprise!), but after some consideration, I think (despite being unable to understand her half the time) that Nicki Minaj's voice is pretty cool too. What's coolest is this song is - according to Wikipedia anyway - an iTunes Store bonus track. Bonus tracks for the win! Many of my favorite songs are the ones that don't make it into the "official" portion of the album. Consider the organ-infused remix of Christian Brown's "I'm Stupid" that I'm still fond of, even though I'm not presently bitter about love like I was the last time I hyped this song. 


I'm bringing 2006 back
So, apparently, in 2006, Justin Timberlake's song, SexyBack, was all the rage. Apparently, it prompted the entire population of the country to start "bringing everything(/insert word of your choice) back." I missed out on this phenomenon, probably being too busy swooning over Madonna's 2005 hit, "Hung up." Being behind the musical times is my specialty, after all. When I finally did get around to hearing SexyBack, I don't recall being impressed. But fast forward to June of 2011, when I happened to hear it on a Pandora station I'd concocted. I still wasn't impressed.
Then the next morning, I woke up with bits of it clattering around in my head. It is probably the stupidest song ever made, but I couldn't stop thinking about it! The distorted vocals! The minimalistic electronic background music! The deliciously brainless repetitive lyrics! That crazy voice shouting, "Take em to the chorus!" What's not to love? 


Now that I have polluted your minds with two questionably tasteful pieces of pop music, I can safely say my work here is done. Stay tuned until next time. Or avoid staying tuned like the plague. That might be better for your health.

COOKIES!!!!!

Well, I admit it. My plan to review the aesthetics of chocolate bars fell flat after just the first post. Who'd have imagined that, underneath the wrapper, most chocolate bars pretty much look the same?

But now, however, I have a food review idea that will actually work! Giant Cookies!

As a self-proclaimed Cookie Monster, I have an undiscriminating love for cookies of all types. Except the crispy ones--which eliminates about half the cookies ever made, so, never mind. It seems that in cookies, as in all other types of comestible, I am a picky eater. But I have a fairly strong love for cookies of most types. And, after years of cultivating my love for cookies, I can say this: Sure, you can eat 4 little cookies...but eating them in the form of one big cookie is a million times better! (Less crust, more soft chewy interior, for one thing).

Everywhere I go, I'm on the lookout for good cookies. Since I seem to be on a neverending mission to find the best giant cookie, I'm going to blog about it and make sure the readers of this blog find it too.

The rules to qualify a cookie as "giant" are simple: Any cookie with a diameter over 9 centimeters is fair game. That's all. I might revise these rules as the mission goes on, but for now, I'm sure that will keep me busy enough.

And now, I'll begin with an old standby:

The White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Cookie by Così.

Così is a sandwich shop which I'm sure you've seen. And while they have a pretty good tomato-basil-and-mozzarella sandwich (known as the TBM), when at Così, I never fail to snag a pair of white chocolate macadamia nut cookies. A pair. Even though one of these cookies would be sufficient to feed an army of mice, I buy two, because they are just so fantastic!

There isn't a crispy surface on them. From the perfectly cooked (almost undercooked) exterior, to the delicious bits of white chocolate dispersed throughout, these cookies are pure chewy goodness. The bits of macadamia nut are admittedly a bit crunchy, but that adds just the right level of interest.

Così also sells brownies and blondies, which are good but kind of costly (not that the macadamia cookies are cheap--a set of two sets me back 4.50$ after tax), and some kind of round granola bar which I wouldn't touch with a 9-centimeter pole (that's right, they don't meet the size requirements anyway), and chocolate chip cookies, but why go with a classic when you can go with the tropical and exotic instead?

Maybe one day I'll review Così's chocolate chip cookies, but can they ever stand up to their blond cousins? Can any cookie? I might have started this review series with an impossible challenge.

But the show must go on! Should I add some star ratings? Sure, why not?

Taste: 5 whopping stars! (Out of 5)
Price: 3 stars.

I changed the font size...

...to have the units in centimeters. I hope this will make it aproximately the same apparent size on every screen. I picked a size that looked legible on my screen. I hope it looks good on everyone else's, too.

If not, here's the place to complain about it! ▼

Consciousness

I was getting some work done today while listening to some trance music podcasts, and I decided to take a quick blog break (A "quick" blog break in Val's Galorious Galaxy usually ends up being an hour at least!) I started outlining the post in Notepad but quickly discovered that I was writing like a kindergartener. My music was so loud, I couldn't concentrate! I always thought I could work while listening to music, as long as it didn't have words, but now I'm forced to re-evaluate. Now I've turned the music down (but still audible), and I rely on you to tell me whether my writing today is worse than usual. And possibly whether you can think and listen to instrumental music at the same time.

On a slightly related (musical) note, there's this song that I (and everyone in the country) has heard a million times. It goes, "Karma karma karma karma karma chameleon! You come and go, you come and go!" (Note to songwriting self: If lacking for lyrics, simply repeat same word/phrase a few more times.) Imagine my surprise, when, sometime last year, I learned for the first time that the singer was not actually repeating a string of commas! Imagine also my disappointment. Sure, "Comma comma comma comma comma chameleon" makes no more sense than "karma (x5) chameleon," but it's infinitely interesting. Imagine if the singer separated all the commas with commas, and then dictated the lyrics. It would go something like this: comma, comma, comma, comma, comma, comma, comma, comma, comma, comma chameleon. And then converting my typed commas would result in twice as many commas as in the phrase before that, and then dictating that phrase would result in twice as many as that and so on into infinity!


Which makes me think of something only slightly related: Imagine a comma nesting inside the curve of another comma, and another, smaller, comma resting inside that comma, and another one inside that, spiraling smaller and smaller and smaller into – again – infinity! Much like the picture, which, due to a lack of similar pictures on the Internet, I had to make myself (no wonder my quick blog breaks take so long! Also, no wonder the picture isn't really finished). So, yeah, compared to the fractal wonderfulness of "comma chameleon," "karma chameleon" is just so blah.

Speaking of chameleons, I've been thinking a lot about color changes lately.
As you probably know, I go through phases where my favorite color changes. Back when I was a youngun, it was yellow. During most of my school days, I was in love with blue. In college it was lavender for a time, then pink (the pastel babydoll variety); following graduation, I had a green period, during which I also developed an affinity for brown; and now - with an inexplicable fascination with white (clothing especially) making an appearance every once in a while - I have veered back towards pink (but of the more fuschia variety).

Those of you who know me on Facebook probably couldn't miss the outrageously pink streaks I put in my hair a few weeks ago. They've faded by now to a faint discoloration, but you can bet I'll be trying that again! Plenty of dye left. Those of us who lead boring lives must settle for having interesting hair. (Of course, those of us who get excited about spirals of punctuation marks probably have boring lives for a pretty good reason.) I've modified my Val's Galore logo to incorporate the hue (and I hope to be able to show it to you soon). And today (actually, the event that prompted me to write this post) I noticed myself grinning idiotically simply because I was so delighted about the pink staple with which I bound a sheaf of papers.

Ah, the little things that make us happy. Although I enjoy feeling happy as much as anyone, sometimes I wish I weren't so prone to these spontaneous mood swings. If I can feel like I'm floating on a cloud simply because I unclogged a drain and followed it up with a pink staple job, I can just as easily sink into depression because I smacked my hand into a milk crate or left my backup sandals at home when I went out in un-sensible shoes. It's pretty draining, having a new mood every minute.

Anyway, though this post is totally lacking in denouement, that's all I had to talk about.

Update:The Galaxy Shall Remain Galorious

Well, my three top readers (all my readers, probably) have spoken, and it looks like I'll be keeping my layout the same. At least until the small type drives me bonkers.

But seriously, guys, if you want a huge logo and lots of pink, you're at the wrong blog. Don't worry, though. The Unfashionista has got you covered!

Do you read me?

I was going to write a real post today, with lots of deep musings on the intricacies of English grammar, or perhaps my feelings on babies, or being left-handed, or the coolest things I've heard in music lately, but then I signed into my blog.

And I looked at the home page.

Now, ever since I came up with this layout, I've been kind of ambivalent about the color scheme. The black text on the blue background has always been a little hard to read for me, especially on those days when my eyes are dry and blurry (most of spring, summer, fall, and winter). When I got my new computer, which crams 142 pixels into an inch and turns graphics that were once the length of my whole hand into the length of my finger, all of a sudden, my blog was miniscule. The type became infinitesimal.

I thought about perhaps redesigning for better legibility. But then I thought I should ask my readers. What do you think? Would you prefer more contrast between the words and the background? Would larger type make you happy?

And – dare I even ask it – is the celestial motif just galactic overkill?

Eh, don't spend too much time on that question, cause I'm unlikely to change it.

But do comment below about what you think works and what could be improved. I can't do it without you!

Day Off... or Off Day?

Because I work from home part of the time, I get to set my own hours. This is good, except I feel like I always should be working. Whenever I don't have an obligation to do something else, I'm trying to work. I'm working inefficiently of course, with too many breaks to exercise, to nap, to get sidetracked by a cavalcade of YouTube videos (curse you, Suggestions sidebar!) I'm always making work my first priority, and never quite getting it done. This causes me a lot of stress, because I never have a moment to myself--a moment when I'm not thinking, "You really should be working right now." I realized that even though I'm only scheduled to work 4 days a week, I never give myself a day off. So today I decided to change that. This morning when I got up, I vowed that I would not do any work! None! Zilch! I can do anything I want to, but if it involves filling in a time sheet, it is out of bounds.

I started the morning loafing in bed, checking email, Facebook, and the like on my phone. I then proceeded to my usual 25-minute workout and followed it up by turning on my computer and checking other email accounts. At this point, I would usually switch to my "work" user account and tell myself, "You really should be working right now" before staring off into space or switching back to my personal account to see whether my bank balance reflects the deposit I just made, or to check the shipping status of that package I ordered, or to download that song I suddenly remembered I wanted. Today, however, rather than slack off under the heavy weight of guilt, I slacked off with impunity! I told Facebook this was going to be the best day ever!

And then, I finished loading the dishwasher, turned it on, and started making cookie dough! At this point, I received the first sign that this might not actually be the best day ever, despite my best intentions. As I was setting out the last of my ingredients, the sink began to fill, from the drain up, with water from the dishwasher. Vigorous plunging did nothing, except fill the sink with dirt from the pipes.

What could I do? I finished making my cookie dough, cleaned up (without using the sink or the dishwasher), and called the landlord. Then... I made more cookies! Later on, I plan to make sweet potato fries. Yes, my plans for the day when I can use neither the sink nor the dishwasher involve dirtying as many dishes as I possibly can. My wisdom is unparalleled.

I tried not to let the failure of my kitchen plumbing get me down, and thus spent the rest of the morning downloading one of those songs I wanted and taking surveys for reward points.

At 10:30, I had an appointment with the orthopedist, who took one look at the ganglion cyst on my wrist and decided to fix it. This would have been great, except that the sight of synovial fluid and blood oozing from a hole in my wrist, combined with the pain of having a giant needle poking around inside it, made me more than a little woozy. I always forget how horrible it feels to be on the verge of passing out. I said that last time. Fortunately, the nurse took forever to return with my visit summary sheet, and by that time, my cerebral blood flow was pretty much back to normal, and I was able to walk out without blacking out. They told me to ice it; consequently I am now typing this with a bag of frozen edamame beans strapped to my wrist with a belt, since I don't bother too keep such pedestrian stuff as ice lying around.

My next stop was a visit to the thrift store, where I got some good deals on a small table, a pair of shorts, and a hanging organizer thingy where I intend to store my winter accessories. Then at Target, I really outdid myself when I found Reese's Big Cups for $2.73 a package! I bought three, because I love them so much and the price was that great.

Despite all these good things, I am in a bad mood because I can't use the kitchen sink or the dishwasher and have no idea when the drain will be repaired, and now it seems like the bathroom sink is running slow, and my only surviving banana plant is dying, and the keyboard I'm typing on is about as sensitive as a callus and I constantly have to go back and retype everything because it keeps missing letters. I wonder if I can turn my off-day back around.