kiya

Every so often, usually when out driving, that "If I had a million dollars" song pops up on shuffle, and every so often I think about what I'd actually do.

The issue of course requires limitations. Because when people ask for the "If you had a million dollars, what would you spend it on" answer they're not looking for the answer "Hire a good accountant and maybe an investment broker, donate a substantial amount to charities I support instead of my usual $20 to $50 blibs, and pay off the mortgage". Well, maybe some people are looking for that answer. I don't know. It always feels a bit like a "You have these resources that must be used" question, often a "that must be used on yourself", and often a "right now!"

( Weirdly introspective materialist-universe ramblings. )

teinedreugan is away for two weeks because of crazed business practices. I will not be getting much time with him this summer, alas. He left yesterday, at a ridiculous hour of the morning, and is safely ensconced in a hotel in Utah. It's going to be awfully weird without him around. I'm not to the "Waugh, I miss you" state, and we've chatted a lot in email today, but ....

I am attempting to be more or less productive in his absence, though I have not made actual progress on things today so much as continued maintenance: started dishwasher, washing sheets and the towel he asked me to launder. I did find my seed corn and plant the second corn crop, though; the seed packets had opened up in the plastic bag they were stashed in, so the seed corn was mixed up with a few beans, peas, and some other random seeds. It is, however, large, and thus easy to extract, and the plots are now planted and watered. (That's whaffer.)

Yesterday, I assisted arawen with his woodworking, in one of those amusing displays of "My power exchange relationship is nowhere near as exciting as some people would really like it to be." He says I saved him about an hour and a half of work; Mongo good minion.

The box computer is b0rken. This frustrates me in unprintable ways.

Am considering moving the stacks of gaming books out of the living room and down to the basement, though there is nowhere near enough shelving to store them properly at the moment. But that would be progress on the ongoing establishment of order in the house. Pondering poking the Ikea catalogue to see if there is anything obvious for a couple of places that I want more shelving, rather than having to go to the effort of designing and building it.

Edited to add: Automated lolcat generator for LJ. Swap in your own name for your own posts; I got a few I rather liked.

arawen reclaimed the barcode scanner today, so it is time for me to work on cataloguing books that the scanner didn't work on, which is the dozen or more boxes in the room here, the mass market paperbacks upstairs, and stuff. In the fiveish days I had the scanner, I went from 598 books (assembled painstakingly over the course of since-November-when-we-moved-in) to 1261 books in the database. Some of that was the scanner, much was upgrading the program.

I baffled teinedreugan mightily this evening by calling his cellphone while he was on the way home from work and declaring, "WE HAVE NO MEATS!"

I did not dig any holes today. However, teinedreugan finished putting together my raised bed boxes, and we extracted the dirt from his car and moved it to where the beds are. So I'll probably be filling them with dirt tomorrow.

I am amazed that my joints have held up through all this, though my shoulder was strained earlier this week (I babied it a day or two). I did, however, manage to injure both my heels to the point of bleeding today, in fits of spectacular grace and failure to navigate the Huge Heaps of Books.

Friendly Orange Cat has been traced to the immediate neighbors. I was chatting with FOC, the neighbors came out, and he immediately ran over to them. "He likes you more than me" I called to them. "Well, he lives heah."

Life is boring and domestic. I imagine I will become entertaining again sometime, but for now, my life is almost entirely composed of gardening and boxes of books with occasional brief interludes of other things. Perhaps as a substitute for being interesting I will, when I find the camera, take pictures of either the gardening or the boxes of books.

Have meats now. Mm, dinner.

At the last training retreat for my studies with yezida, I commented that my experience of the apprenticeship program was like carving a farm out of New England: a year of learning the lay of the land, building the house, clearing out a few of the big issues, and then a year of going, "My gods, another rock" as one tries to dig, or plow, or clear out what the frost brought up.

The "rocks in my head" metaphor kept going for many of the people who commented after me.

So today I went and dug holes. I have a pair of grapevines that I got a few years ago, which have lived in a half-barrel type bucket which has now rotted out the bottom. I wanted to put them in the ground somewhere I intended to stay for a while, somewhere they had space to grow.

There's something about claiming the space, treating here as a place to be for a while, that's really potent, really powerful; it's something I tried to write about in my article for RTV, the magical act of treating the place as the right place. Not sure I got it out right, but that's so where my head is these days, with reality and domesticity.

So I dug holes. And pulled out rock after rock after rock -- round ones, big flat ones, things that ground up white against the tip of the shovel. Got a little stack of rocks now.

And vines in the ground. One of which has definite new growth, one of which appears to have buds. I had been worried about them making it through the weird, weird winter.

Vines in the ground, and a little heap of rocks.

As I left the counter holding the guitar case:

"Now you have to name her."

Aw, geez.

A random link: Spong reviews The Da Vinci Code.

Am back at home after a busy weekend.

Let's see. Stuff: arawen picked me up Saturday morning though I don't think we got out of the house until after noon. Had random sushi for lunch. Helping with bookcases was diverted by the need to deal with an invasion of ants which were carrying their larvae up the front of his house and into a hole up under the eaves, which was behaviour Not Approved Of. So there was agitated ant-slaughtering and roof repair. And afterwards a great deal of enjoying of each other's company (which left me with a slightly dislocated right hip).

Sunday there was much work on bookcases, which started before I got up because I didn't sleep well and so stayed in bed for an hour and a half or so later than arawen did. Funniest help request was, "Could I use you as a stand?" Various things were accomplished. I think we watched a couple of episodes of an anime, plus also some Babylon 5 commentary which provoked me into reading lysana's rendition of how Stephen Furst got the role of Vir, though that may have been Saturday. We went out for what I'm pretty sure was our first doing-something-as-a-couple sort of dinner, and thus I consumed vast quantities of sushi (including, as it happened, my first fish-based sushi -- this is extremely impressive, as I haven't willingly consumed fish in probably over twenty years because fishy-smell leaves me feeling ill). Much affirming snuggling and talking, even if arawen does have a marbles in a funnel problem.

Slept better last night, woke up before the alarm, woke up arawen. He made me breakfast. More carpentry, in which I was minimally helpful mostly in the fetching and carryingness. Had leftover sushi for lunch. Went to hardware store (minioning mostly limited to pushing the cart and answering, "Is there anything else I've been whining that I don't have?" with "Time, world domination, and a pony"), stuff. Eventually came home, said hi to teinedreugan and suzimoses, helped them heckle The Chronicles of Riddick, watched the end of the ballgame, and saw arawen off to the airport where he is collecting whispercricket from her weekend of dealing with crazy people.

Thus was my weekend of sex and carpentry. (With bonus sushi and ants.)

eyebrowsmcgee has produced some really neat preacherifying for Holy Week. Recommended for Christians and Christian-friendly sorts who want a shiny thought to play with.

In my strange world in which all my whims were satisfied, How AWESOME Will It Be?: A Teenager's Guide to Understanding and Preparing for the Second Coming would not have no Amazon reviews. It would have at least one. And that one would be written by elfwreck.

Have spent the last day and a half or so more or less insane. Was unable to deal with it for much of this time for various reasons; thus, spent a lot of today engaged in vigorous displacement activity. This led to the doing of a load of laundry, a load of dishes (including the washable stove components), the cleaning of the stovetop, the cleaning of floor around the stove, decluttering the foyer and slaying many dust bunnies, discovering that a suitcase was full of cat piss and cleaning that up, watering the plants, and cleaning out the right-hand soap dish in the bathroom.

My mead ferment came unstuck; my jasmine water and orange blossom water have arrived.

Added to to-write list: seeking homes; possibly something about fear/vulnerability.

Much processing around a bit of personality fragment that needs to be dealt with. Only slightly mad. Also dealt with the crazy eventually, as well as it can be done, by talking it out with arawen. (Among other things, mmm.) But it matters so much to have him willing to deal with my crazy with efficiency, even if there's nothing really to be done about it other than support and let time pass. (Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.)

( Poem cut on general principles. )

Shower, full moon Rite, bed.

First note. Toooooo daaaaaaaaaaaamn hooootttttt. Cleaned up some of the stuff in the way so teinedreugan could put in the other AC unit when he got home. Which is why the living room is liveable; he set that up before we went out.

Out was productive. Got a lamp to put in the mathom room (so I can have indoor lighting for the lily tank). Got a new phone earpiece (mine has succumbed to the fact that I affect my environment like a Calabite, and also the fact that the old one irritated me). Got new printer cartridge. Then got an orange and cinnamon sticks (for the rhodomel I need to start before the roses go) and lightbulbs for the lamp.

And then fish. (It is also worth noting that there was an awfully cute I-think-it-was-a jungle carpet python coiled up around a branch. Cuteness!) (Also they had crawdads. Swimming ones, not just lurking ones.) It was New Fish Day at the pet store -- about a third of the tanks had plastic bags floating in them with fish in, staring out at the world and going 'glurp'. Took your advice, alhandra -- got a half dozen cherry barbs to go with the algae-eaters. The algae-eaters were hard to catch, and were in a tank with a burrowing eel; the shop clerk would chase an algae-eater around with the net, and disturb the eel, which would suddenly snap into vision, undulate across the tank, and vanish into the gravel again as smoothly as Kitty Pryde. Shoop!

Came home, read yehoshua's summary of today's game and read bits of it to teinedreugan. Fishies are now in their own bag, floating in the lily tank to acclimate. Water swap in half an hour, and I check on them occasionally to make sure the cats aren't getting at 'em.

Had this conversation with oneironaut:

I say "THe barbs are all attempting to swim out the corne of the bag they're in. All of them. At once."
oneironaut says "United we stand...."
I say "United we all attempt to occupy the same place at the same time."
oneironaut says "United we don't have a very good grasp of physics...."

So. New fish day.

Not one I'd recommend.

Got up this morning after spending several hours lying in bed with a meh. And dealing with really odd dreams. My subconscious is clearly nesting again. Or at the very least heavily pregnant and covered in kittens. (Hello, Bast; how are you?)

Dealing with miscellaneous meh. I decide that it's warm enough to take my orange out to see if light and heat will revive it, and I also bring down the pot with the tulips my mother-in-law sent us. I turn around to go back inside, and see a box on the stoop. With the logo of the place for the plants I bought for my aquarium.

We were planning to go on a dirt-and-tank-purchasing run . . . on Friday.

Well. Panic mode. teinedreugan is not unamenable to coming home and dealing with panic mode. I go out and get some things from the pharmacy down the road (my pots for planting the lilies in are too big for the tank). Got that. Scrambled to get food. Drove up to Ipswich.

I break this narrative to point out that near the place we get supplies for such things, there is a small, discreet sign: "Myopia Hunt Club. Members Only." Does this worry you as much as it worries me? Anyway, we were going by there, and there were horses and hounds milling about across the road from that. Very odd; never seen such a thing before. Sort of strange to know I live a half-hour's drive from that.

Plant store closed. Other plant store closed. Yet other plant store closed. Well, bugger. Went to get tank. I'm wondering if the parrot in the shop there was an eclectus -- it had hairy feathers and was the right shade of fairly flat green with the red and blue flash under the wings. Would have been a male if it were. Got tank, got heaters, got pebbles.

Wheeling the tank over the curb cracked it at one corner. Well, bugger. It was at the top of the tank; that's not as bad as it might be. And we were going to Home Depot anyway for dirt, so we got sealant too. Got dirt, though not the ideal sort of dirt for this purpose. Got bricks. Got rhythm. Got music. Dodged through vast hordes of of Fakus trees (if fig trees in pots are Ficus, then synthetic fig trees in pots are . . .). Got stuff.

He got paged on the way home with a borderline-bafflesome issue with the sattelite. Well, bugger.

Then we got into an accident and the passenger side of the car won't open anymore. Well, bugger. That made it interesting to get the tank out, as it was in the back seat.

Got all the miscellanea ready. Started working on plants.

It was just the irises.

This is the point at which I break down into one of these hysteriae.

I never saw a purple couch. . .
. . . . I never thought to see one. . . .

The cats are now Exploring the New Terrain.

Well, Arthur, as demonstrated in this image, is sniffing everything thoroughly, but that's because Arthur is a small, furry locomotion construct for an olfactory system.

Safari Arthur! Burrowing through a mass of tumbled pillows and emerging, triumphant, though somewhat bewildered, at the other end of the couch!

Lennon, on the other hand, has discovered that this is also an adequate spot for Staring Out The Window, and alternates between lounging precariously atop the pillows and sitting and Looking Alert.

Arthur has only nearly fallen off once.