The River Green

For this year’s milestone birthday, I decided to have a three day extravaganza, topped off with a gift to myself. The gift was finally, at long last, my own website. richwertzonline.com is up and running. The time it took settling on a theme was a bit longer than anticipated, but in the end, it is a bamboo inspired design with some pretty impressive and cutting edge css style renderings. Of course, I had to make a statement along the lines that it looked and functioned better with either a Chrome or Firefox browser. I imagine some people might say that I am incapable of designing anything that is viewable in Internet Explorer. I say to them that IE hasn’t been able to match my level of creativity as yet. I’ve always been one to push the boundaries of web design. I remember spending so much time creating images for a table layout that mimicked public transportation with the content located where the adverts would be. It was a while before I could show it to anyone without Netscape or Mozilla. Just for kicks, I re-created the same concept using purely css constructs and it took about a tenth the amount of time.

So that’s how I spent the first half of my birthday week. Tweaking my new website and doing school work. The other half consisted of my birthday dinner (on the day of my birthday) at Hokkaido; Kara joined us and she gave me an iTunes gift card in a really awesome card. I managed to stuff an entire plate of crab legs into my gob, but half of the shells ended up on the floor when I tried to open a particularly difficult shell and slipped. The wait staff literally standing next to our table didn’t find my antics amusing at all. Afterward, we all went to Dave & Buster’s for some game time. Kara won me 1,000 tickets at the bass fishing thing- which was really awesome. I couldn’t get enough of the coin games. Jovanna met us there and had some fun, too. Some of the nearly 3,000 tickets we have on the card covered the purchase of a new mug.

Thursday was stamppot day. Kara, Jen and my mom were invited, but mom had to cancel because of her back. Everything was delicious- even the turkey sausage turned out better than I thought.

A few days after my birthday, we went to mom’s so that she could give both Marieke and I our birthday presents. She gave me a really neato existentialist book about chaos theory and the philosophy of physics. It’s kind of hard to read, only because certain sections need some devoted time to finish and I can only read it in smaller bits until class is over.

Labels: family , friends , holidays

The day is upon us. Time for turkey, mashed potatoes, friends, family, beer and Marieke’s sweet potato oranges. Unlike last year, we are hosting this time around and are welcoming eight people to our ginormous table.

Part of the reason we opted out of hosting last year was because we didn’t have the energy to clean. Having to spend most of our physical and emotional strength dealing with our friend’s accident meant that we just could not hack hosting. The decision did not go over well with our normal crew- one person in particular responded to our decision with static. I did expect a little more understanding, but I knew it was just expecting too much.

Our day began with some coffee and planning. My first task was to make room in the former Gecko room, for all the stuff that doesn’t belong where we plan to eat dinner and socialize. Marieke’s first task was cleaning the bathroom. An hour later, we seriously considered cancelling. Aunt Flo paid us a three-day-early visit, so that wrenched up the whole works.

It is a mystery to me, how, in under twelve hours, the house looks like a palace- granted a small palace. Maybe a gnome palace, but a palace nonetheless. Speaking of Kabouters (Dutch for gnomes), the vacuum we had to borrow from mom was made for use in only the residents of gnomes. This is the only possible conclusion to draw, given the ridiculous angle one must stand in order to operate it. My mother is what I would call average in height for a woman in her demographic. Marieke and I are what I would call above average in height. I can see over everyone’s head on the bus and in crowds, I tend to be the first to know when it starts to rain. So maybe it’s a matter of perspective.

In digression, I’ll say this: the turkey looks quite defrosted, having spent the last five days sitting in the fridge. Our prep work for tomorrow- food wise- seems like it will be smooth sailing, since we have a CuisinArt hand-me-down that slices carrots faster than the speed of lightning and chops onions like nobody’s business. I’m sad to see our ‘manual’ chopper go, but I won’t miss nursing the wounds suffered to my knuckles from the mandolin slicer that it doubled as. Also gone will be the nearly ninety minutes of slicing four pounds of carrots. It’s a tradeoff, but those things were invented for a reason. Now I can sleep in.

My cousin, David, shared a quote from Melody Beattie that I thought appropriate:

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.
Melody Beattie

Have a good Thanksgiving.

Labels: family , friends , holidays , house , Thanksgiving

Even though I’m having a crisis of mammoth proportions in school and I’m behind on e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g, I’ve come into some really awesome music by way of iTunes radio. This website provides the best continuous music heard in quite some time: http://laut.fm/alternativeworld. I’m listening to Phoenix now, but I’ve been introduced to Troy von Balthazar, The Temper Trap, The Twilight Sad, Marquis of Vaudeville- a small sample of the playlist I’m gathering.

And thank goodness… I was starting to dream in Bach and one morning woke up singing Whip It. not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just that something new was definitely needed.

Neil is coming in today to get the geckos and take them to Norfolk. I’m gonna miss the little guys. Think he’s only staying the night. Luckily, we are pounding out the ‘get ready to have people over for Thanksgiving’ cleaning list, so his room is clean(er). We got the porch done last night and Marieke washed the sofa cover so that there is a spot to sit.

I’m falling ever behind and I don’t see any clear sky ahead- at least not before Christmas- which is 43 days away. Fingers crossed, I guess.

Labels: family , house

Season finale of Glee was on tonight. In other news it looks like Semi-Super Tuesday Primary elections for the mid-terms have shaped an interesting November. I’m not as into it as I would normally be. The tea is helping with that.

I met mom at Giant Eagle to get a book from her that she checked out of the Pitt law library for me. The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation. It is the 16th edition, which unfortunately does not have the information I need- how does one cite Supreme Court Oral Arguments in APA style? I’ve looked everywhere and I can’t find it at all. Thankfully, she is going to photocopy a couple pages out of the most recent edition for me.

This is being written in bed, thanks to the fact that my laptop is so awesome. I had to throw that in there.

For the new school week, I hope to have more practice exercises done for my IT class and maybe this week my writing class will make sense. I haven’t yet written the midterm survey for that class, but it will be scathing. I can’t stand the fact that the prof for my Comp II class can’t write for shit. Or more to the point, her writing is shit. I find that she writes with the same cadence and lack of clarity similarly to the way a certain former GOP VP candidate speaks. It is annoying to say the least.

The coming weeks (maybe months) are not going to be comfortable at all. if there is a way to go without or make due, I can’t think of one. We’re headed to KMart to get the first of two necessities to help us get through. As a result of the predicament, I am now ‘in charge’ of the finances. Oh good, because I certainly didn’t have enough to do already. Ugh. Maybe I’ll feel more useful.

Nearly 2.5 hours after taking my melatonin pill, I am not yet sleepy.

Labels: classes , family , house , politics

After a long deliberation, we decided to cancel Thanksgiving for this year. It's just too much work. The dining room is unmanageably cluttered and we're just too tired. Jen made a point of making us feel a little on the guilty side of the matter.

We ended up taking an invitation for supper at aunt Jan and uncle Ed's house. Our contribution was Marieke's wonderful sweet potato oranges and some cranberry sauce. Mom brought bread and some wine. It was a nice evening overall.

We were expecting to see Patrick, his family and the new addition, my little second cousin once removed, whose name continuously escapes me, but it is another Irish-ish name and his middle name is Michael. Sadly, there is some strife between he and his parents and only Aiden (whose middle name I cannot remember!) came over at the last minute. It was very nice to see everyone, not even Audrey could darken the mood.

Uncle Mike called with the news that Ling delivered their new baby. Nathan is his name and he is adorable!

At the request of aunt Jan, we left a large portion of the oranges over there so that she could take them to her mum's in Beaver, where they were planning a trip for the weekend.

Our Black Friday began at 2:30am, when the alarms went off. Our target? Samsung T401G sliding phones with full keyboard. On sale at Best Buy for $69.99 each, but they each came with $30 worth of minutes, so the actual price of the phones themselves was $39.99. We arrived at the Waterfront bright (actually not so bright since it was still dark) and early (actually, it was late for me because I hadn't yet gone to sleep), at the unholy hour of 3:17am. The line was already about 100 or so long and it started to drizzle freezing bits of rain on us while we waited for the doors to open.

The people in blue shirts came around at least twice to hand out vouchers for big ticket items such as tvs, appliances, computers, stereos, that kind of thing. We were in line waiting to buy Net10 Prepaid phones, which we learned were guaranteed to number at least ten at every store.

Jen was handing out fliers to the people in line, so when she got to where I was, we chit-chatted for a while. Then the doors opened and the chaos was toward the rear of the store and we largely avoided it. Afterward, we visited Jen for a while since she was standing in front of BB&B handing out coupons to the incoming crowds (about 3 in the twenty minutes we were standing with her!).

At last we were at home and while Marieke caught up on some z's, I transfered my contact list and played sudoku on my new phone.

Not a bad holiday weekend, all told.

Labels: black friday , family , Thanksgiving

Our collection of animals… these are only the mammals.

Labels: animals , family