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Monday in Disguise

Yesterday I took my car in for its 90,000 mile check-up. I had a $199 coupon that I had been saving for this event on my frigerator door. Not that I'm so naive to believe that I could get in and out of the mechanics for $200 when I have 90k on my car. I was expecting $500. That seems to be the standard price for sneezing in an auto shop. Turned out to be $813 by the time I had to bail my car out at the end of the day. Apparently I needed new brakes, front and back. Ouch. It's not that I bad, I tell myself. At least I got out for less that $1000.

Out of Time

Cheryl and I stand at the rim of the dance floor, watching the couples swirl around the room counter-clockwise. Dancers on the face of a clock running backwards. Most of the couples moving past us are swirling by in hoop skirts and coat tails, victorian lace swaying as white-gloved gentlemen lead graceful turns in a waltz rhythm. Here and there the timeline leaks or wrinkles. There goes Queen Elizabeth I, and here are Romeo and Juliet. That looks like it Regency-era lady over there, talking to a gentleman in a modern suit and tie.

All Good Things...

I watched the next to last episode of Voyager last night. Shawn and I have been Netflixing StarTrek. We started with The Next Generation, moving through chronologically. We picked up Deep Space Nine along the timeline and bid farewell to Captain Picard after seven good seasons. And a few years into Deep Space Nine, as the war with the Dominion swelled, we met a little lost ship named Voyager, deep in the Delta Quadrant. Now the U.S.S. Enterprise has departed and we left Deep Space Nine with its prophets and changelings and self-sealing stem bolts.

A Health to the Company

How many of you remember that old rhyme from Girl Scouts about making new friends? I can't be only brownie in the batch here.

Make new friends but keep the old
One is silver and the other gold

I've spent the week visiting with friends new and old, marveling at the threads that weave us together, how they form, which ones break and which ones hold, all the way through life.

Friday Morning

The coffee shop around the corner now sells muffin tops. For one dollar I can have all the best parts of a blueberry muffin and not have to deal with the creepy paper wrapping bit that normally comes around the bottom. At first I was concerned. Do they bake the whole muffin and then just cut off the top part so wasteful people in the land of plenty can have only the good parts?

Crow Sitting

I was heading down to a local bookstore yesterday to pick up a few books I've been hunting for and it occured to me as I headed out the door that maybe I ought to grab my Yolo Crow stuff and bring it with me. The owner of this bookstore has already agreed to sell my magazine, but I thought perhaps they'd let me post a flyer. I popped onto their website before I left to see if I could discover the name of the owner, in case she happened to be there. Do you know what I found there?

Dress Rehearsal

In the anteroom, dancers silently cluster into group of similar costumes in the dark. They practice plees and tondues at the bar to warm up, kill time, kill nerves. They adjust each other's costumes, untwisting leotard straps and fluffing tutus. The weight of the world outside the studio in sitting on my shoulders and so I can ignore the nervous ball in the pit of my stomach for now. I need to shake this off. Plee, rond de jambe, arabesque... A fellow dancer taps me on the shoulder. She marks through a few steps from our piece and pauses with an eyebrow raised in silent question.

Hot Spell

So how hot is it in the Sacramento Valley right now? I mean, the weather folks say 105 degrees, but if you're not used to 105, what does that really mean to you?

Allow me to translate.

Right now, it's 9:00 a.m. and 82 degrees. By the time I work up at 7:00 it was too hot outside for the little sweater I put on to defend me from the office air conditioner. At 7:00 in the morning, it's tank top weather. It's put-the-hair-up-to-keep-it-off-your-neck weather.

Harry Potter and the Disappearing Bookstore

Alright, people. I know that Harry Potter is coming out on Saturday and everyone's excited. I'm excited too. I've got my copy pre-ordered and I'm picking it up at midnight on Friday, in costume no-less. So yes, I'm excited.

"You're picking it up at midnight," you ask? "Gee, Shannon, you don't live next to Amazon's distribution site, do you?"

No. I don't. Now is your cue to say something like, "Wow, I didn't know that Walmart and Costco were open that late!"

Does anybody shop at bookstores anymore?!?!?

"But, Shannon, it's just so much cheaper."

Mind-bogglingly, Stupendously, Fantastically Amazing!

Okay, I'm going to geek out here, but bear with me because this is cool. I was talking with my ESRI tech support folks this morning (Thanks for all your help, Margaret - You rock!) about difficulties in calculating magnetic declination in our mapping software.

For those who don't know, I'm a GIS analyst. That's something like a cartographer and database manager at the same time. When people ask my profession, I generally say "Map Geek"; it saves time.

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