A car-loving cat

One thing I've really enjoyed about staying with my parents is their cat, Ginger (short for Gingervere--a name I'm pretty sure was derived from her color plus my little brother's love of the 1967 Camelot). Several Jane Austen adaptations also topped the list of his favorite movies as a kid, and the funny thing is that my sister and I were never really that into them ourselves. I think it had more to do with the fact that while my family owned the multi-disc Pride and Predjudice, the video collection was rounded out with the likes of Mighty Ducks II and one or two other random movies people sent us . . .

But I digress. So, the other day, my dad and Jesse picked me up around 7:30pm at school. As I was getting into the backseat of the car, they both told me to be "careful" multiple times. It was dark and all I could see was that I was going to have to sit on some of Jesse's textbooks. The fact that he would never have been protective of such property didn't cross my mind owing to the line of cars waiting behind us. I vaguely sensed that there was something at my feet--a box perhaps?--but it wasn't until we got to the MTC and I said "it almost feels like there is some live animal down here" that dad/Jesse confirmed the presence of said live animal.

Apparently, Ginger had hopped into the car that afternoon at 3:30 and wouldn't budge. Rather than fight with her, my mom let her stay, thinking she would be home again soon. Well, 5 hours later, the car hadn't yet made it home and Ginger was curled comfortably on the floor in the back seat--though she was holding very still, which is how I mistook her for a box. That and I'm really used to things (like a baby) moving by (okay, in) me and don't notice it so much any more. Once we pulled up to the house, she reluctantly got out of the car and took up her normal post sitting on the dining room table.

But the best car-cat story goes back to the days when Josh and I were dating. One summer night, after having been at my parents' house to visit me, he was driving down the street by the temple when Ginger suddenly jumped through the sunroof! She had been surfing on top of the car for at least 5 minutes.

Gypsy Cab

My little brother, Jesse, is an amazing drummer--really. He's been playing for, what, eight years or something now?

He is now in a band with members who match his talents. The guitar and bass players are technically amazing and the singer has such a great voice. And, from the kitchen of my parent's house, I often enjoy their practice sessions going on in the basement. They've been getting ready to compete in the state high school battle of the bands (after having won their region).

But, they haven't done much--okay, none--in the way of playing live. So last night we showed up at a local venue, Velour, to hear them play on open mic night. Our hopes weren't set too high. Upon trying to pay, Josh's friend and Velour owner, Corey, waived our money aside, responding to our protests with "sometimes open mic night is not a gift." And, truth be told, it wasn't. But it especially wasn't for my parents, who had been there since 8pm, listening to a drunk guy try to tune his guitar for a half-hour on stage and endless pop-acoustic-one man/woman guitar acts.

When Jesse's bad, Gypsy Cab, took the stage, there was a palpable sigh of relief just to see something different--four guys armed with a guitar, a mic, a cheese grater, and spoons. And their feet. They immediately broke into a joyful, upbeat shindig of the best kind--a mix of blues, funk, soul, rockabilly . . . think the White Stripes on ritalin, but in a good way. It was fantastic. It felt like they stomped up a soulful cloud of dust on the stage, and then they quietly sat down. And the crowd erupted.

I think these 16-year-old boys have a bright future ahead. To check out their (non-acoustic) music, go here.

Oscars

Last night my friend Kristin hosted a fabulous Oscar party with delicious food and great decor.

My favorite part of the whole show? Seeing this guy (and he looked so happy!):
I wonder if Ian McEwen was there too. I realized that I would be really excited for an "author's Oscars."

Other than that, I'm really glad that Once won the best song and I love Jon Stewart for letting Marketa Irglova have her say. Oh, and I loved Tilda Swinton's acceptance speech.

Films of 2007

Hi, this is Josh. Each year before the Oscars I post my choices for the best and worst films of the past year. Below are my choices for 2007.



Excellent (2007) These were my favorite movies of the year, by far.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford . The Darjeeling Limited . Gone Baby Gone . Grindhouse . Hot Fuzz . In the Valley of Elah . Juno . The King of Kong . Lars and the Real Girl . Lions For Lambs . No Country For Old Men . Zodiac .


Very Good (2007) These were very well made films, but not my favorite.

3:10 To Yuma . 300 . Air Guitar Nation . Atonement . Breach . Crazy Love . The Diving Bell And the Butterfly . Eagle vs Shark . Fido . Girl 27 . The Great Debaters . The Host . Into Great Silence . L’Iceberg . Michael Clayton . My Kid Can Paint That . Once . Paris Je T’aime . The Price of Sugar . Protagonist . Rescue Dawn . Rocket Science . The Savages . Sunshine . Sweeny Todd . There Will Be Blood . The TV Set . Waitress . The Wind That Shakes the Barley .


Above Average (2007) Not amazing, but better than most of the crap out there.

28 Weeks Later . Alpha Dog . American Gangster . Arctic Tale . Black Sheep . Black Snake Moan . Blades of Glory . Blue Harvest . The Bourne Ultimatum . Broken English . Bury Me At Wounded Knee . Cash Back . Charlie Wilson’s War . Dan In Real Life . Death Sentence . Eastern Promises . Evan Almighty . Falling . Fay Grim . For the Bible Tells Me So . Goya’s Ghost . Hairspray . Harry Potter And the Order of the Phoenix . He Was A Quiet Man . I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With . I’m Not There . Interview . Into the Wild . Klimpt . Knocked Up . Lonely Hearts . Maxed Out . A Mighty Heart . The Namesake . Noriko’s Dinner Table . Ocean’s 13 . Paprika . Persepolis . Ratatouille . The Real Dirt On Farmer John . September Dawn . Seraphim Falls . Shrek the 3rd . The Simpson’s Movie . Sleuth . Smokin’ Aces . Stephanie Daley . Superbad . Surf’s Up . Talk To Me . Terrorist Advocate . Walk Hard . The War Tapes . Wassup Rockers . We Are Marshall . We Own The Night . Year of the Dog . You Kill Me .


What’s Wrong With Utah County? (2007) These never played in my area.

Avenue Montange . Berkeley . Brand Upon Brain . Day Night Day Night . Ghosts of Abu Gharib . A Few Days In September . Lake of Fire . Manufactured Landscapes . Standard Operating Procedure . Summer 04 . Taxi to the Dark Side . Ten Canoes . The Unknown Soldier . Vedis . Yiddish Theater: A Love Story .


I’ll Catch It On DVD (2007) Wanted to see it, but not that bad.

Amazing Grace . Brooklyn Rules . Cassandra’s Dream . Cloverfield . Even Money . The Final Season . I Am Legend . Joshua . King of California . The Kite Runner . The Last Winter . Live Free Or Die Hard . Right At Your Door . Sea of Dreams . The Wendell Baker Story .


Biggest Disapointments (2007) I had hopes that fell flat.

30 Days of Night . Boss Of It All . The Contract . Elizabeth the Golden Age . Evening . Factory Girl . Fracture . Halloween . Hatchet . The Invasion . Pirates of the Caribbean at World’s End . Redacted . The Sasquatch Gang . Spiderman 3 . Tenacious D And the Pick of Destiny .


Guilty Pleasures (2007) Don't tell anyone.

Dynamite Warriors . Kickin’ It Old School . Resident Evil Extinction . Transformers .


Still Waiting For From Last Year (2007) Whatever happened to these?

Be Kind Rewind . Genova . Mister Lonely . Leatherheads . Paranoid Park . Snow Angels . Synecdoche, New York .


Most Anticipated For Next Year (2007) It's going to be another great year.

Be Kind Rewind . Body of Lies . The Brothers Bloom . Burn After Reading . Diary of the Dead . The Fantastic Mr Fox . Gentlemen Broncos . Hamlet 2 . Indiana Jones 4 . The Killing Room . Lakeview Terrace . Leatherheads . Machete . Paranoid Park . Semi-Pro . Sin City 2 . Snow Angels . Step Brothers . Stop Loss . Synecdoche, New York . The Trial of the Chicago 7 . Vicky Cristina Barcelona . Where the Wild Things Are . Youth Without Youth . Zack and Miri .

The saga continues

So, we're still living at my parents' house. We've been there for two weeks today, and it looks like we're going to be there another two weeks more or less (probably slightly more).

But we are going to have a model bathroom--that we didn't pay for--when this is done. I'm trying to keep that in mind.

Belly and Blockus

This is me with my latest accomplishment--a six+ month belly (about 29 weeks to be exact).

And this is my brother-in-law, Jon, with his latest accomplishment (since getting into dental school)--a perfect Blockus game, meaning he got every last piece onto the board.

What no one told me about pregnancy

Among other things . . .

. . . your stomach muscles separate?

I guess this makes sense logically--they can't stretch forever. But I had never thought about it until in doing a sort of sit-up off the couch, Josh suddenly yelled "I see the baby's arm! Ah!"

You've probably already realized that it was no baby's arm but instead whatever innards are normally concealed by my abdominal muscles making an appearance in an "arm" shape down my stomach. Basically, when I flex my stomach, it turns into a pyramid shape with the tip being a lot squishier than the rest.

And, folks, it's freaky.

And I just found out they never totally knit together again.

Mold, mold, mold

When Sears delivered our washer/dryer unit back in September, they ripped our linoleum. It's taken until now to get to the point where we could turn in an estimate to them. Yesterday a guy came out to look at the floor, and--to make a long story short--he/we discovered that an old toilet (removed before we bought the house) had caused water damage to previous flooring that had subsequently been simply covered up by multiple layers of flooring and linoleum. So yesterday, Josh spent a good six hours ripping up four wet layers of floor and scrubbing what was about 1/4 inch of black mold from the original wood floor. SO GROSS! I'm not allowed in the house, but I've seen pictures and they're not pretty. I'll post some when our lives are put back together. We're staying with my generous and gracious hosts of parents in the meantime.

After Josh finishes pulling up the remainder of the flooring today (the edges are tricky with all the nails) and scrubbing the wood floor about a million more times, then letting it get really dry, a plumber will have to come out to move our old clawfoot bathtub (in addition to all the other bathroom appliances) so that Josh can rip the floor out under that. But the pipes to the bathtub and sink are so old, there is a good chance they will break when those two items are moved, so we'll likely end up replacing them with new plastic ones. Then we are going to put tile down.

But, surprisingly, I'm not freaking out. I don't know why. In fact, I'm feeling grateful for the following things:

1. That Sears ripped the linoleum in the first place so that we could find out about a problem that, left unfixed, could have posed a health hazard to the baby and eventually rotted our floor to the point that our heavy tub could have fallen through it! (The plumber's words.)

2. Even though this is going to cost more than just putting down linoleum would have, we're saving a lot on the total cost by Josh doing all of this horrible clean-up himself, and the Sears payment will cover a lot of the tile install.

3. We've been referred to a great plumber who is nearly retired and therefore has lots of experience working with houses and appliances the age of ours (i.e. 100 years old).

4. Our pipes are super easy to get to--they're all exposed in the basement and won't be much trouble to replace. And if a couple break, that's two pipes we should be replacing eventually anyway. Plus, we'll have better water flow in our bathroom.

5. We will have tile in our bathroom!

6. The bathroom will no longer have that faint, but strange, odor I can never get rid of.

7. We now know we have nice wood floors under our carpet, should we ever chose to restore them.

8. This happened before we got carpets cleaned in the rest of the house and before we deep cleaned or put any furniture in the baby's room.

9. The water in our bathroom sink had been of lower volume than normal. The plumber fixed it (for free) while doing the estimate and also checked all the other pipes in the house and declared them leak-free. We get some water on our basement floor sometimes, and I've been terrified that we have some major leaking problem. Not so.

10. Josh is doing all the work.

Josh is amazing, by the way.

An embarrassment

Why is it that the one Mormon candidate to ever get this far in a presidential bid has to end his campaign with the following statement:

"If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror."

Oh. my. gosh. Talk about a politics of fear. A Democratic win = a "surrender to terror"? What happened to this guy? He used to sound somewhat rational. It makes me embarrassed that he's representing my religion to the world and also thankful that his decision to suspend his campaign will render him less able to do so.

See the full article here.

Six months

That's right--I'm six months pregnant today. Crazy. I'll have to post some pics soon that show how much I'm showing. I've really popped out a lot. I can't believe how fast the second trimester flew by when the first one felt so long. I feel like there is so much I still need to do! Any tips on the most important things to focus on during the last three months (besides the obvious things like getting the nursery ready, etc.)?

Happy Super Tuesday!

Oh, today is so exciting! I can't wait to go home (well, actually to Kristin's house) to watch CNN. Kristin and I got to the polls this morning about five minutes after they opened at 7am and there were already a handful of people there. I have a feeling it's going to be a busy day.

And can I just say that this country does not make it very easy for one to vote? Both Kristin and I are active committee members of the county's Democratic Party, and yet neither of us had been informed that apparently our precinct had been cut in half. Though Kristin voted at the same place as me in November and never received any notification of a location change, her name wasn't on the list and she had to go to a different building to vote. And we are informed, educated, politically savvy and dedicated women! So Kristin made the extra trip to vote, but how many people would take the time to do that on a busy morning? When I teach my freshman about civics, their main questions are how to get registered and where to go to vote. It seems like we do a whole lot of "you really should vote" and a whole lot less of "this is how to vote" in the US of A.

Also, why in the world do we always have to vote on a week day? Making major election days into holidays or holding elections on weekends would make so much more sense--so much sense, in fact, that I'm inclined to believe there is some kind of conspiratorial group somewhere preventing it. Think about it: if elections were on Saturdays, folks like me would volunteer at the polls. And though I'm no computer whiz, I promise I know more about electronic voting machines than the congregation of 80-year-olds (as sweet and cute as they are) attempting to run them on a Tuesday. Let's face it--they have a hard enough time remembering that L comes after K. And I really mean no disrespect to 80-year-olds. Josh's grandparents are stand-up members of that demographic, still sharp and supremely capable. But then they aren't the type who have nothing to do on a Tuesday.

I do owe the comic highlight of my morning though to the volunteers' collective hearing loss. Right before I received my voting card, the woman handing it to me was yelling (ostensibly to the woman 8 inches away from her but actually to the entire room and down the hallway), "We have a Democrat, here! We have a Democrat!", in case anyone was wondering what those looked like in Utah. Besides getting to bask in the "outed" Democratic spotlight, my blue affiliation also let me skip the registration line that was already starting to form. Because for some reason, the Utah Republican Party doesn't feel like it has enough of the state's loyalty and demands registration in said party before one can cast a vote in their primary. But I guess that makes sense, because if I was allowed to vote in the Republican primary, I would probably vote for Romney because I think there is a way better chance of Obama (I'm hoping!) beating him in the general election than beating McCain. And Utah is never gonna go to Romney.

Right. Well, that brings me to this. I could post the video here, but that would require more technological know-how than an electronic voting machine requires, and I never claimed that. Also, it might make my blog slow to load, and I hate that. But it's a cool tribute to the candidate who received my vote today, though it is a little celebrity-heavy, not to mention heavy-handed. But I really like the idea. And it really does (blush) make me get all excited and inspired feeling.

Which brings me to my final topic today. How much do emotions affect the way you vote? On the one hand, I consider my vote for Obama to be extremely calculated. He is the one candidate that I pretty much agree with and I also think has a chance of winning. In truth, I find myself slightly more aligned with Clinton (why does everyone call her "Hillary"?), especially when it comes to health care. Her policy is substantially stronger I think than Obama's. But she'll never win. And she'll so never win if it's McCain she's running against. And do you know why McCain would win? Because people think he's a nice guy. And that he stands for something. What? They're not so sure. Josh has even been known to take this line. But let me get back to Obama. So it makes logical sense for me to vote for him. However, having said that, I have to say that he also really appeals to me on an emotional level. He feels fresh, hopeful, and "presidential" in the best sense of the word. And the sad thing is that I know those three adjectives have been oh-so-carefully cultivated by his campaign. That's not to say he couldn't actually embody them, but they are part of an intentionally manipulative message. Of course, all campaigns are intentionally manipulative, but my point is this: why don't we actually spend more time looking at these people's policies?

There are actually a few answers to this question that make some sense. 1) Policies change. The isolationist George W. Bush who was elected in 2000 was miles away from the preemptive attack dog George W. Bush who named an "axis of evil" in his 2001 state of the union address. 2) Presidents don't actually control policy. That's Congress. Sure, the president helps set agendas and priorities in Washington and has a good measure of lobbying and veto power, but in the end he (or she!) is the executor of policy. That's it. 3) Most candidates' policy positions are so vague and/or unrealistic as to be pretty unhelpful forecasters of actual actions. (This is the part where you think to yourself "politicians always lie.") That's not what I'm saying. Instead, it's really hard to get an uninterested (not disinterested, which means "unbiased," everyone, including reporters and academics) American public to listen to longer than 10-second sound bytes about complex issues.

Having said all of that, I am still an advocate for voting on the basis of policy--both in terms of record and statements. Why? Because what better thing do you have to go off of? Looks? Gender? Race? Religion? "Good vibes"? I've heard people say they're still deciding between the likes of Romney and Clinton or McCain and Obama. Though the last two are ever-so-slightly closer on the political spectrum than the first pair, these candidates are light years away from each other! They have wildly different ideas about the course of America's foreign policy (Iraq in particular), the morality of torture, the nature of U.S. health care, who and what deserve tax breaks, etc. And these are things that matter!

On the other hand, there are some policies (like . . . dare I say it? . . . abortion) that actually matter less to our everyday lives but are so emotionally laden that people get caught up in them. And I ban my freshman from writing about them. I realize I just opened a can of worms, but I'll keep it short here by saying there are lots of things, including abortion, I wouldn't do and others would do be they legal or not. And I don't believe in making my personal (both individual and Mormon) moral code into national law. But beyond that, abortion (or some similar topic) is one issue in a huge mix of issues, most of which--especially health care--could and should be considered "moral issues." And they are worth being "emotional" over. But when passion or anger or some other emotion becomes so consuming on just one issue, I think it impairs our ability to vote responsibly and ethically.

Okay, see me stepping down from the soap-box now? What do you expect? It's Super Tuesday!

New First Presidency

So, I never did get around to posting about this man and how much I'll miss him . . . . . . though I'm so happy he is now with his little wifey.

But I was also excited to learn who was going to comprise the new First Presidency: President Monson (who went to high school with Josh's grandma), Elder Eyring, and . . . Elder Uchtdorf! The last one was obviously a bit of a surprise, but a pleasant one. It will be cool to have the first non-American in the First Presidency as well as someone so young.

For you craftys

So, supposing I wanted to sew a shape like this. . .

. . .out of some fabric like this. . .
. . .and mount it to a wall. Do you think wallpaper glue or starch would work? And would it ruin the paint underneath if I removed it in the next few years?