Lucy's Spleen

Let's Just Say I'm Starting Low and Planning to Work My Way Up the Vertebrate Subphylum

Ever since the loss of our two ladybugs, Jumbo and [the other one], I have been thinking nonstop about getting a pet. I've been thinking how I need a living thing around the house to take care of. Something besides Stan. A small thing. This weekend the urge really peaked and all I could think about was how I really needed a pet; how much more settled I would feel and how my life would be improved if we were a pet-having household with a little angibal to care for, now. So yesterday after work I mounted an expedition across the newly dangerous black ice-slick sidewalks of Porter Square and (after a rather anti-climactic experience in what is possibly the dingiest, most dismal pet store run by the most depressing pet store owners ever) came home with someone very special-

His name's Dieter Dengler.
Unless we decide on a different name. Those who are clever at devising names for fish and such (you know who you are) are welcome to enter submissions for consideration. It seems like it would be fun to have a contest or prize or something, but I think we've learned that I'm not so great with the follow-though in this type of event. Plus I'm not hating the name I've come up with, yet, so let's say the contest is this: anybody who comes up with a fish name that is undeniably better than Dieter Dengler may win the prize of naming a fish from somebody's blog one time.

I will furnish a few facts about Dieter to abet your creative processes:

• Dieter is small, with a rakish dorsal  fin.
• He is a peppy fellow.
• His face is slightly asymmetrical; one of his- uh... nostril-like-flap-things* is more pronounced than the other.
• Dieter enjoys eating and... um... bobbing.
• He is a goldfish.

Okay? Good luck everybody!

* Snout-scale abnormalities? Bacterial infestations? Scabrous lesions?

Unfinished Business

When you're trying to blog every day for a month, and you find you have nothing to write about, sometimes it's good to dig through your blog archives from the last year, find the unfinished posts, lump a few together and just publish them as is- as though you meant them to stay like that.

Around the holidays:

A few weeks ago Stan's 7 year-old nephew called to tell Grandma the joke he made up. He is wildly entertained by his joke and has continued to be very proud to tell it to anyone who will listen, thusly:
  Q:  Grandma, why do pigs have tits?
  A:  Because they're tittyheads!
Proper delivery of this joke should involve semi-formal multi-generational family gatherings and be followed by screams of riotous laughter on the part of all five to seven year-olds in the vicinity.

February:

It's Thursday morning, I'm in our kitchen, the uncontested Favorite Room in the House. This is where we gather on weekends to visit and graze and team up on the Sunday crossword puzzle. I'm eating Eggs Athwart Toast- pretty much my standard breakfast, sometimes instead I eat oatmeal- and coffee with Irish cream, which is how I always take my coffee, though with perhaps a bit more Irish Cream today than is necessarily meet for a workday. I'm watching the birds at our feeder.

April, or maybe it was May, when we went to visit Grace:

It's a sunny, windy afternoon in Santa Cruz. Stan and Malcolm are napping in the bedroom and I'm drinking chamomile tea sweetened with raw, local honeycomb and padding around Grace and George's wonderful home snapping pictures of everything looking beautiful. I would love to live in an angular, window-filled, 1970s-era wooden house like this one. I am among the few who believe that the '70s actually got a lot of things right. The 1970s spawned punk rock, for example, and Sesame Street. They gave us feminism and halter-cut lamé and George Clinton and something else very special, something I have always loved to see on anybody with the wherewithal to support it, particularly black women and young men with strong noses. This intensely dreamy and desirable thing being, of course, my all-time favorite/least personally attainable hairstyle, the afro.

I am a lazy participant in NaBloPoMo.

Spring

We've been having perfect spring weather around here lately; warm, but not too warm; sunny, with a little rain thrown in, gorgeously lit at every hour of the day and very romantic. Everywhere I look I see animals going about together in pairs- the Canada geese fly over in pairs instead of vees these days; there are two horses on each pasture at the stables to the north of our home; the birds at our feeder- doves, quail, house finches and goldfinches- arrive together in matched sets, the male goldfinches seeming to grow a brighter yellow each day as they wine and dine their lady friends on Black Oil sunflower seeds. There's one male and one lady sheep in each pen over at the farm (I wonder if we might see a couple of little lambs over there soon), and there are two new little piggies I've been admiring greatly as well. They happen to be twin brother piglets, but hey- to each his own in this romantic season, no? A couple of lucky male creatures keep harems. Our neighborhood pheasant, Kevin, is one, and there is a new male doing a lot of puffing up and strutting in the formerly ladies-only turkey hutch at the farm. I'll show you his picture- he's at once splendid and revolting, see there?

I can't decide which is more impressive- the angry neck warts or the flaccid nose flap. Here's one of him all floofed up for the hens:

I think it's awesome how even though he has a number of crumpled, broken tail feathers he's still proudly fanning those suckers out like there's no tomorrow. I picture him like an oblivious hiccupy drunk, relentlessly coming onto all the women trying to avoid him outside the bar, letting them know that, "This here turkey is one fiiine mother fucker."

Here are the piggies:

They were cute when I took this picture, but they've doubled, possibly tripled in size since they came to the farm and are growing more disgusting by the moment.

Lastly (and bestly), one of the mares over at the stables on the other side of our house has had a new little foal. He is gawky and gangly and lurches around with his long legs and pointy face and little beard and caterpillar tail. I can hardly get enough of him. Look:

In college tour news, Stan has visited three of our top picks in the Midwest and has two trips east coming up in the next week, then (yikes!) the official decision must be made. We've been leaning toward settling on a university in what I like to call a "major urban metropolis," so I'm trying to make the most of my farmy weekends while I can!

Awww...

Possessed

We're talking to each other in our best "possessed" voices.

I say something scary and, um, possessed-sounding.

Stan says, "(something unintelligible)."

Me: What?

Stan: What?

Me: What did you just say scary and possessed?

Stan: I said, "Hey Jesus, why ya gotta keep buggin' me?"

Utterly Pointless

Me (singing): Where'd you get that nipple on your butt from?

Stan (also singing): From the backyard of my solitude.

Me: Oh.

Good morning. What are you doing? I'm drinking Lady Grey tea and eating Eggs Athwart Toast in the kitchen of our beautiful house while watching birds visit the feeder right outside the window (amateur birding being my new consuming passion with which I am boring everyone I know nearly half to death). The other thing I am doing, with deep and abiding pleasure, is typing here at my computer which (after many woes involving bad service and being in an unincorporated area and much other stupidity) is FINALLY, gladly, set up and running and connected to this new-fangled technology I hear they're calling "Internet." This brings us out of the stone ages and back into the world of modern conveniences  such as Listening to Music and Being in Touch with People. It's very novel and already I find myself wondering, "Whatever did we do before music and people became a part of our lives?* Good question.

This final convenience means all is just about perfect in my world, then. This, and the fact that tonight after work the two of us are hopping on a red-eye because Stan is taking me on my first ever trip to NYC. We're taking a quick weekend to explore the phylogenetic organization** of the top floor of the Natural History museum, eat, wander and spend a little time with a couple of very good friends who we don't see often enough. Most of all I am looking forward to being on vacation with my own loving cup.

Like this (only without the dog and in a major hugeantic urban metropolis rather than remote barren wilderness):

Hwre!

* Before= prior to yesterday

** Stan's current consuming passion with which he is politely NOT boring anyone nearly half to death