I'm busting out the Halloween icon while I still have time. :O
Birthdays in COVID timez are stranger than usual, though at least this wasn't an important milestone? My son and his friends all turned 21 this year, and it was anticlimactic to say the least. Mine was just a regular birthday, though I cannot grasp the fact that I'm 57 now. Who IS this person?
Plus, as is typical for Sacramento, it didn't FEEL like my birthday. Last Monday, the high was 93o. I was able to go for a bike ride, but it was a shorter one and also downstream (the area I do not love) because there isn't enough shade upstream when it's that hot. G.A.H. (It was also oddly smelly, with a long stretch of "open sewer," a few seconds of what I think of as "burning bus brakes," and an encounter with "resin.") \o?
We had takeout dinner from a nearby Italian restaurant, which included way-too-large slabs of their dark chocolate cake (stupendous). HalfshellHusband had planned to make me a birthday cake from scratch this year, but the recipe is still sitting on his desk like a reproach. He probably still has another 4-5 weeks of healing on his broken leg before he'll be able to do anything normal? Hard to know--it's still incredibly painful for him just to sit or lie in bed, without even trying to stand on that leg. Walking is a long way off.
It cooled down a little last Thursday, so I was able to able to get out in the yard long enough on Saturday to deadhead some roses, pull a few weeds, and bemoan the state of things. The roses were way overdue by then, but with all of the incredible heat and/or smoke we've had from near the beginning of June through just recently, I haven't been able to do much of anything outside for months. The yard needs a LOT of clean-up. Some plants also need replacing, but is it too late for that already? Fall is such a mess here. When summer goes on too long (like this year), you can't plant too early or things will scorch. But if you plant too late, the overnight temperatures and then winter are just as deadly. And Spring was a lost cause because all the nurseries were closed!
But as with most years, instead of having the time to tackle all of that, I'm playing a new round of Idol instead. So I spent much of the weekend thinking about story idea #1, then starting a poem instead, then losing the "feel" of the poem and working on a non-fiction entry for days... and then finding the rest of the poem after the non-fiction entry was complete, so I could flail over which one to post in the last hour before the deadline. \o?
This Idol mini-season is something different, modeled even more closely on the Survivor reality TV show than ever (which makes the community posts even more fun than usual). It's being played over at Dreamwidth (though I believe LJ members can vote over there), and elimination is currently based on which of the two tribes has the fewest votes each round. I wound up being captain of the Asaga tribe, based on an early all-community ranking, and I think that's probably how all of the selection worked? Some of my besties are on the other tribe (with
bleodswean as captain), and some of them are on my own tribe, but it's just 19 writers overall and it's a really great bunch of people. If you can, please take a look at my entry for this week (I went with the poem), and follow the link at the bottom to the poll to vote for ALL the entries you think are good!I'll put up an Octobuddy update at some point, but this post is long enough already, so toodles for now!
