July 2011 Archives

Remember when we said, girl, please don't go, and how I'd be loving you forever, taught you 'bout hangin' tough as long as you got the right stuff, didn't we, girls, ooh, didn't we, girls, aah?

I just finished reading Rob Sheffield's book Talking to Girls about Duran Duran. It was a pretty good and quick read. He mixes a lot of personal stories with analysis of the best (and worst) of 80s music. Sometimes he focuses a lot of the specific songs and other times, the songs are basically irrelevant to the story.

I did like best about it that it reminded me of a ton of music from the 80s that I haven't listened to in forever, and how much I loved it growing up. Near the end of the book he mentions a few songs from Tiffany and New Kids on the Block. As he mentioned them, some of the melodies popped back up in my head. So of course I had to head over to iTunes and check them out.

For as much as I worshipped New Kids as a tween/teen, I was actually surprised that my extensive iTunes collection was significantly missing New Kids. The only song there was Hangin' Tough and that was from an 80s greatest hits cd. I guess in high school and then college I separated myself from New Kids to head in new musical directions.

We all love and hate how easily the iTunes music store allows for impulse music purchases. And to an extent I'm annoyed that I had to rebuy albums that I owned cassette tapes of box in the late 80s/early 90s. When the album covers for Hangin' Tough and Step by Step appeared on the screen, a wave of nostalgia swept through me. When I previewed the songs, a huge smile broke out on my face as I recalled many days and nights singing along and dancing to these songs. With just a single relisten, all of the lyrics that my brain filed away popped back up.

In the book, Sheffield's overarching theme is that through the 80s (when he was in his very formative years of 13-23) music taught him lessons of love, how to act, what the world was like. Finishing the book and now listening to New Kids shuffled with Debbie Gibson and Tiffany, as me wondering about when music becomes meaningful to an individual. From his book, it seems that for Sheffield started recognizing the importance of music somewhat before 13, but it was really around 13 that more personal significance was found in the music/lyrics.

Here's the psychological/scientific question that a nerd like me asks (instead of just enjoying the bad music): at what cognitive/developmental stage in life does music become an important mentor/confidant/teacher? Little kids like music, but when do they switch from liking something catchy to actually internalizing the lyrics and feeling like this music is important. Sheffield's entire book is dedicated to how songs taught him about life, and less explicitly how looking back them become significant memory tags.

Part of my random musings here are when do we start to take on some music genre/group/singer as our own. There's a lot of music that I like from when I wasn't born or old enough to really even be aware of it. There's a lot of that music that I've taken to since high school and college. But really at the time, what music did I like when it was popular, and like enough to love the songs that weren't the hits on the radio?

If I were 10, 11, 12 years old now, would I love Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift? Listening to New Kids and Debbie Gibson, I'd have to say yes. All of the songs are about love, being in love, longing for love, trying to get love back. What does a 10 year old know about that stuff? Nothing really, but maybe it is part of preparing for teenage crushes and heartbreak. Everything in love will be fine because Jordan Knight's told me that time is the answer and time is on our side, and I'm his one true love. And that's immediately followed by Joey asking "where do I go from here" after our love's hit the rocks. By the end of the album, we're all lovey dovey or at least going to be strong enough to survive. I don't know much Bieber music, but I'm pretty sure that Taylor Swift is essentially singing the same themes (just of course from the girl's perspective like Debbie).

I don't have an end to the ramble other than that I'm going to surround myself with some of the cheesiest songs of 1988-1991 and ponder the role music plays in our lives, especially the music that we earliest claim as most important to us.

Over the past several days in which the temperatures (and humidity!) have been intolerable (and I know it is worse in other parts of the country), I've realized how much I hate AC. The noise, the constant blowing, the lack of fresh air.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the cooling effects and I'm not going to turn the AC off just because it annoys me. I hate being hot more than I hate the AC. But it is just so nice to be able to have the windows open and fresh air circulating. In our new apartment, we have so many more windows, so much more air.

It is so beautiful outside this morning that I've opened all of the windows and am sitting in front of one now enjoying the breeze. I hope the weatherman was right and today stays nice so I can keep enjoying the open windows.

Change one little thing and suddenly the blog is dead!!!!!!!! Working on fixing it.

Updated:

What I wanted to do... I wanted to add a new little blog to my website to keep track of my workouts and goals.

What I ended up doing... When I last updated to the latest version of Moveable Type, I somehow was excluded from fully changing the format of my blogs. Apparently previous incarnations of MT (as I understand from googling), allowed you to have multiple different blogs and webpages that were linked under your common domain name, but otherwise separate. However, in an attempt at convenience (and the total opposite of what I wanted to do), the newer version that I have aggregates all blogs on the domain under a common website as a parent with each blog or webpage as children. Update any blog and it will be reported on the parent site. I'm not sure how I was skirting this issue previously, but somehow I was until I did something (which I'm still not sure what).

This blog (Dr. GF Knits) is set to the main web address of my domain; however the new parent webpage also wants to use that address and thus overrules the blog. You can still see the correct knits blog here (http://www.drgirlfriend.com/index.htm), but the main web address is now the aggregate webpage. I can't change it back. The best that I can do is make the aggregate page looks as close to the original blog as possible. I think that I've achieved that with a few exceptions (mainly the most recent posts list and current archives are missing from the left). I've already wasted over an hour and a half trying to fix this and I'm quitting for now. I had planned to shower and head out to the grocery store and be on my way home by now.

So please (if there are still any readers) be patient if things are wonky. You'll see that this aggregate page is going to pull both my Knits blog and new Exercise blog. Email me if you notice any weird happenings (I do know that search doesn't work, not sure that I can fix that one.)

[Test and note to self... is it not enough to just publish a new entry? Do you have to take an extra step and refresh/publish the aggregate page too? -- ARGH!!! Answer appears to be yes and not in a way that's easy to do. HATE!!!!]

At the wedding we attended last weekend, there was a photo booth for the guests to use. It was a cute idea because each set of pictures printed twice. One set for the people photographed and another that went into an album for the bride and groom. Some people were having trouble with the timing of pictures... but I think that was because they were unprepared. I went in the photo booth with my brother and before we went in, we planned out 4 pictures... rock 'n roll, thumbs up, fight, and guitars. They came out really funny. Unfortunately my mom stole that strip.

Kevin and I went for a less pc theme...

Spousal abuse is certainly not a funny topic, but come on... these are funny pictures. We were inspired as always by Larry David. Hahaha!

"It's just a bit we do!!"

(I forgot when we went into the photo booth that I had my phone in the little pocket on my dress. At least it fits the color scheme.)

(Random musings to get me back into posting more frequently.)

This holiday weekend, Kevin and I attended a beautiful wedding in Philly. We drove down Saturday afternoon. We took my car because that gives us the option for two drivers (I still can't drive a manual) and Kevin needed to do some work Sunday afternoon and didn't want to be exhausted from driving if there was a lot of traffic coming home. I drove us down, no real problems other than a lot of traffic.

Driving home was a different story. Everything started out fine. I drove us out of Philly and PA back into Jersey, stopped for cheap gas, and got onto the Turnpike. Accelerating to get up to speed on the TP my car's engine surged/revved way too high. We thought that was weird, but if it was only once, no big deal. But of course it can't be only once. It continued to do this as I tried to maintain speed. Fortunately there was a rest stop in 2 miles, so we got off. When put the car in park, it surged again and then calmed down. Kevin got out and looked under the hood (I don't know what he was looking for or at because while I've seen under the hood of my car a few times, I have no clue what any of it is... well, I could probably point to the battery and possibly where the wiper fluid goes). Everything looked normal, so we got back on the highway and it continued being weird. To make things more fun, the skies had opened up and it was raining really hard. Fun! I found that the car was fairly happy at 50-55 mph, so I tried to maintain there. Kevin offered to take over driving, but not wanting to succumb to gender pressure, I said that I was fine to keep driving. As we got closer to NY, the traffic thinned out and the rain stopped. So I tried taking it back up to 65 (the speed limit) and it was hesitating to accelerate and then once at 65 needed a lot of effort to maintain speed. We eventually made it home.

Where I was totally ready to accept gender roles was in taking the car to the mechanics. We have a really great repair shop that we use for both of our cars. The guys at the shop know Kevin by name; they recognize me and my car, but don't always remember my name. I told Kevin Monday night that he had to prep me to make sure that I told the guys at the shop the right thing about what was wrong with the car (really, I wished Kevin could go and tell them, but he had to go to work). Most of how I described it above came from Kevin's prep and was what I told the guys. If I were on my own with that, I would have said it did weird things. Weird things is not very diagnostic.

I told the guy at the shop everything that the car did. I think he could tell that I was repeating a mental list and trying to make sure I described the three big things (hesitation, sluggish, surging) the right way. After I finished, I told me that I did a good job describing the situation, so I told him that Kevin prepped me with what to say. I'm now waiting to find out what the problem is, although depending on how complex it is, I may need to be ready to google it to understand it. Haha!

But thoughts on gender... as I was walking home from the mechanics, I was thinking about gendered situations and how despite being a feminist and teaching about gender, and very much believing that gender is a social construction that girls and boys are virtually the same in all things, we just learn to be feminine or masculine from society, there are still very many gendered situations that it likely not go away or be very, very slow to go away. I should learn more about cars... I own a car, I drive a car, I should know more about how they work and be able to communicate intelligently about them... I don't need to be an expert, but knowing more would be good. But then (and I hate to admit it) there are those times when playing the gender game can be helpful, playing the card "I'm a girl and I don't know," can be individually beneficial, while still keeping down the whole sex. For example, when we go to Home Depot or similar stores, I don't understand the logic or organization of where things are located (I have a feeling that very few people do, but men won't admit that), so I'm fine with going up to an employee and asking where something is. That is, until a couple of weeks ago when we were at the Home Depot and we needed to find something. Kevin and I had already been looking around for 20 minutes. Finally, we saw two employees and I said, I'll go ask one of them. As we walked toward them, a tall, skinny, pretty girl popped up and both male employees turned to talk to her just as I was standing there with my mouth open. Then I remembered why playing the gender card is so damaging to the group.

Since getting Netflix almost a year ago, I have watched a lot of things. I mostly use the streaming video function either through the Xbox or computer. I've watched old TV shows, movies, and interesting documentaries. Kevin and I together watched lots of David Attenborough stuff. Over the course of about 7 months, I watched the entirety of Nip/Tuck (excellent, twisted, weird). I keep adding more and more stuff to my online cue... and not necessarily stuff I've never seen. I mostly add shows and movies that I love so that in case I want to watch them, I can quickly find them. (For example, during finals week to destress, I rewatched the entire first season of Rock of Love, including watching one episode on my iPhone in bed when I couldn't fall asleep.)

I'm disappointed however that HBO programming isn't available streaming. Which in some ways makes sense as HBO has launched its own online streaming stuff... which requires an HBO subscription (which I have, but I still can't use the service because they haven't reached an agreement with my cable provided. Boo! And don't suggest HBO On Demand as an option, my greedy cable provider charges extra for on demand). And so to catch up on HBO shows, I need to use the mail service. Which really isn't all that slow, but when compared to streaming seems like forever. But I have a system down for a quick turn around.

I got into True Blood around the time the third season was airing. Like a good viewer, I started with the first season (thank you Netflix) at the end of last summer. Then over x-mas break from school, I watched the second season (again Netflix). Now the 4th season has started on HBO and I'm dvring it. When I bumped the third season discs to the top of my cue the day they were released, did Netflix send them to me?! No!!! Argh!!! I at least appreciate that Netflix recognizes that they should not send disc 2 of a series before disc 1, so instead they sent me my 6th or 7th choice on my list. Realizing that there was probably high immediate demand for the discs right after they came out, I waited a few weeks... didn't even watch whatever disc they sent me... and then sent it back. Season 3 disc 1 showed up on Wednesday around 11am. I immediately watched both episodes and ran to the post office to mail the disc back. Thursday I get the emails that they received my return and then that they sent the next disc for Friday. On Friday, I watched all three episodes and then ran to the post office to mail them back. Now if it wasn't for this stupid holiday weekend getting in my way, I'd have the 3rd disc Monday, 4th disc Wednesday, and last disc Friday. Then I'd be only 2 episodes behind on season 4 (or maybe still one... are they showing a new ep on a holiday weekend?), which I could watch from the dvr and I'm finally on track with everyone else on the planet and can discuss episodes and not have to religiously try to avoid spoilers and sites discussing the show.

Ah, what silly life complaints... So I'll be a few days behind my master plan. It's all cool. I'm just still totally amazed by the swiftness of Netflix in sending out new discs. If only I could watch them all as fast as True Blood... (there was one disc that I had for about 4 months and never watched!)

Sometimes you get that craving for a favorite childhood food. The other day as I was walking to the grocery store trying to think of what we should have for dinner (ok, not entirely true... I knew we were going to have pasta with pesto made from our basil garden, but we needed nuts, so I was actually thinking about what we should have for the next couple of days dinner because walking all the way to the grocery store just for one bag of nuts seemed silly). It struck me that I really wanted some chicken nuggets. Not the fast food kind or the frozen kind, but the kind that my mom would make. Pieces of chicken tenders coated in cornflake crumbs and pan fried. We would usually have this with Kraft Mac n Cheese or my mom's homemade baked mac n cheese. Kevin isn't the biggest fan of this style of chicken. He'll eat it, but he prefers to dip it in ketchup and really likes bread crumbs (especially panko) instead of cornflake crumbs. I bought the chicken tenders anyway figuring that I could make half with panko and half with cornflake (to happy eaters). Then when I asked Kevin if he wanted chicken or breakfast for dinner, he picked breakfast.

So that left me with a craving for chicken mom style, and super smart me realized that it didn't need to be a dinner thing. And heck, I didn't need to share it!! I'm home for lunch, instead of yet another peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I could make myself from fried chicken nuggets.

Chicken prepared for frying.

Chicken frying.

Chicken cooling.

Honestly while this will make a delicious lunch for today, tomorrow's lunch will be even better. My favorite way to eat this type of chicken is refrigerated the following day. Yum yum yum!!!

As I was frying up the chicken, I remembered a chicken related moment from high school. I was going over to the house of the guy I was dating to have dinner. I was worried because I was a super picky eater and I also knew it would be rude to refuse to eat whatever they were having. Boy was I relieved and overjoyed to find out that his mom was making pan-fried chicken nuggets covered in cornflake crumbs.

I just renewed the old domain here and figured that this was a good time to get reinvigorated about blogging. At the moment I'm on summer vacation, I haven't been knitting, I haven't been baking, so I'm not sure what I'm going to blog about, but hopefully I can come up with something more interesting than discussing old episodes of Roseanne that I can't stop watching.

One awesome piece of news is that we moved! While it wasn't very far (just to the apartment upstairs), it is a substantial upgrade from our previous place. We now have the second and third floors of the building. ..........

[Sorry, had to leave for a bit... although how would you know since this isn't live blogging... spotted another big black ant (second I killed today) and went on a Raid spree. I think I may be slowly poisoning myself since I sprayed every single window in the apartment and used nearly the entire can, but there better be no more damn ants. Can you believe that when I went up to the bedroom there was an ant running across the floor?! That's three ants today. One yesterday. They seem to be mostly in the office and bedroom (not cool!). I haven't found them in the kitchen The one yesterday was crawling on the quilt on the bed, while I was in the bed! Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!!! Now I'm very itchy, paranoid, and breathing fumes.]

We have so much more space for not too much more money. We have a real dining room (we got a table and chairs at Ikea!!) and a real office (that's where I am now) and a real guest bedroom. The kitchen and living rooms are both bigger. The bedrooms are bigger. And we got to keep our washer/dryer. The two best things are (1) that there is a ton of storage space (There's a nice walk on closet on the 2nd floor and a bathroom closet. And on the third floor there's a storage room and a crawl space.) and (2) that there are TWO bathrooms!!!!!! The second floor bathroom has a shower stall and the third floor bathroom has a full shower and tub. Now if only these ants would go away (and the baby spiders... oh god the baby spiders make me want to cry. The ants I'll squish and get mad, but the baby spiders are freaking me out!!)

Want pictures? Check them out here.