10:22:06 PM    comment []  trackback []  

I arrived home from town this afternoon to find Gunter had pried the plywood off the insides of the greenhouse and was fiercely attempting to batter his way through the tempered glass. And my hammers and nails are all at the store. Trying to keep him away from me while I patched things up proved impossible (he weighs 70+ pounds and was very insistent about wedging himself between me and everything I tried to do in there). Finally I had to run in and fetch a couple of little apples to toss in different directions to lure him off so I could try to put the walls back up. Tomorrow before I leave I'll have to scour the garage for hardware and reinforce what I did.

I got paid. That was a good thing.

Had to mail it all away for bills. Immediately. That was sad.

I took an Office Frog to the creek. I thought it was best. But my heart wasn't in it, and that should have told me something. He just kept jumping out of the water and back up the bank toward the house. Just this morning he was pacing the edges of the card table, reluctant to risk a big jump, and I stretched out my arm and I swear to you he jumped right in my hand, and I moved it to the giant orchid cactus plant and put him on what passes for a leaf. He seemed to like the way it felt under his legs, smooth and cool and alive, as he hunkered there.

Now I feel bereft.

This was not a good day. I was itching under my skin, and clumsy and muddle-headed and ready for a fight. Maybe it's the wind. It's been roaring in the junipers all day. The air through rigid trees makes a sound like airliners, like freeway traffic. The ground rumbles with it. Even the dogs are jumpy.

But the sky. I should have photographed the sunset sky tonight--the whole of it in panorama, not just where the sun was setting. The turquoise of it, with bright sherbet-colored ridges of mackerel cloud stacked in the west, and in the east, piles of what might have been cumulus billows but, instead, due to the land's altitude and the mountains and the air currents, had formed smoothly layered lens shapes--lenticulars--where domes and thunderheads ought to have been.

That was a good thing to see.

I worked in my office much longer than usual trying to fix the theme template for the blog and when I finally got up to check on the beans and rice on the stove I found my brother laying his playing cards down in the pitch-dark livingroom because the light bulb was dead in the lamp next to his chair. So we had to have another talk about not sitting in a dark room, about how to turn on lights, about asking for help when you don't know what to do.

And that wasn't such a good thing.

It's just about bedtime. And given the checkerboard patterns of ups and downs we're getting these days, I can look forward to something terrific to happen tomorrow. I'll put in a cat picture. And hey--we'll be painting the two end walls at the store this weekend. I'm sure that will be fine.

Stay tuned.*

* The topper: This post has been trying to upstream for an hour. Argh. But we have electricity, and a roof, and clean sheets on a real bed a thousand miles from any hurricane.

OK, then.
8:43:59 PM    comment []  trackback []  

•  Not Your Soldier/Leave My Child Alone! For organizers of Not Your Soldier youth training camps, the only way to end the war against Iraq is to "starve the beast;" i.e., cut off the military's supply of young people. ... Not Your Soldier is trying to build a more effective counter-recruitment movement -- and that means empowering kids as organizers of their own peers. Young people can check out the site's "Pick a Camp" section to find nearby trainings. And parents can go to the Leave My Child Alone! website for easy-to-use tools to opt their teenagers out of the Pentagon's recruitment database. Under the federal No Child Left Behind law, schools must provide students' names and contact information to military recruiters or risk losing federal funding. Parents can have their children's information removed from the list if they submit their request by October 1.
http://www.notyoursoldier.org/
http://www.leavemychildalone.org/

•  Antiwar Activists to Converge on Washington Fueled by the outrage inspired by both Cindy Sheehan and Hurricane Katrina, the peace movement is rapidly gaining momentum. Here is a look at the upcoming September 24–26 demonstrations in Washington, DC, and actions you can take at home.
http://www.utne.com/webwatch/2005_217/news/11794-1.html

•  Jesusland in Ruins At the height of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's televangelical empire, the couple used millions of prayer-dollars to build a Christian theme park and resort called Heritage USA -- complete with its own fairytale castle. Costs inflated, and a combination of mismanagement and Jim Bakker's incarceration in 1989 caused the park to close down. This site includes a brief history and a photo essay of the ghostly abandoned structures sprawling over an area that exceeds the size of the original Disneyland, UK's Blackpool Pleasure Beach, Six Flags Great America, and Universal Studios Florida combined.
http://illicitohio.com/SBNO/heritage/heritage01.html

8:29:52 AM    comment []  trackback []