Since I really need to get home from work at a normal time (before, say, 7 PM) to really rub those brain cells together and write something worth reading, I’m going to post something else altogether. Something worth looking at. If you’re me. I listen to music all day long at work. Some of it’s new stuff that Jim brings home for me to hear, but the vast majority of it is “old” and is thus guaranteed to make me stare off into space, shaking my head about The Days of Yore while my boss/officemate/intern/UPS guy try to get my attention. These are Male Rock Voices I Love Listening To. Exhibit A: Ebbot Lundberg, Union Carbide Productions, 1993 - He now sings for Soundtrack of Our Lives (and sings nicely!), but his total badassery on all the Union Carbide stuff makes me think back to when I was working for Cargo Records and Jim was too (we were not yet dating) and the only band - the ONLY BAND - that everyone employed by Cargo could agree upon was Union Carbide Productions. Even the dance guys liked UCP. Exhibit B: Ride/Mark Gardener, probably 1991- I saw them once in MPLS (First Avenue) and once in CHGO (Metro). They were touring with Lush that first time and I forget with whom the second. I was pregnant with Cody the second time; they stopped by the record store his father was working at, and all I could think was, these men are so tiny! I can’t remember what they bought, but someone from their label was with them and put it all on their plastic - I’m sure it was the usual pretentious-ish stuff. Gardener’s voice, to me, is the ultimate in shoegaze - it’s masculine and sounds good with guitars, but is close enough to the Tears For Fears guys’ (Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith) voices to be comfortably close to twee. Exhibit C: Chris Cornell of Soundgarden, 1991-ish - So Hole was soundchecking at the Avalon in November 1991 and had just lurched its way through an absolutely mindboggling version of Leadbelly’s “In the Pines” (mindboggling because it was great and mindboggling because Courtney was wearing black leggings and an Edie Sedgwickian bateau shirt, flats, hair all ponytail’d and face all bare) and to break the silence after the song was over, she bellowed “CHRIS CORNEEEEELLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!” Anyway, the entire Superunknown record is testament to his vocal greatness. Other rocker dudes hated him. For lots of reasons. I mean, look at him. Exhibit D: Ken Andrews, Failure… 1993? 1994? - I’ve written about old Ken before when I was posting at Madame Insane. His voice is, I believe I wrote, like pure indie boy sex. It’s way masculine, but is articulate - even brainy-sounding. It’s a little pretentious and Californian, but can also be quite workaday, like a black t-shirt and Levis with boots. It can rock, and it can glide alongside electronica Failure were one of the most underrated rock bands of the 90s, surely deserving more notice than they ever got. I know Ken’s still working, but I don’t know what he’s doing. Hey, this was fun and all, but it overheated the laptop. Part Two coming soon.

OK, I finally have the theme I want (something old-skool so I can at least attempt to code it myself). Now I just need the time to post. Something is forthcoming, I swear.

I recently decided that re-commitment to eating well (in my case, that means bringing my lunch to work every day and avoiding processed food and making more of an effort to cook dinner after work [which recently has fallen to Jim, which is a good thing, except that his repertoire is a bit limited]) and exercising every day are going to be the main way to manage my creaky & cranky frame.The apparatus above is what’s called a fluid trainer - it’s a fancy version of a bike mount. I decided I don’t want to join a gym and I don’t want to exercise outdoors in winter, so a fluid trainer and Pilates DVDs it is. Right? OK. I can do this. Sure, it’s been months and months since I’ve done anything remotely resembling “regular exercise”, but I’m still in what could be called “reasonable” shape. Right? Ed and Jim set it up last night, so when they were done and I was safely alone, I set the iTunes to the Stooges and hopped on. People, that thing kicked my ass! I rode for 26 minutes and broke a sweat in the chilly B-K basement (aka The Garden Apartment) and when I (gracelessly) alighted from the bike, my legs felt like they each weighed several hundred pounds. I have a ways to go. It’s the start of a beautiful relationship, I reckon.

A woman going by the name of CroneWit articulated in a diary post at Kos why I do what I do and why I will continue to do what I do with some added twists and augmentations. I mean, I believed in the work I do before, but after reading her essay, I realized I’d never really articulated, to myself, WHY I believe food banking and food justice are incredibly important and essential apart from the obvious, and how much work needs to be done, possibly by additional, future organizations, to tie what I believe about food together. For example, she writes:

The residents who root around among the boxes fall into roughly two classes: old women, who are largely disbled, and young women with small children. Sometimes the young women feel a dainty revulsion to the process of rooting through dirty, moldy boxes of food thrown on the ground. The older women are more practical. The other difference is: The older women actually know how to turn the produce into food — we know how to cook, and make suggestions to each other about how to use unfamiliar products. When there is a wealth of whipping cream (usually after holidays), old women make butter. When, one summer, there was a continuing abundance of tofu, I wrote up a factsheet on storage and use so residents could make use of this protein source. The younger women — the ones with chidren — look at the fruits and vegetbles with blank faces. They don’t know how to cook anything but pre-packaged food. They might take one or two apples, but the thought of making applesauce is foreign to them — as is the thought of making banana bread with black bananas. If you know how to prepare healthy foods and create a healthy diet from cast-off food, are you sharing your knowledge? If not, why not?

Her entire diary can be found here.

Winter has come to central IL. It’s dawn when I get up and well into darkness when I get home, and the juncoes are back. Big, sloppy flakes came out of the sky yesterday for a bit, but nothing stuck. It’s nothing like the winters I spent as a teenager in Minnesota in the early 80s. The below-zero cold just went right through you; the snow was powdery and prodigious. I had just come from Florida and was wholly unprepared for what cold like that feels like, but - I lived!! This will be my 12th winter in my part of Illinois and I’m accustomed to the green grass after Thanksgiving, the occasional winter without snow, and the tips of daffodils starting to poke through the earth after a couple 60-degree days in January.The Solstice isn’t far away.[I wrote long ago about the ice rink my father built that first winter in MN, and how I skated beneath the Northern Lights. I’ll have to see if I can find it.] ******I survived my trip to CHGO. I even had fun. I spent time in the two parts of CHGO I never spent time in during the five years I lived there - I never hung out in the hotel-y area by O’Hare, and I rarely went downtown. [Almost never, actually. I think we went to the Shedd Aquarium once. I never shopped on the Magnificent Mile.] The party was in a private room here. It was amusing and a little bit ostentatious. My brother’s wife’s father is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, which I did not know in advance; he has no use for digital cameras of any kind and was amused by all the bad digital photography that increased as the amount of drinking increased. It was a good time. ******It’s 27 degrees outside. If you see my eldest walking to school in a warm-up jacket and flip-flops, please know that he has been raised to wear a winter jacket and proper footwear when the weather gets chilly. Thank you.

A life in bullets:

• Tomorrow, I leave work at noon to head to Chicago with my mother, who will have spent the morning driving FROM Chicago to pick me up.
• Why, you ask?
• Because I got roped into attending a surprise family event.
• An event that is “adults only”.
• OK, fine, I said initially. Have a good time!
• I don’t see my nuclear family enough; it pissed me off that we were just expected to leave the kids with someone and go PAR-TAY IN THE BIG CITY!!!!.
• My mother talked me into it, because she’s coming all the way from Portland, OR to attend this thing and is willing to spend 7+ hours in the car with me (!) THE DAY OF to make sure that at least I show up.
• I’m regretting this decision for a myriad of reasons, but I don’t feel compelled to back out. Yet.
• Actually, now that I think about it, there’s no freaking way we’re going to get to the hotel at O’Hare in time to catch the Party Vehicle that’s taking everyone downtown.
• [Yes, downtown. From O’Hare. That’s another 2 hours in a car round trip.]
• If we leave here by 1… man. It’s going to be close.
• I don’t really have anything to wear, either.
• Oh, well.
• We return here on Saturday.
• Then Sunday morning? I have to be at an event for work for 4 hours. Presenting. Constantly. To kids.
• I booked this in August or something and cannot get out of it.
• Somehow, a cake must be made for Grandparents-In-Attendance birthday party for the daughter (see “We return here on Saturday”, I’m thinking) Sunday afternoon.
• Mom leaves for Chicago late in the afternoon.
• Then it’s going to be Monday. Wasn’t it just Monday?

I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy for Thanksgiving weekend to arrive. It used to be that it was just that much more extra work for me, but now I get to do stuff I rarely do - sleep in, cook food, read, etc. Entry on balance is forthcoming, because this is a little bit ridiculous. np: I Don’t Wanna, Bear Quartet

I have many pithy thoughts regarding “balance” and what that means to crazy old me since I went back to work full time, and they’re not what one might think. Here’s a hint: while things are wildly wild right now and are centering primarily around my work outside the home (much of it is seasonal), my life wasn’t particularly balanced before I went back to work, either. Right now I’m talking on the phone, reading a thread on Kos about vegetarianism that hinted toward sustainability that I participated in (albeit briefly, and touting my love for all animal products raised humanely/organically/biologically correctly), writing a letter to potential donors for a holiday campaign at work, and mentally filing away ideas I have for a non-work-related meeting tomorrow morning. The siding outside my office is creaking and groaning - the big, blowsy Canadian gusts spitting rain and sending clouds across the sky are responsible. We were talking today at work about taking the roof off in a future expansion… maybe Mother Nature will take care of things for us. np: I Love Her, Kevin Tihista’s Red Terror

And I can’t find them. That’ll teach me to go fooling around with style sheets. The thing is, I’ve recopied the original CSS into the template space and nothing is changing. Clearly, something is amiss. Somewhere. Off to exercise!

Yeah, this looks like the theme I used on my last blog. That’s because it is. It’s called Journalized and is the most recent version - while it looks a lot like the version I was using before, it’s much more complex underneath. I like it, mostly. Mostly. Yeah, not exactly original, going back to my old design. Sue me! I love the three-column layout, and the version I worked with for MizUntitled was fully customizable. This one? Not so much. At least, as far as I can tell. It won’t let me edit the CSS or anything - it just lets me browse. I have discovered, whilst prowling around in the Theme Editor portion of my dashboard, that this “skin” I have chosen can be modified inseveral ways from the dash - I can add an image header, I can add more link categories - but that’s not what I want. I’d like to change things like colors and font sizes and upload my own banner. I’ve checked the forums and posters there keep talking about paying for customizable CSS… is that what I have to do? After switching to Wordpress because of its famed easy customizability? Well, while I wait for advice (snerk), I’m going to: a) begin cleaning in advance of my mother’s arrival here next weekend; b) check out my Pilates videos (and possibly attempt some exercises); c) do some prep for work tomorrow. This wasn’t multiple choice; I’m going to try and do all of it while The Teenager ™ is at drama club and The Daughter and Jim are at a U of I women’s basketball game. [Oh - that reminds me - the U of I women’s soccer team (actually, they’re the only soccer team the U of I has; the men don’t field a team) is playing in the 2nd round of the NCAA tournament in St. Louis today. I’d love to see them play postseason here, but until we get rid of our racist mascot, that ain’t happening. Women are up 2-0 at the half.]

Well. Hi.

My name’s Lisa. You may have “known” me at one time or another as Madame Insane or, more recently, Miz Untitled. Maybe? Yeah? The former was a beautiful custom-designed blog and was online from 2002-2005. The latter was a regular old Wordpress blog, orange, and was only online, really, for about a year and a half. Both handles had their origins in songs by one of my two favorite Swedish bands - Soundtrack of Our Lives and its parent band, Union Carbide Productions.

The story with this name is simple:

I was chainsmoking and talking a blue streak to my pal Rob at the record store I worked at in Chicago; it was probably the year of my life I still occasionally refer to as The Nadir of My Existence - 1993. I’m sure the “conversation” was something along the lines of me nattering on and on - blah blah blah Smashing Pumpkins blah blah blah Veruca Salt blah blah blah Flaming Lips etc etc etc - and Rob, when he saw an opening to get a sentence in, wasted it by saying, “You really are the wordy diva of the alt scene.”

Here’s a photo from that year, and probably around the time of that conversation:

I liked “wordy” and “diva” together (plus, I definitely fancied myself to be worthy of the title - o, youth!), and so when my friend Chank made a font of my scrawl in 1995, that’s what I chose to name it. See?

My days in the alt scene are pretty much over, at least where music is concerned. I quit smoking over two years ago; the only record store in town worth visiting is Parasol (there used to be several); I’m usually in bed by 11. I’m the wordy diva of my own scene, I guess, because I still like to talk. People have asked my why I give up blogs and then start new ones. To be honest, I never planned on quitting either one - both of them were eventually rife with tech issues that, frankly, I had neither the time, patience, or freakin’ know-how to solve. When it came time to renew the domains, I was like, never mind. I still don’t have the time, patience, or know-how to solve those kinds of problems, so here’s hoping nothing untoward happens. Since my last update at ol’ Miz Untitled, I have:

• returned to work full time
• let my garden go completely to hell (see above)
• had one child enter high school
• put my younger child in public school
• been diagnosed with fibromyalgia (leave it to me to get diagnosed with something totally nebulous)
• written very little

There are a lot of things I don’t do anymore because I’m short on time and physical energy (I baked bread today for the first time in months, for example). I’m not the same person I was in 2002, not by a long shot. I’m not even the same person I was 6 months ago. Hope that’s OK. Thanks to Clint for hosting and to Ed for helping me get everything set up. All right!