High Holy Mass of Contradictions

I may have to have my thyroid removed.

More tests to do, but that’s the likely upshot.

I guess I better enjoy my thyroid while I can. Alas, dear thyroid, I hardly knew ye.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

• Next time you think you’re signing up for a veg*n cruise, check to make sure you’re not in fact signing up for one on holistic health and macrobiotics with just a hint of patience for veg*ns.
• However, if you do find yourself on a holistic/macrobiotic/veg*n cruise, you will eat far, far better than you initially fear.
• Eating gourmet five-course macrobiotic/veg*n cuisine for three meals each day will make you feel healthy and light and pure, but will still probably add the Cruise Ship 10 to your bottom line.
• Having the opportunity to hear doctors and macrobiotics experts and yogis and monks speak on all aspects of physical, emotional, and spiritual health is amazing; being at sea while having that opportunity means missing a lot of classes in favor of hanging over the side railing on the pool deck watching flying fish in the ocean.
• SPF 70 sunblock only blocks the sun when it’s actually applied to the skin, not just sitting in the bottle in the cabin while you’re on the pool deck watching flying fish in the ocean over the side railing.
• I burn easily. And then I do not tan; I beige. I am, therefore, sunbeiged.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

Yes, each of these probably merits a post of its own, and my blog has been sorely neglected of late. But since I’m powering through my to do list, I’m giving them each a bullet point, and I may choose to come back to one or more of them later.

• I’ve been working very, very hard. If you visit Magazines.com over the next few months, you may see some cool changes start to take place.
• I’ve been traveling a lot. Since the beginning of February, I’ve been in San Francisco, New York, Cincinnati, Salt Lake City, Chicago, and Boston. And not in Nashville very much, clearly.
• My 17-year-old cousin (well, first cousin once removed) has lymphoma. But she’s got a great attitude and a lot of fight in her. I’m thinking a lot about my cousin and her family.
• My coworker’s 10-year-old nephew just died from cancer after 9 months in the hospital. And then, at the funeral, the same coworker’s mother-in-law collapsed, had a heart attack, and died. I’m thinking a lot about that family.
• Karsten and I are about to go on our first cruise. It’s a vegetarian cruise.
• This weekend is the fifth anniversary of the crazy little experiment Karsten and I performed that we like to call “getting married.”
• I finally convinced Karsten to join Facebook. We’re now married on Facebook! I feel so hip.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

I thought about writing a year-end update yesterday, but the truth is, not all that much of note happened. And that’s a pretty good thing, as it turns out, because I was also thinking yesterday about how I’m feeling more balanced and centered than I have in — gosh, what? — maybe 8 or 9 years.

In the meantime, the highlights were clear:

• Karsten and I celebrated our 10th anniversary of being together and being crazy in love by going to Paris, world capital of romance. And it was romantic. The trip wasn’t 100% perfect all the time, but it was wonderful on balance. As for being together 10 years: wow. Our ties to each other just keep getting stronger, and having that is the best thing life can offer in any year.
• I started working at Magazines.com in January of 2007, and it’s been a really good move for me. I worked a lot (so much so that I seem to have lost my ability to update blogs), but I’m really OK with it. In fact, by far most of my efforts and energy in ‘07 were directed towards helping make something really special happen there. And it looks like that will be the case in 2008, too, and again, I’m OK with that. (Although if that’s still the case in 2009, I will have to re-evaluate my effectiveness. I want to be able to find better balance around then.)
• We got the front porch, doorway, and fence built, and the front of the house is transformed. I find so much pleasure in those last few yards of my drive home, coming up over the top of the hill in front of us, looking at such a charming house and being perfectly content to live there. I’ve never had that feeling about a place where I’ve lived before, and I don’t take it for granted that I’m this lucky. (And who knows — we might even be able to begin the major addition and renovation in 2008.)
• Karsten and I got close to another song placement, and although it didn’t ultimately come together, we ended up having much-needed clarifying conversations about our level of commitment to our songwriting (both still very committed) and how to refine our writing process under our current highly-unavailable circumstances (maybe more on that later). That clarity should help us over this next year, too, as we both continue to be heavily distracted by other areas of work (me with my job, him with renovation and visual art) — we should still be able to make progress, as long as we continue to want to. And so far, we still want to.

There were other events, of course: stressful conflicts at work, pests in and around the house, disappointments, disagreements, and so on. But they don’t stand out in hindsight, and that tells me exactly what my resolution for 2008 needs to be:

I resolve to find as much happiness in the current space of every moment as I possibly can, remembering that, in the end, it’s the happy moments I’ll want to carry with me.

May 2008 be the happiest of new years for all of you, as well.

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• it’s only 10:30 but i’m already having a no-good very bad day. rethinking this whole “being awake” thing. #

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• standing in line at Baja Burrito behind Craig Wiseman #

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I’m so lame. I never got around to posting on Blog Action Day. But my excuse is that I’ve had a real roller coaster of a week. I went from, well, managing myself on Monday to having two direct reports on Wednesday, and that’s only part of it. So yeah, I really do think activism is important, I just didn’t take the arbitrarily designated day to talk about it. I wish I could link to my activism category, but I’ve been slow with this whole content import and re-tagging thing, so I’ve only gotten around to tagging one of my old posts with it. Oh well. There’s always next year.

***

On Thursday evening, Karsten and I went to hear Peter Plagens give an art lecture at the Frist with our friends Brad and Jed, and I’m pretty sure we were all creatively inspired. It was awesome. He basically talked about the struggle to embrace the new once you’ve become comfortable and familiar with the not-so-new, but unlike that rather trite-sounding summary, he was articulate and witty and insightful.

***

Speaking of embracing the new, I spent this morning working on updating the top-level honeybowtie.com site. I needed to replace a lot of the clunky tables, image-based text styling, and Dreamweaver-generated Javascript from oh-so-long-ago with a more adaptable CSS-based design. I’m not in love with how it looks yet, but it’s definitely a step in the direction I’m trying to go. The idea is to incorporate the blog and the rest of the site a bit more seamlessly, but I’m obviously not there yet.

***

Karsten is spending the day working (and I’m occasionally collaborating with him) on a project we’ve been trying to get around to finishing for several months now. Between all the chaos of the house renovation, my day job, our flea and rat troubles, sick cats, and vacation, it’s been delayed a bit. So with any luck we’ll have a scratch demo recorded by tomorrow night, even if it’s only a chorus. The artist we’re communicating with about this song has been waiting long enough and we need to get this one wrapped. I’m also trying to round up some other song ideas she might be interested in, so I guess we have next weekend already planned, too.

***

This vodka and tonic is simply perfect. I am a bartending genius, I tell you.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. Please leave any comments there.

OK, right off the bat, here's the sucky thought du jour: I can't decide if we should go through with the trip we were planning to Europe. Though I'm in luck if I need to travel, because I've got bags under my eyes that could hold my entire wardrobe. Why? Because we spent the night in a hotel room with all six cats while we fogged the house for fleas.

I cannot properly do justice to the level of annoying this whole flea thing is. And it's not just fleas annoying me. Allow me to whine for a moment.

• I'm pretty sure I saw somewhere that it's the hottest August ever on record in Nashville. Even if it's not, it should be. So let's just get that out of the way right now, 'cause the extreme heat sure isn't making anything (or anyone) easier to deal with. 



• Remember the rats? Well, they've apparently nested underneath and in the walls in the back of our house. (One of my coworkers suspects that this is where the fleas are coming from, but I don't know if there's any way to be sure.)
  
  OK, and side note -- this is a bad story. Feel free to skip to the next bullet -- Karsten went out weeks ago and got rid of the junk pile, busted up the old deck, and started digging out the weeds around the house. He hit a nest with tiny wriggling ratlings (it's easier to call them ratlings than "kittens" when your aim is to get rid of them). It was an awful scene and he was devastated at having hurt them but the aim is, after all, to eliminate the population from our property. So as a compromise, whichever babies weren't already killed from the impact of the shovel got carried off to an empty lot a few hundred yards away.
  
  But anyway, even after all that there are still rats in the walls, and we're not sure how we're going to win this one.



• Baby Clyde is doing better, we think. He apparently had a blockage in his digestive tract so when they x-rayed him, his stomach looked totally full even after a day of intense vomiting. Not sure how or why, but the next day's x-rays showed his stomach clear and his lower digestive tract filling up, so the vet was satisfied that things looked to be on the right track. But I'm still nervous because we don't know why he was having trouble in the first place. Which in my mind means it could happen again anytime. But considering I thought he might be dying on Sunday night, I'll be relieved if all we're dealing with is a bad case of indigestion.



• And the fleas! The fleas are driving me nuts. I mean, it's just exactly the kind of thing that really gets to me. I can't take any kind of insect in large quantities. I won't even release ladybugs in the garden 'cause they freak me out en masse, but individually I'll let them crawl all over my hands and arms. A whole mess of bugs I don't like under any circumstances invading my living space? Definitely gonna mess with my mind.



• One of the other cats, Blackberry, has had a long-standing problem with urinating where he shouldn't. We've fought it for a while, but it had been getting worse recently. Took him to the vet and found out he has a pretty serious bladder infection. Uh, OK. Now I feel like a terrible cat person. So we've been giving him pills twice a day for weeks, and if you've never had to give a pill to a skittish cat, well, you just haven't experienced life.



• Between the overages in the house renovation and the flea/rat/vet/hotel expenses, we've depleted our checking account to levels we haven't seen in years. It really sucks and it makes me feel anxious. I think having had the experience of losing nearly everything we owned and getting as close as you can get to bankruptcy without actually filing, I'm having traumatic flashbacks to my anxiety level at that time. Our situation right now in no way resembles our situation then, but it's hard to shake an experience like that.



• Oh, and I'm trying to accomplish about a million things simultaneously in the next few months at work. So there's that, too.

I'm really trying to keep everything in perspective by remembering that we have a house, we have our health, and we're not broke (yet). But the amount of stuff we're having to deal with is enough to make me whimper.

So yeah, I can't decide if we've now spent enough unbudgeted money on all these various problems to mean that we should hold off on our long-awaited vacation. The vacation that coincides with our 10 year anniversary. The vacation we've been trying to take since 1999. The vacation we could really freakin' use right about now.

You see what I'm saying? We've been really looking forward to this. So to put it off, while it certainly wouldn't be the end of the world, would hurt and would suck and and and. Yes, we'd get over it. But it would be a big disappointment.

Anyway, it's not time to decide yet. For one thing, I don't think we're out of the woods with the whole pest control issue, so there may actually be even more money to spend. But also because we still have a little time before we have to make the decision, and I may yet come up with some genius plan to make everything work. Hey, it could happen.

Mais il y a peu de chances. Le sigh.

The ugly: we spent the entire weekend obsessing over fleas. In 8.67 years of living with multiple cats, they have never had fleas. Admittedly, our cats have been outside (on leashes) more lately than ever but I also think the flea population must be larger this year, probably due to the heat.

Anyway, we'd "treated" the cats with some over-the-counter Hartz crap a few weeks ago, but it obviously didn't do a thing. Meanwhile, the problem was getting worse. I've been busy with work so I couldn't do much about it myself and had been trying to be patient since I knew Karsten was already dealing with the rat problem in our back yard and I didn't want to overwhelm him. Besides, he seemed confident that the Hartz stuff would work and that the fleas were minimal anyway. On the contrary, it seemed to me that if you spot one, you can assume there are dozens/hundreds/howeverthehellmany you can't see. I regularly noticed fleas on the cats, so I printed out web pages with tips on killing fleas and left them on his keyboard. I suggested he just call an exterminator and get it over with but when he did, he only asked about the rats. He just didn't seem to feel as much urgency as I did about having to coexist with the fleas. It was all starting to freak me out a little. Last week, when I stood in the cat room and could see the fleas jumping around, I had a major meltdown. Karsten felt bad for not realizing how upset I'd been getting about it, but I assured him that everything would be fine it we could just rid the house of fleas. So he picked up the Advantage flea treatment from the vet on Friday and we started treating the cats first thing Saturday morning.

Each cat had to be isolated so they wouldn't lick the stuff off of each other, which meant that we could only treat three cats at a time: two of them were stuck in cages while a third got to be loose, but stuck inside a closed-off room. Meanwhile, we vacuumed the house, sprinkled boric acid powder on all the carpets and fabric surfaces and used a broom to push it down into the fibers, and washed the curtains and bedclothes in the hottest water and dried them in the hottest drier they could withstand.

By mid-day Saturday, there were dead and dying fleas all over the house. So I went around and vacuumed everything again yesterday, but they're still dropping off. It's gross, but it means the treatment is working, so I'll take it.

The bad: it was miserably hot outside. I mean it. Hot. It was 104 yesterday. It makes me feel like I'm melting. And since we wanted to escape the house once we got through each day's flea treatment, we were limited in our options.

Though actually, that didn't go too badly: we ended up going to see a movie ("Becoming Jane"; it was OK), eating out for every meal (all the food was great), thrift shopping (I found some cute stuff), and hanging out with some songwriting friends who were visiting from Chicago (which was fun).

So I guess the bad was really just that every time we stepped outside, we felt like we were about to melt into flesh puddles.

The good: even in my jangled state of mind, I wrote a few songs. Hanging around songwriters last night got me all fired up. When we got home, I dashed off two songs in fifteen minutes along with a few other ideas I'll come back to eventually. One of the reasons I was so inspired was that, although the songs our friends were playing last night were written well and were enjoyable, they were so consistently about relationships ending badly that I felt double-dog-dared to write a heartfelt song that wasn't about that. So I did.

Latest view of the porch,
originally uploaded by Kate O’.

Not much has changed in the past week or so except for the new copper downspout to the right of the porch, but it’s hard to see in this picture. I’m looking forward to the handrails, the spindles, the rest of the trim detailing, and the caps for the posts, but above all I can’t wait for the new doorway and door! That should be happening in the next few weeks or so.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

I've been chastised by multiple people in multiple circles within the past week for not posting enough. I think about it a lot, but I never seem to make the time. Part of it is I feel like I'm scrambling to keep up with my work responsibilities, and part of it, if I'm honest, is a increased feeling of restriction on my posting since I started this job. Not that anyone has given me reason to think I need to do that... well, other than letting me know that people at work know about this journal/blog. But whatever. I know I have options. I could always use friends-only posts, but at this point a good deal of my friends and readers are outside of LiveJournal and I don't want to ignore them. I could adopt a different persona, set up a different blog, and talk freely about whatever I want, but I've always enjoyed being myself online. I could talk about things in a veiled way, but there are always those who know what's being described and who's who and all that. I could just throw caution to the wind and write whatever I want, but I'm not sure I'm up for that.

But I think the latter is closest to what I'm going to have to do. We'll see how it goes.

In the meantime, by way of update:

• I've been at the "new" job almost 3 months now and it's very cool but very demanding.


• I haven't really had time to think about songwriting since I started here, but I'm still holding out hope that that'll change.


• The staircase and front porch have been gone for several weeks now but we still don't have a new staircase yet, which looks really funny.


• My mom got elected to office at the local level last week. She's now a politician. That's weird.


• I was part of an amazing gathering of women bloggers over the weekend, and was very humbled to have been invited.

And by way of apologizing for my lack of recent activity, I give you a picture of a robin.



There. Isn't that better?

Yesterday when I posted my year in review stats, I briefly thought the 28th of December was just a tad too soon to wrap up the year. And then I dismissed that thought with a snort.

Well, my anal-retentive detail-oriented nature turned out to be right, because the number of bird feeders stolen this year has now increased by three. One of them was only a cheap suet cage, and the other two were relatively inexpensive, but the feeders themselves were still worth about $30 combined and they were full of feed, so that's another $10 or so.

And it's not the money anyway. Putting out feed for the birds isn't all that cheap a hobby even if nothing ever got stolen, so I'm prepared for a little expense here and there. It's the principle of it. As I mentioned in one of the previous posts about stolen feeders, we originally set up these feeders as a sort of memorial to my dad, who loved feeding the birds. Every time we lose one, I wish the thieves could be cursed with knowing the grief they're inflicting. (And now the number of posts tagged "dad" just went up by one, too.)

Actually, I realized that I underestimated the stolen bird feeder number anyway -- it was three the first time, and four the next time (three the day I wrote about it and one the day before). So it should have said seven yesterday, and it'll say 10 when I update it.

These were in our back yard and along the side of the house. I don't know why, but the theft of stuff from our back yard feels more invasive than the theft of stuff from our front yard. Well, yeah, I guess I do know why: the front is so public and accessible, and people walk by on the sidewalk all the time, and it's only a few steps off the sidewalk to anywhere in the front yard. It's hard to really secure anything, and somehow I just accept that now. But to get to where the feeders were in the back you have to come clear across our back yard -- not huge, but a good deal more than a few steps -- from the alley and right up next to the house. It's even more invasive that they went along the side of the house, right next to our bedroom window. That all feels pretty creepy to me.

And I haven't reported it to the police because every time I call in one of these petty thefts, the person on the phone (not sure if the person who answers the non-emergency line is an officer or an operator or what) acts like I'm annoying them with trivialities. I'm certainly not looking for police action or for an officer to come to my house or anything, but in my mind, even the little stuff like this matters in case a pattern evolves and can be linked with larger thefts or break-ins. But from the way the police act over the phone, you'd think I was reporting that someone looked at my cat funny and I want them arrested.

Anyway, I'm irritated beyond belief.

Number of jobs held this year (not counting HB): 5
Number of jobs held this year for fewer than four weeks: 4
Number of bird feeders stolen this year: 5 (plus a pole system) Update: I miscounted and that should have said 7 yesterday, but it's 10 now anyway
Number of full song demos recorded this year: 2
Number of posts referencing how cold the house was: 6
Number of posts tagged "dad" this year: 11 12
(Number of posts tagged "dad" last year: 21)
Number of posts tagged "socializing" this year: 18
(Number of posts tagged "socializing" last year: 6)


( January )( February )( March )( April )( May )( June )
( July )( August )( September )( October )( November )( December )

The summary of 2006 seems to be: better than 2005. I'm getting through my grief. I'm still struggling to find the time and discipline to write. I'm busying myself with work and the house and hanging out with friends, but it seems to have been a wide pendulum swing, and I'm looking forward to a more centered 2007.

It’s the last day of November, in case you hadn’t noticed, and that means all November writing projects are pretty much at their end. In my case, that signals the end of my 30-songs-in-30-days “NaSoWriMo” challenge, which I have once again failed to complete. But I don’t really care. All I’m really shooting for when I set about to do these things is to make myself write fast and get some ideas down, and I did do that.

I managed to draft 13 songs. I can’t say I really finished even one. But that’s OK. Because this was also a crazy-ass month. At work, we had a major scramble with a deadline of 11/30 (yep, that, too, is today!), and my weekly average number of hours shot way up. I’ve also been sick twice this month, including right now, which is why I’m not expecting to be able to churn out any more than I already have before tomorrow. And my current tummy troubles have me in a really bad mood and I’m finding it hard to concentrate on anything. So yeah, not the best conditions for creative writing.

So it’s over, and the count is 13 songs in 30 days, sort of. There might even be a few ideas worth going back and polishing up, which is a bonus because I was really just thinking of this as an exercise. Maybe I’ll try the challenge again in a few months when it’s not looking to be a crazy month at the day job and I’ve loaded up on multivitamins and echinacea.

In the meantime, the month of December is usually a wash for songwriting. Too many weekend activities, too much commotion, not even time to sit idly with my laptop, my guitar, and a cup of coffee and mull over an idea until I find just the right thing to say. So this is probably pretty much it until January. But I’m pretty satisfied with where things stand, so I’ll be happy to take a break and then get back into it come the new year.

Hope everyone else who participated in a writing challenge this month got something good out of it!

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

So if you love me, you noticed I was offline for about a week. Lie and tell me you love me, dammit.

On Thursday, my employer took us on an overnight retreat to a cabin on a lake in Alabama. We did some "strategizing" and then got really, really drunk.

On Friday, one of my coworkers and I decided to stay an extra night at the cabin and get our respective spouses to come down and stay with us. It was great fun for all five of us: Karsten, me, the other couple, and their parrot. Their parrot, in fact, may have had more fun than anyone. He even developed a crush on me, I'm afraid.

Good thing he didn't see me on Saturday night in my cat costume.

Oh yeah, so we got back on Saturday just in time for several Halloween parties, which we graced with our costumed presence. You already know my costume -- here was Karsten's:



He was a hillbilly hockey player, or something like that. The ballcap he's wearing says "Country Western Hockey Tournament" and he found it at a thrift store. It's real! You can't make shit like that up. His hockey stick is homemade, and it says "Puckfucker 1000" down the handle. The mullet wig, however, makes the costume, in my opinion.

Oh, and that's my coworker Jim grabbing Karsten to keep him from escaping the camera. Jim was a futuristic gay spaceman from the 1950s, or something like that. (Not that Jim is gay, really -- only the tight silver gym-queen shirt he wore under his spaceman suit was gay.) He wore a suit covered in duct tape; pretty classic.

Some other costumes seen: witch, devil, zombie vampire, cheerleader, French maid, King Kong & blonde, pirate... oh, and Japanese anime characters. LOVEd that.

Hope everyone's been doing well... and missing me. Lie and tell me you missed me, dammit!

Oktoberfest looks to have been a big success for the Historic Germantown neighborhood, and our party was a blast. Thanks to everyone who came and partied with us, and my apologies to anyone I may have offended by suggesting they patronize the beer vendors while the festival was still running. We bought plenty of beer from the beer vendors ourselves. Yessir, plenty of beer. Yowch.

We probably had 80 people come through our house on Saturday. Bunches of people from the neighborhood, scads of coworkers and some former coworkers, quite a few songwriters and musicians, and some random good friends from who-knows-where. And 2 dogs. (Luckily, the cats were locked up in the office/studio/cat room for most of the day.)

We had drunk people climbing the scaffolding, but no falls. We had people from across the political spectrum, but no brawls. We had over a dozen people on our front stairs, and they didn’t collapse. All in all, a good day.

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So it's decided: I'm staying on at my job. Maybe you didn't know I was debating this, but yessir, it's a big part of why I haven't been writing much lately: because so much of what I wanted to write was somehow linked to the decision and I didn't want to talk about it openly.

But anyway, I had a really nice offer at a really nice company and I took it very seriously indeed, but several key people at my current employer made really nice gestures to convince me to stay and so I did.

Now that that's all done, I can get back to obsessing about other things, like Oktoberfest and getting the house ready for all the people who are going to be there. Yikes!

Getting ready to go-see-do. Tying up last-minute details. Figuring out what to pack.

Tomorrow I'm off to see knekkebjoern and his fabulous new house!

I'll try to post occasionally while I'm gone, and I'll try to keep up with my reading, but if I don't, I'll try to catch up when I get back.

And then it's off to my new job!

See you all after a few days! (Except for you, knekkebjoern -- you I'll see tomorrow. Woo hoo!)

( ginormous 2005 year-end meme behind cut )

I feel very disconnected with LJ and email lately -- I've barely been able to keep up. I apologize to everyone for not reading enough to know what's going on in your lives. I'll catch up soon, I'm sure.

In the meantime, work is tough -- two of my colleagues and my boss are all on vacation this week, we have a new director (the former Boss's Boss and the new director were assigned to a permanent job swap, with very interesting results for our team), my project manager is getting ready to go on a month-long vacation, we have interns coming in who need to be ramped up and made productive, and a big governance issue that's very stressful as it requires me to be the bad cop.

But I have a new Treo 650, and I love it! And the cats are settled into the house, and Karsten is very kindly finishing up the move from the apartment to the house without my help. There's only a little bit left over there, mostly books and artwork, and he will probably have it all here by the end of today and the place cleaned by the end of tomorrow. And then we're DONE with that apartment, thank the gods.

The house is coming along. I took some quick pictures this morning [edited] and they're on flickr with a few descriptive comments if anyone wants to see them.

There's more to say, but I'm too tired to get into any details about any of it. Maybe more later, if time permits.