Oh, my stars and garters!

Cat so dumb, yadda yadda

He got gum stuck in his fur. I knew it wasn't shit because it smelled like wintergreen.

Election

Election election election election!

I do not write much about politics anymore because I value my job, but in my secret non-blog life that's all I am thinking about. Halloween, succulents, the sad trombone, and my precious path are all great and worthy of my attention, but they are not the election. I am convinced I will be a much better, healthier, more productive person one week from today, even if the outcome is not what I want it to be, because at least then I will not be obsessing about the election.

Election!

Halloween

I have a fun party to go to that night and my neighbor has asked me to hang out with her and hand out candy at the end of our driveways in the evening, but I'm grumpy because my costume this year is boring and as yet unmade. Next year I'm pulling out all the stops and going as a sexy anal fistula.

Autumnal asshole

Everyone is very happy that it's fall. They are busting out their colorful scarves and attractive jackets and seem invigorated and alert. I am happy for these people. I mean, it really is great to be surrounded by happy people, and it's true this summer was particularly brutal--apocalyptic, even; just unacceptable all around, and everyone was beaten down and mostly silent for all of August--and it's not like winter here is  difficult. Actually, it can be really beautiful.

Still, despite the knowledge that I am being absolutely ridiculous, I am feeling a little crankier with each progressively stronger cold front. I am mourning the loss of light in the evenings and the lack of swimming. Also my skin is getting dry, I have always felt itchy and constricted in sweaters and scarves, and I hate mums, which are everywhere all of a sudden.

I have resolved to make the best of things by buying some sweaters that feel good against my skin and making pot roast. Besides, the holiday beers are starting to appear on the shelves. That is definitely something.

Stupidmania!

Wowee! The Compose page in Typepad has gotten so fancy since my last post. I can change fonts and stuff all of a sudden. And type ^superscripts and _subscripts! 32^o! CH₄!

This is so awesome_!^!_!!!^!_!

Well, that was pretty exciting. Here are some other exciting things:

 
Oh, oh, oh. This is a stroke of marketing genius. If only I'd bothered to look more closely at the package in the store. I would have sprung for a set of bile bowls to match.

This is a tiger's jaw plant. We didn't even know these flowered. It's always fun when your unassuming, workaday succulent throws a gigantic bloom in your face: Here, bitches! Have a yellow flower!

This is our finished decomposed granite path, which we are actually very excited about. It looks totally crappy in this picture, but all that beige stuff on the ground is winter rye grass seed we planted as a temporary substitute for the Saint Augustine that got eaten by these really ugly grubs. So you have to use your imagination and picture soft, bright-green grass along either side, and Eric and me skipping up and down looking so happy because we don't have to slog through mud or dust to get to the gate anymore, and also some nice flowering shrubs along the fence and around the AC unit. Oh, and a pommel horse there in the corner.

See, isn't that nice?

Finally, please go to this site and ask whoever is handy to tell you a story about a minor disappointment in his or her life. Then press play. I promise it will never get old.

Despot

The Home Depot at St. John's and I-35 is having a massive closing sale in anticipation of the opening of the fancy new Mueller location.

I have always hated this Home Depot because it was filthy and staffed by sullen zombies, plus they had the PA system set on "ear-splitting" so every time the storewide phone would ring (and ring and ring and RING, my god, someone PICK UP THE FUCKING PHONE) it would shatter your skull and vibrate your very marrow as you helplessly flailed around its counterintuitively organized aisles hunting for a toilet flapper or whatever. But! Now it will die, and the new one will rise up in its place a few miles south, immaculate and packed with pissy Austin yuppies, at least until they're all underwater on their new urban-village homes and forced to decorate with duct tape and string, and when that happens I'll probably be screwed even worse than they are, so I shouldn't sneer.

I had a point, though, and it is that if you are planning a project that will require the purchase of a lot of materials you should go there soon and clean up; I saw a lot of tile and bricks for not much money. Also tons of fertilizer, for some reason. The entire garden area seemed to be stocked with nothing but pallets of smelly fertilizer. Lawnmowers, gas grills, fireplace crap: all cheap. A whole shelf of American flags; a wall of discounted tiki torches.

Anything really cute is gone and all the plants are gone or dead, but there's still tons of stuff left. Not all of it is a great deal, but some of it is. All I got was 10 bricks, some hook extenders, and a five-gallon gas can because I wasn't really planning on spending money and they were out of the decomposed granite I needed. I may do a tool inventory tonight and go back to fill in some gaps tomorrow, though. 

Dental damn

It is probably the height of self-indulgence to post a close-up of my cat's infected, rotten teeth, but oh my sweet, sweet Christ, they're horrible!

I didn't realize just how bad these nasty things were making him feel until he got home today. Although groggy and pupil-blown and bow-legged from the anesthesia, he's peppier and more affectionate than he has been in months. Maybe it's just the drugs, but I don't think so.

It took us a while to pick up on his malaise and get the surgery scheduled, and maybe we should have known sooner considering he's had this done before. But he's scampering around like he's five years younger and still has a whole six teeth left with which to gnaw kibble and mice, so he's good for now.

How dumb is the cat? No, really, we're about to hit bottom here.

Well, he finally learned to go to the bathroom outside. Unfortunately, that means he has taken to rolling around in his own shit. At least I think it's his, and I think he's rolling in it. I can't imagine why else he'd wander in with giant smelly shit mats in his fur at least once a week. I didn't know cats even did that.

The other, smarter cat is scheduled to get all but his bottom four teeth pulled out tomorrow, poor guy, because he has some horrible disease that causes them to rot painfully under the gumline. Sigh. All my cats are broken.

Incantation

The path to enlightenment taking out the recycling without getting your feet muddy begins with a single step.

Eric and I were outside doing yardwork, digging out a path to the back gate, when we heard chanting start up from next door. Six or seven people, chanting the same atonal, rhythmic phrase over and over again. What the hell? Oh, a meditation group. The neighbor on our other side has hosted a group of her own before, but this was the first time at this house; usually all we hear from over there is the neighbor calling her dogs or singing along to Celine Dion late at night.

We kept working. They kept chanting. Eric put his pick down and began nodding his head gracefully to the rhythm. After a few cycles, he laughed. "It sounds like they're saying Gay guys are hungry, gay guys are hungry, gay guys are hungry...," he said, and so it did.

After that, I couldn't not hear it. Gay guys are hungryyy, gay guys are hungryyy. I thought about putting on music to block it out, but before long the monotony became soothing and I thought it was both pleasant and hilarious to be doing manual labor while the gay-guys-are-hungry mantra washed over us. Gay guys are hungry, gay guys are hungry. They finally broke the chant an hour later and burst into applause, and I pretended it was for me, for doing such a good job on my own path.

Let's cook some random shit that's in the kitchen dinner menu

Orange-baked shark (shark bought out of curiosity and left forgotten in the meat drawer until nearly too late; sub stale table water crackers for crust; probably not a very good recipe to begin with)

Amy's Organic Tom Kha soup with rice (not bad provided you have a lime on hand to cut the sweetness)

Whiskey and Topo Chico (nothing wrong there but not exactly great with the above)

Dark chocolate (ditto)

My palate is deeply confused, as am I. But that was fun, and now I never need to do it again.

Personal pork

I wish I could have two presidential candidates vying for my approval in a nationally televised event. I would be asking for more interesting things than Joe the Plumber's stupid business tax breaks and health care, I can assure you of that. McCain would be all sneering, "Senator Obama, and you can look this up, under your plan Joolie the Dork would only get a thirty thousand dollar a year tax deduction for helicopter fuel and beef jerky purchases," and then Obama would be forced to look up and say, "Senator McCain would have the American public believe that, but the truth is I looked Joolie the Dork straight in the eye and promised her a three hundred thousand dollar tax break for that, plus a five-hundred-dollar-a-day per diem for pommel horse performances and professional fireworks displays. And we will pay for that with investments in wind power because I truly believe that is what we need to move this country forward."

Then I could sit back, squinting one eye and tapping my foot with my arms crossed while the entire staff of CNN made frantic phone calls to fact-checking organizations and nonprofit policy groups to determine who was telling the truth.

Do not mess with the priorities of Joolie the Dork. She has her finger on the pulse of this great country that is the United States of America.

Time bomb

This tiny little kitten was hanging out under my friend's house. We spent most of Friday night passing him around from lap to lap, nuzzling him, and letting him crawl all over us. He was adorable! We had so much fun! Except today we found out he has ringworm. Anyone know the incubation time for that off the top of her head?

Stakes raised

Eric just announced he will keep his new goatee until a Democrat wins a presidential election.

Sharpening

Pointy farm!

Pointy petting zoo!

They (you know, those people) say you are better off planting bigger things to begin with so your planters look good right off the bat, but even though they may look a little silly at first, I love watching these things settle in and start going nuts in a larger space.

Most of the plants in the stock tank were gifts or propagated from bigger plants--the ones in back were given to me after they were rescued from a building site and were the first I ever potted--so I feel sort of invested in them.

It's not worth a picture because the change is not that dramatic, but the succulents in the mailbox garden are straightening up and putting out new leaves this week. That's is good because they didn't transplant well at first and I was afraid I'd created a horrible death garden for a few weeks there. The rosemary croaked almost immediately and had to be replaced, but that's what I get for buying a plant at Home Depot; those usually do better than fine here.

Everything that makes it through this winter will be a keeper, and the rest will have to be replaced with hardier stuff. This is definitely the fun part.

Not sitting well

The La-Z-Boy commercial where all the people are sighing rhythmically as they lean back makes me not only want to never buy a La-Z-Boy anything but also to set all my existing furniture on fire and spend the rest of my down time shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot in protest. I have been watching more TV lately because I have been obsessed with the news and how it's presented lately. I don't think it's good for my temperament.

You there! Look at more pictures of rocks!

You know, I'm starting to get the feeling that my pictures of West Texas all look the same after a while: blue sky, brown rocks, green cactus, sweeping vistas, yah yah yah, and none of them do it the slightest bit of justice. But I put some of them up anyway, so you can click on the nice picture of the blue sky and brown rock up there and run through the rest of the set if you want to see them.

I hope some of my night pictures came out, but I won't know until I finish the roll and get it developed, which I guess is both the beauty and the frustration of using film.

The stars were bright, and the desert was green and smelled so good, and the beer was cold and my friends are hilarious. I can't believe I never really went camping until last year. What a dumbass I am! I could have been camping all this time. Let's all call in sick and go back tomorrow!

I write this instead of unpacking the truck.

I love camping in West Texas because I get to indulge a little bit of my inner dirty stinky hippie. Why shouldn't I wear the same pants for four days, man? Four days is nothing compared to the millions of years those mountains have been there. Changing your pants is just something invented by the man to make us all feel insecure about ourselves. I just climbed one of those millions-of-years-old mountains, baby; I've got nothing to feel insecure about. Who has a beer for a lady?

Pictures and more when I'm a little less blissed out. And sore.

I am the westward ho

The truck's getting packed, the camera batteries are charged, good people are lined up to look after the house and cats, and I'm about to turn my laptop off for the next five days. Also much beer is ready to be iced down. Back next week with pictures of things you've seen before, but at different angles and with my friends standing in front of them.

Pee Ess A

Hello! It's your biennial Stars and Garters reminder to make sure your voter registration is current and updated. I know Travis County has been updating its rolls, so if you've moved recently you might want to make sure you're kosher while there's still time to do something about it.

This article says you can just go to your old polling place or early vote, but don't you want to vote in your precinct? If you live around here, who your congressperson is could depend on what side of the street you live on. The registration deadline in Texas is October 6; if you live in Texas you can check your registration status here. You people in other states surely know what to do.

Man, it's gotten all serious around here the last few posts. I'll have to rectify that soon, but we're going back to West Texas for a long weekend early Friday, so I don't know exactly when that will be.

Wait, I know: Fart nipple clown cheese! Ticklebuckets! Nutnose orgleborgle!

Phew, that was close.