Heather Anne

It was the best movie I have ever seen.

Posted by Heather Anne at 11:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Sir finally has a blog!

Smitten am I.

Posted by Heather Anne at 08:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

All credit for this meme goes to Peefer's Google Reader share.

You are in a mall when the zombies attack. You have:
1. One weapon.
2. One song blasting on the speakers.
3. One famous person to fight alongside you.

Weapon can be real or fictional; you may assume endless ammo if applicable. Person can be real or fictional.

—

My answers:
1. Flame-thrower.
2. I Want You Back, by The Jackson 5
3. Dwight K. Schrute, duh.

Posted by Heather Anne at 09:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (1)

I have had occasion lately to purchase Business Woman in Town on Business clothes, which, as you might imagine, is not my favorite activity, because a) no t-shirts and b) no Chuck Taylors. The only thing that keeps me from ramming my head into a dressing room wall when clothes shopping is that Amy knows how to handle me. She will stand patiently outside the dressing room making sympathetic noises and catching clothes as I toss them over the door shouting things like: "Too much lace!" "Too low cut!" "The pockets on this skirt make me like look I have a boner!" Slowly, slowly, we narrow it down to items I can tolerate and just when I am having a crisis with the last few bits of apparel, Amy breaks out with, "You know what I like best about this skirt/shirt/shoe combination? It looks exactly like something Tina Fey would wear." And, of course, I'm breaking in line to buy it.

Amy is also brilliant with Scout, but her patience wanes as the day goes on. Saturday looked like this:

"Let's not start off like that this morning, okay? Every day is a new day, and an opportunity to be on our best behavior."

"You're just barking because Margaret did. Being a follower is what leads to alcohol and drug addiction. I worry for your future."

"What did I tell you, huh? Don't meddle in cat business."

"Scout, I swear to God if you make me lose firepower!" (Re: The New Super Mario Brothers.)

And finally:

Me: Amy, was Scout barking?
Amy: Yes.
Me: Did you squirt her with the water gun?
Amy: Yes.
Me: A lot? Because, I mean, she's absolutely drenched.
Amy: Mommy might have overreacted.

Which: Amy is the most patient person I know. If she loses it with Scout, I assure you that you'd toss the Beagle out of a window.

Posted by Heather Anne at 06:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

There will come a day when the changing of seasons will once again become a promise, when the voice of the spring bird is more song and less equinoctial alarm. In case you are keeping count, it is ten. Three winters, three springs, two summers, two autumns I have spent without you.

We said we could only live where the seasons acted like seasons. Summer should stick to you. Winter should demand fleece and a beanie. Snow isn’t probable, but always possible. Autumn is not autumn without sour cherry leaves and campfire smoke that lingers in your hair and permeates your skin, even after a shower. And Spring? First season strawberries from a roadside produce stand. You’ll know ‘em when you taste ‘em.

Someone asked me just the other day if I’d ever had a broken heart. I bypassed my first love, my college love, the propositional love, and every poor decision and wasted kiss in between and went straight to you. “I lost this friend once.”

The whole sentence was lie. Friend? Moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire. Lost is supposed to be synonymous with unredeemed. What does that make me? Once is laughable. The sun and moon conspire to make losing you perpetual.

Juliet didn’t like lunar imagery. Mercutio called it Petrarchan, love by numbers. You hate Shakespeare. You say eggs and legs like aygs and laygs. I hope you didn’t change that for him. It’s one of the best things about you. I like Shakespeare. It’s one of the best things about me.

Here’s a number. Six billion.

As in six billion people will go to sleep tonight without caring if you know the first season strawberries are in up on US-129.

You want to know what I have learned in ten seasons?

I love you.

I love you.

It matters to me.

Posted by Heather Anne at 08:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

"Do you know if Tiger Woods won the US Open playoff yesterday?"

"Why do you care?"

"Uh, to be a good dinner party guest or employee or, you know, date, it's important to be able to talk about things other people are interested in."

"That is so lame: dinner party guest blah blah blah. You should focus on what you care about, what's really important."

"And what's that?"

"Being a brilliant writer and a great lay."

Posted by Heather Anne at 08:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

For first 48 hours after Scout's heart treatments, she is not supposed to have any physical activity at all. Now, I don't know how much you know about Beagles, but basically that little task is equal to solving a problem like Maria: how do you catch a cloud and pin it down? how do you make her stay, and listen to all you say? how do you keep a wave upon the sand?

It was so impossible this time--because Scout was SO HAPPY to be home and Margaret was SO HAPPY to have her home--that Amy and I had to give Scout these little tranquilizers called doggie downers to keep her calm.

Margaret's favorite game is Chase Scout Round and Round the Living Room Chair Until They Both Fall Over With Dizzy, and she couldn't figure out why Scout wasn't interested in playing when she came home from the vet. Margaret tried nudging Scout with her nose; she tried bringing mouthfuls of her own food from the kitchen and dropping them on the couch for Scout; she even tried squeaking Scout's favorite blue ball in her face. Scout would wake up just long enough to see that Margaret was making a practical Levitical Offering, before her eyes got too heavy and she fell back asleep.

We had her home for less than a week when we got a call from the vet with the latest test results. Scout was scheduled for three more treatments lasting through November, but her body has been so receptive to the medication that she isn't going to have to have any more treatments at all! Two more weeks of minimal exercise and then we can begin running her around like the Beagle she was built to be! She'll have one final check up in December, but she is practically as good as new.

The first day Scout lived with us, I told Amy that she was the worst behaved animal I had ever seen in my entire life. And I wasn't comparing her with incomparable Margaret, either. I just meant that in the history of dogs and cats and hyenas even, Scout was terrible; she didn't have any training at all. Amy said Scout wasn't terrible, that it wasn't even training she lacked. Scout, Amy said, just needed some full-on love. That's not a problem here; we're bursting with it. I just wondered if Scout could love us.

The dog books all said the same thing: You'll know your dog has fallen for you when she begins staring at your adoringly.

Yesterday Scout sat on a stool and watched me play Guitar Hero for two solid hours. Every time I finished a song I would look down at her, and she would meet my eyes with her big, brown ones, like, "97% on 'Cherub Rock'! That's the best guitar playing I ever saw!" Every night she wakes up a few times to make sure she's still touching me. She picks up her little head, army crawls over to wherever I've moved, gazes at me for a moment, tucks herself in, and falls back asleep.

Posted by Heather Anne at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

If you have been around our little circle of the Internet for any length of time, you will have no doubt found yourself wholly smitten with the guy who comments simply as "You can call me "Sir.'" His actual name isn't sir, but I cannot reveal his secret identity as we are both in the Global Superhero Alliance. I have been hounding Sir to start a blog for over a year, and until he does I am forcing him to post here. So give him so love, y'all. He's the awesomest of awesomes.
---

Heather Anne made two requests: Spill about my recent return to England and provide a guest post for her blog. Because I am nothing if not an efficient killer, I will now kill two birds with a single stone in the form of eight paragraphs.

The back of my house faces East and on Memorial Day of last year I added a deck, because I knew how to do it and figured that it was as good a thing to add as anything else. Beyond the mighty oak that dominates my back yard, past the giant phallus-shaped building that commands the skyline of my little burgh, and across the sea sits the frequent destination of my thoughts as I sit on said deck. For brevity's sake, I will simply say that the Isles and I have a long history. It’s an affection born in Scotland, cultivated in Ireland, and given root during the four years that I lived in England, just outside of Cambridge. When I moved over yonder, I bought a cottage that was over 3x older than America in a village so small that one of the first things the defacto mayor asked me was whether or not I was willing to be a bartender in the pub a couple nights a week. This was the moment that, had the country been a woman, I would've dropped to a knee and asked for her hand in marriage.

From my little slice of heaven, it was a 1-hour drive to the northeasternmost point of the London Underground, followed by another hour on the 'tube' to the center of the city. I made this trip nearly every week for 4 years in order to satisfy the classical music freak that lives inside of my head. As a result, I learned my way around the city well enough to give tourists directions and discovered a side of it that's lessened its ability to intimidate, and therefore made subsequent visits much more enjoyable. Long before this, however, my first trip to the UK was to Scotland, where I studied (played golf and drank) for a semester. In what remain the five happiest months of my life, I didn't talk to a single American and, in the process made enduring friendships with Irish, Scottish, and English types that now constitute places where I can lay my weary head throughout the kingdom. I returned annually until finally moving to England in 2001, left in December 2005, returned in June 2006 for a wedding, then ... nothing. Two years was far too long of a separation, so I decided to take my 'stimulous' check and use it to 'stimulate' the economy of a foreign country.

To the uninitiated, London is a violent assault on the senses. It can be a wee bit overwhelming because it seems physically and mentally impossible to see and do everything that the city offers without going insane or being run down by the occasional bus or taxi. In four years, I still didn't see or do all I'd wanted. What I did realize was that the places really worth finding were the ones away from the glut of humanity. Having said this, I have never tired of spending time in the National Gallery, the Imperial War Museum, and the Royal Maritime Museum in Greenwich, but this trip was more about seeing the friends and recharging the batteries rather than fighting crowds in the tourism apocalypse that begins in May and extends through September.

So, I found myself returning to the grounds of Fulham Palace, former home to the Bishop of London, which is situated maybe 1/4 mile off of the main Fulham road and overlooks the Thames. At one end of the botanical gardens that surround the grounds, near Putney Bridge, is a church with a small cemetery, the oldest of whose inhabitants (whose markers I could read) expired in the late 1700s. Adjacent to the church is an immaculate little area with a war memorial along with some benches that look out over the river. It's the only place that I've ever found in London consistently without traffic of any kind. You get the occasional dog being walked, but neither the dogs nor their owners tend to say much, so the mood is rarely broken.

For me, then, a key aspect of enjoying London requires reacquainting myself with such places and letting the day slip by. Admittedly, though, the major reason I enjoy the city anymore, aside from its proximity to the friends, is simply because it's surrounded by the rest of England. I find myself missing the country more every year. And it's not that our two societies are all that different, really; were you to look upon the US and the UK from on high you would see basically the same cultures saturated by reality TV, remarkably unhealthy lifestyles, and a government and media that exploits people's fear in order to further the cause du jour. There are, however, two aspects of the kingdom that make even my cold cynical heart melt.

Pubs. In my little village, I knew nearly everyone because families would all congregate at the pub. Kids, dogs, grandmothers, crazy aunts with the wacky hair. All there. All welcome. You can't buy that kind of social atmosphere and potential for endless entertainment. This is in stark contrast to the states where neighbors may not even know each other. The sense of community inherent in a majority of UK pub culture is so extraordinarily refreshing to an American such as myself that coming back to bars with Bud Light perpetually on tap and screens on every wall showing sporting events running the gamut from badminton to arm wrestling is enough to make a body sit on a deck with a cocktail, staring into the looming dusk toward a far-off shore. If you provide me with a quiet pub on a rainy day, stocked with a dart board, a fireplace, a dog, and Guinness on tap (and not that 'extra cold' crap, either; whoever the hell is responsible for such asshattery should be shaved and beaten in front of their home), you'll throw me into fits of convulsive glee.

The dry sense of humor. It is the land of spotted dick and pubs named The Cock and Bulls (with the associated picture of a rooster surrounded by cattle, as if trying to assure pedestrians that this is the scene the name meant to conjure). It’s only in the company of British friends that I laugh until I cry. There’s comedic timing and an appreciation of the absurd that is so perfect that it almost seems unfair to other cultures. The obvious illustrations of such absurdity are Monty Python, Father Ted, the Blackadder series that made the pre-Bean Rowan Atkinson famous, and the original version of The Office. It does the heart good, though, to see such things in person and it was the Friday of my arrival in a rather large pub that a live band played power ballads to a throng of dancing professionals still in their suits from the day’s labor. Surreal arrived when two storm-troopers, Darth Vader, and a cheerleader walked in (together, naturally), at which time the band stopped what they’d started to play and broke into Smells Like Teen Spirit. The storm-troopers started head-butting each other to the music, the cheerleader did the hop-skip pom-pom thing (as they do), and Darth Vader, who actually turned out to be a short woman wearing a bandanna and leather chaps, started doing the ‘mashed potato’. All while surrounded by men and women wearing (to varying degrees) suits. Now, aside from the faux pas inherent in the Dark Lord of the Sith practicing such an inappropriate dance during a grunge anthem, one need only pause to take in the scene, while remembering that the British are generally a reserved people, to see the comedic ramifications. I don’t do it justice. I assure you: It was epic.

There are much deeper truths behind my affections for the kingdom, but I’ll save them for another time and another web site. I need to learn how to reel myself in on the word count before I tackle such subjects. As it is, I believe this sufficiently killed not only the two birds previously mentioned, but all other wildlife unlucky enough to be within range.

Posted by Heather Anne at 08:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

My next-door-neighbor, George, is grandfather-age and his number two goal in life is to take care of me and Amy. (His number one goal is to have the best grass in the neighborhood.) Last week George was outside in a wife-beater, boxer shorts, and a pair of black dress socks, checking his thermometers at 5:00 in the afternoon. (Even though it is probably against the homeowner's covenant of my neighborhood for him to dress like that.)

"How hot is it, George?" I called over to him as he padded around the driveway in his Sunday-stockinged feet.

"Too damn hot," he shouted back. "Get inside!"

It is unseasonably warm, even for The South, and every time I go outside to run or ride my bike I have to sneak away, or George comes charging out his front door shouting at me about heat strokes and heart attacks and whatever else the sun can do to you. Friday afternoon I was wheeling my sister's bike to the front porch so she could come by and pick it up when George spotted me and yelled, "You already exercised today!"

"It's for my sister!" I yelled back.

"Has she already exercised today?" George shouted.

"I don't know!" I said.

"Well, if she has, tell her it's too damn hot to do it again!" George yelled. "Now, get back inside!"

Fortunately, George goes to bed at 7:00 p.m. Near dusk, we can stay outside as long as we want.

Posted by Heather Anne at 07:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Last week this little postcard came in the mail reminding me that the Atlanta Pride 5K is on June 28, which meant four weeks to train, which meant five weeks until the Peachtree Road Race (10K), which meant somebody had forgotten to get off her ass and start running; because, hi, winter is over. When I spotted the postcard, I put down the french fries and lugged myself out to the road where I managed to run about, oh, two minutes before I collapsed into a sobbing heap onto the ground. I was finally able to get up and start again, but only because I tapped into the power of The Collective. (Jennie!, Kat!, and Abigail! run every day.) I cried (texted) out for help, and immediately they came back with a pep talk that went something like, "Make the pavement your bitch, and then get back into the air conditioning and turn on the television, fool."

I have gone running almost all eight days since the postcard came, and when I tell you that every single night I have to take a hot bath and ice down my knees because my body is nearly too sore to function, it is not hyperbole; it is actual fact. I have been racking my brain trying to figure out why it is so hard for me to get back into running this time around. I mean, if I'm being honest, it's not like this is the first time I've stopped running for months on end. Usually my body just picks up where I left off, with just a little chastising. But this time: gah!

I was huffing and puffing my way up a hill this morning when this little boy rode past me on a Big Wheel.

"Are you hurt?" he asked as he sped up next to me. "You're hunching over like you're hurt."

"Old," I wheezed back. "Just old."

"How old?" he asked.

"Closer to menopause...huff... than I am...puff... to the day I signed...huff... my college basketball scholarship."

"Oh," the little boy said wisely. "Well, good luck with that."

When I was twenty, I would have just smiled and run on by. But I'm almost thirty now, so I tried to beat him up and steal his Big Wheel. But he got away because I was tired. And also because I am no match for a whippersnapper.

Posted by Heather Anne at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

Scout went for her second heart treatment yesterday, and I know it's the veterinarian's job and everything, but I hate how she explains it to me: Your dog could die. Die dead. It's very common with these sorts of treatments. It's dire. It's dismal. It's doleful; like she's Cole Porter's antonym, with no tap dancing.

When we took Scout for her first heart treatment it was like, gosh, I hope she survives or this was a terrible investment-- the Beagle with the negative-ist equity on the planet. But this time, it was so different. We love her now, she is a part of our family. Her picture is on our refrigerator, her fur is on our pillows, her poop stains are in our carpet. She knows how to sit now, to lie down, to stay. She knows her name and to come when we call.

I reluctantly gave Scout's leash to the vet tech yesterday morning, and as she led my little puppy away, I said, "I wish I'd given her a kiss."

Hearing the word "kiss," Scout darted back out into the waiting room and jumped right up into my arms, licking me full on the face.

She's going to be okay. She has to be okay. Margaret hasn't even taught her the joys of rubbing her neck in roadkill, and then rolling all over the furniture. She's just a puppy; she has so much to learn.

Posted by Heather Anne at 08:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (18)

You Are a Yellow Crayon

Your world is colored with happy, warm, fun colors. You have a thoughtful and wise way about you. Some people might even consider you a genius. Charming and eloquent, you are able to get people to do things your way. While you seem spontaneous and free wheeling, you are calculating to the extreme. Your color wheel opposite is purple. You both are charismatic leaders, but purple people act like you have no depth.

So, who's a purple?

Posted by Heather Anne at 08:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (25)