The Husband has no fingerprints.
He used to have them; they must have fallen off at some point and he didn’t notice. Either that, or aliens stole them during the night when they took him up to their flying-saucer laboratory, then wiped his memory clean of that experience. I wouldn’t have noticed, because the Husband sleeps so noisily that the sound a flying saucer and its suck-‘em-up ray make would almost certainly be quieter than the shouting, yelling, singing, screaming, talking, thumping, whumping, banging noises he makes pretty much all night long – which Is why I sleep in another room, because it’s the only way I can actually get some sleep.
Amazingly, when the super secret re-badging process at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard uncovered this new and curious fact when the Husband was recently there to re-up his super secret creds so he can take super secret photos of the Shipyard’s super secret on-going projects ---all of which you can observe from Portsmouth, if you have a pair of binoculars and look across the water (because the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard is actually in Maine, not in Portsmouth), the super secret powers that be decided it didn’t really matter. They’ve seen his fingerprints before and don’t seem to care that they’ve since disappeared.
Which I find odd. I’m slowly developing a conspiracy theory about this, but don’t hold your breath waiting for me to reveal it, because I’m really, really tired so it could take awhile.
In the meantime, it’s now officially autumn. And raining. The leaves are slowly turning, on my island of a world, stuff in the garden is slowing, slowing down, the late-planted sunflowers are tall and newly in bloom, the hummers are long gone, I hear owls every night now the air conditioner is out of my bedroom window, and the cats are back to spending all day outside except on rainy ones. It will soon be time to plant garlic, when it’s more reliably cold out. The gladiola flowers this year are beyond beautiful, but are mostly done and soon I’ll be pulling them up and drying out their new bulbs for planting next year. I’m always surprised, every year, when I discover the bulbs I planted are totally spent, but they’ve grown a new bulb atop the old one, that I get to pull off and dry, and toss the old one into the compost to feed the next generation.
Rasta Furian contemplating making trouble
There is something living in the compost bins; I haven’t seen it, but it’s dug a pretty large hole down near the bottom, which was hidden all summer by a volunteer squash plant vine and a lot of volunteer catnip and summer-blooming weeds. I can’t smell it, so it’s not a mink. The cats are fascinated and spend a lot of time atop the compost walls, trying to terrify the thing into running out and revealing itself. So far it hasn’t.
We ‘ve had too much fun this summer with Chemo-Man: two emergency trips to the hospital, one resulting in an un-needed antibiotic that produced nothing but hives, the other that resulted in a colonoscopy which, while it should be reversible, in the meantime comes with its own set of sometimes ridiculous, other times eventually funny, unexpected situations. Just let me say that you’ve not really experienced your mate’s colostomy gear until you’re eye to eye with his stoma trying to line up the new poop-balloon-holding gear, when it decides to shoot diarrhea out at you.
Since I wrote the paragraphs above this one, we’ve had another emergency run to the hospital which didn’t result in a new hospital adventure, though the ARNP in charge did ask me whether I wanted him home or should they keep him there overnight; and again on a Friday, so I had to cancel patients again. And I’ve had another close encounter with the poop balloon, when one decided to fall apart. Yay.
Since the last time I went to F’ing Florida, to move my F’ing FL Friend (was that really only a year and a half ago?), I’ve read something like 250 books; most of which got passed on to friends or left on the Free Bench for other readers. In the past several months, things with Chemo Boy have gotten more complicated, I’ve gotten more tired, and there hasn’t been enough time to do much reading – unless you count the nights I read in bed ‘til the book falls onto my nose and wakes me up.
But I’ve met an author who is new to me and who,
honestly, wrote books I wish I’d written. The man was my age and died of a
brain tumor just a few years ago; and his books are sometimes hard to find, but thriftbooks.com seems to have them, or most of them, usually. His name
was Brian Doyle (not the same Brian Doyle who lives in Canada and writes pretty
good kids’ books). He lived on the west coast; and his writing is so infused
with love and joy for what he’s writing about, and wonder at the people and
critters and land that he writes about, that I’ve fallen deeply in love and am
very sorry that I didn’t meet him while he was still living. If you decide to
look his books up, try to start with Mink
River or Chicago or one of his other novels; or his book of essays
which I’m joyously allowing myself just one or two of, per day, in order not to
run out too soon: Eight Whopping Lies and
other tales of bruised grace. That last is a collection of essays he wrote
for publication in magazines, collected and printed as a book after his death.The lady in the garden, back in July
Prepare to be awed, made to feel humble, and to be infused with wonder and amazement.
For the blog: herondragonwrites. blogspot.com 28 September 2024
All photos Deb Marshall
Onions and garlic drying in the kitchen
