I hate to bug you, but... "Dogs who paint" update: Miss Luna now has a patch of pale blue paint on the tip of her right ear. And I have a swatch of white hi-gloss on the end of my braid. Nasty flying-ant type critters (they look like termites but I am told they aren't) have been swarming due to the recent rain. Luckily it doesn't rain much here. They are not really a problem unless you provide a landing strip for them and they get stuck there. I'll explain. We were getting ready to put a new floor in, so a few days ago I painted the baseboards. Kip had pried them loose and laid them out on the porch. I used some delicious creamy hi-gloss white paint. The first coat looked like frosting--but you could still see the puke green through it. Puke green (after taxi yellow and international distress orange) is one of the hardest colors to cover up. Damn that cover-up. So I applied a second coat right about the time the sun was setting and the porch light came on. We went inside and had some fruit for dinner. When I came back there were dozens of these exoskeletal bugs mired in the paint like mammoths in a tar-pit. We decided to let them sizzle in the sun then sand them off once they were fully crisped and fused with the paint. Then we applied another coat of shellac and then the paint again. I told Kip it's OK, it's just like we made our own fossils and they are now trapped in amber. About shellac: Kip told me that shellac is actually made from bugs, by the way. A secretion is collected from Lac beetles; the beetles reside in India. Here's the definition from the dictionary stored in my computer: lac insect |ˈlak ˈinˌsekt| noun an Asian scale insect that lives on trees and produces secretions that are used in the production of shellac. [Laccifer lacca, family Lacciferidae, suborder Homoptera.] So. If you are one of those vegetarians who are upset about the cochineal bugs used to color that Starbucks strawberry drink, you had better think twice before you start that decoupage project... Another gross thing I learned while painting is that location is important: the baseboards were laid out on the porch under the hummingbird feeder. For some reason the rain has revved up the hummers to the point where they don't even stop to eat. They just buzz around and guard the feeder so that others can't eat. Capitalists. Anyway, I probably should have been wearing a helmet but I was feeling reckless. So I just kept painting as the hummers swooped and dive-bombed above me. Suddenly, something fell right where I was painting. A tiny brown speck the size of a pinhead (by "pinhead" I mean the actual head of an actual pin—not a person who is a pinhead). It was disgusting, but ONLY A TINY BIT disgusting. Last evening we took a break from putting in our new floor to take a "beachcombing" stroll through the desert outside of our fence. (As opposed to the desert inside of our fence.) We found some old furniture that had been washed down an arroyo. It looked like it had once been a nice glider with curlicues carved in the wood. Now it is driftwood and I am thinking of somehow using it in our garden. Don't laugh; we planted something called Hummingbird Mint and Mallow, which is a yellowy flowery shrub—and the hummers, butterflies, and bees provide plenty of entertainment and encouragement. We'll plant more drought-tolerant flower things. Other things we saw out in the sand were less appealing. Lots of stripped wires and rusted springs...broken windows and battered siding, taillights from trailers, and unidentifiable plastic shards in all the wrong colors (see above), and probably toxic. Today I contributed to the overall toxicity of the environment. Kip asked me to hand him a little strip of the vinyl flooring. This stuff has a glue strip along the side of it. I found a scrap that looked to be the correct size and shape. But there was something light brown stuck to the glue strip. I reached to pull it off, and then thought better of it. It raised its pincers and waved them at me. Its curved tail was stuck to the vinyl and there was nothing it could do but stay there and look ugly. I took the whole mess outside and threw it over the fence. " You can't live with us!! Go DIE!" I said, not quietly. "So...what did you do with it?" asked Kip. "I threw it over the fence," I said. "What? You threw the vinyl over the fence??" Yes I did. Sorry about that, environment. But my personal space is more important to me just now. In the eloquent words of Chandler Travis (one of my favorite songwriters): "Don't talk to me about the great outdoors! I wanna hear about ceilings and floors!" This morning there were several large explosions just east of the mountains. I thought about people who live with that every day, with gunship helicopters and fighter jets flying low and plumes of smoke interrupting their picnics and outdoor weddings. Why shouldn't we see what that feels like since much of that weaponry and powder and smoke probably originates right here in the Mojave desert? So anyway, getting a piece of the floor done meant that I could unpack some boxes and load books into the pine cabinet. First thing I did was look for a nice poem to send out to you people. So here it is. I got it from the New Orleans Review, Volume 20, Numbers 3 & 4. It's the one that features Everette Maddox, but this poem is by someone else. ANOTHER COUNTRY by Shannon Mark Smith I want to go to Pujilakria, where I'm well aquainted with the wind. If I could get to Pujilakria, it would be alright— they would wrap me in linen, apply a poultice of garlic and the root of the wandering Yamo tree. They would bear me sweetly. They've had a war there; the Marble Palace, I've heard, is in ruins, the Obelisk is cracked. The morning market-women sell soft melons and hard words. The scholars are writing tracts about the failure of the government, how the General mustered, how it didn't work. I left a woman there; I hope she wept for me. I hope she cried for a day at least.