Browsed by
Month: April 2013

more on bikes

more on bikes

the first concrete memory i associate with a bike is when i got my bigwheel for christmas when i was 2 or 3. it was a pink and purple bigwhel that actually lasted quite a while, as myself and my siblings all used it, rotating our little legs  to try to get the hard plastic get a grip on the gravel in our driveway, until it was a faded greyish white plastic remnant no one could fit into anymore.
another early memory of a bike was riding down our long driveway to get the mail with my dad on his bike. his bike had a metal carrier on the back, and he would set me on it, telling me to keep my legs up and clear of the back wheel. i remember it was a hazy day – it may have been sunset, with the low sun shining yellow-orange on our east-west road. then i remember a mess, because i hadn’t upheld my end of the bargain and my foot got caught in the spokes of the back wheel. we went to the ER, where i don’t remember a lot besides bright overhead lights. i didn’t break anything.
the rest of my bike time is relatively fuzzy. i know i got my first two-wheeler for christmas, but i don’t remember it. there were training wheels, then there was one training wheel, then there were none. i know it was pink, and at some point i put those little brightly colored plastic spoke beads on my wheels that made me not only cool, but also added a musical element to tooling around the driveway. i had an old brown secondhand bike for a while after i outgrew my pink bike, and after the barn burned down (for which i was NOT responsible! woo!), one of the first things my dad and i did was go to the bike shop and buy me a new bike. it was the early 90s, right around the time road bikes were on the way out and mountain bikes were on the way in. i remember the bike guy trying to convince me to get the mountain bike he made me read the full guide here in hopes that I would jump on board. unfortunately i was not a pioneer, and i got a nice, sleek, purple road bike to be like all my friends. after about 3-4 years of riding it, i never rode the road bike again (much, i think, to my dad’s chagrin).
a few memorable bike events:
1. the catholic school walkathon/bikeathon was held every year, and my friends and i would bike the 12-mile loop around the eastern edge of austin to raise money for catholic schools.
2. one hot summer day, we were planning on going swimming, and it must have been at marty handsome’s house, because liz and i were biking eastward from our house with plastic garbage bags with a towel and change of clothes dangling from our handlebars. somehow my plastic bag whipped into the spokes (those dang wheels!) and stopped my bike cold. i flipped over the front handlebars and nailed my chin on the asphalt.
3. many trips to southeastern minnesota were had to take a trip on the root river bike trail, seemingly spending all day doing so.

write away

write away

this morning i went to a writing workshop with michael perry, author of “population 485” and “coop” and “truck” etc. 2 things i got out of the session that i need to work on – write more (i don’t write nearly enough) and revision’s nasty. the theme of the workshop was that you don’t need to live in an exciting place to make good writing. it’s all about taking the mundane, regular, everyday things and presenting them correctly (rhetoric!!). he suggested  taking a creative nonfiction class (done) and attending writing conferences (eek). his first 3 books were self-published (in a different time….with his own funds at a printer) and an agent approached HIM after seeing his freelance work.
i had fan girl moment. he said that he has been to neil gaiman’s house on occasion and done things with him. it took everything in me not to be all *SQUEEE* ish, as the room was full of serious, nodding writers (seriously, a few published authors and scereenwriters were there – i am small beans).
1. i need to write more 2. maybe look into submitting essays to magazines or newspapers or online places 3. i have a day job and that will severely cramp my wanting to do this, but we’ll forge ahead and see what happens.

archives

archives

you may have noticed a huuuuge increase in my archives on the right hand side lower in the page. i just spend 4 hours going through my old LJ entries, tagging them, and uploading them. i still have to go through quite a bit and delete some of the more, uh, interesting ones, especially now since so many work-related people search this stuff (seriously – what was i thinking back in 2004? – oh yeah, that no one other than 20-somethings went online to look for this stuff. it was true). so….a lot more reading material out there if you’re bored out of your skull one afternoon.
i ALSO created a new twitter handle for all things DS related – @DevilsSyrupBook, so i will push posts about DS to that account, and all other stuff to my main twitter account. plus, if i’m going to do this book, i want to grab up that handle before someone else does.
i leave you with the hoff.

grr

grr

it still irks me that i lost 3 years’ worth of blog posts. so i’m going to at least put the pictures from these posts out there, as if that will somehow make it better (a little, but not much).

kindergarten

kindergarten

tell me everything you remember about kindergarten.
the kindergarten room at queens was unlike all the other classrooms in the private catholic school. it was by itself on the second-and-a-half floor along with the reading room for grades 1-5. there was a short stairway taken up from the 5th and 6th grade classrooms, and you were in kindergarten domain. it was a green room, i remember, large and cut up into sections by dark-trimmed large archways like you see in older homes. there was the small corner cut off from the rest of the room for reading, another for playtime, and a semicircle of small desks with small chairs for when we learned our ABCs. and can’t forget the statue of the virgin mary, around which every morning we said our prayers.
but the mainstay of the room was sr. brian. i had no particular beef with the teacher of the kindergarten class, other than she seemed to make a lot of people cry more than any other teacher did. one time i was humming while i was putting my ABC blocks in order, and she told me to quit humming. i don’t know why a kindergarten teacher would discourage humming in children, but there you have it.
we hatched a butterfly in kindergarten. i don’t know who it was, but someone found a cocoon, and we put it in a jar to watch its transformation into a monarch.
our kindergarten bags came to us before we started school. they were simple, made out of cloth with a design on the front and our name, just big enough to carry the few sheets of paper needed for kindergarten homework. mine was light pink.
then there was the rivalry between me and nicki bibus. she was at the beginning of the morning kindergarten line, and i was at the end. because we rotated leaders in the line, when she got stuck at the end, she was behind me. and for some reason she started literally picking on me. don’t as me why – maybe she didn’t like my face. anyway, i ratted on her because i was sick of the picking. sr. brian made us shake hands underneath the virgin mary. and guess what? the picking became worse – who knew, right?

so it starts

so it starts

i spend a good chunk of my weekend reading through books and finding websites for my devil’s syrup book. a lot of it i already know; i just need a legitimate source. i also looked up how long a memoir should be, and they’re averaging around 80,000-100,000 words – thats twice nanowrimo! good thing i have longer than a month, i guess.
then i rewatched “king corn” which is what prompted my strike in the first place, and it just made me more po’d at the whole industry. what a racket. time to go full-out unprocessed foods, i tell ya.
anyway, i heard something funny at walmart yesterday (step one: stop shopping at walmart) while i was picking out my eggs (i went through THREE cartons before finding uncracked eggs…). there were two girls there picking out eggs.
girl 1: if XXX were here, he would get the cage-free eggs.
girl 2: i used to buy those…but then i realized i wasn’t trying to save the world.
this if funny and sad at the same time. sad because if everyone tried to save the world, guess what? we probably would. funny cuz of the way she said it. it was just perfect timing. and the two together made it awesome because then i put down my cheapo eggs bought the cage-free eggs. if she won’t save the world, i will.

saturday!

saturday!

i’m hoping it will be a very productive saturday. i’ve got my stack of research books for corn, laundry to do, and a derm appointment to see about accutane. my skin has been cooperating a little lately (of course), so hopefully s/he’ll say yea to the accutane even after seeing my clear-ish skin. (i think the lanolin might be working – to a point.)
the cold weather has sort of cleared up here. jane called me last night and told me how it was 70 there today. that made me sad. all i’m asking for is 50! (supposedly tomorrow…)
welp,, that’s pretty much all i’ve got today. we’ll see if i come up with anything new later on – it might be a two-post day; you never know.

outside

outside

tell me about a time you slept outside.
in 2007, harry potter 7 came out, and chances were it came out the first day of my family reunion, where we spent 4 days at leech lake. seeing’s how this was my 28th reunion and this was the first time HP7 was out, i spent most of the time with my nose buried in the book.
the first morning i woke up early – it was barely light out – to the sound of a light drizzle on my tent. i was warm and comfy inside, but i couldn’t get back to sleep because of the thought of HP7 waiting for me. so in the wee hours of the morning, next to leech lake in my tent with filtered light coming through the top with the sound of rain plip plip plipping on the tent walls, i read my way through harry and hermione’s own camping adventure. meanwhile, a low rumble from far away started up and continued…and continued…and continued. it was the oddest thing as i, for some reason, had never actually heard rolling thunder. i kept expecting a big crash of some sort, but it never came, just a low rumble, like the sound of another person’s stomach grumbling.
eventually i decided it was time to get out of the tent, so i pulled back my sleeping bag, collected my book, and braved the drizzle.

research

research

i have a list of 5 books to check out to begin “real” (aka sourced) research for my hfcs writing. here is something i found today while reading a book unrelated that i’m going to use:
In 1980, at the dawn of the obesity epidemic, the US food supply provided 120 pounds of added caloric sweeteners per capita per year – 84 pounds from sucrose, 35 pounds from HFCS, and the rest from honey and maple syrup. By 2008, the total had increased to 136 pounds, but the mix had changed. The amount of sucrose in the food supply decreased by 18 pounds, but this decline was than offset by a 34-pound increase in HFCS, which has the same number of calories as sucrose. Fructose, we must emphasize, comprises about half of both sweeteners (glucose is the other half). Nobody is or should be worried about the fructose in fruit, because fruits do not have all that much, and whatever fructose they do have is accompanied by fiber, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and other good thing.   – Why Calories Count, pg 162-163
per capita, americans consume almost 70 lbs of HFCS a year. omg!!!

home

home

where is home for you?
home is not necessarily a concrete where. when i was young, i could pinpoint home to an address – ask me where home was and i would spit out RR5 box 23, Austin, MN. it was an easy, simple answer. cut to our move to the new london-spicer area, and i was conflicted; at first i still thought of austin as home, but then as the months progressed, it gradually pulled away and new london became home. enter college, and everyone went “home” over break, weekends, summer. even after i graduated from college, i still talked about going home – and i didn’t mean my apartment; i meant my parents’ home in new london.
but something happens when you meet someone you want to be with on a more permanent basis who isn’t your immediate family. somewhere in there, a shift happens in your mind that moves home from a physical place to a person. and maybe home wasn’t really about the physical place all along – it was about the family, the traditions, the laughter. but there was a point where i was in a flux of what, or who, home actually was. i would say i was going home to new london for some event, but once i got to new london, i had to get back home to nate. after a year or so of marriage, home was 90% nate, and now home is always where nate and the kitties are. if i’m going to new london, i’ll say i’m going to new london or to my parents’ house. even so, when i’m with family, i’ll always be home.