We are going skiing for about a week, in a village in Upper Austria, so this site won’t be updated again until around 8 February, when I hope to have some pictures of the trip. I am not much of a skier, having wrecked a knee skiing about 10 or 15 years ago, so I plan to accompany Gamma to her ski lessons while everyone else is on the slopes (it is common for Austrian kids to start at 3 or 4, so at about four and a half she’s not too young) and spend any spare time rewriting a novel or drinking Hefeweizen beer.

I appreciate you coming here to read this stuff, and even more I appreciate those of you who take the time to leave a comment or write a mail. Until I get back, I recommend that you visit some of those great sites in my right hand sidebar. I love all of them equally, of course, but have lately been re-discovering the sites I have linked to the longest, from the very beginning of Feral Living way back when (sometimes I have the feeling that I have been writing here for ages). Sites like Riley Dog or So Blue It’s Black. The latter is actually defunct now, Moira has stopped updating it and has started a new literature blog, which I recommend highly. Other old links that I still enjoy a lot are A Blog With a Name that Keeps Changing, Words Mean Things, Anti-Drug, Something New to Look at Every Day, Dangerous Monkey, Bauke, Garden of Eden, and Uren.Dagen.Nachten, which is in my opinion the best European blog, even if you don’t speak Dutch. I am mentioning these particular blogs not because they are better than the other ones in my sidebar, but just because I haven’t talked about any of them in a long time, although they are still all very good and worth reading, so go there now.

Finally, I’d like to mention that the Shoe Project is not dead, and is scheduled for a relaunch soon, like in February or March of this year. There will be a few slight design changes and it will have a new URL, all as yet to be determined. Besides 150×150 images of shoes, I hope to include also a short (optional) text by the contributor about the picture.

See you in a week.

“Sometimes I start blog entries which I realize half way through writing them are real lame. And then I throw them in the dumbster.”

Says Pat.

I think I could use a dumbster.

Cleaning up the coffee that flooded our kitchen counter because I made more than the pot would hold, I noticed that we had a mosquito in the kitchen this morning. Not one of your meek little sneak-up-on-you-while-you-sleep mosquitos. This was a big, black Alaskan-style One-Percenter mosquito with attitude, and it chased me as I chased it. then I lost it against the shadows.
Me: “Where is it? Where is it?” [clapping hands randomly in the hope of getting it]
Alpha: “It’s a mosquito, a mosquito for god’s sake!”
Me: “Where is the damn thing?”
Alpha: “A mosquito! Are you deaf?”
Me: [stop clapping for a moment] “What are you talking about? I know it’s a mosquito.”
Alpha: “Then why did you keep saying, ‘what is it’?”
Me: “I said ‘where is it’, not ‘what is it’.”
Alpha: “It sounded like ‘what’ is it.”
[meanwhile, mosquito flies back outside in search of a Rottweiler to bite]

Also not best tagline.
I would like to offer my sincere congratulations to this year’s winners of the “bloggies”:
Webloggers / Tourist Guy (best meme) / Weblogs: a History and Perspective / Blogger / Moveable Type (yay) / Loobylu / weblog wannabe / Plasticbag.org / ItzPapalotl / Luminescent / EastCoast/WestCoast / Davezilla / MetaFilter / BluishOrange /

Survivor Blog 2 / U2log.com / Fark / Slashdot.org / Fucked Weblog / The Leaky Cauldron / LittleYellowDifferent / MetaFilter / What’s New, Pussycat / Evan Williams

and last, but not least:

Wil Wheaton, Wil Wheaton, Wil Wheaton, Wil Wheaton, Wil Wheaton and Wil Wheaton

Yesterday was the warmest January day on record in Austria, ever, and the records go back nearly 300 years. Nearly 70 fahrenheit. Today will be nearly as warm. Despite this fact, I just now discovered, the juice I bought to drink at lunch is frozen completely solid in its little carton. However, the warm weather has brought beautiful blue springtime skies and magnificent sunrises.

Yesterday was best of all – the moon still nearly full behind me – and it was such a fantastic one this time, low and big and golden on the horizon – the skies just turning blue and the sun rising over the hills in front of me, turning the last clouds pink and purple before they dissolved. Lower down, the forest along the river still black and bare, a dense black tangled creepy mass of huge trees, with that sunrise climbing out of it. And in front of the woods, dark brown plowed fields, with the first optimistic shoots of grass and grain and the first flowers giving them a green cast. Sprouts that will be in for a big surprise when the weather turns freezing again in February.

A temporary spring. All of it viewed through a windshield caked thickly with winter road grime, salt and dirt and bird shit. And my perception moving back and forth between them – sunrise, windshield, moon, windshield, spring field, windshield, sunrise, windshield, scary forest.

This weblog uses Moveable Type, which was developed by Mena of dollarshort.org fame, and her charming husband Ben. It is a reliable and fast system, a joy to use for me and everyone else I know who uses it. I think it is Mena’s second-best idea ever. It has changed my life for the better.

Mena’s idea that changed my life for the even more better – I mean, really changed the way my entire family conducts their daily life – was in a post that she made a long time ago and which I will not take the time to find. The idea in the post was simply to keep energy bars or granola bars in your car. Eat one of those when you get hungry (and cranky) and it stabilizes your blood sugar and your mood.

I also keep bottled water in my car. I’m not kidding, try it, if you don’t already do this. It has greatly increased family harmony during commutes and other car rides. So, thank you Mena for two good things.

The Feral Living Googlewhack of the day.
[via everywhere]