Bloon = Blue + Moon

I thought I had made up a cute new word for the blue moon, but I had not. Bloons are part of a major game thingey PLUS a thing you can fly around near space in to enjoy your home planet. Probably I had learned some of that before, though the test flight for the near-space bloon was just this May in Spain.*

Anyhoo, there's a 100% full moon tonight, and it's blue, meaning it's our second full moon this month. This is making some people crazy, but it's making me clean the bathrooms and launder the sheets. Oh, maybe the approach of houseguests accounts for that!

The moon does have a big pull on us, in many ways. It makes some of us blue, it makes some of us stand in awe, and, you know, the tides... But, speaking of cleaning toilets, what makes the swirl of a toilet flushing go one way or another? Ah, the Coriolis effect. My brain is full. And swirling.

And gone.

*The bloon in Spain stays mainly on the plain?

Thanks to Gregory H. Revera and Wikipedia for this full moon.

Prettier Than Mushrooms

There are some very, very pretty mushrooms in the world, but these Four Lemons on Plate, by Jonathan Koch, are prettier than yesterday's yellow mushrooms in my alligator pear pot.

Mushroom update: the one big yellow one spread out its parasol, and then crumbled into...mushroom crumbs.

The summer continues gorgeous, the cardinal climber continues to climb and to bloom, and I continue to write poems, edit, and send work out, before the activities of fall completely take over, which is already happening. So this is a week full of labors, and I look forward to the Labor Day weekend.

Bright Yellow Mushrooms

Ew, right? Today, as if to celebrate the Hump of the Week, bright yellow mushrooms surged up from the soil in the big flowerpot that holds my thriving avocado plant. I know from Googling, and from this Houseplant Care Guide in particular, which I also thank for the images, that the problem is fourfold: some probable combination of overwatering, poor drainage, old soil, and/or cheap potting soil (with mushrooms already in it).

So I put my avocado plant outdoors in the gorgeous sunlight; most of the little 'shrooms curled up and died, and one got bigger. (But not as warty as these.)

I am reading two books at the same time. (I have my reasons.) One is Blindness, by Nobel Prize author Jose Saramago, and the other is The Solitude of Prime Numbers, by Paolo Giordano, both in translation. Loving the latter, a fast read, and a little scared of the former, partly because, before I read the opening scene, I dreamed it!

It was happening to me this morning in a dream: I was driving, and I suddenly went blind!

Fortunately--so I don't have to fear my own psychic powers--the blindness in the book is milky white, while the blindness in my dream was utterly black, as if all power went out everywhere.

Creepy as yellow mushrooms!

AKA flowerpot parasols.  (Cheered myself up with these!)

Cardinal Climber

What a beautiful, beautiful late summer evening, with a three-quarter moon. Just home from the Truly Irish poetry reading, but the moon has put me in mind of the Eddi Reader song, "Wings On My Heels," with its refrain about music in three-quarter time. She's a Scottish folksinger.

One of her verses:

I never learned how to sweet talk
those are the words I can't find
yet I had a tongue of pure silver
when they played
in three-quarter time

Eamonn Wall was a charming poet with a tongue of pure silver!

And recent rains have charmed the cardinal climber on the fence into bloom, finally!

Sweet Corn

It got back-to-school HOT (but not too hot, cuz the blues are cool) just in time for the Sweet Corn Blues Fest in beautiful Uptown Normal.  As WGLT says, "The Blues are free and the corn is cheap!" Some years they actually run out of corn, which is cooked on the street. You can hear, smell, and eat fresh Kettle Corn, as well. And buy ears.

Bands today have cool names, among them: Chicken Shack and Sugar Prophets. But it's Slattern Day in the blog, so just click the links!

We may bike into town via the Good to Go program! I may be tempted to purchase WGLT Acousticity pint glasses, to honor beer and folk music. But mostly I will hang out with the college grad son, home for the Sweet Corn weekend!