Poem for Monday

Syntax
By Carol Ann Duffy

I want to call you thou, the sound
of the shape of the start
of a kiss — like this, thou —
and to say, after, I love,
thou, I love, thou I love, not
I love you.

Because I so do —
as we say now — I want to say
thee, I adore, I adore thee,
and to know in my lips
the syntax of love resides,
and to gaze in thine eyes.

Love’s language starts, stops, starts;
the right words flowing or clotting in the heart

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Poem swiped from Emily F., from Duffy's poem sequence Rapture, which follows the arc of a love affair from start to finish.

After Adam got back from the Hebrew school Chanukah party, we made our yearly (well, these days sometimes every-other-yearly) trip to the Fairfax Station Railroad Museum for the holiday train show. Santa Claus was there in the sleigh out in front of the caboose, which houses the N-scale trains, and there were gingerbread cookies and tea in the station plus the G, HO, Z-scale layouts and Lego trains. The museum has permanent exhibits about the history of the station and its temporary status as a Civil War hospital where Clara Barton nursed Union soldiers.


Fairfax Station Railroad Museum, moved to this site in the 1980s from its origins on the Orange and Alexandria Railroad.


At this time of year, Santa Claus is out front greeting arriving children.


There are seasonal decorations inside as well...


...in the layouts as well as on the tables.


I love the little imitation small town decorations.


Not all the decorations were Christmas-related, however.


I'm not quite sure what Frodo, Sam and Gollum have to do with the diner and trolley and stuff!

I figured those Lord of the Rings figures at the train display were a sign, particularly since the kids were playing The Two Towers GameBoy game, and I took it to mean that we were supposed to watch The Two Towers after dinner. We didn't quite get all the way through it because naturally I insisted on the extended edition -- no way was I watching the version without Boromir, Denethor and Theodred -- but oh, it's wonderful. I always think that Fellowship is far and away my favorite, but there's an awful lot of Shire and long Isengard sequences, whereas in TTT there's nothing besides the Uruk-Ent stuff that makes me want to get up and get pretzels. (Well, and the extended scenes with Eowyn cooking for Aragorn.)

Then we watched the Brotherhood season finale, which ran at wonderful full steam for 45 minutes and trickled into WTF! I suppose they might assume Showtime won't pick up the series and wanted it to be A Day in the Life of the Caffees, because in some ways it was painfully typical, but given some of the plot bombshells that got dropped, I was more ready for a Sopranos cliffhanger than a quiet resolution. Spoilers: I don't understand why Michael killed Ralph! Did he assume Ralph conspired to let Freddie go? Or was he just afraid Ralph would talk to the cops, though Ralph would already have talked to the cops if he was going to, wouldn't he? And why strangle him...why not Michael's usual M.O., shooting him? Tell me Michael isn't stupid enough to have left fingerprints or anything on that glass. Michael definitely wins the Caffee Asshole Award for the week; Tommy's just generally politico-sleazy like everyone he knows and Colin is actually quite pleasant, just when I thought he was going to have a meltdown and do something extreme. And no Kath anywhere to be seen. Eeesh, what a place to end.

Oh, LiveJournal...it's not that we couldn't see something like this coming for ages (and did the deal make those execs anywhere near as rich as they were obviously dreaming?). But now I don't know what to do...keep storing photos in my permanent account at LJ, start putting them at littlereview.com again where I have plenty of space in terms of GB but can only have 25,000 total files before I have to start paying for more, start filling up various other accounts that may disappear as more companies shift on the internet? I have this journal and my others backed up entirely in terms of the text, but the photos aren't stored on my computer, they're imported each time...is there a way to change that setting in ljArchive?

And the Redskins managed to lose the Sean Taylor tribute game, and one of the cats is sleeping on the new scratch mat, and, okay, I'm begging: I want to create a page in CSS that does what this one does, only (obviously) without using frames. (Also obviously, if you click: warning for frames!) I can't figure out how to make an index page where pages will pop up in the main content window, only how to make it look like that's happening by having the same repeating left column on every page, but to use that would require modifying every page! Can anyone help?