Command your lover to start without you while you create another nutella and pancake concoction (for yourself). Don't let your lover wait until his or hers gets cold; everything will be cold soon enough-- the food, your love, your hands, your head . . . the grave.

Slashfood

I've been having a great time building my online library at LibraryThing. It's a service that allows you to catalog the books that you own online. I'm not sure yet if it's really useful, but it's fun. You can compare the books you own to books that other people own, and view similar libraries. It's quite addictive. It's free for up to 200 books. If you want to catalog more than that, it currently costs $10--a lifetime fee. I only have 100 books up there now, but I just bought a paid subscription as a hedge in case that very reasonable fee goes up in the future.

Here's the official site of the giant rabbit, with more photos, including a slightly scary overhead view showing a wound in the rabbit's side, spilling intestines:

The things one finds wandering in a landscape: familiar things and utterly unknown, like a flower one has never seen before, or, as Columbus discovered, an inexplicable continent;
and then, behind a hill, as if knitted by giant grandmothers, lies this vast rabbit, to make you feel as small as a daisy.
The toilet-paper-pink creature lies on its back: a rabbit-mountain like Gulliver in Lilliput. Happy you feel as you climb up along its ears, almost falling into its cavernous mouth, to the belly-summit and look out over the pink woolen landscape of the rabbit?s body, a country dropped from the sky;
ears and limbs sneaking into the distance; from its side flowing heart, liver and
intestines.
Happily in love you step down the decaying corpse, through the wound, now small like a maggot, over woolen kidney and bowel.
Happy you leave like the larva that gets its wings from an innocent carcass at the roadside.
Such is the happiness which made this rabbit.
i love the rabbit the rabbit loves me.

I'm not sure what to say about this giant pink bunny. It's certainly novel, and kind of cute, but what do you suppose it's going to look like after lying out on the mountainside for 20 years??

Link from Drawn

Reading this actually made me feel a little faint:

Find a day when you don't have anything to do. No where to be. Nights are even better, especially in the fall. Get in the car and roll down the windows. Go somewhere, but don't think about how you're going to get there. Drive from your home to your work. Or leave work one night and try to get home. Don't take your normal route. Make random turns, take roads that you always pass but never turn down. Go into neighborhoods where you don't know anyone. Take as long as you can, trying really hard to get lost.

I know I've spoken before about my "getting lost" dreams--dreams in which I'm lost in an unfamiliar city, or in a big hotel, or just trying to find my way home. And unfortunately, it isn't just in dreams that I get lost. When I go to a department store I have to be really careful to make note of where I came in so that I can have at least a fighting chance of finding my car when I come out.

When someone gives me directions, I write them down, and I read them to myself backwards when I leave to go home.

I take the same route home every night, and I hate it when there's road construction and I have to take a detour, because chances are good that I'll get lost. I can find my way to the bank downtown when I need to make the company deposit, but I have never yet been able to get back on the right street to head home on the first try.

Get lost on purpose? I don't think so.

52 Projects

Y'know, I hardly ever comment on other journals in a critical way, but come on:

Sundays here are the same way. Last week wasn't so bad, because everything was still in turmoil. Now the little town is back to normal and I find myself appalled by its version of normalcy. Sure, you can never buy a drink or a great meal or a non-Christian book here, but at least during the week there's something. Today EVERYTHING IS CLOSED. I had volunteered to cook dinner tonight, but I'd have to drive an hour to get the groceries.

I guess when I read something like this it makes me glad that my "version of normalcy" is very, well, normal. Sure, after I write this I'm going to get dressed and head out to the library, but it's actually only fairly recently that the libraries started being open on Sundays, and really, I was okay with that. When I was growing up, the stores weren't even open on Sundays, and it wasn't really a problem.

I've been doing laundry and cleaning this morning, I just scrambled an egg for a late breakfast. I might knit a little later, maybe read something, maybe watch a DVD. I certainly don't bemoan the lack of a sparkling night life, but hey, that's just me.

I loved this from 37 days:

So I have him back, the part beyond a static photograph, the part where he's actually made something of his own volition--a grocery list, an identification tag for all those trips he and I planned to take someday. (Now if I could only get his voice back). My daughters have mainly these typed images of me, the ones you see in front of you, not swoops and odd dots and strong "Ts." In this typed text, they have scratches that could be anyone's, not just mine.

Almost everything I write now, I write electronically--email and blog entries and HTML on the computer at work or home, grocery lists in my Palm Pilot, text messages on my phone. I used to be proud of my handwriting, but now when I handwrite anything, I'm usually rushed--writing something down so I don't forget it before I can enter it into my Palm or computer. And also, my eyesight has deteriorated, so unless I got and put on the strong glasses when I write checks or address envelopes--my handwriting is even worse than usual.

But Bob recognizes my handwriting, and I assume other people do, too, and I suppose it doesn't look bad to them. Because whenever I see someone else's handwriting, it mostly doesn't look "good" or "bad," it looks like them.

My mother has very bad eyesight, and writes (prints) using a magnifying glass and a heavy black marker. My father was a draftsman before he retired, and has a beautiful, regular, technical printing style and a lovely cursive. Both of their handwriting styles are completely distinctive.

I'm trying to be less of a packrat lately, and don't keep every scrap of paper that comes my way. But I should be careful to keep a few examples of handwriting from the people that I love so that I can recall the way the letters slant, the pressure of the stroke, the personality that comes through the pen.

I can do whatever I want, with no concern about whether it makes me seem cute to some guy. I don't have to fake rapt attention to any conversation pertaining to computer games, sports, motorcycles, sports, supermodels with no cellulite, cars, or sports. My opinions are all mine. I don't do anyone else's dirty dishes or dirty laundry. I can be 100% totally myself without worrying if he'll still like me, or think I'm pretty.

Crazy Aunt Purl

I've been reading Poppy Z. Brite's Livejournal since the New Orleans flood--she lived in New Orleans and evacuated with, I think, a dog and one cat. As I recall, she had something like 26 cats, 18 of which have been rescued and reunited with her (they're still hoping to find the rest). In this entry she quotes an email from a reader who says that her (Ms. Brite's) plight caused her (the reader) to come up with a plan for getting her own animals out should the need ever arise.

Ms. Brite says: "Still: we allowed ourselves to accumulate far more animals than we could realistically evacuate, because, like most New Orleanians, we didn't believe in our hearts that The Big One would ever dare to hit our beloved city."

Even before I read this entry, her situation had caused me to decide that, if I can help it (I realize situations may change), I never want to have more animals than people. Right now Bob and I could each take charge of one cat, and, I guess, realistically, if one of us had to evacuate both of them, we could, but any more than that would be unmanageable.

Just something else for the emergency list in my head, I guess.

little. yellow. different.: "Next on Ernie's theoretical perfect television show: hot guys in boxers talking about web standards and gay pillow fighting afterwards!"

Good advice, I think, for anyone:

To be quite frank and not only that but possibly boring and repetitive as well, the way you get through the year is you do it one day at a time. One day at a time you get up in the morning and one day at a time you go to bed at night. If you are a person of faith you call on that faith every day. Every day, if there's a prayer that you know, you say it. If your doctor says you're depressed, every day you take your medicine. Every day, if there's a posture that you assume, you assume it. Every day you write the book. Every day you notice the minute shifting of light as the earth quietly surrounds the sun. Every day you take note of the precise quality of the miracle of life. Every day you write down your check numbers. Every day you count your change before leaving the counter. Every day you press the button for your floor.

And never do you let the coming year rise up like a monstrous wave and crush you with unimaginable tedium. Never do you let the dread sink in until you feel cold and dead inside; if you find yourself staring into the abyss you switch seats and think of ice cream.

Salon.com Life | Must I have a grand calling in life?

Enchanting Juno: "One of the hardest things to learn, after college and 20th century life and women's studies classes, is when it is wrong to make a fuss, when a larger humanity demands that you wait quietly, let someone else act, be female, be still and feel the currents of an interaction, respect the moment. But I think it just might be one of the most important things I know now."

This looks like another incredibly useful service: Air America Radio

Air America Radio's Public Voicemail - 1-866-217-6255

Call the toll-free number above, enter your everyday phone number, and then record a message. Other people who know your everyday phone number (even if it doesn't work anymore) can call Emergency Voicemail, enter the phone number they associate with you, and hear your message.

You can also search for messages left by people whose phone numbers you know.

I've been purposely avoiding reading the stories about pets in Louisiana, but I ran across this photo by accident, and it made me laugh rather than cry: The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century :: Joey deVilla's Weblog :: Please let this be a rescue rather than a food run

I cried at the gym today while walking on the treadmill and watching CNN--I couldn't get the close-captioning to work, so I was listening to my iPod and watching television with no sound. I can see a lot of stuff and stay somewhat neutral about it, but I saw a group of old people sitting on what looked like a luggage cart on an airport runway. A couple of old women were sitting at one end, leaning on the back, and an old man got up off the cart and reached to help someone else off . . . I don't know, it just really, really touched me, and before I could even think about it, I was sobbing. I think it reminds me of my own aging parents and how awful it would be if they were in trouble and I couldn't get to them, or if I even knew if they were okay.

Sometimes it hits me at strange times.

I installed Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) last night. I haven't totally explored "Widgets" yet, but this one will probably come in handy in the next little while: Gas.