Waiting to Get There. Usually on the A/C/E in Chelsea, New York City.

A teacup with fur in it  This teacup with fur in it is supposed to be the quintessential Surrealist object. The artist, Meret Oppenheim, is said to have transformed a common, utilitarian item into something "simultaneously disturbing, attractive and sexually charged." So fine with the disturbing. I'm disturbed thinking about drinking tea out of this thing and winding up with a hairball. Anybody who has had a cat will right now be conjuring up memories of thunderous "Bootsie has a hairball" barf howls.  If I squint I can see the "attractive." I mean, not in any sort of minimalist way, but when I picture this teacup and saucer and spoon nestled amongst golden things on an elaborate table strewn with grapes and velvet and surrounded by masked burlesque dancers covered in glitter... I mean, you can also almost get to "sexually charged." This whole surrealist art movement rose up in the 1930s. Everybody was captivated by the same idea -- that cert...

And it's a wrap. 2020 NaBloPoMo is in the bag. via GIPHY Thank you to this blog's loyal readers, mostly meaning Tom, Wanda and my mom. If you're not Tom, Wanda or my mom then most likely you're Sharon. We're the kind of operation where everybody knows your name -- except if you just visited that Cher post that still gets hundreds of visits a week from strangers around the globe.  You people, the actively-curious-about-Cher set, are a big question mark for us over here at blog central. We don't know quite what to make of you, but I'll tell you what you make us: Approximately $29/year on ad views. So thanks for the shekel.  Hopefully next NaBloPoMo there will be more action and a little less pensive musing exploring the ins and outs of lying around the house.

Today, the penultimate NaBloPoMo day, I successfully: Completed reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. You can call me a philosopher now, totes obvs. Hiked in the woods with Tom. Forest bathing, if you will. We took a detour through a neighborhood and saw a McMansion looking like it had a bad hangover from the big ass party or wedding or whatever went on there last night. A whole tent village sprawled across the backyard, and rubber gloves and paper cups blew around on the street out front. Standing in the middle of the debris were three people having a spat. As we walked by, the old guy said, "How was I supposed to fucking know what she was going to do before I went to the bank." It added a little spice to the whole nature thing, honestly. hummed "The Edge of Seventeen" literally the entire day. I woke up in the morning singing it under my breath and and Tom just asked me what I was mumbling moments ago. THE SAME DAMN SONG, HONEY. And the music there, i...

Amongst the great treasure and assorted debris that my mother dropped off over here after they moved, I found a brooch: Hawk Brooch. Or is it an Eagle?  I think it's an eagle. Taking a page out of Grammy T's book, my mother put a tag on it with a string. The brooch belonged to my great-grandmother. This morning, in a moment of synchronicity that was also a small triumph, I found a picture of my Great wearing the brooch! My great grandma wearing the brooch  Mom dropped off. Also in the stash of old pictures, I ran across a shot of my mom's Aunt Holly wearing the brooch! Aunt Holly wearing the brooch while I eat lunch on a tray and stare off into the middle distance pensively. I found all this brooch action very inspiring so I told Renya heretofore I will be sporting brooches for Zoom calls. No one could feasibly argue that a brooch wouldn't add zing to an online meeting. Especially this brooch. It's a fucking bird of prey.

We will not be going skiing in Craftsbury this year, after almost a decade of going up there over New Years. So let me recount a little incident from last year that I haven't told anybody about.  Before we begin, it would be key to know about the annual fire. It's a main event. It's a little tough to see the scale by this video, but this fire is about as big as one of those fires you see on the news when someone blows up their garage with their new turkey fryer: The ski center celebrates new years eve with the Burning of the Christmas Trees. So many Christmas trees, so little time. The sparks fly everywhere, and you can take that as a pro tip.  Bottomline, if you wear your normal winter coat made out of whatever newfangled fabric your normal winter coat is made out of and you stand anywhere near this conflagration ... your normal coat will, at a minimum, have little burn holes all over it. At a maximum it will start to melt, but that only happened to that one woman that onc...

 So that was lovely and making the best of it and all. We just got off of Zoom Thanksgiving with the fambo. Three little Zoom windows enjoying dinner. It was the culmination of a great cooking extravaganza by Tom. He even made an amazing gluten-free, vegan pumpkin pie: Tom's pumpkin pie with a concentric circle of pecans. Yes, the recipe said to "place pecans in a concentric circle." Check and check. The afternoon was not without unplanned excitement. A bird somehow got inside the house. I don't mean a turkey kind of bird you'd expect to be in the house on Thanksgiving, I mean like an actual bird bird. Suddenly it was just flying around in the living/morning room. Tom chased it around for a little bit and finally it flew into the bathroom. He opened up the window and the bird flew out. He swears the bird hopped into the house by squeezing around the side of a mostly closed screen door. If true, that bird was on some kind of mission to go through so much trouble. W...

 It's a weird one for sure, just sitting here the day before Thanksgiving all by ourselves. Quarantining is the right thing to do, but it's so quiet. I had time to scroll through a bunch of clothing purchases I made over the past year and stumbled across a belt I bought in early 2020. It stopped me cold. A belt?! I haven't even thought about belts for months. Yesterday I wore a dress with a slightly tight waist. I took it off mid-morning, vexed by its sinister constricting energy. I haven't worn a pair of pants with a zipper and a snap since the last frost. And I'm extremely civilized compared to all the people who have given up pants entirely . I got interviewed recently and I wore pants. Unlike lots of other people.

It's like we got a new addition onto the house. We replaced the sofa in our living room and now we actually sit in the living room. Or as I like to call it, the Morning Room. Tom on the sofa in the Morning Room Downton Abbey had a morning room, as did all the fine estates. Now that I've taken to swanning about the house in a dress (yes we've reached that point in the pandemic) it seems fitting that we have a morning room too.  Plus Tom sits there in the morning. He has other places to be after luncheon, but in the AM, he's on that sofa. So lots of sound reasons why our new Morning Room is a thing.

Here is a little shelf I made the other day. It is petite. I made it out of a scrap of engineering steel Bob gave me a long time ago and a square piece of quarter inch. So it's pretty sturdy in other words. When I say "pretty sturdy" I mean you could use it for hand-to-hand combat. They'd call you the "Knight of Shelf" so you'd be a pretty basic bitch, but you could do it is all I'm saying. Tom had to use the wall anchors:   A Sturdy Shelf I put a plant on the shelf: Might need to upgrade the container. A ghetto vase on the sturdy shelf

 Talking to Mom on the phone this morning: "Your father is headed out for a bike ride right now. He's wearing all his fluorescent clothes." From the background I hear: "I haven't changed yet." Dad enjoys a high-color ensemble for every day wear as well as biking gear. Are these his bike clothes or his living room clothes? Sometimes it's tough to tell.

This whole adventure went down in ancient history. Way before 9/11 and cell phones.... The tunnelbana, aka Subway, in Stockholm Maybe a week before I was supposed to fly home after living in Stockholm for over a year, gypsies stole my passport. I was riding in the tunnelbana, aka the subway, and my handbag was on the floor in between my ankles. As the subway pulled into a stop, I saw a really little kid dash out the door. Turns out, the bastard had my wallet in his hot little hands. The gypsies trained their kids to crawl underneath the subway seats and take people's wallets out of their handbags. I wish someone had mentioned this slightly earlier. My passport was in my wallet. Furthermore, I had no other identification except for a chewed up college ID. I was concerned about my chances of success if I attempted to use it to board a plane. I say this not just because it's unlikely that college IDs pass muster for international flights, but also because the photo on the ID was t...

  What's up in the 'hood

The sad fact is that NaBloPoMo is not really a thing anymore. I have no idea how it started or why it ended, all I know is that five years ago my path intersected with its dying flame.  And now here we are.  I'm kind of like the modern day version of  Conrad Heyer . Conrad was the last known survivor who crossed the Delaware with George Washington. When he died in 1856, he was 106. In NaBloPoMo years, I'm 106. It is probably more of a stretch to equate my achievement with participation in the Revolutionary War but that doesn't mean I won't attempt it. All the NaBloPoMo faint of heart so-called bloggers scattered years ago. It is no small feat to post something, anything, every single day for one month. This is big potatoes  for people who have far higher blog post standards than I do. And/or more things to do in the evening. For me, shit gets real right about now. Pre-November, I'm not going to say I sandbag post ideas, but I kind of sandbag post ideas. So the firs...

 Last year, we saw the Mechanical Turk at the Met. It was a marvel, really. The Turk was constructed in 1770 to go on a royal roadshow and entertain the glitterati. Uncanny Valley to the max with this one! Kings and queens were shocked and amazed how an automaton could beat them at chess!  Too bad the original burned to a crisp in a fire. It's lucky some OCD type found the blueprint and built a pristine replica. Which is what we saw at the Met. The original Turk was burnt in a fire. This is a replica. That Turk sure is uncanny! Secrets revealed!  If Beth Harmon  had lived two hundred years ago, I wonder if she would have spent her afternoons crunched up in the Turk cabinet. Seems like a tough job even if you're not always on the edge of a bender.

 The Scene: New Jersey last week Tom says, "We are running out of dishwasher detergent." I say, "We have it on Amazon Subscribe & Save. Another box should be here on November 26." Tom says, "We only have a few dishwasher tablets left. I don't think we'll make it until November 26." I say, "Yes, but we have it on **** Subscribe & Save *****" Tom says, "OK, well, we'll just have to go to the city and stay there until November 26." I say, "Totally." Yes, we have some serious first world problems, yo.

  Outside our house, circa 1988 This photo was carbon cannondale dated by my pop. If you look close, there's a bike leaning up against a bush. Scrutiny revealed that the bike is his Cannondale touring bike. He got it after he crashed his earlier bike in 1985. So this photo transpired after 1985 but before my brother totaled the Toyota pick-up, which you can see extant over there on the left. So this was taken probably on or about 1988. The car on the right is my mom's Aunt Holly's 1969 VW Station Wagon. When we first got it, and I'm not exactly sure how our family ended it up with it, but when we first got it, the car was that classic VW Bug robin's egg blue color. My mother called it "The Tank" because it weighed more than a school bus. Here's the Tank when it was still in Aunt Holly's garage ... which apparently doubled as a great place to make ice cream. Soon thereafter, somehow, it was repainted "BMW Orange." I vaguely remember somet...

 Maybe you read the recent post about Potato Rock and began to wonder about the rock's place of origin. I could see this keeping you up at night. Because I appreciate a well-rested reader, I made some inquires on your behalf. Luckily, Derek had photos. Here's Potato Rock, In situ: There's a lot mysterious going on in these images. Look at all the footprints. Was Potato Rock brought to this location and left there like some kind of potato sacrifice? Or did many people walk up close and check him out? Did they think to themselves or perhaps say out loud, "What an exotic spud!"  These things we may never know. All we know is that Derek saw Potato Rock and made the singular decision to pick him up and take him home.

Wanda, Derek, Tom and I set out on our Art Tour promptly at 11am. You have to make a firm plan these days due to the timed ticket situation at museums. This is really a hitch in my giddyup because I enjoy a spontaneous outing wherein I show up whenever the hell I want. Despite the timed tickets, we showed up pretty much whenever the hell we wanted. Derek and Wanda overshot the Whitney and had to walk the whole way back. Upon learning this news, Tom detoured to look at some sneakers and then of course we had to walk through Arhaus beause we were right by there anyway. This is about the fifth time I've seen the Craft exhibition at the Whitney . It is really something, I tell you. Of course the bedazzled kitchen is the standout every single person sets off the alarm trying to get a better look at. It really is something. This whole entire kitchen life-sized diorama is covered in glittery beads. This time I really appreciated this "femmage" by Miriam Schapiro who stuck fabric...

 I don't have anything against it. These restaurants need to bank bigly for the long cold winter ahead. As for us, indoor dining in New York City during a pandemic feels like an excellent way to get breathed on with 'rona breath. Restaurants in NYC are not exactly known for their spaciousness. Or their ventilation.  And so, we will be staying in when it's too cold to eat outside. Unless I figure out how to swath myself in electric blankets or stick hand warmers in my pants or something. At first, over the summer when the outdoor dining started, each restaurant had maybe one or two tables out front their place on the sidewalk. After a couple weeks, the more entrepreneurial of the bunch started looking left and right. They noticed that the theater next to them was closed and maybe the Chelsea Man Spa too, on the other side.  So each day I'd walk by and there'd be another table on the sidewalk, a little bit further away from the restaurant front door. Until some places...

 Last weekend, Tom was super excited about his new AirPod Pro's .  AirPod Pros are exciting. He unboxed them immediately upon arrival and started checking out all the modes. "I'm in transparent mode! Talk to me and I'll let you know if I can hear you!" Tom also tested active noise cancellation mode and hypothesized he may find it alarmingly weird. Too quiet. He decided to go down to the bagel place for a test run on the street. So he sits at a table outside on the sidewalk with his bagel and tinkers around with his mask. And one of the AirPods goes flying across the table. Plink, Plink and right down the sewer grate. He hears a tiny little splash sounding far away. Well, that didn't last long.

 It's kind of a sure thing. If you say any of the following words around my mother: - Nordic countries - Rain, sleet, snow, hail - the wearing of waterproof gear - islands in the northern hemisphere - Alice Deal from up the street's oldest son Alex's blue-eyed, blond haired very tall wife  - A pale wintery sun - rucksacks, kneesocks, compasses and survival rations ... If any topic comes up that, even in the most 5-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon way, has anything to do with anything above, my mother will yank out her iPhone and tell you the current weather in Reykjavik. It's like a super power. She can do it so fast these days you barely have five or six seconds to prepare for what you know is coming. After the breaking news weather report, Mom will confirm that it is always, every day of the year, 35 degrees and raining in Reyjavik.  When she was there for a couple weeks last summer, it was 35 degrees and raining the entire time. Clearly this was traumatic. And so it seems she ...

  I took this photo while sitting outside on the deck in New Jersey enjoying a very pleasant breakfast. In mid-November. I know, totes cray.  We had a debate about whether to turn on the AC. We did not, btw. Turning on the AC in November feels like asking for trouble -- attracting the evil eye, etc etc.  I really enjoyed hanging out in the sunshine with everything smelling all autumnal and carpets of fallen leaves. Then my allergies threw themselves a gigantic celebration and I had to go inside. And sweat a little bit due to the no-AC situation.

 A couple weeks ago, we had dinner over Wanda and Derek's. While there, we viewed a real curiosity. A rock that looks exactly like a potato. I mean, this rock really looks like a potato: Can you tell which "potato" is really a freaking rock? You can easily see we're dealing with some next-level shit here. Derek found this potato rock lying in the middle of a sandy path. It was just lying there, waiting for someone to pick it up, take it home, and nestle it together with its own kind. Like a king amongst root vegetables.  Or maybe like an extraterrestrial amongst Drew Barrymore's stuffed animals hiding from the law: ET and a bunch of stuffed animals. Don't get me wrong, I'm not making any claims about the potato rock. Likely it cannot fly if you put it in the basket of a CitiBike.