Dave the Trip Planner

I spent all day yesterday at home. It was supposed to get rainy later in the day, so I spent the morning trying to get some stuff done. I moved our rubber trees inside after their summer outdoors -- both of them look much better having had that outdoor time -- and I mowed the lawn. The garden looks much tidier.

I also vacuumed and took care of all the houseplants and washed the door mat at the back door, and I trimmed the bushes along our front steps so we can get in and out of the house without looking too much like the Munsters.

And then I dealt with blogs and blog comments, and finally, after all that, I sat down to read another 100+ pages of "City of Night." I hadn't touched the book all last week but now I want to make a concerted effort to finish it. I'm feeling a bit bogged down. I wouldn't say John Rechy is the greatest writer -- he turns a nice phrase but he's also very casual. Wasn't it Truman Capote who said of the work of Jack Kerouac that "it's not writing, it's typing"? (I also have it in my head that he said that about Jacqueline Susann, but that might have been a joke I read somewhere.) Anyway, Rechy occasionally wanders into typing territory, but the book is nonetheless remarkable for its candor about gay culture in a very conservative era. I wouldn't say it's sexually explicit, except through implication and deduction, but the cultural descriptions must have been eye-opening for many people at the time.

I just learned yesterday, incidentally, that John Rechy is still alive! He's 94 years old. So much for the idea that clean living leads to a long life. After all, the famously dissipated William S. Burroughs lived to be 83.

Our cyclamens have bloomed in the back garden. We planted these things years ago and they just keep coming back. We're always surprised by them, having forgotten they were even there.

Speaking of surprises, Dave has come up with a Thanksgiving trip for us. He bought us tickets to Tenerife on Easy Jet, and found us a hotel. This astonishes me for several reasons: 1) It involves an airport, which Dave detests; 2) We've never flown a discount airline anywhere; and 3) He took the initiative to make the plans. Usually I am the trip planner. I am thrilled to take a back seat for this little adventure even though, like our planned October break in Penzance, it's going to be a very short vacation (about 48 hours).

Remember the blurry photo of my childhood dog Herman that I posted several days ago? I wondered how it would look after being run through Waterlogue, the watercolor painting app. It still looks blurry, weirdly, but it's an interesting effect!