Rufus update

I had an OB appointment today. Since B and I are both off work today to drive to Dallas, he was able to go with me and hear the baby's heartbeat. I am hoping that in a few weeks I will get to the point where I hear the heartbeat and think "oh, there's the baby's heartbeat," rather than "oh, thank god, he's still alive." Anyway, everything checks out okay. I am having my triple screen blood test next Friday, and then in three weeks we will have the Big One, i.e. the one where we find out the baby's sex. This time around I'm not very impatient. I am perfectly happy to just know that a baby is alive and safe. Family members, though? Not so much. I think some are uncomfortable with a sexless baby, and others are eager to start buying tons of gender-branded items that will be outgrown within weeks.

Names: currently, I like Henry for a boy and Lily for a girl. B likes neither, and hasn't made any suggestions himself, but he is always willing to make fun of my choices.

BTW, this is what our baby looks like right now. I love the internet.

Mysterious flowers growing in my yard

Anyone know what it is?

A stupid thing I did

When B and I were first looking at houses, we looked at a neighborhood that had one or two acre lots. B commented that he would rule those houses out because he didn't want to have to mow the lawn. Like an idiot, I replied that he was a wuss and I would take care of all the lawn work so he didn't have to worry about it.

So now all I can say is thank god we ended up with a tiny little lot with no backyard and a girly electric lawn mower. My long term plan now includes getting rid of all the grass and replacing it with garden so I never have to mow again. It's not working outside that I despise - it's just the lawn mower.

Poetry Thursday

Acquainted with the Night

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have out walked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
O luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

-Robert Frost

Garage sale

Our neighborhood garage sale was last Saturday. Of course we didn't remember until we happened to venture outdoors and noticed that four of our neighbors were out on their driveways with all of their stuff, and there were cars parked at every available curb. So we weren't early enough to get any of the really good stuff.

We did got a jogging stroller that looks a lot like this one for $15, and a big bag of baby clothes for another $15. It has both boy and girl clothes, but I figure that kid won't know the difference. Anyway, I am unlikely to put anything frilly on a girl, and I love with anything that has frogs or bugs on it, so I think it's already determined how the kid is going to dress.

We came close to buying a very nice crib that looked like this, but I don't think I'm ready for that yet. As much as we want this baby, having a real live actual crib in our bedroom would just freak me out right now.

Mario Bros

I love this - especially the guy making 'neep neep' sounds in the background.

Mario Bros. Lego
Uploaded by Bibi-de-Bibopof

found via BoingBoing

Poll

This weekend, I did something that I have never done before. I confronted a complete stranger at the grocery store for rude behavior. I was in the produce aisle looking at the half-pound boxes of blueberries, when I noticed a man on the other side of the display. He was opening boxes, sampling a few berries from each box, and then replacing them in the bin. In an act very unlike my usual self, I brought it up. I thought I was polite and reasonable, but he yelled at me so I walked away with my face turning red (and no blueberries). Was I wrong? I am not opposed to people sampling things like grapes that are sold by weight. But sampling things that are sold as units seems like cheating.

Also, does confronting the man make me a rude and nosy busybody? A stranger once berated me in public for leaving Sebastian in my car with the window rolled up (in my defense, it was a shady, cool evening and only for about ten minutes). It was right after the baby had died and I was already feeling very vulnerable. Her words made me feel like I wasn't even capable of taking care of a dog, much less a baby. I was impassive to her face, and then I cried in my car. I wonder if she would have said what she did if she had known what I was going through. For that reason, I am very ambivalent about saying something at the grocery store. What do you guys think? Was I out of line? And is it inappropriate to sample blueberries?

More spring pictures

This is the flagstone walk that leads to my front stairs. Last year, I spent all kinds of time and effort trying to keep the weeds out from between the rocks. This year, I have decided to embrace the clover.

The Marie Pavie rose makes a very fragrant stand

This is a blue lace-cap hydrangea that my coworkers sent me after the baby died. It was potted, and after a few weeks started looking terrible, but I couldn't bear to throw it away. Everything I read said that it could not survive in Texas. It can't take the heat, and it likes acidic soil - hard to find in limestone hills. But I planted it anyway, and it has miraculously survived. I cut it down almost to the ground a few weeks ago and it immediately began to put out shoots.

This is cherry sage. It grows like a weed around here and it seems like it blooms from March to November.

This is my neighbors' dogwood tree. These are also not supposed to grow here because they need very acidic soil. My neighbors, a very staid elderly couple, regularly get bags of used coffee ground from Starbucks to mix in to the dirt around it. That side of the yard - under the redbud and cherry tree and variegated ligustrum - always smells like espresso.

How is it possible

that my baby sister is getting married? It's just so strange, when I still think of her as having braces and a spiral perm and my hand-me-down New Kids on the Block t-shirt.

Chloe

I guess I haven't talked about Chloe for awhile. A few weeks ago, she found out that her parents were getting a divorce and her mom was taking the three kids with her to Killeen. Next week. In a way I'm relieved. I got the strong impression that her dad was not a great role model and I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing for her to get away from him and all the fighting. Also, at 10 years old now, her problems are getting to a point where I don't think I can be much help anymore. She's at an age where it's no longer considered cool to have a mentor, and despite her being excited to see me every week, I know she gets some teasing from the other kids.

However, it's hard for any kid to switch schools in the middle of the school year, and especially a very shy, self-conscious kid like Chloe. Plus, as I know from experience, living through your parents' nasty divorce is a miserable, confusing time.

I gave Chloe my address, phone number, and email, so I expect to hear from her a lot. I also told her that I would still keep our date to see the new Harry Potter movie in July, although driving to Killeen in July when I'm 7 1/2 months pregnant will not be much fun.

B always tells me that I worry too much. I just hope she does okay. She's got some hard times coming and I wish I could help make it easier.

Poetry Thursday

Apple Tree

No choice for the apple tree,
And after the surgeon's chainsaw,
from one stubborn root

two plumes of tree now leaf
and even blossom, sky's
cool blue between them,

whereas on my left hand
not a single lifeline
but three deep equal

channels -
O my soul,
it is not a small thing,
to have made from three

this one, this one life.

-Ellen Bryant Voigt

It's spring, so what do you expect?

Flowers!

Here is my first wildflower picture of the year - the bluebonnets and and daisies are just starting to poke their heads up everywhere, but nothing is in full swing quite yet.

And this is my first Madame Joseph Schwartz rose. The flowers are more pink-tinged in cool weather, and white in warmer weather. The aroma is incredible. You can smell it from five feet away, and up close it can almost knock you out. Either this rose or my Marie Pavie is going to be planted in the ground next to the staircase soon. I'm going to let them battle it out - whichever makes more beautiful flowers and smells the best wins. The loser has to stay in a pot for another year.

On Being

Go check out the latest On Being video with Sherin Nicole. I think it's the best one yet.

Thanks to J for the original link

Cutest. Thing. Ever.

Does everyone know about Nora, The Piano Playing Cat?



Found via Cute Overload

Dinner

I ended up going with the 'rustic Italian' loaf at Whole Foods, with longhorn sharp cheddar, caramelized onions, and dijon mustard. I added some tomato slices and ham on B's. I was unable to locate an appropriate tomato-basil soup, so we had tortilla soup instead.

Delicious. I was thinking that would be the end of my craving, but then Lee has to go and tell me about apples and bacon and cheddar on whole-grain bread and now I'm going to have to pick up some more ingredients.

Rufus update - food edition

I'm so glad that I am pregnant and therefore have an excuse to obsess over all kinds of food without anyone thinking I'm too weird.

I finally gave in last week and had a corn dog over B's objections. And I've eaten enough strawberries to make me sick several times over.

My latest cravings are for pickled okra and grilled cheese sandwiches. All I have to say about pickled okra is thank god I live in a place where such a delicacy is readily available.

Grilled cheese, however...

I have had a love-hate relationship with grilled cheese sandwiches for my entire life. As a kid, I couldn't stand American cheese, and I still can't. Nor did I particularly like gooey white bread that stuck to the roof of my mouth. Unfortunately, that was all that was available then. So I was an adult before I rediscovered grilled cheeses that came on Italian bread and focacia and ciabatta and baguettes with cheddar and gouda and provolone and gruyere. Not to mention extras like tomatoes, mustard, bacon, cucumbers, ham, and onions. And the day I found out about croque monsieurs was a very happy one. I am positive that one could live happily on grilled cheese sandwiches for years and never get bored.

Since this weekend, when I wrote out my grocery list, I have been planning my grilled cheese ingredients for this week. Right now, I'm thinking I will stay fairly classic, with french bread, sharp cheddar, Dijon mustard, and possibly grilled onions. If I remember, I will take a picture of my creation before it gets eaten. In the meantime, here is a wonderful site to browse for grilled cheese recipes.

Wedding

It has been brought to my attention that after complaining a lot about having to wear fancy clothes for a wedding, I never wrote about the actual event.

Our friends Roy and Jorie got married on the Saturday before last at the Driskill Hotel. It was a traditional Jewish wedding, the first one B and I had ever attended, and it was beautiful. They were married under a chuppa. The bride circled the groom several times. A glass was broken. Part of the ceremony was in Hebrew, and the other part was not audible due to the screaming, 1 yr old nephew of the bride sitting in front of me. I mostly had no idea what was going on, but I got kind of weepy anyway.

The reception was very possibly the fanciest event I have ever attended. Tuxedoed waiters circled with trays of hors d'oeuvres and champagne. There was a sit-down dinner, at which I had to teach B how to say haricot verts without a Texas accent. I then spent awhile cursing my non-drinking status. After many toasts, which, being pregnant and all, made me weepy again, everyone danced with the bride and groom held up in chairs. Then, they got down to some serious disco dancing. B and I only lasted until about midnight, but everything was going strong when we left.

Of course my complaining wasn't serious and it was totally worth it to see good friends so happy together. But at the end, I still had some serious blisters from my fancy-ass shoes.

p.s. isn't that the most beautiful wedding dress you've ever seen?

Dreams - not the good kind

With the exception of Friday night, when I dreamed that I was a race car driver in Hazzard County, I have had a bad dream about the baby every night. So far, I have dreamed:

• That the baby was born early and we didn't have a crib or a rocking chair or diapers
• That the baby was born early and we kept forgetting to feed him
• That the baby had cystic fibrosis (I really only had a vague idea of what that even was until I woke up from this dream and googled it)
• The the baby inherited an upturned pig nose from me - not a pig nose like mine, but a real animal pig nose
• That the baby was born and was so small that we kept losing her

The worst, however, was last night. I dreamed that I went to the doctor and she printed out a sonogram picture and said "The pregnancy is gone. All that is left are some bones." She showed me the picture of my stomach with a few tiny bones inside. "We'll have to do another surgery," she said, "but this time, we can't use any anesthetics. You have to be awake to tell us when it's all gone." She began wheeling me to an operating room. I was crying and protesting and screaming, but I couldn't get up from the gurney. I was yelling for them to call B, but I knew that he was in a meeting and couldn't be reached.

I woke up crying, and I still feel a little bit dazed. I was especially disturbed by the image of the doctor calling the baby "the pregnancy." That is what they kept calling it at the abortion clinic we had to go to last time, and it really bothered me. It was very Orwellian. (Speaking of having to go to abortion clinics, I ended up filing a complaint against my last doctor's license and was recently notified that she is being investigated for mismanaging my pregnancy.) The worst part was the feeling that it was real when I woke up. I just kept thinking that I couldn't go through it again. It was unbearable.

I know that vivid dreams, especially anxiety dreams, are normal during pregnancy. Right before B and I got married, I had all kinds of anxiety dreams that had to do with weddings, and right before I graduated, I started dreaming that I was short by one credit and couldn't walk. But still, pregnancy dreams are different because they are so vivid and intense. It's frustrating to wake up exhausted in the middle of the night, and then be afraid to go back to sleep.

Rambling about jobs

In high school, I was a serial job hopper. I got my first job at age 15 - I was a carhop at Sonic. From there, I mostly switched jobs every few months. They got boring fast, and it was always easy to find another one that paid as well or better. Frequently, I would work two or three different jobs at a time to get around the child labor laws. But I still never had any money. I'm not sure why exactly, and I bet my parents then would have never expected me to turn out to be an accountant. I worked at several Sonics, Barnes & Noble, B. Dalton, a coffee shop at Collin Creek Mall, and CiCi's Pizza among others.

But the weirdest job I had was one that I found on the internet one year. I was an assistant to an artist. Her name was Donna, and she was a middle-aged woman who made soft-sculpture dragons. The dragons were kind of neat, and she took them very seriously. She was constantly lecturing me about how the dragons had souls, and would choose people to live with. She couldn't let them go home with just anybody, so she priced them accordingly and sold very few.

She had a crush on Al Gore because he had "honest eyes and a dragon soul" (they were running rampant, those dragon souls). Every day, we would watch Opera together while I sewed and stuffed legs and cut spiked ridges out of leather. She would sew all the parts together, and then make a ceremony of adding the eyes as the last step. If someone she didn't like came on the television, she would use a smudge stick to rid the room of the bad energy. Her workroom always smelled like burnt sage.

She had a kind of amalgamation of new age ideas and spirituality practices. I frequently distressed her by bringing in bad energy that I must have picked up at swim practice, or maybe the mall. She was always arranging crystals on my work table, or waving smudge sticks at me, or working on my chakras.

In the spring of that year, she bought a booth at the Scarborough Renaissance Festival. I was the salesperson, and we stayed all weekend long every week. I started out wearing a beautiful hand made gown of wine-colored panne velvet, with an ivory and gold brocade bodice. It only took about one day of the Texas heat before I went and bought myself a blue and white cotton 'wench' costume with a short skirt and short sleeves. At Donna's insistence, I faked a (very unconvincing) British accent and explained to potential customers that they couldn't choose a dragon; the dragon had to choose them. Our booth was right across from the Mud Show, and by the end of the first weekend, I had developed an intense hatred of the act, which I could recite from memory (I can still hear it in my head - Beowulf: IN! THE! MUD!). At night, the booth was swelteringly hot and I would stay up until the early morning reading a book by flashlight and munching on ice from a cooler.

That job didn't pay as well as some (I made mad money as a roller skating carhop), but it made for some kooky stories.

Bizarre

So a lot of pregnancy symptoms are not generally known. They kind of get sprung on you after you get knocked up and people start asking questions like "are your feet itching yet?" and "have your gums gotten all bumpy?" But here is the weirdest thing that keeps happening to me. At least once per day, I will start to feel sick to my stomach. That is not abnormal. But after 15-20 minutes of building nausea, I will start sneezing violently. I usually sneeze about 4-5 times in a row, and then I feel fine again.

Very strange.

My faith in humanity

is being battered.

I hope they catch the person who did this, and I hope he or she gets some help. And a jail sentence.

I think I might take a few days off from reading the news.

Poetry Thursday

Some questions you might ask

Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of an owl?
Who has it, and who doesn't?
I keep looking around me.
The face of the moose is as sad
as the face of Jesus.
The swan opens her white wings slowly.
In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.
One question leads to another.
Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?
Like the eye of a hummingbird?
Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?
Why should I have it, and not the anteater
who loves her children?
Why should I have it, and not the camel?
Come to think of it, what about maple trees?
What about the blue iris?
What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?
What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?
What about the grass?

-Mary Oliver

Reading

I'm not doing so well keeping up with book reviews.

Bad Blood by Lorna Sage: Sage was a noted literary critic in the UK. This is her memoir of growing up in a small town in England after WWII with her man hating grandmother and her brilliant, but alcoholic and womanizing grandfather. It's amusing and interesting but not life changing
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova: very overwritten for what is basically a vampire thriller. Also, the format was confusing. At one point I calculated that I was reading about someone reading a letter about someone reading a letter about someone reading a letter about someone reading a letter about someone doing something.
The Sea by John Banville: a depressed widower returns to the seaside town where he spent his depressing childhood. Someone drowned. eh. He got a Booker prize for this?

The big one:

A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah: unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard about this book - the publicity has been very widespread. Ishmael Beah grew up in Sierra Leone. At the age of 13, he got caught up in that country's civil war. His family was killed and he was forced into the army, kept hopped up on drugs, and taught to murder people without mercy. The book is hard to read, but hard to put down. Ishmael survived and recovered and was able to emigrate to the United States and graduate from Oberlin College. But his story is rare. The book filled me with a kind of helpless rage against what people can do to other people. Considering this, I'm not sure why I recommend this book, but I do. I think it should be required reading.

Cartoon

I think this is one of the funniest cartoons I've ever seen.

Also, are you aware that the New Yorker charges over $100 for a print of one of their cartoons? Ridiculous.

Two hints to single men at Jason's Deli

1. A seriously crowded, noisy lunch rush on a Thursday afternoon is not the time to pick up the ladies.

2. If a cranky looking woman with her arms and legs crossed (and wearing a wedding ring) ignores your first two cheesy pick up lines, GIVE IT UP.

Thank you, rant over.

Holiday

Happy Pi Day! Also, happy Albert Einstein's birthday. Maybe the two should be combined in a holiday called Nerd Day.

Luck

Writing about odds below reminded me of a story.

Not to long after I moved to Austin, I took a trip back to Dallas with my roommate Sam, and our friend David. We stopped at a dinky little gas station somewhere between Austin and Waco to fill up and get some snacks. We also bought three scratch-off tickets and agreed to split anything we won. Sitting in my car in the parking lot, we scratched all three and discovered that we had won $1. We went back inside the gas station to redeem our dollar, and then used it to buy another ticket. This time, we won $2. We redeemed the $2 and bought one of the fancy $2 tickets. We won $10. We redeemed that and then bought another $2 ticket. That time we won $80 and decided not to press our luck any further.

To three poor college students living on ramen in ghetto student apartments, this was a fortune. We spent the rest of the trip discussing what to do with the money. About $20 went to cover our gas costs. We blew the rest of the money taking ourselves out to a nice dinner in Dallas. We probably would have done better to split it up and pay some of our expenses, but that wouldn't have been any fun.

Rufus update

Rufus is our code name for the baby. Don't worry, it's not on the list of possible real names.

The genetic counselor from the perinatal place called me today with the results of the screening I had last week. Before the screening, the risk of Downs Syndrome was 1 in 770 based on my age. The screening puts my new risk at 1 in 3,000. The previous risk of Trisomy 18 was 1 in 2,700 and is now 1 in 10,000. So far so good! I can't help but imagine all the other thousands of things that could go wrong, but I'm trying to be positive. I know it's normal to be paranoid after what happened, but if I let myself think about it too much, I'll go crazy. The worst part is going to be in another month or two, the age when the previous baby died. I'm considering asking my doctor if I can visit a couple times a week just to listen to the baby's heart.

In other news that I probably shouldn't be sharing on my blog, my pants aren't buttoned! Today was the first day that I just could not get them closed. So I have a rubber band and a long shirt. Because I'm just not ready for maternity clothes yet.

The great gardening project

Boy, for something so small, that sure took a long time.

Actually, it wasn't the planting that took so long - it was getting the bed ready for planting. That is one of the spots that used to have a 25 yr old hedge on it. Many of the very thick roots were still in the dirt. I started out with a small shovel and garden fork, and ended up with a heavy-duty tree lopper and an axe. It doesn't look like much now, but when it fills out and starts flowering (all the plants but one should produce purple or yellow flowers), it will be beautiful. Just four more beds (each two-three times that size), and I will be done with what I wanted to complete for this year. No problem, right?

I also finally got my first daffodil - just in time for the 87 degree weather that promptly wilted it. But still, I grew it all the way from a bulb and it actually made a flower. I am still totally amazed when things grow. It seems like magic!

Bugs!

I have three potted roses - a Marie Pavie, a Madame Joseph Schwartz, and a Dame de Coeur (my favorite). In the last two weeks, all three have been busting out with new foliage and buds.

They have also been busting out with aphids, so last night I released ladybugs for the first time.

We dumped 1,750 bugs all over the base of the three plants at dusk last night and then left them to their aphid feast. When I went to check on them this morning, it looked like most of the ladybugs were still there. Unfortunately, so were most of the aphids. There were several different ladybug conventions going on, however, with much kinky bug sex. I suppose it's important for them to make more bugs to eat my aphids, but I wish they would be a little more industrious. If they are, then I should have roses within a week or two. Wish me luck!

Poetry Thursday

Light

I live for books
and light to read them in.
Waterlilies
reaching up
from the depths of the pond
algae dark,
the frog loves a jell of
blue-green water,
the bud
scales
a rope of stem,
then floats in sunshine. Like soap
in the morning bath.
This book I read
floats in my hand like a waterlily
coming out of the nutrient waters
of thought
and light shines on us both,
the morning's breviary.

-Diane Wakoski

Beauty

My trees get more beautiful every day. I love spring.

Top Secret Construction Project

Clues:

1. I've been nauseous for the last three months
2. I've started taking two-three naps per day
3. I have an overwhelming desire for corn dogs and strawberries

Anyone want to take a guess?

Yup, that's right, we're trying again. I have a different doctor, and things just feel better this time. I'm at the end of my first trimester and I've already had three sonograms and so many blood tests that I look like a heroin addict.

This morning, I had a screening for Downs Syndrome. The screening was optional, but I chose to do it because it involved a sonogram, and I am all for seeing proof of life every chance I get. As soon as the technician turned the machine on, I blurted out "where is the heartbeat?" She replied "I'll show you as soon as he quits turning somersaults."

We never got to see our last baby moving. By the time we had a second sonogram his heart had already quit beating. So this was a new experience for me. It was incredible to see this tiny human being doing somersaults and bouncing up and down and playing with his fingers and toes. Just remembering makes me want to cry. I think this baby is going to live. We are so lucky.

Oooh, Snoped

Disgraceful.

Whine

B and I are going to a fancy-ass wedding this weekend at the Driskill Hotel. I expect the wedding itself to be fun, and I'm very happy for our friends who are getting married. However. This means that I have to wear a dress. And not just any dress, but a dress that is appropriate to a black-tie optional fancy-ass evening wedding at a fancy-ass hotel.

I hate wearing dresses anyway. My philosophy on clothes is that you never know when you might need to climb a tree, so you might as well be prepared. Fancy dresses do not fit into my clothing philosophy. Nor do pantyhose, high-heeled shoes, or overly restrictive undergarments, all of which are usually required for fancy dresses. I would like demonstrate my belief in this philosophy by pointing out that I wore sneakers at MY OWN WEDDING.

I currently have four weddings to attend in the next few months. The other three aren't as fancy as this one, but I plan to complain as much as possible anyway. Just because.

PSA from Boing Boing

Gross!


What Happens When You Pour Coke On Raw Pork? - The best video clips are right here

Mistake - flowers, cherries, what's the difference?

My cherry tree turned out to be a red bud and a cherry tree entwined together. The cherries I noticed last week were actually flower buds. Don't blame me too much, though. It's a tall tree and I couldn't get a very good look. But you can't miss it now. Here is the redbud tree behind my favorite plant drama - the variegated ligustrum that caused me so much grief last year. The cherry tree part is behind. You can see from my kitchen window that the redbud half is full of flowers and the cherry tree half is bare. Why, I don't know, since this website has promised me white flowers and "small clusters of pea-sized purple-black to red-black cherries."

Movie review

Last night, we went for an outing to see Pan's Labyrinth at Alamo. I knew the movie had gotten great reviews, and I had heard nothing but good things about it. So I was not expecting the level of graphic violence depicted. A quick scroll through Rotten Tomatoes shows that no reviewers felt it necessary to give warning. Granted that I am a wuss who can't handle more violence than is in the typical Disney animation, this was still a little much. I feel like I am doing a public service here. Do not go see this movie unless you can handle:

A depiction of a woman having a very bloody miscarriage
Someone pounding someone else's face with a broken wine bottle
Many people being shot at point blank range
A person having a gangrenous leg sawed off
The immediate results of vicious and cruel torture, including a closeup of a hand that might have been cut open with a blunt object and an ice pick (I didn't look long enough to be sure)
Someone having a knife stuck in their mouth and then their cheek sliced open
Above person sewing his cheek back together
A child being shot

This was not an upbeat movie. It was beautiful and dark and engaging. The story was well-written, and the ending was very well done. But the violence was just too much.

*note* I usually love the food at Alamo, but I thought the ribeye chili last night had a funny after taste, and my salad was a little limp and had too much dressing. Also, the buffalo chicken salad (lettuce, tomatoes, buffalo chicken strips, celery, and blue cheese dressing) is no longer on the menu. Grrr.

*another note* When we came out of the theater, some kind of cross-promotion was going on between Scion and some Reno 911 thing. There were a ton of pimped out xBs around the theater, and someone had kindly left an invitation on my windshield to join the local Scion enthusiasts club. Do cool people drive Scions? Because aside from myself, the two people I know who drive them are my friend Eric (who recently lent me his well-worn Star Trek: TNG dvd collection), and the (IT guy) husband from the couple that have nerd game night with me and B. Just saying.

Poetry Thursday, part two

The Elephant, or The Force of Habit

A tail behind, a trunk in front,
Complete the usual elephant.
The tail in front, the trunk behind
Is what you very seldom find.

If you for specimens should hunt
With trunks behind and tails in front,
That hunt will occupy you long;
The force of habit is so strong.

-A. E. Housman

Poetry Thursday

from The Garden

What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness:
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.

-Andrew Marvell