|
|
|
arc of spinach
Tuesday, July 12 2011
I knew it was going to be hot today, so I thought I'd give the dogs an opportunity to swim if they were so inclined. This morning I took them on a walk in the corn fields north of Wynkoop on the edge of Old Hurley. It was still morning, but already the heat was fierce and the corn fields provided no shade. Eleanor is smart enough to stay in amongst the corn, where a critter her size is fairly well shaded, but Sally insists on walking the main road with me, and by the end there I was a little worried she would overheat. I'd brought seven five gallon buckets with me, and I filled them all with topsoil, most of which I added to the new water diversion ridge I'd built in the lawn south of the south tomato patch. With such a well-defined arc of barren, fertile soil, it seemed prudent to use it agriculturally, so I planted it with a thick broadcast of spinach seeds.
Last night both satellite receivers on our DVR were occupied with the recording of shows, and to record this week's episode of The Bachelorette would have required skipping at least two shows. So instead of doing that, I decided to just download it off Bittorrent. I'd never tried to obtain such fresh content using Bittorrent before, so I wondered how soon it would be available. It turned out that within an hour after the live broadcast ended, a .torrent file for it showed up in the thePirateBay.org .torrent search engine. It wasn't listed as popular (few or no seeders or leechers), but I downloaded it anyway. It proved to be a perfect HD copy, though the download didn't finish until sometime after I'd gone to bed last night. I watched it late this morning while eating a burrito. (I'd made burritos last night and there was plenty of bean glurp left over.)
This afternoon I finally got around to mowing the lawn for the first time in weeks (to give you an idea of how rare this was, I think this was my fourth mowing of the mowing season). As always, I used the weed whacker and it took nearly two hours. It would have taken longer and I would have done more, but the cutting string broke while I was mowing an encroaching colony of Poison Ivy, and I didn't want to handle the weed whacker's spool system until I'd hosed it off and let it bake for hours in the sun.
Normally I don't allow myself to drink alcoholic beverages on Tuesdays, but I have exceptions for vacations (I still have to make up those drink-free days, but they can be any days). With Gretchen gone, I decided I was having a staycation, where vacation rules applied. So I drank the same way I would have had it been a Wednesday.
I only seem to like watching teevee when I'm drinking alcoholic beverages, but there weren't many good shows on the DVR. Fortunately, based on a slide in a Slate.com slide show, yesterday I'd downloaded the Peter Jackson zombie splatter flick Braindead (released as Dead Alive in the USA). I'd watched part of it yesterday, leaving the rest for today. As zombie movies go, Braindead follows a familiar story arc. But it's the details that make it wickedly clever, imaginative, and gut-bustingly funny. The thing about zombies is that, under our society's moral paradigm, there's nothing objectionable about killing them in the most gruesome manner possible, and this is where Peter Jackson lets his imagination run wild. There's a scene where our hero has strapped a lawnmower over his shoulders and uses it to dispatch a roomful of zombies. By the time he's done, the room is monochromatically red and the floor covered with a thick layer of body parts. There's also a wicked little zombie baby who chuckles maniacally and causes no end of trouble (and is accorded none of the tenderness or understanding our culture normally demands for them). Braindead is one of Jackson's "early" works, though it dates to 1992, after I'd already quit being a college student. That's probably why I've had to discover it on my own.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?110712 feedback
previous | next |
