we're going to detroit (me, nathan, my sister, and my parents) this weekend for my grandfather's funeral.

here is his obituary (the one at the very bottom) in the detroit free press.

he was a good man, and i miss him. but he'd mostly been gone for a while, already. this weekend, we will put his ashes in the crypt at his church, along with my grandmother and my aunt mimi, his second wife.

which francesca lia block girl are you?

(quiz created by shelle)

no weird dreams in the past day or so. hurray for that.

today, there will be much tiling. woo!

cuteness alert: monkeys rescue one of their own from a police station.

somehow, i thought that if i wasn't taking the meds that have a listed side effect of weird dreams, i'd stop having them. not yet, alas.

two nights ago, i had bought another house, and was busy cleaning and packing the old one, which suspiciously resembled my parents' old house in hastings. my mother was cleaning the upstairs bathroom, which involved taking the sink and vanity out of it, and she was about to go get fiberglass to put in the bathroom.

last night, i was in a very large house, wandering around, following an ex of mine who wouldn't talk to me. zie just wandered from room to room, not talking. "well, what are you doing in my house if you're not going to talk to me?" i kept thinking.

(russia, contd.)

my dad made me scrambled eggs with hotdog type objects in it. he said he hadn't salted it because his salt tolerance is very high. i explained to him that i liked salt better than just about anything, and that he was free to salt anything he cooked and that i'd probably still eat it.

after that, we negotiated where i would nap, since i desperately needed it. we decided that i would nap on the waterbed for right now, but sleep at night on the sofabed in the living room. we decided this because all of the entertainment opportunities (television, books, and laptop) were in the living room, and i didn't want to strand him being totally bored while i napped.

so, off to the waterbed for the napping. i slept and slept and slept, and finally got up about noon, all bleary eyed and dull. but much better rested.

i changed into a pair of shoes that i hadn't been wearing for thirty hours, and we hiked off to the department store, to look around and to have lunch at new york pizza. we walked up the street, and past the grocery store, and down the street. past dom ochornik (which i am surely spelling wrong), and past a few perma-kiosks set up selling candy and cigarettes, and down a hill through some trees, and around the corner. there was the department store, which was a big store with lots of little shops in it. the first one in the door was the shiny thing shop, and if i bought you something while in russia, i almost certainly bought it there. there were also shops that sold appliances and fabric and furniture and clothes and umbrellas. after we walked through the department store, we were out in a hallway in the rest of the building, and there was new york pizza. i tried valiantly to order diet pepsi, but there was no diet pepsi to be had. so instead, i had regular pepsi (with no ice! they seem to be quite against ice in drinks there in the former soviet union), and a piece of pepperoni pizza which had mushrooms and onions on it even though i did not request them. i was very pleased that i managed to figure out how to read "pepperoni" in cyrillic. (having all those p's in it and having it be such a long word was very helpful.)

there were gypsies and gypsy children along the sidewalks. the mothers looked sad, and were usually nursing a baby. the children ranged in age from about four to about twelve, i believe, and they would walk along the sidewalk and ask for money. they each had a prescribed territory, with space on either side of their mothers, and they would walk up to you and ask boldly for money, and follow you until you were out of their territory. there were several families of them between us and the department store.

in front of the grocery store, during the day, there would usually be people sitting, selling vegetables. they'd bring along a milk crate or a chair to sit on, and bags of vegetables or flowers. we usually bought our vegetables from the store its self, because the woman who worked behind the counter had worked out that we didn't speak as much russian as we'd like, and we knew she'd be patient with us.

they were sandblasting the outside of the building down to bare brick while we were there. i think they were going to be doing some restoration work on it, but i'm not certain.

going into the store involved climbing three stairs, opening the first airlock door, taking two steps, and opening the second airlock door. (you can generally tell that a place has extreme weather if their construction uses airlock doors.) there was a cash machine which didn't like minnesotan cash cards on the left, and then a cafe just past it. a lot of days, there was a woman sitting by the cafe door trying to sell water filters or a water filtration machine. she didn't seem to have a lot of takers. you had to go through a little metal door (not really like a turnstile, but it was closest to that) to get into the actual store. then you could purchase diet coke (whoops; coca cola light, i mean) kasha, bottled water (either still or, eeew, carbonated) bacon, blini, pelmeni, hot dog type objects, frozen chicken breasts, noodles, cyrillic alphabet soup, and many other things that we couldn't decipher well enough to be willing to purchase. (we did manage to purchase japanese style blini, though. we still have no idea why they were japanese style.)

then, we paid for our purchases, took them out the other set of turnstiles, and over to the counter where the nice little woman took our shopping basket back and bagged our purchases in plastic bags for us. the vegetables were at the front of the store, close to the same doors we came in, but we always got vegetables last, because we didn't want to have to bring them through the store.

(to be continued...)

today's learning:

if the person who called the meeting is off at training this week, no one else will go to the meeting either, so it's okay for me to skip it.

hurray!

blah blah blah. blah blah blah.

i have stuff in my head, but i am too angry/sad to be coherent much about it.

anyhow. stuff i can be coherent about.

kylee is back off in seattle again. which is pleasing for her as she gets to see her boy and her cats, but sad for me, as there is much less kylee in my life when she is inconveniently living in another state. (we have a yard to garden in! and a dog who luuuuuvs you! move to minnesota! you know you want to!)

had vietnamese food for dinner with lauren, which was good, and then puppy snuggling and talking here.

and now i must drag nathan off to bed.

suddenly, my weekend is improving (knock on wood). good conversations with people i like. yay!

most people i'm not willing to fight with. mostly, if i'm willing to fight with you, i either a) don't give a rat's ass about you, or b) am willing to get seriously hurt.

most people fall somewhere in between the two for me.

and here's a link to the survey. go fill it out!


Follow this link to complete the survey!

finally a survey that gets it! woo! i was able to actually answer this question in a useful way!

28d. Which of the following describes you? (Check all that apply)


In a committed relationship with a man
In a committed relationship with a woman
Somewhat involved with a man
Somewhat involved with a woman
Single and uninvolved
Widowed from a partnership with a man
Widowed from a partnership with a woman
Other

i take back what i said about less cranky.

a friend of mine is hiv-positive.

god damn it all to hell.

less cranky today. i promise.

we dropped kylee the fabulous off at the airport this morning. she looked like she was not excited about the family reunion that she was off to, which made me want to throw her back in the car and drive her back to the house for the puppy to play with all day while we were at work. but i valiantly resisted!

in brighter news, i giggled mightily all through this afternoon at my training class when the instructor basically reprised the arguments i had in my last breakup.

"no, you have to give them specifics. just saying they have a bad attitude isn't helpful, because they don't know what that means, and they don't know what to improve. give them specific behavioral examples."

i did not fall on the floor, but it was close. and i bet everyone was wondering why i thought it was so funny.

(and the instructor did say, after i asked, that if one was not getting specifics, the thing to do was to push for them. then there was more giggling on my part.)

oh, i love fannish politics. love, love, love.

maybe people aren't waiting gleefully for things to explode, eh? maybe they're just worried they will.

maybe they're worried because they care.

maybe they're worried because they don't want things to blow up.

and maybe, just maybe, it's not all about YOU.

fyi. i have training on wednesday and thursday. therefore, not much computer time for me, until after work. whee.

the phrase that most often wants to come out of my mouth today is "well, i'm sorry that you're an idiot, but..."

i am instead, nodding and smiling like crazy.

m. socks says she has no plans for august thirtyfifth. well, that's a relief.

i had weeeeird dreams last night. (what a surprise, eh?) in one of them, i was speaking firmly with my sister and telling her to go make appointments with a few new doctors, and that i would talk to the rheumatologist that she and i both see and explain about how much pain she was in and how this was unacceptable. then, she said that she would be moving out of her half of the duplex on august thirty-fifth, and i thought "hmm. maybe L could move in downstairs, since i think she's going to want a new place to live, soon."

so many of the pieces of this are real, you understand. m. socks and i do go see the same rheumatologist, and she is in more pain than i particularly consider okay, and L may in fact want a new place to live soon.

but august thirty-fifth? aaaieee.

went to xat and nick's wedding last night. i had two glasses of wine and am hung over. this is no fair, i tell you. no fair at all.

there were some quite nice turns of phrase during the ceremony, which i intend to remember and steal, should i ever be in a circumstance where i might need them. mwhahaha.

right now, i am at work, doing a printer move. oh boy, oh boy. my favorite.

mwahahaha! it worked!

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i am editing knowledge management documents today. this is right up there on the "things i'd rather have a root canal than do" list. i have friends who are tech writers. i think they're all nuts. (yes, even you.) but if this is what makes them happy, that's okay. i bet they don't understand why it makes me happy to make the printer script shorter.

i'd rather be making the printer script shorter.

ooooh. seems like it might. that'd be handy.

i wonder if the l-space spoiler text works here, too.

and now i'm started on the exploding. how exciting my life is.

i am going to stay home tomorrow and write knowledge cases until i explode. wheee!

possible new internal betsy rules under consideration:

don't get close to people who push your boundaries and won't take no for an answer.

don't get close to people who explain to you how you don't really need to be upset or worried repeatedly.

and reinforcement of an old one: behavior matters. not words. words are nice, but if your behavior doesn't match them, then go the hell away.

james lileks. lileks.com. go read.

here's a bit from today's.

In “Wolfenstein,” every room you enter has Nazis. You never enter a room full of startled film editors piecing together an anti-Jew screed, family men who’ve been incrementally co-opted by three years of occupation. You never find that room.

And what would you do if you did?

my manager and i have both decided that working as a greeter at walmart would be better than having our current jobs. less stress, and carts to run people over with.

i like life in hell way better than i like the simpsons.

okay! more sleep equals a happier betsy!

also, there was more dog cuddling. this is also a bonus.

so, here i am back at work after convergence. a very long, very tiring weekend, and coming back to angry email.

now i have annie lennox singing a not particularly true or accurate song in my head, and now i am only a little wistful about not having managed to get a diane duane autograph to give away.

i was going to rebleach my hair tonight. fuck.

russia, cont.

eventually, i got on the plane to novosibirsk. it was an aeroflot plane, and it was kinda weird. first, you need to go actually outside, onto the tarmac, and then climb up the little stairs to get onto the plane. this puts you on the first floor of the plane, where you can set down your carryon luggage to be strapped in on some shelves. then, up another flight of stairs, and there are the seats. aeroflot planes were designed by midgets. no, no, skinny midgets. with no legs. that's my theory and i'm sticking to it. four more hours, and i was in novosibirsk. down two flights of stairs, outside, through the fence with the pointy barbed wire at the top, and look around.

hmm. no dad. hmm.

so, i looked inside the little building, and found an enormous ad for new york pizza restaurant, but no luggage on the carousel yet, and no dad. hmm.

i'd been up for something like thirty six hours at this point, so i decided that the smart thing to do was a) refuse all offers of taxis, and b) sit down and look for extraordinarily tall people. so, i did. shortly after (maybe twenty minutes or so) i spotted an extraordinarily tall person, and in fact, even the extraordinarily tall person who happens to be my father. hurray! i leapt up, yelled for him, and scooted over to say hello, and to let him be in charge for a while. we hiked out to find the taxi that he took in from the apartment, dropped my carryon luggage into it, and hiked off again, with the taxi driver, to go get my suitcase off the carousel.

you know those little stickers they give you at the airport and they attach part of it to your luggage? in russia, they check those! and if they don't match, you don't get your luggage! don't lose those stickers. mine was cleverly stuck to the back of my return tickets, but they managed to peel it off so they could keep it and i could keep my return tickets.

then, into the taxi. my dad explained to me about russian driving, which kept me from screaming in terror when the driver kept rapidly swerving to avoid potholes, including driving in the left hand lane into oncoming traffic. oh boy that was exciting.

it was about a forty minute drive back to the apartment. we went over the bridge where the ob river becomes the ob sea, and past some churches, and past all sorts of things, into novosibirsk, and then into akademgorodok. we drove down what appeared to be an alley, then what appeared to be a sidewalk, and then parked the car nose to nose with a biiiig khaki sort of suv thing. ta-daaa! here we were, number seventeen morskoy prospect. out of the car, and my dad paid the taxi driver and tipped him (apparently tipped him enough to necessitate naming little russian children after him in the future, but that seems all right), and then into the building.

oh, the building. it is made out of poured concrete. there are no lights, and no windows in the bit of the stairway going up to number 35, where we were staying. the tile floor was chipped and uneven, and the stairs were not of a regular sort of height. quite tricky. but i learned the magic code to get in the front door, and was shown how to unlock the apartment door.

(to be continued...)

What Obscure Animal are you?

my seeester who is smarter and funnier and quieter than me. so since she's not so good at the selfaggrandizement, here i am aggrandizing for her. (it's a verb now. i've verbed it. mwhahahahaha.)

sorry i haven't been updating much; it's been warm up with the computers at home, and i'm busy at work. whee. maybe tonight.

this is the text of a talk given by my friend kate's dad. here it is. it's about adhd, and talking about the diagnosis of it, the treatment of it, etcetera. (my thought was "wow. a pediatrician with the guts to say this stuff. woo!")