Enough with the breast cancer

The State House was pink last night.  They have special light filters (I assume they’re filters, but I’m not the State House lighting director), and they change the colors monthly (?). It’s pretty cool, makes driving around at night an adventure.  Also, everything available for purchase lately seems to have a pink ribbon on it, or it’s a Halloween, or Christmas (already?!?!?) decoration.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about raising money for breast cancer, and I stopped hating the color pink a while ago.

Let’s take a step back, though, October is obviously the month of Halloween, Breast Cancer Awareness month, the month of Oktoberfest etc.  It’s also DInosaur Month.  Poor dinosaurs are always getting lost in the shuffle, and if I hadn’t been at the library yesterday, I wouldn’t have known about it either. In celebration, I will now list a few fun dinosaur facts that people may or may not know.

There is no such thing as a Brontosaurus.  Remember growing up, that giant long-necked herbivore of the sauropod genus was always called a Brontosaurus?  Then, I stopped paying attention for a moment, and it became Apatasaurus.  I feel that not many people know why, because when a friend of mine was wearing a t-shirt with an Apatosaurus on it, and I correctly identified it, he was wildly impressed (dinosaurs are super-awesome).

The story goes, dinosaur nomenclature dictates that the first name given to a dinosaur is the correct one.  In 1877 Othiel Charles Marsh found a skeleton and named it Apatosaurus ajax.  Two years later, he found a similar skeleton and named it Brontosaurus excelsus, which means Thunder Lizard (clearly, he had been thinking up cool names in the interim, plus this skeleton was larger and more thunderous).  The only problem was the fact that the Thunder Lizard skeleton was incomplete– lacking a skull.  Marsh fashioned one according to what he believed it would have looked like, and wound up creating a massive skull to match the massive body.  The skull created was similar to the Camarasaurus:

Finally people stepped back and examined the skeletons and realized that they were actually the same, or similar enough to eliminate the need for two names.  The mighty Brontosaurus excelsus, actually had a puny little head, and all signage would need to be changed.

Getting away from sauropods, the largest of the stegosaurid armoured dinosaur or Stegosaurus has the smallest brain of all the dinosaurs– size of a walnut.  However, he has another things going for him that baffled scientists for years.  There is a large cluster of nerves in the hip/tail region, that led many to think that it was actually a second brain that controlled reflexes in the rear of the body.  This has been disproved, and Stegosaurus remains the just dinosaur with the smallest brain– although it was chosen as the state dinosaur of Colorado since that’s where it was first discovered.

If you would like to learn more about dinosaurs, I highly recommend The Modern Scholar Lecture Series: Behold The Mighty Dinosaur.

Dinosaurs rule.

*all pictures were taken by me at the Peabody Museum of Natural History in New Haven, CT– you should go there.

I really do have a lovely life

The design scheme in my apartment is sort of “found objects/ whatever was free at the time.”  This has resulted in me decorating with a lot of things I found in the basement: among them empty window frames, empty picture frames, and windows that are clearly no longer functioning as windows.  I’m pleased with the way it’s all come together, but have expressed for quite a while how nice it would be to have a door no longer functioning as a door to use as part of my decor.

The problem with doors is not the fact that they’re hard to come by– in fact, there are dozens just lying on curbs around Providence (for some reason), and every time I see one I exclaim to Jewish Friend (who always happens to be with me when I see these doors), “Jewish Friend!  Can we strap that to the roof of your car?”  She always says no, and I remain doorless.

Today, I woke up to the sounds of more workmen tearing apart the abandoned house.  Three of them have been showing up daily to cut down trees, and do god knows what to the interior of the house.  They park three giant vehicles in the driveway, but are usually quite gracious about moving them when I demand it.  I don’t mind these guys so much because they haven’t placed a giant dumpster in the driveway, and some of the tree pruning they’ve done has really made it easier to see the street when I’m backing out.

I walked to work this morning, so their being there was a non-issue.  I had a fairly easy day of work, and for lunch, took myself for a walk around downtown and to my favorite used book store to pick up some more vintage Nancy Drew Mystery Stories.  I bought an iced coffee, spoke on the phone to Jewish Friend who’s been out of town for a couple days, and solidified plans to go to a movie tonight for free. On the walk home, I got whistled at by a man leaving the coin-op laundry, and then he promptly backed into a pole, which made me chuckle.

All of this was very nice, but made all the better by the fact that when I got home, I found the abandoned yard, the one that has caused me so many headaches, piled high with doors!  There are eight, to be exact.  It’s a shopping bonanza.  Naturally, I picked out the best one, and dragged it into my apartment– rather difficult to get a door through a doorway– but I pulled it off.

In all of my eagerness to acquire a door, I neglected to think about what I would do if I actually had one, but I’m not even worried about that.  I could even go back out there, grab a couple more, and make some kind of room divider– possibilities are endless with a yard full of doors.

we’re pretty much the same person

Wise Lawyer Friend asked me a while ago how my new job was going, “What do you do there?  What did you do today?”

I thought for a moment, and replied, “Well, this morning we talked for about an hour about the class that he’s teaching, he read me his first lecture and asked my opinion; we talked about Sarah Bernhardt and the history of theatre in France.  Then we had lunch.  After lunch I worked on this website for a while, and then we talked about opera– specifically Tosca, and the production of Swan Lake that we both saw at the VMA and had a little dispute as to whether or not they changed the ending from one night to the other.”

She paused for a moment, “Are you kidding?”

So, aside from the fact that my boss is a gay gentleman in his 50s, a Libertarian, and a poet– we are pretty much the same person.  Every day that I get to work, we spend at least the first 45 minutes talking about something that has nothing to do with the task at hand– today it was Alexandre Dumas, a brief chat about the America Birth Control Movement, and Medea.  Then we went to lunch, attended a meeting, and chatted at length about Frankenstein.  We both have masters of English, experience in publishing, an extreme distaste for organized religion.  I haven’t really ever had an office job, but I’m sure that this is not standard.

It’s actually somewhat similar to my relationship with the appraiser that I used to work with, only now my lessons fall under the category of Women’s Studies, Humanities, and Literature rather than economics, and I’m learning stuff that other suckers are actually paying for.  My job rules so hard, but it’s going to be a little sad when I finally get my own office.

The best movie theatre ever

I need to revamp my list of summer goals because in my haste to not fall behind, I’m gotten way ahead of myself.

* I’ve read Diary of Anne Frank

* Painted the ceiling in my bedroom (which brightens it up considerably)

* been running regularly

* Ate a sandwich while sitting outside talking to a friend (picnic)

* Chapter 4 of Passage to India

* Table is fixed

* Made a dirty martini that was very close to perfect– still a work in progress

* Went to movie theatre with self-service butter dispenser and $5.50 movies before noon, and it was a magical place for a number of reasons which I will now list.

Not only do they serve delightful Coca-Cola products, but they also provide small plastic cups to fill with butter and take to your seat with you so you don’t have to saturate the top of the bucket while leaving the bottom dry. Genius.

My friend and I got the “Jumbo” sized popcorn and soda, which has unlimited re-fills for only $10. They have a second concession stand on the theatre side of the lobby so you don’t have to walk all the way around and take more time when you go to refill your jumbo-sized concessions at a crucial moment during Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

I’ve joined their movie club, which is free, and that’s already netted me a cool $.50 off popcorn or beverage next time I patronize that establishment.

I have a collector’s bucket, with handle, and Indiana Jones’s face of it still 3/4 full of the leftover popcorn.

Best movie theatre ever.

Smitten with this Woonsocket

I’ve gotten a powerful response to my previous blog about Woonsocket, so I decided to make it a two-fer. Mostly because I’ve been there now! Yay!! Despite all of you doubting Thomasinas, I ventured to this Woonsocket– and found it lovely.

Two friends from the prairie came to visit recently: Heidi and her husband Zac Echola (who wants his name out on the internet as much as possible). I had to pick them up in Shirley, MA and on the drive back to Providence, Zac Echola asked if there was anything we could stop and do along the way. I thought for a bit, then remembered The Museum of Work and Culture in Historic Woonsocket.

“What is that?” Zac Echola asked.

“I believe it’s a museum dedicated to the Québécois who moved here and worked in the mills.”

“Let’s go!” Zac Echola cheered, and his wife rolled her eyes.

So we found the museum, went in, and waited at the desk for approximately three minutes before an old, old man shuffled out of the office and realized we were there.

“It’s only $5 today because there’s a bridal shower going on in the Union Hall.”

“Ok.”

“Are any of you students?”

“Yes,” we told him, “We all are.”

“Student rate is $5,” he paused, “but that doesn’t matter to you cause that’s what you’re paying anyway.” He pulled out a map and a fine point crayola marker– purple. “You’ll start here at the farm house, and if you push this button here,” he drew a dot on the map, “you can hear Jessie and Simone’s conversation about leaving Canada and coming to the New World. Then you go here and push this button here,” another dot, “to watch the movie. After that you go here, and then you can go upstairs. Now usually you’d watch the TV in the Union Hall, but there’s a bridal shower in there today, so I moved the TV upstairs and put out four chairs,” he drew four little marks and a box to represent the television, “here. Then you go here, and there are devices to listen here, here, here, don’t use this one, the sound is so low you just can’t hear anything, and here.” He handed us the newly marked map, “Good luck to you.”

So we went into the farmhouse and listen to Simone and Jessie’s good cop/bad cop routine about coming to America:

Simone: “America is a magical land full of opportunity.”

Jessie: “But we’ll lose out culture and our religion.”

Simone: “In America we can work in the mills and make life better for our parents.”

Jessie: “I don’t want to leave our homeland.” etc.

The exchange lasted a good three minutes, and I couldn’t help thinking: Girls, you are going to go with your parents regardless of your personal feelings about it, so quit wasting my time. Thankfully, it wasn’t translated into Québécois as well, though that may have been more interesting. After Simone had pretty much sold everyone on how glamorous life in America is, we watched a brief documentary about how much it sucks to work in a mill. Nuts to you, Simone.

In the children’s portion of the museum, we had a bobbin sorting contest (Heidi won), I punched in on an old-fashioned time clock (Heidi tried to convince me that it was an antique and I wasn’t supposed to touch it– why would they have sample punchcards there then, hmmm??), and the movable displays sprang to life without our having to push buttons (which after Simone kept us all standing in the farm house for way too long, we decided we were just going to skip from now on), and scared the crap out of us.

On the second floor, I flipped through old yearbooks in the schoolhouse, played the piano in the parlor of the triple-decker (we skipped watching the TV that the old man had lugged upstairs for us, but cheered when we saw the four chairs, just like he had told us), and found the listening device that just doesn’t work (although, someone did attempt to fix it with duct tape– my kind of people).

Then it started to snow on Magical Woonsocket. So we watched it come down, and noticed an outdoor skating rink just across the square, which we didn’t go to, but instead, had a conversation about how outdoor skating rinks are pretty awesome.

We rounded out the day with a walk (in the snow) down the sidewalks in Downtown Historic Woonsocket. Zac Echola marveled at the sheer number of signs advertising “hot weiners”, and bargained poorly for a used CD. Here is a reenactment of the bargaining:

Zac Echola: “I want to buy this CD. This is awesome, Heidi, give me money.

Heidi: “I don’t have any cash.”

Zac Echola: “Andria, do you have any cash I can borrow.” I didn’t put a question mark at the end of this question because Zac Echola doesn’t use question marks.

Me: “I have some cash, but I’m not contributing more than $2 for that stupid thing.”

Zac Echola: “I wouldn’t pay more than $2 for this anyway– I’m going to bargain.” Zac Echola walked determinedly over to the purveyor of the pawn shop, “How much for this CD, my good man.”

Good man: “$2.”

Zac Echola: (brief pause) “Sold.”

Zac Echola then walked back to where his wife and I were openly mocking him and said, “I think he heard us.”

Now to give credit to all of the glorious comments I got on Fascinated by this Woonsocket:

Jenna says:

Q: How many lightbulbs can you screw in Rhode Island?

A: One! There’s only Woonsocket.

– haha, very funny, Jenna

Lex says:

Don’t go

–too late, Lex, and I’m going back. You can come with me.

Sarah says:

Just blog surfing here…I live in Woonsocket. There really is nothing spectacular about it. We don’t even have a bookstore. The Starbucks just recently closed. If you like bargains I’d suggest going to the CVS Warehouse Store Mark Stevens (hours are 10-6 now). If you knit I’d suggest checking out Yarnia.

– I did check out Yarnia. It was a bit out of my price range, but I laughed at the name for the rest of the day. Actually, I’m chuckling about it right now. I will check out the CVS warehouse, because I love bargains, and any town that can close a Starbucks is a-ok in my book.

Joanharvest says:

I was born in Woonsocket, R.I. 58 years ago. My mom and dad owned a grocery store on Manville Road.I went to Mt. St Francis which is now a nursing home.I am half French Canadian. The last time I visited there just to see what things were like was about 15 years ago. My mom had 12 brothers and sisters so I am sure I still have relatives there though we are not in contact. Her maiden name was LeMay. When I lived there it was a textile mill town. I would like to visit again someday.

– Very interesting family history Joan. From my limited time in Woonsocket, I can tell you that it still looks like a mill town, but has adapted with the times. I recommend that you do visit again someday, as it is lovely.

Alf says:

I am bummed that the Starbucks closed. I used to stop on my way to work in Cumberland.

On a positive note, I just discovered a really great restaurant in Woonsocket called Vintage.

–sorry about the Starbucks, Alf, I too appreciate a road coffee on my way to work. Also, thanks for the restaurant recommendation.

There you have it, I have my next trip to Woonsocket all planned: Shopping for bargains, maybe going back to Yarnia, driving down Manville road to see if Joan’s parent’s grocery store is still there, and dinner at Vintage. Maybe I’ll go early enough that I can have lunch as well, since I’ve heard that fish ‘n” chips place across from the Museum of Work and Culture is pretty renowned.

I am a Woonsocketeer.