meme me, meme me

This one is swiped from Falling Dog, and she did one for me (which pleased me so that I linked it in the link, great title and all!) so now I’m throwing out for all of you:

Dictionary.com defines "meme" as: A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. The idea of the meme list is you leave me a note that you want me to meme you. I pick a few random entries from your diary and respond with the following:

1. I’ll respond with something random about you

2. I’ll challenge you to try something

3. I’ll pick a color that I associate with you

4. I’ll tell you something I like about you

5. I’ll tell you my first/clearest memory of you

6. I’ll tell you what animal you remind me of

7. I’ll ask you something I’ve always wanted to ask you

The only stipulation with this is: If I do this for you, you must post this on yours and meme all who ask.

It’s fun! Really, it’s lots of fun. It will take me a zillion years, mind you, but it will be fun.

Here I am again in the Christian Coffee Shop, because the cozy campus library is – DUH – closed for the holiday weekend. But oh, well. This is good too. It actually keeps me from being on the computer for hours and hours, since I get tired of sitting here and even I can only consume so much caffeine before I start getting really really weird. So I can catch up with my OD reading but am not overly tempted to go off surfing and wasting time online. Not like at home. Well, when I could actually get a connection at home. This may be all for the best, this limited connection thing.

And another advantage of the Christian Coffee Shop – I feel comfortable in leaving my computer at the table when it’s necessary to make a trip to the bathroom. Not because they’re christians, but because Baker B comes in here pretty much every single day of his life and orders his iced latte in a hot cup, so they all know him and I’m pretty confident they wouldn’t stand idly by and let someone make off with my computer. If I was in the library, I’d have to pack up and take it with me. Of course, if I was in the library I wouldn’t be drinking huge cups of coffee either.

I need to go for a walk, but can’t decide what the weather is going to do. We have had days and days and days of rain. Now it’s kind of trying to be sunny but it’s also looking cloudy and dire at the same time. It was quite the shock, coming back from the sunny hot Charleston weather to pouring cold rain. At least it isn’t snowing. Yet. Also a shock was getting in an awful fight with Baker B Wednesday night, which carried over into Thursday and even to yesterday – very unusual for us these days. We did that all the time when we were younger, but it’s rare that we get into really big fights now, and I don’t remember the last one that lasted for days. It was mostly stupid and I’m not going into the boring details, but we’re fine now. At the "wow, what was wrong with us???" phase now.

Topping it off was having to take poor Stella to the vet yesterday  – she’s been having occasional coughing fits, and in the last couple of days has been sounding raspy sometimes when she breathes, and when she purrs. Not all the time, and she seemed to feel perfectly fine, so I kept hoping I was overreacting and it would just clear up on its own, but we decided we’d better take her in yesterday given the long weekend. She hates going to our wonderful usual vet, so I really didn’t want to subject her to a stranger at the emergency clinic if she got worse over the weekend.

Well, that was just the final straw in a horrible couple of days and I wept like a crazy person – "Stella is SICK!!! She might DIE!!!!!!!!! What will I doooooooooooooo???? WWWWWWWWAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!" and Stella looked at me like I’d lost my mind and Baker B assured me that she would be fine, it’s just a little cold or something, she won’t die, and I did manage to pull myself together enough not to burst into tears at the vets. Where we had to LEAVE her, because they were so busy they had to just work her in. But the verdict is she’s fine, she’s just got a touch of a respiratory infection that’s going around. That she’s been vaccinated against, but apparently they can still catch it – it just doesn’t make them that sick. She gets to take pink medicine twice a day. And I’m fine too now. Really, I am. I just can’t imagine how people with actual human kids live through them getting sick and getting hurt and having to go off to school for the first time, though.

Is it going to rain, or what???? I’ve just finished my coffee, I can’t sit here all DAY. Maybe I should go do something. Oh, good movie alert – good WEIRD movie – Naked, which is a Mike Leigh film. The Mike Leigh who has done ten zillion movies, including Secrets and Lies, one of my favorite movies of all time. I also liked Vera Drake a lot, which was fairly recent, and Topsy Turvy. And Life Is Sweet, which I’ve never actually seen in the right order – IFC was showing it every five minutes or so at one time, and I think I saw the whole thing but in out-of-order bits mostly. ANYHOW, I got Naked because I often love his movies – we rented Grown Ups a few months ago and didn’t like it quite so much, but it was made in 1980 and I usually like his recent ones more than his older ones. It wasn’t bad but it wasn’t Secrets and Lies. So Naked was from 1993, and I stuck it in the queue. Then when we started watching it last night, Baker B says, "We’ve SEEN this!" I disagreed at first, saying maybe he’d seen it on IFC or something, or seen a little bit of it perhaps, and just thought we’d watched it, because he couldn’t remember a thing about it – other than being certain he’d seen it – and I just knew I hadn’t seen it. For a few minutes. Then it started having a really really vaguely familiar feel, although I couldn’t remember a thing about it either, and still thought maybe we’d just seen a little of it on TV maybe. Ages ago.

Well, we kept watching, and after the first fifteen minutes or so it wasn’t even seeming vaguely familiar to me anymore, and I just hoped I’m not entirely losing my mind. And it got weirder and more interesting as it went along, and I just couldn’t believe that I’d completely and totally forgotten having ever seen it. But I’m very happy to report that before it was over, I solved the mystery. FINALLY it came back to me. Ages ago – years, probably – I went on a Mike Leigh spree and rented a number of his movies. I got two one night when Baker B was out of town. I watched Career Girls, liked it okay (it’s an older one) and then didn’t watch the other one that day, but the next day when Baker B was back, we started watching it — and gave up on it fairly fast. I’m not sure why now, but I remember not being crazy about Career Girls, and not being that interested in Naked and Baker B not caring much about watching it and I thought maybe I’d watch it later – and never did. Till last night. So, I’m not going crazy! Hooray!!

And I really have to get out of here now. SO, here are some more Charleston pictures for the road:

 

A fun sign on Bay Street. I regret having cut the fish’s nose off – I didn’t realize that until later.

 

View through an open door – a lot of the houses sit sideways and have these doors that open to the street from their porches.

 

 

Pink house on the Battery.

 

 

Flowers!!!!

 

 

The Battery.

 

 

Palm trees! And only 29,764 more to go!