I'm adding this to Sunday's post

Today in the Visual Thesaurus Magazine:

I Want my MTV (Mood, Tense, Voice)!
Gen-Xers like me remember MTV as the 24-hour-a-day source of music videos in the 1980s, when it stood for "Music Television." Many people today would be surprised to learn that MTV ever had anything to do with music. These days, MTV is better known as the source of reality shows like "The Jersey Shore." And now, here's something else that has nothing to do with music that you can think of when you think MTV: Conjugating verbs! When you think MTV, think "mood, tense, and voice."

Click here to read the whole article...

---

Nice that someone else explained my fridge-magnet's problem!

Dated humor

When humor gets more questions than laughs, it's time to take it off the refrigerator, I guess!



To the right of the towels. It's not there anymore. It will be on a filing cabinet in the office...



It used to be pretty funny, but MTV isn't what it used to be.

---

ALERT!

---

Two days after I posted the photos and notes above, this came in the e-mail (Tuesday, August 31):

Today in the Visual Thesaurus Magazine:

I Want my MTV (Mood, Tense, Voice)!
Gen-Xers like me remember MTV as the 24-hour-a-day source of music videos in the 1980s, when it stood for "Music Television." Many people today would be surprised to learn that MTV ever had anything to do with music. These days, MTV is better known as the source of reality shows like "The Jersey Shore." And now, here's something else that has nothing to do with music that you can think of when you think MTV: Conjugating verbs! When you think MTV, think "mood, tense, and voice."

Click here to read the whole article...

New desk, new duck

Keith is creating a desktop to conjoin my old college desk, which I've used ever since as desk, or sewing, or desk, or sewing... and a $6 filing cabinet, wooden, sold cheap because it had been outside for a year or more and black widow spiders had lived up under it. Yucko! I have a vacuum and strong spider-courage. The moms were all gone, but the webs and eggs were still up in there. No more!!


And while I'm sitting here using the unfinished table because it rained, and some glue is drying, and it won't be finished for a day or two, keith brought in the mail. Nice long letter from my longtime friend Kate Holford (Marie Heuser) with news about her life & Rob's, and an early Christmas gift. I hung it up where I can admire it for a while!




It's a Holly-wreathed duck. Very sweet.

Life moves quickly and isn't fair

I was at the dentist, a place I don't like to be. I had taken the teeny iPod that a friend of my kids' had given me because it was old and he wasn't using it. Old. And so I was bored in the dentist's office and didn't want to start a magazine article, so I examined the iPod. Not much writing on that, and it didn't take long to read it.


It shows better if you can tilt it in person, than it shows in a scan. It says Geneva, March 2007. Okay. For electronics I guess three years and some can be obsolete.

Having read the whole iPod, I looked at the art on the walls. Art nouveau toothpaste ads, and one nicely-framed diploma. I don't read Latin, so pretty much it was blah blah blah (or in Latin, blabus blabus blabus), but I do read Roman numerals fluently. 2008.

My dentist graduated from Harvard in 2008. The 372nd graduating class, I think it was saying (probably not of the dental school). A year after my iPod was proudly date-stamped, with its month of manufacture.

I was grateful to have music, a charge card to pay for the dentist visit, and a car to drive home in.




So today Marty and I drove around. For mysterious reasons never to be explained, we didn't get the mail saying the jeep registration needed to be renewed by mail. My name is on it, Keith's isn't. Marty's is but he's broke this month. Marty and I went to the emissions-check station. Passed all but gas cap. $10 to retest there; free re-test blah-de-blah Broadway NE. Old Jeep place closed on them without notice; now Mazda, have some old Jeep parts still, not that one. So far we're still not five miles from the house. Go to Coors Road. Far. Friday afternoon congestion. Parts store slightly moved, quarter mile up the strip of auto sales places. One Wrangler gas cap in stock; got it.

Broadway emissions headquarters closed at 4:30 and not open until Monday. (It's 4:47.)

Back far across town to our house, $10 to approve new gas cap and get forms. Motor vehicles might be open to 5:30 or 6:00?? NO. Closed at 4:00. Not open until Monday.

Stayed fairly happy. Marty's girlfriend has a car; he can use my van; he can get it finished up Monday.

We are unaccustomed to these things. Keith mails the fees for registrations right after they arrive. Also unaccustomed to a recessions closing parts stores that way. Glad I enjoyed being with Marty, and glad we live in town and not far from those places, offices, checkpoints.

Fountain and unrelated cake

In Sacramento, to get from the room Kirby and I were in to the conference area, we passed this place every time. It was suddenly beautiful and musical, and then it turned to repeated stretches of hotel rooms opening toward parking lot with Costco past a fence. But each time, this:

Today I made a chocolate cake, from scratch, three layers. And I made a frosting recipe I hadn't made before, that involved cooking the cocoa powder and butter "until it thickens." I wasn't too sure about how thick was thick, but it worked. Tomorrow, Holly will take some of it with her to work, at Clare's house, because that's where the duck eggs came from that inspired the cake-making.

Also, as a bonus, candid photos of my kitchen today. Obverse and reverse of the scene of the cake.

Sunday night, HSC, tired

"Tired" is too light a term.

The same gamer group as last night is here again, playing. I'm mostly packed. My suitcase is "only" 42 lbs; yay!

This morning in the young-adults panel Anselm, the guy on the far end, said: "Weird kids make interesting adults."



Kirby, Rose, Hannah and Aselm

Sacramento/HSC

Yesterday morning early, I saw this all set up and not used yet.


I saw it later with slippery, happy little kids all over the place, too. I had many happy memories of Kirby's pollywog party, when he was little, and other happy backyard waterplay times.

I think he was four. Maybe five. I remember the verse on the invitation:

Kirby's birthday's in July
Not many days are hotter
And so like little pollywogs
We'll be playing in the water

But those were twenty-year-old mom-memories; Kirby's grown.