Au Gratin Party Potatoes

I have reached a point where there is no more cleaning or research I can do regarding the bedbugs (Since laying down the diatomaceous earth on my mattress, I haven't received a new bite in 4 days—I can almost imagine they're gone), so I am forced to go back to an almost normal mode of living. Almost normal inasmuch as I still choose my daily outfit by whatever I can find near the top of my storage bags, and am continually stymied by simple tasks such as cutting my toenails (can't find the toenail clippers) and washing my hands (the towels are all in bags in the basement). But there is one thing I still have all the supplies for: food preparation!

Today, I decided to make my lunch another Adventure in Cooking! and prepare some au gratin potatoes from scratch. Here's how you do it.
1. Find a recipe for au gratin potatoes on the internet, such as this one. You know you've picked a good recipe for dinner for one, when you see the word "party" in the recipe title. This will enable you to practice your recipe-dividing skills. Allrecipes.com is kind enough to do the dividing for you, so if you scale your recipe down to use about 2 1-lb. potatoes, you will be presented with nice, easy-to-measure amounts such as 1 Tbsp. + 1¾t tsp (margarine) or 3/8 of a can (evaporated milk), and you won't have to do any math!

2. Scrub and slice your potatoes (2 of them). The recipe may tell you to peel, cube, and cook them, but you are too Galorious for that, so decide not to peel them (the peel is where all the fiber is!). Also decide to slice them (that's the way real au gratin potatoes are done), and not to bother with the pre-cooking (they're thinly sliced; they'll cook just fine during baking, and besides, you're hungry now!).

3. The recipe tells you to mix your ingredients in a mixing bowl. To save on supplies as well as washing time, decide to forgo this as well, and mix all the ingredients in your 9x13 baking pan, which you have not greased, despite the instructions. Spread the potato slices on the bottom of the pan.

4. This would be a good time to preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

5.  Now for the hard part: 3/8 (12 fluid ounce) can evaporated milk. Honestly, who keeps evaporated milk around the house? You'll have to use powdered milk. Since the powdered milk comes in 1-qt packets, there are no instructions as to how much powder makes 3/8 of  12 ounces. You'll have to guess. 3/8 is almost 1/2, so just assume you'll need one half of 12 ounces, or 6 oz. Six oz. is 2/3 cup. Fill your 1-cup measure up about 2/3 full with milk powder. Then fill it to the same level with water. Add a little more milk powder because it doesn't look thick enough to be "evaporated." Mix with a fork and dump over the potatoes.

6. The recipe calls for 1/4 pound of processed cheese. Since you find processed cheese totally unpalatable, use colby-jack instead. Cube the cheese nicely and distribute it over the potato slices.

7. 1 tablespoon and 1-3/4 teaspoons butter or margarine, cubed. That's what the recipe calls for, but who has time for such finicky measurements? That's just about 1.5 tablespoons, so cut that approximate amount off your stick of margarine and cut it into little pieces over your potatoes. The pieces will stick together, so you'll have to cut them up more later on.

8. The recipe also calls for:

• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper
• Paprika

1/2 teaspoon = approximately a few pinches, so go ahead and sprinkle on the salt. Since you don't have pepper, you'll skip that, but you actually do have some paprika left over from when you made deviled eggs for Easter.Sprinkle that on, too. Realize the recipe said to put on the paprika after cooking, but figure it won't make that much difference.

9. Mix your ingredients in the pan. I find that a fork and a knife make delightful little screeching noises when you use them for this purpose. A spoon may also work. Pick up all the cubes of cheese that have fallen off the potatoes and put them back on top of the potatoes. Use your knife to cut the cubes of margarine into smaller cubes of margarine.

9. Bake, uncovered, at 350 degrees F for 45-50 minutes or until bubbly. Since the oven has only reached about 200 degrees at this point, just set the timer for 53 minutes and go ride your exercise bike. Take a shower, excavate your nail file from the car, and remove the potatoes from the oven with one minute and a few odd seconds left on the timer. Serve hot. 


I suppose if you're an au gratin potatoes connoisseur, these would not go over very well. The cheese pretty much stayed where it was put originally, leading to patches of bald potatoes and other patches of overly cheesy potatoes. The next time I try this recipe, I'll melt the cheese with the milk first for a more even consistency. Still, the potatoes cooked, just as I expected them to, and they were tasty and the cheese was cheesy, and I had a good lunch.

Or just blow all my theories out of the water.

Yesterday, I surrounded the entire base of my bed with a thick layer of diatomaceous earth. This is what Josh did to his bed months ago and it seemed to protect him from any new bites. However, in reading about bedbug prevention, I have learned that more is not better, in the case of diatomaceous earth, as a thick coating acts as a bedbug repellant, whereas a light dusting doesn't deter the bugs but kills them after they walk through it (in the yuckiest way, by perforating their exoskeleton and allowing them to slowly die of dehydration).

This morning I woke up with a new bite on my torso, just behind my right armpit. So much for only getting bitten on the butt. I don't know whether to be relieved or disappointed. On the one hand, it means that my diatomaceous earth barrier was not effective, or else my sealing and sterilization of the bed frame and contents was not effective. On the other hand, it means the bedbugs are still getting to me and likely walking through the deadly diatomaceous earth to do it.

To be sure, I dusted more DE around the edges of my mattress. Bedbugger.com recommends against this, as inhaling diatomaceous earth isn't really good for you, but I'll sacrifice some lung tissue if it means being rid of these parasites. I guess for now, I'll be satisfied with this result.

The question remains, though, whether to bring in an exterminator or not. I have an appointment with the sniffing dog on Wednesday. If the bedbugs are gone or dead, the dog should be able to detect this, thus saving me a thousand dollars. On the other hand, if the bedbugs are not gone, then I will have spent 200 dollars on top of the extermination costs for no real reason. Perhaps I should just cancel my appointment, wait a few weeks, and then see. But can I stand a few more weeks of living out of garbage bags?

Blow those bedbugs out of sight

Alas, two new bites last night. Some people say you can get delayed reactions to bedbug bites, but I'm not biting (er, buying) it. I guess some head-wall-interaction is in my future.

I'm also beginning to think that I may just have to fork over the couple of thousand dollars needed for the big guns.

Called another exterminator today (we're calling them PCO's [for Pest Control Operator] over at bedbugger.com, which has been my best friend in recent weeks). This one has a bug-sniffing dog that can pinpoint the exact location of the infestation. Unfortunately, it costs 200 dollars just to have the dog visit (whoa, sounds like this crazy auction I saw on eBay recently), and a thousand-some dollars to have the whole house heat treated (but the heat treatment comes with a six-month warranty, so I'd be pretty confident that it would work).

All my research in the past few weeks has missed a few important points that I just learned (too little, too late) this evening (instead of doing my work, again!).

• Setting off foggers will make your problem worse because it can cause the bugs to retreat into new hiding places. I'm not too worried about this result, because we set them off in every room, so it's not like they could have retreated very far. And I'm pretty sure they'll come right back to me and my delicious blood before long, anyway.
• A metal bed frame is not a solution, because it is so good at thwarting bedbugs, that it will cause them to migrate elsewhere in search of food. Again, I'm not so sure I subscribe to this. If the bugs can't bite me, then it doesn't matter where they migrate. They will die eventually (I just have to wait 18 months to be sure).

Today I followed my housemate's lead and put diatomaceous earth all around the bottom of the bed. There's tape on every crack in the bed, making it look rather like a pair of pajamas. Should be conducive to sleeping.

In other news, the bedbugs seem to think I have a great butt (thank you, thank you) because that is all they've been biting for the past few days. I'm beginning to think that maybe the duct tape around my bed really has been deterring them, and they've been forced to bite me from the comfort of my computer chair (where my butt spends most of its time when not in bed). Interesting thought.

Wish I may and wish I might...

The past two days, I did nothing but battle bedbugs. I got home Friday afternoon and continued the neverending task of bagging all my possessions and getting ready for some chemical warfare.

On a related note, after seeing the giant pile of garbage bags in the basement, my boyfriend forced me to watch an episode of Hoarders, which is a documentary TV show about people with hoarding disorders. While I may not have a hoarding disorder (I do not accumulate rotting pumpkins and 4-year expired yogurt in my house), I do realize that I have a lot more possessions that I formerly thought I would like to have. Living simply seems to have gone out the window in favor of living as complicated as I can, as long as I have space to store it all (such is the hazard of renting an entire house--you feel entitled to spread out all over it). Something has to change. Do you think I can survive without always having a craft supply for every possible occasion? Do you think I can start getting rid of some of the clothes I only wear once a year because I don't like them? Do you think, next time, I can resist when someone is Freecycling the entire Doctor Who series on VHS plus a few miscellaneous other Sci-fi videos?

But I digress.

Saturday we did it. It was so tiring, I don't even want to think about it any more! Yet, in spite of that, in spite of being two days behind on my work, I am compelled to blog about it. Perhaps I have a blogging disorder.

We cleaned every bit of furniture with Pine-Sol. We put (almost) every loose item in our bedrooms in plastic bags. I laundered my mattress cover. We sprayed in all the corners. We set off foggers, which were kind of unimpressive, considering they were supposed to be our coup de grace, in every room in the house. The only thing left to do is for me to put masking tape over all the cracks in my bedframe (and let me tell you, there are a lot) and put the duct tape back around the skinny parts. I am overcome with fear. Last night, I was so afraid that there might still be living bedbugs lurking about, that I begged my boyfriend to let me stay over, even though it meant driving a half hour to work at 6 the next morning.

But tonight, I have to stay here. If I get another bite, I think the only thing left to do is destroy my bed frame and buy a new one, remove the wall-to-wall rug, and sleep in plastic bags. And probably also beat my head against the wall until I have brain damage. I hope it doesn't come to that!

This time it's for real

Yesterday and today, I eviscerated my bedroom. Everything must go. I put more loads of junk in the oven than I can even count; I laundered the last of my clothing. Towards the end of the day, running out of things I can safely bake, I decided to make some room in the freezer and take my first load of freezer-treated possessions out to the car where I'm keeping all the other treated possessions that are too pointy to store in garbage bags.

When I opened the freezer door, 10 days since I had placed my most recent load inside, the first thing I noticed was the multitude of dead insects arrayed near the door. Most of them were clearly fruit flies, all wings and legs, but some of them had the distinctive teardrop shape of bedbugs.

Bedbug. Teardrop shape and dark posterior.
No, this isn't one of the ones I found.
I really don't feel like getting close to them.

My stomach dropped. I grabbed my tweezers and with shaking hands, I managed to collect the three bedbug-shaped corpses (after crunching off most of their legs and crushing one of them entirely). They had long antennae and that characteristic darker posterior that screams "bedbugs." I about screamed myself.

Well, they are safely in a plastic bag now. Without their legs, I doubt that even if they revive, they'll be escaping anywhere, but I am totally freaked out anew!

These three bedbugs are the first hard evidence I've seen of them living in my house. After all my flashlit inspections, all my cleaning, all my scrubbing and vacuuming and high-temp washing and baking, I still hadn't seen one bug, nymph, egg, or even fecal stain. Yet these dudes prove that there are probably others. And if the others haven't been creeping out of their hiding places to die when I cooked them, then maybe they're still alive!

My car is probably now swarming with living bedbugs! I'm doomed.

The only stuff that I had in the freezer were the art supplies that I'd stored under my bed and the cardboard box of CD's I'd stored in my closet. So did they come from the closet or under the bed? Curse me for not trying harder to isolate the sources! If they were under the bed, I might still be OK, because almost everything that was formerly stored under the bed was in cardboard boxes that I subsequently threw away.

But then there were all the sewing supplies in the giant sewing box I'm so proud of. And the wrapping paper collection in the briefcase! Gaah!

Now, even if the house treatment is successful, I'll still have to re-treat everything I take out of the car! And then treat the car! Thank goodness I don't drive very often. Maybe I can just wait until summer and let the greenhouse effect do its work.

(I left the freezer stuff in the freezer for good measure. I'll take it out after I'm sure my 3 stooges don't wake up).

Bedbugs, week 3

After a pleasant 3 days in Florida, during which I discovered only one new itchy bump, I returned to my own bed with some trepidations. Over the course of the following day, itchy bumps appeared all over me--mostly in places I'd rather not mention. This, combined with my return to a climate where winter is just around the corner, combined with being unable to find any of my stuff since it's all packed up in plastic bags or piled in the back of my car, made me quite cranky.

So after work, I decided to escalate the battle a bit. I'd been waiting to aggressively treat my bed until we could treat the whole house, but I decided to give it a go anyway, because there are only so many itchy bumps I can stand before I lose my mind completely. So I stuck a sprayer nozzle in my electric teakettle and blasted every crevice in my bed (above the level of the duct tape) with boiling water.

Then I squirted hot glue in in all the places where bugs might conceivably be crawling under the tape. I wish I knew for sure whether the tape is actually enough to deter the bedbugs. It's certainly not catching any of them, but from forum discussions, I gather that that's to be expected. But if they're walking right over it with a grin on their faces, well, I'm wasting a lot of my time. It's the industrial-strength duct tape. If it's not good enough, I guess my only recourse is to cry.

My other housemate (the one that's never here) finally found time to bag up most of her possessions. She did it while I was gone, and I have to say that when I saw her handiwork, I was way impressed. She did more in 2 days than I've done over the course of several weeks.

On the other hand, she's never here! She doesn't have to pick and choose and try to decide what stuff she's going to need and what stuff she can safely pack away, because she doesn't need any of it! So now that she's done her part, we are almost prepared for our major offensive.

What's eating me?

On Wednesday, an exterminator came to do an inspection (thank goodness the inspections are free; the other exterminator who gave me a quote quoted 925$ for the whole house! If I'm repeating myself, it's because I'm in shock, and I'm only a few steps away from "buh buh buh")

When he came, he looked all over my bed and couldn't find anything, then he looked at my housemate's bed and found fecal stains around the edge of the mattress! Success! Validation at last! Then he looked closer and realized that the stains were actually the dark varnish Housemate had used to finish his bed frame. Failure. He did find bloodstains on Housemate's pillow, but no evidence of live bugs.

I got out my undeniable evidence: the live bugs I'd captured under my bed the previous week. They're in there, I assured him. They're just really tiny. But they weren't. The one that I'd so carefully sprayed to the piece of paper was no longer there. The live one that had been crawling around on the plastic lid was nowhere to be found. They must have died of asphyxiation and shriveled away. One of the ones attached to the ant was still there, but looking a little worse for the wear, and the exterminator wouldn't look at it in my pocket microscope, instead summarily dismissing it: "That? That's not a bedbug."

It was a bedbug! I knew it. It was just a little too young and a little too old (that is, a little too small and a little too decomposed) for a positive ID. But I knew it was a bedbug. I had the bites to prove it.

That afternoon, after he had left, I decided to check my clothes in the storage totes in the closet. I'd asked him whether they were safe, and he said they'd be fine and I should just concentrate on getting a bedbug cover for my mattress (which sounded like a lame idea to me, since my mattress didn't have any bugs on it, and the bedbug covers are around 50 dollars each), and I didn't trust  him anyway since he'd rejected my sample.

First I started poking around inside the My Fair Lady DVD that was sitting on top of them. And when I shone a flashlight into the depths of its cardboard cover, I found (egads!) Two tiny translucent insects crawling around inside it. Despite my immediate horror, I set out to get better documentation of my infestation. So I got those little guys on tape. Meaning I stuck a piece of Scotch tape inside the DVD case and snagged the bugs. The box went into a plastic bag, and then, with great trepidation, I opened up the storage tote, and then started looking around on the lid. Closely. There were more of the vile creatures! These are the "host" of bedbugs I mentioned yesterday.

Since I didn't think it would be easy to identify insects that are all squashed between two layers of semitransparent tape, I decided to try to get photographic evidence as well (I recalled one website was offering money for good photos of bedbugs). It was time to put my new camera's super-macro mode to the test.

This was not easy. Try sticking your camera lens within centimeter of a miniscule insect that keeps walking around on a recessed surface whilst lighting it with a flashlight. After a few attempts, I was exhausted, and set about the daunting task of discovering just what else had been infested. The discovery of my bedbuggy boots transpired, and I was overcome with woe.

My housemate's comment about my space-bending storage abilities cheered me up a bit, but mainly I was too depressed to do anything else that night but quarantine everything in plastic bags and crawl into my no-longer-safe-haven of a bed. I didn't get any new bites that night, and I thought maybe this time I had 'em licked. But no, two new bites this morning.

After my requisite 5 hours of work today, I decided to find out whether my photographic experiment had been successful. And lo, it had! I found on my SD card more than one in-focus, well-lit shot of the insects I had subsequently consigned to their adhesive graves.

There it is! Between the A and the 7!

Well, something compelled me to double-check my findings, so I searched Google for "bedbug nymph." And the first result I found was "Booklice vs. Bedbug nymphs." I clicked.

"Several bedbuggers," said the article I found, "have mistaken [booklice] for bed bug nymphs. Notice the shape of the body is elongated, with three clear segments. There’s a pronounced head." Yes, that is definitely the shape of the creatures I found. Bedbugs, on the other hand, are supposed to have a flat, wide body.

1. Bedbug                         2. My bug                                        3. Booklouse

Well, it seems pretty clear that the samples I've found are not bedbugs, but booklice (also known as psocids, if you want to sound more scientific). Booklice, as their name implies, live in books. They do not eat blood or any other human byproducts. They eat mold and mildew.

So what this says about my house is that we may have some mold growing somewhere that I need to take care of. But what it does not say is why I got two new bites since yesterday!

Night night, sleep tight

It's my bedtime, and I'm avoiding going there for obvious reasons. Instead, I am going to tell you more of my bedbug saga. Don't expect the brilliant telling you received in last post; my 17 hours of wakefulness have not been kind to my writing ability.

Following my great revelation of 2 weeks ago, I went into cleaning overdrive. I vacuumed every corner of my room, washed every sheet and blanket on my bed, stuffed all of my stuffed animals unceremoniously into a plastic bag, and began researching.

My bedbug infestation, as with most things in my life, does not follow the typical pattern.

For one, I insist on calling them bedbugs, even though traditional terminology would prefer "bed bugs" (with a space).

Hey, now, they're the scourge of humanity. Doesn't that at least make them worthy of a compound word?

But aside from my usual nomenclatural stubbornness, what sets my bedbugs apart?

• They aren't in my bed. Oh, I've checked high and low. Every day I do a flashlit inspection of my mattress, hoping and fearing that a bedbug might rear its ugly head. Yet, I can find no sign that they are in my bed, or indeed, have ever been there. Other than the marks that they leave on me while I'm sleeping.
• They seem to shun soft surfaces. Although I do tend to find them around cracks and crevices, which they are said to enjoy, my bedbugs seem to congregate around the very materials they are supposed to avoid. I found a whole host of them on the plastic storage tubs I keep in my closet (by "host" I mean approximately 5) when bedbugs are supposed to dislike plastic. And as I've already said, they left my mattress high and dry.
• They do not bite in a "breakfast, lunch, and dinner" pattern. I have noticed I find their bites in pairs, but never in threes. Apparently my bedbugs are trying to lose weight.

I have concocted a plan to rid myself of bedbugs. Unfortunately, this requires doing a lot of laundry.  There are now 6 rather large garbage bags in the basement full of my clothes and other fabric items (ahh, now I know why sewing is a bad hobby) and I haven't even gotten to my winter clothes collection yet! When my housemate saw all the junk I had dredged out of my closet (just my closet, mind you, and just the bottom level...not the shelf on top, or the storage area under my bed, or my second closet, or any of my shelves and tables), he said, "How you fit all that stuff in your room, I'll never know." Yes, there is a time when it sucks to have the remarkable ability to store a whole house's worth of stuff in a single room, and that is when you have to clean it to remove bedbugs.

I have put duct tape (sticky side out) around the narrowest parts of my bed frame (being a sturdy bed, it doesn't have legs as such) and pulled the bed away from the wall. Then I removed the ladder from the bed, too, and am slowly mastering the art of jumping into a bed that's 5 feet up in the air. In the three days that I have been taking these precautions, I haven't gotten a bite. I don't think. Unless this itchy spot here is one. It's too bad I'm itchy by nature. I'm probably causing spots to spring up simply by the power of anxiety!

I vacuum all exposed areas of the rug every couple of days, and am about halfway done cleaning out my closet. I found bedbugs crawling around the zippers of all my most fabulous boots. Other clothing items, you can throw in the washer or dryer and be done with them, but boots are another matter. I had to put them in the oven on 170 for 20-40 minute periods. I'm storing all my heat-treated items in the car. Good thing we're having an unusually warm spell coming up. It will hopefully bake out any survivors.

I also learned you can freeze bedbugs to death. So I have put many of my paper products in my housemate's freezer downstairs and will leave them there 2 weeks. She's never here, anyway.

My other housemate bought some diatomaceous earth, which he sprinkled liberally (OK, he "dumped") all around his bed. He claims he's not getting any more bites...but he claimed that once before. When this is all over, I shall avail myself of the diatomaceous earth and put a protective circle around my sleeping area, and another one around the perimeter of the room.

But first, the major offensive: pesticides. I will show no mercy. I'm having trouble getting my housemates on board with this campaign of destruction (mostly because I don't believe they're as horrified by this whole mess as I am, but also because they're a little less Type A than me about pretty much everything, including basic housekeeping), but if we don't take every precaution we can, we risk having them come back and having to pay around a thousand dollars for professional extermination.

So here's the plan: Clean, clean, clean. Strip the house down to essentials. Should I throw away the couch? I don't think it's infested, but it's ugly anyway, and I got it for free, and it would be one less thing to worry about.

Then set off a bedbug fogger in every room. Then once the dust has cleared, go back in and spray every corner the fog might have missed. Saturate those suitcases. And my rug. Every inch of it. Then break out the diatomaceous earth. I won't let my bedspread near the wall for months. I have been thinking about moving out, and if I'm not confident the bugs are gone by the time my lease is up, I'll be out of here!

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!