Sole Soup

Seen chez anavolena, ( important facts about me. )

The Significance of The Blue Edges

Book meme, seen chez kightp:

List the ten books physically closest to you:

On my desk:
1. Steven Erikson: Midnight Tides (my current read)
2. M.A. Foster: The Gameplayers of Zan (currently being done on the Wiki)
3. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza: Genes, Peoples, And Languages (my current non-fiction read, from the library)
4. Stephen Humphrey: Blue Angels (my brother's poetry book, which I keep out so I might pick it up again--I'm not much for poetry)
5. Carl Bernstein & Bob Woodward: All The President's Men (I read it months ago, and somehow haven't put it away)
6. Elaine Morgan: The Descent of Woman (ditto)

In my backpack, on the floor beside my desk:
7. Carl Sagan: The Dragons of Eden (another current non-fiction read--currently my "bathroom book" at work, which I take when my current fiction read won't fit in my pocket)

There's a big stack of books on the floor next to my backpack, so I'll pick the three that are sticking out the most on my side:
8. Robert Jordan & Teresa Patterson: The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time
9. George R.R. Martin: A Feast For Crows (hasn't gotten put away either, apparently)
10. Sherrilyn Kenyon: The Writer's Digest Character Naming Sourcebook

A Very Infectious Laugh

We don't store much that's important in our kitchen cupboard under the sink. We put our garbage can there, we toss our grocery bags(the one that we use for lining the garbage can, as opposed to the ones we recycle in the blue bag), we stick our bag of dry cat food and our SOS Pads and our blue bags there. Most of the time it's filled with the grocery bags, though we go through cycles of hoarding vs. recycling.

Right now we're at a low ebb, so it's a little emptier than usual. A couple of days ago I caught a glimpse of a box of Tender Vittles in the back corner. My mom had given them to us a few years ago because her cat wouldn't eat them; our cat wasn't that keen on them either, but they stayed there as a kind of emergency supply. I thought about them last week when we ran out of canned cat food, but didn't think they were still around.

So I picked up the box. As I did so, I noticed a few things--the fetid smell coming from it, the white fibrous spiderweb-like material around the edges of the box, and the two arachnoid creatures crawling on it.

I'm not particularly ashamed to say that I dropped the box, went to the other end of the kitchen, and had heebie-jeebies while I implored my wife to deal with the matter. I tried not to pay too close attention to what it was, but eventually she had me bring her a green garbage bag, we put the box into it, and then I loaded a bag of diapers on it for good measure and took it outside into the just-below-freezing temperatures, where hopefully most invertebrate life would at least go sluggish, if not die outright. The next morning, bag still quiescent, I put it out for garbage pickup, and it's gone.

I really don't like bugs. Intellectually, I can understand the evolutionary niches of insects, especially in a house like ours which is so sloppy. But to see them crawling around, or worse, to feel them, or to think about one of them possibly coming into contact with my skin, makes me feel like the janitor at the aquarium in the Far Side Cartoon who gets a delayed cumulative attack of "the willies". Spiders are, in theory, better than insects, because they eat them, and keep the population down. Charlotte's Web was one of my favourite books as a kid. But I don't want to touch their webs, or them, or see them inside my house.

So now I'm a little bit skittish about that cupboard. I don't want to fill the cat's food dish, or change the garbage. A rational thing to do might be to clear the whole cupboard out and vacuum it or fumigate it or Raid it or something, but it will take a stronger person than I.

Unbroken Undulation

Tonight we finally finished watching "Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid", which was ostensibly one of our New Year's Eve movies. For many years now our tradition has been to watch old movies on New Year's Eve--"The Maltese Falcon", "Gone With The Wind", "North By Northwest", "Harvey", "Breakfast At Tiffany's", and several more. But though it's been a few years since we could manage more than one in an evening, I still insist on getting two. At least this year we got them from the library, so we could renew them for another week.

Our other one this year(well, you know what I mean), which we managed to actually watch on the 31st, was "Cat Ballou"--which was interesting because, like "Butch Cassidy", it was also a western featuring "the Hole in the Wall gang". It was pretty funny, with a very young and pretty Jane Fonda in it. "Butch Cassidy" itself we didn't cotton to nearly as much. I had some high expectations, I confess, because it was written by William Goldman, but I should've remembered my last experience with William Goldman, reading the ham-handed Boys And Girls Together. It had its moments(the movie, that is), but not enough of them, and we spent too much time exchanging looks of "I guess directors could get away with this crap in the sixties".

For more recent movies, we did manage to see "Flightplan", which was a pretty good thriller. It tried to mess with your mind a few times, and the explanation for the events of the movie is, in the end, highly implausible, but it's good fun. Unfortunately Peter Sarsgaard's character looked like he was falling asleep for the entire movie, but you can't have everything.

We also took Simon to see "The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe" last weekend. I thought they did a good job with it, except possibly for the river-crossing sequence. And I somehow thought there'd be more animals in Narnia, and less of the humanoids, like fauns and centaurs and dwarves and giants, but I guess those are easier to cast. I suppose I don't remember how many of them there actually were in the books. I wonder, are they going to do all the books, and if so, in which order? In the editions I grew up with, "The Magician's Nephew" was the first, though I can easily understand them starting with "TLTWATW" instead. Still, do they do "Prince Caspian" next? When do they do "Horse And His Boy"? Well, in any case, I'm looking forward to "The Voyage of The Dawn Treader", which was always my favourite of the books.

Oh, and I got "Friends" Season 4 and "Veronica Mars" Season 1 for Christmas. We're still working sporadically on Season 7 of "Buffy", but I've taken to watching an episode of two of "Friends" on some evenings. Season 4 is one of my favourites, but now, after having given up watching the reruns for probably over a year now, I'm getting nostalgic for the show, even the last couple of seasons. I keep thinking of good scenes and remembering that they're in Season 3, or Season 5. Someday...