Category Archives: Uncategorized

Mine And I Got To Get

Posted by Tata on

New vocabulary words: mall alps.

Oh how I love the Alba Botanica Coconut Milk Face Wash. I buy them two at a time in case I have to turn another cheek or something. So sue me! Anyway, Pete and I were tooling around the cosmetics aisles of the health food store and I stumbled on the Alba Botanica Terra Tints. I love lip balm but it lacks glamor. Lipstick is hard to keep on winter chapped lips. I picked the two colors pictured and carried them around the store, since I pictured myself dropping them into the shopping cart, then chasing them around on the floor. That didn’t seem glamorous either. The manufacturer’s product description:

Six luscious, long-lasting lip colors, TerraTints will beautifully tint your lips with a natural translucent glow. Zinc oxide provides chemical free sun protection with SPF 8, while nourishing, organic coconut and olive oils soothe and moisturize. Calendula, echinacea and organic peppermint rejuvenate and restore for healthy lip care.

100% Mineral Colors
Chemical Free SPF

Parkinglotterhorn.

The two lip balms have completely different textures. The Blaze (above) has a moist, creamy texture and a wonderful peppermint fragrance. It comes off on coffee cups, which I absolutely loathe. The bronze (left) is hard and a little tricky to apply to dry lips, but the bronze color is much more natural looking and stays on lips better.

I like them both, but I’d like to try a third color – for SCIENCE. Then I’d have three! I’d recommend these lip balms for light makeup, low-kissing situations.

I Say I Want To Be Alone

Posted by Tata on

Spent the afternoon at the dentist and can’t feel my face except for the parts that feel like someone whacked a tuning fork against them. So let’s talk about something cheerful.

How to Prepare for a Volcanic Eruption

Awesome.

Protecting your family in the event of a volcanic eruption can mean the difference between life and death. However, knowing how to prepare for a volcanic eruption can be confusing without the right information. Organizing a plan of attack is key to proper preparation, and educating everyone in your family or household will help to better ensure their safety and well being when disaster erupts.

Volcanoes fear being outflanked, so you’re already making them nervous.

Know beforehand where the active volcanoes are in your area. Find out whether they’re likely to affect you where you’re living. If so, be prepared at all times.

Things you should know: 1. Where are the cool clubs everyone wants to get into? 2. Where are the cool active volcanoes? Word to the wise: if you see smoke rising from the cool volcano, DON’T BE A VIRGIN and do run away in the very latest ember-repellant asbestos tuxedo!

Put together an emergency supply kit. This kit is something that anyone living in a volcano zone should have prepared at all times. The kit should include such items as a first aid kit, food and water supplies, a manual can opener, a flashlight with extra batteries or preferably a crank model, any necessary medications, sturdy shoes, goggles or other eye protection, and a battery-powered radio. Ensure that everyone in your family knows where the emergency supplies that you prepared are located.

None of these things will burn up in a pyroclastic flow so you’re A-OK no matter what!

Set an emergency evacuation plan with your family. Review it in depth with them, so that each person knows what to do in the event of an eruption, how to find one another if you’re apart, and how to contact neighbors and/or emergency services if you cannot get away from the property using your own transportation.

Ah! The important part: drive away!

If anyone has disabilities, these need to be taken account of in the plan.

Roll away!

Include pets and livestock in the plan.

Trot away!

Discuss with your family what you will do if there are warnings to evacuate and any of you don’t want to leave. Bear in mind that it is not fair to other family members if some of you choose to stay behind in spite of evacuation warnings, and precautions should always be taken to ensure that those family members who want to leave can do so.

Abandon ship!

Know how to switch off all utilities and ensure that every family member old enough to be responsible for turning off utilities knows how to do so.

Um…safety first?

Talking to children about the possibility of a disaster and what to do in the event is better than pretending it may never happen. If children are aware that everything is planned should something go wrong, their fear and anxiety will be reduced in the event of a disaster because they’ll know how to respond.

Show me on the doll where the volcano touched you, pumpkin.

Create an emergency kit specifically for your car. It should include maps, tools, a first aid kit if you haven’t already packed one with your other emergency supplies, a fire extinguisher, flares, additional non-perishable food, booster cables, sleeping bags and/or emergency blankets, and a flashlight.

When you’re finished RUNNING AWAY! it’d be excellent to join the fire department and go back in.

Attend to livestock and pets. In the event that your house and property are directly impacted by the volcano, your animals will not be able to escape. Do what you can within reason to ensure their safety.

Place your livestock in an enclosed area or make arrangements to transport them as far offsite as possible.

Make transportation plans for your family pets. Be aware that most emergency shelters will be unable to accommodate them. If keeping your pets with you, you’ll need to be sure that you have planned ahead for enough food and water for them. Alternatively, leave messages on social networking sites such as Twitter asking for people who are available in the area who can board your pets temporarily until the disaster is over. You are bound to get a lot of kind offers.

What? We trotted away paragraphs ago! Wait, are you saying my livestock which are supposed to huddle close together to avoid flying cinders depend for their survival on dorks who don’t know enough to evacuate and my pets go all Blanche DuBois? Oh. My. God. I’m a terrible person who doesn’t deserve the love of a Schnauzer!

The most likely hazard during a volcanic eruption is ash fall. Knowing how to deal with it is important whether you’re remaining in place or you’re traveling.

Stay indoors. Close all windows and doors; some may need to be sealed with tape or similar (damp towels work well). Stopper up any vents to outside if possible. Avoid using anything that sucks in air from outside such as air-conditioning or dryers.

Bring all pets indoors. If you have livestock, bring them into sheds, barns, or other shelters. Even the garage will do as a temporary shelter. Ensure that livestock have enough food and water.

Fill your bath and other containers with water. This may become a very important water source if ash impacts local water supplies.

Protect sensitive electronics until the ash fall has well and truly ceased; only uncover them when the environment is totally ash-free.

So much for the Twitterati feeding my livestock at the trough of my tub.

After the ash fall, stay indoors and follow the radio instructions. When you do go outside, keep away from ash falls and build-up of ash and continue to wear protective clothing.

Don’t drive through ash fall. It will clog your car’s engine severely and cause serious abrasion damage to the car.

Keep children, pets, and animals indoors. If pets and animals have ash on their fur, hoofs, or paws, wash it away to prevent them from ingesting it and give them plenty of water to drink.

Huh. This sounds like a Wile E. Coyote moment. Umbrella, anyone?

If your home or property is in the path of a lava flow, pyroclastic flow, surge, or lahar, it is important to be ready to evacuate immediately when local authorities ask you to.

And as my last meal at home, I will eat an entire herd of carpaccio, because I am AWESOME.

Lost In the Dangling Conversation

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Arrrrrgh.

Looters broke into the Egyptian Museum during anti-government protests late on Friday and destroyed two Pharaonic mummies, Egypt’s top archaeologist told state television.

The museum in central Cairo, which has the world’s biggest collection of Pharaonic antiquities, is adjacent to the headquarters of the ruling National Democratic Party that protesters had earlier set ablaze. Flames were seen still pouring out of the party headquarters early on Saturday.

“I felt deeply sorry today when I came this morning to the Egyptian Museum and found that some had tried to raid the museum by force last night,” Zahi Hawass, chairman of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said on Saturday.

“Egyptian citizens tried to prevent them and were joined by the tourism police, but some (looters) managed to enter from above and they destroyed two of the mummies,” he said.

You know, I’m smaller than a speck of dust in the flow of history, but about that stream, I really do care. I care that we preserve the things about ourselves that teach us where we’ve been, what we did, why and how. It’s not the business of royalty that matters, but the history of a monarchic civilization cannot be written without regard for its monarchs. We can go forward as we choose, but we must know who we have been.

Yeah. I know. Not everyone cares. Events in Egypt are hard to read about and tough to imagine. It’s heartening to see the courage of Egyptians protecting the museum while they stand up to the corrupt government.

For the Light That Is Reflected

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Treasure appears when the hunter is ready to see it.

Between Christmas and New Year’s, the unnamed university closes all non-essential offices to conserve energy, and by “non-essential,” the university means “offices without trucks and shovels.” I don’t mind and plan projects that require some attention to detail, despite the fact that I have no attention span. A few days ago, I opened an old cigar box I’ve been tossing photographs into for a decade or so and went about scanning the images. Pete did all the actual scanning and I did the sulking, pouting and flouncing off in several colorful huffs. I wanted to do the scanning myself because I’m selfish and crave project-related glory, but the scanner refused to connect with my laptop; it took Pete three tense days to scan the pictures and mail them to me in small batches. I resized, labeled and put them up on Facebook, where many of my relatives were overjoyed to find them and at least one was mortified that his friends could see we were, in fact, dirty guinea wop dagos. Merry Christmas, wannabe cracker, get some self-respect!

I’ve had most of these pictures since my grandmother died nineteen years ago and I’ve shown them to people. Funny thing: this unfamiliar picture turned up in the scanned picture pile. The little boy is my father, but I had no idea who the woman was. One of my cousins asked her mother who the woman in the picture was. “That’s Andy’s mother,” she said and my heart skipped a beat. It’s a complicated moment. It suddenly dawned on me I’d never seen a picture of Giannina, the image of her in my head came completely from stories and I didn’t even know that. I believed she was thin, severe and had dark brown hair, but here she is lush and has light hair. Her face also seemed strange until I looked at the picture under the biggest magnifying glass I could find and recognized her son Andy’s – my father’s father’s – features. Giannina died just about the time I was born. Where are the other pictures of her? Why had I never noticed this picture before?

For Christmas, I got to see my great-grandmother’s face when she was just about my age. What did you get me?

A picture may be worth a thousand words but this one won't shut up.

After she died, my grandmother became mysterious. She’d told some carefully chosen stories of her childhood, a few about her young married life and almost nothing about any time between my father’s birth until I was a teenager. She told stories about her extended family, but left out most of her own. I did not know until I was a budding drama queen that my father and Auntie InExcelsisDeo had a sister who’d died in childhood. It was like a spell broke when I told the assembled family I knew there had been another baby. After that, her name was mentioned. Gram told me lovely and terrible stories. Throwing open a once-locked door was the only way I got anywhere. After she was seventy, Gram told me she missed that little girl more with the passage of time – that you’d think it would be the other way around, but it wasn’t. If she’d lived another ten years, I’m not sure how much more about her life I would have ferreted out of her, since I only saw this picture days after she died. She was smart, tough, critical, stylish, emotionally distant from her family, always the adult and lonely. Everyone leaned on her and she had no one to lean on. Despite everything I knew about her, I did not really know that she had once been young and beautiful. I didn’t know she’d ever had a carefree moment in her entire life until I saw this picture, hidden in a coat closet in the bottom of an old box.

When Every Day Your Secrets End

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At 7:45 this morning, I broke into an office in the library by hitting the up button in the freight elevator and stepping out when it stopped. I propped a specially labeled, brand new, still flat box with the new cardboard smell against the desk and taped a note on pink phone message paper to the flat thing. The note asked the receptionist to call me about this box. Three hours later, I went back up to the office, this time up a flight of stairs and through the front door, where I found the receptionist who had not called me and the box that had not been set up, moved to the other side of the cubicle.

Tata: I see you got the box I left you.
Henny: We wondered who left it!
Tata: Did you get my note?
Henny: What note?

I reached past her, turned the flat thing around and saw the note taped to what was now the back. She looked so surprised.

Henny: Your note!
Tata: Yep, there it is. I wanted to tell you about assembling the box.
Henny: I didn’t.
Tata: I see that! Do you have packing tape?
Henny: Nooo.
Tata: You don’t have packing tape?
Henny: We do. We have that!
Tata: Well, thank you! And here you go, the box for our project. I’ll be back later, okay?
Henny: Thank you!

I’m a frequent user of words like homicidal and raised by wolves, but this conversation seemed special. It’s hard to tell, though, because I’m in a mood. This morning, my cousin’s puppy ran off and everyone’s upset about it, but not like this, which is so upsetting you want to jab hot metal spikes through the ears of defenseless-pet-murdering scumbags, and by you, I mean me. So instead of baring my teeth at my co-worker, I did the backstroke across the floor to the elevator and here’s a peaceful picture Pete took of our pantry I wish I’d seen just then.

The Pages Of A Blue Boy

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Siobhan started yapping before I said hello.

Siobhan: PEARS IN PORT WINE SAUCE ARE SOOOOO DELICIOUS!
Tata: Hey, what?
Siobhan: I soaked them and my housemate Trixie said, “I don’t know…what’s that?” I came back four hours later and oooooooh they look like vaginas, but I’m straight and pears in port wine sauce are SOOOOO DELICIOUS!
Tata: Your inner conflicts have such happy endings!
Siobhan: I sent you a picture!
Tata: Holy cats! And they were delicious, you say?
Siobhan: Completely delicious! I can’t say enough about how delicious they were!
Tata: This can only help your already shocking popularity.