Car poetry

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqmQ829qYRc


For Poetry Friday - a Mary Oliver poem read by a woman in a car who posted it on YouTube.
I love how it starts out - a bit wonky, this, you think, a woman in a car waiting for her husband to finish a doctor's appointment. And then she starts to read this most marvelous poem of Mary Oliver's, and you get so pulled into it, and it isn't wonky after all, just you and this woman in a car and this bridge of words between her speaking the poem and you listening, and the little space in mind it creates afterward.

Catting around

Okay, not really catting around but it's fun to say. Speaking of...(nice how I worked this in, huh?) cat lovers take note - a really charming book I came across in a Vet's office (appropriately, I suppose, although I was there with a very cranky tortoise, not a cat) is

With Cats for Comforter by Ray Bradbury. When not writing his terrific short stories, screenplays, essays and novels, apparently he is loving cats.

Morning grass, rock lines

Starting to look through the vacation photos - here is the grass at the edge of the deck at the place we stay...
I also liked these rock lines, formed at the swimming hole by an anonymous earlier visitor - I love seeing what's left behind, mud castles and stone bridges.

Some good reds

Some bright and bold summer reds to welcome the new week.

"First say to yourself what you would be;
and then do what you have to do."

-Epictetus

I am so sick

and yet in my raised temperature haze, I recalled I had this photo...I think times like this make a girl realize she has become addicted to blogging...back to Advil and antibiotics.

some good blues

thoughts on wanderlust

Was writing a review of a book on Goodreads and thought I would drag some of it here since it (the book) got me to thinking about travel. You've seen the book in bookstores, I'm sure... A 1,000 places to see before you die. Well, I thought that this book really sets the bar a bit high. A thousand places just assumes right off that you have time and money since the rest of us drones have trouble getting time off to go visit Aunt Ida in Des Moines. I mean, come on. We were skimming through it at work - I cannot imagine anyone actually reading the whole thing unless they had a highlighter in hand and index cards 'cause that is how they roll. However, besides realizing I will not ever see 100 things at the rate I am going, it also made me realize I have questionable aim in the places I would choose compared to the higher end choices laid out in this puppy.
So - let's just assume you have ten places to go because really, just going from the couch to the kitchen and back to the couch can be exhausting some evenings, yes?
Well. 1) I want to eat a slice of key lime pie in Key West.
2) I want to go to Scotland and if I don't go soon, my daughter says she will clonk me over the head and drag me there as she is sick of hearing about it.
3) I want to see San Francisco because my mother loved it.
4) I don't want to see Niagara Falls but the husband has some obsession with it and I imagine it would be sort of cool to take one of those little boat rides where everyone wears rain slickers, so I have to include it.
5) Pablo Neruda's house in Chili. Isla Negra. And could I just move in?
6) Portland, Maine but without children as I have heard the combination of bookstores and restaurants is lovely...
7) England - but Virginia's England and C.S. Lewis' England and Mole and Ratty's England. A cousin-in-law who lives there said I shouldn't actually see England as the England in my head is really far more beautiful and quite fictional.
8) Long backroads and good b-b-q and people that say "hey".
9) Watch the sun set in a desert. Any desert.
10) Open to suggestions and changes of heart.

Fish love and furniture

A small and solo road trip last weekend - I was aiming for a crafts show but got sidetracked by a sign for a sale at the Lillian August outlet in Norwalk, Ct... I don't usually bring a camera into a store with me, but it was a happy accident that I had mine in my bag - I love the textures of the iron against the brick, the cement, the glass.

I love the beach bone weathered wood feeling - this couch was corduroy and as comfortable as a favorite pair of autumn pants...



I am generally not a big shopper but I found wandering around in the store with a camera very pleasing - the price tags even on sale were beyond me but it started turning into an explore of things I like.

I loved the wood of the old shelves and bins although I was a bit surprised to realize that people buy cleaned up pine cones and bark and seed pods from stores rather than finding them on walks. It was like finding those bags of seashells and dried up starfish at craft stores and feeling sad that a starfish ended up dried in a bag just waiting for somebody's glue gun to stick it on something.



But what made me so very happy was to see this fish. He was the reason I got sidetracked. The husband and I went here about a year ago to look at chairs before we realized we have Lillian August taste and an Ikea budget. But I fell in love. This is a great big whomping fish - and his wooden tale could move side to side the way it is hinged. He looks like he's made out of an old tin shack and he speaks to me. I was so happy to see him again - and me with with a camera! It was meant to be.

Hail Storm

8/8/08

eighty degrees and a few rumbles of distant thunder even as the weather woman announces the storm has passed us and is on route to Long Island. Suddenly pouring rain, hail, and a drop in temperature to the fifties.

I love summer storms.

Snip, snip

A discussion at library - how would you know when a children's librarian has really snapped? Puppet starts saying inappropriate things? When she's wearing a dress made out of a torn-up thesaurus? When she keeps performing the same fingerplay over and over like a stuck record? (Thanks, M. for that one!). Clearly the summer crowd is getting to us - most of the time it seems the library is used only for the a/c and the computer games.

Maybe it's just the August blues, but I might just be a scissor snip away from wearing a paper dress and using my rabbit puppet for in-depth therapy.

(Hopping over, Charlotte Rabbit asks - but, Susan, how do you really feel?)