Today, I managed to finally get my apartment windows all clean and shiny.. There's a very narrow window of time that I can actually get them cleaned, not before it's too cold to open them but before the giant spiders take up residence outside them. Late March is about right. The spiders are rather wicked looking things, their bodies round and fat as small grapes and short legs. Of course, outside the highrises downtown their are ones with legspans about the size of silver dollars, so I'm not complaining (ditto the orange/yellow striped garden ones at my parent's house). Luckily not many get in, too big, I'm convinced to shimmy through any possble openings. Their slenderer sisters occasionaly wind up on my ceilings, and with bugs, I'm a stone cold killer. No mercy. (This is a girl who once broke her finger slamming a door to get away from a bee.) Between the spiders and the giant roaches in the library (some large enough they could be put to work shelving) it's like fucking wild kingdom sometimes. And rumor has it, with construction on both sides of us down at Columbia (the old Blackstone hotel to the south and the new Spertus Institute to the north) they may be shakin up some rats who'll be looking for new homes. Wonderful. Remind me to check beneath my desk before I sit down.
Otherwise, I'm in the last throws of my paper for my lit class--half-assed as usual. Hopefully I can pull it together tomorrow. I've ordered the paper for the next chap, The Animal Husband, from a new place--it's supposed to have a slightly linen-like texture. Let's hope it doesn't get stuck in the printer. Also got some textury laid paper for archer avenue, which I'm planning to issue probably late May. Have also started talking to an artist about the May release, Sarah Gardner's How to Study Birds , who sent me some lovely samples and is cooking something up.
I'm planning on trying to do NaPoWriMo this year, again. Last year I got to the 20th and petered out. Though I did get some good stuff if I remember correctly, so it's worth a shot. I need to flesh out the girl show poems now that I've wrapped up the other projects. I did wind up sending feign out to a contest (I just like their books too much not to) after all my bellyaching, though I'm not going to let it make me crazy this year. I'm the new, lower-key, chilled out poet this year--not the manuscript weilding obsessive mess I was last summer.
And summer, yes, god, could it possibly get here any faster?
