No really… He’s great.

More of the gang with Sweetness, Noodle, Sally and a shocking surprise on the patio under the jump. Read more

I went and took pics of Ben Thompson’s grave at Oakhill and went out to the Round Rock Cemetery to get Sam Bass. Badasses and very bad men, both, and it is surprising we don’t bandy their names around like Wyatt Earp or Jesse James. Funny, the people who get remembered in the popular imagination and the people who don’t. They will be making an appearance in MacabreTexas.com (which has been delayed but certainly not abandoned). As a woman who is supposedly a direct descendant of train robbing thugs, Sam Bass is especially interesting to me.

Out at Round Rock Cemetery, I was overwhelmed by despair and it was all due to my surroundings. I think I am becoming one of those people who whole-heartedly approve of locking cemeteries up at night and surrounding them with walls, because Round Rock is in bad shape. So many overturned headstones. So much garbage everywhere. For a cemetery that is supposedly up kept, it is in bad shape in many areas. It needs less a caretaker than a marksman.

Round Rock is an old cemetery and was once formally segregated and that segregation carried into present times. I felt very happy in the Hispanic section. Statues of St. Francis, huge plastic virgins - I used to find such celebratory graves in poor taste but I like them now. I like being among people who were so loved when they died that their relatives still bring Christmas and birthdays to them.

I had read in several sources that the former slave section of the cemetery was the most peaceful, and if by peaceful they meant “canopied in trees” then I get it. Otherwise it was not peaceful. Stones completely overturned and smashed, trash everywhere. It was a bizarre feeling - a sense of being protected while feeling completely abandoned and forgotten.

A taste of what I saw under the jump. Read more

“O god, if one could only concentrate, concentrate on just the very simplest of things there could be no end to the pleasures of life.”

J.P. Donleavy, from The Lady Who Liked Clean Restrooms

Yes, I have been semi-excited by all the news of impending Ike, but who can blame me? There’s clearly a demographic for weather porn. I love bad weather, in the way that only someone who has experienced precious little bad weather could. Ice storms? LOVE THEM! I can sit and watch the weather men for hours, as they warn about black ice, telling us all to stay at home.

I went to Target today and got candles and batteries and bottled water. I mean, we’ll eventually use all these items so when the inevitable doesn’t happen, I won’t feel the fool that many people who got into fist fights at WalMart over the last can of ravioli may.

Worst case scenario? Our decrepit fence will likely fall over, but we won’t even lose power. We needed to work on the fence anyway, and now I can be all, “Remember when we rebuilt our fence after Hurricane Ike?”

(Cole, who has survived snow storms, dust storms and been on the coast during hurricanes, does not share my love of weather porn. Just thought that bore mentioning.)

Calling Kevin Modares, calling Kevin Modares!

Why, oh why is your name showing up as my top search again?

I hope it’s self-Googling or similar and that distraught people who want to know what happened to their kittens aren’t searching for you again.

Again, read here to find out what I found out about Modares. Never charged with any crime, but don’t give him kittens, cats, or the time of day, okay?

I tend not to discuss politics here. There are several reasons for this. Among them are the fact that I think pretty hard about what I believe and feel no need to discuss it in the blogosphere. Also, I think I can find better things to do with my time than get embroiled in political wank. For example, I could bang my head repeatedly with the refrigerator door. I could eat an entire pie and puke it back up. I could clean Cicero’s butt drags. The list is almost endless.

But let me share some of my more recent observations:

–The most right wing person in Sweden is still more liberal than Barack Obama.

–I think Sarah Palin’s veep nomination is possibly one of the largest EFF YOU’s that a Republican true believer could possibly receive and the fact that the entire GOP did not revolt when her name came out of McCain’s mouth should be a really good indicator of what has become of American politics. You would think they would have learned their lesson with Dan Quayle, but then again, George the First won that election, didn’t he? So who knows?

–But then there’s Joe “Credit Card” Biden. Yeah. I’m real excited.

–This Presidential race has shown me that I am getting old because Barack Obama is the first candidate I could ever really see sleeping with.