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Ah, what a fine thing to live in such exciting times.

Apple's OS X 10.2.8 update certainly got the blood pumping, for one thing. (First you see it, now you don't!) The download had the "gotta have it now" crowd scrambling to work around all kinds of incompatibilities, yet I've heard from a number of people who aren't having any trouble at all. I love this business, sort of: everything is true and nothing is true. Getting to the facts is like using a jellyfish for a hatchet: it might work if you keep at it long enough, but ewww! Oh well. If it weren't for being obligated to find something to say about refrigerators every day -- the door is open, I feel cold air; the door is closed, I hear it hum -- I might be wasting my time earning a million bucks or making love.

As it turned out, today I did none of those things, phooey. With October just around the corner, I had other dramas on my mind, like saving the geraniums! Go ahead, laugh. You probably don't live at 7,000 feet or give an HBO about geraniums. Well, I do and do. Geraniums add color to my outdoor landscape. They live in giant terra-cotta pots from Mexico that weigh a ton, and any night now they're going to freeze. What I did last year when we lived in a fancy-schmancy condo with a long windowed hallway was drag the bloody pots inside on rag rugs. That worked fine with Saltillo tiles, but my current carpeted mud floors are another matter.  

Maybe I'll just take off my pants or open up my checkbook and scare the pots inside, hah! You wouldn't believe it, though. In this part of the world, moving the geraniums indoors is something of an obsession with some people. I knew a guy, a scoutmaster actually, who regularly lugged several dozen of the things to the foyer of a local church every fall. He quit the joint over some controversy involving Episcopalians and homosexual boy scouts, or was it homosexual Episcopalians and boy scouts?! Nothing I could ever get straight, or him either probably (pun intended), but of course he had to find another winter refuge for his flowers. Either that or build another room.

I have plenty of space to fill with giant terra-cotta pots, however. What I didn't have were great big plastic saucer-things to set them in, so they wouldn't make a wretched mess every time I watered. I'd seen the perfect ones at Wal-Mart just a week or two before, so off I went, la-dee-da. (Early Sunday afternoon is a pleasant time to go Wal-Mart. The suicidally-depressed should stay away on Saturday or weekday noon hours, but Sunday usually works for me.) 

Of course I needed more than just the saucer-things. AA batteries, you know, and paper towels. Oh, and Kleenex too. Good ole Wal-Mart. I got my shopping cart and took the long way around to the Garden Center. That's what they want you to do, you understand, and I almost succumbed to a tall display of yellow-and-black utility lanterns with krypton bulbs. (They float, see. Just the thing for living in a desert.) Back-tracking a bit, I scored a package of paper towels the size of a small sofa and headed for the Kleenex. No luck: a middle-aged lady and her mother were parked in front of the boxes I wanted, jabbering away contentedly in Spanish so lovely and so clear, I had no heart to interrupt. What a softie I've become, I thought to myself, and circumnavigated Aisle 14 to come back at the tissue section from the other end.

AAGHH! They were still there, but now I could see why: the cleaning products were on the other side of the aisle, and the two of them were opening each item to see how it smelled ... Pine-Sol? No. Windex? No. And on it went. I took a longer detour this time, passing up a package of two dozen AA batteries for one with only six that cost a little less. Two dozen batteries? I only wanted one for the kitchen clock. By then the aisle was clear, thank God, and I finally found my box of Kleenex. My shrink-wrapped package of three boxes, that is. Geez.

 

At last I reached the Garden Center, but it had been taken over by Halloween candy and Christmas decorations! There were costumes, too, and talking plastic skulls to set outside your door. Hey, Halloween is a big deal here, and none of that demeaning suburban crap like trick-or-treating with your folks at four o'clock in the afternoon. No one puts razor blades in apples, either, because your older brother would simply shoot their dogs, or worse. I like the attitude, but I wanted my saucer-things, dammit, so I went outside where the rest of the garden goodies were, and "were" was right.

A flat of chives and several more of pansies lay wilting in the sun. I saw a single clay saucer on an empty bottom shelf, no good, and the potting soil was gone. I'd been down this road before and knew the score: by the end of the week, there'd be stacks of snow shovels and bags of stuff to throw on icy sidewalks. The garden supplies would reappear, all right (in January, I figured), but I needed something now. Rats! On the way to the cash registers, I passed a life-sized dancing Santa robot in a deserted corner of the store, loudly singing "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" to the delight of absolutely no one. I swear I am not making this up.

Back at the ranch, I went online and checked the forecast: all this coming week were predicted highs in the 70s and lows around 35 or 34. Yes, that's a typical spread. Anyway, geraniums are tough, and frost just turns their leaves a fascinating shade of red before they die. Another few days to find my saucer-things, ho-ho-ho!

See? I'm in the spirit already.

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr invites your emails, and while you're at it, why don't you visit his LATEST PROJECT?

HOLY FIRE JOURNAL is a) not nearly as pretentiously named as you might think, and anyway, I thought of it first; b) a PDF mini-mag, every issue with a completely different theme; c) really cheap ($1 per issue); and d) one of the last things between me and a life of crime. If you don't like BitPass and want to pay with PayPal, you can get the first three issues (already online) for only $2.50 at Zoo Pilot Publishing.

Alternative eBook source:

Lots of pictures of el Norte:

Salon Weblog: yackety-yak!

(Beautiful land for sale here: "What It Is About El Rito,")

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