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Saturday, June 19, 2004
Vegetation Situation
Given that the month of May, and now again the month of June have neighbors chatting about how it might not be a waste to start an Ark, also given high temps and humidity, my back yard though small is a jungle. It was cut back to zero two weeks ago and is now over waist high, a wall of vegetation. Either I must buy a sheep or resurrect the clippers and get going. I seem to have already read my whole big fat sack of grocery store books. Might as well get out there and try to find the dirt.
Hi, ho,
Hi, ho,
I have to go,
And mow.
Friday, June 18, 2004
Grocery Store Book Orgy
I have tooled up for my first weekend as a retired person by getting a big fat sack full of grocery store books. As a little kid I was very high-minded, read WORKS OF LITERATURE, just pounded through authors like Milton and Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy and Dickens...et al. Why? I liked to read and that was all I had. A pair of wealthy literature-lovers gave me their entire library when they both became blind. I read it ...all of it...even practically paralytic stuff like Bacon's Essays. The time for me to take courses in English literature was when I was 10-12 years old and soaking up all that worthy verbiage.
That was then and this is now. Now I read grocery store books. I just love a 500 p. book that says on the cover..."had to read it in one sitting"...hahahahahaa! Who reads that fast? I DO!!
One weekend I read 7 books like that. I like books where a lot happens. I don't like books where the characters keep taking their own emotional temperature, keep checking their feelings for boo-boos. I don't like romances. I like improbably insane adventures. I don't like books where I have to keep standing the author in the corner for being a potty mouth. I like books where I'm either terrified or laughing and sometimes both at once.
So, how would a person like me celebrate retirement? With a big pile of low brow literature.
Just finished the first. I highly recommend it!
Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. Never heard of her before this book, but it is great.
It is how social studies should be but never is, fabulous historical narrative. It is one of those 500 page books I read in one gulp. Here is the ultimate accolade; it is the kind of book that when you have to go to the bathroom/answer the door/ get some Vernors, you read on the way, while there, and on the return, not noticing surroundings. On to the next book!!
Thursday, June 17, 2004
Pimped My Ride
Mood:
 mischievious
A couple of months ago a telemarketer called here offering to highgloss polish my car so it will stay shiny for several years...at a cost less than going to the car wash for a while. Since I haven't even ever washed the Honda, I thought that was a fair deal and said yes. Today was the day. I was up at 4:00 A.M. and driving into the crackiest part of the inner city to this place that pimps people's rides. It was a busy place working on Hummers and other expensive SUV's, the kind of place that puts neon lights under the edge of your running boards, britegold bumpers front and back, tiny scampering Christmas lights around the license plate...stuff like that. They also install car alarm systems from a company called Viper and all the employees wore shirts with shocking snakes on the front. Not really a Honda Accord kind of place. Actually not a place for a little old retired schoolteacher from the suburbs. Now that was a unique waiting room experience. I'm still alive and I did push my luck. I was there for two hours. Decided I was NOT going to watch raunchy cable shows on the TV up in the corner. So I got chatty, made everybody talk, on and on quacking and yakking. I thought, "Mrs. Pollifax Gabs in the Ghetto." Was I secretly intimidated? Yes I was, quite a bit. Getting into the car to come home, I suddenly felt too tired to drive, just filletted and I'm feeling it now. My first adventure as a retired person. How does the car look? Very shiny. I wonder how it would look with pink neon underlights.
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