Besides ordering John Bellair's Magic Mirrors, I ordered Tim Powers' The Stress of Her Regard (how could I resist purchasing a novel which takes its title from a poem by Clark Ashton Smith?), a supernatural "historical" romance, which details the interactions between the Romantic Poets of the early 19th Century (Keats makes a cameo in the novel, and Byron and Percy Shelley are fairly major characters) with a class of ancient, predatory elemental entities. Powers bases these vampiric beings on the nephilim of the Old Testament and the lamia of Greek legend. Powers portrays his nephilim as predators, but also as sources of inspiration (I'm about halfway through the novel, and Powers so far hasn't mentioned the Leanan Sidhe, the destroying muse of Celtic legend, but his "neffies" are a very similar concept).
The subject matter is also reminiscent of Powers' supernatural espionage novel Declare, which presents the role of similar supernatural beings in the Cold War (a trope employed by Charles Stross in such works as A Colder War). Powers also makes brief mention of fictional poet William Ashbless and Kusiak's tavern, from The Anubis Gates, one of my all-time favorite novels.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Sparse Posting Schedule Ahead
I have to work an event this weekend (starting tomorrow) and next week will be a busy one (Learning While Intoxicated on Tuesday, Census Follow Up Follow Up Training Wednesday), so the posting will most likely be pretty sparse for the next few days.
The old classic Booker T. and the MG's song comes to mind:
The old classic Booker T. and the MG's song comes to mind:
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Bastard's Batch of Booze
Cross-posted here.
Limoncello is a typical liqueur from Southern Italy- the centers of Limoncello production are centered around the Gulf of Naples and the Gulf of Salerno. Best served chilled, limoncello is a perfect after-dinner digestivo- though I would never criticize anyone for drinking it before, or during dinner, or on a lazy summer afternoon, or to chase away a winter chill, or... sorry, I was distracted by the prospect of a nice, chilled glass of limoncello.
While limoncello recipes are plentiful on the internet, here's my personal method for making it. First, thorougly wash, then peel fifteen or sixteen lemons (depending on the size of the lemons, and whether the market is selling them in lots of three or lots of four) with a vegetable peeler, making sure you are not getting any of the white pith (which will make your limoncello bitter). Place the lemon peels in a clean gallon jar and pour a gallon of pure grain alcohol (I have to drive to Connecticut to obtain the stuff) over the lemon peels, and cover. Let the mixture sit for at least a week (I leave the jar in a dark, cool corner for three weeks), then prepare a simple syrup by heating two pounds of sugar with a quart of water, and simmering until the mixture is slightly thickened. Strain the lemon peels out of the alcohol, and add the syrup to the infused alcohol (I use a couple of one-gallon pitchers for this stage of the production). Dilute the resultant syrup/alcohol mixture with water until the desired strength is reached (I use a 50/50 ratio, making the resultant liqueur about as strong as a typical vodka). Strain again, and bottle the stuff. Keep away from small children and open flames. A few hours before serving, place the bottle in the freezer to chill. If necessary, dilute individual servings to taste... the stuff is strong.
Here's a still life which incorporates the ingredients of this delicious treat. Look at that forlorn lemon, which has been robbed of its golden integument. Also, note that the contents of the gallon jar, with an alcohol content around 95%, have a clear golden color, while the glass of limoncello in the center has a milky translucency. This is the same effect one sees when one mixes water with absinthe- as the percentage of alcohol decreases, the oil from the lemon peels forms a microemulsion in the glass:
Yeah, that's a gallon of pure alcohol in the jar... WOOHOO!
La dolce vita, served by the glass.
Limoncello is a typical liqueur from Southern Italy- the centers of Limoncello production are centered around the Gulf of Naples and the Gulf of Salerno. Best served chilled, limoncello is a perfect after-dinner digestivo- though I would never criticize anyone for drinking it before, or during dinner, or on a lazy summer afternoon, or to chase away a winter chill, or... sorry, I was distracted by the prospect of a nice, chilled glass of limoncello.
While limoncello recipes are plentiful on the internet, here's my personal method for making it. First, thorougly wash, then peel fifteen or sixteen lemons (depending on the size of the lemons, and whether the market is selling them in lots of three or lots of four) with a vegetable peeler, making sure you are not getting any of the white pith (which will make your limoncello bitter). Place the lemon peels in a clean gallon jar and pour a gallon of pure grain alcohol (I have to drive to Connecticut to obtain the stuff) over the lemon peels, and cover. Let the mixture sit for at least a week (I leave the jar in a dark, cool corner for three weeks), then prepare a simple syrup by heating two pounds of sugar with a quart of water, and simmering until the mixture is slightly thickened. Strain the lemon peels out of the alcohol, and add the syrup to the infused alcohol (I use a couple of one-gallon pitchers for this stage of the production). Dilute the resultant syrup/alcohol mixture with water until the desired strength is reached (I use a 50/50 ratio, making the resultant liqueur about as strong as a typical vodka). Strain again, and bottle the stuff. Keep away from small children and open flames. A few hours before serving, place the bottle in the freezer to chill. If necessary, dilute individual servings to taste... the stuff is strong.
Here's a still life which incorporates the ingredients of this delicious treat. Look at that forlorn lemon, which has been robbed of its golden integument. Also, note that the contents of the gallon jar, with an alcohol content around 95%, have a clear golden color, while the glass of limoncello in the center has a milky translucency. This is the same effect one sees when one mixes water with absinthe- as the percentage of alcohol decreases, the oil from the lemon peels forms a microemulsion in the glass:
Yeah, that's a gallon of pure alcohol in the jar... WOOHOO!
La dolce vita, served by the glass.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
The Book to Which I Alluded Earlier, The Face in the Frost
In an earlier post, I mentioned ordering a book that I'd had my eye on for months. Well, I finally have my hands on Magic Mirrors: The High Fantasy and Low Parody of John Bellairs. John Bellairs was perhaps best known for his supernatural thrillers for children, starting with The House with a Clock in its Walls.
Magic Mirrors begins with The Face in the Frost, published in 1969, a fantasy novel, which manages to be comic and unsettling by turns. The book starts out cheerfully enough, with an elaborate description of the bizarre home of Prospero, the book's protagonist, which would do a Jack Vance proud:
Inside the house were such things as trouble antique-dealers' dreams: a brass St. Bernard with a clock in its side, and a red tongue that went in and out with the ticks as the tail wagged; a five-foot iron statue of a tastefully draped lady playing a violin (the statue was labelled "Inspiration"); mahogany chests covered with leering cherub faces and tiger mouths that bit you if you put your finger in the wrong place; a cherrywood bedstead with a bassoon carved into one of the fat headposts, so that it could be played as you lay in bed and meditated; and much more junk; and deep closets crammed with things that peered out of the darkness off the edges of shelves, frightening the wits out of the wizard as he poked around looking for jars of mandrake root or dwarf hair in aspic. In the long, high living room--heated by a wide-mouthed green-stone fireplace--were the usual paraphernalia of a practicing wizard: alembics, spiraling copper coils, alcohol lamps--all burping, sputtering, and glurping as red, purple, and green liquids boiled, dripped, or just slurched uncertainly in their containers. On a shelf over the experiment table was the inevitable skull, which the wizard put there to remind him of death, though it usually reminded him that he needed to go to the dentist. One wall of the room was lined with bookshelves, and on them you could find titles such as Six Centuries of English Spells, Nameless Horrors and What to Do About Them, An Answer for Night-Hags, and, of course, the dreaded Krankenhammer of Stefan Schimpf, the mad cobbler of Mainz.
Prospero's peaceful, contemplative life is interrupted by some mildly off-putting phenomena, and the visit of his friend Roger Bacon, who has come to consult with Prospero about a mysterious book that Prospero had asked him about (there's a funny aside as Roger narrates his misadventure with his brazen head). The two embark on an investigation into the provenance of the book, which takes them to the library of another eccentric wizard (a comic interlude, with another humorous allusion to HPL's works), where they realize that an old colleague of Prospero's is behind the phenomena which have been hounding him. This precipitates a perilous errand to obtain a magical bauble co-created by Prospero and his former acquaintance.
After the whimsical opening, Bellairs plunges the reader into some truly unsettling scenes, as the sorcerous attacks on Prospero increase in intensity, and their focus shifts from unnerving the wizard to a more lethal bent. This particular scene gives a taste of Bellairs' ability to put a subtle chill up the reader's spine:
He had not gone a mile when he saw, off in a clearing beyond some beech trees, the light of a campfire. At least there’ll be someone to talk to, he thought, and he stepped off the road into the swishing wet grass. But as Prospero got near the fire, he saw that there was no one tending it and that it was burning in a very strange way. The flames moved back and forth as if blown by suddenly shifting breezes. As he watched, the movement became rhythmical. Prospero looked about him with growing fear, and he noticed that there was a little stream running nearby. He was drawn by what he first took to be a reflection of the firelight on the water. But as he knelt by the stream, he saw that the faint glow came from beneath the surface of the water. There, on the bottom, in a speckled green trembling light, was a smooth triangular stone, and on it was painted his face. The moving water was slowly flaking away the paint, or whatever it was, and the face appeared to be slowly decomposing. He saw a thin film, like a piece of dead skin, wriggle off the portrait-mask and float away down the stream. And the face underneath… Prospero felt his own hands on his wet cheeks.
Against all his instinct, he plunged his own hands into the greasy-feeling, incredibly cold water and picked up the stone. Without looking at it, and holding it at arm’s length as if it were a rotten dead bird, he took it to the fire, which was dancing faster now- it was moving to the rhythm of his own heartbeat. He knew the words that must have been said. “When the fire dies, let him die too.”
He pulled a burning stick out of the fire and held it to the painted stone as he carefully recited a spell he could just barely remember. When the face on the stone was completely blackened, the thing turned into an awful viscous mush in his hand, like a potato left in a damp dark cellar. With a disgusted shudder and a quick jerk of his left arm, Prospero threw the pulpy thing into the stream, where it hit with a gulping sound. Now the whole stream began to boil, and out of the lurching, hissing water rose a smoke shape with arms. It moved toward Prospero and settled around him in swaying layers of mist. He felt as if his eyes were made of blank white chalk. And the thing was throbbing, to pump the life out of him. Prospero stared with open eyes into that stony nothingness, and he shouted a word that sorcerers can only speak a few times in their lives. The whiteness began to break, and he could see night through the cracking clouds. Now he began to speak like someone reciting a lesson: “Michael Scott is buried in Melrose Abbey. A light burns in his tomb day and night. And it is stronger than your freezing white. Go! In his name, go!”
As the narrative moves along, the protagonists realize that their enemy has stumbled upon sorceries that have the power to warp the fabric of reality- night terrors abound, causing a frightened populace to dismantle the social order. In one particularly horrible scene, Bellairs shows that evil need not take a sorcerous form:
“We’re going over to the north to burn that town… Bow…what’s its name?”
“Bishop’s Bowes,” said the innkeeper. “Why are you doing this?”
“We’ve finally figured out what’s going on. Town’s full of evil people. Witches. I have an order here from Duke Harald to burn it to the ground. Here, look at it. Not that you have anything to say in this.”
He unrolled a long parchment that trailed lead and yellow wax seals on twisted strings of skin. The signature, a cross with a letter on each point, was so large that it covered a quarter of the page.
“They deserve it, too,” the leader went on. “You’ve seen the things. Half the people in Wellfont are afraid to go down into their own cellars. Shadows moving, screams from kettles when there isn’t any fire. Well, a little fire’ll teach ‘em. A couple of my men are out getting wood for torches. Do you have any pitch?”
“In the basement. I use it on the roof.”
“That’s fine. We’re going to use it on the roof, too.” He laughed, spitting flecks of brown beer on the muddy floor.
It's tempting to make the point that this was written while the Vietnam War raged, (it was published in the year that the investigations into the My Lai massacre took place so news of My Lai could not have been a direct influence), but, sadly, John Bellairs is not around to verify if this was meant allegorically.
After that particular bit of dialogue, the supernatural horrors seem a little less horrific, although Bellairs still describes them with his characteristic flair:
In the roadside towns, the wizards picked up stories and rumors. One man told how frost formed on the windows at night, though it was only the middle of September. There were no scrolls or intricate fern leaves, no branching overlaid star clusters; instead, people saw seasick wavy lines, disturbing maps that melted into each other and always seemed on the verge of some recognizable but fearful shape. At dawn, the frost melted, always in the same way. At first, two black eyeholes formed, and then a long steam-lipped mouth that spread and ate up the wandering white picture.
If there's one flaw with The Face in the Frost, it is that the climactic confrontation takes place off-stage. At one point, in a twist that will have some readers cringing (but which I loved), a fleeing Prospero stumbles into a most unusual place, and (less felicitously, though Madonna would approve of this) ***SPOILERS REDACTED***. The end is rather abrupt, which is also the major flaw of The House with a Clock in its Walls.
While Magic Mirrors, at $25, is pretty steep in price (I prefer paperbacks anyway), I'd recommend it for any fans of Bellairs' young-adult fiction, fans of the "Harry Potter" books (which I still haven't read), or fans of "weird fiction" who don't mind comic relief (Bellairs' protagonists are the sort of scholarly types that HPL wrote about, though they know what to do about Nameless Horrors). Anybody not into this sort of genre fiction would be better off either ignoring this review, or trying interlibrary loan to get an old Ace Paperbacks edition of The Face in the Frost.
Perhaps, I'll tackle the other portions of the book in a later post. I've been going on about this book for quite some time.
Magic Mirrors begins with The Face in the Frost, published in 1969, a fantasy novel, which manages to be comic and unsettling by turns. The book starts out cheerfully enough, with an elaborate description of the bizarre home of Prospero, the book's protagonist, which would do a Jack Vance proud:
Inside the house were such things as trouble antique-dealers' dreams: a brass St. Bernard with a clock in its side, and a red tongue that went in and out with the ticks as the tail wagged; a five-foot iron statue of a tastefully draped lady playing a violin (the statue was labelled "Inspiration"); mahogany chests covered with leering cherub faces and tiger mouths that bit you if you put your finger in the wrong place; a cherrywood bedstead with a bassoon carved into one of the fat headposts, so that it could be played as you lay in bed and meditated; and much more junk; and deep closets crammed with things that peered out of the darkness off the edges of shelves, frightening the wits out of the wizard as he poked around looking for jars of mandrake root or dwarf hair in aspic. In the long, high living room--heated by a wide-mouthed green-stone fireplace--were the usual paraphernalia of a practicing wizard: alembics, spiraling copper coils, alcohol lamps--all burping, sputtering, and glurping as red, purple, and green liquids boiled, dripped, or just slurched uncertainly in their containers. On a shelf over the experiment table was the inevitable skull, which the wizard put there to remind him of death, though it usually reminded him that he needed to go to the dentist. One wall of the room was lined with bookshelves, and on them you could find titles such as Six Centuries of English Spells, Nameless Horrors and What to Do About Them, An Answer for Night-Hags, and, of course, the dreaded Krankenhammer of Stefan Schimpf, the mad cobbler of Mainz.
Prospero's peaceful, contemplative life is interrupted by some mildly off-putting phenomena, and the visit of his friend Roger Bacon, who has come to consult with Prospero about a mysterious book that Prospero had asked him about (there's a funny aside as Roger narrates his misadventure with his brazen head). The two embark on an investigation into the provenance of the book, which takes them to the library of another eccentric wizard (a comic interlude, with another humorous allusion to HPL's works), where they realize that an old colleague of Prospero's is behind the phenomena which have been hounding him. This precipitates a perilous errand to obtain a magical bauble co-created by Prospero and his former acquaintance.
After the whimsical opening, Bellairs plunges the reader into some truly unsettling scenes, as the sorcerous attacks on Prospero increase in intensity, and their focus shifts from unnerving the wizard to a more lethal bent. This particular scene gives a taste of Bellairs' ability to put a subtle chill up the reader's spine:
He had not gone a mile when he saw, off in a clearing beyond some beech trees, the light of a campfire. At least there’ll be someone to talk to, he thought, and he stepped off the road into the swishing wet grass. But as Prospero got near the fire, he saw that there was no one tending it and that it was burning in a very strange way. The flames moved back and forth as if blown by suddenly shifting breezes. As he watched, the movement became rhythmical. Prospero looked about him with growing fear, and he noticed that there was a little stream running nearby. He was drawn by what he first took to be a reflection of the firelight on the water. But as he knelt by the stream, he saw that the faint glow came from beneath the surface of the water. There, on the bottom, in a speckled green trembling light, was a smooth triangular stone, and on it was painted his face. The moving water was slowly flaking away the paint, or whatever it was, and the face appeared to be slowly decomposing. He saw a thin film, like a piece of dead skin, wriggle off the portrait-mask and float away down the stream. And the face underneath… Prospero felt his own hands on his wet cheeks.
Against all his instinct, he plunged his own hands into the greasy-feeling, incredibly cold water and picked up the stone. Without looking at it, and holding it at arm’s length as if it were a rotten dead bird, he took it to the fire, which was dancing faster now- it was moving to the rhythm of his own heartbeat. He knew the words that must have been said. “When the fire dies, let him die too.”
He pulled a burning stick out of the fire and held it to the painted stone as he carefully recited a spell he could just barely remember. When the face on the stone was completely blackened, the thing turned into an awful viscous mush in his hand, like a potato left in a damp dark cellar. With a disgusted shudder and a quick jerk of his left arm, Prospero threw the pulpy thing into the stream, where it hit with a gulping sound. Now the whole stream began to boil, and out of the lurching, hissing water rose a smoke shape with arms. It moved toward Prospero and settled around him in swaying layers of mist. He felt as if his eyes were made of blank white chalk. And the thing was throbbing, to pump the life out of him. Prospero stared with open eyes into that stony nothingness, and he shouted a word that sorcerers can only speak a few times in their lives. The whiteness began to break, and he could see night through the cracking clouds. Now he began to speak like someone reciting a lesson: “Michael Scott is buried in Melrose Abbey. A light burns in his tomb day and night. And it is stronger than your freezing white. Go! In his name, go!”
As the narrative moves along, the protagonists realize that their enemy has stumbled upon sorceries that have the power to warp the fabric of reality- night terrors abound, causing a frightened populace to dismantle the social order. In one particularly horrible scene, Bellairs shows that evil need not take a sorcerous form:
“We’re going over to the north to burn that town… Bow…what’s its name?”
“Bishop’s Bowes,” said the innkeeper. “Why are you doing this?”
“We’ve finally figured out what’s going on. Town’s full of evil people. Witches. I have an order here from Duke Harald to burn it to the ground. Here, look at it. Not that you have anything to say in this.”
He unrolled a long parchment that trailed lead and yellow wax seals on twisted strings of skin. The signature, a cross with a letter on each point, was so large that it covered a quarter of the page.
“They deserve it, too,” the leader went on. “You’ve seen the things. Half the people in Wellfont are afraid to go down into their own cellars. Shadows moving, screams from kettles when there isn’t any fire. Well, a little fire’ll teach ‘em. A couple of my men are out getting wood for torches. Do you have any pitch?”
“In the basement. I use it on the roof.”
“That’s fine. We’re going to use it on the roof, too.” He laughed, spitting flecks of brown beer on the muddy floor.
It's tempting to make the point that this was written while the Vietnam War raged, (it was published in the year that the investigations into the My Lai massacre took place so news of My Lai could not have been a direct influence), but, sadly, John Bellairs is not around to verify if this was meant allegorically.
After that particular bit of dialogue, the supernatural horrors seem a little less horrific, although Bellairs still describes them with his characteristic flair:
In the roadside towns, the wizards picked up stories and rumors. One man told how frost formed on the windows at night, though it was only the middle of September. There were no scrolls or intricate fern leaves, no branching overlaid star clusters; instead, people saw seasick wavy lines, disturbing maps that melted into each other and always seemed on the verge of some recognizable but fearful shape. At dawn, the frost melted, always in the same way. At first, two black eyeholes formed, and then a long steam-lipped mouth that spread and ate up the wandering white picture.
If there's one flaw with The Face in the Frost, it is that the climactic confrontation takes place off-stage. At one point, in a twist that will have some readers cringing (but which I loved), a fleeing Prospero stumbles into a most unusual place, and (less felicitously, though Madonna would approve of this) ***SPOILERS REDACTED***. The end is rather abrupt, which is also the major flaw of The House with a Clock in its Walls.
While Magic Mirrors, at $25, is pretty steep in price (I prefer paperbacks anyway), I'd recommend it for any fans of Bellairs' young-adult fiction, fans of the "Harry Potter" books (which I still haven't read), or fans of "weird fiction" who don't mind comic relief (Bellairs' protagonists are the sort of scholarly types that HPL wrote about, though they know what to do about Nameless Horrors). Anybody not into this sort of genre fiction would be better off either ignoring this review, or trying interlibrary loan to get an old Ace Paperbacks edition of The Face in the Frost.
Perhaps, I'll tackle the other portions of the book in a later post. I've been going on about this book for quite some time.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Fourth of July
Here's wishing a happy Independence Day to all. While I could post a Sousa march or some other patriotic song, I've decided to post a video for one of my all-time favorite songs, The Fourth of July by L.A. rock band X. While I am a huge X fan, I will defer to anyone who has a greater understanding of the band, and the scene in which they emerged in late 70's Los Angeles- if such a person is among my readership. The song The Fourth of July was written by Dave Alvin, formerly of rootsy rock group The Blasters, who joined X for the See How We Are album:
John Doe and Exene Cervenka, to my ear, rank among the great vocalists in the rock pantheon, and their vocal interplay is instantly recognizable. The song itself is a timely one- with economic uncertainty, this tale of a couple in a struggling relationship could be the back story lurking behind the headlines about the 99ers and the underemployed (in the opening line, the narrator sings about coming home from work, which implies a low-level service job- or a job at non-profit fundraising event, if he's lucky, which he does not seem to be).
She gives me her cheek, when I want her lips,
Oh, but I don't have the strength to go.
On the lost side of town, in a dark apartment,
We gave up trying so long ago.
There's a glimmer of hope, though, as the narrator struggles for a reconciliation, and tries to rouse his wife or girlfriend out of her malaise:
What ever happened, I apologize
So dry your tears and baby walk outside,
It`s the Fourth of July.
On the album version (scrubbed from Youtube by Warner Music Group, which prompts me to link to my great and good friend Jim Keyes' satirical Warner Wonderland yet again), John Doe sings "We forgot" over the chorus, "We forgot it's the 4th of July"- the first "we forgot" could apply to the relationship as a whole. They forgot the things that made their relationship worthwhile, but there's the hope that they could rekindle things.
Here's hoping that the struggling couples out there can pull it together in these tough times. Here's hoping that we don't forget those we depend on this Independence Day.
Note: I almost made a joke about how it's not Codependence Day... anyway, ignore this bit of snark and watch a whole lot of X videos after your cookout guests go home, and you're polishing off the last of the beer. It's your patriotic duty to listen to this great American band.
John Doe and Exene Cervenka, to my ear, rank among the great vocalists in the rock pantheon, and their vocal interplay is instantly recognizable. The song itself is a timely one- with economic uncertainty, this tale of a couple in a struggling relationship could be the back story lurking behind the headlines about the 99ers and the underemployed (in the opening line, the narrator sings about coming home from work, which implies a low-level service job- or a job at non-profit fundraising event, if he's lucky, which he does not seem to be).
She gives me her cheek, when I want her lips,
Oh, but I don't have the strength to go.
On the lost side of town, in a dark apartment,
We gave up trying so long ago.
There's a glimmer of hope, though, as the narrator struggles for a reconciliation, and tries to rouse his wife or girlfriend out of her malaise:
What ever happened, I apologize
So dry your tears and baby walk outside,
It`s the Fourth of July.
On the album version (scrubbed from Youtube by Warner Music Group, which prompts me to link to my great and good friend Jim Keyes' satirical Warner Wonderland yet again), John Doe sings "We forgot" over the chorus, "We forgot it's the 4th of July"- the first "we forgot" could apply to the relationship as a whole. They forgot the things that made their relationship worthwhile, but there's the hope that they could rekindle things.
Here's hoping that the struggling couples out there can pull it together in these tough times. Here's hoping that we don't forget those we depend on this Independence Day.
Note: I almost made a joke about how it's not Codependence Day... anyway, ignore this bit of snark and watch a whole lot of X videos after your cookout guests go home, and you're polishing off the last of the beer. It's your patriotic duty to listen to this great American band.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Whew!
I was a little, uh, concerned today, because the garbage on my street hadn't been picked up by noon. There has been a battle raging in Albany over the New York state budget, local governments have had to adopt austerity budgets as a result (the state Office of Parks, Recreation,and Historic Preservation has closed numerous sites statewide,and most municipalities have cut library hours drastically- just the cuts that need to be made for a public that has less money to spend on entertainment). Well, when I saw that the garbage hadn't been collected today, I feared the worst. The prospect of the neighborhood's garbage sitting out in the hot sun for a long weekend would have been horrifying.
Thankfully, the good people of the Yonkers' DPW made their rounds soon after noon.
Thankfully, the good people of the Yonkers' DPW made their rounds soon after noon.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Life is Tough
For some reason, I woke up at 6 AM today, even though I was not scheduled to work. I spent some quality time peeling fifteen lemons while listening to the Errol Louis show on local radio station WWRL, then spent some even more quality time pouring a gallon of pure grain alcohol over said lemon peels so I will have ***FUTURE BLOG POST*** in three weeks. When this arduous task was completed, I must confess that I went back to sleep for another hour (please note, I did not sample any of the pure grain alcohol). I woke up when the phone rang- I have been retained by the Department of Commerce, the next phase of Census 2010 starts in two weeks.
After the mail came, I decided to take a stroll down to 233rd St in the Bronx, then crossed Webster Avenue to get to the path to Muskrat Cove, one of the most beautiful stretches of the Bronx River. All along the way, I found mulberry trees, so I spent the entire time gorging on the sweet, sweet Morus multifruits. My hand was so purple, one would have thought I was proxy voting for an entire Iraqi village.
Around 3 PM, I received a call from my supervisor at the part-time job... one of my co-workers had a family "situation" and they needed coverage. I am currently at a site I don't work very often, but I scoped out all the wild raspberry patches the last time I was here (about a month ago). I have been bogarting all the ripe berries I could get my greedy mitts on. There's no wireless here, so I'm posting from a different computer. I'll post pictures later, in order to make any readers jealous.
After the mail came, I decided to take a stroll down to 233rd St in the Bronx, then crossed Webster Avenue to get to the path to Muskrat Cove, one of the most beautiful stretches of the Bronx River. All along the way, I found mulberry trees, so I spent the entire time gorging on the sweet, sweet Morus multifruits. My hand was so purple, one would have thought I was proxy voting for an entire Iraqi village.
Around 3 PM, I received a call from my supervisor at the part-time job... one of my co-workers had a family "situation" and they needed coverage. I am currently at a site I don't work very often, but I scoped out all the wild raspberry patches the last time I was here (about a month ago). I have been bogarting all the ripe berries I could get my greedy mitts on. There's no wireless here, so I'm posting from a different computer. I'll post pictures later, in order to make any readers jealous.
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