10:00 p.m. - 2002-10-14
A Reeeeally Reeeeaally Gooood Thing
Tis the Season! Yes, Target is full of groovy and tasteful Halloween items! Bruce and I stopped by there tonight to buy a black cat doormat that I had seen at a friend's house and found a veritable plethora of black cats, bats, ghosties, ghoulies, and things that go "BerSHRIEK!" when someone rings your doorbell.

It was oh, so satisfying. I really enjoy this time of year, for obvious reasons. When I was a little kid I really thought that the whole Halloween sheboogie was in celebration of my birthday, and I wondered why other little kids didn't get the same kind of wild celebration. I still have remnants of that feeling, that all those cats and bats and witches are for me and me alone.

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We spent the rest of the night at a lecture given by one of the most boring lecturers I have ever had the discomfort of falling asleep listening to. I won't give her name, but her topic was how barbarians were depicted in Roman art, and she was funded by the American Institute of Archaeology.

She started out by fawning over the organiser of these lectures, a professor we'll just call Dr. J. I always feel uncomfortable around Dr. J. She is perfect in every way, and it has always struck me that she is exactly the kind of woman that Bruce's parents desperately wish he had married. Dr. J. has perfectly coifed blonde hair, is tall and thin and has a doctorate in something to do with the history of art in Rome. Not only that, but as the visiting lecturer pointed out tonight, she is "just a FANTASTIC hostess! She made it all seem so EFFORTLESS!" Gush, gush, ad infinitum!!!

With her ten minute ode to Dr. J. finally over, the lecturer proceeded to whip out a 20 page manuscript and read the whole thing, word for word. This was accompanied by slides of classical art pieces, all of which I had seen, oh, let's say several dozen times in Art History Survey 101. It was like having someone read Janson's "History of Art" as a bedtime story.

I found my mind wandering off to what colour we should paint the house, should I go back to Target and buy that fabulous black cat bath towel, would we get any Trick or Treaters this year, and why did the Gauls wear those God-awful torcs around their necks anyway? And how do you spell torc? Torque?

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I had a much better time at Gabbie and Jim's home brew party on Friday night. Jim has been making beer and cider for several years now and decided other people should enjoy the fruits of his labours. So Friday night he and Gabbie set up a brew tasting, with about five different kinds of beer and a cider at Gabbie's sister's house.

Who would turn down an invitation to a beer tasting? The party was infested with interesting people, not all of them drunk. I had a long talk with a photographer friend of Jim's from Atlanta. He had worked for a time as an art courier, and told me a bizarre story of picking up a priceless antique cabinet from a ramshackle mansion. The mansion was inhabited by an old man with a bad back who was strapped to a gurney. He propelled himself from one room to another by using two canes as though they were oars.

After this riveting interlude I needed another cider. Or, actually I didn't need another cider, but I got one anyway. One of the students from a local flora class that I helped Gabbie teach insisted on my having one with her while she drunkenly told me about her antique roses, her envy at Gabbie for having found a stand of Ginseng in the forests of Guntersville, and her opinion that my marriage to Bruce was "a gooooood thing, you knoooooow?? Lak a reeeealllly, reeeeaaalllly goood thing. Yeeeeah."

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And last but not least, I was so fried yesterday when I wrote my entry I forgot to say:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SIMON!!!!!!! MEOW WOW!

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