Happy Birthday yendi!

Many happy returns of the day!

Raining on my Parade

Well, not a parade, so much as a back-and-forth of wheelbarrows full of mulch. Not going to happen with rain pouring down. Well, it might, provided the lightning doesn't start zapping around like it did most of the night.

I still remember a couple of years ago, when Justin and I were making sure the Rachel River was not overflowing its banks; we just made it up onto the porch when lightning hit a tree across the road from where we had been standing. Zap-crackle-pop.

Rain is good though, we've been far to dry. This should green everything up, plus it saves me the time of lugging a bucket of water to each tree we've planted...

Wrote a short story this morning. Read it once, made a few tweaks. Seems good. Might want to add a bit more because the final line shows up on its own page. Could cut some, I suppose, but that's not as likely. Probably something in there that I missed. I wrote it in a single pass, more or less transcribing from a dream - a terrible, horrible dream; so bad that I have to make others suffer through it. Curiously enough, some of the childful/childfree discussions going about on prime_liquor a short while ago seem to have had some influence, or maybe that's just analyzing it in hindsight. I did manage to sneak a tiny bit in from a recent National Geographic article in there - it's not really topical, but it gives pause at a key moment.

I had just looked through the annual report of the Delaware & Lehigh Canal before heading to bed last night, and noticed a picture of Pidock Creek Bridge at Bowman's Hill Wildflower Preserve... that picture stuck with me, because it appeared, modified somewhat and under seige by raging, running waters in a number of photographs in my dream. In the dream it had a D--- name which I couldn't recall, so I named it Dunwich, with a nod and wink to a sartain author.

I suppose the other big influence, though, was suffering through the Phillip Glass disc "The Photographer" yesterday at work. Now, I absolutely love some Glass stuff - I have a number of his works such as Itaipu, a symphony or two, some organ music, his violin concerto, and his Aguas da Amazonia collaboration with the Brazilian group Uakti. Very listenable stuff, beautiful, moving, and so on. But this, something about the vocal line just drove me nuts - could be because I was struggling through a coding problem at the time, but it was *nearly* as bad as his Einstein on the Beach (and the only saving grace of that is that Peter Shickele uncovered PDQ Bach's Einstein on the Fritz, with it's classic line of - I'm paraphrasing here - "1, 2, 3, 4; 1, 2, 3, 4..." before seguing into a theme remarkably like "Three Blind Mice.")

Anyway, I might post The Photographer (coincidentally, the title of my short story) later today... possibly not until Monday - it's on the new laptop, and this is the old laptop, and they don't know each other that well (although they've slept on top of one another.)

In other news, Justin's birthday is tomorrow - we're going to Red Robin for his birthday dinner, but other than that it's his day. I'm almost willing to bet we'll be watching The Fellowship of the Ring tomorrow - he's been asking to see it lately...

In a very rare case of advance notice, I'll be at the Moravian Book Shop for our monthly Poetry Circle this coming Friday - stop by and read or listen!

Vermont asks Congress to begin Impeachment Process

Yahoo News story

I like the bit at the end, explaining how Vermont came to attention back in 1974 for doing much the same for Nixon...