Average Jane

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  • Average Jane’s Guest List

    I couldn’t resist picking up this meme from J-Walk Blog.

    Ten Bloggers for Dinner
    The
    goal of this exercise is to identify nine other bloggers that you would like to
    meet for dinner/drinks. The only caveat is that these bloggers must be strangers
    — you haven’t met them before. State the blogger’s name, a link to the blog,
    and why you would like him/her to be in attendance.

    This is going to be a toughie, so don’t feel offended if you don’t make the cut, but here are the first nine who spring to mind for me:

    1. John Walkenbach of J-Walk Blog – Not only because he was an early Average Jane supporter and links to me all the time, but because it would be a great chance to pick his brain about Excel and music.
    2. Yvonne DiVita from Lip-Sticking.  She’s a fellow Marketing Babe and I have a feeling we’ll meet in person sooner or later anyway.
    3. M. Giant of Velcrometer.  We could talk about Television Without Pity and life with lots of cats.
    4. Alice of finslippy, because if she’s half as funny in person as she is on her blog, we’d spend the whole meal laughing uncontrollably.
    5. Alex Boese of Museum of Hoaxes.  I’ve read his book and I’m sure he’d have lots of great stories to share.
    6. Bakerina of Prepare to Meet Your Bakerina.  If she’d come over early and help me make dinner, what a coup that would be!
    7. James Lileks whose blog, The Bleat, at lileks.com was entertaining me before I knew what a blog was.  He, of all people, would surely appreciate my extensive Jell-o mold collection.
    8. Sarah of sarahintampa.com because we have similar tastes in movies and TV shows and I always appreciate another girl geek.
    9. Fi from Kiwifruit – another early Average Jane reader who could regale us with tales of living in beautiful New Zealand and pass along gardening tips.

    If I weren’t compelled to stop at nine, I’d squeeze in the rest of the people in my blogroll who aren’t lunch buddies or relatives.  I check your blogs every day – really I do!

    If you end up creating a similar list, tell me about it in the comments and provide a link.

  • Average Jane’s Weekend Plans

    On Saturday, I’m planning to spend the afternoon wandering through antique stores with one of my friends.  I don’t need or want anything in particular, but that’s beside the point. 

    Now that I’ve completed my extensive collection of faux copper Jell-o molds, the only thing I still look for while antiquing is old Oz books (as in "The Wizard of Oz" and the rest of the L. Frank Baum Oz series).  A good, hardbound, early 20th century Oz book can run $75 or more, so an Oz book bargain is my antiquing holy grail.  I’ve even had dreams in which I find a small-town antique store that contains a whole shelf of Oz books at some ridiculously cheap price and I can buy as many as I want.  Yes, folks, that’s what book geeks dream about.  Sad?  Oh, a tad.

    On Saturday evening, we’re going to a grand opening celebration for a friend’s new auto tuning shop.  We had meant to give him a hard time about hiring a band without asking us first, but since our band is on indefinite hiatus, it takes a lot of wind out of that idea.  It’s probably best that we just shut up and eat our free canapes.

    Sunday needs to be a day of junk mail shredding and tax paperwork gathering.  I’ve waited so long on my business taxes that I might as well bring our personal tax stuff to the accountant at the same time. 

    Okay, wow, I’m even boring myself today.  Have a great Friday and a relaxing weekend.  Later!

  • Average Jane Stays Up Too Late

    Sleeping is one of my favorite activities, which makes it all the more uncharacteristic that I’ve been staying up really late recently.  I still wake up at 6:30 or 7:00 a.m., so I’m starting to get pretty worn down.

    I used to be asleep by 10:00 or 10:30 p.m., but lately I find myself still surfing the net while Craig Ferguson introduces his final guest.  I’m not accomplishing anything worthwhile, unless you count gaining encyclopedic knowledge of Aqua Teen Hunger Force.  (And, damn, that’s a bizarre show.  Bizarre, and yet I cannot look away.)

    If I were shredding my mountainous piles of junk mail or even folding laundry I might be able to justify the squandering of midnight oil.  As it is, all I can claim is more quality time with the cats.

    On another subject, it was interesting to read everyone’s comments about bad pets yesterday.  I think we’ve learned that we shouldn’t attempt to befriend poultry.  Assuming that scientists are correct that modern birds descended from dinosaurs, perhaps we should take a moment to appreciate the fact that our world isn’t overrun by pea-brained, aggressive, toothy lizards.  It’s one thing to be attacked by a peacock, rooster or goose – it would be quite another to be chased down by even a small T-Rex.  Just a little food for thought as your week winds down…

  • Average Jane vs. the Peafowl

    When I was a kid, my parents decided that it wasn’t enough to keep horses, chickens, dogs and cats – they wanted something more exotic.  They procured a half-dozen peachicks and we raised them in a cardboard box under a lightbulb until the pullets were big enough to live in the barn.

    One thing you’ll notice about peacocks and peahens is the tiny, tiny head.  Naturally, this houses a tiny, tiny brain – one that fixates mainly on food, especially if you’ve trained its owner to view you as a food source.  We quickly learned that hand-raising peafowl resulted in free-range, food-seeking menaces.  Every time we went outside to work, garden or simply sit in our grape arbor, there came the peacocks, begging for treats.

    That would have been fine, except that the older and more aggressive they got, the more they began to demand food rather than hint about it.  Eventually they’d just attack anyone who dared set foot outside.  I think I may still have talon scars from our peacock, Scruffy, jumping on my back as I mowed one day.

    Aggression alone doesn’t make peacocks bad pets.  You have to also take into account the screeching and walking around on the roof that terrifies babysitters.  Then there are the giant lumps of poo they leave everywhere they go, including all over the family cars (which really left the full service gas station attendants wondering).

    One of the most frustrating things about peacocks is their lack of self-preservation sense.  I clearly remember going out to the barn after an ice storm and seeing a row of peafowl perched along the peak of the barn roof, coated in ice.  They survived, but wouldn’t it have been smarter to just go inside?

    So here’s my question for you today:  What animal have you ever owned that really wasn’t suitable as a pet?  Discuss amongst yourselves – I’m off to work.

  • Average Jane’s Surfeit of Dishes

    Yesterday’s post on Fussy.org made me realize that I have a ridiculous number of dishes.  In fact, I have nearly three complete sets.

    It all started with the set of cheap, clear glass Corning dishes I bought when I first moved out on my own.  They are as close to indestructible as dishes can be.  I’ve dropped them in the sink and frisbee’d them across the counter to no effect.  I think our cat managed to knock one of the bowls onto the slate floor of the kitchen hard enough to break it, but otherwise the set remains intact.  The plates are scratched and ugly now, but how can you throw away perfectly serviceable dishes?

    When I got married, my mother insisted that I register for nicer dishes.  I didn’t want china, but I registered for a stoneware pattern that probably seemed like a great idea at that very moment, but is now as dated as a pair of stirrup pants layered with a shoulder-padded sweater.  It’s Noritake Sand ‘n Sky, if you feel like looking up a photo of it on Ebay to confirm my assertion.  The very fact that I would select something that had ‘n in its name tells you how compromised my taste was at the time.

    Thanks to my Vegas wedding and at-home reception, the wedding gifts didn’t exactly come rolling in.  Thus, I didn’t get a full set of the Sand ‘n Sky (urgh!) until quite a few years later when my grandmother noticed the oversight and insisted on buying the rest.  By then I already knew I wasn’t exactly in love with them, but the cereal bowls are nice and large and I have the matching chip and dip set and gravy boat, so it seemed reasonable not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

    I’m sure you’re thinking that’s all the dishes anyone could possibly need – and you’d be correct.  However, that didn’t stop me from buying another set of dishes a few years ago.  I was on a garage sale shopping roll one day when I spotted a nearly complete set of Vitromaster Jazz china for $25.  I was contemplating turning my guest room into a dining room (and, in fact, the contemplation continues) and I thought the colors in the Jazz dishes might be a good starting point for the decor.  The Jazz dishes have a little bit of an Art Deco feel, but they’re really the Madonna lace gloves and rubber bracelets that would nicely accessorize the aforementioned stirrup pants and linebacker sweater.  In other words, I don’t know what I was thinking.

    So here I am with three sets of dishes hogging an entire kitchen cabinet.  We use the old glass dishes every day, move on to the stoneware ones when all of the glass dishes are dirty, and almost never use the china.  Yes, that was money well spent.

    It’s all a symptom of my compulsive collecting of kitchen items.  But that’s a story for another time…

  • Average Jane Loves the 90s Selectively

    Last week I allowed myself to be inundated by the "I Love the 90s – Part Deux" series on VH1.  Turns out, I didn’t love the 90s all that wholeheartedly.

    One show featured the movie "Natural Born Killers," the existence of which I had heretofore successfully blocked from my memory.  It was one of those movies that taught me not to believe the hype.  Everyone we knew kept saying, "It’s awesome, you’ve gotta see it," but I had serious reservations about the gore and violence.

    We went to see it anyway and it was everything I hate in a movie.  I was appalled by the violence and left with a pounding headache.  My husband and I both agreed that we should have gotten up and left long before the end.

    To top off the experience, we returned home to the condo where we lived then and discovered that our outdoor cat had slaughtered a nest of baby bunnies on our back deck, right outside our bedroom door.  Still suffering from the heebie-jeebies that the film had produced, I found myself scooping grisly body parts into a trash bag.  Even Oliver Stone would have appreciated the irony.

  • Average Jane Apologizes for Boring You

    Clearly I’ve squandered some reader goodwill since I attracted so much attention last week with my food discussions.  I’ll try my best to hit upon something equally interesting again someday.  Then again, maybe you’re just as busy this week as I am and I’m being way too "Put ME out, I’M on fire."  I just can’t know, can I?

    Even though yesterday’s Ask Average Jane proposal fell flat, I’ll still answer Stacie’s question about my archiving and calendar.  I wish I could take credit for mad programming skillz, but my calendar is merely an option offered by my blog host, Typepad. 

    I have one blog on Blogger and several on Typepad and I have to say that Typepad is by far the superior system.  The Basic level of service is only $4.95 a month.  For Average Jane I use the $14.95 a month Pro service with more bells and whistles than I probably need, and there’s also a Plus level in between at $8.95 a month.  The comparison chart is here.

    If you ever decide to switch blog platforms, I definitely recommend Typepad.  Occasionally they’ll have some access and speed issues, but they’re growing pretty rapidly and I imagine that’ll settle down eventually.

    That’s all for this week.  Feel free to still ask a question.  In many ways, writing a blog entry is like cooking dinner:  the hard part isn’t the production, it’s deciding what you’re going to produce in the first place.

  • Average Jane Is A Little Frazzled

    Sorry about not posting yesterday.  Wednesdays seem to be particularly hectic for me and often leave no time for blogging in the morning or evening.  Yesterday was a prime example, as I left the house a little after 8:00 a.m. and didn’t make it home until almost 9:00 p.m.

    I’m trying to think of ways to cut down on my more unpleasant manifestations of stress and first on my list is a massage.  I have a gift certificate for a free one-hour massage from a massage therapist I’ve never been to before.  She lives about four blocks from me, so you’d think it would be a no-brainer, but I can’t seem to remember to bring her phone number with me when I leave the house.

    I’m a big fan of deep-tissue massage.  Anything lighter seems like a waste of an hour of my life.  Back when I had more in the way of excess income, I used to try to get a massage once a month.  I think it’s been at least a year since my last massage.  Sigh.

    Next on my priority list is trying to work in some kind of regular exercise.  I really enjoy yoga, but I’m not advanced enough to be able to maintain a creative and varied practice at home.  There’s a yoga studio not far from where I live, but the classes they offer at times I can work with are not the classes that I would necessarily prefer.

    That leaves the treadmill in my guest room, which works perfectly well but is in no danger of ever wearing out because it sits upright and unused, day in and day out.  Once it gets warmer, I might be willing to take walks outside, but that tends to fizzle out after a few journeys to the closest places of interest.

    I’m rambling, I know.  I need to get ready for another marathon day of work, so I’ll cut myself off. 

    I’ll end with an idea designed to give me something to write about tomorrow that I ripped off from J-Walk Blog:  Ask Average Jane.  Ask me anything and I’ll try to answer to the best of my ability, research skill and willingness to be candid.  Use the comments area or e-mail me using the e-mail link on my About page.

  • Average Jane’s Earliest Admirer

    While my four-year-old niece was visiting last weekend, she told me all about her boyfriend, Connor.  There’s a girl in their preschool named Chloe who is a rival for Connor’s affections, but my niece confidently told me, "I’m going to marry him because I love him the most."

    It reminded me of my first kindergarten boyfriend, Donny Tate, who brought me a bouquet of flowers from his yard one spring morning.  As I walked into the brick schoolhouse holding my foil-and-damp-paper-towel-wrapped bundle of irises and peonies, my teacher said, "Oh, are those for me?"

    I replied as any self-absorbed five-year-old would:  "No, they’re for me."

    Probably because of the novelty of kindergarten, I remember more things that happened to me during that single year than I do from the six years of elementary school that followed.  A lot of those memories involve my own misbehavior and the inevitable consequences.

    For example, one day a friend and I decided not to go back to class after recess ended.  I can’t remember which one of us had the idea, but it seemed like a good plan to both of us…until we were hustled back into the building by our irate teacher and made to sit on the steps during recess for an entire week thereafter.

    By the time I left kindergarten, most of my rule breaking was limited to talking too much.  It’s something I could still stand to work on.

    I don’t remember anything more about little Donny except the bouquet of flowers.  I assume that he ended up at a different elementary school (much as my niece and Connor will be sadly separated next year when kindergarten begins).

    That leads to today’s reader question:  Who was your very first admirer/crush/boyfriend/girlfriend?  Did he or she figure into your later life or disappear in the mists of time?

  • Average Jane’s Weekend of Sloth

    I had a lot of things I should have done over the weekend before and after my niece’s visit.  Unfortunately, I rediscovered Yahoo Games and watched a Battlestar Galactica marathon instead.

    A year or so ago I got hooked on the Bookworm game and played it incessantly.  In fact, I pretty much played it until I got so good at it that each game lasted forever and I finally stopped playing out of boredom.  My favorite game of late has been Jewel Quest and over the weekend I discovered Avalanche.  I’d probably play even more games, but I’m on a Mac laptop using Firefox, and most of the games just aren’t compatible.

    It’s dangerous for me to have a laptop with a wireless connection next to the television.  I can stay rooted to one spot all day long playing games and watching TV, occasionally breaking away from the game to check the IMDB to sate my curiousity about the age of a particular actor or actress.  (Brigitte Nielsen is younger than Flava Flav by about four years.  Who’d have guessed?)

    I did tear myself away to make pizzas from scratch with my niece on Saturday.  She "flatted" her own crust (which I think is a pretty inventive description of rolling out the dough if you don’t know the correct term) and selected and placed her own toppings (pepperoni, sausage and cheese).  We watched "Shrek 2" and afterward my niece treated me to her rendition of "Holding Out for A Hero."

    Even though my niece won’t be five until April, she’s already learning to read a little bit.  She surprised me by reporting that I had the blender set to "Chop" and "On" when I was mixing my protein shake on Sunday morning.

    She also quizzed me closely about when I’m going to have a baby (survey says:  never), which gave me flashbacks to my own childhood when I did the same thing to my aunt (who eventually did have my cousin, but not until I was a teenager).

    So how was your weekend?  Did you manage to accomplish more than I did?  Did you manage to be even lazier than I was?  Let’s hear about it!