Monthly Archives: September 2004

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The Abduction of Liz Bear

How many of you have met my Teddy Bear? You may remember her from stories such as “Liz Bear Hangs in London” which was immediately followed by the sequel, “Liz Bear Takes on Those Blasted French.” There was once an expose on her travels through Europe by rail and she’s even been featured in a Midwest local news article while there on research titled “Liz Bear and the Lake Okoboji Monster” (picture to come, waiting for copyright release).

After 28 years of love and travel, Liz Bear has gone through many an Extreme Makeover. It was hard to get her to lose the neck bandage as seen in the previous clippings, but she braved it and had a stuffing implant done with some fur grafting in the form of fabric stickons. Needless to say, when you go cheap (I told her not to get it done in East LA), you get bad results. When she arrived in Olympia for yet another work trip, she confided in me that beyond the vanity, she was merely concerned her insides were trailing behind her and it was not just humiliating, but possibly detrimental to her health.

Seeing as I love her dearly and would do anything for her, I marched right out to the best doctor (JoAnn Fabrics) and bought more fur grafting bits. Since I had left my operating instruments at home I decided to bring her into the clinic with me and borrow the scissors there. She said she would sit tight on my laptop and hang for the day in the Blue Cave where all the other Blue shirts come and go, while I went to work.

And then disaster struck. I returned to the Blue Cave at lunch, excited to begin surgery, and she was gone. Vanished! All that was left was an email with the following picture: Ransom Demands to follow.

Needless to say, I was distraught. Liz Bear’s life was in danger and worse yet, she wasn’t in her healthiest state! I sent out an email to all blue shirts, begging for her return and pleading with the kidnappers to treat her well.

Then bad turned to worse. The kidnapper (a Ms. Talbot) confessed, but only to inform me Liz Bear had been stolen from her! The next day Ms. Talbot received this in an interoffice mail envelope with the note: Who’s Katie going to blame now?

Ms. Talbot sent an email out informing all blue shirts of the terrible news that Liz Bear’s remains had been discovered and that a service would be held in her honor. I was appropriately devastated for a week and was even brought in to identify her remains.

Then on Sunday everyone received the following email from Liz Bear:

Hello all! During my traumatic kidnapping I managed to escape my evil captor by MacGyvering my way out of the Blue Cave. I stacked up a pile of to-do lists and some discarded classroom summaries, then jimmied the door open using nothing but a log-in card. To throw the evil Ms. Talbot off course I interoffice mailed the remains of some other poor sap of a Teddy Bear to her, then seeing an opportunity for much needed R&R, I joined a band of renegade Barbie dolls and headed to Hawaii. Boy can those ladies party.

Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll bring you back some souvenirs and maybe I’ll only get one body part pierced while I’m here. Disregard the “cigarette” in my mouth, it was all for show. I swear it.

And just so you all can quiver with jealousy, here’s a picture of me with my new lady.

Alive and kickin’,
Liz Bear Toft

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Lay your women at my feet…

I wanted to make sure I didn’t go an entire month without blogging again. A few things that have worked out in my favor and a few cosmically balancing things that have worked against me:

1) I took my personal laptop to Olympia and realized that even though the hotel has a high speed ethernet connection, my laptop is old enough that my ethernet port was a card I removed when I went wireless. Argh.
2) By the end of the week I decided to turn on my laptop anyway and see if I had any music in my ITunes to listen to. Ding ding ding: “Wireless Network Detected.” The hotel turned out to ALSO have unadvertised wireless and I was surfing within seconds. If only I’d tried earlier in the week.
3) I came home Thursday night for XGym and Book Club only to discover my desktop computer won’t work. HELP! Last thing I remember my windows update was telling me I needed to install something that they encouraged I back up my hard drive for and I said, “No, thank you. I’ll consider installing you later, but I do not have time for silly back ups.” Now my computer comes to a screen that tells me I am missing a file in my system folder is missing or something and that I need the XP install disk (which is in the boat barn in Oak Harbor). Man, I sound computer illiterate, but I swear everything I’ve researched online does not make this sound like an easy process. Anyone else getting crap out there? Did anyone else get that Windows XP update that said to backup your files? Did you do the install? Now I’m nervous to install it or not install it on my laptop. Argh.

I guess there is not much else working for or against me. EXCEPT…

As a follow-up to my previous entry, I had another opportunity to listen to music out and about in Olympia. Do you remember my new love for Mirah, an adorable musician who was crouched at my feet picking through the vegan treats outside the Homo-a-GoGo concert she was playing? Jay noticed she was playing another show in the basement of the ABC house, which is essentially a big house that some musicians live in and use the basement to host shows.

We ventured out on Monday in search of the house and ran into some familiar faces from the last show there. One face belonging to Alex, who plays the accordion with Mirah. He was with a friend of his and it felt nice to already recognize people and be recognized (KB, you know our normal plight where people don’t remember us but we remember them). The four of us squatted in the back yard of the house while we waited for the show to start at the standard show starting time, two hours after the posted start time.

The back yard was so impressive it could have held two more houses on it. I sat mesmerized by the tree that reached over to cover the entire area, which in turn sparked a conversation about roots and such. I learned from Alex’s friend that if you need to cut the root of a tree or move a tree, there is a specific ratio or percentage of root that needs to be preserved in order for the tree to survive. I don’t know if what he said was true and I don’t remember what the percentage was, but it did cause me to ponder if this were similar to the quality of life a person could maintain based on the number of toes/fingers/limbs one loses.

The same guy said he had planned on donning a dog suit and diving into the Indigo Girls concert we had attended, but he had chickened out. We said he would only have to fear the wrath of the crowd if he dressed as a Frat boy and did a stage dive. Both Jay and I were extremely disappointed that he hadn’t followed through on the dog costume idea and encouraged him to follow through next time.

As the show finally started and we headed into the basement, I noticed a pair of sandals at the edge of the grass. Now, I’m not a shoe or clothes horse by any means and don’t usually notice things like this, so I giggled to myself when I gazed a bit too long at them thinking, “Wow, I really like these shoes.” It was everything in my power not to slip my toes inside. I was seriously surprised at my desire to wear these sandals.

Bored yet? Jay and I leaned up against a wall close to the front and proceeded to listen to the following:
-one less than adequate band named “Touchdown Eagle”
-a cute duo with potential named “Chubby Bunny”
-an old bandmate/friend of Jay’s with the wonderful name of Katy who was later accompanied by Cynthia Nelson
-Cynthia then followed Katy solo style

Katy was entertaining because she can’t help but be funny to listen to, not to mention she is a talented guitarist. Cynthia was obviously more polished than some of the others that came before, so I’m still not sure why I didn’t buy her cd.

During “Touchdown Eagle” though, I saw a hand reach out and set a pair of shoes down and then the girl attached to the hand crouched down at my feet. The shoes were the very same sandals I had admired before. And the girl? Mirah. I froze. Jay poked my back. I titled my head up and grinned giddily. For the rest of the show, until she came on, I couldn’t stop staring at the side of her tilted head resting in her hand as she held one finger in her ear to soften the sound.

She eventually got up, I presume to gather herself before she performed. Before she went on, Jay and I went outside to get fresh air only to be greeted by the biggest Dog costume I’ve ever seen outside of Disneyland. Alex’s friend had apparently brought it with him and after hearing our disappointment over the lack of dog diving at the Indigo Girls show, he decided to put it on. I couldn’t stop playing with his ears and hugging him. Made me think of Furries, those people that like to have sex while wearing animal costumes, so I tried to tone down my affection. Then I grabbed the cat that had been hanging with us and handed it to the giant Fido. The cat didn’t even seem to mind and I wish I could have taken a picture.

We could hear the next act setting up, so we headed back down and settled into a couch close to the front. When Mirah finally went on, all I could think was how fortunate I felt to have what felt like a private Mirah show in the coziness of the basement.

Saturday night Jay and I are going to see Mirah play at Yeah! Fest! and I am sure now that she is drawn to me, unbeknownst to her. Perhaps next week I’ll tell one more story of how she crouched at my feet, only this time she’ll look up and see me and the rest will be told in my autobiography. You just wait and see.

Unless my true destiny is to fall for the guy in the dog costume, in which case instead of buying my book you’ll just see me on HBO.