November in SC

It really is not endless summer here. In fact we had some nights in the high 30's (fahrenheit) and cold coat-weather days just last week.

What happens here is that weather comes more in spells than in seasons. Single digit nights occur in winter, and days in the 70's are not uncommon any month of the year.

The past couple of days have been in the 70's.

Tomatoes are ripening on our vine. There could be a frost any night now and we have to watch out and go ahead and harvest them, green or not, if frost is due. These 4 (you can't really see the 4th one) will make a nice one-meal batch of fried green tomatoes.


But today, bees were still hanging out in
a sunflower.

Nights are chilly. A housefly takes refuge in a still-blooming rose, and another bud is ready to open. Scooter is more interested in the mice that rustle in the underbrush back there.

We're still seeing butterflies.




AND some fall color. Fall, like everything else southern, ambles slowly through the weeks. No big burst of color, but a flare here and there. This year's drought has affected it too, and has seriously dampened the color, but it's appearing.

All photos taken today, November 20th.

My Unillustrated Robert Goulet Post

One of these days I will blog about life as an unmedicated ADD. It's not self-deprecating humor, it's a real medical diagnosis. I hated the meds I was on and quit them several years ago. They didn't help much anyway, so life is only a little more chaotic without them, but I lose things. I have piles of unsorted junk mail and paper scattered everywhere. I leave tasks unfinished, and I often take something out of its logical location, walk toward another place where I plan to use it, and somewhere along the way get distracted by the inevitable Something Shiny, drop the item randomly and find it years later. An expired check stuck in a pile of magazines. Old photos among recyclable paper on top of the printer.

Every single object I had planned to photograph, to illustrate this post, is missing in action. Photos of myself and my cousin. The Game. The Autograph. Days go by. The news about which I plan to blog gets old. I search the house but no luck yet.

Meanwhile maybe the Wash Your Car And It Rains Law will work for me here. If I give up and post this without them, then they'll show up and I can update it.

This is my very own Robert Goulet story.

In 1968, when we were 14, my mom took my cousin Emily (the same cousin whose dad took us emerald mining) and me to New York City for a wowzer of a week. To give us the full NY experience, she took us by train and we began the the trip by disembarking in Penn Station.

Charlotte, NC, home, was no backwater, and my mom had seen to it that I experienced live theatre by age 8 (a tour company of The Music Man), and good professional stock companies at that. Betty Grable came to town in Hello Dolly. (Dad was in charge of my music education and took me to concerts by Ella Fitzgerald and Benny Goodman.)

But real New York theater was still pretty impressive. We saw You're a Good Man Charlie Brown, The Fantastiks, Hal Holbrook in Man of La Mancha, and Robert Goulet in a little musical called The Happy Time.

Daytime was a wowzer, too. In the Metropolitan Museum I stood right in front of paintings I'd only seen in books. And we saw Central Park, the Automat, Times Square, Lincoln Center! Familiar to Emily and me from our favorite TV shows (That Girl! He and She!).

When I talk about my cousin Emily, it's closer to the truth if you think "sister." Our dads are brothers. She and I were the first members of our generation, were due together. She was a tad early and I was late so she beat me by a month. A few little brothers came along later, but Emily and I remained the only girls. The extended family, and most others with social ties to our grandmother, treated us like twins.

Our other favorite TV show was The Patty Duke Show. Emily and I look nothing alike. We are nothing alike, but we related, partly to Patty and Cathy's radically different personalities. Only a couple years ago she found The Patty Duke (Board) Game for me in an antique shop.

She's quick thinking, scientific (she's now a chemistry professor) and assertive. She walked into Big Name College and told them: "You need the courses I can teach," and they hired her. I'm timid and reclusive. She led, I followed, even in NYC which should have intimidated even her. But not much did.

We never considered getting autographs from the actors in the other musicals that week, but Goulet was Big Time Celebrity to anyone raised as I was, on Broadway musical cast albums, by a theater-buff mom.

To me, Julie Andrews was a star before she ever made a movie. I ran outside one day circa 1963, after reading the showbiz gossip in the Charlotte News and announced to my friend Sally: "Guess what! Julie Andrews is gonna be Mary Poppins in the movie!" Sally gave me a blank look.

And Goulet had been Julie's Lancelot in Camelot!!

So here we are, filing out of the theater after The Happy Time. Emily's got an idea: "Let's go around to the stage door and get his autograph!"

How she even knew this was possible, I can't imagine. To me, celebrities exited their performances by special Celebrity Portals to their Home Worlds and did not exist in ours. But my cousin, at 14, knew where to go and knew autograph hounds hung out there.

The stage door crowd was small. We waited ages. Then actors started wandering out. Lord help me, I ignored Charles Durning and David Wayne (!) I didn't know who they were (Our Finian's Rainbow recording was from a later revival, not the original that won Wayne a Tony). People lined up for signatures from Goulet. Emily was ahead of me. Then I stepped up to him and handed him my program. Overwhelmed. This was the guy in the Camelot record standing right in front of me.

He asked my name. I answered and stared at the ground. He signed my program, handed it back and said,

"Let me see your eyes." He put his hand under my chin and lifted my face and looked me in the eyes with a big smile. If he said anything else, it was lost in the buzzing in my ears. My memory ends at that point.

Did he know how to charm a shy 14-year-old, or what?

The picture stayed on my bulletin board for years. It's still here somewhere. Really.

So is my brain, but that's another story.

Back to church

Oh, like a night in this %&$*ing trap isn't bad enough, now you get flash in my eyes?!

Come the revolution, your species? Servitude City. Count on it.

Another discovery everybody else knew about already

At this time of year, when the garage is neither too hot nor too cold to work in, I have a burst of activity, clearing clutter, weeding out, assembling sets of books to sell.

But I thought I'd take time out to share yet another of my Amazing Discoveries Actually Discovered Long Ago By Others: if you've got a yen for curried chicken salad and you don't have raisins on hand, dried apricots in it are yummo! In fact, I like it better this way.

The Episcopal Church Welcomes You!

Something had moved into our garage. We were keeping the back door of it open so Scooter could come and go at will, by day. Not a good decision. His food, his water, The Lifestyle To Which He Had Become Accustomed, looked fine to what we thought was a raccoon. Much knocking over of shelves full of our stuff. Several smelly messes.

Use of the Havaheart trap revealed that it was a little possum. We have relocated him to the perfect new home - After all, the Episcopal Church Welcomes You! We resisted the urge to name him Dumbledore. I mean, no point in putting up red flags.

The church sits next to a big undeveloped tract of forest.

A trip to the church parking lot.

In the trunk.

Naturally this would be a Sunday. We waited till past noon, but there were still people around. A group of kids enjoyed meeting our possum.

We walked him pretty far back into the woods, opened the cage and persuaded him to make his exit, which took a few minutes, while he got it through his head that he was not about to become our dinner.

GO, already!

OK, it's not real gem mining

I've probably spent too much time and money trying to replace things I lost in Hurricane Hugo, but i was determined to replace one more thing on this NC trip. I wanted to go mining.


When I was 14, my uncle brought my cousin and me to the mountains and, among other things, we went emerald-mining. The area is studded with old mines, whose main product was feldspar used for BonAmi cleanser and Fels Naptha soap. But they also yield various precious and semi-precious stones. On that occasion nearly 40 years ago (OMG) I though I'd hit the jackpot when I found a chunk of granite with a cloudy, rudimentary emerald (worth about 2 bucks) embedded in it. It's now out in the SC marsh, along with most of my childhood artifacts, where it can baffle some future geologist.

So Larry, good sport that he is, took me along a winding, winding road deep into the mountain, as we followed signs toward Little Switzerland and the Emerald Village mine. I'm happy to say he ended up having a fun day too.

Safety and insurance concerns have ended real do-it-yourself mining in most of these tourist tra- I mean, places. So what you actually do is buy a bucket of rubble and sort through it for any valuables. They seed each bucket with enough poor-to-medium quality gems to make it worth your while, and the rest of the rubble sometimes contains a surprise.






The price varies by bucket size. We got the $35 buckets, and each received a bucket full of rocks, a trowel, and a plastic cup to sort the good stuff into.









You trowel out some of it. Sluice it through the water. Examine each big rock on all sides.








Once the big pieces are sorted out, then I pick through the tiny ones. I pull out every item of any color at all, since even the worthless stuff can be pretty.

Trowel, rinse, repeat. It didn't occur to me to bring my reading glasses, so I examined each piece with a Mr. Magoo squint, for about 3 hours of sorting.

Then we bagged it to take home. The mine will also appraise it for you, but somehow we thought we'd get a better deal elsewhere, so now we've got two plastic bags of pretty varicolored rocks.

This was done in the lower mine. The upper mine is set up to tour and we did that, too, after a nice deli lunch which they also offer. Gift shop, displays, the whole tourist tr- I mean, nine yards.


As we walked to the the upper mine I found one of my favorite rocks-of-the-day for free, lying alongside the road. I've taken umpteen pix, but suffice it to say no photo really gets the multicolored and layered, textured, 3D -ness of it.










UPPER MINE SELF-GUIDED TOUR
(3 PHOTOS HERE BY LARRY)


According to the guidebook, the third photo shows a 12-horsepower steam engine, model name the "Eclipse," made by the Frick Company of Waynesboro, PA, "probably in the early 1890's." And it still runs.

This mine closed in the 1950's, as did many, though feldspar is still an economic force of some merit in those hills. The mine exhibit shows various miserable aspects of the job, including child labor, and a lot of original equipment, most from the 1920's and 30's.












And here's my take. (above)







A select array of colorful items from it is in the photo on the right -- and note the clear purple-tinted crystal at the very bottom of the picture. This may be the coolest thing I got, because that back speck in the end is a tiny fossilized ... something. Bit of seed or leaf. Maybe a tiny feather? This thing, I will definitely need an expert to identify, but whatever it is, it's neat!


ENLARGEMENT PHOTO BY LARRY









Overlook view in Little Switzerland











Last but definitely not least, a non-mine-related addition to the general documentation of the trip -- I just got back prints from my one role of conventional film, wherein can be found the Motel Cat. She seems to drift from room to room, visiting all who are amenable.

A week in the mountains

(Pictures should come up in a higher resolution if you click them -- be forewarned, the quilt photos come up extra-large to show detail to anyone who's interested!)



Yancey County, NC, week of Oct 1 2007.

This area is a little to the north of Asheville, NC. We didn't visit Asheville, or much touristy stuff (with one exception, to be covered in a followup post). What we were looking for was to sample everyday life, as a potential place to land. For the rest of our lives, maybe.

A place away from hurricanes,
with a mild climate but real seasons.
A place where our vote might actually count.

So you might as well know, I picked this county by pulling up an election 2004 political map, then looking into amenities and accommodations.



The local coffee shop, where we had tea, bagels with cream cheese, and delightful conversation with locals, each morning. We miss this place! We're now scouring local shops for approximations of the tea flavors we got there.


My best picture - a winding road between Burnsville and Little Switzerland. This one's going to be my desktop wallpaper for awhile. Not much fall color yet, just a hint.




SPRUCE PINE, NC

We were staying in nearby Burnsville, a nice little town that straddles a major highway. It's the county seat, has the chain restaurants and big grocery stores Spruce Pine enchanted us more. This is a view of the "lower town." Just over my right shoulder, the road splits and takes you into upper Spruce Pine, a similar, slightly busier street one step up the mountainside.



Close encounter with a freight train coming through Spruce Pine. According to the local newspaper guy --we stopped in the office and received giveaway maps and tourist info-- the Barnum & Bailey Circus Train also comes through each year, on its way to the circus's overwintering in Florida.




Spruce Pine has nice shops selling exquisite local arts and crafts. The glasswork in the art gallery was fantastic.

I was particularly blown away by this piece (right), about 10-12 inches tall, with what looks like a baobob tree inside it!

Closed! Will reopen at 10:00AM!

Well, darn!

PHOTO BY LARRY

The Mountain Piecemakers Quilt Show

Can't we put this one on the Amex card??

Back in Burnsville, a small but superb quilt show was on. All from local crafters. From the traditional to the very artsy. We were asked to vote for our favorites, and the one to the right got my vote.














On our last evening we had dinner at the Nu-Wray Inn. Built 1908, and pretty famous - Elvis stayed there! Its recipes show up in southern cookbooks. Delicious country-style dinner, which reminded me of Scarlett O'Hara's reminiscences, during the hardship years at Tara, about the opulent meals they used to have in the prewar days. The dishes just kept coming, and I gave in, fell off my sugar-free wagon and sampled the peach cobbler.






Mist in the mountains, as we drove out.



Sunset on our last evening

Since this post is unwieldy enough, I saved our Wednesday excursion for a post of its own!

I tried to resist

I place all blame on bad influences. You know who you are.

AN INTERESTING CONSERVATIVE I HAD AROUND FOR SOME TIME

I dated a Republican for 4 years. In fact, a Republican politician, local level, though his term of office had just ended and he'd decided not to run again, by the time we had our first date. He's definitely one of the good guys, and, while we were ill-suited as a couple, we got past it and he was a truly good friend during my life implosion of 1994.

When we first went out, the Bork nomination had just been rejected, and was still a hot topic. My take on politics was still pretty simpleminded and I was furious with Reagan, but my friend asked me to consider the possibility that Reagan was a shrewd politician who nominated Bork both to play to the anti-abortion voters, and, quite intentionally, to fail the approval process. Equally shrewd liberals, he claimed, would know that it was a political maneuver designed to keep the anti-abortion people placated and the Court centrist.

I still watch the process with his words in mind and wonder how often either party is really trying to get something done, in a system where failure can sometimes score you more points with voters.

AN INTERESTING CONSERVATIVE I ATE

Forget whatever you're thinking. I'm counting the alligator I sampled at the Gator Cookoff. I mean, alligators are the quintessential conservatives. Firm believers in private property, absolute freedom within that property, local control. Surely they believe in Intelligent Design. They consider their design so intelligent that they haven't seen any need to change it in 60 million years. Strong opponents of redistribution of wordly goods. Traditional values.

INTERESTING THING I DID WITH A CONSERVATIVE

With the Republican boyfriend, I attended a Barry McGuire concert. Barry, famous for Eve of Destruction, became a Born Again Christian in the early 70's. This concert, in around 1990, involved a lot of talk about his beliefs and experiences and a few songs. McGuire is skilled with an audience, animated and jocular, but his jokes veer into obnoxious insults of people with different beliefs. It was one of the rare occasions on which we agreed about the whole evening. It was interesting, disturbing, and musically dull.

A CONSERVATIVE IN A MUSEUM

A CONSERVATIVE IN ITS NATURAL HABITAT

Michigan??

All I can tell you is that I have three online conservative friends. They are all in Michigan. And the Republican boyfriend mentioned above? Born and raised in Michigan.

First things first

Chris Clarke, who writes a very nifty natural history blog, started passing around this animeme, and tagged people I know. Next thing I know I get roped in by both Sherwood and Dann. So I'd better get on the job here. I will however, tag no one else, since most of the people I know who blog are already victimi- I mean tagged. Actually, my biologist brother might have some fun tales. I'll have to email him, though he's often on the road doing field work.

AN INTERESTING ANIMAL I HAD

SPARKY, circa 1972
Sparky, like many of my animals, adopted us instead of the other way around. This was around my 7th grade year, 1966-67 or so. He lived several streets away but had a devoted relationship with a girlfriend, Spooky, who lived 2 doors down from us, and he simply bunked at our house so much that his family called up. The kids are grown, they said, he's always at your house, shall we just bring his stuff down? He became our dog. Mine most of all.

He and Spooky were a lifelong couple. When he was injured in a fight with a Saint Bernard (Yeah, really. Brave or stupid. We could never decide), Spooky came down to our house and stayed next to him, while he lay in his basket on the porch fighting a nasty infection from a really big bite.

He looked like a beagle, but his original family said he was actually a dachshund/basset mix. He was kind of an Eeyore dog, looked gloomy most of the time. My mom recalled a kitchen incident in which a mouse sauntered along the wall and disappeared behind the fridge, while she said to Sparky "Catch it!" and he looked at it, then at her like, "Oh please. Must I?"

He vanished a week before Christmas 1973. A week stretched into two. Surely he was gone for good.

New Year's Day, 1973, I went mountain climbing with friends. Sort of. OK, really just a big hill there in the Carolina Piedmont. Came home to find ...

Sparky, thin and exhausted!! He'd staggered back onto the yard and pretty much collapsed against the brick wall. He mostly slept for the next week. And we can never know what happened or where he was. But we've always joked that somebody, as my grandfather had suggested, had make the mistake of catching him to hunt rabbits. And had discovered, as with the mouse, that he looked at the kidnapers as though they were insane, and they either let him go or he escaped.

He was mine. I was his. I spent a lot of time with his head resting on my knee. He was getting quite old by the time I finished college, and had one last burst of energy Dec 23 1977, when he chased and was hit by a delivery truck. We buried him in the damn snow. That Christmas sucked.

I want to see all my animals again in whatever the next life is, but he's the one I want to see run out and meet me first. He appears in my dreams often to this day.

AN INTERESTING ANIMAL I ATE

This would be marinated alligator, at a Gator Cookoff. Chewy.

AN ANIMAL IN A MUSEUM (OR ZOO)

One fun day during our NJ years, Larry and I took the kids to the Philadelphia Zoo and went into the Lorikeet Aviary. These little birds are hilarious. Here's a picture from another aviary, showing someone feeding one. You get a cup of some kind of nectar-y stuff they love and they land all over you and battle each other to get to it. Hard little claws. Pushy, funny little guys.

AN INTERESTING THING I DID WITH AN ANIMAL

Our neighbors had a daughter with birth defects, and built a backyard swimming pool for her. It was a homemade pool, rough concrete walls. She grew up and got married, they sold the house to us. We'd drain the pool for the winter. In spring we'd clean and paint it and try to seal out the water leaks.

One spring a mole got trapped in it. I don't care how destructive moles supposedly are. I'm a bleeding heart. He was adorable. He scrabbled blindly around the concrete walls, lost and helpless outside his environment. I followed him with a bucket trying to catch him. Finally he bumped against the arch of my foot and just ... stopped, too tired and discouraged to move. I remember his hard, weirdly human little hand and the fine velvety texture of his fur. Scooped him into the bucket and tipped him out next to the fence, which he scurried under, and presumably dug his way to happiness.

AN ANIMAL IN ITS NATURAL HABITAT

Meet Betty.

PHOTO BY LARRY, 2007

Our tidal marsh is rather brackish, not an alligator's favorite thing, but once or twice a year, Betty hangs out for a few days to check out the local edibles. She solved the nutria-invasion problem in short order. This picture is from January -- she was around a couple weeks ago, but we couldn't get a picture. And since we fear for both Scooter and our feral cats, it's just as well that she didn't come in too close or stay too long.

My heart's in the highlands

Little Switzerland, NC, October 4, 2007

[date corrected!]

There's something about a vacation.

We didn't need to leave home to see natural beauty. We're surrounded by coastal tidal-marsh beauty. We didn't need to leave home to take a break from work. Leaving home didn't really put any of the stresses we've got on hold. They were all just a cell phone call away, and always are.

But it was delightful. Cooler, drier air. Not much fall color, just a hint, but beautiful mornings with mist cloaking the mountains. Lots of so-so pictures taken by me with my inexpensive camera and my not-real-steady hand, and great ones taken by Larry, but with few exceptions you're gonna get mine, so try to bear up!

More later, as I get my picture act together.

It's the perfect week

...to read a banned book!

Have a good one, everybody!

A poem

I oughta save this for Mother's Day but
A. Mother's Day is a dumb Hallmark holiday anyway, and
B. it's a long ways off.

To say I know the poet would be kind of an exaggeration. We were co-staff members of a poetry magazine in college, only 6 of us, but she and I were not paired on a project. She's brilliant and shy and I never got to know her there. But I've watched with interest as her award-winning work has given me a glimpse into a talented mind and heart. Her books have a strong autobiographical thread through them and tell, among other things, about her deep desire to have a child. At the end of the last collection I felt so sorry that she was still waiting for her dream, and so happy when this new book arrived and I saw she finally, at age 45, had a son!

This poem, from that new book, made me smile.

CHERRIES

Rocked in my mother's pregnant amble,
and born into forty-five years in the dark,
the egg this child was also swayed in the arts
of lovers I took before you, fed with me

in the public markets of Baltimore and Denpasar
on oysters and rambutan, woke with me each year
to new waves of wander, fish and flower,
liqueur of each region, and bread of each village,

each cup of moonlight in the long sward
between my window and the Wannsee.
The egg he was heard the voices
of everyone I desired and held itself

in some deep hormonal bloom,
taking whatever was remarkable
in my life into its possibility.
We learned not to hurry in Balinese rain,

to listen for the rumble of wild boar
in the Malvan woods. We climbed
into planes bound for cities we'd never
visit again and skin we'd summon

with sobbing. And so, my husband,
as you dream of owning this child,
remember that he has ridden in my fire,
bathed in my blood, and sipped

at the breath I drew the first
time I saw what Rodin had clawed
from stone before he turned from Claudel
and went home for dinner and a clean shirt.

Remember that this child is collage
of everything before you, frangipani
and escargot, five-for-a-dollar boxes
of macaroni, and French cherries

from an old woman in Auvergne
who insisted on the gift
because it was so marvelous
to see a woman travelling alone.

-- Leslie Adrienne Miller

from The Resurrection Trade. Graywolf Press, 2007.

You can get the book at Books-a-Million, B&N, or Amazon.

Bottlecap philosophy of the day

.
From a bottle of Honest Tea [TM ] "Green Dragon" tea with Passionfruit, part of yesterday's nutritious lunch at the health food cafe.

The bad news:

there is no key to the universe.

The good news:

it was never locked.

Turns out that Swami Beyondananda is a comedian: click here for his website!

My, um, exciting week

MONDAY: We repaired the screen door (which a raccoon had torn right through to raid the bird seed) and cleaned the porch. At last, it's porch weather again! In SC, spring and fall are the seasons for it. In between, the heat is usually too much. Now we're getting slightly cooler days.

Time to eject a cat from a lounge chair and get comfortable to...

ALL WEEK: ...proofread and edit a manuscript for Larry. I'm not the greatest copy editor. I can't maintain my ability to focus very well, so I miss typos, have to do a lot of backtracking. But I do make some good suggestions and weed out a fair number of typos, and I work cheap! The plan is to finish this project before we head for the mountains for a week, so I can take my own work, and some fun reading with me. Most of Larry's writing is fun to read but nothing is fun to edit - I was not built for detail work.

FRIDAY: My mom turned 80, and that gives us four parents in their 80's.

SATURDAY: As we're loading our car in the grocery store parking lot, a guy comes running out, with 3 store employees after him. He crosses the 4-lane highway, disappears through the trees into the neighborhood beyond and they lose him. We've got the car running by now, so we leave the store, cross the highway, cut through a parking lot, and there he is, strolling across in front of us and letting himself into a house. Back at the store--where they had not only devoted the 3 employees to the chase, but had called the sheriff --we gave them his address.

Later on Saturday, a friend of my brother's came to visit my parents. He had kind of a troubled family and spent a lot of time with us as a teenager, grew quite close to our parents. Hadn't seen him since my brother's 1994 wedding, so it was a cool visit.

SUNDAY: Today was Larry's birthday. The gods smiled - we had no accidents, auto or otherwise!

This date has been inordinately accident-prone. In 2000, our neighbor locked herself out, came to our place to use the phone and tripped on the sidewalk, breaking a wrist and a cheekbone. That was a rental complex, so we had plenty of sympathy and no liability. She and her husband took us to dinner afterwards. Then in 2004, and again in 2005, SUV's backed into us. On his birthday. Who the bleep uses a drive-through ATM, and then backs up?! That was the 2005 incident. Only someone sent by Satan to crunch our front bumper, though one reason we let it go is that the decorative front plate took the damage. The guy offered me $20. I said, "It's a custom plate." "Will you take $40?" I agreed.

By last year we were scared to leave the house.

But 2 years in a row have been incident-free. We finished the day at what used to be our favorite restaurant. We still like it but they had dropped prime rib from their regular menu about a year ago, breaking Larry's heart. They do have it as a special on occasion, and derned if tonight wasn't one of those occasions. Which means this blog has entered the darkling plain of my telling you what we had for dinner!

Woulda coulda shoulda

This is a picture of pretty much nothing. The eaves of our porch. Well, pine trees. Trees are nice. But yesterday, and for a couple months, we've had a big beautiful garden spider living there. Now she's gone.

We may be too emotionally involved with our wildlife around here, but aside from the fact that, thanks to her, no annoying flying insects have come in our front door to divebomb us--not one all summer--we just loved her. We watched her and her downstairs "sister" build their webs. Larry took care when weeding around the downstairs lady not to disturb a line of weeds that anchored the bottom of her web. We enjoyed the drama as a collection of small males sidled over to each web, hinting around for the privilege of being her lover and her next meal. (Actually in the wild, the female only lunches on the guy sometimes. But if I'd gotten a good photo of the suitors, I still had an "eatHarmony" post all planned out.)

In the AA program I learned the dangers of "woulda coulda shoulda." All the things we wish we could go back and do over. They can drive you crazy. Some of them seep through anyway.

We got back from the grocery store yesterday and there was the Termite Guy.

This isn't our house. My parents own it as a guest house and we live here gratis which makes it possible to meet a lot of our obligations, especially medical ones. It's wonderful. But it's their house and we do things their way. My dad loves lawns. Larry and I both hate 'em. Someday in our mountain acreage we'll have woods and gardens. No bleepin grass. But we keep up the lawn here. OK, Larry does it. 8~)

In our own place, we'll avoid chemical pest control as much as possible. But the folks send the Termite Guy around periodically and it's OK. We did stop the inside spraying long ago. We figured that termite damage affects the house, but inside, chemical sensitivities take precedence. We've got cats for that anyway. Somehow we both thought that ended everything but the termite service itself.

So yesterday we waved Hi at the Termite Guy, said hello to our pretty spider, went inside and put the stuff away. After awhile the bell rang. Termite Guy said "OK, your termite inspection and pest control are done," presented me with the orders to sign, we bantered about the weather as per usual and he went cheerfully on his way. I didn't think to look over at our lady on her web. Though it would have been too late then.

We didn't notice till this morning that our girl and her whole structure were gone. Pest control had done its work. Her sister downstairs was cleaned away too. The words suddenly came back to me: "Your inspection and pest control are done."

Woulda, coulda, shoulda. "Hey we like the spiders so don't bother them, OK?" If I'd thought of saying it when we saw him in the driveway, they'd still be there, munching happily and making eggs. He didn't attend to them till after we got back. Upstairs Girl was still there when we went up with the groceries.

You wouldn't believe how much we care. Larry called the pest people up and told their Saturday answering machine never to bother our spiders again. I went out, looked around hoping she'd escaped, but knew that Termite Guy wouldn't have been doing his job if he just said "Shoo." Our 2 spiders are dead. No rewind.

I sat on the steps and had a good cry, helped some by the cat pragmatism of Scooter who mewed irritably and headbutted me: "This isn't about me so it can't possibly be important. Scratch right here." Then I walked around and visited the three who had not built on the house itself and thank God, they were well and happy.

There's one:

But the two on the house -- they shouldn't have died, damn it.

A nice break from errand-day

Just had a couple of days too boring to go into -- cat-loosened computer wires ("What the bleep is the matter with this thing?!"), Vista-incompatible programs, errands, lost orders (though we found the stuff eventually). What a great day to run into a fun timewaster website over at Nellie Blog.

I decided to Simpsonize myself over to my favorite mini-mart for my drug o'choice, a fountain Diet Coke fix. 32 oz., only a little ice, and a shot of Full Throttle [TM] energy drink mixed in. Good, stuff, man! Now i'm ready to put my achy head to bed early.