9 posts tagged “vermont”
The police are very active on the last few days of the month around here. I got pulled over by one on my way home from work. I've been sort of courting this ever since I knocked out my headlight two weeks ago. I have an appointment to get it fixed today at 4 pm, no foolin'. It would have been fixed last week, but my mechanic's dad was in town. Then it would have been fixed on Monday but the parts people didn't send the parts because they knew my mechanic was out of the shop. Wednesday I got pulled over, with my gas tank door flapping and my spiffy new tabs ready to put on my plates just as soon as I clean the salt off of them. I guess I should do that today.
It was a non-event. I was going 23 in a 25 zone. I had current license/registration/insurance which is unheard of in these parts. I did the "turn on dome light, make no sudden moves" routine, and said please and thank you and otherwise kept my mouth shut except to note that I was getting the headlight fixed tomorrow. The policeman lady said to have a nice night, and I did.
update: car is repaired!
I dislike shopping and do it as little as possible, clothes shopping especially. Some of this stems from being cheap, but a lot of it has to do with me knowing exactly what I want and being dismayed that I can't seem to find what I want anywhere, at any price. Vermont generally can be bad for consumer options and my little region is often worse. I'll go visit my sister and hit stores that run more to my tastes when I'm in the big city. Otherwise I just wear what I've got until I realize that, for example, my pajamas are so shabby and holey I couldn't wear them in mixed company, or I've been swimming so long I no longer own a pair of sneakers. Also, moths ate every wool sweater I had, which wasn't many.
My next big city visit is a ways off so I went to my favorite little consignment shop -- the place I buy swimsuits which wear out with shocking regularity -- to pick up a few things. It was strange. The place was empty and dreamlike, every rack or shelf seemed to have something that was on my list and fit me perfectly. I tend towards lists in my writing. Here is the list.
- Nearly new Airwalk sneakers
- Gently used Redwing steeltoe boots, same size as my existing 13 year old pair. Made in USA!
- Woolrich wool jacket, red, shiny buttons
- Flannel pajamas in one of my favorite plaids.
- Three wool sweaters
So, I think I'm set for whatever is left of "winter" this year. Oh, and the reason I can never go anyplace else, why I'm rooted to the spot here in the land of trees and rivers? I mentioned before that I was cheap, or perhaps thrifty. When I paid for the needs-two-arms-to-hold-it bag of stuff, I gave the woman at the counter $30.- J. Crew baggy tan v-neck
- Maroon pullover something
- Purple cardigan made partly of "rabbit hair" according to the tag
And she gave me back change.
Good riddance shortest day of the year! Here in the valley the sun set before 3:30 today. I took a few pictures. Judging from all my solstice pictures, it was a hell of a lot snowier here this time last year though judging from friends' reports, it's snowier almost everywhere else in the US besides here.
My sister is coming up tomorrow from Massachusetts and we're doing our traditional xmastime stuff a little early because she has to go back to work at the Crime Lab on Tuesday (I love saying she works at the crime lab, so cool!). I still miss being able to go up to Alaska easily for the holidays but there is something about being in New England that feels like how this time of the year is supposed to be.
While she's up I figured I'd introduce her to some of my friends. There has been a certain amount of concern in my family and elsewhere that me living alone in this spooky old house might be some sort of... problem. The fact that when they ask me about it I say "No actually IT'S GREAT, REALLY REALLY GREAT" doesn't help. So, Kate's coming up and she'll see how great it is and we're having people over for soup. This means a bit of tidying up, and a bit of recipe planning. Here is my crib sheet of recipes, some or all of which will wind up on the table tomorrow along with some sweet potato fries, xmas cookies, candied ginger, mulled apple cider and some good crusty bread. Here are soups I like, some of which I may make. You are invited.
Ari's The! Science! Of! Vegetable! Soup! recipe - don't know shit about soupmaking but don't want to embarrass yourself? start here.
judith's understated lowercase pumpkin soup - not much could make me pay $7 for an organic squash, but Judith can.
Some sort of red pepper/lentil soup. Two likely candidates from epicurious - Lentil and sweet red pepper soup or Lentil soup with garam masala
Matzoh ball soup - from some random box, though maybe I'll try this recipe since it has me laughing by the second paragraph.
Dear Dish Networks,
I was mightily impressed when our Dish was installed. Watching your installer guy climb around with heavy tools on ladders and rooves was inspirational and even somewhat mystifying.
When my landlady moved on and I decided I no longer needed a zillion channels of television, imagine my surprise when I realized that I would be expected to climp up on my own roof to remove the LNBF from its position at the center of my Dish. Fortunately, you provided instructions and a box.
However, while I am pleased with your concern and your entreaties to "use caution when climbing and working at the dish mounting location" I was less pleased with being told I had ten days to accomplish this task or pay you $149. You see, it's wintertime in New England and climbing and working are two things that we New Englanders like to do less of when there's ice on the ground, roof, ladder and Dish.
I exaggerate for effect, actually it was only pouring rain today. However, since snow is forecast for later in the week, I thought it might be good to get this out of the way before the freeze. You see, I enjoyed satellite television while I had it, but I am not willing to die for it. I'm a little concerned that climbing up on the roof of my Victorian house with a phillips head screwdriver in hand might be considered suicidal enough during a rainstorm.
Your directions were less than clear. I'd like to blame my own failing eyesight but alas even with a close inspection in good light it appears that the arrows and labels that you used to identify the various parts of the LNBF were blurry even at significant magnification. This may have been due to your "one sheet for all eleven varieties of Dish" schematic approach. Next time you might want to consider maybe limiting the diagrams to five or six per page.
Next time you might want to mention what LNBF stands for.
Next time you might want to mention in your directions that while your diagram shows a "switch" as being part of the items that MUST be returned, in fact not all customers will have a switch. The nice man on the telephone informed me that I did not have a switch.
Next time your installer guy might want to say "Take careful notes because if you ever cancel your service, this will be your ass up on this ladder!"
I say next time, but there will not be a next time, Dish Networks. I got my LNBF taken apart -- after first removing the protective "shroud" -- and I unscrewed the coax cables. Now I'm returning the remaining Dish to the klatsch of ladybugs that seemed to be happily nesting in a place that I was less than happy to be.
After I drive the 40 miles round trip to my nearest UPS drop-off location with the prepaid box, I will go home and sit by my darkened television and I will turn on the radio. The radio is free, and its antenna works comfortably from inside my house. No hard feelings, I hope.
Your former customer,
Jessamyn
If my landlady were on MySpace, this would be her photo there. However, she is not. She does have a new gmail account and satellite radio in her car. I helped set her up with both of those. She left today on a big driving adventure, down to Tennessee to see family over Thanksgiving and then off to California with her dog to visit four of her five kids on the west coast. If all things go well, she'll be entering the Peace Corps in March 2007 and heading off to the South Pacific. If that happens, I'lll be minding the place here. If it doesn't, she'll come back sometime in the winter and we'll move on to Plan B.
There was a big going-away party at the neighbor's place down the street and this picture is from that. It was mostly the local area Democrats (Ola's license plate reads DMOCRAT) who were happy for a change, and very happy to have a party to see Ola off. There was a lot of great food that people made, and our two local elected officials -- the local rep and the local senator -- were there. I bent the ear of one of them talking about my blah blah digital divide stuff and offered to come by her place any time and fix her computer. Free tech support is the coke vial on a chain equivalent here in rural noplace; I'm sure I'll be able to make inroads with her.
Overheard from the local senator "It's too bad that we overused and wore out the word 'facist' in the sixties when it just meant anything we didn't like, because it's really apropos now"
Then Ola and I hopped into her car with part of a bottle of Jim Beam and were happy to find that the satellite radio had finally populated itself with all the stations. We got home and I programmed in the 40s channel, CNN, CSPAN, the old time radio channel and whatever passes for NPR on XM radio. She went to bed early, like she always does, and we said goodbye since I knew she'd be leaving in the morning well before I got up, before the sun got up. We had been getting to the point where she was getting up almost when I was going to bed, each of us having a different manifestation of our restless minds.
I woke up this morning to a quiet and empty house, a clean kitchen and a to do list forming in my mind (get rid of extraneous hutches in kitchen, install programmeable thermostat, feed birds, INSULATE) and I've been picking away at it for a while now. I'll probably still be picking away at it when she comes back.
Just a few screenshots from some of the movies that I saw last weekend at the Vermont International Film Festival.
My writeup of the movies I saw is here.
I'm in Burlington for my annual movie watching binge. My usual stint has been cut from four days to three (one of which is over as of a few hours ago), but I'm making up for it in volume. I saw seventeen films today, though most were under fifteen minutes. I'll do a full write-up this week, but on the off chance that anyone else is also at the festival, please say howdy to me. I'm in the jacket that looks like it's made of orange muppet fur.
It's been an odd set of months. I've had an incredible amount of freedom to do whatever I want, and I've also had some serious limitations that balance and offset those things. The highlight of the past few weeks has been getting to explore Braintree and my friend's little cabin here as I wait for things to settle down in my own house (landlady en route to the Peace Corps, not there yet) and go back and forth to MA to visit and tend to family.
If I didn't feel that there was something a little off about a woman my age running around living out of her car and a backpack, I'd think I'd finally made it... someplace. With one job I can take with me and another that links me to the place I love to be (and enough money to go the other places I still want to see) I'm liking it. And yet, in some sustainability way, there have to be in-person people to balance the online posse of librarians and bloggers and friends and strangers that make up my digital social network. Right? Maybe?
Finding the balance - enough real people to stay connnected, not so many as to be crazymaking - is the order of the next few months. People I know often seem somewhat surprised at how many other people I know, and yet I probably spend more time alone than any one of them. I wonder if it's like some sort of XYZ Anonymous thing "Hi my name is Jessamyn and even though I have a lot of friends I'd like to be a friend of yours" where whatever trigger most people have that says "I think you've had enough" is a switch that never flips.?
In any case, I'm on the road again to see Mom, and then Dad, and maybe a pal from high school. I'm slowly making peace with the absurd amount of driving required to maintain an existence hours away from any major metro area, though I traded my iPod for some php programming, so it's a few hours of classic rock in store for me. As always, send postcard to box 81, Bethel Vermont 05032. I like mail.
