nestclutter:
raven eye
sees past horizon
finding shiny words
raven claw
plays with years of
shredded bits of
ink and paper
hoping for
the right bit
but can only find old words
so she looks at sky
remembering the future
beak opens
wing wind blows thanks your way
breeze before sound
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Seasonally Challenged
What joyous mixups... I've been corresponding on email with people in several different time zones (and continents!) and have at times become so intent on the correspondence that I lose track of what season and time zone I am in.
What hasn't helped is April weather acting like November, or sometimes February, or sometimes May, here in hometown. I keep thinking we're heading into fall, since after every nice day we get rain, hail and dropping snow levels; we cooked red cabbage tonight as part of dinner, and I use it to color Easter eggs -- they come out a brilliant robin's egg blue that way, oddly enough; so I suddenly got confused enough to forget we already had Easter over three weeks ago.
A getaway weekend last weekend found us a four and a half hour drive north, and we lost four weeks of spring in the process there, too: here, the leaves are coming out despite the wild winter, the blossoms are mostly gone, and the grass is growing like mad. There, daffodils were still blooming, and the fruit trees just hitting their peak, but no sign of leaves on the trees yet.
And one of the towns we visited (Port Townsend) is an old Victorian town which looks as though all efforts to bring it to this century are failing -- the romantic ghosts of old buildings and former citizens are vivid and strong, and those of us in the present fade in comparison. Port Angeles, by comparison, is much more bustling and energetic, and has blended all kinds of time periods together. It too is an odd mix: murals on walls of historic district buildings depict Native American settlements, a 1930s aluminum ferryboat which looks like a giant version of either a flying saucer or a motor home; then, there is a brick courthouse whose bell tower clock sounds the hours so that people living or staying nearby fall back a century or so and don't need their own clocks, the courthouse sits next to a big Safeway store, which is next to a few older houses and some new hotels and a senior apartment building. All a joyful jumble of old and new.
What's a person one card short of a full deck to do? ! Except relax and enjoy the ride....
What hasn't helped is April weather acting like November, or sometimes February, or sometimes May, here in hometown. I keep thinking we're heading into fall, since after every nice day we get rain, hail and dropping snow levels; we cooked red cabbage tonight as part of dinner, and I use it to color Easter eggs -- they come out a brilliant robin's egg blue that way, oddly enough; so I suddenly got confused enough to forget we already had Easter over three weeks ago.
A getaway weekend last weekend found us a four and a half hour drive north, and we lost four weeks of spring in the process there, too: here, the leaves are coming out despite the wild winter, the blossoms are mostly gone, and the grass is growing like mad. There, daffodils were still blooming, and the fruit trees just hitting their peak, but no sign of leaves on the trees yet.
And one of the towns we visited (Port Townsend) is an old Victorian town which looks as though all efforts to bring it to this century are failing -- the romantic ghosts of old buildings and former citizens are vivid and strong, and those of us in the present fade in comparison. Port Angeles, by comparison, is much more bustling and energetic, and has blended all kinds of time periods together. It too is an odd mix: murals on walls of historic district buildings depict Native American settlements, a 1930s aluminum ferryboat which looks like a giant version of either a flying saucer or a motor home; then, there is a brick courthouse whose bell tower clock sounds the hours so that people living or staying nearby fall back a century or so and don't need their own clocks, the courthouse sits next to a big Safeway store, which is next to a few older houses and some new hotels and a senior apartment building. All a joyful jumble of old and new.
What's a person one card short of a full deck to do? ! Except relax and enjoy the ride....
Thursday, April 3, 2008
The Enchanter Cat
We took the Giant Kitten to the vet a while back because of a bite on his tail that needed tending to.
Giant, as in: The vet unloaded him from his carrier, and more of him just kept coming out and her eyes got bigger and bigger ... he is now 18 pounds 4 with the same ol' blue eyes as big as his appetite.
Anyway, they searched through their records and noticed he hadn't been in since the summer of 2004. I thought for sure they were wrong, till I searched through my Very Disorganized Loose Filing and didn't find anything more recent, either.
We always seem to be on the verge of taking him in for annual checkup and shots and something happens to the Orange Menace instead, so we take him, forget about Giant Kitten, and there you go. Escape from the vet yet again.
It even happened again this week, spring break. OrangeMenace came up with an abscess that suddenly made itself visible by draining, we snatched him up and took him to the vet and realized on the way back that yes, once again, the plan had been for GiantKitten to get his checkup and shots and yes, once again, he escaped notice.
We are now wondering if this is big plot and he's casting spells on all of us. Apparently, it has worked for four years now.
Giant, as in: The vet unloaded him from his carrier, and more of him just kept coming out and her eyes got bigger and bigger ... he is now 18 pounds 4 with the same ol' blue eyes as big as his appetite.
Anyway, they searched through their records and noticed he hadn't been in since the summer of 2004. I thought for sure they were wrong, till I searched through my Very Disorganized Loose Filing and didn't find anything more recent, either.
We always seem to be on the verge of taking him in for annual checkup and shots and something happens to the Orange Menace instead, so we take him, forget about Giant Kitten, and there you go. Escape from the vet yet again.
It even happened again this week, spring break. OrangeMenace came up with an abscess that suddenly made itself visible by draining, we snatched him up and took him to the vet and realized on the way back that yes, once again, the plan had been for GiantKitten to get his checkup and shots and yes, once again, he escaped notice.
We are now wondering if this is big plot and he's casting spells on all of us. Apparently, it has worked for four years now.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Back to the Silly
My junk mail filter bounces junk mail but logs the email addresses into a log I can look at if I want to.
Apart from the usual gibberish there have been a lot of oddly combined names and names that would look great in a junk romance novel (or even a real one, if you're a frustrated writer scrounging for usable names!) and names
which start out serious sounding but have wildly silly middle names.
Surprise! Junk mails are good for something!
Just imagine characters named like:
Sergio Connelly
Nannette Burt Goddard
Sherrie Baffin Street
Virgie Anything Fournier
Darla Wagner
Johnny Holler Henderson
Sharon Honey Kendall
Effie Anode Sylvester
Tequila Roberts
Newton Noble
Bobby Barber Diaz
Chadwick Front Hurley
Imogene Sort MacNair
Carolyn Workmanlike Werner
Clark Slogan Fitzgerald
Malcom Penelope Mack
Carlton Morgen Leonard
Rocky Hartley
Fred Rhodes James
Jason Weeks Rodriguez
Pearlie Heard Maher
Colleen Daytime Dooley
Pauline Permeate Hollis
Gabriel Britt
Not to mention the ever-popular Roqfarmerscoopexchangefis !
(Just think about those desperate mothers-to-be out there who can't figure out what name to name their children. Now they too can be inspired by the internet....)
James Shrug Jones
Lacy Wade Medrano
Evangelina Exercisable Valentin
Delores Houston Courtney
Cleo Manzanita Koch
Veronica Patrician Valenzuela
Zachary Nightshirt Kelly
Therese Monkish Redmond
Caroline Screechy Quick
Angelique Nuance Mclain
Anton Combinate Numbers
And apparently there's a spammer out there who is trying to use up every possible permutation of first names combined with "Danby" or "Davie" or "Dalzell". I've been getting multiple posts of those for so long I'm surprised they haven't used all of them up yet.
Apart from the usual gibberish there have been a lot of oddly combined names and names that would look great in a junk romance novel (or even a real one, if you're a frustrated writer scrounging for usable names!) and names
which start out serious sounding but have wildly silly middle names.
Surprise! Junk mails are good for something!
Just imagine characters named like:
Sergio Connelly
Nannette Burt Goddard
Sherrie Baffin Street
Virgie Anything Fournier
Darla Wagner
Johnny Holler Henderson
Sharon Honey Kendall
Effie Anode Sylvester
Tequila Roberts
Newton Noble
Bobby Barber Diaz
Chadwick Front Hurley
Imogene Sort MacNair
Carolyn Workmanlike Werner
Clark Slogan Fitzgerald
Malcom Penelope Mack
Carlton Morgen Leonard
Rocky Hartley
Fred Rhodes James
Jason Weeks Rodriguez
Pearlie Heard Maher
Colleen Daytime Dooley
Pauline Permeate Hollis
Gabriel Britt
Not to mention the ever-popular Roqfarmerscoopexchangefis !
(Just think about those desperate mothers-to-be out there who can't figure out what name to name their children. Now they too can be inspired by the internet....)
James Shrug Jones
Lacy Wade Medrano
Evangelina Exercisable Valentin
Delores Houston Courtney
Cleo Manzanita Koch
Veronica Patrician Valenzuela
Zachary Nightshirt Kelly
Therese Monkish Redmond
Caroline Screechy Quick
Angelique Nuance Mclain
Anton Combinate Numbers
And apparently there's a spammer out there who is trying to use up every possible permutation of first names combined with "Danby" or "Davie" or "Dalzell". I've been getting multiple posts of those for so long I'm surprised they haven't used all of them up yet.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
A shot in the foot by local school district
*Sigh*
Our local paper ran an article that one of our local school districts cancelled its contract with Scholastic Books -- "in part" because a parent complained about its publication/distribution of The Golden Compass. At least that's how the paper spun it.
They also pointed out that this deprives our poorest elementary school, 75 percent of whose children need the school to feed them lunch, of a world of books (and I would expect this includes the "more wholesome" fare which could offset any concerns about one book's content. The school has declined to allow parents to run the book order program themselves because it draws a line between those families who have parents with spare time and money, and those who do not, so they're ruining it for everyone regardless of status, and I guess they somehow think this is better.
Nobody has heard of a school district anywhere doing this before.
My immediate temptation of course is to airdrop one copy of the Golden Compass per student over all the district schools. Not that I'm literally capable of same, of course, but I'm really ticked.
I was very poor in elementary school but still managed to order some very nice books through Scholastic. This was forty years ago. Books about Helen Keller's life, horses, Irish heroes, Bambi the book, life in Japan, you name it, I got my hands on it one way or another. What a loss.
A second reading of the article gave me some cryptic hints that the decision "raised other issues" which were supposedly the real reason for the pull -- but said NOTHING about what those issues were.
I have a call in to the school district's legal counsel so perhaps she can explain.
Our local paper ran an article that one of our local school districts cancelled its contract with Scholastic Books -- "in part" because a parent complained about its publication/distribution of The Golden Compass. At least that's how the paper spun it.
They also pointed out that this deprives our poorest elementary school, 75 percent of whose children need the school to feed them lunch, of a world of books (and I would expect this includes the "more wholesome" fare which could offset any concerns about one book's content. The school has declined to allow parents to run the book order program themselves because it draws a line between those families who have parents with spare time and money, and those who do not, so they're ruining it for everyone regardless of status, and I guess they somehow think this is better.
Nobody has heard of a school district anywhere doing this before.
My immediate temptation of course is to airdrop one copy of the Golden Compass per student over all the district schools. Not that I'm literally capable of same, of course, but I'm really ticked.
I was very poor in elementary school but still managed to order some very nice books through Scholastic. This was forty years ago. Books about Helen Keller's life, horses, Irish heroes, Bambi the book, life in Japan, you name it, I got my hands on it one way or another. What a loss.
A second reading of the article gave me some cryptic hints that the decision "raised other issues" which were supposedly the real reason for the pull -- but said NOTHING about what those issues were.
I have a call in to the school district's legal counsel so perhaps she can explain.
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Friday, February 1, 2008
Warning: smartass at work
Hello, world:
You are hereby put on notice that this blog is meant to be lighthearted and silly.
So this is a warning not to assume the Seriousness of anything I put here. It's
to reassure the world that #1 I need to keep my day job and #2 I'm ABSOLUTELY NUTS ...
Ok, so with that in mind,
This is what happens when I'm typing at nearly 5 pm on a Friday and my cold is taking over what's left of my brain. I started inputting someone's url and typed .ent instead of .net.
Enter the smartass.
.ent is an extension for people who like their websites to load VERY, VERY, SLOWLY.... at about the rate of a growing tree!
See, I warned ya...
You are hereby put on notice that this blog is meant to be lighthearted and silly.
So this is a warning not to assume the Seriousness of anything I put here. It's
to reassure the world that #1 I need to keep my day job and #2 I'm ABSOLUTELY NUTS ...
Ok, so with that in mind,
This is what happens when I'm typing at nearly 5 pm on a Friday and my cold is taking over what's left of my brain. I started inputting someone's url and typed .ent instead of .net.
Enter the smartass.
.ent is an extension for people who like their websites to load VERY, VERY, SLOWLY.... at about the rate of a growing tree!
See, I warned ya...