Katherine E Bennett

Tomorrow I may have a kitty!!!!

I had complained that the weather had turned grey and icky before I got any gorgeous autumn leaves shots; so when this morning we had the sun come out for once, I grabbed my camera and took just a few pictures from around the house.

( Warning: cut for largeness! )
I should also take pictures of some of the halloween decorations.

With a side helping of The Secret Power Is Heart.

I finally got a chance to go see 9, which was a much better movie than the reviews had led me to believe. I mean, yeah, there were some parts of the story that made no sense whatsoever, but to be honest that's par for the course with Hollywood movies these days. It was a visually spectacular movie, with some really disturbing and terrifying monster designs, an amazing sound board, characters I liked a lot, and some edge-of-the-seat action scenes. I would totally recommend it.

The insurance company finally paid up, so I have to find an auto place to fix my fender. I know there are a few around here, I just have to have some way to determine what places are good. I never know how to find places like this, do I just pick one out of a book? I have the same problem with doctors.

I've been staying at home this weekend; my roommates are in Canada and I am feeding their cats, as well as harassing them so that they don't get too lonely. And I am thinking about getting a cat of my own soon, yay!

Summer is definitely over up here; we had hot weather up until about a week ago when there was a cloudy cold day. Since then the sun has come back but it's much cooler. Today was a gorgeous fall day, temps in the low 60s and clear shiny skies. I actually got a lot more done today than I expected. I bought some herbs which I will put in the ground tomorrow, and I have been waffling recently over decorations. Do I want Halloween and/or Fall themed decorations, or no? How extensively can I decorate? Probably I'll end up just not doing much of anything at all, ah well.

Speaking of upcoming October, my sisters need to tell me what they want for their birthdays!

Feeling kind of sad and let down, but only in the way that you get after something good is over.

I just came back from Boston, attending my sister ayelle's wedding with nick zendzian. (Now Nicholas Paul Bennett-Zendzian, if I understand correctly.) It was about as good as weddings can get. The bride was beautiful, the location was beautiful, the ceremony was beautiful, and the party afterwards was fantastic. All of it helped along, I think, by my sister and brother-in-law's experience in theater, as well as the generous sprinkling of theater friends among the guests.

Also, on the topic of weddings in Massachusetts, you should read this story. It's very tear-inducing.

So I am painting the room in my new house before I move in, because 1) the room belonged to the previous owner's daughter and they decided to paint two of the walls bright purple and the other two bright blue, and 2) the walls have been beat to shit and are full of dents, gouges, pockmarks, and places where they spackled over dents and gouges but then didn't sand them before painting.

Fortunately cryogenia knows about such things, so under her direction I bought plastic sheeting, paintbrushes, thirty yards of blue tape, a gallon of primer, a pint of spackling, putty knives, and sander blocks. We spent all of yesterday putting down plastic and washing the walls, and all of today sanding, spackling, sanding again, washing again, and finally putting on the first coat of primer. Tomorrow: moar primer, then monday and tuesday I can finally put on new paint.

Quick poll: The color I pick has to be pastel side of the spectrum, which is fine by me. Right now I'm looking at the blue-green range. I like blue better, but I hear cool colors can get depressing during the winter, and green would have a nice meadow-like feel to it. Opinions?
[Poll #1438465]

Anyway, once the walls are finished, THEN I can start looking at moving my actual STUFF into the room. Mostly into the room. It won't all fit in the room; some of it will obviously have to go in the rest of the house.

Things I still need to do:
-Fill out change-of-address forms
-Fix move-out date with current landlady (Current est: August 16th)
-Inform the following parties of address change: Workplace, State Farm, AT&T, Wells Fargo, US and WA gov't.
-Cancel account with Comcast.
-Contact Starving Students Movers to see their rates to move one bed, one mattress, and two desks.
-Visit the container store to get an other half a bookshelf.
-Buy, at Home Depot/Lowe's, more paint trays, and actual paint.

One more week until our lease starts on the new place. Two people are checking out my apartment today, and once we have a taker my landlady will give me a move-out date. I'm very excited and looking forward to the new place, but at the same time I'm also kinda... scared.

The house is unquestionably a huge upgrade from my current place. Much more space, much more amenities for a much lower price, in a much better neighborhood. I'm not scared of my roommates, who are very nice, or of the moving process, which I'll have at least two weeks to complete. It's not even so much that I'm scared of change as I've changed residences pretty much once a year now for all of my adult life. It's something else.

The change is going to be to me, to my lifestyle, and to the way I think. I'm scared because I've spent my entire adult life moving from one temporary, limited shoebox to another. I'm scared because I've spent seven years with a certain set of habits, of thinking patterns, that are going to change now.

For example, whenever I've had to acquire furniture or other domestic devices, I went shopping with the mental metric "can I lift it without assistance, will it fit in the back seat of a sedan?" Anything that didn't meet that metric (with a few obvious exceptions like bed frames) was rejected. Non-furniture items underwent a similar process; if it couldn't fit into a handbag or a backpack, I wouldn't get it. When doing grocery shopping, I never buy more than could fit into a bike basket. And I always look for the smallest package size, even knowing that it's cheaper to buy in bulk, because I simply never had the room to store things.

For the past three years my cooking ability has been severely limited; in Japan I had no oven and few ingredients, and in my current apartment I had no oven, no freezer, and no space whatsoever. The limitations have sharply reduced the menu of things I know how to cook. Now that I'm going to have a full fridge and freezer, stovetop and oven, all manner of cookware and lots and lots of storage space, I'll have to remember everything and get in the habit of cooking again.

Basically, for all of my adult life I've been thinking like a snail. My home and my possessions needed to be something that I could pack up and take with me: in a suitcase, on an airplane, in a car. But that's not necessary any more, and that's what feels strange.

I'm going to get a cat. I've wanted one ever since I've left home, but circumstances have never allowed. Now I can. I'm so excited that I can hardly wait. But at the same time, I'm scared.

As I started to get ready to leave Japan, one of the things that they advised us to do, to try to prepare us for the culture shock and the sadness of leaving JET behind, was to make a few lists. Lists of things that we liked about Japan and were sorry to leave behind, and things that we were looking forward to having in the US. (Here's the old post, actually.)

So it's been about a year now, and as I watch people on my facebook and friendslist preparing to come home from Japan too, I feel like it's time to do a retrospective.

Things I miss about Japan in general, Toyama in particular.
( Read more... )

Things I don't miss about Japan.
( Read more... )

Oh Japan, I miss you still. You taught me so much about myself, about the world, about my own culture. I'm not sorry I left. I couldn't have stayed. But I still miss you.

And for the Americans, happy Independence Day as well!

Today is sunny, clear, and hot in Seattle... and if it's like that in Seattle, imagine what it's like in normal places!

Go out and make the most of it!

We may be getting a house! This one!

As you no doubt have heard before, Dr. George Richard Tiller was murdered yesterday in his church, in what can only be described as a terrorist act. Coming on the heels of a recent article about increasing death threats and harassment of judges, this depresses me more than I can say. What a country we live in, where we shoot doctors and judges.

Regardless of your feelings on abortion 'as a method of birth control,' late term abortions are exceedingly rare; and while early abortions can occur for any number of reasons, late term abortions generally take place for one reason and one reason only: that there is some medical reason why the baby will not survive the birth, or has an extremely short and painful life expectancy. It is the hardest choice for an expectant mother to make, but when it is necessary, it is absolutely necessary, and Dr. Tiller was one of only three doctors in the US who would do what is necessary, and do so in a compassionate and caring manner.

I'm not going to get angry, because if I started to get angry, there would be no bottom to it, and it would accomplish nothing. So instead, I'd prefer to do something vaguely productive, even if it's not much. I haven't looked at the I'm sure numerous posts celebrating his murder; I haven't googled Dr. Tiller, but I think I can guess what the top result for him is right now. Dr. Tiller, mass murderer, baby Kevorkian. So I'd like to start to change that with a little good old fashioned Googlebombing. (Does googlebombing still work?) I'd like to push something else to the top of the google list, so that the world will remember him as he truly was, not as the scapegoat for blind hatred. So please, if you care about these issues, consider posting this or something like it in your blog.

Dr. Tiller was not just "an abortion doctor," he was a doctor who performed years of compassionate care for the women he knew. Dr. Tiller had standards and protocols and if they were not met, he would on some occasions refuse to perform a late term abortion when it was not a medical necessity. Dr. Tiller kept on working after years upon years of death threats, after actually having been shot once, because he believed in protecting women's rights and women's safely, and because he wanted to make sure that these women didn't end up like these women.