I will not make a declarative post.
I will not make a declarative post.
I will not….

….well, there went my resolve…I generally try to steer myself away from telling straightforward tales of the everyday on domesticat. I'm not certain why, exactly, I have such a desire to avoid a simple retelling, but I think it's because I like to think that I'm able to take a few minutes out of each and every day to lift myself out of the immediacy of the moment.

To see the bigger picture.

Tonight, I haven't managed it. It was one of those nights that I tried to help a friend resurrect a site with problems, but didn't manage my usual magic. For the second night in a row, my attempt to make a tasty dinner fell flat. I didn't get as much coding done as I wanted, nor as much housework.

Just…flat. I think maybe I've exceeded my code-and-domesticat-fu for the day.

Several times this year I've promised friends that when I went back to Tull for the Christmas holidays, that I would take pictures. Most of them have trouble imagining a reality of a place like Tull, because few places like it still exist.

So, this year, I went home for Christmas and brought the camera.

This is where I grew up.

Native, lifelong southerners don't quite know what to make of snow. Snow is, of course, that mystical white stuff that seems to fall in fourteen-foot clumps onto remote places like Buffalo, New York, and the upper peninsula of Michigan. This would be a problem, except that it's a demonstrable fact that nobody (the Abominable Snowman excepted) actually lives in the UP of Michigan.

As for the eighteen people living in Buffalo, New York: you're out of luck. Have fun digging; we'll see you in August. Say hi to the polar bears on your way out, willya?Snow is inconsistent with southerners' natural states of being. We react to it like pampered house cats—when thrown outside amidst the mess, we stand there, shell-shocked, for a few minutes, and then begin twitching our hands uncontrollably to try to shake the cold stuff off. (If you've ever seen a house cat thrown outside in the snow for the first time, you know exactly what motion I'm trying to describe.)

I get asked sometimes about the kind of people I meet when I travel. Mostly because I always seem to come back with stories of the people that I didn't intend to meet, but somehow managed to bump into, anyway.

When I travel alone, I ask a lot of questions. Telling perfect strangers that you're a writer is almost tantamount to asking them for the story of their life; stand there quietly, perhaps with a pen and a piece of paper, and the world opens up to you. The next thing you know, you're sitting on a park bench with someone who formerly looked like everyone else (but who now is suddenly very interesting), and they're telling you the story of their life, their loves, and why they live where they live.

It's fascinating, and it's very, very addicting.While in Illinois, I took two day trips to Springfield. The first I devoted mostly to Lincoln-related sightseeing.

Amy, Lincoln Memorial
by domesticat.

Andrew and Joy tried to explain her to me, but I've managed to forget everything about her (including her name) except for two things: the way she looks, and one of her pet peeves. "She has this thing," Andrew said with a laugh, "about butt-warmth. It just grosses her out."

Butt-warmth? What in the world? I assumed it was one of those terms that, while thoroughly confusing on first listen, made perfect and complete sense once it had been explained.

I was right: 'butt-warmth' is the perfect word to describe what her pet peeve was. If forced to define, it would be something like this:

butt-warmth, (noun): The noticeable rise in ambient temperature left behind after a person sits in a chair for a period of time, and then leaves the chair vacant for the next person.

I only participate in ye olde Friday Five when the questions interest me. Today's questions were very interesting indeed: