beetiger

OMG Vegetables!!!!!!

This weekend marked five years of having the most wonderful lediva in my life. We celebrated by having her help me sell stuff at a bellydancing show in Brooklyn, and then going out for good cheap Vietnamese food and then walking around Little Italy, down Mulberry Street which is closed to cars on summer Saturday nights so that all the restaurants can let people spill out into the streets. I spent my last dollar on spumoni. We saw guerilla brass. It was just perfect. She got me an mp3 player from Woot, and loaded it with cool music. I got her a poem/lyrics that I commissioned from ladyperegrine, laid out pretty with my modest graphic design skills and put in a frame so that I knew she'd actually get around to looking at it regularly. It was perfect. It was us.

Last night I decided to be spontaneous and actually accept a last-minute offer to vend at a Pirate Fair in Manhattan. It was goth-industrial music, and goth-industrial pirate costuming. No one showed up until midnight. It was very loud. I was old and frumpy and my pirate costume was not black and white striped. There was a charity slave auction at which apparently someone paid $400 to earn the right to do whatever he wanted to his own girlfriend. There were free hotdogs on a little grill in the courtyard. I sold a few things and traded a lot of stuff with the guys at the table next to me who sold leather goods and pretty necklaces. I got home at 4 am. I am tired.

My son was just reading a fairly complicated book to himself, and took the news that he could not have "something from the freezer like ice cream and maybe putting on the brown syrup on it" for a midmorning snack pretty well.

I can't really complain about life.

A little while ago, we participated in Stormhoek's US blogger promo. The party rocked, and I'm sorry if you missed it.

Stormhoek, besides sending us lots of nice wine they wanted to be virally marketed, sent us a bunch of lovely signed and numbered limited edition cartoon prints by Hugh McLeod of Gaping Void fame. They're about 12 by 16 inches, and have some people who look like the letter "R" standing? sitting? and having the following conversation:
"The market for something to believe in is infinite."
"You've been drinking the Stormhoek again."
Ours are numbered in the 820s and 830s out of 1000.

Our guests, though wonderful, were not as numerous as expected, and some of them had the bad judgment to decline to take one of these art posters with them. I can only really hang one of them, so would any of the rest of you like one? It's yours free for the asking.

Feel free to pass this on to anyone whom you know personally that you think might be interested. I've got a dozen of them left.

EDIT: On reading around and finding out that Mr. McLeod is very generous in terms of allowing his stuff to be used by others, I present a not very good photograph of one of the prints.

(Trip was excellent. Detailed post on that later.)

We took Rhys to a little fife and drum performance/reading of the Declaration of Independence this morning, at one of the local historical houses. They were selling little flag-themed pinwheels, and I got Rhys one. It is distinctly marked "Made in China". For the gods' sake, there must be a factory in America able to make cheap patriotic plastic shit, mustn't there?

After the show, they had a table where people could add their names to a facsimile Declaration of Independence. Much as I'd love to have an independent, self determining New York in some ways, I declined.

Could someone arrange for a reasonable number of clothes I can wear this summer without being uncomfortable or being completely hideous on me to show up at my house so I don't have to deal?

Thanks.

Recent events of various sorts have started me thinking about reputation. Lots of people are "known quantities" in certain groups and subcultures. There's some generally accepted knowledge about them (which may or may not be true), whether it's that they are crazy, or that they flirt a lot but don't really mean it, or that they are ridiculously generous, or flaky, or that they give good hugs, or some sort of old story that means that even someone new to the community gets some sense of something to expect from them, even before they meet them.

I probably have some sort of a reputation, in some of the communities I'm in. I've been hanging around long enough, and even though I'm not a super high profile person, I'm not the lowest profile one either. The poly, pagan, and furry communities are all very well known for this sort of thing, and the "mommy circuit" around here does a ton of it as well. The odd thing is, though, that I'm really utterly unaware of my own reputation. I have *no idea* what proceeds me in any of the groups I spend time with. *No idea* what people might joke about when they talk about me. *No idea* what someone might get warned about if they are planning to meet me. And somehow today, I'm thinking that that's a little odd.

Anonymous commenting enabled.

What the heck is "I'd hit it!" supposed to mean, anyway?

It's going to rain any second now, but Nick Jr. is having a Wonder Pets marathon, so it's all good.

Ask me a whole lot of trivial questions. The more trivial, the better!

(Note, trivial, not trivia. I have a very poor mind for actual facts and figures.)

When I was in junior high school, I went to a French language themed summer sleepaway camp. The counselor I fell in love with was named Reba, short for Rebecca, and she was plump with long straight blonde hair, and she was really really smart and was going to Cornell on scholarship in the fall. I had a stuffed toy which was a combination of a pegasus and a unicorn -- a winged unicorn, I guess -- and she told me that that was called an "allicorn". It made sense to me, since it had "all" the features. It took me years to realize that she'd almost certainly just been saying "la licorne", the French word for unicorn.

I was just fishing through the bag of stuffed animals from my childhood that I've got tucked in a closet, which I tucked away from their perches inthe guest room when we set up the nursery for Rhys. There are three of these little white horses in the style I remember, two with yellow-gold wings, and one with a horn, but none with both. I wonder if I made this all up. I hope Reba's dreams all came true.