potentialities

In May I visited the amazing Minneapolis Arts Institute with my father and brother, the latter of whom was getting ready to leave the Twin Cities after graduation and doing a last hurrah tour as well as entertaining his out-of-town family.

While we were wandering around, perpetually gobsmacked by gallery upon gallery awesome, I suddenly squeaked and darted in the direction of one painting in particular, which turned out to be separated from me by an atrium that necessitated a severe course correction before I found myself standing in front of a familiar canvas: Six Tuscan Poets.

Not familiar enough, however. Upon reading the placard, I realized that, in my initial Google images search, I had been too readily seduced by the appealing composition and sexy hand-porn, and my Virgil/Dante icon turns out to be more of a Guido Cavalcanti/Dante icon, and oh, man, I'm not saying I wouldn't read it, hot young Italian love poets in sweet new love, but talk about your rairpairs.

So I should probably get around to making a new Virgil/Dante icon, but I haven't done so yet. This one is going to have to do for posting about Thrice Purified, virgofolkie's Virgil/Dante set in the same continuum as mine.

I loved the idea when virgofolkie floated it, and now that it exists, I love it even more. A sweet, sensual sexual interlude in Canto I of Purgatorio, with lovely crisp metaphors, poetical banter and philosophical musings, and further sequelae to come!

If you're a Divine Comedy slasher, you should totally check it out.

My mom has been renewing contacts with old acquaintances now that the children who prompted their initial meetings are all grown and gone and everyone has quite a bit more free time. She and the parents of one of my little brother's good friends from his Christian private middle school have been back-and-forthing until they finally settled on a date when our two families were available to get together for dinner and a proposed group activity that all concerned have been known to enjoy. Even I, disinclined by nature to socialize with virtual strangers, opted to attend when I heard that my mom was bringing her famous cheesecake.

I mention all of this, not because it is of general interest, but to explain how I come to be going out to play poker on Good Friday.

... at least it's not strip poker? (John 19:23-24)

My mom genuinely wants this alarm clock and now she is vexed.

Nate, my brother's former roommate of three whole years, accidentally knocked his girlfriend up and they're having a baby together, like, any day now, or something like that.

(This is particularly noteworthy because Nathan, my brother's BFF from their days together in private fundy Christian school, accidentally knocked his girlfriend up and they had a baby together a few years ago. I'm just saying, if your name is Nathan and you know my brother, you should seriously consider celibacy or a vasectomy or something.)

Danny asked me over Thanksgiving what he should get Nate and his babymama for the baby shower. I gave the matter some thought, trying to decide what would be useful to the parents-to-be and also a meaningful gift from my brother, and then I had this brilliant idea: a black hooded towel with bat ears!

Now I just have to manage to make it with my deeply suboptimal sewing skills, but I think it's going to be awesome. Most importantly, they don't know the sex of the baby yet, but obviously both girls and boys can wear black and aspire to be batbabies.

Stan's cat, Clay, is terrified of the Legolas standee in our living room. He pokes his head nervously out of the bedroom and stares into Orlando Bloom's blue contact lenses, unwilling to approach this steely-eyed cat-killer closely enough that he might notice that he is, you know, made out of cardboard.

My mom is so awesome! She found this Legolas standee at a garage sale and set him up in my apartment and made everyone pose for pictures with him.

My dad is also awesome. He and I went to see STAR TREK ♥ ♥ ♥ Like my mom, he only watched TOS, with the addition of some or all of the films, and he really enjoyed it. He remembered back in his Navy days when he was on shore leave visiting some friends and he announced that he had to be getting back to the U.S.S. Enterprise and this little kid was just in awe: "You work on a spaceship?!"

My less awesome plans for tomorrow are to go shopping for shirts, because I don't have enough of them and they all look kind of similar so it looks like I have fewer shirts than I actually do, which is just sad.

I think I really need to/want to get a Wii Fit.

Tomorrow is my brother's birthday and he is in Minneapolis and I will not be making him an awesome cake, alas. I did help pick out his top-secret present.

The night before Halloween, Stan and I decided to take a little late evening stroll through the semi-wilderness that adjoins my backyard, although it was cloudy and dark and everything that had looked completely benign by daylight had taken on sinister aspects. In an even more ill-advised piece of bravado, we approached a little circular clearing containing two indistinct black objects in the center, saying, "Look how spooky they look when you can't see what they are!"

One of them proved, upon further inspection, to be an upholstered armchair, lying on its back and quietly disintegrating. Laughing, we approached the other one, perhaps a yard or two away.

This one made a sound, and something visibly lunged in our direction.

We clutched each other and screamed like little children and ran away, so I don't know what it was. Anyway, I prefer my interpretation, namely, that the spirit of the armchair is haunting us.

It is, of course, 1 November, and so here is my Obligatory Word Count Meter Graphic:

1,674 / 50,000 (3.3%)

If you wish to more efficiently stalk my word count, my NaNo profile page is here, which may actually be more helpful to you if and when the NaNo site shows a greater propensity to load.

At my house we have a large quantity of Legos. Our original collection was fairly substantial, and my mother has doubled it several times over by buying up other people's treasured childhood collections that their parents were selling cheap at garage sales. Right now, they are all arrayed on the floor of my brother's bedroom, because he's not home to object or anything.

( I tried to fit them all into this picture here )

Apropos of very little, Stan asked me how many Lego pieces I thought there were in total. "Um, a lot," I said. He found a pencil and a couple of scraps of paper and thrust them at me and told me to guess how many.

I stared at them for a moment while Stan turned his head and covered his eyes for good measure. Mentally, I estimated what I thought was a quantity of 1,000 Lego bricks, and counted approximately six such regions. Then I noticed that the Legos were not distributed with a uniform depth and added another 2,000 to my estimate. Finally, I don't even know precisely why, I wrote down "8,500", folded my paper in half, and gave the pencil to Stan.

He scribbled something quickly and then we compared our guesses. One said "8,500".

And the other said "8500".

We are spooky.