Looking at the calendar, I realize it's time for my annual public post about the state of my life. I cannot believe I didn't realize this until xydexx reminded me, but I'm such a dodo with numbers.

Longtime readers of this log are familiar with the basics. Indeed, the basics tend to be very basic. I'm no poet; I'm just Rhys. The published poet in the family is my wife, Deborah, who has just turned 44 and is my hero. Having survived ovarian cancer, she is in her first year of remission and is in the best shape she has ever been in. Our neighbors in Colorado Springs constantly see her on her custom flamingo-pink bike and cheer her on; she is muscular and positively wasp-waisted. I have no words for all the coolness that is Deb. Squishy-robot teledildonics used to be such a male-dominated field, too, but she was right in there with the innovators.

Even up here, at this high altitude in the season of the White Queen -- or perhaps especially so -- I am ineluctably reminded of my white male, WASP privilege. I won't say more than that, because to do so would seem to speak ill of my neighbors, and I mean them no harm. Indeed, nowhere else but Colorado is it possible to make such a comfortable living breeding Goliaths for the spider-show circuit. We have one female and one male ready to do the tour this year: Selina, 15" across, and Fonzie, a male about half that. (Those are just their call names, of course. Goliaths are sweeties, with really docile temperaments, but of all the spiders, they're just not the sharpest crayons in the box. They won't respond to elaborate kennel names like "Maestro Champion Shelob Doomfang of O'Reilly's Mountainside.") Next year we hope to be able to start Dormouse in the 100-yard dash and Caucus-race.

Of course, the competitive spider circuit takes up a lot of time and means leaving Deb on her own to test mock-turtle-soup recipes all over my nice clean kitchen, but it's great for meeting LJ friends I'd never get to see in real life otherwise. I had such a good time laughing my ass off with greenglowgrrl and ghymoreid in a pub and hearing some incredibly drunken story about a baby turning into a pig. (We only placed fifth at AusArachnidae in the male-Goliath category, but we consider it a moral victory for the Yanks.) dewhitton's place was inexplicably overrun by those wasps that prey on tarantulas, but our kids are so much bigger than an ordinary tarantula -- picture your dinner plate; Selina overhangs it slightly, and Dormouse has the potential to be even more massive because of good genes -- that they would have pwned those little bastards in a heartbeat. Anyway, we had a most excellent game of chess, and we met the head of Den's croquet league.

So yeah, I have to go do guy things and putter with my Vespa (and find the sonic screwdriver and hydrospanner!) somewhere in the garage. If I don't replace the crappy compression coil, that thing's gonna blow. And if you seriously have any questions about anything, ask away -- but you know me. When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less. Pardon my rather scornful tone!

ETA: For serious. Deb just called me into the living room. She is in there watching a signal-scrambled, pixelated version of a food show -- the channel is all weird and psychedelic today FNAR -- and listening to a trance-y remix of Depeche Mode's "Everything Counts" instead of the audio. She called the chopped-up channel vaguely-impressionist effect "beautiful." That is what she wanted to show me. FTW?

... who wasn't a drug user. Who was a fully-employed grandfather. Who, according to a source I contacted about this at PC World magazine, where he was senior technical editor, wore an American fucking flag pin on the lapel of his tweed fucking blazer. (I don't particularly care, in this context, whether you excuse my expletives.) Granted, his son is a card-carrying member of a Bay Area cannabis club, a fully examined and registered medical patient, but the late Rex Farrance has had his blood smeared by "unknown assailants" and his name smeared by the police. Because the son had his MEDICAL POT in the house, reason the police, naturally the robbers who attacked the well-known hunter who probably had a bunch of legal, expensive guns must have done so because Farrance and his wife were drug dealers. Yes, brilliant logic! "S/he was involved with drugs," too often, is police code in the wake of a home invasion (his wife is still in the hospital from a pistol blow to the head) for "We fucked up."

The SF Chronicle story, which accepts the police spin, is here. I do hope one of the alternative weeklies will dig a bit deeper. I do hope those of you who voted for GWB did not actually do so thinking, "Yeah, we should totally defame crime victims because they let their sick children use pot in the house, as per state law."