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Vox Hunt: Puzzling

Show us something puzzling.  

Buckle Up

This was outside a school, wtf does ET have to do with seatbelts, or am I forgetting something essential about that movie?

QotD: Right Before I Doze Off

What's the last thing you usually do or think about before you fall asleep?

I usually lie on my back for a long time waiting to totally unwind before I fall asleep. I do all the stuff -- turn off the computer early, don't watch tv, drink tea or read a book, keep the lights low -- but sleep is slow in coming, it always has been. So I lie on my back and fold my hands in what's not too corpselike a position and go over what happened in my day.

Sometimes if I need to force something out of my mind, I'll touch type in my head. I have this weird visualization thing I do where I read words as if I was tracking them letter by letter over a keyboard. It's a little complex but also not too brain-intensive and it's like a radiator flush for whatever was clogging my thoughts. It's hard to concentrate on that and also worry about whatever I may have been worrying around.

The last thing I usually think is "oh hey I think I'm dreaming..."

QotD: My Musical Horoscope

What's your musical horoscope?  (Put your music player on shuffle and write down the first 10 songs that come up.)  Inspired by Stephanie.

I lost my whole music collection in a tragic asshated deletion moment. I've been rebuilding it from the collection of friends and strangers, so it skews towards banjo currently, apparently.

• Sea Lion Woman - Crooked Jades - nice acapella sounding. I wish this wasn't all DRMed
• I Can See Clearly Now - The Deighton Family - awesome cover, from a mix cd I think I imported but never listened to
• Off to Sea Once More - pretty sure it's Grisman/Garcia - from the sea shanty mix "These are the wails of a hundred years" made for me by good old whatshisname back when he and my sister had a good thing going.
• Golden Ring - Dry Branch Fire Squad - excellent cover [why are these all covers? how non-random is that? what does that say about my horoscope? damn this song is long]
• Lost John - Woody Guthrie
• Letter From an Occupant - New Pornographers
• Barefoot Marmlish Blues - B. Sam Firk - I see a theme here
• Charles Giteau - Kelly Harrell And The Virginia String Band
• Drink to Me Babe, Then - AC Newman - one of the things I'd lost that was in the "hipster stuff that the ex listened to all the time" that I went ahead and replaced anyhow
• Take me Into Your Embrace - Marika Kanaropoulou - Ah the lovely Women of Rembetica!

I really wish last.fm's redesign didn't suck so hard, otherwise I'd have more excitement about teling you to go check out what else I listen to. What a weird group of stuff? What have I learned?

why I am holding a mop, why my sister is making a face

kate and I recreate an earlier photo

My sister and I have been hanging out at my Mom's place since Thursday. On Thursday morning she went in to the hospital to have a lung resection to remove some mystery lump they found when she was getting medical work done for another mystery lump elsewhere. The good news is she doesn't have cancer in her lymph nodes and they said they may never know if it's cancer or not. The good news is she's recovering nicely. The good news is that my sister is one of the people I'd most want to be with when I was in the middle of an emotionally trying time, especially if it was family related, and she's the one I'm with. The picture above is one of a series of photos we took to cheer my Mom up, basically re-creations of photos taken in the same house 30 years ago. She laughed until she had to put the pictures down, which we branded a success. She doesn't mind being a patient as much as I mind her being a patient. She shoos us out of the hospital in the evening.

My Mom is in the ICU where she has been since the surgery but the ICU label is deceptive. She's alert and awake and feeling okay, just sore, bored and cranky. In fact she's always felt fine, through the month of dealing with the "what do we do about the mystery lump?" discussion, and now she feels lousy. She should be moved to the normal patient wing sometime soon. Then she'll come home. She lives alone so my sister and I are coordinating with neighbors and other family members to take care of cats, mail, phone calls and whatever else her life entails, which we're learning as we go. I know I have a place to go back to in Vermont, but the difference between feeling at home there and at home here is really striking.

It's been weird. I haven't been in my Mom's house without her -- the house I grew up in and where I lived for about 15 years -- since high school. I haven't been here with my sister for any extended period of time in maybe 20 years. Coming back to the town I grew up in, where I've visited but not really lived, has been an experience. The town was on its way out of being a farming town when I lived here, it's now firmly a tony Boston suburb. The people in the supermarket look bizarre to me. The traffic is ridiculous. And yet, the house is still totally quiet at night. The place where I took swimming lessons is now a nature preserve where Kate and I went hiking. The hospital where I was born and later worked in high school, has wifi and some darned nice ICU nurses.

I haven't told almost anyone about all of this because I have no idea how to bring it up. After someone says "How are you?" do they really want to hear "Oh my Mom's in the ICU..." Some people do, and some people I've told. Some people I didn't tell until I had to and felt weird not telling them earlier. Some people I gave loose outlines "a family member... a medical problem" and didn't know how specific to be. I haven't written about it on my main blog because my Mom reads it -- though she's not reading it now -- and I know she'll be critical of whatever I write, we have that sort of relationship. I have a hard time figuring out how to behave here, it's been nice to hang out with my sister who doesn't care how I act.

I'll go back to Vermont, and then head out to North Dakota for a library talk in a few days. I have no plan, and it's unusual for me to have no plan. I'm not sure what to say, and that's pretty unusual for me as well. This is a start.

QotD: Speak To Me In...

How many languages can you speak?  Which languages can you read or understand?

1. I speak English okay.
2. I can swear in Spanish and otherwise speak Sesame Street Spanish (count to eleven, know how to say water, open, closed, &c.).
3. When my roommate was talking to his parents in French about the skunks that live under the house, I knew roughly what he was talking about, but not exactly what he was saying.
4. I spoke Romanian for a year when I lived in Romania. I have a great accent but a small vocabulary.
5. Malcolm X's daughter once spoke about the importance of being able to say "Thank You" in the language of any country you visited, so I can say thank you in a few more languages like Turkish, Hungarian, Czeck and maybe, if I remember, Bulgarian.

QotD: I Get Around

How many places have you lived in your life?

Places like cities/towns? Parentheses indicate how many different places I lived within those places where live is anyplace I slept for more than a few weeks, kept clothes/toothbrush there.

Acton, MA (1)
Boxboro, MA (1)
Amherst, MA (4)
Westford, MA (1)
Seattle, WA (7)
Sanibel, FL (2)
Cluj-Napoca, Romania (1)
West Topsham, VT (1)
Bethel, VT (1)

Charity

What's your middle name?  Is there a story or history behind it?

And you know, I don't really know the story behind it but I'll have to ask my Mom. It does suit me though.

But I do know this. I was born in the sixties and I have a hippie name: Jessamyn Charity West. My sister was born in the seventies and she has a nun's name: Katherine Elizabeth West.

QotD: Three-Day Weekend!

candles

I've got a birthday right after the weekend, so the weekend [three day? four day? the weekend idea is sort of mysterious to me] doesn't mean terribly much. I'm hanging out at a friend's place who is down in New Jersey so I'm up in Kittery, Maine with a loaner cat, walking distance from Portsmouth and water that tastes like salt. Big plans are sleeping in, taking pictures, typing letters, finishing books, getting sun, taking baths and ripping CDs. Maybe I'll even toss a fake chicken patty on the grill.

It will be a pretty low key Labor Day which is just what I was looking forward to.