Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

the amount of times i mix this up=preposterous

whether...a sort of either/or all crammed up into one word, implying uncertainty between two choices

wether...a castrated ram


i just wrestled with those there homophones.

i generally pride myself on spelling while enjoying bad spelling by others...so much so that my friend joe and i had a thing going on where we would send emails back and forth to one another so terribly misspelled that they were nearly impossible to read. and the trick of the situation is that when i would write entire emails out in the worst possible spelling imaginable i had to work over time, retraining my brain to make mistakes and make assumptions on how a word would look based on the sound. during those months i undid years and years of basic elementary school lessons. it was bad. it was dark. it still springs up on me now and again.

Friday, May 11, 2007

...day three...

today can be summed up with this: brother jason jumping in on the scene, literally...he engaged the nieces in some serious taekwondo/wrestling action that ended in momentary tears, breakfast for dinner (apple/chocolate chip pancakes), ice cream at 'it's NUTS!', and one of those modern day computer animated movies that didn't seem to satisfy anyone.

Thursday, May 10, 2007

...day two...

today can be summed up with this: kids these days eat a lot of food coloring...super saturated, knock out your eyeballs, kick your liver into high gear food dyes.

there's something going on in the marketing of food to children that seems to say that the more removed from nature and natural ways of eating food the better. take personal enemy number one: gogurt. yogurt in a tube. or better yet, yogurt in a glorified, elongated, mini trash bag.

niece number two...two in terms of being born second, not some sort of cruel aunt hierarchy...ate a gogurt this morning. and 'ate' is an insufficient verb when it comes to the consumption of gogurt...and anyone who has seen a kid slurping down a tube knows what i mean.

anyhow, today's gogurt was brought to us by? sponsored by? shrek. it was some sort of swampy marsh flavor and it was some sort of swampy marsh color. murky. whitish. greenish. opaque. and there was no escaping it...every time she opened up her gogurt hole to chatter away her time before making her way to the bus there it was. completely gnarly. not something aunt jen can handle at eight am without any coffee in her.

something else to know about me: i'm a food label nerd. i like knowing what i am eating...good or bad. i get psyched about yogurt b/c it has on average 10g of protein per serving. i started to get half psyched about gogurt til i nerded it up on it's food label...2g of protein. 2g...what'd shrek do with the other 8?

Wednesday, May 9, 2007

...day one...

today is day one of five of jen corace: pseudo parent. i'm sitting my nieces while my sister meets up with her husband in las vegas.

something to know about me: i don't spend much time with kids, let alone in a multiple day, contained setting. while i am lucky to be an aunt to two of the coolest kids ever i have an idea that by the time monday rolls around i will feel a particular level of 'spent' that my body has never known before.

at the moment i have set up a temporary internet cafe/winery of sorts in my sister's living room. i'm not too sure what i mean by that beyond making a snack, having a drink by my side, computer on my lap and 'the scarlet letter' on the all too huge tv plodding away in front of me.

wha? what! you say...'the scarlet letter?' demi moore's 'the scarlet letter?'. yes, that very scarlet letter.

i can't even begin to describe the strangeness that is unfolding before me. such an oddly star studded cast...such a paltry interpretation of the story. sort of, how do you say, much like a soap opera. oh gary oldman dimmesdale, it's going to be okay. i mean, not really, that's a total lie, but shuuush shuuush.

the funny thing is is that two years ago a portland trip of mine fell in the middle of a nathaniel hawthorne marathon. and as it goes when i am on one of these reading rampages...cue 'reading rainbow' music...it's all i can talk about. nathaniel hawthorne this, nathaniel hawthorne that. i talked it up so much that it seemed like a good idea to track down the movie and give it a go. i had no misconceptions about it being a good film. i was hoping to be surprised by how horrible it might be (and now here, in the future i can attest that it is indeed terrible...a fantastic terrible).

the only misconception i did have was that it was going to be an easy task to accomplish. how foolish. how naive. it wasn't that the video store didn't have 'the scarlet letter', it's not that they didn't have it on vhs...the format i was looking for...it was that SOMEONE ELSE HAD ALREADY TAKEN IT OUT THAT NIGHT!! ten years well past its prime...if this movie even ever had a prime...some portlander beat me to the chase. now that's a 'wha? what!

highlight of the day:
at my niece's softball game a group of boys under the bleachers were making 'boobies out of dirt.' i know this because they said it over and over again. not so much as an announcement but rather some sort of pre pubescent chant. they one upped the awesomeness of this event when caught by a parent and covering their deeds claimed that they were making hot dogs out of rocks. an interesting jump.

Friday, May 4, 2007

high five

in case you are wondering how i do what i do...part of the recipe is that i have THE BIGGEST HANDS IN THE WORLD! seriously, i have huge hands. they're good for holding down paper, good and steady. thanks to if'n books deb...courtesy of her flickr account.

Tuesday, May 1, 2007

tick...tock, tick...tock

for the past two weeks the muscle below my right eyelid has been pulsing, tic-ing.

fluttering.

it could be that i am on the computer a lot
it could be that i am in charge of a large move at the end of the month.
it could be that i have a lot of large work on my plate.
it could be that i am afraid of severing a tie to a wonderful community.
it could be that my snoring is keeping me up at night, denying me solid sleep.

christ, to the right of my left eye just started up...fan-fuckin-tastic.

now and forever...