3rd House Journal

Festival of the Trees

[Beech tree, Public Garden, Boston; October 4, 2009]

Thanks to Dave Bonta for including my poem, Conservation of Color, in his Festival of the Trees: seven billion new trees roundup post. A wonderful collection of links, which I've only begun to explore, with several very nice photos of Dave's included. Check it out!

Float time

Some interesting links:

Dale writes:  "I don't think anyone should work at a desk for a full workday. If you have to, then you must take care of yourself, by doing, at a minimum, this:... (including get the hell away from the desk)... (it's in part two, past the musings on massage therapists needing to take care of their body mechanics).

Simon Critchley, in the New York Times, writes that "Our lives are filled with the endless distractions of cell phones, car alarms, commuter woes and the traffic in Bangalore. The rhythm of modern life is punctuated by beeps, bleeps and a generalized attention deficit disorder" while happiness is to be like God (or, like floating in a boat in fine weather)...

¡Biblioburro!

Acclaimed Colombian institution has 4,800 books and 10 legs.

Skimming

For some time now, I've been meaning to post links to interesting things I've read online. I've emailed articles to myself from the NY Times, bookmarked pages, and sometimes sent links to friends. Then an image comes to mind of the box-loads of clippings my mom filled obsessively in her dementia, and it freaks me out a bit. She started small, too... However, there's a fine line, even a chasm, between that and sharing a few interesting links. Which is how weblogs started, no? (See? Rebecca's still slipping links into her pocket after all these years, and has not correspondingly slipped into senility, as far as I know.)

A couple of things that amused me today, distractions on a Friday afternoon:
(1) Text Messages That Would Have Been Helpful. (Found after reading Carmen's own amusing list on McSweeney's.) Before my yoga class commenced last night, someone mentioned text messaging and our instructor asked if anyone over 40 sends text messages ("they do if they have children"). I suggested that that's why God gave us opposable thumbs. But then I've never sent a txt msg in my life since I can't actually see the letters on my cell phone.
(2) Hawk swoops down onto teenager's head at Fenway Park. (Probably she didn't notice as she was text messaging at the time.) The great part about the story, though, is her name: Alexa Rodriguez. Oh, so close...

I'll leave it at that for today. Except... the review of The Flight of the Red Balloon in today's NY Times arrived in my email inbox this afternoon, just hours before my film group posted an event to go see it later this month. Looks good. Since my NetFlix account has come off hold, I may try to rent the original 1956 version before I see the new one.

Enjoy the weekend, everyone! Any fun plans?

Year of the Rodent, off and running (eek!)

[Chuy the cuy; chocolate mouse from L.A. Burdick; click to see larger]

Chuy arrived in our household on Tuesday evening. We're all adjusting. He's a little, um, smelly, though we have him and his palatial crate upstairs in a spare room we'd been using as a workout room. K installed a plug-in air freshener, so now it smells like plug-in air freshener more than pig. This is considered an improvement, of sorts. Ah, spring will come and windows will be opened...

Today, on this Friday before a long weekend, my work colleagues took an excursion to L.A. Burdick, recently posted about in connection with rat sightings (outside Burdick's) and previously described here. I couldn't join them, but gave them $10 and asked for however many "Year of the Rat" special chocolate mice they could buy (specifically the dark chocolate/tangerine... mmmmm). They were apparently out of mostly everything, it being the day after Valentine's Day. Instead, they brought me back a small assortment box with one chocolate mouse included. Good enough for me. (I even held off all afternoon so I could bring it home and photograph it for you, dear blog readers).

But wait, there's more... In science news, potential good news for lab rats in this Year of the Rat.