b.rox

Every week, Xy has her students write sentences using vocabulary words — pretty standard stuff, dictated by the school system.
This week, one of the words is “tamper,” and one of the students wrote the following sentence:

The dead baby of my auntie died in her stomach for a week so, when my brother was trying to [...]

Signs of the impending holiday in our neighborhood…

It’s a little hard to read because of the burglar bars, but the spray-painted message lists the names of the little girls who live there: “Merry Xmas Liondai, Tilai, La’Shai.”

We took Jaylene out to Lafitte National Park Saturday afternoon. When we got back, we discovered a window in the back door was broken, and a rock was lying on the floor of the kitchen!

Upon further investigation, we found a number of rocks scattered about the back deck. One was lodged in the screen of [...]

While I was writing the previous post, this picture came in via e-mail from Jaylene:

That’s Xy in the corner. I note that she seems to have a drink in her hand. She and Jaylene took the streetcar to the Quarter for a girls’ night out, while I stayed home and finished my stupid novel. Oops, [...]

I did it! I finished my novel.
It’s not the 50,000 words required by NanoWriMo. It’s only 21,469 words. So it’s not actually long enough to be what most people would consider a novel. More like a novella.
Oh, yes, it is a steaming pile of crap. But it’s mine, all mine. I made that crap. Me.
And [...]

I’ve been skeptical of Thanksgiving for years. There are two conceptions of Thanksgiving which seem to be etched into my mind from early childhood: The idea of giving thanks to God, and the idea of unbridled gluttony. Pilgrims, Indians, the whole historical thing — not so much. To me it’s always been about God and [...]

Jaylene Marsh came to visit us for Thanksgiving. She drove down from Indianapolis yesterday, and today she took this picture with her phone and e-mailed it to me. I posted the picture to Flickr. (Thanks, Rachel, for turning me on to the site.) So this is my first real attempt to post from Flickr [...]

Shontanay, one of the neighbor girls, just came by with a big open wound on the sole of her foot. She said she stepped on a rusty old screw. She’d already been to the hospital, and they checked to make sure she’d had her tetanus shot, but she’d been walking around in sandals and her [...]

There were not too many films starting with “E” on my list, so we made short work of this letter.
I actively disliked these:

The Entertainer
The Eagle Has Landed

I felt kind of ambivalent about these films:

Eating Raoul
The Element of Crime

They held my interest somewhat, but I couldn’t say I actually liked them.
In other words, I didn’t [...]

Xy and the neighbor girls two years ago:

Xy and the neighbor girls last week:

Last night we had a house party for Adam Wilson, who is running for State Senate in District 4 here in Louisiana. He’s the Green candidate, running against an independent and a Democrat on December 4th.
I’d say the party was a success on several counts. We had more guests than we expected. All the beer [...]

Yesterday the IT department here at the university finally delivered my new computer, a Macintosh G5. It was supposed to arrive this summer, but everything seems to run about three months late here. Nor is it what I requested. I asked for a dual 2.5GHz machine with a 250GB hard drive, 2GB of RAM and [...]

My knee last Tuesday:

My knee on Saturday:

My knee today:

I’d thought it would be completely healed by now, but it’s not, quite.

I’m at 15,508 words. The month is more than half over. Ideally I should be over 25,000 words at this point. I seem to be averaging about a thousand words a day, and at that rate I’ll never make 50,000 by the 30th. Oh well. I’m taking today off. Maybe I’ll write 10,000 words. I’d [...]

Speaking of cats, Folds scratched Xy’s face again.

Even though I evicted Folds from our bed back in July, Xy has been letting her back in and she’d been spending a lot of time on our downstairs couch. Despite getting scratched repeatedly, Xy can’t resist kissing Folds and pressing her face against the feline’s body. I [...]

This inquisitive fellow poked his head over the neighbor’s shed and stared at us for a long while this morning.

In the morning, it’s usually cooler inside our house than it is outdoors. That’s a good thing during the summer. But today, the outside temperature was in the upper 60s, and inside it was in the lower 60s. During the week we probably wouldn’t have cared, because by evening, when we get home from work, [...]

My friend Jason Neville put this together from data collected at opensecrets.org and CNN. He couldn’t find a vote total for Peroutka, but I found a number on the candidate’s website. I thought it put an interesting perspective on the 2004 presidential race.

Candidate
Votes
Money Raised
Votes-Per-Dollar

Cobb
104,087
$133,576
0.78

Badnarik
373,729
$841,498
0.44

Peroutka
129,255
$654,757
0.19

Kerry
55,546,066
$317,788,245
0.17

Bush
59,106,230
$360,651,752
0.16

Nader
391,330
$3,950,963
0.10

Update — Perhaps the point is better made by figuring dollars per [...]

Haven’t been able to watch too many movies lately, but I did finally view the last “D” title on my list.
Loved:

The Deer Hunter
The Dresser
The Duellists

Liked:

The Devil and Daniel Webster
Il Decameron
The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
Drugstore Cowboy

Ambivalent:

Depeche Mode 101
Dinner For Five
Diva
Donnie Brasco
A Double Life
Down By Law
Dreamscape
Dressed to Kill

Didn’t really care for:

Darling

Fell asleep after too much beer:

Death [...]

Just saw Davy Rothbart and Popcorn Pete of Found Magazine fame at Xavier. Davy came to New Orleans last year on our tenth wedding anniversary, but Xy was too worn out from teaching to go see them. I subscribe to the magazine, which is excellent, but I was stunned when I saw a flyer for [...]