The Cusp of October & November

Not much writing lately... need to fix that.

The winter storms are here to stay it seems. It looks like we'll have to live with a house that is primed until May or June when the weather dries up again. At least the wood on the house is sealed.

The Tuesday before last was the Wordos Halloween reading. My Halloween short was very well received. This makes me cautious; for the last four or so holiday readings, I've been led astray by the positive response to the reading only to have the story ripped to bits during written critique. I think my radio voice hypnotizes people when I read.

I've been thinking about religion. (Oh no, I can hear some of you think.) For the longest time I've always thought about rituals in terms of where they fall on a line between spiritual and theatrical. I've decided that it really should be a plane defined by sprituality, theatre, and (for lack of a better word) therapy. Or possibly a space defined by those three axes.

I visited Grandma last week. She was having a better day than I was, I think. I hadn't gotten much sleep the night before, so I was yawning a lot. We started talking in the living room (where there was some trashy TV show on), and she finally suggested that we move our conversation away from the noise and out into the kitchen.

Then we went on a long weekend out of town. It was nice and relaxing. I looked at various gardening magazines for ideas to fix our back yard. Mark and I also spoke about ripping out our tin roof patio cover and replacing it with a large umbrella. I go back and forth on that idea -- on one hand the roof has seen better days and looks like it was tacked onto the side of the house in the late 70's; on the other hand, it does provide a large swathe of rain and sun cover that would be difficult to reproduce with a large umbrella. What I really want there is a plexiglass greenhouse that can pump heat into the house in the winter.

The stars and the skies were very clear. I tried taking some photos of the stars, but my camera's better at microlens work, so instead of the Pleiades, I got a lot of smeared dots and digital noise-- I'll have to see if I can figure out a way to have a longer shutter speed than 15 seconds. As soon as we crossed the mountains back home we were driving under grey clouds and fog.

Last Tuesday was a Wordos session -- there was only one story on the table, and we ended up talking about a lot of other things. Luckily, one of the folks at the table is an anthropolgist, so discussion frequently goes that way.

Muriell continues to be an irritant. A really loud irritant.