The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Just spent an hour outside, in full costume, in 35 degree weather and a driving, visibility-limiting snowstorm, because I rock Halloween just that hard.
An inch of snow fell on my front yard while I was waiting for trick-or-treaters. I gave every kid who came by a full candy bar and told them to just take a handful out of the bowl of candy. Because Jesus what is happening out here.
Regular programming should resume tomorrow.
I kind of feel bad, because I feel like you guys deserve at least one actual post with, like, some words today, but on the other hand I’m so tired I can feel it in my teeth. I mean that literally, my teeth are tired. Feels exactly like chewing on fresh-picked cotton.
So maybe I’m going to go to bed instead. Go read about the cat again; that post seems to be getting some traction. 🙂
The Martin book is about a hundred times as deluxe as I was thinking it was gonna be. Cool!
Giving away, oh, ten copies or so. You’ll have to download it through Smashwords but they carry all the relevant formats.
Leave a comment. I’ll pick up your email address through that and I’ll get back to you with a code later today.
Meanwhile, The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 is perma-free over there and has been for a while.
YES. This. Totally and completely this. If you’re going to swear, swear. If you don’t want to, don’t. But you’re an asshole if you pull this halfway nonsense.
I’m going to swear a bit more than normal here. Maybe my mom and her friends shouldn’t read this one. I’ve had a couple of sappy blogs in a row now, and if you’ve followed my patterns, you know it is to be followed with something completely ignorant. I wouldn’t be me otherwise.
The topic of course is swearing. There are people who glorify swearing. I don’t think that’s me, although it’s not too far off the mark. There are people who don’t condone swearing. That’s me a very small percentage of the time. You can’t swear elegantly if you can’t pick your spots. I will say this though. I don’t condone substitute swearing. What’s that you ask? It’s when somebody says Fuzz, Frig, Fudge, when they really mean FUCK! (The exclamation mark was meant for the word, not for the whole sentence in case you’re one of those readers…
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“Start washing the pillows,” she tells me. “Just follow the instructions on the tag,” she tells me.
You may remember this cat from such hits as “nearly dying and costing me a thousand fucking dollars last year,” and “Bad housekeeping/good geography” back in September. I am going to punch him in in his stupid cat face once per day until I get tired of having to catch him to punch him in his stupid cat face once per day.
Allow me to set the scene: it is roughly 6:55 AM. I am already running several minutes late as I exit the shower, to discover my wife getting dressed and the boy playing on the bed. I discover that I have no socks. My wife tells me that there are some socks in the laundry room, so I, barefoot but otherwise dressed, head off to the laundry room to acquire them. Important detail about my house: due to weird architecture and a persistently stuck door that I haven’t done anything about yet, our laundry room is literally the farthest point in the house from our bedroom, but shares a wall with it– meaning that if you’re in there you can generally hear anything going on in the bedroom.
I am looking around for my socks when I suddenly hear two things, which both start at once: my wife, yelling “Oh God!” over and over, and my son, screaming his fucking head off.
I race to my room at top speed, still barefoot. My son is still screaming, his face is purple, he’s holding his hand at a very wrong-looking angle, and my wife… well, I’m not really sure what the hell she’s doing. She appears to be chasing something.
My first thought, of course, is that the boy has fallen off the bed and broken his wrist.
Luckily for everyone involved, I quickly determine that no, that’s not what has happened. I determine this because there is puke fucking everywhere, and I’m only barely exaggerating when I say that. Apparently Shithead here was laying in his accustomed spot on my wife’s pillow when he started horking. My wife tried to shoo him off the bed, and succeeded in doing so– except the little bastard started projectile vomiting in mid-shoo, leaving a foot-wide trail of cat vomit all over the following things:
Kashmir is tiny. There is more puke than there is cat. I am not at all sure why this is even biologically possible.
This is why the boy is purpled and screeching; he’s got cat vomit on his hand, which is in less of a “this is broken” awkward angle and more of an “I want this to fall off of my body” sort of angle.
So I get the boy cleaned up, we pull the linens off the bed, I clean off my nightstand and my phone, and I text my boss to let him know that I’m going to be late, and that he’ll greatly enjoy my reason when I get there to tell him about it. Meanwhile, the boy has clearly decided that his three-year-old brain can’t quite process what has just happened, and spends the rest of the time I’m home asking a near-constant stream of clarifying questions:
Why the hell do we have pets again?
Oh, the punchline: ask me when I bought my pillows.
Go ahead. Ask.
And then guess the answer.
If you said “two days ago,” you get to punch the cat too.
Little bastard.
Here are the rules of Raking Leaves. Well, the Rule of Raking Leaves, because there’s really only the one rule: you are responsible for the leaves in your yard, period. The location of the tree does not matter, because leaves blow. We raked leaves last Saturday. There were leaves in my yard from oak trees, and I don’t even know where the nearest oak tree is. Nevertheless, because I am a Good Neighbor, and because the two trees in the front yard I share with my immediate neighbor (in the sense that they but up against each other with no fence as a divider; it’s one big chunk of grass) are both in my lawn, I did my best to blow as many of “his” leaves as I could into our pile. The majority of them fell off of my tree. I use an electric leaf blower, and if you had looked right after we did it you could pretty neatly delineate exactly how far my cord let me get into his yard, because those areas were bare of leaves.
My neighbor’s wife and son are outside right now, blowing leaves. They (or, rather, she, because their son is in a different part of the yard) are blowing the leaves not to the foot of the lawn, where the city can pick them up, but into my yard. Where the wind is just gonna blow them right the fuck back into their lawn. And I’m, like, right here, in my living room, and I can see her doing it, because the tree is right outside my living room window. Plus the city came by and sucked up leaves today, so they won’t be here for at least a week and this is a pointless endeavor right now anyway because there are literally probably still a million leaves on that tree that haven’t fallen yet.
I do not understand people.
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