Sunday

Didn't sleep too well Sunday night. Not sure why. Just toss-turned all night. This morning I feel tense, tight, all wound up in the flesh and all too loose in the brain. My elbows and wrists hurt in that overworked way.

But then kneeling in a flowerbed and pulling out weeds one after another, hour after hour, will do that to a man. At least the front of the house is starting to look good, but I should probably buy a cheap power-washer to do the windows and paint facing. I turned the compost bins, and set up a trap in the house for fruit flies, since we seem to have a sudden infestation of them in our trash. We cleaned everything out as soon as we found it, but there are still loose bugs in the house, so the trap.

I'm worried about my orchard, though. The apple trees were assaulted by tent caterpillars in mid-spring, and now they're both just groaning under the weight of their apples. I've never seen them so burdened before that their branches are brushing the ground. I can't mow under there and have to pull out the dandelions by hand. The pear tree seems to be doing better, but it's early yet for pears. Wait until they get full-size.

We attended a good-bye party for Kouryou-chan's teacher, who's moving back to her native Ireland. It was sad to see her go; she was such a good teacher and I really liked her. I don't have much in common with many of the people who send their kids to Montessori; I get the impression few of them are breaking their piggy banks to do it, what with all the Lexus and Mercedes in the lot. Great cartoon, though: shows two fish wandering past a mob of fish, all clearly going in different directions. "That must be a Montessori school."

But it was fun to talk to the people there, nonetheless. I was a bit disappointed to discover that at least one woman I spoke with there thought that it was still the school's job to do all the educating. There is that "I'm paying all this money, why should I do the work too?" attitude that depresses me.

When we got home, we did more gardening, I played a chapter of Opposing Force, and then Omaha and I played with Kouryou-chan for a while, making paper crowns and playing pretend games. I made a london broil for dinner that, sadly, wasn't nearly as good as it could have been. And there were yellowjackets in the house-- three of them! Kouryou-chan freaked when one of them landed on her. I got out the portable bug zapper and killed them.

Y'know, I love living in a suburb, especially an older one where there's still a lot of green. But some days that greenbelt is just a source of nuisance bugs, y'know?

Something someone said about Polycamp reminded me of this:

The Naked and the Nude, by Robert Graves

For me, the naked and the nude
(By lexicographers construed
As synonyms that should express
The same deficiency of dress
Or shelter) stand as wide apart
As love from lies, or truth from art.

Lovers without reproach will gaze
On bodies naked and ablaze;
The Hippocratic eye will see
In nakedness, anatomy;
And naked shines the Goddess when
She mounts her lion among men.

The nude are bold, the nude are sly
To hold each treasonable eye.
While draping by a showman's trick
Their dishabille in rhetoric,
They grin a mock-religious grin
Of scorn at those of naked skin.

The naked, therefore, who compete
Against the nude may know defeat;
Yet when they both together tread
The briary pastures of the dead,
By Gorgons with long whips pursued,
How naked go the sometime nude!

Girls Bravo and Litterbugs!

Heh. If you think you've seen harem anime, you ain't seen nothin' until you've watched Girls Bravo. The set-up is about as silly as anything one can possibly imagine. Usually, the male character is a klutz and completely incompetent with women. Girls Bravo takes this one step further-- Yukanari is allergic to women! They give him hives. He's short and cute and women seem naturally inclined to abuse him.

Worse, he lives alone. He's pretty organized, but his parents are "overseas" for the next few months, so he has to take care of himself. This would be tolerable if not for his next-door neighbors. Their water main broke, so their slightly-older-than-Yukanari daughter uses his shower. Being Yukanari, he can't get anything right; when he stumbles into his own bathroom to find her drying off, she accuses him of peeping; when he disclaims any interest in her, she gets mad and knees him. He falls into his bathtub and lands...

... on Selene, the Planet of Women. Apparently, women breed truer here; only one in ten births is male, so women make up the bulk of the laboring and warrior classes. Wars have been fought over men.

Yukanari finds himself a desired commodity, with women, especially the first two to find him, fighting over him, and him completely incompetent about how to proceed.

At least, while on Selene, he doesn't break out in hives when women touch him. Convenient, that.

---

NASA litters! Last week on Mars, while scanning the ground with the microscopic viewer, JPL engineers came across a tiny, microscopic thread that, by golly, looked organic. The team went berserk but chose not to alert the media lest it turn out to be a false alarm.

On closer examination, it turned out they were slightly downwind of an airbag impact site, and the threads were debris from the impact. Bummer.

Senryu #2, Haiku #4, Haiku #5

Senryu #2

To her you are gum
Chewed until drained of flavor
Stuck under her chair.

Haiku #4

Timber sinew strains,
Apple tree branches sweep grass,
Burdened with promise.

Haiku #5

Star-shaped scar on chin,
Muscley legs learning circles,
A child, a bicycle.