The Big Green House

Wanna see our vacation slides?

As promised: Science Girl's pix from our trip to California.

A three hour tour

The vacation. Well, let’s start at the beginning, shall we?

Being a morning person by nature, I still tend to feel that things need to be under way by 10 AM or the day is shot. Given my work schedule, though, most days I’m just rolling out of bed at ten. This is to sort of explain the thought process behind booking a flight that left at 10, necessitating a ride to the airport at seven-fucking-fifteen in the morning. I’d made arrangements to leave work early the night before, and I was actually in bed by 10 PM, but my brain & body hadn’t quite made the shift yet. I didn’t get to sleep until two. We got up at five. You do the math.

Needless to say, I wasn’t at my sharpest for the flight.

It worked out OK, though. Science Girl was pretty relaxed, given her deathly fear of flying. I tried to snooze on the plane, but the air was so damn dry that it just wasn’t gonna happen.

I was a little concerned about trying to drive out to the Ancestral Markey Home from Sacramento. It’s about an hour and a half if you follow the directions; if you’re brain dead from lack of sleep, it’s closer to two hours. We got there, eventually.

The weekend was a whirlwind of wine tasting and Mom’s home cooking. Both were great. (Science Girl and I are both pretty good cooks – she’s better than I am, most days – but mom’s food is always best.) All in all we picked up about three cases worth of wine, which will keep us going for most of the year. Lotsa good stuff. My fave is definitely Vino Noceto. Mom and SG were giving me a hard time because I tend to make a “meh” face while tasting most wines; when I tried the VN Sangiovese, they both said, “Ah! There’s the happy face”. And they were right.

Back home on Monday, and I spent the rest of the week in domestic pursuits – cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc. – writing (new reviews at #1HS), and just generally relaxing. Also thinking through some stuff regarding… well, a lot of things, really, but some of them to do with The Big Green House. Look for some changes, maybe, within the nest month or so.

And there are a lot of pix. Science Girl is in charge of that end of things, so when she’s got them ready I’ll post a link.

Back, not happy

I ended up taking the entire week off. It was really nice, for the most part. I’m still pretty bummed about what happened last night: Martin caught and killed my favorite bird, the little solitary Bewick’s wren that’s been coming up onto the deck for the past three years. It always made me really happy to see him* hopping around. I’m trying really hard not to read too much into his death.

And so it’s back to work tonight. I’ll write up the vacation later, possibly tonight, and Science Girl will be posting pix later as well. In the meantime, I’m gonna watch the women’s gold medal hockey match. Go Canada!

*I’m assuming – I have no clue as to how to sex a wren.

"Thanking the academy"? Is that what you kids are calling it these days?

Apparently the Grammys are tonight. I suppose I should be interested, given the amount of time I spend listening to and thinking about music, but the cold hard pointy fact is that I do not give a husky fuck one way or the other. Haven’t since I quit retail music sales, back in 1982.

Awards shows in general are the bunk, but the Grammys are especially pointless. They are a sick joke foisted on a narcotized populace by the bloated, festering corpse of the “music industry” and the ghouls at People magazine. Why civilians would want to watch such a wankathon is beyond me, but then so is most of what my fellow Americans do with themselves.

In other news, Science Girl and I are heading to California Friday morning for some R&R at the Ancestral Markey Home. Pix to come.

File under "No Shit, Sherlock"

Eighty percent of the respondents consider it stealing to download music for free without the copyright holder's permission, and 92% say they've never done it, according to the poll conducted for The Associated Press and Rolling Stone magazine.

Meanwhile, three-quarters of music fans say compact discs are too expensive, and 58% say music in general is getting worse.