Average Jane

Average Jane on Landscaping

Now that I have a glimmer of evidence that spring may someday arrive, my thoughts are turning to the large areas of my yard that are bereft of decorative vegetation. Last year we had a new sidewalk installed to replace the 70s-o-rama brick and railroad tie marvel that we'd been tripping over (what do you know? - literally and figuratively) since we moved in. As part of that process, I removed a couple dozen mini rose bushes from the flower bed nearby and moved them to the back yard, to a bed that was more to their proper scale. Now their former bed is an expanse of mud and old cypress mulch. Not pretty.

Over the winter, my husband bought me some software called Instant Landscaping. It has a lot of cool features, but my favorite is one that lets you load photos of your house and yard and play with different plants and other yard features until you've developed the perfect plan. I'm looking forward to trying it out as soon as I get this year's tax issues out of the way.

I'm a lousy gardener, incidentally. Even my indoor plants are chosen for their ability to go long periods of time without water. Of the things I've planted outside since I moved here more than eight years ago, only a handful are still thriving. I lucked out in purchasing several perennial purple geranium plants. They come back every year and keep getting fuller and prettier. I planted some Stark Bros. colonnade apple trees a long time ago, but every year they produce only a few blossoms and never any apples, except for the crabapple tree. Since I don't know what to do with crabapples, the squirrels are pretty much the only beneficiaries of my "orchard."

The first spring after we bought this house, I spied an area of the back yard that had clearly been used as a garden. I tilled it, added manure and peat and everything else you're supposed to, and planted every kind of vegetable I could think of. The tomatoes did okay, but everything else either failed to come up or quickly languished. I tried again the next year with even worse results and that was the end of that. I don't know why, but that area of the yard is so sterile that I've been trying for the last six years to grow grass there, but to no avail. The nearby fence line is the best place in the yard to pick up a nice case of poison ivy, though. Yay.

So that's my tale of incompetent gardening. I'll try again this year with the big, empty flower bed, but I'm already envisioning a carefully-sculpted application of sod that will make it about half its current size before I begin. It's best to keep everyone's expectations realistic, I find!

Average Jane Goes Out to Breakfast

I am not a huge fan of many breakfast foods. I've given up on cereal for the most part, and menu items in the "syrup-covered" family (pancakes, waffles, french toast) just aren't filling enough. However, the best-case breakfast scenario for me is a restaurant breakfast.

One of the things that makes breakfast preparation such a huge pain is that each item must be cooked separately. The eggs go in one pan, the bacon in another, the toast goes in the toaster, and any potatoes go in yet a third pan. If you happen to want biscuits instead of toast, that's another five dirtied utensils.

At a restaurant, someone else coordinates all of the cooking and gets your food to you quickly, and at a reasonable price. What could be better?

The biggest restaurant breakfast rip-off is oatmeal. $4 for a cup of cooked oatmeal, an ounce or two of milk and 10x the amount of brown sugar you need? I don't think so.

Average Jane Stages A Comeback

Yes, I know I haven't posted anything for a couple of days. I won't run through my list of excuses except to say, remember last week when I said I was sick? Well, I'm still sick. But I'll soldier on for the good of the site.

Today I looked around at the squalor that has overtaken my house while I've been feeling poorly, and it occurred to me that I must somehow address it. I believe that every drinking glass in our entire house is now dirty, so it's time for one of those top-heavy dishwasher loads that has nothing in it but a full rack of cups and glasses, one dessert plate and five peanut butter-coated knives. I just ran a load of laundry through for the THIRD time after days of neglect. It's finally made it to the dryer, so its ordeal is now over. Then there's a nice stack of overdue bills, but then that's par for the course.

This weekend I'm hosting a baby shower at my house, so I'll have to do a more thorough cleaning job between now and then. Even though the house should still be fairly clean, it's amazing what four oft-puking cats can do to bring down the level of sanitation.

Tonight I need to grocery shop to get the ingredients for the cheesecake, blueberry scones and Devonshire cream I'll be making for the shower. I was fortunate enough to be on some kind of high-level, "we love you and your money" mailing list for either our local grocery store or Starbucks which resulted in my receiving a good-sized sample packet of Starbucks coffee in the mail yesterday, just in time for the party. It'll be a midday shower, so we're concentrating on desserts, tea and coffee.

Obviously I'm rambling today, so I'll quit before I get off on another tangent. Tomorrow: Something more interesting, I promise!

Average Jane Talks Cars & Movies

I'll start by saying that I know the average woman isn't really into cars. I was never really into cars myself until recently, except as a means to get from Point A to Point B, preferably very, very quickly. However, I absolutely love my current car even though it's old, things are constantly breaking on it, and it has the potential to be a bottomless money pit.

To establish some kind of limit to the money pit, I've been trying to learn how to do minor repairs and maintenance on the car. Yesterday I got together with my wrenching club (all guys so far, although I'm trying to rope in one more girl), and replaced my shifter. I'd had the new shifter for about a month, but I hadn't gotten around to installing it. As it turned out, the repair took LITERALLY five minutes (sorry, I've been watching MadTV a lot), plus a trip to Advance Auto to get a 41-cent clip I needed to hold the parts together. All those weeks that I'd been driving around with the shifter all loosey-goosey and wrapped in duct tape seemed especially ridiculous once I had the nice, new shifter in place. I did need help from one the guys to pull the old shifter out of its cradle. It was one of those brute force, "can you open this jar for me" things that sometimes we gals just can't do by ourselves. It was still satisfying to do the rest of the job myself, though.

Yesterday night, the car-a-palooza continued with a trip to the theater to see a preview showing of Starsky and Hutch, starring Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson. (What does that have to do with cars? Their distinctive Ford Gran Torino, of course.)

I thought the movie was everything you could ask for in a throwaway comedy. In addition to Stiller and Wilson, it featured Vince Vaughan, Will Ferrell and Snoop Dogg, all of whom were hilariously perfect in their roles. The movie is set in the 1970s (no specific year, just "the seventies"), and the one detail I kept noticing in various scenes was the seemingly unending selection of 70s-era coffee cups. From the shiny, bumpy pottery kind, to the plastic-footed type, to the ever-popular "happy face" cup, every 70s coffee cup I remembered from childhood appeared at one time or another.

Granted, the movie is pretty lightweight, but I found myself laughing throughout. It wasn't quite the triumph of the first Charlie's Angels movie, but then again it was way better than the second Charlie's Angels movie (which is pretty safe to say in that the latter was one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Except Batman and Robin - now that was two hours of my life that I wish I could get back). Just for the casting alone, I'll want the Starsky and Hutch DVD when it comes out.

Have you seen any good movies lately? Have any thoughts to share about your car? I've been doing this blog for more than a week now and nobody has left a single comment. Feel free to participate!

Average Jane Does Laundry

The other day as I was leaving an evening meeting, I remarked to someone that I needed to go home and do laundry so I'd have something to wear the next day. The other person laughed at my obvious exaggeration, little suspecting that it was no exaggeration at all.

When I was young and poor and used to have to periodically drag my laundry down the street to the laundromat in the back of a pickup truck, I got into the habit of waiting until everything I owned was dirty before I made the trip. More than a decade has passed since then, but I still can't seem to adopt the logical practice of washing clothes regularly. I do laundry for two now, so that means both hampers get stomped full and create Laundry Mountain in the basement baskets when they're brought down. It takes a week of evenings or a full weekend day to mow through it all. (Especially if you include re-washing at least one load each time that has been left too long in the washer.)

I'm always jealous of people who have their laundry rooms in their kitchens or near their bedrooms. Part of the reason that I don't approach wash day with gusto is that I have to haul the baskets down the world's steepest, narrowest stairs to the basement, hoping against hope that I don't step on or get tripped by a cat on the way down. But then, I doubt that more approachable appliances would have much effect on my general laziness in this area.

Signs you're a bad laundry procrastinator:

• You own 3 dozen pairs each of underwear and socks
  
• Football season ended two months ago and you still have a basket of team t-shirts and jerseys in your "red" pile
  
• You're forced to dry yourself with a hand towel after a shower because both sets of bath towels are dirty
  
• When you put away your clean clothes, it's as if you just returned from a giant shopping spree. Sometimes you find a recently-purchased item you had forgotten you owned.

We won't even talk about dry cleaning...

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By the way, I'm feeling much better today. Last night I dosed myself with some heavy-duty prescription cough medicine that I had left over from one of the other two times I've come down with this same set of symptoms since winter began. It's amazing what a good night's sleep will do for you!

Average Jane (Rerun)

Since I'm even sicker today and my pounding head is blocking any humorous thoughts I might share, I'm not even going to try to write something new.  Instead, here's my review of "A Knight's Tale" from May of 2001:

Today's Consumer Report

Last night I went to a sneak preview of "A Knight's Tale," which has to be among the oddest movies I've ever seen.

It stars Australian hottie Heath Ledger (of "The Patriot" and "Ten Things I Hate About You") as a lowly squire who passes himself off as a high-born knight.  There's no one else in the movie anyone would recognize - apparently they blew the majority of their casting budget on Heath.  This is not to say that there aren't other good actors in the movie, but there are some clunkers, too.

Anyway, as I already knew from previews, the soundtrack to the movie is almost exclusively arena rock standards of the 1970s and 1980s.  I wasn't sure just how weird that would be in practice until the opening "number."  As a crowd waits for a joust to begin, the soundtrack kicks into Queen's "We Will Rock You," and the crowd does the "clap, clap, stomp" that makes the song so distinctive.  Okay, so MAYBE that could have happened in medieval times, but then you see various crowd members singing along.  Deeply strange.

As the movie progresses, our hero falls in love with a noble lady with a very anachronistic tan, for no readily discernible reason.  She jumps him through Psycho Girlfriend hoops, which doesn't bother him enough that he refuses to play along.  He also develops an intense rivalry with a French knight, also for no reason that the movie is willing to expound upon to the audience's satisfaction.  The filmmakers preferred to paint their plot developments with broad strokes to leave more screen time for galloping horses, shattering lances, and defeated knights lolling out of their saddles.

Oh, and I can't leave out Sir Heath's ragtag band of merry men.  In addition to two fellow squires who join him in his deception, he also manages to pick up Geoffrey Chaucer (yes, the writer), who serves as his forger of documents and who introduces our hero at his jousts like a Renaissance Ed McMahon.  Before the end of the movie, their little band also includes a female blacksmith who apparently enjoys the advantages of 20th century feminism in the midst of the Dark Ages.

But back to the main story.  Heath and his Malibu Barbie continue to make googly eyes at each other and eventually end up at a banquet and dance after a jousting tournament.  One of the squires makes him a tunic to wear to this event, and for a horrible moment we think he's going to construct it out of the tent, a la "Gone With the Wind."  His merry band also teaches him to dance.

At the banquet, he meets his girlfriend, who has clearly taken her hairdo and makeup tips from Sheena Easton, circa 1984.  Incidentally, her costumes throughout the movie are extremely odd and I daresay not historically accurate, and her hairstyles get more bizarre every time we see her.  By the time the dance devolves into a David Bowie song, I am half expecting the camera to pan over to Bowie himself, fronting a modern band in some corner of the castle's banquet room.  Thankfully, that does not actually happen.

After that, Sir Heath's diehard enemy returns to the front of some war or other, depriving his rival of the opportunity to beat him at further tournaments.  Both men get very worked up and pissed off about this, again for no readily apparent reason ("pride," I suppose, in the remedial logical sweeps of this movie).

The wrap-up of the movie includes a completely non-tear jerking interlude in which Sir Heath finds his beloved father, who apprenticed him to a knight years ago so he could have a better life.  The father is now ancient (although considering the era we're talking about, he's probably only about 45) and blind.  Sir Heath's visit to his father proves his undoing, as his rival follows him to the 'hood and discovers his true identity.

After some gratuitous "kicking him while he's down" scenes, our hero is saved by the Prince of Wales, with whom he once jousted when everyone else was too afraid.  The actor cast as the Prince bears an uncanny resemblance to our current Prince of Wales, except that he's considerably handsomer (with a cool scar to let us know he means business).  The Prince, impressed by Sir Heath's knightly qualities, makes up some B.S. about an ancient royal lineage, which the peasants have to accept because his word is law.  He then knights our hero once and for all.

The movie ends with a final joust between Sir Heath and his mortal enemy, who pulls out every dirty jousting trick in the book in an increasingly cartoony, Snidely Whiplash kind of way.  Naturally, our hero triumphs, despite hideous injuries that suddenly seem to disappear the minute the joust is over.  He vaults a fence and runs to embrace his girlfriend, who now bears a striking resemblance to Jennifer Lopez.  Fade to the credits, rolling over AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long."  Wow.

If you still think you might want to see this movie, I recommend waiting until it's out on video or DVD.  That way you can watch it with friends, have a drink or two, and make the most of the opportunity to provide a "Mystery Science Theater 3000"-style commentary.  If you see it in the theater, don't say I didn't warn you!

Average Jane vs. Her Tonsils

For the past few days I've had that "I think I may be catching a cold" feeling. As of yesterday evening, there was no doubt that the cold had arrived in the form of a painful sore throat. I heard the word "strep" bandied about the office last week, so I imagine someone carried in the germs and thoughtfully passed them along to me.

I'm no stranger to tonsillitis. When I was 23 and living alone in my squalid first apartment, I came down with a case of it so bad that I missed almost two weeks of work. My tonsils looked so swollen, spotted and horrible that everyone who saw them involuntarily reacted with an, "Ewww!" - including the doctors and nurses. The first doctor I went to decided it wasn't necessary to test for strep, but that I "probably" had it. After the first round of antibiotics not only failed to help but landed me in the emergency room, I finally had a strep test (negative) and the right drugs to get me back on my feet.

In the midst of that whole medical drama, my mother had come by my apartment and, noting my lack of food, comfort and will to go on, scooped me up along with my cat and taken me to her house. It was from there that I'd made my late-night emergency room trip. It's a little worrisome to consider what might have happened if I'd had my bad penicillin reaction alone at my place.

I know it's boring to read someone's self-indulgent whining about their minor ailments. But you know it's difficult to focus on other things when you're sick, so I'm sure you understand. I'll work on amping up the entertainment value tomorrow.

Average Jane on Ice

I am now officially tired of winter. The first couple of snowfalls were pretty, even though the worst of them kept me home in my food-free house for a day. The reason I had not grocery shopped before the storm is that I'd stocked up before a previous storm prediction that had amounted to NOTHING. Rather than be sucked in again by the "weather guy who cried 'blizzard,'" I smugly sat home and watched the estimated 2-3 inches of snow become 12+ inches that trapped me in my driveway and denied me a lunch of the world's best Chinese dumplings (which I'm still craving, by the way).

My winter vehicle is a soccer mom van that is in dire need of mechanical assistance. The operation of the power steering ranges from "works somewhat, but squeals like a piglet" to "let's pump up those pecs and biceps." Yesterday my husband had finally chopped through enough layers of ice and snow that I thought I might finally be able to get my summer sportscar out of the garage and take the van to the shop. But no.

As I left the office yesterday, I saw little snowflakes drifting out the sky. Since I almost never seek out weather forecasts (see above), I had no inkling that any snow was expected. On the way home, a radio weather guy said we could expect a "dusting." Well, I stopped watching the snow accumulate when I turned in at midnight. We got at least two inches. The driveway is completely covered again. At this point, I'm so sick of shoveling that I'm considering a trip to Flamethrowers R Us for a quick afternoon rental.

The good news is that it's getting warmer outside and I can hear water running through the downspout by my window. But enough is enough. Bring on the crocuses and light jacket weather!

Average Jane Watches TV

I used to watch a lot more television than I do now, mainly because all my favorite shows keep being retired or cancelled. Today I learned that "Angel" will be ending this season* (you can vote here for an unlikely reprieve). Along with, of course, "Sex and the City" and "Friends" (a mercy killing, but still...), added to last year's loss of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," it means that even with a TiVo at my disposal, I'm still watching less and less TV with every passing season.

Even if I do end up with only a couple of favorite shows, I swear I'll never turn into the sort of person who responds to every mention of a TV show with, "Oh, I don't watch TV." Ugh, get over yourself. I watch television to entertain myself. If I want to learn something, I'll...well, I may watch television for that, too. Cable certainly does present a wide range of learning options. If it weren't for "Trading Spaces," I might never have redecorated my kitchen a couple of years ago. If not for "Unwrapped," I wouldn't have the comprehensive knowledge of junk food manufacturing technology I now enjoy. I'm also a big fan of the history/nature/animal/oops, don't drop your baby in the crocodile's mouth variety of programming.

The good news is that I now have more time for reading and Web surfing. It would be even better news if I took the extra time and did something constructive, but that's just a bit too much to ask.

*Update: While doing my daily net surfing, I ran across a comment at E! Online that suggests the uproar may be premature. Maybe Angel isn't cancelled after all. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Average Jane Goes to the Prom

Despite the fact that I am way too far on the wrong side of 30, I agreed to go to a Valentine's Day prom-themed party last night. My husband's band was playing, so I figured it might be fun.

Of course, the whole thing brought back memories of my real high school prom. I hadn't been very excited about attending it either. My mother gave me a big spiel about, "This is an important milestone in a girl's life..." blah, blah, blah. Anyway, I got a dress, roped in my boyfriend, and went.

I remember a few key things from my high school prom.

1. The minute I walked in the door, I spotted someone else wearing the same dress I was wearing. It did not help that she was wearing a version of my dress that was several sizes smaller than mine.
   
2. My boyfriend (a year younger than I, and from a different school), had not thought to plan beyond procuring a tux, so we had no dinner reservations. We ended up having hamburgers and chocolate malts after prom, which seemed rather lame, even at the time.
   
3. The best-kept secret of prom is that it is BORING, BORING, BORING! At least it is if you don't live near anyone in your school, you're widely thought of as a big geek, and none of the people you do know from school would be caught dead at prom.

Anyway, I'm over it.

So, I went out to the thrift stores yesterday in search of the perfect 80s prom dress. Oh, did I find it! It's a masterpiece of 80s design from Bonwit Teller, covered with tiny black and white checks guaranteed to make it unphotographable. The long sleeves are poofy at the shoulders, which are padded, of course. The waist is gathered from hips to lower ribs, and there's a giant bow across the chest. Best of all, the tulle peeking out from under the skirt is red!

I persuaded my sister to fix my hair in classic 80s poofy style. The big black bow on my head was her idea, too, as was the shocking purple lipstick and the "someone just slapped both my cheeks" blush. I also put on the oh-so-trendy-at-the-time blue eyeliner. I should be embarrassed to admit that the eyeliner stick in question really is left over from when I was in high school. The condition and age of my makeup collection always prompts much disgust and dismay from my sister.

Anyway, I ended up at the prom party very late. As it turns out, that was just as well because I didn't know anybody. Since my husband was occupied with the band and nobody seemed moved to talk to me, I got to play the wallflower. Just like high school all over again!

So, it didn't end up being very much fun. On the other hand, I think that playing dress-up is always kinda fun, so that was one small consolation. I only wish that I'd been surrounded by my own friends in hideous prom attire. That may be my next party theme...