Valadilenne

It started as a book, but turned into a calendar series.

People submit photos of their dogs looking or being stupid (usually wearing dumb costumes), and then the series authors put captions that sort of relate to what's going on.

Right now I have a picture of a Golden Retriever wearing a suit and tie sitting at a desk with the words "I'm afraid I accidentally scooted on your divorce settlement. I'm having another copy drawn up right now" on it.

There's another one that has a Husky wearing a fishing hat that matches the bedspread he's laying on, an open book at his paws. "I wear this jaunty cap whenever I'm reading P.G. Wodehouse."

I wonder why dressing dogs up and then taking pictures of their desperate expressions is so hilarious.

Good ones, preferably.

When I leave the library every afternoon at 5, the marching band is usually outside practicing. I especially like their overly-flourished rendition of our state song.

I don't know--there's something really happy about a good marching band that isn't totally strict on measures and the "marching" sound.

As much as I love the level of detail and the actual point of this game, it's the change of seasons that really gets me excited.

And it isn't just like WHAM one day the leaves are all orange and there's a bit of a nip in the air. Come late August, the green everywhere takes on a new bluish tone. September, and we find the grass has gone a bit dry and straw-like. It isn't until October that every other tree or so starts to look a bit yellow on the tips.

Even winter comes gradually--brown leaves, cloudier skies, until one day you log in and it's magically snowing. And then gradually the trees become more visible, and the snow falls once a week instead of once a day. And slowly the snow melts, and there are patches of green at first, and shy, hesitant buds on the trees. And the cycle starts over.

But there's all kinds of stuff in between. Lightning, rainstorms that are heavy or mild, the slim chance that you might get a rainbow at the end of a storm or (and I've never been lucky enough to see this) a double rainbow at the end of a storm. The snowballs that form around town that you can roll in the snow to create a snowman. The wishing star in the skies at night. The way the moon goes through its cycles just like in real time. New bugs and fish to catch every month.

The game only seems to get old, but it's so comforting to watch my happy little world change along with the world outside my window, even if it is a bit stereotypical--it doesn't snow here until a freak blizzard or ice storm in late February.

I can't WAIT for Animal Crossing: City Folk, by the way. I am so thrilled that they're going to have game weather match real city weather.

I don't mean the song.

Mostly it's the color--the color of my eyes, which I'm told are pretty. I look good in this color, so it's my favorite.

It's the color of water (which if you're into astrology is the element associated with Scorpios), of perfectly open skies in September (right up until August in Oklahoma they're very hazy and almost white on the edges from the pure heat), my car is a devastating shade of Curacao, which coincidentally happens to be a very pretty liqueur for hip, electric blue martinis.

I guess the only shade of blue I don't really like is Prime or Royal--I don't look good in primary colors. But you put me in some Cornflower, Peacock, Cyan, even Navy--I have ash dark brown hair that will look awesome when it turns gray and I just look good in blue.

The hardest part about it is that it's almost impossible to match two shades of blue--any other color you can throw against a differing shade and it won't clash. Blue is impossible to match. I don't know why that is.

You're getting an extra dose of the project tonight because this week has been insane. But I don't fall behind, see? I just do another one.

I've recently developed a thing for gum. I think it has to do with grocery shopping for myself and there being a massive aisle at Target full of nothing but gum and candy.

The new flavors they keep coming out with are interesting: "Fabulous Fruitini," "Fresca Sangria," "Strawberrymint" (which is interesting, but really not my thing, though I'll go through the whole thing anyway). I buy citrus-y flavors because mint makes me feel like I can't eat anything after I chew gum.

Two main reasons I'm into it, I guess, and these are obvious because everyone does this:

I can share with other people and see what they think of the flavor. It makes people like me if I give them a new flavor of gum to try. That's pretty cool.

I'm afraid of people thinking I have bad breath. This is a legitimate concern. Sometimes no matter how well you brush your teeth, you still wind up having an awful taste in your mouth halfway until lunch. Gum doesn't just mask the flavor--it increases saliva production, which improves teeth and helps clear bacteria off the tongue.

Thumbs up, gum.

I have pretty broad taste in music, but I do have a special affinity for certain genres, and classic rock is one of them.

I can't say that my parents were roadies or groupies at any point in their lives, or that I grew up under a '71 Charger in the process of being badly restored. In fact, my parents' musical tastes are pretty limited: I'm not totally sure what they enjoy apart from Buckwheat Zydeco and the soundtrack to O Brother Where Art Thou? I mean, I've collected their old (pristine) LPs and while there are the expected ABBA records (I wouldn't be related to them if they hadn't listened to ABBA--it's in my genes), there's mostly Disco. But more on that later.

That's not to say that we didn't listen to the La Bamba soundtrack or old Buddy Holly hits in the car on our 500 mile trek up to Grandma's house every year when I was a child. And herein, I think, lie the beginnings of it. It wasn't that my parents liked classic rock, it was that they liked whatever came before that. It was a gateway to later pieces that they had never wound up listening to themselves--and they lived through that era.

And so in the summer of 1996 I felt like I had to make a choice because I was getting out of elementary school: all my friends gravitated toward the Today's Best Hits station on the radio (hard to believe this was the days before CDs were really popular), and I just wanted to find all those old songs that I had listened to before. I hit the 60's station on the dial and stayed there for probably six or seven years. I went to camp and everyone was listening to "The Thong Song" while I wanted the Mamas and the Papas in the background.

But my methods of making sure I got all the songs I wanted on tape were elaborate. I can remember listening to the Saturday night shows waiting for someone to request a song so that I could hit Record and play them back later--over and over and over, sitting in front of my vanity lip syncing along with the Partridge Family or Diana Ross into the mirror, wearing a huge pair of can headphones so the sound came in almost perfectly.

They even had call-ins where people had to guess the name of a song after hearing the first three notes, and let me tell you: I am good at that game. But back to classic rock.

After the advent of the internet, things got interesting. I remember the first song I ever downloaded from Napster: Alicia Bridges' one and only hit, "I Love the Nightlife." What a great choice, huh? Anyway, that made me realize that it was okay to listen to music from the 70's and that my mother was wrong when she told me that "Anyone who likes Disco shouldn't admit it." I don't know what she was thinking--Chaka Khan and Donna Summers are my friends on the treadmill. But for some reason I thought 70's rock music was off limits, like it was too edgy and too dangerous for little 10 year old Melissa. Now I listen to it and think how much better the quality is than the "rock" that's coming out today. It actually had melody and good power chords--even the lame stuff did. Now it's just "let's amp up our distortion machines and scream."

So there you go. I think it was just an inevitable offshoot of all the Beatles and early 60's pop that got me into Free (especially Free), Journey, Foreigner, Pilot, Jefferson Starship (God help me I love ALL OVER THE WORLD)--all those groups whose songs that are bizarrely coming back en vogue; or maybe they never left. And I don't think liking classic rock and liking disco somehow cancel each other out. If we didn't have classic rock, we wouldn't have Guitar Hero. If we didn't have disco, we wouldn't have modern dance music--or a movie where Meryl Streep dances around in too-tight overalls.

Some people like their sheets nice and taut, fresh from the dryer and totally brand new. My mother is one of these people. She can't sleep if the sheets are offset or .

On the other hand, while I love having clean sheets, my preference is the soft feel of wrinkly sheets. They're not gross, or dirty, or messy. They're like a sweater you wear two days in a row--somehow they get better and more comfortable after a few uses.

The sheets I have at school are a light blue and get the most wonderful microfiber-y feeling after a few days. It's like something familiar versus the demo beds at Penney's: this feel more cozy, like I own them even more.

I know, it's a strange thing to like. But I didn't say this list was going to be anything normal or expected. But I have an abiding appreciation for humidifiers.

Now, if you have a modern humidifier, or if you've never seen a non-misting humidifier (misting humidifiers, for when you're sick, are gross. They leave white chalky residue everywhere--the kind we use is different, this is the big kind you leave in the hallway in the winter), here's a bit of demystification. Having a humidifier was a mainstay holdover from my parents' many collective years spent in Iowa, where winters were very dry and made even more so by having the heater running constantly.

The first humidifier we ever had was the old brown one with plastic panels and a felt fanbelt inside. It required the use of a bucket, several trips to the kitchen, and a healthy dose of anti-mold chemicals (which I always assumed gave the humidifier its wonderful smell [more on that later], but the scent apparently actually came from the wet fanbelt). The felt was attached to a larger plastic wheel that went around, and had a seam at the beginning where it began. The body of the box held several gallons of water, through which the felt strip would rotate, kind of like a mill's water wheel, only without the little grooves or buckets that pick up water. A real fan would blow out the moist air and life would generally be more comfortable. There was a plastic grill cover over the top, and I used to take it off to get an even bigger blast of air.

There is video footage of me as a toddler (back when I was a bouncy blonde) being obsessed with the humidifier. Running up to it, checking to see if it was on, holding my dollies over it so they could enjoy its fabulous smell, pointing out to my dad behind the camera that the humidifier was not, in fact, running... It was magic--it knew when to turn on, it had the most wonderful, enticing, watery smell that was so fresh and soothing, and it blew out cool moist air into the desert heat of an old house running on central air. For years (well into college) I enjoyed bending over our old humidifier and inhaling deeply--and this is something I've never found a replacement for. Nothing replicates that smell.

Our new humidifier is a strange beast--there's no fanbelt. It's some plastic contraption that I don't quite understand, and get this: it doesn't smell. Humidifiers are supposed to smell. Why my mother ever got rid of that relic, symbolic of almost 20 winters of deep breathing, I'll never really understand. The other one that we keep upstairs is just as bad--it has a water tank, but no fanbelt at all. Just a bunch of water and a fan that keeps pumping out wet air.

Weird, is what it is. Not unlike my fixation on those things. But I suppose it's an effect of associating a certain smell and feel with the safety and comfort and ease of childhood.

I am starting a new project based on the x365 thing I've seen some people doing. Instead of writing about people I know, I'm going to write from a list of random objects or ideas and give what I think are some good things and bad things about them.

So basically, "To quote Wally exactly, here's some stuff that I like."

This is open to everybody, but private entries will stay private.