Photos: my front yard flowers, a future tomato and there’s the future dahlia.

Clutter Warrior
On Friday I was going through the kitchen counter pile. You know the one where bills and infozines from your bank or insurance or old people organization pile up along with reminders and clipped recipes and things you need to file elsewhere? I like to do this every week so nothing falls through the cracks and so there isn’t a giant pile of crap in the kitchen. My husband wouldn’t touch it until the power was cut off if I wasn’t around.

He started to tease me as I tidied, momentarily ignorant of the fact that I enable him to remain blissfully ignorant, and made up some sort of song about me organizing.

“I’m a clutter warrior,” I said. “All I need is a cape and mask and I can be the superhero fighting clutter.”

It seemed funny at the time.

My camera works. Every time I put batteries in there it beeped and the display said, “Batteries exhausted.” How do they think I feel? I tried every battery in one pack and then on a whim switched to an entirely different brand and it worked fine. It would be more helpful if the camera said, “Camera no like Maxell” but guess that’s a lot to ask when you buy the cheapie one.

Photos: my backyard future sunflowers, the mystery plant that has that wispy stuff like fennel or dill on the top and a long root like a white carrot. Anyone know what it is? And a rose.

I finished Annie Proulx’s 2nd Wyoming stories book Bad Dirt yesterday (#14). It’s really fabulous. I read Close Range several years ago and there were two stories that really stuck in my mind. I don’t know the name of the first one and I’d go pull my copy off the shelf and look it up except I can’t find it. I’ve accused my Mom, Sister, and co-worker, who grew up in Wyoming, of having my copy but they all say no so I’m going to buy myself another. It’s a story about a man driving in a snow storm. The other story was Brokeback Mountain.

Doni and I were talking about this book one time, this was way before the movie, and she said, there were two stories that stuck in her mind and it was the same two. The new collection also has two stories that really stick in my mind. The first one is called Man Crawling Out of Trees and it’s about this couple that moves from New York to Wyoming and try to fit in. The couple have a bitter relationship that sets the tone for the story, but there’s a moment in there simultaneously hilarious and pitiful, that says a lot about the woman character. The other story is called The Wamsutter Wolf about this poor trailer folk barbecue that goes from bad to horrifying. My. Great stuff.

I’m always around people who read. My extended family, including the kids, with very few exceptions, all read. My husband reads. When I hear about someone who doesn’t read I can’t understand what that means. Not ever? Or, only the paper and magazines but not books? How could a person not read? I get personally anxious when I see a person get on an airplane without something to read. Why would you do that? Airplane reading is great reading because there’s nothing else to do. When I get on a plane I often have a variety of books because I don’t know what I’ll be in the mood for or whether I’ll finish something. Any flight over 2 hours. Mom once told me she only takes one book on a plane. “What if you finish it?” I asked, aghast. “Sometimes I do,” she said.

I love books and people who love books. Whenever I talk about cutting back on my TV shows it’s always because I want to read more. Check out this Flickr group of people’s reading piles. I took a photo of my reading pile last September.

(click the photo for larger view)

[I need to take a new one because I’ve already read half of these plus even on the big photo it’s hard to tell what some of the titles are.]