I have things in my house I don't want. The stuff just appears like a hairball on the carpet or a toadstool in the back yard. I have three kids, six cats, two birds, a dog and a husband who's suspicious that I'm a secret hoarder. My garage is full. Even my front lawn is full of poop from by neighbor's dogs. I have bags of bags, boxes filled with boxes and gorged closets. Worst yet, I have forgotten what I put in them. I did investigate the contents of one closet one time. I came away with a large bag of old Loc blocks, seven long red candles with an unpleasant odor, a pink robe with large red roses appliqued on it that was my mother's, two unopened packages of men's underwear, a Ziploc bag filled with socks without partners, a twenty-five year old swimsuit and some green rubber gloves. Before I fled, I had three dead spiders sticking to my pants, two live spiders in my hair and a dehydrated dead mouse by the tail. I haven't returned since and am too cowardly to repeat this profitless adventure.
No doubt there are more interesting things in my closets but that doesn't mean I want to go there. Life is like that. It is full of interesting places that I don't want to go to. Hell is first on my list. I'd like to know where it is and who is there, but I don't want to go there. Hell is followed closely by a pig farm, prison, Big foots home, the public landfill, a slaughterhouse and a junior high school. A morgue would also be an interesting place to visit as long as nobody moved.
Collecting things just adds to this problem. Hobbies can rapidly get out of control. You start with one antique button, but that isn't enough. Then it's twenty and twenty quickly escalates to a hundred. It has been like that for me with a couple things. I confess to being a aqua phobic numismatic bibliophile. I don't swim, collect shinny round things and books. My husband is suspicious of this. I ignore him.
This is why I approached LibraryThing with a gimlet eye. Would I want to record my phobic collection for everyone to see? I signed in to the site and tentatively added one book. Then I added two more in quick succession. By the tenth book I was hooked. I leaped from my chair and scurried about my house recording books from every shelf and pile. I didn't think this would be a dangerous undertaking until I stepped on a sleeping cat's tail. By the time my heart returned to it's normal rhythm I had fifty items cataloged and was busily scribbling notes on other entries.
LibraryThing turned out to be a terrific and unexpectedly gratifying addition to my life. This is my opinion of course. My husband is convinced I'm over-productive in certain areas and is earnestly looking for a treatment center for me. I'm happy. Until he finds one I'm free to collect and catalog to my soul's satisfaction.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Messages from the boneyard.
Flickr is a lot like my high school annual. It has thousands of pictures of people I don't know. I decided to do a search for the odd and curious stuff. Anything peculiar, queer or uncouth would do. It was then that I learned something that would keep me awake at night. I made the mistake of using the explore option to research zombies. I didn't need to know that zombies desire human flesh or that they are unfailingly tenacious in their attempts to obtain it. The only good news was that they are are really dumb. I thought it best to move along.
So I decided to venture off into another area. Instead of the undead I'd look into the really very dead. What I uncovered, digging into this subject, was that graveyards are facetious and witty places. I found an auctioneer who had "Going, going, gone!" as his epitaph, a Mr. Pease who's gravestone read, "Pease is not here. Only his pod." I found a monument to a young man erected "by his grateful family" and another marker claimed that the man buried there was the "only surviving son" of Admiral Vernon.
As a warning to us, I suppose, many people had to tell you how they died. One claimed it was from eating crab, another claimed that bananas had done him in. One man died choking on a fish bone. I didn't find this unusual, but then there was the woman who claimed her death was due to eating a watermelon. Then there is the hypochondriac who's marker reads, "I told you I was sick."
Ultimately, it is nice to know the dead are really dead and will stay put. It is also nice to know that they have a sense of humor. Some names on grave markers, for example, set you to thinking. Names like: Yul B. Next, Willy Rott, U.R. Gone, Barry M. Deep, Izzy Gone, I. Emma Ghost and Sue D. Bum. One of the best epitaphs I came across was written by a woman who had shot her errant husband and I am sure wrote his epitaph from her jail cell with a big satisfied smile on her face. It read, "At least I know where he's sleeping tonight."
Flickr got me to thinking that maybe I should ponder what I want on my headstone. During my researach I came across a picture on Flickr of the marker of the man with a thousand voices, Mel Blanc. His marker says, "That's all folks!" It seemed so final that I had an immediate vision of Peggy Lee singing "Is that all there is?" So I sat in my kitchen and gave it some thought. I'm vacillating between two choices. Either, "I just knew this was going to happen." or, from Longfellow, "From dust thou art to dust returnest was not spoken of the soul." What do you think?
So I decided to venture off into another area. Instead of the undead I'd look into the really very dead. What I uncovered, digging into this subject, was that graveyards are facetious and witty places. I found an auctioneer who had "Going, going, gone!" as his epitaph, a Mr. Pease who's gravestone read, "Pease is not here. Only his pod." I found a monument to a young man erected "by his grateful family" and another marker claimed that the man buried there was the "only surviving son" of Admiral Vernon.
As a warning to us, I suppose, many people had to tell you how they died. One claimed it was from eating crab, another claimed that bananas had done him in. One man died choking on a fish bone. I didn't find this unusual, but then there was the woman who claimed her death was due to eating a watermelon. Then there is the hypochondriac who's marker reads, "I told you I was sick."
Ultimately, it is nice to know the dead are really dead and will stay put. It is also nice to know that they have a sense of humor. Some names on grave markers, for example, set you to thinking. Names like: Yul B. Next, Willy Rott, U.R. Gone, Barry M. Deep, Izzy Gone, I. Emma Ghost and Sue D. Bum. One of the best epitaphs I came across was written by a woman who had shot her errant husband and I am sure wrote his epitaph from her jail cell with a big satisfied smile on her face. It read, "At least I know where he's sleeping tonight."
Flickr got me to thinking that maybe I should ponder what I want on my headstone. During my researach I came across a picture on Flickr of the marker of the man with a thousand voices, Mel Blanc. His marker says, "That's all folks!" It seemed so final that I had an immediate vision of Peggy Lee singing "Is that all there is?" So I sat in my kitchen and gave it some thought. I'm vacillating between two choices. Either, "I just knew this was going to happen." or, from Longfellow, "From dust thou art to dust returnest was not spoken of the soul." What do you think?
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Sunday, November 4, 2007
Swimming with zombies
Zombies are one of those things in life that you never give it a lot of thought to until you have one standing next to you. Looking at you. Abruptly your knowledge on zombies becomes personal and important. I haven't had this experience but if I ever do then I am now prepared thanks to one of the podcasts I watched. I learned more in that three minutes than I ever expected. For example; zombies cannot swim. {I do feel a bit conflicted about this unsettling piece of information because, as you know, I cannot swim and therefore cannot elude zombies by hiding in a lake.) Zombie bites are always infectious and fatal. You should not hide from zombies in your house or apartment. The best escape is to flee to either Costco or the mountains. Why this is the case was never made clear, but I do know that I need to have a survival kit ready to take with me. That kit should include a hatchet, long-handled knife or chain saw. You need one of these three because zombies can only be killed by chopping off their heads. I've chosen a hatchet as my weapon. The reason is clear. I'd have to get too close to the zombie to slice his head off with the knife and the chain saw seems too messy. The other reason is that I have ready access to a hatchet in my library. It is a part of my disaster preparedness kit. Really. It is. It is kept behind the kit which is right next to the courier boxes in the hall closet opposite the ladies restroom. I had no idea the library was so prepared, but I am delighted and feel much safer knowing it's there for me to use to slay a zombie if I need it.
This has presented me with a quandary and that is that I am sure it takes some skill and therefore some practice to swing a hatchet just so. It would appear that you only get one opportunity and you would want to be quick and accurate. So, I am thinking I need some practice. The conundrum is how to practice and become an expert hatchet-handler without ending up confined to a softly padded beige room with no door handle on the inside. I'm going to think more about this later.
What krl2pt0 has done for me is to open the door to a world of pleasing stuff (no other word covers everything like stuff does) and provided me with a way to link that stuff to my front doormat. I don't have to go searching for zombie sightings. Instead they come to me. Could it get any better?
This has presented me with a quandary and that is that I am sure it takes some skill and therefore some practice to swing a hatchet just so. It would appear that you only get one opportunity and you would want to be quick and accurate. So, I am thinking I need some practice. The conundrum is how to practice and become an expert hatchet-handler without ending up confined to a softly padded beige room with no door handle on the inside. I'm going to think more about this later.
What krl2pt0 has done for me is to open the door to a world of pleasing stuff (no other word covers everything like stuff does) and provided me with a way to link that stuff to my front doormat. I don't have to go searching for zombie sightings. Instead they come to me. Could it get any better?
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