It's too darn hot. Even with
my air conditioners both running full blast (upstairs and
downstairs) it's 87 F in my living room. There's no
thermometer in my study up here but I think I just burned
my finger on the USB hub.
The forecast, in as much as they
can forecast New England weather, says this uncomfortable
heat will be long gone before the Beach Boys' wedding on
Saturday. They've asked me to do a reading, either write
a few words/a poem and read them or select something
apropos and read that. I have no idea what to write. I've
written wedding poems before and I've written beach poems
before, but nothing seems to be coming to mind. Nancy's
advice was "Whatever you do, don't write about
bones
on the beach!" I reallly
wasn't planning to. I want to say something about the
tenacity of love being like the tenacity of beach grass
(Ammophila breviligulata). After all, it does have
love in its name -- Ammophila is "sand loving" (Greek
ammos for "sand" and fileiu (phila) for
love) - come to think of it that describes the Beach Boys
too. Anyway, I found a passage from Diane Ackerman's A
Natural History of Love that I really liked and ran
it by them for approval. They like it too, so whatever I
write will be a personal add-on, not the centerpiece. Now
all I need to do is find an appropriate t-shirt to wear
over my bathing suit -- something that says "I Love
Massachusetts" or "Thank you, SJC" or the like or just
pick one of my Pride shirts from the tangle at the bottom
of the closet. Only three more days...
Yesterday's writing project,
besides infinite letters of inquiry seeking grants for
the conifer book, was a letter to Governor I've Got Great
Hair and Live in Utah asking him to please stop trying to
stop gay marriage. The funniest part of his approach has
been to try to apply a 1913 law making it illegal to
marry out of state people if their marriage wouldn't be
legal in their home state. Duh? That law is still on the
books? It was meant to stop miscegnation (that's a big
word for "race mixing"). What makes this funny is
Governor I've Got Great Hair and Live in Utah's going
after nonresidents getting married in Massachusetts when
he's a nonresident. So nonresidents can be elected
governor but can't get married?!?
Y'know, I do love
Massachusetts.
In between writing projects -- more
and more letters of inquiry and grant applications won't
some rich dude who loves conifers just give us a whole
bunch of money please -- I shuffled downstairs to fetch
the mail from the front hall. Birding came today
and lo and behold there's an article on identifying
seabirds from shore. And it takes on my
question/frustration about scoters.
Of course they recommend distinguishing them in flight
and I'm always trying to identify them bouncing up and
down between waves. Nothing in there about stress
hormones in bait fish though, after all, it's
Birding not Fishing...
My personal Hungarian dendrologist
phones with news that we got half the money we asked for
on one of the grant applications and a rejection from
another. That's about the right batting average for grant
applications, so I'm feeling good at this point. This
book is gonna be great.
I answered the phone "Dick Cheney's
office", which has become a family joke, and Zsolt
thought I meant I had gone to work for the government --
he asked if I was going to war in Iraq and have the
Ex-Pat sitting here writing grant applications.... I
don't think so!
I'm deliberately messing with the
punctuation and over using italics because I've been
laughing my head off at Eats, Shoots and Leaves by
Lynne Truss. Sticklers unite! Indeed. She's orders of
magnitude nuttier about punctuation than the nuttiest
grammar teaching nun I had in my entire educational
experience. The one thing I wonder about is whether
debates about semicolons and commas are as common in
other languages. After all, other languages have no need
for spelling bees. We know that languages whose
pronunciation matches their orthography don't have the
weird spelling problems that English has. Do they also
have fewer problems with punctuation? Another thing I've
always wondered, which has nothing to do with
punctuation, is whether populations who grow up with
languages whose pronunciation match their orthography
have as high an incidence of dyslexia. Just another weird
thought from the weird side of the table.
Now I had really better shut down
this computer because lightning is flashing and the power
is vulnerable.
