I went to bed at midnight, and I should still be tired, because it’s only 5:27 AM, but we took a long nap after church, yesterday so I’m actually pretty well rested.

The tradition at our church, we learned yesterday, is that the choir doesn’t sing over the summer – a notion I understand but don’t like – and that, instead, people get to suggest favorite hymns, and the weekly music is picked from the most relevant of the suggestions, so I went through the hymnal after my nap and found that of the 710 or so songs in it, there are a total of six that I was familiar with (not including the national anthems of the UK and US, which are both in there, or “America the Beautiful,” which is also in there) BEFORE we started singing with the choir. And of those six, I only like five of them.

So I’m sitting here, with my scalp itching because I’m hot (it’s not hot in the house, I’m just hot), and my brain running circles, trying to decide if I should bother submitting my suggestions at all, because two of the three are sooo cliche as to be over-done.

What are they? In numerical order:
(8) “Morning Has Broken” – cuz I’m a true child of the ’70’s
(376) “Joyful, Joyful” – can there ever be too much Beethoven?
(405) “All Things Bright and Beautiful” – which really should be sung by freshly-scrubbed school-children in uncomfortable outfits, for maximum effect.
(416) “For the Beauty of the Earth” – it’s a really simple melody, and actually it’s inclusion in the Episcopal hymnal surprised me, because I think of it as being sort of Quaker, though I suppose it’s really not.
(671) “Amazing Grace” – a song I’ve loved forever, actually, and have always associated (erroneously, as it was written by an ancient Anglican) with Southern religion.

Clearly, my knowledge of liturgical music is lacking. Must work on that.

But as I sit here, waiting for the first rays of light to paint color in the sky, the birds are stirring into the ultimate dawn chorus, and I’m wishing someone could capture THAT in a hymn.

I say… And you think…?

1. Heimlich:: maneuver
2. Gesture:: noble
3. Party:: line
4. Cuddle:: muffin
5. Room with a view:: Room of one’s own
6. Sebastian:: PDQ
7. Ooooh:: la-la
8. Sigh:: breath
9. Two fish, three fish:: ugh
10. Cake or death:: the bastard love-child of Marie Antoinette and Patrick Henry

Like this meme? Play along here.

…taking your dogs for a walk on a sultry spring evening, and watching them roll in the grass for the sheer pleasure of it.

…smiling up at the moon when you walk – the glorious peach-colored full moon.

…waving to your neighbors, and meeting their dogs, as you pass them on THEIR walk.

…coming home to notice that the tree outside your garage door, that you’d thought was an ornamental fruit tree is actually a fruit-bearing PEACH tree.

…sitting out on the patio on that same sultry spring night, and eating the first peach of the season, sun-warm and succulent, from your very own tree.

A writing challenge courtesy of Tales from the Ridge: 300 words with the title “Disembodied Voices”

She was in bed, with the covers pulled up to her chin and her tiny hands clenched into white-knuckled fists around the sheets. Around the perimeter of her bed, an army of stuffed animals stood guard over her, making sure the muffled sounds from beyond the wall didn’t penetrate her dreams as anything but indistinct sound.

When the sounds got louder, she squinched her eyes shut, so that all she could see was the pixelated after-image of her darkened room, blankness like the snow on an ill-received television channel forming general shapes of furniture on the backs of her eyelids.

She yelped when she heard the *crack* of something hard against something alive…and took herself to the place inside herself where the stuffed animals could talk. “Winnie,” she whispered in her mind, “are you there.”

The golden-brown stuffed bear answered in a golden-brown honey-thick voice, that he was there, and she was safe as long as she kept her eyes closed.

Sleep child, she heard the maternal voice of Raggedy Ann urging in harmony. Everything’s fine when you sleep. In your dreams, everything’s all right.

She smiled into the darkness of her room, and drifted into sleep, an imaginary soundtrack blocking the voices of her parents from her consciousness. She’d learned to do this months ago, when they’d first begun their almost-nightly screaming matches: tune out of the real world, and tune into the songs in her head, or the voices of her dolls.

When morning came, she crept to the door of her room, and peeked out. Finding no one, she announced “I’m going to get juice now,” to the toys that had been dumped to the floor when she tossed and turned in her sleep.

She didn’t wait for any response, but silently thanked them for their vigilance.

I’m told the temperature was over 100 today, though I wasn’t aware of it at the time. Funny, when you don’t know how hot it is, it doesn’t seem as hot.

We watched The Phantom of the Opera on DVD the other night (Wednesday? Thursday? One of those) while eating hamburgers and a lovely caesar salad with lots of garlic. I love the music. I loved the show on stage. I thought the sets in the movie were gorgeous. The movie itself did nothing for me – I felt the entire cast lacked depth, and it annoyed me when they spoke lyrics that were originally sung, because first, when people speak in rhyme, but don’t change the phrasing it sounds really stupid, and second, because it just made it obvious that these actors needed far more experience. Yeah, I’m picky. Sue me.

Tonight, we went to the Cinemark in Cedar Hill to see Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, which is the only Star Wars film I’ve managed to stay awake through since the three I grew up with. Not only that, but I actually enjoyed it. Also, I liked the theater itself – rocking chairs, liftable armrests, and comfy chairs – it’s not the Century 22 (0r 23, 24 or 25) from San Jose, but for a modern theater it’ll do.

The nice thing about having eight million movie theater complexes within a twelve mile radius: No lines. We showed up at 6:30 for the seven pm show, had no waiting, and got good seats. Yay, suburbia.

(In truth, we could have seen it in the theater on our street, but it’s one of those that was built in the old style, with arm rests that don’t lift, and not much rake in the rows of chairs, so it’s fine for a sleeper film in the middle of the afternoon, but not for something that you really want to enjoy).

Fuzzy is on call for the next ten days, but after that we’ll be visiting another sort of movie theater, the Angelika in Dallas, because it’s been over a year since I’ve seen an art film on a big screen, and I’m suffering from withdrawl. I mean, blockbusters are all very well and good, but I like the stuff from the Sundance festival, too. You know, the kind with subtitles, or at least lots of subtext. The movie I want to see, Winter Solstice, may not still be playing in ten days, but I’m sure something else will strike my fancy.

In other news, I’ve expanded my cd collection a bit more, with the purchase of yet another disc I found at Starbucks: From the Ground Up by Antigone Rising, an all-female band with a folk-fusion sound that sort of combines vintage 10,000 Maniacs with Blues Traveler. Lovely stuff. I highly recommend it.

My calendar tells me what month it is, and I keep track of the days, but I’ve been in a writing mood so deep and intense that I haven’t written anything ONLINE since Wednesday.

I’m in a groovous mood, and am often found late at night, dancing in the kitchen, my pony-tail bobbing to the beat in my head.

I’m re-visiting my 2004 NaNo project, attacking it from a different angle, and using different tools, and I’m excited and inspired about it.

More later.

It may not be Halloween, but I’ve had ghosts on my mind a lot lately.

Last night, I woke feeling hot and sweaty, and read the numbers on the clock (5:17) through sleep-blurred eyes. Getting up to click the a/c to a lower temperature would have required moving two dogs and turning on a light, so I merely flipped my pillow onto the cool side, and pushed the covers down, and closed my eyes. Half an hour later, I smelled my grandmother’s night-time cream (oil of olay), and felt a soothing, cool hand over my brow. It’s likely it was just a sense-memory and a breeze from the open window, but I prefer to believe my grandmother was watching over me.

I’m not sure I believe in literal ghosts, but energy, memory, thought – the line between those things combining to give the perception of a presence, and an ACTUAL presence is pretty thin, really, especially for someone like me, who has an overactive imagination.

On other nights, I am dragged from my dreams by nameless terror, a feeling of dread, and a dog growling at nothing. But those are rare happenings, and the older I get, the less they occur. (Sometimes I wonder, though, if I’m merely picking up the dogs’ dreams – for often I am awakened by one of them paddling in their sleep, chasing birds, or scratching to dig a hole.)

Different kinds of ghosts also fill my head – fragments of conversations I’d love to forget, snatches of songs and stories I wish I could remember – these things haunt me during my waking hours, lurking in the back of my brain, and giving me a tiny prick, as with a pin, now and then, to spark a writing project, help me choose music to play, influence a meal I might cook, or a book I might read.

Tonight, we watched National Treasure on DVD – an enjoyable film, for what it was – but the ghost of my grandfather watched along with us, in the sense that I knew this is a movie he’d have enjoyed – he loved puzzles – and a part of me tallied points he would have particularly liked.

They say people you love are with you as long as you keep them in your heart. My grandparents, then, must linger really close by.

I tossed and turned all night, my head filled with thoughts, ideas, notions, and various images that begged to be explored, finally falling asleep just as the sun was coming up and the birds were stirring from sleep.

Birdsong makes a lovely lullabye.

I was in bed, and checking email, at 12:30 this afternoon, got up, did some work, played with the dogs, thought about bathing them, didn’t bathe them, and had a tuna sandwich on toasted tomato-basil bread before realizing that sometimes the One Productive Thing for the day doesn’t have to come until the end.

I made teriyaki chicken and broccoli with soy and wasabi, and we ate while watching 99% of the tivo’d Gilmore Girls episode, missing the very last two lines because it ran over by a minute, and tivo didn’t pick that up.

But I read online spoilers that revealed the missing lines and I’m eagerly awaiting October, and the aftermath.

I came back upstairs to find ants swarming my keyboard – I hate ants. I detest ants. LOOKing at ants makes me itchy all over. So I’ve spent the last hour removing every key from my keyboard, cleaning all the crevices with windex-doused cotton-swabs, and putting it all back together.

Oddly, the computer booted faster with a clean keyboard.

It’s only 11:30, but my body is telling me SLEEP, and I am going to answer, even forgoing a vintage shark movie on TCM.

Because the thing is, even though I’m still in a good mood, I feel as if I’ve really been asleep all day.

We attended our first HOA meeting tonight. We don’t live in a condo, and we’re not a gated community, so it seems weird to me to even have an HOA, but we do, and they were meeting, so we went.

When we lived in our townhouse in San Jose, there were only six homeowners, so we were all on the board, and we had perfunctory meetins every month that amounted to, “The gardeners suck, let’s yell at them, stop parking in the fire lane, who wants to be president next?”

The meeting we went to last was nothing like those informat meetings in California. It was, in fact, much more like the Town Meetings on The Gilmore Girls, full of eccentric characters who bickered with each other, but since our ‘neighborhood’ consists of between 2300 and 2400 homes, I guess that makes sense.

I haven’t observed the characters, or their bickering, enough to adequately describe them, and the meeting room at the library had the a/c set to “arctic,” so what energy I was expending was used for maintaining the minimum body temperature needed to survive, and not really on paying attention, but much of it amused me.

These people need help, but I don’t really want to volunteer for anything that requires being on a committee – because after seeing the sizes of soft drinks here in Texas, I’m terrified that the “camels” these people create would be big enough that one bowel movement would obliterate a city block.

(The reference here is, for the two people who don’t get it, to the notion that a camel is a horse designed by a committee.)

I volunteered to write for the newsletter.
I said ‘yay’ and ‘aye’ and ‘nay’ when appropriate.

But mostly I sat there shivering and thinking, “This would be more fun with coffee, and a better script.”

A writing challenge courtesy of Tales from the Ridge: 250 words with the title “Jackson’s Rock”

Their relationship still felt new, the first time he took her to the woods. She loved him, and could see he loved the cabin like an old friend, so she didn’t complain about the lack of water pressure, the mouse droppings in the back of the pantry, or the miss-matched sheets. She simply took half an antihistamine, and began cleaning while he went to light a fire, and turn on the boiler for hot water.

She asked if they could go for a walk before it got dark. (Before the mosquitoes came out in force, to eat her alive.)

He grinned and said that would be a lovely idea. (She liked that he could use the word ‘lovely’ and not lose an ounce of masculinity.) He made her change into clunky hiking boots, and then took her by the hand.

They wandered toward the creek, a merrily burbling stream of water, with a beach just big enough for two chairs and a cooler. At the end of the beach was a smooth expanse of sun-bathed rock that jutted out into the center of the creek.

He told her as a kid he’d spent hours there, with books and the neighbor’s old retriever for company and that he was always yelled at for not wearing sunscreen, and coming home sunburned, but happy.

They stood on the rock, and kissed in the sunshine, and then he asked her a whispered question, and slipped the ring onto her finger when she answered yes.