Suzy Says

I lost another post, thanks to the terrible internet service. Gah!!!
So you’ll have to wait until I finish throwing a temper tantrum to read my reconstituted post about Christmas.
Sigh.

I just had some really bad in-room coffee and burned my tongue. The beverage which I sort of enjoyed turned out to be extremely hot. Maybe I can sue the motel and stay somewhere better next time. Actually, the room is, as Jacques Pepin would say, pairfectly fine, and it is conveniently located within [...]

I really like this theme, but it’s kind of hard to read. Also links within posts don’t seem to work, as in “party” below. I guess it’s a lot to ask for both form and function in one pretty package.
Megan and I are heading to Berkeley today to attend BAD RAP’s tenth anniversary party. [...]

On Thursdays, it’s my turn to make dinner.
My sis is coming off three twelve hour night shifts, and is exhausted. I don’t know what she did before I lived here, but I’m glad to take that burden off her overburdened shoulders*.
This week was much worse than usual – she’s been having pain and complications [...]

Yesterday, I took Henry to the vet.
Partly a fact-finding mission, partly because Henry has been having…issues. He often rents his food very briefly, to the detriment of the living room carpet (why do cats always vomit on carpets instead of the much more easily cleaned wood floors?), and as for the bedroom carpet, well, [...]

This is going to be mostly a pictorial, since the working (and digging) of wells is beyond me. Megan and I have limited our involvement to bringing the boys lunch and picking up essential items from the store, like candy bars and cigarettes. Add in some nylons and you have your basic WWII [...]

This sleeping beauty was awakened with a kiss on Thanksgiving morning.
My sister stopped by on her way home from work to make sure I was awake. She even made coffee, and there are few things nicer than lying in bed and smelling coffee you didn’t have to make yourself.
After checking with Erica, I learned [...]

You can see that the bear-proof fence is almost in place. The posts are sunk deep into concrete, and the wire was a huge score Rob made at the dump. The wire is expensive new, and someone had discarded it, so once again, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. All that’s left [...]

View from the bookstore
In addition to picking up unglamorous necessities at the unglamorous Rite Aid (why do I always run out of all my drugstore items at once?), I also stopped off in Mendocino to pick up the organic, free-range Thanksgiving turkey from Mendosa’s. Fortunately for me, my sister had prepaid it, so all [...]

The road to town
The town
You have to get a lot more up close and personal with your garbage here in Hooterville.
I mentioned earlier that I invested in allegedly animal-proof garbage cans when I moved here. I say “allegedly” because so far they have remained animal-proof, but I’m figuring that it’s a case of “them [...]

I’ve made some fun discoveries during the un-fun process of unpacking.
I found my grandparents’ wedding announcement (they got married in a field of flowers on a summer day with one attendant each, so Nana’s parents sent out “At Home” announcements after the fact. I wonder if there was a great big noisy fuss over [...]

Frost burning off the post*
Yesterday it was raining so hard that it woke me up before 6:30. I lay there listening to the rain on the curved roof, wondering if the power would go out, and realized that the propane heater needs electricity to start and stop, just like my gas oven in Oakland. [...]

Apparently, I have a boat.
I really shouldn’t be surprised. James was the king of the pack rats. I’m not sure that he ever threw anything away, just in case it came in handy one of these days. And to be fair, both he and my brother have shopped the junk piles in the woods [...]

Yesterday’s rain, today’s sunlight
My new house and I go back a long way.
My brother lived on this property for fifteen years or so, and my sister and brother-in-law have lived here for a decade. James and Rose, who lived here before me, were friends as well as neighbors and landlords.
Our good friend Paul, who put [...]

Swine flu* is just so passé. All the cool kids have library-itis.
Its onset can be insidious. You can have a library card for years, lurking in a drawer or making your wallet a little snugger than you’d like, but never take it out or even think about it. But when you come into [...]

Audrey on the porch
It soon became apparent that my in-house doorman* gig had to end.
The door in question is this one, which separates the (somewhat heated) living quarters from the (completely unheated) studio. The studio was where Rose created her pottery – her kilns are still there – and now is home [...]

Library
Literary Cat
One of my few talents is being able to spot a misspelling or typo at twenty paces. I rarely read a book without finding at least one spelling or grammatical mistake*. I guess that makes me pretty white, but I can’t help it. Possibly it’s the aftereffects of having an utterly useless [...]

Waking up is hard to do.
Some of us don’t even try.
What should I do today?

Morning light
The past couple of nights I’ve dared to sleep in my bed, although for some reason it makes my aches achier. But I couldn’t handle the Elephant Man thing of sleeping partly sitting up on the couch anymore. Why is life full of unpleasant choices instead of, say, one fun’n’easy option? [...]