I Know the Answer: Do You?

From Word a Day:

"What's common among the five words (scintillescent, vetitive, rapparee, bilabial, froufrou) featured here this week? If you know the answer, send it to wordsATwordsmith.org (replace AT with @). The first person to identify it wins an autographed copy of the book "Another Word A Day".

-Anu Garg (gargATwordsmith.org)"


Hint: think of Noah's Ark

Yay Amelie!

 

Mauresmo wins Wimbledon over Henin-Hardenne 2-6 6-3 6-4.
I am so happy for her, I am skipping inside.

 

Strangers With Candy

We are going to see Strangers With Candy opening at the Varsity Theater tonight. I can hardly wait to hear Amy Sedaris' character, Jerri, referring to her naughty bits, say: "I'm moist as a snack cake down there."

Alphabet Meme

From Pamela:


Accent: none, they say Pacific Northwesterners have "no accent" (except that we say "Warsh-ing-ton.")

Booze: vodka, cointreau, lime, a little fruit juice, shaken with ice, poured up in a chilled glass.

Chore I hate: ironing

Dogs/cats: nada

Essential electronics: PDA with Scrabble

Favorite perfume/cologne: None please, I like a man to be a natural man

Gold/silver: matching gold wedding bands

Hometown: Seattle, WA

Insomnia: Nope

Job title: Family Practice Doc, Community Clinic

Kids: nada

Living arrangements: 1904 little box of a house, the first house built in our neighborhood.

Most admired trait: silliness/sensibleness

Number of sexual partners: I lost count (was I supposed to keep count!)

Overnight hospital stays: hernia operation age 5, chest pain GI scare 2004

Phobia: roller coasters

Quote: "Dreams lost to waking, days undone by sleep."

Relationship, longest: 20 years this December, with Dean. My oh my.

Siblings: 4 brothers, 4 sisters, one sister who is deceased (age 5, diabetes).

Time I usually wake up: 6:00, 6:15, 6:30 at the latest, 6:45 at the very latest, 7:00 at the very *very* latest (Dean is dying laughing right now)

Unusual talent: anagrams and crosswords

Vegetable I refuse to eat: sweet potatoes (is that a vegetable?)

Worst habit: Perfectionist

X-rays: rapid CT of my chest last year: no heart plaque!

Yummy foods I make: I am the King of Risotto.

Zodiac sign: Cancer

  

Ken Lay, the Enron thief and former close buddy of the President, dies of a heart attack. Yeah, right. What a coincidence. Poor guy. I bet it was Bush and his cronies who offed him, so that his jail sentence and other falderal wouldn't look bad on the "family."

It's the Fourth of July and like clockwork the clouds and the rain and the THUNDER have blown in to Seattle. It is NEVER sunny on the Fourth of July here. Oh well, at least those little bottle rockets the kids next door are lighting won't catch our roof on fire this year.

Dean and I sat out back and ate ribeye steaks for dinner, with grilled baby bok choy, garlic and portabello mushrooms, as it rained. We were protected by the table umbrella, and it was actually kind of delightful, to watch the rain coming down, yet not be wetted by it. NPR was playing on our hand-cranked emergency radio. A red-breasted finch was sitting on the telephone wire, watching us, and flapping his little feathers.

Congratulations to Annette Spaulding-Convy, winner of this year's Floating Bridge Press Poetry Chapbook Award. In the Convent We Become Clouds is hot off the presses, and includes a gorgeous letterpress cover designed by Jules Remedios Faye. Read more about Annette and her chapbook here.


THERE WERE NO RULES ABOUT UNDERWEAR

My friend, the Carmelite, could only wear white
non-bikini panties, laceless bras,

but my Order was progressive — red satin, cut
to show some hip, a midnight-blue Wonderbra

hidden under my habit. The fathers were perceptive, not priest
fathers, but men who flirted with me

while their daughters lit Virgin
of Guadalupe candles in the chapel alcove,

men like the firefighter, who ran into my bedroom
the summer night I slept nude, flames

in the cloister attic. I pulled the sheet around my body
as he looked at black lace on the floor —

I need to feel your walls to see if they're hot.

On This Day In History

1937: Aviator Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the Pacific while attempting to make the first around-the-world flight at the equator.


"We must be on you, but we cannot see you. Fuel is running low. Been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at 1,000 feet."

"We are running north and south."

Dean and I went out for dinner at Ray's Boathouse last night. We sat in a window seat and watched the boats putt-putting through the ship canal and out to Puget Sound, probably heading out to the San Juans for the 4th of July weekend. It must be fun to have a boat, especially this time of year, or to be able to "summer" in the San Juan Islands. We will never be rich enough to have a summer house, so I guess the best we can hope for is friends with summer houses (*wink*).

After dinner we drove out to Golden Gardens. The beach was packed! Families having picnics, kids playing volleyball, kids being drunk and disorderly, lovers holding hands and walking the beach. The sun was setting still well past 9pm (or so it seemed) and the light was glorious. We walked up to the railroad tracks and watched a train go by through the canopy of forest, then drove back home through Ballard, which has really changed a lot in the past 5-10 years: a brand new high school building, numerous low-rise condos, lots of new shops and restaurants. We want to try this new Spanish tapas place called Matador, decorated with a bullfight theme (it sounds hokey, but it's really cool), and wrought iron railings and candles and outdoor seating close to the street.

This morning we put in several hours on the yard. We pruned wisteria, trimmed back tomato leaves to get air to the fruit, dug up nasturtiums that were crowding the Walla Walla onions, staked up the huge and leaning towers of crocosmia lucifer, filled the stone bird bath, watered and weeded. It's hot enough for sunstroke! Looking forward to having some friends over for dinner tonight, one of the docs I work with and his wife. We're gonna grill something and eat outside. Fun fun!

I am reading Late Wife, by Claudia Emerson. It won the Pulitzer Prize this year. I had never heard of her before, and am enjoying the book. My favorite poem so far: "Migraine: Aura and Aftermath." The kind of poem I wish I'd written. And then, yesterday, I saw a poem of Emerson's in the new issue of Virginia Quarterly Review, that knocked my socks off, about a piano burning in a field. Amazing stuff: "We watched the keys going furious and all at once,/heard in the fire a music-like relief when the several tons of tension//let go, heat becoming wind in our faces. We learned that when true ivory burns/the flame is playful, quick and green. And in the ash, last lessons: the brass,//clawed feet we had never before noticed, the harp's confusion/of wire, the pedals worn thin, shaped like quenched-hard tongues—loud, soft,//sustain. We waited with her until they were cool enough to touch."

Listen to these, it will bring you bliss

From my friend and fine poet, Allen Braden:

http://www.virtual-bird.com/birdsounds.htm

Beaver Believers

Oregon State (where my nephew Jason just graduated) Wins College World Series.

"A lot of people out there picked us to lose every single game, so thank you for doing that," closer Kevin Gunderson said. "It gave us a lot of motivation to go out there and prove those people wrong."