Eclipses Bring Cookies and Change

Oh my, I can't believe it's December. And not just December, but like, halfway through December.

So sorry it has been a bit of awhile since I last blogged. My boss has gotten some funky new jewelry in at Falkora Jewelry, so I've been writing web copy for pieces like these fun atomic age earrings.

Falkora also had a show at the recent First Fridays in Pittsburgh, on Penn Ave in the Friendship/Garfield area, and was very successful!

I am not sure yet that I totally have the whole Christmas thing in hand this year, but at least I did get some decorations up and baked some sugar cookies today.

Today was also a lunar eclipse, and funnily enough I did hear of two major (or one major, and one semi-major for my family) events that took place today: my dad, stepmom and stepsister got two new kittens (monumental since the deaths of our other two cats), and my cousin got ENGAGED!!

That is the big one. I have been smiling all evening after hearing about it. I haven't met her fiancé yet, but thanks to Facebook I pretty much feel like I know him. I am so happy for both of them.

As winter approaches, we come up with so many reasons to celebrate and try to bring light back to the world. Peace and love and light to you all, dear friends, in the coming days.

*photo courtesy of www.falkorajewelry.com

at bedtime, go to sleep

yesterday we had a lecture for the LCS students on the joys and difficulties of academic conference panels, after which we all headed over to our advisor, Kathy Newman's, for some dinner, drinks and prospective MA/PhD-welcoming. they are a great group and hopefully we'll have a good many of them decide to come here in the fall.

the above image depicts the household rules, as written by David Shumway's little boy, for all to see and abide by. my favorite is "feelings under controll."

and naturally, i obeyed all the rules, including the one about sleeping. at about 10:30, i decided it was bedtime and hightailed it out of there with Brittany, took the 61C back home, and fell blissfully asleep.

too bad i had a bad dream that night, though, that i was married to Hungarian composer Franz Liszt. i guess playing by the rules doesn't always pay off.

wait...it's the end of March already??

our prospective MA/PhD open house is this week, and i sit contemplating how a whole year has passed. for one thing, i can't have been a whole year, because it would have to be warm and spring-y for that to be, and it's cold. for another thing…i don't feel ready for it to end. well, part of me does. but i like school. and the whole finding-a-job bit is slightly more elusive. family members have already been inquiring for months now what i'm going to do after i graduate, which has caused me to threaten them considerably.

ok i can't stress about it. i need to get back into a good rhythm of yoga, checklist-making, and bubble baths. tonight i took a break and read a Shopaholic book in the tub with my lavender milk bath bubble soap, so that's a good start. tomorrow morning at least looks like this:

• 8:00 a.m.: wake up, my breakfast, cats' breakfast, Good Morning America
• 9:00 a.m.: yoga DVD or running/weightlifting at the JCC
• 10:30 a.m.: shower
• 11:15 a.m.: organize/plan all academic projects and begin working on them.

of course, tomorrow might end up looking like this:

• 10:45 a.m.: wake up, cats pounce on bed
• 11:00 a.m.: cats force me to get out of bed and feed them
• 11:04 a.m.: back in bed

we'll see which of these plans comes to fruition.

three and a half hours of mandolin foolin'

oh boy. so. how does one write about a mandolin orchestra festival?

well here's how. so saturday night i headed over to frank and debbie's, my dad's first cousins, and there we caught a quick drink and i got some pup-petting time with the two most famous border collies, lucky and traveler. then we piled in the car and headed down to the CAPA center in downtown pittsburgh, where frank succeeded in parking the car. no, that came out wrong. he parked the car in a garage next door, not at the center.

i had no idea what to expect, whether a "mandolin festival" comprised of a series of concerts, or a series of mandolin-playing workshops, perhaps with a special demonstration on how to make mandolins. frank didn't know if he was supposed to bring his mandolin or not, and i half-joked that i would bring my uke, disguised as a mandolin. in a beard, hat, and glasses, naturally.

it was a concert it turns out. a three and a half hour concert. don't get me wrong, i really enjoyed it, and our friend gregg was playing in the pittsburgh mandolin orchestra so it was a real treat to see him on the stage. but even operas aren't three and a half hours. and they have costumes.

so each group was great to hear, but perhaps they could have each played about half the number of pieces they chose, to keep things moving. one can only listen to one instrument for so long before needing a break. it's like listening to the bagpipes for three and a half hours straight.

there were three groups: the pittsburgh mandolin orchestra, the dayton, ohio mandolin orchestra, and an international mandolin orchestra, including two young italian guys who took the liberty of goofing off on stage since they could play brilliantly enough to not really pay close attention to what they were doing.

i also enjoyed seeing the range of instruments in the mandolin family; i had no idea that such things existed as mandocellos, and mandobasses, essentially the mandolin equivalents of the various violin family sizes we are used to seeing in a classical orchestra. the mandobass looks like a giant tick, and is totally worth giving you a visual for:

erin go bragh!

i'm off to the south side in a bit for some guinness-ing fun, but happy saint patrick's day, everyone! today was sunny, warm, and i painted my nails green. tonight, i'll drink guinness with chocolate shots, dance, and be merry.

in honor of this favorite holiday of mine, if you have not seen the films the quiet man and the secret of kells, you are missing two treats! the quiet man stars john wayne as an ex-prize fighter from pittsburgh who comes home to ireland where he meets the fiesty maureen o'hara ("that red hair is no lie!"). the secret of kells is a beautifully animated film that tells the story of how the famous and breathtaking illuminated manuscript, the book of kells, was created. erin go bragh!

february and it is coooooold in pittsburgh. but the snow is falling, and my heart feels cheerful, if stressed and sleepy (how possible?). i have a job interview to prepare for, tons of homework to do, have had a stressful and dramatic past week or so, but i've also had good days recently, and i keep my eyes fixed on the days ahead, when surely spring will come.

i also started doing yoga again, and have tried to manufacture spring in my apartment by buying some nice house plants. it's not quite phipp's conservatory, but it's a start.

happy halloween!

i am feeling surprisingly full of health and energy despite the fact that i went to bed at 5:00am this morning after partying for six hours, and then walking 1.6 miles home. i know this sounds lame, but i think the secret so far has been lots of cups of tea, and lots of sleep. so yes, i went to bed at 5:00am, but i slept today until 1:30pm.

which, ok, partially explains why i'm up writing this blog post at 12:39am when i should be a-bed, but i'll get to that in a minute. i went to a party at caitlin's house for all of the english masters students, and danced the night away to "thriller," "in the navy," "monster mash," and other favorites, with great zest, but by about 2:00am i was ready to sleep. so how did i end up leaving at about 4:00am instead?

one thing was that i became trapped up in caitlin's bedroom talking with a man who was–no, not trying to rape me–demanding to know why i had never read anything by vonnegut. and he wasn't even one of the masters students.

the other thing was that i was waiting for my friends to be ready to leave because we were all walking home together. rachael was quite ready to go when i was–we were both exhausted. but brittany is our MA event coordinator, so she had to stick around and clean up.

and michael…michael was just drunk, and having a great time, and there was no pulling him away from the fun. we tried several times, in fact, to get him to the front door, but somehow he would sneak away and you'd find him back in the kitchen looking for another beer, or at the food table stuffing pretzels in his mouth, which was actually quite comical.

so that left brittany and i to try and get michael out the door, and not appear drunk so that if anyone should approach us, it looked like we had a competent, sober man of considerable strength at our disposal. yeah, right.

it was then that brittany announced that our walk home was about 1.6 miles. beautiful. we started out into the biting night (or morning?) air, with michael lurching behind us making rude commentary. by the time we gained south negley ave., he was murmuring something about the children he was going to bear, or something, while brittany and i mostly ignored him.

then we had to stagger up the quarter-mile, forty-five degree angle incline of south negley ave. at least at this point the walk had started to make me slightly warmer. michael helped by stealing a joe sestak sign and dragging it behind him on the sidewalk.

by the time we got close to my apartment building, the story now was that michael wanted to bear his own children so that they would only have his own genes (?). i was so glad to pass him off to brittany's responsibility.

when i got home i made myself a cup of hot tea, put a hot water bottle under the blankets, and fell grately into bed…at approximately 4:48am.

flea-eradication project (FEP): part II

today i enacted part II of the flea-eradication project, or FEP. here are some terrifying stats about fleas, according to vetmedicine.about.com:

• "the total flea life cycle can range from a couple weeks to several months, depending on environmental conditions"
• "the adult female flea can lay up to 50 eggs per day, 500-600 eggs over several months"
• "flea saliva, like other biting skin parasites, contains an ingredient that softens, or "digests" the host's skin for easier penetration and feeding"

great. so today i vacuumed the whole apartment, wet-vacuumed the furniture, and tossed all of my bedding and blankets in the wash. huck, now used to his flea collar, has been complacent this whole time, watching me with mild bemusement as i run around the apartment like a madwoman. but i can't help it...i'm becoming paranoid about flea saliva.

here is my hope: neither cat has been scratching themselves at all, and in fact if i hadn't seen the little blighter crawling across huck's fur, you'd never think there was a problem. so hopefully i have caught this at the beginning and can terminate it before it escalates into an infestation. but vetmedicine.about.com doesn't make it sound very promising. sigh. pray for me.

fleas!!!!

ooooh huck has a flea. a flea. no way.

tonight, when i should have been focused on reading the way of the world, i instead looked down at my cat, who was snoozing on top of me, to see a tiny black thing moving across his furry white chest. i leaned forward and put my fingers against his fur, and yes, the little black thing jumped out of sight. definitely a flea. huck, of course, began purring happily because his mama was petting him. totally oblivious.

in that moment i realized just how much stuff huck was touching. the blanket we were wrapped up in together, the couch, the pillows on the couch, my bed which he had just been sitting on moments before. ughhhhhhh.

with a shudder i jumped up from the couch, threw on my trench coat and some flip flops, and ran down the street to, thank God almighty, the 24-hour rite aid. two flea collars later, i came back home and opened the apartment door. there, jack and huckleberry sat on laz-e-boy recliner and couch, respectively, looking trustingly up at me. oh, what they didn't realize.

luckily i was able to get the collars on them with minimal bloodshed. huck has never worn a collar, so he didn't even know what was coming, and as jack ran over to sniff it and commiserate, i quickly advanced from behind and slipped his around him. he definitely gave me a look of betrayal, but they will thank me one day.

they will thank me one day.

pittsburgh-mt. riga alumni club

i had a great evening last night with what i've decided to call the pittsburgh-mt. riga alumni club, which is kind of like the pittsburgh-gettysburg college alumni club, except we don't get awarded degrees…yet.

at any rate, our branch of the mt. riga alumni club consists of frank and debbie, their friends greg and nancy, the many dogs, and, in spirit, doug and his girlfriend carrie, who were not in physical attendance but who were in our thoughts.

we met at frank and debbie's house, which is a pretty, rambling sort of place that sits at the top of a hill, on the outer bend of a curve in a the road, and looks as if parts of its architecture range from the middle of the 19th century through the 1930's. the walls, furnishings and decor are all in warm, earthy colors, and it was very cozy. parts of the house were in some need of repair, but nothing really major; their house, like them, is sort of casually elegant, pretty enough to not care about perfection. they also have a garden in similar condition, lovely and slightly wild, that falls steeply from the back of the house where they grow some veggies and the dogs like to tumble.

the evening consisted mainly of what any evening involving members of the wells family includes: copious amounts of wine. we also had some great conversation, of course, and talked extensively over family matters, the content of my courses, how nancy was liking her first taste of life outside of new york city (a "novelty" was how she put it), etc.

at some point, someone (ok, frank; these things are always brought up by frank) called us all to remember the ritz crackers-styled 'mock apple pie' that used to be advertised for years on the packaging of any box of ritz crackers. the curious thing about this pie was that it did not contain apples in its list of ingredients, and frank could not get over this, nor let the matter pass until we had dissected the origins and reasons behind such a recipe, with the final mandate that we will eat mock apple pie the next time we get together, which i deeply fear.

chillin in pittsburgh

i am so tired...but tired as one who's just done a bunch of yoga and eaten granola and run a couple of miles and then enjoyed a healthy apple. in short: i mean that though i am exhausted, i am exhausted with time well spent in my studies, and my brain is eating up the good, healthy challenges of prose that force it to stretch itself to build new synapses and...

well that's all a bit lofty, isn't it? i must check that or else i'll be labeled a typical graduate student. still, i can safely say i am quite happy to be just where i am, and only sigh that this program is just a year. watch–i'm sure i'll change my tune once the first huge paper is due.

on the other hand…i'm getting quite excited about choosing my research paper topic for film adaptations. here are the choices i'm debating between:

• jane austen (duh, and i'm afraid everyone will just say this is typical)
• star wars (it'll be like going back to a first love)
• dr. who (tom baker years, anyone?)
• the thursday next series by jasper fforde (all about adaptation)
• the women (nobody can ever again be norma shearer)

so that's my internal struggle right now. not a bad life, is it? i know, i'm very lucky right now, and i know it. thank you thank you thank you Life!

back to school

SO excited for my first day of classes tomorrow! i feel almost like i'm going into kindergarten, though, instead of a graduate program, such is my level of excitement. i even have my lunch box all ready, although i won't really be needing it until tuesday, when i have a morning class. but still, it is primed for lunch-packing.

i'm most excited about my green dinosaur-themed sandwich and soup containers (wonderfully named a "feed bowl" on the packaging, as if the contents inside are actually to be consumed in a more animalistic style than one usually meets with in civilized society). i expect i'll get quite the bit of attention from carting those around carnegie mellon!

oh, yes. i am so ready.

please won't you be my neighbor?

well, i'm sold on pittsburgh. despite arriving here and immediately falling deathly ill to a still unnamed stomach virus, i absolutely love living here. and especially living in squirrel hill.

squirrel hill is in eastern pittsburgh, just up the hill from carnegie mellon, and is full of leafy streets and beautiful nineteenth-century brick houses and garden apartments, like the one i live in. down the street from me is an intersection with the carnegie library (where i presently sit typing on my laptop), a rite aid, an old movie theatre, grocery store, lots of shops and restaurants, and the grandest pnc bank i have quite seen (i feel like i should have a hat and gloves to go in there).

the other neighborhoods i am slowly getting to know as i get lost in the city traveling to them: east liberty, where my cousin has some friends, oakland, shady side, homestead...or homewood. something like that.

but squirrel hill is still my favorite. i'm still enjoying people-watching whenever i need to pop down the street, as the variety of people you see is somewhat greater than we had in gettysburg: tons of young people with eclectic fashion sense and heavy backpacks, who are clearly students; as part of the large jewish community here, dozens of families in (what i suppose is to be) more traditional modest clothing doing their shopping; bicyclists and people on mopeds of all sizes; and generally a wider sea of faces than i've seen in awhile. how funny to think that, for all that i've traveled, and for all of the places i've lived, this is probably the most diverse, eclectic place i've lived since living in stamford. brewster, ny and greenwich, ct certainly never came close, for opposite reasons.

i guess it's not that surprising–unless you live in a city, we are, for the most part, creatures of habit who are rarely exposed to anything outside of the narrow frame of reference which we know. and pittsburgh is not, perhaps, as diverse as many other places in the world. but i am loving it here.

did you know that mr. rogers lived in squirrel hill? i think that just about says everything you need to know.