After reading yesterday's blog post, my older son suggested that Poetry Out Loud might make a good TV reality show. My husband disagrees. He feels that it has more potential as a Monty Python skit.

So far today, Ruckus has only destroyed one pair of shoes. The temperature is slightly above zero, and it is not snowing. I have a million pages of editing to do before attending a high school one-act festival. We are almost out of dog food. As apology for the tedium, I will now tell some lies.

Shards of ice glimmer, their iridescence shot with violet and viridian, like the plumage of a phoenix. The enormous white cat pads slowly across the frozen lake. A peacock dangles from his mouth. Above, the balloon hangs motionless. Hot air whistles in and out, in and out--asthmatic, metronomic. The basket appears to be empty; the balloon's silk is striped blue and white, like a king's pavilion.

Good. That brightened things up. There's nothing like combining Technicolor, a sweeping landscape, a beautiful predator, and the imminence of a human entrance. [Obviously there really is someone in that basket. I suspect a female. Possibly she's a thirty-year-old Elizabeth Taylor wearing gobs of eye makeup, but I'm not promising anything.]