Deviant Dispatches

Let me be up front with you about a topic many don't discuss: leg shaving. I will never shave my legs again if I can help it (unless I really want the feel of smooth legs again sometime, but it's not likely I'll ever want it that badly). First, apologies to my mom. She tried so hard to make me a lady, and here I am, all hairy legged and burping at the table with my sisters. Love ya, Mom! My sister's friend asked one day why I don't shave. My short response was that it's too time-consuming and sexist for me to bother with. Here's the long answer, in two parts. Practical Reasons I have always been really bad at shaving. My shins and knees are so angular that I have myriad scars from various careless experiences. Last time I shaved, I ended up with a scar two inches long. I'm not a fan of risking injury like that on a daily basis. Because I'm so terrible at shaving, it takes me twenty minutes or more to make the whole of my legs naked. I'd...

I've deliberated long and hard over what my favorite Led Zeppelin song is, and I think I've at least reached a conclusion: I love  Kashmir. I love the orchestration, first and foremost. There is a sense of going places, merely through the repeated progression of notes in the strings, ascending until the end of a verse, where the full orchestra comes in and notes descend together. Robert Plant's vocals are, of course, another key element of the song and, along with them, the lyrics. SongMeanings.net always has some hilarious interpretations posted by random people on the interwebs, and Kashmir is no exception; everyone on the site is arguing whether this song is about Africa or Tolkien, and also whether P. Diddy wrote it. (It's about the desert , and P. Diddy raps over the orchestration in his song Come With Me . Sorry, elf fans and crazy people.) Anyways, the lyrics vie with the orchestration for the most beautiful part of the song. I think they're poet...

One of my favorite new sites is Dear Blank Please Blank . It allows people to fill in the blanks, writing short, hilarious/serious letters to various people, things, or places. For example: I can totally relate to the person who posted this. My sister will still  hoist the cat into the air - no prompting whatsoever - and start singing The Lion King's opening theme, while poor Cinnamon looks down on his kingdom, ears splayed back and terrified of his sudden removal from the ground. (In some ways, I think he's gotten used to her doing this and is just thinking, Really? Again? You just did this five minutes ago. ) Other favorites of mine are Twilight commentary. Some posts are trying so hard to be funny that they're just offensive. I have several responses I'd like to post in regard to this last one. Such as... Dear boys who post sexist things on the Internet, Please shut up. Your attempts to set women's rights back fifty years are not funny. I...

Sometimes I'm amazed that two different pictures can be from the same sunset. These were taken at the same place, less than five minutes apart. But the sun's color and the position of the clouds make them seem like entirely different things. The top one still speaks of daylight - when the sun is still that shade, you know you have time to accomplish something yet. The day isn't over, and the clouds are reassuring bubbles. But in the second one, the sun's changing color is a harbinger of evening. It's the color of ducks coming in for the evening, and packing up the picnic until another day has come. The clouds have darkened, and seem to bring a taste of evening with them. They're no longer fluffy and optimistic; they're a shadowy blanket, advancing a little at a time on the brightness that was day. In that way, you can almost have two sunsets at once.

  XKCD Dear Internet, I'm really tired of you playing hard to get. You've gotten predictable that way. In the mornings, you're like, "Yeah, I'm for realz here for u!" and then in the evening, your tune has changed to, "Well, I dunno." At least learn some grammar if you're going to start hating on me. I will not hesitate to bitch-slap you with a dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary. All 20 volumes . I don't know what to do with you anymore. Yes, I'm still interested in pursuing this. But every time you get flaky on me, you start talking about "commitment" and "contracts" and "installation fees." Hell, commitment is expensive. You think I want that? Your little game of cat and laser pointer has gotten old. I know what you're trying to do: you want me to finally admit how much I need you and give in to my anger. You want me to turn to the Dark Side and hope I'll sign my life away to y...

Brace yourself: it's time for cute. If you're not interested in cute, too bad. It is HERE.   Daily Squee These owlets look like a mini circus. The one in the middle just accidentally walked into the left guy's beak and is like O HAI I IZ WALKIN HEER. The guy on the right is the one who is secretly evil and plotting their demise, but it's only because he was neglected as a child. Daily Squee (a division of I Can Haz Cheezburger) is full of delightful nonsense like this. Speaking of I Can Haz Cheezburger ... Cake Wrecks has several posts devoted exclusively to cute cakes. This panda is still one of my favorites. Cake Wrecks They have more cute stuff here , and here , and here . Korknisse are my new favorite knitted/crocheted thing.   Knitted korknisse They are little gnomes made from wine corks, an excellent Christmas decoration or an everyday surprise. The photo above came PieKnits , which features a little story about these two adorable creat...

Spousal Unit and I are getting antsy about choosing and buying a teapot, so we at last have a savings plan underway. This will be part of goal #11 for me: getting a tea set. The pots we're interested in are rather expensive, so if I only get the pot before my birthday, I'll count that as a goal accomplished, as it's the larger part anyway. Our plan goes like this: when we save money on something (such as the $10 we saved on groceries last week via coupons), it will go into our savings jar for the teapot. We will not, of course, count up every penny saved, but when it's a significant amount, the cash (or a piece of paper with a number on it) will go into the jar. By itself, that may save enough for a teapot in a few months - I'm pretty frugal. But as I mentioned, we're really eager for this. So we've added another stipulation: we'll add $5 to the jar for each person when friends or family come to visit us. Considering that Spousal Unit's famil...

Technically, it is at last spring. The last week or so has felt like a fast forward to July, but at least the mornings still have a little bite and the grass is dewy. One or two trees outside are budding, confused by the odd winter and odder rush of heat that came after. The lakes have melted; ducks and robins aplenty are pooping happily all over the parks again. And, with the sun setting later in the day, I can take glorious sunset pictures again. One week ago today, I planted an amaryllis bulb my brother-in-law gave me for Christmas. It's already in full bloom, with two more buds waiting to be unleashed. Fall and winter are always in competition for my favorite season. Usually, fall wins out, but spring is so invigorating that I always reconsider it on arrival. (It eventually loses out because of bugs and impending heat.) This is our first full spring back in the Midwest, and part of me is surprised at all the green appearing, almost as if I didn't exp...

Next year, Spousal Unit and I - along with a big group of family - are hopefully going to Germany. The stipulation here is, of course, being able to save enough money to go. But I'm already daydreaming of going back to the place I visited ten years ago with a student exchange group. Bavarian Tours I want to take Spousal Unit to Königsee, a lake as blue as the Carribean, but in the midst of mountains. The lake is such a vibrant blue-green because of mineral runoff from the mountains, and St. Bartholomew's Chapel is an unusual but delightful beauty in this little niche, too. Mere minutes away is the Eagle's Nest , which was Nazi headquarters during World War II and Hitler's home. Now, it's a cafe, serving hot chocolate and a beautiful view to tourists. When I was there in high school, I had fun bounding all over the mountain like a hyperactive teenage goat. American in Norway There are also tours of the former bunker underground, with an extensive...

I'm here to talk to you about a serious threat to men everywhere: pirate romances. Clearly, someone who went from vikings to pirates for her romance ideas only has worse things in store for men everywhere. Maybe it's the eyepatch that's speaking to me here, but it seems Connie Mason is only waiting for it to become a trend in the bedroom. Then she'll use pirate/viking magic to give them a reason for needing the eyepatch all the time. Also, pirates and vikings? Pretty much the same thing. Alright, so far as we can see, this guy doesn't have an eyepatch. But what the heck are these two doing on the same ship? The Pirate and the Puritan ? That's really the best Howe had in her arsenal: a pirate named El Diablo who is "notoriously sexy"? Sorry, if that was his only pirating skill, I have a feeling he'd be dead. And why is she wearing a tablecloth? Now, ladies and gents, may I present... ...Fabio. Yes, that Fabio. Who wrote three boo...

I'm really missing my books lately, especially the poetry ones. Hopefully we'll be reunited soon, but in the meantime, I plan to find some of the poets I don't have yet. Reading more poetry is, believe it or not, a step in working on my novel, to make my prose more lyrical. (All of these poets and more can be found on the Poetry Foundation's website .) Robert Hass is one of these. He's known as a poetry translator, along with writing his own poems. If you think poetry translation is just a matter of knowing another language, think again. When a word can have several different meanings, how do you choose which one is just right? How do you keep the feel of a poem when it translates with such different sounds? It's a difficult thing, which Hass does well. Several years ago, I went to a reading of his in Chicago, and he was delightful. I'm not looking for a specific book of his; anything will do. Another poet I'm seeking is W.S. Merwin , author of The ...

This customer I'm about to describe to you was real. (Presumably, she's still real, but no longer a customer.) I have not made any of this up. As my friend Nan says, "You can't make this shit up." At the bookstore yesterday, we had an event, during which we turned off the store music and spoke quietly so as not to interrupt or disturb the authors as they spoke. Some people are just oblivious to these clues; this customer was one of them. I dub her Oblivia. She wasn't shouting, but she definitely spoke much louder than most people I know, and she was one of those who just liked to talk. Sometimes, customers don't like to ask for suggestions, for whatever reason. Instead, they just start telling you everything about themselves, and everything they've ever read, hoping you'll pick up on the clues with your incredible mind-reading abilities. Sometimes it works, but customers, please understand: we are not psychics. Most of us don't even want...

I hate shoe shopping. In that, I'm rather unlike many of my friends. I don't care to have a lot of cute shoes, so long as they don't make me want to die when I wear them. I hate having to go out into the wild world of department stores and boxes of misery and people trying to clothe their feet (which are the second worst thing; armpits are the first). But sometimes it's a necessity. All I need is a good pair of walking shoes, so I can get to work without totally destroying my back. Here's what I found instead yesterday. Kohl's (slogan: now that's more like shit) is a nightmare to shop. I had to work for them in college; why would I have thought otherwise? Yes, sometimes they have good sales. But is it worth trading your eternal soul for? Their aisles are a claustrophobic nightmare, like walking into a cave that gets deeper and darker, and who knows if you'll ever see the light of day again, and here comes a giant Indiana-Jones boulder, so your only...

William Carlos Williams is one of my favorite poets. One writing exercise I like to do involves mimicking my favorite writers, so I wrote this poem, based on W.C.W.'s poem of the same name , which involves fewer governments and more plums. This is Just to Say I have disbanded the government of which you were so fond and which you probably wanted not to change. Forgive me; it was horrible, so rotten and so vile.

And now, more pictures from yesterday's garden post. Because I need a day to recover from all the work I did on my novel yesterday. (I love that I need that.)

Yesterday, Spousal Unit and I visited Olbrich Botanical Gardens . They have a year-round tropical greenhouse (a.k.a. the conservatory), full of gorgeous birds and flowers. When we first arrived,  my camera fogged up from all the warmth and moisture. The birds, a volunteer explained to us, were particularly friendly yesterday, allowing people to come much closer than usual. Look carefully in this one for the quail's beak and eye. When Spousal Unit and I first saw them, they were darting through the undergrowth, and we thought they were kiwi birds. But no, they were quails. And I don't understand how someone could eat something that adorable. The coolest birds were definitely the waxbills, who were working on a nest near the orchids, high up in a corner. We sat while they flew around, building their nest, and they didn't mind our presence at all. They were so cool to watch that I had trouble getting a picture with Spousal Unit. Obviously, there wer...

I had an awesome post for you today, full of things I'm excited about lately. I wrote paragraph after paragraph, detailing the awesomeness. Usually, this stupid site will save my progress as I go. But every now and then, the internet is a little silly (read: Class A dunce) and terrible things happen. Like I try to add a picture before I realize nothing has saved. And another window will open, which isn't really another window and blocks me from working on anything I've written thus far. So the page continues pretending to open the picture uploader, while the words I've written are barely visible on the other side, and I know I will lose all of them. Stupid internet. Stupid Blogger. So, rather than rewriting exactly what I just wrote (because now I am not only discouraged, but late), I will enumerate the things that make me excited, when I'm not too busy being pissed at my blog host. 1. Circle M Farm - Spousal Unit and I are getting a share of vegetabl...