I love my new shoes

I guess I never did give a shoe update. The pair I ordered online? Yeah, I took advantage of the free returns. But on our trip to the City, I found a pair of brown dress shoes. (I particularly needed brown; my two brown pairs were falling apart.) Then I found another pair. Okay, two pairs to replace two pairs. But THEN I found a third pair. A pair more comfortable than any shoes in history not bearing the label "Birkenstock." Did they have them in black? (After all, I could really stand to replace one of my black pairs after replenishing the brown supply.) They did not. So, I have three new pairs of brown shoes, and not enough brown belts to wear with them. But the third pair (which I wore to work today) is so COMFY!

So much stuff

First of all, I'm kind of pissed. 2006 was supposed to be the year of big health crises; 2007 is supposed to be all better. Last night during the Oscars, my mom calls to tell me that my niece is having throat surgery on Wednesday to remove some suspicious lumps. This afternoon I get a call--at work--from a friend of a friend. The husband of our mutual friend fell 14 feet last week and has been in ICU, just regaining consciousness yesterday. AAAH! I have HAD IT with this hospital stuff.

Okay, on a lighter note, the Oscars. We had a friend over and watched SEVEN HOURS of Academy Awards coverage. So many hours just to see Melissa Etheridge thank her wife. We haven't seen ANY of the nominated films (we're just getting to 2005's nominees in our Netflix queue; we watched "Capote" Friday night). We did watch an actual movie in a theater this weekend, though. We went to the Saturday matinee of "Reno 911: Miami."

We went to the matinee in the pouring rain. The weather has been wild here lately. It has hailed four times in the last two days. (I captured a little bit of it on video; if it's decent I'll post it to YouTube the next time I download stuff from the camera to my PC.) Then this morning there was an earthquake off shore--5.4 and NEITHER of us woke up! (Okay, technically that's more of a "natural phenomenon" than "weather," but still...)

Oh, I also have a new blog, sort of. Blogger has this feature where you can send stuff from your phone to an e-mail address and they will create a blog for you and then let you claim it later. I finally tried it out, with a picture from my phone (of Stan's computer desk). Here it is: http://oxyrum798.blogspot.com/. Hopefully in the future I'll send INTERESTING things to it, like trip pics.

I've had the camera phone for almost two years now, but now Stan has one too. After 11 years together, 10 years of joint checking accounts, joint credit cards, joint car ownership, etc., we are now--finally--on the same wireless plan. One or the other of us has been in a contract with a cell phone provider for what seems like forever. Once we were even on the same network for about two years, but the plans were somehow incompatible. Finally last weekend we went to the local Sprint Store and got him a new phone and switched me to a plan that would allow a second user. I think playing around with his phone was what prompted me to use more of the features on mine.

Back from the City

Okay, this week has been crazy. I knew it was going to be like this. Still, knowing and being prepared are two separate and distinct things. Anyway, we had lots of fabulous experiences in San Fran last week. Many good, some trying, all educational and thought-provoking. I think it can best be summed up in one experience:

While riding Muni down Market to rendezvous with our lesbian friends for brunch, I looked out of the window and saw an obviously affluent couple in a Jaguar pulling out of the parking lot at the Castro Safeway. They were white. He was wearing golf course-appropriate attire. She was obsessed with the little dog on her lap. It was, naturally, one of those yappy little numbers with ribbons in its hair. Crossing the parking lot directly behind this couple was a homeless African-American gentleman pushing his entire worldly possessions in a series of garbage bags stacked on top of a shopping cart. I almost pulled out my camera to capture this juxtaposition. That's SF for you.

What makes a good song?

'Tis the season once again. American Idol, that delicious trainwreck of others' ambitions, is back on the air. It seems to keep growing--the few holdouts at work who weren't watching last season have tuned in this season just to see what the rest of us keep yammering about.

Now, I would never try out for Idol. I KNOW I'm tone deaf. But Nelly Furtado has convinced me that I should become a record producer.

Usually, since I am tone deaf, I respond to lyrics. My dear husband is always amazed at how quickly I can memorize all the words to a song. "Well, when you don't have to devote any brain power to the notes..." Anyway, occasionally I respond to a song for some other reason, and when I do it's usually the beat (I was a percussionist in junior high, after all).

That seems to be the case with Furtado's latest single, "Say It Right." I couldn't tell you the lyrics to the song, because they are absolutely forgettable. But the underlying beat is just incredible. It is begging to be sampled and turned into a REAL song. I went out and spent $15 for the CD just to hear this beat. I am driving Stanley insane because I'm in that place where I play the song OVER and OVER and OVER and... you get the idea.

I want to do something with this song. I want to record a YouTube clip with that beat. I want to go out and find a 19-year-old with a good voice (which after five seasons of Idol, I think I could identify) to record new lyrics over the beat. It's an odd compulsion.