My ankle was giving me fits until yesterday. Nothing major. Just the occasional shot of pain. You know, a “Hey they’re buddy, how ‘bout treatin’ me better” type of thing. But it has been fine today. Haven’t gone running yet, but I did do a ton of yardwork with no problem.

Speaking of yardwork. We bought a new weed wacker today. It’s been quite a debate. I’d previously always used electric. But to edge certain parts of the yard will require dragging a cord across at least two flowerbeds and constantly maneuvering back around trees. And that’s just the close-in parts. I didn’t really want to test how many extension cords I could string together. So I looked a battery powered. Which apparently get about twenty minutes of use. What is that? I can only dream of having a yard where twenty minutes makes a dent in the edging. So I went with gas. I hate myself for it. But I also kind of love it. We spent a lot on it. Because, I have a lot to edge. And it’s a pretty cool little engine, and it has two strings, and.. and… And maybe some of those trees in the backyard will eat up all the carbon it’s spewing… right?

It’s kind of crazy though. I really like it. I really get satisfaction out of having nice tools. Even though most of the time I don’t splurge for them.

So last night we watched “Across the Universe”, and it proved my hypothesis - Ringo and Harrison were the geniuses behind the Beatles. Well possibly not. But the orchestrations were so bland and they slowed down every, single, song. And they all ended up sounding exactly the same. It started ok, but it went downhill quickly. And it had a great moment were you realized that a masturbatory baby boomers history movie, would actually be pretty moving if it was done completely from the perspective of black Americans. Could you imagine a movie about kids going to college and vietnam and protesting the war where they weren’t just pissing away their middle class parent’ money and doing drugs? I think it would be pretty cool. I might get really arrogant one day and write it.

The worst part was where they mixed together Across the Universe and Helter Skelter. Almost brilliant. Except there have been a million movies that have had amazing scenes done to that music. Powerful. Violent images. And in this one a guy gets handcuffed. And another guy gets clubbed over the head. But off screen. And that’s it. Oh, and then a bunch of guys get blown up later, but that’s reported in a newspaper story. So it’s offscreen. Pathetic music video.

I guess Julie Taymor’s puppets were ok. But overall bpppppppppllllttt! I know I don’t like the Beatles, but that doesn’t mean I don’t respect them enough to want them to have a movie made up of watered down musical theatre karaoke versions of their work with no soul. To sum up. Bono’s acting is really good. Really good. I’m not just saying that. But you will not remember his musical performance

<a href="http://www.mapmyrun.com/run/united-states/tx/austin/568032201" _fcksavedurl="http://www.mapmyrun.com/run/united-states/tx/austin/568032201">bull creek route</a><br/><a href="http://www.mapmyrun.com/find-run/united-states/tx/austin" _fcksavedurl="http://www.mapmyrun.com/find-run/united-states/tx/austin">Find more Runs in Austin, Texas</a>
It’s a Thursday so I had to go into work today. I ran at lunch. Did my normal Bull Creek route. The route is pretty easy, but it’s littered with rocks and boulders. Plus there are a few perennially wet places. I’m convinced I’m eventually going to injure myself out there, but so far I’ve been lucky.

Today I was jumping from boulder to boulder (these are in the ground, not tall ones), and hit one at a bad angle. Felt a little pain in my ankle, but I ran it off pretty quickly.

Now this afternoon I got up after sitting for a while and I can feel light tinges of pain when I walk. I’m really hoping this isn’t one of those slow burners. Those always seem to be the worst.

I’d run on the road if that didn’t seem even more foolhardy.

---

Comments

Kate (http://katiekatworld.blogspot.com)

2008-02-15T04:04:37.000Z

I’m hoping the ankle thing is temporary! Even without the cars, the street has lots of pitfalls, too.

Two nights ago I was cooking dinner. I had given Stella a carrot and piece of broccoli to try. She always has to have a carrot while she’s waiting for dinner. The broccoli was part of my plan to get her to eat more by letting her sample the raw ingredients. She had been silent for a while so I went and looked for her.

She was in the living room with a bowl, the carrot, the broccoli, and one of her plastic knives. She was chopping them up and putting them in the bowl. I got her out a cutting board so she wouldn’t mark up the coffee table and we both went back to work. Cooking.

---

Comments

Tara (http://rabid-fraggle.blogspot.com)

2008-02-13T22:38:21.000Z

Oh my goodness, how cute!!!

Kate (http://katiekatworld.blogspot.com)

2008-02-14T04:29:29.000Z

It will be time for that Baby’s First Knife before you know it. Mom let me make an angel food cake when I was about 8.

I’m sorry. That song lyric will always have horror connotations for me. I guess that’s just suburban programming, but what good could possibly come upon a midnight clear?

Anyway. Last night our alarm woke us up again a few minutes before midnight. Our digital phone has gone out again and so the alarm can’t phone home. It conveniently phones home every night at midnight. Then it beeps loudly that something has gone wrong. It’s fantastic. I’ve found I can turn it off, by jumping out of bed and resetting the alarm.

So last night I was on my way to do my nightly reset when I noticed a figure at the window. At first I thought it was Punky, our cat, looking out. But it was on the wrong side of the window. Then I thought it was perhaps one of the 2,004 cats that live in our neighborhood and like to stare in our windows. But it was the wrong shape.

As I got close it shuffled off. It was a juvenile possum. Not quite as long as an adult. It shambled away looking embarrassed that I had caught it peeping in.

I mentioned it to Julie when I got back from resetting the alarm. “There’s a possum in the house?!,” she yelped. I calmly explained that it was outside the house. It was just looking in the windows. “I would have screamed bloody murder if I had seen that,” she replied. I mentioned that I thought its shambling was kind of cute. She turned over, convinced of my insanity.

---

Comments

Kate (http://katiekatworld.blogspot.com)

2008-02-14T04:27:30.000Z

I agree with the cuteness of possums, especially if you think you might see one. There were a few by Ryan’s old house that liked to walk past the front window. Probably to make Tilly insane because she wasn’t allowed out to “greet” her neighbor. Alarms going off in the middle of the night are NOT cool.

Man, I am tired. It’s been a rough few weeks which is why I haven’t been posting. I’ve been up against a ridiculous deadline at work that had me working until 2:30 am last Friday night. Or Saturday morning. However you like to structure your days.

I couldn’t really sleep in on Saturday. Stella was in a loud talking mood, and my body just refused to fight it. So I got up with less than 5 hours of sleep. Make that much less. Roxie woke me up twice that night.

Roxie.

Roxie. Bane of my existence.

Roxie is our dog who walked into our front door after deciding she was done riding the rails. She’s a depression-era hobo dog. When we took her to the vet initially they said she was twelve years old at minimum. That was three years ago. So now she’s at minimum Methusala-aged. She’s also taken to waking us up in the middle of the night barking. She’ll usually hit us at least once sometime between 1am and 4am, then another round between 5am and 7am.

I was putting up with that ok. I’ve developed a much looser relationship with sleep lately. Apparently, I don’t need nearly as much as I used to think. But then last night she started getting lost. In the past you’d let her out. She’d go pee on the closest scrap of grass, then she’d wander back to somewhere that she approximated was close to the door and start barking. I’d have to step out of the house, and start waving at her frantically (because she’s deaf and you can’t call her) so that she could trot back over to the door. She never, ever is right outside the door. She can be anywhere up or down the house except right outside the door.

Then last night at dinner time she wandered off and I had to go fetch her. Then we went to take out the trash and she somehow got stuck on the other side of a ladder that I had left out from our painting. A ladder that was lying on the ground. A ladder that could easily be walked around. The obstacle was insurmountable for Roxie. She was spinning in circles. Coming back to the same conclusion that, “Yes. There is a ladder directly in front of me.”

So last night she started getting lost in the middle of the night too. And I had to wander out in my underwear to find her. Usually not in any way trapped, but having no clue where she is. I should point out also, that she’s not wandering into any of the parts of the backyard that are kind of far from the house. She’s just wandered behind a bush.

I’m realizing that people near me should probably not get alzheimers because I have little patience for it.

Oh, who am I kidding. I’d probably be great. After all, I’m getting up in the middle of night and wandering around to find my lost dog.

---

Comments

Kate (http://katiekatworld.blogspot.com)

2008-02-13T00:32:27.000Z

I agree with your last comment. I think that life is less about what annoys you or doesn’t, but what you do or don’t do.

Stole this one from Kate. Seemed sort of interesting. I wonder why so much Neil Gaimen is on here.

The instructions are simple:
Bold those you’ve read.
Add an asterisk* to those you have read more than once.
Italicize books you have started but couldn’t finish.
Underline those on your TBR list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (her own fault she needed an editor)
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion (I tried this so many times as a kid. I have no interest in even trying again now)
Life of Pi: A Novel (attempted and was bored to tears)
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
* Great Expectations (I loved this one the second time. Sooo good.)
American Gods (brilliant)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex (brilliant. Want to read it again in a few years)
Quicksilver (Thought I hadn’t finished this one. Finished this one. It was “The Confusion” [book 2] I couldn’t finish.)
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World (I want to read this. For some reason it’s one I pick up and start when I don’t have time to finish a book)
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
*The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
* The Once and Future King (Julie hated this one too. I’ve read it multiple times.)
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984 (again with books I start only when I have no time)
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (I’m assuming this is the novel. I’ve read the play dozens of times)
To the Lighthouse (yaaaaaaaaaaawn)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (loved this one, and very readable. Don’t know why it’s on here)
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
* Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
* The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
* Treasure Island (good grief. I think I’ve read this like 100 times. Beware the black spot!)
David Copperfield
* The Three Musketeers (great book. But could do with being abridged. The serial nature ends up having several stretches being a tad slow)

<a href="http://www.mapmyrun.com/run/united-states/tx/austin/547141413" _fcksavedurl="http://www.mapmyrun.com/run/united-states/tx/austin/547141413">Country Club Creek via Pleasent Valley and Wickersham</a><br/><a href="http://www.mapmyrun.com/find-run/united-states/tx/austin" _fcksavedurl="http://www.mapmyrun.com/find-run/united-states/tx/austin">Find more Runs in Austin, Texas</a>
So this was my Friday run. It’s been a long stressful week at work, and I didn’t get to start running until 4pm on Friday. It’s a decent route. Wickersham is still a pain. I took Stella with me, and my back was killing me from the hills at the end.

I haven’t been writing much because of the work. It’s been taking a lot out of me. We finally finished painting the exterior of the house last weekend. It looks fantastic, but it was a massive amount of work. And we still have to clean up all the drips around the house.

We got a big screen TV a few weeks back when we unexpectedly got our refund from Newmark. Every so often, Julie and I decide that our eyes are failing us and upgrade the TV. This led to 4 hours on a Friday night with a toddler at Circuit City. In the end we were happy with the TV. I managed to convince Julie to get a blu-ray player since the main purpose for our TV is to watch movies. I ended up returning it for a playstation 3, though after reading reviews online.

This of course led us to need new furniture. So the day after we headed off to Ikea. We put together a Besta solution that would put the TV on a nice cabinet, and we got some Besta bookcases that house all of our CDs in a manner that should not kill small children should the decide to climb on them.

Oh, and in the middle of this I finished my newest play - The Automat.

This past week was mostly a blur. One of the cabinets we planned for the living room was to be suspended over the TV. Julie always underestimates hanging things on the wall. She seems to think the reason I don’t want to put on child safety features is that I don’t believe children will ever use them. Rather than the fact I’m lazy and don’t want to spend 3 hours trying to attach a bookcase to the wall. Julie yet again assumed that hanging this cabinet would be a quick ordeal. Of course it was another 3 hours. 3 hours of holding the cabinet while we tried to measure. Tried to find our studs. Put in drywall anchors. Quite a pain. But it’s in.

Only 1000 more projects to go.

---

Comments

Kate (http://katiekatworld.blogspot.com)

2008-02-02T23:16:40.000Z

I love that running map maker. If I ever feel good enough to run, I’ll try that. If I just go a few miles I can take Tilly. She can still run with the best of them. Your projects sound so fun! I hear you about hanging things on the wall. It usually takes Ryan a few hours with stud finders and levels before he even starts making holes. And he was not thrilled when I asked him to put the safety straps on the tall bookcases. He’s glad he did it, just the thought of spending all that time wasn’t appealing.

The statesman reported on my parent’s church this morning. You can read the article here. Seems they’re suing the City of Austin claiming that the city’s rules that keep them from building a new parking lot over our water supply is infringing their right to worship. Because part of your right to worship includes a free parking space.

Austin’s chief of litigation, Anne Morgan, says the church has other options: build a parking garage or ask its members to take the bus.

So in other words, these Christians won’t take a bus. Even though if you look at the route for the 331 it drops off practically in their parking lot. I know this because after much prompting my mother took the bus a few times. It also happens to cross bus routes with the 3, the 10, and the 1, which means pretty much everyone in Austin can get there by bus. Well except West Austinites. Who won’t pay for public transport. And from what I hear are pretty well represented at this church. At some point we should cut those moochers off. Especially since they can’t even be bothered to drive around a parking garage.

And people wonder why I want nothing to do with these “caring” churches. How about giving a damn about the water I drink? How many more missionaries could you send over seas for the cost of this lawsuit? How many people could you feed for the cost of your state-of-the-art sound system? Why couldn’t you build a parking garage on your current land? Or is this just about serving rich people their weekly singing and dancing catharsis so they can endure living one more week with the spouse they hate, at the job they hate, without pulling the plug completely?

I know a lot of people dislike organized religion. Personally I like it much more than this “dis-organized religion” of the evangelicals. Organized religion has shown historically that it’s pretty corrupt. Not having the checks and balances that organized religion has I think can only end badly. Which probably explains why most of these churches are essentially prosperity-preaching country clubs.

One of my shows is playing at Frontera Fest tomorrow night. It’s called the nymph, and it’s a bit of a twisted fairy tale about what happens when a river o’er runs it s banks. Fun stuff.

You can still get tickets here:

http://4thwalltickets.com/store/show/72

Just scroll down to Jan 23rd and buy some tickets. I recommend buying in advance. Frontera often sells out. And by often, I mean almost always.

This is probably my favorite show I’ve written, and I hope to return to it some day and make it into a full length script. Something along the lines of Neil Gamine’s Coraline.

<a href=“http://www.mapmyrun.com/run/united-states/tx/austin/899336311” _fcksavedurl=“http://www.mapmyrun.com/run/united-states/tx/austin/899336311”>Big and Little Stacy and a detour to manlove
<a href=“http://www.mapmyrun.com/find-run/united-states/tx/austin” _fcksavedurl=“http://www.mapmyrun.com/find-run/united-states/tx/austin”>Find more Runs in Austin, Texas
Decided to check out Big and Little Stacy today. I took a detour and looked at the houses near Oltor and Parker. There’s some cute stuff in there. Then headed over I-35 at Oltorf. Ran past Travis High. Kids were walking back from lunch, and I can report that girls still wear “Victoria”. It really makes puts a new spin on the Dazed and Confused quote “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age. ” If you aren’t into preying on high school girls it can make you feel chronologically disoriented that the kids seem to be exactly the same, but you are now 30.

Ran down Eastside drive and ran through the parks. I like the way the houses line the park. That’s a pretty cool neighborhood design. I also loved the point where the trail ran under the road. I’m a sucker for that. I headed out onto riverside. Checked out those cool modern houses they’re building at I-35 and Riverside, crossed the interstate again and headed up summit. I decided to check out one of the culdesacs and ended up on manlove street. I’m assuming that’s someone’s last name. Hopefully a woman.

I headed up Summit back to Woodland. Headed up parker to Oltorf and took Burleson home. I wasn’t about to attempt the two Parker hills again. So 2 miles less than last week and a lot slower. But it was a really nice trip.