What a great Fourth of July gift for the United States - goodbye, and good riddance!
I've spent nearly two weeks with one of those fun summer colds, but if I can stop coughing long enough, I'm off to a pool party this afternoon. (Now that'll be good for me, won't it? Or for other guests who get too close.)
Happy holiday weekend to my fellow Americans!
I'm focused on Canada these days, I guess, because I'm making plans to drive to Québec later this month. On the way, I'm going to be meeting Sean and his husband Jeffrey, who have graciously invited me to stay with them en route to break up the trip!
Odd choice of image, I know - but it was the only photo I had with flags of both Canada and Québec. I used to shop at this Canadian Tire in Trois-Rivières, by the way - but I never bought tires there. :-)
Okay, not wheezy enough to prevent commuting by bike yesterday, but about halfway to work my chest started to tighten and I started to feel that choking sensation that I hate - which lasted all freaking day, despite all the albuterol huffing. So after six months of practically no asthma symptoms at all, are these exercise- or allergen-induced? My vote is for allergens, since the pollen levels are high. But I'm hoping this is a brief symptomatic interlude and not an omen of a miserable summer. Usually I'm okay until August, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed. (And look how fast I managed to go on a long downhill stretch on my ride home!)
So, what else? I'm really enjoying Simon Doonan's Beautiful People. I've watched the first three episodes on the web. It's light, but very entertaining, and young Simon's father in the series is hot.
And this weekend a colleague and I are hosting a big party for two of our friends who are retiring. I invited Mike to come to the party with me - so I was actually going to bring a date to a work event - but now I think he isn't going to be able to go.
Last but not least, it's almost summer vacation! Just days away, as a matter of fact. And I am craving yet another bike...
I've been snickering all afternoon at the New York Times's Tom Swifty contest entries. Most of them are good, but my two favorites are definitely these:
I've also been fascinated all week by The Washington Post's online retrospective of the Robert Wone murder. It's a truly bizarre story. I remember when the murder happened a few years back, but hadn't thought about it since then. Now, nearly three years later, it's still unsolved. The Post is running a full feature about the case, including several new articles, a photo gallery, a timeline, a diagram of the Dupont Circle rowhouse, and links to all its previous coverage of the case. It will be fascinating to find out what really happened, if the truth ever comes out.
And speaking of bizarre, now the debris fields in the Atlantic are reportedly not from the missing Air France jetliner.
Hope everyone has a great weekend. I can't believe that I have a work event both Saturday and Sunday! I'll still be happy as long as the weather turns warm and sunny again, though.
Yes, it's a new post. Don't have a stroke.
But the one reader I probably have left is correct, I believe, in thinking that this is the longest uninterrupted stretch of time that I've neglected my blog.
But at least for now I'm not ready to hang up my keyboard, and with the rapid approach of summer I will have more time and, I hope, more inspiration, to keep writing.
On verra.
So, what's new?
I'm sad about the missing Air France jet.
My colleague and I just finished an enormous work project yesterday, nearly 200 pages of text when all was said and done. We both crept out and went home early when we finally uploaded the completed file.
I'm going back to Québec this summer. Plans are to meet up with some fellow bloggers - Sean and, I hope, J.P. and Earl - along the way.
And oh, yes - I had my testicles ultrasounded today. I'm not too worried, but there are a few nagging doubts at the back of my mind. I had hoped for a super-hot technician to rub that big hard ultrasound wand all over my happy places, but as it turned out - not so much. Can't win 'em all, I guess.
This weekend is the big annual festival in my town.
It's nice enough, I suppose, but over the years my observation has been that it seriously inconveniences the entire downtown area merely to afford local patricians the opportunity to indulge in a lot of self-congratulatory exclusive socializing and out-of-town plebeians the opportunity to come and behave badly in someone else's backyard.
And no, I'm not at all cynical about this exemplar of small-town Americana, thank you very much.
However, the one big advantage of this yearly annoyance is that a few short blocks from my house a whole tent city of food stands springs up, a festival of excess sodium, saturated fat, and empty calories that makes putting up with the whole weekend almost worthwhile. For years I've stuffed a few plastic grocery bags in my pocket and strolled down the street to buy a carry-out dinner from the assortment of boardwalk-style cuisine offered.
This year, as usual, I walked through the whole food arcade to scope out the evening's menu, then went back to hit the stands with the most appealing possibilities. My menu, though, is pretty traditional at this point. An Italian sausage sandwich with peppers, onions, and sauce. A surprisingly good crabcake sandwich with extra tartar sauce. A new dessert this year, a kebob made of chocolate-covered strawberries. Deep-fried dill pickles.
Wait a minute. Where are the deep-fried dill pickles? Twice I walked the length of the food arcade, sure that I must just have overlooked them. I love dill pickles, and you can't find them deep-fried just anywhere. In fact, I can't find them deep-fried anywhere at all, because they seem to have disappeared from the festival food menu.
@#$%&*!
Who knew that deep-fried dill pickles have apparently had their fifteen minutes of fame? My tolerance level for this whole ridiculous festival has just dropped precipitously.
I am about to do an oral presentation and turn in a paper that is absolute crap.
Well, that's not really true. It's not crap so much as it just doesn't say anything new, or sophisticated, or interesting about the topic. Now, when it's too late to do anything about it, I can see how I could have transformed the topic into something more engaging and worthwhile, but at this point I just want to get these things finished, get them presented and turned in, and be done with it. One good thing is that I can - and I'm not trying to boast, but I just can - write nearly flawless French when I make the effort, so perhaps the quality of the language can make up for the skimpiness of the content.
But here's what's making me feel even worse. I haven't even told anyone about this yet, so my total of one-and-a-half blog readers are the first to know. I was notified earlier this week that I'm getting an award this semester for outstanding graduate work... nominated by the professor to whom I'm turning in this sorry excuse for a paper.
Maybe I should just save the university the trouble and give the award back immediately.
Sigh. I hate doing things in a mediocre way. And now I'm not just disappointing myself, I'm disappointing a raft of other people as well.
This jackpot is one that I'm a little hesitant to actually write about, since I'm afraid that I might jinx it.
But it's been five months, so maybe I'm safe in mentioning it. Here's the thing: ever since I was in the hospital back in early December (first instance of the eventually diagnosed "atypical chest pain"), I have actually been able to breathe. By that I mean that I have had almost NO asthma symptoms at all since then. Yes, there have been a few days where my chest felt a little tight and I seemed minimally short of breath, but I can count those days on one hand.
I mentioned this to my pulmonary doctor back in February, when I'd just had three months of easy breathing. He thinks that maybe, with Advair and Singulair, we have finally found the right combination of medications.
That would be nice, and it would be even nicer if the asthma symptoms would just recede into the background as they did for so many years. But even if they don't, I'm not complaining. Over the past five months I've felt better than I have since the spring of 2006. So regardless of how long it lasts, that is a jackpot of another type.
For years I've used a Washington Mutual Human Rights Campaign Visa as my major credit card. A couple of weeks ago, Chase - who recently bought WaMu - sent me one of their rather dull looking cards to replace my snazzy HRC-branded version. As usual, I had to call a toll-free number to activate the card, but because I'm new to the Chase fold I had to listen to a relentlessly chipper customer service agent vaunt the many virtues of my new bank's Visa cards.
In between her cheery attempts to sell me their credit insurance, the Chase representative mentioned that Chase had imported all my WaMu bonus points into my new account. "And you have over 17,000 of them! Wow!" she chirped.
Well, I had forgotten that the WaMu card even had a bonus points program, so after I was finally able to ditch the Chase cheerleader I went to their web site to see what 17,000 points would get me. A new iron, I figured, or something equally exciting.
Surprisingly, I didn't have to content myself with an iron at all. Let me tell you what you can trade 17,000 points for: a $50 Amazon gift card, a $50 Macy's gift card, a $50 Shell gift card, and - just to use up those odd leftover points - a $10 Target gift card. And I don't mean that I had to choose among those, I mean that all four of them showed up in my mailbox today.
Not bad for a few minutes clicking around online. I guess it was worth suffering through the nice Chase lady's phone solicitation to find the buried treasure that lay beneath my years of Visa use.
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