Archives for category: life

I hope nobody else (besides the Big Island and Qinghai) had any unpleasant omens today. I had to collect and bag three dead house finches Mira found on the side of the house.

(No, that is not one of them. Just a different adorable idiot who needed a personal escort out of our feeder a couple weeks ago.)

I hear my dad had an exploding tire this afternoon. Here’s a palette cleansing river in case anyone else ran afoul of the universe today:

She dug her heels in the couch. It felt good to stretch. It felt good to kill.

She’d always wondered, of course. How could you not? What would she hear? What would it smell like as she held its lifeless body in her jaws? Would she move quickly enough if her much smaller companion could flush it out from its cover?

Mira the Killer

She rang its neck and dropped it when asked. I looked it right in the beady dying eye and crushed its skull with my trusty rock hammer.

Mom visited! We ate Mexican food! I walked the dogs!

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(We also did some yardwork, but I’ll wait until some things start blooming before subjecting you to dirt photos. Until then just dogs and food probably.)

Happy Wednesday! I hope you are having a great week so far. I just learned I get a 3 day weekend so I’m planning all sorts of ways to spend it. Ideas so far include sleeping, dog walking, catching up on past newspapers and snacking. Maybe I’ll catch up on fashion week from the comfort of my couch. I can feel your jealousy through the internet.

Can you believe it? I am updating from a phone. It makes me wish even more I had the old brown non-cordless (corded? That’s ridiculous.) phone from when I was growing up. We actually had to answer the phone “Wertz residence, so and so speaking.” I might just start doin that on my cell phone, you’ve been warned.

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One of Sam and I’s favorite things to chuckle at is the odd assortment of search terms that lead errant googlers here; variations on “ocean pout” and “Lake Karachay” are by far the most common. There’s a new flurry of recombinations juggling “October,” “Scorpio” and “horoscope” coming in now.

It reminds me of what sort of convinced me the signal-to-noise ratio on Twitter was too low to be useful to use it as any real cultural bellwether— meme pirates who fill their tweets with a potpourri of whatever the meteorically-rising current trends are. It’s like wearing brand clothing taken to an attention-seeking compulsive extreme. Want to read thoughts from the zeitgeist on the passing of Greg Giraldo? Too bad you have to sift through dozens of messages along the lines of  “Greg Giraldo Grey’s Anatomy Bristol Palin Deuces Remix #OMGTeenQuotes #FollowFriday #whenIwasakid;” garbage spewed for the sake of being noticed spewing garbage.

The preceding sentence could have been an excellent segue into the subject of Tarrare— but I think I’ll close with this adorable deer family I saw instead.

They were eating apples.

The intellectual basis for your standard astrology column is pretty threadbare— for example, the idea that all the variety of experience lived through by humans the planet over in a single day could be distilled down to a variation on one of twelve themes. So I’m obviously coming at this from the skeptic perspective.

I’ve always liked Free Will Astrology for being content with bon mots and humane sound advice in place of earth-rattling predictions. You can imagine, then, how this caught my attention yesterday:

SCORPIO: You know me: I hate to sound sensationalistic. But in honor of this dramatic moment in your story, I’ll risk it. So be alert! Heads up! Get real! A pivotal moment is upon you! What you do in the coming days will ultimately determine how you will interpret the entire past year, shaping the contours of your history for better or worse! I advise maximum integrity! I suggest thorough preparation! I urge timely action! Decisions should come from the roots, not the surface! Climaxes should be mediated by the heart and head together, not just one or the other!

… this hot on the heels of one last week admonishing me to surrender one fixation, two habits and three dogmatic beliefs. I don’t know what the Bad Boys of the Zodiac did to engender such portentous prognosticating, but it sure is tough being a Scorpio sometimes. Curse my having been born between October 23rd and November 21st!