Octopus Wand in the Pool

 

Today I worked from home, then in the evening Travalon and I went swimming. There was some guy who insisted on going around the edge of the pool instead of taking one side and leaving us the other, so we swam around in the middle. After the guy had finally left, I noticed a toy stuck in the pool drain. I pulled it out and saw it was a clear wand with a pink plastic octopus on one end. 

"This must do something," I said to Travalon. Sure enough, if I pulled on the octopus, the wand became elongated. I tried elongating it under water and then smashing it back to its shorter length above water, and sure enough, it created a beautiful stream of water. I aimed at Travalon, so then he took revenge. Then I tried aiming it straight up, so it fell back down on me like a fountain, and Travalon said it was like an Esther Williams movie. Everyone else in the pool probably thought we were nuts because we were laughing so hard.

Way back in May, during the Forward game, I suddenly had a song pop into my head that I thought was by Steely Dan, but just a snippet. As a musician, I can hear the tune and all the instruments clearly, but I couldn't quite make out the lyrics, so there was no way to do a Google search. Google has this new functionality where you can hum a tune and it will name it for you, which Rich successfully used to track down a tune that had been haunting him since before I was born. (It was the Eurovision Winner for 1971, so I'm not surprised that he heard it constantly while living in Europe.) I was hoping to have the same luck, but Google couldn't tell me what I was humming. Odd, I thought I could hum at least as tunefully as Rich. I made a voice memo of the snippet of tune and then forgot about it until yesterday evening, as I sat on the porch with Travalon. Suddenly I thought of it again, and I said, "That song - it's not by Steely Dan, it's by Boz Scaggs. Name some of his songs, but not the big ones like 'Lido Shuffe' and 'Miss Sun' and 'Lowdown.'" He started naming songs, and when he got to "Georgia," I said, "That's it!!" and listened to my voice memo. Sure enough, it was a snippet of "Georgia." I guess I'm not good at humming, because neither Travalon nor Google could get it from the snippet I hummed for them.

As promised, here are photos of the glow-in-the-dark crystals in sea shell shapes that I got at Atwood Fest.

They looked better under blacklight in real life than in the photo.

But they sure enough did glow!

And here is the orange Niko bracelet I got.

If you look closely, there are tiny hamsas on either side of the eye. I used to only see evil eye protector stuff in Galena, but within the last year or so it's become all the rage around here. They're traditionally Turkish, but it seems like Latin cultures love them, because you can find Evil Eye jewelry at every stand selling Central and South American stuff. This one came from one of those, you know the ones that always sell alpaca wool stuff. I'm clearly not the only one who's a sucker for these.

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