Author: wideeyedfunk

Far in space, far in time.

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The mighty Pathfinder and I rolled down Main Street, heading home after a day of thinking and talking. Same as everyone, same as always. My freshly opened bag of Tyrrell’s Handcooked English Chips – Mature Cheddar and Chives flavor (flavour?) – rustled on the console next to me. “Crunch, crunch, crunch,” my chomping teeth said at a red light. “Crunch, crunch,” while we waited for a school bus to drop some kids. I checked the back of the bag for interesting potato chip news at an egregiously long red light. I was eating Lady Rosetta Potatoes grown in Herefordshire. Well ok. I examined the next chip in the afternoon light. It sorted of looked like a Herefordshire potato. “Crunch.” Tasted like one, too. I got to wondering about that potato. Who planted it? Was the farmer dreaming of a better life, or was she living the rural dream? Did the tractor need a new water pump and was the mortgage due so all hopes were with this potato and it’s brethren? Could the potato feel …

WideEyedFunk Progenitor is Also WideEyed Over Spring

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*Guest written by WideEyedMom from her home in central Virginia. “When we left for Florida last week there were little peeping buds of pale chartreuse on the trees and a smoking yellow mist at the tops.  We arrived back yesterday afternoon to a darker chartreuse and a deep spicy aroma of oak woods.  The mist from the trees is now on all the porches. The oaks are alive with bug-eating woodpeckers, darting bluebirds, finches and cardinals.  A little bird again built its nest upon the patio light fixture and Choppie the Cat monitors it every day from the upstairs decking.  I have peas and onions waving their heads and summer is almost upon us…”

Surrender to the Sweatpants

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Miss Tibbit-the-Useless-Little-Black-Dog is pressed against me here on the sofa. She is super fluffy and still a little damp. Hamish is asleep in his chair looking rumpled. We all had a tense evening and I made an early surrender to the sweatpants. You know what I’m talking about. There comes a point when a person submits to the notion that the day is over. That there is no need to be in any way presentable. In this moment, sweatpants are the only choice. Not pajamas because those aren’t even clothes. Sweatpants. Elastic waist. Sometimes, preferably, elastic ankles. Droopy. Large. Sickeningly comforting. So horrifying that even if the house were on fire I’d change into other pants. Mine are 11 years old. I bought them when I was writing my PhD thesis and I vowed I would wear no other pants until it was finished. That took four months. Now they are a faded navy blue. They have zips at the ankles just in case I’m being active and need to shed my sporty outer layer. That’s just …

San Francisco and the Stealth Cast

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My WideEyedBrokenArm and I stumbled through San Francisco last week. We presented research findings. We learned about other people’s new research. We fumbled through botched handshake attempts and embarrassing dropsies of all kinds. Then, the Stealth Cast and I went out into the world. (The bone doc says a black cast is a Stealth Cast because of its Ninja-like invisibility. The eye slides across it. Sort of.) I slung my good arm around an outside pole on the Powell-Hyde trolley car line and wing-dinged my way across Nob Hill, Russian Hill, Chinatown to Fisherman’s Wharf. I could feel the wind of our passage blowing through the fiberglass of my Stealth Cast as it dangled in the open space of the city streets. The trolley driver rolled his eyes at me and kept yelling for me to “Hold on!” I held on even though my knees got weak when the Golden Gate Bridge loomed over the city next to us. Even when the curviest street in the city went by. Even when I saw San Francisco Bay …

You can’t drink the ocean.

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Hamish the Corgi, Miss Tibbit the Useless Little Black Dog, and I piled into my parent’s old Chevy truck. I opened the passenger window just enough for Tibbit’s head and shoulders and so that Hamish could get his nose into the air. Any more than that and Miss Tibbit would shove her entire body out of the window and air surf her way to the beach. As it was her ears flapped in the rainy wind of Upper Township while we cruised through the marshes and neighborhoods on the way to the beach. The WideEyedHousehold was on a mini-break to the shore – and while the WideEyedSpouse wasted his time inland, meeting with a friend and talking about cars, moto-cross, and computers, the dogs and I hit the beach. We walked for a few miles but in the dense fog we couldn’t tell. Our feet were moving but the scenery didn’t change. Gulls flapped at Hamish when he ran in looping arcs around them. He was bound to be frustrated in his corgi heart, no one …

Spring on my bookshelf if not on the ground.

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Outside it is snowing. I can’t stand it. Miss Tibbit can’t stand it. My mouse keeps clicking on garden websites. I pretend ordered over $500 worth of dry, sunny condition plants yesterday. I bought tulips in an act of desperation. They are keeping me company in the office, nestled among the things I look at everyday…my dried frog from a beach cliff road in Estramadura region, Portugal. A favorite rock from the Rat Islands. Binoculars for staring down squirrels at the bird feeder. Beethoven on the radio because the Beethoven Festival is this week in Buffalo and that’s what’s playing. Grandpa WideEyed’s Perfect Attendance Certificate 1915-1916. My dented clock. Which would not be dented if it chose to stay on the wall like a normal clock. And, from my salad days – a Certificate of Award for participating in the Middle School jog-a-thon in 1981. I jogged 6.9 kilometers – I jogged in KILOMETERS you’ll note because the school system was still pretending to the metric conversion back then. Spring tulips among my everyday things. They are making …

Ludwig’s No. 9 on a Spring Evening

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We dug deeply into the closet for The Suit and a Dress. The WideEyedSpouse installed cufflinks. I glued a dangling sequin back onto my dress and pulled out the outrageous silk and roses wrap I made last fall, just as my world turned dark and winter. It is Springtime now. And, of course, Ludwig deserves the best and brightest. So last night we sparkled and gleamed the Mini over to Kleinhans Music Hall, leaving glitter and joy in our wake instead of carbon-rich exhaust. It was that kind of feeling. Have you spent much time with Beethoven’s Symphony Number 9? It overwhelms. It fills a person with complexities of sound and silence. There are whispered conversations between flutes and violins, there are arguments between basses and tympani drums, French Horns have opinions all over the place and eventually more than one hundred voices join the instruments, yelling in German about Joy.  More or less. The lyrics don’t actually make a lot of sense – I don’t know if it’s the translation from German or changing …

Fear.

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We were on the island to learn about prehistoric Aleuts and the ecological past. But between us and Aleut occupation of the place, World War II happened. We hiked across maritime tundra landscapes scattered with symmetrical cereal-bowl bomb craters. We mapped what felt like an endless series of Japanese entrenchment features and the young men on the crew talked about gun emplacements, turkey shoots, and the Pacific Theater of War. They were terribly excited and they stood in the old emplacements waving their arms around, arguing over probable tactics, logistics, and use of terrain in defense of bays. I sighed over my graph paper and measuring tapes because I wasn’t there to learn more about World War II. Nonetheless, I was there, the WWII sites were there, and finally it occurred to me that I was thinking about the soldiers who built and maintained these trenches as people – not as machines of war and history. Young men scrambled in these irritatingly numerous trenches in the same howling wind and rain I was experiencing. Except, …

Sun shining on suet. Briefly.

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I looked in the fridge and discovered that the WideEyedSpouse and I had successfully filled the backs of the shelves with containers and objects of mystery. Crème fraîche container. Actually contained crème fraîche. From New Year’s Eve caviar, blinis, and a bright-sparkling Spanish cava. I sniffed it. “Seems ok,” I told the Spouse. My tongue tingled and burned under the little sample. Perhaps not. Tarter sauce jar. Actually contained tartar sauce. Expiration December 5, 2014. No one can remember why or when it was purchased. Now we have a warehouse club bag of 115 frozen fish sticks waiting for saucy additions. I wacked the stuck on lid on the counter a couple of times and cranked it open over the sink so the crumbly bits didn’t go all over the floor. I sniffed it. “Seems ok,” I told the Spouse. I dipped a crunchy warm fish stick into it and tasted. “Tastes ok,” I announced and plopped a few tablespoons on my plate. If something happens to us, tell them to check the fish sticks AND the …

A good mattress.

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I love a good mattress. You just don’t see too many of them at this time of year. Maybe it’s so cold that people aren’t moving here and there as often in the winter. Maybe there’re good ones under all the snow banks – I don’t know but I miss seeing them. We were out on patrol two days ago when it got a little warmer. I didn’t even have to wear that horrible coat. I HATE that coat. A lot. … Oh, right, we were out checking our blocks a couple of days ago and there it was. A big, floppy mattress slung across a snowbank. I ran right to it and shoved my face into a really nice looking dark spot dribbled down the side. I breathed in hard and snorted back out. I rolled my eyes back in my head so I could really concentrate. I snuffled my chin hairs along the edge, to catch interesting spots along the whole length. I sneezed and looked around. No one seemed to be in a …