I won't forget a single day, believe me

[austin_dern]

The phone interview ended and bunny_hugger and I were left to take in the rest of the night.

We didn't have any plans for anything too tightly bound to time, with only some notions that we would sooner or later make dinner, the first time we'd made a proper meal instead of going out somewhere to eat, or eating at my brother and his wife's, or just snacking over things like sandwiches. We also had plans to barbecue later in the week, although we weren't having much success in finding mosquito spray and we knew there was nearly a whole week left and we'd get around to it.

This probably sounds pretty domestic and quiet, but that's what felt so nice about it. See earlier comments about how the circumstances of our earlier meetings-up had meant that we really didn't have quiet time together. One of the great things of this week was the quiet time, hours spread out without the need for accomplishing anything and without any schedules but our own feelings about when we should sleep, when we should wake, and what takes our fancy at the moment.

We spent some time talking over her phone interview and how it felt, and what a potential job offer from them might mean and the sorts of decisions about whether to take it or not that might come about. It happens that I'd applied for the same college; I'd forgotten that on top of the ordinary community college nuisance questions they also asked a series of essays on maybe a half-dozen topics. It may sound funny that I'd forget something like that, but too many community colleges like putting up these sorts of nuisances and they all blend together, and in any case they didn't ask me for a phone interview, much less a proper interview, so I didn't have much reason to think specifically about them again.

One of the things we did do was look at Animal Crossing, a rather cute game which she's been encouraging me to get into. I have looked into it and drawn inspiration for a few projects from it, particularly with the abundant changes of setting and events that happen only at particular times of day or days of the year or so, but in my usual plodding way that hasn't translated to action. But then I finally got around to beating the career path on Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 late last year, about four years after I first got the game, and I'm expecting to play a third game of Civilization IV sometime soon. bunny_hugger was good enough to show her home and the surroundings and the various cute ways to improve the setting. I haven't yet bought the game myself, but then it's also hard finding the time to play, given the shared nature of the TV that the Wii here is hooked up to. I also haven't got around to doing much with Thrillsville or Bally Pinball Classics.

There is something here which I realize I'm not positive whether it happened on Monday or Wednesday night. I think Monday, because that seems like the better logical fit, but I could be mistaken. The incident was that while she was getting things for dinner together she found a centipede in the sink, which is one of bunny_hugger's phobias. (Centipedes in general, although finding them in the sink is just making matters worse.) It threw dinner preparation off schedule. But I was able to go in and, you know, centipede seems like it was undercounting things. But I took a couple sheets of paper towels off and used the folded edge of the perforated seam to force it onto the paper. Making my way briskly to the side door since the bug was doing its best to roam all over the entire surface and make an escape, I got outside, past the driveway, and the centipede fell off in the general direction of the neighbor's soon enough. So we were able to resume without any particularly disruptive bugs.

Dinner, now, was sweet and quiet and shared over low lighting that helped bring out the features of her home. It was wonderfully decorated in little ways from painting of the moulding to metal sculptures all over the place, which the previous owners had been working on and which she's kept up. We spent time, and attention, together, enough to feel nicely satisfied with dinner.

We also got involved in watching some of the local commercials of television of her youth, which are more abundant on YouTube than the local commercials of my youth are, strangely enough. The most I could offer was various Crazy Eddie commercials, and while his existence does explain various references that have slipped into New York City-originated comedy that parodies the troubled electronics chain, if you've seen a couple commercials you've got the spirit of the whole thing. She could offer things like commercials for the amusement park that Detroit used to have in Canada, or an electronics chain which in the mid-80s used those oddball Comic Eighties Russians to make ``Fifty Watts per channel, babycakes'' a Michigan-area catchphrase. It's programmed into the minds of many people of the appropriate era (and by coincidence both were talked about at The Onion's AV Club in a discussion of pop culture things that were buried into their subconscious the day before I flew out) but this was my first chance seeing it in person. Wow.

At some later point we realized we'd been at dinner all the way through Conan O'Brien's debut on The Tonight Show, which we had some notion of catching. We would have to count on the Tivo substitute doing its duty and recording it. (It did, but in a confusing way for some reason.)

Trivia: From the start of training for Apollo 11 on 15 January 1969 through the end 15 July, Neil Armstrong logged 1,298 hours in training, while Buzz Aldrin logged 1,297. Michael Collins recorded 926. Source: First Man: The Life Of Neil A Armstrong, James R Hansen.

Currently Reading: The Decision To Go To The Moon: Project Apollo and the National Interest, John M Logsdon.

(By the way, there are a lot of Moon-oriented movies on Turner Classic Movies for the 20th, at least in the United States feed, some of them comedies and some classics and of course starring George Melies's little piece.)

Comments

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

I've had some of those childhood regional commercials stuck in my brain, the same. Different ones than Bunny Hugger, though; the champion is the Bob's Discount Furniture campaign, which is still going strong and voiced by the same owner.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

My real problem is we didn't have cable until I was a teen, so there weren't truly local commercials that I had the chance to see: we got New York City television and while that had local adverts, they were for things like Crazy Eddie's that gained some spinoff national currency.

I did want to show off stuff like Jason's Furniture (where'd everybody go?) but couldn't find the commercials I was really looking for. There were just all these newer ones that didn't have the great punchlines.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I'm not phobic about centipedes in general (though I don't like them). My phobia is for that particular species of centipede, and they live in large numbers in my basement, and I live in terror of them coming upstairs as they do on occasion. If you hadn't been there to get that one out of my sink, I probably would have ended up unable to use my kitchen for a few days until I thought it might have gone. My phobia is such that it is almost incomprehensible to me that you exposed yourself to possibly being touched by it.

Readers possibly unfamiliar with the particular type of centipede I have in mind could Google "house centipede," but I advise caution because you might find out you are phobic of them too. (I can't actually look at photos or even drawings of them without getting really upset. Years ago when I was looking online for information about how to get rid of them, I had to turn images off in my browser first.)

I think it must have been Wednesday that I found the centipede, because I recall that I had gone to the sink to run water into a pot for making spaghetti. But on Monday, the first time I cooked, I made Swiss vegetable casserole.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Oh, *those* things. Every now and then I spot one at Momgoose's, and have to kill it if at all possible. They are faintly creepy.

The ant invasion at Momgoose's house every summer had me mildly twitchy, but more "Kill 'em all." than anything else. (Only in the house or in a 10-foot-or-so surrounding ring; I don't go randomly killing bugs or stepping on anthills. When they are in my personal space, the least-annoying[*1] are escorted outside if possible, or dealt with by squish.) Once the problem was under control, I calmed down.

--Chi
[*1] Spiders and Ladybugs, mostly.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

Faintly creepy? I find them nightmarish, filling me with a deep, primal horror.

I don't kill them for two reasons. First, I don't think I should kill things (even primitive things) merely because I don't like how they look. Second, I find mangled dead ones even more horrifying than live ones.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

The former I can agree with as a good reason not to kill them. Life deserves the same respect regardless of prettiness. ("In my house and likely to intersect negatively with me" and "Tasty" are the two main criteria I use for deciding if an animal's going to die. The first is personal, and the second personal _and_ professional as a chef. (And yes. I know you're a vegetarian. and I applaud encourage such! Not I, though.))

The latter.. really? Dead bugs don't *move*. Unmoving and squooshed don't even need to be looked at; a napkin covers them and then to the trash bin.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I do my best to be nice and peaceful regarding insects that might be in my domicile. Most of them I can ignore, actually, and just worry about moving food out of the way of, or sometimes scooting them out of the shower when I'm about to start.

I'm striving to be more vegetarian, although I could honestly make a better effort than I do.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

Almost everyone could make a better effort than they do, which very much includes me. I'm very approving of people who make any effort at all.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I've felt like the effort I've made has been passive, mostly in happening to be eating less overall and so eating less meat as a result of that, rather than active things like choosing the vegetarian option deliberately. That may sound like a pretty vague reasoning, but I think some part of me is arguing that something easy enough I barely have to think about the fact I'm doing it --- such as having cheese slices for breakfast instead of sandwich wraps or hot pockets or the like that contain some kind of meat --- doesn't count as an effort.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

The way my brother once put it was, "Have you noticed what happens when you kill a centipede? They deconstruct into their component parts." I assume he was referring to the fact that when in distress, house centipedes eject some of their legs in an attempt to distract predators while the rest of them gets away. They can afford to do this because they grow a new pair of legs each time they molt, and they live ten years.

People say that we fear what we don't understand, so at one point I read a lot of stuff about house centipedes thinking it might help. Instead I learned facts such as the above that made me even more thoroughly horrified.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, yipes. I mean, I knew about the growing new pair of legs with each molting, but I didn't know (or didn't remember) about ejecting their legs. That's terrifying. I'm glad I don't go looking to kill them.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I knew that it was just the one species but I realized as I started writing that I wasn't positive I could specify the right species and if I thought really hard at it could I be positive it wasn't actually a particular sort of caterpillar and ... well, it seemed easiest to pick the creature I was most nearly confident I was at least partly right about.

You're right, though, that it was a Wednesday event. I should have trusted my instinct in that too, because it felt like it wasn't such an early thing to have happen.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, I typed "50 watts" into Google and its first suggested completion was "per channel babycakes."

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Aw, cute. The trouble with trying it on ``They've gone to Jason's Furniture'' is that Google Suggest doesn't think that start can end any other way than ``plaid''.