If you don't have any handy ice floes you have to improvise.

And I still hope someone manages to liberate from your camera that amazing picture you took of Matilda in mid-laugh.

I'm still working on it, JZ. I'll let you know as soon as I do.

The places I've been looking at are 80% higher than rental.

I think it would probably be 100-200% higher here. Oy. A small 2-3 bedroom, older house, in ok shape but probably needing some real work in the next few years, across the street from me just sold. I'm not sure what they got, but they were asking $329k, and that was under assessment. And they sold it within about 2 weeks on the market, so I doubt that they would have come down much from that, if at all.

I pay $750 for a large one bedroom, including utilities.

In cheerier news, my mom and her partner have been visiting the past few days, and we haven't gotten into one fight. She's staying with some friends instead of with me, which is probably part of it, but I think that this is her first visit that actually feels too short.

I'm a little bit nervous about telling her that my dad is visiting next month, and staying with me. He got a good airline sale, but I just visited him in April, and she's a little bit jealous of visits.

I paid attention in history class, and the Romans continue to surprise me.

Did you watch the HBO series, Sean? Really very good. I think they captured the nature of the Patrician Roman very well.

DH finally let me futz around with the settings on his work laptop. I KNEW it had wireless capability but he never likes to play around with those things. I switched on his wireless and now he doesn't have to vanish in the basement to hook up the LAN line when he wants to go online.

Silly actuary--doesn't he know it's perfectly ok to play around with stuff until you figure it out?

Did you watch the HBO series, Sean? Really very good.

No, but I'll catch up on DVD. I know it's over and done now, but it's on the list to watch.

17-year Cicadas coming... [link]

I'm (half) watching a thing on the History channel about the history of punishment, and they just said that somebody (the Romans, I think) used to execute condemned criminals by throwing them in a river tied in a sack. With an ape, a dog, and a snake in the sack, too, so that the animals' panciked attempts to escape imminent drowning also sped the condemned to their doom.

This was also a popular way to get rid of unfaithful harem denizens. I dunno about the animal additions, but the sacking and the drowning were a medieval Arabic go.

Sean, I hope S is doing better.

I was a grounds crew worker when 17 year cicadas came up.

We played our worst game ever today. The slaughter rule was invoked. Emmett walked a bunch of people and gave up 7 runs. Then everybody else did worse. Very discouraging.

Fortunately, afterwards I went to a get-together with an online writing group I've joined recently and it was really cool. Everybody was fun and interesting and accomplished and writing for magazines and things. So it was a good networking experience for me as I try to finesse the periodic book writing career into a more frequent freelance career.

We saw the pandas splashing in the water, and somewhere billytea felt a cold shudder as a woman said, "Is that a wallaby?" and her friend said, "No, it's an oryx."

The hell? Incidentally, my last Chinese lesson involved a dialogue about a zoo visit. The Mandarin for panda means literally 'bear-cat'. A kangaroo is a pouch-rat. There's also a pouch-bear, which is not strictly a koala but a wombat. (A koala is a tree-wombat.)

what's the most graceful way to avoid a hug?

Ninjas!

"You shove a living snake up his ass!"

There's a word, 'feague', that referred to the practice of making a horse for sale look more lively and spirited by shoving ginger up its arse. Or, if you were out of ginger, a live eel would do. Buyer beware indeed.

Wait -- did people who were committing the particide kill their father via the ape/snake/dog/drown method, or was that the method of punishing the person who killed his father?

That was the punishment for the patricide perpetrator, though now imagine if someone did kill their father that way. Then the authorities would have to come up with something even worse to teach him a lesson. "Ok, so we stuff him in there with a lion, an ostrich and a rhino..."

There's a word, 'feague', that referred to the practice of making a horse for sale look more lively and spirited by shoving ginger up its arse. Or, if you were out of ginger, a live eel would do. Buyer beware indeed.

THAT'S my Billytea!