Don’t get me wrong – I have nothing whatsoever about motorcycles. I’m happy for people who enjoy riding them even though I have absolutely no interest in riding one myself. It isn’t people who ride motorcycles in general I have problems with.

The ones who are troublesome are the ones who think they own the road. Just like anyone in a car who thinks that they’re more important than everyone else on the road, the people on bikes are creating dangerous situations as I try to safely drive to work. Last week, I saw someone on a bike with no helmet or any other protective gear that I could spot. This isn’t too unusual, and I wouldn’t really make a big deal of it if he had been riding safely and respectfully of the other people on the highway. He wasn’t, though. He decided he didn’t want to deal with the traffic which had slowed to about 5 mph below the speed limit (really slow, right?). He zoomed into the emergency lane and drove down it for a good half mile, then wove in and out of the cars until I couldn’t see him anymore. I presume his behavior continued as he drove down. I saw him drive in between two cars who were driving in their own lanes. Nobody in this scenario was doing anything out of the ordinary – just this guy on a motorcycle decided he had more important places to be and used his bike to his advantage.

That’s just one example of the crap that I’ve seen driving to work. (Interestingly, it mostly happens when I’m on my way to work, between 7 and 7:40AM on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday every week – I rarely see it on my way home.) I see this all the time and as I’m mentally calling these people jerks, or worse depending on my mood that day, I have to wonder what it is that motivates them to do things like that. If I were on a vehicle such as a motorcycle, full well knowing that there are other vehicles on the road which weigh thousands of pounds and won’t be able to stop as quickly as my bike could, I don’t think I would want to be swerving in front of vehicles or going in between the lanes to get farther up in the lane.  I guess I’m also a little more safety minded, too. I’d be wearing a helmet, for sure, and at least long pants and sleeves. I mean, one more layer between me and the pavement, right?

I imagine most people with motorcycles understand the risks and know that there are options out there to keep them safe. Why, then, wouldn’t they employ these things? In a collision, the car has the advantage. It’s bigger and has a ton of safety features built in – airbags, seat belts, crumple zones, etc. I can’t imagine many situations in which a motorcycle would survive intact, and the rider is also likely to suffer some high levels of injury from such a collision. The fact is that there are a lot more cars on the road, and they are bigger, heavier, and are a direct enemy of the motorcycle when it comes to collision.

Seeing these people act so recklessly irritates me. It’s disrespectful to the people using the roads as they’re supposed to, following traffic laws and giving reasonable distance to their fellow drivers. When these people blatantly disregard the law in this manner, they’re putting themselves at risk and spitting in the face of those who do abide by the law and try (mostly) to follow speed limits and don’t do things like driving around other cars in the emergency lanes to get places sooner. I am not wishing for someone to get hurt. I want people to be safe. I just really wish that some of these people riding these motorcycles wanted the same thing.

When it came time for me to make my first pair of socks (at least the first pair that I actually envisioned finishing – I did do one half of a sock last year, but it wasn’t until later that I realized that I hated the stitch pattern on the yarn and was probably never going to finish the first sock, let alone do a second!), I followed suit. I like the idea of socks from the toe-up, particularly for Johnathan, since he wanted knee-length socks and I wasn’t positive I’d have enough yarn for that. Plus, knowing that I have second sock syndrome (a syndrome in which the knitter indefinitely puts off beginning or finishing the second sock because said knitter has tired of the pattern; my first mittens were made well over a month apart!), I wanted to try two-at-a-time. Two-at-a-time from the toe up on one circular needle. I found a tutorial for it, and off we went!

The tutorial is for worsted weight yarn and larger needles while I was knitting with fingering weight yarn and tiny needles. They aren’t the smallest size I own, but just about. I cast on for two colorwork socks, with striped toe and heel, reversed a pattern from being cuff-down to toe-up, and just jumped in with both feet and started. It was a pretty enlightening experience, mainly in how easy this was to accomplish for me.

I won’t say I haven’t had my fair share of setbacks, however. First I made the socks about half an inch too short – uncomfortably short for Johnathan’s feet. So I ripped out the heels and knitted longer, then did the heels again. Then when I got to the color work, we found that it was too tight. Well crap. So, I got really mad at the socks, threw them across the room, fumed for a bit, then came up with a plan to fix it. I put out all sorts of fires in the knitting of these socks!

Starting out with a technique that is perceived as difficult to many makes me feel kind of good. It makes me feel fearless. Even though I’m not starting these things this way to show off, it makes me want to boast to other sock knitters how well it’s going. (Until I run into a snafu, that is.) I feel wonderful knowing that by not letting myself think something is hard, I’m able to accomplish it. Even the warnings on the tutorial that said tutorial should be for experienced knitters didn’t deter me. I have two successful socks in progress that hopefully will fit Johnathan’s feet perfectly – better than any store-bought sock could.

Now that I’ve conquered sock knitting, lace is next on my list. I couldn’t, of course, pick an easy project for that, either. No, I have in my queue (and the materials in my stash) for a shawl that, as written, can measure anywhere from 44″ square to 50″ square depending on the knitter. Start easy? Well, clearly that’s for other knitters. Not this stupidly fearless knitter!

Enter the protagonist.

We found a place on the east side of town that had two-bedrooms available for a little more than what we are paying at our current place. The apartments were bigger, though, and all came with balconies! We would have a bigger kitchen and living area, and the bedrooms were sensibly sized. We toured one and we were very impressed with not only the size and appearance but also the other amenities. There was a workout room in one of the buildings, open to all tenants, a party room in each building, and a billiard room in each building. The place has a heated garage (which I don’t foresee us paying for), a bike cage in said garage, and a big swimming pool – bigger and deeper than at our current place. We put our names down on a waiting list to be called if there was a vacancy that came up around the time we needed to move.

Johnathan called them in late June out of curiosity, just to see if they thought they would have any coming up soon. As it turns out, that waiting list meant absolutely nothing. Nada. They had a couple of apartments available, but none that fit our request (two bedroom, one bathroom in the main building – where the fitness center was). Well, actually, they did. But they had promised it to someone who would be bringing the deposit the next morning. They followed that up with, “Whoever gets here first gets the apartment.” Bzuh! Okay, so we bit. Hard.

We spent that evening figuring out how to acquire the money necessary to make the transaction happen. We withdrew cash from one bank account, then went to our local bank to get a money order (as we had neglected to ask what name to put on the check). We showed up bright and early that morning. Excessively early. The office didn’t open until 10AM, but the lady had said that they would be there starting at 9:30. I thought that meant they could let us in starting in then, but Johnathan insisted it meant that they were saying we could show up at 9:30 and be fine. The other person wasn’t schedule to get there until 11AM, so I thought it would be polite to at least wait until they were actually “open” to go in. One minute to 10, Johnathan knocked on the door. It turns out I was wrong – she was inviting us to show up at 9:30.

It didn’t matter, though. The person who had been promised the apartment came back the night before, just before the office closed for the night, to put down her deposit. She didn’t want to miss out on it! We had gone through all that, only to end up disappointed. “But,” she said,  “I have another that you might be interested in.” She gave us the details. It was a two-bedroom one-point-five bath with an L-kitchen instead of a square one. Hmm. It was $40/month more, but it also had more square feet. We said okay, we’d look at it. The advantage that I could see to this one was that it had an air conditioner in the second bedroom – something I desperately wish we had now. It was also on the eighth floor. Well, heck yes!

Oh, the apartment was wonderful, especially compared to our current abode. It has four ceiling fans – one in each bedroom, one in the dining area and one in, of all places, the kitchen. It has a pantry. It has a big storage closet and a linen closet, a coat closet, and of course closets in both bedrooms. The bathrooms are nothing really special, but I didn’t expect anything special. It has lots of windows, and a 32 foot balcony. 32 feet! There are two doors out onto the balcony – one from the smaller bedroom and one from the living area. I am just amazed by the apartment. It’s a lot more than we’re paying right now, but after juggling numbers, we can easily afford this move, and still arrange for some savings as well. Heck. Yes.

There are some downsides to the apartment, though. The kitchen is… dated, I think, is the word I’m looking for. The floors look old, and the counters and cabinets look worn. They were maybe stylish 30 years ago! The hallway is narrow, which leads to some worries about fitting furniture down the hall into the bedrooms. The master bedroom closet is a bit on the small side, which means we’re going to need to get some additional bedroom storage, I think. (Our current dressers are falling apart; they weren’t well-constructed when they were built years and years ago, and are obviously not meant to last forever.) Other than that, I ‘m pretty excited!

We asked for a new stove if they’re able and willing, and we got to pick our carpet color from four different colors since they were going to replace it anyway. We ended up picking the color they were planning on using, but it was definitely the best choice, I think. Not too dark, but certainly not white.

I am really looking forward to living on the top floor. Living in a new place where we can settle in with a little more sensibly-organized space, with thing that will hopefully not fall apart after regular use (our “brand new” refrigerator in our current place had the door come off within about a month of moving in – we fixed it ourselves because the manager couldn’t be bothered to remember). I look forward to being able to cook without tripping over the other counter, and being able to have two people in the kitchen at the same time without being stuck. Some days I feel like Sims in the kitchen, putting up protest because yet again there’s another Sim– erm, person… in the way.

We’re moving! … In the middle of September! The first day of our lease is September 15, and Johnathan and I are like-minded in that we want to make sure our stuff gets moved that weekend. I’m not sure when we’re going back to sign the lease, but I can hardly wait. A new chance to make a place into home!

Speaking of making places into home, we have big plans for this place, and many of them involve IKEA. We have built an entertainment center with many bookshelves, and a place to mount our TV. We have come up with a good sewing table for Johnathan, which will have more storage. There’s a kitchen cart for extra workspace. There’s a wardrobe for bedroom storage. There’s a couch to go with my modern/minimalist idea of what our living room should look like. There are vases and dishes and silverware — okay, I’m getting a little ahead of myself. The priority is going to be the entertainment center and sewing desk, and possibly the kitchen cart if we don’t find one locally that we like. We’re going to drive to Pittsburgh, possibly with Johnathan’s mom’s van, and pick up everything that we put on a very restricted wishlist to make this place into home. I am hoping that we can make this look like the home of two adults rather than two young twenty-somethings who are struggling along with whatever they can. We had our bookshelves fall apart lately, so I don’t want to deal with that again.

I can hardly wait to move in to our new place and make it home.

People feel very strongly about what the “right” way is to give birth (natural versus with the assistance of drugs versus c-section), and what the right way is to nurse your child and bring them up. There are the people who feel like breastfeeding should be out there in the open for all to see, arguing that the baby shouldn’t have to be hidden just because it eats “naturally.” The people who think that those who bottle-feed for any reason are lazy and gave up on the natural way. There are people who very obviously look down on anyone who had to have a c-section for any reason, or who had drugs to assist the very painful process of vaginal birth.  The more I read, the angrier I get, not because people aren’t entitled to their opinions about what is best for them and their child, but because they are projecting those beliefs onto everyone else and making bad situations worse by making women feel guilty who, for one reason or another, did not or could not do it the way that the advocates believe is the best.

I am not an expert when it comes to having children. The closest I come is having a monthly period, and that’s, well, exactly the opposite of pregnancy. So I’m as close to it as the north pole is to the south pole, really. I do, however, have some strong opinions about it, despite not having done it myself. I was around for all of my step-mother’s first pregnancy, and also around for the early stages of my older half-sister’s life. I witnessed the nine months of morning (noon and night) sickness, the changes that she went through, and then the “aftermath”, so to speak. (She was born by c-section because she was breech and they couldn’t turn her, so right there, her pregnancy gets discounted by a lot of people online. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do, you know?) I was there when the lactation specialist visited, and I was there helping when we made baby food for the baby. She wasn’t my child, but I was a major part of her life for her first ten months or so until I moved out after my graduation. So I was there for that part.

It doesn’t take a genius to take in the norms that emerge when it comes to having a baby. For instance, babies are going to poop. It happens. They spit up, they pee, they poop, they drool, they snot, they make messes with their food. It’s normal. They pretty much control the schedule for the first part of their lives, too. The fully-developed humans work around the schedule of the baby and go through sleep deprivation and lack of showers in order to facilitate the normal growth and development of this tiny, in development human being. These are the things which seem to be standard across normal early parenthood. And that’s where the “norms” stop. After that, everyone has their own way of dealing with aspect of it. Cloth diapers or disposable? Breastfeeding or formula? Jars of baby food or homemade? Do you do baby swim lessons? Do you listen to Mozart for hours to facilitate development? At this point, I have to shrug and say, “Hell if I know.”

What really bugs me is that it seems to me that parenthood is a very personal thing. I can understand giving advice and anecdotal evidence when requested to do so, but there are so many people who are willing to give out advice without being asked, or going far beyond the request so as to be pushy about it. The thread I was reading devolved into a bunch of people going back and forth about what they experienced and what was the “right” way of doing something. All of this, of course, without taking into consideration that there are plenty of reasons that it might not work or be able to work that way for any other person. It takes all kinds of people and situations to make up the world, and for as many pregnancies there are, that’s how many different parenting and child-rearing styles there are likely to be. I feel like as long as the child in question is growing up as healthy and strong as possible, it shouldn’t matter whether mom is able to breastfeed or whether she used disposable diapers to catch the refuse.

This kind of advocacy bothers me more than any other kind. It is the same as evangelism in that it doesn’t consider what the audience wants, instead pushing its own view of what’s right regardless of extenuating circumstances or differing opinions. I’m not saying that these people aren’t entitled to their opinions and views. They are every bit as entitled to theirs as I am to mine, but I should be entitled to feel differently than them without feeling persecuted by them for the difference. I guess this comes down to my dislike of someone touting any one idea as the only truth and asserting that all around them should agree.

Ultimately, I had to stop watching the thread. I ignored the user who was pushing the hardest and who started the “argument” (it was very civilized, but I didn’t understand why it had to happen at all), but that doesn’t stop the conversation from happening. I wish the lady who started the thread all the best, and I sincerely hope that she has a smooth pregnancy and that parenthood suits her perfectly. I can’t read the preaching and pushing anymore. That particular user, it seems, is just not willing to let the subject drop until she has somehow proven that she is in the right on each issue on which she believes herself to be an expert. And maybe she is an expert – I have no way of verifying or disproving this claim. But whether she is an expert or not, she is giving her expert advice in a venue that is really inappropriate, since she can have no way of seeing whether her advice is the most appropriate for the people in question. And frankly, it comes across as very judgmental for those who do not adhere to the way of behaving during pregnancy, of birth or of child rearing that she believes is best.

Opinions are all well and good, as is active and healthy discourse about those opinions. It can open up people to ideas that they maybe hadn’t considered before. However, I think we should draw the line at making actual statements of how things “should” be and what is the one and only “best” way of doing anything. Whatever happened to live and let live?

Later, news articles started to show up stating that the epicenter was in Ontario. Or else it was Quebec. Nobody was really sure yet. But they were pretty sure it was either a 5.0 or a 5.5. Really specific, right? Still later, they finally narrowed it down to the Ottowa area on the Ontario/Quebec border. The consensus seems to be that it was a 5.5. It is amazing to me how far away the quake reached. Down to Cincinnati! That’s quite a distance.

Earthquakes aren’t totally new to me. We got a couple in Oregon when I lived there. It was, of course, nothing like what is experienced in California, but we got a few. I remember one that was strong enough to merit evacuating our school until they could assess whether there had been any damage that could endanger our precious teenage lives.  It was otherwise unremarkable. We stood on the football field, whining and bored until they deemed the school safe for us to re-enter. This one wasn’t even that remarkable. Being on the third floor, we experienced some swaying, but people who were on the ground floors of buildings sometimes felt nothing. Johnathan was driving at the time and didn’t feel it at all.

The little earthquake was kind of a fun diversion. There was no real damage to speak of, even, apparently, closer to the epicenter, and nobody died as a result of the shake. We did get a little excitement with people texting friends and relatives to find out whether they felt it or not, and scouring twitter and google for results that would tell us the epicenter and more about how far-reaching it was. Nobody was scared; we all got excited instead. It was kind of like a birthday distraction from the average humdrum of everyday working.

The theater was pretty full for a Wednesday night, probably owing to the celebrity draw and the well-known and loved show. The seats are still tiny, but I’m working on becoming tinier so that it’s not quite so much a squeeze. There was a family next to me, and thankfully they were willing to seat their small-ish son in the seat next to me so I didn’t have guilt for being fat and taking up a little more space than a normal sized person. He was too precious during, too, taking in so much of the show as well as the mechanics of it. At one point, he had a conversation with his dad about how it would be a nice place to take someone on a date. I just about melted after hearing that. Yes, little boy. Take someone to the theater on a date. That is a fantastic idea! I didn’t jump into the conversation, but it was very touching.

Harvey Fierstein is an interesting Tevye. He is not Topol, that’s for sure, and his voice… took a little getting used to. The actresses who played Tseitel, Hodel and Chava were very good. They had reasonably strong voices that blended very well together. The acting was pretty strong, which was nice. All in all, what is there to say about Fiddler on the Roof? I love it from start to finish. It’s long, emotional, and entertaining. Harvey Fierstein’s portrayal of Tevye is very interesting in that it is much more loose than I am accustomed to seeing. There was a certain… flair to it that is a bit hard to describe.

Johnathan says he was unable to get past Fierstein’s voice as far as the gravelly sound and really low pitch. That did make him hard to understand on occasion. At least I already knew what the lines were supposed to be! This could usually be a disadvantage, in that I could get bored, but he delivered the lines differently than Topol did in the movie, which made “old” jokes new again. It was, for me, a different version of the same thing, and I loved that. There have been other shows that I’ve seen twice or three times and it has been the same experience each time, because the roles are played in exactly the same way. I think it probably takes a truly good performer to take an established role and perform it in a different way, while still maintaining the core of the character.

I loved the show. It reminded me why I love Broadway and the theater to begin with. I had those thrills of the “curtain” going up, of the orchestra starting and just in general of enjoying a musical. I sometimes forget exactly how much I love going to see shows. It was a wonderful “gift” for my birthday.

As a side note: the spell check in Firefox really doesn’t like anything to do with this show! Lots of red.

One laundromat was in a city a couple of miles away. It was… okay. Sketchy and old, but cheap. Unfortunately, our very first time there, we ran into disaster with one of the machines. We ended up with some snags on some of our work clothes. The clothes were salvaged, but that was the last time we ever went to that laundromat.

The second is one that Johnathan went to relatively frequently before I moved, and it was our laundromat of choice for a while, for being 24-hours and less expensive than the machines at our complex. It seemed that there were often many broken machines when we were there, though, which made things hard when you need three of washer size A and only two are functioning, particularly if someone else is already using them. So we kept looking for our perfect laundromat.

Johnathan found Leo’s.  We gave it a shot because it seemed newer than the other two places and, hey, it was worth a shot, right? They had a card system which served to simplify things as far as needing quarters. The washers were newer and faster, and there were more of the larger sizes. The dryers were faster. Heaven? We thought so. We saw their ads for laundry drop-off service, and an idea started to form. It seemed extravagant, though, so until a post on Get Rich Slowly about outsourcing parts of your life, we didn’t really consider it. The post talked about how outsourcing daily tasks (cleaning for some, cooking for others, etc) could be financially beneficial in the sense that it frees the person from the hated task, and he or she regains the time that would otherwise be spent on that task. It seemed like an endorsement for us to go ahead and try the laundry drop-off service that was offered. So we did!

The first time we tried it, we had to buy the bag. That was $5, which isn’t really so bad. Then it was about $25 to have the load done. We left it with them and went on our merry way, intending to pick it up the next day. We picked it up and took it home. We were met with a bit of an unpleasant sight when we started to unpack the clothes. A lot of the clothes had mysterious stains on them that looked like grease or oil stains of some kind. We had some irreplaceable shirts stained and some of our work clothes. I was not happy. In fact, I was livid. We took the clothes in, or rather Johnathan did, and talked to the people there. Ultimately, he ended up on the phone with the owner of the place, who offered to send the clothes off to be claimed for insurance (which meant we’d get a lot less than they’re worth and be out the clothes), or we could let one of the attendants try to get the stains out and he could offer us some credit. We took the latter since it meant we might be able to wear the clothes again. The girl was able to get the stains out for the most part, so that was a satisfactory resolution.

The next time we brought in our laundry, nothing went wrong. Hurrah! Unfortunately, the next time we brought the laundry in, we were informed that we couldn’t drop laundry off after 7PM. Really? That seemed odd. The attendant explained that his coworkers would accuse him of not doing his work if we brought it in after that, because he wouldn’t have time to complete it before closing. Well, we thought it was a stupid rule, but accepted it and went home with our full bag of laundry. We dropped it off the next day and got a clean bag of clothes back. A person could get used to that!

Then we had another problem. We dropped off and paid for our laundry to be done and got back… a bag of unwashed clothes. It didn’t get done. This was apparently due to a miscommunication where one employee put the bag in the wrong place and the other didn’t bother to check whether the work had been done. So, more fussing to make sure that the load got done. Then we would get our clothes haphazardly folded. Overdried. Not even folded at all, on occasion. Smelling like no detergent was used.

The last straw came in two parts. The last time we dropped off our laundry, the lady asked Johnathan if he was “the one who tips.” He kind of gave her a funny look, and she went on to say that, oh yeah, people tip all the time! This statement doesn’t jive with the first, since the question was, “are you the guy who tips?” He said he would talk to me about it. I should state now that I think tipping for a service that we are paying for is stupid, so I was absolutely against tipping these people for the consistently inconsistent service we’ve been getting. I tip servers at restaurants because I know they don’t make even the minimum wage that everyone else is paid. I think tipping as a rule is stupid except for when exceptional service is given, and the people at Leo’s Laundromat were certainly not giving it. I mean, we still haven’t gotten all of our credit for our original problem because apparently only one employee even knows how to use the computer. Our name is in the system something like ten times because nobody knows how to use it and apparently nobody cares to learn, either. These people were not helping their case.

We were going to drop off a load of laundry on Monday, and the same lady with the tip comment was there. The first words out of her mouth were not “Hello” or “How’s it going?”, but “Did you talk to your wife about tipping?” Johnathan restrained himself from saying what he really wanted to say (“HOW RUDE!”) and just said, “You know what? Nevermind.” And then we became former customers.

Being expected to tip for a service that we are paying for is a bit ridiculous. I don’t tip the guys who change the oil on my car or the service technician who comes to install internet service at my apartment. I am not tipping for inconsistent laundry service that I am paying for. It is an advertised service that they don’t even do very well. We won’t be going back except maybe to use up the rest of the money on our cards if we absolutely have to do that. We won’t be going back otherwise. We’re going back to the 24-hour place with the creepy lady who asks too many personal questions because at least we know what kind of service we’ll get there.

I’m sad that it happened this way. I still don’t like doing laundry because it takes so long and, well, I just don’t like doing it! But if it means we know our clothes are cleaned, unharmed, unstretched and we don’t have to tip someone for a service we’ve already paid for, I’m for it. We’ll look out for another service, but I’m not hopeful we’ll find any reasonable alternatives. The owner of that laundromat was so nice, but I have to think he must be really disconnected from his property because things there are not exactly running smoothly. It’s a great idea, and their machines are nice, but would I recommend it to anyone else? Not a chance. The swank machines are not worth the headache of dealing with the staff.

Until Sunday.

Sunday, we decided we wanted to go to Panera for an early dinner. We also wanted to go for a bike ride, but wouldn’t really have time because we wasted the morning away sleeping, and our day didn’t really get going until about 3PM. I suggested that we combine the two endeavors, and Johnathan thought that was a pretty good idea. We’ve never ridden our bikes in town before. Whenever we’ve wanted a bike ride, we’ve gone to the metroparks and ridden on the trails there, which is fine, but those aren’t very flat, and well, we’ve seen all the close ones enough before that it’s boring to ride the short lengths. Four or five miles of trail really isn’t much, and the one to Oberlin isn’t very feasible for a weeknight or a short ride. So, this was a nice change, sort of.

It’s about 2.25 miles to Panera from our house. There are sidewalks the whole way, which is nice because there’s a lot of traffic on the streets between our apartment and the restaurant. No problem, right? Most of the way there was okay. We almost had to wait two light cycles because a bunch of cars decided that, despite the fact that we had a “walk” signal, they were more important and had to turn first. I don’t know about anyone else, but I didn’t feel like risking my life just to be able to cross the street. We did go across, but we had to run to make it before the light turned red. I have to say, that really annoyed me. If they had let us get going, they all would have been able to go, and we wouldn’t have had to run the bikes across the street.

We ran into more trouble when we got to another fairly busy intersection. People have a habit of ignoring crosswalks and limit lines alike. There were four cars in the crosswalk to go across a street. We could probably have crossed in front of them all, but the point of the crosswalk is that it’s the safe place for pedestrians (and cyclists, hi!) to cross. If I got hit outside of the crosswalk, even if it’s because I couldn’t walk in the crosswalk because someone was a jerk, it’s ultimately my fault as much as the car’s. The crosswalk is my safe haven as long as I’m crossing when I’m supposed to (walk sign). Cleveland drivers don’t seem to think that the limit line is the first warning to stop, the first line of the crosswalk is the second, and the second line of the crosswalk is the third. And then there are the really big jerks who continue to creep into the intersection on red lights, as if that will cause the light to turn green faster. I’ve seen cars get totally out into the intersection, the whole vehicle past the crosswalk. I mean, really. Don’t be a jerk.

Anyway, once we got past the perils of cars and safely back onto the relatively safe sidewalk, we rode up behind the restaurant. I decided to ride up the tiny grassy hill and coast into the parking lot next to the Panera. It would have been okay if the grass were the same height as the curb, but there was a little dip. It happened really fast, so I’m not 100% on what happened, but I suspect one of my pedals bottomed out, and then my heel did, too, and my bike kind of shuddered and I came to a stop. In the process, I banged up my left index finger. I usually keep the finger on the handle while the other three fingers hover over the brake handle, so when my hand jerked off the handle, it jammed into the mechanism that holds the brake handle up onto the handle. I nicked my knuckle (good gash on it), and I really jammed my finger. I think something hit the muscle in my finger pretty hard, too, because it swelled up and it looked ready to bruise up right away.

An injury on one finger is relatively minor as far as injuries go. I mean, it was the index finger of my dominant hand, but ultimately, it wasn’t broken or anything, and it certainly wasn’t as if I broke my wrist or something. I had some range of movement, and it wasn’t excruciating to try to use it, but any pressure caused pain. So that was fun. I had to figure out how to eat my early dinner without using my left index finger. It was… interesting! I had a feeling of inner instability afterward, as if everything would go wrong if I didn’t stay very, very still and try to do as little as possible. It was a very strange reaction to have to something so simple as jamming a finger. Somehow that simple injury influenced the rest of my day, however.

We did ride our bikes home, but I did everything I could to avoid actively using that finger. It wasn’t as hard as I expected, at least as far as riding home. Typing was interesting, because it hurt to use the finger very actively, and I learned quickly that I had to pay close attention when I was picking things up, because otherwise I would tweak my finger by trying to use it too much. It’s true that you never realize how much you use a part of your body until you can’t anymore. Johnathan was worried that I didn’t just bounce back from the injury and that the swelling didn’t go down much, even after taking ibuprofen. He said that if I hurt enough the next day, we needed to go to the urgent care to get my finger looked at and possibly x-rayed. I agreed. I’ve never been to an urgent care, or at least not in a very long time, so it’s not something I think of doing right away.

Well, I woke up on Monday morning and my finger did not feel at all better. I loaded up with painkillers and it took the edge off, but it certainly wasn’t better. I decided, since it wasn’t feelinf even a tiny bit better, that a trip to ugent care was, after all, necessary. After I got home from work, we headed up to the nearest urgent care center, which also happens to be the facility where my GP’s office is. But that has absolutely nothing to do with this story. I checked in, and probably waited about 20 minutes before they were able to see me. The very nice nurse took me to an examination room and started to get the dtails of what was wrong and what happened. He joked with me a bit, which I appreciated.

We established that my finger was now turning a lovely shade of reddish-bluish-purplish-blackish. In other words, I was developing one major bruise. And it was a beauty. He checked my pulse-ox… stuff, and my blood pressure (better than it was at my last physical, whoo!), and then did a pregnancy test – just in case – before I went off to get some x-rays done. The good news is that I am not pregnant and that I did get some x-rays done.

I went back to my exam room and waited for the doctor. This is the part that amazes me most. The doctor poked and prodded my hand a bit and told me that, thankfully, the x-rays didn’t show any broken bones in my finger. Since I hadn’t fallen, my wrist was given the all-clear, too. He told me it didn’t look like I had torn any ligaments or muscles and that I didn’t appear to have punctured anything. Just a bad bruise. He told me he’d have the nurse come in and put a splint on my finger, and I was to wear that for three to four days, just to help the finger heal, and keep it elevated whenever possible to help with the swelling. And that was that. Then he left. He touched my finger and poked at my wrist, and that’s what he gets paid the big bucks for. Oh well. That’s the system.

The nurse came back, put a splint on my finger and I was free to go. No pain killers – I’ll just use OTC stuff as necessary – and just a splint to help immobilize it. It’s helping with the pain already. Although, I have to say, I kind of look like a dweeb.

So, this has been my adventure this week. Do you know how hard it is to type when your dominant index finger is in a splint? Well, I’ll tell you. It’s really hard. I can’t wait until my finger is healed. You can bet I won’t be haphazardly riding off any curbs, however short, in the future.

I have had this pattern favorited for a while, and it was the only thing that I could see coordinating with the Grove pattern, which required the yardage that I had, was free, and was at least sort-of fitting with the style of the mittens. I probably could have made up a hat to go with the grove pattern, but I didn’t want to get into designing when it comes to hats. I’ll stick to scarves for now.

I started the hat on Monday. I must have cast it on about ten times that day, with my last attempt garnering me a fairly uneven cast on of 95 stitches. I needed 96. So I started over on Tuesday. I got the right number of stitches cast on the first time, and it didn’t look like crap! Hurrah! So I started the brim.

K1, P1, K1, P1. I got two rows into the pattern before I realized that I was not knitting, I was knitting through the back loop, which produces a different kind of stitch than a regular knit. Oh well, I’ve decided to say that’s a custom design element, meant to go with the twisted stitches on the mittens. Now it coordinates! Totally planned, I swear.

The rest of the hat was a trial at best. Not because the pattern was bad, because it wasn’t. I just couldn’t seem to pay enough attention to it to do it right the first time. I would knit two rows, realize I had done something wrong, then go back to fix it. This went on for almost the entire duration of the hat. On Saturday night, I was finishing with it, and by the time I got done, I realized that my decreases had somehow gone wrong. I ended up with twenty stitches when I ought to have had sixteen. Well, crap. So I just did a ssk, k2tog around and finished with ten stitches. That was good enough for me, and threaded the yarn through the remaining stitches and called it done.

There really was only one problem when I finished. It neither looked nor fit like a beret. I know that the Swish yarn from Knit Picks relaxes a lot when it’s washed, but I did not expect it to relax quite that much. I washed it anyway, and pulled out a plate to see what would happen. Much to my surprise, the hat fit over the full-size plate! I guess it was going to be a beret after all.

After blocking, the hat was definitely a beret. It’s not a very floppy or loose one, and it stays fairly close to my head, but it’s definitely not a beanie anymore. I love how it turned out, even with all of my mistakes.

Tonight, we’re going to see Fiddler on the Roof with Harvey Fierstein. That’s all I asked for this year. I asked for some posters to be framed last year, but we still haven’t managed to go and make that happen, so it’s still outstanding, and that’s okay. (It’s a couple of Singin’ in the Rain posters that I’d like to hang either in our bedroom or our computer room.) Other than that? Low-key. We’ll get a half-cake from Giant Eagle, maybe, and Joyce brought in brownies for everyone to celebrate my birthday.

I love my birthday. It’s the one day of the year that I feel absolutely okay with making demands for things and being absolutely selfish. After today, I’ll have to turn around and be normal again, because it won’t be my birthday anymore tomorrow. It’ll be someone else’s. But for this one day of the year, it’s all about me!

Here’s to another year and more!

Until the release date of Toy Story 3, it was at 100% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes according to the professional reviewers (T-Meter Critics). Enter a few contrarian jerks. On the release date of Toy Story 3, long after many of the reviews had already been posted, a couple of stray reviews were posted, stating that Toy Story 3 was rotten. This has ruined Toy Story’s perfect streak on the website, with both Toy Story and Toy Story 2 remaining at 100% fresh ratings, robbing it of the chance to be the only trilogy ever with a perfect 100% rating. Another negative review showed up on Sunday, making Toy Story 3′s rating a sadly imperfect 98%.

If the reviews were genuine, if they had real criticisms about the movie, I wouldn’t be so incensed by this. I admit, the Pixar fangirl inside of me would be annoyed, but if they were real reviews, that would certainly mitigate the fury that I feel right now at these three men, who can only really be characterized as assholes. Yeah, I said it.

One reviewer, Armond White, has a history of giving contrary reviews. If everyone loves it, inevitably, he hated it. He criticizes Toy Story 3 for having too much product placement, though he gives no explicit examples of how Toy Story 3 has any more product placement than either of the other Toy Story films. The blurb on Rotten Tomatoes reads: “Toy Story 3 is so besotted with brand names and product-placement that it stops being about the innocent pleasures of imagination — the usefulness of toys — and strictly celebrates consumerism.” In the full review, his main point seems to be that the movie is about toys, and that’s just not a good movie! Wow, how useful. He has gotten a lot of attention for his negative review, something I suspect was not on accident, and has managed to say absolutely nothing about why he has cursed the movie with the “rotten” rating. What is the point of a review if the reviewer cannot actually tell his readers why he did or didn’t like it? That’s left for us non-professional reviewers, who are allowed, by dint of not doing it professionally, to have an opinion of “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it.” We don’t have to ascertain whether the movie is good, merely whether we enjoyed it or not, and those are two vastly different things. He has cheated us all out of a real review by preferring to have a different opinion than everyone else on this and other popular films. (It’s not the first time he’s panned a fan and critic favorite.)

The second reviewer who posted his negative review on Friday is Cole Smithey. His blurb is this: “Once you get past paying the inflated price for an animated “3-D” movie where nothing floats in front of your eyes as with quality 3-D films, the story that unfolds is more sad than joyful.” I am amazed at how he has managed to say absolutely nothing critical about the movie itself other than the fact that it was sad. Really? A movie is sad? This makes it bad, apparently. His opinion of the 3D is equally ridiculous, since it seems like he wants the gimmicky 3D with things “flying” at his head. (That’s the first time I’ve seen anyone other than a kid want that experience.) Smithey’s website claims he’s the smartest film critic in the world. For a man that smart, one would think he’d be able to come up with more than a couple of short paragraphs about why he hated this otherwise universally loved film. “‘Toy Story 3′ is about neglect, betrayal, and the planned obsolescence of plastic toys that end up as so much toxic landfill.” And this is a bad message for the film, apparently, to have. Maybe if he spent his time focusing less on the fact that Andy had enough sentimental attachment to keep his childhood toys until he was 17 (I still have  my Holly bear, and I’m 25 in two days. What does that say about me, eh?) – Smithey implies that Andy can’t possibly be getting any dates as a result of his emotional attachment to toys that he’s had since he was a small kid) – he would have seen that the movie is less about the sad reality that eventually we all have to put away toys and do grown-up things for the majority of our lives. His review is forced at best, and he says nothing about what makes the film other than it includes themes like abandonment and the danger of planned obsolescence. Gee, definitely not things that people have to deal with in real life! And he totally ignores the ending, claiming that the film is sociopathic and promotes the wrong message to kids. Definitely don’t donate your toys to daycares or other smaller kids, folks! Definitely don’t do what you can to ensure that your old toys don’t end up in landfill, but instead go to other kids who will enjoy them as much as you did! Definitely don’t form emotional attachments to your toys that give you fond memories of your childhood, or you’ll never get any dates! Yep, I totally see it.

The third negative review that Toy Story 3 has been smacked with is by Jeremy Heilman. I’m not really sure what I can say about his review except that he totally pans Toy Story 3, calling the plot threadbare and accusing it of being a rehash of Toy Story 2. This man gave a more favorable review to a movie called The Human Centipede, in which people bite the butts of a person in front of them, forming a long line – in essence, a human centipede. What the hell? How can a movie like that garner more favor than Toy Story 3? He accuses:  “Toy Story 3 frequently indulges in the cheap brand of crass humor that has defined that series, with fart jokes, ethnic jokes, and gay jokes throughout its run time.” I’m not sure what movie he was watching, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Toy Story 3. This smacks of attention whoring to me – giving a negative review late, destined to be on the front page of Rotten Tomatoes, and scarring the reputation of an otherwise well-loved film.

These men do movie reviews at least semi-professionally. They are the ones that the rest of us look to (in theory) to help us decide whether a movie is worth our time and money. How are we supposed to trust any reviewer when there are those who are willing to give negative reviews simply for the sake of doing so, or for the attention that will inevitably follow for being in such a minority? There ought to be a level of integrity expected from those whose job it is to tell us whether something is good or bad. These reviewers should have some kind of check and balance to keep them from habitually panning fan and critic favorites for the sake of being contrary. You like a specific genre better than others, yet you review all genres? You are not a reviewer whose opinion should be broadcast to the general public, because what you are spreading is a false representation of the truth. Perhaps you don’t like this film (and that goes for any film), but if you have a history of disliking specific kinds of films, how is that a real review? It isn’t a criticism of the film itself, it is a criticism of the genre, disguised as a review for a specific film.

In the case of Toy Story 3, these reviewers have gamed the system and gotten away with it at the loss of something that Toy Story 3 and the Toy Story series deserve: a perfect record. The people at Pixar have poured their hearts and souls into this film, and it shows, just as it has with all of the ten films released previous to this. They strove to tell a good story, and they did. The only people in the world who disagree are these three assholes who can’t even manage to say anything real or valid about why they don’t agree that it was a cinematically well-told story.

Roger Ebert called Armond White a troll last summer for his inconsistent review history, and I’m going to go one further: Armond White, Cole Smithey and Jeremy Heilman: You are all trolls of the worst order. You don’t deserve to write reviews that other people are expected to take seriously. I hope Rotten Tomatoes yanks your T-Meter Critic status.

Disclaimer: I loved Toy Story 3. I am very incensed by what these men have written, but I think you should know that my bias in the other direction regarding this single film may affect your view of my thoughts here.

I got myself a Canon Digital Rebel XS with a kit lens and a Flickr Pro account and started taking pictures. I haven’t taken nearly as many photos as I would have liked to by this point two and a half years later. My skills haven’t progressed much past “dude who recently bought a camera,” either.

See, I have this problem where my passion for things I like fades. I love taking pictures, but I just can’t get into it sometimes. The same thing happened for me with riding roller coasters. I’ve ridden about 180 different roller coasters and have been fascinated and thrilled by them since around the time of my earliest childhood memories. Recently, though, the passion for coasting has faded.

I’ve managed to get a few photos I’m really proud of. I’ve gotten many, many more that I’m not proud of in the least. But that’s how photography goes. For every 10, or even 100 photos you take you might get one or two that you really like.

Part of the reason my passion for taking pictures faded is self doubt. I’m sure I’m not a very good photographer. There are plenty of good photographers out there! Why do we need more? (For further reference and to see the trend of why I don’t do things, check out my previous post about blogging.)

I manage to convince myself that the creative works that I do are sub-par and shouldn’t be done. I have a dusty guitar two dusty guitars. I have unfinished code in at least three different languages. I have two draft blog entries saved on this very site.

I have a goal this summer. Laura was kind enough to put together a bit of a challenge for me. Each week she’s giving me five things to take photos of. Some of the prompts are concepts, some concrete things, some adjectives. The interpretation of the prompts is up to me. By the end of each week I will have taken at least five photos that I am proud of.

Now I just need to get around to starting. I’ve pushed back zero day on the project for the last month or so, which brings me to another thing I have a problem with: procrastination.

But I’ll write about that later.

Fifteen years ago, the very first Toy Story film came out. I was ten years old, and I remember going to the theater to see it. I remember being amazed at how real everything looked, and loving the story. I thought Woody was the best toy ever, and Rex was one cool dude. I remember getting toys from Burger King, of all places, and playing with them a lot. (They were hand-puppets. Possibly the coolest kid’s meal toys that ever existed.)

In 1999, I was 14. Toy Story 2 came out and my mom again took us to see it. I remember being amazed that not only was it good (and sequels had a bad reputation by that time), but it was just as good if not better than the original! How could they manage such a feat? And then they released it with bloopers a couple of weeks later, and back to the theater I went, for the sole purpose of seeing it with the blooper reel at the end. It probably didn’t hurt that I loved the movie.

For the last eleven years, I’ve been enjoying both Toy Story and Toy Story 2, thinking that was all there was to the franchise, and thinking that was just fine. I was okay with Andy staying a kid in my imagination. And then I heard that there was going to be Toy Story 3. I was immediately skeptical. I mean, Pixar managed to capture lightning in a bottle twice with the Toy Story, erm, story. Could they really expect to do it a third time? Some of my fears were put to rest when we accidentally got to be part of a Q&A with Lee Unkrich, the director of Toy Story 3, at a screening of The Pixar Story at the Cleveland International Film Festival in March, 2008. He was so excited about Toy Story 3, about 3D, about all the things that both Disney and Pixar would be doing in the future, that it was impossible to decry the company as an imminent failure and the movie as dreck. (Not that I would ever, ever say such a thing! Perish the thought! Ahem.)

Since I now follow Lee Unkrich on Twitter, it was only natural to get excited as I heard him enthusing about the various stages of production over the last year or so. He posted countdowns, letting us know that Toy Story 3 was only months away, and then weeks, then days from release. How could I not get excited? Excitement, however, only leads to more worry, as it can often lead to the horrible feeling of anticipointment. (See: Ponyo.) I knew that we would have to see the movie on opening day, though. I couldn’t risk having the movie spoiled for me, and I definitely wanted to enjoy this movie without any expectations as to what the plot had in store (other than as seen in the trailer, of course).

On release day, we showed up at Crocker Park for our 9PM showing maybe a little early. We’re talking two hours early. Whoops. Radio Disney had a booth set up outside the theater where they were giving away prizes and encouraging all the kids to come and dance. I’m sure it was a major boon for the theaters those kids were in that they’d been dancing in the hot sun for a while and were likely to be slightly more subdued by the time they got in to the movie. Or maybe it just riled them up even more. Who knows? We hung out in the Borders next door for a while, and then about an hour ahead, walked over to the movie theater. We got a drink, and sat for a few, expecting to be let in probably forty to forty-five minutes early. We tried to go in, and the boy said that it would be about twenty minutes before he could let us in. Oh! Eventually a line formed for the Toy Story 3 showing in 3D, theater 6. We got let in at around 8:45, and some people ran to the theater as if all the seats would run out before they got there. We got seats in the back and settled in for the start of the movie.

First, I’d like to commend those who worked on the short. I loved it. Day & Night was charming and interesting, and while it’s obvious that it was Pixars traditional computer animation, it also had a feeling of some of the drawn cartoons that I watched as a kid. The combination was really neat. I loved the use of sound effects, too – it was clever and well-done.

We saw Toy Story 3 both in 2D and 3D. We saw the 3D first, so that factors more into my thoughts about the film at the moment. The opening Pixar logo in 3D was really fun. It had such depth, and the way that it was rendered wasn’t gimmicky at all. Really – one of the things that stood out to me was the opening logo. Weird? Maybe. But it was cool! Then, after waiting for three years (since hearing of the film at The Pixar Story), it was finally time to see Toy Story 3.

The movie starts with an action-adventure feeling, featuring all of Andy’s toys. It’s difficult to know why this is going on at first, but it was exciting to watch the toys in action sequences more fitting for the kinds of characters that they are. Wild west, anyone? We find out later that it’s Andy’s imagination as he’s playing with his toys, and then he gets interrupted by mom with her video camera. It’s a sweet opening sequence, reminding us of the Andy that the toys (and we, by proxy) loved in Toy Story and Toy Story 2. Then we come to real time. Andy is grown up. He has graduated from high school and is off to college in a matter of days. The toys make a last-ditch effort to draw his attention to the toy box in which they have languished for years, waiting for him to realize how important they are to him. And it doesn’t work.

Andy’s mom shows up and gives him an ultimatum: he needs to sort through his stuff before he leaves to college. College, attic and trash are the categories he has to choose from, and with a heavy sigh, he decides to make some hard decisions about his toys. They’re going into the attic, with the exception of Woody, who’s going to college with him. But then – disaster strikes! Of course it does, it’s a movie! Andy is silly enough to put the toys into a trash bag to put them into the attic, but he is distracted by Molly, who is taking a box of her own old toys downstairs to be donated to Sunnyside daycare. He helps her take the box downstairs and leaves his bag on the floor, right under the stairs to the attic. Mom finds them and assumes the bag is trash. Because … it’s a trash bag. And it’s on the floor. What else is she going to assume?

The toys are being thrown out! They start freaking out! They manage to use Rex’s tail and escape from the trash bag, just in time not to be picked up by the garbage man (cameo: Sid Phillips! I love how self-referential Pixar films are). They do their usual “hide under something and run” trick to get into the garage, where they get into Andy’s mom’s car and deposit themselves into the donation box. Woody tries to talk them out of it, assuring them that they were meant for the attic, not the dump, but nobody believes him (as usual!), and they all end up en route to Sunnyside.

Now we have the plot and the conflict, and I’ll leave you at that. I don’t want to summarize the whole movie because it feels much more clinical than actually watching it. No amount of summary could do justice to this movie.

Toy Story 3 is really a celebration of everything that Pixar is capable of, and of how far it has come in the fifteen years that they’ve been producing feature films. It’s amazing to me to watch and see that the screws on Buzz look so real that they could have been film instead of animation. The attention to detail is, as always, incredible. It’s a beautiful movie as far as the rendering is concerned. But the beauty doesn’t end there – it also has a beautiful story. Andy grows up and goes to college, but the toys are given new hope for the future; hope that they’ll be played with and enjoyed for years to come by a kid just as wonderful as Andy himself. (I know, I spoiled that bit. I gave a warning waaaaaay up at the top that I would!) It was so sweet to watch her, and also to think about the precious toys that I have had packed away since I grew too old to play with them and also too old to have them on display. (It’s maybe weird for a married alm0st-twenty-five-year-old to have her stuffed animals out for viewing.) I pulled Holly bear out of her box when I got home after seeing the movie on Friday night. I slept with her for the first time since probably high school, maybe longer. She smells the same as I remember – like whatever fabric softener my mom used to use when she’d wash the bear for the umpteenth time. I thought about Andy giving up his toys, and it made me emotional all over again. Could I do that with Holly? Not a chance.

Two days later, I can’t even adequately describe how the movie made me feel. I laughed, I cried (3D glasses are good for hiding the tears, but they do nothing for muffling the sniffles that accompany), I got nervous and excited. It was 103 minutes of movie bliss. We saw the movie again yesterday with Johnathan’s mom, and I’m going to suggest we go to see it at the drive-in next weekend (we did the same with both Wall-E and Up), so that we can talk during the film and nobody will get mad at us for it.

My favorite moment while watching the movie for the first time came not from the movie itself, but from the two or three year old girl who was sitting next to us. She really didn’t have a whisper voice, or even an inside voice, which was pretty annoying most of the time. She redeemed herself only by saying possibly the most funny thing I’ve ever heard a child say at just the right moment. In reference to a scene with Mr. Potato Head: “He looks more like Mr. PoTaco head!” I had to stifle my giggles because the moment onscreen was definitely not as funny as what I had heard. Yes, little girl, he did look like Mr. PoTaco head!

I loved Toy Story 3. So much. There’s really nothing else I can say in praise of this wonderful movie. Can you believe that Pixar has done it eleven times now? Eleven successes! Way to go, Pixar!

After we got home, I added the movie to our Netflix queue so that I could watch it again. Part of me wanted to ensure that I hadn’t just imagined how good it was, and that I wasn’t just in a particular mood to like it, which would mean that it wasn’t as likely to be repeatable. The rest of me just wanted to watch it again. (I do things like that.) I got it on DVD (because, sadly, it is not available on Netflix streaming), and verified that, yes, I had enjoyed it and it was a lasting enjoyment. The colors were vibrant and the dances were interesting. The usage of music was so unique to what I’m sued to in American cinema that I couldn’t help but be drawn to it.

Netflix, as it turns out, has a fairly healthy variety of Bollywood films available for streaming, which conveniently we can do right from our Playstation 3. I’ve been making my way through the ones that look interesting to me lately. So far, I’ve watched ten Bollywood films on Netflix Streaming. This doesn’t sound like a lot, but at an average of 2.5 hours long, I can, at best, watch two or two and a half films during my work-from-home day, which is when I use the streaming most. (As a matter of perspective, I can easily watch 4 American films, sometimes 5 in this same span of time.) They are long, but somehow they keep my attention through the end.

What I have seen so far:

• Chance Pe Dance: This has the same actor in it as My Heart Goes Hadippa – Shahid Kapoor. For this reason alone I put the movie into the streaming queue, and I don’t regret it. He is a very good dancer, and he seems to have less reservation when it comes to looking silly on film, which I find incredibly endearing. Chance Pe Dance was about a guy who was trying to make it in the film industry in Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay), and his struggles as relate to that goal. It is an endearing movie, and the dance and music sequences didn’t hurt its entertainment value.

• Kismat Konnection: I found this one very interesting. It also stars Shahid Kapoor, but it takes place not in India but in Toronto, Canada. This, I have learned, is not uncommon for Bollywood cinema. The films may be intended largely for Indian audiences, but they do not all take place in India, which differentiates the industry from Hollywood, where most American films take place in the United States. It, of course, centers around an Indian community, which makes sense. There’s a boy who was once very successful, but now seems to have nothing but bad luck. He’s told by an oracle that he needs to find his lucky charm and stick by her. He finds her, and they immediately don’t get along, but of course that changes through the course of the story. The conflict surrounds an Indian community center, which is going to be demolished to make way for a mall, and boy is an architect who finds his luck in being signed on to the project.

• Jab We Met: Shahid Kapoor again! Are we shocked? Boy is depressed because his mother ran off with another man and now his fiance has left him, and he has a business to run but doesn’t want to anymore because his mother is making crazy demands on her rights regarding the company. He gets on a train with the intention, it seems, of killing himself, and a well-meaning girl intervenes. She is chatty and interfering without, it seems, intending to be, and the movie centers around the things that happen to them as she tries to get home and he tries to figure out what it is that he really wants out of his life. Very sweet, very endearing.

• Pyaar Impossible: Nerdy boy sees popular girl and falls in love with her. She gets in trouble and he saves her, but as a result of her trouble, Daddy takes her out of college. She gets married, and boy doesn’t see girl again for a long time, but remains in love with her. Later, he has some software stolen and goes to Singapore to track down the evildoer who stole it, and happens to run into girl while he’s there. As it turns out, she is divorced and has a 6-year-old daughter, and he, through a series of misunderstandings, ends up as the nanny. Mayhem ensues. This is the first film I saw with Priyanka Chopra in it, and I was very impressed with her from the start. I found her very endearing, and I must say, she isn’t bad to look at, either. (She didn’t win Miss World for no reason, I suppose.)

• What’s Your Raashee?: Boy is away at college in Chicago, and his family calls him home under the pretext of father having a heart attack. (This seems commonly done in Bollywood films.) His family convinces him to get married within ten days so that he can get his inheritance from his grandfather to pay off his brother’s debts. He goes to a matchmaker of sorts, refusing a dowry, but insisting that he meet one girl of each Raashee (sun sign) to help his chances of finding someone with whom he will be compatible. Priyanka Chopra was also in this one, and played twelve different characters in the film – all twelve girls that he goes on a date with. His grandfather explains this similarity away by saying that he is searching for the face of his perfect mate in each of them, which is why they all look so similar. I think this has been one of my favorites so far, because of how well Priyanka Chopra played all of the different women, and how well executed it all was.

• Main aur Mrs. Khanna: Girl is an orphan and has no surname as a result. (God forgot to give her a last name, she explains.) Boy woos her and marries her, saying that she can share his name. Aww. They get married and move to Australia. Then his career tanks and he sort of unintentionally takes it out on her. He goes to Singapore for an opportunity, and instead of booking a ticket for her to go with him (as expected), he buys a ticket for her to fly to Dehli. She doesn’t go, and befriends two rather bumbling bartenders and gets a job at the airport. One of the bartenders calls her Mrs. Khanna all the time instead of her name, and this is a big deal throughout the film. It was a sweet film, although not as engaging as some of the others, I’d say.

• Bachna Ae Haseeno: Boy wants to be a playa. He befriends a girl on a vacation in Switzerland, and woos her. She falls in love with him, and he promises to save her from her arranged marriage. When they separate at the airport, he brags to his friends about all the “stuff” they did, none of which is true. She hears and her heart is broken. Later, he shacks up with another girl. He expects her to stay behind when he gets a job in Australia as a video game designer, but she decides it’s high time for them to get married. She goes so far as planning, well, everything, and then he ditches her on their wedding day without a single word of apology, and flies to Australia. While in Australia, he meets and messes around with a different girl each night, always managing to strike out with them eventually because he doesn’t actually care about them. He later meets a girl who is a taxi driver and she doesn’t believe in marriage, and he ends up falling for her, and she breaks his heart much in the same way as he broke the hearts of the other girls. Go figure! So he decides to go on a mission to apologize to the other two girls, learning a lot along the way. I won’t tell you how it ends, although I’m sure you can guess. It was very sweet, and I really liked the perspective of how Indian women are expected to live and behave, versus what I’m used to in the USA.

• Fashion: Priyanka Chopra again. Meghna (I love that name) wants to be a fashion model. The movie centers around her experiences in the fashion world, from beginner to top model and everything in between. It is dark and gritty, but also really shiny. It focuses less on music like other Bollywood films, but it definitely exposes a side of Indian culture that is different than American culture. The fashion industry there is much more… I want to say sheltered, but that is not the case. It has different standards and as a result, their scandals are not the same as our scandals. Interesting film.

• Chup Chup Ke: Boy is badly in debt after money-making scheme after money-making scheme failed. His creditors are on his case and want their repayment now, or else! He decides to throw himself into the ocean and drown himself so that his family will get the insurance money and will no longer be burdened by his debt. He… fails. And ends up playing a deaf mute in order to survive with his new companions. This one was long, and not my favorite as far as halfway through. I actually let it sit for over a month before finishing it. It turns out the end is better than the beginning! I really like Kareena Kapoor, and she was in this one (as well as others), and of course, Shahid Kapoor (no relation). I thought it was very sweet, and I might have cried a little.

So, ten films and counting (I recently popped a bunch more into our streaming queue for my work-from-home days). What have I learned? I don’t know a lot about Indian culture and norms. The movies help me learn a little bit, but I think it is distorted knowledge, because of course they’re movies, not accurate representations of life. I need to learn a lot more about the culture if I want to truly understand these movies. It probably wouldn’t hurt to learn a bit of Hindi, either. I’ve also learned that while the characters might say things like “shit” or “damn” or “bastard,” the translation will never, ever say that. It makes me laugh, actually, how much the subtitles are censored.

I feel like I have discovered a whole new genre of movies, and in a way, I have. It’s not exactly new, but it’s new to me, and it is, I think, braver than American cinema. American filmgoers are not happy to accept singing and dancing characters unless the movie is advertised as a musical. Some of these films have singing and dancing but would not, I feel, qualify as musicals because often the musical numbers have little or nothing to do with the actual story. It’s like a shiny, modern version of the 1930s and 40s Hollywood musical era. The music might not relate to the story, but who cares? We love those movies anyway. I love these Bollywood movies more than I ever expected I would. And I am all for expanding my horizons!

Since Ponyo was released in American theaters last summer, I’ve been hearing good things about it. Johnathan is a Miyazaki fan, so we’d intended to see it while it was in theaters. Then suddenly it wasn’t in theaters anymore, and we hadn’t managed to see it. Somehow it has fallen off of our radar consistently for almost an entire year! We got it on blu-ray the other day from Netflix, and finally got around to watching it (rather than letting our Netflix discs sit for months on end, as I have managed to do on more than one occasion).

Ponyo is very, very beautiful. The colors are wonderful and the characters are whimsical which makes it a treat to watch, at least from a visual standpoint. The film is hand-drawn on paper rather than cels, digital rendering or even digital drawing. The texture that results creates a depth that I’m not sure could quite be replicated any other way.

To my dismay, however, I did not find the plot as engaging as the art. I felt that it was a little bit lacking in overall plot depth. Little fishy wants to get away from her father/father figure and swims out into the open ocean, then ends up right near land, where Sosuke finds and saves her. Because she tastes human blood, she is able to morph herself into a human, albeit a socially inept one (since she’s not a human – she’s a fish). There’s talk about how when a fish with a human face comes to land, there’s a tsunami, and sure enough there’s a tsunami. Sosuke’s mom Lisa is a bit reckless and kind of stupid at times when it comes to handling the weather, and ends up abandoning the two small children in the house on the hill instead of evacuating as they were warned to do, and then in the end, some magical spirit lady shows up and says that if Sosuke really loves Ponyo then she can stay on land, and if not she has to become a fish again and live in the ocean. Sosuke promises that he does and everyone promises to be very good to each other, the end.

Nothing felt like it delved very far down below the surface, and I ended up bored enough that I just looked for the artistic details instead of paying much attention to the story. It was simple enough to comprehend that it did not require even half of my attention. I’ve watched only one other Miyazaki film to date, and of the two, this one was the less weird, but also less engaging. The other was much longer, but had a more complicated storyline which kept me interested through the end of the movie.  It was much darker, in art and in plot, but I think that was fitting for the story. Ponyo was light in color for the most part, but also fairly light in plot, with the majorest of events being the conflict of whether Ponyo will be able to live with Sosuke on land or whether she will have to return to the sea with the other “ponyos” and her parents.

While I view animation as a medium, not a genre (and certainly not a children’s genre), I felt that Ponyo was a movie aimed at children. It didn’t seem to have enough depth to keep me engaged, and in fact, I really liked The Princess and The Frog better than I liked Ponyo, which was totally unexpected. Ponyo was certainly a beautiful film, but I found it lacking in story development. I really wanted to like it, and maybe I would have if I had been watching with younger kids, who would likely have been enraptured by Sosuke’s adventures. I was really just disappointed by it, maybe because my expectations were so high. As Johnathan likes to put it, it was anticipointment.

I remember hearing that Disney was bringing back their 2D animation studio, and was pretty happy about that until I heard that the first thing out of the gates was going to be another princess movie. It was to feature a black princess, which excited people for about ten seconds before they started complaining. Why is her prince not black? Her name isn’t black enough! Etc, etc, etc. Drama. Walt Disney World was laden with banners and advertisements for the upcoming release of the film, and I really wasn’t all that excited about it. Usually I’m on board with seeing films in the theater (there’s nothing quite like a dark, quiet movie theater for immersing yourself in a film – emphasis on the quiet), but I really didn’t want to see The Princess and the Frog.

After the movie was released, I was expecting to either hear an ecstatic response, or a multitude of groans about how horrible it was. I heard neither. Maybe it’s because all of my media sources hadn’t seen the film in theaters, but then I didn’t hear about it after it came out on DVD, either. I figured, though, since Tiana was clearly a new Disney Princess and a mainstay, at least for a while, at the parks, I should at least see the movie so I would know what it was about. Into the Netflix queue it went. (On Blu-Ray,of course!)

Johnathan and I sat down to watch it with much reluctance, expecting that we would not at all appreciate it for what it was. We popped in the blu-ray disc and navigated through the approximately eighty previews to get to the menu, only to have it sit on that lightning bug for something like eight minutes before we gave up. It occurred to Johnathan that maybe the disc was prompting our system (Playstation 3) to look for a network connection before allowing us to go to the menu, so he went to unplug our router (which was currently just plugged in, but lacking in internet connection as Time Warner had disconnected us before our requested date, and we had not yet gotten our DSL modem for our new AT&T service), and poof! It worked! We had a bit of a facepalm about that, then proceeded in starting the movie.

I loved the style from the beginning, though Johnathan wasn’t as fond of it. I thought it pulled really well from the popular art style of the time. The story was pretty cute from the start, and we had a moment of amusement when we recognized John Goodman’s voice (it was akin to our “Patrick!” recognitions). It was cute. Princessy white girl and the black girl and her mother – mom’s telling a fairytale and sewing another princess-y dress for the white girl while the black girl enjoys the story, too. Appropriately, the story told is The Frog Prince. What else would it be? Then we see how Tiana lives – in a poor tenement with parents who clearly work very hard for what little they have but dream of having a better life. Then we are introduced to the moral: hard work and love will get you everything you need. Aww.

Tiana and her friend (whose name escapes me right now, but is definitely a spoiled princess by nature if not by title, but she’s at least not mean-hearted) grow up and Tiana works hard at two jobs trying to save up for her dream restaurant while the other girl is a rich daddy’s girl who is trying to woo a prince who is coming into town that very day. Plot point! Blah blah blah, Prince is arrogant, Tiana is prejudiced toward him and they both end up getting turned into frogs by an evil witch doctor who wants Big Daddy’s money, even if it means tricking the poor little rich girl into marrying a man who looks strangely like a monkey (the prince’s henchman). Through a series of wacky hi-jinks, Tiana and the Prince start to get along and fall in luuuuurve, and then there’s drama and a little creepiness and everyone lives happily ever after. That’s a seriously simplified version of how things went, but the ultimate sentiment is true.

The moral of the story is hard work and love. That stays consistent throughout. Tiana has her eyes fixed hard on her prize (her dream restaurant), and Prince Naveen wants some money so that he can continue living high on the hog and having fun without any responsibility. Big Daddy’s Princess wants to marry a prince and really doesn’t seem to have any goals at all outside of becoming a wife. Big Daddy’s Princess seems worst off out of everyone because she doesn’t really learn anything through the end of the movie, although she is a refreshing take on that type of character. She is not mean-hearted, even if she is spoiled, and ultimately she refuses to let Prince Naveen “sacrifice” himself by marrying her, but agrees to help Tiana and Naveen anyway. The others grow in their own way – Tiana learning that maybe hard work isn’t all there is to life (love) and Naveen learning that love of fun and money isn’t all there is, either (hard work and love). Aww. They get married and then, through hard work and a little help from Big Daddy’s Money, fix up the restaurant that Tiana had almost been blocked from buying because she’s a poor black woman (three strikes, you’re out).

There was a lot of humor in this movie, which I think helped it along, but there was a prevalence of dark elements which surprised me. The villain was a voodoo witch doctor who called on evil spirits to help him do his dirty work. He had a real motive, which is not something I have been able to say of all villains in animated films. He wanted Big Daddy’s money. (I’m sure that character has a name, but frankly I’m too lazy to look it up.)  He saw that Prince Naveen and his henchman had something that they wanted and used those wants to draw them into his evil plot. I’m not entirely certain why Prince Naveen had to be turned into a frog, but without his frogginess, we wouldn’t have had a Frog Prince story, would we? The evil spirits were actually pretty frightening in their ability to move about, and I was impressed with how unabashed the evil-ness was. As a small child, it would have terrified me. I remember being frightened by Sleeping Beauty and Alice in Wonderland as a child, though, so it wouldn’t have been out of line with some of the other Disney films. I actually quite liked the dark elements. It gave a real sense of danger and of conflict that propelled the movie along.

The Princess and the Frog also dealt more openly, I felt, with things like World War I, racism and sexism. Tiana’s father, it is implied, has died in the war, which I found to be an interesting element. It is never explicitly stated, but anyone with a knowledge of history should be able to glean that from the brief shot of his photograph in uniform on her desk. It might go over the heads of some smaller children, but they’ll figure out soon enough that he died, without having to go into great detail as to why. The racism and sexism come later when Tiana has finally worked hard enough and earned enough money to purchase the old sugar mill which she and her father had dreamed about turning into a restaurant. She gives the money to the realtors, and asks them to bring the contract to sign as soon as possible (smart girl) so that they can seal the deal. They agree, but later “regretfully” inform her that she has been outbid, and unless she can come up with the difference within a few days, the other bidder will own the property. The realtors comment that it was probably a bit much to take on for someone from “her background.” They are, not so subtly, referring to the fact that she is a poor black woman. I thought this bit was quite bold of Disney to address, considering it would have been the exact kind of opposition that any woman, but especially a black woman with no means other than what she creates for herself, would have experienced. Obviously she could have purchased another place, but she wanted that one, and what’s to say that she wouldn’t have run into the same kind of opposition for any property that she tried to buy? She was blocked from buying that which she had the means to purchase, simply because those selling viewed her as inferior. There are sexist overtones to the statement, too, but the racism is the strongest part. I really admire that the people involved with the film were willing to leave that element in.

Ultimately, she does get her building, and she buys it with her cans of money, but she has a little help from the alligator that she and Naveen befriend in their adventures in the swamp (grrrooowwwl!). It’s a little bit of a cheap way of her getting what she wants, but I’m glad that she didn’t have Big Daddy’s Princess sweep in and do it for her. This way, ultimately, she was getting what she wanted, largely on her own terms. And then she and Naveen do it the old fashioned way: by hand. I’m sure there was a little assistance from Big Daddy and Big Daddy’s Princess, and perhaps even Naveen’s parents, but I feel like Disney is showing that they ultimately did the work.

By the end of the film, it did start to smack us over the head a little bit, I liked the message. Magic didn’t get them what they wanted in the end, their love and hard work did. That’s not a bad thing to tell kids, especially with all of the other Disney films using such an emphasis on magical intervention and Happily Ever Afters. It’s the most realistic Happily Ever After I’ve seen in a Disney film. I really, ultimately, enjoyed the movie. Is it a perfect film? Not by a long shot. But I liked the story and the humor, and even the music was interesting. The art style was attractive and appropriate, and different than other Disney films, which makes it a unique creation. I’m sure Johnathan won’t be totally thrilled about this, but I’d like to own the movie, to put it on the shelf with the rest of my Disney fairytales that I go to when I need a dose of the unrealistic and magical. It was a pleasant way to spend an hour and a half. I just hope they’re not already planning a sequel. (No more sequels, Disney! John Lasseter, I’m looking at you!)

I do sometimes wish that he had lived somewhere other than Cleveland, though. I’ve really tried to like it here. The summertime is pretty, but so hot and muggy that it’s almost impossible to enjoy it. The winter is cold and gray. Spring and fall seem to have identity crises where they’re really not sure whether they’re maybe actually winter or perhaps summer instead, rather than a smooth transition into the next weather swing. I cannot deny that Cleveland has some beauty and charm to it. I mean, there’s charm in the cottonwood fluff that made the grass look snow-covered a couple of weeks ago, and I like seeing the leaves turn in the fall. But there’s just something about the fact that the Cuyahoga river has caught on fire more than once that doesn’t scream “ecological mecca” to me.

Cleveland has buildings. They are not the tallest buildings, or the grandest, but a few of them are very nice to look at. I especially like Terminal Tower, which has a stateliness to it that I find very appealing. I love the Playhouse Square area, with all of its theaters and bright, shiny signs. I can’t help myself. I love the lights. (And the theater that goes on inside isn’t so bad, either!)

But ultimately, I have a feeling of vague antipathy about Cleveland. I’m not alone, it seems. A few months ago, there was a news article – one of those “Best of/Worst of” kind of lists that everyone loves to read but nobody really believes because some of the info seems so far off of what we know. Forbes named Cleveland the most miserable city in the United States. I seem to be the only one who was not surprised by this. In fact, afterward, the Cleveland tourism folks and some Cleveland-centric magazine started a Twitter meme: #happyinCLE+. (The + doesn’t stick, so it has since morphed to just #happyinCLE.) People were encouraged to tweet about why they were happy living in Cleveland. It came off badly, I felt, because it looked like people were just trying way too hard to find ways in which one could be happy in Cleveland. And, to be frank, a lot of them were cases of being happy and also being in Cleveland, so it totally missed the point anyway. It did get me thinking about my status in this metropolis, however. I’m happy enough. And I am, in fact, in the greater Cleveland area. But I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I am happy to be in Cleveland.

Cleveland has a kind of self-loathing that people here seem to almost hold as a badge of honor. Nobody really seems to actually like Cleveland, except for odd moments when something nice is happening and they’re there for it. Nobody really admits it, but people are proud to have bumper stickers that say “Cleveland: At least we’re not Detroit”. That doesn’t exactly scream civic pride. There seems to be a pervading attitude of distrust of your fellow person, too. People will stare you down, just to ensure you know that they are aware of your presence, so don’t try anything funny. I witness this everywhere in this area, not jut the more active parts of town. We could be going into a store to pick up a gallon of milk, and someone might end up giving us the fisheye of suspicion.

There seems to me to be a lack of things to do. “No!” my coworkers insist. “There’s lots to do in Cleveland!” So I ask them what. And then there is a very pregnant pause. And after exhausting the museums, the zoo, Playhouse Square and the West Side Market, everyone seems to be stumped. And then, do you know what the next thing on the list is? Bars. That’s the best thing people have managed to come up with. “Well, I know this great bar over by…” And food. “Have you been to the Cheesecake Factory? I love that place!” I admit that I have not yet been to the museums, but I’ve managed to do everything else on the list, save for the bars. We’re making our way through Little Italy, one restaurant at a time, and we’ve tried a few local Thai and Indian food places, but for the most part, the chains are way easier to find than the independent, local places. (Unless you want to pay an arm and a leg to eat down on East 4th at Pickwick and Frolic or one of Michael Symon’s restaurants, which I’d like to do, but isn’t exactly in the budget for now.)

So, what is life in Cleveland for me? It is surviving. Chicago opened my eyes (and Johnathan’s) to what life could be, and to what a city should be. We realized that there’s just something lacking here in Cleveland, and that ultimately, we’re settling. We’re not really living, just surviving, and that’s no way to be. I want to move somewhere, and we’re still talking very seriously about moving next year to Portland, but who knows at this point. We’ve both realized that it is not an option to stay in Cleveland. Cheap cost of living is no reason to stay in a place that feels like it is perpetually heading downhill. I’m sure someday Cleveland will come back and thrive, but I’m not willing to wait it out here until it does.

I know that Cleveland will always be a part of our lives. Johnathan’s parents are here, and I’m pretty sure we’ll be coming back for the Cleveland International Film Festival in the future, but I can’t see it remaining our place of residence. I’m sad that Cleveland hasn’t turned out to be quite what I expected, or even something that I could grow to love after two years and nine months. Life in Cleveland isn’t living, though, and I can’t keep putting off life forever.

I need more winter gear like I need a hole in my head. These mittens, though, they have been calling to me since Jared Flood released the pattern last summer in his book Made in Brooklyn. I waited until it was available as an individual PDF, because nothing else from the book was calling to me as strongly as these mittens. I got my yarn, as usual, from Knit Picks. I went with orange, partially because I liked the color of the ones in the picture and partially because I don’t have anything that’s orange and I thought it would be nice for the dreary, dull winter.

They’re not very hard to knit, honestly, once you figure out what the pattern is doing. I started with size 6 needles, but after doing part of the pattern, I decided they would be too small, so I ripped it out and started over in size 7. I’m glad I did, too, because they fit perfectly after blocking, and they certainly would have been too small if I hadn’t gone up a needle size. The cuffs are pretty easy. They are the only part of the mittens that require cabling. I used a cable needle because the yarn is slippery and with my nickle-plated needles, I didn’t want to fight with cabling without a cable needle, even if I’m capable of doing it. After the cuffs, the charts start, and they’re pretty easy to read once printed out from the PDF. I understand that they were very small in the book, but they take up a whole page on the PDF so I had no problems reading the different symbols.

Most of the pattern is pretty clear, but I did have some problems with the chart. One of the symbols is defined simply as “purl” when it should be decreasing two stitches. It appears twice on each mitten and six times on each thumb, so I really needed to figure out what it was. After searching the internet and Ravelry, I determined that I am apparently the only person who had this problem with the pattern. I looked up common chart symbols for knitting and ended up looking up a way to do a two-stitch no-lean purlwise decrease. The left-hand chart was fine – I had no problems with it. There were some mistakes on the right-hand chart where there were some missing symbols, but by that time I was well-versed in what the pattern should be doing so it didn’t mess me up at all.

Can I just say how much I love these mittens? They’re bold and beautiful. They’re also very soft, owing to the superwash wool, and they fit me very well. I can’t wait to wear them when the weather backs down from “amazingly hot and muggy”. (Okay, so it’s only kinda hot, but it’s also only June. It will be amazingly hot soon enough.)

I did goof with this, though. I ordered 3 skeins of Swish worsted based on the yardage mentioned for the mittens, expecting to use maybe half of the third skein, if that. It’s always better to have a little more than necessary, right? Well, I think I went far beyond “a little.” I used less than 1 skein for the first mitten, and I got at least 1/3 of the way through the second mitten before I needed a second skein. I used 28 grams of the 50 gram ball, so I have 72 grams of yarn left – 171 yards! That’s almost enough to make an entire second pair of mittens! I’ve decided I’m going to make a hat to go with the mittens. I need another hat just as much as I need another pair of mittens, but how can I resist when I’ve found a wonderful pattern to showcase this beautiful yarn color?

After doing a search, I learned that most shoes touted for arch support are… well, really ugly. I wasn’t sure I was willing to walk around in ugly shoes even if it meant having support. Surely there were shoes out there that were supportive! Then, I stumbled upon the answer: Dansko shoes. No way! My mom loves those shoes, and I had never even given them a thought, mostly because of their cost. But if I was going to get shoes that supported my feet, I was probably looking at spending a pretty penny, so I might as well get well-made shoes that were likely to last. I started looking up the Dansko shoes and found a Mary Jane style that I thought would be most likely to fit my feet. Then my mom tipped me off: Dansko shoes split off from their supplier, so the shoes are not the same as they used to be. She recommended that I look at Sanita shoes, which is the company that made the old Dansko shoes.

Sanita, as far as I can tell, offers identical styles to Dansko, but slightly cheaper. Well, that’s a boon! I found a company that was selling the style in a lovely-looking brown that saved me about $15 on what I was seeing as an average price for the shoes, so I ordered a pair in the size that, listed, appeared to be my size. I waited about a week for my shoes to arrive, cursing every painful step I had to take in the meantime. When the shoes arrived, I hurriedly unpacked the shoes and admired them. They were beautiful and well-made. They were going to be wonderful and they were… way too small. Well, shit. After my initial bout of frustration, I started to look at sizing online. Johnathan suggested that we go to a store to try some on. I was able to find a place in Strongsville that said that it had those shoes in stock, and off we went to a mall in Strongsville (stopping only for a little yummy pad thai along the way).

We got to the Walking Store and I was a bit surprised at how small it was. Apparently most of the shoes were in the back, so it wasn’t really a “find it yourself” kind of store. The girl in the shop helped me find the Dansko shoes, and having felt the material that they’re made out of, I’m even more glad I made the choice to go with the Sanita shoes. The Dansko brand feels cheap in comparison. Unfortunately, the store did not have any of the Marcelle/Mary Jane style, so I was unable to try any on to ascertain my real size, but I was able to try on some of the “traditional” style. I learned that without some serious modification, there’s no way I’m wearing the traditional style of Sanitas or Danskos. I tried on a 39, which was the size that I theoretically should wear for my shoe size (I had ordered a 38 from the store online). They were far too small, and I didn’t want to ruin the shoes by stretching them to shove my feet in. She brought out a size 41, which I discovered fit my feet pretty well, but was excessively long (equivalent to a US women’s 11-11.5 – I wear an 8-8.5!). I determined that in order to fit my weirdo feet, I’d probably need to order a size 40 in the Marcelle style, which is the equivalent of a US women’s 10-10.5. Crazy! That’s the size my mom wears, but her feet are actually size 10.

The store that I ordered from made it really easy to do an exchange. I put in a new order for the correct size and sent them a notice indicating my intention to return the first pair. They sent me a return label with my second order, which covered my shipping cost for returning it! I was really impressed with the simplicity of it all, and it definitely made a good impression on me, even if the shipping was slower than I would have liked. (I didn’t pay for expedited shipping, so that’s on me.)

When I got the new shoes, I could hardly contain my excitement. I put them on my feet right away, and they FIT! It was wonderful. I had to tighten the buckles a couple of times before I found the right fit for the top, but that was all the adjustment necessary. It was wonderful. We didn’t go anywhere that night, and I worked from home the next day so they didn’t get a lot of wear, but on Friday of that week, we were meeting Allison in Columbus for fun times before she would come up to our place and we’d hang out for the weekend. It was my debut day for the shoes. We did a reasonable amount of walking – not a lot, but we weren’t sedentary, either. Not once did my feet blister, and they took longer to get tired than they normally would. It was like a revelation to me.

I’ve been wearing these shoes now for about three weeks, and I still can’t believe how great they feel. When we were in Chicago, with all the walking around that we did, my feet did not get blisters and they weren’t sore. They were tired, for sure, but they were not sore or blistered, and that, to me, is a major win. No longer do I wake up in the morning with foot pain, and my back even feels better. My ankles hurt less and they pop less. I know in my head that good shoes are important, but it has never factored as a priority for me. Now I have shoes that don’t make me hurt, and I love them. It’s amazing to me that I could be in love with a pair of shoes, but I am! I’m planning to get two more pairs.

Something I found out after I ordered the second pair of shoes was slightly devastating. This line of shoes is discontinued. Sanita is not making the Marcelle anymore! That puts the pressure on to find more pairs of these shoes if I want to get more of them (and I do). I have found some on eBay, and some on Amazon, but at around $100 a pair, I can’t just go out and buy a bunch. We’ve made a plan that I can get another pair here pretty soon, and then another a few weeks after that. I’m planning to get a pair in red patent (hot!), and a pair in black (practical), and then I should be good for quite a while when it comes to shoes.

They’re a little clunky, but that suits me. I’ve never felt particularly dainty or graceful, so the clunky shoes work. And they’re comfortable! If I treat these shoes right, too, there’s no reason why I should need new shoes in the next couple of years. That’s an even more beautiful thought.

But the fact is, I wanted to go to W00stock. I wanted to be a part of that. I mean, Wil Wheaton’s pretty cool, and so is Adam Savage, and I enjoy Paul & Storm! And there would be other funny, geeky people, too? Well, sign me up! the initial problem was that the concerts were, until recently, all taking place on the west coast. It kills me that there was a performance in Portland and I wasn’t there. I bet I would have loved W00tstock with the Portland crowd. Instead, we found out that there would be on in Chicago. Chicago isn’t too far from Cleveland. It’s most certainly within driving distance! I mean, 5.5 hours drive sucks, but it’s not impossible. So we got tickets to W00tstock, booked a hotel and made sure we could have the next day off. (I’d heard about the EPIC length of Portland’s, and there was no way I wanted to drive home from Chicago and go to work the next day. No way.)

We took the bus to the venue and got there about 2.5 hours before showtime. There were people lining up already when we walked up to get our tickets from will call, but we were hungry, so we went to get food. It was interesting to take a look at the people walking up and down the street. It was pretty easy to tell a lot of the people who were headed to the show. They were often dressed in geeky t-shirts, and, let’s face it, there’s just a certain way that most of us carry ourselves that makes it pretty easy to tell. I’m sure we didn’t get it all right, but there were some that were completely obvious. After our people watching stint (and eating some subs), we went to get in line. By the time we got there, it was already around the corner of the building. We lined up and were followed by many, many people. I couldn’t see the end of the line anymore by the time it was time to go inside. Part of that may have been because it started raining. The rain was not the drizzly, wimpy rain that I’m used to in PDX. These were serious raindrops. We happened to be right near an overhang, so Johnathan put the little camera-bag-poncho over his bag (built in – it’s so cool) and I squeezed under the overhang as best  I was able. Then someone had the nerve to want to use the door! Oh well, no more overhang. Then the line moved forward and we had a tree to shield us from the rain. Until the tree became saturated. Once the tree was saturated, it was all over. I was wearing short sleeves and was not in any way prepared for the cool weather or the rain. The couple behind us had brought two umbrellas and were nice enough to let us use their spare, which we did until we were finally let in at about 6:35.

I’m sure the merch table made a killing that night in t-shirts thanks to all of the cold, wet nerds. We made our way inside, and thanks to how early we got there, we pretty much had open choice of where we wanted to sit. We picked a spot about halfway back on a table a little bit toward stage left. Then it was a waiting game until the show started at 7:30. I knitted for a while and listened to everyone else chatting. Despite my general feelings that I’m not a true geek, I felt like I fit in with everyone there. I didn’t feel like I was somehow inferior to everyone else because of my lack of geek cred. So that was really nice. Johnathan got his camera set up and then we waited for the start of the show.

Wil Wheaton kicked it off by telling us to please not take flash pictures and also to let us know that the show was licensed under Creative Commons Non-Commercial, Attribution, Share-Alike. And then it was time for the show. I’ve been reading Wil Wheaton’s blog and I follow him on twitter, but I’ve never really had any other exposure to his work. I watched Stand By Me because Johnathan said that I should, but I’ve never seen Star Trek: TNG. He’s a well-spoken fellow.

Paul and Storm came out to kick off the show with Opening Band, because really, how else do you start off a show in which Paul and Storm are taking part? Then they left the stage. They promised to come back later, but that was all they had planned to do at the time.

I’ll be honest, a week later, I’m having trouble remembering the exact details of what happened from the beginning to the end. I do know that Wil Wheaton kicked it off with a fun story of how this W00tstock came into being (I’m sure it wasn’t embellished at all). And then, gosh. I cannot remember who went on stage first. How about some highlights instead?

• Wil Wheaton’s story of his first time seeing Rocky Horror Picture Show. I’ve still never seen it live, although I can now attest to having seen it twice on DVD. I know it isn’t the same, but especially after Wil Wheaton’s story, I’m terrified of the hazing!
• Adam Savage. Well, okay, I’ll be more specific: Adam Savage’s Jamie impressions. Adam Savage’s dance club story (he does have the musical taste of a 14-year-old girl, but that’s okay). Adam Savage singing “I Will Survive” as Gollum. (No, really.)
• Peter Sagal doing a monologue an evil villain’s henchman. And then he swore. Brilliant.
• Bill Amend – honestly, I enjoyed his bit a lot more than I expected to, and it was one of the parts that had the most impact on me. I love the funnies!
• Paul and Storm’s epic – EPIC – 35-minute rendition of “The Pirate’s Wife’s Lament”. By that time, I think everyone was punchy and ready to go to bed, but nobody wanted it to end. And the cover band jokes… oh the cover band jokes. They went on forever, and then had Johnathan making them days and days later.

Really, it was about five hours of comedy and fun. My stomach hurt the next day after laughing so hard for so long. Everyone seemed to be having a good time, including the performers, which just added to the experience.

The one thing that I wish were different was that I wish the venue had food. We ate at about 5PM, and since the show officially ended at about 12:20AM, I was quite hungry by the time the show was over. But of course it was after midnight, so most normal places were already closed. Once we finally fought our way out of the theater (we didn’t have anything to be signed, so there was no real point in sticking around for the signing, and even if I would have loved to get pictures with everyone – we were hungry and tired!),  we made our way to the bus stop and it was kind of sad. We were still processing the whole thing, but I had a feeling of loss. I had been a part of a community of people who had gathered for an event that, while part of a series, was unlike any other. No other W00tstock will be exactly the same as the Chicago one, which, I think, is part of the appeal. We got a special set of jokes and antics with a special set of performers that can never truly reproduce what went down that night. (Case in point: Adam Savage did his “I Will Survive” song again in Minneapolis the next night, but thanks to a nose bleed, it was not at all the same as the one we saw.)

W00tstock was one of those things that I think I’ll remember bits and pieces of for a long time, and recall them to Johnathan so that we can have a little giggle. I’m going to end up cruising YouTube for videos to relive certain moments of the show. It was a wonderful night and absolutely worth the drive to Chicago. If I had it to do all over again, I would absolutely do it. I would stand in the rain and I would deprive myself of food and sleep to experience that again. There’s just no way for me to adequately explain the feeling I got from being there with all those other geeks who were just as excited as I was to be in that venue, seeing those people.

If W00tstock ever comes back to the midwest (or to PDX after we move), we are so there.