apropos of anything

Oh my god y’all we were down by five in the bottom of the ninth and then the Pirates walked in two and Chipper drove in two and then Texiera hit a pop fly for the second out and then McCann hit an easy fly that should have been caught BUT THEN JASON BAY DIDN’T CATCH IT and we tied the game and now it’s in extra innings and I am so glad baseball is back.

(takes breath)

Happy opening day, ya’ll.

I meant to do a 3BT last week and didn’t get to it. I was going to do one this week (as in, today), but then I saw Aisha’s post listing off 30 things she loves, and thought, why not? So, here we go:

1. Faith. It keeps me going, keeps me focused, keeps me grateful every day for the favors that have been granted me.
2. The faithful. They inspire me to new heights.
3. And speaking of inspiration… change we can believe in. For the first time in a long time, I am hopeful. I am optimistic. I really believe, yes, we can.
4. Kids. They’re so darn cute:

5. Baseball. Opening Day is just…. four short days away, and I am beside myself with glee. I cannot wait to get back to Turner Field.
6. Adding a new recipe to my repertoire. It’s lovely to find one that’s so delicious you know you’ll be making it again and again.
7. Georgia Navigator. Keeping me informed every day so I know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away and when to run.
8. Harry Potter. The books are mesmerizing and magical.
9. Sunlight. So pure and so clean.
10. Friends. Don’t know what I’d do without them.
11. Odyssey of the Mind. Every year, those kids just bowl me over with the breadth of their creativity and energy.
12. The No Cookie List. Even though I’ve never actually enforced it, putting names on and taking them off the list amuses me to no end.
13. Toodles.
14. Philosophy’s Purity face wash and Hope in a Jar lotion. Finally I can stop feeling like I just attacked my face with a brillo pad.
15. Screen on the Green. Easily my favorite Atlanta summer festival.
16. Shake at the Lake. Second favorite Atlanta summer festival.
17. Battlestar Galactica. If this is a surprise to you, you obviously haven’t spoken to me recently.
18. A perfectly matching hijab. Hard to find, but so awesome when I do.
19. Lilies. Easiest way to get me to go all sentimental.
20. Blankets. On a cold day, there is nothing better to snuggle under.
21. Chocolate. Like you seriously didn’t think it would make the list.
22. My job. And yes, people who know me well will probably wonder whether I dipped into my secret stash of Good Stuff, but as frustrated as I sometimes get with work, it still remains that I am lucky to do what I do and to be able to work with the (mostly) awesome people that I work with, people who are really more friends than colleagues.
23. Peep-toe heels. So adorable.
24. Itr, and body splashes, and all those things that smell good. (I swear, anybody who comments to tell me I am going to hell, I will immediately block your IP. We had enough of that nonsense last year.)
25. Berries of all kinds. Bright and summery, I love them in all their incarnations.
26. Snow. It’s easy to love when you only get it once a year or so.
27. Cell phones. Seriously, what did we do before we had these?
28. And along those lines… the Internet. No explanation necessary, I believe.
29. Airports. Getting me from here to there in almost no time at all.
30. My brothers.

Things I do not love:
1. WordPress editing my code because it thinks it knows better.
2. Stalkers. Dude who keeps hitting my site because he’s repeatedly Googling my cousin: You do realize that’s extremely creepy, don’t you?

I know there was a speech yesterday. If you’ve only heard the sound bytes, you should read it or watch it for yourself. I thought it was honest and intelligent and awesome, but I don’t want to write about it just yet. All my words on this subject are so scattered the only way I could write about it right now is with abstract poetry.

Me, not a poet so much. In the meantime, let’s talk about other things! Scattered things, but in prose.

I made the world peace cookies today. They’re yummy as always, but I think I am still a little scared of overworking the batter. I didn’t make the logs as tightly as I should have, so the cookies crumbled a little upon slicing. I haphazardly patched them back together, but they still made the ugliest cookies I have ever seen in my life, and that includes the time I watched somebody make chewy cocoa cookies with non-fat yogurt. I’m going to have to serve these with the lights dimmed.

There was a tornado on Friday. It looked like this:

After it was done, my office building looked like this:

By Monday, they’d boarded up all the broken windows as well as the holes in the roof. My desk is on another side of the building, so I didn’t get affected at all (except for the still spottily functioning elevators). In those first few post-tornado hours Friday night, I worried mostly for the people who worked the overnight shift and partly for the building itself. If I am perfectly honest, I probably spend more time in that building than in any other, and as much as we joke about business continuity, I never thought I’d actually see it with its windows blown out.

We got several hours of wind and rain today (which probably barely made a dent in our overall water shortage, which means our esteemed state government may be continuing with its plans to annex Tennessee and eventually steal its Jack Daniels). The APD blocked off all the streets surrounding the affected buildings so pedestrians wouldn’t get knocked unconscious by falling windowpanes. And inside our building… well, they did this:

It was raining outside… and inside, too. I am ready for my office to be whole again now. Also for my front window to stop leaking. I wonder whether the HOA would actually make fixing it a priority if I followed Alicia’s suggestion and borrowed one of those tarps to tackily cover the leaky window.

If not, I suppose I always have ugly cookies as a consolation prize.

And I crack up.

Oklahoma may allow college students to carry guns.

Yep, that’s right. Refreshing CNN, and the New York Times, and Time, and yes, sadly, even Drudge, like the obsessive-compulsive that I am.

Things, they are not looking good. Also not looking like they’ll get resolved any time soon (and by this I mean both the results tonight and the nomination in general)… so part of me wants to go to sleep while the other part of me can’t stop refreshing. And of course, all of me wants to know what in God’s name is wrong with Ohio that two major elections in a row they have monumental screw-ups.

Ohio. It’s the new Florida.

There’s some speculation that Hillary’s ringing phone 3 a.m. ad may be what swung voters back her way, and if that’s true, I want to quote some Shonda Rhimes: Seriously? Seriously?!? A Walter Mondale fear-mongering rip-off is what convinced people in Texas and Ohio to vote Clinton? With every such passing event, I have deeper understanding and appreciation for our founding fathers, whose hard work and effort was later repealed by the seventeenth amendment.

I’d wanted it to be over, not just because I like things to be in the bag, not just because I’m tired beyond belief of Hillary and her “everything but the kitchen sink” negative campaigning (that she doesn’t even ACKNOWLEDGE, especially not when she’s prattling on to Jon Stewart about the civility of the Democratic party’s nomination process — news for you Hillary: one side is being relatively civil, and it’s not yours), and not even because I think there’s truth to the concern that the longer the primaries run, the more the Democratic candidates do McCain’s job for him. Mostly I wanted it to be over because I simply can’t take another five weeks of this nonsense, and now Clinton won’t give up until after Pennsylvania at the end of April.

I am curious, though, how Texas fits into Clinton’s (or rather Mark Penn’s) graph of states that “matter” seeing as it’s one that will likely go red in November… and also completely not looking forward to all the coverage of Clinton gloating tomorrow.

When you’re out of practice with pie crust, it takes a long time to roll out, especially if maybe you didn’t add quite as much water as you should have the night before when you set it to refrigerate. And if it takes a long time to roll out and you didn’t exactly start early because you had to finish up some work first, you might end up pulling the pie out of the oven on what is technically the next day, but at least you can go straight to bed because you spent the 40 minutes of baking time cleaning up the kitchen.

Up tomorrow: monsoon season detours in the southeastern United States on its way to Asia, and Obama and Clinton duke it out in Texas and Ohio. Things are never dull, are they?

Just busy, and a wee bit obsessed (with many things: my leaky front window, the drought, tomorrow’s severe weather forecast, the Texas and Ohio primaries, the growing food price crisis, the falling dollar, and a certain television show, to name a few).

But I promise, new post tonight, possibly even about none of those things, because obsessions shouldn’t really be encouraged (except of course if you are my DVD supplier because as much as I hold your enabling entirely responsible, if you cut me off cold turkey, I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE).