I'm back

Yesterday I got in one short entry. Oi. Mom was using the computer almost all night to work on her photography, and then she was on the internet for a long time. When she got done, instead of checking if I wanted to check my e-mail, she shut it down and went to bed. Which is a real pain since she was on during the hours during which I am most likely to catch my various friends online, and also the hours when I am most likely to get e-mail from my friends in Japan (none last night, but still.)
No Tanka yesterday, but then I'm not really doing them right. I've been writing them more like long Haiku than like Tanka, but that is in part because I really like Haiku better, but I like the longer format better too. I've been stuck on the syllable form which is pretty silly since even in Japanes, authors don't stick to it that strictly (they do them short long shor long long, but it doesn't have to be 5-7-5-7-7) and American Haiku and Tankas are less formal than that. The syllable counts are less important than the completeness and the experience evoked. (I hate it when people lose track of an artform for the rules that are supposed to guide it, and here I am doing the exact same thing. Oi Vey.) Well, I'd like to try a kasen Renku, but it requires audience participation. It is a form of syllabic poetry where you alternate authors and which has linked verses. It usually contains 36 alternating long and short verses (5-7-5 7-7 5-7-5 7-7 5-7-5 etcetra) and is broken up into three sections. I'll post more about it in the next entry. We'll see if it goes anywhere.) They can have any number of authors (though obviously 36 is a final limit.)

It has rained a lot in the last couple of days. The back yard has reverted to swamp mode again. My snow peas may have drowned. The sunflowers seem okay mostly, mortality is still below 20%. The tomatoes aren't dying but they certianly aren't growing either. The bushes and vines I've planted are doing very well, and the brocciflower has sprouted in the seed tray. I'm going to let it get pretty big before planting it.

I took down our old swingset yesterday. Killed a screwdriver doing it. Mom told the kids about my intention to dissasemble the non-functional swingset, and they asked her not to let me. My brother wanted to use it to jump off of onto the trampoline. Sometimes I wonder about his common sense though. He told her about falling off of it while trying to jump off onto the trampoline. Not the strongest arguement I've ever heard. Especially since he's the son who went to the hospital with a cracked skull because he was playing catapult with a swingset once, and the one with very little sense of mortality, or when to keep his mout shut about it. "Oh yeah, I did almost fall off the roof at dad's." One of the bolts holding it together was rusted so badly that it twisted in half before the nut came off.
OOh I just changed Trillian so that the sounds it plays when people log on and off of AIM and MSN and such are distinctly different from each other as well as the other trillian sounds!