what leaving already?

it isn't like her
she's never done this before,
elizabeth taylor

                              ~mudpie

i'll be changing my hairstyle

at the reading,
the good poems were by poets
with weird hair
              
                         ~mudpie

what do you say to a dead man?

i fell in love with Warren Christopher yesterday

npr's website said he died
i knew the name. i clicked the link
i saw his picture
my heart burst with love
an old man 85
a good man
he tried - he worked so hard
he did so much
his heavy spirit clung to me
i held his spirit i didn't know what to say
it would not leave me
my heart was so full
i said what little i knew
or understood
of how to guide the dead
he would not let me go
i need to learn more
in case this happens again
i tried to send him off
to people who know how to help
in these situations
but the love between us was so strong
at last i remembered that today
i am going to a friend to work on a project
a friend who knows
who can guide the dead
or the living for that matter
my heart grew lighter then
and i wrote this

early spring call of the human

redwingzarback!
bright and sunny today - March 8 - and a fresh new layer of snow.
nothing is whiter than snow -- snow defines white!
yesterday morning, shoveling the walk,
the snow heavy, wet spring snow,
falling and falling even as i shoveled,
wishing i was not doing this,
but knowing anything else i might be doing
would be equally if not more meaningless,
like i'm not going to be discovering
a cure for cancer or anything like that...
i suddenly stopped.
could it be?
am i hearing that unmistakeable sound of spring?
yes it is - a red-winged blackbird song.
and now another.
not a flock mind you, but just the few crazies who risk all to be first arrived.
when their gamble pays off, they get the best land and the best mate months later when the girls drift in.
smiling, i call my hubby, using the spring call of the northern human "redwingzarback! redwingzarback!"
soon our call will be heard all over town,
in the store and the post-office,
on the steps of the library...
"redwingzarback!"

University of Western Australia

Arches in the Mist at UWA's Virtlantis

Blue Tsuki's installation Vessel which closes today.
"Before you is a concentric landform of unknown time and origin. It appears to bear witness to an ancient artifact in the sky known as the Vessel. Walk the circular labyrinth to the center where you will find teleports to the Vessel." 

they don't mention that the labrynth is more fun if you are riding your horse, and the Vessel above is way more fun if you are on your unicycle!

click to enlarge - see me on my horse?

wheeeeeeee!

a dream of pigs

i dreamt that some men in a couple of boats were pulled up in the shadows across the river to watch a huge white pig that had escaped as pigs so often do, swimming away from the near riverbank encampment of naked beautiful dark-haired women , one or more of whom would soon notice and be coming to chase it back to their compound.

no doubt this is a very obvious and common sort of dream...which can be interpreted to mean....ah would you like to guess?

Cutting for Stone

by Abraham Verghese.  a good read, as they say!
long and involving with the depth and breadth of the truth of human existence and emotion mostly found only in fiction.
complicated characters living as the best humans they can be considering where and when they live. ethiopia. which i didn't know when i started reading.
and coincidentally, friends of mine had just a month ago moved there from here.

Raglan Mardi Gras

one day lucy sez to osprey  "there should be fortune cookies in Second Life" and osprey grabs it and ran wid it!  

she made fortune cookies dat breaks open and gives you a fortune when you click's dem (fortunes made up by lucy and enjah and maybe more peeps ... dey so funny!) 

somma da fortunes only makes sense if you hangs out in second life.

den she went charging on an made fortune cookie avatars we wears so we is fortune cookies in ossem red sneakers, and we was in da Raglan Mardi Gras parade yestiddy - best second life parade i ever seen! 

it wuz Mysteries of da Orient so we fit right in behind a chinese takeout float! 
here some pics.  hunnerts of peeps wuz dere!

~ mudpie

dere we is lining up at start

 

dual alarm cats

one cat misty predawn grey
striped with wet deep brown bare trees
the beech still with their tan leaves
that hang on all winter to guide the deer
pats my face before cold sunrise
crawls in as i lift the blanket
to a warm ball against my tummy.

sunlight filtering thru blinds
the tiger cat comes stiped like
sunbeams thru dissolving mist
orange shadows cross white snow
a fire beneath glows brighteyed
pounce! on the purring lump
beneath the blanket
morning is here!

Mars - another excuse for human curiosity

why does the japanese astronaut selection process involve origami?

who ate the onions experiment?

what happens if you don't bathe or change clothes for 2 weeks?

how much will NASA pay you to stay in bed for 3 months? 

what happens to your bones then?

so how do old ladies benefit from space research? (get it?)

how do dolphins have sex under water?

is that why they don't let male dolphins in the swim-with-the-dolphins pool?

what is astronaut chow?

what concoction best simulates human shit for test purposes?

what tests are those??

what percent of people can light their farts?

why is drinking Orange County's water kind of like being an astronaut?

did you ever think that sustainability engineering and human spaceflight engineering are just different sides of the same technology?

PACKING FOR MARS by Mary Roach - a book by a science writer who walks the fine line between making fun of and seeing what is funny about space exploration and the research that is part of it!

i loved this book, and had a new view of the value of it all... all the research spills out into everyday life. her last paragraph is surely thought provoking - to summarize, any money saved from not funding space exploration would not go to any of the things you feel it should be used for anyway!  you know that!  so why not play and learn.

oh just read it, you'll laugh out loud at sentences like "The zero gravity fart has been a popular orbital pursuit, especially on all male flights."

some bad guy has a car like mine

a DRUG dealer! or maybe a TERRORIST!  -- somewhere around here i am SURE there is one with a car JUST LIKE MINE.
  you would NOT THINK they would drive a BORING looking vehicle like a blue subaru IMPREZA station wagon.
(granted it does GO like ANYTHING!)
why else would the cops KEEP STOPPING ME? 
ok i WAS speeding, but not enough to be given a TICKET apparently.
i just got a WARNING. and then--
ok i went through -- i DID go through a red light when that cop was BEHIND me,
but i had never BEEN in that town before, and i DIDN'T EVEN SEE IT! 
and HE didn't give me a ticket EITHER, so it must happen ALL THE TIME THERE.
and then YESTERDAY i was stopped because my INSPECTION STICKER is over a MONTH out of date.
i forgot! and i can't SEE it because of the rear-view mirror HIDES it.
and yet...who NOTICES things like that UNLESS --
they are already checking out your car looking for an excuse to STOP you?
no ticket again.
you SEE?
they just want to look in the BACK...
see if i have bombs or bodies.

we were meant to fly!!

should second life be a copy of a first life? for most, it is.
most choose to be humans, have houses, cars, horses, dogs, even kitchens and bathrooms! crazy!
why walk when you could fly?
live in a house when you can live in a bubble, a mushroom, underwater, or on mars?
look human when you could invent a life form for yourself?
or - ah - live in the sky!  YES!  people DO like this.
we happily take naturally to flying and off-the-ground life.
here's a snapshot of the sky high above Dunvegan, a sim where i hang out sometimes, with all the hang-outs and homes people have put high above their land.

(people's sky places! click to enlarge)

Blue Lagoon

yesterday i installed phoenix standard on my old laptop. 

right away mudpie went to raglan to test it out, and ended up at a kind of charades game.

the contestant had to create clues from prims (simple 3D shapes) --

clues to the words or phrase the rest had to guess.

mudpie didn't know how the game worked exactly,

but got all caught up and correctly guessed one!

wow she won 25 lindens!

but then - uhoh - turns out she had to be the next one up!

how the heck do you create prims using phoenix? omg.

i did figure that out, and her words were "blue lagoon."

after a few false starts i managed to make a flat oval

and fill it with BLUE. 

then i decided to add water texture.

then i found a fish in mudpie's inventory and added that.

the fish swam round and round - and someone guessed "blue lagoon"!!

what i hadn't noticed was that the moderator, awenbunny, had

been hollering at mudpie in chat "you can't use textures!"

and then with the fish, she completely lost it!

that was totally against the rules!

luckily it was raglan, home of the fun-loving tinies,

so everyone laughed and laughed.

awenbunny said she laughed so hard her dimples hurt!

snow body

knock knock!

who's there?

Snow Body

Snow Body who?

's nobody gettin' to YOUR front door!

my front door -- good thing we haz back doors too!

after i opened the windows and shoveled awhile to keep them from breaking, i went off on my snowshoes.  wheeeee!

i was the first one out after the 15 or so inches of snow....ugh it was hard going!

painting the magic

"i hate to tell you this...but..."
this is what carpenters say to you when you get home from work.
that is, they do if your house is a little cape built in the 1800s.
i've been hearing it for years.
pull off a wall, some clapboard, some flooring, and it's -- uh-oh!!
one of our first carpenters was a young guy i'll call bob, mostly because that's his name.
carpenters here are like new york waitresses ...they are really something else.
bob was an artist.
we named our bathroom after him. 
i wish we had gotten him to sign it!
not long ago i went to his house on an open studio tour, and -- whoa!  $1000 and up?
wonder what our bathroom is worth now!
i love his paintings.  take a look!
i love them because he paints the things i love; 

and he knows how to capture the radiant magical energy of the world's display.

phoenix creates butterfly cat-woman

the viewer phoenix has been good on my w7 64 bit lappy, so based on new info, i decided to get all my old viewers off, and then download the phoenix 818 SSE2 viewer.
it worked beautifully! looks so good, and so far not crashy and stuff rezzes!  here's a picture...(it dint make me a better photographer)

HOWEVER i must have deleted a cache or failed to create a separate cache or SOMETHING!  because....
when i logged into my old 32 bit lappy on SL, i got a little of my current fairy look, plus a little of my new year's eve tiny tiger look all jumbled together!  what a hoot!

chilblains?

for years i've heard people discuss painful finger cracks they get in winter, and what to do about them.
i never experienced it until this week, when suddenly my right thumb got one!
first stop - google!
is it chilblains?
is it really?
wow!
didn't i read that word in some musty book we had to read in 6th grade about dreary new england depressives?
wow, cool!
immediately i begin a series of experimental treatments.
honey?
may help but too slow and kind of messy.
my plan was to go on from honey to try yogurt, vinegar, and super glue, holding back on cortisone cream as a last desperate measure.
unfortunately i lost interest and just went with a thick layer of johnson's first aid cream (disclosure - i have some shares of j&j) and using my left hand for everything.
using my left hand is an endlessly fascinating hobby i developed the year my shoulder was frozen.
it's more fun than curing chilblains.
i love seeing what it can and can't do.
oddly, my wii bowling scores as a lefty are about the same as righty.
all in all, i feel extremely lucky in life to be so easily amused!

barney and hank a few weeks later

we did wonder for awhile if Hank would kill Barney!

we hoped they would become pals.

i think it has finally happened!

they fight like brothers, and play like friends.

it is still a circus!
a ruckus!
the cat-town races!

a keystone cats show!

but now it's a fun one.

auspicious coincidence or loss of entropy?

i wanted a joke-a-day calendar
but border's in mid-january had none.
so i have a metropolitan museum of art
page-a-day calendar.
i love it!
on my birthday i was amazed
to turn the page and reveal
a tibetan buddhist painting
tanka style
of Onpo Lama Rinpoche (1251 - 1296)
in his indian incarnation as
Jnanatapa
surrounded by
the progenitors and abbots
of Taklung Monastery.

how did they know?

jack frost paints our windows

 the responsible thing would be to replace all the big old loose windows in this 1850s house with smaller tighter windows. but we get so little light in the winter!  and when it's clear and -24 F (-31 C) at night, and the sun rises bright and low, our morning glows with crystals and feathers thanks to jack frost!  at least we don't have ice on the inside of the windows, like we did in one place we lived!

now at noon it's up to 50 on our glassed in porch, from the sun!  (the predicted high today is 4.

silence of the yams

clocks hum, cats ticking,
refrigerator purrs --
the snow makes no sound
                                
                                              ~mudpie

the monster is gone, but things are still bad!

the only vacancy in shanghai seemed to have 3 dead bodies stored in it.

so much for my whim to move back to the beautiful steelhead sims!

(click to enlarge)

things had not been this bad when i had my shelter open there.

a little research, and i discovered more than i wanted to know and concluded that i'd stick to higgins and raglan a while longer!

here is the latest from Dr. Beck 

driving route 1

i always think it should be fun to take road trips in second life, along the public highways.  but vehicles are difficult to control, and the scenery went by too fast to rez, so i didn't see much!
today i noticed a car in my lost and found, so i rezzed it, and decided to take it for a spin on rte 1.
driving seems much smoother now!  even getting a bit of the scenery and buildings as i tooled along!  sim crossings didn't crash me either.
the only problem was finding a place to stop!  i drove on and on -- no spot where i could park and resume my journey next time i logged in.  if i stop just anywhere, i have to go back to the beginning to rez my car.
finally i found a parking/rezing stop!  like finding a rest area on a real life highway!  yippee! 
however, i must say, it could win a prize for most boring spot in second life!

click for total boring effect - car was freebie from burning life or man or whatever it was

stranger than second life

Poorly Dressed

A Visit from the Goon Squad

by Jennifer Egan


another book i actually finished!  it started out as interesting enough to keep me coming back to it, although not compelling.  when the pages turned sideways i got really annoyed, then intrigued once i caught on to where it was going, then i skipped the graphs entirely.


but the LAST CHAPTER could have been standalone. i was totally hooked at the end. loved it.


(the last chapter has to do with a rock concert come-back by a long forgotten musician -- the music biz is a recurring theme throughout the book.)

harnessing the mind!

great news in medicine!

tiny mention in NYT science section a few weeks ago.

this could change lots of things.

doctors have discovered

that if they TELL THE TRUTH

then in certain illnesses, such as I.B.S.,

they give the patient a placebo, and

they say something like

"this is an inert substance, like a sugar pill,

that has been found to produce significant improvement

in I.B.S. symptoms through mind-body

self-healing processes"

the patients given the sugar-pills

in a bottle marked "PLACEBO"

reported significantly better pain relief

and reduction in severity of other symptoms

than those who got nothing.

not just a little better!

"The magnitude of effect here is very large."

said Dr Ted J Kaptchuck a researcher at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

think of it!

trigger the mind-body self-healing process

by giving a pill!

Winter's Bone

a beautiful movie on many levels.

kinship, clan, crystal meth and above all, What Is.

the young heroine stays the path

avoids the pitfalls

goes through the trials

she does not have a scar on her forehead

well actually maybe she does by the end!

all in the stark color-richness of

children's book paintings.

if only Howard Frank Mosher's books

could have been movified so well.

if you thought the beans of egypt maine was

a depressing book, instead of a book about

real people and their lives, skip this movie!

i don't live in the ozarks, 

yet i know these people -

some of them are my neighbors.

the kitten formerly known as buster

update on buster the kitten. his name is now barney.
it was the name i wanted to begin with, after furdinand was rejected,
but i have a friend named barney
and also a wonderful book about a dead cat
"the tenth good thing about barney."
try as i might to call him buster, i kept calling him barney.
it's a time-honored method i have of naming cats.
think up a bunch of names for them and wait to see what sticks.
5 reminded me that i used to have goldfish named barney.
guess i like the name!
oh - the fish were not each named barney.
they were collectively named barney.
they were barney.

hankzilla vs buster brown

back on dec 12 i wrote this verse about kitten hank.
he turned out to be a born killer and we have the scars to prove it.

the hankosaurus never sleeps
onto your bed hankzilla leaps.
pouncing upon them as they doze...
his midnight snack - not toast, but TOES

on jan 4 we brought in buster
and they took to each other like a cock fight

here they are becoming frenemies

and after that i had to put the camera down and rescue buster!

we are fattening up buster and putting him in training - he looks like he'll grow up to be bigger than hank, but he's a lover not a fighter.

Nixon Under the Bodhi Tree

over the last year or so i have failed to continue to read so many books!

i start them and then realize i just don't care.

this is one of the few that i read cover to cover and loved.

it's short stories, a collection of  "Buddhist fiction."

i'm not always clear on what the Buddhist part is, but i liked all but maybe two.

alot!

the beginnings caught me, and held me to the ends!

i've bought a copy to keep.

theory of relativity

i've always loved the buddhist teaching tale

about the guy who was so enlightened 

that shit and gold were the same to him.
my sister glimpsed enlightenment 

last week when florida went arctic.

she and her dog went out 

for their evening exercise walk 

on the darkest coldest night.
not in the habit of thinking 'keep warm,'  

she forgot her gloves. 

it wasn't very long before

she realized her hands were freezing 

even in her pocket!
and then she had a happy thought

(picture the lightbulb going on above her head)
..."oh boy, soon i will have a nice warm plastic bag of dog shit in my pocket to warm my hands!"

happy 2011 W00T !!

raglan has the best new year's eve party from 1 pm SLT (same as california time) to 1 am SLT with dj's and live performers taking turns.

here's a picture of mudpie dancing at some time in the evening, giving you a look at her mohawk. 

it's hard to tell a girl hamster from a boy hamster, and even mudpie found it confusing sometimes. she's hoping the long hair and the dress might make her more girly.

used space ships available

A M Quar is my current favorite musician in second life, mostly because he's had 2 performances this week at times that worked for me!

my other faves play at inconvenient times mostly.

yesterday AM was playing at The Enchanted Forest of Dyfed on Cheonma.

so glad i got to see it -- looks like the good old second life before we got so sophisticated!

snow falls, sun shines, all is beauty

the low in florida was 35 F, which is 1.6 C.

my family moved to south florida when i was 10 years old.

that december, it was so cold there, my sister got pneumonia

my mother drove us around in the sun-heated car to keep us warm.

now houses there are better heated for the most part, but still, 

all glass and tile and cool surfaces, no cellar.

my neighbors are already in florida for the winter, and friends will be packing up to go soon.

last week, i was feeling a little jealous, until the sun came out,

and i realized what they will miss!

still some open water

but the falls look funny!

snowshoes

gators would have been smart in this powdery snow,
but i never got to try these snowshoes that i bought last spring and i couldn't be bothered.
my hope was that i could fasten myself into them without removing my gloves...my oldest rawhide ones had actual buckles, and my newer light ones still needed some fiddling to put on.

and i did! no more frozen hands before i even get started!
these are really for trails, not deep snow, but i just wanted to see if i could get to the library
through my neighbor's back yard, then behind the abandoned stone house,
then skirting around the back yard of my nasty neighbor...and i'd be there! with very wet pants!
and then i would have a trail to the library.
across the neighbor's snow i went (they are in florida missing all this fun!), but had to stop at their stone wall.
i couldn't see where exactly the wall was, plus some severe looking blackberry canes were just peeking out of the snow...
next time maybe i'll take ski poles and attempt the wall and the berries, or find a way around.

it's going extinct because....

who would read this article through to the end? only someone avoiding washing the kitchen floor. (me).
obviously the scientists involved did not read the last paragraph of this article, or they may have re-thought their ideas on why this bird is so rare, or maybe why it may make a comeback!

read the entire article, or just the first and last paragraph i've pasted below. 
Rare Albatross Expands Its Breeding Grounds
Two pairs of the short-tailed albatross, thought to remain only on two Japanese islands, have been found nesting on Kure Atoll and on Midway Atoll, American wildlife refuges in the Hawaiian Islands.
...and the last paragraph...
The birds that were recently found include one male-female pair, with a fertilized egg, and one female-female pair with two eggs. It is still unclear whether the eggs of the same-sex pair are fertilized.

amid the snows of winter

the first guests arrived around 2:15. John's turkey was beautiful browned to perfection! and the wild rice dressing, no meat products, no dairy products, no bread, no nuts, in respect for our guests' various beliefs and physiology, to have something everyone could eat, was delicious.
each guest brought something, too.
the first guests brought - mead made from honey from their bees, and grape pie made from juice from their grapes - tastes of summer past in the midst of freezing temperatures and snow! we started right in on the mead!
then everyone was there, with all kinds of nourishing food and delicious treats and bottles of wine, and we ate and talked for the next...really!...7 hours!
i can only assume that meant we were all having a good time. not even once was i tempted to say my father's famous line "Lets go to bed so these people can go home."
why these 3 couples we invited, who didn't know each other, hit it off so well, i'm not sure.
among the 8 of us were 5 atheists (3 of them buddhists), 2 jews, and 1 undeclared, 2 poets, 1 artist, a pharmacist, a shoe-store owner, a writer, a carpenter, a muse (ie do-nothing layabout - me), 3 leos, 2 aquarians, a cancer, a sagittarius, a gemini.
must be a recipe for success!
mix all together with unlimited quantities of turkey, veggies, desserts, wine and black tea. set in front of a woodburning heat stove with glass front, add a few candles and lowering dark outside with sprinkles of snow...

ski raglan!

(click picture to feel the cold air)
 
it's a long way up on the clanky ski lift! but the trip down goes very fast!!

the houses below look tiny!  
oh, because they are houses for tinies heehee.

take my money please

autumn in vermont is highly praised, 

but by late november it has me in tears.

lack of light may not really be the cause 

of seasonal affective disorder.

it's not just me 

perceiving the world through november-colored glasses

it is me perceiving the front page of the new york times 

huge photo of people trampling each other to death on a bridge, 

and piles of mail asking for help 

for the sick and dying and going-extinct humans and animals, 

the starving, opressed, tortured and enslaved men and mostly women, 

the homeless, the tsunamied, the cheated and lied to, the addicted. 

i want to give them all my money 

everything i own

all of it take it all if it will help. 

but i don't. 

i talk myself out of it 

and send money to the local food shelf, 

the local homeless shelter, 

the local environment and avian-recovery center,

the local library and of course 

the volunteer firemen. 

generosity, yes, sort of, but also in hopes 

that they will be there 

when i find an injured bird, 

or am hungry, homeless, wifiless and bookless 

and on fire.

The Wrong Alice

so did anyone like T Burton's Alice in Wonderland? 

i just saw it - wonderful characters and animations and scenery - but very sad about the story. 

i am an avid fan of the original tale and don't believe it can be improved upon, especially by stirring together narnia and avatar!

well i've always had mixed feelings about Burton's movies, there's something queasy-making to them similar to barton fink and faulty towers.

an underlying sense of eeeeeeeuuuuuuuuwwwwwwwww

ok i made this up

 christmas was coming soon. 

a woman came to the buddha and asked him to bless her plumbing so it didn't break down when she had house guests, especially in-laws.  

he told her to bring him a toilet brush from a family who had never had this happen. 

she emailed all her friends and finally even put a notice in the newspaper.
but no such family could be found!


so when it happens,
since you are already miserable,
you might as well breathe in the misery of everyone else in the world it is happening to!  

then breathe out a sense of humor and a jolly plumber to all of them!

Wootmas in Raglan!

it's wootmas in raglan again!
time to sing wootmas carols,
like waff-EL, waff-EL,
and we wish you a merry wootmas.
here's mudpie and a friend caroling

mud decided she'd better get a snowsuit - it was COLD!


then after a disorganized rehearsal we went caroling some biggie sims.

(Click to enlarge picture)

we sang wootmas carols (being critters, we sing about food) like ~*Waff-EL, Waff-EL,Waff-EL, Waff-EL...Born is the Breakfast Treat that is WAFF-EL!~*~

(definitely click this one to enlarge!)

and ~*~Here we come a waffling please feed us breakfast food, here we come a hungering so help our starving mood~*~
~*~Knives and forks come to me and a warm butter patty, and please serve us some syrup and chopped up pecans too~*~

Killing Mr Watson

after the war - the civil war - indians, settlers, fortune-hunters, mostly folks no longer welcome elsewhere, lived around the thousand islands of southwest florida.  over time they killed off the herons for the plume trade (yes all -- in hideous slaughter) most of the gators, and sometimes each other.  the difficulty of making a living, and finally, the hurricane of 1910, pretty much cleared everyone out.

last spring i went on a swamp walk in southwest florida - (read all about it here) - and then south past everglades city to visit the old trading post, store, post office built on an ancient indian mound (pile of shells) - the orginal building with lots of stuff still in it. fascinating to go through and read the history and imagine it all.

this book - Killing Mr Watson - takes place right where i stood on chokoloskee bay, and i can picture it all! the book is confusing with so many people and places, but as each person tells their story, the insights into life in those days is wonderful! mr watson is a legend in those parts, and this is the story pieced together from written accounts and interviews, and brought to life by peter mattheissen's imagination.

my sister has kayaked and camped this area of the everglades, and she reports first-hand that "There are remains on Watson's Place. There are cisterns, one with a huge alligator in it (alive), and a smaller cistern where you can't see thru the water. Back in the woods there are foundation remains and a big copper kettle. Unfortunately it is too accessible to motor boats so things are being carted off and the small camping spot is being trashed. You can follow the saga of his life as you kayak the Everglades channels."

The Big Apple Circus

when i was childless in springfield, my sister came to visit and we went early one morning to see the elephants and people set up a circus.  my sister is so much fun - she gets right into it. once she went to see the tall ships setting up and got offered a job aboard!  and at dawn at the fairgrounds, she got offered a job traveling with and setting up the circus! (she turned down both offers)

that circus was the last "old style" one i ever went to; it was a real turn-off.

but  years later in hanover, along came The Big Apple Circus!  using the excuse of my child, i went, and it was all new and shiny, no mistreated wild animals, no scarred and wrinkled performers, one ring, a 'european style' circus as i later learned.  up close and personal!

want to know what it's like to be in the circus? (i once seriously considered going to clown school in florida). PBS just did a series on the inside story of the people and history of The Big Apple Circus. six episodes. i'm loving it. highly recommended -- better than a soap opera or mystery series!

i don't get TV reception, but i hook my laptop up to my big flatscreen and watch it online. hooray for PBS!  you can watch it too here http://www.pbs.org/opb/circus/video/

see Paul Binder and Grandma and the circus "family" in the subculture of the circus world!  do clowns cry? what becomes of an aerealist who falls 80 feet? do 8th generation circus people get along with noobs? suppose an act cancels the night before opening? and more!

only a cold

4:18 a.m.
the cough medicine's worn off.
the kitten pushes my cellphone
and coughdrops to the floor
then crawls between the quilts
down to where i fear he will smother.
do you notice when you smother?
you still breathe, just nothing with oxygen.
gently, i remove him,
trying to give no encouragement of play.
i wriggle under the pile of quilts
meant to warm me out of my coughing,
pull the flannel sheet over my cold ear
worry that i'll fall asleep
and choke to death on this cough drop.
a square of light races around the room
and is gone.
who is driving this road at 4:18?
someone who comes or goes to work
maybe at a hospital.
they arrive out of the dark
to hot coffee and people maybe donuts.

i smile to myself.
or maybe a breakfast cook
at the diner. or maybe a baker.
my breathing relaxes and deepens
at the thought of fresh baked bread.
oh it could be someone coming home
from making snow all night
for the ski trails on okemo or ascutney.
or a woman in labor! rushing through
the dark to the hospital!
i remember the strangeness of it all.
the kitten is back, curling by my knees.
i think of all the good cats we've had
sometimes three at once like warm sandbags
in the bed at night.
he will be a good one.
i can tell.

---------------

tiny snowflakes appear one at a time

two handfuls of snow
fell since last sunday
one flake at a time
lightly sifted
by a sleepy sifter
a dust of snowflakes
that cover nothing
floating and twinkling

hank

a few months ago john started having dreams about an orange striped cat named hank.

he went around to some shelters looking, but no orange tabby.

then in october he found one, brought him home, named him hank, and he is one of the funniest cutest and luckiest shelter kittens in history i'm sure!

his favorite toys are 

a coiled up strip of paper

a rolled card tied to a long string

a ball of newspaper

a sock stuffed with 2 balls of newspaper

a paper bag with a few holes cut in it

everything else

he does scientific experiments with these, placing them in different locations and testing out various attack methods. stairs, doors, shoes, are great spots. 

flipping water and food out of his bowls is fascinating too, as is removing teabags from cups.

does he look slightly familiar?

web comics

the cartoon xkcd was suffering from illness in the family for which i was very sad, however, guest cartoonists rose to the occasion, so i'm discovered some new internet cartoons!

saturday morning breakfast cereal, overcompensating, buttercup festival, and questionable content so far! not sure i like them all but it's fun to find them.

Somewhere Towards the End

Somewhere Towards the End is a memoir by Diana Athill. i liked it a lot!

okay i never heard of her either, but it was on the New Book shelf at the library, somewhere towards the beginning, because her name starts with A. 

i didn't know it won the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography and was a New York Times bestseller.

apparently she was one of the great book editors of the twentieth century (sez the cover).

for some reason, i immediately like some books from the first page and dislike others.  it has less to do with the subject matter than with the writing style. 

this was one of those books that i opened to the first page, standing in the library, and decided to take a chance on it.  that doesn't happen with many, even tho you can take a good many chances on library books that you would never take at a book store.  i walked out with 3 or 4 to try out.  read this one right away- to the end!

i've read 1/4 of the s. hawking so far, and probably won't touch the others.

more and more, like my father, i start books and never finishing them.  i remember once he explained that after he read a bit of a book, he knew what it was about and could figure out what was probably going to be said or happen, so he lost interest.

Diana Athill's book kept me guessing. she is around 89 or 90 when she wrote it, and it is not just retelling incidents from her younger days, but also writing about what she does and thinks about now that she is nearing the end. 

as i read it i kept thinking of a friend of mine, who has a similar style, or voice, or something, to her tales of younger days and musings of current days. they both like to analyze life and search out what it's all about.  i'd never tell my friend of this similarity, for she would no doubt disagree quite strongly. heehee that's part of the similarity. but it makes me think she should write for publication, not just for fun, friends, and the internet.

elephant sanctuary much

this morning over oatmeal i read Trunklines from the elephant sanctuary -- loved it as usual -- and flitting in the back of my mind was the thought of how buddhist-sounding the expressions and presentations of the writer are. 

for some reason i assume he/she is not buddhist, and i idly mused on how much buddhism is the same as any open, compassionate way of thinking and living.

once that thought came, tho, i became aware of how scrupulously religion-free the writing about the elephants is. this is unusual in this day and age, when frequently there is an annoying religious tint or hint in any tale of doing of good.

i came to no conclusions except that these were wonderfully good people.

then on the last page, was a sad, loving notice of the death of one of the elephants.

the last word was "namaste."

man who shot etc

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance -- not a movie i ever wanted to see, but i got talked into it recently.  halfway through, i didn't want to watch any more, but i stuck with it to the end!

the next day i realized why it's a guy movie. 

(okay so this is gross generalization and stereotyping.  just keep in mind what my dear daddy always told me, "all generalizations are false." (yes including that one!))

inside a guy's mind:

inside a guy's mind is a mean, scary out-of-control guy prone to murderous rages.

inside a guy's mind is a guy who lives by the heart.  he loves deeply, cares hugely about all his friends and animals, he takes care of everyone and is always alert to protect everyone he loves from danger, even at the expense of his own happiness.

inside a guy's mind is a guy who lives by higher principle, who will fight for what he believes in and even lose his own life over it.

so there you go.

roles for women in this movie - uh - right.  plot device anyone?

imagine the fun i could have analyzing it if Annie Oakley showed up and shot Liberty V.

the history part is interesting -- women obviously couldn't vote, pommey couldn't come in the saloon, the railroad ruined the open ranges for the cattlemen -- tho they seem to be making out ok these days due to the gummint giving them huge wads of our money.

"Oklahoma" was way more fun even if the farmers and the cowboys couldn't be friends.

monster dream

one night i dreamt that a monster -- a blobby yucky sort of monster -- was eating all my winter clothes. 

it didn't want to especially, and i didn't want it to, but it had to be done somehow and we commiserated over it. 

"i suppose you will have to eat all my summer clothes too" i sez.

it sez resignedly with a sigh, "oh, you have summer clothes?" 

"yes, they are stored in the attic."

and so it had to eat them too.

plus all the stuff stored there, and the mystery boxes of who knows what inherited from great aunties or bought or received as wedding gifts, and even the big cut glass stuff my mom had for fancy dinners that nobody wanted after she died and who knows  where it is now either my brother took it for his girls or it went to the salvation army and some canny dealer bought it up. 

yes, the monster had to eat all that too!

poor thing!

pemphigus

i had lunch with a friend who has been dealing with something called pemphigus, a horrible auto-immune disease, for about 8 years. the treatment involves induced coma and bone marrow replacement and while almost killing him thereby saved his life. however he has been recovering from the medications for almost a year now. he looks to be in better shape than he has for a long time.

he is still in pretty much constant pain but as much fun to talk with as ever, with no great diminishing of his sense of humor, gentleness, his interest in people and curiosity about all things.  it amazes me that people carry on with their lives under such dire physical situations. i often think of a character in The Poisenwood Bible who has no legs, but lives, gardens, fetches water, raises her children, by walking on her hands (water carried in jug on head), and seemingly enjoys life. this sounds far-fetched unless you know some people who have chronic pain or disabilities and continue to have a lively involvement in all that is.

remembering supe!

i'm standing about where the superman suit is buried. i miss paul.  everyone misses paul! if i start to write about paul i'll go on and on. the superman suit was his. after he moved out of the village, he still liked to come over on halloween to give out treats to the hundred or more kids who came knocking. most of them he knew from little league, had given them their knickname. and as always, he wore his superman suit for treat-giving. 

suddenly one year he was getting old, grey, bald, more the shape of old elvis than of supe. we realized that an old bald guy in a superman suit, complete with that red speedo thing and cape, a couple of holes in the blue tights, a gut like santa...was maybe actually scaring the kids!  and maybe scaring the parents who stood out in the dark street as guardians! HAPPY HALLOWEEN BUWAHAHAHAHA 

we talked him into retiring the suit. but we had to give it the proper attention of a sacred relic. so one cold windy day, before the ground froze, a few of us went with paul and a shovel and the suit up to the sacred village ballfield, and gave it a proper burial in an unmarked spot in the woods outside the back gate.

standing there today i imagine that someday kids will dig a hole here for an arbor day project and find remains of it. if any of them know who superman is/was, and have any imagination, wow!!
we should have thrown a few bones in just to make it interesting.

surprise!

low clouds hide the sky
no leonids for us this year
but in the morning - snow!
                                         
  ~mudpie