Storm Stories

"We've got a low-pressure system and a northeast breeze, we've got a falling barometer and rising seas. We've got the cumulonimbus and a possible gale, we've got a Force 9 blowing on the Beaufort scale." -- Billy Joel

Friday, 9:00 AM: I make a beautiful blueberry almond cake for a dinner party I'm hosting later in the day.

11:00 AM: Said dinner party gets cancelled because of the "hurricane" people seem to think we're getting. More cake for me, I guess.

12:00 PM: And here come the emergency email alerts from work. People actually think this hurricane thing is going to happen? Weren't we supposed to have one of these a few weeks ago, too? Lightweights.

12:30 PM: Work just contacted me. Other hospitals are evacuating, patients are getting transferred to us, and we might be short-staffed over the weekend. I agree to put my name on the call list for emergency volunteers. Crap... I guess this hurricane thing is actually happening.

12:35 PM: I just realized that putting my name on the call list means I'm confined to my apartment for the entire weekend.

1:00 PM: So what am I supposed to be doing? I've never had a hurricane before! I should stock up on food and water, I guess. I have candles and a flashlight. Laundry goes in. Phone plugs into the charger. My Dutch oven and big pasta pot get filled with water and stored. Better refill the ice tray, too.

3:00 PM: I head over to the supermarket. Bedlam! Crazy! I wasn't aware that this many people lived in my neighborhood in the first place!

3:15 PM: A woman in the freezer section is screaming on the top of her lungs about ice. "There's no ice! How could there not be any ice! What if the power goes out? I need ice!" I helpfully remind her that the power isn't out yet and that she should put some water in her freezer. "Hey, that's a good idea!" she responds.

3:20 PM: The guy on line behind me, who has a cart full of tuna fish, points at the mushrooms and head of broccoli in my basket and asks me why I'm buying so many perishable items. I say mushrooms and broccoli will last just fine in a cool fridge rather than a cold one. He nods thoughtfully. Nothing like a little rain to bring out the crazy in people.

3:30 PM: Looks like I'll be stuck in my apartment for the foreseeable future. Let's see what's on Netflix.

3:35 PM: My top recommendation is the complete series of Firefly. I've never seen that show... completely missed it when it was on the air for ten minutes ten years ago and only learned about its existence through obsessed friends during college. It has serious geek cred, though... and it stars my second-favorite Canadian. What the hell, let's give it a try!

4:00 PM: This is stupid.

4:25 PM: River Tam is annoying.

4:30 PM: Not even Nathan Fillion can save this shit.

4:35 PM: Hold on... is Jayne played by the same guy who played the Area 51 commander from Independence Day? Google Google Wikipedia Google... aha! He is! I had a huge crush on him when I was ten! Wow, this brings back memories.

4:45 PM: This isn't bad.

5:00 PM: River Tam is still annoying.

5:15 PM: Jayne shooting people is way sexier than it should be.

6:15 PM: This is awesome.

7:30 PM: Half the cake is gone. Whoops.

11:00 PM: Why hello, shirtless Jayne. Damnit, he's hot.

11:30 PM: Work sends a second emergency alert; all the lab buildings are closing for the weekend. I bet my friends -- and one doc in particular -- are freaking out right about now.

11:32 PM: The aforementioned doc in particular texts me in a panic because he's getting thrown out of his lab for the weekend and has experiments running.

11:50 PM: Jayne's pumping iron now. I could watch this all day.

Saturday, 2:30 AM: Crap look at the time! And I'm not even tired!

2:32 AM: Zzzzzz.

9:30 AM: Now that I'm washed and dressed and in my right mind, time to continue the hurricane prep. Windows and blinds are closed. Maybe I'll fill up my bathtub too. If only my stopper sealed tighter...

9:40 AM: I am the MacGyver of storm preparation.

12:00 PM: Am I supposed to like River Tam yet? Twelve episodes in and I still don't.

1:30 PM: Mom, you need to stop calling me. And no, I am not sleeping in my kitchen tonight "just in case." You do know there are knives on top of my fridge that might come raining down on my sleeping form if I kick the door the wrong way, right?

3:30 PM: I'm getting impatient with the amount of time it's taking my oil paints to dry in this weather. The skyline of Manhattan at sunset I'm currently working on has rolling hills instead of buildings, and I can't do a damn thing about it until the paint I used for the clouds is dry.

3:35 PM: I used a lot of cadmium yellow in this painting. Cadmium is a carcinogen and I'm sitting here with all my windows closed. I'll crack one just a little bit.

3:38 PM: I closed the window. Too nervous.

4:30 PM: All fourteen episodes plus Serenity have now been viewed. Jayne needs to have my babies and I still wish someone would have tossed River out of the airlock a few episodes ago. And work hasn't called me to come in. What to do...? Aha! The new season of Doctor Who started today!

4:45 PM: Who needs River Tam when you've got River Song? Sigh, what a badass.

7:30 PM: Dinner time! I made tri-color orecchiette with broccoli in a light mornay sauce, baked until golden brown. Or, more simply, glorified mac and cheese.

7:45 PM: Crap... it just got really dark out there really fast.

8:00 PM: A couple of my friends are online. Let's use Google + Hangouts to wait out the storm together!

8:05 PM: Jon can see me, I can't hear anyone, and no one else showed up. Let's abandon that idea.

10:00 PM: It's blowing something fierce out there. My bed is next to the windows. So is my couch. And the asshats across the street didn't do anything about their patio furniture. I'll drag the couch into my foyer tonight so I'm not sleeping next to panes of glass.

10:01 PM: Couch. Heavy. Ow. Forget it.

10:20 PM: Pillow fort on the floor in the foyer!

10:30 PM: This is way more comfortable than it should be.

Sunday, 2:45 AM: My ass is cold. The rest of me is fine, but my ass is cold.

2:46 AM: Oh. The couch cushions slid apart during the night and my booty fell into the vacant spot. I should rearrange my pillow fort so it's wedged against the wall.

8:45 AM: Plink plink plink... what the hell is that noise?

9:00 AM: Clock radio went off. The classic rock station is playing their usual Sunday morning Beatles lineup, and somehow all of the songs are storm-related. Guess the UK weather had a bigger effect on the Fab Four than I ever realized.

9:10 AM: Still with the plink plink plink. It's coming from the kitchen. Not the refrigerator, not the oven, not the toaster. Ah, great. My ceiling is dripping. Where's that old frying pan?

9:15 AM: Mmmm, coffee. Finding the super to ask about the flood status of the apartment above mine can wait.

10:00 AM: The streets are dry and it looks like the sun is coming out. Guess it's safe to empty my bathtub, huh?

12:00 PM: My kitchen wall is bulging. And it's squishy. Greeeat, there's water in there, too.

12:30 PM: I should have frozen half of that bread loaf I bought last week... just tried to toast a slice and found it moldy. In the chute it goes. And the supermarkets are still closed. Time to bake bread, I guess!

2:30 PM: My butter-almond bread dough rose beautifully! Now I need to flour my table, punch down the dough, roll it up with some cinnamon sugar, and let it rise for another two hours.

2:31 PM: I bobbled the flour container. Half a pound of flour is on my floor. And on my jeans. And in my handbag.

2:35 PM: Made the mistake of using a wet paper towel to mop up the flour. Now I'm Cloroxing sticky paste off my parquet.

3:00 PM: I took a walk during my dough's second rise. My neighborhood is wet but completely undamaged. Thank goodness.

4:40 PM: Bread is in the oven and the alien in my wall is gone. Now the paint just looks deflated and pathetic.

5:00 PM: Work never called for me. Woo!

5:30 PM: My apartment smells like fresh-baked bread. And the bread itself looks delicious.

5:40 PM: My apartment smells like the two burnt slices of fresh-baked bread that didn't agree with my toaster oven.

6:00 PM: I'm wandering around in circles with a steaming pot of boiled vinegar water to try and get the burnt smell out of the air. I feel like I'm participating in some sort of crazy religious ritual here.

6:30 PM: The aforementioned doc just texted me. He wants me to bring the remainder of the blueberry almond cake to clinic tomorrow. Hahahaha... he thinks that cake lasted the night... poor naive man.

7:00 PM: Baking another blueberry almond cake would replace the burnt toast smell with delicious cake smell. Hm. Do I have any milk left? Yes, but I'm low on blueberries. This will have to be a blueberry almond peach cake instead.

7:50 PM: Ironing for work tomorrow. Seth MacFarlane cartoons are on TV. Something delicious is in the oven. Typical end to an atypical weekend.

30 Day Photo Challenge: Days 5-12

"And so, if you want to be with me, you have to follow through on every word you say." --Gavin DeGraw

I'm actually doing a decent job keeping up with Oh So Lovely's 30 Day Photo Challenge...

Day 5: Someone I Love. My family and a hundred other people who may or may not be related to me at a feast celebrating our town's patron saint.

Day 6: Childhood Memory. Fresh homemade pizzelles. My apartment smelled like butter and lemon zest -- exactly the way my grandmother's apartment would smell during Christmas week every year during my childhood.

Day 7: Something New. I left Zumba class with a stitch in my side and a sense of accomplishment.

Day 8: Technology. My second set of Bose in-ear headphones, which are splitting and fraying and falling apart just as badly as the first ones did. I'm switching brands once these finally bite the dust.

Day 9: Faceless Self-Portrait. My shadow and I waited for the bus.

Day 10: Something I Made. My retro rocketship poster bathed in sunrise.

Day 11: Something Fun. A few dozen Scotch glasses and a dozen friends makes for an amazing evening.

Day 12: Close-up. My windowbox tomatoes have been on the vine for two months and still aren't ripe yet...

30 Day Photo Challenge: Days 1-4

"Please baby, can't you see I'm trying to explain? I've been here before and I'm locking the door and I'm not going back again." --Melissa Etheridge

I've decided to use my Smartphone to its fullest potential by taking on Oh So Lovely's 30 Day Photo Challenge. I started on August 9th instead of August 1st, but better late than never, right? I'll be posting the results in batches to save space.

Day 1: Self-Portrait. Talk about a clean start to the challenge!

Day 2: What I Wore. The dress has a fluffy a-line skirt and I paired it with purple platform pumps.

Day 3: Clouds. Late afternoon looking west.

Day 4: My Favorite Color. Red velvet from Two Little Red Hens.

The Lichtenstein Project: Part 2

"I think that most people think painters are kind of ridiculous, you know?" -- Roy Lichtenstein

Last week, I covered my apartment wall in clear contact paper and painted a huge Roy Lichtenstein face on it. A few days later, I picked up my brushes to finish off the mural.

 

 

 

I gave her hair, a skyline, and a giant thought bubble... but I couldn't decide what phrase should go in it. Should I leave the text unaltered from the original? Should I write something of my own? Should I steal a quote from another Lichtenstein painting?

 

I elected to leave it blank. You can draw your own conclusions about what she's thinking.

The Lichtenstein Project: Part 1

"In America, the biggest is the best." -- Roy Lichtenstein

I love pop art. I chose the color scheme of my apartment based on a piece of pop art, my friends buy me pop art for my birthday, and I've even tried to create pop art self-portraits.

I have a lot of blank walls at the moment and not enough artwork to fill them all, so I decided to invest in a print -- the hugest print I could find -- of my favorite pop art painting: M-Maybe by Roy Lichtenstein.

The hugest print I could find, however, was a measly 31" x 31". And the cheapest ones I could find were all upwards of $50. Unframed. Minus shipping.

I'm an artist and I never buy anything I can't make myself, so my path forward was clear.

Trouble is, according to my lease, I can't paint my apartment. And even if I wanted to slap some color on my walls and risk the inability to turn them pure-white again, I certainly can't paint an actual mural on them. Flat color is one thing, but you can't make brush strokes vanish with primer and a prayer.

I brainstormed. I tested. I Googled. And then, while writing a shopping list in chalk on my kitchen wall -- which features a retro rocketship design cut out of chalkboard-surface contact paper -- I thought of a solution. Why not cover my walls in clear contact paper and paint over that? Then, if I get tired of my artwork or need to remove it for any reason, I can just peel it off!

Last night, I stopped off at my local junk store and bought 27 feet of clear contact paper, bottles of acrylic paint in black, white, and the three primary colors, and a bunch of sponge brushes. Grand total: $26.74. I papered my entryway wall in plastic, smoothed out all the bumps, and started sketching.

I laid down the large blocks of color first. Then I laid down the Ben-Day dots by hand using an old Burt's Bees chapstick tube as a stamp. (This alone took two hours... no wonder Roy made his Ben-Day dots with a stencil instead of trying to do them freehand!) Then I "inked" the lineart using a narrow sponge and a lot of black paint.

It's only half-finished, but I'm loving the results so far.

Tonight, I need to borrow a ladder from somewhere. Stay tuned...

Science is Delicious

"Better living through chemistry." -- Nietzsche

 

 

The following is the transcript of an actual email exchange between a few members of my team. We understood each other perfectly without resorting to Google, though I can't tell whether that's a credit to our knowledge of chemistry or our knowledge of each other's snack cravings...

 

Coworker 1: Anyone want to go get some iced ?

 

Coworker 2: I was just about to go get  at Gotham, wanna come with?

 

Me: Will you guys please pick me up some ? I can't leave clinic!

 

Intern: Sigh. I haven't taken Orgo yet.

A Night At The Museum

"Color and light. There's only color and light." -- Stephen Sondheim







Went to the Met on Friday night. Did some drawing, wandered around. Finally caught the Alexander McQueen exhibit and it was, in a word, phenomenal. Irritatingly packed with people who know zilch about museum etiquette and how to behave themselves in a gallery, but still phenomenal.

Once Shy, Twice Bitten

"A friend's not a cheap little phony creep or a jerk trying to make a deal. A friend is a person who, most of all, cares about what you feel. And nothing is harder than learning a friend isn't real." -- Jason Robert Brown

Once upon a time, a prince from a faraway land was riding through the forest when he happened across a beautiful young maiden. She was weeping.

"Why are you crying, o fair maiden?" asked the prince. She showed him her hand, which was mangled and covered in blood. "I was feeding a beast and he bit me."

The prince unsheathed his sword. "Where did he run? I'll slay him!" he roared.

The maiden scrambled to her feet and clutched the prince's robes. "No, don't!" she pleaded, tears forming anew. "He's my friend, and he's been hunted and persecuted for so very long."

The prince gazed into her eyes, moved by the maiden's concern for the savage animal. He pried her uninjured hand from his chest and turned it in his own, examining it carefully. "Your skin is covered with scars. Are they all from him?"

"Yes. I keep feeding him and he keeps biting me."

"Why not just stop feeding him, then?"

"He's a beast, and biting is simply what beasts do. He still deserves kindness. I can't expect him to change his nature for me!"

The prince peered off through the trees. "Beasts can be tamed," he said. "He does have the ability to not bite the hand that feeds him, but he just won't show that courtesy to you." The maiden was silent. "Have you told him how much it hurts when he bites you?" asked the prince.

"All the time."

"Does he promise to stop biting you?"

"Always."

"Does he actually stop?"

"For a while. Then he bites me again. It seems like he forgets that I don't like being bitten. Either that or he doesn't realize how badly he keeps hurting me."

The prince ripped a strip of linen from his hem and began to bandage the maiden's hand with it. "In the faraway land where I was born, friends don't bite their friends," he told her. "Friends detest causing each other pain. You call your beast a friend, but remember: beasts aren't capable of compassion. In fact, it sounds to me like he thinks of you more as a meal ticket than a friend."

He bound off the linen in a perfect square knot, kissed it, and returned her hand with a rueful smile. "I'd tell you that your beast should be the one patching you up right now, but he clearly lacks the thumbs necessary for the task."

The maiden blushed. The prince gazed at her for a moment longer, then turned to mount his horse. "You deserve better than this, my dear," he told her as he gathered up his reins. He gave his steed a gentle nudge and it began to canter away.

With the prince's words fresh in her mind, the maiden sat to contemplate their conversation. She rose again, however, when the hoof beats of the prince's horse ceased. "Oh maiden?" the prince called over his shoulder. "A word of advice... forget beasts. Try for a prince next time." He winked and galloped off.

The maiden never bothered with animals again. And she met many wonderful princes who always treated her with the love and respect that a human deserves. And when the beast inevitably returned to her looking for another meal -- because, after all, he only ever sought her company when he was hungry -- she braised him in wine and baked him into a pot roast.

The End.

I've Been Waiting My Whole Life To Hear This.

"Don't you ever bring home a wimpy man! You need someone capable! You need someone stronger than you to take care of you!"

-- My mother for the last 25 years

"Don't you ever bring home a wimpy man! You need someone capable! You need someone stronger than... never mind. I don't think you'll ever find a man who's stronger than you. You're stronger than every man I know."

-- My mother yesterday

The Cumberbatch Effect

“[Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes is] lavishly, wonkily beautiful, 900 feet tall, has a voice like a jaguar hiding in a cello, and would clearly be able to work out in a second what a 15 per cent tip should be..." -- Caitlin Moran, from The Times

"The Cumberbatch Effect" is a phrase my friends and colleagues have heard me use for the better part of a year. I've been promising to blog a definition for most of that time, but life kept getting in the way.

Until today.

The man who inspired the phrase, the incredible British actor Benedict Cumberbatch, is about to get a hell of a lot more famous than he already is. He just snagged a film role portraying one of my all-time favorite literary characters in what's sure to be one of the biggest blockbusters of all time. Thus, I need to put this definition in print so people all over the world have a phrase to describe their emotions when The Hobbit is released and they find themselves oddly attracted to the CGI dragon.

the cum·ber·batch ef·fect

noun: the phenomenon by which an ordinary-looking male is perceived as being significantly more attractive than he actually is due to the deep, sexy timbre of his voice. See also: rickmanssage.

In lieu of an example sentence, I present the following: