I awoke yesterday morning to discover that our lovely houseguest had made hard-boiled eggs.  I like hard-boiled eggs.  I don’t really have cooking them worked out, so I don’t ever make them, but they’re pretty much the funnest food to eat.  They certainly have the highest fun to difficulty ratio of any food I can think of.  I like to carry them in my pocket.  It makes me feel like I’m carrying a delightful secret.  Plus, the shape of an egg is so agreeable for general fidgeting purposes.  Have you ever sat at a table and idly spun a hard-boiled egg?  You haven’t lived till you’ve done that. 

If there were no such thing as Easter, and no one had ever thought of painting eggs before, I’d have thought of it by myself, I’m certain of it.  The world is full of insane inventions that I can honestly say would never have occurred to me at all, not even in part, and it’s comforting to me to know that this one thing, painting hard-boiled eggs, would have been an invention I could count on.  I don’t really know how pulleys work, or why they don’t work when I think they should.  When my car stops working right, I have as much chance of making it run again by myself as a tobogganer has of making the mountain taller (though I do open the hood anyway).

I have an idea for an invention.  It’s a collapsible stepladder that’s shaped like a three-tiered wedding cake.  Instead of carrying it, you just roll it where you want to go, then pull it up, and viola.  Who doesn’t want to stand on a cake?  It would have a rubberized traction layer that was very reminiscent of frosting, which also made for easy rolling.  Cakes are, in part, made of eggs.

Once, at a céilidh, I met a guy who had invented a revolutionary new kind of mop and needed people to invest in their manufacture so that he could become a rich man and god among custodians.  I’m not making this up.  He needed like $15,000 to make the mop heads and he figured every custodian in the world would be stoked to buy one.  I told him that I didn’t have any money, though I wished him well, and that I had actually come to the céilidh to dance with girls, not talk to custodians, no matter how visionary.  I had had eggs for breakfast that morning.

Whenever I fry eggs, I always crack the first egg right in the middle of the pan.  This makes the finished yolk constellation pretty limited.  The shape is always set to some kind of lopsided thing by that middle egg, unless I cook six more and take care to arrange them around the middle one in a circle, which I’ve never quite done.  I ought to think it out beforehand, but I’m not a morning person.

I can never be sure how the egg I’m about to crack will turn out.  I fry eggs nearly every day, usually 3-5 of them, and I still always end up with the pan too hot or the oil to sparse.  Every egg I crack causes albumen to get on my fingers, which I think is a little bit gross.

Make a little birdhouse in your cathouse

 It's not clear what cockatiels are saying, It is clear that they mean it emphatically.

There's this house in my neighborhood that has cats. It was the first thing I noticed about the place, because I noticed the cats slinking around the neighborhood over a block away. I couldn't tell you how many cats live there. at least a dozen.

They all seem like pretty good cats, all things considered. A good chunk of them are related, I believe, and many of them clearly are not, so I suppose they have the makings of a good cat society: the family aspect, clanishness, to encourage sticking together, but with enough genetic diversity to keep fresh generations from getting harelips and things. They mostly seem to live on the front porch during the Summer, which is to say that the cat density is highest there, though individual members of the household probably wander as far as flat Top when the urge strikes them. They certainly set the tone for the surrounding block, which is to say that it is full of furtive, wide-eyed shadows crouching under cars and trees, and noticeably empty of mice.*

I'd say the cats have the run of the house, except that they don't appear to. I've never actually seen any people who live there, but each window on the South side of the house leads to an outdoor aviary which is full of cockatiels. Consequently, the East, South and West sides of the house are full of cockatiel noises, which are stunning, and then stunning again when you realize that they aren't being played on a nature sounds cd or something, but are actually piping fresh from the vocal cords of a flock of actual birds, that, as I have described, live in the house. The outside of the aviary frequently has cats crawling on it, trying to figure out some way to get those paint-feathered assholes to shut up for a minute.
With that visual and auditory barrage going on, the placid waddle and low murmur of the ducks in their pond on the house’s Southeast corner might go completely unnoticed.

Given all this, it should not surprise you particularly to learn that the house next door is for sale, and has been for some time, despite its quite reasonable asking price.

I’m always conflicted by things like these. The people who I must infer live there obviously put a great deal of energy into keeping these animals, and keeping them from killing one another. This would seem to suggest that they like their life the way it is. I feel a kind of jealousy. I imagine these Francis of Assisi types sitting I their sunny home, which contains a fountain in the living room, speaking to their birds and cats, their lives somehow serene. I also feel a squirmy kind of pity. I imagine them sitting, frazzled on their ruined furniture with their flock of birds and their herd of cats and whatever else they’ve got in there, feeling somehow a slave to the degenerate flow from two birds and three cats to four birds and six cats, to what the hell’s the difference, sure, we’ll take ‘em, we’re already deaf anyway and the toxoplasmosis isn’t so bad once you get used to it.

There but for fortune go me, anyway.  Except that I don't think I like birds much.


*I am actually referring to mouselike creatures of all kinds, as well as largish beetles, spiders, flies, unwary songbirds and anything else which has the unfortunate qualities of being smaller and slower than a cat, and therefore becomes a thing for a cat to play with until the thing dies, or if it thinks of it in time, feigns death. Those possessed of the mentality or instinct for playing possum, if they do it convincingly enough, find the experience of having to do so unpleasant, and usually find some other neighborhood to be small and slow in.

The antonym of density and a dearth of suffixes

 (picture not related)

Back when publishers printed the daily news for local areas on paper (if you will believe it) made of tree pulp, There was a little trivia column that was nationally syndicated that was called L.M. Boyd.  L.M. Boyd was the name of the guy who wrote the column, which was usually a collection of sentences which didn’t have to do with each other, except that each sentence was a fact, and it was usually a surprising fact.  Though Mr. Boyd wasn’t above periodically taking these facts out of context, one did get the impression that he was wont to do scrupulous research to determine, before a factual sentence made the cut , that it was, in fact, a factual sentence, at least in some sense.  Today’s blog is inspired by L.M. Boyd, except that I have trouble expressing everything I want to about a topic in a sentence, even a run-on sentence, and also I don’t care if what I’m saying is actually true or not.  In fact, I think today’s blog may have almost nothing to do with L.M. Boyd at all.  I’m not sure now why I brought it up, except that I was thinking about it. 

The other day while playing Frisbee with my dogs at the lake, which for some reason everybody calls a bog, the dogs missed a pretty long throw.  This is not really something I fault them for.  Riley is, God bless him, kind of a pussy when it comes to water, and doesn’t normally like to get his belly wet, though for some reason, he’s willing to swim at the lake, but I knew that he wouldn’t go for a Frisbee that was out that far.  I was throwing the Frisbee for Ursa.  She loves to swim out and fetch things, and will do it whenever the opportunity presents itself, and would probably continue to do it until she collapsed from exhaustion or hypothermia.  She’d have gone out ten times for that Frisbee, but she was distracted right when I threw it, because we were actually sharing the beach with ten other dogs and their attendant humans. 

Connor’s bog is an off-leash dog park, and for some reason, there is a narrow stretch of the lake, maybe forty feet of beach, which has sand on it.  The rest of the shore is mud, sticks, brush, and moose.  So people kind of stick to the sandy section.  This works well for the wildlife that are trying to raise a family in the area, but it does get a little crowded there from time to time.  I’m afraid that, with so many butts to sniff and so on, Ursa was distracted at a critical moment, and within a few minutes, the prevailing winds had pushed the Frisbee out to the middle of the lake, where lillypads grow.  After a few minutes of hemming and hawing on the beach, during which time it was determined that I had on a pair of underwear which bore some resemblance to swim trunks, I decided the smartest thing to do was to swim in after the Frisbee myself. 

I waded in to my knees, and it was warm water.  Warmer than you’d think a lake of this size would be at that time in the afternoon in Alaska, in fact.  Then, as I went on,  I began to sink into a substance that was some species of mud.  I then waded into that.  It was extremely thin mud, having a lake on top of it to keep it nice and wet, so it wasn’t very sticky, and so, I didn’t actually begin swimming until I was wading in mud to my thighs, when the water was above my navel.  It was about this time that I began to appreciate the distinction between a lake and a bog.  A bog, you see, is a lens of water that sits on a lake of mud. 

A person of a less hearty disposition would have probably decided to turn back at this point, but I felt I had committed to this course of action, and I wasn’t coming back empty-handed.  I squelched on.

When I got to the part of the lake with the lillypads, I found the Frisbee, and I also found two forlorn and hopeless tennis balls, which I offered a ride back to shore.  They accepted, although one of them did momentarily find itself lodged in the top of the mud, where I lost it.  It returned soggily to the surface a few minutes later with a story about its own heroism in the face of muddy specters to terrible to repeat, which I didn’t believe for even a moment.  I was simply not in a good position to believe things like that about the mud that hovered below me, or I would have freaked the fuck out. 

We got back to the shore and dried out.  Well, I dried out (mostly) and the ball was almost immediately descended upon by a pack of ravening dogs, who collectively slobbered on it.  I had no sympathy.  I wringed out my underwear as best I could.

Eventually, I decided to put my clothes on, because I’m not the kind of guy that hangs out in my boxers with a bunch of fully-clothed people around.  I looked forward to the wetness of my shorts which were different from swim trunks in that they were made of cotton flannel. 

It wasn’t till the next day that I discovered that a seam of bog mud had goosed me during my swim, and that it remained lodged in my buttcrack until it was removed by force.  I won’t tell you the entire story, but a power sprayer may have ultimately become involved.

The whole event got me thinking.  This mud, you know, it was very thin.  It seemed to be quite a lot different from your typical mud, which stacks up on itself more densely.  This particular mud was less dense than your typical mud.  It made a very high stack on itself, like a house of cards, or the frosting they put on cakes at the supermarket.  At first, I thought the action of the lake must be enough to keep it constantly stirred up, but on consideration, I decided that the component sediments must themselves be undense.  That’s when I got really annoyed with English for not having a concise word already available that means “less dense.” 

It just got me that I can say hotter or colder, I can say higher or lower,  I can say baller or loser, but then I have to say denser or…less dense.  See? It’s unreasonable.  So I wondered what to do about it.  At first I set out to invent a perfect antonym for dense.  But then I got discouraged.  It’s not a very good way to go about it, you know?  I can’t just go around inventing words piecemeal, because then I have to spend half my time explaining the fuckers.  So what we really need, instead of a full-time vocabulary developer, is just a nice, tidy antonym that means “less [adjective]” and that’s way easier to explain.  We don’t have so many words that actually mean “less [anything],” and it would come in handy. 

I think –et would be a good one.  So then I could just say “this mud is denset than other mud I’ve experienced.” And leave it at that.  And just Reckon that when you want to say something is the “least [adjective]” you could say it’s the [adjective]ets one.  

I think the whole thing’s got a lot of potential.