Monumental

Like, wow.

Elite Person 2

From a message-board discussion of why "theatre people" sometimes laugh exaggeratedly at shows:

"I always wonder what's wrong with audience members who DON'T laugh out loud - do they not get it? Are they used to watching sitcoms, where the laughter is provided by a track or a studio audience?"

"You've got it backwards. Comedy is mainly intellectual and technical. It can be appreciated cerebrally without vocalization. But because it is also depends on rhythm and satire, less analytic types can also appreciate it for its tempo and character portraiture in a more overt fashion."

Elite Person

A fan posted this set-list after Barbra Streisand's recent show in LA:

"Questions from audience members my favorite was Why is she touring ? Answer she said because she is a charity slut and then she quotes from my 2nd favorite of hers
"Hello, Dolly!" Money is like manure it's not worth a thing unless it is spread around encouraging young things to grow."
George Bush sketch no dueting
Woman in the Moon
Have I Stayed too Long at the Fair
A Cockeyed Optimist
Somewhere with IL Divo
My Shinig Hour
Don't Rain on my Parade reprised version from the end of OBC Funny Girl
Happy Days are Here Again
As she exits the stage for the last time she is handed her puppy"

Terrific

Tonight, by the glowing...

...I'm using that to watch this...

...If by "watch," you mean "listen... to."

Maine

Perspicacious

From Long Or Short Capital.

Revival

Puppet Shows

It's going to be alright.

It's gonna be alright.

Gonna be alright.

Cleaning Up Is Hard To Do

A brief mess, I pray.

My personal junk, my life's baggage, has been dumped again into the dim recesses. How sad. And it's been raining, of course. (Ah, always steps forward and steps back and rain.) Now I tackle once again the cluttered and cloistered environment that, once again, I awake to. But this time, I am that much more a tougher and wiser person. Now I know how to clear a path from room to room. Split up the tasks. Break up the job.

OK, done. Next, get up! And find a sweet approach.

Maybe now that I have grown some more, my domesticity can become more harmonized, more clean, and more lastingly liveable. Time to toss out more of my debris. I've had a long-enough relationship with a too-familiar arrangement, in here.

Sad to see it go. Nothing lasts forever, I guess.

Luckily?

Re: Radicackalacky

Has the puppet conference in Chapel Hill/Carrboro made statewide political blog headlines already?!

Don't Look.

Is this funny?? I think so.

Tushkins

They're paying rent, at least.

Siouxie Sioux Say Huh?

Went to that new bar called Milltown.

My buddy D shot lightening bolts out of his forehead all night long. Oddest thing, look...

He sure thought bright thoughts! (Too, stood for my curdled critiques and saucy readings of his stagings' texts. Good man.)

The menu was not, ahem, as innovative as I had hoped for. The prices were reasonable enough -- even though there were dozens of, ahem, seventeen-dollar beers on the menu. I was happy to find they offer poutine. Not quite the same meat-sauce-and-curds-on-fries heaven you find in wintery Quebequois tummies, sure, but it felt alright going down with an entirely affordable French farm ale... even this many miles south... in August.

Later at my house, we watched some anime that was so philosophically thick that it made me feel dumb. I don't like it when cartoons confuse me. Bad sign. Anyway, that was last night.

Today is another day. This next image renders what the side room in my house looks like right now. No promises, now. I'm just saying. This is the way it lies. Until I post again.

I should be doing projects and photographing them. All home-betterment projects have ceased. I'm not happy about it, believe me. And it's not because I'm unhappy, either. I'm good. But not at that.

OK Sure

Guess what this is? According the them, it's the graph of this website. Pick something and try it. The animation as it works it through is lovely.

Growing Up And Over

True

If I have a rock band it's called Charlie's Rose.

Rasa

This is less enchanting without photographs. Misplaced rechargeable batteries result in a sidelined digital. Results in few words... thousands fewer. I would like to show those basil plants again, here, since they've all gone to seed and it's a sight. (What happens when I go out of town, even for a second, I swear.)

Instead, let's all do breathing excercises that truly hum.

What Not To Read

I have another blog. The topic is cupcakes and how to ice them. (No, actually, it's politics.) Start reading from the bottom, please.

Sorry, all, in advance.

Map

The piano will go from the bedroom to the livingroom against the common wall. The couch moves in front of the window nearby. My new soft chair fits there in the open floor somewhere.

When I moved the gift piano into the house, it went in the bedroom mostly because of shyness.

Hopful ggurggles

Flooming upturns off na yaya
Mossy wiggle hrfing ggurggles
Dimping upturns iff na yaya
Hooming oven swoofing ote

P-list:

Get a pallet knife in hand and clear out tree-debris from all the spaces between all the back deck's planks. Get lightbulbs. Get on over to the Lowe's Hardware that just opened up in Pittsboro, really, really close by. Buy paint. Get commode to flush properly again, after so many years of trevail. Appeal to reason; get self to throw out piles, and piles, and piles of collected papers. Clip hedge around shed door. Get self going, get something going.

Summertime

What is summertime

Never
Like another time

A rare
Sometimes fair

With luck
Fairly mild

Season
To wildly
Simmer

And rhyme
Skin with wine
Growing
Tall and benign

Summertime

Mo' Foie

Used the small coconut-wood mortar and pestle from Thailand. Collected basil leaves while the spaghetti cooked in a pot barely large enough to hold it. Tore up leaves before putting them in the mortar and added a little coarse salt before pestling. Next time, though, I'll try mincing the leaves a little first. I had a reluctance, getting myself to add enough olive oil for all the parmesan I dumped in, which was lot, so it needed a lot... and forgot to add a little oil to the drained pasta while I worked on the paste-o, so it got a little wumpy. At the table, it turned out to need a little something. I got the duck fat. A smidge, swirled in, intensified the earthy parmesan notes, and darkened them to a lilly-pad's green, but not actually, with lovely-tasty mud tones and a few actual feathers. Gosh I love that goo. Anyway, this lunch of spaghetti with pesto was fun and foundational, and the remaining end of last week's famer's market sourdough loaf was a nice foil when dipped in wine.

These Dreams

It's ridiculous! I now have virtually unlimited access to 80's music. Not playlists of my own choosing, sure; but internet radio is free, and specific, and multiple, so there'll be a numer of complaints from me equaling zero. And that is not even where the enrichment stops. This morning I set up a wireless internet connection to my stereo via the wi-fi tranzponder to my laptop. I think I'm experiencing one of those ballyhooed lifestyle shifties that the new economy is counting on. I'm, like, a pillar of that.

iTunes, Here I Come

"Back In The High Life Again" Steve Winwood
"Broken Wings" Mr. Mister
"Two Of Hearts" Stacey Q
"I Want To Know What Love Is" Foreigner
"Everything She Wants" Wham!
"Don't Go" Yaz
"Every Time You Go Away" Paul Young
"These Dreams" Heart
"Eyes Without A Face" Billy Idol
"The Lady In Red" Chris DeBerg
"Always Something There" Simple Minds
"Cruel Summer" Bananarama
"Sad Songs Say So Much" Elton John
"I Didn't Mean To Turn You On" Robert Palmer
"Careless Whisper" Wham!
"Take My Breath Away" Berlin
"Every Breath You Take" The Police
"Something About You" Level 42
"Easy Lover" Philip Bailey
"People Are People" Depeche Mode
"I Can't Wait" Nu Shooz
"I Know There's Something Going On" Frida
"Let The Music Play" Shannon
"Wishing On A Star" Rose Royce

Silence! ... *Cough*

I've been sick. This is primarily supposed to be a journal of my activities in and around the house. So, when activities grind down to the barest nub of sleeping, coughing, and staring at the ceiling, then not so much is worthy. On the bright side, I recently felt a strong and jolly tingle of nostalgia when I ladled into my mouth the first tablespoons of cough syrup I'd had in decades. Cherry flavored cough syrup is childhood, boiled down to a thick ooze. Of course, now that I'm choosing for myself, I prefer the herbal sort: co-op bought, and non-drunkinatin'. (On that tip, being an adult, I do possess the genuine. It's up on the shelf, it's brown, not cherry-colored... in a large glass bottle... not a small plastic one... made in Kentucky.)

Look What Mia Hath Wrought

"It Is Hardwood To Meditate Every Day"

Lunch...with some ingredients from Mary

I got out my day-old sourdough loaf.

Cut two slices. Carefully folded salami pieces and layered them across one slice, like sardines. On the other, I put little slabs of cheese, chopped sun-dried tomato, fresh tyme and dried rosemary, salt, pepper. Lifted top and bottom, and slathered all four sides with rendered duck fat. Heated cast iron pan, and browned on both sides, covered, over medium-high heat.

Meanwhile, steamed green beans. Then poured wine.

Sipped on it.

Once sandwich was crispy and melted, removed it from pan and replaced it with the steamed beans. Added some olive oil to the traces of duck fat in the pan; also tossed in leaves of sage from the box-garden on the railing just outside my kitchen door. Cooked green beans in the fats and sage just long enough to faintly crisp and richly season them.

Added to the sandwich and beans on the plate a handful of mixed nuts.

Added ice to another tall glass, and two squirts of lime juice, then water, and sugar, and stirred it up.

Removed all food and drink to my back deck.

Conjured up sunshine, and warmth. Called stepmother to wish a happy mother's holiday; and a happy birth day to my father, a day early, accidentally.

Listened closely. The backyard hums and hollers. Then, fit and feeling no pain, I played a whole lot of croquet. It's a nice course I have set up now, though it's probably best for the one-person play I've so far used it for. Once I invite challengers, we may find it to be awkwardly set up, and incur too much croquet-ing of each other. We'll see. (I wonder what I'll serve?)

Instead

Siding, With My Yard.

Purple Basil in moist soil in a raised bed in the side yard; also other basilses, and cilantro, and sage. Also, weeds. You can see the lengths of lawn, many cubic yards, in the middle distance. Nice siding, to the left. In other photos taken with this one you can wonder, "what was he thinking?," about the way I planted-in these wee ones. It doesn't look like it here, but they are bunched up and other rules were broken, too. But they'll do well.

It is enjoyable and attractive to tear up a few basil leaves when the heat of the food will send the warm odor wafting freshly up. (Can we make a basil mojito?) So I also have a garden-box on the railing outside my kitchen door. As ever, I get what I put in with my gardens, and both sides of that equation are worthwhile and should be made larger.

I want to side with my garden more when I maneuver to do my days.

despite/defiance

It's late and the refrigerator is keeping me company, clearly audible over my pop music.

It's a blog about life in this house. See, I do hope to keep a reasonable and public diary in defiance of my longstanding tendency towards a rather more weird and private one. As such, focus starts with the foundation, and moves to the details.

Been meaning to get over to Clyde's house to ask him for a favor - for him to mow my lawn with his riding deal. Knowing myself, what with recently getting home all relaxed from a month's vacation in Thailand, who knows how long the yards will go uncut? The front yard, both sides and back were all overgrown... until today, that is, when Clyde drove up all on his own and mowed the back yard. From his perspective as kindly neighbor, weren't hard to see it called out for a cutting. He came to my aid. There's still a lot for me to do. I usually have trouble getting the pull-start to work on my push-mower.

Rain. Plantings. Purple Basil, lettuce Basil. Cinnamon Basil. Marseille. Happy tiny basils.

There is the outside, and then inside is something else. Sky is not house. Being warm inside, stretching, being on the couch. Looking around the room, walls need painting, and I daydream about colors. The warm, current feeling is that househould jobs will, get done in defiance of my longstanding tendencies. Despite inside, outside yet gets to be somethin' else.

Curtain Up

This utensil reflects the life I've made with that of which I am made.


I am going to bend this spoon with my mind, right before your eyes.