The evening

Okay, so a recap, since I'm in here anyway. I got partway through the Bs (finished B-52s, Bauhaus, Beatles, Beck, next is Bigod 20, Bjork, Bowie . . .) I found out that the bike carrier I bought for my hatchback fits on my CRV. Yay! I thought it was a loss. I also squashed down the recycling as best I could -- you know, I have the pint-sized version of the garbage bin, and I never fill it, but my recycling is always brimming over. It's frustrating, because I'm trying to be an upright citizen and whatnot, and I end up with bags of recycling hanging out in my kitchen, waiting for pickup day. While I was cutting up cardboard, I ran across the world's biggest black widow. I swear to god, the spider from the other week pales in comparison. This spider was the size of a Japanese lantern, and its hourglass was done in flourescent lights which I could hear buzzing from ten feet away (which is where I was standing about a millisecond after spotting it). Ultimately I pummeled it with a broom handle, but not before screaming like a girl and scraping my ankle on the sprinkler head. I was very cautious with the rest of the cardboard -- there were about ten bee carcasses all cocooned up. Blech!
Then I chatted with sweetie for a while, who's not feeling well. I then decided to make dinner (I'd flirted with the idea of going out for Indian food, but decided against it), so I heated up some soybean succotash from Trader Joes while I baked a Butternut squash. I hung out in the hammock listening to my iPod while waiting for the squash to cook, and the neighbors were (from what I could sense) vaccuuming, using Febreze, and smoking cigarettes at the same time. Incidentally, my neighbors have listed their house for sale, and I went over the other day because they were having an open house. I was supposed to have band practice, so I wanted to know what time it was over so I wouldn't fuck up any possibility of a sale ("And this is the den, from which you can hear the strains of local punk rock band the Gynas every Wednesday and Sunday.") Anyway, out of curiousity I picked up the flier while I was there. Okay, so in Sacramento, there are definitely areas where houses of moderate size are going for half a million bucks regularly. In my area, however, they're going for closer to $200,000. In fact, I've been watching the paper and it is only recently that that figure has been showing up more often. My house, two years ago, was significantly less than that. Well, I think my neighbors may have accidentally transposed some figures, because they're asking $324,000!!! Dude, okay, they've built on to the back, including adding a bathroom, which certainly raises the value marginally, but it also ate up the backyard, and there is nothing but a tiny strip of outdoors left. Additionally, their house smells very, very strongly of cigarette smoke (hence the Febreze, I would guess) and the walls are discolored because of it. Also, their home was decorated at roughly the same time mine was, which means lots of dark wood paneling and basically totally out of date color schemes, etc. I have no idea what's up -- either they're totally delusional or they really don't have any desire to sell it.
Rant over. I ate my butternut squash with a dollop of Patak's curry and a glass of viognier that I opened Saturday -- it went surprisingly well. I've been reading Zadie Smith's new novel "The Autograph Man," and relaly enjoying it, but at the moment, as you no doubt can tell, I've been sucked back to the computer. Soon, though, oh, so soon, I will be watching Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. It's a secret vice. I can't wait -- I'd better get another glass of wine!