Saturn's Day

I can't believe it - it's raining outside! Woo hoo! It seems like it's been months since we had rain here in the rain belt. I woke up quite early and thought I heard rain, but I've been fooled more than once with the sound of dirt softly blowing across the concrete being interpreted by my desperate brain as rainfall. I'd have gotten up at 5 AM (which is when I first awoke today) and stayed up if I'd known my precious rain had returned; instead, I crawled under the blankies and returned to the arms of Morpheus. It looks like rain again tomorrow morning - I'm very excited about that!

So yesterday, in the middle of blogging, Egon (MSG, to y'all) called me and asked for my help in choosing a birthday present for a mutual friend - her birthday celebration is today, and we are both attending. This worked well for me, as I was facing a long trek into Madison Valley today to fetch her gift, but instead, Egon kindly drove me down there - in icky Friday afternoon traffick, no less - so that I'd be spared the task today. I'm pleased that I was able to get my task completed. After our chores we went for dinner - more sushi. No sake for me last night, though. I'm looking forward to trying something tasty on the single malt menu at the place we're going tonight, so I thought I'd give Mr Liver a day off. Egon, however, had his first taste of Wakatake Onikoroshi and agreed that it was delightful and refreshing. We had the pleasure of running into a couple of friends of mine at the sushi bar, and thus had some delightful conversation to accompany the tasty fish.

My Freya day began under much more mundane auspices, though - I trotted up to Whole Foods for some dairy products (milk, yogurt, eggs - eggs count as dairy, yes? No?) and some fresh veggies. They also have these lovely bouquets of locally-grown organically-grown flowers, and the colors and textures were so gorgeous that I had to spend $10 of grocery funds on a bunch. My photo doesn't begin to do them justice (damned sun wouldn't get out of the way), but here goes:

As I said, the photos sort of sucks. But I've got them placed next to me here where I sit and type, so that I can enjoy them when I actually look away from the screen and around the room.

I lost a few hours on Thursday and Friday to the Comics Curmudgeon. Excepting Dilbert, Boondocks, and the occasional Non Sequitur, I have considered daily newspaper comics a form of soporific at best, a form of torture at worst. However, Mr Curmudgeon has shown me that, in the right hands, daily comics can be a source of great amusement. I read about three months of entries before the site went from being hysterically funny to mildly amusing. I recommend visiting Jeff Curmudgeon when things at work get so painful (or painfully boring) that you desperately need a good, snarky laugh to improve the mood. And now that I'm no longer at MDC, folks, I know that the snark level has definitely decreased. (In some regions of the building, the backstabbing level has gone up - I don't think CC could help with that unless you can disarm your disgruntled coworkers with naughty remarks about Mary Worth's private life.)

I do want to say that I was seriously saddened by the suicide of writer David Foster Wallace; a man of great insight (I won't waste verbiage on shallow speculations that perhaps he had too much insight), he was full of wise quotes such as this:

"...learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. "

We've few enough thinkers around these days, and I always mourn the loss of one of their number.

I came across another interesting passage in the course of researching one of my many novels. I'm reading a book of letters written during the British expedition up the Scheldt River in 1809 (who says life isn't exciting when one is unemployed - look what I'm doing? I'm reading about obscure, failed military expeditions of the early 19th century!). The author is an excellent writer, his prose clear, and his world view is very liberal (as we would say now - I've no idea what adjective would have been proper back in the day). Anyway, I came across the following passage, and was impressed - and saddened that such arguments have been made for two centuries now and still fall upon deaf ears ultimately.

Congreve is very busy with his rockets. I need not inform you that we are not very much prejudiced in favour of this new invention. I really think that they are scarcely fair weapons; and the principle, that of the introduction of more destructive instruments into the practice of war, should not be encouraged. They must necessarily become common; both parties are men on a level, and humanity only will be the sufferer. War, already destructive, becomes more cruel. Such is our military opinion of Colonel Congreve's rockets.

Plus ça change, plus c'est le meme-chose.