One Last Slice

Is there anything as sad as the very last piece of cake?

It's never the piece that was graced by the candle. It's never the pretty piece. It's never the piece that everyone wanted to eat.

The last piece of cake is always the piece that people kind of avoided for one reason or another. And while every other piece had only one side that had become dry due to air exposure, the last piece has two sides (or more) that have become just a little dryer than you'd like.

So it sits on the plate for just a little too long, as you contemplate whether to eat it or put both of you out of your misery and just relegate it to the bin.

But then you pour yourself a glass of milk and settle in.

The frosting is a little sturdier than you had hoped. The cake has a kind of outer shell that  seems just a tad off. But the center is just as nice as the other pieces had been.

As you work your way through that last slice you find yourself thinking about the first slice - not just of that particular cake, but every cake. The frosted brownie shaped like a shoe. The chocolate teddy bear and the white bunny. The cupcakes and wedding cakes and shower cakes and anniversary cakes.

And by the time you're tipping back the last of the milk, the cake has become one of those memories. And it wasn't the last slice after all, but simply another piece of the strange cake puzzle that is your life.

The Mystery Clean

We all know about mystery bruises. The ones that show up that you can't explain - or even think of ways to explain.

And there are the mystery messes. The ones that show up and you can completely guess how they showed up but you don't know when or why.

This evening, we found a mystery clean. Our new tablecloth, which had gotten broken in while my folks were here this week, is somehow clean tonight. It may also have been this morning, but I don't pay attention to much that isn't in my tunnel of vision in the morning. And, heck, it may even have been clean last night - but we went out to dinner last night and never sat at the table.

But, whenever it happened, it is suddenly clean and tidy and very spiffy looking - and neither Christopher nor I had anything to do with it.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that the pup did it. But she's not good with the lid on the washer (you know - when it's open, it's very hard for her to reach to put back down). And I think my folks might have mentioned it if she had asked for their help in washing the tablecloth.

So, for now, we'll just call it a very much appreciated mystery.

Time Lapse

I've mentioned what I did all weekend. It was a project for work that took the entire weekend to do. (I'm happy to say that the person for whom I was doing it was very appreciative.)

Then, on Monday, I had a couple of (much) smaller projects I needed to work on, and so I did those in the evening. Of course, we didn't get around to cleaning the house on the weekend, so that happened on Monday, too.

Last night, my parents flew into town on their way home to South Dakota from Los Angeles. But - as you may have noticed if you live in the States - the spring weather this year is a little weird.

You see, when they came through town on their way to LA a couple weeks ago, my parents were commenting on how much snow there was still on the ground. Then the weather moderated while they were gone and the snow dissipated. By the time I picked them up at the airport last night, we were down to pretty much just brown.

We got up this morning to about an inch of slushy snow, which quickly disappeared from any pavement, but stuck around on the grass. Dad contemplated leaving to drive home, but I convinced him otherwise. You see, it's a 5- or 6-hour drive to my home town, and between here and there there has been freezing rain. Closed roads. Power lines down. No travel advised. The works.

And parts of that are moving this way. We're supposed to have 6 to 10 inches of heavy wet snow by tomorrow night. So they're hanging out with us - probably until Friday mid-morning, when this all wraps up and the road have a chance to clear. (After all, April sun is pretty warm - even after a snowstorm.)

Here's the thing, though. Since I was working all weekend, and a little busy in between, I didn't get a chance to look at Sunday's newspaper until tonight. The weather forecast - just 3 days ago - was for us to be in the upper 40s with rain yesterday through tomorrow. Yes, tonight, we're looking at highs in the low 30s, with snow.

It's amazing how a large lapse in knowledge can be revealed after such a short elapsed time.

Lost Weekend

I just apologized to Christopher for basically missing our entire weekend. Aside from an outing on Saturday night, and about half an hour together for dinner this evening, we've been in the house but in different rooms for the waking portions of the past 48 hours.

With that in mind, now that I don't have to keep working on the project I was working on, I hope you'll forgive me for not writing a long post, tonight.

And... oh... look... it's almost Monday already. Whee.

Clubbing Books (wait... that's not right...)

In the midst of a 90-plus-minute phonecall with a friend of mine from Baltimore (well... actually from before my time in Baltimore, but that's where he now lives), as we were talking about travel and jobs and families and all sorts of the random things you talk about on 90-minute phonecalls, we somehow started talking about books.

It's weird, you know. I work with books. Eight hours a day, five days a week, I'm pretty much immersed in books. But when I talk about them, I'm mainly talking about the mechanics of them. Things like "Do you prefer end-of-line hyphenation, or do you want those taken out?" or "Maybe you should rename your characters so they're not too cliche..." or "This sentence makes no sense, could you reword it?"

I don't really get to talk about the books as a whole - just the pieces of them. It's basically a "forest for the trees" kind of situation.

So tonight, when we stumbled into a book conversation, it was really nice. He talked about books his book club has been reading. And about books his students have been reading (he's a secondary school librarian). Then I told him about the books we've been reading in my book club, and what I've been working on at work.

I found myself actually taking notes of which books to put on my reading list, which I really can't imagine doing on the phone with more than a few people in my life. In part because I already have a massive stack of books next to my bed, so picking up new books is a dangerous thing to do. Of course, before I can read any of those, I need to finish the proofread that I brought home with me this weekend.

Life would be so much easier if I were independently wealthy.

A "Golden" Evening

Christopher and I are not the most spontaneous of people. We admit that. We plan. We both plan. We share an online calendar to make sure our plans are planned.

And, unfortunately, this often leads us into ruts, because when we're not planned, we tend to just do rut things - like watching TV and/or going to bed early.

This week, however, we have made our plans work for us. In a strange confluence of things, we've ended up with three decidedly non-rut events all on the calendar this week. Last night we went to see Madeleine Peyroux perform at the Dakota Jazz Club, and splurged on having dinner there, too. It was pretty great. And although we had plans for tonight, as well, I think we were both thinking last night might be hard to beat.

But then we went out to tonight's event. It was a "pre-release" screening of "Golden" for the cast and crew who worked on it. You may remember that we had a short film filmed in our house last fall. (If you don't remember, here are the posts that related to it: Before, During, and After.) And we had an amazing time hanging out with the people who were involved - even though we really had nothing to do with it except saying "yes, go ahead and use our house."

Well, the 9-minute film is now about to start making the film festival circuit (starting with the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival this month, and hopefully going all sorts of places in the very near future), and so the director opted to have a private screening of it for everyone involved.

We got there a little before 7, and it was like the start of a really great reunion. We got to see all of the great people we'd met last November, and then - after an hour or so - got to see the film. And then we schmoozed some more, followed by going out for one last drink. As we were driving home, we both admitted that getting home after 11:30 on a Wednesday night was *not* part of our original plan.

But, sometimes, even the best laid plans need to be laid aside.
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"Golden," as part of the Minneapolis St Paul International Film Festival, will be showing in a block of short films on Wednesday 4/17 at 7pm. You can find out more info on the film, the block of shorts it will be included in, and how to buy tickets, here on the Film Festival's website.

Talking the Talk, part two

(Following up on what I said a couple of days ago, here.)

If you're on Facebook and were paying any attention last week, you most likely saw a lot of variations on a red and pink equals sign in support of marriage equality. It was based on the Human Rights Campaign's (HRC's) logo, and it was pushed out while the two landmark marriage rights cases were being heard by the US Supreme Court.

It was kind of amazing to see the visual manifestation of the outpouring of support by people from all over. And, as the idea spread, it was great fun to watch the variations. From the equals sign being replaced by bacon, to the square panels being used as the tiles in mosaics, the campaign became as individualized as are the reasons people support the cause.

Believe it or not, according to ABC News and Facebook, something like 2.7 million more FB users changed their profile pictures last Tuesday (after the HRC suggested using the red equals sign) than on the prior Tuesday. And although FB didn't tally how many were actually the logos, you kind of have to assume that a lot of them were.

Here's the thing, though: I watched all of those spring up on my FB Newsfeed, and it was amazing. People were saying that it was becoming hard to know which of your friends you were talking to, because everyone looked the same - and how cool was that?

But then people started to kind of get badgered into changing their profile pictures. I, personally, put up a photo of Christopher and me - because that seemed to be more about my own case for marriage equality than any red logo could be. And, happily, the reactions I got to that photo offered me just as much meaningful support as all the rest of those red logos put together.

Of course, over the past few days, FB has started shifting back to "normal" - where people's personal photos are taking back the Newfeed. (Mine went back to something Easter-y for the weekend.)

And although the visual outpouring of support was nice, I'm okay that it's fading. Or at least that the pressure to be one of the cool kids by showing the logo off is fading. There are still plenty of people with those logos on their pages, and it's still cool to see them when I log in. But I don't *have* to see them.

You see, as much I love seeing those images, I would rather have people speaking out every day in favor of equal rights for all - and contacting their legislators, and, most importantly, talking to their kids, and talking to each other - than to have them pressuring other people to post a picture for 2 days.

After all, if equality is only something we support 2 days a year, we're not going to get anywhere. When it's part of our everyday lives - when it fits in right alongside pictures of our dogs and cats and kids and vacations - that's when real change is going to happen.