The day was cloudy and somewhat cool, making it possible to tackle some of the remaining firewood chores. At this point the woodshed is about as full as it can get, but there is still a bunch of wood (mostly large pieces of hickory from Susan the Memoirist's Bearsville blowdown) that need to be split up and put somewhere. The hickory is proving more difficult to split than maple and oak, but not nearly as bad as elm.
This evening Chris (or Chris and Kirsty, aka "the photogenic vegan couple") came over for a yet another quiche-and-pesto-pasta dinner Gretchen had prepared. (Kirsty was down in Philadelphia, attending to an ill parent.) For some reason Gretchen decided to revist a topic we'd discussed while very drunk on the streets of Adams Morgan: putting fingers up the ass of a sex partner.
For the past day or so I've been listening to an atmospheric British "shoegaze" band called "The Engineers." Given that one of their songs is used as the theme song for Big Love, it seems there're a little less obscure than most of the bands Indie Pop Rocks introduces me to, but I couldn't find any downloads on thePirateBay.org. Lacking other convenient sources, I bought their debut album in MP3 form from Amazon.666. Who says kids today don't still buy music? I love the way the Engineers can be both melancholy and hopeful simultaneously. You can hear this clearly in the song "Forgiveness," with its fresh springlike guitar riff underneath dreamy fattened-up vocals asking for, well, forgiveness.
Other great songs include "Come in out of the Rain" and "Thrasher." The Big Love theme is "Home," but it's not as excellent as these others.
You may remember that a week or so ago I tried to buy a party bulb using the Lowes ecommerce site, only to immediately get a phone call back from a Lowes call center apologizing for an inventory glitch and saying my order couldn't be fulfilled. I'd taken the phone call as an indication that they really don't understand how to do this whole newfangled internet commerce thingiemcdoogle.
Today I received a letter in the mail from Lowes containing not a request to pay a civil penalty for shoplifting but a receipt for the refund that had happened after the failed ecommerce purchase. Not only had they resorted to snail mail to inform me of this, but they'd actually addressed the letter by hand and sent it from the local Lowes big box. It was so weird (and the penmanship so interesting) that I'm forced to scan it. (Note that they'd written the name of my street wrong, though I'd entered it correctly in their web form. It got to me just fine.) Another 44 cents less profit for the Lowes ecommerce operation!
