Because while back in Middletown sometimes my ripe tomatoes would walk, never did the whole plant disappear…

From the sign currently attached to our railing upstairs, behind which once sat a lovely rosemary plant:

Dear Plant Thief,

There are only three scenarios we can envision when taking someone else’s plant are acceptable:

1. You have Alzheimer’s or some other degenerative brain function disease and honestly believed that you lived here and this plant was yours. If this was the case, you have bigger problems and are forgiven.

2. You are homeless and are trying to chew herbal sprigs to keep your boss or teacher from finding out from your rotten breath. If this was the case, bring back our plant & we’ll leave you a toothbrush instead.

3. You weren’t paying attention and your dog peed on our plant. Thinking that it wasn’t hygienic to let us eat the plant anymore, you took our plant hoping to replace it with an identical one from the garden shop this evening. If this was the case, we expect to see a rosemary plant here this evening.

If you don’t fall into any of these categories and you took our rosemary plant, then you are just a mean person and your parents didn’t raise you right.

Bring back our rosemary plant!

Outraged,

Your Neighbors

This would refer to the only plant that survived the great plant-napping of last August:

Can’t you just feel my outrage in this picture of the sign I made back then? (Kudos to Sarah, who I knew snapped the shot, even if it took me a while to track it down.)

It’s gorgeous today, the sort of weather that just begs for patios to be taken advantage of or windows of brand new offices to be opened. (Oh, yes!) To celebrate, let’s think back on three beautiful things from the past week:

1. I’m one of the few people in the country who don’t mind paying taxes. So I was happy to send off my check today in order to have nicer roads, better schools, and protected national parks and seashores.

2. Spinner and AOL Music provided me with lots of good, new releases to listen to this week including cds by Kaki King, Tom Lehrer, Straight No Chaser, and MGMT. I’ll definitely be picking up at least a few of them on Saturday during Record Store Day.

3. Despite not having sent out real mail in far too long, I was the recipient of both a cd and an honest-to-goodness letter this week. I think I’d better work on getting some outgoing mail written this weekend to continue this exciting trend.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

Every week Carole offers a Ten on Tuesday meme. This week’s asks for your ten favorite tv shows:

1. Castle — I love character-driven shows and this one is populated with lots of well-thought-out personalities. Castle and Beckett have great chemistry, but it’s Castle’s interactions with his daughter and (until recently) live-in mother are what moves this show up to the top of the list.
2. The Big Bang Theory — Ah, nerds! We missed much of this season with the transition to digital tv, which resulted in a temporary but prolonged loss of CBS. We have it back now (most nights) and look forward to catching up with what happened after the guys left for Antarctica last spring.
3. Glee — It’s interesting, because the writing on this show isn’t great and the songs are often over-produced, but I love it anyway. The kids seem like real, if often one-dimensional, teenagers, and it’s great fun to sing along with the soundtrack. If you somehow missed this show in the fall, turn in tonight.
4. Bones — “Quirky” is probably my highest praise for characters and this forensic drama is populated with them. Our appreciation for David Boreanaz in this show has even made us investigate one of his earlier shows, Buffy.
5. Chuck — We missed the first few seasons of Chuck because it conflicted with other shows we liked. However, the aforementioned channel blackout effectively took them off the air, leaving us with plenty of time to watch this fun spy show.
6. The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson — He sings. He dances. He doesn’t have a script. He crosses lines left and right. Funniest guy on tv.
7. A Mets or Nationals game — I don’t watch baseball indiscriminately, but am more than happy to watch my two favorite teams play. We don’t have cable and have lost Channel 50 (which airs a Nats game once a week), so we’ll have to rely on the Fox Game of the Week to help us out with this one.
8. Mystery — PBS is lost to us these days which has directly affected how much more often our tv is turned off these days. But when we had access to it, we loved the Sunday nights where we got to follow Miss Marple, Inspector Lewis, or Lynley and Havers.
9. The Mentalist — Emotionally stunted ex-con man Patrick Jane helps a California Bureau of Investigation team solve murders with the hopes that they will enable him to catch the mobster who murdered his wife and daughter.
10. Masterpiece Classic — Again, no longer accessible, but oh! what great BBC costume dramas these are! Dickens, Gaskell, Austen…

Numb3rs would have made the list, too, because I really liked the family dynamics of the show and might have a small crush on Charlie’s character, but it ended its run earlier this year.

How about you? What are your top ten tv shows?

If you don’t live in the area or follow the news, you might not be aware that there’s currently an international nuclear summit going on in D.C. I admit that the first I’d heard of it last Sunday and I live here, so don’t feel bad if you didn’t know.

Visiting dignitaries are nothing new to our nation’s capital. Important people routinely caravan across town, pausing our lives with their motorcades. However, a simultaneous visit from nearly 40 heads of state and another dozen VIPs from around the world is another magnitude above and beyond what even locals are used to.

Obama is holding the summit at the Washington Convention Center, which is located about half a dozen blocks from my office (which is also four blocks in the other direction from the White House). Last week, word began to leak out about road closures. Then we learned there would be a secure perimeter. Some businesses located within the fencing were opting to close for the duration of the summit in order not to lose business. Residents of the housing project located along one edge of the perimeter would have to turn out their bags and pockets every time they want to return home.

This was not going to be your everyday Washington meeting. [Editor’s note: D.C. or the District is what locals call the area where we live. Washington is used to refer to the federal government or by people outside the region. It is frequently said with scorn or disdain.]

By Friday, our building was astir and managers instructed employees to check the hotline before coming into work today. The helicopter presence ramped up on Saturday and at this point their whir is omnipresent. The boosted police force in the metro and on the streets became noticeable with blue or black uniforms, flashing lights, and sirens becoming commonplace.

I thought I was prepared until I stepped outside by my office this morning. There were cars parked at every corner for blocks in order to stop traffic at a moment’s notice. The streets were laden with dark SUVs (which, it turns out, have been rented by the Indian media). National Guard vehicles were posted along the outside of the perimeter along with dump trucks filled with sand. A squadron’s worth of police officers seemed to be on every corner.

So much hoopla was associated with this event that when I left my office at 7 to discover the building swathed in yellow police tape and the road closed just outside that I wasn’t surprised. I saw a protest walking down the street next to ours and assumed the two events were related. Apparently not. The local media is reporting that a cyclist was somehow struck and killed by one of the National Guard vehicles as it was pulling into place to block the road for a motorcade to pass through. The details are few at the moment, but it is a terribly sad thing regardless.

I hope good things come out of Obama’s summit because certainly nuclear weapons are a serious problem requiring intense discussion. And I appreciate that the topic and the quantity of heads of state from around the world dictate that a high measure of safety precautions are imperative and take precedence over our desire to get around unimpeded. But it does make me wonder if maybe a large conference call or online chat might be a better option next time.

ETA Tuesday a.m.: This morning’s sad email informs me that the cyclist was a colleague. I didn’t know her personally, but we often lunched at the same time upstairs. My thoughts go out to her family.

Surprise, surprise, it was not all reading all the time here at the Burrow this weekend.

This morning Rudi and I headed to the market where there were carrots, nettles, asparagus, and ramps to be had, amongst other things. We used every dollar we took with us, down to the last one that I used to buy a single yellow tulip to cheer our kitchen. It looks great atop the fridge nestled next to (but not in the same container as) the asparagus.

We spent midday up in Columbia Heights where Sarah was kind enough to invite us to celebrate her birthday with brunch and some hanging out. Everyone agreed that the food was quite tasty even if our waitress seemed a bit … distracted.

We came back home where I laid down for a teeny before we headed to the garden to dig. We weeded our plot, turned over the soil, envisioned where our square-foot garden sections might go, improved the soil, and planted cabbage babies, which despite sitting in my gardening bag for a week, did not seem to be too worse for the wear.

It’s been a quiet night at home since then with lentils and ice cream (although not together; that would be gross), Chuck and Bones (we’re still a week behind on the latter), and knitting. Shortly, we’ll be taking some ibuprofen (hoeing is hard on the back) and heading to bed.

Seems like a nice way to finish a weekend to me…

What did you get up to this weekend?

A few final thoughts on Saturday’s readathon:

After writing the last book review and leaving a few encouraging comments for fellow participants, I did take my book to bed to try to read there, but decided within minutes that it’s hard to read through closed eyelids. I turned off my book light and went to bed — probably sometime around 4 — and didn’t wake up again until after the 24 hours had concluded.

In the end I completed three books and the first three chapters of a fourth book for a total of 1,072 pages. I probably only read for 12 of the 24 hours, but it did prove that I would not like to read all the time, despite what I always thought as a kid.

I’m definitely feeling it now. Would it be cheating and self-defeating to go read in bed?

Kwaïdan, by Jung and Jee-Yun

From the jacket: “In 12th Century Japan, one sister’s spiteful jealousy begins a complicated web of revenge and redemption that spans two centuries. Ghostly encounters, samurai swordplay, undead armies, beautiful landscapes, and strange demons are brought to life by Jung’s lush, expressive artwork. The lost spirits of two unlucky lovers may still find freedom in the supernatural birth of a strange girl … and her ability to unravel the secrets of the restless ghosts that haunt her, the Kwaïdan.”

My take: I believe this was a gift from a representative of Dark Horse Books who was a fellow vendor at an ALA show several years back — the year we were in Orlando. Bill of Overdue Media introduced me to Thea and when I expressed interest in learning more about manga, she suggested this was a good gateway title.

I’m tired so my review is going to be a bit jerky, but basically this is a Japanese ghost (kwaïdan) story. Two sisters are in love with the same man. The homelier, Akane, scars the pretty one, Orin, with burning oil, who then drowns herself out of what would seem to be preemptive self pity. The guy returns from war, learns she’s dead, and gouges out his eyes on the bank of the lake. The sister, too, eventually ends up at the lake, but we later learn it’s so she can achieve some sort of twisted immortality. Confused yet?

Well, it turns out that after several centuries, Orin is able to temporarily escape the lake and imparts a portion of her soul to an about-to-be-born child, whose mother is then murdered by Akane’s demon army. The baby, Setsuko, is born, but missing a face, a symbol of her fragmented soul. Tormented as a child, the masked girl ends up in a brothel but later leaves to follow a blind artist who is known for perfectly painting the face of a beautiful woman he has never met. The two of them embark on a journey to the lake, where they hope to unravel the mystery of what has brought them together.

There’s an army of demon children. There’s a friendly ghost (named Toshiro, not Casper). There are creepy golem-type creatures that serve Akane and act as Orin’s prisoner.

It was good, but not great. But if you know of someone you’d recommend The Woman Warrior to, this is probably a good companion to that novel.

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