Ah, the start of a five-day unwork week.

What?

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I’m hosting a bird feed on Thursday; tomorrow shall be to market. I had thought to mow the lawn, in order to mulch the leaves, but it started raining about when I had intended to fire up the mower. They do say this week is to be a bit drier than it has been. Hopefully on Tuesday. I have been waiting until nearly all the leaves are down, and it looks to me as if they are, finally.

I need to pull in the rest of my garden harvest, too. I have about four peppers of various kinds, most mostly ripe, some excellent-looking and very colorful Swiss Chard, some past-its’-prime kale, a ton of parsely, a few onions, tarragon, verbena, sage, and a ton of largish Roma tomatoes that have been coming off a late-season volunteer plant, a monster that popped up in September and shot up to five feet or so before I racked it and wrapped it to keep the cold off.

The heatwave and the deck-replacement project quite thoroughly screwed up my fall succession planting, so no squash or winter potatoes or broccoli this year.

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Last night Viv and I watched and enjoyed the somewhat-confused 2004 (?) Ricky Gervais comedy Ghost Town, clearly intended as a programmatic inversion of, among other things, The Sixth Sense and Ghost. Of course, it is also a platform for Gervais’ inspired squirm-inducing improv and the film was at its’ best when he was doing his thing. However, I have to say I admired the rigor of the film’s inversions. The bereaved widow’s new boyfriend, for example, is a sterling fellow. The ghosts aren’t kept hanging around because they have unfinished business but because we, the living, hold them here.

There’s a scene which as shot struck me as the film’s intended closing – Gervais’ character has resolved the attachment problems for a series of ghosts, and so they leave him alone, and in v/o he muses that we die just as alone as when we enter the world, which is certainly my worldview. Of course, what kind of major-release romantic comedy would ever embrace pure, unsympathetic existentialism in whole? The film is also confused with regard to its’ position on the supernatural – each of of the in-narrative points regarding the existence of the film’s ghosts is essentially extrapolated from an atheist position, yet here we are, interacting with the dead in the, um, grand tradition of the films Ghost Town is seeking to take down. It’s forgivable, I suppose. I laughed a great deal.

One more thing that I enjoyed was a scene shot in the Met in NYC, in the glorious gallery of the Temple of Hathor, which I last visited in very early spring, 2001.