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My latest gardening project is a small, shady grove at the back of the yard -- near the giant tiki head, if you remember the geography from my Flickr photo sets -- whose entrance will be marked by banana trees and Carara ginger. (Yes, I know these plants need sun, and will get it -- they'll be providing part of the shade, that which isn't already provided by the scrubby trees and brush I've left covering the rear quarter of the yard as bird habitat.) I cleared and mulched the whole area, planted asparagus ferns, and arranged lots of container plants -- mostly bromeliads, as well as one tiny jade tree I hope will grow mighty.

The only frustrating thing is that this all happened too fast. I got the idea a few weeks ago and figured I could begin implementing it gradually and lazily, as befits summer gardening. Then I realized I had better go ahead and get those banana trees and gingers in the ground if I wanted them to get a really good head start before winter. I had a burst of energy this week despite pretty bad sciatica, and now, before I know it, the project is practically done. Of course I can keep adding details forever -- I have a broken granite pot that begs for some creeping herb or other, and an empty bracket for a hanging basket, and lots of fence space for art, and eventually I dream of having a stone bench -- but overall it was not the leisurely project I thought it would be. I've always had trouble not throwing myself into things.

[Please note: Because my Assbook is still out of commission and I've kinda gotten used to the witty repartee we enjoyed there, I have temporarily opened this journal to comments from friends. Sorry, I know I have a lot of friends reading who aren't LJ "friends," but I don't feel like dealing with trolls and anyway you can still comment on prime_liquor or one of my other groups. I don't have e-mail notification for comments, so don't go commenting on old entries and expect me to see it. Caveat emptor. Quid pro quo. My name has been Kevin; please enjoy your meal.]

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http://www.dailykitten.com/2009/07/cinder-rumour-whisper/

http://www.dailykitten.com/?p=3196

Location: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

These three beautiful kitties were part of a litter of four (their brother Midnight is hiding somewhere) from our barn cat, Gizzie. Cinder was the big man on campus, fearlessly swatting at our 140lb akita Bear and trekking into the vast depths of our basement. Rumour was the nut case, flying about at top speed, twitching in pure energy. Whisper was our quiet little girl, hiding timidly when she was separated from her siblings or the safety of a warm lap. Midnight, black as night, refused to sit still for any pictures, and consequently we have no shots of his wonderfully emotive face. All of these amazing kitties moved to new homes once they were old enough, and we miss them terribly.

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My Facebook account has been disabled, and I have no idea why. Is there something wrong with the site, or do I just suck so bad that even Facebook doesn't want me? My last status update was, " ... is worried about my hypothalamus. If my brain is worrying about my brain, does that make me meta?" I don't think that violates any FB TOS ...

(Actually, come to think of it, my Amazon Connect page recently disappeared too. I didn't care enough at the the time to try to find out why, but this is clearly a conspiracy!)

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PZB: ...blah blah blah blah blah Stephanie Meyer.

CdB: Uh-huh.

PZB: You don't know who that is, do you?

CdB: Who?

PZB: Twilight?

CdB: What?

PZB: Edward?

CdB: Who?

PZB: Sparkly?

CdB: Huh?

PZB: You don't have any idea at all what I'm talking about?

CdB: No.

PZB: Oh, I love you. I love you so much. You are the most wonderful man in the world.

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Just wanted to mention that Chris is doing something really cool at the Green Goddess for the Independence Day of the Colonialist Power (a.k.a. the 4th of July): they've rented the penthouse apartment on the fourth floor of their building and will be serving a Persian buffet in honor of the people's struggle for independence in Iran. As Chris points out in his entry, "This will be a private RSVP party, and the only way to find out how to attend, with a lush Persian banquet, a clear view of the fireworks display on the Mississippi River during the night of Independence Day, and a preview of a few of our creative cocktails soon to be available at The Green Goddess, only happens if you get an email invitation from us. The only way to score an invitation is to ask me for one on our website email listing for your chef correspondent." Or you can just call for reservations at (504) 301-3347. There's a reason he is being all 007 about this, but I'm not allowed to say it here.

He will also be running a Persian tasting menu all this week and probably next week too. Here's the drool-inducing part of the post:

Our 4th of July Tasting Menu, to Persia and her people,
Let us remember their courage this Summer 2009

Chilled Cucumber Soup (for Rumi)
Blended with Yogurt and Sumac,
Finished with “Snow” from Lemon Balm,
Crenshaw Melon, & Pimm’s #1 $8

Shamsi’s Refreshment
Watermelon Juice, Izze Sparkling Pomegranate & a Big Sour Cherry Ice Cube $8

A Fragrant Slice of Koukouye,
A Persian Frittata redolent with herbs, &
Homemade Havashu Naan Flatbread $9

A Pair of Stuffed Vegetables
Eggplant filled with Roasted Red Peppers and Pomegranate,
Swiss Chard Dolma filled with Zeresk Pilaf of Barberries, Basmati Rice,
Saffron, Ivory Lentils, Pistachios, and Black Lemon $15

Peach-Passion Fruit Tea with Green Cardamom $4

Oasis Sweetmeat
Medjool Date stuffed with Rose-Scented Almond Filling $8

Pistachio Gelato in a “Nest”
Shredded Phyllo, Orange Blossom Water,
Saffron, & Candied Yuzu Peel $9

Tasting Menu $54 (including drink pairings)

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http://www.dailykitten.com/2009/07/melman/

http://www.dailykitten.com/?p=3189

Location: Elk, Wisconsin, USA

This is when Melman was only one month old. It was her 1st time in the grass. Melman is actually a girl, but since she has a twin named Gloria it just fit. Her only brother is Mufasa, but they also have 3 other siblings: Chi, Gloria, and Kiara. All their names are from Disney Channel movies like Kiara, and Mufasa is from the lion king.

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( the month of june )

So now I am in LA. Today I went to Malibu with my two cousins and we
hiked and climbed some ridiculous rocks. Tomorrow is maybe Magic
Mountain. Friday is maybe a lot of things involving Bernarda.
Saturday we fly!

Mood: calm

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Last night I had occasion to send "Enough Rope" to a gay couple from my OLGC rosary group. Rereading the essay, thinking about it and my other, somewhat less serious gender essay "Cocksucker Suit" (published in Greg Herren & Paul Willis' anthology Love, Bourbon Street), I came to a realization that I hadn't ever really admitted to myself before:

I like wearing dresses.

Mentally and emotionally I identify as male and always will, but the older I get, the more fluid my feelings on gender seem to become. It makes me happy that terms like "genderqueer" are used in casual online conversation. It makes me realize that when I put on a nice dress and shoes, fix my sacrum-length hair, and generally get all done up, it doesn't make me feel female; it just makes me feel sharp, the same way I feel when I wear my cockseersucker suit and Stacy Adams boys' alligator loafers. I don't wear much makeup, but I do like me some jewelry. Most of the time my style of dress resembles supergee's timeless description of his own fashion sense -- "garish and slovenly" -- but when I want to look nice, I don't care what gender my clothes are. I did for a while in 2004 and 2005, going through a phase where I wasn't at all comfortable wearing women's clothes or jewelry, but then in '05 there was this certain little event, and after that I found that I had bigger things to worry about than whether wearing a dress made me less manly. And everybody knows that most men in New Orleans, gay or straight, have at least one dress in their closet anyway.

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For nearly two years I could not look at my Authors Guild bulletins at all, and would throw them in the trash as soon as they came. Now their headlines grow increasingly desperate (Spring 2009 issue: "Can This Industry be Saved?"; "The Future of Publishing"; "Keeping Calm in Changing Times" ... ), and I have to confess that I enjoy little thrills of schadenfreude as I flip through it. Not about the misfortunes of writers; I could never enjoy the fact that writers and books have fallen on hard times, but when I think of the incompetent 22-year-old assistant editors and publicists crying because they've lost their benefits package, I must admit I come a little more alive inside.

(From the "Along Publishers Row" column -- and please note that all the Guild's missing apostrophes are sic:

A cartoon by David Sipress in The New Yorker shows a smiling editor behind her desk. Across from her, an author looks shocked as the editor says, "We'd like to publish it, do nothing to promote it, and watch it disappear from the shelves in less than a month.")

Ah, kiddies, I am a bitter old publishing buzzard for sure.

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An ice cream truck just went by playing the theme from The Godfather. That is so wrong, yet so New Orleans.

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http://www.dailykitten.com/2009/07/chester-3/

http://www.dailykitten.com/?p=3185

Location: Madison, Wisconsin, USA

Chester is one of 4 kittens I am fostering for the Dane County Humane Society. He loves tummy rubs and fishing pole toys.

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lolz, LoudTwitter is down apparently, meaning absolutely no activity on my friends page because it all seems to be LT dumps these days.

Changed Twitter SN to match AIM SN because well, why not? Now all I need to do is make a new Myspace with a new URL and I'll be golden...but I'm lazy. If there's a prog I can get to auto-add all my friends I'd do it though.

2nd job interview with Duke people today. Bringing the Patented Valencia Charm™ in full-force. If I don't have a job by the end of the day I'll eat my hat. If I don't have a hat I will procure someone else's, and then eat that.

I can't lie, I kinda want the Lenovo gig I applied for so I could have a fancy-schmancy security badge, also because I could tell people "yeah, I work for Lenovo :smug:"

"...as a barista :smith:"

But I highly doubt I'll hear back from them, plus the Duke gig looks like loads of fun. I imagine it to be kind of like Scrubs. I like Scrubs. :D

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Here's a true one-of-a-kind item: a hand-written piece of perversion by yours truly!

Auction description:

In 1989, Ian McDowell (MORDRED'S CURSE, MERLIN'S GIFT, "Geraldine" in Poppy Z. Brite's LOVE IN VEIN) wrote CRAZY CREATIVE WRITING: STORY STARTERS AND WORD BANKS, a reproducable workbook for teachers of grades 1-4, which was published in 1995 by Carson-Dellosa, an educational pubilshing company based in Greensboro, NC. The book consisted of 30 "Story Starters" -- that is, the first paragraphs of stories, such as "Donna was in her room, playing a game on her computer. Suddenly, a big fat toad hopped out from under the bed and jumped on the monitor. "Give me a kiss, Cute Stuff," it said. "I'm a prince." The reader was then instructed to WRITE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT on the ruled lines following the first paragraph, and use as many words as possible from the provided "Word Bank" while doing so. Each Story Starter was accompanied by an illustration and 12-16 blank lines on which to write, as well as the aforementioned Word Bank.

I'm Ian and will stop talking about myself in the third person now. In the later 90s, I started pestering various professional writer friends to complete a page in one of my contributor's copies of this book. Quite a few complied. NEIL GAIMAN took the story of the Frog Prince described above. POPPY Z. BRITE took the story of Abe, the boy who'd always wanted to join the army, in a VERY perverse direction. Caitlin R. Kiernan wrote a lovely mini-story about Hannah, who woke up one day to find she'd turned into a horrible monster. Kelly Link wrote about Julia and her rapidly expanding cat, turning it into a mini-epic. Other contributors included Mehitobel Wilson, Phillip Nutman, Rain Graves, and Rachel Manija Brown.

The stories are short, but they're original pieces of fiction which will never be published anywhere (I'm pretty sure they can't be, as the begining of each story, the part I wrote, was Work-for-Hire and presumably still owned by Carson-Dellosa, who would not be pleased with the decidedly adult direction some of these authors took the material). Neil Gaiman's, for instance, is 150 words long, and like most of the other contributions, imaginative and laugh-out-loud funny. Each contribution is in the author's own hand writing. You can't have a more limited edition, or a more unique collectable (and yes, I know "more unique" is a barbarism) than this.

Here's a link to the item, which unfortunately isn't mine because it should sell for a mint! Ian's a pal, though, and this really is a nifty thing, so I thought I'd mention it.

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I'm thinking of throwing a birthday party for myself Saturday July 11th since my birthday is officially on the 12th and that's a Sunday. Would people be interested in coming?

EDIT: Like really guys, you better come if you live around here.

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In case any completists were wondering, this is NOT the season of the short-lived anthology TV series The Hunger that includes "The Dream Sentinel," their rather loose adaptation of my short story "The Sixth Sentinel." Mine was on Season 2, hosted by David Bowie (which was pretty much the only cool thing about it), as was an adaptation of a story by faustfatale. I do gather from mentions of Season 2 in the reviews that it may be released eventually.

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http://www.dailykitten.com/2009/06/liam/

http://www.dailykitten.com/?p=3181

Location: Madison, Wisconsin, USA

This is Liam the lover. His favorite things are sleep and eating. He purrs like a locomotive and has a very sweet disposition.

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Tweets here, get'cher tweets here! Fresh and hot!

• 15:26 2nd interview w/ Duke ppl on Wed! Also good to check twitter and see no celebrities are dead today. #
• 18:20 ~28gb of unorganized, horribly tagged LimeWire music in this folder. I have no idea how to even begin the process of sorting this stuff. #
• 19:15 @sakkymeersand Condensed it down to 688mb that I'm actually keeping :o The tagging and such can wait till later. #

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If I didn't know faustfatale and I were destined to be BFF before, I realized it when I found out we had both enthusiastically bought and read the wonderful book Washed Up: The Curious History of Flotsam and Jetsam by Skye Moody, though others scoffed at our "goofy" reading. But right now I use the phrase because I have many little skritty bits of subjects to write about, nothing worth a full entry. Chris and I have booked our 20th anniversary trip to Amsterdam, our second-favorite city in the world, which makes me very happy. We'll be there for our actual anniversary (November 5, Guy Fawkes' Day) and for Museumnacht, a wonderful event we stumbled across on our last trip in 2000.

Gardening goes well; as you know if you read me on Facebook (hey, don't be shy; I'll friend anybody except ex-stalkers), the milkweed I planted attracted a monarch butterfly, the first I've ever seen in my garden! Actually, I made a whole little butterfly garden with purple and white coneflowers, black-eyed Susans, and Queen Anne's lace as well as lots of milkweed, a Golden Trumpet esperanza, & three kinds of salvia nearby. I also have a big passionflower vine for the Gulf fritillaries and plenty of parsley and fennel for the black swallowtails. I found a caterpillar on each one, and I'm betting our black swallowtails from this spring came back and laid their eggs here. We got grandworms!

Later this week I must return to my doctor and discuss whether the Vilify Abilify is actually, er, abilifying me any. I have kept a log of possible side effects which I present to you here:

Overall -- increased use of -pams; intermittent twitch in eyelids (though this is something I've had off and on for years)

6/21 -- bug crawling sensations (I did spend a lot of time in the garden that day and once there really was a bug on me)

6/22 -- a weird euphoria in the AM but it went away

6/25 -- could not concentrate on reading; jumped from one book to another unable to settle on one (this virtually never happens to me -- I finally gave up and read some Carson McCullers, as it's almost impossible not to become absorbed in "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe")

6/26 -- major mood crash; feeling of utter futility & hopelessness -- lasted about 12 hours

6/27 -- still no appetite; price of meds is actually raising my stress level

6/27 (11:30 pm) -- sudden dizziness & extreme nausea -- lasted 20-30 minutes (?), then headache

And that is my flotsam and jetsam for today.

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http://www.dailykitten.com/2009/06/percival/

http://www.dailykitten.com/?p=3177

Location: Madison, Wisconsin, USA

This is Percival the protector. When they came to live with me Percival would stand guard while the other kittens ate. He will still issue corrections for bad behavior when he sees it. However I think he has come to trust me to take care of all of them now. He loves to be held like a baby for hours.

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