Friday, March 25, 2005

Some Things You May or May Not Know

First of all, this T-Shirt folding method is just awesome!! I mean, how cool is that?!?!? It takes a wee bit to load but is well worth the wait. You've gotta love Japanese culture - all kinds of cool gizmos and gadgets and art forms on never knew existed like this T-shirtgami as it were. And of course Hello Kitty. We would NEVER forget her!

OK, so really that's just one thing you may not know. I will now endeavour to make up some others...

Aha! Here's something. I found coyote poop in my yard today. I knew they were close - we hear them at night - but had no idea HOW close they came to us. COOOOOOOL! I was raking leaves (yes I know it's Spring - I am a procrastinator, OK?) and I found 3 large, furry logs that could only have been from coyotes. Too much info? We also found a dead mousie with no visible wounds under the oak tree. Not sure what happened, but he was a very beautiful little creature - reddish fur, white, white tummy, plump - ever so cute. We took him into the woods hoping he'd get "recycled" - maybe by the coyotes.

While I raked, the girls kept busy by pulling bullets and nails out of the big oak tree. Yep, we're close to Detroit. OK, they're actually remnants from the days when our subdivision was a farm and the folks apparently used to hang out on the farmhouse porch and shoot up paper targets on the big oak tree. :oP Yee haw! I'm actually hoping the nails weren't the only thing holding the tree together. :-/ I'll try to get a pic up to make that comment more easily understandable. For now, suffice it to say that it looks as if someone took an enormous bite out of the trunk. It's a very large, old tree and when it comes down (and I do mean when!) it's going to make a big impression on something - hopefully not our house. I should use Trigonometry for the only useful purpose it will ever serve in my life and figure out how tall that thing is and whether or not it's going to actually hit our house. From the looks of things, it's too close to call. It does still leaf out every Spring, so it's not yet dead of lead poisoning. It's so chock-full of various and bizarre lifeforms (and the holes thereof) that I'm not sure what will happen when it does fall. Last summer I saw the most enormous bug I've ever seen in person in my life. We're talking Goliath beetle size! It was very slowly and solemnly wedging itself under a shelf of bark at the edge of the big "bite" on the trunk, so I never did get to see the complete massivity of it, but what I could see was deliciously unsettling.

For some reason there is wire - I don't think it's barbed - wrapped about 3 times around the base of the tree. I'm not sure what that's all about. It certainly doesn't keep anything out of the tree. And I seriously doubt that the tree is in danger of walking away if the wire is removed. Unless, of course, I'm just really unobservant and it's actually an Ent.

I also found significant chunks of said tree littering the ground underneath. Gives one pause for thought...

We're reading the Lemony Snicket books and just loving them to bits. They are really, really, really delightful. Tim Curry does a spectacular job of reading them on CD, too. :) We listened to #1 on a CD we borrowed from the library and promptly bought a set of volumes 1-10 from Scholastic for $21.95. We're also re-reading the Narnia books. I just bought our 3rd set from Scholastic. We loved the other 2 sets to death.

Other books I've read recently include the DaVinci Code (great read, IMO,) Early Thunder by Jean Fritz - we're looking for Revolutionary War books from the Tory point of view as per Mollusc's request. This one half fills the bill. He turns Patriot during the course of the story, but at least you get a glimpse into how the other side felt and why. I recently finished Plum and Jaggers - an interesting but odd book I picked up free at a library sale (on day 3 everything left was free!) After watching Camelot, the Musical from um - maybe the 60s or 70s - I'm inspired to pick up the Mists of Avalon for another read through, but I have other books I'm still working on first. I have Kite Runner from a friend, as well as Eyes of the Tailless Animals, which is just too depressing to read much of in one go. It's about N Korea - an autobiography of a woman held in one of the prison camps there. I also have the Aquariums of Pyongyang - also going to be depressing. Argh.

My latest new CD is from Chris Rice - "Run the Earth, Watch the Sky" and just as awesome as I've come to expect from his work. My faves are "On the Other Side of the Radio" and "My Cathedral."

Latest movie watched was "Bridget Jones: the Edge of Reason." Cute. The fight scene, as anticipated, was a hoot. :) And you get some good insight into it all by watching the bonus material. Before that, we saw "Evelyn" - very interesting. Hard to imagine kids could be kept in orphanages without their parents' consent. I finally saw Starship Troopers, too. Well done except for that whole plot thing. Why not just blow up the planet and be done with the nasty beasties? But much better than some of the doozies John's picked lately. :oP (I cannot, for instance, recommend "A Day Without a Mexican." Or that really weird and unsettling movie about "little people" with Gary Oldman, the title of which I have no interest in recalling.)

Tomorrow we're having an egg dyeing extravaganza with some friends and their kids. Should be messy and lots of fun. John has a 4 day weekend and TKD is closed tomorrow through Sunday. What will we do with ourselves? Looks like we'll paint the Master Bathroom, actually. Wheeeeeee! I'm actually pretty excited about getting this place a bit more personalized. I really like how the garage entry came out.

I'm looking at upgrading cameras and have finally selttled on the Digital Rebel XT. I think...

Haven't sewn in a while. I'm thinking of making an actually useable "How to Catch a Husband" bag for my sis. A diminuitive partner, as it were, to the goliath shown previously. What do you think? If she doesn't want the big bag, maybe I can catch that beetle and keep him in it. I really hope he's not what's holding the tree together...









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