But It's a Dry Heat

Archive for September, 2010

That Home Time Religion

Wednesday night. Under a gray sky, a mass of fat rainclouds rolled over the house. So low you could almost touch them, but opaque and thick like dark gray cotton balls, not misty, like fog. They moved fast. Lifelike spooky, leviathans that hurried east across the valley where they collided with the Sandia Mountains, and broke apart as rain.

Husband critter and I watched, delighted by the first rainfall in months.  Outside, rain collected in puddles on the brick pathways.

After a few minutes we looked at each other and said, “The roof!”  We made for the master bathroom.  (“Master bathroom” being such an incongruous term for a room the size of a closet.)  Once there, we studied a section of ceiling near the ventilation fan.

See, the homebuilder didn’t bother to hook the bathroom fan vents to the exterior vents (Tiffany/Collatz Builders, I’m lookin’ at you).  So for nearly a decade, the ventilation fan had been pumping humid air into the gap between the drywall and roof.  Ruining the roof, insulation and some of the roof framing.

Husband critter and his parents repaired most of the damage.  But that section of roof still leaks on the rare occasion of a real rainfall.

Fortunately, the roof held on Wednesday night.  So scratch “roof-tar-goopy-stuff” off the weekly Home Depot/Lowe’s list. Nevertheless, we both surveyed the bathroom, silently cataloging a litany of dreams.  A new vanity.  Fresh paint.  And did the mold just move?

Our household doesn’t just shop at Home Depot. We tithe there weekly.

Go, Team Scorpion

“Clash of the Titans” is delightful. Delightfully bad. Having recently suffered through the critically acclaimed, but mind-rapingly dull, “No Country for Old Men,” husband-critter and I decided to dip into the shallower side of the cinematic gene pool. Clash of the Titans is the perfect vehicle for some major Mystery Science Theater 3000 style snarking.  Oh, boy. We haven’t had this much fun since the equally vile “10,000 BC.”

It’s like a story recited by your eight-year-old nephew. One event leading to another with no apparent connection, told to you in a breathless rush. It doesn’t make a lick of sense.

Other than the trailer, shown before this newer, more CG-y version of the tale, I’ve never seen the original version of Clash. But this is hardly an improvement. It fiddles with the story from original–Andromeda isn’t Perseus’ love interest this time around–and replaces a wooden Harry Hamlin with a buff, and apparently bored Sam Worthington (who seems to be wishing he’d found something else to do while waiting to shoot the sequel to Avatar).

The absence of a love story with Andromeda, in this case, is a good thing. Andromeda is a saccharin, old-time Disney Princess. She suffers, suffers, I tell you, for the plight of the poor, and feeds bread to starving children. (I dunno. Maybe it was enriched, Wonder Bread?) I’m surprised the filmmakers didn’t throw in cute little bunnies and other woodland animals to gaze at her adoringly. Anyway, she’s a dud.

Liam Neeson, as Zeus, is shiny like a lightbulb, and oozes misery (or maybe he’s just plotting the murder of his agent). Ralph Fiennes as Hades seems to be suffering from a Botox overdose, as he never moves his mouth while speaking. The rest of the cast is so unmemorable, I can’t even remember their names.

Mostly, the film is guilty of larceny. While watching, phrases like, “‘300’ called; they want their wardrobe back” and “Lookee, it’s the Scorpion King!” come to mind.  (Unlike “300,” Clash of the Titans suffers from a profound lack of man candy. It’s like casting went out of their way to find homely men. And wardrobe/makeup worked their butts off making the few good looking chaps hideous.)

And yeah, I was rooting for the giant scorpions.

Good Thing He’s Cute

After spending the morning staring at the computer screen at work, wondering, “What the hell is it I do I here?” I’m back home.  And staring at the computer screen.

My faithful greyhound enters the office, walking carefully over the saltillo tiles.   He makes it to the area rug, sighs in relief, and plops down next to my chair.

“Now this is nice,” I think.  “Exactly why I have a dog.  Companionship.”

A few seconds later he starts farting.  Big dog.  Big, fetid, meaty farts.

I grab a sketchpad and wave it around to clear the air every time he lets one fly.  After about a dozen repetitions of this, Mr. Sensitive gets offended and leaves.

He doesn’t, however, have the good grace to takes the stench with him.

Greyhounds are better seen than smelled.

Like a Dog, But Bigger

It’s six-thirty am and my horse is bugling at the house. I, the antithesis of a morning person, am thinking dark thoughts about glue factories and horse steaks.

Bleary-eyed, I tromp out to to the barn, where the Wonder Horse awaits, stamping, snorting, and registering his displeasure over a marginally late breakfast. I fumble around in the barn, find his fly mask and enter the paddock. Just as I finish dressing him for another fly-ridden day, I notice something black and disheveled by the fence.

He follows, clearly pleased with himself, as I go investigate. The lump turns out to be the remains of a roll of landscape fabric. My neighbor had left it by the fence, and the WH yanked it through and shredded it like tissue paper.

Wonder Horse, now bored, flits off, tail in the air, toward his feeder. Hint, hint, hint. I stuff the remains back under the fence and head off to get the beast his breakfast.  Hey.  It’s not my problem.  The neighbor should know better than to leave anything within WH’s reach.

Non-horse people tend to think of horses as big, dull-witted, docile creatures that stand in fields, placidly munching hay. In truth, they are a lot more like destructive dogs. Twelve-hundred pound, destructive dogs.

Whot I Lurnt at Pubic Shool

‎”Who was Stephen F Austin??? Why are shool is named after him”

That’s the title of a posting at my high school’s reunion page over at Facebook. It’s just a cavalcade of sad. A little misspelled monument to the inadequacy of a Texas public school education. See? Ah canz spel “school.”

Although I’ve professed a disinterest in these people, I nevertheless “liked” the reunion page, engaging in a combination of Schadenfreude and bewilderment. I really don’t remember any of these people. And most of the postings and comments left there contain more typos than, uh, my spam box has ads for cheap Rolexes and male enhancement meds. “Typo” is generous, since most of the errors are probably unintentionally intentional.

Given the quality of discourse at the site, I’d say I’m sticking by my plan not to attend.  As I noted before, my money is better spent on my favorite charity.  Like, say, my Oreo Blizzards for Me fund.

What’s That Smell?

Ah, Fall in New Mexico. When the air is filled with the tantalizing smell of roasting chile.

*Sniffs*

Oh, wait. That’s not chile.

Crap. I set myself on fire again.

Occupational hazard of working with welders and plasma torches.

Coming up, we’ve got two Art in the Park shows and a holiday show over the Thanksgiving weekend. If my motto wasn’t “Why do today what you can procrastinate tomorrow,” I’d already have a vast inventory of metal objects d’art.

But this is me. As of the last show, I was coasting along on the fumes of last year’s unsold art. But it had to go and get itself sold last month. Now I’ve got a scant two months to make all kinds of lovely metal tchochkes for the holiday show.

What’s that smell? Panic.

(Pictured: Mountain goats. Media: Steel.)

Brother, Can You Spare a Zucchini?

In which the Casa de Kirby is struck by a case of “careful what you wish for.”

Rewind several months, back to March, when a young, uh, youngish, erm, what-ever, gardener’s heart warms after the winter that would not end. Me and husband critter are wandering around Lowe’s. We stop by a display of seeds and gardening supplies.

“What should I try this year?” I say.

“Well, how about squash? And peppers. And tomatoes. We have to have tomatoes.”

I peruse the display and take several seed packets. Frankly, I’m a little unenthusiastic about vegetables. Our official “garden,” the part that is protected from marauding rabbits by an adobe wall, is at least 2500-sq ft of flowering plants and shrubs. If it’s not edible, I can grow it.

Vegetables? Not so much. From seed? Fuggetaboutit.

But every year, I try.

This year I tried something new. Raised beds.

Fast forward to September. We’re drowning in squash. This despite an army of squash bugs who treated my garden like a cheap hotel, spending the hot summer afternoons fornicating in the leafy shade. And spawning a whole new generation of squash bugs.

Husband critter, a.k.a., the family chef, scowls as I come in the house, another load of squash in my arms. “More squash?” he says. He’s run out of squash recipes. We’ve both reached the point where if given the choice between starvation and squash, we’d … well, we’d eat the damn squash, but we wouldn’t be happy about it.

“Maybe we should give them to the homeless or something,” says my beloved.

The notion immediately conjures up the following scene: I’m driving. I stop at an intersection, red light and all that. There’s a homeless man standing by the road, holding the obligatory cardboard signage with “Hungry, please help.”

I roll down the window and he hurries over. He reaches out and I plunk a huge zucchini in his hand.

I drive away, fast, before he can gets a chance to throw it at me.

I, Geek

Alternate title, Lazarus, the Xbox.

Horror of horrors, about a month ago our beloved Xbox got a case of the Three Rings of Death.

At Casa de Kirby, this counts as a relationship crisis.  What are a husband and wife to do, if they can’t kill alien hordes together?  Talk to each other?  Perish the thought.

So my super, duper, handyman husband applies some mighty Google-fu to the problem and finds hope. With the proper application of leverage…screws and a soldering iron, it can be fixed.  We can make it better, stronger and more heat resistant.

The fix worked.  For a month.  And then, Three Rings of Death, part deux.  This, just as we had slaughtered the zombie horde in Dr. Ned’s Zombie Island, the add-on to Borderlands, one of the bestest gamer’s games ever.  Or at least the best recent release. (For one, I actually get to play a female character, the ass kicking Lilith the Siren.)

After some agonizing, we decided that we were going to have to give Microsoft some more of our hard earned pesos.  Crap.  So we bought a new Xbox.  Supposedly this version is immune to the three rings of death.

The couple that games together, stays together. Armed with a spiffy new console, we are marching across Pandora in search of General Knoxx’s Secret Armory.

The Music of Chaos Finds a Home

After an assortment of misadventures, my first novel, The Music of Chaos, has found a home.  I have contracted to publish it with Decadent Publishing, a really new publisher.

And by misadventures, I mean publishers going out of business before the ink is dry on the contract, and, most recently, a publisher with a train wreck of a contract that glommed onto every right in existence.  Uh, yeah.  I turned that contract down.

This is my first post in my new, improved, fuzzy wuzzy (like kittens), and usually PG-rated blog. (As opposed to the more caustic blog, where politics, religion and any number of controversial subjects have been, and still will be, ranted about.)

Cheers, and happy Labor Day Weekend!