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Monday, November 01, 2004
I don't even know WHAT to call this one
Can someone please tell me: Where did November come from this year? As I get older and the years do their clichéd-but-true (after all, most clichés are true) speeding-up thing, I find myself sometimes having to think to remember not just the date, not just the MONTH even, but the season. Mentally I'm still adjusting to the fact that it's 2004. And it's about to be 2005, in two short months. Two short months, may I add, which are always the most frantic months of the year for just about everybody, and we're no exception, with a whole slew of family birthdays, and pretty much every weekend taken up between now and New Year's. So I fully expect to step outside tomorrow, feel that the air is cool, and have to look at the leaves to remember if it's fall or early spring.
I think I am going to do NaNoWriMo this year. Shut UP, just SHUT UP, I do not want to hear it. I am such a lemming.
Things we did this last weekend:
At the last minute, invited my parents to hold my grandmother's birthday party at our house instead of theirs, for some complicated reasons I won't go into here. This meant that my house went from "pigs wouldn't claim it" to "ready for a family gathering" in two hours. It was a transformation to behold. And yes, my grandmother was born on the exact day of the stock-market crash which catapulted the nation into the Great Depression. It's almost enough to make me believe in astrology, that is. Did I just SAY that?
Spilled water in our keyboard. We air-dried it, and then I used the blow-dryer for a while, and it works almost perfectly, just a little stiff with the SHIFTing.
Played probably twelve hours of board games lying in front of the fire on the hardwood floor, including an actual complete game of Monopoly, played until one person had all the money and stuff. I've done this maybe twice in my life before. (I lost first). We also played two matches of Trivial Pursuit. I won the first one and T won the second one. (Has anyone seen the BOok Lovers' Version of Trivial Pursuit at Barnes and Noble? Omigosh I WANT THAT. Except there's nobody to play it with me.)
Drove to the city to buy school supplies. Well, C and I did. T was otherwise occupied...
Built a pig pen. T did this (thank God) while I drove to the city. And not at our house (thank God again, many times over, because pigs? they stink). Someone is giving us and his boss's family two piglets. They're going to be raised at the boss's house. I think we'll name ours Loin Roast.
Went over all our ballot propositions and decided how we're going to vote on them. Ironically, we're Republicans (more because America is enslaved to the two-party system, than because we actually agree with everything in the platform; we're considerably to the right of Republican on several issues), but I think we are going perpendicular to the party line on all but one or two of the long list of propositions. We don't expect them to go our way, however, because we so do not fit in politically in California. Talk about "disenfranchised". Yet we still vote, every single time. Both of us have voted every time it was possible since we've been old enough to do so.
Cut wood. Well, I got out of most of this (cackles with glee). I love wood heat. I really do. I also really don't like cutting wood. I mean, viewed from a distance, it's an invigorating family activity for a brisk fall day, with the smell of wood and the camaraderie and blah blah blah burning brush piles of sawdust. When you're doing it, however, you notice that stuff less than you do the noise and the muscle strain and the squished fingers. And it wasn't my fault that my dad decided to change the day for wood cutting to a day when I'd had a lunch date with a girlfriend since the summer. It really wasn't. So I hauled about ten very heavy rounds of pine, and then got back in the car, drove 45 minutes back to town with the radio up very loud, took a shower, got dressed up, and went to my favorite restaurant to talk for an hour with a friend who now lives across the country with her army husband, about girl stuff and the Iraq war and our husbands and kids and our ex-boyfriends and stuff. Then I got to go home and help stack the wood, just so that I could meet the requisite smashed-finger quota for a winter's worth of wood. (actually there will be many more days of this delightful kind of exercise before spring, and you can bet I won't get out of those. sigh.)
One of my favorite things about autumn is the way the light slants, even in the middle of the day. This picture was taken at almost ten a.m. In the summer, it's already prime sunburn time at ten, with the sun beating down on your head and crisp, ugly, short shadows squatting under everything. On the 29th of October, however, you have dew on the grass and lovely, long, blurry, cool shadows everywhere. No contest at all, if you ask me.
'Tis the season. You can't drive anywhere around here right now without encountering about a tarantula per mile. I am genuinely ambivalent about the creatures -- they don't freak me out like they do some people to whom I may or may not be married, but I am not a staunch tarantula advocate like nearly everyone else seems to be who isn't freaked out by them. I don't cringe when T purposefully runs them over (backing up if necessary) -- I just laugh. I was glad to have the opportunity to photograph this one, though, creeping his mechanical legs across the dirt road. If T sees this page he may well file for divorce. I'll keep you posted.
