Handsome James was one of three born in Pepper's second litter with The Pirate King of Pleasant Street. Pepper, a dainty seal point Siamese, twice escaped to mate with the one-eyed, ratty-eared brute before my mother finally got her fixed, abandoning dreams of raising purebreads. We know The Pirate King was the father, because every single one of Pepper's many kittens came out looking exactly like him; there wasn't a single thing to suggest their Siamese maternity, except when they opened their mouths to let out the trademark Siamese caterwaul.

I named him Handsome James, because that's exactly what he was; sleek, black, strong, with yellow-green eyes and an affable face. He spent most of his waking hours patrolling the neighborhood, eventually inheriting his father's title by the ancient rite of combat. He likely fathered plenty bastards before he, too, was fixed, almost as an afterthought. He would sometimes disappear for days, only to show up in the backyard with a mouse, smelling of skunk, or with a gash in his ear: trophies from his many escapades.



Sometimes he would march in, eat a can of catfood, promptly vomit it back up again, and march back outside, satisfied. Other times, he'd chase around Annabelle, my mother's chihuahua, or decide that the best place to nap was on top of your sleeping face in bed. Whenever he left the house on one of his many adventures, he would answer my mother in a call-and-response that continued until he disappeared around the corner.

"Here you go, Handesome James." 
"Mrrow!"
"Don't go in the road!"
"Mrrow!"
"Have fun!"
"Mrrow!"
"It's supposed to be cold out tonight!"
"Mrrow!"
"Goodnight!"
"Mrrow!"
"See you later!"
"Mrrow!"
"Okay!"
".....Mrrow!"

He'd been gone for nearly three weeks when my mother found his body underneath our front porch today, already far along the process of rejoining the soil that fed the grass he loved to hide in, stalking voles.

I had worried about how he'd take it when my mother left the house, taking the animals to start a new life. I know he wouldn't have been happy being an indoor cat. He'll always be a part of Pleasant Street, now, his belly always full of fieldmice and his feet on the sun-warmed earth.

Somehow I missed the fact that my flight to Vermont leaves the day after the semester ends - at 9am. I think I'm going to do myself a favor and stay in a hotel at Midway the night before, rather than take the 2am bus again (something I swore to high heaven I'd never do). Travel is migraine-inducing enough without a massive disruption of my sleep cycle! This will definitely bee an interesting two weeks: GO GO GO GO GO GO GO GO GO  - NOW GET ON A PLANE!

I've already decided on a project while I'm home: Yard Sale! When I was a kid, Grammie (you know, what other people call Grandma, or Nana, or Big Momma, or whatever) used to have a yearly yard sale, which has been exploded into the epic proportions of youth and become a "tradition" in my mind. Meaning, I may have only been involved once or twice, but in my memory this has expanded into dozens of yard sales crammed into my first seven years or so.

My grandparents owned a duplex that my great grandmother (aka "Great Grammie") shared next door. Great Grammie's contributions to the yard sale were stacks of historical romance novels that it was my job to label. An aggressive little capitalist, I spent lots of time trying to convince my grandmother that five cents was much too little to be asking for these almost-new books. Eventually, I'd give up and concentrate on enjoying the novelty of marking up little price tags. Meanwhile, my grandfather brought up old tools and eight track tapes from his shed, and Grammie carried out costume jewelry, mis-matched china, and polyester pants suits.

(Aside: as a kid I didn't realize that the out-dated paisley and lime green were fashions frozen at the time that my grandmother stopped buying clothes. I thought that these were "old people" outfits, and that one day I'd give up my wardrobe and inherit chunky crystal clip-ons and flared maroon slacks. Additional aside: Grammie said "slacks," "dungarees," and "pocket-book," further trappings of her grandmother status.)

My favorite part was the metal money box, with little concave containers for pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. No one ever used fifty cent pieces or silver dollars - that was the sort of thing that yard-sale-goers, mostly grandparents themselves, saved for their grandchildren. I would sit behind the card table, swinging my bare legs importantly and guarding the money, adding up the purchases on the clunky calculator with the paper tape. Sadie, my dog, would lie in the shade of the table and pant until a yard-saler pulled up, at which point she would enthusiastically take on her role as greeter and guide.

Since Jeremy and I moved in together, I've referred to The Yard Sale, which will be held when we move to wherever I get my first post-doc position. Our basement storage unit is gradually filling with the merchandise for this event, which I actually look forward to more than finishing my PhD. I actually fantasize about little paper tags on strings, oil-cloth-covered card tables, and a metal cash box of my very own.

I was on the phone with my mother the other day, and I realized that my week in Vermont would be the perfect opportunity to have a yard sale. I don't have to wait until I finish grad school after all! The semester can't end soon enough.

A recent NY Times article highlights a rap video about Vermont created by Montpelier teens - the YouTube video is here. Indeed, our dome is pretty blingin'...and the video is wicked cool, yo. They mention Angelino's Pizza, even (it is overpriced).






PS You get extra Green Mountain Points if you know where my icon is from!

Welcome, scullybully!

scullybully, aka Val*, aka Scully, is a longtime friend and new livejournaler (I finally got her to peek in here, so be nice to her or she'll run back to MySpace!). We first met back in Vermont when I worked at Friendly's, and then spent several years at Waldenbooks together. She's currently in college for psychology and women's studies, and wants to work with adolescent girls on body image. She's funny, sweet, and wise, and is probably the only person I know who can pull off pink without being Paris Hilton about it.






*Not to be confused with x_pyewacket_x, aka Val, aka Sousa.

Saturday: I took my little sister (13) to Lui-Lui's for lunch (great Italian place in West Lebanon, NH) and then bowling in White River Junction. I cut my thumb pretty badly on one of the bowling balls, and when I brought it up to show them all the counter guy said was, "do you want a Band-Aid?" I had to stop myself from saying, "no, I want a refund!" We had fun, otherwise. Jillian and I sang along to Jet's "Be My Girl," and I kept messing up the lyrics and yelling at the lead singer for messing up, which cracked her up every time. I can be funny when I want to be.

As soon as I got home (at around 5pm) Mom came up and informed me we were going to Foxwoods, a resort casino about four hours away in on the Rhode Island side of Connecticut. We had a really good time on the drive down, just talking. We don't get to do that enough. Of course as soon as we crossed the Vermont border it stopped raining (it'd been raining so long here that it's starting to smell like mildew outside). We got to the casino around 9pm, parked, and looked around for a good slot machine room (Mom's specialty).

They've stopped using the dingy buckets with quarters, and have switched to a ticket system; you put money in, and when you win or pay out you get a ticket instead of the "ding-clank-clink-tink" of a thousand quarters. Mom was disappointed, because she likes the money slots, but the paper system ended up saving us in the end. She handed me $250 (note: my parents do not have this kind of money to habitually throw about). I wanted to keep it, rather than gambling it, to which she replied "if you're not going to play with it give it back!" As I slid a $50 bill into the machine, I said aloud "this is not my money, this is not my money."

Which is good, because I lost it all.

Foxwoods is an odd slice of culture- it's an Indian Reservation casino, and huge; self-contained with over-priced shops, restaraunts, concert venues (they were getting Macy Gray on the 16th), and hotel rooms. The odd stereotypical statue of the arrow-knocking brave or the papoose-bearing woman completely clash with the fake country village decor of the shops and hallways. Some people dress in jeans and a sweatshirt, others in long and spangled evening wear, or like something out of a bitches-n-ho's rap video.

The table-game rooms are full of Chinese later in the night, and almost all the dealers and croupiers are Chinese. In the slot machine room, the money-changers are all (subcontinental) Indian¹, and the girls serving drinks are all white and middle-aged, with too much make-up and hairspray. Old ladies, hunched over and chain-smoking, sit in front of the flashing machines with their Foxwoods credit cards in the slot attached by a bungy cord to their clothing, so there's a surreal sense of suspended animation to the place. They sit in the same seat, smoke, and never make a sound; they're more part of the ambiance than actual people. Meanwhile, the younger patrons are on the move- restlessly moving from one machine to the next, the girls in groups of three or four, the guys in groups of five or six, the couples usually paired. There's the occasional squeal or buzzer going off, and everyone (except the elderly) looks around to see who's hit it big.

There's a strange superstition that develops; you find yourself hitting buttons in different patterns, betting one unit (usually a quarter, or a dollar on the dollar slots, or a nickel, etc.), then two, then three, then two, then one...people watch you put money into a machine, then when you get up they pounce on your ass-warmed chair like they're sure to win since you walked away. Women will put money in two or three machines at a time, leaning over to press the betting button in what is surely the only exercise they get.

When we went to cash in Mom's white tickets, she had $480, so she came up $80 above. We finished around 2am, which is when all the bars let out in the casino and they stop handing out free drinks in the game rooms. The halways were filled with the young and drunk; skin-baring girls teetering on pencil-thin heels, hanging on to their girlfriends' arms, or being steered by barrel-chested men with identically-clipped haircuts. Cat fights broke out in the middle of the hall, and security guards were escorting brawlers out. We walked by a young kid, maybe 12 at the most, sitting on a park bench outside one of the slot machine rooms. I was this close to approaching the kid and calling 911  when an older woman, short but thick, in a security guard uniform came up to him. He had this bewildered look on his face, and pointed into the slot room.

I have such a hard time wishing humanity well sometimes.

We got home around 7am. I dozed on and off in the car (and woke up to see that the rain started once again as we crossed into Vermont), and as soon as we got home I tumbled onto my mattress on the floor, my back and legs stiff and sore from my cramped position in the car.

I had a great time.

1 - EDIT: Oddly enough, I didn't see any Native Americans employed there. There were a number of them gambling, but none as employees. I wondered at this; wouldn't it make sense to have a good source of local jobs for the Tribe? Or would it seem more demeaning for them to be employees at the casino serving a mostly white population?

In less than six hours I need to be on a bus heading for an airport in Chicago. This is the only bus, of course, that will get me there in time for my noon flight to Manchester (New Hampshire, not the one across the pond). Every time I fly, I manage to arrange my time so that I don't start packing until at least eleven at night (correction: doing laundry before I can pack). I tend to live far away from airports (a good three hours on average), so if I'm taking a bus for a morning flight I always end up stumbling onto a Greyhound between 2am and 5am. Every time, frantic and cranky with sleeplessness, I swear to myself never, never again. And here I am.

I have a backpack full of books to read (and two more to review) towards my 50 Book Challenge, and a small suitcase full of clothes and toiletries (or I WILL when my laundry is done). Add my laptop bag and I'll look like any other twenty-something grad student visiting home. This is my first vacation (can I really call it that?) since...March of last year, before my last senior trimester. I spent winter and spring breaks here in the lab, and last summer I moved to Madison almost immediately after graduating. Tomorrow I'm heading home to spend some time with my mom, (step)Dad, sister Jillian, and brother Josh. Chihuahua Annabelle, Siamese cat Pepper, and Pepper's leftover children Skittles and James will also be right where I left them.

Twelve days. Twelve days to rest, read, think, stratagize, be with some of the people I love, miss the rest, and watch my best friend marry the woman of his dreams. The day after I get back to Madison, it's off to Indiana for a research coring trip. I'm dreading this like work, rather than fun, but that's to be expected pre-vacation. If I survive tomorrow's thunderstorms in Chicago and rain in Manchester, my next dispatch will be from the Green Mountain State. Vermont is really it's own universe, governed by its own laws; at times I'm amazed it exists. I should need a passport, or special permission from the governor to visit. My preception of the world is altered somehow by the time I've spent there; I spend so much time forgetting the rest of the country can be so cold, so hard, so wrong.

I am currently on hold with ETS, the equivalent of the mafia as far as grad students are concerned, and listening to exceedingly bad smooth elevator jazz. ETS administers the GRE, which I took last February, and now I need my registration number to provide to the National Science Foundation as part of my current effort to convince them that they should absolutely give me $30,000 a year for three years, pay my grad school tuition, and provide me with health insurance. Granted, the university is already doing that, but it would essentially entail a 75% pay hike for the next three years, plus a very sparkly line on my curriculum vitae (CV, or "fancy academic term for resume," for those of you non-academics). This grant application was sprung rather suddenly on my by my advisor, and I have to get it done by November 4th (transcripts, letters of reference, personal statement, research plan, research background, blah blah blah). I'm the 45,755th applicant, and they give out 1,000 fellowships. It's...more of an exercise, really. Good practice, right? "Sigh."

Well, that was easy. No more Cosby Show jazz. Thirty minutes on hold for a seven-digit number.

The weather has gone cold and lovely. I think there's somehting to my being a solstice baby- I seem to become more vital from June 21st to December 21st, more creative, more energetic, happier. I think I wane a bit in the second half of the year. Or the first half, conventionally. Less than two weeks until the Vermont Trip, and I'm really starting to feel antsy, eager for New England in its most perfect time of year. The leaves will be gone (and some are still green here, which is so strange to me!), but frost and the twlilight stars against the smoke-curled white church steeples have their own magic. And I miss my friends, and even my family. I miss my little community. I still feel like something of a refugee, in my sleeping bag, eating noodles from a pot on the floor. Without my tribe.

They're tearing down the hospital two blocks up the street, and today they're selling all the furniture within at "rock-bottom" prices. In half an hour, at one, they'll be giving whatever's left away. I'm going to walk up there and see what the various domesticity gods (or maybe I should be thinking more along the lines of, say, Norse pillaging patrons) have to offer. I'm trying very hard not to get excited. Everything will be gone, right? Except, say, giant wrap-around business desks that won't fit in my house. Right?

I worked the Dan Savage event at Borders last night. If I didn't have to eat my Annie's Shells and run up the street, I'd tell you all about how smart and hilarious and real this guy is. So you'll just have to wait. Maybe I'll come home with a hospital bed, the kind on wheels that raise and lower. Why don't they make those things big enough for two to sleep on?