The All-New Bunrab

My niece Hanna came to visit with me for a few days last week, and volunteered to help me go through stuff. We didn't get mountains done, but we did get a couple of very important molehills cleared. First, we cleared off the folding table in the sewing room, so that the guest bed could actually be opened. And then we listed the folding table on Freecycle and found a new home for it almost immediately. (This still leaves me with two folding tables left, BTW, which are folded and in closets rather than unfolded and collecting junk.) Then, we cleared off the dining table, so I can now have people over for tea or even a meal. A few people, anyway - it's still a tiny table, and the dining room is tinier than it should be because of the huge sideboard which I hadn't meant to have follow me here from the house. And then, we started in on a few of the boxes in the box room (the third bedroom, the one which is also home to Fern and the piggles). First, we cleared out a plastic rolling cart - and that's currently waiting for its Freecycle taker to pick it up. Then, I started in on a big box which turned out to be some of my files from the 70s and early 80s - tax returns, check registers, etc - and a whole bunch of cards - birthday and christmas, mainly, also from the 70s and early 80s. Most of that stuff went into the "shred" pile; a shoebox' worth of greeting cards still to be sorted through for personal messages is still in the room. Make a note of that shred pile.

Then, also from the storage unit, a two-drawer file cabinet, full of all of Steve's and my files from the 80s and 90s - every pay stub Steve had ever received from the City of Austin, all our tax returns, all our electric and gas and water bills from Austin, homeowners insurance documents from our houses in Austin...so again, most of that could go in the "shred" pile immediately. Altogether, we filled three bankers boxes of stuff to shred, and one box of stuff I want to scan before shredding, so that I have some small record of it.

And then we took the three boxes of papers over to Sir Speedy in Linthicum and had them run it through their big shredder in three minutes flat, instead of having it sit around the house waiting for me to run it through 3 sheets at a time in my tiny, very noisy, shredder, which would have taken several days of several hours apiece. It was worth every penny to have it disappear that fast, and every penny was still under $20. So it's not still sitting here, silently in the way, reminding me of unfinished stuff. And now I know where I can take the next load of similar stuff, instead of trying to force myself to shred a boxful myself and hating the waste of time. Definitely a victory. Oh, and the file cabinet went on Freecycle, had an immediate taker, and is now out of my way.

And we found three more boxes of paperback science fiction, out of which I kept about 30 books and about 200 went to Goodwill. Stuff that Steve liked that I didn't, incomplete series, nothing valuable or collectible or important. Just straight to Goodwill, along with the contents of an entire box which was full of unopened kits for cross-stitch christmas ornaments. Some of those were expensive kits in their day. But if I haven't gotten to even opening them in 25 or 28 years, I'm not going to - and it's not like I don't see three more similar boxes we didn't get to.

And then Hanna and I met up with Cindy to go to an art gallery opening and a fancy dinner, and on Sunday Hanna came with me to a concert the Montgomery Village band was playing at a retirement community, and then I put her back on a train to Pennsylvania. The whole process of commuter rail and Amtrak is so easy up here, and since Hanna qualifies for disability discounts, it's cheap, too, so I believe we will repeat this a few more times! Meanwhile, she starts back up in her freshman year at Temple next week, so she just has this week to get through at home with her noisy siblings. It is one of the features of being from a large family, that college dorms are downright peaceful and uncrowded by comparison! Fewer people to share a bathroom with! She's enjoying that feature as much as I did my freshman year.

This week, so far, I've done nothing except crochet. I need to take the Christmas tree down, don't I?

Here's that meme again - first couple lines from the first post of each month:

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January One of the problems with buying lots of books, in lots of unplanned trips to both new and used book stores, is that every once in a while one goes to look at the TBR (To Be Read) shelf, and there's something on there that neither of us recognizes, neither of us remembers buying, and neither of us can think of why we would buy it.
February Lately, it's been murder mysteries for a while: Curiosity Killed the Cat-Sitter by Blaize Clement (reviewed at Amazon.com here; as ever, please clickie the helpful button if you like the review; I am vain and get an entirely disproportionate thrill out of being in the Top 1000 reviewers.) This turned out to be less silly, and better plotted, than I was afraid of from the title.
March Science News from 20 January: hamsters and other pet rodents are likely spreaders of salmonella. Wash your hands after you snorgle your hamsters.
April First, the promised-last-week Amazon.com review of Harry Turtledove's Beyond the Gap. Next, also reviewed on Amazon.com, although it's a crafts book, there is text in it, which I read, and even learned a few new finishing techniques for small cross-stitch pieces, is Mini Cushions in Cross Stitch: 30 Original Designs to Make by Sheena Rogers.
May We're home. Lessee. The Austin Symphonic Band concert on Saturday night was great, the party was fun. All sorts of people who played with the band at one time or another were invited, so there were people there who hadn't played with the band in 20 years.
June Not as much recent reading and needlework as one might think, because given the lack of rain, and the overall nice weather, I have been out on the bike more. However, today was a car day because we needed to hit up Trader Joe's - our regular monthly-pay-day purchase of assorted lower-sodium snacks and frozen things.
July C & V are here! They got here way earlier than we expected - we got home from lunch, I unlocked the door, and these voices go "Surprise!" Took me a few seconds to catch my breath there. C says "we thought you'd notice the car out front" and I point out that the neighbors *always* park in front of our house, so we're used to ignoring cars there. Probably neighbors are peeved this evening that they have to park in front of their own house. Anyway, tomorrow we're going to the Aquarium. And Camden Yards, I am given to understand
August But I have not caught up on my flist yet - that may take another day. The visit to my friend S in New York was reasonably successful - we can now see parts of the surface of her dining table, sit on the sofa, and see large chunks of the living room floor.
September So, Cindy got here yesterday evening, with her cats, and they are settled into our basement. She's got 4 job interviews already set up for the next couple of weeks, so I'm confident that she'll find a job and her own apartment quickly. Which is good, because there's already stuff turning up not-where-I-left-it, which would be likely to drive me to outright anger after too long.
October Our DSL connection has been down since Thursday a.m. And we were on the road all day friday (I have conceived a deep and lasting hatred for the Hutchinson River and Merritt Parkways in CT; it should NOT take 9.5 hours to get from Baltimore to Worcester!)
November The National Aquarium had a members-only evening this evening, so we went. Extra guides/docents/educators around, prize drawings, whatnot. We went up and visited my favorite Potamotrygons, of course, and watched the puffins for a bit. The Pacific giant octopus was asleep in a corner, as usual.
December So squirrel_magnet got the modem to boot up again and we have, at least for a little while, an outside collection. Who knows how long it will last?

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So, it looks like this year was reading, houseguests, and DSL problems. All in all, that's actually pretty accurate!

Let's see. Cindy has a job; she starts next Monday. She's found an apartment but doesn't move in till October 13, so she's in our basement for three more weeks. So far we have all managed to avoid killing each other, although there have been a few tense moments over who put what on which refrigerator shelf, who used the "wrong" kind of garbage bags, and other similar details of daily living. Anyway, the job is a good one - she'll be assistant branch manager of one of the branches of the Baltimore County Public Library, which is pretty ideal in terms of where she'll be and what she wanted and what kind of salary it pays. Yay for Cindy!

So, Cindy wanted to go to the beach, now that she's living on the east coast. Everyone recommended Ocean City, but that's 3 hours away and a chore to get to and all. So she did a bit of Googling and found Sandy Point State Park, about 45 minutes from here, just underneath the Annapolis end of the Bay Bridge, and we went down there this afternoon and sat around in the breeze and watched seagulls and read books and dozed. Not completely empty of other people, but almost. A few crows stealing things from the seagulls; very funny to watch these huge black land birds swooping in. (Possibly ravens, given the size; I honestly can't tell a crow from a raven just by looking.)

Tomorrow: party with some of the Biker Skum. Next weekend: Fall festival at PIGS sanctuary in West Virginia. Weekend after that: Jewish wedding. Weekend after that: knitting convention and a concert to play. Whee!

Recent reading:
Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff. A disappointment, really. The ending was too many twists that despite being surprise twists were predictable. Nowhere near Set This House In Order in subtlety, nowhere near Sewer, Gas & Electric in humor.
The New Space Opera - an anthology. The update of Scheherezade by Robert Silverberg was nice, if predictable - well done, cute. Kage Baker's offering was set on Mars, same setting as the limited-edition novella "The Empress of Mars" was, an offshoot of her Company world. Generally, I liked the stuff by authors I already liked, and didn't like the stuff by authors I didn't already like.
A couple other SF anthologies - SFWA's new collection of recently translated stuff from Europe, some of the stories almost 20 years old. A few I liked, most I didn't - too literary, or too stylized, or something.
Paloma, latest in Kristin Kathryn Rusch's Retrieval Artist series. Not the best, but still a very good SF murder mystery. Lots of references to events of the previous books, so you wouldn't want to start the series with this one. As usual, a big chunk of the theme is the conflict between law and justice, and the conflict of different ethical systems.

After a long day Thursday going through the Baltimore Museum of Art, we did almost nothing Friday - C & V brought a couple of DVDs with them, and a game, so we played Munchkin Cthulhu, followed by a couple of games of Guillotine, then watched "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra," which we are apparently the last SF geeks on Earth to get around to seeing. It is a hoot. Munchkin Cthulhu has slightly too many rules for my taste, but the cards are awfully cute!

We got them headed west toward Pittsburgh this morning, jug of iced tea and bag of leftover chicken in hand, so that they have lunch taken care of.

It's really good to have friends visit, and C & V are extremely good houseguests - but it's also good to be able to go back to our normal slobby ways, leaving half-opened mail on all the furniture, and walking around in the morning sans PJs or bathrobe.

Funny thing about the BMoA - it has one of Rodin's "The Thinker"s - but the one day C & V were there, that's the day that the piece was removed from its spot to be taken and weighed, because they're considering moving it to a different wing and they're not sure the new wing will structurally support that many tons of bronze. The plaque was there, and a square of less-faded tiles on the floor. Oh well, at least the Antioch mosaics are still right there; they are the best thing in the museum, to my mind.

We're hoping to convince them to come back in the spring or fall, when day trips to DC won't involve the risk of heat stroke and the presence of 400,000 other tourists. For that matter, there's still lots more to see here - we didn't even get around to a boat tour of the harbor, or a concert in the Meyerhoff - and we didn't get around to playing our stack of 40 or so other games! (V noticed the Transamerica game, and said that he doubted it was related to the movie, and I said, you're right. That would be a different game altogether.)

OK, enough babble. Gotta get back to work on the bookmark with her name in Hebrew that I'm making for my cousin's daughter's Bat Mitzvah.

The Baltimore Symphonic Band concert Tuesday night at Oak Crest went fine. The "Santa Comes to Dixieland" piece is a hoot; I really enjoy the tenor sax part! Oak Crest Village is one humongous retirement community. After rehearsal, we went straight to BWI to pick Cindy up.

Wednesday Cindy wanted to hang out at a library branch, so that's mainly what we did in the afternoon - she's applied for a couple of jobs with the Balto. County library system, and wanted to see what the system is like. The Catonsville branch was as good a place as any to hang out. Found several new books. We also did some yarn-buying at JoAnn's, what a surprise. Wednesday night, Montgomery Village rehearsal (concert for that is this coming Sunday.)

Thursday, squirrel_magnet got hit with the worst of this cold we're passing around, so Cindy and I went to the Balto. Symphony Orchestra concert without him. It was all-Baroque - Handel, Vivaldi, Telemann. Meyerhoff is all decorated for Christmas. The guest conductor was one Robert King, who wore a black shirt and black trousers - no tux, no tie, no jacket. Exuberant and cute. Did not use a podium.

squirrel_magnet slightly more human today, so we went to the Baltimore Museum of Art for a few hours, and did a bit of holiday shopping in their gift shop. Ate supper at Salsa Grill, a Peruvian restaurant on Security right near the SSA offices. Good food, but the entrees are huge - one has to either split one between two people, or automatically save half for another meal (which then makes the price per meal more in our usual price range.)

Recent reading: The Sudbury School Murders (Ashley Gardner), a historical mystery set in Regency England, part of a series, which I shall probably go find the rest of, since it was pretty good. Hearts and Bones (Margaret Lawrence), a historical mystery set in Revolutionary-era Maine, also part of a series, don't know whether I'll bother hunting down the rest - I haven't decided whether I liked it or not. Slightly harder going than the other one, gorier and perhaps more perverse and more psychological than things really were back then? A couple of collections of SF short stories - one of them, The Emperor of Gondwanaland by Paul DiFilippo, several of the stories are fairly funny, including the title story, and the story that goes with the cover picture, which is indeed a gadget-using, scarf-wearing, giant beaver. Re-read The Light Fantastic - it's been re-issued relatively recently; I shall have to go back and find an old copy as well; it seems to me as though it is now slightly more congruent in details with the later stories than it was 20 years ago, but that could be my imagination.

I think that's all. Tomorrow may be TubaChristmas, if the weather calms down from heavy rain and strong winds as it is this evening.

with the sound of music... We have some band friends from Austin visiting us. They are traveling north along the Atlantic coast at a leisurely pace, visiting relatives and friends and doing some leaf-peeping. So of course the evening has been a cut off of this CD from the bands that played up at ACB in Williamsport, and a cut off this other CD that the Austin Symphonic Band played at ABA, and a few minutes of a film score that's heavy on the brass that most people haven't heard, and a couple of bits from a DVD of a group, and photocopy the programs of this, and dub this CD of yours for us, and this other CD of ours for you... a musical evening, with cats.

We went to the Poe House & Museum - a very small house, indeed, and even reading every word of every sign, it didn't take us terribly long. And in the house lived Poe's grandmother, his mother-in-law/aunt, his wife/cousin, her brother, and himself. 4 tiny rooms, and then even after they built a couple more rooms on the back, still tiny. We then went over to the cemetary where Poe's final grave is (both Poe and his relatives got moved around a bunch post-mortem.) Some nice shady spots in the cemetary.

Then we went down to the Inner Harbor, ate lunch, and took the 60-minute Sightseeing Cruise on the Prince Charming. A few interesting things on that route - especially the Domino Sugar factory - huge ship being unloaded of its brown sugar, and then the factory itself - refinery, I guess, would be the correct term - which smells strongly of caramel, which wafts across the water, sometimes with a whiff of what my nose interprets as burning raisins to go with it. Even with the stiff breeze that being on a moving boat on the water brings, it was quite warm, though, and we were glad to get home and take a nice, air-conditioned nap.

Tomorrow: the Smithsonian Art Museum.