Yikes! I've been tagged!

I've been tagged by fermicat. Not wanting to break this venerable tradition, here are my 8 random things about myself:

1. I have two sons. They are 19 and 23 years old. The younger one just finished his sophomore year at North Carolina School of the Arts and the older one (as a couple of you may know) lives in Shanghai.

2. I am a lay dummy science geek. I love reading about science, especially astronomy, cosmology, subatomic physics and all that crazy higher dimension math stuff. How much of it do I actually understand? Not sure. Probably not very much. But I love how it stretches my brain. So much of it is theoretical anyway.

3. I'm a playwright. Yes, I'm one of those artists who toils away at a day job that's sucking the creative soul out of her. But one of these days....

4. I am also divorced. But unlike fermicat, I haven't met a suitable replacement yet.

5. I am a huge blues fan. Don't know why, but it really speaks to me.

6. I've come to the conclusion that there is pretty much no food that can't be improved by adding either Tabasco or creme fraiche. Or both.

7. I had rotator cuff surgery on my right shoulder last year,

8. I was born at the end of October and I have always considered my birthday as the unofficial start of the holiday season.

Balinese Shadow Puppet

In response to a request, here is the aforementioned shadow puppet. It is a wayang kulit puppet. Traditionally they were made of water buffalo skin. I bought it a long time ago as a gift for my ex. I took it when I moved out. When I have some extra money, which hasn't been for quite a while, I collect folk art puppets.

It's down to days!

Those of you who have suffered through this whole moving adventure (or misadventure) with me can get ready to breathe a sigh of relief. I know I am. Day after tomorrow (Thursday) it will all be over. I will be out of here and into there. It will be moderately painful or extremely painful but at least it will be over. I had a packing party yesterday. Two friends came over, we drank mimosas and packed. And goofed off too. Probably a little more than we should have. But boxes did get filled. The problem with packing is that the more you pack, the more shit appears. It's a paradox. I am still so not ready. I can't believe I had so much crap in my kitchen. All those dopey little appliances. All those boxes of pasta and beans. All those freakin' cans of chicken broth! How the hell did that happen?

I'll be taking Wednesday off to do all the million things that haven't been done yet. Take down and carefully pack all the art and artifacts. I am a collector of exotic little pieces of folk art. Like a flying frog from Indonesia and a Balinese shadow puppet and a Burmese horse puppet. Things that don't take kindly to being shoved into a carton.

And taking down the window stuff. And packing the lamps and the stereo. And oh shit I still have to pack all my CDs! But fear not, my whining will shortly come to a very welcome end.

Memo to self: next time I move by myself, I'm paying the movers to pack it all!

What is it? The beginning of time!

Is this not a beautiful thing? This is the Large Hadron Collider under construction at CERN in Geneva. By next summer, those happy physicists will be slamming protons together, hoping to recreate the same conditions that were present when the universe was less than a trillionth of a second old. They're hoping to find -- finally! -- the Higgs Boson. And they're expecting to discover all kinds of weird and unexpected stuff. I wish I were a physicist.

Damn, I'm good!

Okay, I still hate my job, but a cool thing happened that I feel very proud of -- which was primarily my doing. So I'm going to brag just a teensy bit.

I just found out today that the museum was awarded a federal grant, from the Institute for Museum and Library Services. I WROTE THAT PROPOSAL. ME. I DID IT. And it was my first federal government grant. And we got it. The whole amount. That's because i did a kickass job at it. See...when I get to do what I'm good at, good things happen. Sadly, much or most of my time is taken up doing things I'm not that good at and frankly hate. But today, I'm feeling good about it all.

If I cared about the place, it might be even better.

What's going on inside

My interior universe has been really bubbling lately. I mean this in a good way. Now that the serious craziness at work has subsided and my brain has been allowed to resume some of its natural meanderings, it's been finding its way to some really interesting places. A new idea of it all -- sort of my very own Grand Unified Theory -- is starting to coalesce. Not too pretentious, comparing myself to Albert, right? But what the hell, we're all entitled to postulate our own theories.

This one has been growing little by little for quite some time. A little thought here, a crumb of an idea there, accreting over the months. Years, actually, when I think about it. Who knows, maybe the intense pressure at work accelerated the process. Kind of like creating diamonds or something. Or maybe it's just a matter of critical mass. But anyway, some amorphous, cloudlike overarching notion is floating in there. The most frustrating thing -- every so often I'll feel like I'm just about to understand something clearly and then poof! it's gone. Just out of reach. But having seen an atom or two of it, I now actively pursue it in my head. A fun little activity I engage in when I'm falling asleep.

So I've managed to say a lot about this "theory" and yet have also managed to avoid any mention of what it actually is. Clever, no? Thing is, it's not in any kind of form that I can actually articulate yet. Be assured that when it is, I'll be happy to share it.

Yup, that's me, spacing out again. Hey, I'm entitled! While I'll admit I'm not quite as deranged as I was a week or two ago, I'm still in that grey zone. Three weeks and counting till moving day and I'm sure I'm not as far along as I should be. But at the same time, I'm feeling dislocated and temporary because furniture has disappeared and cartons are starting to stack up in visible places. I swore three years ago that I wouldn't go through this again so soon. This is my fourth move since I got divorced -- okay, that was...(how long?) 12 years ago. But even so, to me that's a lot of moves. The thought of doing it again fills me with dread. But at least I'll have way less stuff to deal with.