Wurmple

Yesterday I had an old, surreal, and vague memory confirmed as fact. I've thought it could just have been a vivid dream, especially because the details are so hazy. But no: I saw a deer in a dining room. A live deer. Standing in a live dining room. On the other side of a live dining room table. It was in Mrs. Poe's house—she took in wounded animals and nursed them back to health. When my mom and I took a wounded bird to her, there was a deer in her dining room. Now she's dead, her house has been demolished (it was right by the Bahai Temple in Wilmette), and the deer is probably dead as well. But I remember seeing a deer in a dining room.

There is this bush just outside my kitchen window that grows little red berries in the summer. I think they're probably poisonous. They might not be—I've never tried them because I've always thought they were poisonous. But animals like eating them. Chipmunks cram their cheeks with them. Birds pluck them off the twigs with their beaks. Squirrels bend the branches with their weight as they savor their food. So they're probably not poisonous to chipmunks and birds and squirrels and whatever other animals might eat them. But they could still be poisonous to humans, because some things are like that.

This late in the summer all of the berries are gone, but the birds still land there, and I watch them while I'm washing bell peppers, orange and red. All different kinds of birds, kinds that I've never noticed before because I wasn't really paying attention before. I don't know that I could describe them, but they're all pretty small (otherwise they wouldn't be able to stand on the branches I think, though birds tend not to weigh much because of their hollow bones). There are little black ones with shiny black beaks; do they have white patterns on their head? There are brown ones that have a ring of browny-orangey-red around the edges of their wings. And there are others. Stripes and speckles—combinations of colors—beaks and crests and breasts and wings—and I can't keep track of how they all fit together. Maybe there are only a few different kinds but it seems like a lot because they're not just crows and robins and sparrows (I think).

I like to think about watching the birds again sometime.

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This is really cool: Lala.

Reasons Lala is really cool:
1. You can listen to all the music you already have in your library from any computer with an internet connection once you run the Music Mover.
2. You can listen to any song on Lala once for free (so you can listen to an entire album before you buy it).
3. You can buy a song to listen to online for only $0.10 (the first 50 are free!). And you can buy a DRM-free download of the song for $.89.
4. If you use iTunes, it can sync with iTunes to automatically update it when you download a song, and to upload any new music to Lala.

Super-nifty! I think it's a good idea, at least.