Toad in the Hole

More Things that Go Bump in the Night

Compare and contrast:

Blackface

Drag.

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Brass Tax

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Things that Go Bump in the Night

When the element pandemonium (Pn) is discovered or synthesized, what will its properties be?

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B-B-B-B-Birthday

So it’s my 56th birthday and I got up feeling mostly old. I think this is the first time that seeing that number roll over has been actively depressing. I’m already in one of those spells where communicating—including writing anything down, or talking, especially on the phone—seems like a bad idea. This is a problem when one writes for money. At least when one needs that money.

However, I got a funny (because it reflected my feelings uncannily well) e-card from my sister Jeanne, and Joe managed to find a card with a photo of paired animals on it and space for his wiseass caption inside (which gets harder, as it’s become a tradition between us over the years, and there have been lots of years, and we’re running out of paired animal photos). And he gave me a copy of M. Kat Anderson’s new book Tending the Wild. I’d been lusting after that since I’d seen someone else’s advance copy.

There’s a new feminist blog carnival over at Philobiblion. I’m bookmarking it for later after reading only one entry because I’m already in a grouchy mood and politics just makes it worse. Any politics.

It’s not as if I don’t have enough exposure to bad news. I keep having these moments that I’ve only just recognized as familiar, as resembling some of the time I was in pediatric nursing and somehow wound up taking care of a lot of kids with fatal diseases like cystic fibrosis. The only news would be who’d died. (Getting involved with the nursing home, come to think of it, has a tinge of that too.) Part of the feeling involves the fact that the latest horribleness or outrage or bad news is getting to be just what I’d expected, or familiar, or “Yeah, of course.”

There’s another aspect of aging I’ve only recently begun to feel, and I don’t mean the knees that suddenly won’t get me up from a squat, or the back that’s mostly a background noise, or the weird sounds I get from inside my ears, or the teeth, or the sore arm (they’re taking turns, but so far it’s been one at a time). Or the other stuff, nevermind, it’s becoming an organ recital. I don’t talk about it much (Do I?) except when I have to tell someone that I’m not having a stroke or a crisis, it’s just the same old damned thing, not to worry. This new thing is just a relief that I’m not younger, so I won’t have to see all that much of the future. Frankly, I’m not liking the trends.

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So Fair and Fowl a Day

Driving back from the mountains, I noticed one of those things you notice that you’ve been noticing without quite noticing the notice for the last half hour or so. I’d been taking those little white shreds along the dead weeds on the road shoulders for bits of plastic bag, but for some reason I glanced at a spot long enough for a clearer view, and then did it again a few times for confirmation. You know, that snagged flick of the eye, between bouts of watching the road and that damned fool in the Velcro Mixmaster who can’t decide which lane he wants to be in, at what speed.

Feathers. They were white feathers, and I saw them for at least 30 miles along the road, lots of them. I got Joe to take some longer looks, and we both saw feathers, all white. Some were pretty big, wing feathers four or five inches long.

Conclusion: we were following, at some distance (maybe a day’s or so) a truckload of turkeys, maybe a caravan.

Joe, in W.C. Fields mode: “A truckload of Beltsville Whites. More concentrated stupidity than Congress in session.”

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