My Top 10

You can read just about any music blog and find the top ten albums of the year. But what about the top ten albums I bought over the last 6 months? Now there's a list worth paying some attention to (actually you can probably tell I was sort of focused on a couple big gaps and was pleasantly surprised by their creamy filling). These are in no particular order but you should totally go out and spend $160 on all 10 right now... trust me:

1. David Bowie: Aladin Sane
2. David Bowie: Low
3. Brian Eno: Another Green World
4. Brian Eno and David Byrne: My Life In the Bush of Ghosts
5. The Fugs: Second Album
6. Ragged But Right - Great Country String Bands of the 1930s
7. Pere Ubu: The Modern Dance
8. The Slits: Cut
9. No New York
10. Mingus: The Black Saint & The Sinner Lady

Sorry about the shallow "list as post" I just needed to rebreak the ice on this.


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He's Making a List, He's Checking it Once

(No time for editing!). With all of the tugs from everything you've read about here and work just starting its six-week pitch of stress, I'm being stretched pretty thin. Three pounds in the last two weeks! Anyway...Gimme the Mic followers, here's a holiday grab bag to keep you warm as you do your own run up to the end of the year. Enjoy.

Small World: This trap is amazing. I caught two mice with peanut butter on a cracker, and one by just setting it when I was too tired to prepare bait. When I've been around to, I've heard no more wall sounds and seen no more tell-tale signs of our mice. Good. I'll make my third trip to the cemetery at the bottom of the hill tomorrow, where I release them and hope they can't find their way back. Besides this, M and I will make some long-term storage changes, because their wiliness is damn wily. (note: I have good reason to believe that the mice have successfully reintegrated into society, which reason is that I don't want to think about it).

As a life-blogging aside, when I caught my first one, I googled "releasing field mice" and this was the first hit. Like me, Rana was inspired to start her (recently defunct) blog from the example set by Invisible Adjunct, whose warm, intelligent, and long-time-now defunct blog, deserves its own entry. I caught onto IA just as it was closing shop--and in time went through all the archives--and followed Rana's dispatches pretty regularly. With any luck, these will be my last interesting thoughts about mice.

Auto Update: I failed my road test today. In what many licensed drivers tell me is an odd complaint, my examiner failed me for being too slow during parallel parking. I flubbed both tries to the soothing sounds of "Go, go, go!" and "What makes you think you've got this much time?". Also, my first turn was too slow. I've done plenty of post-fail mental self-defense and sympathy-gathering today; that helps. Though it's annoyingly expensive and style-cramping, I've no choice but to make it to my next scheduled test on January 31st. Yeah, it sucks.

A Christmas Story: After twenty-six Christmases in sunny California, I'm spending this one in upstate New York with M and her family. In lieu of a cross-country flight, I'm finishing up a gift package for home that I'm really happy with. M's family is full of wonderful traditions, and I hear preparations are moving along briskly. I helped with the beginnings this weekend and, let me tell you, you never saw so many Santas in your life. It's going to be great.
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Ready, Set, Go

The first mouse trap, from Maine Supply Co., is here! I get the physics of it, and it's both promising and much more pleasing to the eye than its Amazon photo--like a trim and graceful homemade trap. So, I'm setting it tonight and home life should be much less intermittently creepy for it. Plus, ridding the house of that first critter might be the kick in the pants I need to get moving on the rest of my projects. Right now, it's one foot in front of the other, with plenty of time for reading, exercise, and keeping house. That's not so bad now, but school (nineteenth-century American lit) will begin in late January, and I really want to have a reliable vehicle by then. Regular lessons are starting to give me confidence on the road, but car and, let's not forget, gift research has gone by the wayside without a schedule or structure. As these are actually fun things to do (and catalog in my new, stylish "Flip Back 360" binders), it's action time. Tonight's thinking, then, is, "If only I can get one mouse, then I can move on to the next thing." For this week only, I'll go ahead and call that a plan...
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Mouse Trap

[Trapping] is the preferred method to try first in homes, garages, and other small structures where there may be only a few mice present.

For months now, M and I have harbored these unwelcome guests, and step zero--by turns, doing nothing and worrying that nothing's been done--has only made things worse. Like an assassin's mark, the mouse dropping reminds us that we're the hunted. The mice maddeningly show us the extent of their reach in increments; I get the stovetop and countertop, but how'd they scale the three-foot tall sealed cupboard? For one cat-sitting week, we got a break from their noises, sightings, and deposits--but that was a while back and the mice know it. So it's time to order traps, read manuals, and...come up with euphemisms, because, whatever else I'm known for, it's not killing; I'm more of a reader.

So now I've another winter undertaking. On their way from Amazon, my arms are two re-usable humane traps: the Victor Tin Cat Clear Top, and Maine Supply Co.'s Live Mouse & Chipmunk Trap. Except for the one clear part of this concern that's no fun to think about, it's a cool project: the tools are tangible, I can track progress all the time, and it will be so satisfying to finish. I intend to make a quick end of this work, so, mice of central New York, you're on notice. I invite readers to follow this hunt in the comments thread, where I'll track each new...result. Also, please send in tips and, if you edit for violent content, your own pest control stories.
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February

Step 2: Hope: We come to believe that God, through Jesus Christ, can restore our sanity.

Harcourt's Wharf was nothing more than a sullied backwater full of fags and whores that an honest trawler, like myself, wouldn't step foot in without a reason.

I admit that's hardly a fair assessment.

My first visit to the Wharf was entirely without reason. Or, at least, I should say that had someone approached me and asked, "What brings you down this way?" I certainly couldn't have said anything specific in reply. I probably would have just muttered something about "feet to the flame" and moved briskly onwards. Then again, I was 17, and who has good reasons for anything when they're 17?

But now I was back, and for a damned good reason. My darling wife, loyal companion and all, was dying of, as the doctors put it, "An unspecific hereditary ailment, attacking first the pituitary glad and moving slowly toward the cerebral almeliores." Bunch a' crap, if you ask me. The symptoms, as far as I could see, were three fold:

1. Day by day, the world around her seemed to be getting smaller. Not in that lovely, one world way, but quite literally. As her perception of her body's spacial dimensions remained entirely static, the size of other things (our bed, our home, the stove) seemed to be steadily shrinking. I want to be very clear that this is not the same thing as the feelings of steadily growing, but it is perhaps similar in so far as it leads to the same type of crippling claustrophobia. Frustratingly, she believed that this claustrophobia was only temporary since, as the world continued to shrink, she would certainly be relegated to living entirely outside, becoming larger and larger, barely balancing on the earth until she could finally simply topple into oblivion.

2. The sea's unfathomable depths became, in a word, a source of terrifying possibility.

I admit, I was getting desperate. I heard the Arab physicians could often make things right that our own witch doctors couldn't handle. And so I beached my skiff at Pier 16 and walked towards the clinic.
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