Bits

A cricket has moved into my house. I haven't heard it chirp, so it might be a female (only male crickets chirp), but it's also rather small, so it might be a younger male who just isn't ready to begin chirping. I've only seen it a few times, clinging to a wall or leaping into a dark corner when I turn on a light. Several years ago, I had a full-grown male cricket living in the den for a few weeks. He took up residence in a potted plant, and I used to hear him chirping softly now and then. I think one of the cats finally got him. My current cricket might be wise not to begin chirping, though there's only one cat left.


I only found out last night that the Cartoon Network has been airing an animated series based on Aaron McGruder's daily comic strip The Boondocks since early November. I suppose they'll be doing reruns of the five or six episodes I've missed. Must remember to tear myself away from the computer Sunday night.


It's looking very slightly foggy this morning, but it's bound to clear soon at this elevation. It will probably be foggy all day in the valley, though. I'm just a little bit envious. I like when the atmosphere matches the inside of my head.

Meltdown

Bright Venus and the nearly full moon were staring at one another across the sky, each floating in a hazy pool of their own light captured by the thin clouds. It was an oddly sensual scene, like one of those glamour photographs romantically blurred by a smear of oil on the lens. As was on my way out, I heard from the television in the next room somebody playing what sounded like something from Ravel's "Mother Goose Suite" on what sounded like a marimba. It was disconcerting, yet somehow appropriate. Everything is slightly vague tonight, all the edges softened, as though the world were about to dissolve. I don't think I'd mind if it did.

Another oddity: Last time I looked at the statistics on the LJ login page, the total number was about to turn over, and there would soon be ten million journals, and there were about two and a half million of them listed as active. Today, it's down to just over nine million total, and a bit less than two million active. I'm wondering what happened. Were the numbers wrong before? Is some glitch making them wrong now? Were almost a million journals lost somehow, half of them active? Probably not that last, or we'd be hearing about it. I'm not particularly worried about this sudden change, just puzzled.

I used to want lots of useless things, but my desires have diminished and become more practical in recent years. Still, every once in a while I see something that is utterly superfluous to my life (though I would undoubtedly derive some pleasure from it), and have a sudden desire to possess it. I would very much like to have one of the limited number available of this. Seventy bucks is very little for eighty years of a weekly magazine. It's unlikely that I have enough free hours remaining in my life to read the whole thing, but the idea of having it available to me is appealing.

My earliest memories of The New Yorker are of seeing it in waiting rooms and at the barber shop, and of thinking it very dull (I didn't get any of the cartoons when I was a kid.) I began buying an occasional copy when I was about 15 or 16, when it was only twenty-five cents a copy, and grew rather fond of it, but I never subscribed to it. I hate to throw things out, and the thought of a thick (it used to get very thick indeed) magazine piling up at the rate of fifty or so copies a year was inhibiting. Six DVD's wouldn't take up much space at all, though, and some 4000 issues in that format at that price costs less than two cents per issue. Such a deal! Eighty years of history crammed into eight little silvery discs. I could probably scrimp together the price, too, though there would certainly be more practical ways to spend the money. But it's so tempting.

Wednesday night already? One week until the solstice. It feels as though the year has come up short. I'd better go out and check, just in case the moon is streaking across the sky like a meteor.