The pitfall of asides in radio drama

Oh, car stereo, why do you hate me?

I’ve been listening to a dramatization of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline on CD in the car in an attempt to stay alert. It is already distracting to sort out which character is weeping/yelling/cajoling on the CD in which scene while I weave in and out of traffic on the highway.

the asides are impossible. Yes, they’re dramatic, but each character sounds less like he or she’s telling me secrets and more like they have split personalities that they make whisper. “Oh, fair sir, I greet thee! mutter mutter mutter mutter. I suppose the vibrations of the tires on highway pavement drown out the sound.

The happy goat of the suburbs

Really… that kind of sums up the sort of weird day I’ve had.  While driving, I passed a display of 50 silver and bright blue pinwheels stuck in the ground in a park. They’re facing a hospital (if I had to be in a hospital this would cheer me right up). If I’m lucky, they’ll be there tomorrow when I have my camera.

Then, in the Washington, DC suburbs, I passed a brown and white goat that was out for a romp not that far from a train station. It was possibly the happiest goat I’ve ever seen. [I've been humming the goatherd song from the Sound of Music all day.] Last I heard, the police were wondering if the goat was feral or not. Or what its “purpose” was. [From the goat's perspective, I think it probably was looking for an opportunity to create more goats... It had already found a place to gallop.]

Later on in the evening, I saw a double rainbow, pointing down toward the District of Columbia. It was an amazing day, but all I’ve got is text.

One disturbing truck with a literacy message

Literacy Rocks is the theme of the Dollar General Literacy Foundation. Gretchen Wilson (a singing, country music star) is the face they have chosen. Not sure if “rock” and “country” are interchangeable these days in the minds of today’s youth, but they couldn’t have chosen a more eye-attracting face. No, seriously. In the gloaming, having your headlights hit the back of a large truck, with a beautifully airbrushed rendering of Gretchen Wilson looking straight at you (just face, with hair disappearing into the dark truck behind her)  is startling. If you’re stuck in quick moving traffic, you might wonder where the heck you’ve seen the face (is it someone who was in Cats? no… maybe Battlestar Galactica? No, um…. Ok, I know, it’s the woman who sings “Redneck Woman”).

It’s a great campaign for her, speaking closely to what is known from her bio. But you know, every time they have to get into the back of that truck, her beautiful face gets split in half.

In other news, I have been knitting. It’s the same interminable sock. The knitting needles go round and round, and I never quite get to the toe. I’m starting to think of nicknaming it ” under the spell of the White Witch” Eh, perhaps not.

You know that clothing designers hate women

….when you have a closet filled with shirts in the following sizes: 14, 5, 8, 10, and 12 all of which do not fit. In some cases, the size 8s are elephant large. In one glaring case, the size 14 is too small — a victim of a designer using “stretch” fabric to make it “figure conscious”. Feh. Not much knitting going on these days. Instead, a question:
Is it wrong to want to see if we can fill the BP oil spill with fashion travesties? Some of it would be petrochemicals going back home. And some of it might have enough cat hair stuck in it that it would attract more oil. (If BP can have top hats, then I can have the flounce solution.)

[I know this is totally inane and frivolous, but clothing is one of those things you can't do without, and sometimes it is irritating.]

Imelda has lost her shoes

….Or someone has. A whole trail or tribe of shoes lay scattered on the side of the highway, starting with large fancy dress shoes, heels, and finishing up with a few forlorn little baby shoes that had been tied together. I drove by in traffic slow enough for me to notice details — a zipper pull here, an olive suede upper there — until it started to feel like a slow motion scene from an Oliver Stone film (although, alas, no soundtrack). I spent a good 20 minutes wondering why they were there, and here are some brief theories:

• A shoe donation box tipped over while being moved
• A family was fleeing from suburban America and dropped their shoes as they ran
• A dance troupe lost its shoes for the weekend’s big number
• Inept thieves stole shoes from a shoe outlet, then dropped them when they realized they forgot the cash

No serious theories in my brain today, as you can see. But my, it was funny. Almost as good as the day I followed a strand of yarn 1.5 miles around the outer loop of the DC beltway.

Snow removal follies

Yep, I’m back (semi-back). I’ll be on and off the blog for a while due to a lot of stuff going on, some of it work related.

During and after the Nor’easter (nope, nothing to do with Easter) I saw a lot of snow, blustery wind, and people doing idiotic things.

For instance:

• The newspaper delivery guy who did a K-turn in the middle of an unplowed street to go up the street the wrong way so he was in position to hurl papers at peoples’ heads as they dug out.
• The people who decided to leave streets unplowed in major metropolitan areas, including small streets like Connecticut Avenue near Washington DC.
• Abandoned furniture was placed out in forlorn hope that spots would be saved while people go out to get their bread, milk, etc. (I wonder if the baby will miss its crib?)
• A girl at an ivy league college who dressed in baby doll, short sleeved t-shirt (pink), flannel pj pants (yellow with pink and blue perfume bottle designs all over it) and sheepskin clog slippers was clambering on a snow hill that had swallowed her car. Last I saw, she was chipping away at the snow-encased window with a child’s orange, plastic sand shovel. (Book smarts, maybe. Common cold, probably. Possibly had a date with not-prince-Charming, who didn’t bother to chip her out so she could go home.)
• An unnamed city told me to hold my trash, because they hadn’t bothered to plow anyone’s streets and the trash trucks couldn’t get through. Ayup.

Meanwhile, things around here are slowly getting back to normal, now that the snow has melted into everyone’s basements. There have even been bird and wildlife sightings. Snow geese flew overhead, north and a bit west while I drove to work. Their wings glinted in the sun. I saw a lot of blackbirds in formation swarming around the Mormon tabernacle (Ok, in my fantasy it was a swarm of bats, but in the middle of daytime I don’t think that’s likely). And tonight, on an elite golf course, I saw what might have been a young stag denuding the greenway. And, most exotic of all, I got to see the sun and use my sunglasses today. Of course, it’s March, so we’re probably due another gasp of cold, wintry weather over the next 4 weeks.

About that snow on the rooftop

No, I’m not saying anyone has dandruff. However, all drivers of trucks and gi-normous campers — you might want to check if you still have some snow on the roof still.

I was behind one camper that had so much snow and plates of ice on top of it, that it was streaming fog like streams of glory while dropping big chunks of frozen snow in front of my tiny car. When you’re creating your own meterologic event, you might want to consider the other people who need to swerve around your detritis.

Once people get their presents, I will end up showing off some of the knits. One baking idea — if you’re making sugar cookies from Fannie Farmer cookbook, you might want to try adding 1/4 tsp cinnamon and 1/4 tsp nutmeg. It balances out the vanilla content.

You know it’s going to be a long week

When you pass a sign for Font Hill Drive, and think, wow… wonder what the hill looked like with all those italics, Times Roman, Arial, Helvetica, and Bookman crammed beneath it? Maybe a monument to printing? Anyone else read the Phantom Tollbooth and think it didn’t go quite far enough?

Oh yeah… it’s gonna be a loooooong week.

Kind of Odd signs on trucks

I’m not talking about the KANE is Able truck signs (although they make me smile with this slogan that sounds like a Biblical joke), the Batesville Casket Company logo with its green tree or the Leidy logo (which I remember in its pre-2003 incarnation, with Leidy in the shape of a pig). I’ve shared my drive with all three of these.

I’m talking about homegrown slogans with hand-drawn letters (or reflective letters lovingly glued to the side of a truck. Recently I saw two:

1. On the back of a moving van: “The Lord Is MY God!” (Is it me, or do you wonder if the truck was professing its faith too? All I could think in the heat of the commute was “You go, Van! Tell it to the faithful!”
2. On an old, green dump truck, in silver hand-painted letters with red outlines “Pimpin Aint Easy” (Even the trucks out there realize it’s hard for a pimp. I mean honestly… what? Maybe an explanation of why the driver is behind the wheel earning an honest day’s work hauling dirt?)

I’ve seen hand-painted logos from team sports, marijuana leaves on the back of a city trash truck, and a Pinto painted a pink most often found in the medicine cabinet.

So, seen any fun signs on trucks or cars while you fight the fumes of the morning commute? I’ll keep watching. It makes a welcome break in the day when I find something as fun as a yellow rubber ducky stuck on the end of someone’s antenna.

A Tale of Two Cement Lions

Every morning and evening, my commute takes me past a gateway for two houses, and on top of one of the gateposts has been a cement lion. The gatepost on the right has been empty, but an identical lion has been hidden behind the brick wall in front of the house on the right. I could see this lion cowering on my trip homeward bound.

For half a year, it has been this way, as though one lion tired of looking out across the orchard to the east, and decided to sulk behind the brick wall. Or, perhaps a fear of heights?

Today, both lions are cemented firmly in place, both staring off in the distance over an orchard and a herd of brown cattle. I like to think the other one teased the one down on the ground until he got the gumption to get back up there. But then again, my commute is long enough to write books in my head, and whimsy keeps me alert and looking for interesting items as I pass by them. I’ll miss the cowering lion, but I’ll wonder for a while why both lions on top of a gate are less intriguing than one up high and one down below.