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Les Misérables / Bright Pizzas

So Em's birthday plans got rearranged because we all got sick a couple weeks ago. She finally got to have her sleepover party part tonight. Awake over, really, I can here them as I write this, well past my own bedtime, and I doubt they're going to sleep any time soon.

So part of the birthday deal, I took Em to Les Misérables. She kind of got me hooked the other day with a concert presentation of the music from it she has on DVD.

We were early for the movie, and there was a Trader Joe's right there. I still needed toppings for the pizza I planned to make when we got home, so I went in to get them and Em and her friend stayed in the car. They said they were going to hijack my camera while I was in there, and I guess they kind of did.

Going into the movie, I grabbed a heavy stack of napkins, over an inch thick. Buttered popcorn inspires me to take quite a few, but I'm also getting over a bit of a cold so I figured I might need a few extras for nose-blowing. I had no idea.

The first time I found myself actively crying was when Anne Hathaway is singing after being reduced to selling hair, teeth and her body to save her kid. I was really surprised at my reaction, I kind of knew the story going in, after all. Then Em's friend was asking me if I could spare one of these napkins and I realized that not only was she crying, too, the man sitting next to me was also sniffling.

It's not so much the deaths that worked me over, it's the lives of the characters, the way they surprise me. The bishop who gives Valjean the stolen silver plus more, Valjean's willingness to sacrifice for Cosette, Gavroche's foolish bravado, these are all compelling characters.

But the reconciliation of Valjean to his true identity in the end, I couldn't maintain through that at all. Let alone the barricades in the end. I should probably resent having my emotions manipulated so wildly, but in the end I needed more napkins.

They should wait longer to bring up the houselights after a movie like this, some of us aren't tough enough to pull it together in a couple of minutes.

After, we came home and I made nukular green prosciutto, black olive, alfredo pizza and a purple pepperoni.

I'm still not sure what I think of Les Miz. Is it entertaining to sit in the dark and cry?

Birthday Pathogen Pot Luck

So we rescheduled Em's 17th birthday celebration because we were sick. Mo was puking Thursday, I got it Friday, then after I'd rescheduled the family get-together for the following Sunday, Corinna got it and then Em on her actual birthday.

And there really isn't a present to compare with projectile vomiting on your birthday.

So we all seemed to be well or on the mend from our various ailments a week later. I was still fighting some chest congestion from a cold I had before the puke festival (norovirus, I suspect).

I made my patented chocolate mayonnaise cake and my even more patented even-more-frosting-than-cake cream cheese icing.

Seriously, this was a regular, two 9-inch pan cake, and the frosting used three pounds of cream cheese, three sticks of butter, some confectioner's sugar, vanilla and food coloring. That's nearly four pounds of frosting for a cake that uses two cups of flour.

The party was great, we had a surprise visit from our rent-liberated friend Raymond and most of the fam over.

Fast forward to about ten o'clock that night, and I was puking my guts up. Second time in a fortnight, and I basically never get sick. Then I woke up in the middle of the night sneezing so violently I thought I'd given myself a hernia. I even took a sick day Monday, something I go years on end without doing.

Ever since (that was Sunday night, today is Wednesday), my nose has been so violently inflamed I've taken such desperate measures as jamming Vagisil into my nostrils to numb things out.

Vagisil is really marketed entirely too narrowly. It has more narcotic pain killer in it than any other ointment I've ever found. It's good for saddle sores, and as far as using it on your schnoz, if there's a part of a man's body that's somewhere like a vagina tissue-wise and nerve-wise, it'd be inside the nose.

My Mom called last night to ask how I was because she'd heard that basically all the family members who came to the party had gotten sick, too. No telling who brought what pathogens to our little buffet of infection.

Happy Birthday With the Power of E

I had to call in sick for Em's seventeenth birthday. Actually, her sister was puking Thursday night; I was projectile vomiting so hard my abs got sore on Friday; Corinna got it Saturday and Em got it Sunday, on her actual birthday. I think it was the norovirus.

So fast forward a week and we're doing the family cake & ice cream thing tomorrow, and Em wanted an orange cake. Corinna tried to talk me into buying a cake to save time because of other obligations I have this weekend, but the only way I could be satisfied was to make one from scratch.

I'm pretty sure the frosting actually outweighs the cake. It was my usual chocolate mayonnaise cake, two cups of flour, three eggs, 3/4 cup mayo, 4 oz chocolate, etc. The frosting was made from three pounds of cream cheese, three sticks of unsalted butter, some confectioner's sugar, vanilla and food coloring. I doubt the cake weighed anything like four pounds, so I'm thinking I've found a magical 1.58:1 ratio of frosting to cake.

Night Shot

I've been doing more reading on the subject of night/low light photography, and I haven't got it all figured out, but I did get this.

Blue Highways to Carthage & Joplin

After my abortive attempt to pedal to Joplin and Carthage, I decided to punt and take the car.

Corinna and Brian were keen to at least ride back from Carthage, and while my leg was hurting too bad to consider riding that far fully loaded, I was keen to visit our friend Edward and to see the recovery of Joplin.

Edward lives in nearby Carthage, but had the bad luck to be driving in Joplin when the tornado hit. His car was thrown approximately a half mile with him in it and landed on its roof with a pole skewering it from front to back. If he'd maintained a normal driving position while his car was being thrown about, the pole would have impaled him, but as it is, he made it out with miraculously minor physical injuries.

We took a more or less bicycle tour route going down. My xB was loaded with Brian and Corinna's bikes, Brian's B.O.B. trailer, all their touring/camping gear, my CPAP, changes of clothes, and against my better judgement our dogs.

I don't get the whole take your dogs everywhere impulse. I love our dogs, but I love for them to stay at home. If I leash train my cats, I can see taking them on some trips, but not multi-day out of town ones.



I am alone, in my marriage, in this view of pets and travel, and to her credit, Corinna does the vast majority of the dog-handling/managing/care when we take the hounds with us.

By the time we were in Harrisonville, I had my fill of interstate driving. US 71 is only recently dubbed 'Interstate 49' but it has long been the sort of road I hate to drive on—fast but incredibly boring.

Brian rode shotgun with a Missouri Gazetteer and we visited a pecan shop in Virginia, ran the dogs in a park in Drexel, saw an oil pump cowboy, and lots of scenic sorts of things getting to Carthage.

We even passed through Amsterdam, which had a windmill by it's caboose in the park. I think they could really pump up their tourism revenue if they used their name to justify legal drugs and prostitution.

We passed through Alba, which appears to have a sort of critical mass of the car unsafe at any speed, the Corvair.

We got to Edward's in a mere five hours. Or something like that. We enjoyed our trip along highways named 'V' and 'Y' and 'FF' but they took roughly double the time. It was such an eccentric route that when we called Edward for final guidance in to his Carthage estate, he kept asking where we were in 71 Hwy/I-49 and not seeming to hear when we said no, we came in on 96.

Some of the stuff at Edward's place was hard to identify. I asked about this swiveling truck thing and he didn't have any more notion how it came to be and for what than I did.

Edward also has cattle. Or his family does, I guess he doesn't have much to do with them except they're in his back yard and his dog plays with them.

Sheba kept barking at the cattle and it took me awhile to realize, she thought they were more dogs. And since they were the biggest dogs she'd ever seen, she figured she had to put up a big front to keep them from kicking her ass.

What I wasn't prepared for was our tour of Joplin. We did some fun stuff, ate a couple of meals out (Edward has a different sensibility about what is a 'good' place to eat than I, I would have definitely done the Colonel's Pancake House, for instance, but he seemed to think it might be almost lethal).

But when Edward started giving us a play-by-play of his tornado experience against a backdrop of the rebuilding effort, it got pretty heavy.

I guess I expected a mostly positive look at how marvelously all this has come back sort of story. There is definitely that. People have rebuilt about as fast as materials could be hauled in, new roofs, new houses, etc.

Between that are driveways to empty lots that appear to have no owner. And between all those new houses, so many twisted, shattered trees with dead branches and broken off limbs.

There are bright spots, a painted tree, rebounding neighborhoods.

But there were so many ghosts. The overwhelming nature of the tragedy is still near surface level.

I wondered at my friend Julie, I've known her since high school, and her career as a photojournalist. I was pretty set back by my own little photo-tour of Joplin a year and a half after the fact. She was there on assignment right after, took a picture that ran big on the front page of the New York Times.

Of course I wasn't the only photographer running abound Joplin shooting away. Which I found strangely comforting because I get the impression that our national attention span is so short that Joplin and it's kind get forgotten except maybe on anniversaries of disasters that make them famous.

We visited the gem & mineral museum as well, and even made an attempt on the George Washington Carver National Monument, getting there about ten minutes after it had closed.

My trip home, I didn't take the blue highways. Corinna and Brian are getting ready to cycle back, but I needed to get home with the dogs while I was still sharp, and since it was dark there wasn't a scenic advantage to those back roads. I got home in half the time, but with less than 10% the visual stimulation.