Don’t be one.

I’m organizing an exquisite corpse. Email me (meloukhia at gmail dot com) by 5pm PST if you want in!

this ain’t livin’ turns three years old today, which is kind of neat. Or at least I think so, I don’t know about the rest of you. What started as a whim has definitely outgrown my expectations, and outlived many of the blagorgs rattling about on the Internet. And for both 2006 and 2007, I posted every day, which I think is rather a feat; we’re also going strong for every day in 2008. So here’s a retrospect of notable posts from the last year:

Last August, I did lots of things, including musing about figs.

In September, I went to the Paul Bunyan Days Parade, and took two bad pictures with my cellphone.

October found me in the coffeehouse, talking about fat.

The chilly gray November sky brought a camera!

With December and the close of the year, I announced The Book Project.

The January storm made me very cranky.

In February, I wrote about the bolts of the Molybos carousel.

The Henry Makepeace serial started in March.

In April, warnings about bad plastics led me to reminisce about my Nalgene.

May heralded the arrival of the Book Club of the Damned selection.

California caught fire in June. I took a cool picture of the sunrise.

This July, a fart was heard ’round the world.

Here’s to another year of adventuring together. I also want to give a special shout-out to some of my readers, because although I love you all, I love some of you more than others, and that’s just how it works. Although I would love to see more of you commenting, of course. Let’s make the fourth year of this ain’t livin’ the year of the de-lurk.

Vicki has made some excellent comments, recommended some really good books, and sent a whole stack of reading material. I can’t wait to read her novel, and I may have to give her a special reader prize or something. For Special Services to the Blog.

Tristan has also made some good book recommendations, as well as some less good recommendations via the Chicago book club. And our late-night debates have fueled hours of productive blograntings.

Brendan always leaves delightfully argumentative comments which are well thought out and sometimes so convincing that I change my mind. Sometimes.

Thanks to Suzy, Tallie, Bronwyn, Haddock, Kris, F, Baxt, David, Kenyon, and Ideasinca for their book recommendations. Suzy, XUP, Meridith, Lindsay, Gowan, and Dr. Regina all comment regularly (and interestingly) enough to merit a special mention.

Gentle readers, the time has come once again to give a shout out for reader participation. I am working on an article on caring for your own dead, and I would like to hear from any and all of you who have dealt with some aspect of the death care process, whether it’s holding an entire funeral at home and burying on your property, or just performing some of the tasks associated with the funeral.

If you’ve dealt with funerary paperwork like death certificates, disposition permits, and Pete knows what else, I want to hear about it. If you’ve fought with the Health Department to protect your right to care for your own dead, I want to hear about that too. I’d also love to hear from people who are interested in death care and want to know more, and I especially want to hear from readers who have cared for their own dead in California.

In addition to hearing about the bureaucratic side of your experience, if you’re willing to share, I would also be interested in the emotional side; how you felt about the process, how other family members/friends dealt with it, and so on. Furthermore, if you have tips and suggestions for others going through the same experience, what would they be?

I’d also love to hear from people who work with hospice organizations or groups which offer death care and assistance with home funerals. If you work for a hospice, do your organization offer death care? Do you wish you did more? Would your clients and their families benefit from classes on caring for their own dead? Have you ever taken a death care/death midwifery class? Are you a death doula/midwife?

Email meloukhia at gmail dot com with your thoughts, and feel free to spread the word.

I love the whole world. That is all.

The “little toilet bobbly thingie” I referenced in the pee post last week is apparently officially known as a ballcock. Heh heh. Ballcock. Anyway, thought y’all might want to know.

So, thanks to Haddock, I am now aware that my feeds are apparently awry, and I apologize for that. I think it has something to do with the latest version of Wordpress, which I recently upgraded to, since things are going haywire on the back end as well. At any rate, hopefully those of you who can’t read this because it’s not showing up in your feeds will eventually head to the main page and see this. The direct feed for this ain’t livin’ is at: meloukhia.net/feed, and you may want to update your feed readers to reflect this. There are some other direct links too; you can use your feed reader to find them, if you feel thus inclined, by typing in my URL.

Speaking of which, I do like the latest Wordpress, although it is kind of irritating that it’s making the site go all wonky. For those of you who use Wordpress, it is a good idea to upgrade to the latest version just in general, and it was an easy install. I realize it sounds sort of silly to be plugging the new version of Wordpress when I’m having site problems, but I’m not sure it’s fair to blame Wordpress for all of those problems. So, uh, go upgrade.

For those of you who are completely mystified by the above two paragraphs, here’s a story about rearranging furniture:

So, the thing is, I like to rearrange furniture. It’s kind of a thing with me. Usually, every six months or so, I totally rearrange my house. I start to feel restless when everything remains in a static position, and I get antsier and antsier until I abruptly decide it’s time to tear the living room apart, usually late at night, and then I get all sweaty and covered in dust and then I am filled with a sense of deep satisfaction.

The problem is, I can’t do that in my new house, because my new house is very small, and it has a highly restrictive floorplan. When I moved in last year, I arranged everything in what seemed like the most logical way, and everything is still arranged in pretty much the same way, despite the fact that I moved in almost a year ago. This is…unprecedented for me.

A few weeks ago, I rearranged the objects on the shelves in the kitchen, attempting to channel my frustrated desire to move furniture around, and it really wasn’t very satisfying. The problem is simple: I want to change the way my house looks and feels by moving things around, and I can’t, and I’m starting to feel like I’m suffocating, which makes me bemoan the myriad issues with my house even more.

For example, they could have put in a half-story to make the upstairs lofts useful, but they didn’t. So instead I have what seems like a lot of space upstairs, but I can’t use it, because the ceiling is too low. And they could have made the bathroom, I don’t know, a few square feet larger so that you don’t feel like you’re making out with the hot water heater when you take a poop. Oooh, and they could have put ventilation in the kitchen, so that the house doesn’t always smell like whatever was most recently cooked.

The fact of the matter is that I bore easily, and I think that rearranging furniture allows me to pretend that my house is different, as well as allowing me to work off some excess energy. And the thing is, I don’t really want to go through the headache of moving, because it’s a pain in the behind, so I’m stuck in this furniture configuration and it suddenly feels very oppressive. In short, I’m bored with my house.

I thought about moving my desk upstairs, because there is just enough room to sit on my ball and work up there, but I think I would feel too cloistered, what with the ceiling sloping in on either side of me. And then I would have to skulk upstairs to watch movies, which doesn’t sound all that pleasant. Plus, it’s going to get wicked hot up there this summer, because this house only has one window that opens. And, seriously, ONE WINDOW? It’s not like this is Siberia, people. Cross-drafts are actually a good idea, and I’m not talking about the drafts that whistle through all the cracks in the winter.

So maybe I could move my desk against the west wall, and unstack my bookcases and line them up against the wall that the desk faces now. But then I would have my back to the window, which I think would give me the heebie-jeebies.

I think I might be going stir crazy. Maybe I’ll just burn all the furniture and fit the house out Japanese-style.

Christ is risen!

My friend Annie just got her first article in the New York Times national edition, which is pretty darn sweet, if you ask me. I might even say it’s totally awesome. I will admit that I’m a bit jealous, but also immensely proud of her. I guess that’s what a degree in journalism will get you. At any rate, the article is about the mill site, and an attempt to bioremediate the dioxins with mushrooms, so it’s not only cool, but also interesting.

So go read it!

Whatever can it be?

(Cat shown for scale.)