A two-bunny day

Storm-damp honeysuckle fills the air with memories. The giddy last days of school before being let free from chalk-dust shackles for another summer. Such magnificent freedom! A nearly endless expanse of three whole months ahead. Months in which to build Legos in the middle of the rug all day long or concoct action figure epics in the patio. Trampoline mornings, garden hose afternoons, and mosquito-hum evenings. Slamming aluminum screen doors, Caprisun pouches, and moss-filled sidewalk cracks. The ability to have sleepovers any night of the week! Bicycle figure-eights. Meatball alphabet soup lunch on dented PacMan tv trays. The unbearable burden of being forced to dress nice and spend an entire hour in church Sunday mornings.

Grieg's "Morning Mood" always makes me think of chicken and rice soup.
Dunno why.

Wind in the roses

Went for a nighttime walk, while it was cool and windy.  The scent of honeysuckle was on the breeze.  I think there might even be some starting to grow on my backyard fence.  I tried to suckle some honey a few days ago, but it wasn't ripe yet.  Blech.

Elsewhere during my walk I passed a rose garden, which the wind brought to me.  It got me to wondering why the scent of roses is so strongly associate with the feminine.  Is it just the use of perfumes, oils, and bath scents throughout the ages that has permeated the culture with the accompanying associations?  Or is it a deeper sorta thing.. like that study that said the scent of pumpkin pie mixed with lavender inexplicably aroused men.  Peculiar.

On another note, I was looking through some old tv commercials on retrojunk.  I saw a shanghai mcnugget add.. I had practically forgotten about those, but boy did I love em.  They were only out for a short time in the mid 80's, and they came with chopsticks and teriyaki dipping sauce.  I must have asked for those things every day while they were available.  Oh teriyaki mcnugget, where have you gone and why have you foresaken me?

I made homemade teriyaki sauce for chicken once.  I must have overcooked it, cause that chicken was like beef jerky.  Still tasty, though.

Spring! It exists!

Aside from a recent cold snap, the weather's been just grand.  The air is warm, the trees are leafing, the flowers are a-bloom, and the pollen, she is in the air.  So that's all very good.. except for the tornadoes.

A storm started late evening the other week.  Not unusual for around here.  Then the sirens started going off, so I ducked under the stairs.. the center-most point in my house.  The sirens kept going on and off for the better part of an hour.  Between intervals, I peeked out the window and saw what I later realized was the wall cloud passing right overhead.. that's the lowest part of the storm, a solid black, round column of cloud which spawns tornadoes.  It was preceded by a curtain of ground-striking lightning bolts.  Rather daunting, I must say.

The storm passed away north, and the worst I got was heavy rain and some wind.  Just a few miles away though, some neighborhoods got hit... trees uprooted and splintered, sections of roof gone, shingles everywhere.  Even my usual video store got hit.. they still have some ceiling panels broken and hanging. 

Well, that's Spring for ya!

crabs ahoy

Gosh it's windy out there today, along with rainy.  It tore the wreath right off my front door and hurled it down the stairs.  Well, then.  I guess nature didn't care for my x-mas wreath on the door in March.  That'll show me.

One of my male fiddler crabs has been losing lots of limbs lately.  Normal crab = 8 legs, 2 claws.  Yesterday he was down to just the one claw.  Rather pathetic sight, indeed.  This morning I caught the red claw crabs red-handed.. eating the remains of the one-limbed fiddler.  Well they hardly ever show themselves, and when they do it's to eat the plants and other crabs apparently, so I returned them today.  The fish girl wasn't supposed to take them back, but I guess I must have looked despondent standing there with my tupperware full of crab, and she relented.  So I got a couple more female fiddlers to replace them.  They're adjusting right now and finding bits of goody to eat.

Nerds

I was perusing a candy wrapper museum the other day ( http://www.candywrappermuseum.com ), and it got me thinking about some of the favored candies of my youth.  There was one particular favorite I had for years... the Nerd.  I first came across them sometime in the mid-80's, probably when I was 8 or 9, while I was in a convenience store with a friend's family.  I was immediately drawn to the funny, colorful little nerd characters on the box, as well as the gimmick of two different flavors poured from opposite sides of the box.  The most common flavor then (and now) was grape/strawberry.  Later on I found other flavors such as watermelon, lemon, lime, blueberry, raspberry, and citrus.  I became a nerds junkie.  I kept a ziplock bag full of them, all the flavors mixed up.. and not one of the little sandwich bags, but the sturdy, large size.  The nerd mixture was predominantly purple-pink, since grape/strawberry were the most common.  I'd sit in front of the tv with my nerds bag, dipping my fingers into the little pebbly candies and eating them by the handful, letting the hard shells dissolve into a mouthful of pure sugar... with a bag of tropical CapriSun to wash em down.  Probably not the healthiest snack, but there you go. 

I even saved up proofs of purchase and ordered a special promotional toy.  Eight weeks later (after daily mail-checking) it arrived: a purple plush Nerd doll!  That was a great doll.  Those were the days.  Nerds, Ewoks, Legos, CapriSun and ColecoVision.

A whole new year

Yep.  A new year.  Another year older.  I've been a little sad lately, because I'm still searching.  Each year I try to assure myself that this will be the one.. that by this time next year I'll have someone of my very own.  But each year passes and that hasn't changed.  I dunno.  I'll get by.

Looks like I haven't posted since before xmas.  Well, it was a fine xmas as xmasses go.  I got some nice presents, and I even got the lights down in a timely fashion.  And I've had a birthday since then, upon which I was pleasantly surprised to receive a candy-colored knitted security blanket and a cat-shaped cake.

On a whim, I set up a small 10 gallon fishtank next to my computer.  It's mainly for small crabs, but I have a couple guppies in there right now, and some live plants.  It's still cycling, as new tanks must, and it'll be a wonder if any survive til next month.  But for now it's soothing to look at.

Right now I'm just getting over a rather unpleasant bout of food poisoning or stomach flu.  Not sure which it was, but it was unpleasant either way.  And yesterday morning I stepped out for groceries to find that my car had been hit-and-runned in the night.. right headlight assembly totally smashed in and some frame damage.  I don't know how bad the damage is yet, will have to wait for the insurance adjuster to come give me an adjustment.

Also in the last week I've been looking around at deviant art pages.  People who like art of any type should take a peek through there.. there's tons of user pages with subjects traditionally, kinky, and just plain strange.  I must have 50 pages bookmarked, and still lots to go through.

O, that Xmas Cheer

Well.  That was unpleasant.  I get food poisoning/stomach virus maybe a couple times a year, so it's not that big a deal.  When you tear your throat and vomit blood.. that's when things get interesting.  Anyhoo, even that passed quickly enough.  Just to be sure, I went to the doctor, who bade me get a chest x-ray from this delightfully antique x-ray machine.  I kind of like vintage medical equipment.  It all looks so much more medicalish than the sleek computerized devices of today.
I got off my duff and set my tree up tonight.  This year it's going to be white with pink lights and ornaments, and why not?  Also, it came to my attention that of the two strings of outdoor lights I hung on the roof, only one was blinking.  That just looked odd.  So I got me some replacement blinky bulbs, climbed back onto the roof, and made the non-blinky string go blinky.  Now that that's fixed, the formerly blinky side has decided to curtail its blinking activity by half.  Sigh.  I really don't wanna climb back up there again.

Again, I opted for a more minimalist approach to the tree modification:  lights, a few boxes of simple, glass ornaments.  When I was young, we would get huge fir trees that always had to be sawed off (at the top or bottom) to fit, with long gangly branches with large open spaces, that would take up half of the living room once it was screwed into its stand and properly balanced.  Seasonal music would be placed on the old, faux-wood-grain record player.  Then out would come the Giant Box of Christmas from under the stairs.  This huge, time-worn box (the top edges soft and creased by the weight of eager children trying to peer over the edge and reach inside) contained pure holiday heaven to a young child's eyes-- filled to the brim with house decorations and ornaments.  Then the tree would be decorated with miles of lights (the big bulbs, not the dainty ones), complete with large, aluminum reflectors, and loads of silver tinsel (I recall loving to thrust my hands into the tinsel box and squeeezing.. mmm..  tinsel squishiness.)  Then came the hundreds of ornaments, of which very few twos were alike.  Mirrored stars and balls, elaborate homemade ornaments, glass ones, clear ones, cloth ones, plastic ones, pretty ones, gaudy ones, pipe cleaner ones, fake birds (both new and mangled cat-attacked ones), and just about everything else imaginable.  A chaotic cacophany of christmas cheer.  The frickin holiday spirit threw up all over those trees and, god, it was wonderful. 

I had adventures on those trees.  My mind would wander along the avenues of the branches between the needles and lights.  Wars would begin between different factions of ornaments (chiefly among my mom's homemade ornaments, which looked a whole lot like deep sea jellyfish) over ownership of the tree.

I had remember getting up early on Saturday mornings to watch cartoons in December, clad in my footed PJs, for cartoons (usually while the color bar stripe of the off-air channels was still showing) and plugging the tree in.  I'd be the only one awake in a darkened house, while it was cold and dark outside, sitting in the rainbow glow of the vast tree.  Slowly, as the bulbs began to warm and blink, I would hear the faintest, almost inaudible, tinkling of the lights.. tink, tink, tinkle, tink, tink.  The sound of happiness.

I think you have to be a child to fully appreciate that kind of wonderment.  Only flickers can ever remain, and child-like glee is nowhere near the same thing as a child's glee.  But, still, those feelings were strong enough to keep me enjoying the holiday season despite all the commercialization, congestion, and whatnots.  It's something the real world can't touch or tarnish.  And so, though my tree is nothing like the garish trees of old, I continue to set it up and decorate in honor of those all too fleeting christmasses of the past.  Because that's something worth doing.