THEY won.



YOU watched.



kthxbye!

The Turkish word for full moon is "Dolunay." It would be a good playa name, only I'm not quite sure how to pronounce it.

Does anyone know if Regina Armenta is still doing her hoop yoga classes at St. John's on Monday evenings? All the links I could find which might provide information are blocked by net nanny.

When I was 7 years old, I had a friend from Argentina named Cecilia. Her family was living in the US for a year on some work thing, I think; when the year was up they went back to Buenos Aires and that was that. I never forgot her, though.



She turns 40 today, but in my mind, she'll always be 7 and we'll always be sitting in the back of my father's station wagon on the way to the beach, playing with Barbies and talking about spaghetti.

2009-10-31 20.41.34

Originally uploaded by Frankenyutz

My jack-o-lantern might have been influenced by all the Islamic art I saw in Istanbul. You think maybe?

Speaking of Lord Byron ... it KILLS me that these letters change hands between private collectors.



KILLS me.

On some level, I guess I always was aware there was a lot of anti-Turkish sentiment out there ... after all, didn't my boyfriend Lord Byron die of a fever he caught while talking about fighting alongside the Greeks against the Turks in some civil war or another? And didn't Vlad Tepes vanquish the evil Turks from Romania in another civil war, a few centuries before that? And what about that Turkish prison T. E. Lawrence was held in for seven years? Speaking of Turkish prisons, anybody see Midnight Express? Or how about The Adventures of Baron Munchausen? I mean, I haven't done the scholorship, but I suspect C. S. Lewis deliberately chose Turkish Delight to be the agency of evil for this very reason.



Dang. People just don't seem to like Turks. I guess the moral of the story is, if you're going to conquer the world in one millenium, you better sink into oblivion before the next, because history is a very, very sore loser, and there's nothing a loser enjoys more than eating a Big Mac on the ruins of a lost empire.

I don't think it is.



If I may quote Zorro, the Gay Blade: "There is no shame in being poor, only in dressing poorly."



Your thoughts?

Yeah, it's a month away, but I gotta be planning *something*.



I had originally planned to spend it with the kitteridge clan down in Austin, but financially that's out of the question now. There's another city that waits for me, much like Vienna.



I would like to see friends and family up in New York, but I haven't heard anything from my aunt if she's hosting it or not this year. My sister is back in the States, but it's been a tough year for her in-laws (their patriarch Bernie passed away this spring) and I imagine they're going to want to keep it very small and low-key.



There are several compelling reasons to stay local. Money, of course, is the big one ... also, lapinetrose's baby is due right around then and I'd like to be here for that. Plus there's the annual lighting of 34th Street, which is always a good time.



So I'm keeping my ear to the track for any local Orphans and Black Sheep T-day feasts. Hopefully the DC burners will be doing something ... after missing both PsDF this year, I feel kind of estranged from the community and would enjoy the opportunity to reconnect.

Cost to repair the furnace: $60 for a routine service call. It just needed to be drained and cleaned and it started right up. Fingers crossed this takes care of the problem!



Also, my insurance company reimbursed me $149 for the two times my car had to be towed to the garage. It's not much compared to how badly the repairs set me back, but every little bit helps.