September 06, 2008
Beasts
"Come on Mr. Squirrel, you want more, don't you?" Ben taunts.
The squirrel chirps angrily.
Ben tosses his head back and laughs. "I think my work is done for the day," he says, gleefully.
Our neighbors have a walnut tree just across the fence from our back patio. Two squirrels live there, picking walnuts and dropping them on the patio to break them open and extract the meat. They make a mess, then run down to grab their food and taunt the cats. It's loud and obnoxious, and when the nuts hit our grill it can be quite alarming.
Today, the squirrels crossed the line. Too much mess, too much noise. Too much taunting. Ben stepped outside. Turned on the hose. Let loose. When I started this entry, I thought he'd succeeded in fending off the rodents. But just now a dry squirrel - the companion to the wet beast he hit earlier - loped across our patio.
Ben headed out again. Reached for the hose.
"I guess my work isn't done," he said.
I guess not.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 05:57 PM | Comments (0)
September 04, 2008
Happy fried brains
Man, oh, man. Today I worked so hard my brain hurt. I think there's a kind of pain in the brain that comes from overuse that's distinct from a headache. I whined a bit, but then I remembered that we have a third floor patio. So I stepped outside for the grassy garden, breathed a bit, looked at the distant trees, the bridge, and wandered back inside. Not every day is perfect, but even with fried brains I feel relatively happy.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 10:36 PM | Comments (0)
September 03, 2008
Nonsequitors
There are turtles on my pajamas. I bought them after the cloud pajamas ripped because Ben was endlessly amused by the clouds. Now he's endlessly amused by my turtles.
I had applesauce a few minutes ago and flashed back to childhood. I'd ask for applesauce, and my grandpa would say, "Do you mean applesass?" And I'd freak out and practically throw a fit because he said it wrong, me three years old shaking my head of strawberry blond hair. "Noooo!!!!! It's not applesass, it's applesause!!!!" And my grandpa would laugh at me.
Now Ben plays the same games, only instead of crying and throwing a fit like I did when I was three, I laugh and throw his made-up words back in his face.
I sent my old passport away today so I could get a new, unexpired, replacement. The old one was a diplomatic passport because of my dad's job. The new one will be normal, only fancier because passport technology has come a long way since 1995.
Ben said, "Now you'll get a gooflomatic passport." I could have freaked and thrown a fit. "Nooo!!! There's no such thing as a gooflomatic passport! I HAD a diplomatic passport! And now it's gone!" I could have said. Well, maybe I did say that. But then I pulled myself together and told Ben that he's the goofl0mat. And he laughed at me anyways, just like my grandpa used to do. But I know the truth. He IS the gooflomat. And I control the Internet, so I have the final say.
"I'm going to bed now," Ben said, a few minutes ago. I said I'd be up soon, but first I had to post here. "What should I post about?" I asked. "Turtle butts," he said. He was looking at my pajamas. I guess these turtles have butts, as they greenly march across fields of pink. Turtle butts it is.
Good night.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 11:05 PM | Comments (4)
September 02, 2008
Chance
My 17-year-old brother survived Burningman. I asked him if he did anything really weird, and he said, "Not too weird." I asked him if he slept all day and stayed up all night, and he said, "No." He didn't volunteer more.
What is it about the late teens and early 20s that makes boys and men speak in deep-voiced murmurs and one-syllable words? Maybe I'll get more out of Chance when I drive him to the airport tomorrow. He starts his senior year of high school on Thursday, two days after the rest of Herndon High. I suspect a little adventure was worth the academic lapse
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 10:22 PM | Comments (0)
September 01, 2008
We're ba-ack
I'd hoped, by picking a famously dark campground on the only moonless weekend of the summer, to glimpse thousands of stars. I didn't count on the clouds. It rained, it was cold, and during gaps in the chilly wet the trees were tall and blocked most of the sky from overhead. It was cold and cloudy last year when Ben and I hoped to see dark skies from camp grounds, too.
So next time when stars are the goal I think we'll head east of the Cascade Mountains.
But. But it was beautiful. The air was clean and green. Ben coaxed a fire from scavenged wood. With friends we hiked nearly 8 miles. We saw steam rising from a scalding spring. We toasted smores, cooked dinner in the camp fire, brewed coffee in the morning. I'm glad we went.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 08:40 PM | Comments (0)
August 30, 2008
Into the woods we go!
Back when we return. Until then: tents under dark and starry skies.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 02:02 PM | Comments (0)
August 29, 2008
Camping
At least three of the five Sherwood offspring will be sleeping in tents or under the stars tomorrow night, one of the only moonless weekend nights of the summer. Morgan and Chance will be surrounded by art and chaos and thousands of people in the desert at Burningman with Robin. I'll be in green woods next to a stream with Ben and Mike and Dan.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 10:56 PM | Comments (0)
August 28, 2008
News junkie
We're three weeks through a pretty awesome four weeks for news junkies. First the Olympics, then the Democrats, then the Republicans. This is the best television in at least eight years, probably longer, because these things don't usually run together for so very long. The TV is great, but so are the blogs, and so is the old-media written commentary. I love it. I'd cancel Netflix, except that I know in a week it will all be back to normal.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 09:37 PM | Comments (0)
August 27, 2008
Money
This may be the first month since I bought my car back in 2003 that I've spent more money than I took home.
In addition to all the regular expenses, I paid tuition for my database class ($350 or so), paid my share of our January airfare to Florida, renewed my lapsed memberships in the Society for Professional Journalists and Investigative Reporters & Editors, and had a couple of meals out with friends and family. It was a nice month, and I had more than enough money in my savings account to cover the extra expenses.
Last time I spent more than I made I didn't have any savings. I churned through all my cash trying to fix my old car, then had to put a rental car on a credit card so I could keep going to work, and then but another $500 on a credit card to cover the down payment for the new car I had to buy to stay employed. That was stressful. It took me more than a year to dig out of that hole.
I prefer just to save a lot of money and spend less than I make, but if every five years I lapse I have to say it's much better to lapse with a savings account.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 09:00 PM | Comments (0)
August 26, 2008
Rambling essay about books, after two glasses of wine
I'm feeling weirdly guilty and strangely conflicted.
Morgan and Robin are at Burningman, and I'm checking their mail and their cats. I stopped by today on my lunch break. There, arrayed on the bookshelves in chronological order, was the history of my literary life.
I moved to Oregon in March 2001, and when I left Virginia I left a lot of books behind. I've gone back a few times and returned with bulging suitcases of literature, but it's been clear to me for years that some of my favorites had gone missing. Now I know that Morgan stole them.
On the top of a stack of sideways books I saw "Sirens of Titan," an early '90s reprint of the Vonnegut novel, and I remembered how its happy ending made me cry. At $6, it was more than a week's allowance, more than an hour's babysitting pay, but when I finished that book I got on my bike and headed back to the Little Professor Book Store to buy "Cat's Cradle." Its tragic ending made me laugh. That's when I knew that I loved Vonnegut too much to keep buying his books new. I couldn't afford them. I was in high school, on a budget. I bought "Piano Player" next for 25 cents at a used book store. There it was, on Morgan's shelf, right under "Cat's Cradle," right above "Slaughterhouse Five."
In the first half of the '90s when you fell in love with an author you couldn't google him or look him up on wikipedia, so as I worked my way through Vonnegut's corpus that summer I also spent some days at the library reading about his life. School was starting again when I learned that Vonnegut's recurring Kilgore Trout character was modeled on sci fi writer Theodore Sturgeon. I read my first Sturgeon book in the first week of school, then shared it with a friend, and we talked about how weird it was. There it was, "More Than Human," one stack of books over on Morgan's shelf.
There was "Walden Two" next to "The Handmaid's Tale." I read those in 1996, my first term in college, a tutorial on utopias that included some studies of distopic worlds. Did Morgan steal these? I recognized my second-hand imprint of "Walden Two." I wasn't sure if it was the same edition of the Atwood novel.
I wasn't sure if that was my copy of William Gibson's "Idoru," either, or Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon." I was pretty sure that was my Tim Robbins book, but Robbins never blew me away so I didn't care. "The Communist Manifesto," which I've still never read, still had the Grinnell College book store "used book" sticker on its cover. I think another book was one I bought for a linguistics class, even though I never read it, even though I should have.
I felt robbed. Years of reading, hours of babysitting and bike rides to bookstores, my life, arrayed on Morgan's shelves.
After checking the mail and the cats, I left most of the books behind. I grabbed a few important Vonneguts. "Snow Crash," by Neal Stephenson, and also his "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" - because that one was a gift, I felt like I had to bring it back home.
A couple of the books I took with me, however, left me feeling guilty instead of robbed. "A Canticle for Leibowitz." I stole that from my dad years before my brother ever had a chance to steal it from me. My copy was printed in 1968, a decade before I was born. I remember finding it downstairs on the shelves with my parents' books, reading it, and hiding it away with my own favorite tomes.
"Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead." Did I steal that one from my dad or from my mom or from my high school? I know I read it in AP Literature in 12th grade, the cumulative work in a long study of plays. We read "The Frogs" by Aristophanes and learned about humor, then "Hamlet" by Shakespeare and learned about tragedy, then "Waiting for Godot" by Beckett and learned about existentialism, then "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern" and learned about allusion and humor and tragedy and existentialism and how entertaining they can be when they're all wrapped up together. Whoever I stole it from, it was later stolen from me.
I grabbed some of the books that Morgan stole from me, and some of the books that he stole only after I stole them first, but I left his bookshelf mostly full.
I came home and looked at my own shelves. I've paid for the library books I never returned. But not for "Henderson the Rain King," which has my mom's social security number in the cover, her student ID number when she went to college the first time around in the '70s. Not for "Bleak House," which my dad took with him to the hospital the night that I was born. It has contraction times written in the back cover. I'm stealing that one forever. Nobody can have it. I never paid for "The Horse Whisperer," either, which Fatima let me borrow in high school, and which I still haven't read and still haven't returned. I tracked her down on the Internet a few years ago to say hi and to apologize for the theft. She was surprised. No big deal, she said.
I guess that's the thing about books. We're supposed to buy them, to scrounge them, to borrow them forever, to read them, to love them, and to steal them when we have the chance. It's part of loving words so much they drive you crazy.
And that's why I'm feeling guilty and conflicted. How can I resent my brother's theft from me, when some of what he stole I stole from someone else, when upon discovering the theft my first response is to steal it all back? And at the same time, when those books are in my blood, when their words are the building blocks of how I view the world, how can I not resent a theft, although I myself am eager to commit it?
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 09:04 PM | Comments (4)
August 25, 2008
The end of summer
It's still warm every day, but it's starting to rain more often. It's not completely light out yet when my alarm clock goes off. A few leaves have turned yellow and fallen off the tree in front of our house. We're eating corn and tomatoes and rough late-summer lettuce.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 11:23 PM | Comments (0)
August 24, 2008
Update
1. Morgan, Robin and Chance should be setting up tents at Burningman by now.
2. I got an A in my database class. Now I have to decide what to do with this knowledge that has few applications in my day-to-day life.
3. I think I may also take the next class in the sequence.
4. I'm determined to go camping over Labor Day weekend.
5. Friends are coming over tonight to make pizza.
6. Ben and I have booked a just-us Florida vacation for the first week of February.
7. I really, really, really want to go to China.
8. My passport is expired, but I just got new passport photos taken.
9. Why, yes, I have been watching the Olympics. Why do you ask?
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 11:22 AM | Comments (1)
August 22, 2008
Talk about coincidence
A couple moved in next door. One of them went to high school in the same county as I attended high school, and had a math teacher who later taught people I knew. The other graduated from Grinnell College, the small rural liberal arts school where I earned my degree. They both seem very nice. What a strange, small world.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 11:44 PM | Comments (0)
August 21, 2008
Family
Chance, my 17-year-old brother, got into town last night. He interviewed at a Portland art college today. He, Morgan and Robin leave for Burningman on Saturday. Chance will miss the start of his senior year of high school in order to pursue some adventure in the desert.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 10:02 PM | Comments (0)
August 20, 2008
I survived SQL.
I just turned in my last assignment for my killer database class. Then I made this movie:
Untitled from Courtney Sherwood on Vimeo.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 09:46 PM | Comments (0)
August 19, 2008
Cardiac catheterization
Good luck with your heart stuff tomorrow, Mom! I love you!
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 09:50 PM | Comments (1)
August 18, 2008
"Dinner," or "Doing Bad Things": Two vignettes
1. An onion made us both cry tonight. So we ate it.
2. It's probably illegal, when a recipe calls for rosemary, to go for a walk around the block, stopping at neighbors' pungent gardens and returning home with overflowing pockets.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 09:40 PM | Comments (0)
August 15, 2008
More or less moot
"You catch more flies with honey," I read today. It's a cliche, but that's not what really irked me about the statement. When people write about something being more or another being less without saying what it's more than or less than, it drives me nuts.
Sometimes the "than" is obvious. "Boys more likely to outgrow asthma," I read in a recent news headline. More likely than girls, I assume, and I move on. "Commodities cost more," I read elsewhere. More than in the past, I assume. Often, however, the comparison is unclear.
You catch more flies with honey than what? More flies than grasshoppers? Perhaps you catch more flies with honey than you catch with asparagus.
I think you'll catch more flies with dung than with honey, so the point of the cliche - that we should all be sweet to one another - is moot.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 06:00 PM | Comments (2)
August 13, 2008
Rambling woman
Thank goodness this class ends a week from tomorrow. I think I might burn out if I had to maintain this pace long term. Up past midnight doing homework for the second night in a row.
The Olympics don't help. I swore I'd only watch for an hour tonight, but somehow I got sucked in for two. Same thing yesterday.
Maybe I need a couple of hours to admire athletes and think frivolous thoughts after a long day of brain churning at work, though. If I churn my brain nonstop day and night, it will turn to butter.
(Mmmm, butter.)
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 12:06 AM | Comments (0)
August 11, 2008
Not bacteria!
I just saw an advertisement for antibacterial Windex. Is there really a window bacteria problem anywhere in the world? I care if my windows are dirty or streaked, because then they are hard to see through. I couldn't care less if there are bacteria hanging out on the glass. Life without bacteria would be unpleasant and short. You'd eat, your body would be unable to digest your food, you'd die.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 08:19 PM | Comments (3)
August 09, 2008
In the name of progress
Across the street from my living room there's a small mowed field, rows of rose bushes, and beyond them an urban view - roads, buildings, a radio tower, a giant spinning milk carton on advertising a regional dairy distributor. In the middle of the field across the street, a bold white sign: "SALE or LEASE - 94,000 sq. ft. land - USE: office, high rise, condo, apartments."
Somebody's interested. A developer want to build a six-story structure with 225 units, taking out the field and four adjacent houses, according to the Hollywood Star News, a monthly neighborhood newspaper. Units of what, it doesn't say. Apartments or condos, I assume, but maybe offices, maybe a mix of all.
I can live with this. But I really hope that if this grand idea moves forward it's not only homes. In my dreams the ground floor would be a hub of commerce. Maybe a small cafe, a dry cleaner, a convenience store, a deli, a pizza shop. I could cross the street and get a pack of gum or drop off my work clothes or something, instead of walking the five blocks now required. Otherwise, I think I'd like to keep my view, thank you very much.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 07:17 PM | Comments (0)
August 08, 2008
Olympic debut
Yay Olympics! Yay America! Yay China! Nothing else can move me to watch four hours of television. I love these games, the literal games and everything they represent.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 11:28 PM | Comments (0)
August 07, 2008
His own WHAT?
Ben's big band played tonight in the driveway of one of the band members. A well-to-do band member, if the 4,000 square foot house, swank zip code and stunning view have anything to say about the matter. I was the youngest person there, excluding the 16-year-old caterer. Youngest by three years, including Ben, by at least 15 excluding him.
The Woodshed's vocalist performed Billie Holiday's "God Bless The Child," a song built around the lyrics "God bless the child that's got his own." Got his own what? I wondered, tonight, as I listened. An hour later, I wonder still.
Posted by Courtney_Sherwood at 10:30 PM | Comments (2)
