12 Hours was Almost Enough Sleep

As it began in the days of old, I have an iced Latte in an avengers glass and I have the sounds of the fountain behind me and construction down the road for music. I could do without the construction noise, but the man who owns the house on the hill aways down City Park road from us has apparently been building pretty much constantly for the last 20 years. It's okay though, a breeze just kicked up so the sounds of the wind chimes and the rustle of leaves are working to drown him out. To paraphrase Kevin Spacey in Baby Driver, am I slow? It sure feels like it today.

I should be slow. Between writing for data.world, helping Jessie with her film, doing the bare minimum around the house and yard that I can get away with, shipping frit orders, sewing masks, minding bees and pets... I can't sleep enough. And I'm driving 1000 miles to Atlanta on Sunday with Jessie. After wrestling until 3:00 am yesterday with getting J's film online, I went to bed last night at 9:00 and didn't get up today till 9:30--and I'm still tired!

I posted on Facebook this morning and mentioned a bar my parents took me to after skiing when I was four. It has since burned down, but back in the 60's and 70's it was a little roadside dive outside of East Missoula. What I didn't put in my post was that 19 or so years later Wayne Nance, Missoula's serial killer, worked there as a bouncer and killed three women taken from the bar. 

Enough morbidity. It's almost too hot to sit outside and the mosquitos are the worst I have ever seen them here. But I am safe in my princess tent. Best way to deal with mosquitos is mosquito netting. I have dosed myself with enough bug spray over the past week in the course of filming on the front lawn that I had to scrape it off when I came back inside. And it was only marginally effective. I am covered from head to toe--including in some pretty unmentionable places--with mosquito and chigger bites. I even have a bite in my belly button! The indignity! But up here on the deck, on a porch couch, under a mosquito canopy, I am safe. 

And that's enough writing for now. I think it's time for a nap!

Summer cut

Some might (would) sneer. Some (like his breeder) would probably disapprove. But I was tired of the snarls, and the burrs, and the drool, and the caked-on food under the chin and tonight I took action: For the first time in six years, Gallifrey got an actual hair cut. This wasn't some brushing and light stripping, oh no. This was an all-out, grab-the-trimmer-and-whack-away job. And I don't care if Dave thinks he looks like a hobo werewolf, I think he's handsome. He's certainly more pleasant to pet, and I have to imagine he also feels better. Okay, so I missed a few spots (and there is one rather sizable bald spot). But have you ever had to hold onto a 185-lb dog with one hand while trying to give him a haircut with the trimmer with the other hand?

Too bad I didn't think to get a before picture!

I Pick Up the Pen

Earlier this week I was talking to an old friend who asked me if I was ever going to post again on Misbeehiving or Glass Incarnate. I hadn’t thought about it because I’ve been so busy writing technical doc for a SAS (service as software) company that I hadn’t been jonesing to get fingers on keyboard. But that’s a different kind of writing, isn’t it? When I started thinking about it, I realized how much I missed writing about life. It’s weird, but it almost feels like it didn’t happen if I don’t write about it. It goes by in a blur and I can’t remember it. On the one hand that’s good because it means I’m living in the present, not the past. But on the other, I find myself living so much in the present that life is just a bubble around me—timeless and weightless—with no gravitas and no anchor. Writing about it means slowing down and processing it more. Taking it in. Savoring it. So I write again. Today I’m going to write about bees because the girls took up most of my morning and they were particularly interesting. Go on over to Misbeehiving and see what I mean.