What Were They Thinking?

Hooray! It's the end of Saturday, and we're where we thought we would be Friday night. Today's theme was "What were they thinking." Not us; the previous occupants of our house.

While the mercury climbed into the hundreds (and the humidity rose, too) we contniued to wash the walls and scrape back the trim. The current wall paint layers are a kind of ugly sandstone-meets-khaki and a pale intestinal pink (in the kitchen). Before that, the walls (and ceilings) were white. Before that, they were a kind of avocado-sage green, and before that they were yellow. We're guessing the green and the yellow layers are the layers we don't want to know the chemical composition of. And guess what, we're probably going back to a yellow-based palette (although Mark isn't quite sure yet and wants to experiment with one room before committing).

Whoever did the last paint job didn't really know what they were doing. The white trim on some of the door frames, the Jim Kirk divider, and the mantle was a latex paint applied over an enamel. At least in most places the white latex peels off like a bad sunburn. In other places, they painted over hinges. It was a rush job, too, as there are some places where you can see through the top coat.

We hope to do better.

We also found places where people were creative with trim, walls, screws, and nails. I also found the false ceiling in the kitchen where we can hide small bodies (I found two dead wasps, so that's a start).

Mark Wyld stopped by to help (during the hottest part of the day), and I think he thought we were being anal-retentive very thorough in our efforts to prepare the walls and ceilings. Mark W also broght by some hedge clippers -- they're vorpal, and Mark D had to call me back into the house to continue scrubbing the walls before I could begin my topiary masterpiece. They're waiting though, hung up on a nail, calling to me.

My dad loaned us a laser level. Mark tried to convince me that we had no tasks in the house that could use a laser level; but I quickly chimed in that they would be handy getting a square-cut hedge. They're waiting for me, too, singing a duet with the clippers.

In the very early evening, Elizabeth and Jamie (from Scary Reading Hour at the Library) stopped by and Jamie and Arthur got to play together for a while. By this time we were taking a kind of break in the back yard, so I pulled up some pernicious weeds and we discussed things to do with rhubarb (which, it turns out, we have growing in the back).

If we're really good, tomorrow is taping day.

John Burridge

Today Arthur and I hid out at my folk's house. They have a swimming pool and air conditioning. They're also going just a little bit crazy getting ready for my sister's wedding, mostly because about three weeks ago their water heater failed and flooded the downstairs and the wallpaper and the carpets and some of the sheetrock and various stored items (like books) got soaked. Who would have thought your house could be flooded on a hill 300 feet above sea level?

In response to the wedding, my sister is fighting back her inner Bride-zilla, my dad is channeling his inner vaudeville carpenter, and my mom is making lots and lots of lists.

I had gone to help out with The Great Deck Rebuild, but ended up doing some computer work for the folks, instead. Then Arthur needed to be fed, and then we both sort of napped. We did make it into the pool, but Arthur wasn't as into it as I thought he would be.

This weekend is the great house scraping weekend. Tonight we managed to scrub and scrub and the one room that had been a Shrine to Mother Whoever is a completely different color from the other rooms. Maybe we'll have to call that room the Sistine Chapel. Five more rooms to go! A quick and dirty estimation of the square footage is about 1000 square feet of walls (probably in a very, very pale yellow) and about 800 square feet of ceilng (in a nice, bright white) to wash, rinse, scrape, prep and then paint.

Angels Don't Lie

The weather I hate is back. I guess it's back all over the country. Tomorrow (Friday) and most of the weekend it's supposed to get to 100 F. At least it isn't humid, and at least we can cool the house down to 60 F or so at night. I wish it would rain. Don't get me wrong, I like the sun and the light, it's just the heat I could do without.

The other day I was walking Arthur around our new neighborhood on a shopping trip and he started imitating the crows. It took him a few tries before I realized what he was doing. He's also learned the sign for bird, and I think today he wanted us to whistle, so he made the sign for bird followed by music.

The house move is going slowly. I think it really hasn't quite sunk in that we are home owners. We're also having to rethink our decorating style. Six years or so we agreed that we wanted a fairy tale cottage style. It was that or else sixties retro (which I think is a little sterile) or Elizabethan Palace (which Mark thinks is too exhausting).

Mark, who has more style than I do, noticed it first. Fairy tale cottage style doesn't work with the new house -- the ceilings, while high, are not vaulted, and there's no exposed rafters or wood banisters or ladders going up to lofts. It's a 1950's house that sort of but not quite uses golden rectangles in the floor layout.

Just to move something into the house I took the two gilt angels out of my writing loft and put them on the fireplace mantle in the new house. They don't go at all... OK, they go even less in the new house than they did in our current home (but they're gold and over the top, which is why I love them).

We'll have to negotiate a new style we both like. I think we might be able to go with an Arts And Crafts style or a Mission style. Art Deco is out. Mark has already vetoed hanging wattle fences as a border along the top of the walls as a way to add some texture to the house. He's also vetoed painting the walls as if the house were the Temple of Dendur, and he's vetoed placing a Japanese spirit gate outside the dinning area window to continue the line of portals that start with the front door and continue out through said window. I've taken down the offensive light fixtures in the bedrooms, but we haven't found something to replace them with.

I still think we should build a bunch of shoe-box-sized boxes, sink LEDs into them, paint the walls white, and then change the LED colors to whatever mood strikes us. We could even cycle through Christmas colors and bring out the gilt angels.

I don't know what we're going to do with our dog-sized Sphinx.

The Joys of Home Ownership

We haven't moved yet, but we're getting a lot of junk mail from mortgage companies who would be very happy to charge us money to manage our mortgage.

The moving strategy goes something like this:

• Clean the walls
• Prep the walls
• Pick a color to paint the walls that isn't dreary or too Romper Room; something that doesn't make our complexions look blotchy or ghastly and yet doesn't force us to live with an oddly colored trim
• Paint the walls
• Paint the walls with a second coat
• Wonder how to pull up the carpet tacks underneath the space heaters
• Attend my sister's wedding
• Pack everything we own into boxes
• Move
• Wonder where the hell various items are for three or four weeks
• Wish the kitchen had more damn counter space
• Pull up the blackberries living in the yard
• See how much money we have left for things like new window treatments to replace the hanging plastic slats in the living room and to get new bedroom (and kitchen) light fixtures so we can send the current ones back to Tragicistan
• Install shelves that are too high for Arthur to reach
• Raise the shelves that were too high for Arthur to reach when we started...

So far, what we've discovered is that Arthur prevents us from getting anything done unless he's napping, we wear him on our backs, or one of us watches Arthur while the other actually works on the house.

We have managed to clean the walls -- we think the sooty black marks on a wall we were blaming on an old space heater were actually caused by a previous occupant's shrine to some Indian Personage (when we saw the house the first time they had a very large portrait of a middle-aged woman surrounded by many candles and thurables).

The back yard lawn is bothersome. The last folks to mow the lawn didn't mow it so much as mush it down. We've aquired a fabulously antique push mower, but the grass is too tall to mow even at the mower's highest setting. I have managed to create a kind of path which runs from the back patio slab to a couch sized spot of dried yellow grass stubs. We have three rose bushes -- I like the blooms, but Mark doesn't like rose shrubs. We also have two trees, a nice, shady ornimental cherry tree, and a sad, dying, broom-handle of a maple tree. Along the patio slab is an herb garden -- the herbs are slightly withered except for the oregano (which is a thug) and the clover (which is overrunning the sage).

So far our neighbors are friendly. Our neighbor to the east is Dorothy Parker. I guess we'll have to get her books.

Tequila vs. Rum

I've discovered rum mixed with orange juice.

In some ways I think I prefer tequila. Tequila can be integrative -- I feel when I've drunk enough tequila that I've somehow managed to tap into the mysteries of touch. Rum is just disorienting -- things feel disconnected.

My sense is that rum has knocked out my main integrative processes -- the sub-processes that allow me to walk and turn out lights seem to be working OK. But the way that they communicate with each other isn't working properly. I also feel really cold, but the thermometer is reading 69 F. This sort of thing hasn't happened to me with tequila or vodka.

Vodka usually knocks out my awareness of muscle tension; so does tequila. Rum doesn't appear to do this -- I can feel how my right neck connects to my right shoulder. I can feel how my nose feels when I touch it, but my nose has become localized. With tequila, my nose would become a minefield of tactile information; under Vodka my nose would just be numb. With rum I can feel my nose, but it feels a slightly disconnected from my face.

With tequila, and to some extent vodka, it feels easier to organize my thoughts. Rum seems to muddy them more. I suppose that I might have felt this way with my initial experiences with tequila and vodka, but that repeated doses have allowed me to learn how to think (or at least navigate cognitively) -- rum is a new experience, so I have no corresponding cognitive mapping. Rum may be an opportunity to explore alternative connections in my cognitive associative array.

Rum seems to have affected my balance... I don't recall feeling this dizzy before. Again... Awareness has been redefined upon a macro level -- awareness of how my hands move is limited to the start and end processes. Libido seems slightly elevated, but nothing compared to the reactions of tequila. Salacious phrases seem just as easy to mutter under rum as they do tequila, but they're more amusing under rum than anything else.

I suppose a video tape would reveal flaws in my motions that I am unable to detect at this moment. To me various test motions seem fluid (except for occasional typos in this text).

In summary, rum seems to have the same effects that I imagine nepenthe might have -- awareness has been knocked back from a micro level to a macro level, and there is a disascociation of bodily sensations. To the extent that I can perform automatic tasks, I can. It would be interesting to see if tequila and rum could be mixed -- would the hyper-sensitive tachtility associated with tequila overcome the apparent numbing effects of rum?

So, how about art, truth, beauty and freedom?

Right now Im' feeling like a biological process trapped by my perceptions. Is this delusion or a glimpse of how the processes really work? It all comes down to the question of is reality a revelation of hidden processes or an unfolding of known processes into unpredicted patterns? I have to day that with rum I feel like I've slowed down my cognitive processes enough to look at them.... And the only thing I can tell you right now is that they're dizzy.

I suppose Dionysus would be laughing at me right now. Here I am, a confirmed desciple of Apollo, and I can barely type because my fingers wish to follow other branches on the cognitive associateve tree of homophones and synonymes and my eyes keep bouncing between the goalposts of this window. Only practice typing and the shining light of Fowler's Modern English Usage keep this posting legible.

Leave this body for a moment. Do not shuffle off this mortal coil so much as jump above (or below or beside) it -- like a passenger in a Volkswagan sticking his head out of the sunwindow (or was it moon window?) My hands try to sign in a new language... they try to sign in a language my eyes do not know. My body wants to dance new forms, but they are divorced from meaning. Is this a metaphor for the world -- forms do not have meaning? Or is meaning packaged in everything and it is our task to organize the messages into something coherant? Do the gods and goddeess and dieties send us everything at once ? Do our senses act not as doorways, but as gateways -- blocking out the messages so that our feeble minds can deal with things in a linear fashion?

If truth depends on what you drink, I prefer the drink that gathers truth together. I prefer the cup of truth that bridges the world of vision, of disolution, with the world of the every day. I prefer a truth that doesn't make one so dizzy.

Another Rejection

The US Post Office finally deigned to deliver our mail today. I'm not sure what happened with our mail hold while we were on vacation -- they were supposed to deliver our mail last Wednesday, but they didn't get around to it until today.

Sitting in our mail box wa a large conglomorate of messages bound together with two rubber bands. Nestled in amoung the junk mail from the Baby Industrial Millitary Complex and various mortgage companies was a slim envelope from Polyphony. I've developed a writer's feel for letters. The ones that have a mass that's slightly more than the mass of the envelope are rejection letters. I imagine that an acceptance letter is hefty with a contract. The one from Polyphony was wan and thin.

Anyway, the negligent mass of the envelope spoke to my spinal cord and I knew that a rejection letter lay concealed within. I said 'damn' in front of Arthur several times. I shivied open the envelope and there it was, the dreaded form letter, "Thanks for playing," with a nice and encouraging hand-written note from Deborah Layne.

So, with this rejection it's pretty clear that I don't quite understand the market for my stories. I'd like to think that I'm simply sending things to the wrong markets; the alternative is that I'm outclassed, and my writing can't compete against other stories. The next step is to re-evaluate what I've written from a marketing point of view.

New York (the state)

Once again I've let the blog get behind and have a ton of things to write.

Last week we got back from a two week vacation in New York (the state). Our flight home got in about 9 PM and we got home about 1 AM. I don't know how Mark managed to get into work the next day.

Arthur was the best child on the plane both ways. On the way back there was a particularly insane child three rows ahead of us, so in contrast every other child on the plane was a veritable angel.

The Dwyers are doing well; we managed to spend time with all of Mark's brothers and sisters. We flew into Newark Airport and then rented a car so we could drive to Suffern, New York, where Mark's mother, Mary, and two sisters, Melora and Melissa live. Suffern was our home base. Everyone was quite excited to see Arthur, especially Kristina, Melissa's daughter. We got (somewhat) adjusted to the time zone in time to drive to Buffalo July First.

While we were in the air flying to Suffern, the bank was trying to reach us. They'd forgotten to have us sign some piece of paper and they wondered if we could pop in and sign it. We'd only been telling them for about two weeks that we were going on vacation. So there was an afternoon of frantic FAXing. Everything got straightened out, but at one point Mark was considering flying back to Oregon to sign everything.

July First we drove to the wedding celebration. Driving to Buffalo was somewhat entertaining as it was the July Fourth weekend and just a few days before many of the roads in New York (the state) had been flooded out by torrential rains. Arthur traveled well, and we had a nice stop on the Erie Canal where we saw some old stonework and various unattractive joggers.

Mark's oldest brother, Michael, lives in Buffalo with his family. Laura, one of Michael's daughters, had a large wedding celebration with tiki torches, inflatable totem poles, faux grass skirts, and lots and lots of games. The Dwyers took up most of a wing of a local Mariot. Mark's sister, Maria, and her family; and Mark's other brother, Matthew, and his family came up for the celebration. I'm afraid I only saw it on tape, but during the celebration the three brothers did an improvised tiki torch dance that was pretty funny (think Ooompa-loompas in grass skirts).

July 3rd, several of us went to Ontario to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. It was obligatory that we ride the Maid of the Mists to get as close as possible to the falls. Arthur was great in the line to the boat, and then slept through the entire twenty minute aquatic adventure. The falls were pretty; it's amazing how much water flows over them.

While we were in Ontario, we got a chance to visit a butterfly conservatory. I got a some really good shots of butterflies up close. Even though we stayed much, much later than we had initially imagined we would, Arthur was a real trouper through it all.

July 4th, we had a nice breakfast and visit with Michael and Karen (and Christian and Patrick) before setting out to visit Amy and Sharon in Ithaca.

Ithaca and Cornell were interesting. It's always fun for me to see buildings that are older than my grandmother (a building in Oregon is old if it was built in 1910). Amy and Sharon fed us wonderful meals and took us on a great tour of Cornell. Amy, Mark and Arthur listened while Sharon and I went up into the bell tower near the Ash Chapel with a chime mistress to see the chimes played. She let Sharon and I sound the noon carillon.

We sped off from Cornell July 5th to visit Mark's sister, Megan, at the Joseph Campbell Center for Symbolic Studies in New Paltz. Megan, her husband, Morgan, and their two boys, Marly and Masio, were all at trapeze camp (which Megan teaches). Megan's class wrapped up and we visited their cabin before finishing our travels back at Mary's in Suffern. Since we were leaving after dark, we stopped back at the trapezes to see all the fireflies. There were lot, they were in the meadow and up in the trees -- it was the most fireflies I have ever seen in once place.

July 6th we hopped into the car again to visit with Lime Green Larry in the City. I actually asked Mark, "So, if people from Oregon are Oregonians, and people from California are Californians, people from New York are ..."

"New Yorkers."

"But," I continued, "people from New York City are..."

"From the city."

Anyway, we got into the city a little early, so we went on a photo outing of the city, and wound up at the Museum of Natural History. It was funny; I love their astronomy section, but it's all astronomy 101 stuff. So after about a half-hour looking at suns and planets and the spiral of time, we went into the dinosaur exhibits. The taxonomy is exhausting, but I always feel like I'm learning something new. Mark decided that Arthur needed to have all the dinosaur's feet pointed out to him. Judging from the photographs, I think he might have been looking at their teeth instead.

We met Larry at the Rockafeller Center for a trip to the Top of the Rock. The elevator ride up was really cool; the ceiling went clear so you could see the blue LEDs in the elevator shaft, and they had a timeline of TV playing as you ascended. The view was great. The sun was setting and the sky was very clear. Arthur liked the light fixtures.

Larry had to leave us to our own devices, so July 7th was Metropolitan Museum of Art day. Arthur handled it pretty well, but the MET really isn't very infant friendly beyond the Temple of Dendur. Luckily he fell asleep for most of it, and Mark continued to perform the lion's share of child care duties. I think the most interesting object this visit was one of Hatshepsut's sphinxes. The face was more or less in one piece, and the eyes still held a mesmerizing power.

After the Egyptian exhibits, Mark wanted to see the Rembrants -- various pieces that had once been united as an alter were reassembled for the first time in many years. I think of the Rembrant exhibit the most interesting piece was the top where God and some angels were posing with a sphere or two; the angels had these sort of petulant expressions on their faces.

I'm afraid most portraits don't speak to me jewelry, sculpture and architecture do. I'd say that the most fun painting we saw was one by William Blake that was the parable of the Virgins with the Oil: the foolish virgins lamenting was so over the top it was great. There was also an interesting picture of King David and another one of a kind of flower angel emerging from the mouth of a serpent.

Outside of the museum, on a park and bubble break for Arthur, we saw Cleopatria's Needle (where I met a new best friend who insisted that I try absolutely everything in my and my camera's power to photograph it).

On July 9 we (Mark, myself, Arthur, Mary, Melora, Veronica, Melissa and Kristina) went to the Bronx Zoo. We saw the gorillas, giraffes, African dogs, various rodents, buffalo, wallabies, tortoises, goats, chickens, geese, peacocks, alligators, and prarie dogs. Probably the most funny event was when Arthur, who had been exposed to a battery-powered dancing rodent that sang "Girl, You Really Got Me Now", signed to us (by reaching out and making a pinching motion) that he wanted us to turn on the wallabies -- presumably so they would start gyrating and singing old seventies rock songs.

What I found fascinating was the gorilla exhibit. It was pretty slow for a while, but then a mother gorilla started to express her milk, lick it off of her hand, and then regurgitate it. It looked like she had eaten some grass or other plant material as well. She would repeat this process -- expressing, licking, regurgitating -- and I'm guessing that she was working on creating a kind of semi-digested paste for her infant. What was intriguing was that she would stand on her legs and then sort of bend over like she was one of those glass drinking birds to regurgitate. Her legs seemed engineered to accommodate her large belly as she swiveled at the hip. Then she'd essentially barf up into her hand while the homo sapiens on the other side of the glass said things like eeuw! They eeuws were louder when she licked it all up again. I couldn't help thinking about all the pagan imagery of the Sacred Mother's milk and in my mind I could hear my friend Gra saying, "Ha! Where is your Goddess Now?"

July 10th we (Mark, Arthur, Mary, Melora and myself) visited a lake with Megan and her boys. Arthur really liked the lake and wanted to play in the water for a really long time. It's a good thing he seems to like cold water because that's what he'll get when we visit the Oregon coast. This was our last day in New York (the state), and we had racked up about 1500 miles in travelling.

July 11th was the day we journeyed back to Oregon. It was a long day, but fairly easy -- we got back to Eugene around 1 AM.

Now we're back and we own a house. We're in the throes of repainting and we'll have to pack up everything we own in about three weeks -- stay tuned.

Summer Solstice

The weather I hate is back. It's currently 83 F inside the house and 95 F outside. The house typically lags about ten degrees F behind the outside. If it reaches 100 F today (and it did), the house won't cool down to 80 F until about ten o'clock tonight (and it did).

I wish it would rain. A lot. (At least Tuesday it's only 85 F.)

Arthur has generalized his sign language again. Mark is now "the bubble dad" and I'm "the harp dad." He requests bubbles and harping on an hourly basis. Just now he asked for the harp (over Cheerioes) so he could fall asleep.

He is getting a little perfunctory with the sign for more, too; I'm not so sure about this sign-language thing -- Arthur seems to think he's at some sort of spa.

Sunday the Unitarians let me do a presentation on neo-paganism and Wicca with a Wicca-style ritual as a part of their Sunday worship service. A woman named Martha was the day's worship associate (a kind of lay minister). She was introduced to Wicca about the same time I was, so we split up ritual duties. The lecture was humorous, and the curious got information out of it. The Tree of Life guided meditation went well, and the mystics had a numinous moment (at least I did, sort of). And everyone thought the spiral dance at the end was fun (although I did think I was going to drop my harp in the middle).

The service went very well. No one has set a question mark on fire in front of my lawn. With any luck, as a result, a Covenent of Unitarian Universalist Pagans group will start up at the church.

Let's see. We closed on the new house. We signed a zillion papers last Wednesday (the Solstice) I think it gets recorded Wednesday (tomorrow), at which point we'll be the official owners. The sellers fixed many of the problems, and all of the ones that were safety issues (like making sure the wall outlets were properly grounded). Before we move in the house will need to be cleaned, and we'll probably repaint.

I think the kitchen is ... well... oppressively uninspired, cheap, and institutional. And it doesn't match the rest of the house (neither does the bathroom). Mark thinks we should sand down all the cabinets and see what kind of wood they're made out of -- if it's nice wood, we could stain it to match the floors. And the kitchen's (and bedrooms') light fixtures have to be sent back to Tragicistan. Although I'm not usually a big fan of exposed wire track lights, I think they would do well in the kitchen in a retro kind of way.

I'm sure Mark and I will have many things (colors, lights, stencils, shrubbery, finance) to discuss over the next few weeks.

Signs of June

I don't know why everything in the universe has to happen during the solstice. In December we're running around buying gifts for everyone and going to a zillion family events. In June, ... we're running around buying gifts for everyone and going to a zillion family events. Why do Fathers' Day, pride events, the Solstice, weddings, The Writers of the Future deadline, and birthdays all have to happen in the last half of June?

June 11 was Arthur's first birthday. He enjoyed himself very much. One of his favorite presents was given by Evil Cousin Patrick, a plastic MegaBlock Wizard of Oz play set. It lights up and plays music. His other favorite present is a plastic pug.

Mark doesn't remember if Arthur started feeding the plastic pug spontaneously or if Mark did it first. But Arthur continues to feed the plastic pug. He also feeds us sometimes; but more often he takes back his food.

We've also closed on the house. We'll probably get the keys in a few days.

Arthur is signing like crazy. The other day I made up a sign for harp -- today he demanded a harp concert. Arthur really likes the harp; he likes to play it and he likes to be harped to sleep.

He learned the sign for flower at the beginning of the week. He's also making up his own signs. When he puts his hand to his nose like he's got hay fever, that's the sign for Mark. All this signing has led to his first poem (well, at least that's the way I interpreted it). Yesterday, when I was changing into a cooler shirt (the weather has gotten hot here), Arthur pointed to my nipple and then signed "flower". I'm guessing this is half of some haiku, and that we'll get the other half sometime in the future

         Daddy's nipple 
         is a flower.

I think this deserves some sort of Robert Bly Award. I don't know why Arthur thinks my left nipple is a flower -- he didn't smell it. I suppose my aureole looks like a blossom, but the hairs growing out of it don't look a thing like petals. Actually, now that I think about it more, I hope he wasn't calling me a pansy.

The Potential New House

We met with our relator and an inspector yesterday to go over the house. The oral report was good and we'll know more tomorrow. Seeing the house again was interesting; we'd remembered things slightly differently (i.e. larger), but we're still happy with the house.

My Kid's a Geek

A couple of days ago I had a eye doctor's appointment. Mark and Arthur came with me. As we were waiting, Arthur noticed the toys in the corner. One of them was a kid's laptop.

Mark sat Arthur down at the small desk. Arthur straightened his posture, curled his fingers ergonomically, and began to type on the lower keys. My and Mark's mouths dropped open. Arthur then grabbed the mouse and began to wiggle it while continuing to type with the other hand.

"Oh my god!" we both said, covering our mouths.

Arthur's not even one year old yet.

Mark says that while I was getting my eyes checked, Arthur picked up the mouse and threw it at the screen and grunted in frustration.

In other monkey-see-monkey-do news, Arthur and Muriel have been holding secret conferences or something because Arthur managed to lunge right in front of me the other day and I tripped over him.

Useless creature; the least she could have done would have been to teach Arthur to catch mice. With our luck, Arthur will be jumping up onto the counters looking for food.

Eeek, The Next Step

We've seen the inside of the house. It's a charming 1950's style layout. The front door opens up into a living room with a fireplace tucked into one corner. Two bedrooms and a very narrow bathroom are to the right of the living room. In the back is a dining area and the kitchen (also very narrow).

At the end of the kitchen is the door to the very large one-car garage. The garage loft could be used to store a lot of things (like the Bromley Horns, the Christmas stuff, the anti-valentines, the Renaissance clothing, the twenty-plus drafts of all the stories I've ever had critiqued, the fake antique gilt angels, etc.) Or it could be a very rustic office space. Or a indoor tree house for Arthur (if we caged it to prevent ten foot falls onto concrete).

If we have any money left after purchasing the house, we'll use it to replace the macroscopic sink in the microscopic bathroom and to install a dishwasher somewhere in the kitchen.

The back yard is small but nice. It's completely fenced in by a five foot tall chain link fence. There's lots of room for us to do things with it. Or not. We'll have to buy a lawn mower.

Almost everyone we've shown pictures of the front to has decided that we should rip out the overgrown bushes. I wouldn't mind sculpting the boxwood into castle crenelations.

The house is located on "College Slopes"; it's within easy walking distance to a park, a used book store, a super market, and other services.

Our friend, Ed the Out-Of-Retirement Contractor, looked at the house and gave it very good marks. The worst thing he could say about it was that the plumbing and electrical were old. But everything else was great. Juel, our realtor, tried to seduce him into part-time jobs; but he managed to resist her advances.

Now we get the house inspected and see if they find deadly wiring problems or ravenous termite infestations. If the house passes inspection, we go forward to closing on the house.

Eeek!

We're starting a scary ride. Our realtor found us a house we can afford (barely) in a neighborhood we actually like. So now we start the roller coaster ride.

• We make a bid. This involves offering a little more than the asking price so that...
• The Seller accepts our bid, and
• No other potential buyers out bids us.
• Then we walk through the house (yes, at this point we've only seen the outside) and have two hours to decide
  • the house should be condemned and we'd be crazy to buy it (and we keep looking for a house), or
  • the house is something we like enough to live in.
• If we like the house, we have it inspected.
• If the inspector likes the house, we close on the house and owe a lending institution lots and lots of money. And we never buy anything else except beans and oatmeal for the next five years.
• If the inspector kind of hates the house, we negotiate with the Seller to cover some of the closing costs.
• If the inspector really hates the house, our housing loan falls through and we start all over (minus the costs of the inspection).
• We sign our lives (and incomes) away in exchange for house keys, a deed, and an obligation to pay the sewer hookup.

We've done the first three steps, and we're actually first in line to walk though the house. All we know about the house is that it's in a great location; it's 863 square feet; it has two bedrooms and one bathroom; it has an attached garage; and it was built in 1953. More sometime Sunday.

Shopping With The Boys

We've had a long day here visiting with our friends Mark and Dario. Mark and Dario, have a fabulous home near the Capitol Hill area of Seattle. They have a lovely collection of objects de art and pictures that they've tastefully arranged. I am slightly envious and I'll have to take pictures of what they've done to see if I can apply it to our home. I really like the way that they've decorated their second story bathroom; it's very rustic, and it features cute little crow paintings Dario has done.

We've managed to wear out the kid shopping. Luckily, Arthur loves shopping.

We visited an antique store that had a lovely Welsh armoire and lots of old stain glass church windows (the sort that you would hang behind your entry windows). The Armoire was fun, it had a lot of grotesques on it, and clawed feet. I would have used it for jewelry and fun clothes.

Next it was an Asian shop called Distant Lands. They had a lot of fun stuff from China; I really liked a little hare hare stone mastaba they had... I'm not sure where they got it from. The proprietor thought it might have been carved from basalt.

We also visited the Stonington Art Gallery. I'm currently working on a story set in a glass art gallery and I wanted to see how many details I'd gotten right (and which ones I'd missed). The art was fun; I particularly like the works of Susan A. Point. I also like the works of Thomas Stream and thought that his work might be the sort of thing we could hang in the nursery (in a kind of idealized, if we had money to afford a house with a nursery with nice art in it kind of house), but Mark thought his work was like a kind of bland greeting card.

We had lunch in Mark H. and Dario's favorite noodle restaurant. I had a nice chicken noodle soup. I forget what Mark had. Arthur was relatively well behaved. He had rice and avocado. We listened to this one really loud white guy and spoke amongst ourselves about loud Americans. He was probably my age; very opinionated, and slightly racist.

There was one odd moment when a shop keeper managed to scoop Arthur out of Mark's arms. It was probably a good thin that Mark had Arthur and not me because I would have tried to Judo-chop the shop keeper and there's a chance that the shop keeper would have known real live Judo (as opposed to my movie-inspired John-Judo). After a minute Mark mentioned that Arthur had just eaten and so there were no guarantees about Arthur urping up on the shopkeeper.

We also visited a cute little store filled with benches, cafe tables, and sinks. Everything was made out of plate glass or plastic. It was lots of fun; my favorite chair was fashioned like a giant leopard print stiletto-heel shoe. Lots of the glass tables were priced under $150, so we wondered if there was something wrong with them and if they would crack down the middle in a month or three after purchase.

Arthur had his first boat ride today. We took a harbor taxi from the Seattle riverfront (hmmm, OK. Most of Seattle is riverfront) to a bunch of beaches that start with B. I will admit that I was the classic fearful parent and checked out where all the child life jackets were. I also wondered briefly about which exits I would take in the event that the boat flipped over in the water. Is it something about being a parent that makes you imagine a ferry flipping over in perfectly calm and sunny weather and imagining what it would be like to unstrap an infant out of a pram under water?

We saw a little Statue of Liberty that was pretty awful. The Statue had lost the little barbs on her crown, and she looked like she had been modeled off of someone's blonde niece instead of the actual Statue in New York Harbor. And the beaches -- well, I suppose the strips of gravel could be called beaches at a stretch. On the ride back we saw sea lions.

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I've made a discovery. It's much easier to read The Quangle Wangle's Hat by Edward Lear with great abandon (and rolling R's) after drinking a Cosmopolitan. I'd never really gotten into the story or the syntax of the poem until after a Cosmo. I think part of the problem is the way that the poem is broken up in the edition of the book we have. Edward Lear (the guy who wrote The Owl and the Pussycat) has a structure that gets hidden in the book illustrated by Louise Voce. I think part of the problem with The Quangle Wangle is that the format of a children's' book breaks the poem down on too fine a level; the structure of the poem is lost in a line-by-line illustration.

If you have a children's book that you'd like to appreciate, here's the recipe for a Cosmopolitan

1 2/3 oz Vodka
1/2 oz Cointreau
1/2 oz cranberry juice
1/2/ oz fresh lime juice

Of course, now that I've typed this in, I see that I've somehow managed to confuse the instructions in the book (they also list measurements in centiletres) and I've mixed a very strong drink. Ooops. I thought I was a cheap date, but I see it's more a case of I shouldn't be my own bartender.

These Aren't the Gods You're Looking For

OK.

Let's see. On the Arthur front. He's started to sign for things, mostly food. He'll knock his knuckles together, the sign for "more" [food]. He'll bring his index finger and thumb together in a circle for "Ohs" (Cheerios). He made up his own sign, bringing his hand up by his ears and opening and closing his fist for "Stop fooling around with that spoon and give it to me!" He can also wave good-bye. He hasn't learned the sign for cat, yet.

Arthur occasionally wants to feed us. I used to think this was because he wanted to share his food. Now I think it's an excuse for him to get his hands inside our mouths so he can pull on our tongues and teeth.

Last week we gave into our pediatrician and filled a subscription for amoxilian to treat an infected ear Arthur keeps having whenever he's sick. We gave him a dose last Wednesday night and Thursday morning. By Thursday afternoon his back was covered with little tiny red dots. It was like he had chicken pox. "Hey, wait a minute," I thought, and read the little fact sheet the pharmacist gave me with the antibiotic. There, rash was listed as one of the symptoms where you should seek immediate medical attention. Of course it was 4:30PM when I made this discovery. I managed to make an emergency visit with another doctor in our pediatrician's practice (we'd visited her before) and it was off to the other side of town. There's nothing like a child with a rash to focus one's aggressive driving skills.

Of course the City of Eugene responded. There were the two stupid college girls riding their bikes down 13th street -- a really busy street -- with no safety helmets, dragging a dog on a leash behind them as they rode against traffic lights. There were the really slow drivers in the lanes I needed. There was the idiot salesman in a jacked-up truck, obviously lost and spreading his attention between a cell phone and a map. And we mustn't forget the city busses.

With a judicious use of The Force, I managed to get to the doctor's office with about five minutes to spare. In the ten minutes it had taken to get Arthur to the doctor's the rash had spread from his back to his front. It turns out this sort of rash is a reaction to amoxilin, but not an allergic reaction to amoxilin. The rash went away a day later. They really need to make a distinction on those list of symptoms and distinguish between "seek immediate medical attention because this could be a problem" and "seek immediate medical attention because you could die."

Oh yes... during all this driving, I managed to rush out of the house without my wallet, which includes my driver's license. By some miracle, I had the joint credit card in my pocket. I suppose if I had been pulled over I could have explained to the nice officer that (exhibit A) my child did have a rash and (exhibit B) it was caused by an antibiotic prescription. Then I would have said, "These aren't the 'droids you're looking for. I can go about my business."

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The weather I hate is here. I hope it goes away. Monday it was in the low nineties. Tuesday (yesterday) and today it's been in the high eighties. I want it to rain and go back to being in the sixties and seventies. I suppose I did have a kind of hiatus, though; there's a gastrointestinal bug going around Eugene (Mark had it first) and the accompanying fever had me feeling cold Monday.

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A new god has entered Arthur's pantheon. The Big Red Kitchen Aid Mixer. It came out of its corner when we made a chocolate cake with chocolate icing and chocolate mouse filling for Mother's Day. It (the mixer) elicited a look of awe and an "ooh" from Arthur. With all this love of household appliances (and the toilet), maybe Arthur will be a domestic mantis.

And speaking of new gods on Mother's day, my Mom has been telling all her friends that I've returned to regular church service. I'm pretty sure that she's been leaving out that it's a Unitarian Church that has the last half of Doreen Valantie's Charge of the Goddess in its hymnal. Mom (and Mom's friends): I'll be leading a service on Wicca at the Unitarian Church this June 25 -- we'll use the hymnal to chant pagan chants, and we'll be celebrating the first new moon of Summer. Sooner or later, someone will probably want to talk about Asherah and bake cakes for the Queen of Heaven. Don't tell the Pope, he already doesn't approve.

On other fronts -- I've got two stories in the mail. I expect to hear about one around the end of June. I'm not sure when I'll hear about the other one, although it's made at least the first cut. Before everyone got sick I was writing about two hours a night for a while.

I've also discovered a cute little Macintosh Application called Voodoo Pad. It allows you to make your own little Wikipedia on your Macintosh. I intend to use it to make author and subject cards for my library and cross index some of my essays. What I really want is something like the Star Trek holodeck; I'd display pages of a book in a column, and arrange the book columns on a timeline and then put glowing links between references in the books. Then I'd add things like "The Sorcerer of Trois-Frères," a Paleolithic cave drawing that bares only vague resemblance to its original reproduction by Abbé Henri Breuil. Then I'd make all the glowing links to "bad" or "suspect" research red. This would do some bad things to Margaret Murry's God of the Witches and the effect would cascade downwards. At this point, one of my writer friends, Grá, will intrude on my research fantasy to accuse me of shouting, "Hah! Where is your Goddess now?" next.

"Where is Your Goddess Now" will probably be the title of the service at the Unitarian Church once the atheists get organized.