Average Jane

Blog

  • Average Jane Gets Up-to-Date Gear

    Wow, remind me not to talk about my cats again. I know that pet stories range into Jean Teasdale territory, but I didn’t think they were THAT uninteresting. Ahem.

    Well, on to another subject then: the new band. As I’ve mentioned, it’s been about seven years since I last sang in a band, and probably twelve years since I was in a cover band. If you watch bands on TV these days, you’ll notice that the latest thing is nearly-invisible, in-ear monitors. Gone are the days of the wedge monitors, feeding back from the front of the stage.

    For our first mini-gig, I wore dorky-looking regular headphones onstage. By next week I’ll have a pair of the cool Shure E Series ‘phones (the cheap ones, of course, which can be had even cheaper on eBay). With my hair covering them, they’ll probably be nearly invisible.

    I already love playing with headphone monitors. I have my own voice cranked up in my personal headphone mix, which allows me to sing even challenging songs without straining. The volume never creeps up (much) or gets overwhelming. Since all of the instruments (guitar, bass, electronic drums, vocals) are run directly into the mixing board, the only sounds anyone can hear in the room without the headphones are quiet string noise, stick hits on the drum pads and singing.

    After today’s practice, we should have close to 20 songs learned well enough to perform them. Twenty more and we’ll have enough for a real gig. I’m working frantically to learn all of the lyrics; I believe memorization must be a “use it or lose it” skill!

    Well, I’d better fire up iTunes and listen to the songs I’ll need for tonight. Have a lovely Thursday!

  • Average Jane’s Free-Range Annoyances

    I’ve spoken before of the four aging felines with whom we share our house.  (The word "whom" in that last sentence should be a major tip-off as to how the whole situation came into being.)

    Because of varying cat health conditions, we’re in a situation where two of the four cats get special food.  All of the cats are free to sup from the public cat food dispenser at will, but the supplemental food is doled out in the morning and evening.  This has been going on for several years with one cat and several months for the other.

    "The Possum" gets a little triangle of canned food at each feeding.  She has taken to racing to the kitchen every time I go in there, even if she’s not hungry or it’s clearly not time for her to eat.  When she does get some food, I have to stand guard until she’s finished lest one or more of the other cats push her aside and eat the rest.  Considering that she beats the snot out of her housemate, "Chunky," on an almost daily basis, you’d think she’d be a better defender of her own interests, but apparently not.

    "The Boy" gets prescription dry food served to him in our bathroom.  He’s supposed to be fed once in the morning and once at night, too, but he’s figured out that he can get double feedings from my husband.  He’s developed a crazed, "I’m starving!" meow that convinces my husband that I must have carelessly gone off in the morning without feeding the poor cat.  Consequently, "The Boy" is getting a bit pudgy of late. 

    He’s also cranked up the begging behavior until I can scarcely stand to be in his presence.  He starts by crouching on my chest like a vulture each morning until I wake up.  Once I get out of bed, he begins frantically meowing while he walks right in front of my feet in the perfect tripping position.  As long as I’m downstairs, he mercilessly hounds me to feed him.

    I’ve been trying to break him of the constant begging by laying a few ground rules:

    • No feeding him in the middle of the night if I get up to use the bathroom.
    • No feeding him until I’ve been up for at least a half hour or so.
    • No feeding him until I’ve been up for even longer if the reason I’m up is that he woke me up.

    Of course, it’s impossible to communicate these rules to the cat directly, so he just feels extra deprived and becomes more shrill and demanding.

    The good news is that once everyone’s been fed, I get to enjoy four friendly, furry kitties who only want my company.  It almost makes everything else okay…

  • Average Jane Works Harder

    Wow, what a busy Monday I had! It’s funny how deadlines just launch themselves out of the underbrush and bite you on the butt sometimes. I got to work just after 8:30 a.m., didn’t go to lunch, and still couldn’t make it back out the door until after 6:15 p.m. (and I didn’t even take my usual afternoon Starbucks break).

    I’ve been trying really hard to pare down my extracurricular activities now that my job is kicking into high gear. I’ve removed myself from two club newsletter committees and more or less resigned from one club’s board of directors. Of course, I’ve countered by joining a band that practices three times a week, so it’s all pretty much a wash.

    I don’t know what I think I would do if I really managed to free up my schedule. Work for my dad more? He certainly has enough work to keep me endlessly busy. Read? I’m already making it through a couple of books a week on average. Keep up with housework? Ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Watch TV? Maybe, but I’m reluctant to jump back into that time-sucker and, besides, I have a TiVo that lets me watch whenever it’s convenient anyway.

    My conclusion is that having more time is like having more money: you always think of a way to spend it.

  • Durchschnittliches Jane

    Hi, my name is Average Jane, and I’m addicted to my blog’s “Vistors and Referrers” statistics. (Hi, Jane!)

    This is why I know that “Average Jane” in German is “Durchschnittliches Jane” (actually, re-translating it shows that it means “On the Average Jane,” which I guess works, too). While checking my stats, I discovered that someone had Googled my blog entry on triops and then translated it into German. When I clicked through, I got to see the whole page and comments translated. Let’s hope it made some sort of sense in German, since heaven knows my stuff makes little enough sense in the original English.

    Another blog I work on was recently featured by a Japanese blog. I used Altavista’s Babel Fish translator to try to figure out what the blogger and commenters were saying about it, but it was nearly as incomprehensible in the Japanese-to-English translation as it was when I found it. Just trying to puzzle it out made my brain hurt, so I had to give up.

    As I’ve mentioned before, I get a lot of traffic from people searching for information about the new “Average Jane” TV show. I also get a lot of hits on my mentions of our betta fish. Even a pre-Easter post about araucana chicken eggs still gets a search hit now and then. That’s the nice thing about random blog topics: you never know when you’ll be one of the first people online to mention something obscure.

    I appreciate all the comments I’ve received from first-timers in the last couple of weeks. Welcome – and keep ’em coming! Gotta keep those stats up…

  • Average Jane Sleeps In

    It’s never a good feeling when you wake up, look at the clock and realize you should ideally be at work already, or at least on the road. That happened to me this morning, so my blogging time is severely limited.

    Last night, my husband and I finally returned the beer kegs from the party. We’d managed to break one of the taps, so there was an extra $60 down the drain. Actually, a lot of beer went down the drain, too. I ended up pouring out several gallons of the wheat beer to make the keg lighter. I’m afraid our friends just can’t drink the way they used to!

    I’m reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman and enjoying it immensely. I don’t know why it took me so long to get around to it, but it’s exactly the kind of book I like (well, one of the kinds of books I like).

    I’ve noticed a lot of cool author websites lately. J.K. Rowling’s site is really awesome, too.

    Perhaps someday I’ll write a few things of note and be able to launch something more sophisticated than AverageJane.com. First, though, I should get to work. Have a lovely weekend!

  • Average Jane’s Soapbox Issue

    I keep my opinions out of this blog to a large extent, but women’s equality is the one issue that resonates so strongly for me that I can’t help but take up the standard.

    You may have seen the news recently that U.S. women are now, on average, making only 75.5 cents for every dollar that men make. Yvonne DiVita of Lip-Sticking covered this last week. As Yvonne says, what a disappointment.

    I come from a family in which the women have worked outside the home since before it was a common thing to do. My grandmother often told me about her experiences as a newspaper reporter, a job she loved. One day she discovered that the male reporter with whom she shared an office earned significantly more money than she did. She complained to the paper’s managing editor who said, “Your husband works, doesn’t he?”

    I had rather innocently hoped that anti-discrimination laws had made that kind of attitude extinct, but the news about the pending class action suit against Wal-Mart contained many similar stories, some worded almost exactly the same way.

    I refuse to believe that there’s anything radical about political, economic and social equality for women. These days a lot of women are distancing themselves from the “f” word, “feminism.” I’ll never forget how shocked I was the first time I heard a conservative preacher use the word “feminist” as though it were an epithet. There are many social issues in this world with a lot of grey areas, but “equal pay for equal work” sounds like simple, playground-level fairness to me.

    Yesterday I wore my favorite new t-shirt that says, “This is what a feminist looks like.” I would love to see a whole roomful of different and varied women, all wearing that shirt. That should address any lingering sterotypes in one fell swoop!

    The days of coasting on this issue have ended. If you can think of a way to make even a small difference, now’s the time to get started.

  • Average Jane Shoots Her Shelf

    Here’s something fun for you digital camera buffs: a photo project called “Shoot Your Shelf.” Here’s my shelf. Just shoot a photo of a shelf in your home or office, not tidied or changed in any way, and send it in.

    On my shelf, you’ll notice on the upper left, my bas-relief Mayan jaguar eating a human heart. In the middle is my Zen Alarm Clock, which proved to be a little too annoying for use as an actual alarm clock. On the upper right is a vase I found at a flea market. It’s a lovely, pastel, pearlescent scene of an elephant being savagely attacked by a tiger. The whole sensibility was so incongruous that I had to have it.

  • Average Jane Asks You to Please Hold…

    In typical Wednesday fashion, I have little to say and almost no time in which to say it. I’m living to regret having the day off on Monday as work piles up at my job, my dad’s office and on my desk at home.

    Once again, I invite you to explore my selection of links to the right. I try to add to it whenever a new visitor or other entertaining blogger or site catches my eye.

    Back tomorrow with at least 75% more substance – it’s my guarantee to you!

  • Average Jane Rolls With the Punches

    Despite my little outburst at the end of yesterday’s post, I really try not to get myself worked up about things beyond my control. I allowed myself one initial rant in response to the surprise and to express my deep aversion to wasting money, then mostly got over it. Still, conflict is more interesting than calm, so I’ll always play it up for entertainment value! I’m not especially confident that the dent will be fixed soon, but I’m sure I can weather the shame (and ignore the whistling sound caused by the change in aerodynamics) for a little while.

    Yesterday began without any concrete plans and ended up being a full day of activity after a slow morning. I met my sister and my niece at a children’s museum and we had lunch and spent the afternoon looking at and playing with the exhibits. After that, my husband and I went to a birthday party/barbecue and hung out with two other couples all evening. It was low-key but very pleasant.

    I woke up this morning and realized that I needed to leap out of bed and get the trash bins from the party out of the back yard and to the curb as quickly as possible. I guess it didn’t need to be that quickly – they’re picking them up right now. I spent my first waking minutes slogging through the dew-soaked yard, picking up trash from fallen trash cans and gathering garbage from inside the house to add to it. I’m also in the process of laundering the beer-drenched blanket that we’d wrapped around the kegs. I suppose there’s no better way to get back into work mode than to wake up and start working!

    This week should be typically busy, but I’m not quite sure of the specifics yet. If any great stories arise, you’ll be the first to know!

  • Average Jane’s Very Nice Party

    Our big, backyard party on Saturday turned out to be a lot of fun, despite a relatively low turnout. In past years we’ve managed to attract 70+ people, but this year’s attendance was a modest 48 (not counting me or my husband), out of about 175 people invited.

    The band set up and played three short sets (which meant we played almost all of the songs twice). It was the first time many of my friends had heard me sing or my husband play drums, so that was an interesting experience. Everyone was quite complimentary and I really enjoyed singing again after such a long break. The “reunion performance” with my old band didn’t materialize due to scheduling conflicts, but I’m sure we’ll have other opportunities later.

    We didn’t have quite as many children at the party as I thought we might. In the words of one set of parents who’d left their four kids at home, “We thought we’d have more fun without them.”

    I’d purchased a playground ball, a “bumper golf” set from good, old Wham-o, put up our badminton net, and invested in a new box of sidewalk chalk. The chalk and the ball were the most popular with the child guests, followed closely by my friend N.’s pet schnauzer and a Hoberman sphere from my office that my niece brought outside.

    Because the party was a potluck, there was a lot of wonderful food but I was so busy running around that I barely had a chance to eat. I lit our charcoal grill before the party started and guests used it all day to cook their own hot dogs and burgers. I have about six pounds of hot dogs in my freezer left over from the party, but I’m sure I’ll get to them all eventually.

    I’d gotten a large keg of wheat beer and a small keg of pale ale. We have leftover wheat beer running out our ears (figuratively), mainly because the tap we originally used didn’t work very well and nobody wanted to drink cups of foam. I’ve swapped taps with the empty keg and I’ve been keeping the wheat beer iced and transporting it from place to place as we attend additional parties, but that only serves to make it foamy and difficult to dispense again. I may end up taking most of it back with the keg, unfortunately.

    The party cleanup went pretty swiftly on Sunday afternoon, except that I left a couple of indoor tables outside meaning to get them later and they got rained on before I got back out. Oops.

    Today we have Labor Day itself. The sun is shining and there’s another party coming up later this afternoon. Maybe I’ll have a nap this afternoon, as I did yesterday (only this time I’ll lie in bed instead of curling up in a chair and drooling on my own hair).

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    Jane’s Dark Cloud of Automobile Misfortune Update:
    My mechanic and insurance company have declared the flooded car a total loss and the insurance company is throwing out distressingly low settlement figures. We’ll have to see where that ends up.

    Yesterday I washed the Ford and enjoyed its sparkling adequacy until my husband backed out of the driveway and HIT IT! He called to tell me and I thought I was going to have a brain hemorrhage. The word “apoplexy” took on a whole new meaning for me. He was all, “We’ll get the dent taken out, blah, blah, blah,” but all I could hear was, “I just wrecked the last car you have left.”

    May I say, “Aaaaagggggghhhhhh!” Thank you.