IN RESPONSE TO LISA'S QUESTION OF WHETHER I CAN DO A "CHINESE SPLIT."

The Answer: Close, but not quite.

Maybe it's better this way. Those ceramic tile floors can be pretty cold.

[It's Ok to turn forty, as long as you do it with attitude.]

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE WORLD'S TEENS AND TWENTY-SOMETHINGS.

In. Your. Collective. FACES!!!

[It's Ok to be forty--as long as you do it with attitude.]

To be continued...

STONEHENGE UPDATE.

No time to write lately. My energies have been consumed with landscaping. Here are the results thusfar. Again...I know that most of you don't care about my yard. I'm really posting this for my parents and some friends.

This is the front yard, which I landscaped and planted in April. My-oh-my, how my little sprouts have grown.

BTW...that's an almond tree in the foreground and an olive tree in the background.

Same front yard from the other direction.

This is the side yard. I did the lay-out this weekend. Ahem...ALL weekend. I'll spread dark-gray pebbles (same as those in the front yard) over the landscape fabric next month. I'll plant various drought-resistance aromatic bushes (lavender, thyme, rosemary, santolina and sage...same as in the front yard) next Spring.

BTW...that's a fig tree.

Same side yard, from the other direction.

This is the far corner where my two side yards meet. I've ear-marked this large hunk of dirt as my daughter's vegetable garden--in the hope that by growing her own vegetables, she might actually eat vegetables.

I refer to that patio space in the foreground as "The BBQ Lounge." BTW...that's not a UFO sitting in The BBQ Lounge. It's a good ol' American firepit--bought at a Chicago-area KMart and hand-carried across the Atlantic Ocean.

And finally...my other side yard. This is a Weber Grill's-eye view.

In case you're wondering why I don't have a blade of grass in my yard, that's a good question. The entire yard used to be grass, but it would die like clockwork each May-October. The Iberian sun has a real mean streak.

That's why I opted for this desert rockscape instead. It's low maintenance and (IMO) looks kinda good. So if anyone wants to buy my house, the price just rose considerably this weekend.

And now...would somebody please give me a back and neck massage?

THE ZZZZZZ MEME.

My Ricola-chawing, leiderhosen-wearing, perpetually-yodelling friend, Canadian-Swiss, tagged me on a meme recently. She also tagged Tiiiiina, TBFs and Michael.

Memes are always good fodder for easy, gratuitous blog meat...especially at the fingertips of a currently less-than-motivated blogger. So, here goes.

6 WEIRD THINGS THAT I DO WHILE GETTING READY TO SLEEP OR WHILE SLEEPING.

1. My pre-bedtime, metrosexual routine: Wash hands; remove contact lenses; wash face; brush teeth; floss teeth (it's important, folks!); wipe-down face with an astringent (preferably Aqua-Glycolic, but normally Clean 'n Clear); spot-treatment using AcneFree (because it has very little benzoyle peroxide and thus won't bleach my pillowcases). Yes...as you might've gathered, I have pretty oily skin.

2. For most of my life, I slept on my stomach. Over time, however, this proved to be murder on my neck. So with a considerable amount of effort, I trained myself--about fifteen years ago--to fall asleep on my back each night. To this day, however, I've almost never wake-up in the morning on my back.

3. I don't snore. I don't thrash-around. I almost never need night-time wee-wee breaks. I just don't. Wee-wee breaks were, for some reason, a source of fixation for the others who were tagged on the meme. I felt obligated to make some mention of it myself.

4. Falling asleep usually isn't a problem--mainly because of the excessive quantities of exercise that I get each day. During times of stress, however, waking up at 2-4am (and staying awake) is a frequently a problem.

5. Without an alarm clock, I'll wake-up between 7am and 8:30am. No later. This is true regardless of how late I stayed up the night before. To me, there are few feelings as utterly miserable as sleeping late in the morning. The day is wasted, and the mind and body feel like they're swimming in glue for the remainder of the day. Total, complete misery. Ick! Makes me shudder just thinking about it. I don't know how 99.999% of the Spanish population can do it.

6. I've more or less trained myself to realize when I'm dreaming that I am, in fact, dreaming. I can't always do it, but it happens often enough. It's called "lucid dreaming"--i.e., knowing that you are dreaming and controlling what happens in those dreams. Lemme tell you...it's fun!

BONUS FACTOID: Somewhere out there in cyberspace is another blog that I write. It's an anonymous blog. It's pretty much a download of the bizarre dreams that I've had--written in as much detail as I can remember, and written asap after waking-up. I haven't been terribly diligent with its upkeep. But there's enough material in there to be pretty interesting. Beside me, only one other person in the world knows where that blog is located and has read it. Only one.

Intriguing, eh?