True that

This morning, Scott said, "I have come to the conclusion that Tim Burton's goal in life is to make Johnny Depp look as weird as humanly possible."

I have to agree.

Another great book club

Good company and good food - steak, chimichurri, gnocchi, cookies, and cake. Who cares if the book was iffy? It's always great to catch up with the gang! Thanks for hosting, Beth! And there's no need to fire the photographer, either - it was nothing a little image editing software couldn't fix!

A bus moment

Yesterday morning, I was parked in my bus seat, reading a book (on my iPod Touch, o' course), when a mournful-looking man embarked and sat down behind me. He was disconsolately clutching a Comcast cable modem and, oddly enough for a basic-looking dude in a baseball cap, he reeked of - well - flowers and vanilla.

Soon enough, he leaned forward and held the cable modem out to me, saying, "Ma'am? Do you happen to know how much these cost? Ain't it hundreds of dollars? Man, I am in serious trouble. My son broke it and now I have to take it in. They're gonna charge me hundreds of dollars. Man."

"It won't be hundreds of dollars," I said. "That's why they charge a monthly fee just to have it. Besides, you can just tell them it stopped working. They don't have to know your son broke it."

"Oh, they'll be able to tell," he said sorrowfully. "Take a whiff. He poured a bottle of Hannah Montana perfume into it."

It was all I could do not to burst out laughing. That would explain the flowers and vanilla!

I thought it was a bus moment worthy of sharing.

Toadily hilarious

Voices from an old cassette

[The widget has been removed. I can send you the MP3 if you want to hear the song. Just say the word!]

See that new Grooveshark widget over there to the right? It's only got one song on it. Let me explain what it is.

A lot of people don't know this about me, since I've lost touch with most of my stateside relatives over the years - but I come from a big hymn-singing family on my American side. I was raised entirely non-religiously, but during my childhood summers, my mother and I would visit my grandparents, and there would be a whole lot of old-fashioned hymn-singing, which I loved.

Sometime in the early 80s, when I was 12 or so, a bunch of Draper relatives gathered around Grandma's rollicking old piano and sang a hymn. It got taped, by me (obsessed, as usual, with recording everything), onto a cassette that I never labeled. A couple of years ago, I acquired a tape digitization gadget for my birthday, started ransacking old cassettes... and found that tape.

I just found that file again. Click the Grooveshark widget to hear the hymn, digitized out of my past. Now, I'm not saying we're the Mormon Tabernacle Choir or anything: it's just seven or eight relatives standing around a piano happily hollering out a tune, and it was all about the doing of it, not the sounding. They didn't even know I was taping it, or if they did, they didn't care!

Note: It's hard to listen to at first because the original tape sounds so spotty, but hang in there: the tape stabilizes about one minute in.

The song is an old 30s tune called Jesus, Hold My Hand. (Not "When Jesus Holds My Hand." I mistitled the digital file when I created it and can't figure out how to fix it.) Just listen to Grandpa's belting baritone and Grandma's stomping piano! Hurray for my childhood obsession with taping everything.

An interesting sidenote: after checking out iTunes this evening, I have discovered that there are any number of versions of this song. Cowboys growl it. Huge choruses present it. Sweet country divas warble it. Glee clubs svelte it up. Bluegrass groups fiddle it back to earth. Old folk ensembles belt it out much the way my relatives and I did. And Elvis? Yes - Elvis! He has a version, too.

Who knew!

Maeve and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad [President's] Day

Okay, so that was pretty much the worst President's Day ever. Let's see if I can recreate the timeline...

The night before: Ten minutes after I got off the phone with my mother, during which I uttered the sentence, "It's so great not having to go to the laundromat any more!" - the dryer stopped working. I did some online shopping for dryers new and used, and cursed my bad luck. What a hassle! Then I called a repair service and they agreed to send someone out the next morning.

8:10 a.m.: (And who wants to wake up at 8:10 a.m.on a holiday?) The repairman called and arranged to come out.

8:15-10 a.m.: Frantic cleaning up. Okay, okay, you're right, we probably didn't have to clean up for the repairman. But it was pretty disastrous in there. So we cleaned. I hate cleaning.

11 a.m.: The repairman showed up and announced it was a blown fuse. He pulled the dryer out and messed around with it, then left after installing the $20 fuse for a total of $90. But I'm not complaining: I now know how expensive dryers are! As he left, he said casually, "Oh - and there's a smell of gas behind your dryer. You should call DTE Energy."

11:30 a.m.: We started smelling gas, too. I called DTE Energy. They agreed to send someone out right away.

12:15 p.m.: Scott drove to the corner store for a couple of basic sundries. The car died in the store parking lot. He called in a panic. I told him to call Barb for help, if she was around. She was, and despite an afternoon appointment, bless her, she agreed to come give his car a jump.

12:30 p.m.: The gas man arrived. He was the most unpleasant grouch I have perhaps ever encountered. "We're not in the business of cleaning up after incompetent repairmen," he growled, and then lectured me at great length on how my whole laundry setup was completely against code. He explained (with what seemed rather like relish) that if the dryer malfunctioned while someone was in the shower, it would suck all the oxygen out of the bathroom and the person in the shower would die in short order from carbon monoxide poisoning. I thanked him for this lovely image and sent him on his way.

1 p.m.: The grumpy gas man stomped off just as Barb's car pulled up and deposited Scott. They hadn't been able to get the car started, so it was still in the store parking lot.

1:15 p.m.: With Scott panicking about the car and me seething about the grumpy gas man, we decided to treat ourselves to a hot, fresh, delicious pizza from Happy's Pizza, right around the corner.

1:45 p.m.: No pizza.

2:15 p.m.: No pizza.

2:30 p.m.: We became the disappointed recipients of a cold, soggy, entirely unappetizing pizza that had clearly been driving around for a while.

Now, actually, that's sort of the end of it. The evening improved tremendously with a dinner invite from Barb, who prepared a sumptuous repast on the evening before leaving for New York on business. And really, when it comes down to it, the dryer was fixed, and the gas leak was fixed, and the car mysteriously started again when Scott returned on foot to the parking lot where it sat. Everything could have been a whole lot worse.

But I'm just saying: it was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad President's Day.

I'm glad it's over.

Wow

Yesterday, Scott and I treated ourselves to a trip to the DIA. We prowled the new rooms and explored the new layout, loving the expanded contemporary and modern sections in particular.

But once again, it was Diego Rivera's "Detroit Industry" mural that truly wowed me.

Wow.

I could honestly stand there and look at that thing for hours!