Twisted Spinster

Before, when I wanted a trip tik from AAA, I used to have to 1) belong to them (as in, pay for membership), and 2) physically go to their office and stand in line at a counter. Now I can just go to their website and get one for free. I did one for Orlando to St. Louis — it’s only about a 15 hour drive, which means I can make it in a couple of days, or one if I decide not to stop. Now I just have to figure out how to enclose the back seat so I can keep the cats back there for the duration. (I’d leave them in their cages, but what if they want to pee? I’ve had the pee-filled cage cleaning adventure before and want no repeats. Update: and where will I put the litter box? Hm, driving a thousand miles with a car smelling like cat pee… well, it won’t smell any worse than it does now. Let’s just say it’s been raining a lot and the car has leaks.)

Plans plans makin’ plans…

I just found this:

In this week’s U.S. News & World Report, staffer Justin Ewers interviews Benjamin Jealous, the new president of the NAACP. (I couldn’t find it online anywhere.) Near the end of the Q&A, Ewers poked at “catty” Sarah Palin…

No really, his last name is “Jealous”? Sometimes real life beats fiction all to hell.

This article is best read while listening to this song.

Naturally, the fact that Naomi Wolf (“the men are killing women with makeup! Aaaggghhh!”) is driven to hysterics by Sarah Palin makes the latter seem even cooler than she already is. This election is getting more exciting by the day. McCain, you SLY DOG.

(Via Rachel Lucas.)

No, not that change (and not this one either!)… A few posts down I had mentioned I was thinking of moving out of Florida, possibly to St. Louis. Well, that idea has crystallized into a decision. I am definitely getting out of Florida, and St. Louis is the goal. Why St. Louis? Well, I don’t rightly know. It has a lot of history, it’s on the Mississippi (rivers fascinate me), and it’s in a part of the country I’ve never been in. It’s not far from Chicago, a place I’ve always wanted to visit but not live in. It gets four seasons. Today Central Florida’s feeble imitation of autumn starts (it’s extra breezy, we’re supposed to get nightly temps in the 60s — oh, bring out my furs! — and humidity is supposed to go down to something less than “under the swamp”). It’s not enough. Also, I want snow.

My problem is a lack of funds, no job… but this week my assignment at the cabinet company ends, and I’ve had no new offers so far. I’m on the verge of tossing my cats and some underwear in the car and heading off, but my stupid sense of responsibility is telling me to try to stick it out until the end of my lease. That’s April. I may stab myself in the head before then… or worse, lose my momentum. Then again, if I can’t find a job, what’s the point in staying here? I’m sick of Florida.

Anyway, I already started to go through my books to pull out those I absolutely can’t live without. I don’t have any rare editions, or anything that isn’t still in print (or isn’t available free on the internet), so I’m hoping to get those down to no more than one box. (And not a giant box either. I’m going to move with very little stuff, and I need room in the car — which is a Toyota Tercel, not a van — for the cats and their carriers.) Eventually I’ll sell whatever I have that’s sellable. If I can’t afford furniture right away when I move, so what? I can sleep on the floor. I’ve done it before.

One thing I am going to do is sell my computer and trade it in for a new laptop. It’s a great computer — it’s still pretty new — but I need to be more portable. I don’t need all the stuff this one came with, like media hookups to turn the thing into part of your in-home theater, and other stuff that I don’t even know what it is. It has Vista Home Premium on it, but I’ve had hardly a speck of trouble with this install. Maybe I lucked out. It has 2 GB of RAM which can be upped to 4, a giant hard drive, the monitor (which I bought separately) is a 17 inch LCD. It’s not junk. I can get a decent new laptop for around $500.00. My old laptop is trashed, or I’d just switch back to that. (Maybe I will in the interim. In fact, I’m going to see if I can get it working.)

Anyway, this feels like the right plan for my life. I feel good about it. I’m going to log on to Careerbuilder and so on to put some feelers out for jobs (clerical and administrative assistant stuff is my “specialty”). The job market up there can’t be any worse than Florida’s in any industry but tourism (and that’s down since the price of gas doubled). I’m going to put an “escape from Florida” announcement above my Paypal links too. Like I said, I’d like to stay until April — well, not “like,” but should — in order to not break my lease, but if I can’t get a job down here I won’t be able to pay any rent anyway.

Stay tuned for updates.

Update the first: I tested the old laptop last night and it seems to be working fine, so maybe I’ll put off buying a new one and just save the money from the sale of the desktop for the move. Hmm, save money, what a concept!

“Well, honey, I pretended that the war hadn’t actually ended. See, fighting was too much fun, and even more fun was the nice way everyone treated you when your side was losing. Then the tide turned, we won, and then it wasn’t fun anymore… because we realized that our winning meant everybody got to benefit, even people who weren’t our sort. That wasn’t supposed to happen. We were supposed to take all their power and lord it over them the way we had been lorded over!”

It was never about fixing society’s ills. It was always about revenge and power.

I mean, if you’re 84 years old and clearly demented, what are you waiting for? Time to do your duty!

(Via Tom McMahon’s news feed.)

My mail, that is… the temp agency that employs me must have missed the postman, and there was no paycheck in my mailbox. Well there went some of my plans for this weekend… Is it too early to start drinking? (Oh well. At least they didn’t forget I had cancelled my direct deposit and put the thing in my overdrawn bank account, where it would have vanished like a liberal’s tolerance upon seeing Sarah Palin on tv…)

Well, I am still driving to the beach tomorrow. I have enough money for that at least. I don’t plan to do anything much, just sit on the sand and stare at the water, eat a bagged lunch, and then drive back home. I just need some away time.

One more thing: lately I have become fascinated by the idea of moving to St. Louis. I’m not sure why — it has a lot of history, it’s in the middle of everything, it’s in “flyover country.” And this passage in the Wikipedia moved me: “St. Louis has four distinct seasons.” I don’t know, I’m sick of Florida and I want something different. Can any of my readers who have been to/lived in St. Louis tell me anything about it? If I do decide to move, I’ll sell just about everything I own first — I’m not moving furniture ever again.

I’ve thought occasionally about a cottage at the beach. Not for full time living, you understand, but for vacations and the like. But in my mind it’s a simple place, a shack really, with electricity and plumbing (I needs my toilet and my hot coffee) but not much in the way of luxuries. For one thing, I wouldn’t have air-conditioning. Right on the beach, even in Florida, you don’t really need it if you have the proper kind of place to live — in other words, a simple sort of place with lots of open screened windows. And I wouldn’t have luxe furniture, or cable tv (heck, I wouldn’t have tv). Since I only have a cell phone these days I wouldn’t need a phone line. That would mean no internet, but that’s what coffee houses are for. And the whole point of a getaway place is to “get away.”

Here is the plan of my dream beach mansion: basically a one-room house with a bathroom, it could have just a shower, I don’t need a tub for a vacation. I could do with a kitchenette, or no kitchen at all — I actually have stashed in my closet one of those combo coffee machine/toaster/tiny fry pan on top jobs that pop up in bargain stores (I got mine at Big Lots). I also have a larger electric fry pan. And of course I’d have a simple grill outside, just a pile of concrete blocks with a metal grill stuck in them, or I’d get a cheap charcoal grill from Walmart.

I’ve already said no luxe furniture, just some cast-off stuff maybe, or those cheap resin chairs and a beach lounger thing. And a simple cot to sleep on. The shack could be made of wood, like old Florida houses (like the house I grew up in, actually, which lasted through fifty-five years of Miami weather only to succumb to the wrecker ball). And when a hurricane came along and wiped it out, it wouldn’t be like I lost a million-dollar mansion with all the conveniences of the hectic city life I was supposedly leaving behind.

You know, that whole “it won’t happen to me” mentality? You do know that’s like painting a big target on your behind, right? God likes to keep in practice.

According to the Accepted Knowledge, things like this are supposed to make me feel tiny, inadequate, inconsequential, useless, pointless, and depressed. This existential despair is one of the underlying themes of contemporary culture. But I never get that feeling when I contemplate the endless vastness of the universe. Instead, I feel happy and safe. It’s like this: I realize that I am part of something bigger than myself that is still outside myself, that we will never run out of things to discover, and that if something goes wrong over this way there is still the whole rest of the universe still existing. Isn’t that great?

While I am waiting for thoughts to form themselves into words, I thought I’d share with you some recent photos of how I have been occupying myself for the past few days. First, here is a picture of my dinner of a couple of days ago:

I call that my “pretend it’s already autumn in some place that has proper seasons” dinner. Yes, those are brussel sprouts — I love me some fresh brussel sprouts smothered in butter. And sweet potatoes, I have discovered, are excellent when not canned, and I put salt and butter on them, not brown sugar. (Sweet potatoes are sweet enough — the brown sugar makes them too cloying for my tastes.) And the meat is these pork medallions I found in the grocery store for not too much money. So that was Tuesday night.

Tonight I had this:

First, the photo came out double exposed like that for some reason — I think I need a new battery in my camera. Anyway, that’s green beans (fresh, of course), these really thin steaks, and fresh mushrooms fried in the steak and olive oil grease, with a bit of the zinfandel you see in that wine glass over there poured over them to deglaze the pan. And I also had the brilliant idea of chopping up a shallot, a habanero pepper, and half of a long thin pepper called a “finger hot,” and frying them a bit in the pan as well. Oh oh oh. I am such a good cook. However, I think I had better invest in some gloved for any further chopping up of fresh hot peppers — I had tingly, burning fingers for over an hour.

And that brings me to my project! Which already looks like it’s going to expand… observe:

Yup — that’s a real pot, full of real dirt, planted with real plants: thyme, rosemary, chives, purple basil, and two tomato plants (one a red variety and another a yellow) hidden in the back. If all goes well and my notorious black thumb doesn’t kill any of them I should have tomatoes in or around December. I love fresh tomatoes and fresh herbs, and the plants were so cheap. The most expensive part of the project was the pot and it cost about twelve dollars. Anyway, I am already getting ambitious — Walmart had some varieties of peppers, cucumbers, and other veggies, not to mention more herbs like mint and cilantro. And I’d love to have a lemon tree in a pot. And I could grow lettuce…

Xena (the younger cat) loves the herbs. I’ve already caught her gnawing on my chives, and she can sit and smell the thyme for hours, or would if there weren’t lizards and the neighbor cats to distract her. Squeaky, my older cat, is more mellow; she just likes going out to the patio for warmth. Here she is, getting baked in the hot sun like a cake:

More later…