Bear and bare

Once again, life's just been busy yet boring. It's amazing how things written just over a week ago, before the election, are now so outdated. I was happy with everyone who got elected, except for Eliot Spitzer, New York's governor-elect. I think Spitzer is a nanny-statist par excellence. However, I've been reminded that there's a bright side. Spitzer will treat same-sex marriages and unions contracted out of state as legal in-state, and the governor-elect of Massachusetts will overturn that awful 1913 law that keeps out-of-state couples from getting married there. (It was started to keep interracial couples from using Massachusetts as a refuge, and judges decided to keep that terrible history going for same-sex couples from out of state.) That means L'Ailee and I can have a legal re-wedding. It's good news, but we're proceeding cautiously, with our eyes wide open. We don't want this yanked out from under us again.

L'Ailee and I finished an interior redesign job. This one was more complicated than usual. It was BossLady's friend who commissioned it, which added another layer of pressure for me. (If I screwed up, I'd have problems at my real job!) They had their last kid get his own apartment. We turned one of the bedrooms into a small gym and a gigantic bathroom with garden tub! We got to boss around contractors! I really needed L'Ailee's sense of space and her coolness in front of strangers with me on this one. We have all the holiday money we could possibly need because of it, though, and they're delighted with the results.

We were thrilled to watch Kevin Harvick dominate the Phoenix race last Sunday, and dismayed that Jimmie Johnson's probably going to win the Chase for the Championship. We think Harvick should at least be closer to it--he has, after all, won his fifth race. Next weekend brings Homestead, the last race of the season. We'll have to think of something else to do for three months. We'll figure out some way to spend a cold and lazy Sunday.

I gave myself two silly writing assigments, purely for fun and practice. I am *not* doing NaNoWriMo. I have two past NaNoWriMo projects that need development and promotion. No, these are in much shorter form. One is a bit of fun for the thousand-plus members of Pandas Unlimited, the cutest community at Flickr. Basically, it's an advice column written in the voice of the National Zoo's everlastingly patient and wise panda mother, Mei Xiang. "Mei" takes questions like "How do I handle a hyperactive child?" (Given that cute little one-year-old Tai Shan she's raising, she would know!) The other is a "gift guide" in the manner of the ones Dave Barry used to release every year--a list of the worst, weirdest, wildest possibilities for holiday presents one can order. I'm still taking suggestions, incidentally. :-) It should be done the weekend after Thanksgiving.

And I've got some links.

For some reason today, I ended up telling people online about Manhattan's notorious completely bare spa. They are known for absolute and total waxing. I already knew about Completely Bare with a Flair, in which the, um, carpeting is replaced with a design in Swarovski crystals. If you look under "hair removal", you can also get "Bikini Graffiti"--an airbrushed design of your choice, applied to your newly blank canvas! It's ungodly expensive, too. I've been wanting a tattoo of a sitting, smiling, waving panda, though I don't know where I would put it. L'Ailee figured I could bring in a picture of a sitting, smiling, waving panda and impress my gynecologist and my Swim Girls with...wait for it...Completely Bare with a Bear! Yeah, we're punchy tonight.

Atheists and agnostics now have a winter greeting card of their own.

There's a live polar bear cam in Canada!

I don't care what y'all think about hip-hop, y'all must, absolutely *must*, hear Nas and Jay-Z (a/k/a "the Clash of the Titans"!) on Black Republicans!!!

And finally, a moment of silence. Milton Friedman, one of the most influential libertarians and economists, died last night at age 94.