(Though if summer doesn’t end soon and Ben & Jerry’s continues with their Limited Edition flavors, I may yet come to be a blorpulous writer.)

So think of molasses, or Karo syrup, and the way you hold the jar over your measuring cup, waiting for 9.7 years for something to come out. Then this giant round bead of stuff comes out in a big BLOOP and plops in the bottom of the cup. Then there’s a long, sticky thread, and if you move at all, the sticky stuff gets absolutely everywhere. So you keep holding the jar, and BLOOP BLOOP BLOOP, until the measuring cup is full, but you still have to deal with that sticky string.

Oozing globs. That’s what writing is like.

(Especially if you’re writing about boils.)

(which I’m not)

See, about 3 pages in (even if it’s Tim Powers, y’all!), my head gets too heavy to stay up. Maybe it is full of delicious words! Regardless, I can’t stay upright anymore.

And don’t even talk to me about reading books in bed. You lie on your seft side, reading the left page, and then you have to flip over to your right side to read the right page. I read FAST. I do not have the energy to keep rolling back and forth like a seiche in a lake. For real.

I think my perfect reading setup would be a massage chair with one of those face rests, with a book rest right under my face. And a voice-activated Kindle. I could put a nice handkerchief under my mouth to catch the drool and just doze and read all day long.

So attractive!

I have a stiff triangular pillow (from Levenger [angel sounds]) that’s supposed to hold your book in your lap, but I’ve found that it’s the same height as the chaise part of our sofa. So I can lie on my stomach on the chaise with my head hanging off the end, resting my head on the pillow, with my book on the floor. That’s pretty good, except for the crick in my neck and the big red spot on my forehead.

Last night I fell asleep that way.

My Kindle is the best thing that ever happened to sleeping. I can prop it up in its case, with my hand lying on the bed so that my thumb rests against the “next page” button, so that the only effort required is one eye open and the occasional thumb jerk. I will sleep/read/sleep/read/sleep several times until I’m actually asleep.

So I don’t know what’s wrong with all the Kindle-haters who say it’s not possible to “cuddle up” with a Kindle. I do it every day.

(If they don’t WANT to – that I get. But it’s completely possible.)

I first dyed my hair in April 2000, on Divorce Day. I dyed it pink (Manic Panic Deadly Nightshade, which was WAY more fuchsia on me.) I haven’t seen my natural hair color since.

I gave up on the Manic Panic pretty quickly, because I had to re-dye my hair every week, so each Monday I went in to work with pink ears. For the next year I spent enormous gobs of money on my hair, because it was buzzed so short that I got it cut and re-dyed every 6 weeks. It was eggplant purple. I loved it, but so much upkeep!

For about the past 5 years I’ve used L’Oreal Couleur Experte in Chocolate Mousse, originally because I think the woman on the box is really pretty. I know. Anyhow, I’ve always gotten compliments from hair stylists about my ability with my own highlights, which is super cool.

But. The itching. So much itching! And over the years, the itching has gotten worse and worse. So I thought I would try henna. For years and years I have periodically gone to Henna for Hair to read about the tremendous awesomeness of it. So I figured I would try it while on vacation, and if it looked stupid or gave me hair the color of a tangerine, I’d have time to re-dye later.

I mixed up a bunch of green mud, let it sit overnight, then glopped it all over my head (and thankfully not all over the bathroom), put a shower cap on, and sat around feeling gorgeous for 4 hours.

The stuff was so thick that I thought maybe putting it down the sensitive drains in Innisfree was not a great idea. My idea of dunking my head in the rain barrel was met with exclamations of horror (with which I agreed once I looked in the rain barrel). “Aha!” says I. “I’ll rinse out in the yard using the hose!”

Cue Virginia, in pyjamas, kneeling in pine needles, dumping travel-size bottles of conditioner on top of green mud and taking the hose to it.

The water comes from a well. It is REALLY REALLY COLD. I gave myself brain freeze from the outside in.

The color is kind of boring and needs desperately to be made less natural and more weird. Also, over a month later, my hair STILL smells like wet hay when it’s wet.

But no itching!

Some excuses to myself: too tired, not interested in communicating with humans, didn’t have the perfect picture of the house.

whatEVER. Here’s a picture of the tree:

That’s the back of the house and a tree that I consider part of the family. When I was little, it had a large branch suitable for climbing if one could get a boost up. I’m glad that only the branch had to come down.

So it was a wonderful trip. My family walked (or rode in) the Prouty, and there were 18-ish members of Team Joe. We buried the rest of Dad’s ashes under the maple tree at the bottom of the hill with everyone else and cooked an enormous breakfast for everyone. Then most people left and I spent the rest of the week trying to move as little as possible.

Except to change clothes. I wore at least 4 outfits a day while I was there. It was strange and hilarious, and I deserved all the ribbing I got.

For the past several summers, I have eaten several quarts of strawberries when they’re in season and then, once I’m tired of strawberries, I move on to cherries. Last summer I ate probably 6 bags of cherries.

Last weekend, I had 1.5 bags of cherries in the fridge and no desire to eat any more. But I did NOT want to waste all those beautiful little fruits. There are far more recipes on Epicurious for sour than sweet cherries, but I found this conserve, and HOLY MOLY. Dead easy, and I want to eat it on everything. Of course, so far I’ve only eaten it on biscuits.

We had fajitas for dinner one night, and there was left over chicken and sauteed onions and peppers. These I put into an omelet along with a little Cabot basil-tomato white cheddar.

Not only was it a TRIUMPH, it was the prettiest omelet I’ve made in years. Recommended!

The horror I won’t even link to. I figured that if I  have been loving radish sandwiches so much, I should try a different radish recipe, so I tried one for a little radish salad with a rice vinegar dressing.

It  tasted pretty good, actually, but the smell is SO AWFUL I can’t even tell you. And the smell gets into EVERYTHING. I seriously could not bring myself to eat it today, just because I kept getting a tiny whiff of it every time I opened my lunch bag. SO AWFUL.

Sadly, this means radishes need to go on temporary ban.

He could fit in one hand.

And now he cuddles with Modernist poets.

I was extremely skeptical about Mr. Jinx for quite a while. For one thing, kittens are a pain in the butt, toes, fingers, and skin. Also occasionally ankles and elbows. For another, he was Not Boadie, and what I wanted was my Boadicea girl back.

He continues to be Not Boadie: the only things Jinx fears are outside and the car. He loves all people and disapproves of Alone Time. He doesn’t like the vacuum but doesn’t hide from it, either: he sits and watches me vacuum,  his ears swiveling in dislike.

I said my one criterion for a cat was that it be totally into me. Jinx is like Boadie in that he must always help me when I’m in the bathroom, and 9:00 is bedtime or I start getting Looks. But he clearly loves Dingo as much as he loves me, and he spends evenings moving from one lap to another, to ensure equal opportunity snuggling.

So I’m glad that he is himself. If he were too much like my old girl, I’d probably have become extremely weird about it. He is himself. A good friend.

(Though still kind of a pain in the butt.)

Of knitting.

First up, a blown-out picture of korknissen:

Even with too much flash, they are cute.

Next, baby shoes!

Please ignore my egregiously long toenails. Also, you can see my right baby toe wot is in the wrong place. But it is not as cute as those baby shoes, not by a long shot.

And finally, hats!

There are going to be some adorably warm babies in the American West this winter, I tell you what.

Then on Friday night I went out for drinks and dinner with three coworkers, and we sat around telling outrageous stories about ourselves (translation: mostly me), teasing one another, and generally laughing our heads off. It was terrific.

Also terrific: Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker, which took up all of yesterday. I didn’t get a dang thing done in favor of reading, and it was totally worth it.

My mom and sister have taken up a Saturday night tradition of surf & turf (the surf is different every week), and last night Dingo and I had our own version of it. We went to our favorite place, Masa’s Sushi & Robata Bar (fondly known in our house as The Robot Bar). They make the best beef teriyaki I have ever had. Dingo had the beef, and I had the salmon. I ate the cabbage it came on top of, as well, and both my and Dingo’s seaweed salad. Alas, after all that I didn’t have room for his cabbage too.

Yes. I am a shameless eater of garnishes. It’s a schtick. Plus I really love cabbage.

During dinner we had a totally goopy conversation about how awesome it is to be married to one another and that given the enormous piles of steaming crap we’ve surmounted, it’s hard to imagine anything that would drive us apart.

I definitely feel a little better.

Tomorrow: pictures. Pictures of great cuteness. Possibly accompanied by nostalgic romanticism.

Next month, my family is walking as a team in The Prouty in honor of my father (the handsome guy on that page). There are so many places that are desperate for money right now, and budgets are tighter than ever, but I am grateful for every dollar of sponsorship.

Jinx spent last Thursday at the vet’s office after throwing up all over the place, including one bit that looked bloody. After last year’s adventures with poor Boadie, I freaked right the hell out. It turned out to be an expensive tummy ache, and he’s fine now, but geez louise. I think we both lost weight.

Things are boring on the outside because they’re exciting on the inside, and writing is going well. In the meantime, I’ve been thinking about water.

When we were in Colorado in February, I said something about how much I like Denver, and my friend Dan said, “You can’t move here unless you bring your own water.” That got me on a line of thought about snow barrels (like rain barrels, but for snow), and how I’ve always lived in wet places, where we think of water as something that could trap you, could get in the house, hardly ever as a precious resource.

When I was 16 I spent a couple of weeks on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, and that was the first time that I learned to think about water. We had been bathing in the river (using Dr. Brommer’s soap), much to the amusement of the fine folks of Red Shirt, SD.

“You’re out here to help us, but at least we have indoor plumbing,” one lady said. She invited us into her cinderblock house, where we sat around warming up and drying off for a little while. She was washing dishes, and she kept turning the water on and off.

If I were a cat, I’d have been dead of curiosity decades ago, and I am rarely afraid of looking like a fool, so I asked why. She talked about how scarce water can be out on the plains, and about how you have to respect resources, because they’re holy. Keep things clean, use only what you need.

Since then, I turn the water on and off when I’m washing dishes. I turn it off while I’m brushing my teeth. Even in this damp place, where even the air is wet. I don’t have any idea whether this makes any difference in my actual water usage – clearly, as a citizen of the developed world, I use way more than I actually need – but paying attention is important to me. I try to stay awake inside my own life.