Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

Putting the TMI in absentminded

Month: January 2022

  • Rewriting the Novel: Gary’s Input

    I told Gary two things about the novel. It begins with a train derailment. Gary’s response: Does the heroine DIE NO ONE SURVIVES A TRAIN DERAILMENT ELLEN DON’T YOU KNOW THAT (followed by many pictures or train derailments) THERES NO SUCH THING AS A MINOR TRAIN DERAILMENT. It now begins with a train impact at…

  • Weekly Paint Progress: 1/20

    This week the pitchers went from this: … to this:

  • Fountain of Youth

    Do you want to feel young? Then get with your husband and watch videos that your favorite band made … what, ten, fifteen years ago? When they were skinny teenagers? “Look at Ed!” Gary cried. “He’s a baby!’ (He wasn’t a baby. He was young and slight and shiny.) We danced on the basement floor…

  • Cracker Barrel Redux

    Remember how GrubHub forgot the hashbrown casserole from our order and I ended up getting an insane amount of food for free? Since then all we want to eat is Cracker Barrel hashbrown casserole. Perhaps that is the business model: leave something out, play hard-to-get. Our desire overrode our liberal hatred of Cracker Barrel. It…

  • Dog Ears

    A recent conversation with Gary. [Stage direction: Gary has been coming in and out of the room to re-enact recent football plays and demand attention.] Gary: “And then the quarterback – HEY STOP READING YOUR BOOK AND PAY ATTENTION!” [Ellen dog-ears book to keep her place, and puts the book down and clasps her hands…

  • Rewriting the Novel: Who Said Writing is Rewriting?

    Oh, it was Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast. “The only kind of writing is rewriting.” Ernest Hemingway and everyone else quoted in this article. I particularly like this one by Vladimir Nabokov: “I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.” I’m not even…

  • Reclaiming My Kitchen

    There was a brief time a few years back when Gary was in charge of the food. He took over the kitchen, added an entirely superfluous knife block, bought a “palette” of all the spices, reorganized the drawers and banished my cunning shiny tools to the back of a drawer, then put our ugliest spatulas…

  • Nurse Blake

    Remember when I bought my Kinsa crowdsourcing thermometer it came with this Nurse Blake character, who might have been a bot? A new email has arrived and, big news, there’s a Mr. Nurse Blake, and he has Covid. There’s a link in the email teasing the story, then you take a link from that second…

  • Weekly Paint Progress: 1/13

    A friend has been posting on Facebook a number of floral photos. This one appeals to me: Doesn’t look too appealing right now: Need to do that white pitcher again, don’t I. And the green pitcher spout. It’s a lot like the last one, but I like the idea of reinforcing the next few weeks.

  • Stocky Fox

    I looked at a recent video of a fox in the backyard, and I thought, damn, our fox got fat. Like, carrying an extra ten pounds of Christmas weight. I almost didn’t recognize him. On further review, though, this appears to be average weight for a red fox (below). I think I’ve just seen very…