Unfortunate Stuffed Animals

After Thanksgiving...

The Mind Reels

The inspirational music of Soul Surfer is seeping through the cracks of my door. Now I feel confident that I can do anything, including but not limited to writing multiple blog posts. Seeing bits and pieces of the film as I amble into the kitchen for chunks of cantaloupe has made the films strips of my mind reel with alternate endings. Perhaps if it were not based on a true story, and if it were renamed Moby Dick, things would have concluded differently.

One

The Soul Surfer paddles out into the ocean on her board, now confident in her ability to surf with one arm. The plot comes full circle as the fin of the same shark that attacked her before surfaces. She sees it cut across the water and her eyes narrow with the wisdom that she has gained from her journey. Since the accident, the Soul Surfer never paddles out to sea without a harpoon. She uses her remaining arm to launch the harpoon into the approaching predator. Blood surfaces on the water. The waves carry the Soul Surfer and the struggling shark to shore, where she guts the fish and retrieves her severed arm from its esophagus. Modern science provides a way to reattach the limb to her body. Modern taxidermy provides a way to mount the cartilaginous skeleton above her decorative marble fireplace – providing the film’s closing image.

Two

The Soul Surfer paddles out into the ocean on her board. A fin surfaces, the fin of the same shark that previously attacked her. She assaults the shark with her trusty harpoon and a knife between her teeth and drags it to land. As she guts the shark on the lonely stretch of Hawaiian shore, she finds no trace of her arm. For retribution, she slices off the fin of the offending shark and leaves it, gills heaving, in the sand. Modern science provides a way to attach the aquatic limb to her ocean-amorous body. An image of her gliding across the curling waves on her board, extending her shark fin for balance, fades to black.

Three

The Soul Surfer paddles out into the ocean and sees the fin of a shark moving towards her. She hurls her harpoon, skewers the shark, and guts it in the smoldering crystal sand. Triumphantly, she leaves the beach with a surfboard in her hand and a shark fin between her teeth. An eye for an eye; a fin for an arm, she mutters unintelligibly as she spits the fin onto an operating table. The tide gently pulls the suffocating shark back to sea. The shark community is outraged by the story of the 100 millionth human attack on a shark that year, imagining that the lost fin went on to be fermented into hakarl, a traditional Icelandic dish. The wounded shark is told that it will never swim again, but against all odds, it does.

Four

The Soul Surfer is making banana bread one morning when she hears a sharp knock on the door – the sharp knock of a shark. The predator apologizes for the whole incident, admitting elusively that it thought she was someone else. It announces that the shark community’s advances in stem cell research have produced a new arm for her. Then it returns the partially digested arm and gives her a large loaf of banana bread as retribution, making the situation all the more awkward for the Soul Surfer as she wonders what she should do with the banana bread batter she already has on the table. Should she freeze the batter, bake the bread and freeze it in some foil? Who knows? She decides to re-gift the shark bread.

Pins and Needles

While I should have been blogging or writing about pterodactyls, the urge to make something colorful and slightly idiotic became too strong to resist. It has been a long time since I last exercised the full range of my fine motor skills. I cracked open my sewing machine case and descended into lunacy for many lonely moons.

In a weekend of frenzied stitching I produced a new bag to replace the one I made last August for my European travels. The bag I brought to Prague tattered and ready for a comfortable retirement. The new one looks slightly Southwestern to me – perhaps it’s the button? Now that I’ve broken my one year pursing fast, I have an uncontrollable need to make clothing and curtains and cacti.

Continuing with the Southwestern theme, here is my cactus pincushion in all of its spiky glory. There is a breed of cactus called a pincushion cactus, so I've actually sewn up a lame visual pun and rendered it humorless with explanation.

The cactus is made of 100% XXL men’s tee shirt found in a free pile at college. I have many ridiculous pieces of used clothing that will probably become whimsical cacti in my idle hours. I just need a lot of tiny terra cotta pots to do it.

I also made a rather sad attempt at wire wrapping a vase. This is a technique I apparently have yet to master. The hook from which I intended to hang it is all barbed and mangled and I haven’t quite figured out how to fix it. Perhaps what it really needs is a tiny cotton cactus inside of it...

A Series of Flashbacks

There are several adventures I had during last semester that never were written about, and I intend to correct this crime immediately. The posts that will follow do not indicate that I am still in Europe, for I am not. I am, in fact, merely reminiscing.

Venus Fly Trap: Week Whatever

The action in the terrarium is hardly worth reporting. It’s looked the same for several weeks now. Every time a leaf grows to a certain size it keels over and dies. Then another leaf starts growing on the inside and the cycle begins again. I put it outside in the shade on a hot day to evaporate some extra water, and when I came back for it one of the leaves had little bite marks all over it. I took the plant aside and explained that it is supposed to be eating the insects and not the other way around.

On another note, I let my dog out while I was sautéing a milky green squash to find him on my porch minutes later with a skunk carcass in his mouth. The skunk has been decomposing at the end of our driveway for more than a week now, and the smell alone has been enough to discourage me from biking if only to avoid passing it.

Now that the smell is wearing off a little and the skunk no longer resembles a skunk, Bear thought it would be a good idea to stop traffic and risk his life to acquire this savory morsel of rotting flesh. My neighbor brought him over, the flattened road kill dangling from his smiling snout. It looked like something that fell into the bottom of the oven and was left burning for several years. Bear tried to bring it into the house, but we got him to drop the skunk remains on the porch before he went inside.

I wasn’t sure what to do with it, so I took our kitchen broom and swept it off of the porch. Then I disinfected the broom with vinegar. After that, I disinfected the porch with vinegar. Then my brother hosed the porch. He removed the skunk with some sort of fireplace tong, and then we disinfected the tongs with vinegar. My brother sprayed his body with Lysol. Then he Lysol-ed his shoes.

It will be a long time before I feel like my porch is sanitary enough to walk on. It will be an even longer time before I think my dog is sanitary enough to kiss.