Very-very-very fine house

Sean and I are officially residents of Palo Alto. We have no furniture and have discovered that our DirectTV account is useless at this new address, but we're moved in and so far everything's fucking super.

I've been riding my bike to work every day - besides the oil-less commute (which I love), the best part is smelling the eucalyptus each morning as I ride through the less developed parts of campus to get to my building. And this morning I watched the sun rise over Hoover tower - it also turned the rolling hills in the distance an amazing purple color.

The new 'hood requires some adjustment for our dog - Brisbane was the land of off-leash living, not so much Palo Alto.

Hopefully muttly will get used to leash-life before she dislocates one of our shoulders...

We're still in the process of emptying and cleaning out our old place in Brisbane - time and energy are at a premium, lately. *Yawn*

Emily, my first roommate in Alaska and good buddy flies into town this afternoon, so we probably won't get much done this weekend, either - she's worthy of the sacrifice, however; no complaints.

Autumn is beautiful in Palo Alto - maybe not as beautiful as New England's, but it's warm and colorful, so as burnt out as I feel, life is really very good.

And that's the news from here.

If you have second, check out this website about breaking the bottled water habit - our water supplies may depend on it.

Read it, embrace it and pass it along.

While I'm at it...

I'm up late due to a surfeit of sleep today. Besides rising late I took a long nap after lunch. This morning I took Frieda to the beach with my coworker, Lisa, and her friends John and Yosh. The dogs had a great time, though I think Frieda overdid it, her hip is sore and being a crybaby, she's acting incredibly put out about it. Me, I feel gritty - there's easily a pound of sand down my shirt.

This last week was busy. Summer is usually slow around university campuses, but I've got some ongoing projects to slog through. Adding insult to injury, I was also hormonal as hell and that tends to suck my energy away. And make me weep uncontrollably. Nonetheless, I had a productive week, poetically speaking, as I entered out an assload of poems into some contests. (Assload: that would be more than "a fucking lot," though considerably less than "goddamn horrifically vast.")

I'm a little disappointed that we don't have any summer vacation plans - all of our travel is happening this fall. Pairing that with my heavy workload makes me feel a little overwhelmed. I'm also bummed that the solstice is behind us - now we start losing daylight. I realize this happens incrementally, but I mourn the loss of sunlight anyway.

We were watching the first of Frontline's two-part series Bush's War tonight. You know, some light, weekend entertainment. It's both impressive and angering at the same time - the horrible march toward war where almost every player in the administration bowed to the whims of fucking Cheney. It's a finely crafted outline with amazing photos and moving interviews. One realizes, watching CIA and Pentagon officials sit and spill their guts out, that these people were burned badly enough to participate in this documentary. These aren't people who would generally run to the media and let loose - they're truly appalled enough by the adminstration's actions to come out 7 years later and tell their stories. Part two begins with the first attack on Baghdad, the actual start of the aggression. As Navin Johnson said in The Jerk: "Roll the ugliness."

Wouldn't Navin be a great name for a cat? I think it would.

Sean's stepdad has been scanning Sean's baby pictures this week (a fucking lot of them) and many of them are unspeakably cute. This is my favorite:

Inauguration

I've decided to move my blog from facespace because I'm jealous of those real blogs out there.

And what could be more fitting an inauguration than to post pictures of me washing the skunk stink from my dumb-ass dog? Again. Will it never stop?

And, no, I'm not wearing pants. But neither is she, dammit.

In other news... Sean and I saw Salman Rushdie the other night in San Francisco, an event that is part of the City Arts and Lectures series - the same wonderful organization through which we've seen Art Spiegelman and Barbara Ehrenreich. Rushdie was endearing - funny, cocky, lewd - he told a great story about playing ping-pong with Charlotte Johansson during which she expressed repulsion over the idea of him licking her face.

I don't know. I'd let him lick my face, I mean, how many people have experienced that?

And, oh yeah, Happy Summer Solstice! If I were in Fairbanks tonight would the night with pretty much zero darkness, although the whole summer is void of a night sky. I miss that - it never stopped me from sleeping, but was really handy if you had to pull an all-nighter doing something interesting, like killing chickens and whatnot.

The weather has been great here - sunny, mild and breezy with spectacular sunsets. The fog has been minimal, instead we have clouds, that's a rarity.

Work is great, too - our 2007-2008 batch of fellows has mostly departed, so the office is empty and our one problem employee has been in Israel for the last week; tender is the workday. Sean and I have no summer travel plans, just hopefully a couple trips to our favorite nude beach and maybe some hikes, should we ever feel motivated enough to leave the house some weekend. We do, however, have some travel coming up this fall. We're heading to Hawai'i with my mom over Thanksgiving and will be spending winter break in Palm Spring with Sean's parents. Best of all, we're going to venture eastward at the end of January to see Barack Obama's Inauguration.

I know, aren't we counting chickens before they hatch?

I say no. Considering that McCain's latest defense strategies have been to call Obama's policies "pre-9/11" (a lame-ass move from the Bush League play book) and say he's untruthful because he decided not to use public funding for his campaign (Is not using public funds really a bad thing? Is that the best attack you can muster?), they're already at crisis point. It ain't getting better from here for McBushinstein's feeble little campaign.

So, we're pretty excited to see a brother in the White House! Which also leads us to wonder, who will speak at the inauguration? JFK had Robert Frost and Clinton had Maya Angelou. Frost is dead and Maya is a Hillary supporter and, well... we really can't think of any other living figure who lives up the task. Thurgood Marshall is dead; ditto MLK Jr; ditto, um, Lincoln. The only person who springs to mind is Nelson Mandela, but he's not American,
so probably not quite
appropriate (though awe-inspiring, nonetheless).

The best speaker, most properly "larger-than-life" pubic figure
I can think of is Obama himself. What a great fucking quandary! Well, no matter who speaks, I plan on being there, this is a moment I don't want to miss.

Stephen Colbert, maybe? Jon Stewart?

And thus ends my first blog - or, as Nixon ended his resignation speech: "In leaving it, I do so with this prayer: May God's grace be with you."

Or as Pynchon says in Gravity's Rainbow:

"What?" - Richard Nixon