ahem ...

... so, I think maybe I'm going to start making appearances again. I dunno. I have a lot of internet haunts that preoccupy me. Only lately I have been feeling absolutely none of them. But, I miss writing. And I like doing it here because I just sort of verbally meander without an audience or expectations, and there's something sort of reassuring about that.

Of course, that means that does mean that if I want to keep this thing interesting, I have to make entries that aren't so damned meta all the time.

That, though, is sort of what bloglines and the like are for, no? Original content is made so much easier when you can just steal links from other people and make the force the "original" by adding a few base comments from your own little head. Or something. It's worth a try at least.

Thus, these, pictures of the auroras are pretty fabulous. And the time is terrific, because I just started reading Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson, which begins with his journey to Hammerfest to check out the Northern Lights. I'm not sure if I've said it here or not, but seeing them are on my pretty short list of things to do before I die. Ideally from Iceland, but that's just a romantic notion and I'd pretty much take them however I could get them. I can still remember the very first time that I ever heard about them, in some children's book I read when I was like eight. Surprisingly, it was a chapter book, fiction, in which one of the characters was named Aurora after them. And thus, a lifelong fascination began.

I have been a fan of Carrie Brownstein for, um, not quite that long, but my devotion to her could have been more hardcore, at it's peak. Although, that wasn't a devotion to her personally, per se, as much as it was to Sleater-Kinney. And even though I will continue to be bummed about one of my favorite bands breaking up (although credit where it's due: they did it with class), but her newish gig as a blogger for NPR is almost making up for it. This week she has had excellent posts on Madonna - and really, I couldn't agree with Miss B. more on the subject - and the guilty pleasure she takes in waching the Bachelor. I cannot admit to the Bachelor thing. Although I've been suckered into more reality television programming than I care to admit, I never got into this one. But I'd be totally lying if I said I wasn't in front of the tv, watching the finale of Big Brother last night. So I, you know, won't say that.

Finally, I really want to make these carrots. At some point in the more recent past, I discovered that I really, really like cooked carrots and these sound delicious. Before I cook anything though, or even, like, make ice cubes, I need to do some dishes. Which, honestly, I've been meaning to get to all night and have yet to do so. Now, maybe.