Mumbling Madly

With moving comes a great amount of recycling. Since I was a wee tyke, recycling has been as habitual as brushing my teeth. I remember going to the recycling center with stacks of old newspapers wrapped in twine loaded up in the back of the red station wagon. (What a happy day it was for my family when curbside recycling came to Vancouver, WA!) I still wince when I see someone throw a cereal box into their garbage can. I am militant about recycling, occasionally catching Josh toss a beer bottle into the can and not the designated recycling basket.
Colorado does not have great recycling…well not compared to WA. They have curbside in F.C., but you have to pay for it in Denver. Curbside only covers newspaper, cans, and bottles. That’s it…no cardboard, no white paper, and definitely no cereal boxes. So I have several recycling bins and cans around the house, and I dutifully trek out to the recycling center every month. The center is not that great…there are multiple dumpsters with various specifications written on the side. For instance, brown paper bags and corrugated cardboard go in one dumpster but white paper bags go with single-ply cardboard, they only take #1 and #2 narrow-necked bottles, etc. etc. Inevitably, you see neon paper stuck with the bottles or yogart containers floating in the cardboard. And of course I’ve head the rumors that ONE wrong piece and you ruin the whole batch of recycling. So, it’s hard not to be anal when going to the recycling center and intermingling with other recyclers.
Today I had to correct a woman, who, I’m sorry, was just being a Recycling Idiot. I tried to come off as casual and helpful but it was hard to contain my frustration. I mean, couldn’t she read? DUH! She was cheerfully dumping corrugated cardboard into the single-ply bin. And let me tell you the signs on the side of the dumpsters are HUGE with big DO and DO NOT lists of what to put in each one. Appearantly, she mixed up the Do with the Do Not list, or so she claimed. Oh well, I still probably came off as some duranged, eco-world friendly, granola lovin, hippie.

Do you folks ever get those phone calls: “Hi, this is so and so from the Cerebral Palsy Network, would you have any new or used items to donate?” Well, we’ve taken them up on it multiple times while living out here. We put out some furniture today for ARC to pick up…this included several chairs, end tables, and a large couch. But this time, what started out as a goodwill gesture (and a great convenience) on our part, turned into a whole bunch of crap. When we called to confirm our pick-up we were informed that they don’t do alleyway pick-ups anymore because, well, it’s hard for their truck to negotiate itself down certain alleys. WHAT? Ok, that’s fine and good, your policy changed, but don’t bail on us now! We have a couch sitting out there! Are you SERIOUS? They wouldn’t even let us talk to a manager, and ARC didn’t seem to care that we had been relying on the pick-up. We were both pretty pissed. I was all set to fire off an angry letter, but ok, so it’s an organization for disabled people and spouting off my fury on their services would probably make me look like a big asshole.
On a totally unrelated note, check out Stringberg + Helium. It’s a series of cartoons with a typically depressed August Strindberg and a helium balloon who tries to cheer him up. It’s hilarious, and even though I don’t know a whole lot about this gloomy scientist, the animation is funny and all of August’s lines are direct quotes from his personal diaries. (My favorites are “Absinthe and Women” and “At Home With The Kids”).

This is a great card. The best part was I knew immediately it was her on the front of the card…the yellow crayola hair was a dead giveaway. I also like the butterflies.

I haven’t been posting lately because I am enduring the major task of saying good-bye to many, many special people. I was sort of hoping to just float away, disappear into the abyss, but I realize this is foolish and that maybe I am just in denial about moving.
In the meantime, my dear friend, Teri, gave me backstage pictures from the last show we did together…you know…the one that I hated? Okay, so it was a rough ride, but these pictures really brought me back…made me feel fondness for the whole experience. Plus, I want to share with you some of the crazy costumes I had to wear…and there were A LOT of them:

Here I am as a “lady in waiting.” (Wait, can you tell through the
make-up which one is me?) I know, I know, it looks like I have
a shower cap on my head.

We are–I’m not kidding–Pythonous Women, slaves to the
Delphic Oracle there in the middle.

Same three girls here, only now we’re Women of the Court,
decked out with our Greek masks and billowing togas…
to spice things up we stuffed fake bananas down our shirts during this scene.

In one scene, Teri and I were arch enemies, I was “Mopsa” and she was “Dorcas.”
We fought over the Clown and I won. (Note, we are in yet, another
complicated costume and our make-up has gone from white to tan).

Because of so many costume changes, Teri and I spent a lot of time backstage
in our slips. This might not be the most appropriate pic to post, but I love it.

Today, I am sick. You know, the usual…runny nose, etc. It was in the works for a while, but I kept kicking it. I would rather get sick now than when we’re holed up in a hotel waiting to move in Seattle. It’s also snowing, very subtly, which is a nice touch when you don’t feel like going outside. It also might be the last snow I’ll be seeing in a while.
I watched a little bit of the Swimsuit Model Search on VH1 and I believe it pales in comparison to Top Model. The judges are nasty for the sake of being nasty, the girls are totally fluffy, and the ‘challenges’ and ‘photo shoots’ are mere eye candy versus creative experiments within the modeling world. I suppose this is because it’s for Sports Illustrated and not Vogue. I was disappointed.
Last night we had dinner with our friends Christy and Jonas:

They’re a classic Colorado couple: Backcountry hikers, tele-mark skiers, they eat organic, they’re socially and politically aware, Christy is a jewelry maker/art teacher, Jonas is getting his Masters in Forestry; I could go and on about how great this couple is. They’re the ones who inspired me to go bold and paint my walls earthy colors, and keep a lot of plants and candles around. Christy and Jonas are getting married in Moab, Utah this September and I hope we’ll make it out there. They joke about being big hippies, but I doubt I’ll meet anyone quite as down to earth as them in Seattle.
We ate homemade pizza (Jonas even experimented with one and put beets on as a topping…it wasn’t bad), drank several really excellent Yellow Tail red wine blends (who knew you could mix cabernet and shiraz and make it work so fabulously?), and watched a rerun of The O.C. They expounded some really valuable information about Mad Cow Disease, and now Josh and I have sworn off ground beef. Although, unlike them, I doubt we’re going to eat elk, moose, or deer meat as a substitute.
Of course being wonderfully Colorodoan, Christy and Jonas have a big, golden retriever named Hayduke. And of course Josh had to get down and start wrestling with him:

I found this picture on the website of the gymplex I work for:

Those of you who know ballet will notice that my foot is ’sickled.’ This is because I am trying to highlight the fact that their baby toe needs to be below their knee while in posse. I cringe when I see this picture because anyone with a skilled eye will think: “Why would I want that sloppy, sickling, teacher teaching my kids?” All that aside, the kids are pretty cute.

It’s starting…the moving process. Now we know when we’re leaving, when the movers are arriving, etc. There are a lot more loose ends to tie up when you’re traveling across several states versus across town. I know some people are really good at moving, but we didn’t move around much as kids. My parents are in the same house we grew up in–that’s 24 years! Granted living in Colorado Josh and I did a fair share of moving around, (partly because we were terrorized by college-aged roommates).
Because this is a new blog format, I’m going to experiment with posting some farewell pictures of the Dance store I currently manage. (But not for long!)

This is me standing in front of the Valentine’s Day display…
note the red elephants and fantastic pink hippos

Tiny rhinestone combs…I own one myself.