2003-03-13 - 8:00 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "Sister Christian", by Night Ranger, because James Lileks mentioned it.

So, I am amused by the results of my milk polls, particularly by the five people who can't tell there's a difference between carton milk and plastic jug milk. Also intriguing are the people who don't care. I care. I much, much prefer cartons.

Since the point of this Diaryland journal is to document my own personal weirdnesses for posterity, I'm including a few things from comments, plus a few more:

I drank milk with every meal as a kid, got out of the habit in my mid-20s, and now am starting to drink it more again. I do like it. I am going to try to continue to drink more, since it's supposed to be good for my bones.

There are certain things I like to drink milk with. Certain spicy-hot foods, for starters. Anytime I use RedHot sauce. Cereal. Cookies. Spaghetti with tomato sauce. I don't like to drink it with bland foods. Milk with mac-n-cheese is overkill.

Cream of Wheat doesn't work unless it's made with at least 2% milk.

Warm milk is disgusting, and I will put ice cubes in it if it gets too warm.

On the commute this morning, we were just past the School for Ugly Children when I saw an exception (a mildly cute kid) walking opposite traffic with his dad. He looked to be nursery-school age, or else very small. His face lit up and he broke into a run, and I thought, "Wow, he's excited to get to school."

Ha. Not. He was running towards the USPS mailbox. His dad caught up, dug around in his bag, and pulled out a stack of ten envelopes. He handed the stack to the kid, held open the "door" for him, and the kid stood on tippie-toe to throw them in. The kid was SO EXCITED.

I sat there, watching out the driver's-side window, smiling. It cracks me up how kids get so excited about doing stuff like that. Pressing elevator buttons is a big one. If I'm out with kids, I never press a button; I wait for them to do it. The dad looked up and saw me smiling, and smiled back, and then the light changed and we were off.

The charger for Poindexter's cordless drill went missing. He spent the ENTIRE EVENING two nights ago looking methodically throughout the house, and it didn't turned up. He looked EVERYWHERE. The only place it could be, he figured, is somewhere that was staring him in the face and he couldn't see it. It made him nuts.

The next evening, he figured out that he'd probably thrown it in a bag during a mad-dash clean (like for unexpected guests arriving within the hour). He was right. It was in a bag in the office closet.

My coworker Jay says that if you throw stuff into a box or bag during such a cleaning fit, then as soon as the people leave, you have to take the stuff back out of the box and strew it around. Or else this sort of thing happens. Let this be a warning to all you not-so-neat freaks out there like me.

This section contains seriously boring nesting crap. Curtains and planter gardening. Those of you who don't find this "seriously boring", please send suggestions!

A trip to Target last night got us our garage shelves, but we had to get a raincheck (argh!) for the closet shelves.

On the positive side, we also got linen-look curtains and scarves, a throw rug, and placemats for the living room, all sage. (Placemats because we eat off the coffee table sometimes.) The one problem with the scarves is that the one around the sliding doors will look shorter than the other two windows, but I'm not sure that I care at this point. We got all the curtains for $130, which is about how much ONE scarf would cost if we had them custom-made, and I'm certainly not willing to make my own. All that hemming. Ugh. What I might eventually do is shorten the window scarves so they "match" the door scarf, since I'm only really looking for window toppers anyway. I can probably do that with the iron-on hem tape.

I also browsed their gardening section and found a whole BUNCH of NICE, lightweight planters, that cost far less than I was expecting. I'm very excited. I can't do bulbs this year, but I will be doing them in planters for next spring. I'm planning to get the 24" window-box type planters ($5 each) to go around the brick walls enclosing our backyard, and they're going to have something prolific and droopy in the front to spill over the wall, and flowers in the back part. Then I'll have a couple large artsy containers with herbs in them -- basil, rosemary, curly parsley, and Italian parsley. The annual herbs I'm going to try to start from seed, right about now, indoors. I have a bunch of rosemary back in Virginia, so I'll try to transplant some of it up here.

A container or two with clematis or morning glories in them, to climb up the wall, would also be nice... I just hope I don't make myself too crazy by taking on too much at once. At least morning glories are considered "weeds" by some people, so they should basically grow themselves.

Oh, and I want a fuschia for the front-door overhang, and a pot filled with some other shady plants. And eventually, window boxes for the second-floor windows, although I'm going to put fake plants in there for now because they're too high up to bother with real ones. Some fake ivy will do the trick. Just something to soften the ugly facade this house has.

Gratuitous photo of the day:

Young Evelynne, just turned 19 judging by the little tabletop Christmas tree in the right corner, studying her Calculus II. I always studied in this position. And clearly it was warm enough in the dorms to go barefoot. Day-amn.

To this day, I learn best in that position. Knees bent, back against something, book resting on thighs. Close observers will notice that's a Paper Mate pen I'm using.

Also amusing to me in this photo is that my jean hems are folded to make them as tapered as possible. Now I'm wearing bell bottoms. Go figure.

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