Sunday Mutterings of my Own

Paula and PJ are playing around with BlogExplosion. I signed up too. But even after five minutes poking around and reading FAQs, I have no idea what it's for. I mean what it's really for. Increase your traffic ... rent your space ... Okay, so maybe someone lost his job in the commercial real estate sector and was inspired to see if there's any cash to be suckered out of the blog world, see if those rare paying advertisers might actually find a few blogs worth renting space on. If so, then the BlogEx people can get their cut. That I understand. But if that isn't it, then I don't know what the hell it's for beyond being just a vast mutual linking and blog-lurve circle jerk. So, like, what's it for, anyway?

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I drove a tent until today. Seemed like it. The glue holding up the headliner in my Jeep finally gave out -- hey, the thing's eighteen years old -- and left the fabric hanging down and billowing like the roof of a medieval pavilion after a bad storm. I took to slouching while I drove and leaning back in the seat all the way, so the material wouldn't lie on top of my head. Any idea how annoying that is when you're going to work in the morning, having a sheet of automotive velvet caressing your shower-wet hair? So today I took it out. Undid the panels and the hatchback supports and pulled that sucker out. It's a sheet of foam-covered cardboard, cut to fit, and now sits on the front porch under a tarp, because there's nowhere else to put it and I don't want rain on it and I don't want dogs on it and I especially don't want cats on it. One of these days I'll either get some new material and a spray can of glue and re-do it or I'll take it to an upholstery shop, whichever, but meanwhile the interior of my Cherokee is all stark and industrial-like and I think I kind of dig it. Maybe I'll take out all that frilly carpeting and plastic paneling and shit and turn it into a Real Man's truck: All black or dark blue diamond plate. Wash it out with a hose.

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While I had the hatch up I saw a peculiar thing for the dead of winter and inside one's truck: An old yellowjacket nest. It was small, about the size of a marble, but it was intact and all the little cells were empty, meaning that while it was parked out in the side yard awhile last summer, it provided a home and birthing room for a dozen or two nasty stinging insects. Nests up to softball-sized and beyond turn up in the eaves of the house all the time, especially way up high where there's almost no way to get to them. But in my truck? *shudder*

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Picking up dead Christmas trees is fun. I get to drive around through obscure neighborhoods I'd otherwise never see, I get to pull a trailer (it's just fun, I don't know why, especially having to back out of some tiny little side road), and the boys get to muscle the trees around and jump around on the branches. All that part of it is fun. The rest is not. I won't detail the not-fun part, though it represents about thirty hours of volunteer work on my part, cause, well, who cares? It's all good in the balance. But today I had to go out on my own and collect a few straggler trees we somehow missed yesterday, and they will sit in my yard for a year or two until I turn them into firewood, because the tree chipper was available yesterday, but not today ...


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I never know if any curious would-be stalking soul ever clicks the "location" link over in the side panel, or assumes I'd be detail-oriented enough to center it over anything in particular, or figures I wouldn't quite be dumb enough to center it over my house. Though if you go all the way in and then back out a few, my house does come into view. But anyway, I never know.

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One more thing, added after first publishing. Maybe it's just me, but the text following an image looks closer together than before the image. Does anyone else see it too? It's like the line spacing shrinks after the img tag. One more weird little Blogger thing, unless of course I'm just hallucinating.