Boy am I red in the face

Um, so I went to the dermatologist today. The verdict on the newest lumpy rash spreading its way across my face and arms?

Not psorosis. Poison ivy.

There goes my pride in not being allergic to it -- apparently, either I've gotten lucky these last few decades by not encountering the plant, or I've developed an allergy in recent years. The "good news" was that with regular applications of cortisone cream, my face will clear up. In two weeks. My arms, the dermatologist said, would take longer. Damn. I'm gonna give the prescription meds a try, though, before I try the advice from the coworkers, which was to scratch the sores open and then apply hairspray to the wound (David) or straight bleach (Lyndsey). Uh, thanks, guys?

An update

Last night's dream: I'm going to check out the venue where our wedding might be held. I get there, and I realize I'm confused -- it's the day of my wedding, only I'm not at all prepared for it.

Shit.

Maybe this will help

I've had bad stress dreams every night this week. But the thing is, not only do they cause me to wake up each morning in a funk -- I end up feeling embarrassed relating them, because they're all so goshdarned trite. The one I had this morning was no different. I dreamed that I was living with my mom and in school. I had a final coming up the next day, and I really wanted to study for it (I was behind three books in the required reading) but my mom made me clean the house instead, despite my arguments against it. Finally, when I was all done cleaning, she admitted that she was wrong, but it was too late -- I only had an hour before my exam, and nowhere near enough time to do what I needed to do. And then I woke up. Sigh. Other dreams this week have involved missing a plane and chasing after a small child.

Oh, and I appear to have developed The Rash again. This time it's centered on my face. Awesome.

Maybe this video will make me feel better. I could use some concentrated doses of cuteness.

U.S. Americans

Holy crap. I don't mean to just post video content on here -- words will be forthcoming, I swear! -- but this was just amazing. Never have I been so proud to be a U.S. American.

Things you probably don't know about me

I love old-timey gospel music. This song -- Down By The Riverside -- has been a favorite since my hippie camp days, while Sister Rosetta Tharpe has been a newer discovery. Good stuff.

Bangs Bash '07

Before I left for Lyndsey's birthday party, Kyle had but one small request of me: Don't shoot yourself. Not his usual pre-party advice -- typically, most of his admonitions surround my ability to go from zero to hungover in 60 seconds flat -- but an appropriate reminder, nonetheless, given that I once told a college interviewer that the word best used to describe me was "clumsy." Still, I could not be stopped. I was goin' shootin'.

Let's get this out of the way: I am a hypocrite. I am no fan of guns, which I think are too easy to get in this country. But, hey, I -- and many others -- have been a big ball of stress the last few weeks, and blowing off some steam via target practice seemed like just the thing to do. So I set out for the party, late (of course), and worried that the quickly setting sun would put the kibosh on all of my plans.

Don't let Lyndsey fool you: Bangs is really far away. It took me more than an hour to make my way up to the Teters' Knox County homestead, driving north through Columbus' upper reaches and then east, through the strip malls of Sunbury and the quaint core of Centerburg. Finally, as dusk began to set in, I arrived.

There were already some partygoers set up in the field behind the Teter house, using a paper plate as target practice. I half-ran up to them, eager to take a shot before the sun went down. Lin, our gunman (so to speak) of the evening generously obliged, showing me the proper way to hold a shotgun, load it and fire it. Remember what I said earlier about guns? Lin is a shining example of a responsible gun owner. He didn't allow anyone to drink before shooting, and gave really great, thoughtful instruction to all of us. Thanks to help from my awesome teacher, I proved to be not a terrible shot, all things considered. I hit that paper plate target, and then the next morning, I managed to hit all of the targets (fire-singed beer cans from the night before).

As it turned out, the shooting didn't even end up being close to the most dangerous activity of the night. That particular honor went to our visit to the House of Nightmares.

The House of Nightmares, about a quarter-mile down the road from the Teters, is, I was told, a former poorhouse-cum-Christian college-cum-haunted house of the professional variety. The hulking Gothic-style building served as a haunted house as recently as Halloween 2006, before it was closed for structural reasons. Being the mature young men and women we are, me, Lin, Lyndsey, Brett and Nikki headed out in the wee hours of Saturday morning to check the place out. We quickly gained entry -- a back door was wide open -- and then walked in, past spray-painted murals and a kitchen redone to look like a murder scene, with red paint spattering the walls.

Brett was the adventurous one, and persuaded us to climb up first one set of stairs and then another, the piles of animal poo of indeterminate origins growing larger as we went. It didn't take long to determine what the source of the feces was. First a high-pitched squeal and then -- Bats! -- someone shouted, and I crouched to the ground, my increasing proximity to the poop be damned. Rabies avoided -- at least for the moment -- we continued on, ducking periodically to avoid the dive-bombing bats. Brett moved on ahead of us, guided by the light of his cell phone, eventually calling us to check out the scene he'd happened upon.

Peering through a doorway, he motioned us over. It quickly became clear what the building's structural issues were. Several of the floors had collapsed on each other, starting right at the threshold. There was a 50-foot drop from where we stood to the first floor, where the pile of rubble, broken beams and plaster, lay. Forget the guns, this was dangerous.

Lesser people would have turned around. Heck, smarter people would have turned around. Did we? Of course not. Brett eyed a ladder hanging from a trapdoor ceiling and continued upward, into the building's attic, and Lin and Lyndsey followed, with me reluctantly bringing up the rear and with Nikki watching from below. In the attic was yet another trapdoor ladder, which Brett quickly climbed, followed again by Lin and Lyndsey after he announced he'd made it to the roof. This time I stayed behind, hunching my shoulders to avoid the bats flying above.

Somehow, everyone managed to not topple off the roof, cave the building in or get us arrested, and we made our way back to the Teters' place, where we drank one last nerve-calming drink by the light of a bonfire and then curled up in our tents, the nylon protecting us from the cool summer night.

More pictures of the weekend's adventures are here and here.

(Above hoto stolen from Lin)

Christian the Lion - Reunion!

Someday Rosa will love us like this.

Busy day

I added a buncha pictures today ... the remaining Japan ones, ones from the fair and, of course, ones from Friday night's Bangs Blast 2007 (more details on that later). You should check them out.

Blowing off some steam

This was Friday.

How hot is it?

It's so hot that the adhesive from the tape holding up my Woody Guthrie poster gave up the good fight tonight, ever so slowly melting away from the wall.

On the up side, it's hot enough that all my bread is automatically toasted, thereby cutting 30 seconds from my typical morning routine.

H-O-T-T

For those of you wondering -- and, I mean, who isn't? -- it is hot right now in our house. Like, surface-of-the-sun-hot. In-the-center-of-a-volcano-hot. Frying-the-egg-that-is-my-brain-hot.

Sollie and Rosa have taken to splaying out on our hardwood floors in an attempt to cool down. Myself, I've been binging on Pop Ice (you know, those ultra-cheap frozen tubes of brightly colored goo that are so divorced from the reality of fruit, that it makes more sense, when asked for which flavor you prefer to say "purple, please!" than "grape!"). It is quite delicious, but we've eaten nearly all of the 100 frozen treats our box came with in less than a month and I am quickly becoming convinced that I've replaced the blood in my veins with corn syrup and food coloring.

Anyway, the one window fan we have downstairs cuts the muggy air only fractionally, and I am finding myself rethinking the necessity of central air in these hot hot hot summer days. Presently, the only a/c in this house are the window units chugging along in our upstairs bedrooms, and I've been trying to convince myself that, in itself, is a luxury (which I guess is the case, if I think about things *too* much, so let's avoid that line of thought).

As a kid, my parents had only two window units for our house. One went in their room, the other in my sister's. I'm not sure why my lil' sis got the other a/c, seeing as how she had the ceiling fan my room lacked, but I would imagine it had something to do with the agreement my mom and I struck: I didn't have to clean my bedroom, as long as I kept the door shut. So, yes, on summer nights, my parents and my sister would open their bedroom doors to (theoretically) cool all of the upstairs rooms, but I spent most nights in a tangle of sweat-dampened sheets. And that is when my youthful DIY-er spirit presented itself: The freezer is cold, ergo anything placed in the freezer will get cold, I reasoned. And so each night, I would strip my pillowcases off my pillows and set them in the freezer. The shock of the ice-cold cotton is only a brief pleasure, but man, it ruled.

And so, tonight, I am going to freeze me some pillowcases. Heck, at this point, the ol' slumber party trick of the bra in the freezer sounds pretty daggone good, too. We'll just hafta see how much stuff I can stuff in there.