Otherwise known as jury duty, which I was summoned to this week.

( Cut for a lot of blather about what it was like ...  )

OTHERWISE. It is hot and humid. In recent weeks, I have read:

The Sunlight Pilgrims, by Jenni Fagan. Apocafic, ahoy! Really liked it, two thumbs up.
Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived, by Penelope Lively. Memoir of the English novelist's Egyptian childhood. Very interesting, would recommend.
The Astaires: Fred & Adele, by Kathleen Riley. Short dual biography of Fred Astaire and his sister, Adele. Maybe a bit too heavy on the details of the behind-the-scenes construction of a Broadway musical, but still good.

Not sure what is up next -- maybe Min Jin Lee's Pachinko, maybe Paul La Farge's The Night Ocean, maybe something else. :-)

My god, there is a huge fire in an apartment tower in west London.

It looks really bad.

I know at least a couple of you guys will be interested in this ...

Here's a short article (I wish it was longer) from The New Republic about a cache of silent films (dating from the 1910s to the '20s), discovered buried under a hockey rink (!) in Dawson City, Yukon Territory (!!!), Canada. A documentary has been made about the discovery and the films, and the trailer for that movie is included in the article (it looks terrific).

Link to the article and trailer

May is traditionally one of our wettest months here (if not the wettest), and yet this year it was unusually dry. But the first two days of June have been on-and-off good rain. It's raining right now, a heavy, steady downpour. Needless to say, it is INCREDIBLY humid.

Gregg Allman, 1947 - 2017 :-(



20 Essential Songs (Gregg Allman)

We FINALLY got some decent rain early this morning, along with lots of thunder and lightning. Now it is partly sunny and not too bad.

Stayed up way too late last night when I noticed TCM was showing Eraserhead and I watched the first 30 or so minutes of it. Have any of you guys ever seen it? It's certainly ... um. I mean, I did think some of it was actually funny, like at the beginning when Henry (Jack Nance) is in his apartment and there's dead ... plants/ivy/vegetable matter all over the place, and he looks straight into the camera like, "You see what I have to live with." I stayed with it until the first scene with Mutant Baby and then I went to bed (it was about 1:30 in the morning).

Does anyone recognize either/both of these two Housefics? The second one (hiding in rafters watching funeral) sounds vaguely familiar to me but I can't place it ...

EDITED TO ADD ... One fic found, one fic ... well, maybe. Are you out there, verbal_kint? See comments on this post for details, thanks to menolly_au. :D

Have been reading Jay McInerney's Brightness Falls. It is set in 1987, which seems like a lifetime ago and another world. McInerney doesn't appear to believe in consistent question marks, though, because there are many many sentences like this -- "Who is this person," Russell asked Donna. But there are other sentences where people are asking questions, AND THERE ARE QUESTION MARKS. I don't know. It's just an annoying tic in an otherwise good book.

Chiclets, it is WAY warmer than it should be today, and the humidity is horrific. I went for a quick grocery trip and it was a sauna outside. No wonder the weather guys say we could get some ugly storms tonight. :-P

We finally had one of our own tomatoes, and it was DELICIOUS. It was a Carnival, and it was tender and sweet. Sadly, I don't think we're going to get very many tomatoes of any kind this year; maybe it got too warm too soon again, but there are only about five or six young fruits in various stages of green on the plants now.

Had a very funny moment on one of our late-night walks a couple of nights ago -- Layla and I walked past a house with a fenced backyard, and the owner had been a nice person who had cut a small opening in the wood so their dog could see out. So we're walking by the fence, and Layla goes up to it and then jumps back in alarm, and there's a dog! The thing is, though, the opening is only big enough for the dog's muzzle and eyes, so it's like there's this disembodied dog face STICKING OUT OF THE FENCE.* I told Layla it was okay, but it was obvious she was at least mildly freaked out, and I was sure she was thinking OMG MOM WHERE'S THE REST OF THIS DOG? OMG OMG. :D


*I will totally admit to being initially spooked myself, because it did look creepy and besides, it was a very windy night and we'd just come upon a large plastic trash can that had been blown over and was rolling merrily in the street. Layla gave that a hard stare. And right after that was the Disembodied Dog Face. :D

So I'm not sure if I ever mentioned it here, but back in March I decided to pull the trigger on an Embark DNA test ... for Layla. We were curious, what can I say? I'd thought about doing it sooner, but I always held off because we had a truly pants result from a test on our previous dog, Chango (an obvious Chow/Border Collie/something mix that the testing people interpreted as ... Pekingese). But that was many years ago, and surely, I thought, canine genotyping has improved since then! Plus Embark has really good reviews! So I stuck a cotton swab in her mouth (she bit it), swabbed it around to get a lot of saliva (she was very baffled), and sent it off.

The results came back this afternoon.

50.0% Golden Retriever
36.1% Labrador Retriever
13.9% ... Belgian Malinois

:D

For what it's worth, I think they're pretty much on track with what we'd suspected. Two thumbs up, 10/10, would rec Embark.

Ugh, very blah because I did not sleep well. And the night before last, I woke up in a start at 3:59 a.m., feeling as though I had JUST fallen asleep -- like I had been reading, and fallen asleep without putting anything away. I turned on my bedside light -- nope, there were my glasses, there was my full water glass, there was my book with its bookmark neatly inserted between pages. Oy. What the fuck, brain? The feeling was so strong ...

Anyway. Started reading Charlie Jane Anders' All the Birds in the Sky. Liking it so far, and the two lead characters (Patricia and Laurence) remind me vaguely of Meg and Calvin (or Charles) from Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.

Yesterday was my birthday. Just as I get the hang of being 58, I have to start working on 59.

Weather was beautiful today, and I saw a pair of scissor-tailed flycatchers perched on a telephone line while I was out. :D