Not dead yet! I feel happy!

Hello, just popping in to say I must be going. I’ve been writing a metric ton of stuff (I said “metric ton” in an effort to avoid saying “shit ton,” which I feel is vulgar), but it’s all for some mythical future publication date, so the tumbleweeds have been building up here.

I’ve also been doing so much gardening, because I don’t have any babies and I guess I’m just locked into this “must be nurturing” thing; and also May is usually stupid-busy with concerts and plays and graduations and field trips, but this year, it ain’t. So I’m gardening. And I’ve been descending into pool preparation madness, by which I mean digging a circle twenty feet in circumference in soil that is mostly rock, but which cannot have any rock, for the sake of the pool. 

So in the meantime, here’s a few things I thought you would like to know!

I don’t know who Blippi is, and I want to keep it that way. 

We finished The Magician’s Nephew and are about to start The Wind in the Willows. Here is Benny enjoying Uncle Andrew’s comeuppance:

If anyone cares, we read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe first, and then we read the rest in whatever order we feel like, as long as The Last Battle is last. You can get worked up over this if you want, but I’d rather go dig rocks.

A bunch of Australians formed a Russian men’s choir as an excuse to get away from their families, and it kind of got away from them. 

Mark Shea has finally broken free of Patheos and has his own site again.

One of the very finest things on social media today is a group called Animals In Perdicaments. It’s cheered me up so many times. Ha ha, those animals!

The origin of the phrase “crazy as a bedbug” is because bedbugs act crazy.

“Hard to Handle” by the Black Crowes is an okay song

but three days of it on a loop in my head is just too much. And no, “Gardenia” by Iggy Pop is not really a step up.

Oh my gosh, shut up!

A Bolivian pan flute orchestra has been trapped in a castle in Germany surrounded by wolves and ghosts.

I almost bought the ground liner that had a picture of an elephant stomping on it, but ultimately went with the one that has a picture of a gorilla stomping on it, because it shows a broken bottle underneath the gorilla not poking through. 

Here is the most sane thing I’ve read about how to live in the next several months or year or whatever. 

Some lady decided to make sourdough bread using her own vaginal yeast, and that’s pretty bad, but the part that really pissed me off was this section of the recipe:

Get out of here.

Don Clemmer spent a lot of time thinking and writing about Fr. Pavone so you don’t have to.

Here is a photo of my great grandparents, Zelda and Feivel, my grandmother Hana, and two of my great-uncles, Gosel and Schloima. They left Kiev in 192o or so for the usual reasons (bolsheviks, pogroms). This is the visa photo taken in Bucharest. 

Zelda became Jenny, which is my middle name. Feivel became Phillip, which is my father’s name. Schloima became Sammy and, and Gosel became Jerry This one is my grandmother, Hana, who became Anne in Brooklyn:

And here is your face when you had to sell everything you own and leave your home with two children with less than 24 hours notice, and it takes so long to get off the continent, you have a whole other baby along the way, and you still have a whole ocean to get across before you can start your life over:

The story goes that they made their way a boat called the S.S. Madonna, which is lovely. The less lovely part is that someone on the boat told my great grandmother that, if she didn’t shut that baby up, they would throw him overboard. So after they got to Ellis Island, and when the child was growing up, if he ever acted up, his mother would say, “I SHOULD HAVE THROWN YOU OVERBOARD LIKE THEY TOLD ME TO.”

I guess that’s about all that’s new with me. How about you? How are you? Want some rocks? I have rocks.

Oh, one more thing. Here is a video I made for a What’s For Supper? post several weeks ago, but I forgot to upload it. It is me inserting cheese sticks into sausages, and odds are good it will end up on a fetish site within the week.

<div class=”mv-video-target mv-video-id-lcu49msh49gi0sndnzm6″ data-video-id=”lcu49msh49gi0sndnzm6″ data-volume=”70″ data-ratio=”9:16″ ></div>

I’m sure my great grandmother would be proud.