Listics

Weeks and weeks ago I hassled Ben to be sure his passport was in order.  It was.

Tonight I went to the file where we keep our passports because we leave the country in a few days.  Not there.  No problem, thought I with a sigh, looking at the messiest desk this side of tax day. 

After the winter holidays I moved five or six linear feet of loose paper off the top of my desk to the dining room table.  There was a certain crude order there and the piles of paper at least had roughly squared off corners.  When visitors came, we shut the dining room door.  We had a house guest for a few days and fed her in the kitchen.  But I’ve cherished the clear surface of my desk and credenza, so I felt righteously miffed the other day when we were forced to move the papers back in order to use the dining room for a dinner… I know the guests would have been happy to eat in the kitchen.

Tonight came the time to get our papers together ("Ausweis papieren bitte," you don’t want to fuck up when you hear that request or it’s back to Stalag 17).  I’ll admit it.  My desk had more papers on it than the four or five linear feet from the dining room table, because current business has a way of growing around me.  And I dimly remembered pulling the passports out of that file and then I invented a memory of putting them somewhere convenient.  Or I should say i transposed the memory, because I had indeed done just that in September when traveling out of Bush’s USA to Canada we thought it would be smart to bring the passports.  I mean, we knew the Canadians would treat us with respect and be generally friendly and not at all uptight and basically laugh at the concept of passports, "Does this look like the third Reich, eh?"  But we had to get back into the country and we figured what with that basic paranoia we’ve been living with since the chimp-faced boy took office…. well, passports would be a good thing.

Up in Beth’s office there’s a wooden box with about six inches of bills and receipts and such.  Next to that is a pile of insurance adverts, old checking statements, bundles of holiday greeting cards going back to 1924.  After going through everything on my desk (and removing it a pile at a time to the dining room table where it could all be sorted more easily) I figured I’d find the elusive little blue booklets with the flattering photos in Beth’s relatively short stack.  No luck.

I’m thinking it’s time for the long-story-short finale.  No reason to go into the darker corners of my self doubt around whether this was just avoidance behavior because I didn’t want to travel, or whose fault it was that the passports were long since shredded following a Saturday morning recycle run or any of that. 

On my dresser is a cigar box, memento of the November 7, 1979 when the boys were born and I bought some of the nastiest, hugest stogies available cheap in San Francisco.  The best thing about them was the box.  But I got a kick out of behaving like I was in a fifties sitcom and handing out these cancer bombs to the boys at Bank of America and I still have the box.

The passports weren’t in it of course.  But while I was going through it I heard the front door downstairs open and close and a few minutes later Beth was back with the prize.  The damn things had been in my glove compartment since the Canada trip.

They’re peering out of windows, looking down from rooftops, lurking behind every tree in cities and towns across Wisconsin.  They’re reading their Dylan Thomas, praising their kitty-gods, and passing their kitty-ammunition.   They’ve gone to the mattresses.  There isn’t a spare bag of Whiskas, Friskies, or Kitty Litter to be found in a grocery store within twenty miles of Madison.  They’ve dug in and they are ready to rumble.

"Bring them awwwn," I heard one fluff-muffin purr as I passed near a dumpster behind a seafood restaurant near the Capitol.  The rednecks want to shoot them, but they better watch out because Fluffy is armed and she plans to shoot back.

Happy Birthday Molly Bloom!
    yes-yes-yes-yes-yes!!!!!!!!!

Born 3/17/2004 at JnD’s Australian Shepherds, Slinger, Wisconsin.  Practically housebroken and seldom chews shoes unless she finds them unattended on the floor.  Favorite activities include running like a wild girl through the horse pasture and finding excellent things to roll in, splashing through the spring, guarding the house by barking at any deer that might go ghosting past in the middle of the night, and playing with her stuffed toys and a squeaky plastic pizza.  She claims she’s not a frisbee junkie, that she can stop anytime.  She generally does after only forty or fifty tosses. 

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My morning blog immersion carried me through photos of Bleecker Street by Ronni Bennet, store by store, shop by shop, each one with a comment about the nature of the business, the quality of the goods, and personal anecdotes from Ronni who has lived in this neighborhood for over twenty years.

I also visited Liz Ditz, who splits her time between the place in Sun Valley and her home in Woodside (what a life), and who commented kindly on my blood-thirsty post about killing all the feral kitties in order to get the songbirds and wild weasels back.  Liz pointed me toward Ray Girvan’s "Apothecary’s Drawer" where I rummaged for a bit, charmed by the Babbage and Lovelace essays,

The phenomenon is not merely one of learning to copy natural methods.
Biologist Mr Stephen Jay Gould has memorably described the cloud of pollen from
a tree as "raining floppy disks", and this view of Nature as information
(utterly alien to the scientific paradigm of Babbage’s day) is reshaping the
endeavours of humankind to emulate those of natural creation.
   
         Confused and dazzled by such complexities, Babbage
took refuge in observation of humble lichens within an ancient oak wood in the
Devon of his boyhood. When, however, one of these enigmatic plants defied
recognition, he sought enlightenment in an Antwerp database. In pursuit of the
Norwegian Bryoria smithii, it occurred to him that the branching hierarchy of
this botanical key replicated the evolutionary and taxonomic classifications it
described. And beyond, the global web (the key being but a small part) has
itself developed to become like an evolving organism, driven less by its makers
than by Mr Darwin’s laws.

Ontologically sated, I decided to ego-surf my referrer logs and found a reference to my cheezy post about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Cheez.  Following the link backwards I found this page, and naturally I had to read the article about food blogs.   It was there I learned about Meathenge,  an effort that reminds me a bit of Bacontarian.com, but in truth Zuckerman focuses on pork whereas the Biggles family and the Meatheads share their experience around all things meat.  The SF Gate article provides a nice short list of Bay Area food blogs.

Anita Sharpe brings me a smile from Worthwhile.  On Tuesday she praised cheese, and all things dairy.  Dairier, dairiest…  nice comparative.  Seems that natural fats might be better for us than ingestion of processed petroleum products.  Who’da thunk it.

Thanks to the gentlest comment spammer for noodging me toward Worthwhile this morning.  How delicate.

"The field of culinary evolution faces one great dilemma: why do most
cooked, exotic meats taste like cooked Gallus gallus, the domestic
chicken?"

Hot dog!

Once the castaway contestants on CBS’s "Survivor" had their first rat
skinned and sizzling over the fire, everyone knew what would come next.

Tastes like chicken, they reported.

"Kentucky
Fried Chicken decided to change their name to KFC in 1991 for several
reasons, none of which had anything to do with governmental regulations
about mutant animals…"

I wonder why it is when we are trying to describe the taste of
something unfamiliar or even exotic, that more often than not the taste
is described as “a lot like chicken”? As a result of my East Texas
oilfield trash and Cajun heritage plus my many travels, there aren’t
very many things I haven’t eaten or at least sampled, especially if
it’s meat.

"…and I am not a great fan either although I am one of the many who has
had snake soup and also thought it tasted like shredded chicken."

Tastes Like Chicken…

What’s Leslie up to today?

Looks like about three inches of snow fell while we were gone.  I shoveled the porch and left the rest to nature.

Hard to believe we were sitting in the Hotel La Jolla restaurant this morning having breakfast with Matt and Wendy,  looking at the cove’s blue waters, the palm trees.  Hard to believe we drove up to John Wayne Airport where they prune their hibiscus like a hedge.   Hard to believe we left the land of sun and sand to return to this frozen hell and will return to our daily routines tomorrow.

Sad note… Molly, Brandy, and Veneta are still at the kennel.  The understory around here is very empty.