Auf Wiedersehen.

Don't stumble on the way out, deary.

Hi, I love you.

Okay, hi. Hi there. How're ya? Ya good?

See, I know it's been a very long time. And I actually have a lot to say to you, my sweet Interwebs, but things have been so so so so so busy lately, that I haven't been able to sit and organize any thoughts (let alone the photos, oy the photos!) to send your direction. I will try, I will. Very soon.

When? After I'm done packing for our move to the giant house this weekend, and have finished the 2500 word article I have to write for one class, and written and practiced the 10 minute story I will be presenting orally (snicker) for another class, and have trained the new girl at the Wellness center, and read three loooooong books for school, and workshopped 7 articles for the first class and read some Flannery O'Connor for the second, and previewed tons of good/bad/heinous submissions for the Portland literary magazine I've committed my eyeballs and exceptional discernment (ha) services to each week, and organized the next meeting for my writing group (that I've COMPLETELY dropped the ball on, you guys, I'm sorry - I'll make it up to you with fancy drinks and an extra large deck on which to smoke your wicked writerly cigarettes), and cleaned my old small pretty apartment, and cleaned my new giant weird house, and phone banked at least once more and hosted my awesome Obamania brother for a post-election decompression, and hopefully having thrown the celebration of the century after the Election in a few weeks. THEN I will sit and put it all down here for posterity. For myself. Because I'm old and I have started to forget things. And for the five of you who might be curious as to what's been happening all up in these here Northwest parts.

So I will tell you about the new house, and my Facebook addiction, and Josh's birthday, and the weird coincidences that have been happening lately, and the dream I had about Jojo giving birth to twins (actually a very fun dream, all things and strange subject matter considered), and perhaps I will have more interesting stories to tell you. For the moment, all my words have been reserved for the classes I impetuously signed up for a few weeks ago.

In the meantime, lacking anything of substance, please watch the following, compliments of Z The Wonder Volunteer, who keeps me well liquored in the lubricating grease of campaign and peripheral greatness:



I know you won't judge me when I confess to thinking these two too skinny Ruskies are hot. Especially not after you hear the "I love you" at the end. I love Al Gore, or whoever invented the internet. I don't know how I lived a life before it came to be.

The Great Schlep.

The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.

Makes me yearn for some retired grandparents in FLA. Oh well. I'll have to be content with the wary California voting pair that I do have. I don't think they really want to vote or Obama, but they will. So you don't have to worry about Cali. Phew!

What Kind Of Special Bus Rider Are You? Vote!

Thanks to Bex for this one. I am essentially too lazy to email five friends, so instead I'll post here, for my five friends to see for themselves.

Of course my five friends are truly the chorus to which I am preaching as I know y'all are already registered and ready to go, chomping at the bit to cast your ballot. Let's hope it counts.

Best Of Intentions.

I had every intention of posting a photo of a mid-summer Farmers Market haul, a sort of "this is what $20 bux'll get ya in Stumptown" sort of thing, prompted by a convo I had with KDog last week in Ventura... But alas, in spite of the blogg-o-guilting, I just can't find the photos.

I know they are around here somewhere, but as I'm drowning in technology and everything looks and sounds the same to me half the time ("Oh this is the 1Gig micro sd card in an adapter, huh, have you seen the 80meg sd card anywhere, cause it's got my summer photos on it") and Joosh has no discernable system of organizing all the little bits, I'm totally lost. I'm nearly certain I backed up all the photos before he left on his roadtrip (dispatches from which I am clearly extremely late in updating, heavysighwhatever). However, I can't find the USB stick onto which I think they were copied, nor can I remember on which of the three laptops (in various states of disrepair, lest you get the wrong idea) we have floating around right now did I make extra-super-duper-secure-thirdly-backed-up back ups? So. Um. Moving on until tomorrow when I can bug my tech guy to please please pretty please find my photos please and thanks!

So instead, I want to tell you about two exciting things.

1) My brother Z is in day one of a five-week stint as a sort of local organizingCaptain for the Obama campaign, organizing throngs of out-of-state and local volunteers in Nevada. He's staying in some lady's Vegas house, along with his old roommate and basically working 7 days a week supporting teams of canvassers, phone bank callers, etc. He's staying in said lady's guest house, actually, with a pool, jacuzzi, tennis courts, the whole shebang... but likely he'll not have time to enjoy these much, it would seem from his schedule so far. It sounds like they have a shit-ton of work to do, all day, every day. I saw him online at midnight, and he was still at the headquarters after a long day. Mmmm, Politics. It's going to be intense. But all this work is so important, and really seems like it stands to make a difference. As he put it on the MyFace: Gonna turn it blue for Obama! This is so exciting.

2) Which brings me to: Opportunities to make a difference without giving up 5 weeks of your life...

I'm really impressed with the Obama campaign for all of its innovative strategies toward volunteers, outreach, connecting with the masses of voters who are out there, who may not be engaged, who may not have access to accurate representations of the campaigns, folks who may get all of their information from the absurd sound bites into which much of the issues and policy nuances have been reduced. The simple act of phone banking, including the request to bring your own cell phone (free weekend minutes!), and the fact that you can sign up to make calls from home in your own time (whaaaa?) is amazing.

Check the website: there is probably a phone banking timeslot open in your area this weekend.

Another goodie that I just found out about is detailed here: http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/organizing/gpl9km

It's essentially filling out postcards with a few words about why you support Obama, putting .27 cent stamps on them, and mailing them en masse (bulk envelope) to campaign headquarters in swing states, where volunteers will address and mail them locally to undecided voters (I think). Maybe this is totally simple, but I think it's totally brilliant. The fact that we can all spend 15 minutes and $5 bux, in our own time and do something positive for the campaign is terrific.

Here in Portland there is a gal organizing a group Postcard-ing event at a local coffee shop. As the cards should be state or locally focused (the personal touch?), she is going to have some sort of handmade card printing situation - Gocco? - plus some cards already dry and ready to be filled out in case you're short on time. Rad. I am truly impressed.

I hope you might have a few minutes to purchase and fill out a few postcards, in this case prior to September 30, but also keep checking the MyBarackObama site for updates.

Here's why:

If you care to know about some of the crap going on behind the scenes, or just in case you are at work or school or the kids are napping and you're reading this with some time on your hands, I will leave you with two articles that totally made my blood run cold. One of which I am especially trying to take with appropriate grains of salt, but both of which leave me terrified all the same. There is a significant internal battle being waged in me this minute and pretty much all the time, between the forces of good hopeful optimism (all my Peace Studies/all you need is love/namaste understanding of the universe) and the rotten fungal spores of FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) that multiply like infectious bacteria in my heart.

As with so many things that have happened in the last 8 years, I keep thinking: this can't possibly be. How is it that we find ourselves here? On every level - civil rights, privacy, torture (TORTURE!!!), environment (acceptable amounts of toxics in our food and in our bodies and melting icecaps, rising waters, shifting weather, dead oceans, lone-star-state sized plastic-filled gyres in the Pacific... the tips of the icebergs), healthcare, economy, energy, integrity of the election system, foreign policy, the war, veteran treatment, infrastructure, secrecy, blatant horrible croneyism, disaster capitalism, the bankrupting of the future... This. Cannot. Be.

So let's try to make sure that it will no longer be... that would be great. And I hope it's not too late. Because according to these two, we're in even bigger trouble than you might think:

Per RFK, Jr. ("Is your vote safe?") we are sliding down the slope here, Sisyphuses, all of us. And we all responsible for making sure our fundamental system of demanding change - the act of voting - is intact. We've already been sold electronic voting machines, which are a total effing unverifiable crock bought sold and managed by Republican interests, and now hundreds of thousands of mostly democratic voters are being scrubbed from the registration rolls. WTF, America?

Per Naomi Wolf (my grain of salt taker-with-er), Sarah Palin (don't EVEN get me started on this lady, jesus christ) is the Trojan Horse of the Police State Apocolypse. It's a tad bit conspiracy theoryish, but on the other hand, so many things that I would have chalked up to tin-foil hat-wearing kooks have turned out to be horrifyingly true so maybe she's a Cassandra and not a harpy.

Oh, and also (this is totally why I shouldn't blog late at night - I cannot be trusted to maintain coherence or frame of reference or keep it under a million words of rambledom), I suggest listening to some Naomi Klein interviews about all of the Wall Street bail out shenanigans going on right now.

So I had the best of intentions for a nice easy short and sweet entry of fruit and veg from our kick ass local market, and instead you get this half-hopeful & yay-we-can-do-it/half-dismal we're-in-for-more-puke-worthy-rides-on-the-shit-coaster post and all I can say is something about the road to hell being paved with all my bests and leave you to go about your business.

Happy Friday (?).

Double check your registration status. Then go buy some postcards, write a few nice things on 'em and mail them to Ohio. Do it for the children.

Fun With Analytics.

Did I mention that I have been writing 1000 words a day for the last month or so? I have. With moderate success (if by moderate you understand that the middle ground between super great and unbelievably horrible is just that).

Actually, I have been tremendously successful at the actual writing of 1000 or more words every day. I've only missed one night since I committed to the daily activity. Ass in chair, blah blah blah. This does not mean that I have been writing 1000 GOOD words or strings of words each day. But whatever, it's a start.

The very first day of writing these grand or so words, I wrote something to read at my writing group, about the process of committing to the page and all the shit that floats up for writers sitting down to write. Well, all the stuff that floats up for ME sitting down to write, anyway. Not surprisingly (because apparently we writers are nothing if not unoriginal in all the shit that floats up around the process, the act, the desire, the actuating, the ass-sitting, etc etc), it was some pretty familiar stuff for my fellow wordsmitheons: I got plenty of positive feedback, and a lot of head-nodding and amens around the table.

Afterward, a gal that I particularly like (the instigator of the nerdy ladies board game fun) grabbed my paper and a red pen and bracketed six or seven sentences or segments that she felt particularly stood out. Right on. When I got home and did the casual math, I was running about 10% good, stand out stuff, to the remaining 90% comme ci comme ca stuff. Honestly, I'm fine with that. And if 10,000 monkeys pounding on 10,000 keyboards will come up with Hamlet in 10,000 years (um, isn't that how that goes?) then surely one girl, at one keyboard, in 10,000 nights can come up with something usable in 10% of all that scattertyped text, right?

So here's the problem: Procastination. It's insane to me how very much I resist the task at hand. I can sit in this fercockt (probably not the correct yiddish spelling of this, my favorite Grandpa word) chair all night long, and read all y'alls blogs like 18 times over, ignoring my real-life to-do-lists and the blank page in front of me, read read read and catch up on CNN and Buzzflash, and write a few words, and head over to Facebook for some Scramble and some spying on my friends and family, and then tap out a few more words, and then go scare the crap out of myself with stuff about the environment and warming and the war and the conspiracies (oy fucking vey, the conspiracies of those that are conspiring and not yet geting caught, holy hell) and the sea of plastic in the Pacific and the damage done and doing and gonna do, and then go write a few more bits (in a decidedly lower tone) and then back all y'alls blogs, and then internet-stalk people like Julia Kernochan from Junior High (she's a Yale-educated lawyer on Senator Schumer's team, if you must know) and back to Buzzflash and on and on and on. (I can imagine one or more of you sitting there with your wee one in your lap as you try to read my overly long post here, in the few spare moments you have to catchup on web bizness, thinking that clearly I need a child in order to stop having infinite time to not focus on the thing that I sat down to accomplish, right? Right. Sorry.)

My ultimate point here, however, is not about my fierce and ridiculous need and ability to procrastinate, but rather to talk about my latest good time in the avoidance realm. Bex treated me to a lovely procrasty show of her own (oh Veronica, oh Logan, how I miss you so) and then I thought about how much I feel that her blog is written just for me (by the way, writers are apparently giant narcissists, so look out) and then I started thinking about what others might think in stopping by her site and then I thought "hey I wish there was a way to find out who was visiting a site, that would be funny" and then I immediately recovered my brain and remembered the miracle thing known as Google Analytics.

I signed up with the old Analytics tool back when I created this little vanity project. And I couldn't figure out if I'd inserted the tracking code correctly (it did not seem as though I had), got super annoyed and then gave up on the effort (shocking, I know). I've not logged in since that day. But hey man, what a perfect procrastination tool!

And indeed it was a sweet little surprise treasure trove of goodness. So much information! More than you could ever need/want/take in/make use of in a million years. But lots of helpful bits and bytes and bites. Here, my friends, is the tastiest morsel:

The top ten (er, eleven) searched keywords/phrases that have led people to This (Amberican) Life this week-

11) anna beth chao.
10) Important stuff to know in life.
9) I'm going to ride my bicycles and roller skates.
8) 3 month old drool.
7) momby porn. (that is not a typo. momBy porn. someone should really spellcheck their blog, am I right?)
6) Sun chips flying pig. (nice)
5) scurvy more tests and diagnosis. (wow, sorry dude, that sucks)
4) Chastity-belt. (hahahahahahaha)
3) sucktastic. (um, ha).
2) 1950's aprons.
1) momboob. *

God I loves me some interwebs, I really do.

And guess what? 947 words, suckers, yeah!

But now I need to wrap it up and go watch last week's BSG cause apparently the 5th Cylon is revealed and it's bugging me that I've gone this long without seeing it but Josh grabbed a crap copy and then he grabbed a super nice, super huge copy that wouldn't play on the computer we've got hooked up to the projector (have you heard the expression "the cobbler's wife wears no shoes?") and then the final copy was just right, but Sunday I babysat* and Monday I procrastinated too long into the evening to allow for viewing and now tonight I'm coming dangerously close to same. So au revoir, mon amies. I hope you enjoyed this last segment of rambling smack wherein I tried to up my word count to make up for all the numericals above, which really shouldn't count toward the sum word total, don't you agree?

1097 give or take.

It counts.

*As it's related to the otherwise baffling search term "momboob" and the aforementioned babysitting, this might be a convenient time to tell you about a mortifying thing that happened while babysitting the wee Watsons on Sunday. Except I just wrote it and it's a million miles long, so I'll make it a separate post, backdated, and thus appearing below. Enjoy.

Can't Resist.

I'm supposed to pass this on to 10 people. But y'all hate fwd:fwd:fwds, right? So here you go.



Please peruse at your leisure. Then talk to your Republican and/or Conservative Democrat friends and neighbors who might not be paying close attention - the mainstream media isn't! - and let them know that McCain has lost most, if not all, of his credibility. (And no, I'm not saying that based just on this cleverly edited video. I have at least 20 reasons off the top of my head, but don't really feel that this "lighthearted romp of a blog" is an appropriate venue. I'd be glad to email you a diatribe or two worth of Why For's, however, so that you too can effectively win an argument against a Head-in-the-Sand-er any ole time).

Ouch, dude.

Yeah, what he said.

(This seems to be viral, not actually sponsored by the Chosen One as indicated, fyi.)