Meltdown

You know that Hershey's USB drive I posted about a couple of weeks ago? It just broke. All the files are gone and the drive is unreadable. It was the second time I used it.

I knew I should've gone with the Mr. Goodbar drive. Peanuts are very reliable.

Standard warning: Do not try this at home

I'm helping my mother go through the Crawford family trunk, and this was among some newspaper clippings from the late 1800s and early 1900s. For those who can't see the image, it reads:

Breaks a Cold in a Day
And Cures Any Cough That is Curable. Noted Physician's Formula.
Get from any druggist "Two ounces of Glycerine and half an ounce of Concentrated Pine compound. Mix these with half a pint of good whisky. Take one to two teaspoonfuls after each meal and at bedtime. Smaller doses to children according to age." Any one can prepare this at home. This is the best formula known to science. There are many cheaper preparations of large quantity, but it don't pay to experiment with a bad cold. Be sure to get only the genuine (Globe) Concentrated Pine. Each half ounce bottle comes in a sealed tin screw-top case. If the druggist does not have in stock he will get it quickly from his wholesale house.

Yep, sounds like a plan. Mix up some glycerine, Pine-Sol and Gentleman Jack, then drink it. Then, if you're all about questioning the physics of spontaneous combustion, have a smoke afterward.

The vaca from my vaca

I've started planning my holiday vacation six-plus months in advance. This isn't anything unusual for me; I'm the kind of person who lives for vacations and starts the 100- (or 120- or 150-) day countdown as soon as a date is set.

"A vaca from your permanent vaca?" a friend asked me last night. Yes. It'll be a little harder on the pocketbook now that we're living on one salary -- and that might mean a shorter trip -- but traveling now is as important as it was when I was working full-time: It gets me out of a rut. And it gives me something about which to be excited. Something to check off on a calendar every day. A goal. ... And a reason to put aside some cash every month, which is something we need to get into a habit of doing -- one salary or not.

This year, it's holiday break at Disney World, squeezed into one of their "value" (slow and cheap) periods a couple of weeks before Christmas. We've even toyed with the idea of driving back down and spending Christmas Day there. (Shh, don't break it to the family just yet.)

Though the dates and length of stay are still up in the air, we're definitely going. I know because I've bought the guidebook and that's how all our vacations start. With any trip, Paul and I can talk and dream about where and when we're going to go, but it's just talk until I buy the guidebook. That's when we pick a date, choose a hotel, scout out restaurants and attractions ... and so on.

So, yes, a vaca from my permanent vaca. Happy holidays to us.

On Regina Spektor

Any Regina Spektor fans out there? I'm a little late to the game, having only "discovered" her by way of her Way to Normal duet with Ben Folds, "You Don't Know Me."(That video is directed by Tim and Eric. Expect T&E-style visual candy.)

I now have two Spektor albums – Soviet Kitsch and Begin to Hope – and plan to get her newest, Far, when it comes out June 23. The entire album now is available for streaming from NPR's site.

This is the first single:


I'm a sucker for great pianists – raise your hand if you didn't know I have an untreatable Ben Folds obsession – and Spektor delivers crisp vocals over strong piano melodies to create little bits of stick-in-your-head-worthy tastiness. (That's a term you'll only see in a Kate-written music review.)

Here's something I don't say lightly, because Tori Amos is one of the muses who got me through college, but Regina Spektor reminds me of Tori before Tori did the split personality thing – not once, but twice – and started writing songs about which nobody cares. Yeah, I went there.

Revisiting the iPod 8-Ball

This is something I stole from Smacky three years ago. I thought I'd revisit it with my much heftier collection of music. ^_^

[Open your favorite computerized music player, set it to shuffle, and then ask each of these questions.]

What do you think of me, iPod?
"My Friends," NOFX

Will I have a happy life?
"Any Colour You Like," Pink Floyd

What do my friends really think of me?
"My Sharona," The Knack

How can I make myself happy?
"It's My Party," Lesley Gore

What should I do with my life?
"Smile," Flickerstick

Why must life be so full of pain?
"Toodles, Mr. Jim," Tori Amos


Will I ever have children?
"Gotta Get Away," The Offspring

Will I die happy?
"Do You Want to Know a Secret?" The Beatles

Can you give me some advice?
"Attack and Release," Kompressor (does not dance)

What do you think happiness is?
"We're in This Together," Nine Inch Nails

Now it's your turn.

The nightmare bee

Editor's nightmare: I just woke up from a dream in which I couldn't spell recombinant.

I was standing in line at Wendy's, writing down the order of the person in front of me. He was this kind of smarmy guy who was complaining he couldn't order an appetizer. But whatever he did order had the word "recombinant" in it. I wrote it down as "recombinent," and Paul, who was behind me in line, gently corrected my spelling. The smarmy Wendy's dude agreed with him. Then I woke up.

And now I'm sitting here at 4:30 a.m. writing this because I was so disturbed by this dream that I had to get out of bed to check merriam-webster.com to prove I really can spell recombinant correctly.

The obvious joke has been made in the first paragraph

This is out of the realm of something I'd normally post, but as I told a friend the other day, it's not that gross once you think about it. So ... yeah. This is what the Depakote did to me. (No, it didn't give me hairy palms. I already thought of that joke.) It made my hair fall out! A lot of it!

I'd take a better picture (wha-?!?!), but alas, I've already thrown the damn thing away.

The only reason I'm showing this horrible picture now is because I got my hair cut into a fashionable bob today and my hairdresser told me my hair is growing back (yay!), but it's growing in curly (WTF?!). Regarding the blob o' hair, she said it looked like I'd been through chemo. :( I'm sure it's not that unusual for hair to change its mood, but it's weird that half my hair is going to be straight(ish) and half is going to be curly(ish).

Okay, that's not why I'm showing the horrible picture. I'm actually showing it because it is pretty darn gross and, well, why the heck not. (Go ahead, eww and ahh.)

By the way, that's fuzz from my brush. Not dandruff. Just thought I'd point that out before someone said something that made me more self-conscious than I already am about losing a crapload of hair.

P.S. Depakote sucks.

Eye candy

A regular ol' Hershey's Miniatures chocolate bar ...


... Or is it?


Hershey's and portable disk drives go together as well as Disney's Aristocats and cat food. (There's also a Disney's Aristocats-branded cat litter, but I can't find a picture of it.)

For better or worse, I've bought in to the cross-media brand engine and now own two cans of Aristocats food and one 2GB Hershey's drive.

900 Posts (plus a little housekeeping)

My previous post was the 900th Kate's Ink post. Holy moly. That's a lot of words pouring forth from my fingers.

P.S. Monstee, FF, SGG and Grr: Your domains have been renewed for another year. Happy Birthday, SGG (tomorrow!!!) and Happy belated Christmas to the rest of you. <3

"There's this woman, she's a hurricane"

The Atlantic hurricane season has officially started, something that holds some importance now that I live on the East Coast. Federal forecasters are saying there will be nine to 14 named storms, while Colorado State's annual forecast is predicting 11. If CSU is right, the last named storm of the season will be Tropical Storm or Hurricane Kate. What a dubious honor! And as long as it's not so big that the name is retired (a la Camille or Katrina), Kate will rotate back into the mix in 2015.

It's 2009, which means Charleston is due for it's once-a-decade heavy storm -- like Hugo in 1989 and Floyd in 1999.

I probably should do important stuff such as reassemble our hurricane kit, which turned into an auxiliary pantry once the '08 hurricane season passed. Hey, sometimes the hurricane kit was the only thing standing between near-death hunger and ramen noodles. Just ask Paul (a.k.a. Atlantic Hurricane Pablo, 2013).