Today we took the snortlepig to the zoo. She enjoyed it, although not (as one might expect) because of the animals. She pretty much ignored the monkeys, gave the reptiles a funny look and was only vaguely interested in the ostriches. She did, however, light up when we came to the tapirs. “DU-CKEE!” she cried, and sure enough, there was some exotic kind of goose. Never mind that it was camouflaged in the grass in middle distance and two tapirs the size of buses were lying at her feet in full view - the snortlepig has only mastered the word “DU-CKEE” in the last few days, and apparently intends to make full use of it. So she strode around the zoo searching for duckies, and in between amused herself with the other great highlight of the trip: gravel paths.
That’s my mother-in-law. I cropped her head out not because of malice, but for privacy reasons. (She’s wanted for arson in several burroughs. No, not really. At least, not to my knowledge. It hasn’t come up.)
I tried to get an arty snortlepig-with-kune-kune-pigs shot, but it was tricky; she wanted to climb in with the pigs and had to be restrained. So this is the best we got:
So Deb tagged me as a Kreativ Blogger - and I’m with you on that, Deb, I think I just threw up a little in my mouth. Here we go, then. Deb’s blog is Green V-Neck, a literary endeavor I am happy to endorse because a) her header contains the phrase “foundation garment” and b) just this week she blogged so eloquently about her child throoming on her Blackberry to its ultimate destruction. Plus, she tagged me and them’s the rules. And we all know if you ignore memes, ten of your love ones will die. (And what with the cancer thing and my sister getting hit by a car the other day*, this is no time to take chances.)
Seven Things I Love:
1. Vanilla essence.
2. The high note Tracie Thoms hits at 2:58 in this song:
3. That feeling you get when you really, really really need to finish a book but it’s too late at night and you can’t keep your eyes open, and when you wake up in the morning you try to reach for it before your eyes are open, and grudge every minute of extra sleep you need in order to keep reading. I haven’t had that for a while, unfortunately; used to happen all the time when I was a kidling. Of course I’m currently reading “More Work For Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology From the Open Hearth to the Microwave“, which, while in fact very interesting in its own way, hardly inspires the sort of die-hard fanaticism that afflicts one as a youth discovering The Princess Bride for the first time.
4. Job 38-42.
5. Maple syrup.
6. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.
7.
I’m here supposed to pass the meme along to my seven favourite blogs: but you know, I’m not entirely sure I have seven favourite blogs; I don’t read any on a fanatically regular basis, and those I do are mostly big swanky ones like Pioneer Women who probably eat memes for breakfast. So, tough. If my loved ones perish, they perish. ** (Should I read more blogs? Is this like the thing where websites tell you you can win a trip to Tahiti if you sign up ten of your friends, and you count them up and realise you can only summon about six who would greet you in the supermarket with anything approaching genuine enthusiasm, and four of them you haven’t been in contact with for a year and might possibly have had a baby in the interim, you think you recall hearing from your sister who knows these things, even though she lives on the other side of the world and wasn’t in their class at school?)
*Sprained her ankle, apparently. Not the same leg she recently broke by tripping on a pebble on the beach while getting lost trying to find the ferry; the other leg, because a car “wasn’t there and then suddenly was”. I have sympathy, because I’m a noble and beneficent person, but at times I start to wonder if the gene pool is trying to tactfully crowd her out.
When baking muffins, it is imperative not to let the quietness of your snortlepig fool you into thinking she is being good. She is not. She is doing this.
This week I have decided to be virtuous. No news really, it’s rare I enter a Monday planning to be lax and dissipated; but there you go. In the interests of which, I have made a shocking Challenge: this week, no non-work-related internet. Except emails. And my blog, of course. But nothing else. I can look up nineteenth-century hairstyles for the purposes of writing Suite articles about them, but the minute I get distracted looking up old Empire interviews with Colin Firth or Googling photos of UFOs, off to the hot rack and the Iron Maiden. K? I have cold chills just thinking about it.
In other news, last week I discovered the disconcerting fact that my usually respectable mother would consent to having a sapphire prominently embedded in one of her front teeth for a million dollars. Would you?
