Bon voyageeee

We leave before the crack of dawn tomorrow for our long planned vacation. I warned my husband months ago that there'd be a chance of snow. He didn't believe me. This is what the national Weather Service predicted for Tuesday morning:

That blue area? SNOW. The forcast is a 70% chance of precipitation on Monday, with a chance of snow...60% chance on Tuesday, with a high probability of snow (as indicated on the map), and then it is supposed to warm up Wednesday afternoon and be at least decent for the rest of the trip. We'll have to scrap some of our plans, since the weather decided not to cooperate. Instead we'll spend a couple of days hanging out, drinking hot cocoa and reading. Maybe we'll play outside, if we get the *right* kind of snow.

The car we rented is so nice, we might have to get one for ourselves. It's a 2009 Pontiac G6 with leather interior. We discoverd that it came equipped with satellite radio, which will be a Godsend, as well as a compass, which will also probably be a Godsend. Plus, an amazing feature that I didn't even know existed - heated seats! That is just...amazing!

I got my new glasses in time for the trip. I'll have to get used to these new frames...I'm not too sure of them yet. I may have made regretable choices. One pair is okay, with a slightly cat-eyed retro shape, although they don't provide the coverage I'm used to with my old glasses. The other pair remind me a little of Linda Cardellini's portrayal of Velma Dinkley in the Scooby-Doo movies.

Which is interesting, considering that Velma (along with Daria Morgendorffer) is one of the characters I'm most often compared to. Jinkies...

It's time to finish packing and go back over our list of things to do before we leave. I'll bring back a snowball for you.

Because it's a small world, after all.

From a recent article about filming the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel "The Road", which has been delayed by the studio for a later release date. It couldn't have anything to do with the story being terribly bleak and dystopian, I suppose?

Spoilers, ahoy, people - you've been warned!:

"The Road" began filming in late February, mostly in and around Pittsburgh, with a later stop in New Orleans and a postproduction visit planned to Mount St. Helens. The producers chose Pennsylvania, one of them, Nick Wechsler, explained, because it's one of the many states that give tax breaks and rebates to film companies and, not incidentally, because it offered such a pleasing array of post-apocalyptic scenery: deserted coalfields, run-down parts of Pittsburgh, windswept dunes. Chris Kennedy, the production designer, even discovered a burned-down amusement park in Lake Conneaut and an eight-mile stretch of abandoned freeway, complete with tunnel, ideal for filming the scene where the father and son who are the story's main characters are stalked by a cannibalistic gang traveling by truck.

No kidding - I'll be there about five days from now. Only part of the midway burned, not the whole park (the work of some g-damned arsonist). If I can get into the park, which had been closed for a while even before the midway fire, I plan on taking some pictures.

This was the midway, after the fire:

Spheres of influence

Last night my lovable, goofy son managed to make me a little sad that he's getting older and growing up. I was helping him get his backpack ready for school in the morning and he was kind of singing to himself, so at first I didn't catch on to the words coming out of his mouth. But then he repeated it, a bit louder, and I just stopped what I was doing and stood there for a minute, a little surprised. I couldn't quite belive what I'd heard so I asked him to repeat it again. Then, since I knew I couldn't be the only one to have to bear witness to the corruption of my impressionable child, I asked him to go in the living room and sing it to his dad. Apparently, the song wasn't enough - he had to get into character for this "performance". So, what song was my darling first grader singing, decked out in gold mardi gras beads, a backwards ball cap and oversized sunglasses? Flo-Rida's "Low". The part where the lyrics go "Shawty had them apple bottom jeans (jeans)/Boots with the fur (with the fur)/The whole club was lookin at her/She hit the flo (she hit the flo)/Next thing u kno/Shawty got low low low low low low low low".

I had to look the lyrics up - I thought that song was by Usher. As you can probably figure, my husband and I aren't huge fans of hip hop (my son gets his love of "rocking out" and playing air guitar from his father's collection of classic rock and hair band music...he gets his fondness for They Might Be Giants from yours truly). After that delightful display (complete with dance moves, to boot), we had to ask where he picked that routine up. We figured it would have been in his after school program. But we were wrong. The little friend that he sits with at lunch taught him the song and the moves, as well as introducing him to that exaggerated hip hop style that he is treating as a costume - so far. I had to give my son a small lecture about how some things are for kids and some things - like that song- really aren't, just to make myself feel like I was having a positive affect on a kid who will now be more greatly influenced by his peers than by his parents. It's bad enough he's been asking for a skateboard for months, and has started to gravitate towards clothes that I see mini skater punks twice his age wearing. I'm losing my kid to the inexorable influence of the wider world. I'll just have to work even harder to instill good judgement in him, now. But I draw the line at saggy, drawer-bearing pants and hypersexualized mysoginy, no matter what!

I heard you missed me. I'm back.

I've been busy getting ready for an upcoming vacation - a much needed vacation. Of course, I'm all stressed about all the things that will need to be done this week at work so that nothing goes terribly wrong next week when I'm not here. I also had to go out and buy some cold weather clothes, since down here it is in the 60's and we consider that "chilly". I just checked the 10 day forcast for our destination, and right now it is predicted to snow. SNOW! You have no idea how excited this makes me. Even if there are just flurries (which, considering that it'll be raining the first part of the week, it may be some actual decent flurries), this would be special because my son has never seen snow. My husband is having second thoughts about his decision to not buy thermals, so this week we get to rush around trying to find some, and I want everyone to get boots since it's probably going to be muddy.

I was recently shocked to discover that Target has appropriated the Japanese advertising mascot Domo-kun into their in-store Halloween advertising. Did no one from their marketing department bother to Google Domo before doing this? Seriously...

For those who aren't familiar, the most common (infamous) Domo-related image to be found on the internet is a photoshopped image of Domo chasing a kitten with the tagline "Every time you masturbate ... God kills a kitten." In internet years, it's quite old, too - been around since the at least the early 2000's. Of course, looking at what we've done to the Sanrio brand, none of it surprises me at all. I'm thinking of buying a Domo doll and putting it in my office (orrr...someone could get me one for Christmas??).


Now for the serious stuff...

In the wake of Colin Powell's late-in-the-game endorsement of Barack Obama (for which Rush Limbaugh is calling the retired United States General and former member of President Bush's administration who donated to McCain's faltering campaign last year an "ungrateful racist"...because Limbaugh isn't either of those two things himself, obviously ...eyeroll...), one of the forums I frequent *a little too frequently sometimes* has devolved into a battleground, divided between a small group spewing vicious jingoistic rhetoric - armed to their sharp little teeth with bigotry and somewhere between seriously questionable judgement and downright ignorance - and the rest of the forum posters, who now get to deal with fending off or downright refuting a rabid chorus of claims of racism and the prediction of the fall of "white society" to socialism and a minority-favoring welfare state full of "traitors".
It actually scares me a little, that the mindset of some people has sunk to that level and actaully spreads to others, ratcheting up their collective vitriol and misplaced anger or sense of middle class "injustices".
I like to think that even though everyone carries a little grain if some kind of biases against others, that there are enough reasonsed, rational people who won't fall for the tactics that are being employed by certain groups...and that in a couple of weeks the majority of citizens of this country will overcome their differences and make the right choice for the future of the nation, so that we aren't represented by those who would drag us down to be mired into this "us vs them" mentality that will reinforce and even encourage divisivness. We haven't come this far as a people and a nation to let ourselves be dragged to the brink of the resurrection of McCarthyism and extreme racial and social discord, have we? We're better than this!

It's always something...and at the same time, a whole lotta nothin'

Tomorrow I have an appointment to get new glasses. Last night I somehow got a giant scratch on one of my lenses, which just capped off a very frustrating day. My son isn't doing as well in school as he should (and can), and this is causing a little tension as my husband and I struggle with how to address it. We have different approaches to parenting and discipline, and it's creating a little bit of conflict. Also, I've officially OD'd on campaign coverage. The running joke in my house is that every time we see Anderson Cooper on tv one of us has to yell out "Super Duper"...then the other one has to respond with something tactless ending in "pooper". I'll leave it to your imaginations, although I can hint that it's usually referencing buggery. My husband and I are keeping it classy, as always.

Speaking of classy...

ROLFMAO:




Our neighbor is allowing the homeless addict who mows his lawn to now sleep in a broken down van in his back yard. So it's not down by the river, and there seems to be a lot of beer and not a too much government cheese, but when I realized what was going on just beyod my fenceline the other night I was...less than pleased. I guess our neighbor the crazy cat man has graduated on to collecting people.

I've come to the realization that there is just no pleasing some people. The boss's assistant was using a really old computer that has been having issues - because the ditz occupying that space before her took the computer that was there and we had to scramble to find a machine since we didn't have funds to purchase a new tower at that time - so I recently made the suggestion that she switch her computer out for one of the newer models that recently became surplus. Now she has a newer, faster machine with upgraded versions of the old programs she was running. And all she can do is complain about how she can't find any of her documents and she had to relearn these programs and wahh wahh wahhh. Not to mention the reminders about how the chair she's using is borrowed, and needs to be returned to the office it came from. I told her yesterday that another office was getting rid of some chairs, and she should go and check them out to see if there was anything that might work for her, but I think she'd rather play chair-martyr because she's holding out for brand new. Knowing that she's applying for other jobs and considering the luck we've had keeping a body planted at that desk for more than six months at a time for the last couple of years, I'm not entertaining the thought of making that kind of investment just to see turn over in that position yet again.

RANDOM LEGO STEPHEN HAWKING!!!