birthday girl

. . .so if you're in the neighborhood

shall we resolve?

Well, maybe not. A quick look at last year's resolutions shows that I managed fewer than half. I gather from all the year end newspaper polls that this is typical. OK, so maybe I will get around to Quick Books this coming year. Hurriedly. . .

the gathering hours

Starting the countdown to the birthday of a new year: Angelina and her daughter got into their hybrid vehicle yesterday in Georgia and will roll in this evening. Wolfen and Caffeine arrive tomorrow, with his Mama. And after them, the deluge.
The logistics of shopping have occupied my waking hours for some nights now, along with other concerns such as elections, assassinations, the stock market and the actuarial and financial insecurities of life after 50. Everyone I know seems to agree that they are so done with 2007. But it's not quite done with us, yet. Which makes me wonder: What else can go wrong?

this ain't north fork

These in from Otra Rubia in the category:
What I Love and Hate About New York

zone done gone

Zone done gone. These three words ought to rhyme. But instead, you have zone, lone, cone, bone and done, none and one—which really ought to rhyme with own.
English, what a language.

sweet home

I just want to make darned sure you caught this.
Sending it out to all my friends in Alabama.

news of the world

Pretty shocking to read the headline "Bhutto Assassinated" in red letters on my own web page. She who fellow Life writer Anne Fadiman knew as "Pinky" when they went to Harvard together. However, it's a good reason to have a news feed on the page, since a couple of people whose task it is to let me know if a major news event happens (in the absence of television in this household) fell down on the job this morning. You know who you are.

morning stars

silent night

How weird to be alone in the house
On Christmas Eve—no mouse
No spouse
No jingle bell rocks
No stockings, no care.
Just a pair
Of my socks

some girls have all the luck

This is the ring that Azu, a.k.a. Wolfen, made for my sister's husband, a.k.a. the Can Man, to give to Sis for her birthday yesterday. Good money in cans.
Of course it WAS her arhurmph Birthday.

cheer goes underground

Busker Kathleen Mock sends holiday greetings to friends and family.

link me, baby

I want to point out that there are links to the right of this entry that allow glimpses into other people's lives. This is what journalists do, though seldom do subjects evince the enthusiasm for our prying that they do for self revelation. Thus the web, a perfect autobiographical format.
We have Katie, who puts up a few of the paintings she does each and every week of her life. We have Ruby, whose life is her art. We have the girl golfers, whose sport is their art.
And then we have a few of the sites I can't live without on a daily basis: the New York Times, the weather, Michael Lutin's wacky horoscope, the ferry schedule, the news from West Plains, Missouri.
If you have a site you want me to link—hook me up.

cornered by a bore

Yes, Let's play the annual game: Claudia's Big Decision! I am caught (very appropriately) on the horns of a dilemma: Should I re-up for another year's membership at the Explorers Club?
I know I have bored on about this before. And in fact, I was so perfectly boring in 2005 that I feel I cannot do better than quote that entry, back in the day when I thought blogging would make me rich and famous and thus devoted more effort to it than I do today, when I know that only my friends and family read the thing.
To quote myself:

My grandmother was a member of the DAR, my mother was in the League of Women Voters and the NAACP. And even today, one of my nearest and dearest looks to be a future president of the Hollistan Garden Club, while another, for her sins, is on the board of a historic trust. I am not a joiner.
I do, however, belong to a very exclusive Club. Housed in a townhouse on the East Side of Manhattan, my Club has a library of rare books, members of rare distinction (Sir Edmund Hillary) and a stuffed polar bear rampant on the second floor landing. Though a pale imitation of the Royal Geographic Club (I've never been), the Explorers Club is the closest thing to a stuffy British scene I know of on this side of the pond.
I suppose I joined out of vanity—because it was there, and I could. I had to be nominated by two members and write reams of self-justifications and attach lists of publications etc. I rationalized that I would find stories and meet people at the club and be able to go on fabulous expeditions.
Thing is, I never go to my Club. In the ten years since I joined, I have been to two annual dinners and one reception—all in that first halcyon year. None of the lectures, slide shows, convivial evenings or banquets for which I continually receive invitations can impel me to slog through the underbrush of Central Park to explore the East Side.
And every December, when it's time to re-up, I have to realize this. Especially now that my expense account no longer covers the $400 annual membership fee nor the additional fees charged for each and every event. I have rationalized that I get a great deal to rent the venue for a party in case, say, my daughter gets married. But my daughter is getting married and she has not selected that venue. Or maybe, I tell myself, I will turn into an old fart who likes to walk to the Club every day and pretend to have business there so as to snooze in front of the fireplace with a newspaper spread over my face. I find I'm not quite ready to be a buffer yet.
But the Club was so hard to get into!
And so I sit, the envelope in front of me, trying to decide: Do I pay up for another year of nonattendance or not?

Yes, my friends, that is the dilemma. And so, yesterday, I invited Carly, one of my newest friends, to join me for a holiday party at the Club in the following e-mail:
The Explorer's Club is a gentleman's club that is VERY hard to get into. (No, not THAT kind of gentleman's club.)
I belong to it.
I pay $400 a year to belong to it.
I have been there three times in the 15 years I have belonged to it.
I have just received the bill for next year's membership.
Let's determine whether or not I should re-up. I have made reservations, 6-9:00.

So we went. There was milk punch. A Santa who did not need a wig or fake beard gave us presents. We ate with a forensic archeologist named Charlie who is still working on 9/11 remains. Carly got cornered by a bore with a fake English accent who wanted to take her to the bottom of the sea in a diving bell with Champagne. There were fires in massive manorial fireplaces.

My sister says I should keep my membership so I can hold my 60th birthday party there, when I will be as boring and bufferish as the rest of them. The amusing things people said the last time I asked this question can be read on Why I Can't Stop
Please vote. I can't promise when I will post again until I get enough responses.Yes, this is blackmail.

And while you're at it, you can vote on Azu Nuz Is Neil Young An Asshole Or What?

jeweler at work

Self Portrait with I Phone

"I phone therefore
I am?"

photo provided courtesy of
Azu LLC

i heart beer

The father who doesn't like to go to hospital is still there, reading pulp fiction and enjoying the nurses—particularly the six-foot African-American one who gave him his bath. Hopefully he will be out soon.
The mother who does like going to hospital will have her spine operated on tomorrow and go into rehab a couple days later, just in time for Christmas. There's no telling when she can go home to Mexico from Minnesota. No, not that kind of rehab. . .

sub rosa

A pic of son-in-law being a good neighbor in the Providence snowfall.
You know, I don't say everything that's going on in this space. So sorry to have been so boring, but what with two parents in hospital, houseguests, DSL out, a story to rewrite and other issues practical and emotional, I have not been the Best Blogger in the World.
"Oh well."
The Dowling family crest.

the not-too-mod squad

The New York bureau of Time magazine reunes.

the birthday girl

IF IT'S YOUR BIRTHDAY
By SALLY BROMPTON
December 13, 2007 -- Are you taking life too seriously? According to your birthday chart you are and you need to lighten up a bit over the coming 12 months. You may have many serious issues to deal with but that will be easier to do if, paradoxically, you treat it all as a game and act as if none of it matters.
Maybe it doesn't.

Yeah, I better lighten up. . .

old school ties

let them eat lasagna

That was my newest friend. Now here is one of my oldest, dating back to fourth grade.
Tonight, same place, same time, arrive three college pals.
The menu varies slightly, between mache or arugala, French or Italian, meat or meatless, but I'm pretty freaking sick of lasagna.

inter-met

She stepped off of the web and into real life—and brought her brother, too. Carly and I met through our respective blogs. She was living in California's high desert at the time, and I was Eastern seaboard. We became sort of friends. And then she was posted in New York en route back to Kansas City, where she just bought a house. We have now spent quality time at the kitchen table with her brother (above) and her son—and she and her boyfriend stayed in Casa Claudia when I wasn't home.

doing business as

And actually doing business!
Opened Tuesday, purchases made by husbands for wives and husbands for husband's mom (figure that one out), visits from Pomegranate and family.
Hours (this week) 12-8 pm.
Shoppers, park your engines.

technical difficulties

Due to circumstances so complex that it would take all day to explain (and DID take all day to explain, like three times), my DSL line has been suspended until next week, so you can only e mail me through my Yahoo address. And I haven't even gotten my new computer, when I will really have technical issues. Of course, you could always try posting a comment instead of just lurking.

winter in the city

The social season has begun. The pedicab cyclists of New York, who are making $600 or so a day giving tours around Central Park and elsewhere (when their bikes haven't been impounded for parking them chained to city property—a tree, say or a signpost), are not drinking Beaujolais Nouveau ("eez terreeble zis year," says Christoff) at Tout Va Bien. But they are drinking a nice wine priced according to the custom they bring the place and complaining mightily about the cops.

hyperlife

It probably had to do with reading William Gibson's Spook Country—not that I liked it very much—but I dreamed of a new kind of book. You would read the book, and then at certain points be told to log into the web, where you would play a game, watch a film clip or read a Wikipedia entry. Sometimes, you would get a phone call or a text message in the context of a book. In my somnulent state, this struck me as a brilliant breakthrough concept.
Upon awakening, however, I realized that the medium already exists. We call it life. We go about our daily business, punctuated with telephone calls, googling something we read about in the newspaper, a cup of coffee, a photograph (like this one by a certain Spirit), e-mail, an IM—any of which can become a Choose-Your-Adventure story. I have even had people pop off the screen and become real characters: life, with hypertext.

before and afterish

The new Azu emporium proceeds apace. The counters have been faced, the fake necks installed, the glass polished the tool bench readied. Now all that's left is—the product and the customers. Oh, and the teal velvet Victorian loveseat, of course. Doors open tomorrow.

almost

The elves worked deep into darkness last night.
And then it snowed.
Must be time to shop.

eat fish

This is a photograph of a photograph that is taking the world of sushi by storm. First Haru wanted abstract photographs for their Prudential Center location in Boston, then for their new store in Wall Street. The murals are gigantic and printed on some kind of plastic. The architects liked their serene quality. No one, particularly the photographer, aka Mr. Coffee, is telling how these images were captured.

underground musician

A New York midnight. And that was before karaoke.

is this genius or what?

For certain people, a canvas does not offer enough scope for creativity. Certain people need something with a little —fur. A sparkle here, a hint of innocence there, and a masterpiece of the art of taxidermy becomes something oh so subtly— twisted. A comment on virginal nuptials and the beast that lurks within, perhaps, or the taxonomy of a taxi dancer.
That, my friends is Weasel World, an emporium coming soon to a neighborhood not very near yours.

what is this?

I found it in my refrigerator.
Who left it there?
What is it for?
What language is it in?

It reminds me of the forward Sis sent me today:
fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too. Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.
i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be
in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it.

The same is kind of true of this tube of—whatever. You can almost read it.
Wott do you thik it is?

and then the winds came

Claudia's Surf City will be closed for the season, as soon as the Gas Guy gets over there to remove the hot water heater for its long winter's nap. BI Bro shut off the electricity and the septic system and the stove.
At the moment, Hannah's is still open, pending the arrival of the Mason, whose arrival has been pending for about a year now. He says he really is gonna be there next week. But there may be no water for him if temperatures are scheduled to plummet (see Island Weather link).
Desperado told me that her father now says little. "Herpes zoster!" he will shout at the top of his lungs. And then later, "Chivas Regal!" And nothing else. He used to be a doctor.
When my brain gets fried, I will be shouting out, "Beck's!" or"The Mason!"

just chill

This is my musician brother's latest project. That would be him on piano.
At www.visionsound.com

still post prandial

Big Surprise of the Event: Firewalker's placecard wasn't needed
Best Pie Award: Little Miss Xanex, for the lattice apple
Mr. Congeniality: Terrabyte
One-man Diversity Boost: Eli's coming
Carving Awards: The two F's
MIA: Miriam, Dylan, Marley, Michele, Damien, Axele, Clement, la Otra Rubia
Special Toast: To Josh, with NA beer
Table Settings: Courtesy of Dangerman's mom, the Ikea wedding
Special Mention: Most smokers in one room in NYC
Final Count: 16

hi michele!

the mystery guest

This morning I dreamt that a woman with a bag over her head was cleaning the bathroom. I got up, staggered out into the apartment and sure enough, there was a team of cleaners mopping and vacuuming—none of whom I knew. And I didn't want them there the morning of Thanksgiving, either. Then I looked around and noticed a lot of people I didn't know, crashing on mattresses in my bedroom, asking me what time dinner was. Some of them were wearing masks. I told them all that if they wouldn't introduce themselves, they weren't staying at my place and there would be NO THANKSGIVING DINNER FOR THEM.
So beware, all you party crashers out there: I'm tougher than a turkey wing.

bubblicious

"A financial analyst I've always admired says that amateur traders always think about what they can win, while professionals think about what they can lose," said the Subway Singer, visiting from Alabama, where she just bought a house with her earnings from busking in the subways of New York and then investing in, among others, Apple stocks. "Me, when I'm in love, I'm an amateur. I don't look at the downside, I only look at the upside. But, really, that first romantic period, that's like a bubble."
Love from the point of view of a trader. If I knew more about the world of finance, I daresay I could spin the metaphor out indefinitely. Feel free to have a go, take a chance, risk all on the hope that this time there will be no market correction. . .

azu nuz

Wow. That color doesn't look right. Sorry.
Azu is spinning off in two directions.
Wow. That doesn't sound right, either. Have the blogging skills gone begging?
Anyway, Azu, personified by its owner. No, not owner. It's a Limited Liability Corporation. Azu's CEO, COO and One and Only Hannah Garrison is soon to announce the December opening of a bricks-and-mortar storefront in Pawtuxet Village, a quaint and charming seaside destination in the town of—but we weren't going to mention that. Let's just say on the outskirts of Providence. The store will be known as Azu. Catchy, huh?
Virtually simultaneously, in the virtual world of www.wearyourmusic.org, Azu, in concert with Relix, the music magazine, will debut a new line of guitar string bracelets.
The two projects couldn't be more different: The physical store, which will be opened just in time for Christmas (hint hint), is aimed at the well-heeled matron who drives a BMW, while the virtual store, which will be opened just in time for Christmas (hint hint), is aimed at the well-heeled teenager who drives a BMW.
There's parking, however, at the physical location, in that town I'm not going to ever mention.
Ever.

ceremony—eating, american

Yes, my friends, once again it's time to play: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner!
There are a few clues in the following lineups. See if you can use them, along with intuition, to determine who and how many are coming this year, 2007. Flashing back to previous years' Tnxbloggings is permitted. Yes, diversity has taken a bit of a hit this year on the Upper White Side. Nevertheless, as Mr. Li would say:
Happy American Eating Ceremony!

2007
Neighbors: 4
LBGT: 2
Latinos: 3
Jews: 4 and two happas
WASPs: 6
Lapsed Catholics: 4
Godless: 13 and counting
People Who Voted for Bush: 1 (known)
People With Personal Websites: 5
Married Couples: 3
Headhunters: 1
Senior Citizens: 3
Under 30s: 6
Ten and under: 2
Sets of twins: 0
Vegetarians: 1
Females: 9

2006
Female: 11
Male: 6
Males under three: 2
Sets of twins: 1
LBGT: (that I know of) 2
Psychiatrists: 1
Under 25: 6
Big media employees: 2
Female car mechanics: 1
Chinese-Americans: 1
Latinas; 1
Gasner/Dowling clan members: 7
Aliens: 1
Parents: 6
Blonds: 6
Strangers: 1
Native Americans: 0 (though a possibility for next year)

Place settings for ??? What's your best guest guess?

sneakin round my back stairs

You can't fool me. I know you've been checking in just hoping that maybe—
So OK. Here is Hannah's as I left it last week, gilded by autumn, jilted by the mason who has yet to finish the second fireplace and chimney and not yet quilted by winter snow. If there is any this year, thanks to G. W. [Global Warming] Bush.


And, oh, yeah, the party!

surf is so not up

We're coming to the end of the road, guys.
I started this site to document the building of Hannah's Party City. Hannah's is built, and it's been two years this month since I debuted this blog with the following:
surf's up
A new feature of my new site is that you can now check out your horoscope in the New York Post or the latest news with the links. So before you do anything, surf over to Claudia's to catch that wave. Also, hit the word "comments" below, and post easily with your own stories and thoughts.


I have enjoyed keeping in touch with all of you through this medium. I thank you for making Claudia's Surf City part of your day. Mahalo. If any of you want to take over the site, let me know and I will give you passwords to post in my stead. I have a twinge of regret that just as I seem to have three regular readers in China (plus a couple in France, one in Italy, and one in Portugal), I am bagging it. Keep your eyes open for my next web effort. There will be one, though what it may be—why I can't or what is my fucking problem or Azu— quien sabe? Now would be the time for you to reveal your identities as readers, so I can put you on my list to inform of a new site. If you don't want to post your e-mail addresses, please send to my pseudonomenous (sp?) account: cgdowe@gmail.com (btw, this doesn't work as a link—you have to paste it in as an address) and I will let you know where I settle. For now, surf's down.
Aloha.

stylin'

I bagged the brown. Obviously.

The Blood Outside Our Window

Twelve years ago in the New York Times:


The white breast of snow was splotched with blood, and my daughter had to step around iced red pools on the concrete as she walked, alone, to the school bus.

The evening before, a friend arrived, breathless, at the door of our New York City apartment. On the street outside she had seen a man who had just been attacked. Police were taking descriptions of a white male in a black baseball cap who had run away. The man who had been hurt lay there in a pool of blood. "I should have comforted him," my friend said. "The police were so cold. I should have knelt in the snow and just patted him or something."

My daughter ran over to the window and looked down to the street she walked every day. The blue lights circled, the ambulances waited. "He's gone," she heard someone say. She turned to me. "I think he's dead," she said. "This is my street. I thought it was safe here."

"Nowhere is really safe," I said.

This was a year ago, when my daughter was 12, the year she was beginning to realize that her parents were not all powerful, that we could not protect her from all harm. From stories about people with grave illnesses in the copies of the Reader's Digest she brought home from school she was learning that not all stories end happily, that people die no matter how much they are loved, indeed, sometimes because of how much they are loved.

She did not remember the incident when she woke up the next morning, nor did I, or perhaps I would not have let her walk by that place alone. Her fears were all for the Valentine's Day dance that evening. "You don't have to go," I said. "You are only 12." Her fears were about sex, not death; both are part of growing up.

But I would have spared her the blood.

The man had lived in our building; I had stood on the elevator with him many times. On Valentine's Day his door five floors below ours was sealed with white police tape. He lay in a white hospital bed in a coma, dying.

Later that day my daughter called me from school. She had decided, after all, to attend the dance. Perhaps her "boyfriend" had come through with an invitation for the first dance, or perhaps her girlfriends, whom I could hear in the background, had talked her into it.

"Did you see the blood on the snow?" I asked.

"It was horrible," she said. "I almost threw up. The elevator man told me the man was dead. I called Dad to tell him I was going to the dance after all, but Dad wasn't home."

"Do you know where he was?" I asked. "He was here, at the office, delivering a valentine to me."

"Oooh," she said. "What was it?"

"Candies. In a heart-shaped box. Red velvet."

"Hey, everybody." I could hear her tell her school friends. "My dad went to the office to give my mom a valentine. Isn't that cool?"

Hearts. Blood. Love. Death. Splotches on a snowbank.

It was dark by the time she walked home again, after the dance, her father by her side. Too dark to see the salt soaking up the red to a fainter pink. A sketch of a man's face was taped to the door outside the elevator. The suspect glared menacingly under the words "Wanted for Murder."

A year has passed. My daughter is 13, and tall. She takes two city buses to get to school. The last snowfall is melting and gray. There hasn't been much snow in New York this year, not like last year or when I was young. The murderer hasn't been caught, despite the fact that a detective from the 20th Precinct papered the area with posters asking for information.

Neighbors speculated that the killing was a hit -- it had been too efficient, and the victim hadn't been robbed. It made all of us feel safer, to think that it was a personal matter, that the murderer wasn't lurking on the street. But I still don't like to think of the white male, 19-24 years, 5 feet 10 inches , 175 pounds, riding the bus with my daughter.

She remembers the murder when she walks down the street alone at night. But these days she is thinking more about love than death, though sex and drugs are on the short list as well. There was a seventh grade dance last night, "the Decade Dance," and her only concern was whether her make-up really looked like it was from the 60's. "My friends say I look too 90's," she said. In the year 2000, she will graduate from high school.

Childhood ends. No place is really safe. But we gird up and go out. We dance and dare to hope for days at a stretch that we, at least, are protected from terrible messages in the cold white snow.


Copyright 1995 The New York Times Company

two years ago

ice city

Happy New Year

and about home improvements

This is J's new kitchen in France. It took some doing, because everything in the house is made of stone, but here it is. The stove alone was a three-day wonder in the village.
I will relate the actual names of the colors no one seems to want me to paint their bedroom after the Mack Attack wakes up and I can get in there.
He just woke up.
1) Peanut shell
2) Woodstock Tan
3) Mudslide(!)
4) Beach House Beige
5) Copper Mountain
At the moment, Wolfen and the Cub are voting for 1 and I am wavering between 1 and 4. Thanks to all of you who advised me to paint the walls blue, maroon, red—anything but brown.

help

Well? The painters and plasterers are coming on Tuesday. This is Wolfen's room, which has needed some serious work for a while. I decided that since it is as dark as a tomb anyway, I might as well try to make a virtue of it. It was Woo's suggestion to use a kind of coffee color, since the only other color in the room will be red. The trim (all four doors) will be bright white. There's one picture with flash and one without, but neither is utterly representative.



I won't tell you the names of the colors lest you be swayed by the words (though feel free to make up color names—they couldn't be stupider than the ones they actually have). So which shall it be?

aloha, pepito

The following parargraph appeared in the Honolulu Advertiser yesterday:
ALBERT "PEPITO" KEKUA MAKUAOLE, 81, of Makaweli Valley, Kaua'i, died Feb. 8, 2007. Born in Waimea, Kaua'i. A U.S. Navy coxswain during World War II; powder man for the U.S. engineering department. Survived by brothers, George Keoki and Melvin; sisters, Grace Acain and Eula Sapir. Visitation 9 to 11 a.m. Saturday at Garden Island Mortuary chapel; service 11 a.m.; burial at the family plot at Kanekula, Waimea Valley. No flowers. Casual attire.

"He was the last of the old timers," said Jimmy, when he called to tell me.
Pepito taught Jimmy, and all the other kids in Makaweli Valley how to hunt. They would saddle up their horses and mules (with plenty of Budweiser in the saddlebags), pick up their rifles and skinning knives, whistle to the two-score pig dogs, the trackers and the grabbers, and hele off "up the volcano, into the interior." There they would track the feral pigs and goats, packing out the meat several days later to smoke and eat and make luau. It was not an easy matter to kill an angry boar. One door of Pepito's shack has boar jaws nailed all over it, the tusks long and sharp.
Pepito lived in a shack in the middle of taro fields. You had to cross the Waimea River to get there, thread the dirt paths and make it through the pack of snarling, mangy, dogs and flies. "Get back here," Pepito would shout. "Cut that out." His shack was small, without electricity or running water, and it squatted over thousands of Louis L'Amour and other paperback westerns and war stories. Pepito sat in a lawn chair under a tree, a cooler or three filled with ice and meat and beer nearby. He was a wild man in his youth, who once rode his mule into the local bar and ordered him a beer. By the time I was working in Dottie's bar in 1973, he had been barred.
But he settled down as the years passed. In the 1980s, he graciously took me, my husband and in-laws on a pig hunt for Life magazine, mounting us and guiding us and instructing us for free. By the time I saw him for what I suspected would be the last time, three years ago, he had given up the cigarettes and beer and was not hunting regularly any more. He tended the irrigation ditches in the taro fields, took care of his bored hunting dogs and mule, read his novels and entertained his frequent visitors with tolerance and grace.
Pepito was ali'i, royalty, and a wise man. Mahalo for your counsel, Pepite. And much aloha for the aloha you shared with us.

A longer piece appeared in the Honolulu Advertiser today: Jan TenBruggencate article
Garden Isle obit

i love you

Who Do You Love?

I walk 47 miles of barbed wire,
I use a cobra-snake for a necktie,
I got a brand new house on the roadside,
Made from rattlesnake hide,
I got a brand new chimney made on top,
Made out of a human skull,
Now come on take a walk with me, babe,
And tell me, who do you love?

Who do you love?
Who do you love?
Who do you love?
Who do you love?

I rode around the town, use a rattlesnake whip,
Take it easy babe, don't give me no lip,

Who do you love?
Who do you love?
Who do you love?
Who do you love?

two years ago today

The way we were:
What is the sound
of one fax waiting?
Finally, Septic Maestro got back to me saying that he had a map, and the septic system was within the Coastal Resources buffer zone so he didn't know whether they'd approve it and that the Department of Environmental management had to act on it first and he didn't know whether they would do so for at least six weeks, and so...
I think I will shoot myself. This basically puts the project back a year.
And indeed it did. But it's done. Ish.
Meanwhile... Dolores wants to buy the first property in the Bronx she's seen
I didn't let her, though.
Desperado has rented two (count 'em!) apartments.
She still has two, but not the same ones!
Dangerman is still in his brace.
Well, his back is ok now, and he's broken and healed a foot since then. That horrible TV station is still trying to eat his soul.
The Artist shows up tonight.
I just talked to him in Korea. We argued about what day it is. But he definitely won't be showing up tonight.
The ex-Pat is in from Paris Tuesday.
Who the freak is this? Obviously in two years I've lost my mind.
The Drummer arrives from Chicago.
He was here a couple weeks ago. He's on about his 106th girlfriend since then.
My Chinese sister (plus four) arrives Saturday.
She finally got her divorce, thank the Goddess, but life is still tough.
And that's the two-year update.
Oh, and yeah, I am still wearing that same damn jacket.

brooklyn

Now, if I could just get to Queens and Staten island. . .

kareoke kowboy

this is ikealand

No, we're still not done with Otra Rubia's cabinets. But almost.
PA Dada points out that there's a bitchin site called Ikea Hacker. Aren't people wonderful? Check it out.