Oh Shit, in a moment of idiocy, I joined a content challenge

Friend Vomitola started a content challenge, which I have foolishly joined. Also, I was blabbing about how I was a so-called "blogger" to all my relatives yesterday at my grandmother's funeral (no, not at the funeral itself, just at the thing afterward where everyone and their brother was like "so, what are you doing now?" and somehow "experimenting with new wooden train track configurations with child" just doesn't cut it.) So some of my relatives might stop by (well, unlikely, but who knows...) and I want to make it look like I actually blog. ("What does Amy know about politics?" my uncle was heard asking a cousin of mine, incredulously. "Don't visit my blog," I tell him. "You will not like anything you read.")

Anyway, I'm already in the hole, content-challenge-wise, since I did not post yesterday. Do I get a bereavement exemption? It sounds like I'm making light of my grandmother's death, and I guess I am, sort of, since I'm joking about it. Of course, I also joke about that time I had the nervous breakdown, and that's not something I take lightly. I am haunted today by Poe's raven, croaking "Nevermore."

Somewhere in the background Ari is repeating "Where's my watermelon, where's my watermelon?" and shuffling pieces of play food around.

It's weird. Max and I were talking yesterday about how we know we do have regular readers (we see you on our bloglogs, people, we know you're there) but you are all so silent. In some ways it's good, since it makes it so much easier to pretend that there actually isn't anyone reading.

On the plane to and fro, yesterday, I did actually read the CRS report on the supposed legal basis for the NSA spying, and I will have more to say about that later, I hope.

I just overheard Ari saying "My Goodness, the taxi fell." over and over. "My Goodness!"

The soil in Washington is much redder than our soil. Orange, really. I think I still have traces of it under my fingernails from when I threw a clump into her grave. I wouldn't want to be buried in such orange soil. That would mean I would eventually become orange, too. I would like to be a nice dark brown soil.

This is how we have explained death to Ari. Living things die, and we bury them in the ground. And there they turn into soil, so that they can nourish other living things.

Well, I guess I'll see what's new in the news today.