freckles_and_doubt | eaten by metabears

It is a dark and stormy night and the rain falling on the typewriter keys writes a story in German about a great-aunt who went to a symposium on narrative and got eaten in the forest by a metabear.

Encyclopedia entries are fun! Probably not for the whole family, but they're making for one very happy academic. I've just spent two days reading everything I can lay my hands on by Ursula Le Guin, who is a very cool lady, and far more relevant to fairy tale/folklore than I actually thought at first. Fortunately, my nice editor is being very flexible about word counts. Also, apart from the general all-round ironic appeal of the above quote, Le Guin's kiddies' books are wonderful. *makes mental note to acquire some while in what Neil gleefully calls the Auntie Jess mode, necessitated by the high number of babies per square inch in my approximate vicinity*. In somewhat astounding news, last night's v. enjoyable dinner with her parents revealed that I really enjoy holding Kathleen, who at three weeks is rife with analytic possibility (what do those odd expressions mean? is she actually focusing on my face, or on some strange baby-realm adjacent to the real world?). Baby As Text: A New Paradigm.

Rubble update: temporary abatement of nuisance. (I keep wanting to write "subtly hairy"). The absence of the Army of Reconstruction during the weekend has been a great relief, although I keep finding horrible things they've done to the garden (broken branches on the hibiscus, and their bloody portaloo right outside my bathroom window). In true military fashion, the purpose of the exercise is apparently to dig careful holes and then fill them in again. The pile of sand from the foundation excavation and the evil hibiscus-eating pile of stones have been joined by a pile of other, presumably more desirable sand, dumped by truck outside the main gate (Evil Landlord now also has to park outside). The garden is now a locus of rubble, clutter and general shambles, which is giving me serious psychological twitches.

(Things You Might Not Know About Me, #5: I hate clutter. Hate it, hate it, hate it. Bric-a-brac - meaningless objects of ornamentation and no actual purpose - inspires me with a mad desire to take potshots with a shotgun or something. No-one is allowed to give me any more owls for my owl collection, unless they're functional, dammit!)

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What do functional owls do? (I mean functional owl-ornaments, we know what fully functional owls do, they swoop down on mice in the dead of night.) How about a disfunctional owl then?

Functional owls hang around the garden at night hooting softly. I'd like some of those, I miss them. Even the disfunctional one (she had a crippled leg and couldn't hunt properly, and we had to feed her, so she was heavily imprinted on humans). "Functional" and "ornament" are contradictions in terms; I suppose I would gracefully accept owls on dish towels, cushions, crockery, T-shirts and gosh-darned plant pots, even. Just not a stand-alone owl-shape whose sole purpose is to stand alone looking owl-shaped. *hisses and snaps beak in annoyance*

How about cement and glass "Owl House" owls, whose ornamental function is to scare the pants off visitors, particularly visitors who have been to the Owl House?

wolverine_nun

Nope. (a) I don't like Owl House owls, (b) they're still ornamental, in fact they're garden bric-a-brac, which is even worse, and (c) I quite like visitors and wouldn't want to scare them. Picky, picky, picky :>.

I'm 100% with you on the useless ornamentation thing, have never been able to stand it. This combined with my rather girly fondness for all things pretty, however, seems to have given rise to an obsession with decorative boxes. Because they're *useful* and you can *put things away in them*. And pretty. Still, the net result is that I have rather too many small and pretty jewellery boxes - for instance - cluttering up the place, rather than one commodious box that would be easier for dusting. And more pleasing on the eye, actually. Ah well.

Functional ornaments: boxes, candlesticks, vases, plant pots. Non-functional ornaments: ORNAMENTS.

You need one uber-huge-beautiful-commodious box into which you can stash all your small boxes. A small chest, in fact.

You need to identify yourself so I can make a note about Christmas presents :>.

It is possible I have been doing maths for too long. Anyway. Or playing word games. Hmmm. I saw a very silly, but nonetheless functional, fluffy owl backpack the other day. I wasn't going to buy it for you, on the grounds that you already have a sufficiency of owls (which is like a suffusion of yellow, only without the sunflowers), but I see now that it is my duty to purchase it post haste. I will work 'specially hard this week, just so's I can afford it =D

OMG, as various witterers would say, please don't. "Functional" in this context presupposes that it has a function to me personally. I don't carry a backpack, ever, and "suitable for burying in the garden" is not an adequate degree of functionality to gain entry into my sufficiency of owls. Which, incidentally, is a lovely phrase. Also, I would never, ever recover from the guilt of thinking that you'd put in extra time at the dataface to achieve a fluffy owl backpack in the same mental category as me. A gross error of taste, that would be.

Emphatic agreement on the le Guin and the kiddiewinks, much of my childhood was spent in the warm embrace of her work (hmm in the embrace of a book does sound somewhat cthulhoid). This may explain a lot really.

eaten by metabears

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bric a break it

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