Droman Thugshot

(random thoughts)



This is my handsome, twenty-some-odd pounds lighter hubby working on his mook jong. What's a mook jong? It's that black tube-shaped thing suspended on wooden slats just behind where he's squatting. It has holes in it where "legs and arms" are inserted, and it's used to practise angles and strikes in martial arts training.



See, Bear spent a good part of his life studying martial arts, both in the USA and in Korea, where he was stationed while in the Army. As part of his getting back into good health and a healthy weight, he decided to put up the mook jong and build a proper patio on which to stand and put it to use.



It's now nearly finished, with only a little sweeping of sand and trimming of landscaping cloth around the edges left to go. Way to go, Bear!!! My happiness at the completion of this project has different facets. It means that a) Bear is getting inspired, and b) that previously awful corner of our yard is finally going to be neat AND useful!

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I just came back inside from a wonderful garden visit. The morning is incredibly warm and sunny. Steam rises from the damp leaves, blue jays scream overhead. A murder of crows visited while I watched, fighting over the feeder and causing a ruckus. Our Samhain jack o'lanterns are collapsing happily at the edge of the circle garden, showing evidence of being the main dish at recent squirrel and raccoon midnight feasts. Leaves fall steadily now, making a sound like skittering mouse feet. All of my garden beauties are turning golden and brown, drifting off to sleep for the winter. The air smells like heaven, the blue of the sky is nonchalant, as if it is too busy thinking about something else.

The chinese citron tree is coming into full vigor now, with its ornamental, odd-smelling fruit turning bright yellow and its huge thorns hard and sharp as razors.


Plans for the day:

* Trim the ivy crawling up the side of the cottage and remove it before it invades the attic.

* Get out the electric hedge clippers and cut back the giant euonymus shrub, which used to be so pretty and now looks like Lyle Lovett's head on a Saturday morning.

* Disposition the pile of brush that I cut down and left in the side yard to "thin out".

* Cut the former dish television cable that has been hanging off the roof like a rat tail and annoying the crap out of me for the past year.

* Get to the library and see if Battlestar Galactica 4.5 is waiting for me.

* Switch my summer and winter clothes out. Probably won't do this until after dark, since I can't stand to do anything inside when it's this pretty outside!


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In other news, I got a pretty little pair of silver "endless hoop" earrings on ebay for ten bucks. I wear headsets 8 hours a day, and they dig regular earrings into the sides of my head, causing more swearing than usual. I didn't want to leave earrings out altogether, because then the holes would grow closed, so these little hoop earrings give me a bit of bling without any of the accompanying pain. I love an easy fix!


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Marcheline's Movie Review of the Week:


Awesome. An action movie that fed my fascination with ancient Celtic / Norse stories, handsome men, and women warriors that KICK ARSE... with a little tiny bit of sci-fi thrown in, but only very peripherally. The action sequences are grip-the-armrests great, and while the emotional content of the story didn't have me swooning (this is no "Titanic"), it's definitely a movie I could pop in and watch on any given weekend. I would rate it right alongside the recently released "Beowulf". Rollicking good fun.


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Last but not least, we made a batch of eggplant lasagna the other day. Bear made the meat sauce, using ground turkey, tomato sauce, squash, onions, garlic, and baby portobello mushrooms. All I did was slice up a couple of eggplants, olive oil and onion salt them, and bake them in a 425 degree oven for fifteen minutes. Then I used the eggplant slices as if they were lasagna noodles - layering them with ricotta cheese, meat sauce, and shredded mozzarella cheese in a Corningware covered dish. Baked the whole shebang in a 350 degree oven until bubbly, broiled it a few minutes to brown the cheese on top, and .... YUMMMMY! It's a South Beach Diet friendly recipe, but I would eat this even if I wasn't on the diet. Eggplant rocks.

This is not where I thought I was going

This post was going to be all about how excited I was to have finally "wrapped up" (pun alert) my Faux Greenhouse de Herb Garden project. Which is actually my first real effort in attempting to make a rosemary plant live through the winter. Most of our herbs are not perennials, and our sage, mint, and thyme have lived through every winter since we planted them without any help at all, so really this is all about the rosemary.

I was going to detail the war between myself and the coiled chicken wire, in which I attempted to straighten it out, and it attempted to poke me full of ragged holes. I planned to re-enact the painstaking process (a pun! a pun! my kingdom for a pun!) of threading tiny bamboo poles through said chicken wire in order to hammer them into the ground for support. I had visions of chuntering on happily about the plastic and how soft and easy it was to work with, as the day was blessedly still - not a breath of wind while I worked.

Yes, that is what this post was going to be about, folks. And now, after seeing the picture I took of the finished product, I have only one thing to say.

Welcome to the morgue.

Meet Jean and Lionel!

Today was one of the most perfectly sunny, chilly fall days that ever fell off the tip of an artist's paint brush. Bear and I had decided to "bump" the weight-loss plateau we'd both been struggling with by going off the diet for one day, so we bundled into his vehicle and went to breakfast at Country Kitchen. We chowed down happily on biscuits, sausage, and gravy, eggs, hashbrowns, and coffee. It was bliss!

As we had to go down to the movie rental store to return a video, I suggested we swing by the little local nursery on the way home, just to see if they had any "winter's coming" sales, or any plants left at all. Happily, they did - both - and we got these two gorgeous beauty berry bushes for half price!




We almost always name our trees and shrubbery, and I dubbed this pair Jean and Lionel, after the two main characters in one of our all-time favorite British television series. Like the beauty berry bushes, Jean (played by Judi Dench) and Lionel (played by Geoffrey Palmer) are a little scratchy on the outside, but have a lovely and long-lasting relationship. Welcome to Thistlebright Gardens, Jean and Lionel! I hope you will enjoy living with us more and more, as time goes by...

The original Lionel and Jean

** Side note: I had to look up the word "series", as I wasn't sure what the plural was. Serieses? Surely not! As it turns out, it's one of those "irregular plural nouns", like fish and headquarters, which is used identically for singular or plural cases. You learn something new every day.

For Cait O'Connor

Silver Ravenwolf, the author of some of my favorite pagan books, had a contest on her blog last year. She posted this picture (above) and asked people to submit poems, stories, or graphic art involving the two girls in the picture. My entry was picked as the winner of the poems, and I was pleased as punch!

I am reprinting it in case my friend Cait O'Connor stops by for a keek, and also because it's a fitting poem for this Samhain season.

The Silver Chain

The sisters lived down in the glen
Beyond the grassy plain
Fair Ellen wore an angel’s face
Her twin, a silver chain

Ellen loved the wildling Hugh
All others she disdained
Her twin was left alone to sigh
And twist her silver chain

Her fingers worked a midnight spell
Fair Ellen to restrain
She wove a silken Samhain web
With threads of silver chain

But love, the strongest magick,
Sighed out its sweet refrain
Fair Ellen wore a wedding gown
Her twin, a silver chain

Genius or insanity? You decide.

The unbelievable art of Kris Kuksi.

Feelin' a bit peaked

Yesterday morning I woke up with... well, let's just say it felt like buffaloes were running around trampling my lower intestines flat. I got to know the back of my bathroom door much better than I ever wanted to, as I spent much of the day staring at it. 'Nuff said.

Strangely enough, the malady didn't take my appetite, and I didn't notice any particular effects for better or worse after eating the delicious breakfast that Bear cooked up for us. But neither did the problem go away.



Last night, when I laid down to sleep, the rumbling started. My guts started howling and hooting and rumbling audibly, and they're still doing it this morning. I think whatever this is has moved on to "stage 2", wherein everything is trying to reinflate itself after the buffalo run, and perhaps doing the job a little too well.

I feel a bit peaked, like I just want to drape myself over the furniture and sigh a lot.

Halloween brunch recap

We had our friends/tenants over for Halloween brunch, since I had to work the evening shift. Hot coffee, scrambled eggs with chorizo, and fresh ripe avocados were the tasty start to the festivities. Above, Jinx ghosts around and inspects the punkins, as usual refusing to sit still while I take her picture.




Then we got down to the business of punkin carving! We kept our punkins carefully hidden from each other until the unveiling. All the lights were turned off, the shades pulled down, and candles were set inside each punkin. And then...




After the harvesting, salting, and toasting of myriad punkin seeds (a treat I look forward to each year almost more than the jack-o-lanterns themselves), we settled down for a showing of Tim Burton's "The Nightmare Before Christmas".

A good time was had by all!