I had a strange experience yesterday, though I despair of being able to convey it in words.

I don't know about the rest of y'all, but I have a very chattery brain. If you come upon me unexpectedly, you'll usually catch me talking to myself; this is the only way I can hear my thoughts over my, well, other thoughts. If I wake up in the middle of the night, there'll already be a song in my head. It's very noisy in here.

Well, yesterday I walked to my coffee shop, had a mocha, and worked for a couple of hours. I completed a goal. Feeling very pleased with myself, I packed up my backpack and got ready to walk home --

And discovered that my brain had fallen silent.

There were no chains of thoughts, no ongoing arguments, no pileup of associations. Not even music. Thoughts floated into my head and floated out again.

It lasted twenty minutes, nearly all the way home.

I told the spouse about it and he said, "You're achieving enlightenment."

The kidlet has discovered Harry Potter.

For years I'd been kind of dreading this, because the series goes from fascinating-for-young-kids to really-inappropriate-for-young-kids very quickly, and the kidlet is not one to read books 1 through 3 and then wait a few years until her mother thinks she's prepared for, like, beloved characters being murdered onscreen and zombies and stuff. (Also I associate the books with inapproriate sexual shenanigans, but we needn't get into that.)

But she never showed the slightest interest. We did Pippi Longstocking and Laura Ingalls Wilder and Misty of Chincoteague, and then The Hobbit and the Enchanted Forest Chronicles and Amelia's Notebooks and The Jungle Book, and eventually Terry Pratchett and His Dark Materials, and last night when she said, "So. Harry Potter -- is it good?" I realized that she actually wasn't too young any more.

She read the first half of Book 1 last night. "I don't want to go to bed. This is a good book." This morning I came down and found her on the couch. "I've been up since six-twenty," she said. "This is a really good book."

Right, because there aren't enough actual fandoms in the world; I have to write a story in a fandom that doesn't exist: I've just posted a new story on the movie "Hancock" to my website:

Flight
Hancock/Ray -- NC-17 -- 1,765 words
"You wanna know why superheroes don't have friends, Ray?"

Beta thanks to rivkat and shalott.

Doesn't everyone have words and phrases that only have meaning in their own families? I want to hear yours, too!

Walter: Sad, but not with ordinary sadness -- with that voluptuous melancholy that you can sink down into and enjoy.

For a Spanish class, the spouse was reading the poetry of Lorca in Spanish, and he read me "The Ballad of the Water of the Seas" (there's a not-great translation here). The poem has a repeating refrain of "the water of the seas" (el agua de los mares), and the last stanza says, more or less: "And you, my heart, where was your deep bitterness born?" "Bitter, very bitter is the water of the seas." So we would go around saying, "Bitter, very bitter."

Well, of course "de los mares" makes you think of Walter De La Mare, who was melancholy his own self. So eventually we wound up saying, with mock solemnity, "Walter, very Walter."

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1. Who wants to recommend me a great vegetarian cookbook?

2. Overheard and overseen:

Me: "Did you ever think that maybe those concrete type people might be better at sex than we are? Like, we're better at thinking of the scenarios, but they're better at the act itself?"
Spouse: "Maybe. But their relentless focus on the here-and-now will become a problem when the here-and-now becomes the fat-and-bald."

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I am so happy to be home again, where I can see my cats, and go to the gym, and read in a quiet room, and go where I like without accounting for my time to anyone, and decide for myself how clean things need to be, and eat normal food, and converse with people who have some imagination!

There were some pretty nice days on our trip. We went to Daiso and bought a bunch of cute little bento things, though I already wish I'd gotten more. We took the kidlet to the aquarium, where she petted skates and rays and sea cucumbers and leopard sharks while the spouse and I talked to an adorable book-quoting deep-thinking xkcd-reading naturalist about animal intelligence and crows that collect loose change. We saw the Frida Kahlo exhibit at sfmoma. I ate dim sum for the first time.

But there was this heat wave that closed off many of our usual means of escape. (It was unpleasant to take walks, and we get glared at if we plan too many day trips). So we spent a lot of time cooped up in a very small house with the in-laws. Who were probably doing their best, but it wasn't a very good best.

Man. Every year the spouse forgets what this is like. Next year I'll say, "Maybe a week? Ten days at the most? Because we get on each other's nerves so much?" and he'll say, "Oh, let's give it two weeks. Why not?"

( Things I no longer have to do: )

Did I ever tell you how I came to have a library card in a town I've never paid taxes in? We spend two weeks every summer with the in-laws, and the only two books in their entire house are a lowfat cookbook and one of those Time-Life America books from the bicentennial. So every single day I go and hang out in one of the two library branches that are in walking distance, and one day I went to the witchy-looking redheaded librarian and said, "Listen, my in-laws have never had a library card, and we're here for two weeks, and I know this is against your rules, but ..." and she interrupted me and said in a deep and meaningful way, "I understand." And she got me a library card.

Anyhow, we're off to the in-laws' for two weeks of beautiful weather and excessive television, and that library card will help me survive. I'll probably be able to pick up e-mail every couple of days. I'll see you all after the 24th. Don't break fandom while I'm gone, because I'm going to need it badly when I come home.

So suppose you could do anything you liked, anything at all, and know that you couldn't do harm to anyone, including yourself, or suffer any negative consequences. (Think of it as a personal reset button, if you like.)

What would you do?




This question went around my old job for a while, and I was always very surprised at the answers I got. The Tech Goddess said, "It would involve a police car and a mall with a big glass window." The spouse said, "LSD."

Me myself, I don't have a lot of violent desires that I'm aware of, and I dream so vividly that the idea of an acid trip bores me, and I already drive as if I lived in a virtual world. Give me a reset button and I'd have a lot of sex, with a lot of variety in the areas of gender and number, and I would do a lot of nonviolent looting.

Maybe I'd throw some watermelons off of freeway overpasses.



Now: what would your favorite characters do?

(Yes, I'm bored; how did you guess?)

rhicauldrie has taken on the enormous task of creating a podfic of Transfigurations (and the mini-follow-up, Repairs). You can download the chapters from here.

Pretty cool, huh? Be sure to let the podficcer know if you like it!

The Tech Goddess and the Good Bad Boy have two sons. The younger one is in his early twenties; he's living with them while he's in college. I like him. He's funny.

(The first time I met him, he was six years old and selling popcorn for the Cub Scouts. The Tech Goddess said she'd collect the money. I asked him, "Can she be trusted with money?" He said, "Not my money.")

Last week, when the Tech Goddess and I went out to lunch, she was very freaked out about this kid. He had had a headache for several weeks. Also some unexplained numbness in his shoulder and arm. He went in for testing today, and I asked her to call me when she had the results.

So tonight she calls me, laughing so hard she can hardly speak. "First of all," she says, "it's not a tumor."

"Cool," I say. "Of all of our families, he's the only one who can say for sure that he doesn't have a brain tumor. Next time I need someone whose brain has been proven functional, I'll call him."

Still laughing, she said, "Not so fast."

( About this brain thing ... )

I'm looking for inexpensive* web hosting for a business. Anyone have any advice? (I'm looking not only for recs and anti-recs of hosting sources, but also for information on what I should look for, what questions I should ask, etc.)

* or free, if it's not clogged with ads or otherwise undesirable

Can anybody set me up with Garth Brooks' "Friends In Low Places" and Toby Keith's "As Good As I Once Was"?

I hasten to add that it's not for me; Ptom wants me to put together another CD for him.

Thanks -- got 'em!

Today at the fairgrounds, the EPA had a "Hazardous Waste Event." (Sounds like it ought to involve a dance and maybe the crowning of a Miss Hazardous Waste of Central Illinois, doesn't it?)

I thought we might have a can or two of paint to get rid of, so I went through the basement and the garage last night. I filled up the entire trunk of my car. Paint we used. Paint that was in the house when we moved in. Paint so old that when I picked up the cans, the bottoms came loose and these rounds of dried-up paint fell on the floor. (The spouse came down and saw one of these rounds and said, "Ooh, you bought an ice-cream cake?")

Also: Chemicals the former residents used on their roses. The little set of cleaning products that came with my first car, which I sold in 1996. Tile adhesive. And one five-gallon white plastic jug of something with no label and a childproof cap.

It took the EPA three minutes to clean out my trunk, but before that, I waited in a line of cars for fifty minutes. We went back and forth and back and forth like when there's a long line at the bank, and at one point an arm came out of the car in front of me and took a picture with a cellphone.

A hundred and fifty cars, idling for fifty minutes. I really hope this was better for the environment, on balance, than just dumping our old paint in the river.

OK, there were two more headless baby bunnies on the lawn yesterday. I buried them in the same hole with the first one and its head. I know it's probably a dog, but it's still beginning to creep me out.

So today I buried a headless baby rabbit that had somehow shown up on my lawn. Possibly this is the suburban Mafia at work. Also, the cat threw up on the catechism. I don't even know why we still have a catechism. There are no Catholics left in this house unless one of the cats has converted.

So here are some of the fruits of my eavesdropping.

At the coffee shop: "Stanford is where money swims upstream to spawn."

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Remember the Teyla, P.I. conversation a while back? As an entry in the paintedspires art challenge, leyna55 has painted it!

If you click the image to see the full-size version, and then click the Up To Gallery link, you'll see that she's made book covers for each pairing, and, man, I would read every one of them.

Wow, that was a long time to go without a computer. My laptop has a new logicboard, and they've added some stiffening to the keyboard half, so it feels subtly different. If I ever had my doubts about whether AppleCare was worth the money, I am now convinced.

I'm so very happy to be in touch with my imaginary friends again!

This period of computerlessness convinced me of some unsettling things about the computer, though:

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I still don't have my computer back, so I can talk to y'all (on the spouse's horrible Dell laptop, while he sleeps) but you can't reliably talk back to me. But I'm lonesome for my imaginary friends, so here: I'll yammer at you about jury duty. I just came off two days of it, which was not as much of a blow to my faith in humanity as you might expect.

(omg, the spouse's Enter key just popped up like a door with the hinge on the top. Must hide evidence of crime.)

( Anyway. Ahem. Leadership. )

That sentence was in my head when I woke up. I wish I could remember the dream it came out of.

I may be offline for a few days -- I'm having more iBook troubles, and want to get them fixed while it's still under AppleCare. Also, strangely, I seem to be able to receive e-mail but not to send it. Anyhow, however much I've not been in touch recently? Expect me to not be in touch even more.

Have some pie instead.

Kidlet questions I've answered this week:

• What does 'treason' mean?

• That magazine says a man is pregnant. How could that happen?

• Will you buy me a hedgehog? OK, how about a ferret? A rabbit? A snake? What about a guinea pig? A dog? A really little dog? Is there any animal you're willing to live with other than a cat? Can we have another cat, then?

• If I worked in the zoo, do you think they'd let me play with the monkeys?

• Does Pantalaimon mean something, or is it just sounds?

• Can we buy a present for the dog next door? It might be her birthday.

• I can't find the Caspian Sea on this map, can you?

• Is it OK if I give communion to the cats?