Science Fiction Then And Now

Whenever I have a day like today when I haven't taken any pictures for one reason or another, I can almost always find Jack and take a picture of him because he sleeps about twenty hours a day. In this shot, he's demonstrating his excellent napping skills in the guest room which is where he likes to sleep when he's not sleeping on our bed. 

Today started out sweetly and it's gone that way all day except...

Oh god. 

I went out this morning to take Moana some treats and let her out of the hen house. As you know, we have been shutting her up tight in there every night to keep her safe. I sprinkled some of the fancy bird food with peanuts and sunflower seeds on the ground in the coop after I'd opened the sliding door to the hen house so that she could come out and I waited for a few seconds and when she didn't appear, I opened the big door to the hen house and there she was. Bloodied and dead on the floor. 

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. 

Mr. Moon went out later to deal with her remains and he said that something had managed to dig under a wall where the wire fencing he had buried had deteriorated. It was no doubt wither a possum or a raccoon and I'm betting raccoon. Once again, the only part really missing was her head. 

So. That is it for chickens. If they aren't even safe in the roost at night, there is no way I'm going through this again. And I just have to deal with that reality. 
Bless her heart. Moana- our last hen. 

Mr. Moon tilled part of the garden I'd cleared and planted the potatoes. He was certain I had not bought enough but there were plenty. We have an eternally ongoing joke about my inability to visualize how much of any one thing can fit into another thing. Like leftovers. I'm just terrible at gauging what container to use to put leftovers in. But he is terrible at over-buying seed potatoes. He vowed and declared that the amount I'd bought was not nearly enough but after he planted three good rows, he agreed that I had gotten just the right amount. I kept waiting for a "but..." in there but there wasn't. 
I am so proud of myself. 
I planted the sugar snap peas. A nice long row of them on the east fence. At least we no longer have to worry about the chickens snatching the sweet and tender vines from the other side of the fence as they grow up it. We haven't had a decent crop of peas since we started keeping chickens and it's a trade-off I would gladly keep making forever but that is no longer going to be a problem. 
Sigh. 

I did some more weeding in an area I want to plant onions. No matter how much we weed for the next ten thousand years, there will still be betony and dollar weed coming up in the garden because those two things send out similarly thick roots from the yard around the garden which come up to choke anything they can get those ropey roots on. So it's a ridiculous and fruitless battle but as I have probably said before, there is something quite satisfying to me, troweling up those plants and following the roots and pulling up everything attached to them. You have to be gentle and yet firm, because the roots will easily snap and yet, they go deep. 
This sounds like a metaphor for something, doesn't it? I am not sure what. 
But I knelt in the wet dirt and dug and pulled for quite awhile. As I worked, I listened to a small collection of short stories by Robert A. Heinlein called "All You Zombies."

I have a long and cherished relationship with Heinlein. I often say that there were two kinds of hippies. You had your "Lord of the Rings" hippies and your "Stranger in a Strange Land" hippies. 
I was the latter. I have to say that reading that book in high school absolutely ruined me for a whole lot of what was considered to be socially and culturally correct in the 1970's including not having sex, and religion. 
Yes. Let's blame it all on science fiction. 
Now let me tell you that much of what Heinlein wrote is horribly misogynistic and sexist in some ways but he broke new ground in presenting women with as many rights to physical pleasure and satisfaction as men and as able and competent as men in many regards. And he was without doubt, a genius. Some of the things he wrote about in the 1940's, 50's, and 60's which were completely beyond anything imagined in those times have turned out to be startlingly prescient. Two of the stories I listened to today were way beyond my brain to comprehend, one having to do with time travel (and a trans man!) and the other a story about a man who built a house which was basically an unfolded tesseract. I mean- really? 

Okay. Just writing about all of this is bending my own brain into a fourth dimension which I think is how a tesseract works but do not quote me on this. 
No. My mind cannot go there. I'll take his word for it. 

But the point of all of this is that I did enjoy listening to these stories very much and made me want to seek out more of Heinlein's books available in audio versions. Some of them I know I will have read but it would be nice to revisit them. 

Speaking of things I do not understand- WHAT THE HELL ARE WE SHOOTING FROM THE SKY? Does anyone really know? I'm sure someone does but not me. 
Oh god. More freaky shit to worry about. As if we didn't have enough already. 

I'm going to go air fry some chicken wings for my husband who is watching the Super Bowl. I asked him who was playing. He was not sure. I asked him who was doing the half time show and he didn't know that either. I said, "Well, is it the Rolling Stones or Bruce Springsteen?"

"No," he said. 
"Well then forget it," I said. 

And he knows I mean it. 

Love...Ms. Moon

P.S. I just looked it up. Rhianna is playing the half time show. I bet she's nervous as hell right now. I sure would be. She'll be great. She's a pro.