Because I've been driving ye olde Pontiac Sunfire, which does not allow for a connection to my iPod, and because I no longer have any CDs here (and the CD player is likely filled with gravel dust anyway - driving on gravel destroys the electronics in your vehicles pretty quickly, rendering power windows dicey and dangerous), I have been catching up on what the kids are listening to these days by listening to the radio.
Apparently there's this kid named Justin Bieber who's pretty popular or something? I mean, I've heard of him (I am an avid gossip blog reader, after all) -- but does no one else find it just the slightest bit disturbing to hear a kid who sounds like he's twelve singing about true love in a song called "Baby"? In which the chorus is "And I was like, baby, baby, baby, oooh"? WTF is that all about.
I also heard this song called "Tic Toc" by Ke$ha. I will admit that it's extremely catchy and stuck in my head, and I would have brushed my teeth with a bottle of Jack tonight if I hated myself a little bit more. However, she says that she kicks guys to the curb "unless they look like Mick Jagger". Mick Jagger in which decade? I mean, I would let Sean Connery hit it even though he's turning eighty in August, but seriously, Mick Jagger? Let this be a lesson to all would-be poets not to keep a line just because it sounds cool to rhyme "Jagger" and "swagger".
Anyway, I will stop critiquing the radio, and perhaps I'll even start listening to it a bit more during my interminable commutes. Today was lovely; I slept in, managed to get up in time to tour my mother's gardens (she has planted quite a bit of stuff, all of which she seems to recognize as old friends even though their shoots are barely above the ground -- and yet it's a drop in the ocean of the eighty acres surrounding the house), and then had a sandwich. My parents went to Des Moines, and so I successfully wrote four pages of zee romance novel this afternoon before getting ready to vacate the house.
I met up with my old high school friend Hannah, who used to work for the zoo in Phoenix but recently moved back here to work as a naturalist for a state park resort in the next county to our east. It took an hour to get there (exactly like my commute, only filled with homicidal deer), but it was well worth it; I hadn't seen Hannah in years, and it was wonderful to catch up. She gave me a tour of the resort (it was all built recently, and I had never been there, but after seeing the rooms and cabins, it's now a prime candidate to host the wedding that may never happen), and then we had an extended dinner in the restaurant. She seems to be doing well here; she just started her new job in early March, but it sounds like a great fit (getting guests outside, teaching them to kayak, taking them on nature walks, and designing activities for kids). The resort is on Lake Rathbun ("Iowa's Ocean"), which is this massive lake near us that I never spent much time on as a kid (except for at age seventeen when I had a rather random jetskiing adventure with the owner of the convenience store I worked at, as well as his lawyer friend, which may have been frowned upon in theory even though nothing untoward happened), but I can only imagine how nice the place will be this summer.
So it was great to see Hannah, and hopefully I'll see her the next time I'm in the area (although I haven't made any upcoming plans to return). I drove home in the friscalating dusklight, which made it difficult to watch for deer, but I survived. I also didn't get burned to a crisp by the out-of-control brush fire that had reached the edge of the grader ditch and was on the verge of jumping the road. I then met the entire fire department for the town of Mystic (one truck, a couple of cop cars, and a string of five or six private cars of volunteer firefighters with makeshift flashing lights), so hopefully they put it out.
And now, I have rambled on far too long; I need to sleep so that I can write tomorrow. Goodnight!
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