Mary Bellamy

Have I mentioned that my boyfriend is a Smarty McSmartPants? And an über-goober, but that's a story best saved for another time. When the Jeopardy! bus rolled into town this week, Tom was there. After kicking ass at the preliminaries, he went on to kick ass and take names at the second round.

Out of 800 people who showed up to try their luck, only 10 were selected for the contestant pool. And as you can obviously tell, Tom was one of them. He's now in their pool and has a 40% chance of being called to the show. Should he be selected, I plan to accompany him. And hopefully convince him to go to the Price is Right as well. I've got a way with the Plinko™.

Tis true, tis true....one of our beloved Hillbillies is moving on. Well, not moving too much, but he has purchased a house down the road. Last night was the official "I own it" party. Beer, champagne and an indoor toilet. He is moving up!

Now we have to begin the long process of looking for a new resident for the commune. There are already three possibilities, but we'll have to figure out if any current residents want to move to the empty cabin, then invite potential residents over to see the place and have dinner, then discuss the potential Hillbillies, then take our recommendation to the board.

Have I scared anyone off yet?

Fucking squirrels ate my hammock chair last year. But then Jay and Nancy gave us a slingshot. Tom has collected a small tub of rocks, and my aim is improving. The new hammock chair is on its way, and I am ready to defend it!

I was poking around Esty today and found myself perusing the hand-printed cards. One artist, Heatherjeany, does some lovely custom work, and as I was clicking through the items for sale, I came across one listing which was a save-the-date card for someone in my high school class. It feels weird to know something so personal about Pilar Vahey, who I haven't seen in more than 12 years.

This is the part where I should apologize for the pun. Please note the silence. And now for an explanation: After years of suffering the injustices of womanhood in silence, I have decided to rise up against the oppression and take matters into my own hand. Literally.

I am sick of Tom getting to use his favorite pee tree while I have to practically disrobe in our tiny outhouse in order to relieve myself. And so, after doing some research (thank you Internet, although you did steer me to some nasty stuff during my research), I have decided that I shouId order a female urination device. But I'm not quite sure which one is right for me, and so I turn to my gentle readers for votes.

Now, right off the bat I dismissed the Urinelle, LaFemme and P-Mate because they were all disposable. I don't want to add to the environmental stress on our planet simply to fulfill my desire to write my name in the snow. After further research, I narrowed the field to three contenders:


TravelMate
Pros: Narrow tip is ideal for perfecting my snow signature!
Cons: It's just so clinical looking.

PStyle
Pros: Please. Have you seen the color range?
Cons: Yeah, that's an open top, which just seems ripe for some accidents.

WhizPlus
Pros: Barbie-doll pink, with a fun name to boot! Flexible material.
Cons: More expensive, must order from Australia.

What? Don't most people blog about this stuff?

The weekend is over, and we survived. Cold Fusion has been working for months now on what just may be the penultimate level of geekdom. I speak, of course, of our now-infamous Borg bellydance. Yes, this was at the gaming convention. How did you know?

The Borg, for those of you who do not know (and you are officially no longer my friends), are a race of cyborgs known for assimilating other cultures and stealing their technology to further their borgifest destiny. In true geek style, we decided to perform a Star Trek bellydance in which I would get to don a bald cap and leather clothes and we could use a little stage combat. Unlike in Star Trek, this time the Borg won. Allow me a few observations:

1. I am way, way hot in a bald cap. In a sexy kind of way.
2. I am way, way hot in leather pants. In a temperature kind of way.
3. It is not easy to quickly remove a bald cap for a costume change.
4. If we wanted to, Cold Fusion could rule the dorks. Because, baby, they loved us! Who would have thought bellydancers would be so popular among the gaming crowd?
   

Did an Amazon reviewer really just compare the nonstick coating on a Calphalon hard-anodized pan to the one ring? Yes, I think he did....

I was passing the time in the main cabin and chatting with Jennie when she noticed that I had received the alumni magazine from my high school. Yes, my high school. It's one of those fancy, full-color, glossy affairs that you'd expect from, say, a private and horrifically expensive college. Well, I went to a private and horrifically expensive high school (but I was a scholarship kid - ha!). When Jennie expressed her surprise, I began regaling her with tidbits from it.

• So-and-so is taking a year off from college and travelling the world. Here are pictures of him in the Galpagos Islands!
• Rich Kid X has started a business importing Ecuadorean woven rugs in Manhattan. Anyone in the area should drop by! It would be great to catch up with other alumnae!
  
• Spoiled Girl is proud to announce that she has given birth to yet another child with a yuppie name. She has left the law firm to stay at home with her children while her husband is continuing his career as a surgeon in Sweden.
• Pretty Boy was recently featured on ABC's The Bachelor, where the girls all obsessed over the fact that he's a prince. (Oh, wait, that one is actually true. Shoot me now.)
  

Do these people all lie? Or are they truly the glitterati? I should have totally married one of those rich bastards, but since I couldn't stand most of them, I'm left with only one recourse: Lies. In the past, I've sent the alumni magazine my version of the truth.

• Mary has left college to pursue a career in dance.
• Mary is finishing her degree and working at the Hartford Courant.
• Mary has moved to Alaska and lives in a dry cabin in a Quaker commune. She is happy to shit outdoors in the winter.

But the gloves are off, baby. No more semblance of the truth. If they can live exciting and wonderful lives, so can I! Thanks to Photoshop, I can travel anywhere! Thanks to my relative anonymity, I can have any job! Thanks to my loose moral compass, I can tell all these things to my former classmates.

So, if anyone asks, I was recently outed as a spy while working undercover in the former Yugoslavia. Fortunately, the United States was able to trade one of their political prisoners to gain my sweet, sweet freedom. I'm recovering from the experience at my ranch in Montana while I ponder new career options. This just might be the time to finish that PhD thesis on Native American female landscape architects working Paris from 1954-62.

But if that seems too outlandish, Jennie has agreed to pose for "commitment ceremony" pictures that I can send in!

Things have been getting a little hectic with the dance scene lately, which is my roundabout way of saying I haven't posted in a while.

Cold Fusion is getting busy. We had a photo shoot, I designed promotional postcards, and they were just shipped to me today. Whee!!


We've got an hour-long time slot for the Ester Library Lallapalooza on Sunday. Hopefully we've got enough material to fill it. Next Saturday is a big one: The Arcticon show. Yes, we will be performing at a gaming convention. What? We're nerds. We even came up with a very special choreography. Here's a hint: You will be assimilated. I also get to be the special guest judge at the convention's masquerade ball costume contest. I'll have a week or two after that to work on our new Web site (which I won't even link because there's literally nothing there yet). At the end of April we head down to Anchorage, where Nomadia is hosting an urban tribal workshop with Heather Stants. We may also be performing at the Dance Together Alaska Festival while we're down there, but our time is starting to get very crunched.

And rumor has it that the Fleurs du Mal burlesque troupe is planning on making a comeback this summer in a big way. The possibility of a 12-show run is out there.....

The group that has been holding a conference in our building all day just finished up and kindly offered the rest of their food to us. Or rather, all we could eat until catering got there to clean it out (at which point it gets thrown away).

I now have all the crackers, a plate full of cheese and a grocery bag with the rest of the crudites on my desk. Did I mention that it's my night to serve dinner at the commune?

After much discussion, I went ahead and purchased tickets for Tom and I today. Sure, it's months in advance, but I doubt we'll find a better deal than this: $1,200 each for round-trip from Los Angeles to Auckland. New Zealand, here we come!

When I received an e-mail from an unknown name with the innocuous subject line "Regarding Work" in my Inbox at work, I shrugged and opened it. Hey, we've got (crappy) spam filters and for all I knew one of our freelance employees was trying to contact me. Instead, I got this:

Hi, I hate to be the one to mention this, but people continue to talk about your weight issue and it just disgusts me. Whether you know it by now, people are always chattering about each other at work but you come up more than enough. I wasn't the happiest or best-fit up until a year ago or so but that did change. Thanks to my dam brother-in-law(of all people). Anyhow, it was for the best.
What I am saying is that you need to do something different and maybe you can make the same difference I did. Try this stuff I used. I took it on the idea it's just more junk but it worked great. I see more positive reviews on it nowadays and makes me feel even better. So, I am encouraging a change, not only in the chatter around here but in you personally.

-Anonymous for now
Using an anonymous email website to send this btw;)
When it helps/works just send a memo out with the name "Angel" in it. Then you can take me out to lunch to thank you. Talk to you sooner than later I hope;)
http://huricaneroou.com

Well I never! Insulted by my very e-mail?!?! Now, I appreciate the misspelling of a curse word that might otherwise draw alarm bells (though you'd never know it by the number of times I've e-mailed the word porn to a colleague recently). Really, I do. And sure, I'm not quite a supermodel. I'm pretty sure it's the height thing, frankly. But my e-mail calling me fat? That's just a low blow.

Joanna has begun to doubt the very existence of my achingly good brownies. Not even a picture can reassure her (because I'm a whiz with the Photoshop, yo!).
It's a shame she lives 350 miles away, or perhaps she would be more intimately acquainted with their unique crumbly, fudgy texture, their ooey-gooey layer of liquid caramel and their crunchy bits of pecan.

Perhaps if I'm feeling really, really generous, I will bring a batch down when I crash at her place for the Heather Stants workshop.

ps that little wreath of decoration around the plate? Well, let's just say that no one will ever ask me to make heart-shaped decorations for Valentine's Day again. Bonus points for using blue paper to depict the pulmonary artery and the superior vena cava!!

I know that yogurt most certainly can be part of a healthy breakfast, but what if it's Boston Cream Pie yogurt?

Research links vasectomy with higher dementia risk
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Men who have had a vasectomy may face an increased risk of developing a rare type of dementia marked by a steady loss of language skills, researchers said on Tuesday.
Researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois, writing in the journal Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, linked this male sterilization surgery to a neurological condition called primary progressive aphasia, or PPA.
They surveyed 47 men with the condition being treated at Northwestern's Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center, as well as 57 men who did not have PPA. Their ages ranged from 55 to 80.
Of those with primary progressive aphasia, 40 percent had undergone a vasectomy, compared to 16 percent of the others. Those with PPA also suffered the ailment an average of four years earlier than the others.
Preliminary data also linked vasectomies to another form of dementia involving behavioral changes. Among 30 men with frontotemporal dementia, more than a third had undergone a vasectomy, the researchers said.
Sandra Weintraub, who led the study, acknowledged that the research involved a small number of people and said she planned to conduct a larger national study to see if the findings hold up. In the mean time, she said her findings should not stop men from getting vasectomies.
"I was hoping not to, but unfortunately it's the kind of news that ends up scaring people even though they may not need to be scared," Weintraub said in an interview.
"This was just a clinical observation that started with one of my patients telling me that he first noticed the onset of his symptoms a couple of years after he had a vasectomy, and he wondered whether that might have something to do with it," Weintraub said. "In his mind, these things were connected."
Primary progressive aphasia, which affects people usually after age 50, can be mistaken for Alzheimer's disease since initial symptoms are similar. In this incurable disorder, nerve cells die in the brain region responsible for language skills.
It causes people's language capabilities to decline steadily, with symptoms such as faulty recollection of names of people and things, difficulties in speech, reading and writing, and poor comprehension.
A vasectomy is an operation in which the tubes through which sperm travels are cut, leaving sperm unable to reach the testes and making a man unable to impregnate a woman.
The study did not look at the mechanism behind any link between PPA and vasectomies, but Weintraub said it may be because the surgery allows sperm to leak into the blood. Antibodies produced by the immune system in response to the sperm might trigger damage that causes dementia, she said.

Just because one person pisses me off, it doesn't mean I should take it out on the next person who does so.* I've got to control my reactions to things, especially when living with so many people with so many personalities (though they usually just have one each).




*In other words: stop, breathe, and don't be a bitch next time

Sigh. Being sick is never fun, especially when you're traveling long distances for workshops that cost a lot of money. And yet on New Year's Day I faced the inevitable fact that I was getting sick. But Texas awaited me!

Before I could get to Texas, I had to spend a night enjoying all that Boise has to offer. Insert obligatory potato joke here. For some reason, I've always thought that Boise wouldn't be a bad place to live. Turns out I was quite right.


They get really excited about the library here. The public transportation system was pretty easy, AND it goes from the airport right past Motel 6. For a mere $2 I got a day pass which afforded me numerous trips around the city. I even managed to squeeze in a visit to the Idaho State Historical Museum.

I didn't necessarily have to paddle upstream to get there. And no, I'm not breaking the rules by climbing in the display.

Ouch!

Of course, the ultimate goal of my trip was Texas. For some reason, I've always thought that Texas would be a bad place to live. Turns out I was quite right. There were lots of pavement and Republicans.


There were lots of bellydancers, too. On the left is the one and only Sharon Kihara, my main reason for going to Texas. On the right is Zymirrah, one of the organizers of the event.

Hooray for Bollywood! And for Reetu, who taught a classical Indian dance class that quickly morphed into Bollywood and dandi raas.

In time, I learned to tamp down my giddy schoolgirl crush on Sharon and play it cool around her. This was not that time. You can almost see me thinking "OHMIGOD!!!!! Sharon totally has her arm around me!!!"

When the final workshops were over, we headed out to whoop it up in the Historic Ft. Worth Stockyards. The natives were not prepared.

From left Kyla of Phoenix, Mary of Alaska and Zuza of Minneapolis. We were strangers, until I put a posting on the Internet looking for people to share a hotel room. Now we're just strange.

After four days and 11 workshops, I was tired. I was, ironically, just starting to get healthier. Zuza and I stopped and got a classy alcoholic beverage to drink out of a paper bag at our motel room at DFW.

I arrived home to weather 100 degrees colder and a boyfriend who had kept himself busy cleaning, building stuff and playing with our Lite Brite coffee table.