It's Better in Wyoming.

Amos Hooley (my Amish alter-ego) says: Happy Halloween!

i finally made it to the new indian place in town. it was delicious, and the waitstaff was fabulous. not many people were there, which i hope is just due to the winter storm that blew in earlier this afternoon. katie said i-80 closed behind her on the way back from cheyenne, and the weatherman says we may get 20 inches in the next two days. this is expected weather: i remember trying to dye a giant snowball orange with kool-aid powder, trying to turn it into a giant jack-o-lantern. it didn't turn out all that well. turns out, the papadums served before the meal (indian restaurants' equivalent of chips and salsa) have no wheat in them. this was great news, since i was starving. even greater news was the waitstaff's willingness to bring us basket after basket of them. i intended to make vegetarian gluten-free pizza tomorrow night, but with weather like this, i think chili seems a bit more appropriate. i predict that i will be at happy jack on saturday morning, with som...

my favorite lyrics, today. from ' in the curve ': my '63 Ford is a bull-- she's four thousand pounds at least. but metal surrenders when oak trees meet fenders and engines go through the front seat. the avetts play atlanta on my birthday. a plane ticket to georgia would make a nice present to myself. or, they're also playing columbia, mo, in march. maybe beth would let me sleep on her couch. google maps says that's just a 13-hour drive, and i've been in the mood for a road trip.

talking to my friend melissa on the way back from chili and music jam at sue's tonight, i said something out loud that i hadn't quite articulated fully in my head yet. i said, 'in a relationship, you can only be responsible for one person's emotions.' i meant, you can't be responsible for how the other person feels--only how you feel. and you also can't help not feeling what the other person feels--you only got what you got. i'm not saying that you shouldn't care about other people's feeling--that's not it at all. and i'm not saying that you should intentionally play loose with other people's heads, either. it's just that the idea of compromise doesn't always cut it: sometimes there's no middle ground, and it's a mistake to pretend that in-between is possible. relationships, in general, are about feeling connected--but they're also about understanding the disconnections. sometimes i think that's the h...

I hope I wasn't too generous with the cold-season fertilizer that I spread on the yard tonight. On the bright side, I can hardly make the front lawn worse....

fidel castro, abe lincoln, or ted kaczynski? or a literary figure, like walt whitman or ernest hemingway? i think brahms, marx, or darwin brahms will require a two-year commitment. maybe i could do castro this year and guevara next year. viva la revolucion!

for the record, a down comforter is another reason to look forward to cooler weather. i've had mine out for a while, but it's been these past few days that really make me appreciate it.

apparently BMG music club shut its doors sometime this summer. Alas, no more 12 for 1 cd specials. Alas, no more random Michael Bolton cds turning up in my mailbox. Alas, the end of the lick-em-and-stick-em pictures of albums and such. Is there a digital equivalent to BMG? iTunes and Amazon don't seem to be quite the same--there none of that "what a deal" feeling, really, no sense of "more is SO MUCH LESS!" awesomeness. Scanning through the list of the top 100 sellers during BMG's six-decade run (current through 2002), I think I only had a half-dozen of these discs. (And probably two or three of them came from BMG) . But since Britney's Pears and Janet Jackson seem to be disproportionately represented here, I'm not sure I feel bad about not being an average BMGer. But still, it's sad news, the end of an era, yet another nail in the coffin of the cd. This all reminds me: I need to find somebody who will lend me a tape player that records to ...

I realized last night, and confirmed tonight, that stew makes for a good gathering. The most successful dinner party I've organized was a relatively spur-of-the-moment stew gathering, and at Kaijsa's tonight was another proof that stew makes for easy conversation. I think it's something about the informality of stew--nobody gets uptight about whether their side dish is going to be "fancy" enough for the event, nobody feels compelled to wear their nice dress, nobody wonders if it will be rude to just show up and eat stew and leave to go back to the project they've got to work on--that makes it work so well. I think there's also something about the heartiness of the meal, too: root vegetables help keep us grounded, help keep the conversation down to earth, help us realize that ultimately we're just nothing more than dirt, too. Tonight's stew was partially a "clearing out the fridge" event--Kaijsa and I both making an effort to clean our ...

I don't know what kind of certification I'd need to have in order to feel worthy of the company I had last night, sitting in the teepee at Addie's birthday event, listening to Greg and John and Chris play "Navajo Rug" and "Mountain Dew" and eating strawberries dipped in Molly's hand-whipped bourbon cream and feeding sticks into the fire on a full-moon night, eating some of Addie's Malian peanut sauce with rice and tomatoes, smelling the dutch-oven cobbler that Mo and Lee had put together. And listening to Laura's story about small-town stupidity, which began this way: "Last summer I had this job pressing flowers in newspaper, and we were using old copies of the Saratoga Sun , and there was this letter to the editor...." You can imagine where the story might go from there, but I like that it starts from pressed flowers.

I wish that cheese were healthy.