Oh the joys of the first day of work. Buses with broken chains and golly you were lucky as fuck (as lucky as fuck can be) to have your bus show up at all!! I was fortunate in the morning, the evening however, not so much. But I'm home, it's warm and I get about two hours of downtime before I have to get up and do it all over again.

The new job is a lot to learn, but I'm blessed with a cubicle and my own computer (intranet, the bastards!) This particular store is a "superstore" and it's a little overwhelming compared to what I did before, but nothing I can't handle. I have one of the brains that sees or reads something once and I get it, so the camera in my mind was overloaded today. Alrighty, now I'm going to stare at a wall until I fall asleep. Once I move the commute won't be as bad, so, until then, posting will happen when it happens and when it happens it will most likely be the delirious ramblings of an exhausted Cupie until the holiday passes. Lucky you. :D

I took this picture this morning, not only does it express my laziness in snowman building, but because it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...lol. It's also beginning to look a lot like I won't make my first day at work, snow covered with ice and 20 degrees with a wind chill of zero, I don't want to die just to fill out paperwork and get orientated. Nope. I'll do it tomorrow, hopefully some of the snow will be gone and it's expected to be a balmy 35 degrees, yep, tomorrow (shoot me.) So much for El Nino.

My sister took this picture, tre' gorgeous, so talented ;) - Redmond 11-19-06

D'oh!! My new boss just called and the store is closed, woooooohhhhhhhhhhhhooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! Snow Day!!!!!!

More snow today, freezing cold tomorrow, woo. :|

It's not a lot, but it does the trick. Time to decorate the tree! Woo! :D

Well, it's back to work for me and let me tell you something, I absolutely hated the process of looking for a job, interviewing - the selling of me - the phone interviews, resume....blah, blah, blah. I thought I would take a financial hit, but got a raise instead and after a month of interviewing for a handful of jobs outside of my experience field and finding myself crying during two of the interviews when asked what I enjoyed about my job at the bookstore. I realized it then - I wanted to keep being the book woman.

I missed it, I never thought I'd say that, but I did and now I'm back, but on the bigger side of the game. So, after mentally conceding to the fact that small bookstores are the past, I sucked it up and started checking out the larger stores, I interviewed with both large chains, but of course, my former company snapped me back up with a salary that makes me so very happy! I'm boss again, a boss in a bookstore. I could hurl big nuggets of joy, but I won't, I'll just be thankful.

Another strange turn of events, I was in Olympia helping out at my mom's store and we stopped by Marshall's and Mervyns to check out the sales when I ran into the woman that intially hired me to work for the company. I hadn't seen her in 16 years so it was wild to say the least, but it brought working the small bookstore to full circle, life is groovy like that. And actually, the bookwoman image in this post is actually a shirt my former boss had given to me as a gift, because, I am a bookwoman and you won't ever find me denying it. ;)

Oh golly, I can take my resume down from Monster!!! Woo! Interestingly enough, I did get a lot of calls from listing on Monster, one just this morning, so it works, however, in the end, I didn't need it. And to those 3 gazillion insurance companies that call me daily, you can stop now I'm resuming my booklust, full steam ahead.

I hope you all have a fabulous and warm holiday with your family and friends!!!

Happy Thanksgiving *bookish happy dance*

Thanksgiving Tip O' the Day-oh!

Don't pick at the stuffing all day or you'll be stuffed by dinner. Mmmmkay?

Which side of the turkey has the most feathers?

The outside :D

Why does a pilgrim's pants always fall down?

Because they wear their belt buckle on their hat

Young ladies around the world, it's Thanksgiving this week and the bottom line is, that you need to eat something, please. ;)


Perhaps a yummy Thanksgiving meal baked via an Easy Bake Oven, yum!
[via Side Salad]

I bet Anderson Cooper will have a loverly Thanksgiving, and if he doesn't, I bet you will. *sigh*. ;)
[via Gawker]

Madame Speaker! Hellooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

WASHINGTON (AP) - Nancy Pelosi was unanimously chosen Thursday by Democrats to be speaker of the House of Representatives, becoming the first woman ensured the job that constitutionally is second in line of succession to the presidency.

Even as Pelosi was enjoying her finest hour politically, her fellow Democrats remained divided over the selection of her top lieutenant.

Pelosi officially takes the post in January, succeeding Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert, when the House convenes in the next session of Congress.

"Men fear women's strength." - Anais Nin

Ummm....Soap on a rope is soooooo passe, welcome to the 21st century where technology respects your lazy ass.

Jim Henson's production company has a new show on TBS called Puppet UP!– Uncensored

The Jim Henson Company's PUPPET UP! - Uncensored is a demonstration of what happens when the perilous and provocative forms of traditional comedy improv are mixed with a bunch of irreverent puppets. With a motley group of characters brought to life world-renowned puppeteers, it is truly innovative comedy. Premiering in March 2006, the show has played to critical acclaim and sold out crowds at both the HBO Comedy Festival and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Performing the puppetry for the show are some of The Jim Henson Company's top puppeteers, as well as some of the country's top comedy improvisers. The cast includes Brian Henson, Second City alum Julianne Buescher, Tyler Bunch (Sesame Street), The Groundlings' Ted Michaels, Drew Massey (The Muppets' Wizard of Oz), ACME Comedy Group founding member Paul Rugg, Allan Trautman (Greg the Bunny) and Victor Yerrid (Team America).

Watch a clip here.
[via Disney Blog]

Today's the last day for free NYT's Select, after today it's $50 a year to have access to the editorial page and that pisses me off. I understand they need to pay the bills, but because I have bills to pay, I can't realistically say, "Hmmm, food or editorial opinion?" My ass yearns for food, my mind for opinion and since my ass is bigger than my brain, my ass wins out and since my ass is usually the underdog in most situations, this past week it was numb because I read everything I could, but it was a joy for my brain. As for my ass, well, it just twitched and in my mind a twitch = exercise. Win/Win.

The Drapes Of Wrath
by Maureen Dowd

The new Democratic sweep conjures up an ancient image: Furies swooping down to punish bullies.

Angry winged goddesses with dog heads, serpent hair and blood eyes, unmoved by tears, prayer, sacrifice or nasty campaign ads, avenging offenses by insolent transgressors.

This will be known as the year macho politics failed - mainly because it was macho politics by marshmallow men. Voters were sick of phony swaggering, blustering and bellicosity, absent competency and accountability. They were ready to trade in the deadbeat Daddy party for the sheltering Mommy party.

All the conservative sneering about a fem-lib from San Francisco who was measuring the drapes for the speaker's office didn't work. Americans wanted new drapes, and an Armani granny with a whip in charge.

A recent study found that the testosterone of American men has been dropping for 20 years, but in Republican Washington, it was running amok, and not in a good way. Men who had refused to go to an untenable war themselves were now refusing to find an end to another untenable war that they had recklessly started.

Republicans were oddly oblivious to the fact that they had turned into a Thomas Nast cartoon: an unappetizing tableau of bloated, corrupt, dissembling, feckless white hacks who were leaving kids unprotected. Tom DeLay and Bob Ney sneaking out of Congress with dollar bills flying out of their pockets. Denny Hastert playing Cardinal Bernard Law, shielding Mark Foley. Rummy, cocky and obtuse as he presided over an imploding Iraq, while failing to give young men and women in the military the armor, support and strategy they needed to come home safely. Dick Cheney, vowing bullheadedly to move "full speed ahead" on Iraq no matter what the voters decided. W. frantically yelling about how Democrats would let the terrorists win, when his lame-brained policies had spawned more terrorists.

After 9/11, Americans had responded to bellicosity, drawn to the image, as old as the Western frontier myth, of the strong father protecting the home from invaders. But this time, many voters, especially women, rejected the rough Rovian scare and divide tactics.

The macho poses and tough talk of the cowboy president were undercut when he seemed flaccid in the face of the vicious Katrina and the vicious Iraq insurgency.

Even former members of the administration conceded they were tired of the muscle-bound style, longing for a more maternal approach to the globe. "We were exporting our anger and our fear, hatred for what had happened," Richard Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state, said in a speech in Australia, referring to the 9/11 attacks. He said America needed "to turn another face to the world and get back to more traditional things, such as the export of hope and opportunity and inspiration."

Talking about hope and opportunity and inspiration has propelled Barack Obama into the presidential arena. His approach seems downright feminine when compared with the Bushies, or even Hillary Clinton. He languidly poses in fashion magazines, shares feelings with Oprah and dishes with the ladies on "The View." After six years of chest-puffing, Senator Obama seems very soothing.

Because of the power of female consumers, some marketing experts predict we will end up a matriarchy. This year, women also flexed their muscle at the polls, transformed into electoral Furies by the administration's stubborn course in Iraq.

On Tuesday, 51 percent of the voters were women, and 55 percent of women voted for the Democratic candidate. It was a revival of the style of Bill Clinton, dubbed our first female president, who knitted together a winning coalition of independents, moderates and suburbanites.

According to The Times's exit polls, women were more likely than men to want some or all of the troops to be withdrawn from Iraq now, and 64 percent of women said that the war in Iraq has not improved U.S. security.

The Senate has a new high of 16 women and the House has a new high of at least 70, with a few races outstanding. Hillary's big win will strengthen her presidential tentacles.

Nancy Pelosi, who will be the first female speaker, softened her voice and look as she cracked the whip on her undisciplined party, taking care not to sound shrill. When she needs to, though, she says she can use her "mother-of-five voice."

At least for the moment, W. isn't blustering and Cheney has lost his tubby swagger. The president is trying to ride the Mommy vibe. He even offered Madame Speaker help with those new drapes.

New York Times Select was free this week and I found this little ditty by author Douglas Coupland. Recycling? The state of publishing? Chewing up your own work to make a wasp nest? Why the hell not?

Time Capsules
by Douglas Coupland

I guess my big issue with the book world is that only rarely does anybody address the physicality of books, as if to do so is somehow an insult to "words," which is kind of corny, and seems almost willfully self-blinding. The extreme is in France, where most covers are blank with just the title and author's name, which is actually not a bad idea, like school uniforms, but then what next - all books set in the same font at the same size? A war between the pro italics and the anti italics camp? I think you can go too far.

In 1996 there was a global paper shortage, and even Rupert Murdoch had to fly to Finland to ensure paper supplies for his publishing divisions. In second-hand book stores you can sometimes recognize the 1996 and 1997 books because they’ve turned yellow from the high acid content of the paper.

Thinking about this yellowness got me to thinking about pulp which got me to thinking about how precious we are about books. Books are central to the transmission of culture from one generation to the next. At least for now. Smart people have argued that we're going to look back on paper (and the book) as intermediate technologies, stops on the road to the all-digital universe. This seems wacky right now, but in 1,000 years it won’t seem wacky at all. One way or another, books will cease to exist. They'll either be supplanted or humanity will become extinct or - well, whatever scenario you envisage.

So back to pulp. Back to paper. My cousin in Ontario is an entomologist, and so I think about insects more than I might think about them otherwise. I got to thinking about how wasps and hornets make paper, too, and paper is, in its own way, just as vital to the survival of their species as it is for us. What if you could trick wasps into using human paper to make their own paper? What if you took a stack of Finnegan’s Wakes and pulped them with hot water and corn syrup and left the whole thing in a pasture and let wasps come and gather the cellulose to make nests? What if you added pigment to the chopped up paper, and tricked the wasps into making nests in designer pastel shades — in candy stripes or tie-dyed patterns?


I had lofty plans to try this but geography and scheduling prevented it — for the time being. We simply don’t have many wasps or hornets where I live in Vancouver. But in the meantime I did a few things. I began looking for nests, found exactly one, and then put an ad in the local shopper paper reading, "Wasp and hornet nests required for science project. Will pay $10 apiece." (BTW, one lesson I've learned in life is that there’s very little you can solicit to buy in a shopper paper that can't quickly be explained by saying it's needed for an art or science project.) I was able to buy three dinky little nests this way, so I then visited (where else?) eBay, where I was able to buy some huge nests for $20, mostly from Texas and Florida.
Nests are beautiful objects — the inner combs in Koolhaasian layers, the striations of pulp that resemble avant garde Japanese fabrics. You can easily meditate on one for hours. (BTW, here's another thing about nests: they can really stink after being in a shipping box for two weeks. Each day we learn something new.)

So after my nest meditations I took copies of my own novels and began pulping them myself, chew by chew, a slow, laborious process. Have you ever chewed a book? I doubt it. The first thing you need to know is that doing so really trashes your saliva ducts, and it takes about a week to get through one average-size book. The second thing to remember is to drink lots of water and spit regularly or your teeth will turn gray. Usually I'd chew while watching "Law & Order." (I'm an addict.)

To look at my own complete wasp nests raises odd issues in my head and, I hope, in the minds of observers. Is our bunkered mentality about the sanctity of books more genetic than cultural? Are we no different than wasps defending against intruders when we force students to read Henry James or Nadine Gordimer? What would wasps make of books? How do wasps think of their role within evolutionary time? Do wasps have any sense of culture? Why does it feel so strange to see a book removed from our own sense of history and culture and inserted into a non-cultural slot where art or music or any other art form don't exist?

This past month has been a pleasure. It's helped me clarify in my mind my experience with society and how books have shaped it. It's made me clearer about my call to anyone involved in teaching or within institutions to try to broaden their thinking about what books are or can be. Since 1991 I've witnessed the triumph of the superstore, the near death of the independent bookseller, the rise of Amazon, the rise of the Internet, the comings and goings of the e-book and the rise of the P.D.A. Books are not under siege, but they are evolving and mutating. The more this process disturbs you, the more necessary it might be to try and engage with these changes. Right or wrong, they are inevitable, and the choice for anybody is whether they want to be able to live fully within the future, or whether they want to become a recluse and vanish into the past. The only way to go is forward. It's all there is.

It's a good day for us liberals, but I don't want to gloat...sadly, I'm sure one of them will have a glitch in their armor, but until that happens we now have checks and balance thing back in place and it's about time.

On my way home from an interview today, I was crossing a major intersection when I saw my state representative Mark Miloscia standing on the corner with a huge sign that said Thank You! I waved and congratulated him. It was a sweet gesture and sometimes it's the little things that make all the difference in the world, I'm glad I voted for him, hell, I'm glad I voted, period.

"We are coming out of a depression, and we're on the cusp of doing something really great," so sayeth Hoquiam mayor Jack Durney of the new biofuel plant being built in Grays Harbor. Aberdeen and Hoquiam have been coming out of a depression for decades now, once the mills starting shutting down, so did Aberdeen. Timothy Egan meshes this new development with the Cobain legacy, yes, Kurt Cobain. Aberdeen has never fully capitalized on Cobain's place in rock n' roll history and now with the Biofuel plant they're ready, I guess.... Newly re-elected Senator Maria Cantwell (D) says

"the fuel plant would put the area on the map as an energy-revolution pioneer.

A Nirvana fan, Ms. Cantwell added that the plant and Cobain could co-exist as trademarks of this part of the coast.

"I think this area is big enough to have two heroes,"

It's a strange, albeit positive, look at a small town with a dead rock star and shitty future, but hopefully the Biofuel plant can only help. Full article here.

I hope you did as well!

It's been pouring down rain for days now (Pineapple Express) and normally I would enjoy it a bit more if it weren't so wet. That doesn't make sense, if it made sense it wouldn't be on this blog and I like it that way.

My mind is erratic lately, job-hunting is such a delight for a hyper neurotic bitch like myself - the job I want, hasn't called back, the job I'd do but will die a long tedious public transportation death if I get it, will notify people next week. The job I go for a second interview tomorrow, would be a challenge, but I'm up for that and the hours are more suited to my cranky old body. Another opportunity has opened up and I'm certain I'll interview for that as well. Interviewing is such an exhausting event; I get all wound up before and come down like a load of bricks right after. I work myself into such a neurotic frenzy, I'm worthless to the world. Let the drooling commence!

Last night, to relax my overworked brain, I opened a beer and promptly forgot about it, made some mint tea but drank hot apple cider instead, I've got to get to work soon, my beverage selection demands it.

Today I vote, because I have that right, the right to walk to my polling place, in the rain and vote my vote. I hope you all will do the same, that is, if you haven't already. Don't forget to watch The Daily Show/Colbert Report's Midterm Midtacular featuring Dan Rather for election returns tonight, we are hoping to laugh our ass off or at least an inch off, that would be swell.

Quote of the day: "It's a risk, I guess, but what the hell." - Dan Rather on starring with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Word of the day: "Nutfuckery"

Have a super dooper day!

I dreamt that I was at a woman's house, apparently, in my mind at least, I knew this woman from a cat show I had recently sold my jewelry at. From what I can remember, I don't recall this lady being at the show at all and in the dream she was part of a mystery as I was with a Scooby Doo group of folks in hot pursuit of um...something, I'm not sure. Like any good investigator I had to urinate, err... so, I found the bathroom and once I piddled and upon standing from the toilet I lost my balance. To steady myself I put my hand on the wall and when I did my hand went through the wall and I heard a cat screech, like the wall was a cat and I stepped on it. Looking around I noticed that the once pristine surroundings were now dreary and decaying. Wanting to hide the damage I did on my toilet ascent, I found a towel and shoved it in the hole.

On leaving the bathroom, I now found my fellow Scooby Doo-er's in this woman's rotting bedroom and she was sweetly introducing them to a gazillion cats and kittens that weren't there prior to the piddle episode. Obligingly, I listened to their names and fell in love with every damn kitty there, but I knew I didn't need another kitty let alone purchase a pure breed, so I just smiled, nodded and "mmmhmmm" a lot. As it is, I'm already one cat shy of "Crazy Cat Spinster" status, that is until I see this tiny little creature, no more than six weeks old with a brown tabby look about it. The lady explained to me that she would give me this particular cat for free, "but you have to understand", she said, "he's blind".

Not having seen the kitten's face yet, it seemed to turn around right as the lady said this, I was saddened and horrified when I saw the kitten's face. His little head slightly deformed and he's eyes were milky as if born with cataracts. I'll be the first to adopt a seemingly loveless creature, it's my nature, I believe everything deserves love, even creepified kitties that look like Sponge Monkeys. As I pet the creature, my Scooby Doo pals grimacing with every touch, I started to fall in the love with the scary looking bugger and just as I'm about to tell the lady I'll take on the task, the cat smiled a huge opened mouth smile, which promptly woke my ass up.

Once awake, I realized my own cats were working their "wake up the bringer of food" mode. Ruby, my black cat, was basically sitting on my chest staring down at me, occasionally touching her wet nose to my chin and Sophie, my Siamese mix, was next to my pillow...staring down at me and playing with my hair, neither of the cats smiled at me and for that I was thankful, but I'm certain that's why my brain conjured the smiling deformed kitty, nothings perfect, right?

Speaking of cats, it just so happens that it's raining cats and dogs today, ugh. Aunt Flo has made a surprise visit, which I hope is not representative of the decaying bathroom, ew. And to top things off I have an interview this afternoon. The huge zit above my lip should scare the living shit out of my interviewer and I'm certain that my hair will do it's amazing humidity freak out trick, which can be quite attractive if I were living in a nut house. I'm doomed. I'm bitchy and bloated, damnit, I feel sexy. Garble snarf with a side blech. Creepy smiling cats, damn.

Paging Dr. Freud.....

John Kerry is to public speaking, like George Bush is to vocabulary.
That's all I have to say about that. Thanks!