This, via here, is making me all warm and squishy tonight and keeping me up later than I might have preferred. On early assessment, I am not surprised to see that we have a relatively obscure collection of books here at Murdering Stream Estates. I am very pleased to see that, at this stage in the import, the three most “popular” titles I own are all “Bloom County” collections. Somehow, that makes me feel a lot better about humanity in general.

There are still lots of tags to enter. And alas, Mark and I between us have over 150 titles without ISBNs, all of which will have to be entered manually rather than imported from our own book database.

Why, yes. Of course we have our own book database. Don’t you?

Happy birthday, Dan. Update your damned website…

A visit from a friend I hadn’t seen in too many years, overabundant food at Libby Hill, obnoxious heat and humidity, mysqldump, The Young Ones, missing my boy, and a (finally completed) bout with insomnia have defined my week. Yours?

Note, please, that the last sentence was more or less a rhetorical request for information.

I drove to Roanoke, Virginia this afternoon. Roanoke is pretty. I’ve spent some time there in the past, but not a lot. We used to drive through a couple of times a year on the way to West Virginia when I was a kid. I had a weekend-long affair with a boy in a semi-dumpy 1940s motel there sometime in the mid-1980s. And my friend Duncan and I drove up there one afternoon from Greensboro to have dinner at the K&W, after which we drove right back.

This time I took a pretty good tour. It’s a cool place, one of those cities that was obviously much more important eighty years ago than it is now. It has a rather sprawling old downtown surrounded by some interesting neighborhoods in varying stages of decay, gentrification, or both, all set in a semi-mountainous backdrop. All in all, it’s a little reminiscent of Asheville, but without all the annoying hippie granola shit going on.

I like Roanoke. I may post more pictures tomorrow. It’s really nice revisiting these smaller east coast cities, many of which I largely ignored when I lived here before. Seeing them with my newer perspective — shaped by years of urban travel all over the country and by having lived in a major urban area — is like seeing them for the first time all over again. Seeing them in the daytime, while sober, enhances the experience somewhat as well. I missed a lot the first time around, although I wouldn’t trade my misspent youth for anything, really.

I never really thought anyone other than the people who ran the House of Representatives cafereria took it seriously. I was wrong. As I was having my dinner last night, I looked up at the takeout menu and realized I was eating in an establishment that proudly served Freedom Fries.

I didn’t have any.

Sorry I’ve been busy and just haven’t had all that much interesting to say lately.

Consuming my time recently:

• Turning twoscore and two years of age last Thursday.
• Working on three new websites for hire simultaneously.
• Brainstorming my own new site.
• Picking the remaining meat (figuratively, and at a 30% discount) from the rotting carcass of Southern Family Markets.
• Visiting Boone NC and realizing (a) that I’m not a big fan of college towns in general, and (b) that Boone isn’t a particularly good college town to begin with.
• LibraryThing.com.
• Pondering a midwestern road trip with the hubby this fall.

Now that’s the kind of headline I like to see in my Saturday LA Times. Of course, I still haven’t forgiven the LA Times for this recent hit piece, but I’m not making fun of the Times because I’m bitter. No, not me…

In my view, one of the biggest down sides to owning a house is having a yard. I like the idea in principle, of course, since it keeps me from having to share walls with my neighbors and allows for shade trees which block out as much sunlight as possible. I even like the idea of having an attractive yard. Left to my own devices, though, I might end up just paving over the whole thing and calling it a day. If I had the money, I might instead consider paying someone else to take care of it for me.

But as for me, I hate doing yardwork. Absolutely despise it. In fact, there are few things in life I hate more than doing yardwork and being “in the great outdoors”. I’d rather clean toilets, or do laundry, or give blood, or even sit through a “Friends” marathon than do yardwork — or anything else that involves being outside in the sunshine, for that matter. Working in the yard neither relaxes me nor gives me a sense of accomplishment or satisfaction. It just makes me sweaty and itchy and cranky.

I didn’t like playing outside in the sun and “fresh air” as a child, and I whined every time the suggestion was made that I should do so. I react pretty much the same way as an adult. It’s no wonder I hate street fairs, as they combine two of the most distasteful things in the world: sunshine and large crowds. I make an excpetion for the State Fair, but I generally don’t even show up there until dusk. Hanging out by a pool or on a sunny beach is like torture to me. Heck, I don’t even like being in cars with sunroofs.

Though no fan of sunshine himself, Mark likes our yard. He’s willing to work out in the sunshine to give us nice flowerbeds and shrubs and trees. He finds it worth the payoff, which is great. As my part of the bargain, I’ve agreed to mow the lawn as needed, since he really hates doing that. I also water his shrubs and flowers every day when he’s gone, which is no problem since it’s better to do that after sunset anyway.

I very often feel guilty leaving him out there working in the yard while I go inside to do something (anything) else. I’m learning to get over my guilt, though. I’m glad there are people who enjoy making yards look nice. I’m just not one of them, alas, and I probably never will be.

I think it was on a page I removed at some point over the years, but I once mentioned how annoying I found San Franciscans who had a pre-programmed political response to even the most innocuous statements, like “it’s nice outside today” or whatever.

If you mentioned the nice weather, these folks would inevitably launch into a tirade about global warming or the rainforest or corporate-controlled weather media. If you said you were hungry and thinking about lunch, you’d hear all about some famine in sub-Saharan Africa. If you said you were feeling particularly good (or bad) that day, you’d get an unsolicited lecture about disease control in Thailand or the pain of suffering farm animals in Bolivia.

I got one of those responses today, following my relatively benign comments the other day about how I don’t like yard work. I was pretty much informed in no uncertain terms that lawns (and presumably Mark and I, by association) are “evil” and that the very act of our having a landscaped patch of land at all was somehow the precursor to a catastrophe of global proportions.

It pretty much made me want to go out and plant a flowerbed full of non-native plants and then spray at least one can of every aerosol pesticide I could find all over them. If nothing else, it made me appreciate the yard (and my hubby’s work in it) just that much more.

I don’t really like to do “entertainment news” per se, but I’m wondering if the ADA could be invoked in this case, since Tom Cruise is so clearly suffering from a severe mental handicap.

It strikes me that I’ve been a day behind for the past two or three days. It also strikes me that it’s not worth fixing. Historical accuracy be damned…

That was kinda funny. I left the TV on in my office and came back into the room a half hour later, just in time to hear Pat Robertson refer to someone else as a “religious fanatic”.

This morning at 11:00…

This afternoon at 3:00…

There is now one less dying tree in Winston-Salem. And three hundred fewer dollars in our checking account.

Funny. The weekend before Mark moved into my apartment in San Francisco, I was all excited about “Mildred Pierce” and “Double Indemnity” being on TV. As the fourth anniversary of that weekend arrives, I’m reading the novels the movies were based on.

In the next day’s entry, I mentioned how excited and happy I was. I still am.

I’m just disappointed he’s not here to experience the great weather.

This pair arrived just as I was being interviewed by a reporter from Supermarket News this morning. I wonder if our cohabitation anniversary will be mentioned in the article. Probably not, huh?

Come on. Admit it. This is probably the only website you’ll read all week that’s run by someone who’s been interviewed by Supermarket News. You know it’s true.

By the way, my apologies to anyone who’s tried to use my email form the past week or so. I took it offline temporariliy to thwart a robotic spammer and then forgot to put it back.