Year: 2007

(I accidentally deleted the second half of this blog entry; here’s the restored version from some years back.) That might be the best way to go. I would just move the lawnmower out of the way and set up my sleeping bag and Therma-Rest. This is a tough market. San Francisco — way too expensive. East Bay — it’s the Brooklyn of the west, but it’s too far away (one of my colleagues says it took him two hours and fifteen minutes to get to campus yesterday!) and about to become very expensive. Santa Cruz — you’ve got to deal with Highway 17 and the fact that there aren’t jobs. I’ve never done the ‘blind dating’ or internet dating thing but it must be similar to this. The advertisements on Craiglist are always quite different from the reality (i.e. crackhouse by the beach, scary apartments, etc.) I’ll keep you posted…

Three days after the hornet situation, my leg now looks like a leg again. I’ll keep everyone posted. I’m learning that I have extreme reactions to insects as well as venomous plants, especially poison oak. The weird thing is, yellowjackets, poison oak, and most of my other enemies, are not “non-native invasive” species. They are all “natural” and native to California. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

It’s not just that I’m very allergic to hornets. They also, for some reason, find me attractive. They swarm all over me — and instead of just flying around me in an exploratory way, the hornets usually sting me without provocation. Anyhow, my leg still looks weird but I think the situation is under control. However, I am going to be a bit gun-shy about hiking for a while. I might start hiking with a thick, full-body raincoat or a suit of protective mesh. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

I have a fraught relationship with nature — and my trip last weekend to Point Reyes reminded me of this. It was beautiful there — fogbound, lots of deer, the rolling Marin Headlands, egrets and herons everywhere. And then, in the middle of a trek, I somehow disturbed a wasp’s nest. A bunch of them descended on me. I was stung about four times — and I had some sort of nasty histimine reaction, causing my ankle (and, really, my entire left leg) to swell up to frightening proportions. Still recovering from this. Keep a close watch for these nasty little beasties. (They are ruthless.) http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

My rat-o-mer is turned down pretty low after living in New York and being exposed to that sort of thing every single day. But I saw a rat in Richmond that beat all previous records. He was at least a foot and a half long from his filthy head to his unspeakable tail. It was a major turn-off from an otherwise nice and sleepy neighborhood. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Hey, readers — feast your eyes on that little box at the bottom right of this blog page with the little number in the middle of it. That is my brand new reader-counting thingamabob! Many thanks to Kara for helping me install this wonderful new device that allows me to track the number of ‘hits’ I get into the site. This is huge for me. Each of the numbers that you see on the screen represents my total number of readers — in the hundreds of thousands. In other words, if the little box says “nine,” that means that 900,000 people have read my site. If it says, “10,” I’ve reached my one million readers mark. This means I can now accept gigantic advertising clients for my site (and retire comfortably by next year.) T-shirts, cross promotions, action figures, and a special CactusEaters cactus-flavored cereal, are sure to follow. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

What can I say about Sea Monkeys? They are actually shrimp, they mail them to you in a weird little vacuum-sealed package, and when you put them into the plastic tank, they flail around for a while and die off very soon. The weird thing about sea monkeys is, they never reproduce. There is nothing you can say or do to make sea monkeys take a romantic interest in one another. They just float around and ignore each other and, eventually, they all plotz, one by one. There is nothing you can do about this. In about a month, you’ve got a useless plastic tank with a bunch of floaties in it. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

I have a lot to be thankful for. In the past week, I haven’t seen a single ant farm taking shape in my car. That’s pretty amazing, considering the size of the antfarm that was living in my car for the past month. I finally got tired of it and sprayed my car down with Fantastic, which did the trick. Also, as of this moment, no rats have tried to break into my house. In New York, rat break-ins were a frequent occurence. Once time (I swear, this is not a fabrication) I had to defend myself from a rat by bopping it on the head with a short work of experimental fiction. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

I can’t believe this, but the rats apparently followed me from NYC to Silicon Valley. I joined the Rat Witness Protection Program but I guess someone “ratted” me out. The other day I was jaywalking (fun to do in Cupertino, and you need to jaywalk some of the time because the sidewalks end so abruptly) when a giant rat — the size of a shoebox — came charging out across the street, with a look of cruel intent in his eyes. In his jaws, he carried a coupon for a $100 I-phone rebate. I got out of his way. He was in a hurry. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default