Still writing away — one article down, one to go! But the weekend was lifted by beautiful weather today (Again! I feel like this has been the prettiest fall we’ve seen in years!) and plans to get together soon with one two three four absolutely wonderful friends whom I love and don’t see often enough. I can’t wait.

Some fish have skeletons that are made out of cartilage, like the hard rubbery architecture of your ears. Sharks do; that’s the fatal flaw that makes their fins edible (in a gelatinous sort of way) and has caused so many of the speedy beasts to perish for the sake of a peppery, viscous soup hungrily slurped up for centuries by half of my ancestral line. Ray skeletons are made of cartilage too, even the poisonous razor-sharp stingers some of them wear on their tails. Lampreys, those exquisitely creepy vampiric eels that don’t even have jaws, are all cartilage and teeth — teeth on the edges of their tongues! And the wonderfully absurd subclass Chimaera — also known as ghost sharks, also known as Elephant Fish, also known as Rat or Rabbit fish — all have that same springy ridigity, down to their snouty faces and drifting angel-wing fins.

But most fish — Osteichthyes — are made of harder stuff. They’re bony. They poke and pierce. They are composed of large numbers of tiny and intricate bones seemingly designed to stick in your craw on the way down your greedy throat. Lacking the long, unwieldy walking limbs we terrestrial creatures are burdened with, fish skeletons possess a certain sleek simplicity — their vertebrae lined up in pleasing parallel lines and their smooth, membranous fins like crinkled yellowed paper.

Gorgeous things. Next time you eat one, don’t forget to admire its bones before you swallow its flesh. It might be less likely to needle you.

Especially freelance articles. Especially when you ignore them for the first two weeks of the month, like you do every single month. And then you are sad and cannot write proper entries or watch tv or play with your friends. For you are the grasshopper who did not collect grain, and now that it is winter you will shiver and starve until you die.

Woeful is the plight of the procrastinator.

This file has a few flawed spots where it skips a beat; sorry. At least you get to hear the end of the story! Next time I will pick one that is slightly less depressing and a bit shorter. I got a bit sick of this one before it ended. :-)

Here you go! Again, click to play, right-click to download.

…from the weekend.

1) Simon stares into my lens , pupils huge with — well — mild interest.

2) On Sunday morning, we had this for breakfast:

I would really like to write a long D.C. roundup post tonight, but I have a million little (and not-so-little) things to get done, so for now I’ll just give you the most important statistic, and a fun fact.

1) In 36 hours we went to 5 museums and the Library of Congress.

2) The word “erotica” is painted on one of the walls of the Library of Congress. If you go, look for it. :-)

And now I really have to go or dinner will never happen. Kisses, lovelies!

Update: Ross and Rachel talked about this yesterday, but I forgot since as previously established, the neuron in my brain that takes care of remembering birthdays has apparently been destroyed by the reckless acts of my youth. It’s Barb’s birthday today! Happy birthday, sweetie! Whoosh!

I made a recording of a short story with my new mike. Well, half a short story, to start with. Which is accidentally apt, since it’s called Halves of a Whole. The piece — which I love — is by a writer named Gina Ochsner, to whom I owe deep apologies for choosing her work as the playground for my audio experimentations. It’s kind of a gigantic file, and I’m not exactly sure why — I think I’m going to have to figure out how to make these smaller, or it might not be sustainable to host them here on Wordnerd. For now I am sorry but it could take an eon to download; I plead for your patience. Go away and brush your teeth or something. Maybe twice. On the other hand, I think if you just let it play in your browser, it loads pretty quickly. Let me know what your experience with it is.

Audio quality is pretty good but sound levels tend to jump about, since I don’t have a mike stand and failed to hold the thing at exactly the same distance from my mouth the entire time, especially when I paused recording (to fix a mistake or take a drink of water) and started again. Finally, I have no idea how to do voices, so those are embarrassing. But it’s a start. No worries if you aren’t interested in listening, but if you do listen feedback is always welcome. Reading well is very hard. I need practice and comments will help.

Mwah! Here you go! Click to play, right-click to download.

P.S. It’s about 20 minutes long and took much longer than that to record. You’ll know when it’s over when you get to the tired and confused sounding voice saying “…this is the end of the first part…”

I saw the turkey again this morning: beaking at its reflection in the glass with more than its usual urgency, moving sharply from window to window as if it thought the image in the glass was teasing it, playing at being a reflection — and that if it could only catch the devious feathered sprite in time, the poor thing would finally be face to face with the other half it so desperately longs for, a real flesh-and-blood bird slipping from one pane to the next. Itself, but other. How many of us dance that way every day, looking and looking again at the pale, flitting visions that we think are hiding our true selves — trying without success to conjure up the one warm heart, the one true living breathing version of the person we think we see in the mirror’s dark shade?

*******

Off to D.C. in the (very early) morning to visit Rachel and Matt and their cat Simon. I talked to Ross an hour ago; he is already there, and had just woken up from a nap.

“Oh… I think I need to rescue my sweater from Simon,” he said, interrupting me with the world’s most adorable concern. I have to remember to bring a sweater with me so that I, too, can rescue it from Simon.