( Okay, first the health report for all the people who are dying to know about the state of my kidney. )

And now the Candy!

This year the Yuletide community decided to open up to an international candy exchange. I got to send candy to someone in Japan, and my candy provider sent me stuff from Australia! Yay! I had pretty much forgotten about it what with everything else, so getting the package today was very exciting indeed.


The contents of the package were all wrapped up individually! Ooh, presents! Plus a lovely note on Star Wars stationery and a sheet of cosmic stickers. My person is awesome!

( Unwrap the presents? )

So, in conclusion, my candy exchange person went above and beyond. Thank you, sailorcoruscant!

After last weekend we needed a rest from the social whirl, so after working hard yesterday to install air conditioners and clean the house, we took today off. Here's how it went:

Lazy morning in bed with the cat (I feel like I am upholding a time-honored tradition here, as I can't count the number of times I've seen Samuel Pepys start journal entries with "Lay long in bed with my wife," or similar), all of us enjoying the new air conditioner. Moss and I consulted the hive mind about Emo's rise to popularity as a musical movement, and as a stereotypical swath of modern teenagehood. The history of Emo music is strange. I don't know any of the 80s bands at all (heard of Minor Threat, but they weren't considered Emo, just the offshoot band one of their members started). I thought for a minute that I had heard of Beefeater, but then Moss wisely pointed out that I was probably thinking of the gin. Right.

Later (having feasted upon cereal with fresh nectarine on top) we went to Framingham and bought tickets for Harry Potter for tomorrow night after failing to secure tickets for today. Framingham has an adults only fancy theatre where you can get them to bring you food on real plates right at your cushy seat, and every seat has its own tray table thing. The food mostly isn't too great, but they make a great plate o' chili fries (which we have started calling America's Poutine). Also, they serve alcohol. I have not yet taken advantage of that, but may well do tomorrow.

Thwarted as our afternoon plans were, we decided to make the most of things and bought an extension cord for the living room air conditioner at Target before coming home. This may not seem exciting, but if you live here it is, because it means we can cool two rooms, yea, two cat habitats at the same time. We've got my sister's cat for the Summer, and she and La Mrowsera are mortal enemies. It is unfortunate, but we must live in a house divided.

Dinah Bell seems quite content with her lot, though. This evening when we returned she decided to give me a hug:


After that we took a walk down to Spy Pond, which was pretty at sunset, but host to rather a lot of biting bugs, so we came home fairly quickly. Now off to watch something diverting and then to sleep. How was your weekend?

Moss and I are about halfway through the altered book round robin project we signed up for last autumn, and the latest results are quite scary! I did my spread in a book of dreams, and Moss took his turn with the Once Upon A Time book. I think his spread takes the cake this time, but here are pictures of both all the same. Click on an picture to see a larger version.


Instant Cooking! With Rudy Giuliani! You're thinking WTF, right? Yeah, that's exactly what I thought when I woke up from this dream.

( Dream or nightmare? )

But enough about that, let's take a look at Moss's spread!


My mother killed me,
My father ate me,

( Can you guess the story on those lines alone? Answer under the cut! )

The scant job market means that this is a trying time for a lot of my peers. I'm lucky enough to be stable and secure for the nonce, but I know I'm the exception among freelance artists, artisans, and homemakers.

If you find yourself in similarly exceptional circumstances and wish to be a patron of the arts, you might consider ordering some delicious chocolates (continental US only, I think) from a struggling chocolate maker and movie reviewer, or checking out the exciting items up for auction over at the adoptingcat community. I'm offering a quest of the five senses, and there are all kinds of other great things to tempt you into helping fantasy writer Catherynne M. Valente get through a bit of a rough patch.

Tomorrow, pictures of the latest altered book spreads (wherein Moss takes the prize for making the most awesome fairy tale spread ever), but for now, I'm off to order some Lovecraftian truffles, and watch a bit of Stephen Fry.

Today I went out with the Boston Area Gleaners to glean apples at Kimball Fruit Farm. Alas, I didn't remember my camera, so no pictures of the apples. It was a beautiful day, with perfectly clear skies, and lots of apples. The three of us on this gleaning trip filled eleven fifty pound boxes with perfectly good fallen apples. Then we had to carry eleven fifty pound boxes of perfectly good fallen apples to the van, but hey, good exercise.

The downsides were all the slugs and rotten apples, which squished when I touched them. Oh, and the poison ivy everywhere. I know it was all over my arms and my clothes, so when I got home, I stripped, washed in frigid water to hopefully get the oil off, and then took a long, hot shower to scrub further and get all the mud out from under my nails.

After my scrubdown, I googled poison ivy to see what other potential remedies there were. Some people suggested that consistently eating raw honey helps make one immune. We've got raw honey, and I don't eat it every day, but hey, I'm certainly not averse to honey on toast!


We have a Hello Kitty toaster, which puts the image of her royal kawaiiness on our toast!

So, having washed, and consumed honeyed toast, it is now time for me to go to the writing workshop I signed up for. I am exhausted, and really hoping that I don't break out in a bad rash of itchiness. If I do, I guess I will be trying a paste of baking soda and water or white vinegar, but I really hope I don't have to do that...

Hope you all had a poison-free day!

Uri Borechka would like you to know that we are in Germany!

They have these phallic snackfoods here, which have a bit of round wafer below a column of chocolate covered marshmallow cream. There are little ones, which come in three colors (white, brown and black), and then there are big ones, which only come in black. The little ones are called Mini Dickmann's. The big ones: Super Dickmann's ("Who doesn't know the slogan, 'Man, they are Dickmann'?"). We are thinking of bringing some with us to the cinema tonight. When we go to see Deep Throat.

Last weekend we went to Nancy (France -- I lived there for two years), where we saw a woman feeding brioche to her dog at the table in an upscale cafe. We also ran into one of my old French professors from Indiana, which was odd and unexpected. (He asked after you, lillornyn).

Sunday we came back to Germany and discovered that there is a teen magazine here called Yam! This was especially funny since I made "Christmas Dinner" for a bunch of Germans on Monday, including my Grandmother's sweet potato casserole, which was a big hit and naturally led to a discussion of yams(!).

At a party last night we learned about a strange series of commercials for Bifi, which is the German equivalent of a Slim Jim. In the commercials, which have apprently been running since like the eighties, these three guys work in a factory called Zomtec. In the factory sometimes you see them standing in front of conveyor belts full of coconuts or parasols. No one is really sure what Zomtec does. Anyway of the three apparently one is Japanese and one has a mullet and handlebar moustache. No one told us what the other one looked like. According to our sources each 30 second commercial has a little plot, so that the collection as a whole is like a mini soap opera. It sounds fantastically strange, and I think you can actually watch a commercial at the Bifi site (if you click tv spot). I can't in this internet cafe, but you should try it and report back.

Going now to visit the Nuremburg Christmas Market where we plan to drink mulled wine out of plastic boots. Perhaps sometime I will write an entry about all the high culture we've been exposed to like catherdrals and such, but for now I'm afraid I'm keepin' it juvenile, yo.

P.S. As we were driving back from France, we saw a billboard advertising Jameson's: L'Irish Spirit. This is one of those things that may not seem that amusing at first, but gets more amusing as you think about it. (Hint: in French the way one might properly say this is l'Esprit irlandais). Say it out loud a few times. L'Irish Spirit.