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a sketchy mink for sketchy rants |
6/21/2000: It is 78F this afternoon. Although I can hardly believe it myself, I am getting on a plane tomorrow. I will take a propeller plane to O'Hare, as I do for most of my vacations, and I will wander around the airport, and wander by the planes leaving for Tokyo, and I will think about going back there. But this time, I will actually have a ticket. It's sort of a strange thing... I never considered Japan to be remotely in the realm of possible vacations, but then my neighbor and friend Bill asked me if I wanted to go, and well, I realized that hey, this is doable! In some ways it feels almost like time travel.
I will be there for two weeks and two days, from June22 to July 10. I hope to go hog wild in bookstores. We will be staying in Youth Hostels and basically just winging it. They're actually pretty cheap, and I'm thinking it won't be another nine years before I go back yet again... Hopefully there will be lots to report when I return (lately work has been busy, and page updates haven't been happening, hopefully that will change!!). Until then, well... see ya!
5/18/2000: It is 75F already this morning and we have tornado time forecast to hit around 3 PM today and last into the night.
5/17/2000: It is 70F this morning and mostly cloudy, supposedly it will thunderstorm in places and hit 78F. Lately the air has been getting more humid.
Last night I went and picketed the county board meeting and also spoke at the public participation part in support of the living wage campaign. Tons of people came, including lots of people from AFSCME. The county in 1999 had a full 20% of full time workers earning below $17K, or the poverty level for a family of four. That alone would be one thing, but at the same time the county manages to waste $90K hiring union busting consultants from Florida (they've since been forced to pay that money back, thank goodness), raise the county sales tax by a quarter cent, give tax abatements to Motorola, which is a firm that not only was already in town (so why the hell do they need an incentive to "locate here?"), but had already broken ground and ordered the steel for their new building to be located in the new research park. They weren't gonna back out of that, particularly when the whole point of their moving was to be closer to UIUC. The board also is giving raises to some elected officials, voted in a swanky expensive pension plan for themselves (and had to do all sorts of machinations in Springfield to get out of it once they voted it in - when the public asked them "why the hell did you vote for that boondoggle??" the reply was "oh, well, we didn't know what we were voting for when we voted on that"). Now, due to the low wages, there are at least 20 jobs remaining unfilled (gee, when McD's pays more, that's not surprising - but this is OUR tax dollars subsidizing this crap!) and so the County Board, in its infinite (heh) wisdom, rather than submitting to their venerated Market and raising the wages, has decided to blow $125K hiring temps, mainly because if they hire temps, the temps aren't eligible to join the union. Topping it all off, every district of the county board has three representatives rather than the more usual one, meaning we have 27 representatives rather than nine. At any rate, at least two of my three representatives, here in the People's Republic of District 8, are supportive of our efforts and were cheering us on after we got done speaking. Others looked rather flustered, and in the case of certain individuals I have no fondness for to put it mildly, that was quite gratifying. As Belden put it, we'll be back, and often. He just retired so has lotsa time to cause trouble these days...
5/16/2000: It is 58F this morning and mostly cloudy, with a high forecast to hit the upper 70s F. Definitely things are having that summer feel.
Final exams at UIUC ended last Friday and graduation was on Sunday, so the usual hordes of people descended for the weekend and then most of the students left town, so we're once again in the nice peaceful uncrowded summertime. Leaves are all out, pretty soon fireflies will be coming out. Irises are out too... the little ones near the shed in my neighbor's yard (which I look out on from my kitchen window) are in full flower now. I got a big catalog of irises in the mail and I'm thinking of ordering some for next year. I have some little ones planted in the front garden but it seems they don't flower the first year, I can tell the leaves are definitely the right shape and one made just one tiny little flower, but next year they should be happy happy. The hydrangea has finally come to its senses and started making leaves up on stems and on last year's stems. For a while it was making leaves only right next to the ground, and then last year's bare stems were twisting and curling up from there, bare, like some sort of alien antennae.
But the best thing is the stripe of garden that passes for my back yard, between my house and the back fence. The aegopodium has totally made a lush carpet now and the hostas and ferns are poking up out of it, and there are some volunteer violets, it's exactly, exactly, as I imagined it would be when I planted those things last May. It's nice too, that I hardly need to weed it at all now that the ground cover has taken real hold. I am hoping that the various ground covers in the front garden also make the carpet by the end of the season - not only do things look much better then, but they're also a lot easier to care for. Oh yes, the other wondrous thing is my front parkway maple tree has indeed leafed out and it's now meeting the maple across the street so that right in front of my house, the street is covered with tree canopy, just the way I love it. The front area of my house also has the huge hackberry blending with the maple there for nice dappled shade and green goodness, and the three silver maples on the other side of the house also meeting with them above the house and down the side. Ain't nothing beats trees. They just get better and better as time goes on!
Things should also look even more nice as I plan to have the house painted soon. Turns out that the building permit for the porch isn't back in time to do that first (the person helping is going to be out of town in June, and I don't want to have it halfway done at any point). So, it seems painting will happen first. I intend to paint the house a greyish/greenish color with white trim. Possibly a little bit off-white trim. The doors will be dark green, as will the porch floor when that's done, and also the back stoop. Hmm. I suppose I could paint the front door red, like some people, but I dunno. The current paint is starting to peel, and in the places where the previous paint wasn't really scraped off (the main places where the current paint is getting crappy as a result) I'm hoping to have most of that old lumpiness scraped off before painting this time. The new color should go good with plants (the current color isn't bad either, though I'm mainly not into dark brown trim). Anyways, I'll probably be trying to do that soon, though depending on how long it takes to arrange, things might end up happening after I get back from vacation. I'm going on vacation June 22, so that's only 5 weeks from now. Yow.
Inside the house, shelves will be happening in the living room. They will be built in, from actual wood to match the floor, and to be extra safe, supports will be put under the floor where they are, too (they'll be attached to the wall, but the main load will be on the floor). These shelves will cover the entire far wall of the living room and go around the corner a bit as well. Considering my rapacious appetite for books, this will work out really well, and end up cheaper than if I tried to buy bookshelves anywhere, plus be real wood so they won't bend and all like the cheapie bookshelves I've mail ordered in the past. Of course, before I start building onto the wall, now I'm thinking hmm, maybe I want to paint the room first. See, the trim is white throughout my house. Odds are that it's designed that way, and at any rate, it looks fine like that, it's all painted really nicely. I have no burning desire to try and take the paint off and make them brown. However, while I like the white walls too, there's not a contrast between the walls and the trim. So I'm thinking I might like to paint the walls just enough to have a contrast there, and warm up the room just a tad. I don't want things to get too dark, of course, since the best thing about the place is the sunny openness of it all. So, I'd probably pick a really light color, probably some sort of really pale sage-y thing, that goes well with the view out my window, which is mainly leaves and sky. I intend to have plants on the top shelf of the living room too so that'd be cool. I'll go look at paint colors when I go to get wood for shelving, and then plan on having a Paint Party, feeding neighbors who come help me paint or just stand around and provide company while I paint. Such is the state of home improvement dreams right now. In Japan, I intend to get some noren for the doorway to the hall from the living room and maybe various ones to change out in the kitchen too.
Thinking about my house and also looking at gardens and buildings on my way into work, I'd like to call people's attention to two apartment buildings. Compare 812 W. Nevada (right at the corner of Nevada and Lincoln) with 709 W. Nevada (between Busey and Coler, on Nevada). These are both apartment buildings, designed as such from the very moment they were built. However, 812 W. Nevada is ugly as sin, while 709 W. Nevada is a place I would love to live in if I was still living in an apartment. 812 is fairly new, it's one of the big boxes, no eaves, grey vinyl siding, no window frames, no garden, no nothing, with a big ol' ugly sign out front. Yeeccccchhhh. 709, on the other hand, looks just like a big house. There are 5 apartments in there, two per floor for two floors, and then one up in the upper roof. The really cool part is that the house has two chimneys, so that each of the regular 4 apartments has a fireplace in it just like the regular houses in the neighborhood, and there's windows on either side of the fireplace, again, just like regular houses, and kitchen has a bay window on the side, just like regular houses. The top apartment is probably a studio apartment, it has windows all across the front. The house has huge eaves on it, it's cream stucco with dark green trim, and it has bushes and flowers out front. People complain about apartments but it's not apartments per se - it's the gross looking new built-on-the-cheap crap they complain about, because you don't see people complaining about either buildings like 709 or apartments that originally WERE one house, even when the house starts looking a bit worn and has odd staircases built up the side to go into front doors on the 3rd floor. There's brick apartment buildings and condos on that street too, but they also have old style windows, eaves, and they have gardens around them. In fact, one of the basement apartments in the brick building (on Coler and Nevada, NE corner) has bulbs just outside the window so the resident gets an eye-level show, first crocuses and then daffodils, tulips, then the redbud tree blooms right outside the window. That place is always one of my favorite places to look at on my way into work in the early spring. In all its ugliness of style, 812 could be really improved if someone would just grab a rototiller and plow a row all around the building, toss in some bulbs and summer bushes, and maybe plant a tree in the yard. It's really, really tempting...
Right now at the Urbana Free Library (I am so lucky to live only 5 or 6 blocks from this place, one of the top ten town libraries in the US) someone has an exhibit of old postcards of Champaign-Urbana. Quite nice to look at. I have a few myself (West Side Park and Follinger Auditorium) but am always on the lookout for those. Last weekend I got a postcard of Karl Marx and also one of a daffodil. They were in a big box downtown and most of them were the sum total of postcards delivered to one Lena DeV..? hmm, some sorta Dutch-sounding name, and her husband Daniel, and all their relatives, back in the early 1900s. Half the fun of looking at old postcards is reading the letters on the back. They had one official New Year postcard from Japan, sent in 1937, during the war.
5/10/2000: It is 57F this morning and brightly sunny, with a high forecast to hit 74F. It's less humid than it has been, too - in short, a beautiful spring day, and the soil is wet, making it the perfect time for garden growing and ANT INVASIONS.
Yes, ants have been coming up from cracks in the sidewalk, making large nests, crawling up out of the wet earth into the shingles of my house, and from there finding a tiny little pinprick hole between the wall and the windowsill near my terminal, in the front room. Somehow they then managed to teleport themselves into a package that was delivered in the mail yesterday, which unfortunately had Peeps in it (those ultra-sweet extruded marshmallow birds with colored granulated sugar on them that can rot your teeth with one glance). Now, these babies were sealed in plastic, but I guess it had some tiny little hole in it 'cuz the entire thing was a big ant farm. Woo. Those were promptly sacrificed to the ants in the trash bin outside. Other items in the box were okay, then I needed to vacuum up the ants, and smear sheetrock joint compound in the crack. See ya. Of course, they're no doubt plotting a new path right now.
5/05/2000: It is 73F this morning and showing more promise for rain that it did yesterday. Of course, the main reason it didn't rain yesterday is I brought my big umbrella to work. My umbrella works pretty much like an amulet - if I carry it around and inconvenience myself, it won't rain. This is the same principle that lets me summon a city bus at will by simply opening up some really messy food that can't be put back into its container... the trick is to choose a food that seems this way, but can really be chowed in a hurry.
My back garden is happy happy. The aegopodium is really starting to look like a carpet, and each of the hostas I planted last year has turned into three. Each is still right there where it was but there's now three centers and there are lots and lots of leaves on them. They are very genki because it's been raining some lately. Things are finally starting to look like I imagined it, back there.
5/02/2000: It is 46F this morning and sunny. Supposedly things will get up towards 73F this afternoon. Yesterday it rained pretty much all day, a nice soaking rain that the garden (not to mention the farmers) should love. This was good timing, as just this weekend I put in some more ground cover in the front flower bed and by the side of the house. The new plants have perked up quite nicely and some of them already made some flowers.
I've been quite busy of late. Yesterday was May Day, with a fest at noon involving lots of planning meetings and flyers and that sort of thing. This past Saturday was GirlZone Day, and so I gave a GirlZone web seminar that morning at 9 AM (yow) that took a while to prepare for, that Friday was several art things to go look at/experience/participate in, I went out to see Jolee and Aimee Rickman sing at Mike'n'Molly's (making it that much harder to wake up for the web thing, hehe) and then Saturday night was House Theater at Grove St. House. This time I actually got to perform at the house theater. I made a parody version of Que Sera Sera about the IMF and structural adjustment and so they invited me to sing it with Paul and Danielle, and Susan played the accordion. It was much fun and people seemed to like it. I wore a suit to sing it, for the first time in years. It reminded me just how glad I am to not have to wear a suit daily. There were some really great and funny things at house theater, including a great skit by Sevilla and Mark Enslin. Spiff got loose and Mike had to chase him all the way to the Solo Cup factory. Then on Sunday I was a guest on the radio again on Peter's show talking about the IMF and World Bank with Danielle in the morning. I'm getting more used to talking on the air and it'd be neat to participate in a regular show. Hopefully the low power radio will survive the Senate vote. Call up your congresscritter and tell them that they should vote to KEEP the FCC's proposal for low power radio as it stands. After the radio show I bought Cat Stuph (food and litter, we handle BOTH ends of the cat), tutored Bill in Japanese, planted extra ground cover, and installed the flat hose in the front garden.
Peeve: Installing the damn flat hose. This thing is, well, a flat hose, with holes poked in it at regular intervals (on purpose) and a cap on the end of it. The idea is, you put it in the garden or on the lawn, screw the regular hose into the open side, turn on the water, and wow, instant "rain." Peeve is, of course, that the hose refuses to sit the way you want. It's really long and needs to be sort of bent around the garden to water the whole thing. But it seems that no matter which way I try bending the hose, the holes insist on spraying down into the dirt or out away from the garden, rather than upwards and into the garden. I've gotten most of it in place now, but it took around 30 mins of wrestling and lots of strategically placed bricks.