Thank Goodness it's Saturday....

The birds are singing happily, though I haven't fed them yet and the morning is grey. Grey as it is, the maple tree outside my window is bright scarlet and cherry. I love this time of year.

Task for the day: clean out the stuff under the bathroom sink. Unromantic, huh?

Saturday morning bird report....

We have some major dish banging going on, on Domino's part - bam, bam, bam against the bars. Do you think he's noticed that I haven't fed them this morning yet?

I think some emergency millet is called for.

Daring jailbreak....

I should have learned, but I didn't. I forgot that the budgies can get out of the right-hand cage when I remove the tray in the bottom. They know it too, worse luck. So as soon as I took the tray out to wash it this morning, there was a whirring of wings and there was Wisdom, on the curtain rod, smug and happy.

I had to open the door so she could go back into the cage for food. After all, I'm going out.

So now the Wisdom, Simon and Domino are on top of the cage for Kaylee and Pryde, eating their cuttlebone, which they can reach through the bars. It's ever so much more fun than eating their own cuttlebone, which is easy to reach and totaly accessible. Of course.

So it's a lively morning in my apartment now (there they go, back to the curtain rod).

I'm getting out of here. I'm outnumbered.

Task for the day....

It was an odd day, a day spent virtually without doing anything fannish (that's rare for me) and without seeing friends, except for a brief visit with maboroshimaki.

I walked to the fitness club for weights and twenty minutes on the cross-trainer, listening to the Georgette Heyer novel Black Sheep, which I read years ago and seem to have almost entirely forgotten. I bought a pair of shoes and a few spices.

When I got home, the budgies were back in their cage, looking well-behaved and virtuous. I wondered if they'd broken something and were trying to hide it, the way cats do. Or perhaps these were little green Skrull imposters who had kidnapped and replaced my rowdy little guys.

I shut the cage door, and then gave them their favourite treat: baby bok choy. Even better than millet.

Still listening to Georgette Heyer, I cleaned the cupboard under the bathroom sink and found numerous bottles of shower gel, shampoo and conditioner that I'd forgotten about. I must have got a quantity at Costco or something. I also found some rather lovely rose-scented oil. That job somehow escalated into cleaning out half of the hall closet. So it goes.

The Monk Who Sold his Ferrari....

I got this book, The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari by Robin S. Sharma, from the library and made notes on it. Sharma was one of the speakers at that lecture-session I went to featuring Deepak Chopra. Sharma's speaking style had impressed me. So had his advice about life.

His book impressed me somewhat less than his talk. This isn't to say the book isn't good, depending how you define the word; it has some very good and wise advice, clearly set out in both parable and point form. Nothing new, but all stated in a good introductory way and made very clear and approachable.

Seen as a story, the writing style was terrible. But he calls it a fable, so he can get away with it. It reminded me of The Celestine Prophecy in that the writing was clumsy, stilted and simplistic, but the information within it was excellent.

Worse, Sharma has some annoying stylistic devices, like having the narrator/protagonist freqnetly say things like, "I never thought about self-improvement before" and "I could never imagine myself meditating." Is this just to make the reader feel proud that he has thought about these things? Or not to feel inferior if he hasn't? Sharma has the wise character saying, "You can see this is true because you see how great my life is," and the reader thinks, "Yeah, right, you're just a character in a book, where's the truth in that? We have to take your word for it." I remember B.F. Skinner did the same thing in Walden Two. Drove me nuts. But this book is far better than Walden Two.

Sharma even says things that aren't true, such as that you can make a baby believe a sunny day is depressing if you teach him it is. Uh-uh. If we were so suggestible as to always believe what our parents told us, it would be a very different world. Parents can't change anyone's perceptions by telling them lies. What you would have is a confused kid, not one who meekly believed what his parents said.

Sharma lives in Toronto and is, I believe, Canadian, but he did everything he could to make this book sound as American as possible. Maybe he's an immigrant from the U.S.

But aside from all this, the recipe for living in the book is very good indeed - the basis of yoga philosophy. I plan to use its suggestions. Some of them I am already using. For all the clumsiness of presentation, the substance of the book is superb.

I have Sharma's next book, which was given to me for my birthday. I wonder how it will compare.

Ashes...

For svdodecals, the challenge to do a Smallville ficlet of 144 words. The current topic: Show us the short "missing scene" of your choice from "Exile," "Phoenix," or "Extinction".

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Ashes

Sometimes Kal took girls home with him, and usually regretted it. Eventually he stopped. When Lana turned up, he hoped things might be different - but no. Clark or Kal, Smallville or Metropolis, it was the same. How could anyone love him? He was freakish. And how could he love anyone while hating himself? Lex would understand, but Lex was gone.

The ring burned him: fiery core of his exploded homeland. The mark of Jor-El, who had given him life, then sent him away, and twisted him unmercifully. When he took off the ring, the burning stopped but the pain began. Guilt. Loneliness. Despair.

He dialed home, and hung up when he heard Martha's voice. She wasn't his mother. He cried over her anyway.

Lex had married, and left him, and died. Clark had nothing now but a ring that burned his heart to ashes.

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