Who goes there? Please leave comments so (An Aries Knows)!
No animals in the photo today except unicorns. This is Lynn who does the same job I do for our rescue. Completely independent of each other, we ended up wearing identical sweaters on Ugly Christmas Sweater Thursday. We take the word “team” to new levels depths.
She keeps me sane EVERY day, and I’m pretty sure we are the two tiredest people in Houston.
My friend and fellow writer Jeffrey Ricker makes me laugh on Twitter which is a place I can go only sporadically because POLITICS, FFS. Jeffrey is a bright spot in part because of his retweets titled “Mood” from the account Hourly Wolves.
I have recently stumbled upon a line of cards that inspire me to use them for a weekly Monday: Mood post. Here’s one that made me laugh and laugh.
Something on Twitter took me to an older article about a cafe in Japan where various stuffed “Moomins” can sit with you if you’re dining solo (“nobody has to eat alone”) or if you just want a companion to join you and your family or friends at your table. Of course there was a chorus of, “THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH EATING ALONE!” and “Sure, everybody wants to call attention to their loneliness.” I didn’t read it that way at all, I guess because I have never minded having a solitary meal, seeing a movie alone, etc. I just thought it was a fun and engaging thing, even though I didn’t know what the heck a Moomin was.
So I Googled (of course!) and found out Moomins are “the central characters in a series of books and a comic strip by Swedish-speaking Finnish illustrator Tove Jansson, originally published in Swedish by Schildts in Finland. They are a family of white, round fairy tale characters with large snouts that make them resemble hippopotamuses.”
When I was telling Tim about this, he knew immediately what I was talking about–he knows the books.
I’ve atoned for being the last to know by getting this little guy into my menagerie as soon as I could. Welcome to Houndstooth Hall, Moomin!
The phone rings. It’s Riley.
“Hey, can I come over? I have a new album with your song on it.”
“I have a song?” I ask, smiling. He always chooses a song that’s mine from every album.
“Yeah, it’s your song.”
“Sure. Come over.”
Later he comes in with his distinctive walk and his smile and his dancing eyes, so very Riley-ish, looking like he has something up his sleeve.
He takes out the record and hands me the album cover. I stare at the photo of someone I don’t know: “Elton John.”
Riley gently lowers the arm to play the first song, and midway into it, I laugh. He’s right. It is “your song.”
We listened to the whole album more than once, and I loved it so much that when he left, he told me it wasn’t just my song. It was my album.
It’s drowned now. I have it on CD of course, and no flood water can wash away the memory of the boy I planned to still be hanging out with sixty years on.
I miss you each day, Riley. You can tell everybody that’s your song.
And I cry every time I watch this.
ETA 2022: I’m not sure which video I linked to, but it’s no longer a good link. Since probably everyone knows “Your Song,” I’ve chosen to try again using “Sixty Years On.”
“Dobby has been given a friend!”
So a Stormtrooper and a Sith Lord walk into a bar.
Anyone got a next line?
Anyone?
If someone could figure out how to give The Notorious RBG the immortal kiss, it would make me very happy.
Can you mix FCTRY action figures with other action figures?
Current Photo Friday theme: Motion
This record on 45. There are some songs that define an entire time for you. “Tighter, Tighter” came out in May of 1970 and reached its highest point on the chart in August. Never mind how old I was that summer–I’m 135 now, so you do the math. But I can tell you that it was one of the most amazing times of my life. Music, TV, friends, books–everything I did that summer and everywhere I went was fun and magical, and I seem always to be hearing this song in my memory. Naturally in the great scheme of things, there are more significant songs than this one-hit wonder that Tommy James delivered to and produced for the band Alive And Kicking. And the 1960s and Summer of Love are part of the soundtrack of my life, too, but…
But 1970 marked not only the start of a new decade, it was the growing into a new me. I still hold those people and summer days and nights in my heart and will always. Some of them are still around and know who they are. Some are gone, but they are never really gone.
Some of my best times have involved decks of cards. October 17 is Playing Card Collection Day. I know I just saw my Beatles deck somewhere, but who knows where in this collection of boxes home from storage I don’t have time to unpack. Meanwhile, here are a few unopened decks and one devoted to my favorite thing: reading!
From the 3 of Clubs in the Hooked On Books deck: The three novels with documented sales of more than 30 million were all penned by American women. Can you name one?
The books are (in order of release) Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann.
I try not to give too much real estate here to idiots, so I’ve deleted the name of the original (celebrity) poster who took Daniel Craig to task for carrying his baby in a papoose. But I LOVED this response which explains some rules for how we treat the tiny people in our lives:
