Home Sweet Home

   At the risk of repeating myself... I'm back! Yes, in case anyone noticed it was a week away from home for the first time in quite a while and it was quite welcome, lemme tell ya.

   It's a short 440 miles- something like eight hours with one stop for gas and two more for stretching the legs and eats -to the coast of the Atlantic Ocean on the barrier islands, the Outer Banks of North Carolina. There a group of, let's see, sixteen if my math is correct plus one very spoiled poodle spent the week enjoying the comforts of a big old residence about fifty yards off the beach. Long story short: Plenty of sleeping in, staying up late, TV Land, sand and scrub, swimming in the pool- I try not to swim in the ocean, sharks can smell my fear, I'm sure of it -hot tubbing, chasing sand crabs and gathering shell fragments on the beach and other lazy, goofing off, vacation-ish kinda things.

   Took in a fishing class, elementary stuff for the real fishermen among us but fun nonetheless for the kids and myself who hasn't wielded a fishing pole in, well, I guess it's been ten, maybe fifteen years. If I may be permitted to boast a wee bit, I caught the first fish during the class, yay! And a few days later, invited to join in surf fishing with the one serious fisherman in our midst, I pulled six or seven little fishes from the ocean, two in a row on the first two casts. Now, that makes fishing fu-u-un!

   More to come, it's late- or early depending on how you look at it -and I'm practically sleeping on the keyboard... zzzz...

 

  

The week that was

...was long and painful. A lingering lower back ailment is making me feel all of my youthful forty-five soon to be forty-six years. I don't recall the exact 'Ouch! My ba-a-a-ack!' moment at all so I guess it kinda sneaked up on me so that by Wednesday night I was laid so low and was so powerfully pained that it took all the grimacing, groaning wherewithal I could muster, a few almost-unprintables, lots of sissified wincing and about half an hour to drag myself from the heating pad outta the bed to the necessary room right next door in the middle of the night.

Too much information, you say?

Well, in other news I've finally finished poring over and though The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke, great stuff*. A massive tome collecting all- or close to 'all' anyway I would guess given the size and scope of the volume -his short stories; plenty that's humourous and thought-provoking, it makes me wanna read more sci-fi again.

Cat is becoming somewhat acclimated to a new sleeping arrangement: wherein my wyfe drags her in and, quickly closing the door behind her, drops the feline at the foot of the bed. I protested mightily given that the last attempt at acclimating her to such close quarters resulted in an early morning footful of something regurgitated and an awful shade of ochre. At first the puss was just bug-eyed, petrified and ready to flee for her life when unhanded inside the domain of her giant captors, then after a coupla weeks she became somewhat resigned it seemed to her nightly confinement- although she regularly managed to paw the door open and make good her escape once her captors succumbed to the embrace of Lethe, as it were. Now, after perhaps a month of repeating the process, she seems almost comfortable and will actually cross the threshold of the bedroom** of her own free will no less.

 She's still a weirdo in my book.

* A favorite? Forget it! There are just too many and besides, my memory is such that I could start reading it again tonight- it's been on the night stand for three, four months, maybe more -and read them over again like it was a new book. I did particularly enjoy the Tales From The White Hart especially though. A gaggle of drinking buddies, all with a more or less scientific bent, all bent on one-upping the last tall tale of their fellow jolly good fellows. Plenty of irony, some twisty endings, some in a darker vein, with a dash of slapstick thrown in for good measure, with a recurring cast of odd men that gives their appearance amidst the stories of space flight and time travel a familiar, episodic flavor when they pop up.

Sort of like Cheers for the rarified English lab coat and tweed set.

**Previously dubbed the 'abyss of boiling lava' after the common ultimate horror of childhood's playground. You know... hot boiling lava under the monkey bars? Where if you let go and dropped to the ground you writhed in mock agony as you were instantly parboiled by the steaming molten stuff? ...Maybe you played different game on your monkey bars...