Poem for Friday

Place Setting
By Johari M. Rashad

Hold me

let me lay my head
in that special spot
on your chest
beneath your chin
where I fit so well.

--------

Spent all day cleaning the house, with the result that absolutely no one but me can tell I did a thing! I mean, the piles on the living room table are marginally smaller but it's not completely cleaned off -- not even very cleaned off, though a large part of that is the responsibility of other people who live in this house -- and I did some book rearranging down the basement to fit new ones on the shelves, but you'd have to have been intimately familiar with the enormity of our library to have any idea that anything had changed.

One of my major activities was sorting boxes of Star Trek-related documents going back literally 30 years -- Lincoln Enterprises catalogues, zine listings (, I not only have the stuff we wrote in 12th grade European History but also the letter you sent me in college on the back of a slash flyer). The scariest parts were the massive collection of Franklin Mint mailings to try to get me to buy collectible plates and the even more massive collection of mailings from local Starfleet groups, amassed when I was in junior high school. Hey, if anyone () wants a massive file folder of printed stuff on Kate Mulgrew/Kathryn Janeway, give me a heads-up...


The waterfall at Scott's Run from above the point where the creek meets the Potomac River.


The trees along the creek banks were colorful this fall...


...but the creek, like the river, was abnormally low from the drought.


Here's the waterfall looking back from the river.


A tree down in the woods.


And the last of the fall wildflowers.

I missed last week's Smallville (which cannot possibly have been anywhere near as priceless as the Television Without Pity recap, anyway), so I may be somewhat out of it in what's going on with our favorite superman and his stalker, I mean archnemesis. At least I got to miss Clark and Lana having sex, yay! Naturally there was no indication whatsoever this week that anything unusual had gone on with Lana -- I mean, the usual "couldn't bear to lose you" atrocious stuff that's been dragging on for six years and the usual doe-eyed uselessness -- but did we know before about Lex's secret?

Julian! Yay! Anything to make Lionel sweat and more importantly to have him in more episodes! Plus Lex has rather nice chemistry with his *ahem* brother, especially when he gets jealous that Lois is more Grant's type. The Zor-El stuff was entirely predictable and wasted. What's the point of introducing Jor-El's evil twin and dispatching him in the same episode! Sheesh! As Adam said, he's Snape and Lara's Lily, only not even as well-developed. Ah well, it'll be a 15-episode season and then who knows if it's coming back.