Wayback - Cradle Robbing

In 2000, I went to Italy for 12 days. While there, I got a crush on a boy many years younger. This is me explaining to two former readers of this blog. From August 25, 2004.

For Diva and Trillian, a tale of (almost) unrequited love.

He’s just adorable. Amused gray eyes, shy smile, large, strong arms and hands, tall enough to look up at, and smart, but oh, way too young. He came on slowly, just getting under my skin. It could have been the exotic location, or it could be that he’s just adorable. I found myself looking for him everywhere, wanting to know exactly where he stood with relation to me at all times. If I wasn’t looking directly at him, I used my peripheral vision to search for the black hair, the beard or the blue baseball cap.

In the cathedrals and in the ruins, I found myself standing in the back, away from the guide at the front of the crowd, just so I could talk to him and be close to him. He’s so eager to learn, so aware of everything around him, so positive about everything. I wonder if I was ever that young, ever that polite, or ever that enthusiastic.

I started to admire him in Venice, noticed his build, the maleness of his body and the way he moved. He held a beer, a Beck’s, in one hand as he saw me look at him, and managed to look sheepish and unapologetic at the same time. On the long ride to Florence in the bus, I played games with his cousin in the hopes that I could get his attention and talk to him. It took a while, but it seemed to work. We played card games and Uno, and I taught him how to play Gin. He proceeded to kick my ass in Gin almost every time thereafter, but I taught him. Maybe some day I’ll get to ask him his strategy, how he manages to win at least 3 out of 4 games.

In Florence, he mentioned going out at night so we decided to go together. We found the open-air bar recommended by the guidebook, and had a few drinks while listening to, of all things, a Dixie-land jazz band called Dixie Train. Had to go from Texas to Florence to hear that. He talked about music and movies, and was charming and funny. The next night in a Florentine bar called Be Bop, I was nervous that his leg was touching mine under the table as we listened to the cover band. I entertained fantasies about being alone with him, finding the courage to tell him that I found him attractive, or just jumping him in a dark corner of the hotel, but always turned away by the simple fact of age.

Thinking about him now makes me smile more than I have in a long time. Two nights in Rome I went to his room instead of going to bed, ostensibly to play cards and relieve my boredom, but in actuality just to be in his company for a few hours more.

I do wish to be 21 at this moment, more than anything I have wanted before. Does it count that I feel 21, that my heart pounds when I see that he responded to an e-mail, that at this minute I can’t imagine the rest of my life without being able to see his face out of the corner of my eye? (Maybe I can call him, and tell him that I just want to use him for sex. Any 21-year-old would go for that, right? I could call him and tell him that I have a crush on him, and he won’t think that it’s creepy at all. My family would approve, and so would his, especially since his mother liked me. When he moves to Seattle to go to stuntman school, he can just take me with him. That would work.)

I want the courage and conviction to do something about what I am feeling, or for the feeling to go away. I keep telling myself that there is no way that he could like me or be attracted to me. I am too old, overweight, too annoyingly sarcastic, and too passive to be someone that he could love.

Too many people were in the way in Italy, and also just me, embarrassed for what I feel, afraid of what my friends would think of me, terrified that he would not feel the same way about me. And yet, telling myself all the horrible things, all the ways in which it wouldn’t work, inventing flaws, I still feel these things for this boy.

Wayback - Long vs. Short Hair

Another Wayback, this one from the same month as last week, September 2, 2004.

About 18 months ago I cut my hair. Severely. I still have really short hair now, but my profile photos on the dating sites were old. When I joined my current pay site, I used a recent photo and I haven't had any responses. Yesterday I changed the photo to an older one with shoulder length hair to see if that might be why boys aren't a' callin', and I got 2 "waves" in 12 hours. After none for almost a month.

I am not ugly, with short or long hair. I have been called "cute" more times than I can count, which I hate, by the way. I am not a different person with longer hair. I even act the same as I did then, more or less. Why is hair so important to everyone?

When I cut my hair, everyone assumed something was wrong with me. Even a couple of my closest friends got worried, thinking that it was a symptom of a deep depression or something. One of them even took me out to lunch to try to find out what was the matter. Nothing is wrong, I just always wanted to cut my hair and see what it was like. I even made some art about it.

It was interesting to hear the responses from the different people. I got pretty much a gender-standard response. All the girls had to come up and touch my head. They walked around me and looked at it really closely and said, "What did you DO?" All the boys said, "Hunh. You have a really nice-shaped head."

At work everyone assumed that I was ill with something serious, and I hadn't even thought how much some of my students would worry or assume something was wrong. To me it was just hair, not my identity. Apparently I was looking at this all wrong.

Now I am sure that people assume way too much based on the length of a woman's hair. I must be a lesbian, I must be sick, I must be depressed, there has to be something wrong with me. (Okay, just so I don't get hate mail for this, NO, I don't think that there is anything wrong with being a lesbian but that is how many people look at it, unfortunately for lesbians. Except for almost every man who ever lived, but then the only use they have for lesbians is asking them if they can watch.)

Now I wonder what is the problem with a photo of me with short hair. Do the men assume that I am manly, or in the closet? Do they all have to subscribe to the feminine stereotype of long, flowing locks? Most of them don't qualify in that area. Why should I pull a bait and switch just to get the opportunity to meet a guy? If I start e-mailing someone, should I not tell him that my hair is short until I meet him? Why are boys so dumb?* (Don't answer unless you really want to. Most of these are rhetorical.)

*BTW, I am aware that I lapse too often into stereotypes. I apologize, most profusely. I have grown a lot over the past seven years, but didn't want to edit these to make myself seem a better person than I was at the time.

Wayback - An Art Teacher

This comes from October 6, 2004. There used to be links that now do't work. There is a blog called "Happiness Squared," but it's not the same one from 2004.


Found a blog the other day from links from others. I love to see what other people read, and almost always check it out to see if I enjoy it as well. I found this one, happiness is. . . when I looked on Metrotronic and I just had to comment on a post. The following was the result.

I'm an art teacher. That still surprises me sometimes. This was not my aspiration, as those of you who have read my "find your bliss" entry know.

What I didn't explain in that entry is my total lack of artistic talent. I didn't have any talent of which to speak. I still don't. I have learned skills that allow me to draw what I can see, that's all. Talent had nothing to do with that.

Now, Bear and any others who have ever seen my drawings are disagreeing with me right now. But. . .I'm right. Talent is the natural ability to do something, usually without formal training. That's not me. Without lots of hard work and learning a new way of thinking, I would not be an art teacher or even much of an artist now. Not that I am denigrating my ability to create realistic representations of things. If anything, I have great confidence in that skill, because it is a skill. I learned it, and am unlikely to unlearn it.

I try to teach this to my students. "Drawing is a skill." Sometimes your creativity can pair with your skill to reach amazing heights. If you want to be an artist, all you have to do is practice. I truly believe this. Hopefully it makes me a better teacher, but that I don't know for certain.

Yes, I believe talent exists. Talent, though, only takes you so far. Drive led me, a non-art person, to become an art teacher. If I had relied on talent, I would not be where I am now, with 650 loving, wonderful and open students willing to take a risk on my say-so. It feels pretty good sometimes to be me.

Wayback - Trevor

This post is about my little friend Trevor. It originally appeared on September 9, 2004.

Today I was in the hall, delivering some students back to class when Trevor appears and hugs me. He looks up at me with his adorable face and says, "Hi. "

I hug him back for a bit, and then let him know that I have to go. "Trevor honey, there are students in my room and I have to go."
"Okay," he says, "I can come and help you with them."
"Well, not today," I tell him. "We'll have to talk to your teacher and find a really good time for you to come help me. Maybe we can try it when you've had a really good day and have been nice to Mrs. Smith." I hug him again and tell him to be good, and that I will see him later.
I turn to go back to my room, and there he is again.
He looks at me and says, "How much do you love me?"
I put my arms around him, look at him, and without hesitation I say, "I love you a lot."
Trevor turns up his face for a kiss, and although this is not something that I normally do, I kiss my little friend. He smiles at me and goes back to his class.

P. C. Hodgell

My absolute favorite book, other than Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is called Godstalk*  by PC Hodgell. I have no recollection where I got it, but I know that I loaned it to a friend and didn't get it back for at least a year. Mine is a very beat up Berkley edition from 1983. I have no idea how many times I've read it, and I can't believe it's not more well known.

Her world building includes one of the concepts that I remember from tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser by Fritz Leiber, that gods exist because of belief in same, and must have followers to continue. This idea continues most recently in Neil Gaiman's American Gods.

I loved that this book had a female protagonist, a girl with no memory. She comes to a city called Tai-Tastigon and gets taken in by an innkeeper. Then she has adventures around the city, which has various organizations that of course include a thieves guild. Magic exists, and gods and other dimensions too. It's all fascinating stuff.

From Chapter 1, Jame (short for Jamethiel) staggers around the city on its most dangerous night:

Her legs betrayed her, and she went down, too spent to remember her bad arm until she tried to break her fall with it. Pain dazed her, spiraled her senses toward darkness. "Don't go," she heard someone cry. "Don't leave me alone, not again!" Yes, it was her voice, but this time no one answered. For a moment she clung to the image of that empty hallway, the last of her old home that she would ever see. Then it too slipped away.

The cobbles beneath her hand were hard and cold, glazed with ice from the bitter rain that had begun to fall. She lifted her face to it. It seemed to wash away everything - icy street, shuttered windows, even, at last, itself. Jame let them all go. Numbly, like a sleepwalker, she rose and stumbled on, beyond guilt and grief at last, moving blindly forward until the night swallowed all.


*Which isn't in print any more, you have to either buy a used copy or as part of an omnibus (also out of print) or reissue.

Merry Christmas

February 2010

It's not snowing here, and it almost never does on Christmas. But, it has snowed in DFW in February the last two years in a row, so I posted these as a suitably Christmassy alternative.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, to you and yours, and may you be with those you love for more hours than those you merely tolerate. Here's hoping that you receive warmth, goodwill and love in addition to whatever goodies might be under your tree.*

February, 2011

*Or not, since maybe you don't celebrate Christmas, I don't know. I'm about as religious as my cat (or some suitably atheist person I can't come up with right now) and I still have family time and gifts and crap. I'm not judging. 

Sunday Cat

Calvin on his new favorite pillow, rearranging for more sleep. He doesn't like the flash either.

Frozen Breakfast Smoothie

1 1/2 c. soymilk 

lemon or orange zest

dash salt

4-5 large strawberries, frozen

1/2 c. blueberries, frozen

handful raspberries

1 scoop soy protein

1 banana, frozen

optional: 

1 tbsp peanut butter or almond butter

1/2 c. oatmeal

spinach (haven't tried it yet)

Put the soy milk in a large measuring cup. (Mine is a 4 cup Pyrex, and I blend it and then transfer it to my travel mug to drink in the car on the way to work.) Grate the lemon zest in to the soymilk, about four or five times, and add the dash of salt. Add the strawberries, blueberries and raspberries. I add the protein before the banana so that it gets covered by fruit and doesn't stick to the blender. Slice the frozen banana with a very sharp knife (I use a ceramic one) and put it in, then blend. When you freeze the bananas, wait until they have a few dark spots on the outside before peeling them and putting them in a container. The frozen bananas make it extra smooth, and there's no need for ice if all the fruit is frozen.  It's sweet enough without adding sugar or other sweeteners.

About two years ago I decided I should do something about my diet. Not to lose weight, though that might be a nice side effect. No, I looked at my food choices and saw a blandness that couldn't be healthy. I generally ate toast with butter for breakfast, a deli meat sandwich with cheese and mayo, no veggies, and chicken and some kind of mashed potatoes or pasta with cheese and tomato sauce for dinner. 

I saw Alton Brown do a smoothie show, and went directly to Amazon to buy a hand blender. This model lasted about a year, and then the gears (?) that attached the motor to the blade wore down and stopped catching. 

I bought the Kitchen Aid one, which is okay, but I'm not sure that I'm cleaning it well enough because of the way the blade assembly works. It's got a plastic disk over it with a sort of loose attachment, and I know food is getting under there that I can't reach. Can you get salmonella from that? Also the Kitchen Aid doesn't gradually speed up, it immediately hits high speed and splashes unless completely submerged, and sometimes even then.

I'd love a Vitamix, but I finally looked those up and I had no idea you could get a blender for the cost of an iPad. I guess $200 is the limit I'd put on blender prices in my head. I used to buy tiny bags of frozen blueberries and fresh strawberries from the grocery store. Now I buy giant bags of frozen strawberries and blueberries from Costco. For a little variety, I bought the giant tropical fruit mix, which had too many strawberries and not enough pineapple for me.

I thought I might tire of them, but I haven't. There are endless possiblities, and even several websites dedicated to smoothie recipes. One of my other favorites is banana, cherries and 2 tablespoons of sweetened cocoa powder.

Now I just have to figure out a way to eat more vegetables, which can be hard when you only like corn, carrots and sweet potatoes. Kale, broccoli, brussels sprouts, beans, none of them appeal to me.

Wayback - My Little Friend Had a Bad Day

Back 7 or so years ago when I taught at the elementary school in a different district, we had a troubled, very young student. He had emotional and learning issues, and he and I bonded. Not all of the posts about him have survived The Great Deletion. Anyway, here's something about Trevor (not his real name.) This post is from August 23, 2004.

Last Monday, my first with Trevor, was a hard day for him. He has never been to school before last week. He doesn’t know the rules; he can’t do lots of things, and he strikes out when he doesn’t understand instead of asking for help. When you don’t know how to ask, you can’t.

My first grade class was writing their names on their work folders. Trevor doesn’t know not to do things with his pencil like poke people, throw it, and give it to someone and then grab it back. In order to help him learn not to do these things, I took Trevor’s work, his pencil and his ruler away. Trevor’s response was to kick the underside of the table for 10 minutes. Okay. I thought that we could start slowly. As I am making sure that the other 20 children don’t need me, I am next to Trevor after his tantrum telling him what he needs to do to get his folder back. I tell him that if he can wait for three minutes without kicking or making noise, then I will give his things back to him. Three minutes turns out to be way too long. I walk to him to ask him why he’s having such a hard time. He has his head on the table and his sad face on. I say, “You can do this Trevor. You can sit quietly. You’re a good boy.”

Without looking at me he says, “No, I’m a bad boy. Always a bad boy. I can’t be good, because I’m bad.” This almost makes me walk away and let him do anything he wants, but I must persevere, or he won’t survive here. I reduce the time to one minute. I tell him to watch my timer and then when it gets to one, he can have his things. I tell him that he is a good boy, I know he can be a good boy and that I love him.

He says okay, and away we go. This time it works. He sits and writes his name, and draws a bit, and then it is time to clean up and go back to class.
He looks at me and says, “You mean we can’t stay here? I don’t want to go back to the class. Why can’t I stay with you?” I hug him and say, “No, but you’ll do a good job in your class. I’ll walk down there with you.” The class lines up, and we go back to his class. I hug him again, and remind him that he is a good boy.

Then, last Thursday, his teacher comes to my door almost at the end of the day. I have my last class, and we will be getting ready to leave in 15 minutes or so. Mrs. Smith opens the door and looks in. I ask what she needs, and she says, “Trevor has been doing such a good job today. We had a talk, and I told him that since he wanted to see you so badly today, if he behaved he could come see you.”

Wow. She could have knocked me over by looking at me too hard. Nothing like love at first sight. I say yes, of course, and he comes in and sits and draws a little in the back of the class. He sits quietly and works, and after a few minutes I tell him it’s time to go. He shows me his paper, gives me a big smile and a hug, and goes back to first grade.

Today, I see Trevor first thing. He comes into school, sees me and I hug him. I tell him that he’s a good boy, and that he will have a good day. Unfortunately, this turns out to be less than true.

Later, Mrs. Smith’s class comes in and sits down. They continue using rulers. The other students complete their pictures and then begin to color them with crayons. Trevor picks up his ruler and starts hitting someone else’s ruler with it. He grabs the crayon box and puts it in his lap, four different times. I explain to him that he must share the crayons, but as soon as I move away from the table, it is in his lap again. I take his folder and ruler and pencil. Trevor tells me he doesn’t care, he doesn’t want it back. He doesn’t like me and he likes to be mean. He goes under the table.

I ask the two students at his table to sit somewhere else, for their own safety. At this point I have no idea what he will do. While Trevor is under the table, he starts humming to himself. I think, maybe this is what he does when upset, I’ll let him sit for a minute. I do, but then go to him to get him back in his chair. He seems calm, but then tells me that he is mean. “You watch out, I’ll be mean to you. I’ll call you names, I’ll call you a [brat], I’ll get you,” he says. The other kids hear this and gasp, and I tell them to ignore him. I tell him that he won’t do any of those things and then get him in his chair. He gets under the table again after I say that he will get his things back once he can raise his hand.

I send a note to the principal. When the student taking the note leaves, Trevor decides that he must follow the student, so I have to then guard the door so that Trevor may not leave the room. When the principal arrives, she tries to explain to Trevor that he must behave. He ain’t buying it. She accompanies us back to his class, at which point I leave.

I found out today that he's been abandoned by his parents and thrust on the grandmother, who also doesn't want him. Nothing like the innocence of childhood, huh?

Tomorrow he’ll probably be asking to see me again. I’ll have to deal with that when it comes.

Three Things

1. My car wouldn't start the other day, so I took it to the garage and they couldn't get it to 'not start' so they didn't charge me anything.

2. I hate the cold, and it's only 45° outside. It's a good thing I don't still live in upstate NY.

3. My cat loves my fake fur blanket so much, he's been grooming it, and now it's damp, yay.

Go ahead, tell me three things.

Prince of Tides

Before Prince of Tides, the Movie, there was Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy. The paperback copy that I own makes it look like a romance novel, and I'll post a photo of the back cover soon. I couldn't find one on the internet.

I've read it twice, and been in awe of Conroy's use of language both times. It tells the deeply moving story of one horribly dysfunctional family in South Carolina, and what happens when the sister of the main character tries to take her own life. Her brother travels to New York City to help her recover, and ends up telling his family's story to her psychiatrist.

Chapter 4 begins:
There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past. I am more fabulist than historian, but I will try to give you the insoluble, unedited terror of my youth.

Later, in Chapter 5:
I spent the first few days reviewing the tapes that so chillingly recorded the extent of my sister's breakdown. She spoke in hurt fragments of language. I wrote her screams down on paper, studied them, and each day startled myself with some clear vision of memory I had repressed or forgotten. Each of her phrases, no matter how surreal or bizarre, had a foundation in reality, and each memory led to another and another until my head blazed with small intricate geometries of illumination.

...in the unconscious I began to encounter both wild fruit and vast disciplined vineyards. I tried to censor the superfluous or the commonplace, yet I knew large truths lay hidden in the clovers, sweet grasses and wild mint. As gleaner of my sister's troubled past, I wanted to leave nothing out but wished to find the one rose that might contain the image of the tiger when found blooming on the trellis.

Sunday Cat

An older photo of Hobbes, about a month after I got him. He and his brother love this windowsill most.

Finished Banana Bread

Here's the banana bread out of the oven. I made a double batch, and got eight mini loaves for my favored co-workers.

Stanley Tucci

I'm watching Easy A and thinking, "Wow, Stanley Tucci is hot." I have entered that stage of adulthood where guys who are dads and are over 50 can be hot. Conversely, I no longer find Pierce Brosnan attractive, as he's gotten a little too doughy for me, at least in Bag of Bones. But ohh, Remington Steele? That guy was hot.

And Matt Bomer? So my type, unless rumors are true. Also, I'm not so much consistent in my attraction to men. Huh.

Banana Bread

White Nut Bread 
makes moist, tasty sandwiches for luncheons* and lunch boxes.


3/4 cup sugar
2 tbsp. soft shortening
1 egg
1 1/2 cups milk
3 cups GOLD MEDAL Flour
3 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
3/4 cup chopped nuts


Heat oven to 350° (mod.). grease a loaf pan, 9x5x3" or three 20 oz. cans. Mix sugar, shortening and egg thoroughly. Stir in milk. measure flour by dip-level-pour method or by sifting (see p. 6). Blend dry ingredients; stir in. Blend in nuts. Pour into pan or cans. Bake 60 to 70 min., or until toothpick stuck into center comes out clean. (Crack in top of loaf is characteristic.) Cool thoroughly before slicing with a thin, sharp knife. 


Banana Nut Bread
Make White Nut Bread (above) —except increase sugar to 1 cup. Use only 3/4 cup milk and add 1 cup mashed bananas. 

Again from the 1961 Betty Crocker's New Picture Cook Book, my famous Banana Bread. I've never actually made the White Nut Bread, just sort of the Banana Nut Bread variation on the page below the main recipe. I don't really follow either recipe.

I have no idea why, but I got it into my head that it needed to be a spiced banana bread, so I fiddled with the recipe over a period of about a year. I don't increase the sugar or decrease the milk. I double the butter and cream it with the sugar. Then I add the egg and the spices. After my experiments, I settled on 1 tsp. of cinnamon, 1/2 tsp. of nutmeg and 1/4 tsp. of cloves. I add two or three VERY overripe bananas and incorporate them. Then I blend in the milk, the baking powder and the salt, and lastly the flour. I never put nuts in my bread. I object to nuts in things on general principal, especially walnuts, which I hate, because they taste like sand.

I cook the bread according to the recipe, though I generally have to cook it longer because my oven temp is way off. I can never wait for it to cool so I immediately start to peel the yummy, crunchy crust off the top. It's good right out of the oven, or sliced into pieces and then frozen, microwaved and buttered. When I'm in a baking mood, I make a loaf to take to school for my mid-morning snack.


*From a time when people still used the word "luncheon." 

Things Wrong with Me - My Breasts

Offered without further comment.

Wayback - My Dad

Today would have been my father's 72nd birthday. Here's something I wrote about him from December 9, 2004 from before The Great Deletion.

My father stands about 5' 9". He's not very tall, but he has width. If he was a smaller object, you might say he had a good heft. He definitely takes up space, and he takes up space so well that people imagine him taller. His beard and white hair make him resemble either Santa Claus or Kenny Rogers, but he won't respond well to being called either.

His parents named him Brad, after his father, and he likes people to call him Brad, not Mr. He says that thing that older people say, you know, "Mr. X is my father. Call me Brad." He and my mom named my brother Brad too.

Growing up, my father played games with us. He did physical things, like hold us with one hand or let us grab his thumbs and walk up his body and flip over. My father the jungle gym. Later, when I got older, he played other games with us.

We had fun, mostly, except at Monopoly. My father insists that we play all games by the explicit rules, the ones written on or in the box. So, when we played Monopoly we had to own the three properties to build houses or hotels, we had to pay rent on everything we hit, and woe betide the person who asked if we could put money in 'Free Parking.' "Free Parking is just Free Parking," he'd say. "It doesn't say, 'Pay me for Parking here.'"

He and my mother share a passion for information and knowledge, and they've passed that down to their children. Each of us possesses knowledge about a specific area. Sometimes more than one. Brad my brother knows comic books, computers and computer games. Chloe, my sister (who just had a baby) knows reality TV, specifically Survivor and American Idol and the telecom business. Jenny knows music, all kinds of music. She knows the artist, the song title and probably all the lyrics too. I know movies and TV, and a little comics. (I love to astound my students by telling them that I accept all challenges to knowledge of The X-Men. Only failed to answer one question so far.)

My father and mother like reference books too, so we grew up with an unabridged dictionary, a giant encyclopedia, atlases and movie and TV show guides. Any time one of us said, "Mom, what does BLANK mean?" she or my father would go look it up, even if we didn't want them to.

I'm actually quite worried about my dad. Like I said, he doesn't take care of himself, and he drinks too much. We don't talk about it, except in passing. We all bug my mom about the smoking, so I wonder why that is? Big Brad won't talk about it.

A while ago, about a year and a few months now, my dad fell down. He hurt his hand and his foot. He lost a nail. You know, black and blue and then fell off? We had to have help getting him off the ground outside next to Jenny's pool. For a minute we thought he'd banged his head on the side of the house.

He got up, someone drove him home, and then he quit drinking. For a few months. Sort of like Mom quit smoking for a bit after the SECOND heart attack. Dad's drinking again, and I worry. He might fall down again. He might have cirrhosis. He might be pickling all his organs.

But, we don't talk about it. Not unless one of us feels especially brave that day.

The One - AKA Hobbes

Following along with Carmi at Written Inc., here's an entry to his Thematic Photographic. This weeks theme is The One.  Because I lack a life outside of school right now you see something that I see everyday, for which the internet has an apparently endless appetite. At least on YouTube anyway.

Three Things

1. Taco Delite has great tacos, so much so that yesterday I went and bought six so that I could have two for lunch, two for dinner and another two for lunch tomorrow.

2. I've had Dish Network since I bought my house back in 2004, and I think it's about time for a change. They wanted to charge me a fee when their DVR box quit working, and the new one keeps doing weird crap.

3. Both the estimable John Scalzi at Whatever and Patrick Nielsen Hayden at Making Light have recently made "Three Things" posts. I'm in good company.

Go ahead, tell me three things.

Mary Oliver

I've already posted this about an encounter my sister and I had in an airport with a woman who read us a poem by Mary Oliver. I'm endeavoring to cultivate more appreciation for poetry that doesn't have the words, "um", "baby", and "la, la, la" in it, so I went searching for more Mary Oliver to read since I loved "Wild Geese."

It seems I have a bird theme, which doesn't make much sense because I don't like birds. Here is an excerpt of The Swan:

Did you hear it, fluting and whistling

A shrill dark music - like the rain pelting the trees - like a waterfall

Knifing down the black ledges?