Year: 2004

Last week Samantha’s store received two new deliveries of bird products. There was new ceramic chicken inventory and a box of six dozen yellow craft chicks. These guys are made from real feathers and lightweight synthetic bodies. Every bird is unique, but they’re variations of three basic poses. There’s the one shown here. Another pose has the bird’s head tipped a smidgen to the side. The third is like the first, except that the bird’s eyes and beak are glued to the back of its head. The chicks are priced to sell – only $5 apiece.

Samantha’s boss is entertained that I’ve been tracking the various birds that have been in and out of the store, and she let Samantha know that I should take one home. I chose one with a backwards head.

Last time I promised a shipment of taxidermied baby chicks. Now I have to report that the order has been canceled. But I’ve heard that there may be a shipment of baby ducks coming along shortly.

When this starts getting too morbid for you, I recommend cleansing yourself with a visit to Sensitive Light‘s recent batch of birdwatching photos.

‘Atmosphere’ – Photo Friday

My April Fool’s prank was a hit. I heard back from most of the targeted site’s owners and Mike Whybark worked everything out in the first twenty minutes.

What happened: I put together cloned versions of some of the sites that link to Beans for Breakfast, and I had a script substitute the clone for my usual site layout whenever someone arrived at my site via a link from one of the targeted sites. So some readers who followed links to this site from other weblogs yesterday saw a version of my site using a layout stolen from the linking site.

I bulldozed through the source code of several weblogs in a couple of sittings last week, replacing their content with Movable Type templates. I lost momentum at the end and didn’t get to a few of the sites I’d wanted to do. Also, the last couple that I did finish are lazier adaptations than some of the others. Here are some screenshots.

I’ve been making a lot of minor changes to the site’s stylesheets again. Let me know if you see anything odd.

The April print calendars have arrived. Celebrate all my favorite holidays with me (including The Boss‘s birthday). Pick your favorite paper size (mine is “letter”, but don’t let that influence you) and print it out at work.

Letter Size (102 kb PDF)
ISO A3 (102 kb PDF)

A girl is sitting in a coffee shop. She has a pad of lined paper and a book laid out in front of her. The top sheet of paper is marked with a date – a week ago – and filled up with two or three long paragraphs. I caught myself reading the first sentence: “So I changed everything I believe because of a boy I met.” She pecks at her cell phone for awhile before turning to the book. She opens the book and reads a few pages of poetry, then slips a pen under the first several used pages of her pad and writes in verse. She lets go of the pen, letting the first pages fall and cover over her writing, and returns to the book. She switches between the book and the pad every few minutes, holding her place in the book with her left hand when she’s writing, and touching the pad with her right hand when reading.

A gang of runners passed by. They wore yellow hooded sweatshirts like the one’s my middle school track team wore. Some of the sweatshirts said “True Stories” on the front. I like the David Byrne film by that title, so I stopped a runner that was falling behind and tried to convince him to give me a sweatshirt. He said he couldn’t, but that he would get me in touch with the person who gave him his. He dialed a cell phone and gave it to me.

“Hello? This guy says you can get me one of those True Stories t-shirts.”

I was surprised that it was TYD on the phone. She said, “Yes, I can get you a sweatshirt. But, do you like that band?”

“It’s a band?”

I found myself watching a video for one of the band’s songs, and it was awful. I was disappointed, because that meant the movie would never be re-released in theaters.

I navigate by intuition from Home Depot to Lowe’s Hardware — up to 4th Avenue, follow the first detour sign around the construction and into Chinatown, turn right on Jackson. Will Jackson put me on Rainier? I’m not sure. …past 11th and 12th. There it is. I take the soft right onto Rainier; and as I’m turning the wheel, I’m thinking the words, “Here’s Rainier.” I begin that short thought while the car is pointing east and finish with the car heading south. In the course of that turn – in the course of that thought – the meaning of the words shift and become vaguely more profound. The Mountain – Mt. Rainier – is painted across the sky in front of me and it seems like, if I were to forget the hardware store and stay on Rainier Avenue, it would lead me right up to the edge of a glacier.

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Later, I was at the waterfront with Samantha, and a lone tourist pointed Mt. Rainier out to us and said something that I didn’t quite catch. Samantha heard it as, “It’s a nice snow-tipped peak.”

I was just skimming through the new issue of Tablet, a free magazine that’s distributed around town, and I learned something unusual about one of my neighbors – a woman who’s working at the reservoir construction across from my apartment building.

She’s a flagger. She stands on the corner with a reversible Stop/Slow sign and directs traffic whenever the big trucks come barreling in or out of the park with their loads of gravel. I come and go a lot during the day, and when I walk by I usually nod hello.

Say What? is Tablet’s man on the street column. They ask a dozen people the same question and print the answers alongside a photo of the interview subjects. The flagger was one of the people that they talked to. There’s a photo of her on the job – standing with her sign while, in the background, a truck maneuvers around my intersection’s traffic circle. The question is, “What is the most disgusting thing you have ever put in your mouth?” She answered, “Monkeys in South Africa. I picked out the BB bullets.” Maybe I can use that as a conversation starter. I can ask her what monkey tastes like. Maybe not.