queen of procrastination

Yesterday's procrastination techniques included several outdoor excursions to see what's blooming. Can you blame me?



I mean, it sure beats what I end up doing when I'm stuck inside:

it's so nice to be needed.

[to me, with sarcasm]: "I'm so glad you came home..."

[and then, on a serious note]: "Well, I am glad you came home. I was hungry."

I hear the secrets that you keep...

...when you're talking in your sleep.

Saturday night we went to our friend Crysanthemum's birthday party, and of course I consumed a good amount of wine. After sleeping through the hour-long drive home, I pretty much crawled right into bed when we got back into the house.

I must've managed to get into an interesting state of sleep by the time J came up to bed, because as he was fiddling with his new iPod alarm clock I asked him, apparently very clearly, "What kind of expertise in abstract patterns do you need right now"?

Thank god he had the sense to write my question down. This is the first time any sleep-talking on my part has been documented, and I was as puzzled by the content of my ramblings as J was. The funniest part to me was that the next day he was telling me about this with the expectation that I might be able to explain what the hell I'd been talking about.

Goodbye Kurt.

"Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be."

"Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why."

"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different."

"I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center."

"If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."

"The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest."

Kurt Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors of all time, and he passed away yesterday. I think it's time for me to go back and re-read his books. If you've never read any Vonnegut, you don't know what you're missing. Click here and enjoy.

I love you but now you must die.

I really, really like bugs. I enjoy looking under rocks to see what kind of bugs I might find. In most cases, if I find a spider in the house, I am more likely to catch it and release it outdoors than to squash it (exceptions: if it's night and the spider is in my bedroom, or if it is in the shower with me). As a kid, I dug up worms and twirled them around the axles of my upside-down plastic shopping cart to play "worm circus". I once caught a praying mantis and kept it in a cage. I don't freak out when a bee is flying near me in the yard.

There are only a couple of bugs that I actively dislike. Silverfish, because they are just gross, and earwigs because they are both gross and scary. To me, the worst horror movie ever would involve an invasion of giant earwigs. In our old house last year, we had a big earwig problem and I was thoroughly creeped out.

Now, because I am a geeky scientist and also a bug lover, I happen to be really

fascinated by social insects, and ants are some of my favorites. A lone ant can do some pretty cool stuff, but as a group, an ant colony is capable of amazing things. Leaf cutter ants are probably my personal favorite--they forage for leaves, which they bring back to their nests not to eat, but to use as a medium for growing fungus, which they do eat. This means that leaf-cutter ants have developed agriculture--they actively grow their own food. Pretty neat.

Now, appreciating ants in the wild is one thing, but nobody likes it when they invade your home. Last year in the old house, on top of the earwigs, we also dealt with a minor ant problem after my brother-in-law and his friends watched the house and left chex mix crumbs all over the living room. They were those small black ants, and a few of those little poison baits took care of them.

Currently, in our new house, we are facing a new vermin problem: carpenter ants: They are a problem for me for a different reason than they would probably be bothersome to other people...I really don't like killing them but I don't like having them crawl around in my dishwasher or in my cupboards. In case you didn't realize, these ants are pretty big. So to me, squishing one of them is almost like squishing a toad. They really are more like little animals to me than they are bugs. Maybe it's the way they sit and groom themselves like cats, or they cute way they carry big food crumbs or their dead friends around, but I really feel bad when I have to hear their little bodies go "pop" beneath my thumb and a paper towel.

I've put the poison baits out, but they haven't seemed to have had much of an effect. So I keep on squishing and cringing to myself. I did discover that squirting them with Simple Green or my Lysol kitchen cleaner also kills them, but they do flail around a little before they die. Today I got so frustrated when one crawled around while I was heating up my soup that I took the pot off the stove and shook the ant onto the burner. It seemed to do the trick pretty quickly, but I felt kind of sadistic about it.

The good news is that I just read something that suggested they are more of a nuisance than anything (an exterminator's ad made it sound like they would eat your house) so we certainly won't have to resort to fogging the house or doing anything so nasty. I *have* always wanted an ant farm, after all...

I am not making this up, I swear.

Last night I caught him masturbating on the La-Z-Boy...AGAIN! I will have to check the blanket for stains. I felt bad interrupting him--I mean, you should have seen the look of dopey pleasure on his face.

At first I wasn't sure what he was doing, I thought maybe something was wrong with him. But the second time I caught him, I decided to check more closely and, sure enough, his arousal was physically evident.

I googled the problem, and they say this can be an obsessive-compulsive kind of thing and that sometimes medication helps. But I figure, as long as it's not hurting anybody (and not leaving stains on the crocheted blanket we received as a wedding gift--he really seems to like that blanket A LOT), then what's the harm?

Could you deny this sweet face a few moments of carnal pleasure?