Wordle

Click to embiggen. (It's worth it because it links you to a gallery of wordles.)

It proves I truly am nuts. What great poetry, though:

Cat
Repairs household,
Determinedly squishing parts.
Yell, "Sit!"

Or how about this one:

Leopard, turned dwarf,
Bespeaks tipped glauca.

And

Manual old world,
Surprisingly beautiful.


Many thanks to Bad Fortune Cookie for wordling so wonderfully, I had to try it myself.

Now this is a book.

This book bespeaks passion. Why in the world would one write a book about dyeing with lichens if passionate curiosity did not drive you to do it?

I can just picture the author with a still damp handful of lichens, comparing them to some dusty old manual with completely inadequate illustrations. Is it Ochrolechia tartarea? Or perhaps Ochrolechia parella? Would it impart a royal purple hue? The book remains mute, and the library yields no further clues. "But I want to know!" she wails, then sets out determinedly with pencil, sketchbook, and the completely inadequate dusty old manual to do the research herself. After months of tramping through woodlands and rocky shores, sketchbooks filled with such treasures as "Hypogymnia physodes, underside of lobe showing the lower skin ruptured," cooking pots permanently colored odd hues of brown and purple, and reams of notes ("Cetraria glauca has been included as it will give a yellow to the wool with boiling water," and ""Found in Scotland only on trees"), she settles at the typewriter to share what she has found.

I want to be this person.

p.s. Thank you, Lysne, for lending me this book. It is absolutely amazing.

Talk About a Carbon-Based Life Form

This is what happens when you burn a cow.
Fortunately, I wasn't the culprit. Also fortunately, it was cooked outside on the grill, rather than in the house -- that would have smelled awful. Although that's also why it burned -- it's easy to forget there's a pan of hamburger cooking when it's outside on the grill.

we ran out of cat food this morning; or, the glories of a vegetable garden

Yes,  I actually sit in this chair and revel in the abundant greenness of the vegetable garden. I also weed. Check out that corn! Pole beans are climbing in the background, squash are squishing happily at center, and potatoes are rivaling the corn for Top Dog at the right. If I were sitting in that chair, I would have, from my left to my right, dwarf morning glories, zinnias, beets, carrots, and kale growing at my feet. You can't see the last three so you'll have to take my word for it. (And I'm sort of lying about the kale. A rainstorm scattered the seeds so they're growing scattershot up to four feet away from their row.)

In other news, I bring you the Apocalypse, or We Ran Out of Cat Food This Morning. It would not be overstating the case to say the cats are outraged. I am hiding from Spock because he will bite me. (Really.) They took out a bit of their frustration in thumpitting* around the house at high speed, hissing at each other. Now they are pretending to be tired, but I know I have to get to the store before noon or I will lose a couple toes.

*to thumpit: to run about the house at high speed, over furniture and through the fireplace, knocking over the garbage can in passing. "Thumpit" is onomatopoeic, being the surprisingly loud sound little cat feet make when thundering through the house. The fog creeps in on little cat feet, my Aunt Fanny.