Your spine is a flower

Egad, that last post hath no title.

And today is Monday, so I'm in organized work mode. But I want to share a snapshot of morning work before I dive into blurbing these babies:

Okay, they're totally just making words up at this point to keep me employed?

And briefly, a highlight of my weekend was mishearing "Lancaster, PA" as "Cirque de Soleil," which made Mark and me laugh (I laughed harder). Another highlight was ice skating down a frozen river and around a large pond and not falling down. And a lowlight was seeing a full grown adult man in the Trader Joe's parking lot wearing a sweatshirt with a cartoon dinosaur that said in all caps DON'T BE A CUNTOSAURUS.

The room will arrange itself in your absence

 

Well, no, but...

You've gotta be kidding me.

Find the ceremony in every instant

Interrupting this busy work day/silent bloggery month with two very important items. First, in the course of blurbing the word natant which is basically a fancy way to say swimming, I found this helpful information:

Doge writing so useful much help

And part two is that a few weeks ago, Mark and I were walking Clover when we passed one of Zoë and Isaac's high school teachers. "What's his name again?" Mark asked, and I reminded him. After we were home, I opened my email to find a LinkedIn suggestion that I add this exact same person to my "network." (Not an invite from the person, just a LinkedIn-generated suggestion. LINKEDIN IS LISTENING)

You're the pupil in god's one good eye

My work queue has recently included so many antiquated, obscure, and fancy words that I feel like I'm writing a Decemberists song. Banderole. Cumbrous. Breviloquent. Ailurophile. Kemp. Maybe I'll call it Here I Dreamt I was a Vexillologist.

Weather report: fairly summerish. Summer-adjacent. The sun is shining at the moment, Mark and I were last-minute invitees to a wedding this afternoon, there are farmer's market strawberries in the fridge, and the only thing I'm concerned about right now is where my crow friend is this morning. It's the first time in several days that he hasn't come by to eat one single, solitary peanut in my back yard. 

THANK YOU

Their greenness is a kind of grief

Alas and alack, I knew this day would come:

HORROR OF HORRORS

How am I going to blurb this "word"? Ah, but there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. Right?

In other news, various birds and dogs, it's Calendar Spring, and tiny crocuses are poking up through dry brown leaves and dirty snow. It seems as though the yellow ones were tastier, since I've only espied purple and white so far.

And now for some things I collected for you on the internets:

I suspect Japan is the best place on Earth.

Hamster content.

More hamster content (not ham).

Everyone needs a wee baking raccoon tattoo.

And a sausage dog named Nigel.

People also ask.

Unique among the monsters

Thursday thoughts:

• Editing > writing
• My neighbor is actually a professional musician, but from here her playing sounds like jingle-jangles and actually becomes annoying sometimes

Well, yeah, cause milk is delicious! Also I truly love how this article is basically "the diarrhea wasn't all that bad."

It me.

More like the tipping of an object toward the light

Wednesday is my Busy Day™ so here I am looking out the window and thinking about how much I love a certain shade of yellow these days. I can see black-eyed Susans on one side, deep red lilies beside them, purple hosta spikes. And on the other, the potential of yellow in the massive field of goldenrod I somehow conjured in the front yard. Still to bloom! More summer to come! And the windows are open, and I have coffee, and a fan, and a yellow shirt my favorite person bought for me.

Hello, it's me. I've thought about yellow clothing for a long, long time.

In other news:

Sunblock In My Eye: the Liz Woodbury Story

(Again the mail carrier comes sidling between the hydrangea and the crazy native garden to deliver the mail, circling back to the sidewalk to make his exit. Does he notice all the monarchs dancing around the milkweed?)

THIS is how you write a headline, NYT.

100%

It's hard out there for a 60-pound fighting fish.

You look, like a dog in a suit, at once old and young for your age

I feel as distracted as I did that day I was listening to the Brett Kavanaugh hearings while trying to get work done (remember way back in 2018? Don't be impressed that I remembered it was 2018, I had to google it. Also, was that the Before Times? Or did the Before Times Era end pre-2016? Hmm, food for thought). Anyway, that was either the height of my distraction or the start of it. And today I'm probably just over-caffeinated.

The pipes are unfrozen, of course. In fact, after my hero's journey to buy a heat gun at Lowe's (I narrowly avoided getting trapped on the way home by a train derailment, expertly steering Virginia Woolf onto the highway and around to approach my house from the other side of town), Mark ended up returning it an hour later (sad trombone sound here). By the time I made it back, he had opened the bathroom floor and exposed the pipes, and they had thawed right out. Later, he shoved insulation in the floor.*

Spoiler: THEY CAN

Me, 2023

Work-related, believe it or not.

Time traveling.

*This may solve the problem, although it's an issue of the pipe being near an exterior wall that's basically not insulated so we shall see.

You want it to be one way

It's snowing, gorgeous fluffy snow, plenty of it, and unlike past years when I've been sad that the wintery weather held off until after Christmas, this time we got both: actually perfect Christmas Day snow, and this lovely melancholy January storm.

Clover wears her boots proudly, after an initial comedy routine of about 30 seconds, in which her feet and legs look like they're being controlled by an inept puppeteer. It's like an extra treat we get every time we put them on her, a moment of hilarity. (Without the boots, she limps sadly over salted sidewalks and stops every five minutes to clean snowballs from her fancy feet.) 

Okay, I should be writing some things so there will be actual money in my next paycheck, but I had to quickly link to this Tilda Swinton profile because:

"My ambition was always about having a house by the sea and some dogs."

And

She’s smiling, and says she’s got a surprise. We head off towards her car, Swinton marching ahead imperiously. In the car there are four springer spaniels in the back and a fifth, the eldest, Rosy, is in the front passenger seat.

We went to a January 6 vigil for democracy last night which was a little bit lackluster. Or maybe that was just me. There were a few guys with a flag that said FUCK BIDEN and fuck you for voting for him. One guy had a megaphone, but the crowd was large enough that it could drown him out pretty easily. The speaker said, "Don't engage!" and although the group was mostly middle-aged and older, I imagined a shared feeling among us all, the holding back of an impulse to surround those jerks and tear them limb from limb like in a Shirley Jackson story.

Elmo and a regular-ass rock

This is why I need to write stuff first thing in the morning. This is my brain in the afternoon.

It's on sale BUT WHAT IS IT

We were together. I forget the rest.

 

The liminal week, in which I do crossword puzzles, finish jigsaw puzzles, light and blow out candles, sweep and vacuum, sort cardboard, move chairs, nibble the last cookies, watch movies, water plants, do laundry, drink too much coffee, and accomplish many many other things in lieu of (paying) work that doesn't need to be done but could be done. Mainly, though, it's a bonus week with Mom and Dad and Zoë and Isaac! 

This is a one poem town

Hello! I found you some things when I should've been working!

Hey!

Mushrooms and coke.

Google docs suddenly thinks I'm British and I'm not mad about it

This. Just...the image this conjures.

Butt catapults for all!

My FB memories basically look like this

Dig a pony

I was so distracted from work this morning by 1) my Christmas shopping lists and 2) these puffed up brown birds battling over a perch on the red bird feeder, shoving and shouldering each other off over and over again, when there was plenty of space for everybody.

Happy last day of November, everybody. I'm still a little obsessed with the Beatles documentary, totally in touch with my child self who loved them* so much and was utterly heartbroken that they split up. 

Fun fact: my first memory (quite possible not real, but I like it anyway) is being in a playpen and hearing Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.

*especially Ringo, every child's favorite

Ephemera

 

One of my two favorite bruddies is coming back to Maine TONIGHT.

Mid-day work brain results in things like this.

In further avocado news, why would you name a mattress AVOCADO? The implications are just...weird. Squishy like guacamole, or hard as a rock like a grocery store avocado?

I would like more reassurance like this in general.

See you tomorrow!

Behind the clouds the sun is still shining

 

Mise en place

November's getting down to business out there today. I'm trying my best to keep it hygge in here on a Friday work day, the day my brain 100% believes is the weekend.

My life goal is to be a good iced bun.

I love you, Great British Bake Off/Baking Show

Lizzie 2021

Okay, forward through a rainy work day and into the weekend (full disclosure: the weekend is usually also a work day, plus extra sleeping in and watering plants and puttering in the yard, but I'm actually visiting Holly tomorrow so it's going to be a very weekendy weekend)!

A puzzle, a monster puzzle, a heavy choking, a neglected Tuesday*

I asked recently what someone's job was, made a note so I'd remember: cloud engineer. Now when I see the phrase (I wrote it on a work thing, I see it every day), I picture an adorable cartoon about a smiling young man who works overnight designing and building clouds. 

Part of my work these days involves trolling several news sites for stories and associated words that might be interesting from a vocabulary/etymology viewpoint. The stories can't be too violent or terrible, or controversial, or generally involve Israel or Tr*mp. There can't be too many Covid ones in a row, or, you know, an overload of environmental catastrophe. Adults might read this thing, but so will 12-year-olds. Hoo boy. You're generally left with a new prime minister in Samoa and a tiny computer on a snail and an upset in men's basketball.

Yesterday I watched a squirrel fall from above, abruptly, like the frogs in Magnolia. He hit the fence, tumbled head-over-tail several times, and landed in the Hostas. I seriously thought he was dead, made Mark go check, and then investigated myself this morning. There's no sign of a body, so I guess he staggered off? The plants are thick there so I'll keep looking.

It's a trick question, they're both correct.

*Gertrude Stein is making more and more sense to me lately, which may be evidence of a brain defect?

Astrophysicist and lead guitarist

Things all in a day's work:

Triple-double

Heir apparent

Left-handed marriage

"Assassin" shares a root with "hashish."

"Asteroid Day was co-founded in 2014, by Dr. Brian May, astrophysicist and lead guitarist of QUEEN."

Other items of note:

Adam walked over for dinner last night, and I made a delicious low-FODMAP meal (one food left to test, and it's APPLE). My brother walked over for dinner last night.

It is a teenage lifeguard's job to show up for work before 7am (how early? 6?) so he can shyly ask middle-aged ladies with dogs if they could possibly come back in 8 minutes (when they say dogs allowed on the beach from 7-9, they mean it).

As I was driving home from the beach, a woman on a scooter flew through a stop sign and screeched to a halt, almost hitting my car, dropping her scooter. I hazard-lighted, jumped out, and helped her pick the scooter up. She had on platform sandals and light khaki pants, and they were barely smudged from the fall. She promised she was okay. It was definitely her mistake, but in retrospect I worried that she thought I'd run the stop sign. (Reader, I did not.)

I am fasting for fasting blood work in about an hour, and I am hungry. I am also a dumbdumb: why didn't I schedule it for 8:00 instead of 10:00?

Sugar and tea and rum

Successes:

• A big work thing. I'm sad it's over until the end of the summer, when it starts up again (assuming I get the contract again).
• I learned how to pronounce Tove Jansson and Maira Kalman.
• I'm halfway through Adriene's 30-day yoga challenge.

Here I'm tempted to add things like "brushed my teeth every day" to this list, which is just pitiful, so I'll resist.

Beauty:

Another January day, another long walk.

I have been living closer to the ocean than I thought

I have gotten the bare minimum of work done this week, at least since Tuesday. It's been easier to accomplish physical things (printing a few t-shirts, cutting mask pieces for sewing, scrubbing a moldy line of grout in the shower, dusting the lightbulbs, running around like a maniac in the back yard with Clover, etc) than the careful arrangement of words in a document or thoughtful sentences explaining terms like "regionalism" and "cryptographer." I.e. my brain isn't working all that well. 

How about you?

The other day on the beach, Clover watched a group of dogs play, maybe waiting to be invited to join, or maybe just watching. It was this funny cartoon bunch of fancy dogs, like the start of a joke: a Borzoi, two Silken Windhounds, and a Bedlington Terrier walk into a bar...

This morning Clover got skunked in her very own back yard. Now our house smells like Nag Champa with a skunky undertone. Some things in this house are very, very clean, and others are extremely dirty right now (I'm looking at you, dining room rug). I am down to the last of my "election night" snacks, a bag of chocolate covered peanut butter pretzels. My magical thinking says if I could bring myself to eat them, the major networks would declare Biden the winner. We've all got to do our part, I guess.

Inquisitive music

I am so delighted by what happens when you take an elderly news article in the form of a PDF and you open it in Google Docs. You get...a ransom note.

What else is delighting me, you ask? Well, I'll tell you: the way Netflix captions describe music:

More from my internet investigations:

No thank you, I don't think I will watch. 

LinkedIn inspo. 

Not to be confused. 

You thought you knew all you needed to know about safety pins.