Tablesaw!

I seem to have struck a chord with my tale of laundry woe. Upon entering the NPL Chat Room, I saw this exchange:

canadianpuzzler: Hi Saw. (FWIW, I have laundry too; I'll be starting it in about half an hour, I think.
QAQAQ: Oh, thanks for reminding me ... I still have to put up my laundry at some point
tablesaw: Wow. My laundry has caused an outflowing of support.
tahnan: I, on the other hand, don't think you should be airing it in public.
QAQAQ: Why not? It's not like we have Fashion Guy here to critique it
canadianpuzzler: Unfortunately, however, everybody talks about your laundry, but nobody does anything about it.

Unfortunately indeed. On Monday, during one of my conversations with Veek, I mentioned that one of the things I'd been doing since my vacation was avoiding laundry. Oh, how true that was. Yesterday, when moving around clothes in what did not, ultimately, lead to me actually cleaning my clothes. I was finally able to shake loose that most mystical of all laminated documents, my driver's license. It haunts me still that, had I done laundry earlier, I would still be able to claim that I'd never seen the inside of a Hooters.

Anyway, most of my clothes are clean now. I still didn't have the willpower to go in there for a long stretch, so I limited myself to work essentials and whites. I'll have to return over the weekend.

Yesterday, I caught up on my sleep and read The Alchemist's Door, my birthday gift from duchez. Work was, mercifully, slow. I'm going to go read for a while, and when I wake up, I think I may actually have enough perspective to describe my vacation.

Good night.

P.S. veek, you really need to get the DVD drive working.

Buying supplies for my party tonight, I decided I'd use one of the quick vegetable mixes to create a chip and veggie dip. Looking at the directions, I saw that I needed some sour cream (obvious), some dried basil, some parmesan (which I had at home), some walnuts and two cloves of garlic. In the spices aisle, I picked up some basil, and I also saw a small container of minced garlic cloves. "How easy it would be," I thought as I looked at the little jar, "to simply use this preprepaed garlic for my dip."

Then, it was as though I could see veek standing beside me, saying nothing, but clearly telegraphing with her face and eyes: "I understand that you don't have much time and that you're going to use a dehydrated dip mix instead of using all fresh ingredients, but are you really, actually considering using this garlic that's been sitting on a shelf for weeks when there's some real garlic just across the room in the produce section that you can mince yourself?"

I put the jar back.

I'm a holistic shopper. I wander around likely stores with no clear ideas sifting the many, many products in front of me until I find the right gift. Ofttimes, I find the gift but do not realize, and am drawn to it repeatedly until I realize that it is, truly, the right gift.

My perfect-gift radar went on overload today when, after walking several blocks for no apparent reason, I stopped at a store on Ventura called Homemade. This is a goodly-sized store filled with many oddities, many of which have been manufactured by local or otherwise independent artists who have leased or been offered space in the store. Lots and lots of very different things to look at and consider + lots and lots of very different people for whom to buy gifts == Tablesaw slowly meandering through the store with a pensive look picking up items and trying to see how the feel in terms of different people. It bothered me, as well, since I knew that the perfect gift for someone (veek, actually) was somewhere in the vicinity, but it took me a very long time to find it. I even found a few false alarms, some of which I kept, some of which I didn't. After the delay of searching, finally holding it gave me a sensation of physical relaxation. Ultimately, quite a while after entering (and beyond my planned bedtime, I might add) I walked out with the perfect (or near perfect, at least) gifts for veek, duchez, cruciverbalist, spacebanana and Mom, as well as one gift that I may use in a pinch, part-presents for some other people, extra Christmas cards^*, ideas for possible gifts for others and a set of amusing coasters.

Of course, then I had to walk home with all of it. And by that time, the clothes that had kept me warm in the still chill pre-9 a.m. air were rather overmuch under the high noontime sun.

Shower. Bed. In that order.

^* By the way, if you want a Christmas card and I don't have your address, email it to me and I'll post it to you.

On the patio of my landlords' house is a boxed game of, IIRC, Charades for Kids, tied with a meager bow.

Now, I'm confused. It's very possible that one or more stalkers, knowing my fondness for games of all sorts, dropped this by. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I've made it clear to those stalkers that it's best to actually leave things near my house, not my landlords'. And there's no one home in the big house to ask about it. What to do.

Anyway, I'm going to see Solaris tonight. No, not the one with George Clooney, the original three-hour Russian movie. What could be better than that? Why, going to see it with a briefly re-Angelenocized veek, of course!

For now, though, I need to use my mostly patched car (I've got a light on again, but I think I'm going to hold off till the early weekend) to finally get some laundry done so that I don't have to go to the Nuart in a barrel and sandals.

Update: The game was for my aunt, for play at Thanksgiving.

veek likes to see the leaves fall, but for me, nostalgia comes easily on a Sunday afternoon, any time of the year. Of course, nowadays, I don't get many Sunday afternoons, so you can bet I'm enjoying this one.

It's an odd melange of emotion. There's an afterglow of contentment for a fantastic and invigorating party combined with the thrill of performance that came with presenting Museum Piece. But there's also a sense of loss, an acute awareness that I'm missing someone to share this day with. Which fuels nostalgia, joyous and painful, that I hadn't been able to experience in such an unadulterated form in a while.

I put on music I haven't listened to in years, sometimes, because I haven't been in the mood to hear them, this mood. It's the reason I keep so many CDs, I know that, eventually, my emotions will swing around to a place when I'll want to hear that particular music. Jobim, Dudley, Lara played loud, sing along, with the windows and doors open letting the soft, seductive breeze slips silently through the canyon into my house while I wash the dishes and put away the chairs in my warm comforting pajamas. I remember family, friends, exes and time alone, desperate and exultant all throughout my life.

Mmmm...

Sorry, loves, but I'm going back to it. Anything more will have to wait until night fall, when the television is turned on, pulling me back to the present fiction broadcast to the nation, and when the chill and darkness of night force me back inside.

Till then, here's proof of my good mood, in the form of an unshowered, unshaven, uncharacteristically unself-conscious MellowSaw.

This journal temporarily closed for mental processing.

Notes:
veek, wjukknibs: Gotta talk.

cruciverbalist: If you were at Canter's last night taking pictures of yourself, I saw you there.

Everyone else: Hang on tight.

It's been two weeks since I switched my journal to friends-only. Two weeks where the first thing on my journal page is a request to contact me. Two weeks that someone hasn't.

When I get home, I'm going to retroactively de-friends-only-ize my journal, with a longer explanation. Till then, some shorter notes.

The deadline for the August Enigma is soon. In fact, tomorrow, so I need to buckle down and get some stuff in. I already completed one, a collaboration with tahnan. I've got one I need to revise and two I need to finish. So, the cavalcade of clerihew is a bit postponed. But in keeping with my NPL bent:

davidglasser's
One of the harassers
Asking me to mete
Out hints for a flat complete.

saxikath
Makes up math
Problems about cattle traders
For second-graders.

The Fourth of July with wjukknibs and company was a lot of fun. It makes me wish I were going to Vegas with lots of people I'd like to spend more time with. Actually, no. It makes me wish that all of those people had decided to go somewhere more interesting.

Speaking of going places interesting, I need to start planning for travel again. My cousin is getting married this fall in Portland, which makes me wonder if I should also try to swing up to Seattle. Then again, veek might send me psychic bombs of death vibes if I don't visit Boston/Providence. And wjukknibs is going to be going to Vegas again. (At least, I assume he is. He always seems to be.) Choices, choices, choices.

It was tough sleeping yesterday. I had to take a very active role in my dreams. I was aware, on a very basic level, that the only reason I was asleep was because I had a light mask on my face and was dreaming. If the dream ended, I knew I would immediately return to consciousness and be unable to get back to sleep. So I had to constantly think of new and interesting places to take my dream, to be sure that I got enough sleep.

MonNYTX: 6:30. Made some mistakes, and also nearly dropped my lunch on the floor. MonLATX: 5. TueNYTX: 4:30. TueLATX: 6:15. Who the hell is 24A? WedNYTX: 6.Under the circumstances, the clue for 52D is fantastic. WedLATX: 8:15. 54D? ThuNYTX: 20. Bleah. ThuLATX: 6:30. FriNYTX: 11:30. FriLATX 7.

As of now, I have fifty people lifted on my livejournal friends list. I promised myself a while ago that I wouldn't ever have more than that, so it's time to take stock. Everyone on my friends list is interesting to me in some way, so I thought others might be interested to know what I find so interesting. (Attention meme propagaters: consider this a challenge.)

( A rundown of Tablesaw's LJ friends. )

I've worked three days so far this week, and I've gone out three mornings so far this week. It's eerie. Can one become sociable this quickly?

On Wednesday, it was the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in the Valley; on Thursday, it was the Equator in Pasadena; and today, it was a special promotion held by a local radio show. A bar opened at 7:30 a.m.? Is there any way I can justify not taking the opportunity? It's not like this happens all the time. Amazingly enough, good times and good conversations were had at all three locations. This may be habit-forming.

On the way back home, on the freeway, I heard about an apartment fire. This was annoying, since it was very close to the freeway and thus caused much unnecessary slowing as drivers stopped to say, "Oooh, smoke." But as I drove past, I realized, "Whoa, that's really close to where veek's family lives. In fact, that looks like almost exactly the place."

I rushed home as fast as I could. I turned on the local news looking for the inevitable local helicopter coverage. Sure enough, when I got my bearings, it appeared that the fire was across the street from veek's mother's apartment. By this time, my computer was booted, and the DSL was connected. Is veek online? Nope. storme is, and I ask if she's seen veek. She hasn't, not surprising seen she's still flying into the UK. At her urging, though, I look for the cell phone number veek gave when she was visiting LA, her mother's cell phone number. And I call.

After a few moments of explaining who I was and why I was calling her cell phone, veek's mother assured me that she was fine and had luckily been at home to take care of veek's grandmother as well. The fire was, by then, mostly contained, and it was clear that it would not spread further, even though she still had to wait in the street until the firemen gave the all clear.

So yes, I worry too much, but it's all good when everyone turns out to be safe. Now it's late, and I have to get to bed.