Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

Putting the TMI in absentminded

Month: February 2020

  • How One Get Ones Husband to Play His Drum Set

    Gary’s hasn’t been playing his drums. I thought it was because his hands hurt from arthritis, or else he doesn’t want to get sweaty, or it eats into his Facebooking time. As it turns out, he just hasn’t felt the subliminal nudge that gets him downstairs to play the drums. It appears there is a…

  • In Which I Make a Wise Spending Decision

    I bumped into another article on what to do with your DNA once you have it in portable zip file format. (Well … more likely an algorithm looked at how my ancestry searches have slowed and it planted the article in Google or Facebook.) I actually headed for Genopalate, which claimed it can look at…

  • Walking Away

    We’ve got some new philosophies at work that mean I have to start projects more slowly and take more breaks. Usually I get Go Fever: an urge to get everything started and therefore finished ASAP. Now I’m being encouraged to make plans and get approvals and punctuate before I even begin. It’s smarter, but it’s…

  • Gary Almost Surprises Me

    I could hear Gary watching television in the next room. It was s some period drama, with duchesses and arranged marriages and plummy English accents. I was trying to work out what it was. The heroine’s name was Georgiana. “Is it one of the Trollope novels?” I wondered. “There’s no Georgiana in Austen, is there?…

  • Golden Eagle

    The time Gary spotted a bald eagle he called me from the road immediately. This time he was home for two hours before he mentioned it. This most recent eagle was a Golden Eagle instead of a bald eagle, and it was in a busy intersection, not on the winding back road. I’m sure the…

  • Moon Illusion Immunity

    Last week I read that there was a Snow moon coming up. That article was illustrated by images like this: There are even more phenomenal images in this article from a few years back. I have never in my life seen a moon look like that. I have seen references to the moon illusion, and…

  • Weekly Paint Progress 2/13

    This week the zebra went from this … … to this … All I did was add a light wash of white to some of the stripes to do some contouring, and then I worked on the eye. I did less on the lamp but it looks like more. … to this.

  • Opera Puppets (spoiler)

    When we saw Rigoletto this past summer, we noticed the main character hauls around a ventriloquist’s dummy. I asked Friend Anne if the dummy was standard and she said no. I felt the dummy was distracting and creepy. Also, it didn’t sing. The reviewer for the Post wasn’t a big fan either. Then I watched…

  • New Ancestor Data

    The Ancestry.com search has been very illuminating. The DNA data just lays it all out for you. I have all the information I could ever want about Jerry’s oil-working, die-making families and Mom’s ferry-running, coal-selling mother’s family. The big mystery ended up being my maternal grandfather. For everyone else, the DNA algorithm figured out who…

  • Midnight Skunk

    I was recently woken out of a dead sleep by the smell of skunk coming through my closed, double-paned bedroom window. I sniffed myself awake. Definitely skunk. “This is what happens when you feed the skunks,” I grumbled. “This will be just like when the house one street over stank of skunk for a week.”…