I sometimes feel I've missed entire pockets of knowledge growing up -- that there are all these things nobody told me about taking care of a house or about personal care or about makeup or whatever, probably because they thought my mom would tell me.

So! In that spirit, here are some household + body care things I have learned in the past few years:

1. If I put skin lotion on right after I get out of the shower, it makes my skin happier and less dry! I have been going to dermatologists since I was eight, and not one of them has mentioned this -- they all gave me steroids and asked me if I used lotion before bed, which I did. And then someone told me this, and it's like a miracle, it works better than using steroids in the morning, it's cheaper, it's better for me, and I can use the steroids as-needed.

2. Cleaning venetian blinds is really hard. The easiest way is to take them off and spray a hose at them, or wash them in a shower, but if I'm too lazy for that those floor-cleaner pads work, and so do disinfecting wipes.

3. If you have a slow-draining drain and you don't have or don't want to use chemical drain cleaners, try pouring in a cup of baking soda and then several cups of boiling water. If that doesn't work, try it again and pour some vinegar in after the boiling water. (Some people say put the vinegar in after the baking soda and then seal the drain, but I've never tried that.) If that doesn't work, agitate it with a plunger, and then run more boiling water. If that doesn't work, call your landlord. :)

4. I have very pale eyebrows, so pale that they're basically invisible, so an eyebrow pencil always looks kind of hilarious. However! I now know that I can use a mascara brush dipped in eyeshadow to just color the hair in the eyebrows. Who knew! (Probably you.)

5. Butter keepers are amazing.

6. If you have ever had to wear a brace that holds moisture in and found some red rash under it with little raised dots? Surprise, you might have diaper rash! If you don't have allergies to creams, some over the counter steroid cream can help. And you can prevent it (sort of) with diaper rash cream like A+D. It smells like lanolin, but it makes life better.

If you have adulthood hints you've recently learned or amazing and brilliant solutions -- things that make cleaning windows easier or that help you figure out which pants are likely to fit or that fixed your broken cuticles or whatever -- please comment and share! Eventually I'll learn how to be an adult by osmosis.

1) I need the election to happen now, because of how I spend my days reading blogs and violently skyrocketing from joy and sniffles to despair and anger to complete bafflement and hilarity.

I mean, seriously, firefox's new most-visited feature informs me that, after from igoogle (my home page) and you guys, all of my most commonly visited pages are either political blogs or stuff for the super sekrit project.

2) I now have early-morning physical therapy appointments twice a week. So I'm getting up when it's still dark, going up to the office to be hit with sticks, and I have to pay for it. This hardly seems fair.

3) I cut myself on my bialetti coffee maker this morning. One of those nice deep gouges in the knuckle. How is that even possible?

So last night I did some laundry, mattress cover and the awesome thick high thread-count flannel sheets my mom bought me as a Christmas present last year. And I made the bed...

... and this morning I couldn't get out of it. It was warm. It was cuddly. That sort of bright, cold light was shining through the window, muted by the trees still on the leaves, and it was clear that outside the weather was frosty and cold. I was warm in bed; I had perfect sheets and a down comforter; I wasn't going anyplace.

I didn't go back to sleep, but I did just snuggle up for half an hour and go "mmmm" while the back of my brain was going "READING! You have reading to do. Do you remember the reading? Hey! You!" I was like "mmmhmmm."

Perhaps I should be using sheets made of, like, hair shirts or something instead. Because clearly this is going nowhere good. But oh, how perfect is a morning with thirty minutes in bed, not even reading a novel, just watching the trees move outside and enjoying the warm flannel sheets?

***

PS: Sierra Trading Post is now doing ANOTHER 20% off all shoes before that coupon, so. Tevas and Joseph Siebel and Ecco, oh my.

Okay, y'all. I Netflixed Supernatural because so many of you seemed to be interested in it, and I watched the pilot, and you'd better swear to me a) that it gets better (and girls eventually have, like, characters, and sometimes horror cliches don't turn out the cliche way) and b) that people (by which I mean, Dean) stop mumbling.

If there are closed captions on the DVDs, I can't find them, and WinDVD can't find them. Amazon.com says it's got 'em, but where the hell are they? GOD. Like we've all got perfect hearing and won't be continually rewinding two seconds, all "what did he say?" Actually, I need a special skip-back-two seconds button.

On the other hand, I hear episode two has Callum Keith Rennie, so at least there's that.

***

In other, unrelated news, I turned on my shower tap to discover no cold water. Now, no cold water's an unusual problem, but one that you can usually work around -- the apartment in Philadelphia had such a meager amount of hot water, with the temperature set so low, that I could've run the water for a minute and then jumped in, probably. Here? Here, not so much. Here, I sometimes nearly scald myself washing dishes. If I run a bath set not even slightly above the middle of the dial, I can't get into it for a good ten minutes at least -- which is saying something, because I'm an avid hot-tubber.

So I turned it off and tried again. Still no luck. Tried the sink; it had cold water. Solution: I ran a hot bath -- and when I say hot, I mean hot -- wandered off for about a half an hour, and then went and took a still quite warm bath. But it seemed a problem, one I should call the landlord about, so I left a message.

And then I went downstairs to start some laundry, only to discover standing water on the floor and the washing machine full of water. So I mopped up the water, and left the landlord another message.

Turns out? That what I halfway suspected was true. Yes. Someone in the building left the door to the laundry room wide open (I suspect my doesn't-know-how-to-live-in-an-apartment upstairs neighbor), and since it is not directly heated -- it's a basement, heated by the hot water heater, and by the pipes running up to the radiators -- well, some of the cold water pipes froze.

I should've known, because I remember noticing that the floor was exceptionally cold recently; it's frequently cooler than I'd like, but I walked into the bathroom and went "fuck! Ow!" But I didn't think about it at the time, thought it was probably just me overreacting to the cold again after so many nice forty degree days.

So anyway, the landlord's coming out to check out the pipes and see if they're still frozen, or cracked, or what, and when I can expect to have cold water in the shower again or do laundry, and I'm seething at my upstairs neighbor -- who also is the person who started a load of laundry this morning and then left it. Pah.

So today I have injured myself in such a way that pressure hurts in TWO places. I managed to slice my finger on my nice sharp knife while doing dishes, which makes this the first time that I've done such a thing. So I have a bandaid on, but it still hurts and I keep trying to figure out how to type, and also it hurts in hot water. LOVELY. I didn't need that piece of flesh, apparently.

And then! I was going to bed last night and somehow stepped funny and suddenly... owww. I used to have this happen all the time when I was a kid, something in the ankle that's neither a twist or a sprain, and I'd shout and tear up and make awful faces like Rodney McKay and then gingerly limp around until all of a sudden, wham! It was better. Well, I haven't had the better yet. So I'm gingerly mincing around the unshovelled walked on campus, continually hoping that this next step will be the step. Also, it kept me from sleeping well, because I kept bumping it and waking up shouting.

... my rage for Verizon knows no bounds. It is CAPSLOCK RAGE, in point of fact.

Query: aren't we supposed to be afraid of communism because it makes everything inefficient? And people don't get services? Or potatoes? Or something?

Because, well, I ain't seeing the benefits of capitalism at the moment. I WILL GO CAPSLOCK HARRY ON VERIZON'S COLLECTIVE ASSES.

We have a lot of vegetables from our CSA, so it's easy to just make some sort of stir-fry, and that's what we were going to do last night. Tofu, napa cabbage, sweet soy sauce and tamari and toasted sesame oil.

Except, as m_shell is cutting cabbage, I turn to her and say, "Hey, we keep not making curry, and you've been wanting curry. We have coconut milk." So she pauses, because cabbage would go into a curry last, and says, "Yes, I want curry, but I don't want to wait for brown rice." So I try to think of things that are faster than brown rice, and I say, "We have couscous, I think. How about that?"

Poking through the cabinet of dry goods results in a consensus on whole grain bulgur wheat. (Partly because I can't find the couscous.) So I start bringing the bulgur to a boil while m_shell puts the cabbage to the side and starts chopping onions.

Current state of dinner: yellow coconut milk curry on unflavored bulgur.

I'm sauteing the onions and telling m_shell about a particular essay on lotus-eaters that made me want to write speculative fiction, create dust-swept stone cities on alien planets, all because the descriptions of Djerba and of food in said essay were so lush. In fact, I say, even the included recipe for masfouf (sweet date and nut couscous) was richly written. So I fetch the book out of my bag and, still stirring, read the recipe aloud: essence of orange blossom; pillows of couscous strained through the hand until soft and billowing; almonds heated gently, until they are warm and fragrant; faint dustings of cinnamon. And m_shell says: you're right, that's an incredibly sensual recipe. And then: Why don't we put some cinnamon in the bulgur?

So I put cinnamon in the bulgur.

And I'm sauteing onions and potatoes (we have a lot of potatoes, and anyway I like potatoes in curry, even with rice) and pondering other vegetables. "Do you want to put anything else in?" I ask. "What else would we add?" m_shell asks. "Well, let's see... we have beets, and carrots, and eggplant, and ..." I don't finish the list, because m_shell says, "Beets? Beets in curry?" And I say, "I was just listing off vegetables from the CSA. I don't know. Maybe?" And when I turn around m_shell is washing beets.

Current state of dinner: cinnamon bulgur and a curry that is now more peach than yellow; it's picking up pink from the beets and beet greens.

Of course, after you've added beets to your yellow curry, there's nothing stopping you from further flights of fancy, so we throw in several tablespoons of cinnamon when we add the coconut milk and tofu. But the flavor still needs more depth, so we add some powdered cumin, to bring out the sweetness. And of course, at this point, it needs extra tamari sauce. And we have to remember to put the cabbage in at the end; after all, it's already chopped. And then, because we're still thinking of the masfouf recipe, m_shell says, "What about raisins?" (We don't have dates.) And she pulls out the almonds without asking.

We assemble the curry, if it's still a curry, in bowls: a layer of heavily cinnamoned bulgur and a ladleful of pink-peach curry, topped with a handful of raisins and chopped almonds. The potatoes have soaked up so much color that they look like yams, but the color from the turmeric penetrates further, so when I cut a steaming chunk of potato in half with my fork, it is a deep pink-orange on the outside, lined with a thin edge of bright turmeric yellow and finally the pale yellow of the potato itself.

Result: a sweet and spicy curry. Spicy-bitter cabbage, sweet raisins, richy, crunchy almonds, tofu, and potatoes. And beets, it turns out, meld with curry quite well.

As we're eating dinner, I turn to m_shell and say, "You know what would make this better? Next time? Dried apricots in the bulgur."

... oh my god, I think we're really going to buy this used Prius.

Eeeep. And: eeep.

Geese that attacked me: one. Fortunately, he/she was distracted by a bicyclist a moment later and waddled off after him, all "how dare you enter my territory at speed!" Thank heavens for geese with the short-term memory of goldfish. (He/she did not quite bite the bicyclist's leg, but from his reaction you'd think he/she did.)

Creepy older men who hit on me: two. One of the "gee, you're sure pretty!" variety, which almost makes you want to say "aww shucks" in response. But instead you say kthxbye. And the other of the "heh, heh, want to go to a club with me? we could dance" variety, which makes you want to say "you're an asshole, aren't you?" But instead you say "no thanks bye."

Miles walked: about seven? Here to downtown, via many errandy places and also Kelly drive.

Miles walked with blisters: about four? Just reward, really. I was just thinking "hey, I've skipped the almost mandatory blisters you get with any new pair of tevas." Ha! I have blisters of doom. In weird places. Not the normal new-tevas blister places. *inspects feet warily*

Number of blisters: four. Two per foot. Ball of the foot and side of the pinky toe. Owwwwww. Blisters the size of the moon. Possibly larger than the moon. (Also, randomly: is pinky toe a regionalism? Or is it more common than I think?)

Errands completed: six. Bus tokens, cash, rolls of quarters, shopping for self at Trader Joe's, shopping for an event of m_shell's tomorrow at Trader Joes (and I only went four dollars over the student government group's budget for the number of rsvps. Despite buying many moderately healthful snack things.), and a rushed trip to Whole Foods to pick up a gallon of cider, because, see, we bought a gallon this weekend that didn't get bagged for us.

Miles walked with a gallon of juice, two liters of fizzy water, a half gallon of milk, a half gallon of chicken broth, two pounds of hummus, two pounds of baby carrots, and many other heavy foods in my backpack: only one. But it felt like a lot.

Bags the checker filled with my stuff: four.

Bags I filled with my stuff: two, and one of them my backpack.

Buses taken: zero. I was going to walk downtown and bus back, but then m_shell came to pick me up instead, yay! Because I was very very blistery by that point and really not looking forward to standing up on the bus.

Kinds of cheese eaten for dinner: only one. But it was a goat cheese on organic whole-wheat sourdough. With a nice organic Braeburn, very crisp. And cocoa almonds. Because I challenge anyone to make it through Trader Joe's without buying unnecessary snack foods. Mmmmm, cocoa almonds. Mmmm, chocolate covered espresso beans. Mmmmm.

Really, I'm impossibly codependent. I'm sitting here going "yes, yes, yes, but when will it be back?"

That's right, my laptop is In The Shop. Metaphorically speaking, of course, as it's more likely In Transit or On An Airplane or Dropped in a Vat of Boiling Acid Never To See Human Hands Again or something similar. I have crucial data backed up, of course, but still... laptop! Laptop not here! Laptop gone! And someone else is going to touch it! Clearly this is a horror that cannot be accepted.

Sadly, I must put up with it, as the connection of the AC adapter to the laptop itself was what is politely referred to as "loose." Meaning "sometimes I could maybe get power if I wiggled the plug and then held it right. there." And the battery only held a charge for 15 minutes. Between the two ... well. It was getting very frustrating. And I am a reasonable person. Really. So I took my laptop out of its safe case and gave it to some weird kid who wasn't even sure how to plug it in. And now it's gone.

***

And at work today, similar computer stuff going on. I have a terminal, see, not a real computer, so I can connect to a "desktop" via citrix or to accounting software via telnet. And I got in this morning to find that -- surprise suprise! -- neither connection was working. ( Helpdesk stories )

Oh, yes, computers are the wave of the future, whoo boy. I can see them improving my work ethic e'en as we speak.

***

At least my very productive work day left me enough time to bookmark one of my favorite quotes from Small Gods, one that really says something about PTerry to me.( Pratchetty goodness )

Actually, Small Gods is the first first Pratchett I ever read. Loaned to me by copperbadge. In return, I believe, for my copy of The League of Frightened Men, the second Nero Wolfe book, which I feel obligated to point out I never got back. *clears throat* A-hem.

And, okay, so there were like ten DW books before it, but SG came out in 1992. I was eleven. I think I'm doing pretty good in that I'd read every DW book before they were all published in the States. (Thanks for the loans, copperbadge; really, it's okay, you can keep the Rex Stout.) I feel comfortable in my fannishness. *g*

***

In other Random News, that being all I'm doing today, Robert Heinlein's widow donated his personal library, including letters and manuscripts, to UCSC. And also funded a position to do research and organizing. How's that for weird?