In Which We Are Lost

 

Is that stupid Mercury back in retrograde AGAIN?  Because I am in the midst of a string of small time disasters. 

Last week I was on my way to the chiropractor riding in Waymo (the local driverless robot taxi, because I am a fancy boy.)  I hopped out, took two steps and realized I was wearing my sunglasses and my regular glasses had fallen out of my pocket in the backseat of the car that was disappearing into the distance.

When I turned to my dear friend Diane von Austinburg to complain about the loss, she very perceptively asked if I had lost another pair of glasses because she knew that I had just replaced my sunglasses less than a month ago.  That's why it's important to remember dear friends can actually know too much.  I have now decided to simply staple these new glasses to my forehead. 

I was already brooding about these annoying and very expensive calamities when I thought to console myself with a cookie.  The very first bite included something much harder than you would expect in a chocolate chip cookie.  When I fished it out of my mouth it turned out to be a crown.  

My dentist, God love her, got me in the very next day to reattach the crown.  Inspection of the site where it used to live revealed a small cavity, the first one I've had in years.  She breezily assured me she would fill the cavity without any numbing since the nerve there had been removed originally and before I could marshal any protest based on how horrifying that idea is, that's exactly what she did. 

So the obvious answer to all this misplacement is to simply never leave my apartment again.   If I can't see and I can't chew, I will simply have to sit here in the dark waiting for the end.  

Boys I wish I could find: 

Exhibit A.

I also tried to convince Diane that the evening when my dinner consisted of most of a bag of Cheetos meant that I was now a vegan, but she didn't fall for it.

Ready, steady, go.

Our old friend Giancarlo Volti.

Shapely

In Which We Are Mystified

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In Which We Celebrate

 

My birthday is coming up soon and I will be 71 years old, to be mathematically exact.  I had thought I would start ignoring any birthday that doesn't end in multiple 0s, but Diane von Austinburg offered to come out to help celebrate, and any visit from her is always something to look forward to so I am pretending to be a good sport about the whole sorry mess, but there had better not be any choruses of Happy Birthday.  I hope she doesn't get caught up in the ongoing collapse of American airports.  It's only a 3-hour flight out here from Austin and I would hate for her to spend more than that long waiting in line. 

Another reason I am willing to acknowledge this anniversary is that my birthday this year falls on Easter Sunday.  This is only the second time in all these years that that has happened, but it has been a near miss before.  I remember when I was very young my mother made cupcakes that looked like little tiny Easter baskets 

Isn't that adorable?

That was absolutely remarkable because my poor mother, god rest her sainted self, was not a very enthusiastic baker. With four kids and a crappy oven, it's hard to blame her.  So yay for her cranking out a bunch of cupcakes with pipe cleaners as handles, jelly beans as Easter eggs, and tinted coconut as grass.  I don't remember anything else about them particularly and I also don't remember my mother's reaction when I announced I do not like dried coconut.  It's hard being a mom.

Also, completely unrelated to my birthday festivities, I wanted to mention that in comments generated by my recent post about the difficulty in understanding British accents, several of my English readers revealed their varying dialects.  None of them were defensive about it, because all my readers are very nice people, and I appreciate their restraint since looking back at the post I realize I was, uhm, a tiny bit insensitive.  I don't think I actually referred to anyone as having a speech impediment, but it was a near miss, so please accept my humble apologies.  Having read their very English blogs for years, I had always assumed somehow that they all spoke with the most refined, poshest, received pronunciation, Agatha Christie inspired, BBC shipping news articulation.  But it's a funny ol worl, innit?

Guys who need to be my birthday presents

Speaking of birthday cakes . . . .

Let's go for a ride.

Did I mention it's spring?

Spring has sprung.

Time to enjoy the great outdoors.

I'm sitting with all the windows open listening to the knuckleheads down on the street yodeling.

Even in permanently mild weathered San Francisco, we're glad to put winter behind us.

In Which We Are Planted

 

I have no idea where I got the impression that the black plastic pots plants come in from the nursery are not suitable as long-term housing for the plants, but I have for decades been adamant about transferring them into what I believed were more suitable containers.  More informed gardeners and professional landscapers have insisted to me, using small words because they thought that's what I needed, that that is not true, that the black plastic pods are just fine.  But a) they're wrong and b) those cheap pots may be utilitarian, but, man, are they ugly and c) shut up. 

When I had my house and garden up in the canyon, my obsession with repotting was no big deal.  I had a big patio with plenty of room to work in and any mess I made (and I always made a mess) was easy to clean up with a hose and a broom.  Now that I have relocated to an apartment with only a few insolent house plants, my efforts at giving them a new, more attractive spot are considerably more difficult. 

The subject has unfortunately come up again because late last year I bought a really charming fiddle leaf ficus.  It has been a great addition to my tiny collection of house plants, and so I decided it was time to give it a real pot.   Repotting is not really very difficult, but since I have to pull it off in the kitchen, The whole operation is a little more complicated.

Especially since the ficus is fairly tall and the pot is sizable.  But I am a genius and also not all that fussy about the final product.  I always explain to any plant that has come into my grasp "You have two options: live or die." 

In the end, it all came out fine

Ficuses are notorious for going into shock if you move them around and then dropping all their leaves to prove have a delicate they are, but this one seems to be less crazed than that and I hope it will be happy in its new home. 

Boys I'd like to put in a pot:

Au naturel

Much like PhotoShopping, I have decided not to struggle against AI created beefcake.

Are these guys real?  They are real enough

If we can't tell easily if it's AI, then maybe it's not worth the grief of worrying.

AI slop?   I want to slop him

Classical

In Which We Detect

 

I've been on an absolute spree of (mostly) British cop shows, procedurals set all over the sceptered isle.  These range from the excellent (Ellis) to the execrable (Vera), but almost all of them suffer from the cliche of the lead character being damaged and dark.  Maybe that's realistic, they are cops after all. But I'm not interested in Detective Chief Inspector Whatshername's trauma.  I just want to see the bad guys get arrested and thrown in the back of a cop car with the steering wheel on the wrong side. 

Also, why do so many of these supposedly professionals find it so difficult to keep it in their pants around the other supposedly professionals they work with?  As soon as there is an adult male and an adult female in the same interview room, you know they are going to be bumping nasties in the next scene and it will inevitably lead to Drama. Guiltily avoiding eye contact, harsh whispered confrontations in the hall, and then his wife kicking him out or her husband demanding to know who the real father is.  In the meantime, nobody can figure out who dumped the body in the river.  Well Clive, maybe if you could keep your sausage out of Anita's pork pie you might realize it was the roommate.  Duh. 

The worst part though are the accents.  I speak English, honest, and technically so do these characters, so why do I have to watch with subtitles on in order to understand what they're trying to say?  The USA has five times the population of Great Britain, but our entire country has fewer dialects than you find in two adjoining English counties. Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool: they don't fool me, they're making it all up as they go along.  And the further north you go, the more indecipherable it gets.  I tried watching a show set in Scotland, dear God.  Called An t Eilean, the dialogue is in a jumble of Celtic and English, a hash which might as well have been Urdu.  Confusingly, the little scraps of English I could understand did not always match up with the subtitles.  That was enough to convince me to give up, especially in conjunction with the plot holes (the action opened with some woman in Paris getting a call from her father in Scotland saying he'd been shot. Dude, wut? I don't care how thick your accent is, surely you could figure out how to call an ambulance).

So why do I stick it out with these shows?  Because when they're good, they are so much better than American ones, looking at you, Law & Order, the mega franchise that will not die. Anyway I got to go, I have a cold case waiting that depends on an illegal search (are warrants not a thing in England?) and I have to figure out what the slang Gilly is insulting Cletus with.

Guys:

Frisk me daddy.

Everybody's favorite cellmate.

Today's naked guys are brought to you by the letter D.

Sculptural.

Don't squint, it'll give you frown lines.

I have to end it here, Toby is demanding attention and I have tacos calling me.

In Which We Have a Nice Day

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In Whuch We Have a Construction Update

Our story so far: 4 weeks ago, there was a small fire in my building and the resultant sprinklers flooded almost the whole building, only the end of the hall hall where my apartment is located escaped, think whatever god looks over bitter old Queens like me. The water remediation and repairs have preceded remarkably quickly, they have finished all the work in the halls and most of the units.

It's been an annoyance (for instance, the dust occasionally sets off the smoke detectors, always when I'm asleep, causing me to shriek "shut up" which helps exactly as much as you might expect it to) but finally this week they have removed all the fans and dehumidifiers as well as the plastic sheeting on the floor and which sealed off my end of the hall.

My cat Toby has reacted to this by bolting out into the hall whenever he can squeeze past me as I open the door.  He had been pulling that for most of the time that he's lived here, but all the racket and workmen out there had convinced him that a little cat should stick closer to home.  I was okay with his previous escapades, justifying them by saying that I wanted him to know which door was his if he ever escaped.  Toby acted like this was an endorsement of what a tough boy he is.  Of course that act was pretty transparent considering he would demand that I accompany him and would then roll on his side and wait for me to pick him up and carry him back home.  What a little gangsta.

Because he is a terribly friendly faux-gangsta, he would either be terrified by the occasional appearance of my neighbors, or he would run right up to them and demand pets.  The little girl who live next door came to believe he was her cat.  One time, a neighbor had propped their door open to get a little cross breeze and before I could stop him, Toby had hopped over the the doorstep and blew into the apartment.  Maybe he was looking for a new life, I don't know.

I tried getting him to come back out before the neighbor could become aware of this home invasion by hissing and whispering commands at him, and then I gave up and started ringing the doorbell, but the neighbor ignored me.  Eventually Toby showed back up at the door with the air of a butler turning away an unwanted intruder so I scooped him up and we went home.  The neighbor never did appear. 

Now that the construction is mostly over, Toby has returned to ruling the hall and waiting for me to pick him up like a baby which is what he trained me to do.  We also have a game where he sits on the table next to my laptop and bites my hand if I don't brush him, or I will toss his toys at him which he knocks off the table and waits for me to pick up and toss again, so apparently he has taught me to fetch.  How did I get here? 

Naked guys I would definitely play fetch with:

Ink.

Everybody gangsta til daddy comes home.

Stop being goofy.

Open for business.

Just cause it's called a "nutsack" doesn't mean you're supposed to put coconuts in it.

Shapely.