Pearl died. RIP Pearl. She died while I was on a work trip so I didn’t have to deal with the body, so that was nice of her. My sister said, “She probably died of sadness that you left.” LOL. No.
I’m reading Wuthering Heights and these heights are not wuthering fast enough. I don’t know what that means! I just know that Catherine is awful. Heathcliff is awful. Everyone is awful! I think I was under the impression that the Brontes were Austen-esque. AND THEY ARE NOT. Which is fine. It is just not what I was expecting when I tucked into the Heights and realized, oh damn, these people are terrible and also it’s very dreary. In Austen, there are terrible people and there are not-as-terrible people and it is not always dreary. Only sometimes! To move the plot! I like to be tricked into liking someone only to find out they’re awful later! Bronte is just like, “Yeah, all of these people are bad, buckle up.”
I figured out substack sort of, so now I get most of my ‘stacks in my Feedly reader and some I just get on the app and some I get in my email too. Well, I made that sound chaotic. It is. I just am used to it now?
I’m trying to plan a trip to Europe with the kids and I don’t know if you’ve heard, but AIRFARE IS OUTRAGEOUS! We’ve done some domestic travel recently and seriously, how are people managing this? It is VERY MUCH A LOT OF DOLLARS TO SIT IN A FART TUBE! I wonder how much my extra kidney would fetch?
I’ve been trying to play tennis with S weekly but usually it ends up being every 2 or 3 weeks and we went yesterday and my arm is very sore right now. I enjoy playing (we don’t keep score, we just try to have a good number of rallies it’s fun!) but I am very competitive and want to learn how to WIN (like I said we don’t keep score, this is just for MY OWN PERSONAL I AM A WINNER FILES) and honestly I don’t have the time to become a tennis champion right now, but that is the only thing holding me back from glory. (LOL.)
In April of last year, I caved and told the boys they could get some pet mice. Knowing full well, I would be the one doing the cage cleaning and the feeding, etc. Mice are pretty easy, it’s fine. Then in May, Moses’s mouse Indy died. So we got Manny’s mouse Jessie a friend named Pearl.
Jessie and Pearl did not get along at first and it was kind of terrible. But then they became pals and this is a lot of words about mice, I know.
Jessie developed a big tumor and just kept trucking along until I found her dead in the cage this week.
Cue “In the Arms of the Angels.”
Pearl is now showing signs of scratching herself raw and I was like, cool, this is going to be a fun “side quest*” for me to deal with on a Friday.
I called a vet (they don’t see mice), I did an online vet appointment (they cannot prescribe over the internet), and finally went to who I assume is the only mouse doctor in Los Angeles and she was not cheap.
She walked into the room with her nurse and THREE vets in training. Which, was cute. They were very cute. And very sympathetic. And I was like, ‘This is embarrassing, I am embarrassed that I’m spending this much money on a little mouse.’ And they were like, ‘Oh, she’s very sweet, I’m sure she’s worth it.’ SHE IS NOT. BUT I AM APPARENTLY STILL DOING THIS?
The doctor did an exam. (HOW?) And said, while it could possibly be mites, it’s not likely (she explained why and offered to treat her for them as a just in case, but that involved 6 weeks of appointments…) and given her cage mate just died, she’s probably suffering from anxiety. So… now I have to give a mouse gabapentin 2-3 times a day. And you guys, what?
Why?
What?
Anyway. A lot of words about a $6 petco feeder mouse that is now, like the rest of the adults in this fucking family, suffering from anxiety.
*Claire from Online uses “side quests” as way to describe her weekend to do list and I find it charming.
(The movie not the TV show.) Also, this is a 30 year old movie, (I got scolded on twitter for ‘spoiling’ a new release rom-com, but like, can you really spoil a rom-com?) if you haven’t seen The Bodyguard and think a 30 year old movie can be spoiled, don’t read this.
I stopped watching Yellowstone because I found the writing to be so bizarre when it came to the women in the cast. Like choice after choice these women were making felt like choices no women I know would make. And before you start with your “but YOU are a liberal west coast elite!” let me remind you I grew up in a rural town (population 5,000) and rode horses and went to rodeos and was in 4-H and am descended from farmers. (Yes farmers are different than ranchers, IDC.) So, I was feeling like, there is Kevin Costner missing from my life and I need to right that wrong. The Bodyguard (available on Showtime, one of the subscriptions I cancelled and last night was my last night with it and boy did I waste it…) was in my queue and I figured what the heck! I loved that movie! I danced with my SERIOUS CRUSH to I Will Always Love You at my junior prom. (I went to prom with his best friend, and later heard that he was really mad at me for dancing with his best friend and then snuggling with him at a party all night… ah, high school.) I remembered this movie as being “A Good Movie.” BOY WAS I WRONG.
The opening is so chaotic and janky that I assumed the film tested poorly and they went and re-shot the beginning because no one understood who Kevin was and why he was such an in demand bodyguard. I went so far as to look up the script this afternoon and the shooting script was even more chaotic and good lord, this was a movie in development for something like 20 years and they still didn’t nail the opening? HOLLYWOOD, CALL ME, I HAVE NOTES.
Then the love story is… shall we say, thin. KC falls in love WAY too quickly. WH’s sister is evil! In an almost believable way, but honestly, if you’re at the point of hiring a hitman to kill your sister, you need to stop working for her maybe. Just a thought! The supporting cast is underdeveloped and forgotten. I wanted more from the chauffeur. I wanted less from the PR guy. I could watch scenes with KC getting roasted by his dad in front of his girlfriend/client all NIGHT and there was only one. The movie has great songs, but the SCORE. THE SCORE! IS EMBARRASSING. (I think that 90s movies should be forgiven for this, but I LOL’d at a couple of cues.)
Side note: My husband claims he knows neither version of I Will Always Love You. I adore the Whitney version because it’s the first one I heard and see above re: HIGH SCHOOL CRUSH JUNIOR PROM, but Dolly’s version is heartbreakingly good. I feel like the Dolly version should have been the version they played in the country bar, and back to that, was there a country bar in LA in 1992? (My husband claimed that was not a thing, he lived here then, and did a lot of drinking in bars then… I am inclined to believe him.)
I did not love this re-watch. It did not make me feel things. I should have just watched the Whitney I Will Always Love You music video. And caught up on Yellowjackets before my subscription ended.
If you want really entertaining movie reviews of really old movies, check out Unemployed Lawyer Mom.
I finished reading Project Hail Mary yesterday and I just loved it. It obviously had some issues (why does DuBois speak like a person who was socialized in an underground bunker ala Brendan Fraser in Blast From the Past? and was all the science talk really required? Did every problem get solved too easily?) but mostly the relationship with Grace and Rocky sustained me and made me feel things. If you were a Challenger obsessed kid excited for Christa McAuliffe to go to space, you might feel things too.
This is fan art from a wiki fan page and I love it.
His little tool belt!
I need to read something by a woman after my latest streak of dude authors so I’m going with My Brilliant Friend. If you hated it, don’t tell me.
Ok, one Rocky quote for the road. “You will miss me, question? I will miss you. You are friend.” Bye.
I have been tired the last couple of days, so I did what any normal** person does and googled why am I so tired and what time should I go to bed?
I am so tired because I am dying of COPD and liver disease, as it turns out. OR, less likely, I am just not getting enough sleep. My doctor* is very vague.
How does one get enough sleep? Well, my doctor* says I should go to bed at 8:55pm. And honestly, my doctor* is really out of their fucking mind. How could I possibly read to the kids, exercise, read to myself, watch a show, and debrief the day with my husband if I am going to bed at 8:55pm. It is VERY clear to me now that I am tired because I am (dying of COPD and liver disease and) not getting enough sleep.
*Google
**I mean, honestly.
ALSO THIS
I’m on Van Life TikTok and I have a lot of questions about how these things handle crashes. There was this one with a family of 5 (DEAR GOD) who I think only went camping/road tripping in their van, ANYWAY, they did a tour and there were like three car seats behind the cab (and she commented they were bolted in?) and over the cab, so like RIGHT OVER the car seats, the mom was like “and here is where we store our tripods and tents!” And it was like a little open shelf. And then in the comments someone was like, “Um, is there net? Or…” and she responded, “Oh, we stuff sleeping bags in there and it’s very secure.”
What? I feel like there is a generation of people who didn’t get enough safety videos on VHS served up to them on a TV cart in Social Studies. Like, why do I know so much about crashes? M.A.D.D. videos? Or was it my summer of Real Stories of the Highway Patrol (SPEED IS THE NUMBER ONE CAUSE OF CRASHES).
There are also a LOT of white women who are talking about their bathroom habits and this one lady was like “I peed in a bush outside in this strip mall,” and lady, can you NOT? If you were unhoused and not white you would be the star of Next Door for the day. Like, USE A STARBUCKS, damn.
We had a house guest this weekend and I drank more than I normally do and we went bowling and to a rooftop restaurant and it was just perfect.
We watched Inside Out with the kids and I feel like I’ve talked about it before, but her mom’s core emotion being Sadness and her dad’s being Anger felt.. well, sad. And then we all talked about our own core emotions and our house guest was like JOY FOR SURE and I was like, oh god, is it Sadness for me? Anger? Am I Disgust? I honestly don’t know. I do hope Joy gets to take the wheel every now and again, because nothing in a movie has stuck with me in that way in a while and IT IS BUMMING ME OUT.
Other things I’m watching are Daisy Jones and the Six and The Last of Us. DJ is not hitting me in the right spot. The book was good, a fun audio listen, but the show is leaving me cold. The Last of Us is frankly surprisingly “infected” light. I am faithfully watching and hoping for the best for Joel and Ellie, but I read game spoilers and well, that was a MISTAKE.
I do recommend Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. I cried. The boys loved it.
I went to lunch in Silver Lake the other day. It has been many years since I’ve been to a restaurant in my old ‘hood and as soon as I walked into the restaurant I was like, “oh yeah, Silver Lake.” And then I chuckled. It’s hipsters all the way down. I love that neighborhood, I love the hills and the reservoir, I do not miss feeling like I was the world’s most normal person around the world’s most interesting people. I used to worry about things like that. Not that I’m some evolved 40+ year old, but my concerns lean more toward “is the food good here?” rather than “is what I’m wearing stupid?” (I still worry that what I am wearing is stupid, but it doesn’t stop me from going to places wearing stupid things that are probably not stupid, just deeply deeply normal and boring.)
THE WORLDS MOST BUSINESS-Y COUCH
We have a couch. I hate the couch. It was an expensive couch. It’s very Modern/Scandi. It was once nice, but is terrible now. The arms are off because they were getting ruined. The cushions won’t stay on. The children have… childrened it and I keep saying “Let’s get a new couch!” and we get flummoxed by the price of couches, the material options, the fact that our living room is weirdly arranged because S won’t let go of a stupid table that ruins the flow.
I sat on a couch today that was fine. It was not what I would call super comfy, but it had arms and wasn’t stained and it didn’t feel like a couch in an agency waiting room, so it had that going for it but it didn’t feel like a couch I wanted to spend $2k on. I need someone else to just miraculously find a couch that I love and that is very comfortable and will have a good fabric and interesting legs and the pillows won’t end up on the floor because even though my children are not babies they still seem feral around couch pillows and then deliver it to me and it won’t be $2500. Maybe good couches are just expensive? Maybe I am a Boomer and think couches should be around $1500 and that is just wrong.
THIS USED TO BE EASIER
What am I doing here? I don’t even know but I’m gonna keep doing it and see what happens! It could be stupid, it might only last for March. Let’s worry about that tomorrow!
Do we really think that’s a real number for a year? I feel like sci-fi writers would use 2023 because it SEEMS made up and far away and like it will never happen. Well, it happened, hypothetical sci-fi writers, it happened.
ABRUPT SUBJECT CHANGE
I was talking to my friend about how mad I was when I was on hiatus that I couldn’t write. I have a pretty decent idea. I had LOADS of time and I had zero motivation. None. I couldn’t even open a notebook. Something to unpack in therapy probably! (I am not currently in therapy, so I guess we’ll never know.) Anyway, she said I should try Chat GPT and I was very curious about it and she gave me a logline it fed her for an idea she was tooling around with and I was like wait a second are we going to be replaced by talented robot computers? And she was like, probably not, but MAYBE.
Which brings me to this (completely unrelated thought), I have noticed a serious uptick in Substack…s (?) (What are we calling them? Newsletters? Posts? Stacks? Substackies? Probably substackies. That seems right.) I have noticed an uptick in substack things and while I appreciate that my friends are writing (check out Wendy’s series on Instagram coaches!) I also wish people would just go back to blogging so my feed reader gets updated and I don’t get another email in my inbox. Or, wait, am I doing it wrong? Is there a substack way of things that I’m not understanding? Either way, it’s blogging and it’s coming to me in email form and my personal email is a hellscape and at some point I’ll probably just have to give up and start a new email. What was I saying? Oh yeah, go back to blogging please! My feedly is easy to navigate.
SUBSCRIPTIONS I SHOULD CANCEL
I have so many subscriptions. Big Media seems to be saying “oh no we’re poor” but honestly HOW? All I do is pay for more media! I have HBO, Netflix, Showtime, Directv Stream (DO NOT GET ME STARTED ON THIS ONE), Peacock, Disney (I think this one is free with my cell phone?), Prime, Hulu (Oh maybe it’s this one that’s free with my cell phone), and that’s just television. I need an intervention. But pry my Peloton subscription from my cold dead hands.
I started Peloton a little over a year ago after being influenced by another friend. I do not have the hardware, I just use the app and it is perfect for me. Little virtual prizes for completing a certain number of classes, or doing a little challenge, miles, etc!
Has my health improved? I don’t know! But I will find out in a few weeks when Infrastructure Week begins again. I was sick with cold after cold starting the day after Christmas and continuing through February so I mostly went on walks, but I assume I am in better health than I was before.
IN CLOSING
Will I try Chat GPT? Will my health ACTUALLY be improved? Will I ever cancel some of those TV channels? Will I figure out Substack? Who can say?
I’m sure you all remember at the beginning of the pandemic, during lockdown when people began to bake. Yeast was in short supply or just completely missing from shelves so folks began their sourdough gloop. I am not one to bandwagon in the kitchen, so I opted out on baking. For one, it seemed hard. For two, I was not in any mental place to fail at MORE things.
Cut to a few weeks ago, I was looking at my goal of trying 12 new recipes this year. I was perusing the internet as one does and saw a No Knead Dutch Oven Bread recipe that seemed… simple. Particularly because yeast is readily available (no need to do a science experiment!).
So I bought a Dutch oven, I bought some yeast and gave it a go!
Below we have the dough looking a little too dry. (I added about four tablespoons more water and it became the right amount of stickiness.)
Here she is rising like the superstar she is!
OMG, if baking is this easy, SIGN ME UP.
A LOAF OF BREAD. MAGIC. AM I A WITCH?
Breakfast this morning was HOMEMADE BREAD, a fried egg with everything but the bagel seasoning and a little chili garlic paste to dip into. DELICIOUS.
I have not written a thing on this site for almost a year! I write a lot of pithy little things on twitter. But hey, why not write some pithy little things here.
One of those things was a call for earring recommendations. I got my ears re-pierced… 4? 5? years ago and wore the flat backed boring studs only switching them out for a pretty pair of pearl drop earrings S gave me for Christmas if we were going out to dinner. Then he bought me another pretty pair from The Real Real and now I have two pairs! I hated putting the flat backed earrings back on. It is impossibly hard. I finally got some closed hoop earrings and I keep them in my ears 24/7.
Anyway, I put a call out on twitter for nice earrings and boy did folks deliver! (I have an Amazon affiliate account, so Amazon links are affiliate. I… have never made more than like $8 a year with that, so don’t worry, I am not an influencer.)
Here are some of the suggestions:
$0 – $50
Allie Kay – Multi Mini Stone ($20) (These are very cute, but I might not currently have the art teacher vibe going on in my closet to pull them off.)
Amazon – Comfy Earrings ($25) (If I didn’t have such a Hate Hate relationship with flat back earrings, I would probably buy a pair of these!)
J. Crew – Crystal Climber Earrings ($36) (These are in my cart and J. Crew tells me I better buy them soon or they will be sold out! Which is probably a trick, but I probably will buy these tonight.)
Uncommon James – Girlboss Earrings ($46) (As Kathleen says, unfortunate name, but fantastic earrings.) (Go be a BOSS boss, not a girl boss, when you wear these to your zoom meeting.)
Ana Luisa – Onda Mini ($46) (Kathleen actually sent me to this page which has so many great earrings, but I narrowed it to these as my faves)
$51-$100
Baleen – Dipped Tulip Hoops – Mint ($56) (I can’t decide if I like the Mint or the Cobalt better but these are so simple but striking)
Glass Berries (Etsy) – Glass Pumpkin Earrings ($61) (This caused a bit of a kerfuffle on twitter, but they ARE cute if you need a theme earring)
Cat Bird NYC – Ear Cuff ($78 – for one) (As Jenny and Kate described this – the perfect way to be cool if you’re 42 and don’t want to pierce your cartilage)
Loren Hope – Austin Studs ($88) (I really want something like this.)
Clare V – Layered Stone Statement earrings ($95) (I like these because they look like they could be estate jewelry, but they are only $95)
Wolf & Badger – Solid X Pave Safety Pin Earring ($60) (Gold and rose gold also available.) (Remember when you would put safety pins through the top layer of your skin to look bad ass? Just me? Nevermind.)
Rhea Noa Jewelry (Etsy) – 14k Gold Diamond Huggies ($217) (Can you have too many diamond huggie earrings?)
$301 – $500
Tilda Beihn – Mini Lumen Drops ($460 for a pair) (If you are very fashionable, I bet you could just buy one and be cool with your cool mismatched earrings, but I am elderly and not able to pull that off)
Lindsey Leigh – Graduated Diamond Huggies ($1,145) (You might already know that ‘huggies’ are hoops that hug your ears. I did not. I am now a cool mom, not a regular mom.)
Estate Diamond Jewelry – Batley Earrings ($5300) (Oh, you have a jewelry safe. You have galas to attend. You are a woman about town.)
Estate Diamond Jewelry – Canonsburg Earrings ($78,000) (Look, you are a widow under mysterious circumstances, but that should not stop you from looking nice.)
