Crumbs. I went to a lot of trouble to participate in the Archipelago April Fool's joke, but the joke's on me. The chump who was supposed to write the parody of Aries Moon just blew it off and never sent me anything. I'm awfully disappointed. I wanted to see what someone else would pick out as being stylistically unique to me.
Oh, well. I did my parody of Today as instructed, and it's not a bad little imitation if I do say so myself. I'm cheerfully hoping lots of people think Brad really does wear a Star Trek bathrobe around the house while he listens to Spice Girls CDs. What an image.
John's ambitions for his genealogy project are gradually ramping up. He's talking about writing programs in LaTeX to organize his HTML files in some arcane and groovy way. He spends his Saturdays doing research at the local Mormon Family History Center and the Pacific branch of the National Archives to pore over old censuses. He gets me to neatly print up his paper copies of family trees (they don't call me the Human Typewriter for nothing). We've got a swell collection of old photographs that no one can identify positively though some of the photos have obviously been in the family for a hundred years or so. I'm dying to know who the guy with the fluegelhorn is. Show me some embouchure, baby!
My own projects are pretty minor now that I've ruthlessly tidied away my videos and software manuals. Currently, I am Gardening, capital G. This involves waiting for the African corn lilies to come up, preventing cats from using corn lily bed as serendipitous cat box, keeping birds out of corn lily bed until the shoots are high enough not to be mistaken for food, and considering planting something hardier than last year's perennials which failed to survive killing frosts of Northern California despite local garden center swearing they would. The yucky begonias which I inherited with the garden, god help me, are merrily springing back to life whereas the beautiful scarlet geranium appears to be kaput. Gardening fills me with despair. I don't know why I'm perpetually seduced into trying to grow flowers.
My reading habits need some variety. I woke up this morning mentally chanting a list of Ancient Roman names: Metellus Pius, Quintus Hortensius, Publius Cornelius, Marcus Aemilius, on and on and on. I've been reading almost exclusively about Rome from 100-30 B.C., and my dreams are filled with blood and battles and politics. Time to take a break and read something light over the weekend. Nothing with too much text. Definitely something with pictures like the new Architectural Digest covering 100 years of design. I love to examine the details of a room and decide what I'd do differently, or try to figure out why it's so highly thought of. I totally relish being an amateur design snob.
But you knew that.
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