Year: 2005

by way of Dorothea…

Step One – Make a post (public, friendslocked, filtered…whatever you’re comfortable with) to your LJ. [or other blog]

The post should contain your list of 10 holiday wishes. The wishes can be anything at all, from simple and fandom-related (“I’d love a Mal/Inara icon that’s just for me”) to medium (“I wish for _____ on DVD”) to really big (“All I want for [insert seasonal celebration here] is a new car/computer/house/TV.”) The important thing is, make sure these wishes are things you really, truly want. – If you wish for real life things (not fics or icons), make sure you include some sort of contact info in your post, whether it’s your address or just your email address where [$MYTHICAL HOLIDAY FIGURE] could get in touch with you. – Also, make sure you post some version of these guidelines in your LJ so that the holiday joy will spread.

Step Two – Surf around your friendslist (or friendsfriends, or just random journals [or your feedreader]) to see who has posted their list. And now here’s the important part: – If you see a wish you can grant, and it’s in your heart to do so, make someone’s wish come true. Sometimes someone’s trash is another’s treasure, and if you have a leather jacket you don’t want or a gift certificate you won’t use–or even know where you could get someone’s dream purebred Basset Hound for free–do it. You needn’t spend money on these wishes unless you want to. The point isn’t to put people out, it’s to provide everyone a chance to be someone else’s holiday elf–to spread the joy. Gifts can be made anonymously or not–it’s your call. There are no rules with this project, no guarantees, and no strings attached. Just…wish, and it might come true. Give, and you might receive. And you’ll have the joy of knowing you made someone’s holiday special.

okay, so what the hell….

1. rain pants for cycling
2. to have all the old journal bits of my novel typed up
3. a new dvd-rom for the media computer
4. a long winter’s nap
5. plants for the side garden
6. a design suggestion for media diet
7. a gnomish sorcerer figure
8. a haircut 🙂 (I’ll probably do that myself the next day or two)
9. someone else to pay for SxSW for me (yeah, right!)
10. yoga mat

Today I’m not feeling too great, so I’m camped in front of the TV watching a tape of Guns, Germs & Steel, the PBS documentary of the book (which somehow I missed reviewing)…right after finishing _1491_ — which was *amazing* — and I’m vaguely disappointed. Not that it’s not fascinating, but I’m really missing any treatment of Asia, and finding the coverage of the Inka unsatisfying after my reading. Plus it’s so simplified even in comparison with the book.

Saturday afternoons, aside from cheesy scifi and ludicrous comedy, are for PBS. Specifically, the cooking shows, which are one of the things that I miss from giving up broadcast/cable.

Anyway…I was going to write something more, but I don’t think I’ve got anything particularly more to say right now.

Sleepy today, and curling into my cocoon…yesterday was way too much human interaction and so today I am once again fending off a cold that wants to take over. But I have the house to myself, so I’m slowly repowering with the usual cohort of juice, dozing, and doing laundry.

I feel like I *want* to write but have nothing in particular to say; lots of thoughts are welling up but I’m too low-energy to gather them into sentences.

Or something like that.

as per Shelley.

for me, Saturday matinee isn’t really so much about going out to a movie on a Saturday afternoon as it is catching something weird on TV, or renting an insanely familiar movie. and it’s all about summer days of my childhood when it was too hot to go out and do anything at all.

the little pharmacy/stationary store in our neighborhood added a video store sometime in the mid 80s, and we spent many hot summer afternoons basking in the air conditioning and trying to pick something that would please 3 kids and their middle-aged mom.

Mom doesn’t like scifi, but she loved The Last Starfighter. All of us loved that movie. Kid saves the universe and all that.

The other movie, which came up in my Netflix recommendations, that we rented over and over again, was Summer School. Silly movie, very 80s, a little bit like Breakfast Club, but LA, slacker, and oddly enough, heartwarming. (I put it in my queue, along with the Calamari Wrestler.)

Something about that time of day, the middle of the afternoon, when nothing is going on, especially when the weather is unclement (either hot, as in my childhood, or cold, as it is now)…makes me ready for all sorts of silliness. Dumb comedy. I think I got *that* from Mom, along with murder mysteries. I wonder if Mom’s seen Legally Blonde yet…..

what I have now:

bulbs…
* tulips
* daffodils
* anemones (do these come back?)
* orange oriental lilies
* crocus
* allium (normal, small white, green weird)
* orange flowers
* gladiolas (yellow)

perennials…
* shasta daisy
* yarrow
* honeysuckle
* purple spikes
* creeper with blue/purple flowers
* lamb’s ears
* fleabane
* creeping phlox
* plant with geranium-like leaves
* little grasses
* rosemary
* oregano
* candytuft
* lavendar

reseeding annuals…
* poppy (pink)
* california poppy?
* bachelor button
* sweet william
* snapdragon
* misc (various seed packets)

also garden art…
* owl
* bunny
* bowl I made
* Kat’s fountain/pillar
* glass sun
* copper woman

what I would like:
* more color in late summer & early fall: zinnia, dahlia?
* peonies!
* more herbs
* cosmos, nasturnium
* a better structure and flow, both in space and in time

It seems a little strange to be thinking of next year’s flowers when everything grows dark, but after three years I’ve realized that this is when it must be done. Next step is to measure and draw, and then to make a shopping list. The deadline for me now is to get bulbs in (and rearrange the ones I have) before any snow, or at least before Christmas.

I’m getting bored with my site design (again, as usual), and I need to integrate in my new Drupal site and the reworked media diet. I don’t have a concept yet, so I’ll throw this one open to the peanut gallery, assuming anyone’s paying attention:

if you could change one thing about my website, what would it be?

There’s so much to be thankful, it took me until Friday to list it all. 🙂

Okay, not really. But I am very thankful for so many things this year. My job (and my great co-workers), fluoxetine, bicycling, getting back to writing, Kat, Dorothea, Kermit, C, carpet tiles, the cat posse, home-grown tomatoes, the internets, D&D, and so on and so forth.

Yesterday was the most laid-back Thanksgiving ever…a very late turkey, some other treats, hanging out talking gaming & watching LoTR I. Today should be mellow too.

Pico, the youngest of the cats, has taken to bringing in fallen crabapples (from the World’s Tallest Crabapple Tree TM) and leaving them as presents for us, in the way that other cats bring dead birds/mice/etc. Our current theory is that she’s seen us eating apples, assumes that the apples she finds outside on the ground are of the same ilk, and is trying to give us something we’d like.

And on top of that, the one cat who does kill birds (Boingo) never brings them inside, but generally buries them out in the yard.

Weirdos.