Postcards from your garden gnome

I've had a strange week. I feel unmotivated, but excited for the future. I feel full of malaise, but not depressed. I think Amelie (real title: Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulain) was the right movie to see under the circumstances. It was fabulously French and weird and just note perfect.

I looked up tonight from Workout Mode and found I'd been dancing on a pad for about forty minutes. Those are 500 calories I'll never see again. According to Workout Mode.

Today I sang Alex songs about koalas and gorillas from his Baby Einstein picture books. They didn't actually come with music. That was all up to me. I have more songs going too. I got the good idea to just play and play and tape myself onto the computer with Audacity. Maybe those tunes that always bump around in my head will never get lost now.

Now that you've read this post, I assign you the task of auditing my papers after I die. Only you and the whole internet will know that there are secret songs on my hard drive. Plus all the flotsam and jetsam I wrote down lo these many years. It's in my will, you're legally bound now.

I've had pentameter lines running around as well. Here is one from a couple weeks back, when I took Alex and Sarah to his language giddyup class, then walked to the USU student center on a clear winter morning:

A sky so blue the towering mountains bow

It was really like that. And here's a quatrain from a sonnet yet to be completed, yet to be called "Hearing Things." I thought it up while I was walking to the grocery store and Subway for lunch, after listening to the song "Lullaby" on the new Dixie Chicks album while driving. [If you've known me for a long time, you might know that I used to describe my taste in music as "everything", with these two exceptions: "country" and "opera". Happily, I came around on the opera and I especially like the ones where people sing ordinary things in these opera voices. Like "Hooooney... Wherrre Is my Brrrrrrush?" "Wherrreverr you Left! It!" And I have heard that this Dixie Chicks album is "crossover" so I can still hate on the "country".]

I am not sure exactly which quatrain of the three in the nascent sonnet the following should be:

It's been a while since I have lived and breathed
A hearing thing within a world of sound
I feel the voices rumble underground
I feel them, though I never once believe

That third line isn't quite right, is it? I tried it as "I feel vibrations rumbling underground". I think a lot will depend on the other ten lines, and maybe that's why it doesn't fit yet. That, and the word "believe" is bothering me too. But I'll never change the first two lines, even if I live to fifty.