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Sunday, November 28, 2004 ( 8:40 PM ) Girl Detective I'm moving. Virtually, this time. I haven't even unpacked all the boxes in our new old house, but I'm on the move again, this time to a new web address. Updating on two weblogs has been tough. Once I thought I needed to keep pop culture and pregnancy/parenthood separate. Silly Girl Detective. I now understand the wishful thinking of such a false dichotomy. As it says on the Dr. Bronner's bottle, it's All One. And now it's all one weblog at the all new Girl Detective. Thank you, and good night. I hope to see you there. | Friday, November 26, 2004 ( 9:43 AM ) Girl Detective I knew an alcholic who said that he never went out on New Year's Eve; that was for amateurs. I feel much the same way about shopping the day after Thanksgiving. Just because everyone else is doing it not only means that I don't have to, it may be the best justification for not doing it. That being said, our favorite children's store is having a "retirement sale". We worry that this means it is going out of business, since it is a good, local alternative to the wretched Babiesrus, a store certain to resemble a low level of hell today. So we may check out the retirement sale, since we've been meaning to pick up some climbing toys for the baby anyway. | Wednesday, November 24, 2004 ( 9:22 AM ) Girl Detective Years ago, my shopping philosophy was "If I can rationalize it, I can afford it." Several thousand dollars of debt and many, many years later, I can say I am mostly over that very damaging piece of nonsense. I am not, however, completely out of the woods. I realized recently that I have a new shopping philosophy: If I can buy it at Target, I can afford it. The scale is smaller, but the faulty reasoning that underlies it is no less full of shit. | Tuesday, November 23, 2004 ( 9:05 AM ) Girl Detective Here are the things I noticed as I watched the first twenty minutes of Huff, the new drama on Showtime starring Hank Azaria. -Stylized opening with moody music, both reminiscent of Six Feet Under. -Hank has a weird little fountain of hair at the front. Looks like Nic Cage's. Is that the last hurrah of their front hair, or is it the tuftiness of implants? -Oh, look, he imagines stuff, as happens on all the edgy dramas these days: Six Feet Under, Rescue Me, etc. -He's ogling a woman with giant tits. Ew to both of them--him for ogling and her for aspiring to look like Barbie. She gives him the finger, which is ridiculous, because she is not trying to hide her assets in that pink tank top and unpadded bra. Take some responsibility for your sluttish wardrobe choices, woman. -Boy makes accusations of incest, brandishes gun shoots himself. Sad, but it's been done. Too many times. -Hank goes home to much younger looking wife, and not that much older looking mother. Who the hell cast Blythe Danner, the WASPiest looking WASP in the world, as Hank's mom? There's no resemblance! -Plus, while the IMDB indicates that there are twenty one years between them, technically enough for them to be mother and son, he looks older and she looks younger. It actually looks like there might be, at most, about 12 years between them. Hank and Mom trade insults. Wife complains about Mom. We discover Mom lives on property. At that point, I'd had enough. The hair fountain, the distortions of reality, the incongruous casting, the trite staged crisis, the creepy relationship with the mother. In sum, icky. I watched the premiere of House last week. It was no prize either--is there really a need for another medical procedural drama? But the main character, played by Hugh Laurie, showed some promise. I'll give the second episode a shot. Both the premieres of Huff and House suffered from "been there done that", which is normal for a first episode. House had a bunch of cliches, but a few moments of genuine wit. Huff, on the other hand, was working so hard to be quirky and original that when it failed, it did so spectacularly, and became instead off-putting and unpleasant. | Monday, November 22, 2004 ( 9:17 AM ) Girl Detective I had a thankfully brief bout of writers block the other week while waiting to hear whether my husband had been laid off. Once we heard for certain, though, I was able to get back to the business at hand, namely posting on two weblogs and continuing to hammer out bad prose for Nanowrimo 2004. In the meantime, my friend The Blogenheimer thoughtfully sent me this link on hacking ones way out of writers block. I am grateful that I don't need it today. I've got a list of over twenty potential blog topics and I am on track to hit 50K words for Nanowrimo by month's end. I think there is something about the mad frenzy of Nanowrimo that unleashes the floodgates of all writing. I feel confident, though, that I will look back on this fruitful period someday with bitter gall, as I sit staring at the blank screen or page. And at that point, I'm going to be very glad for that article on writers block. | Friday, November 19, 2004 ( 8:01 AM ) Girl Detective The vacuum cleaner was messing with me. Earlier this week I wrestled with the angel in the house. I think she won. During the baby's post-bath naked time the other night, I noticed that his feet got filthy as he toddled about our upstairs hallway and thought it was time to do some cleaning. Running the vacuum cleaner is something that I can do while the baby is awake; it entertains him. One of my key lessons of motherhood is to do whatever I can do while the baby is awake, saving his precious, precious sleep time for those things that I absolutely can't do with him around, like writing. So I popped him into his play area and got out the vacuum, figuring that running it over the small area of upstairs carpet would take something like five minutes, if that. Then I slipped into a time warp. See, when our last vacuum cleaner smelled as if it was burning even after we changed the belt and the bag, we broke down and got a new one. We went to Target and brought home one that was medium fancy and medium expensive. My husband was really pushing for a Dyson because of its geek factor, but common sense and Consumer Reports ratings prevailed. One of our new vacuum cleaner's features is a light on the bottom that switches from red to green when the area you have gone over is "truly" clean. The red light chased me around the upstairs hallways. I would go over an area, and over it again, and again, and get little blips of red here and there. I thought of stopping, but figured that since I had the machine out, and the baby was happy--in fact fascinated by, you guessed it, the ever-changing red/green light--that I might as well do a thorough job. The upstairs hallway is small, but irregularly shaped, making quick, even passes difficult. The red light would flash even in areas I had just gone over that were green. Was it possessed? Was it messing with me? More likely, I realized, it was just so filthy that normal attention wasn't even making a dent. We moved in two months ago, and had never yet vacuumed the upstairs carpet. The previous owners had a cat, two small children and they left the house in the technical definition of broom clean--fine in the middle of the wood floors and icky in the corners. Who knows how dirty the carpet was, since it is a very practical dirt-grey color. I do not know how long it took me until I got only the green light. Twenty minutes? Thirty? More? Long enough, certainly, that I could put the vacuum away and feel I had done more than enough cleaning for quite some time. That is, until I set off the smoke alarm in the kitchen by using the oven. Days later, I still haven't cleaned the oven. It's self cleaning, too, so in theory this should be easy. Instead, I have just avoided using the oven. That's not going to work for long, though. I feel a pumpkin pie coming on. So I hope to recover from the vacuum extravaganza soon. Not just because I hate cleaning and have better things to do. But because it's now getting in the way of pie. And that's unforgiveable. | Wednesday, November 17, 2004 ( 8:24 PM ) Girl Detective We watched the season premier of House last night, starring Hugh Laurie, who we remember fondly from Blackadder. House was only OK. It had more than a few howler moments of medical show cliches. But Laurie is good, and if the show can get more of the dark funny moments and less of the "random medical mystery solved" (yawn) then it might be worth watching. | 
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