voncookie | November 30, 2007
My mother and I were over in Newark, Delaware last week looking for yarn, of course, for some fabulous legwarmers for me in my frigid apartment. We had finished at “Stitches with Style” and it was just about noon. My Mom suggested we go to The Trap for lunch, and I enthusiastically agreed, as The [...]
voncookie | November 29, 2007
One little baby miracle that accompanies the return from a long trip abroad is the phenomenon I know as “Fresh Eyes”. This is the moment when you re-enter your usual abode, look around, and find either immense pleasure or immense dissatisfaction in what you see, your space as you left it. Fresh Eyes are hard [...]
voncookie | November 27, 2007
Where I’m at right now: Still jet-lagged, waking before 6 a.m. most of the time, generally tired most of the day. Wondering why it is that the very day after Thanksgiving, all major businesses universally decided to start playing crappy secular Christmas music. If I hear “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” one [...]
voncookie | November 27, 2007
Head on over to FLICKR for pix from Turkey Day in Virginia with the whole fam damily.
voncookie | November 24, 2007
Hola, everyone! I’ve made it back to the States in one piece physically… mentally is a different story, and my body still seems to want to live on Spanish Time, unfortunately. That’s why I’m posing this at 5:15 a.m. EST. Since I’ve been back I’ve been excessively tired, and having bizarre left-over anxiety about travel, [...]
voncookie | November 21, 2007
Need to shower, need to get dressed, need to finally decide which craft project to take on the plane… Need to chill out—fearful that there’s going to be a snafu with my reservation… Gotta think positive. …And gotta give thanks… Thanks, everybody who made this possible, from the bottom of my heart.
voncookie | November 20, 2007
Well, I am officially so bored out of my gourd that writing a 150-word conference proposal actually sounds like fun. I just got the announcement for the conference and it meets all my criteria for being attractive: It’s close by. It’s close by and it’s by the ocean. It’s close by. Beggars can’t be choosers, [...]
voncookie | November 20, 2007
Yep, it’s official. No flights MAD-PHL on November 20th. In fact, My Airline of Choice’s offices weren’t even open at the airport. It’s like they decided not to exist today. The fact that they didn’t send me an email notifying me of the change really, really irks me, but whatever, I get one more day [...]
voncookie | November 20, 2007
I don’t think I’m coming home today. My flight was changed without any notification, and so, well, I guess I’m leaving tomorrow. Wow. Color me surprised. Looks like I may get my extra day in Madrid after all. Huh. Maybe I’ll even go to the Thyssen. What a shock! Still, I’m going straight to the [...]
voncookie | November 19, 2007
OK, so the situation with the electricity in the apartment is that *quite possibly* the electric company came and shut off power because the landlady/agency didn’t pay up. Great. I just shot off an angry email to the agency saying that at the very least, if somebody doesn’t come by within the next two hours, [...]
voncookie | November 19, 2007
This may be my last post from Spain, seeing as for some reason the power has gone out in my apartment, and I’m running on battery. Sometime between 7 and 8 o’clock this morning, se produjo un corte de luz. No lights, no TV, no motorcars, not a single luxury… So far I’ve called the [...]
voncookie | November 18, 2007
I swear Milton-Bradley could make a fortune with a Jenga-type game in which you’re given oddly shaped pieces that you have to fit into a suitcase-shaped container. You start out with a certain number of pieces, and then go about playing the boardgame where you acquire more pieces (like if you land on the space [...]
voncookie | November 17, 2007
First off, here’s the story: At a summit in Chile, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and Rodríguez Zapatero, the Spanish president, got in a spat when Chávez called former Spanish President Aznar a fascist. As Zapatero was defending Aznar, Chávez, according to the newspapers, continued to interrupt him, prompting King Juan Carlos II of Spain to [...]
voncookie | November 16, 2007
I had two successful loads of laundry… I thought I was in the clear… and now *this* bullshit, where the washing machine has been going at it for 2 hours and still hasn’t hit the spin cycle. Man, what the hell do you have to do to get these damn things to fucking work!!!!! Also, [...]
voncookie | November 16, 2007
Here’s the thing: my winter coat positively stinks. It seems to have trapped not just the cigarettes that I’ve smoked in it, but every cigar, hookah pipe and Ducado smoked in my general vicinity. Gross. Today, housebound as I am—woke up with a sore throat that would have killed a small rodent—I decided that, since [...]
