In the Dark

Saturdays are nearly always a little discombobulated here at Casa Blocher, the Museum of the Weird. It's my day to sleep in, and if I have no other obligations I don't get up until about 4 PM. Add to that the fact that I accidentally left my "Sleep is good!" Away message on all day and all night in AIM, and it means that even when I was awake, you may not have known about it.



After an hour or two online I ventured out to buy dinner. John's requests involved groceries instead of take-out, so I conceived a bold plan: I'm going to cook this week! Well, okay, like the character in Sibling Rivalry who said "I don't cook; I reheat," I'll mostly be reheating, but still, it means we'll forego the nightly question of where I'm picking up dinner in favor of a nightly question about what I'll be pulling from the fridge.

This is one time when going to the store while hungry was probably a good thing. I actually managed to fill the cart with several kinds of meat (frozen, fresh, and cooked), veggies (fresh and frozen), soups, frozen entrees, pizza and salad and, inevitably for spring in Arizona, numerous beverages. John doesn't like me to cook meat, because the fan over the stove doesn't expel the smoke anywhere. But I bought a London broil for once, and lamb and pork and mesquite-smoke marinade. Now all I have to do is pay attention to what urgently needs to be cooked, and not get lazy about it. So far we've mainly had just the pizza, to which I added freshly sauteed mushrooms.



I needed John's help bringing in all those groceries in a timely manner, so when I got home I tracked him down. He was in the back yard, looking over his accomplishments for the day. Having built this garden row thingy, he planted flowers in it today, from those pots I've been photographing by the firecracker bush out front.

Pepper hangs out by the nearly-complete path.

John is also nearly finished making a concrete and gravel path to the back gate. His next project will be a porch-like enclosure by the back door, similar to the one he built by the front door but wider. He hopes to finish it by the time the monsoon arrives.

Tuffy is wary of the remaining building materials.

This evening was that Earth awareness / hour of darkness / reduce your carbon footprint and show we can make a difference thingy. Oh, all right; it's called Earth Hour. I made a half-hearted attempt to observe it, sitting in the dark while typing away online. But I left the kitchen light on for the sake of John and the dogs and not bumping into things. Eight minutes into the hour I discovered the bedroom light was one, and thirty minutes in John went into his office and turned on the light there, and forty minutes in I discovered a light on in the front room. Not a good performance!

Eventually I went outside to see whether I could tell any difference from a normal evening on Calle Mumble. I couldn't. Tucson as a city didn't participate, so the street lights were on. Many porch lights were on as well, including ours, which has a motion sensor and came on when I stepped outside. I'd wondered whether Tucsonans would make enough of a difference for the stars to shine more brightly, which would be a boon to the astronomers at the many observatories in Southern Arizona. But no, only the brightest stars and planets were visible at all to my eyes.


The most fun part was identifying the dogs in the dark. Here's Tuffy, caught in my camera flash as she scrounges for dropped pizza toppings. Later I recognized Pepper by her longer, thicker fur and the scabby, dandruffy spot on her back.

Speaking of identifications, I had an apparent wrong number tonight from someone called Pete. I pretty much despise text messaging on cell phones, largely because it's clumsy and tedious and I can't find any indication that punctuation is available. Usually I only get texts from my brother, and they're rare enough that I don't mind them at all. But tonight I receive the following:

This is pete, I hear you are out drinking

I wrote back,

I dont know a pete and i dont drink alcohol ever and im home 0 for 3

He replied,

Ouch

and that was the end of it.

I see from "pete's" text that capitalization and commas are available, at least to some extent. But I don't care enough to try yet again to find such things on my phone.

Hi there!

Two bits of media / celebrity news for the day. First the good news: there is a profile of David Tennant in The Independent, which appears to be one of Britain's more reliable newspapers, in contrast to, for example, The Sun. The article extensively quotes Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies as he heaps well-deserved praise on Tennant for his acting skills and personal niceness. The article also claims that Tennant has agreed in principle to continue his role as the Doctor when the show returns for a full season in 2010 (we get only specials in 2009). Huzzah!

The other news isn't so much bad news as weird news. For quite some time there's been an edit war on Wikipedia over whether someone named Zachary Jaydon was on MMC, the 1990s update of The Mickey Mouse Club that famously launched the careers of Brittany Spears and a few other pop icons. I know, I know. Why should I care, right? It's not as if I ever watched the show in its MMC iteration; the 1970s version was bad enough. But I've done work on the 1950s section of the article, and settled a previous dispute among MMC fans over whether the show ended in 1994 (when it was last made) or 1996 (when the last new show aired), by simply listing cast members by season number instead of by year. At that time I cleaned up the MMC cast list in the article, pulling out vanity and joke additions in favor of the list in a reference book on Disney television.

Since then, Jaydon has been added to and removed from that list numerous times, with a note that he appeared in the show during all seven seasons, something very few of the more established cast members did according to Bill Cotter's book. An article about Jaydon has been written and deleted at least once, possibly twice, and it currently being written again by someone called TragedyStriker, aka Skyler Morgan. But as far as I can tell, virtually all online references to Jaydon being in MMC are in user-editable sources, and may well have been added by Jaydon himself. Ranged on the other side are numerous fans who say they never saw the guy on the show, and one aspiring musician in Florida who claims that Jaydon is a thief and a scammer who worked briefly with some other musician I've never heard of, currently manages some Ohio band or other, and is almost certainly the pseudonymous Skyler Morgan. Myself, I don't really know or care whether she's entirely right, entirely wrong, or somewhere in between. But it would be nice to see the question resolved.

Karen