On the bus into school and work this morning, madelineusher and I were talking about Emily Dickinson, her favorite poet. Apparently Connie Willis wrote a humorous story in which she pointed out that many of Dickinson's poems can be sung to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas", e.g.

"Oh, because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me!"

madelineusher sang ( Read more... )

The whole family headed over to LVX Lodge for the New Year's Eve Mass-and-party last night. It was great having laurellady along; with her health issues, it's been a long time since she made it to an OTO event, and she sure picked a good one for her re-entry. krishnahermes did such a great job of DJ-ing that we danced far more than old decrepit folks like us should ( Read more... )

We Berrys leave a path of destruction wherever we go! I'm proud to have as a brother the redoubtable gridlore, whose post from earlier today began:
If any of you locals were listening to KCBS at around 1000 this morning, you might have heard the traffic report mentioning "metal debris on the connector ramp from Hwy 580 East to Hwy 24." That was me.
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The good: My friend Merri's "Wicca in One Easy Lesson" class at LVX last night went very well. People who were expecting fluffy-bunny-ness were blown away; I guess they didn't listen when I mentioned that one of her craft names is "Sister Napalm ( Read more... )

It was 39 degrees out when I woke up this morning. I seem to recal that temperatures below 45 are actually against the law in LA; below 40 is just plain crazy. Worse, our bedroom is poorly insulated and doesn't get much warmth from our heating system, so despite running a space heater all night I'd guess it was about 55 in the bedroom when I woke ( Read more... )

Our Thanksgiving plans have been radically downsized due to the continuing illness of laurellady and madelineusher. laurellady was quite prepared to forge ahead with a full day of pie-baking followed by a two-hour drive, stressful time with relatives, and another two-hour drive home; I had to point out rather forcefully that she was (a) coughing her lungs out, (b) not keeping ( Read more... )

laurellady, her parents, madelineusher, and I went to Knott's "Halloween Haunt" (aka "Knott's Scary Farm") last night. The previous time we tried this, a couple of years ago, it was awful; the park was so jammed with people that the primary fears were of suffocation and trampling. But it had been good a few times prior to that, so we decided to give it another chance ( Read more... )

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We watched Kurosawa's film Kagemusha last night.  I had seen it previously, but it was 25 years ago; neither
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