Sunday, May 10, 2009

come on and break it on down

I forgot to mention my favorite part of yesterday's "Star Trek" viewing -- early in the movie, there's a lush, panoramic shot of farmland, and then "IOWA" flashes on the screen. I said to Terry, "I KNEW it was Iowa, only Iowa could be that gorgeous!" Then I got a bunch of evil-eyes from the people sitting in front of me; apparently my excitement made my voice carry a bit more than I intended.

However, all is apparently not beautiful in Iowa right now. My parents told me today that my father's gorgeous chickens were massacred by a fox yesterday :( They drove up the driveway to find twelve of the chickens dead or dying in the yard, and a fox eating one of them. It's strange to me that the fox would kill all of them when he couldn't possibly eat or carry away all of them; you would think he would pick them off one by one. Anyway, the two chickens left are absolutely terrified, and the yard is apparently covered in feathers. While I grew up with regular animal carnage, this story made me really sad, particularly given how pretty the birds were and how much my parents (especially my father) seemed to enjoy having them around.

Anyway, in the safety of my highrise city apartment there were no deaths, although I didn't really get anything done. I did five loads of laundry, which was good, but I didn't do any writing at all. I think I just needed the weekend off; one key indicator of this was my strong urge to eat a comfort food from my childhood. I had decided on tuna salad, but after opening the can of tuna, I discovered that my Miracle Whip had expired (clearly this is not an ahi tuna and mesclun salad -- it's canned tuna, Miracle Whip, and my mom's homemade sweet pickles). I went across the street to buy some, but discovered that the corner store carries multiple kinds of olive oil and most other condiments, but NO MIRACLE WHIP. Boo! And Whole Foods would rather close its doors than sell Miracle Whip, since it's the opposite of organic and locally-produced. I threw the tuna away and ate peanut butter instead, and then got my childhood comfort-food fix by making Kraft mac and cheese for dinner. Mmm mmm good.

After I got off the phone with my parents, I got a request from one of the agents whom I queried last week, so that put a bit of the bounce back in my step. And I'm feeling recharged after a lazy weekend, but I will pay the wages of my sin tomorrow -- it's shaping up to be a brutal couple of weeks at work, but at the same time I vowed on zee romance blog to make substantial progress on Madeleine and Ferguson's story in the next couple of months. So, it's time to get cracking again -- after a good night's sleep tonight, of course. Happy Mother's Day, everyone! (but particularly to my mother -- Jeanie Baby, as some of my high school friends called her, is the awesomest)

1 comment:

joannb said...

i thought i read an article somewhere that said the iowa scenes were filmed near bakersfield. i guess bakersfield can be pretty sometimes too. no?