You would think that, what with all the snow and ice, this garden orb weaver would be dead. How long do spiders live anyway? I always thought they hatched in the spring and then spent the summer plotting my death while also protecting the garden from pests and finding ways to spook the bejesus out of me like occasionally riding around on the top of my head. Then they lay a million billion eggs so someone is always around to carry on the work of trying to do me in and when the frost comes they freeze to death. This has always been my assumption anyway.

So why then is this fellow/gal spying on me through the dining room window while I eat my steel cut oats and spinach in January? What’s his deal? I think he may be some super strain of spider impervious to the laws of nature. EDWARD conjectured that heat loss from the crappy aluminum window is keeping him alive but then what is he eating? On warmer days he spins his web and sits in the middle of it, always with a few of his eyes on me, but I never see him catch any bugs. When it’s snowy or rainy he tucks himself under the frame and rides out the storm for hours, days, or even weeks.

Last summer I did not allow the garden spiders to live right next to the windows where I could see them (and they me) all the time. I took a long stick and relocated them when they tried to be peeping tom spiders or when they set up housekeeping where I was likely to walk. So my inclination is to get out there with my stick but I worry that this might be akin to eating the 140 year-old lobster. Maybe he is 140 years old in spider years and I should just leave him be. He’s awfully creepy though and kind of puts me off my feed. Maybe I’ll put up a curtain.

Today I realized that I could set up my giant metro shelf of grow-lights in my bedroom rather than the dining room like I’ve been doing for a coon’s age. This is wonderful on so many levels. Firstly, the metro shelf is UGLY and doesn’t match any of my other non-matching furniture. Secondly, I spill dirt everywhere when I move the trays around and then I have to clean it up because it’s in the public part of the house. My bedroom dark sleeping cave is already aesthetically challenged by a treadmill/clothes rack, a giant dog crate, and piles of dirty laundry. A big set of metal shelves with plants growing on them will probably improve the vibe.

Until now I’d always figured that the room’s sloped ceilings made it impossible for any tall furniture or people to hang out up there, but that was because for some reason I didn’t notice an entire full sized wall. That’s not true, I know the reason. It’s because until recently my bed was sticking out into the center of the room, making it so there wasn’t enough room for anything to go against that wall. Now my bed is pushed into the corner, and the whole place is different. The ability to imagine different furniture configurations is not a skill I possess. I should probably build a diorama.

Bagpipe Man does not yet know my plan to grow starts in our bedroom. I suspect he will be against it until he realizes what fine reading lamps the grow-lights will make.

This morning I awoke after a nearly unprecedented 12 hours in the sack to find my whole family downstairs inaugurating. No one was getting ready for school. No one was going to work. We were just transfixed by the whole thing and unlike the sea of people stretching past the pointy landmark in the distance, we were warm and cozy. This got me thinking. Are there big blowing heaters like some restaurants have warming up their patios keeping the ex-presidents, justices, and other dignitaries warm? Some of those folks are older that dirt, and really shouldn’t be sitting around in the cold. I don’t like the thought of Jimmy Carter catching a chill, although he, for one, looked surprisingly spry. Dick Cheney, not so much. Does everyone have those chemical handwarmers in their pockets? What brand of longjohns do you think they all had on? Maybe the seats are heated. I bet they are.

After all the speeches, prayers, and musical numbers concluded Bagpipe Man whisked everyone tardily away to their schools and I set out on a jaunt up and down the stairs at Mt Tabor. I figured that if more than a million people could stand for hours in Washington DC warmed only by hope and change rather than heated cushions and class privilege, then surely I could manage a couple of hours outside in bright windy January weather. WRONG. Oh so wrong. It took an hour for my hands to regain full functionality even though I kept them in my jacket almost the entire time. The tip of my nose began to tingle 20 minutes into my post workout computer fest and I hadn’t even realized it had gone numb. Early onset hypothermia is the only way to explain the lethargy that has accompanied me throughout the rest of the day. That, and perhaps 12 hours is a might long to sleep.

I am quitting Vineland, on page 229 at the second paragraph to be exact. I don’t know what the hell is going on, and while this is a state I visit regularly in real life, I have a low tolerance for it in literature. Ostensibly Vineland is about pot growers living in a weird alternate reality made up town in Northern California. I suspect it’s meant to be a satirical examination of something. The pace is frantic with flashbacks galore and there are about 50 million characters to keep track of (or not) whose personal histories are woven into each and every mundane detail. You might start off reading about a Hawaiian airline and end with ninjas. It’s disconcerting and reminds me a lot of Neal Stephenson’s work. Vineland is cyberpunk without the cyber and while I appreciate the genre it never fails to mostly bug the crap out of me. I’m so glad to not be reading this book anymore.

I am alarmed, however, at the presence of Gravity’s Rainbow, V, The Crying of Lot 49, and Mason & Dixon, all by Thomas Fucking Pynchon on my canon of 1000 books. What the hell kind of reading list is this anyway? Granted there are 1000 books on there so these can all go down to very bottom with Ulysses, but still, I’ve noticed quite a few titles that I started and gave up on long ago, like 100 Years of Solitude and Cryptonomicon.

Angsty took my bitchen new basket downstairs and returned with all the list titles she had squirreled away and I recognized some that I hadn’t exactly been in a hurry to read. Perhaps I’ll return to going through the list in order, that would mean On Beauty comes next which I’ve been meaning to get to. I hope all this choosiness doesn’t mean that I really am a lightweight. I was just kidding about only reading books with plenty of fighting and fornicating.

Cats in baskets. I also like cats in boxes or paper bags. Sometimes when the universe fails to give me what I want, I have to look extra hard at what’s around me to find things that don’t suck.

Hey, a primrose! Spring must be right around the corner. Spring doesn’t suck.

This Peeperton laid an egg today. It was a perfect little brown egg and I might eat it tomorrow with tea and a piece of toast. That is the opposite of suck.

My crow painting doesn’t suck. It is super awesome and the person who painted it also paints toads and chickens. You can see them here. OK I feel a little better now, but just to be on the safe side I think I’d better go to $ beer night a little later. $ beers can lift the spirits almost as much as cats in boxes.

Here is a pictorial representation of my mood. You’re welcome.

This is a picture of Tomato Soup Echinacea which of course I will buy because it’s pretty fricken awesome but I’m completely against this sort of nomenclature. A bunch of seed catalogs arrived recently rife with such nonsense. I don’t even understand what is meant by “Crisp Mint Lettuce” or “Ambrosia Melon". Does the lettuce taste like mint? There’s no way that cantaloupe looking thing approximates a coolwhip and pineapple salad. Are you supposed to make ambrosia salad with it? Why would I want to eat “Mascara Lettuce"? That sounds disgusting. Actually, I’m buying few seeds this time because I still have a bunch that Stacy sent me last year as well as plenty left over from the last few seasons. And I really mean it this time…except well, I really need to grow some of these Sweet Pea Current Tomatoes because they are so tiny and cute, and also Edible Chrysanthemums, Golden Sunshine Runner Beans, Flying Saucer Patty Pans, and Malabar Spinach. It’s possible I might add to this list, but for now that’s it. I mean it.

I like to set myself on courses now and again, that seem like they will be beneficial. Limiting seed buying is just one example. I also retook up exercising after a 2 week break that might as well have been 2 years. I punished myself good and proper for the lapse by hurting myself so badly that I could barely lower myself onto the toilet for 3 days, let alone go for a jog or do a push-up. Wtf was I thinking? Apparently I am not the jock I thought I was. While recovering from actually working out, I dropped by Burly Girly’s ( http://gimme-strength.blogspot.com/ ) house to chat about working out and to lay eyes on her new kettle bell ( http://gimme-strength.blogspot.com/2009/01/bought-myself-present-as-you-can-see.html ). As you can see I still can’t embed blogger links, but anyway her kettle bell is a beauty and she can do some complicated moves with it that look like they could easily cost a novice a black eye or broken toe, which is to say I have no business getting one. And yet I really want one.

If I had a kettle bell I would name her Jolene, in part because I’m a little bit obsessed with this song.

Of course I also like this entirely different one which plays 5 times a night at North.

Anyway Jolene and I would be very happy together I’m sure until she punched me or stole my man.

Around this time last year we spent a few hours planting trees down by Johnson Creek with Best Friends and ever since then we’ve been getting curious thank you gifts from Clackamas County in the mail. Last time it was leather coasters which I found strange mainly because they were leather. Portland isn’t a real animal product friendly town. There are a bunch of places I don’t wear my leather jacket to, and the only fur I own is monster fur. This time we received handy collapsible lint brushes which I adore. Normally I just walk around with dog and cat hair all over me but I’ve started engaging in a little grooming now that I’m properly tooled up. Earlier Sunny OHS and I spent the better part of 30 minutes currying ourselves, he with his tongue and me with my lint brush. Lint brushes, incidentally, don’t work for taking excess hair off a cat.

When I wasn’t using my new lint brush or wandering through my house noting how gloriously silent it was today, I was exercising. I did crunches, I lunged, I lifted weights, I came really close to going for a run, and I felt GREAT. My body was strong! Do you know how I feel now? Like I’ve been run over by a fucking train. Gads! I must never ever take this long of a break again.

Yesterday as Bagpipe Man and I were taking a walk to Al’s Bootshop we noticed the disembodied head of Tom Peterson in someone’s yard. What a lucky Southeast Portlander. Should I ever come upon such and item, say for free, then I will certainly put one in my backyard too.

Al’s Bootshop was fairly bustling with folks looking for sturdy steel-toed footgear and last season’s ugliest styles. Bagpipe Man’s Merrills have a hole in the sole which has been sucking up mud and rocks and his lineman boots have a piece coming off that catches on ladders. You would think, being in such dire straights, that he would be easy to please. I mean there were plenty of shoes at Al’s without holes or murderous defects, and yet Bagpipe Man morphed into some kind of footware prima dona who doesn’t wear purple, or blue, or tan on his feet. He also won’t wear wide shoes or anything half a size too big or too small. What a baby! The whole trip was a bust and now he’ll have to wear his wanker shoes to work tomorrow.

Today is the last day of Winter Break. I am so goddamn excited to have the house to myself again I can hardly stand it.

This tabletop snowman has a cigarette for a nose. Last night I checked out the new non-smoking scene at the Horse Brass. It was really crowded and still smelled of old cigarettes but man, the air was clear comparatively and I didn’t come home smelling like an ashtray. We were lucky to get a table, in fact were it not for my awesome Reaux! Sham! Beaux! skills we would have had to stand. As it was we ended up at the Breakup Table but you know what they say about beggars. It was positively packed with either people who had previously stayed away for air quality reasons, or disgruntled smokers. I couldn’t tell which. It was fun though, and I drank some beer that tasted like pine sap.

I wasn’t done with that last post but I hit “Save!” so there you have it. I shouldn’t blog in the tool. I should cut and paste from Open Office but I never do. That’s not what’s vexing me though. I find that I am unable to link to any site hosted by Blogger if blogspot is part of the url. If I type out an address, say, like http://gimme-strength.blogspot.com/ (Burley Girly’s fantastic new blog about working out) B2evolution will automatically make it a link but I can’t embed it myself or put it on the side. The same thing happens with http://fuckyoupenguin.blogspot.com/ so I’m not being punished for my potty mouth after all. This sucks because I also wanted to link to my friend Laurie’s blog http://lifeforcevibrations.blogspot.com/ because she has the cutest family ever, and also Seanymph’s http://mermaidstreasures.blogspot.com/ which always makes me hungry. But no, the evil Blogger gods are keeping me from doing this and although Bagpipe Man has promised to find me a work-around, he’s currently siphoning water out of someone else’s leaky basement.

Maybe it’s B2evolution’s fault. I wish I knew where to focus my wrath.

Isn’t she beautiful? She even lays eggs but mostly in this rotted out old set of shelves which makes them hard to get to. What? Doesn’t everyone have rotting furniture in their backyard?

I woke up to a light dusting of snow and blue sky. Before I could get too excited though, it clouded over and all the snow in the backyard melted. Now it’s just a big mud pit. The Pink/Peepertons are squelching about out there with their squirrel friend who eats their food right in front of them and taunts the dogs with much chattering and clicking of teeth. He’s a bit of a butthead.

I’m trying to figure out this link business.

Mr Meyer is loving it here in the house. After the first 2 flowers got knocked off by Stringer Bell compulsively squeezing past to leer at the cats outside, I set the pot on a milk crate and now there are dozens about to open. I don’t know if this is normal as it’s clearly not the right time for bees to be out pollinating. plenty of fruit flies show up when I uncork wine but no bees. I guess I’ll have to hand pollinate although that didn’t work last winter.

I forgot to mention in my last (2!!) posts that I have embarked upon a grand undertaking. I am going through this list of 1001 books and reading them. So far I’ve read 2 and started on a 3rd. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro was creepy and I found the writing oddly flat. Saturday by Ian McEwan takes place all in one Saturday and something awful happens around dinner time. I’m about 100 pages into Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland and although 80 word sentences take some getting used to, I’m enjoying his flair for description and master of the comma. Get a load of this narrative picture:

“Zoyd was both a certified pizzamaniac and a cheapskate, but not once had he ever hustled Prairie for one nepotistic slice of the Bodhi Dharma product. Its sauce was all but crunchy with fistfuls of herbs only marginally Italian and more appropriate in a cough remedy, the rennetless cheese reminded customers variously of bottled hollandaise or joint compound, and the options were all vegetables rigorously organic, whose high water content saturated, long before it baked through, a stone-ground twelve grain crust with the lightness and digestibility of a manhole cover.” (pg45)

I believe I’ve had that pizza before. So after crossing off the hundred or so books I’ve already read on the list I have only around 897.5 left to go. Piece of cake.

I’ve been trying to add fuckyoupenguin.blogspot.com to my links but my anti-spam settings or some such thing keeps kicking the url back. I can’t even embed the link in this post. I even tried to use tinyurl to obfuscate the curse word and it wouldn’t work. Thinking that perhaps the problem lay with the title, I called it “F*uck You Penguin,” “F You Penguin,” “Penguin,” and “I love Penguins” all to no avail. So you will have to cut and paste to see the blog I wish I could link to but cannot.

It is strange that I have to manually delete all sorts of sordid spambot droppings from my comments all the f-in time, leading me to believe that my anti-spam filter is but a fictitious piece of software, and yet it is suddenly censoring me with its puritanical nonsense.

I was tired of 2008. Not for any particular reason, I just like new starts and the feel of a brand new year fresh off the line, no wrinkles, smelling like sunshine. Actually it’s pouring rain right now so 2009 smells like my basement leaking but I’m going to look beyond the immediate. In fact that shall be my New Year’s resolution. That and mastering texting so I no longer send messages that say “surb” and “norfbab” because I don’t know how to backspace, and also is it just me or do my fingers seem fricken giant? I’ve tried to get Angsty to just walk around with me all the time in case someone texts me but sometimes she has to go to school.

Speaking of school, I may have to change her name to Teen Jubilant because she has been so very very happy ever since she found out she got into Reed. It really is fabulous because I was not ready for her to go somewhere far away and be all grown up and shit. I will get ready but at the moment I am not ready. I still don’t know how to text, for one thing, and I’m also hopeless at this thing called “doing my hair". Additionally, I have many wardrobe crises and I need someone to talk about books with who is not Bagpipe Man who holds many wrong opinions. Reed is only 5 minutes away and I’m sure she won’t mind if I just pop by with my phone so she can show me where all those damn icons like exclamation marks are again.

So last night we went to a swell little shindig over at Legoguy’s house and I drank some delicious champagne and ate about 500 of these chocolate covered pretzel things. They were so good. I think they had crushed up candy canes on them. Actually, I don’t “think” this, I know it because this morning I found part of one in my hair. Yum. I didn’t eat it but don’t think I wasn’t tempted.

Anyway, it’s 2009. I’ve got a good feeling about this one. Oh, and I’m going to write more this year so all 6 of you who are still reading check back soon for pictures of Mr Meyer and his fabulous blossoms.