chandler

Picking up a little late where Sharon tagged me ...

The instructions are:
1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Ok... here goes. The book is Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, which I picked up at a local book store because I realized I'd never read any of his books, and I was thinking about detective stories.

"His wife says he never made a nickel off of old man Sternwood except room and board and a Packard one-twenty his wife gave him. Tie that for an ex-legger in the rich gravy."
"It beats me," I said.

Don't know who else to tag, so... anyone who reads this, give it a shot!

stories

1. The scene: 5:00 a.m., my apartment. The purply-gray dawn light is just starting to peek through my windowshades. I am asleep. My phone rings.

Me: (sleepily) Hello?
Drunk Guy: Hi.
M: Who is this?
DG: (challenging) Who is this?
M: Um, Angel.
DG: Where's Brie?
M: I think you have the wrong number.
DG: I don't think so.
M: (tired, getting grumpy and confused) I'm pretty sure you do.
DG: (angry) I'm pretty sure I don't.
M: ...
DG: You're just sitting there, staring at those thousands of gumballs...

At this point, I hang up.


2. Some bad weather rolled in this afternoon around three, and was still going when I left work around 5:30. I was driving home in the pouring rain, listening to a local radio station to see if there were any severe weather warnings out, since we've been getting threats of severe storms all day. Occasionally, I was seeing cloud-to-ground lightning strikes ahead of me to the east.

About half a mile from my apartment, I saw one solid strike and guessed by the time between the lightning and thunder that it was pretty close to where I lived. I eventually got to my building, ran inside (it was pouring rain), and went upstairs. After the requisite e-mail check and changing into non-work clothes, I happened to glance out the window.

It looked like a tree had exploded.

There are shards of wood littering the ground, and you can see the stump where it looks like it burst right out of the ground. Nothing else nearby appears to have been touched, nor does it seem like there was any fire (probably because everything is soaked through, since we've had several inches of rain today).

Pretty cool, huh?

rerun

Hey everyone, it's scone night again!

Yet again, I'm baking scones for work. A couple of the women there decided to have a bake sale to raise money for the relief effort in Myanmar, so I volunteered to bake something to sell. Hence I'm bringing two batches of Lemon Cream Scones in to work tomorrow (made with this recipe plus one small lemon's worth of lemon zest in each batch). However, I did make a third batch... a secret, extra-special batch to be shared with my friends down here.

What flavor? It's a secret. I'll share on Friday (provided I remember to do so between the munching of delicious scones).

I do have some sad news to share as well. I got an email from my mother this morning. My aunt has been in and out of the hospital for more than six months. Most recently she went back in after being out for only a day because she broke her hip. (Notes for those who aren't familiar with my family: most of my aunts and uncles are fairly old, as my parents decided to have children rather late in life. My aunt, for example, is in her 70's.) Last night they discovered that she had no circulation in the lower half of her leg, due in part to a 20-year-old surgery that removed a vein from that leg to perform a heart bypass. She was scheduled to go into surgery sometime this afternoon to try and repair the leg with an artificial vein. But if that doesn't work, they will have to amputate her leg above the knee.

I was never very close to my aunt, for a lot of reasons, but this news has me kinda freaked out. There's some concern that, with how frail she's been, she won't even survive the surgery. And even if she does, she's probably going to be in the hospital for a long time.

It's kind of hard to talk about, so I'll just leave it at that for now.

brunch

Know what makes a good Sunday morning?

Pancakes and The Big Lebowski.

seven

I'm about to lose every inch of coolness I ever earned.

You know what movie I really want to watch right now? More than anything in the world? A few hints first: it's a musical. From 1954. It's one of my mother's favorites, and I grew up watching it on a (progressively deteriorating) VHS tape. It's got a bunch of redheaded men in it. A lot of people would say it's appallingly anti-feminist. Figure it out yet?

Yeah, that's right.

I want to watch Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

Bless your beautiful hide, wherever you may be...