Well, this is odd. I have oodles of stuff happening and nearly no inclination to write about it.
For the record:
I’m helping a friend to make a short film.
I have a huge pile of brush to cut into 15-inch lengths.
My wife is going to have surgery later this month.
We are having an open house at the new place just before the surgery.
I will be forty in a few days.
Oh, there’s more, but as you can imagine, rest and reflection are not my priorities.
It’s a perfect spring day here. I took advantage of the unexpected sun to mow the lawn, after cleaning up a winter’s worth of twigs. The twigs await cutting to suit use as kindling.
As I finished the lawn, I heard an insistent and repeated chirt sound. A ruby-throated hummingbird was perched in a neighbor’s still-leafless tree, declaiming his territory. As he called, he would flare his ruff. When he turned to face me and called his head blazed with light.
Y2K posts The memory of love’s refrain at MetaFilter, wherein he has collected the most extensive set of links the world’s yet seen on the best-known song penned by one Hoagland Carmichael.
Bloomingpedia, via Eric.
I was bummed to learn of the closure of Bert Grant’s Yakima brewpub from the P-I today. From the time it opened to the last time I was on Yakima, about five years ago, a stop at the old depot was a requirement of the trip, in token of Grant’s role in the craft brewer renaissance and in celebration of my family’s agrarian roots in the Yakima valley. Pears ain’t hops, but the incipient vineyards and hops fields of my childhood promised a richer, tastier adulthood, a promise which mostly has been borne out.
I swung by the liquor store on my way to pick up Viv, in need of gin, and wandered aimlessly for a patch. Rounding a corner I was haply surprised to see Clear Creek Eau-de-Vie, a variety of brandy that has been of interest to my family for years (my grandfather was a pear farmer and my dad has a long and lively interest in the manufacture of wine and liquor). So I added it to my forage, traded a small pile of pebbles and such to the man watching the mouth of the cave, and swung up into the saddle of my bantha, the booze in the trunk.
When Viv and I reached home, I picked up the paper bag with the bottles in it, which tore and dropped about five inches to the floor of the trunk. As i reached to pick it up, I was puzzled about the source of the liquid gurgling all over the floor of the trunk. The pear brandy bottle’s neck had sheared off.
I was able to save most of the booze by straining it through a coffee filter, and eventually got the pear out. But I’m still bummed, as I had hoped to open the bottle with my pop.