Shh -- don't tell anybody, but the windows are open

Up at 6:30 a.m. in San Pedro, still on Michigan time, I'm sitting on the couch, laptop warm where it belongs -- on my lap -- reading about all the snow back east. A photo comes up of somebody cross-country skiing on the National Mall in D.C. Mother Nature taking charge: airports closed, holiday shopping and highways all tangled up.

And here I sit in my pink bathrobe on the couch, watching a red sunrise bloom up over the harbor (yes, we face east on this hillside) and yes, it's so mild that we've left the windows open. I just heard the L.A. Times plop onto the porch -- a reassuring sound -- I wonder how much longer we'll have this part of morning. I'm not complaining, not disposed to let myself sink into melancholy nostalgia before its time.

No, I'm not complaining at all. I know enough to be grateful. Because it's a quiet, serene Sunday morning and I'm reading poems in the new Driftwood Review, and the whole day is ahead of me, and my husband is still snoozing peacefully in the next room, and I'm facing the sparkling ocean and...the windows are open.

Boston Herald: Bodacious Breakfast Bites

The only paper at the breakfast table in our hotel this morning was a stack of the tabloid Boston Herald. Its raucous alliteration soon got us guffawing over our scrambled eggs:

Headline: " Banned Nantucket dog's bite worse than its bark."
"Toney Nantucket has long frowned on rowdy rabblerousers running amok on their privileged sanctuary -- but now one four-legged party animal has found himself banned from the swanky isle...Lester, an 8-year-old Bluetick Coonhound who had summered on Nantucket for six years, was unanimously voted off the island at a Board of selectman hearing Wednesday after several neighbors complained the pooch had bitten four people."

Here's one about a 19-pound baby born to a diabetic mom:
Headline: Great Big Baby's Living Large"
"Kisaran, Indonesia-- He's a great big baby, and he just won't stop eating! ...Everyone wants a look at Akbar -- "great" in
Arabic -- who weighed in at a whopping 19.2 pounds Monday and is now drawing crowds. 'I'm very happy that my baby and his mother are in good health,' proud papa Muhammad Hasanudin said. 'I hope I can afford to feed the baby enough, because he needs more milk than other babies.' Crowds pushed to get a peek at the bouncy butterball at the hospital in Kisaran, Sumatra."

Ahh...THIS is journalism.

Another Nail in the Coffin

Yesterday's pull-out tabloid, the Opinion and Book Review section, was the last one, according to an editorial.Times Link. The section already had been diminished -- as I bemoaned in a post a couple of weeks ago, they'd recently re-designed the increasingly measly supplement so you had to turn it over to read the other half, and it was often buried among the (also thinning) classified ads.
It must be so depressing for those writers and editors at the Times, who are seeing their careers and, I imagine, their love of newspapers going down the drain. Fast, faster, faster.

Gloomy about Newspapers, Part One

I'm feeling sad about newspapers today.

Part Two: Hot Type and Fragrant Ink

Traveling again...

Long Day, New Poem

Ted and I have a ritual of ringing my mother's Chinatown dinner bell when we think the longest day of the year is over. The wait proved to be a muse. Read it fast. I'll pull a Rappleye and "poof" it after a day.



*poof*

Okay, readers, here's a new draft. It, too, will go poof in a day.

*poof #2*