stigma pistil stamen
FIVE-OH TYPESETTING
I cannot stop listening to the Chicago police scanner. Be warned, you may be reading highlights here every so often. Here is today’s best exchange from Chicago’s finest. I’ll let you do the accents in your head.
Voice 1: Suspect is a male white, about five-nine, wearing gray sweatpants and a black shirt with Stewie from The Family Guy.
Voice 2: That ain’t helping me much.
Voice 1: Stewie’s the dog.
Voice 3: What? Stewie’s the kid! With the big head!
Voice 2: Whatever, 10-4.
Also in Chicago news: WTF is going on with the sudden cap/lowercase street signs? Street signs have always been all-caps here. Except now it seems that when street signs are replaced the new ones are cap/lowercase (Ardmore at Western and Foster at Kimball being 2 northside examples). With the result being that everything is all MIXED UP, type-wise. And INCONSISTENT. It troubles me greatly.
SCAN ME HARDER
My slightly terrifying gynecologist found “something” the last time she was poking around my business, so she referred me for an ultrasound. I guess slightly terrifying gynecologists and slightly terrifying ultrasound techs run in the same circles and give each other business, because the ultrasound lady was basically a carbon copy of the girl-parts doctor: loud, sporty, alarmingly enthusiastic about delving into people’s private parts.
Both kinds of ultrasound were ordered, and if you don’t know what “both kinds” means, stick around because you are about to. First I had to be chastised for not drinking enough water, although it certainly felt like enough if you ask me, and I got left alone in the room with all the expensive computerized things with several more bottles to chug. Then I had the standard pregnant-woman-style ultrasound that you see in the movies, blah blah blah. Then I got to go pee (YAY) and took my pants off for the other type of ultrasound, where the wand goes on the inside. In the loud, soccer-coach-ish words of the tech: “I’LL LUBE IT UP AND YOU STICK IT IN!” Whoa whoa whoa okay ultrasound lady. Nice to meet you too.
(Report came back with the news that I have two small fibroidy things, but they can probably just stay there as long as they are quiet and well-behaved.)
NEWNESS NEWNESS EVERYWHERE
Ditched my iPhone over the weekend—LT wanted a Google phone, because he definitely welcomes our Google overlords, and after some reflection I realized that I did not regularly use even one Apple-specific thing on my phone. I stream music (and NOT from crappy old iTunes radio), I don’t particularly care how I text, and just about all my favorite apps are available in Android versions. So we both swapped out our phones, and the deal even allowed us to get Nora the cutest little smartphone ever, so she is in screen-obsessed pre-teen heaven. And I have all kinds of parental controls and find-your-ass GPS options that are not quite necessary yet, but may become so in a few years, so ha ha ha joke’s on her.
Other new things include the look of our front yard. There was an evergreen bush that I never liked so a few weekends ago we hacked it down. We planted ground cover and replacement bushes, but of course they are still small so right now it just looks like a dirt patch with a few salads randomly dropped in. I am sure the neighbors think we ruined everything. GIVE IT TIME!
I am sick of giving the tomato plants in the back yard time, however. They grow and grow, spilling jungle foliage everywhere, and they flower and flower, but the flowers are not turning into tomatoes.
A gardener friend suggested that sometimes the pollen gets too sticky to fall and that I could hand-pollinate, using a cotton swab to carefully rub the pollen directly onto the female part of the flower. That is a bit more involved in tomato sex than I wish to be. Maybe I could ask the ultrasound tech. She’d probably be into it.
—mimi smartypants is waiting for sync.