Report!

Last week, the book was in the mail. Actually, several books were in the mail, which seemed a little wasteful, but is what happens when you redeem a Half Price Books gift card online. This particular gift card was a birthday present from last year. I'll give those of you who know my birthday a minute to do the math (or check Facebook). Yep. I had an 11-month-old unredeemed birthday present.

Presumably what the IT department at Half Price Books
looks like, given that every website known to man
has been accepting gift cards since the Internet Stone Age,
or approximately 2008. 

How does that happen, you ask? A really sad case of stubbornness paired with a teensy weensy little attention span. I didn't want to go to a physical Half Price Books because you never know what you're going to find, which can be lovely and spontaneous, but I had a list I wanted to plow through. So I went to their website and it said that they were in the process of reconfiguring checkout so that one could pay with a gift card. Being stubborn about the precise list of books I wanted, I figured I'd wait. So I put the gift card in a drawer and checked in on the website every month or two until, finally, there was a gift card option, and then my gift card didn't have the right kind of magnetic strip and I had to go exchange it for a different one at a retail store. A less determined stubborn person would have attempted to use the gift card at the physical store, but this was a mission.

A fair representation of my brain, only the squirrel is
significantly more focused. I usually tell people I have
the attention span of a crack-addled squirrel. 

I got the new gift card, went home, put the gift card back in the drawer and got distracted for another few months. But, eventually, I remembered I had a working gift card, and the website was accepting gift cards, and, with all of the planetary forces now in proper alignment, I went onto the Half Price Books website and ordered an almost completely different set of books because I couldn't find the original list. Being Half Price Books, each individual book was shipped from a different store, so our mailbox proceeded to regurgitate books every day for a week. It was fun, while it lasted, and made the joy of the gift card linger for a full 11 months.

The first book to arrive was a book I'd checked out of the Round Rock Library a couple of years ago and had been wanting to reread, the fabulously hilarious Blonde Bombshell, by Tom Holt, and I'm happy to say that it was as funny today as it was two years ago, if not more so. If you've never read his many books, Holt is fascinated with the multiverse, time travel, and all those sci-fi conventions, except that rather than visualizing earnest time lords or heroes righting the wrongs of history, he accepts that we as human beings have a pretty much limitless ability to screw things up and finds the humor in that.

The bombshell in question is (of course) an actual bombshell, a sentient weapon of mass destruction sent by a planet of dogs to destroy Earth. The cast of characters include a brilliant drunk of a Russian scientist, a couple of undercover dogs having a hard time acting human, several Creatures of Pure Text, Barbie, several dead octopuses, and an extremely pissed off unicorn. The unicorn, who appears in the most incongruous of places, glares angrily at the protagonists, and speaks the single command: "Report!"

I highly recommend Tom Holt and his many books. Here's one of the passages I can share without giving away plot. Remember, the aliens come from a planet ruled by dogs. The name "Earth" becomes a little lost in translation and comes out "Dirt." Same thing, really.

"Sign here, please," the man was saying.

Sign. He'd heard the expression several times over the last few days. Apparently, it was what Dirters did to confirm their identity. He hadn't paid much attention, and he realised, rather awkwardly, that he wasn't quite sure how it was done. A brief search of his cultural database came up blank; lots of instances of when signing was necessary, but no actual how-to instructions. That wasn't good, because it was bound to be one of those species-specific things that you either know or you don't. Figuring it out from first principles wouldn't be easy. 

"Um," he said. "Do I have to?"

The man looked at him. "Yes, sir."

"Can't I just--" He remembered another phrase he'd heard. "Can't I just charge it to the room?"

"Yes sir, of course."

"I'll do that, then."

"Certainly, sir. Just sign here."

On the other hand, how different could it be? Ostar or Dirter, some things are always the same, because there's no other way of doing them. Eat with your mouth. Walk with your feet. Establish your identity with a readily dispensed sample of your unique scent and DNA, just like they do it on the Homeworld.

"Where do I sign?"

The man handed him a piece of printed paper. "Right here, sir."

"Fine," he said, and unzipped his fly.  

That, friends, is the sort of craziness that is normal in a Tom Holt book. Now, in addition to having no discernible attention span, I also do not have the best memory for books and movies. I immerse myself in them, but then I can forget the whole plot, usually within a few months. Books that I love, Harry Potter, Anne McCaffrey's Pern books (sexy dragons!), the Shannara books, Jenny Lawson's memoirs, Dave Barry's comic novels, and Tom Holt's zany brainy romps: I buy them so I can re-read and re-discover them, over and over. I'm happy to say that Blonde Bombshell was as funny this weekend as it was two years ago. Now that it has a home on my bookshelf, I'm sure I'll enjoy it again in another two years.

However, that's not all. The angry unicorn said to "Report!" after all, and it's always a good idea to obey angry unicorns. It's been a couple of weeks since my last post, what with kids and work and trips from one end of the state to the other (well, okay, from Dallas to Corpus, so maybe more like from one upper middle part of the state to a lower middle part of the state, but you get the idea). So here's a bonus, a zany not-so-brainy short story I've been working on. Enjoy!

Earth Girls Actually Aren't That Easy

My Hotel Room is an Edge Lord

So, this week, I'm meeting the Feds in Dallas. Despite the fact that people (okay, just JFK) have gotten shot doing this, despite the fact that I've managed to go almost 18 years without meeting Our Federal Partners*, here I am, a state govvie in a hotel surrounded by federal buildings, a mere seven blocks from The Grassy Knoll (Pro Tip: if you search for 'grassy knoll,' in Google Maps, it pulls up Dealy Plaza. Evidently a lot of people do this, not just slightly nervous state employees with a tendency to panic when surrounded by tall buildings.)

I was already a bit anxious about this trip before even checking in, for several reasons:

1. The aforementioned anxiety about tall buildings.
2. An unfailing habit of getting lost in downtown areas (Yes, I got lost this time. That is why it is an unfailing habit and not just a tendency. Diction matters, y'all!)
3. Anxiety about being in a two-day meeting (I have the attention span of a crack-addled squirrel. Meetings are painful. I have to constantly will myself to concentrate, and it's exhausting. I'm always afraid I'm going to drift off and at the end of the meeting someone will say, "Dammit, Diana, you committed us to a 92% cost reduction and a relocation to Waco!", although if you read two posts ago, you'll know that a U-Haul to Waco is currently only $99.).
4. Anxiety about the Feds, how fancy and serious they must be and whether, when I go through security, they will stop me and put me in jail for being 'just not quite right.' (Of course they can tell that sort of thing at screening--they're Trained Federal Observers!)

Feds. This is what I imagine
tomorrow's security check
will look like. Which would be
kinda okay because Will Smith
is fine.

Me. I don't think the Feds
would appreciate my shirt,
because Toby is clearly not happy
with his elected officials.

The good thing about the hotel is that one side of it is across from a grassy knoll (no, not that one...evidently, Dallas has a thing for grassy knolls, which is weird, because you'd think they'd want to forget about them), so at least I am not completely surrounded by tall buildings, just 75% surrounded.

The design of the hotel, though, is like a hipster and a business person had several rounds of craft beer culminating in a one night stand in a warehouse the night before the design meeting. (Life Lesson: Excessive amounts of craft beer lead to poor life decisions, millennials!) Without further ado, may I introduce you to Room 319:

The ceiling. It is probably supposed to look artistically stained and raw and concrete-y, but (1) that is a closer look than I ever want to have of my sprinkler pipes because now I'll be worried about fires, and (2) I've lived in enough cheap apartments to wonder what leaked and whether the ceiling will start falling in on me in my sleep.

So we have Urban Brick, plus, Unfinished Building Concrete, plus Ikea Particle Board all next to each other, in some sort of Sad Wallcoverings Ugliness Competition. Clearly, Unfinished Builiding Concrete was the first prize winner. I am really troubled by the two neon orange dots on the bottom. Are they there because that was the real unfinished building concrete and they are being super committed to authenticity, like the Christian Bales of interior design? Or did some decorator carefully go into each room and paint random dots on the concrete to make it look authentic? Did they still have self-respect the next day?

Okay, this. Seriously, WTF, hipster business people, WTF? So there's this weird little area behind the desks, sofa, and TV and in front of the window. There's a little ledge formed by the furniture. Why? Is this a corral for your toddler? Or Pomeranian? Do the housekeeping staff have cockroach races in there during the day? You have to pull back the curtains to see it, so you could hide stuff there. Like, if you committed a murder, you could totally store a body there and close the curtains and it might take several guests before anyone noticed. Although, Dallas is warm in the summer.

The shower has a window with a pull-up shade, just in case you are so extremely supportive of the federal government that you want to provide free entertainment to the federal employees across the parking lot. Also, there is this weird window ledge. It's not under the shower head, so it's not a shower bench. Just a window seat that happens to be located in the shower. I guess if you have too many people in your hotel room and everybody's getting squashed and you've already put the trouble makers behind the curtain with the dead body, you can always tell people to sit in the shower.

Here we have a pleather headboard topped by a print of map colors. Because you shouldn't have to choose between being kinky and coloring in your My Little Pony coloring book. Okay, never mind. You should totally have to choose.

And then there's this. It appears that there may be a slide connecting the fourth floor to the third floor. Either that or housekeeping is kinda lazy about moving trash bags down from the upper stories. Part of me is like, okay, maybe I should go up to the fourth floor and see if it has a sign ("You must be THIS tall to ride.") but part of me is concerned that when I get to the bottom the maids are going to be like, "What are you doing in our trash chute?"

So, here I am, in a hotel that is clearly aware that it is, as my children would say, an Edge Lord (we think they mean 'really cool, edgy' by this, but we could be wrong and they could actually be part of some feudal society based on edginess), waiting to be detained by Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith, which would at least stop me from losing focus and committing us to move to Waco. And the meeting hasn't even started yet!

*My last encounter with a Fed was in 2001 at a conference in Kerrville. There was a banquet. Before the banquet, several of us visited the bar (and by 'visited,' I mean more of an 'extended stay' situation), including our Federal lawyer and his wife. Our table found the banquet incredibly hilarious, probably significantly more hilarious than it actually was. The awesome thing was, our boss was furious but she didn't do more than come over and whisper at us to tone it down because we were at a table with a Federal lawyer, which is an instant pardon, everybody knows that. 

51 Minutes Till Sunset

Sometime today our air conditioning went out. Our beautiful, ten-month old air conditioning system. In Austin. In July. On a day when it was 99 degrees outside. Ugh.

This picture of Dewey, an awesome semi-Siamese who ran away long ago,
represents both the relative age and current working ability of our a/c unit.
I still miss that cat. 

The house is so well insulated that it took us until 3:00 to discover the problem. A quick trip to the store for new filters, a quick trip to the fuse box, staring seriously at the a/c unit as though if we looked hard enough, the furnace would pull a Goblet of Fire move and spit out the diagnostics: sadly, none of these tactics worked. It took a few hours for the company to send a representative, but eventually he came and diagnosed the problem as a blower motor and circuit board issue, which was, frankly, a relief, because there was no way we could've been expected to figure that out on our own. Unfortunately, the shop wasn't open, so we are spending a very warm evening, counting the minutes until sunset.

As it happens, I know just how to deal with a broken air conditioner, because, for two of my three years in college I lived in a house with no central air and only these weird wall furnaces that you lit, very carefully, with a match for heat in winter. (Our preferred approaches to using the furnace were, (1) not to, unless it was really, really, really cold, and (2) to barely turn on the gas and hold out a super long match stick while lunging in the opposite direction so that if the wall exploded we could try doing a James Bond roll out the front door.)

Yes, I said three years. When you're a total nerd and love
school, you get so excited every semester when the new
course catalog comes out and wind up going year round,
eventually graduating in three calendar years--at the age of 20--
with about 20 hours more than you needed to graduate,
even after having switched majors and everything. 

So why would any sane person wind up in an un-air conditioned house in central Texas in 1990? Well, for starters, I enrolled at A&M too late to get a dormitory, so my first year was in an apartment. After that, somehow I stumbled across an ad for a two-bedroom house in North Gate for $285 per month. As a true Conces, those tiny, tiny numbers melted my cheap, cheap heart.

Sydney, my cat, looking for bugs in the garden. Kari and I,
neo-hippies that we were, tried valiantly to grow our own
food. Free spirited and absent minded ditzes that we were,
we failed. Miserably. But the cats had a good time.

These were a couple of streets of identical houses with matching gray siding, rented out by a management company to that select group of students who were willing to sacrifice comfort and, frequently, dignity, for really, really cheap rent. I lived there two years, first with Ursula, a rather unfriendly girl who communicated mainly via Angry Post-it Notes, and then with a girl named Kari.

We learned early on that the management company was not particularly interested in making repairs. However, our house was next door to one that was so dilapidated that no one would rent it. The management company didn't bother to keep the house next door locked, possibly because the multiple holes in the exterior walls, interior walls, and floors made that essentially pointless. Or maybe the locks didn't work. Either way, we came to regard that house as sort of a free Home Depot and raided it for oven knobs, outlet covers, towel bars, window screens, and other items we needed in our house. Shortly before I graduated, a group of male architecture majors moved into the house next door, as sort of a cheap-living-arrangement-plus-class-project deal and we had to go to Real Home Depot.

Sydney in the living room. I adopted that cat as a adult from
the Bryan Animal Shelter in 1989 and he lived to be almost
21 years old. His best trick was fetching wadded up pieces
of paper and bring them back to you.

Anyway, summers in Bryan were pretty brutal, but we survived, mainly by:

• Reminding ourselves about all the money we weren't spending on rent,
• Fans, lots and lots of fans,
• Taking frequent cold showers,
• Wearing nothing but underwear,
• Putting wet towels on our heads, and, most critically,
• Being somewhere--anywhere--else whenever possible.

Fortunately, we had boyfriends with air conditioning, and, between their houses and summer school, we survived. We both had long-haired orange tabby cats, who were considerably less happy about it, but we gave them frequent baths and they lounged around on the linoleum most of the time anyway.

Can you feel the love? Can you FEEL it?

What this means is that, unlike most Texans of my generation, I can say that I've lived without air conditioning for a couple of years, which makes tonight's lack of a/c no big deal. I've got fans, ice packs, and pink lemonade. Most important of all, I know you can survive heat, sweat, and humidity with your sense of humor intact, so long as you're with the ones you love.

Sydney Carton (my cat) and Trinity (Kari's cat), sharing a window.
Trinity's best trick involved a dark closet and a stuffed bear and
is not appropriate for general audiences.

Material World, Not-so-Material Girl

Ruthless, aggressive, and cheap with
products manufactured with slave labor and
a fabulously wealthy ruling junta, sort
of like the North Korea of retail.

So, I have spent my whole career in public service, first as a teacher and then as a state employee. I did work at the college bookstore for a couple of weeks once, but that is pretty much the extent of my experience in the private sector. (Fun Fact: my first job was in the Texas A&M Chemistry Department, conducting the same Chemistry 101 experiment over and over to figure out why the answer key was wrong. Good news: despite my sub-par chemistry skills, I solved the mystery. Bad news: because of my sub-par chemistry skills, my sense of smell was permanently damaged. All for minimum wage!) Needless to say, I find things like marketing and advertising a strange sort of foreign country, fascinating to watch on the news and read about, but not really anyplace I'd want to take the family on a vacation.

Oh, you glorious instrument
of distraction!

Anyway, this morning I found myself distracted by the signage at one of the local shopping centers. Our building cafeteria was closed, so I had stopped for a breakfast taco at Taco Cabana. If you've had their chorizo, egg and cheese tacos (the only variety of breakfast taco I get excited about), you know they are (a) delicious and (b) really drippy, particularly after adding salsa. To eat one in the car, you have to maintain absolute focus on creating a little aluminum foil bowl with the wrapper and be prepared to sop up any impending drips with napkins. You definitely cannot look up at the storefronts and wonder what a Foot Navy is. Is it an Old Navy for shoes? Some sort of weird pedicure place? Then, upon realizing that you're looking at a Foot Heaven massage place located entirely too close to a U.S. Navy recruiting center, wonder whether business people think about the words they choose to make extra large on their signs in relation to the shop next door, before wondering whether that Foot Massage place is taking the place of the make-your-own wine place where you bought four-bosses-ago a gift card years ago, before realizing you've just spilled taco drippings all over your shirt and pants and it isn't even 8:00. This, folks, is why concentration is so important, which is unfortunate, because I have the attention span of a crack-addled squirrel. I briefly considered spilling some of my coffee on the taco stains, on the theory that coffee is a more socially acceptable aroma than taco. Because if you walk into an elevator smelling like coffee, people go, ahhhh, and it puts them in their happy place (especially on Monday morning), where as if you smell like a taco, they question your life skills (and hygeine) and back slowly into the opposite corner. But, in the end, I opted for a quick detour to the bathroom to rinse out the taco stains. Mainly because I wasn't sure my weak coconut-milk-coffee would be able to take on the pungent aroma of spilled chorizo juice and salsa.

Anyway, emphasizing the FOOT in Foot Heaven next to a Navy recruiting station that may be making some sort of political statement by not including "U.S." in its sign (or maybe it was budget cuts...punctuation is expensive) is just poor planning, a failure to look at the big picture. A deliberate advertising strategy I just don't get is continually played out by the local U-Haul company. Periodically, they advertise specials on their sign. Today's special was one way, Round Rock to Waco, $99. This got me thinking...

"Great Balls of Bubblewrap, Martha! Round Rock to Waco is
only $99! Sure, we've got houses and jobs and two storage
pods full of crap, but $99...you just don't find a deal like that!
Pack up the Precious Moments, we're moving to Waco!"

Does that actually work? I mean, my understanding of the point of advertising is to get people to change their behavior. I wasn't feeling particularly hungry, but I saw that Sonic billboard and next thing I know, I've got a strawberry cream slush in my hand. I was feeling okay about my car, but after looking at that ad, I'm in the showroom. That's sort of the idea, right? But moving between cities is usually something that you plan. There's not a whole lot of spontaneity there. And it's not like you're going to decide between places to live based on a special on a 14' truck rental ("Well, I did have that job lined up in Dallas, but...the U-haul is $50 more, so you may go to hell [person who made job offer], I'm going to Waco!"). So, I really don't get their thought process, but maybe other people are more spontaneous about that sort of thing, because there's often some sort of special posted.

Probably the most powerfully effective bit of advertising I've seen recently was the simple, black-and-white sign outside a local bar: "Thursday--Drag Bingo." Now, I don't gamble or wear make up or high heels, I am straight, and my bling quotient is almost tragically low...but the juxtaposition of those two words from two very different worlds was quite intriguing. Who needs a spontaneous move to Waco or even miniature cannons pelting your feet with bath salts at Foot Navy, when there's something as potentially fabulous as drag bingo in the world? I was definitely tempted. At the very least, it gave me much to think about in the rush hour traffic on the way home.