Eheheheheheeee…. yes. Yes, it does.

“Loki must be punished.”

To find his hiding place, Odin mounted the High Seat, the Lidskjalf, and looked over the world. Far in the distance, beside a waterfall, a strange little house with an open door on every side caught his eye. He looked closely, and saw Loki sitting inside by a fire, tying strings into loops and knots.

The Aesir stormed off to catch him, but Loki was keeping watch through the four open doors and saw them coming. He threw what he was making into the fire, jumped into the waterfall, and changed himself into a salmon. “They will never catch me on their hook,” he sniggered. Loki did not worry about being caught in a net because no one had ever made one yet. Indeed that was the thing he had been inventing, and he had just burned it.

Wow, Dean told me that we actually lost our electricity in the storm last night, and our brand-new generator friend woke up and kicked in automatically!

Listening to Shawn Colvin’s cover of “Viva Las Vegas” over & over & over today in the car. Not for the content, but for the sound. Also, singing along (badly, natch).

I must have played it at least 10 times, probably more.

…This nail color looks blue or black, but it’s actually really dark green. :-)

LOL, look what was on the sale cart at the library.

Manicurist at Annie’s Nails, massaging my shoulders: “What happen your neck? Woah….”

Heh. Nothing happened to it; it’s just my neck. Although I guess it is slightly knottier than usual.

Wow, not only is thorn (Þ, þ) cool, but so is wynn (Ƿ ƿ). Fascinating! I love that: 1) the rune stands for “joy” and, B) it looks like a P but transformed into the letter W, just like my middle initial (formerly P., now W.)

Now I stopped thinking about John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt and started thinking about thorn. I remembered writing about thorn on ALB previously (although I had forgotten about thorn in the meantime!), so I looked up the entry from September, 2010:

þ (thorn) is cool! I found out about it because the guide on the cemetery tour told us that “ye” (as in “died with ye Small Pox”) isn’t pronounced “ye;” it’s just an abbreviated form of “the.” (The “e” on “ye” is supposed to be superscript, but I don’t know how to do that with html…)

I was thinking about the word “heim” first thing this morning while washing my face, and all the sudden “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” popped into my brain. I haven’t thought about that song for 30-ish years, but now it’s stuck in my head in an endless loop. Naturally, I looked it up on the Internet, and the Wikipedia article is pretty interesting, especially the only vaguely-related part about Blinkenlights faxlore. Oh, Internet.

[Edit: I always wondered, are the two John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidts related (is one a Jr.?), or are they two guys that just randomly have the exact same name?]

I saw lightning bugs blinking in the wetlands across the road while we were taking out the trash! It was very exciting. And then when we went out with a flashlight to bag up the horrible landscape fabric we’d pulled out of the Bela Lugosi/Nosferatu daylily area (so we could cram some in the top of the trash can), I saw them in our front yard, too!

Laura, giggling: “You know who would like lightning bugs!”
Dean, groaning: “Loki? Oh, Thor.”

Laura: “Look at that big patch of vetch! That’s Vetchheim. The vetch should stay in Vetchheim instead of invading all the other realms.”
Dean: “You and your realms.”

I also think Snakey really should help with the invading vetch army. He slithers around in the front bed all the time where it likes to sneakily grow in the middle of the creeping phlox (pretending, but ultimately failing, to blend in with the phlox), so you’d really think he’d be able to lend a hand fighting it off, instead of just lolling about in the sun all day. Oh I forgot, he doesn’t have hands. But still.

It’s clafoutis season!!! I officially made My Official Strawberry-Rhubarb Clafoutis Recipe this morning, and it’s officially great! I actually used tons less sugar than the recipe calls for (and my official recipe already uses tons less than a normal recipe), so I was a little worried that it would taste horrible, but it was PERFECT. I only used 1 tablespoon of sugar, and the recipe calls for 1/4 cup (although my past self has noted that it’s good with less than that) (but my past self was talking about berry clafoutis and peach clafoutis, not strawberry-rhubarb clafoutis!). It was the best combo of sweet and tart, and I could really taste the rhubarb, but not in an over-the-top makes-you-cry kind of way. Barbed clafoutis is the best clafoutis! And guess what: I did not take a picture of the clafoutis.

[Edit: I used local insaaaaaaanely long rhubarb from Berruti’s, and Berruti’s strawberries, too. One of the pieces of rhubarb was seriously about three feet long. So far I have gotten a strawberry pint each from Belltown, Carini’s, and Berruti’s, and Belltown was the best. Carini’s was not good, but their asparagus, blueberries and raspberries are my favorite. I am so excited that it’s local berry season now. I can not WAIT for blueberries. And cherries! Aaaah!!!]

Oh good, the flying monkey sign is back!

Oooh! It’s breakfast time for me AND the turkeys! There’s a pair hanging out under the triple-and-feed with all the regular birds and squirrels and chipmunks.

[Edit: HA! I just copied my photos onto my computer, and there were a whole bunch of additional turkey photos that Dean took this morning! The same two turkeys are back!]

Oh, Loki. Don’t!!

(The Death of Balder, from D’Aulaires’ Norse Gods and Giants)

[Warning: half-formed thoughts that change partway through as learning more information sends my whirling brain into a tailspin.]

I guess I liked The Avengers a little better this time, because I was able to focus on the interrelationships between characters, but the funny parts weren’t funny anymore since they weren’t a surprise, so maybe that cancelled it back out. I was really empathizing with Thor this time, in every single scene he was in. He’s had a pretty wrenching time of it from the events of Thor until now. And he tries again and again to give Loki that hug he needs, but Loki just won’t have it. I want to love Loki in The Avengers the way I did in Thor, but I can’t. He’s still a compelling character, but something about him in The Avengers is just diminished for me. I think it’s the directing. He doesn’t come across as complex and tortured as he should (even though people say all kinds of great stuff about him, like the whole “Loki’s mind is a box of cats” thing), and he doesn’t seem as cleverly devious as he should, either. [Edit: Also, this is hard to articulate, but he’s just not as attractive to me in The Avengers… there is something rougher and subtly bulkier about him; he’s not as brittle and sharp and delicate as he was in Thor.]

On the other hand, after reading all those Norse mythology Loki tales yesterday, I do think the situation he is in in The Avengers is classic Loki in a way… doing something rash, getting in WAY over his head in a situation where he’s in BIG trouble with a powerful entity and has to scramble to fix it happens over and over again in the stories. I felt, as I was watching the movie the first time and also as I sat through it again today, that I would have loved the Loki parts if only they had focused more on Loki realizing how badly he had screwed up, instead of just subtly hinting at it. (Like in the scene when he is threatened by the Chitauri and flinches horribly as he comes back to himself on earth. And how his eyes look all raw and dark-circled at the beginning of the movie, like he’s been weeping his head off.) I want to see more of how Loki got into this situation (while wrecked after his fall at the end of Thor) and that it is not a good situation for him, but that he feels he is in too deep to change course now.

Mythological Loki would realize the whole thing with the Chitauri is a horrible mistake and come up with some crafty solution to get out of the hole he’s dug himself into (like in the myths about Sif’s golden hair and Idunn’s apples of youth), not try to gain world domination and turn down every offer of help from Thor until he’s subjugated and led away muzzled and in chains. Of course, Loki being punished and forgiven for his crazy over the top crimes is very much in sync with myth, so I love that part. (Not that Loki’s been forgiven by the Asgardians yet, but he’s got to be, right?) (Maybe not. But I hope so, and so do Hiddleston and Hemsworth, apparently.) But in myth, when Loki does something malicious and messes up big, he freaks out and panics when he gets caught, whimpers and begs for mercy, and then redeems himself big. I hope they give him a chance to do that in Thor 2.

And yes, I know the movie Loki is a variation on the Marvel comic character, who is only partially based on Loki of myth (obviously, this is fairly key). I mean, there are some pretty fundamental differences between the characters, like Loki being Thor’s brother (which I love), and the comic character (at least from the summaries I’ve read) being basically evil and irredeemable and hating Thor, whereas, although the mythological Loki likes to play mean tricks on occasion, he’s also “nimble-witted and bright, full of clever ideas… like a flickering, shining flame,” and Thor loves having such a cunning companion at his side. So I don’t expect everything Loki does to be something the mythological Loki would do… but as someone who was fascinated by the Loki character when studying Wagner’s Ring Cycle back in college, I just find these derivations super interesting to think/learn more about.

[Edit: Okay, just finished reading the D’Aulaires’ Norse mythology book. Wow, Ragnarök is pretty darned harsh. Damn. Loki really does become irredeemably wicked in the end, and for very movie-Loki reasons (jealousy and spite), too. What a downer. :-( Ah, Loki. Tragic. I want him to be redeemed SO BADLY. Damn it all.

…Still, there were some pretty darned hilarious adventures (Loki and Thor cross-dressing?!) most of the way through. Can’t the twilight of the gods be a long way off???]