Not actually a spy

As I may have mentioned, my family visited last weekend. Monday I got a series of messages saying that a member of my family had 1) left a laptop at their hotel, and 2) arranged for me to collect it and ship it to them.

This resulted in me driving up to a hotel in the middle of yesterday afternoon, approaching the front desk, and asking for The Item that Dolores was holding for me. Dolores came from the back. I examined the package. Signed for it. I then turned to the front desk and used their shipping services to send the package on to its destination.

I tweeted, during this, that my errands made me feel like Natasha Romonov, aka The Black Widow.

I did not tweet that I felt like James Bond. Fifteen, twenty years ago, I might have. Fifteen, twenty years ago, the only super-spy my brain might have been able to come up with on short notice might well have been 007. I don’t read or watch a ton of spy genre stuff; I only really know what the general culture knows.

Yesterday, I thought of Natasha. Because our general popular culture now has at the very least one badass female super-spy for me to pretend to be while I’m filling out a FedEx form in the middle of the afternoon.

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I renamed this post Burying the Lede

I’m sure something interesting happened yesterday, but I can’t recall it.

1. The baby gerbils are all still alive. The white one is still horribly sick and may yet die.

2. I started rewatching Once Upon a Time from the beginning, because I am a crazy person when it comes to Regina Mills. I recognize that. Please, DO NOT ask me about the show unless you want to be talking to a deranged, profane, fanatic.

3. The weather was cold all weekend, and now it’s hot.

4. Due to scheduling shenanigans I haven’t worked out properly in weeks, and it is making me grumpy.

5. Oh! RIGHT.

The Minnesota Legislature passed marriage equality yesterday. It goes into effect August 1st. I already asked my union rep whether this means my federal benefits could go to J if we got married. He said he’d find out.

I suppose that’s burying the lede a bit, there …

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That was a bit of a weekend

1. The visit from my family was lovely. I like them, they are good people, and it’s nice to get a chance to see them all together.

2. K is learning how to work around her broken finger. It’s on her dominant hand, and she is fairly strongly -handed, so it’s a bit rough for her. But she’s learning. J and I are still working out how things like school and chores are going to go.

3. Work is work-like. The weather is improving, so more and more general aviation pilots are flying. In addition, the photo mission flights have begun. (Aerial surveillance planes, taking surveys.) These flights need to fly very slowly, at fixed altitudes, and can’t be moved. So everyone has to move around them. It’s a bit of a thing.

4. I’m watching the tv series Orphan Black. It didn’t grab me right away, but as of episode four I am invested. Tatiana Maslany is playing at least four characters, women who are clones in a secret project of some sort. There are conspiracies and spies and secrets and all sorts of crazy, and it passes the Bechdel Test constantly, and it has queers and people of color in supporting roles. Also, the show features adoption and fostering in a rightly-complicated light.

Side note, Tatiana Maslany played Ghost in Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed, which is one of my favorite movies.

5. Ten days until I leave for Wiscon.

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Everything at once

I don’t normally post on weekends, but yesterday was EXCEPTIONAL.

1. K broke her finger last night, right before the circus show. Her hand is in a splint. She misses the next show, her band concert, and this will affect her first few weeks of the next circus term.

2. The baby gerbils have a respiratory infection. J took them to veterinary urgent care at midnight last night. They may die.

3. Our clothes dryer is not working properly, and may need to be replaced.

4. I found a dead tick on the living room floor.

5. The puppies ate gross things in the yard, the way puppies do, and vomited in the shoes this morning.

Good morning, internets.

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I have no sense of proportion

I can’t tell whether yesterday was a really busy day by some arbitrary standard or not. I have trouble with this, in general — knowing whether something is “normal” or exceptional (for good or ill). So, was yesterday busy? I have no idea.

But, we got the kids up and going, K practiced her instruments, M did his chores and his penalty chores, we went to Spanish class, had lunch, went to Fleet Farm for two hours, got home, laid the last of the dirt, planted, got the hose out of storage, washed up, saw Iron Man 3, came home, got the kids to bed. While taking care of puppies constantly, doing four loads of dishes, and losing only marginal ground to entropy.

The kids got new summer shoes, I got new summer shirts that fit, K replaced her broken carabiner for her backpack, M cleaned up some old and previously-missed puppy pee, I got dog poop on my hands while unfurling the garden hose and scrubbed off, K made her own dinner, M’s ammo packs for his foam dart gum arrived in the mail, we mailed K’s application to the wall trampoline workshops, I email coordinated with my family for their visit on Friday, I had to change clothes THREE TIMES due to dirt, J held the gerbils twice to socialize them, the puppies ate a seed pod, I cooked breakfast this morning and kale chips after the movie, I replied to an email interview –

It’s a perfectly average day off for me. Made easier by the fact that we skipped school and replaced it with gardening.

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May 7 2013

1. Happy birthday, N!

2. Listening to a podcast this morning, I was pondering how much I wish I could meet Cleopatra. It makes me genuinely sad that I will never get a chance to talk to her, to see for myself the wit and intellect that won people and kingdoms.

She’s not the only one. Victoria Woodhull. Mandukhai Khatun. Eleanor of Aquitaine. History is full of brilliant, angry, motivated women, and I won’t ever get to talk to them. It’s a sadness to me.

3. Warehouse 13 is back on the air! And this season is looking a bit darker, which is EXACTLY what I wanted.

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Circus Juventas 2013 Spring Celebration

I saw K’s first circus show for the year last night. I have such goodwill for these shows.

Circus Juventas is a performing youth circus arts school. The spring shows are the school’s recital. All performing classes perform, regardless of age or readiness. You get your costume on, you get your gear, and you get out there and you perform.

The school is so large that the student body is divided into three section, or color groups. Each color does three shows and one dress/tech rehearsal. Leading up to this there have been regular classes, extra practices, and emergency extra practices. Ready or not, now you go on.

Last night was the Yellow show. Over 400 youth performers, 150 parent volunteers doing rigging and lighting and backstage-wrangling and locker-room-supervision and photography. The Toddler and Kinder acts always go first; three- and four- and five-year-olds dressed as naval officers and pirates, doing their respective acts.

The show is long. Over three hours, with an intermission. Every year they try to make sure the younger kids are all in the first half, so they can leave at 8:30 and go home. It doesn’t always work, but they try. K is now an older kid, and is in the second half for all nine shows.

The show last night had no mishaps. Sure, the Ringmistresses flubbed a couple of lines, but they recovered. Sure, a few unicyclists fell off their bikes, but they got back on. Only one of the flyers made it back to the bar, but ALL of them made it to the catcher without mishap. The clowns were funny. The kids juggling clubs didn’t drop anything. The rigging didn’t jam.

As always, there were a few costume or music choices that made me raise a brow. But the kids performing have no control over those things. They are given a costume and a song and a routines, and they do their best. They smile, and style, and they commit to whatever thing they are required to do. They are game, and I love that about them.

K was very, very tired last night. We got home, and I reminded her she needed to take her makeup off. We stood in the bathroom at 10:50 last night, smearing gunk on her eyelids and wiping them off. I gave her a lot of hugs, and told her she did great.

She did. She did great.

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Spring

I understand, intellectually, that other climates experience a changing of the seasons that they call spring. I understand, in the way that I accept other people’s subjective reports of the world because it is rude to contradict another’s personal experience, that people look forward to spring, even though they live south of me.

Yet, clearly, some small part of me simply does not believe that the rest of you really get it.

This past weekend everyone has been outside. Everyone. The Twin Cities are full of slightly loopy, dazed people walking around smiling these goofy smiles at everyone and everything. We are drunk on sunshine and warm weather.

So, briefly, a moment of regional insularity and jingoism, a moment of world-wide eye contact and knowing looks and head-nodding to all of you, my fellow 40-60 degree latitude people — north or south, I’m talking to you all, here — who are finally getting around to having spring.

Solidarity, comrades.

Solidarity.

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The Garden, one post of what will be many

The ground has thawed.

The snow is 85% melted away.

We broke ground on the site of the garden.

J got two four-foot-square cedar raised beds, with little trellises. We needed first to remove two shrubs, and turn all of the ground where the raised beds will go. This meant I spent a great deal of yesterday shoveling and hacking at heavy plant-things.

After I ran over a mile in the morning.

After doing heavy deadlifts and presses at the Y the day before.

I … feel perfectly fine.

I think there’s something to this entire “fitness” thing one hears so much about.

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The hex bar is my friend

So, a while back, I stopped doing barbell lifts because they had given me incapacitating tendonitis. I switched over to kettlebells, dumbbells, and body-weight exercises.

I like all of those, but I missed the satisfaction of a nice barbell deadlift — of just hauling that damn weight off of the floor.

Yesterday I remembered that my YMCA has a hex bar. This is exciting! The grip, as you can see in the image, is different. So yesterday I tried deadlifts with the hex bar.

I was very pleased to see that I have not lost any ground on my deadlift. I could lift about what I could a year ago! Now I can try to advance further, without destroying my arms.

\o/

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