Bridges, Bullpens

2 November 2001

It was 9:00 p.m. here, which made it 11:00 at home. The phone rang. Michelle often stays up late, and she had called earlier in the evening and told Mark she'd call back, so I thought it might be her. No.

"Hi, Rissy, it's Grandma." (As if anyone else is allowed to call me Rissy except Grandpa, and their voices are quite distinct. She sounded upset.)
"Hi, Grandma. What's wrong?" (My great-uncle Dud has been in chemo for his bone cancer. All of my great-aunts and -uncles are getting older, as are we all, but some faster than others. Instant panic.)
"Oh, I just can't believe they put that kid in! They did just the same thing as they did last night! Last night I just went to bed. I almost did that tonight. I couldn't stand it."

Yes. My grandmother called me at 11:00 her time specifically to complain about the Diamondbacks' pitching choices. And to tell us to stay off the bridges here because of the terrorist threats. Grandpa got on the phone to give me news about our Swedish family, but Grandma's purpose was clear. And she seemed utterly oblivious to the idea that she may have given me a fit trying to figure out what was wrong.

"Doris is so mad," my grandma continued. Do you know what that means? It means that my grandmother was on the phone to her sister at 10:45 at night, to bitch about the D-Backs' pitching choices. It wasn't just me. It was the whole family. Of course, Aunt Dor probably wasn't surprised at all, whereas I was.

For those of you who, like Grandma, are worried about the bridge thing, don't worry about us too much. Mark takes the Dumbarton to work, not the Bay Bridge or the Golden Gate. They're clear far north for that. And we're not going a lot of places socially in the period indicated, and when we go to Avi's next weekend, we'll still take the San Mateo Bridge, not the Bay Bridge etc. Not because it's scary, just because it's shorter. Frankly, I don't understand what the governor did here. Why would you tell people you thought someone was going to attack the bridges, and then encourage them to keep driving on them? What, exactly, is this supposed to do? Besides cover your butt if there actually is an attack. Oh. Fabulous.

I ran out of Advil yesterday morning, so we had to make a grocery run and get some. I'm still feeling the residuals; I understand what my mom means about not letting the pain get ahead of me, now. When we came home, we watched "Barenaked in America," which was good. Good good. I talked back in August about how the BNL concert made me happy. The documentary made me happy in a similar way. Geekboys made good, singing their songs and making their funniness. And then Timprov and I sang together for awhile, but I'm on short sets just now. I'm only up for genuinely singing about four songs, and then I hurt too much and go back to humming-with-words. This brought up a Tom Petty hazard: he is almost compulsively singable. So when I was Done Singing and a Tom Petty song came on Timprov's computer, well, I almost couldn't stop myself.

I did find out that Counting Crows are the proper music for writing the Not The Moose Book. This is good to know. Tim, when he was down for dinner, said that The Old 97's are the appropriate band for writing his new book. I'm glad he's got that settled, too. It can be important.

I'm confused, though; I made the usual double-batch of avgelimonio that usually provides a vat o' leftovers. And we have no leftovers at all. And while we did have an extra person, we usually have a vat o' leftovers, and I didn't notice anybody sucking down more than a reasonable amount of soup. (You're allowed to eat unreasonable amounts at my house. But I probably will notice.) So I'm trying to figure this out. Next time I make avgelimonio, I may decide I want leftovers and try to triple the recipe and end up with two vats. Which would not be so good. Tim ascribed it to quantum events, but we explained that that could not be, since Hayward is a Nuclear-Free Zone.

There is also No Room For Racism. It says so on the sign.

My cousin Cathy is coming over for breakfast this morning. She called last night to say that she's in town, but we had already made plans with Tim, so breakfast it is. I don't know that I'll be dressed when she gets here. Mark needs to get ready for work, so he's got priority, and she's my cousin. She may not have changed my diapers, but it's not out of the realm of possibility. And if your family can't have breakfast with you in your pajamas...well, okay, so there are lots of families that don't find that to be acceptable behavior. But trust me when I say that mine is not one of them.

I don't know...before Columbine's weblog/forum set me off on the Midwest again, I was going to do an All Saints' Day entry, not about religion so much as it would have been about forebears. I've lost all momentum and desire to do that. So I won't. Maybe next year. Maybe on some random day I'll have a lot to say about intellectual and emotional ancestors. Who knows.

I finished reading The Wonderful World of Robert Sheckley, borrowed from David; we need to get ourselves some Sheckley. And I started Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, which is a darn depressing book. It's about all the wrong ways people have tried to talk about human intelligence and race. Systematic bias all over the place. It's good to know this stuff, but it still isn't exactly sunshine and wowwipops. Nor are the scenes I've been writing on the Not The Moose Book, but that's okay. They're still good. And! I now have scenes in all three sections. The strange and frightening second section has been breached. Yay.

Well, I'm going to get the house into some better semblance of order before Cath gets here, probably do something extravagant like brushing my hair as well. I'm just that fancy kind of girl. Lipstick and curling irons, that's me.

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