Outsideness, rabbits and Alice Cooper

We’re now in our third year in this house and yard and it’s only just now starting to feel like our place, if you know what I mean. We’ve done quite a bit of painting and so on inside the place, and we have most certainly spread ourselves (and our stuff) into every available corner. The outside has been a little behind, though, and this is the year that we started fixing that: vegetable garden, herbs, and so on. It’s nice, occasionally, to slip outside during the day and take a look at things – maybe pluck a weed or two. Working from home does have this perk, unwilling though I may be to take advantage of it. There are plenty of days where I go into my office at around 7:30, emerge for about 10 minutes at lunch, then disappear again until 5 or 6 in the evening. Other days I’m on the road seeing prospects and customers, and may be gone for a day or two at a time.

Yeah, I know. Cry you a river. After all, I’m still not commuting on a daily basis.

In any case, my point is this: it’s too easy for me to see the outside as someplace as a destination for escape, rather than as The Real World that I have to leave periodically in order that I might work. It ought not be so, especially when the weather has been so agreeable of late. My job, like many, has a fair amount of nonsense associated with it, and it’s clear to me that an occasional re-rooting outside is essential. It might be just a few moments of studying the sky – I’ve become pretty good at predicting coming rain by watching cloud patterns. Or it might be a few minutes turning – blech – the compost mound (which is still over-hot and over-green, and so it smells pretty bad at the moment).

Our landscape is rich with opportunities for nature studies and observation. True, we live in a suburb, and while it’s not as wooded as our last place, our home is near the edge of town, and so we’re on the cusp of some of the area farmlands. The buffers between the fields, along with the streams and river forks, form a sort of webwork of ecological boundaries. I’ve seen deer, turkeys, rabbits, skunks, turtle, snakes and all manner of songbird on my occasional bike rides. What might be seen at a slower pace – or even standing still – beggars the imagination. Cultivating the habit of mindful observation of natural and built landscapes is something that we – I -  need to work on.

In other news, the tomatoes had aphids. I sprayed them all with soapy water and that seems to have knocked them all out for now. We’ll see. I’m still catching the occasional rabbit in the yard, though I think it’s because the wee ones are leaving the gate open. The neighbors (and my spouse) are occasionally subjected to my suddenly breaking out in a screaming arm-waving  run, and there’s  be some rabbit, sitting there and chewing on a leaf, not taking the least notice until I’m just about on top of him. Then he bolts, and I chase him around our yard widdershins until he can find the gate and make an escape. Great fun for everyone except the rabbit, who crosses the road then resumes eating, nonplussed.

The almanac says that tomorrow will be one minute and thirty-seven seconds longer than today. Use the time wisely. Use it to say an Ave, a Salve Regina or an Alma Mater Redemptoris – May is the Marian Month. The current moon is waning gibbous. The next full moon is the Full Strawberry Moon – go eat some strawberries! We bought some as part of a Mother’s Day brunch around here and they were gigantic. Since I know you’re wondering, the children are fine. Two of them are off with my parents, so we’re down to only five right now. The house seems a little too quiet, but we know they’re having fun.

Finally, an absolutely, positively random item. I listened to Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies all the way through for the first time in 20+ years and was surprised at two things. First, it holds up pretty well. Second, the songs came off like the soundtrack of some modern theatrical musical. Something about the production quality and the lyrics. Just need a quick libretto and a few million in financing. Hey – if they can do it for ABBA, I can do it for Alice. Any angels out there? Call me.

Happy Mother’s Day

Assorted gardening related photos (updated with labels, which I couldn’t seem to do with the iPhone WordPress app).

Herb patch – parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme (!), oregano and basil:

Our Lady’s butterfly garden:

Vegetables-in-the-making. Back to front: tomatoes, peppers, zucchini and yello squash. Way way in the back are what’s left of the sunflowers, which isn’t much.

Compost. Mostly green, so a bit on the stinky side right now.

Intra in cubiculum tuum

The house is full of company this weekend. Big doin’s afoot. Thus:

All the grandparents are in town. Pancho is making his First Communion today at 2. Tomorrow is also his 8th birthday and it’s Mother’s Day. Two of our smaller girls are leaving us on Sunday, as one set of grandparents is taking them on a long-promised Disney cruise next week.

I spent most of Thursday fooling around with python and our product’s API. Any opportunity to reacquaint myself with python is A Good Thing, and I really should spend a little bit of time every week poking around with it.

The weather here has been – if I may risk my erudition here – craptacular. Huzzah for the rain and all that, but really, we’ve had enough now. All the creeks and rivers are well over their banks, the ground is so wet that there are large standing puddles everywhere and part of our garden area looks like a paddy. To say nothing of the mosquitoes.

I don’t want to turn this into a current events sort of blog, because my posting schedule is just too random. Even so, my thoughts on the local National Day of Prayer kerfuffle. Namely, the fuss raised around here over the mayor and governor’s attendance.

On the one hand, as E. quite correctly pointed out to me, this is a private event which is privately funded. If elected officials wish to attend in support of their constituents or as private citizens, no one has any right to prevent it. But the more I mulled this over, the more I couldn’t quite put my finger on why the whole thing just didn’t sit right. The more I pruned and weeded (my favorite mulling activities), the closer I got, and then it hit me:

When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may see them. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward.

But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you (Mt 6:5-6)

The line between public witness and a public display of religiosity for its own sake may be fine indeed, and it’s probably just as well – none of us were promised an easy road. But what do I know? I’ve my own issues of pride to deal with. Was it prideful to say that?

Probably.

Rats. See what I mean?

Conjunction junction

According to my Old Farmer’s Almanac, Saturn is in conjunction with the moon tonight. That means…well, I don’t quite know what it means. It hardly matters, in any case – the cloud cover here is quite impenetrable. The only conjunction I’ll see tonight is “ain’t”, as in, “we ain’t seen anything.”

We had our last den meeting of the year tonight, and spent a few minutes discussing plans for the coming year. General consensus: more knots, less inside work. As soon as I have a chance, I’ll pick up the book for next year and the other leader and I will start hammering out next year’s schedule.

The rain pretty much put the kibosh on any serious yardwork over the weekend, so I spent much of Sunday making a rain chain, which has now replaced one of the downspouts next to the front porch. Since it rained pretty much all weekend, we had a chance to see how well it worked, guiding the rainwater down the links to the ground below, in a sort of Zen symphony of sight and sound.

The result: not very well.

There was a whole lot of splattering near the top, which I think had something to do with removing the entirety of the downspout and simply hanging it in the vacant hole. I fixed this by reattaching a short piece of downspout to sort of focus the water on the chain, but then, naturally, the rain stopped. It looks a little neater and more finished-off. We’ll just have to see.

Here’s a picture of the final product. Clouds, but no rain.

The grass is getting long enough in which to lose things, so here’s hoping that the rain stays away for one more day so that I can cut it, and heave the trimmings into the compost bin.

Here’s the bin:

Those are pallets, attached together on three sides with baling wire. The front has a couple of hinges and, uh, a rock to hold the thing shut. This was one of E’s requirements – the heap must be contained. I freeformed the compost mound at our last house,  surrounding it only with enough chickenwire to sort of hold it together. But then, it was out of sight. Not so here. The bin also serves to keep the children out of it. Not that any of them would dare to go digging around in search of the gigantic worms. Heavens no.

I’ve been adding mushed up newspapers to make up for my deficit in browns to add to the heap. Even with the mostly-grass-and-greens pile, it’s still plenty warm in there.

Speaking of gardens and whatnot, the state of détente that existed between the local rabbit population is over. Half of the sunflower seedlings are gone and I think they’ve pillaged the eldest daughter’s cantelopes. My exhortations to chase the rabbits out of the yard was met with some resistance. After all, I had only just last week been warning the children to leave the rabbits alone. Also, they look cute hanging around, and here we are, scaring them into running all pell-mell. We’re nothing more than a big group of mean ol’ Mister McGregors!

Too true. I have no plans to trade in their skins for rabbit tabaccy, but neither am I interested in seeing them feast on our plants while there are acres of grass and other assorted weeds free for the taking elsewhere.

Salve, cuniculi.

Reading Moby Dick these days. So far so good. Learning lots about whaling.

That I might know

Now God grant I speak suitably and value these endowments at their worth: For he is the guide of Wisdom and the director of the wise. For both we and our words are in his hand, as well as all prudence and knowledge of crafts. For he gave me sound knowledge of existing things, that I might know the organization of the universe and the force of its elements, the beginning and the end and the midpoint of times, the changes in the sun’s course and the variations of the seasons. Cycles of years, positions of the stars, natures of animals, tempers of beasts, powers of the winds and thoughts of men, uses of plants and virtues of roots- such things as are hidden I learned and such as are plain; for Wisdom, the artificer of all, taught me.

- Book of Wisdom, 7:15-22

The rain seems to be breaking a little, so I may yet accomplish some yard tasks today: deadheading the tulips and maybe some weeding. The lawn will have to wait, which is a bummer because the grass is getting pretty tall.  The birds (goldfinches! cedar waxwings!) here are in full riot and the big ditch across the way is doubtlessly full of rainwater again, which means that the frogs will be back shortly.

The picture above is a colored version of the so-called Flammarion woodcut. It was believed to be medieval, but it is more likely to have been produced in the 19th century.  Fabrication or no, I like it a great deal. Et docere et rerum exquirere causas* – isn’t that what it’s all about?

Anyway – I’ve had a long and abiding interest in the seasonal cycles: changes of daylight, the movement of the sun, moon and stars, solstices, and equinoxes. In terms of history, it wasn’t all that long ago that these are the cycles that regulated daily life and I think we minimize these things to our own detriment. We are creatures of the earth – divine for sure, but no less connected to the rest of the creation. We head inside and bear down on the tasks at hand and lose sight of the changing shadows outside. Or the different kinds of light in the evening from one month to the next. The pre-Christian calendar recognized these cycles, prefiguring  – until claimed by baptism -  our own liturgical year. Consider: the feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, which is celebrated on (or around) the summer solstice. The days begin shrinking, bit by bit, until the winter solstice. What does the Precursor tell his followers regarding the Christ? He must increase, I must decrease. The year descends into night until the Nativity of Our Lord. The summer sun for the rich and winter fire for the poor dispels the darkness from our world, guiding us towards the morning of the year,  the renewal of spring.

We were meant, I believe, to live a little closer to the ground and sky than we do today. Cultivate a greater awareness of sun, sky, root, leaf, soil and stone. Re-root. Go outside.

But don’t forget the Claritin.

* – “To teach and inquire into the nature of things,” motto of our alma mater, the University of Georgia

On locales

The April showers came all at once and spent the better part of today soaking our area. Which is good, since we’re still feeling the effects of last year’s drought in some places. Certainly the area farmers ought to be happy – the hayfields ought to be in good shape, which means better winter feeding for livestock, and so on.

We have some good friends locally who raise some of their own beef. Late last year, we bought part of a side and it was delicious. We’re down to the last dozen or so oddball cuts and haven’t had a stinker yet (well, except for the ribs – they were a bit on the fatty side). They’ve upped the ante and gone to three head this year. Last week, the kids got to go over and feed them. From big bottles. We didn’t belabor the fact that we will probably be eating one of them at some point. The cows, I mean. Our friends always name their food animals after food (“Big Mac”, “Whopper”, “Chocolate”, “Steak” and so on). Seeing their place outside of town renewed the itch I’ve had to buy a real piece of property somewhere Out There where there are no covenants or city ordinances to prevent, say, a beehive or a chicken or two.

On the other hand, at the 2 year mark in this house, I think we’ve finally just unpacked the last box recently. Certainly I’m in no hurry to try to stage and sell a place that\’s still full of small kids. Ugh. We got lucky when we moved up here from Atlanta – put our place on the market and had an offer in the first week. Not sure we could pull that off again. Maybe in a few years. Our neighborhood is great, and we’ve finally reached a point where the insides and outsides are Our Own Place: paint, some landscaping changes, vegetables, compost bin. All the little things. We’ll see. Meanwhile, we scan the real estate classifieds and daydream about some of these 10 and 15 acre lots that are out there. Mmmm. I, for one, miss being surrounded by mature wooded areas. Most of the area around here is reclaimed pasture, so you can imagine that it’s a bit on the bare side. There are whole populations of birds and critters that go along with the trees, and I find myself missing them.Most of them. Not the roof rats. I don’t miss those little bastards at all.

Now everyone’s in bed and we have some movies to watch. Disc 1 of Season 4 of BSG and Munich. Have to pace ourselves, you know. Tomorrow, if there’s a break in the rain, I’ll unwrap the statue of the Blessed Virgin that we brought with us and install it near the butterfly garden. May is the Marian month, you know.

A note to the children: I found another one on the upstairs door frame. Hear me well: one of these days, I\’m going to catch whoever is doing this. When I do, that person is going to have two problems: a bloody nose and a broken finger.

May

Then came faire May, the fayrest mayd on ground,
Deckt all with dainties of her seasons pryde,
And throwing flowres out of her lap around:
Vpon two brethrens shoulders she did ride,
The twinnes of Leda; which on eyther side
Supported her like to their soueraine Queene.
Lord! how all creatures laught, when her they spide,
And leapt and daunc’t as they had rauisht beene!
And Cupid selfe about her fluttred all in greene.

Well.

It has been quite awhile. Rather than attempt to recap the last nearly-a-year, I’m going to borrow a page from the television script writers and just pick up in media res. Delicious hints will be dropped and just when you think all will be resolved, wham, there’s the season cliff-hanger. If we’re living right, we’ll get picked up again for another run. If not, look for the extras in the DVD release.

Actually, that would be a bit unfair, so here’s a recap: we are now nine hobbits, I’m still working in a semi-sales-and-engineering capacity, we’re still in the middle of Tennessee (had I not mentioned that before?), and were close enough to the tornado to see it drop down out of the cloud and start bearing down on our house. It missed us by about a quarter of mile to the north, but our yard was littered with debris from other people’s houses which were not quite as lucky. All told, 800 homes were affected (or destroyed). The loss of life was two – a mother and her infant. I drive by the place where their house used to be just about every day. All this on Good Friday, no less. I had resolved to stay home and work in the yard, doing menial (but meditative) work like weed-pulling.

But here we are. There are tomatoes, squash, peppers, zucchini and herbs in the ground. Off to one side, the sunflowers are starting to come up. If we can keep the rabbits (and they are Legion) away for awhile, we might have some vegetables. If not, we’ll have some rabbit. Still homeschooling, though not without bumps here and there. Still doing stuff with the Scouts. Still keepin’ on. Pulling weeds. Patchin’ drywall. Et cetera.

by stevecadman

So without further ado, a random thought or two.

I really need to pick up a reference book on Greco-Roman mythology. There are times, when I absolutely need to know the names of the Fates and the computer is just too much of a hassle. Someone will drop a reference in a poem, or I’ll half-remember their names while waking from a dream and it’ll drive me batty for awhile. How nice to be able to haul a book down and look them up. They are, by the way, Clothos, Lachesis and Atropos. One spins the thread of your life, the second measures it, and the third cuts it at your death.  Tidy! They are named in Hesiod’s Theogeny, which is where I had to look them up for the lack of a dictionary. Is it better just to go the sources? Probably. It would be useful to see the Greek myths cross referenced with the Roman versions. Because YOU JUST HAVE TO KNOW THESE THINGS SOMETIMES.

In between appointments today, I perused the wikipedia entries on May Day (since it’s tomorrow), which led me to The Green Man, and then to Jack In The Green, which had me thinking about Frazer again, which made me thankful to be Catholic. The drive home was full of green vistas. I picked up some rat food on the way home (we added a pair of pet rats to our tribe last December) and the second part of Pancho’s birthday gift. I hope he doesn’t…well, you know.

Anyway, happy Roodmas.

Home again, home again.

Just got back into town after a week in Seattle, where I was holed up in a training root for 4 days learning a little more about the products that I’m supposed to be selling. Or assisting in selling – there’s supposed to be a strict separation of Engineering and Sales, though in practice, that wall is little more than a curb. In any case, I thought I knew the stuff pretty well but came away with a whole new bag of tricks and quite a few questions answered. I go back in a few weeks for another session, then a one-day deal in NY some time in September to round things out.

I’m not crazy about the cross-country travel, nor about being away from home for a week at a stretch. The choice in this case was sort of mine – as soon as I got the green light to sign up for training, I max’ed my schedule out just in case someone changed their mind down the road.

In any event, it was nice to re-visit Seattle. I haven’t been in years, though I have some cousins and such that we used to visit there every-so-often when my brothers and I were small. The waterfront area is nicer than I remember, and I was pleased to see that for all of the other development going on, institutions like Ivar’s and Ye Olde Curiosity Shop are still going strong. And, please – daytime temps in the mid-60s? During July? I actually saw some ads on TV with “Beat the heat with our summer savings” and wanted to laugh. Then I was reminded that few homes out there have central AC, so an 80 degree day is sort of a bummer. Oh well. It’s all relative, I guess.

In other news, our smallest boy hurt his arm on the trampoline on the night before I left town. Turns out that he has a small break and will need to have it re-set early Tuesday morning, for which they will need to put him under. The temporary splint and bandage don’t seem to have slowed him down at all, though he’s a bit peeved at missing out on the pool for now. The new cast, we are assured, will be 100% waterproof and safe for use in the pool and tub. Who knew? In any case, little guys heal fast and he should be right as rain in about 3 more weeks. Everyone else is just groovy.

I picked up The Once and Future King for in-flight reading and passing the evenings while away. I read it years ago but only remembered bits and pieces of it as I was in the midst of the Great High School Breakup period. I’m in the last section now and enjoying it, though maybe not as much as Pyle’s versions. Soon as I wrap it up, it’ll be back to Great Expectations.

Then came hot JULY, boiling like to fire

Good heavens, but this place has some cobwebs in it.

For starters, we’re all still here. Just busy as all get out. I can hardly believe that it’s July already, but there is meat destined for the grill, beer in the fridge, and a bag of fireworks somewhere around here. As long as the weather holds, we should be in fine shape.

About the most exciting thing around here is the rabbit, pictured above. We have many rabbits in the area. There are also more hawks and other raptors here than anyplace else I’ve ever been, and I’m sure it’s no coincidence. We seem to lack the tree cover for squirrels and the ground cover for chipmunks and, frankly, that’s fine with me.

I’ve been engaged in a low-level cold war with squirrels for years now, starting with the one I found gnawing on our roof. When I shot him off the roof with the airgun, he fell to the deck, lay there for a moment, then took off and zig-zagged all over the place. I went into full-on Yosemite Sam mode, cocking and firing the air rifle to no avail until he disappeared into the weeds, never to be seen again. From that point on, he was the Dick to my Ahab. Moby Rat. From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee.

Anyway, no squirrels around here. Well, a few in another part of the neighborhood. They’re on their side, and I’m on mine. Détente, for now. I’ve been mulling over a proxy war via the local cats, but some things are better left undiscussed in the open.

But the rabbits are welcome. I have no garden as of yet, so I may rue the open-armed reception they’ve gotten in general, and to one in particular. The cottontail in the picture above took up residence, more or less, in our backyard a month or so ago. She can usually be found as pictured above – lounging under the trampoline. The kids don’t bother her and the dog can’t see her (as far as we can tell), so she’s become quite comfortable with us back there. Sometimes we can get as close as 5 or 6 feet away before she starts to hop a little. As hawks are not the only danger these “important prey animals” face, we have resisted the urge to name her. The Rabbit was sufficient, since we were not sure of her sex.

Well, until we found the nest anyway.

This is the nest. Sorry it’s sort of fuzzy, but I didn’t want to hang around too long. It’s a little hard to make out, but I counted at least three in there. Oddly enough, this nest was just out in the middle of the lawn in the back yard. We would have never seen it (which is probably the point), unless we hadn’t noticed her loping out to the middle of the yard and sitting there. One afternoon, about dusk, she was out there sitting over it when I noticed something with small ears moving under her chest, which is when I realized she was nursing them.

I went out the next day, pulled a little wad of pinestraw aside, and there they were, all piled up in a tiny hole. We brought the kids out, one at a time, to see them and declared that corner of the yard Off Limits, though I continued to peek every so often to make sure that nothing had eaten them, as I wanted time to get my explanation straight.

Happily, the Circle of Life talk was not needed – they seem to have bolted on their own. Everyone vanished for a few days, and then last night the mother returned and we saw at least one tiny one with her. We are presuming that the others were just hiding. That’s our story, anyway, and we’re sticking to it. The baby is small – probably only a little bigger than a baseball, and the yard we back up to his pretty shaggy and full of tall grass. Our guess is that the young are hiding back there in better cover during daylight hours.

In other news, we finished out the quarter at work and it was super-busy. You’d think that the beginning of a new quarter would be a little more relaxed, but no. The frenetic pace has carried over, which is probably a good thing. I have quite a bit of travel this month, including two back-to-back weeks in Seattle for orientation and product training. I’m looking forward to the training time, but not the time away from home. There will be another week of this in August followed by a one-day deal in New York and I’ll generally be caught up. Oh, and there’s a regional sales meeting next weekend in Ft. Lauderdale. This sounds great, but for all of the free time we’re likely to have (which is none), it might just as well be on Mars. Every hour we’re not at appointments and such is an hour we’re not driving revenue, you see.

And so the world turns.

In other news, our diocese has exercised its episcopal prerogative and shuffled all the priests around, as they do every few years. For us this meant the loss of a beloved little old priest from India who may be one of the holiest men I’ve ever met, though he would not like to hear me say it. He leaves us to become the pastor of a pair of churches elsewhere, and we wished him the very best of luck in his new assignment at a reception last weekend. But as a door closes, a window opens, and one of the men ordained this very year will be joining us in his first assignment, and we welcome him with love. Farewell and welcome, Fathers.

Let’s see…what else…

BookWatch: E is nearing the end of Mansfield Park and still can’t figure out how it’s going to end. I say you only need to read one Austen novel to know how it’s going to end, but I resist the urge to spoil it for her. For myself, I detoured back into Lovecraft for a little while but have started, in earnest, World Without End, Ken Follet’s sequel to Pillars of the Earth. It’s great stuff so far, as expected. We’re midway through season 2.5 of BG and are still having a great time with that bit of after-the-kids-are-in-bed indulgence. I think the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie is up there. We watched the third Spiderman installment last weekend and were a little underwhelmed. It was fun and all, but paled pretty badly next to the recent Hulk and Iron Man movies. As for the upcoming Dark Knight…well…let’s just say we’re pumped to see it. Enough said.

DorkWatch: The almanac says that we’ve entered into the Dog Days, traditionally defined as the period when the Dog Star, Sirius, appears in the morning sky along with the sun. During Roman times, it rose before the sun and was blamed for the hot weather. Thanks to precession, it’s been rising later ever since and now doesn’t show up until August. Hesiod:

When the thistle blooms and the chirping cicada
sits on trees and pours down shrill song,
from frenziedly quivering wings in the toilsome summer,
then goats are fatter than ever and wine is at its best;
women’s lust knows no bounds and men are all dried up,
because the dog star parches their heads and knees
and the heat sears their skin. Then, ah then,
I wish you a shady ledge and your choice wine,
bread baked in the dusk…

Ahem. Let’s move artfully along to Chambers’ Book of Days, which has this meditation on summertime dreams:

What dreams have we dreamed, and what visions have we seen, lying idly with half-shut eyes in some ‘ greenwood shaw,’ sheltering from July’s noonday sun, while we seemed to hear ‘ airy tongues that syllable men’s names,’ in the husky whispering of the leaves! Golden forms have seemed to spring up in the sun-lighted stems of the trees, whose high heads were buried among the lofty foliage, through which were seen openings to the sky. The deep-dyed pheasant, shooting over the underwood with streaming plumage, became a fair maiden in our eyes; and the skulking fox, noiselessly threading the brake, the grim enchanter from whom she was escaping. The twining ivy, with discoloured leaves, coiled round the stem in the far distance, became the fanged serpent, which we feared would untwine and crush her in its scaly folds. Scouts were sent out after her in the form of bees and butterflies, and seemed not to leave a flowery nook unvisited in which there was room enough for her to hide. Bird called to bird in sweet confusion, from leafy hollows, open glades, and wooded knolls, as if to tell that she had passed this way and that, until their songs became so mingled, we could not tell from which quarter the voices came. Then, as the sun burst out in all its brightness, the grim enchanter seemed to throw a golden net over the whole wood, the meshes of which were formed of the checkered lights that fell through leaf and branch, and, as we closed our eyes, we felt that she could not escape, so lay silent until the shadows around us deepened, and gray twilight stole noiselessly over the scene…

Now that’s what I’m talking about, though the shady ledge and choice wine sound pretty good, too. Have a happy and safe Fourth of July, everyone. I’ll try to write a little more often than once fortnightly.

Back, sort of.

Back from vacation. E and the kids are still in Atlanta visiting folks, which means I’m flying solo here at home for the week. It’s just as well – we’re at the end of our quarter and things are getting a little…testy. We had a great time on the trip: pool time, hanging around, the beach, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Took in a few movies, too: Iron Man, The Hulk and Indy 4. A good time was had by all.

Bookwise, I read Bernard Corwell’s Sharpe’s Tiger (which was really good) and started Desolation Island, which is great so far. My dad loaned me Ken Follet’s World Without End, and I just ordered a copy of Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance from Amazon. I was spurred to order it after watching Apocalypse Now Redux last night. Three-hours-plus of Coppola’s Vietnam nightmare. I’m glad I saw it – the original cut has been a favorite of mine for years – but probably will not be revisiting it any time soon. Towards the end, From Ritual to Romance is seen on Kurtz’s desk, alongside Frazer’s The Golden Bough. I’ve read Frazer and occasionally go back to it, just for the literary ya-yas. As to it’s place in anthropology, I’m not qualified to judge. It’s impact on literature in general (and Eliot in particular) makes it worth a visit.

On deck: Das Boot and a few more ultra-quiet evenings before everyone returns to the mother ship.