Spring with a Bang

 We have an ornamental pear tree in our yard. We used to have two, but the really nice big one in front of the house died a couple of years ago. The one that's left is much smaller, and closer to the neighbor's yard on the small side of the driveway. Until this morning it was bare. Naked. In winter shut-down mode. Even more bare than the neighbor's tree is now, as you see on the right.

Her tree is also small, and on the small side of her driveway. They look pretty nice together, actually.

This morning Superman went outside to do whatever it is he does on Saturday mornings and Ta-Da! The tree was in full bloom! Just like that. One day bare, the next day full of flowers. There's our tree to the left. And that's the next door neighbor's house. It looks very nice, much nicer than ours. Which is why I framed the shot to show her house.

 Below is a shot of the two trees beside each other. 

It isn't good photography. The light was bad today. (Bad light! Go stand in the corner!)

It's been wet. The big bad storm that's been making its way across the south finally got here overnight. There was a very big, very loud, very close bolt of lightening that struck at about 2:30 this morning, waking everyone in the house. My very unscientific theory is that the big bolt shocked the pear tree into blooming. Put the fear o' Thor in it, perhaps.

In other news, my back still hurts. Still in the tenderloin district. It's been, what, three weeks or more since it started bothering me. I have an appointment Monday afternoon to get the doctor to reevaluate things. The "duuu-u-u-u-u-d-e" drugs, I'm still taking them, but they no longer "dude" me out. Make me a bit sleepy sometimes, and I have a bit more trouble concentrating sometimes, but I feel pretty normal-ish when taking them. And they do help the back a lot, but not completely. I just took a dose about an hour ago and now I'm getting kinda vacuous.

I read a very good book last night. Do you know how I read books? Especially novels and such; fiction. Non-fiction doesn't have quite the hold on me. I start a good book and don't find a good stopping place. Hell, a lot of times even the end of the story isn't a good stopping place, you know? So I read until close to 5:00 this morning. In doing so I also monitored the storm. The tornado sirens went off at 4:15, though I doubt many people besides me heard them.

But I was telling you about this book. Or I told you I read a book. Changing Tides by Michael Thomas Ford. If it had been illustrated, this is what the pictures would be:

These are nudibranches, also known as sea slugs. One of the main characters was a marine biologist who's specialty was these guys. Nudibranches were not integral to the plot, really, but the author wrote fascinating descriptions of them. I wish there had been pictures in the book, but at least we have Google, you know? Google image search "nudibranch" and ta-da all over again. Pages and pages of colorful fellers like these.

The point I'm pretending to make is that the book was very good and I recommend it. There is a bit of M/M intimacy in the story, tastefully written and not gratuitous.

I have some deep thoughts concerning the subject of my previous post, in which I shared the Roderick Thorp quote: "We have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our own worst enemies."

But I haven't sufficiently processed the thoughts for comment here. Right now the "dude" drugs have my brain too sleepy and fuzzy to make sense of much. And this post already has enough stuff in it. 

Celebration and miscellany

Let's begin with hair. Diva needed to get her hair "did", so I took her to the beauty college where they do hair for cheap. This is the before shot.

And here she is after.

She holds herself with more confidence and has a better attitude when she knows she looks good. I like that, especially the good attitude part. I like the beauty college, too, especially their prices. I plan to wander over there this week and have my hair cut, too.

And speaking of my hair,

mine is slowly turning gray. It's part of the aging process and it doesn't bother me. I'm actually surprised that I don't have more gray hair. But let me tell you, I found it pretty weird when last week I pulled a gray hair out of my nose. Normal, I suppose, but I didn't expect it.

I have this song floating around in my head this afternoon, so I am sharing it with you.

The kids are in school right now (Hallelujah!). I am having a wonderful day. I got a lot accomplished this morning after I dropped Diva at school. Sproing took the bus, which is opposite from how I expected they would get to school today. At any rate, I did a lot of mundane errands and took the cat (Smudge, formerly known as Scheherazade) to the vet for her shots. The other errands were mundane, the cat was not. We both managed to survive, but I now have cat scratches on my back from where she climbed over my shoulder to get away from the vet when he gave her an anal probe (checking for worms).

We need Smudge's updated records in order to bring home our new cat from the animal shelter. Yes, Diva talked her Daddy into getting another cat, and the shelter doesn't allow the animals to come home unless other pets are up to date with their shots. Good plan. I let Smudge's vaccinations expire (forgetful, not malicious) so this gets us back on track. But the point of this paragraph is the new kitten. I am not excited about this addition to the household. Hopefully the new kitty will keep Diva occupied and out of my hair for a good long while. Expect cute kitty pictures soon.

Speaking as we were of anal probes, Superman and I saw "Cowboys and Aliens" this weekend. I liked it, am glad I saw it, but probably won't watch it again. There are movies that I want in my library, and others that I'm happy to see only once. I want to get "How To Train Your Dragon" for my personal library. And call me crazy, but I want to see the smurf movie, too. I know it's bad, that's obvious from the trailer. But it's silly, and has blue smurfs in it. Plus NPH. I'll let you know how that goes.

And speaking of libraries, I read a good book. I like gay romances (M/M, but not so much F/F) and stories about gay characters. There are a lot of tawdry gay romance books out there that are not of stellar literary quality. Light, fun reading, but not much to make you think. I usually like to think. I read The Brothers Bishop by Bart Yates, and it was fantastic. It's a rich book, made me think. Nice literary allusions and stuff. It was almost as good as At Swim, Two Boys by that Irish guy, um... (hang on, gotta look it up) Jamie O'Neill.

I have also recently read two of Michael Thomas Ford's novels, Looking For It and Last Summer. They're good, enjoyable, better than run-of-the-mill, but not excellent. I want to read the rest of that series.

The kidlets will be home in about an hour. I want to piddle around here a bit more before they return. I'm sure I'll be back soon with kitty pictures.

Request for book recommendation and a sexy baseball player

No, I'm not requesting this sexy baseball player. I'm sharing my appreciation of his gorgeousness. May I present Tim Lincecum, pitcher on the World* Champion San Francisco Giants team. Tim Lince-yum!

Now, on to business. The third big assignment in my sexual deviance class involves reading a book in which some kind of sexually deviant behavior figures prominently. I have chosen "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov. The professor suggested "The Story of O" by Anne Desclos. We're trying to think of other novels that deal with some kind of paraphilia or sexual deviance, novels that are a bit more academic than the steamy romance novels a la Harlequin. Any suggestions?

*By "world" I mean the United States of America plus Toronto, Canada. It's an egocentric thing on the part of my fellow countrymen. On behalf of them, I apologize to the rest of the baseball-playing world. While I'm at it, I apologize for American Football usurping the name "football" for something that is clearly not so much about feet and the ball.

But I digress.

I've always liked Thursdays

And today has been a pretty good Thursday, considering the circumstances.

Fall semester begins next Tuesday, Sept. 1st. I've been free from classes for three weeks. I stay very busy reading school related material during the semester, and rarely have a chance to read the stuff I want to read. During this break I had a list of books, books that are actually in my possession, mind you, that I wanted to read. The list includes but is not limited to:

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

The Mermaid Chair also by Sue Monk Kidd

The Feminine Mystique by Betty Freidan (no, I've never read it)

Second Sex by Simone De Beauvior

She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb

I Know This Much Is True also by Wally Lamb

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

I also wanted to finish The New Gay Teenager by Ritch Savin-Williams and Sex as God Intended by John J. McNeill, both of which I started reading quite a while ago.

Ya' wanna know what I've read instead? Tawdry gay romance novels. It's hard to consider myself a serious scholar with that reading list.

gone but not gone and back again

I read a book. A good book. A very good book. You should read it, too.

That's where I've been for the last day or two. Enmeshed in How Long Has This Been Going On? It's a novel, and a compelling set of stories at that. 

When I get swept up in a good story, or an adventure, or a personal crisis, or whatever captures my attention I tend to focus on it. This is one of those books that pulled me in and didn't let me go. I hardly slept, barely ate, and didn't bathe the whole time I read the thing. That shower last night felt really good! :) Maybe it isn't so good to hyper-focus on stuff like that. Other things get neglected. I have that kind of passion. But I'm done with the book now and ready for some of life again. 

Right before I started How Long... I read a history of the Stonewall riots. It also was a very good book, but not nearly as compelling a read as the novel. It took me nearly a month to get through that one, just because I kept coming over here to blog and stuff. My point, though, is that it's good to read up on the social sea change of the 60s era to get a good perspective of what the culture was like for gays in the mid 20th century compared to what it's like today. The novel How Long... covers that time span. I feel as though I had a good background knowledge to appreciate the novel. I have been wanting to read up on Stonewall anyhow, since I really didn't know too much about it. 

Now I'm ready to get to the next book in my HUGE stack of books I want to read. :)

The right meme at the right time

My beloved Cog tagged me for this one, and I'm so excited. This gives me the opportunity to tell another story! (I will try to be brief. Brevity is not my strength.)

As Cog says, I must, under the blogger rules of conduct, perform the following:

1. Pick up the nearest book (at least 123 pages).

2. Turn to page 123.

3. Find the 5th sentence

4. Post the 5th sentence on your blog.

5. Tag 5 people.

Alex Unlimited: True Chemistry by Dan Jolley, my brother-in-law!!!

p. 123, fifth sentence:

"He didn't look scared, worried, or upset in the slightest."

I tag Warrior Scout, Sageweb, Steve, Monkey, and Steven

And now I want to tell you about my brother-in-law, the author Dan Jolley. I'm so proud of him. This is Superman's brother. He's very creative. He makes his living as an author now, although it took a few years for him to become that well known and published. He has worked hard to realize this dream. He started out writing for comic books. He's done some graphic novels, too. This particular book is his third in the Alex Unlimited series. I've read the first one, but haven't gotten to the second yet. The first Alex Unlimited book was very good! These are books aimed at "young adult" readers (who actually tend to be teenagers, but whatever)