Wildlife

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Comfort

I watch almost no television anymore. The only time we ever really watch television downstairs (Bob has a television in his office, and he spends most of his evenings up there) is when we're eating. I guess that's bad -- we eat in front of the television -- by the dining table is usually covered with my craft stuff, bills, books, etc. I hate admitting that, but it's true.

Once in awhile we'll eat at the table, but probably no more than once or twice a month. Anyway, that's not way I mentioned television. There are a handful of shows that I'll watch if I come upon them when I scroll through the channels. There are a few sitcoms I'll watch. I like George Lopez, sometimes Home Improvement or an old Full House.

In general, I hate "reality tv." I can't imagine sitting down for an evening and watching people be humiliated or embarrass themselves; I'm embarrassed for them, actually. But there are two that I do watch: Jon and Kate Plus Eight, and What Not to Wear. What Not to Wear is sometimes hard for me to watch; I always feel awful for the women when they find out that their friends and families think their wardrobe is hideous.

Jon and Kate Plus Eight is about a young couple with eight children--twins and sextuplets, just a couple of years apart. I'm not sure why I like it, but I do. If I'm scrolling through the channels and land on it, I'll almost always watch it if I'm home by myself. Tonight I watched it while I ate dinner--a bowl of cheese ravioli--and it was the episode where they were going to fly to Chicago to be on Oprah.

Kate was packing their suitcases, and she told the kids to go get their "comfort item." I think that's how she put it. Two of the little kids had "chewies," cloth diapers that they chewed on, apparently. A couple of them had dolls, some had stuffed animals, one had one of those towels with an animal head on the corner. It was just interesting--she said that now that they had taken a few trips with the kids, everyone knew what to get when she said "go get your comfort thing."

People always talk about comfort food; I guess the ravioli tonight was my comfort food. Bob's away this week on his annual fishing trip, and I wandered through Target yesterday trying to figure out what I wanted to eat this weekend. I was thinking spaghetti, then when I went down the frozen food aisle, I thought, "Aha! Ravioli!" I really wanted Mexican food tonight, though, but I went by Chipotle and for some reason, they don't have any salsa. There's a sign up on the counter, something like, "Our apologies, but our tomato salsa is currently unavailable."

I didn't get close enough to read the sign, it doesn't really matter. Without salsa, what's the point? And I thought about going to a little Mexican place near our house, but I wasn't dressed very well--not that I would need to there, of course--and I just didn't feel like having someone wait on me, I guess, so I came home.

This weekend has been hard. I'm not sure why. Of course I miss Bob, but it's not like he's never gone away before. I tend to think it's biological--I don't know if it's hormonal, or chemical imbalance or what. Of course my job is stressful, and that's bothering me, and there are other things, but it's all just life, I guess. Just life.

I was thinking about comfort things--what are my comfort things? My comfort food, if I had to choose one, would probably be pasta. Macaroni and cheese or spaghetti (or ravioli!). As far as comfort "things," I don't know. I know that I always feels like I have to have a book with me, but that's more a feeling of not wanting to get caught somewhere and be bored. But there are certain books that are comforts to me. I think that's why I like series books--a comfortable set of characters doing more or less the same thing every time. I know that a lot of people would find that boring, but I find it, well, comforting.

Last week I finished the most recent "Sookie Stackhouse" mystery, "From Dead to Worse, by Charlaine Harris, and I'd listened to a couple of the earlier books on CD in the car over the last few weeks. I'd kind of forgotten how spunky the heroine is, how strong. Sookie is a waitress in a small Southern town, and she is a telepath, able to read minds, which makes her something of an outcast. She refers to it as her "disability."

In the world of these books, vampires and werewolves and shapeshifters are out in the open, and when Sookie meets a vampire, she realizes that she can't read his mind, and the silence is so wonderful that she starts dating him. Throughout the series she's dated other "supernaturals," but it's the vampires that she spends the most time with because with them, she doesn't feel so strange.

I also just finished listening to The Outlaw Demon Wails, by Kim Harrison. In this series, Rachel Morgan is a witch who works as a "runner," basically something like a private eye or bodyguard, depending on the circumstances. Her partners are a pixie (Jenks) with 54 children and a "living" vampire, her roommate Ivy.

I think, for me, when I finish reading a book that I especially like, I want to know more about the characters--I hate to let them go. A series allows the characters to grow and mature, and change. It's kind of like how people always think it's weird that Bob and I have been to Disney World so many times--I enjoy it, of course, but also, I kind of like knowing what's going to happen. I guess I don't like to be surprised.

Another series I've enjoyed for years is Elizabeth George's "Inspector Lynley" series. I just finished the most recent one -- Careless in Red. I actually didn't read the last one--in the one before that, Lynley's wife was murdered at the end of teh book, and the book after that was about the boy who shot her, and I didn't have any interest in that, really. I knew this book would be hard, and it was. Last night I was wondering if Barbara Havers--Lynley's old partner--would show up, and then this morning, there she was, waiting for the bathroom in the inn where he's staying, and where she has come to stay after being asked to help in an investigation, although not by him:

He returned to his humming as he toweled himself off. He was still humming, towel wrapped around his waist, when he opened the door.

And came face-to-face with DS Barbara Havers.

He said, "My God."

Haver said, "I've been called worse." She scratched her mop of badly cut and currently uncombed hair. "Are you always so chipper before breakfast, sir? Because if you are, this is the last time I'm sharing a bathroom with you."

He could, for the moment, do nothing but stare, so unprepared was he for the sight of his former partner. She was wearing floppy sky blue socks in lieu of slippers and she had on pink flannel pyjamas printed everywhere with the image of vinyl records, musical notes, and the phrase, "Love like yours is sure to come my way." She seemed to realise he was examining her getup because she said, "Oh. A gift from Winston," in apparent reference to it.

"Would that be the socks or the rest of it?"

"The rest. He saw this in a catalogue. He said he couldn't resist."

"I"ll need to speak to Sergeant Nkata about his impulse control."

She chuckled. "I knew you'd love them if you ever saw them."

"Havers, the word love does not do justice to my feelings."

She nodded at the bathroom. "You finished your morning whatevers in there?"

He stepped aside. "Have at it."

Comfort.

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Pictures

Yesterday, late in the afternoon, it started to get dark and look like it might rain. I usually leave the office anywhere from 6:00 to 7:00; I'm not sure what time the storm started, but I think it was sometime around 6:30. I could have left then, but I wasn't quite ready to. Shortly thereafter, the storm started in earnest -- thunder and lightning and hail, and I wasn't going to go out in that.

So I waited. Kurt and I were the only ones left, everyone else had already gone. We stood at my office window and watched the storm, and saw lightning strike a building in the distance, which was kind of cool. A little after 7:00 there was a lull in the storm, and I took that opportunity to leave; I think I was tracking the storm, though, because it rained REALLY hard all the way home. I needed to mail something at the post office, and I needed to get a few things at the grocery store, but I was afraid it would start hailing again, so I went home.

I microwaved a potato for my dinner (Bob was working late), then went back out to the post office and Target. I don't think I've ever been at Target at 10:00 at night before -- that's when they close. So it was kind of a long day.

While I was eating, I had the television on to see what the weather was doing, and I saw that there was a big fire in Kansas City, Kansas in the industrial area; a tank full of some kind of fuel had been hit by lightning, and was burning. I wasn't sure where it was in relation to where the office is, but on the way to work this morning I saw the smoke. I held up my cellphone camera and took a couple of shots; they definitely aren't great picture, but you can see the extent of the fire. They had to close the downtown airport last night, but the news this morning said they weren't worried about the fire spreading to the other fuel tanks, and were going to let it burn itself out.

These are pictures of the polymer clay beads and pendants I made last weekend. They were supposed to be "faux bone," or ivory, but I didn't get the grain fine enough, and I think they look more like wood. I didn't really like them when I first made them, but now they're kind of growing on me.

Some random cat pictures:

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Summer

It's summer!

I'm sitting at my desk listening to a soundcheck for tonight's concert at the City Market. My office window looks out over the market, and there are concerts on lots of summer nights. It's kind of fun; kind of annoying getting out of the parking lot, but interesting all the same.

I remember one night when a band was playing -- I don't remember the name of the band, it certainly wasn't anyone that I had ever listened to -- that had a somewhat scary fanbase. As I recall, the band members had a lot of scary facial piercings -- I looked them up on the internet -- and I suppose their fans did, too. Anyway, Dave left to go home, and I think I was the last person left in the office. He asked me if I was ready to leave, and I said I was going to be there a little while longer, but for him to go ahead and go home.

He'd been gone about ten or fifteen minutes, I guess, and he came back into the office and said I had to leave right now, that he didn't want me walking through that crowd alone. The guys here are usually pretty protective of me, which is nice.

I'm doing better in my Artist's Way work this week. I've written my Morning Pages every day, read the principles, written affirmations. I didn't know what to do for my Artist's Date; last night Bob was working late, so I took myself out to dinner at Chili's and sat for about an hour and read and had a very leisurely dinner. I'm not sure if that counts, but it was nice. I'll probably try to do something more "arty" this weekend.

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Lumberjack

I was so ready for this three-day weekend! I don't have any big plans at all, which is exactly the way I like it. Yesterday I slept late, got up and had breakfast, and after Bob left for work at around 1:00, I went back to bed with my book and read for most of the afternoon.

I finally got up and worked on some polymer clay pieces, then got dressed and left the house around 5:00, I guess; I was at Michael's buying more clay when Bob called. He had bought a pair of shoes at Bass Pro a few days ago, and he said they were killing his feet and he was going to exchange them. But he needed the box, so he asked me to go home and find it and bring it out to the store.

He met me out in the front of the store when I got there, and I sat in a rocking chair in front of the fireplace while he got the return taken care of. He came over in his stocking feet and sat in the rocking chair next to me to put on his new shoes, and I took a picture of him with the camera phone.

Then he went back to work, and I went to Borders, bought a couple of magazines, then went to Chipotle for dinner. I sat there for probably about an hour, just relaxing and reading, then I came home and worked some more with the clay. I was going for faux bone or ivory; they turned out looking more like wood, I think -- the grain wasn't fine enough -- but that's okay. I'm giving myself permission to try things out, and make mistakes -- and sometimes it's the mistakes that turn out better than the thing you planned.

The pieces are in the oven curing now; once they come out, I'll let them cool, then antique them with some walnut stain I bought a week or so ago. I'm always drawn more to the natural-looking things. I love looking at brightly-colored pieces, but when it comes time to make things for myself, I almost always stick with neutral colors. I went way outside my comfort zone and bought a few packages of red, turquoise, yellow and purple clay, but the majority of my purchases were black, white, and various shades of brown. Plus metallics -- silver, copper and gold -- and a lot of translucent. Oh, and glow-in-the-dark!

I put about a dozen polymer clay books on reserve at the library, and they've all come in now, I think, so I have a huge stack of books that I've been going through. They all have beautiful things, but the ones I'm most excited by are the pieces that imitate natural things--bone, ivory, wood, tumbled stones. I'm learning a lot, reading a lot about techniques that I want to try. It's fun, and it's not terribly expensive, at least not when I can get stuff on sale.

I finally turned the air conditioner on today, but we've been going without it until now. We've had the windows open and fans blowing, and Bob said he wanted to try to not turn it on until June, but it's beenin the 80's, and very humid because of all the rain we've been getting. Today both of the cats were lying in front of one of the fans, so I decided it's time. We'll sleep better.

One night last week Bob kept hearing some kind of noise that he couldn't identify. It didn't wake me up (very little does), but it kept him awake. The next day he discovered that it was a branch of one of the trees in the back yard hitting the metal cover on the fireplace chimney. He was standing out in the backyard trying to decide how to fix the problem; we don't have a tall ladder, but we have a short one, and he has a clipper with a ten foot reach extension or something like that, but even that wouldn't quite get it.

He was talking about getting up on the roof, but I nixed that. I'm not sure if he was serious or not, but I definitely didn't want him up on the roof. I wasn't too pleased with him on a ladder, frankly, but the clipper thing wasn't too scary. What got scary was when he attached this extremely wicked looking blade to it and started sawing the branches.

I couldn't even stay out there and watch. I suggested he put on safety goggles, which he did, and he put on boots and a hardhat. I could just see the blade coming loose and dropping to cut off his toes, or him falling backwards off the ladder and the blade cutting off his head . . . It was making me crazy, so I told him if he was going to do it, fine, but I wasn't going to watch.

I don't know how long he was out there, but he was really working hard. It was pretty hard to saw something so far away with a saw that you really weren't able to control all that well, but he eventually succeeded in cutting off three limbs that were hitting the roof. He was pretty proud of himself (understandably). He asked me to take his picture. He was singing the Monty Python "Lumberjack" song . . .

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