Prancing ahoy!

Just glanced over at the TV here at work -- which is right next to my desk, always turned on and always turned to a sporting-event -- and saw my first commercial for "The Prestige." Hugh is going to be prancy. Christian is going to be smoldering. Who knows what David Bowie and Andy Serkis will do... Emma is excited!

your scribe, the slavering geek

After work last night I went to a fundraising party for this theater. It was quite nice; everyone was friendly even though I didn't really know anyone, and I spent most of the time talking to a Swedish ninja. I tried to tell Art Boy about it after getting home.

Me: ... Oh! And I met the makeup girl from Call of Cthulhu!
Art Boy: You are the biggest geek I have ever met.

In unrelated geeky news, my long-awaited copy of "The Complete Grower's Guide to Carnivorous Plants" arrived yesterday! I was eating a peach and reading Doonesbury on the front lawn (life is so good here) when the mailman came up. "Is this yours?" he said, holding out the Amazon box. I knew what it was and practically somersaulted over to him. Hooray! I've been waiting for this since April! The book is gorgeous - I've barely skimmed the surface so far, but it just has exquisite photos, many taken by author and Carnivorous Plant FAQ lord Barry Rice. (There's a nice photo of an Utricularia cultivar called Cthulhu. See how everything in this post ties together?) And the chapter on cultivation looks very practical - rule number one is to always assume your plants are under stress. Which is refreshingly realistic. I'm going to go out and snuggle my Nepenthes.

Isis' adventures in crawlspace

When I got home last night, one of our cats (not the new rocket cat) had somehow gone missing. Art Boy had opened no doors or windows since seeing her last, but she just wasn't in the house. Not under the bed, not in the closet ... we poked around checking her hiding places, and trying to think of what new ones she might have invented, and then we found the hole in the closet wall. It led straight down. We had noticed it upon moving in and plugged it up, but someone had managed to get it open again... Now, Isis loves nothing more than hiding in a nice basement, which was her favorite pastime at my last apartment. But here we do not have a basement, just a sort of giant crawlspace under the house. It has a couple of vents that are open to the outside, through which a cat could easily fit. We went out and shone flashlights through the vents, and called and opened her favorite food, but there was no sign of her.

So we'd just given her up for Gone Exploring, and were going to bed, when a hideous caterwaul shattered the night. It seemed to come from every direction. Art Boy, who was feeling awful about losing the cat while just being in the house, immediately identified it as coming from around back. I threw on a shirt over my jammies (it's cold here, dammit) and raced around with the flashlight. There she was, having evidently just reentered the crawlspace. What prompted the caterwaul? What adventures did she have out in the great wide world? We opened another can of food, she came right to it, and we wrangled her inside. Once in the kitchen I tried to give her a welcome-home snuggle. She buried her claws in my scalp and launched herself across the room. It was 5 a.m. Fracking cats.

Today we are all unharmed except that my scalp itches from where the claws dug in. Art Boy is very sensibly still asleep.

The latest from home

Our cats have turned into marauders. they have hardly touched their cat food, and a couple of days ago, Dad found the remains of a wood thrush in the garage, plus a goldfinch wing.

Has the article about the filming of "Thong Girl" in the Gallatin mayor's office been on the wire?? It's worse than Bill Boner playing the harmonica!

Gotta stop--looking at this computer screen is making me nausous.

Love, Mom

Incoming!

Our new rocket cat is on his way to us as I write. We are somewhat nervous about adopting a special-needs kitty, but we're excited too. Art Boy in particular is looking forward to having another guy around the house. Hopefully he won't immediately blow himself up or run away or anything.

We've been rather taking it easy since we got back from Santa Fe. It just feels good to be back from vacation, and it feels like we're home. I need to find some new non-work activities; yoga really just isn't doing much for me anymore. I usually come out of class wanting to strangle the teacher. My ideal would be a dance class, but not having taken one since grade school, I am pretty nervous about the very idea. Also, many adult dance classes are partner-oriented, and you can bet that Art Boy is not going to learn to salsa, merengue or swing with me.

Anyway, here are some photos from Santa Fe:


Art Boy explores the caves at Bandelier National Monument.


Some very cute plants huddled in the rocks at Bandelier. Aww! I'll protect you, little plants!


Art Boy and Music Boy think about being Prehistoric Boys.


Plaza, Santa Fe, during Fiesta, in the rain! Have a wet Navajo Taco. It was fun.

Art Boy is trying to pry me from the computer by blasting all his snarkiest iTunes. I am currently enduring the "Land of the Lost" theme song, complete with T-rex roars... This is what I put up with in order to communicate with you readers.

The wedding

I think this about sums the week up.

Sometimes They Come Back

....From Santa Fe. We are back and dehydrated from drinking so much. It was a great long weekend. Our house has been declared Termite-Free and the cats were safely recovered from the kennel, although they ate almost nothing while they were there, so we have to watch them closely over the next few days. Oh, and the gas was turned off for termite purposes and not turned back on, so there's no hot water and we can't use the stove. Also, the front window, which was removed for mysterious termite purposes ONE MONTH AGO, is now being noisily replaced. Also, I got invited this morning to a very nice-sounding fundraiser that I cannot attend because of work.

On the other hand, I got some sweet birthday presents, including a The Economist style guide from my brother and a lovely lavender plant. And some fabulous cards. And a friend of ours gave the Humane Society a donation in memory of Stella. And there's a chance we'll have hot water tonight. Things are pretty good.

This is an extremely self-absorbed post for the fifth anniversary of 9/11/01, but I just really haven't got much to say about it that I haven't been saying for five years. The president is a twat.

It was in the dark of September 9th that the horror broke loose.

And truer words our dear H.P. Lovecraft never wrote. I was born in the dark of September 9, and this Saturday I will be 30. I'm going to somebody's wedding that I don't really know, and dear readers, I am going to get drunk.

If you haven't read "The Dunwich Horror," the full text is here.

Art Boy and I are off to Santa Fe for said wedding. Talk to you kids on the other side of 30.

I call her Red

I asked my mom about the red thing and here's what she said:

Now, about red at a wedding: I wore a red dress once, and looked around to see if I were the only one that did; I was, so I haven't since, although I have seen both white and black, which I thought were more taboo than red.
My advice is that in Santa Fe, anything goes; you are no longer in the Deep South, with "your mama and them" looking you over.

This only deepens my confusion and alarm. (There's nothing worse than feeling as though the disembodied spirits of your mama and them are looking you over; see diamond entry below.) Solution: Wear an old and respectable dress, and spend dress money on spa treatments to achieve Inner Glow.

Today's universal post title: Crikey

I was at work last night when someone sent out a group message with the news alert "Steve Irwin killed." You should've heard the gasps that went up. Everyone was distressed. When someone read aloud "Stingray barb?" I just thought it was a joke. You step on stingrays, they make your foot swell up; they don't kill you. There are so many deadly marine animals in Australia - such as the stonefish, which DOES kill you almost at once if you step on it. Stingray barb to the chest is a rare and bizarre way to die. (A "freakish death," as Australia's prime minister put it today.)

The Sydney Morning Herald has a harrowing description of Irwin's last animal encounter, which of course was caught on video:

Without warning, the ray, usually regarded as a placid creature towards humans, stops, turns and lashes out, spearing Irwin in the chest with one of the knife-like barbs at the end of its tail - an action like a paring knife creating "a terrific tearing of flesh", said Bryan Fry, of the University of Melbourne's Australian venom research unit.

I mean, good heavens.

We were all sad at the office, and I was unreasonably down after getting home. He was someone everyone knew and probably imitated at some point, and it was because he did something really cool: hung out with animals everyone was afraid of, and showed you what was nifty about them. Tavern Wench has a sweet tribute up. Cheers, Steve. I'm so sorry for Terri & the kids. The image of Terri sorting through a huge closet of pocketed khaki shirts is almost too sad to contemplate.

(If you followed the SMH link above, here's a definition of "larrikin.")

Loss

I've been holding back from posting on this at Art Boy's request, but as he's now posted over at his previously word-free site, Stella here died last week. It was his loss more than mine; we've just moved in together, and I loved Stella, but she was indisputably his cat. I'm not sure I can overstate their bond. The news was a shock and my primary reaction has been overpowering rage. I would have killed anyone who got between him and that cat. Loving someone and seeing them suffer like this is hideous. At the vet's, when we went to see her afterward, I wanted to throw myself against the walls, pull them down, do SOMETHING. It wouldn't have helped, of course, and not having a direction for the anger makes it even worse. (Mostly turns it inward, actually.) It's the helpless fury of the failed protector that has motivated so many bad-action-movie heroes. Good thing I'm a Quaker.

We do think she's still around, though. The morning we got the news, someone jumped up on the bed and started to walk up between our legs. I assumed it was one of my cats, and we looked, and no one was there. We looked at each other. "Did you feel that too?" Art Boy said. The bedroom was really her territory - if my cat Anastasia came in, Stella would run her out. Anastasia still won't go near it. If I try to carry her in, she wriggles out of my arms and runs to the other end of the house.

I miss Stella. She was a good kitty and good to Mike, to say the very least. If you have cats, please keep an eye out for the symptoms of hepatic lipidosis. There are worse things than a trip to the vet.

Real is the new fake?

I sort of ignore YouTube, being a cranky old bitch, but apparently there's an interesting drama unfolding over whether a series of intriguing footage is real, a hoax or a brilliant ad campaign. Nick Spencer has a post on it and the New York Times runs down the possible scenarios.

Sci-fi cutie William Gibson saw it coming in his only novel set in the present.

On another note, my sister has informed me that you can't wear red to a wedding. What the hell?

A pox on the empire-waist dress

A pox on all dresses, actually. Let us return to the days when dressmakers would create individual frocks to suit a lady's form, occasion and taste. Actually, I don't know that I could ever have afforded such a thing, but it's nice to think about, particularly after a day of slogging through stores looking for a dress to wear to someone's wedding. It doesn't sound hard and I'm not picky. I just want something that isn't black and doesn't make me look like I'm trying to appear ten years old. After reading Salon's review of Alan Moore's latest, "The Lost Girls," I am particularly concerned about the latter.

First celebrity sighting!

Saturday I saw Rainn Wilson in a woodworking shop. I thought it was just someone who looked like him, the way you would if you saw him in Ohio, but then the woman I was talking to said "Did you notice that's Rainn Wilson in there? God, I love The Office." Stupidly, I said "What's he doing here?" as if he's not allowed to stand around a woodworking shop if he wants to. (We'll not yet get into what I was doing there.) "He's friends with that guy," the woman said.

So take that, Art Boy! Think you're all that for seeing Ming-Na?

Back from the dead

Today's plant: My beautiful, beautiful Nepenthes have risen from the dead! One is a very large N. coccinea, obtained at Delhi Flower & Garden Center one giddy Christmas. It spent two years hanging unhappily in my Cincinnati bay window, where it got a fair amount of sunlight and enough humidity to keep it alive. One year it formed pitchers, but they shriveled immediately upon reaching mature size. The rest of the time it looked like a very unattractive hanging plant. Anyone else would have had the sense to throw it out, but it clung to life with such tenacity. I couldn't murder it. So I stuffed it in the back seat of the car with all the cats & other plants, and drove it out here, and by God it loves the new patio. I should've been putting it outside in the summers. It's crowded with new growth, and each new stem is forming a pitcher. Several are a couple inches long already. Carnivorous madness! Soon perhaps it will resemble this photo? Although its pitchers are beautifully spotted rather than solid red.

The other Nepenthes is almost more impressive. I got it at Home Depot or one of those places that had just gotten in a cheesily labeled Tray of Insect-Eating Terrors! This would be, god, about four years ago. I picked up one of each kind of plant that they had, and remember well the weary expression on my now-ex-boyfriend's face as I happily explained to him what they all were. The Darlingtonia died, the tiny Sarracenia died, even the Dionaea succumbed to scale after a couple of years and died. But somehow, the very tiny Nepenthes hung on. It's still in a tiny three-inch pot and has never done much besides look frail (at its best, it looked like this). Since being here, I think it has doubled in size. It's got about a dozen half-inch, bronze-colored pitchers. It is gorgeous.

Art Boy can only listen to me talk about the plants for so long, so you people get to hear the rest.

Today's book: "Arthur & George" by Julian Barnes, author of "Flaubert's Parrot." We continue in the English-literary-historical-fiction vein with this well-reviewed novel about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the innocent man he helped after a false conviction. I picked it up at a heavy discount, attracted by the cover (a fetching watercolor of London with beautiful typefaces), and have been putting off reading it on account of it sounded boring. Well, it is just great. I cannot recommend it highly enough. It's both a detective story and a pair of in-depth portraits of two men at the start of the 20th century. What are their morals like? How do they feel about religion and science? How well does a Scotsman of Indian descent fit into society? Oh dear, it does sound boring, but it really is quite good.

He's a rocket cat!

Well, I have not found my diamond, but much to the delight of Art Boy I have obtained us a new cat! He belongs to a friend of ours who is no longer able to care for his special needs, which mainly involve severe pooping, as we understand it. Isn't he cute?

I feel rather as thought I have swapped the family cow for a handful of beans. But didn't that turn out well in the end? So too shall this, I am confident.

She Is A Diamond

Well, bugger all. I have lost my grandmother's engagement diamond. When I graduated from high school an alarming 11 years ago, she came to the ceremony with my parents and handed me a gift bag afterward, asking me to open it later when we were all at lunch. I ran around embracing people, carelessly swinging the bag from my wrist. Mom stayed a pace behind me, grimly guarding the bag, and finally took it back from me - "You're making me too nervous," she said. When I finally opened it I saw why: They'd gotten Gran's engagement diamond reset into a new ring, flanked by sapphires (my birthstone), with a classically pretty sort of curlicue design in gold. It sounded like Mom and Gran had had a ball shopping together for settings, and Gran seemed pleased to be handing it on. "Never take it off," she said, "or you'll lose it. I always lose jewelry by just setting it down somewhere."

I remember looking at it with sort of a sinking heart; my favorite items of jewelry were woven beaded necklaces and a plastic-encased butterfly wing pendant from a nature store. This diamond solitaire was not really my thing. But I wore it every day from then on. I took it off for two trips to Europe (for the first trip it went in a safety-deposit box; the second trip I was a bachelorette living alone, and I put it in the crisper drawer of the fridge before leaving) and to swim in the ocean, and that was it. Gradually I started to feel I was growing into it. Mom's graduation gift was an antique guardian-angel pendant, and after a few semesters of college - where everyone wore beaded necklaces - my only jewelry was the pendant, the ring and silver hoops in my ears. (We will not speak of the navel-ring interlude.) It was my way of wearing three generations, the four hoops in my ears being completely my own. When Gran died two years ago, I looked at her ring a lot. I had almost stopped noticing it, and after her death it took on extra importance. She left us a little money, and Mom gave me a couple of her old calling cards she found cleaning out the house, but the main thing I had from her was the diamond. After giving it to me, she'd told me, laughing, that my grandfather actually waited to give it to her until after they were married. He'd been afraid she'd take the diamond and run off, she said. So the Valentine's Day after their wedding, he gave her a box of chocolates and a diamond ring, which she figured was costume jewelry and tossed into the trash. "He was so mad! He said 'Get that back out!'" she said. It did still look like an engagement ring, even with the new setting; I sometimes switched hands if I was going out alone and wanted to avoid being bothered. And I wondered, in the back of my mind, if I'd want any future fiances to get me a matching one. Having a diamond engagement ring has never seemed important, but then there'd always be this other one on my other hand, silently telling the diamondless ring "I'm fancier than you."

Anyway, tonight at work I glanced down at my hand and the diamond was gone. It would've looked interesting on Candid Camera. I had a moment of pretending it wasn't gone - the denial phase - and then started carefully patting my shirt and looking in my lap and on my desk, and a few moments later I was down on the floor. This attracted attention, and then several of us were on the floor. My boss was very nice about it and let me go wandering off to retrace my steps from earlier in the evening. You don't realize how many shiny, small things are on the ground until you're looking for a specific one. Nail heads, bits of mica and broken plastic, even isolated old bits of confetti. Nobody found it. The last time I remember looking at it and noticing it was before taking a long walk up the beach this afternoon. So it could be at work; it could be in my car; it could be in the apartment here; it could be on the beach. It's not big. I think it's gone.

The most annoying thing would be if it were in the ocean somewhere, or down in a pipe (the sink here, or the tub, or the sink at work), where nobody will ever find it. Because how cool would it be to just find a diamond on the street? I wouldn't mind if that happened to somebody. I loathe the idea of it just getting covered with crud and disappearing forever.

But then I think of all the people in this city. All the things they lose... today on the beach someone had dropped a T-shirt in the surf, and it kept washing up around people's ankles. Every stray corner near that beach is crammed with someone's stuff: there are lots of homeless, and lots of their stashes. The city's full of the trash people drop - T-shirts, bottles, wrappers, cans, broken glass. Why not diamonds? How many others are out there, glinting faintly in the grime? Not all detritus has to be ugly.

This notion cannot be great comfort to the spirit of my grandmother, nor to that of my notoriously cheap grandfather, who died the year I was born. I fully expect them both to rise and kick my ass for this. Oh well. At least I got to grow up with her.

One martini is all right; two are too many, and three are not enough

Last night a slight cold led me to postpone Drunken Blogging Night. Tonight I have just finished the house's first bottle of gin (Art Boy had none of it, I'm afraid) and am watching classic Muppet Show episodes. This is an excellent way to unwind after a somewhat long and stressful day. (The day was not stressful by any objective standards, but by God it made me tired so it counts as stressful. Also, the absolute best thing about working a night shift is getting sloshed alone afterward.) I have just finished the Carol Burnett and Gilda Radner episodes, and am going to round out my second martini with the Steve Martin episode. I believe this one features the vegetable choir singing "Yes, We Have No Bananas" so I am really looking forward to it. I am even more boring without martinis!

I am indebted to James Thurber for the title of this post.

Hm. What was that?

I'm not sure what has been going on that made the blog into a giant page of coding, but it seems to have fixed itself now. It probably involved yesterday's DSL Adventures of Fun that involved us trying to hook up my computer without really knowing what we were doing ... I understood the computer but not DSL, and Art Boy understood DSL but the computer was too different from his evil Mac, and it just ended with us giving up and watching "The 40 Year-Old Virgin" (Netflix correctly hyphenated it on the wrapper! They must read Copy Grrl). Somehow it righted itself while we were doing that. Perhaps it enjoyed the movie too.

So anyway, Art Boy is now flying to Detroit and I am alone in the California sunshine. I just went to the grocery and went slightly insane: Dead Guy Ale, asparagus, mushrooms, scotch... everything he doesn't like. Tonight I'm making steak with mushroom sauce and asparagus and getting absolutely sloshed. Check back for drunken blogging!

Also, we spent all morning watching this. With my old dial-up connection I could never watch video anything, so I really felt like a kid in a candy store.

We're back!

Kind of. It took longer than expected and there are still complications, but we have got DSL or DHL or whatever the hell it is all set up on Art Boy's evil Mac. At some point my tired old PC will get connected and then we can seriously update our blogs. And that will thrill everyone.

Not much going on here. We hiked around in Topanga Canyon State Park today and got all hot. It was fun. Before that we watched Flashdance while eating lunch. I loove having cable.

Today's book: "The Lambs of London" by Peter Ackroyd. Peter likes to write biographies of historical British figures, such as Shakespeare, Chaucer and architect Nicholas Hawksmoor. (I want to read the latter in October, when I'm planning another Jack the Ripper binge - btw, anyone read "White Chapel, Scarlet Tracings"?) This one's about Charles and Mary Lamb, the brother and sister superteam who wrote Tales of Shakespeare for Children. They're sort of lonely and scholarly and are about to get sucked into a famous literary hoax involving a fake Shakespeare manuscript. It's an agreeable, spare little book. Also, everyone in it behaves sensibly and reasonably, which is in very pleasant contrast to Peter Straub's "Ghost Story." I was very disappointed in that one... it sort of lurched into Stephen King territory, where a small town goes mad and many die, but nobody had very good reasons for what they did. (King is so good at getting you inside the people's heads as they start to get all crazy and murderous. Straub is more interested in describing the snow.) At the end you're supposed to be all worked up about someone slicing up a wasp. ...whatever.

Art Boy is leaving tomorrow for a trip back East. I plan to drink a lot while he's gone.