Vaginas Are Gross. Thanks, Lysol!

The Oregonian sent me to this post on Oddee today. Thanks, Oregonian! I learned that if I don't look lovely in the morning, my husband will find another honey by the end of his work day, and that I better, by Odin's hammer, bring home the right coffee, and if I like a man's slacks, he has a license to kill me, and, well, men are better than women.

Thanks, Mad Men!

Our Long National Nightmare Is Over

No, we're still bogged down in Iraq. And Afghanistan. And forty-seven million Americans still are hanging on without health insurance. And unemployment is still hovering around 10%. And the Kardashians are still allowed on television.

But Dean and Jenny are moving back to Portland!

They are going to hang on in Colorado past some of the drearier months ahead, wait out their lease until February-March, but here is something for us all to look forward to.

There is little left to keep them in Colorado Springs. The US Olympic Committee has long since pulled all its funding from the track cycling program (thanks, USOC!), and there is actually less racing action in Colorado Springs, even with a much superior outdoor track, than there is here on the moist, mossy track at Alpenrose Dairy. So he's moving back here where his team is. Jenny is doing well at her job, but there is only so far you can take your career while working at a small (tiny) business. She is ready to fly from that nest.

So get ready, Portland fan base, fam base, and friend base. Dean and Jenny are coming back.

Killer Mom

Do NOT look at this photo if you don't want to smile.

Warned you. From the ever-deadly Zooborns.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Monty Python geezers on Jimmy Fallon. Good choice of hosts. Fallon is really good here. Doesn't get in the way, and even gets in a few good gags himself. (Hmmm...that's three "good"s in three sentences. Not championship writing.)

There's more somewhere at nbc.com or here.

Avast, Ye Scurvy HTMLs!

I think I pirated these photos, but I can't read Dutch, so I think that covers me, legally. I had to convert them several times by methods that I don't really understand to get them to save as jpegs, but once I did, they were MINE.

There's Dean accepting flowers and smooches alongside the Thighs of Pain that belong to Gregory Bauge, the world sprinting champion. This is for their 2-man team sprint on Monday night.

Lining up for the Keirin on Day 2. If Bauge's are Thighs of Pain, then these are at least Thighs of Discomfort.

Aaand, they're off. Dean ended up third on this day, which is damn respectable with this group.

More to come, I'm guessing. There are four more days of racing to go.

Continental Sucks, but Dean Survives

When it's 12:30 am here, it's 9:30 am in Amsterdam, so I have been leaving my iPhone on the bedside table for late-night texting breaks when Dean finds, each day, that Continental still has no clue where his clothes and bike are.

Here is our conversation from last night (includes surprise ending):

12:34 a.m.:

Dean: Still no bag. Tracking number shows it as "missing."

Me: WTF

Dean: Yeah. Beyond frustrated. Racing starts tomorrow. Only one more flight coming from Houston tomorrow morning. Hopefully it's on that flight.

Dean: On the bright side, Amsterdam is the greatest city on the planet. I want to move here.

Me: Glad there's a bright side - besides Scooby Doo (Dean earlier tweeted that Scooby Doo is better in Dutch.)

Dean: Yeah. Couldn't pick a better place to be stranded, really. Plenty to do/see.

Me: Are you in touch with race promoters?

Dean: Yeah. They are great. Yelling at the airline people in Dutch for me. Looking into options for borrowing equipment, and trying to get airlines to give me money.

Me: Awesome.

2:53 am:

Dean: Last bag arrived out of the blue. Rejoice! Clean clothes! Bike parts!

Me: Yay! This trip is going to make such a great story and you haven't even started to race.

Question: If the only flight that they thought might have the bag wasn't due until the next day, where did they find the bag? Neglected in a corner somewhere? Were they sitting on it on their lunch breaks? I call major incompetence. Off with their heads!

Continental Airlines will Steal Your Luggage and Ruin Your Career

More on this as the story unfolds. I was kind of hoping this saga would be over by now, but no. This is Day 3 of Dean stuck in Amsterdam with no luggage, no bike (for which he paid a surprise $150 fee when bikes are supposed to ship free on international flights unless they don't like the way you look), and no way to compete in the 6-day racing event in which he was contracted to appear.

Continental doesn't even know where his luggage is. "Luggage" meaning a custom-built track bike, uniforms, bike shoes, and peripherals valued at - I don't know - lots.

I've never wished for a large blog audience, until now, when I want to shame Continental into getting off their collective asses and fulfilling their obligations.

Nothing Much

I just want to go watch TV and decompress after a dense couple of days drafting documents. Over the past week, as I was busy living or just breathing, I had multiple cases of "I should write about that" followed by the inevitable slate-wiping effect of age and input overload. So I'm trying the old "just start writing" technique. Nothing yet.

We went to see Doug Benson and Graham "Palm Strike" Elwood at the Mission Theater in Portland last Friday. I enjoy the comedy. Drew, um, thinks its okay. I don't understand why there is always a heckler. Although at this particular show it seemed to be a happy, drunky, horny girl heckler, with only lust in her heart for Benson. Hello, who gets a girl hard-on for Doug Benson? No offense, but he's a teddy bear of a fellow. Oh. Never mind. I understand teddy bears are "a thing." I prefer dangerous, growly bears with long sharp talons. Yes, eagle talons. On a bear.

We painted the shed all last weekend. "After" pictures to follow shortly. If it's not too awfully wet, we will clean out the garage this weekend, and fill that baby up. Drew will have such an awesome Guy Garage.

The rest of the week, the two of us have been battling some sort of fatigue thing that just plastered me to the couch on Wednesday, but has slowly been wearing off since.

Okay, this has been going downhill ever since the eagle talons bit. I'm going to go watch the Daily Show from last night. Enjoy not having to read any further.

Another Summer-End Flurry of Activity Chez Tracy

The great question...which I have not been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?' - Sigmund Freud

After some quality horn-locking and soul searching this summer, Drew took a long look at this question and answered, "a shed."

Actually, this is not a bad answer. I believe a garage is for garden tools, garden implements, and yard waste containers. Drew believes it is for road bikes, mountain bikes, cross bikes, dirt bikes, motorcycles, and tools to keep said two-wheeled vehicles in tip-top shape. Garden stuff just creates clutter, which he cannot abide.

In the heat of this friction, the "shed" answer doesn't look so crazy.

So, during his late September-early October vacation block, which he had originally planned to use for some (more) dirt bike riding, he and his friends, who swore that, with their help, we could have a better shed, built in a day, from scratch, for less money than it took to buy a ready-made or kit-made shed, fell upon the side yard with lumber, saws, earth-moving equipment, muscle, and some (some) brains.

When the day was over, we had a ten-by-twelve dance floor. Guess it takes longer than a day after all.

Day Two: walls!

Yes, it rained. Almost every day.

When the week was over, we had most of a shed, but much less money in the bank than we would have if we would have gone with the ready-made job. However, these are fire fighters, and they know what it takes to build something sturdy. We could use this baby as a storm shelter. Make that a fallout shelter. This thing has more studs than the house does.

...and a couple studs on top.

No, it's not quite done yet. It needs a coat of paint and a door latch. But it's a shed that wasn't there a week ago. So it's beautiful.

Test Your Awareness: Do The Test

This is worth sharing. Dean says Do The Test.

A Post As Exciting As Watching Plants Grow

So we had these bushes bordering the back yard. When we had the fence installed in the fall of 2005, we were able to clip them back from the property line almost to the foot required by the fence installers. That was the last time anybody (other than the odd squirrel or bunny) was able to get between the bushes and the fence.

The bushes came out of this winter looking like a bunch of dead sticks, as appealing as poisoned blackberry brambles along the highway. We had seen them weather several winters without any discernible loss of leaf, so we started thinking about how to replace them. Then they rallied in time to push out a record-breaking growth spurt, taking over not only our yard, but sticking through the fence and ten feet into the sky, so annoying that our shy, also-quite-pigletty neighbor started asking about our plans for them.

I had to hunt for pictures with the bushes in them, because we keep forgetting that before-and-after shots require you to remember to take before shots. This is what the bushes looked like last year.

First we tried cutting them back. We hired this done, thankfully, because it took the gardeners a full day to cut them back to fence height, and to try to cut them off the fence. It turned out that they had grown so close to the fence that it was impossible to make them look neat. And the things vined up from the ground, making them look like four-foot-tall weeds.

So we made the decision: Off with their heads. And bodies. And roots. The gardener cut them out and the stump grinder came at 8:00 on a Saturday morning (sorry neighbors) and obliterated the last traces of them. What was left was bare and ugly.

As regular readers know, Scotty enjoys helping me take photos. Here he is directing the shot of the newly bare fence.

Now comes the do-over. After some garden shopping and web surfing, we chose Euonymus (the short ones) and Arborvitae (the ones that look like Arborvitae), both which grow up, but not so much out. The corner is reserved for a pine tree. We're thinking white pine.

Directly across from our neighbors (we live on the corner of a cul-de-sac, making our back yard their side yard), we opted for some more fluffy flora - pampas grass and a nice Colorado Spruce. Here's Drew, trying to turn the best side towards the house. I'll have you know I dug about half of the holes for these plants, including this one (Drew was too busy building me a shed - more on that later).

There's more re-landscaping to do: planting the corner pine tree, making the pilgrimage out to the wilds of Hillsboro to buy clumping bamboo to replace the wisteria-destroyed fence in front of the master bath, and then doing something about ground cover to keep from cleaning muddy paws all winter.

Sounds like award-winning blogging to me.

The Lush and The Ridiculous: My Recent iTunes History

As I downloaded yet more music today, I noticed that my taste in music could be called either eclectic or schizophrenic. You make the call. Here are some recent downloads.

Washed Out - Life of Leisure.

I learned about Washed Out from the wise Young Americans at The Sound of Young America. It's big and lush and small and intimate. Synth-y and homemade-y and soft and loud. Listen.

Don Edwards - Goin' Back to Texas.

I learned about Don Edwards in a boutique shop in Sunriver, Oregon in the early nineties. I heard yodel-y coyotes and needed to hear more, so I bought the cassette (yes! cassette!) that the shop was playing and put it into the cassette player in the car. I was disappointed at first to learn that I had to wade through a lot of cowboy music to get to the coyote part (no one-song purchase iTunes option - prehistoric!), but soon we were all singing about the sleepy Rio Grand, and those line shack blues. That cassette is long gone and Don Edwards became a Bend memory like the smell of sage and juniper.

Where did I hear those coyotes again recently? I don't remember, but it sent me straight to iTunes. I now carry Don Edwards around in my hip pocket, and can hear that wooo-yip, wooo-yip woo coyote song any time I want. I can also hear musical screeds to barbed wire, asphalt and bankers (a favorite line: "while progress toots her greedy horn/and makes her motor buzz/I thanks the Lord I wasn't born no later than I was") Technology is bizarre and wonderful in that it brings me music about the evils of technology.

Regina Spektor - Far.

I find that Regina Spektor is best loved and understood by women. Men tend to find her music a little twee. Yes, her lyrics can be a little, um, adorable, but her voice is so easy and slippery, and her tunes allow it to slide up and down the scale with such carefree pleasure, it practically makes me skip down the street.

Moby - Wait For Me.

I have a lot of Moby in my library, but nothing since 18, which was released in 2002. But his new one, Wait For Me, was getting much better reviews than his last few, so I gambled on it. It's nice. Like Play and 18. Very much so. I put it in the playlist labeled "chill," but I don't find myself seeking it out for album-long listens.

Ting Tings - We Started Nothing

I should listen to this more. I just don't dance enough.

Franz Ferdinand - Tonight

Franz Ferdinand makes great music for your running playlist. I need to run more.

Juana Molina - Una Dia

Do yourself a favor and listen to the title song (you can listen at her MySpace page at the link above). I learned about her from WNYC's Radio Lab, which I listen to via podcast. They are nothing less than obsessed by her, which is easy to understand for a geek, as her music is woven with layers and layers of sound that she creates single-handedly. The result is both high-energy and hypnotic at once.

Van Morrison - Astral Weeks and Moondance.

I don't know why I felt I needed to have these in my library after all these years. He was really before my time, and has been a radio station given all my life, but after hearing a story about the band that was put together for his Astral Weeks recording sessions, I needed to be able to listen with more than a car radio attention span. Worth it. No wonder everybody who won Grammys in the late 70's and 80's thanked him along with their families. He was new. And different.

I recommend listening to music. Pretty much anything, as long as it has not been featured on the MTV Music Video Awards, or, for that matter, the Grammys.

But The Decemberists are still my favorites.

Hollywood Speaks Out to Help Insurance Companies

Aaah! Sarcasm overload! Still worth it.

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

9.12 DC TEA PARTY - MARCH FOOTAGE WITH INTERVIEWS

Dean brought this to my attention. I wasn't going to watch it to the end, because I didn't think I had it in me to watch 9:30 of hate. But it is actually fascinating and enlightening. I don't think there is a cure for this kind of Fox misinformation being gobbled up whole. Is there? I don't see any laws banning Fox News anywhere on the horizon. And there certainly won't be any efforts to tone such hate mongering down, because it sells too well. It sure is disturbing. And disappointing.

In Which I Put Baby In A Category

So Drew and I were talking about drivers who put us in danger in small, everyday ways. This was on the way back from the beach, and we had just been bullied back in a merge situation by a dude who promptly slowed down and turned off the road, and then, not too much later, we slowed to let a swerving map reader decide which exit to take without taking us out in the process.

We came to the conclusion that there are two categories of dangerous drivers: those who drive with a chip on their shoulder, willfully putting others at risk, and those who are oblivious to the danger they pose to those around them, and in fact, are often oblivious that there even is anyone around them. My opinion was that we often miscategorize the oblivious by assuming that they are aware of the havoc they leave in their wake.

And then.

And then.

I was driving south in the left lane of a four-lane road when a gold colored Taurus-style sedan swerved into my lane from the right lane, giving me just enough time to slam on my brakes to avoid rear-ending her, who then slammed on HER brakes to wait for a car to go by in the opposite direction, and then pulled a U-turn right there in the middle of the road.

I was understandably shocked at such reckless behavior and wanted to know who just risked my life and my insurance rating to save seconds off her drive time. I craned my neck out the window as she hit the accelerator heading north to see (with my icy glare of doom) a twenty-something blonde in a pair of those hilariously enormous designer sunglasses.

And the look on her face was one of such serenity and composure, it has left me puzzled. Did those sunglasses not allow her to even see me, making her Category O for oblivious? Was she out to scare me, making her a Category R for road rager? Or did my alarm, and her back bumper, just not register in her list of things to be concerned about today? Should we add another category - a Category A for self-centered assholes? And why wasn't she driving a black SUV, so we could all anticipate her douchebaggery?

Not sure, but I'd rather not do the research to find out.

This Cat Does NOT Like Jazz

Labor Day Rabble Rousing

Working Class Hero by John Lennon

John Lennon was post-Beatles and rich by the time he published this song, but he obviously still had a chip on his shoulder about his early years.

As soon as you're born they make you feel small
by giving you no time instead of it all
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all
Working Class Hero is something to be
Working Class Hero is something to be

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you're clever and despise a fool
Till you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules
Working Class Hero is something to be
Working Class Hero is something to be

When they've tortured and scared you for 20 odd years
then they expect you to pick a career
When you can't really function you're so full of fear
Working Class Hero is something to be
Working Class Hero is something to be

Keep you doped with religon, sex and T.V.
and you think you're so clever and classless and free
but you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see
Working Class Hero is something to be
Working Class Hero is something to be

There's room at the top I'm telling you still
but first you must learn how to smile as you kill
if you want to be like the folks on the hill
Working Class Hero is something to be

Yes , A Working Class Hero is something to be
If you want to be a hero well just follow me
If you want to be a hero well just follow me

Inch = Mile

So I come home from a walk and confess to The Captain that I was daydreaming about traveling the country with a trailer. Seeing New Orleans and Savannah and Taos.

This, as I suspected, got him excited. This is something that he has been talking about since he got his first trailer hitch. In the womb.

However, I did not suspect that this comment would morph into a shopping mission for a touring motorcycle. No, I did NOT say I wanted a touring motorcycle, or that I wanted to tour the US from the back of one. When asked, I said I would try to ride on the back of a borrowed motorcycle one more time if he thought it might change my mind about motorcycles.

The Captain seems to think that since I might enjoy touring the country in the comfort of a four-wheeled, enclosed, air conditioned vehicle with snacks, music, books and iPhone at the ready, that I wouldn't mind taking it one step further. Outdoors. Keeping my balance on a stool going 70 miles an hour, wearing ten pounds of leather and fiberglass for protection, looking at a helmet in front of me.

Yes, I have ridden on the back of a motorcycle. The Captain has had motorcycles before. I have even ridden my own motorcycle or two. I did not enjoy those experiences. But he seems sure that given a soft enough back seat that my opinion of holding on to someone else who is holding on to some handlebars will be (a) exciting, (b) comfortable, and (c) interesting enough to pacify someone who squirms on a car ride of more than one hour and must have a book either in her face or in her ears to keep her brain soothed enough for continued earthly existence.

Stay tuned. Someone is going to learn something. But who? And what?

Those Geese are Cooked

Saturday at Aunt Dolores' House

My Aunt Pat, who is limited, aerobically wise, by a bum heart, turned 80 yesterday, much to her doctors' embarrassment, who have been giving her six months to live since the Clinton administration.

I went to visit her today over at my Aunt Dolores's house in Beaverton. I had never been to her house before, so I had to Google map it and worry about it a little, but I made it even though the 405 bridge was closed this weekend (again), which I should have remembered but didn't, so it took me twice as long with all the traffic, kind of like this sentence.

It's always so mortifying to realize how happy your Aunties are to see you, when it has been so long since you bothered to visit them. They are really sweet people. And, you know, it's not that much time out of your charmed little life. And it's not that they haven't invited you before.

Ah, well. Another thing to resolve to be better at in the future. Get in line, Aunties. Right behind washing the windows, painting twice a week and vacuuming the house every day.