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In the past couple of days New Hampshire legalized gay marriage, and Nevada legalized "civil domestic partnerships" between any two people, regardless of gender.

In both states the decision came from the legislature, not the courts. (I believe the New Hampshire governor signed the new law, and in Nevada the state legislature overrode a veto.) Which is great because it severely undercuts the claim from the right that marriage equality is the result of "activist courts" going against "the will of the people." Oh, I'm sure there are wingers out there wailing about how true democracy is only reflected in a referendum. Well guess what, we live in a republic. Representative democracy, right? That thing conservatives are so fond of when it goes their way? I have to live with all kinds of laws I don't personally like, and so do they.

I've been wondering a couple of things: first, how active are the Las Vegas and Reno tourism industries in pushing for marriage equality? I bet legalizing gay marriage in a state with no residency requirement would be a real shot in the economic arm, at a time when they could use a boost, judging by the insanely low hotel deals they keeping emailing us about.

Second, given the option of either marriage or domestic partnership, how many straights will choose domestic partnership? It seems like there are a lot of people out there who aren't crazy about the word "marriage" and all the baggage it entails, and do it anyway because of all the legal protections it affords. If there's a simple, straightforward way to get all those legal protections without the marriage, I wonder how many straight couples will skip the marriage part.

Wouldn't it be funny if, after all that screaming about "protecting the sanctity of marriage," whatever that even means, the end result was to weaken straight marriage by making it seem like just one option out of many. Or would the right-wingers say that having fewer marriages makes the institution stronger, if the only people doing it are those who really want to? Somehow I don't think they would say that. Though it's hard to keep track sometimes.

May 24 movie: Destination Tokyo. Cary Grant and John Garfield star in this movie about a submarine crew on an advance mission to Tokyo before the Doolittle Raid. Also stars Alan Hale! As the ship's cook, named (no joke) Cookie.

May 23 movie: Battleground. This is a terrific war movie about the Battle of the Bulge, with a big ensemble cast including standouts Van Johnson, John Hodiak, George Murphy, and Ricardo Montalban. The day after watching it we ran into Spacegrrl and her (space) guy, and they had just been watching Band of Brothers, which as it turns out was about the exact same thing as this movie!

May 22 movie: Rebecca. I never get tired of this movie. This time I realized that the main character has no name! How did I never notice that before? All they ever call her is "the second Mrs. de Winter." I also read about the differences between the book and the movie (spoilers behind a cut):

May 21 movie: Greenwich Village. Very silly movie which I watched for Carmen Miranda. It was part of the Latinos in film series TCM did last month. The movie is set in the Edwardian era and she does a great version of "I'm Just Wild About Harry." There's another number where she wears black opera gloves with magenta palms, which must be seen to be believed. They looked like Chairman Kaga would have worn them.

I've recently started reading a blog called No Longer Quivering. Two women who left the Quiverfull* movement use the blog to tell their stories, explain what happened to them, how they got into the movement in the first place, what it was like, how they finally got out, and the problems they face now, from large (one of the two authors lost custody of her children) to relatively small (learning how to express personal likes and dislikes again, after needing permission for every decision for so long).

As a lifelong atheist who grew up in a secular family, these are obviously not issues that will ever affect me personally. Still, it's a compelling read. The authors are both good writers, telling powerful stories with honesty, sometimes anger and sometimes even humor. If you've ever wondered what extreme fundamentalist Christianity is about, wanted to understand it better than just writing the whole thing off as "they're crazy and/or evil," I highly recommend this blog. It's been an eye-opener to follow the story and learn why patriarchal religious movements like Quiverfull are so conducive to, downright encouraging of abuse. And also how an intelligent woman with the best of intentions could gradually fall into an abusive situation, even participate in the abuse of herself and her children, and why it was so difficult to leave. (Hint: being told by everyone you know that God will punish you for eternity if you do anything to stop the abuse had something to do with it.)

One of the two authors was something of a poster child for the Quiverfull movement before she left it. My favorite series on the blog is where she reprints articles she wrote before, for homeschooling magazines or whatnot, then dissects them, explaining what was really going on at the time and what all the "code words" really meant. The title of the series: "Vyckie's Tour de Crap."

*Quiverfull is an evangelical Christian movement which promotes an extreme patriarchy, demands total female submission and encourages families to have as many children as possible. The name comes from a Bible verse which says "happy is the man who has his quiver full of [children]."

May 21 movie: Fats Waller: This Joint is Jumping. Documentary about Fats Waller includes interviews with a couple of people, memories from Waller's son (who looked uncannily like his father), and lots of performance footage. Exactly what I wanted to see.

May 20 movie: Bell, Book and Candle. I think I've finally gotten over my reaction to this movie. I used to always love it a half hour in, and then hate it by the end. Well, I still don't love the ending, but I don't hate it anymore.

May 19 movie: Too Hot to Handle. Fun comedy starring Clark Gable and Walter Pidgeon as rival war correspondents, neither too scrupulous to fake their footage or steal it from each other. They fight over private pilot Myrna Loy and eventually cooperate to help her find her missing brother.

There's a really offensive sequence near the end where they all go to South America and Gable tricks a native population into making him their voodoo king or something. It involves him wearing a mask, jumping up and down and yelling "ooga booga." The movie was great up to that point.

May 19 movie: When Ladies Meet. I've love the Joan Crawford remake of this, and had no idea it was a remake! The original starred Myrna Loy in the part later played by Joan Crawford, also Robert Montgomery instead of Robert Taylor, Ann Harding (Greer Garson), Frank Morgan (Herbert Marshall) and Alice Brady (Spring Byington). The remake is less awkwardly stagey: in the original everything happens in one room, until they move to another room where everything happens, people walk in and out of doors all the time, that sort of thing. In just about every other way the original is the superior movie. Especially Myrna Loy instead of Joan Crawford. She makes the character so much more believable and sympathetic. Crawford's version is a selfish, deluded fool who is enabled by everyone around her. Loy's is a woman who realizes she's been selfish and deluded, and makes good. Much more satisfying.

May 18 movie: Penthouse. Myrna Loy and Warner Baxter costar in a crime/mystery movie, made just before Loy became a huge star in the The Thin Man. It's one of those movies where everything is glamorous, even when it should be rough and seedy. People wear evening clothes all the time and trade quips over champagne cocktails. I really enjoyed this and would watch it again anytime.

May 16 movie: Walk Softly, Stranger. This late 40s crime movie/romantic drama reunites Joseph Cotten and Alida Valli of The Third Man. The movie isn't great, and isn't bad either. Worth watching to see Cotten and Valli together again.

May 16 movie: The Anderson Tapes. Caper movie starring Sean Connery, with a great ensemble including Dyan Cannon, Martin Balsam, Alan King, Garret Morris, Christopher Walken in his first movie and Margaret Hamilton in her last.

The heist is intercut with government surveillance of Connery. I understand that was a key element of the book it was based on, but it drags the movie down. I think they should have focused on the caper -- which is very well done fun and exciting -- and dropped the surveillance. Then again, if they did that they wouldn't have had a title anymore.

We're in that marvelous weather period I call "the sweet spot": warm enough to leave the door open for the dog even early in the morning, not so hot that we need the a/c. Warm enough for t-shirts and dinners outside at our favorite restaurants, not too hot for me to wear knee socks with my comfortable shoes. Most importantly: prime gardening weather, with almost no mosquitos as yet.

In another week or so it will be blistering hot in the afternoon and I'll be eaten alive by mosquitos every time I leave the house. For now I'm enjoying the sweet spot and spending every minute I can outside.

Spent about an hour this morning pulling vines and cleared a respectable area. The vines are just beginning to show new growth after the goats ate them down to bare vines. Which is sort of alarming, that we have so much to clear and it's starting to come back already. On the other hand it's good, because it's much easier to tell which is english ivy and which is poison ivy. And the leaves are still few and tiny, easy to avoid exposure to the poison ivy. I wonder if poison ivy causes more of a reaction when the leaves are small? Is the oil more concentrated? That's true of most edible plants: the flavors are more intense on new growth.

I bagged the vines and put them in the trash can rather than the yard waste bin. Paul James said to do that, and last weekend a friend told us that a friend of his had caught a terrible case of poison ivy from municipal mulch. I want to be careful about not sending poison ivy to the landfill where it will end up in someone's mulch (maybe even my own). Still, the area I cleared this morning was about 90% english ivy, 10% poison ivy. And it's going to fill up our trash bin pretty fast. Maybe from now on I'll try to separate the two vines and put the english ivy in the yard waste, the poison ivy in a trash bag. Except for the area under the dogwood with the really high concentration of poison ivy. There I think I'll keep bagging everything.

Georg staked up the tomatoes yesterday. They're looking good! We have little green tomatoes on all of them except the Arkansas Traveler. Which is looking kind of pathetic actually, compared to the robust growth of the others: Super Sweet 100, Better Boy, Juliet and Sun Gold. Juliet is a sauce tomato which I hope will produce well.

The strawberry sorbet turned out great, if I do say so! It was still a little soft but I had to have some anyway. The recipe was the easiest thing: four cups (two containers) of strawberries, a cup of sugar, a cup of water, the juice of two limes, a blender and an ice cream maker. That's it! I think the lime juice was the secret. It made the strawberry flavor really pop. Here's the recipe. I didn't bother with the shortbread; maybe if I'm feeling ambitious I'll make it tomorrow.

Today we chipped the big pile of wood in the front yard. That's two down, and one to go! I think the blade in the wood chipper is starting to dull. It used to chop the entire stick cleanly, but by the time we were done it was leaving a strip of bark on the end. Like when you cut slices off a piece of cheese with a tough rind, and the rind stays attached on the bottom. I wonder if there's a way to sharpen the wood chipper blade?

We had a nice lunch at Rick's Diner. We used to go there all the time, and then got out of the habit, and just started going again a couple of weeks ago. The manager still remembered us. They play my favorite radio station there: The 40s on 4 from Sirius.

In the evening I did a little bit of vine clearing, and planted an annual vine under the old clothesline post. We decided that the posts would be too much of a pain in the ass to remove, so we're going to plant vines on them instead. Probably a climbing rose on the sunny one, but it's too late in the year to plant roses so we put in an annual vine just for this year.

We also made strawberry sorbet, which tasted great but didn't set up like it should have in the machine. I followed the recipe exactly; maybe the ice cream machine wasn't chilled enough. We stuck it in the freezer & hope it's ready to eat tonight.

Good news for plant lovers: Bluestone Perennials is having their annual sale now! Everything in their online catalog is half-price until June 1. They ship three-packs of teeny-tiny plants, and receiving them in mid-June it can be hard sometimes to get them all through the first year. But the prices in the June sale are so good that I don't mind losing a few. And they always send a big coupon book, and they used to have this special where if you sent back your box and styrofoam peanuts, you'd get free shipping on the next order. They seem like a nice company.

We did so little gardening last fall, and we have that whole huge area the goats cleared to fill, that we went a little crazy with our Bluestone order. Almost all plants relatively common species, but unusual varieties we don't see locally.

For shade we ordered:
AJUGA Burgundy Glow (nice bi-colored leaves)
AQUILEGIA Melba Higgins (a pretty dark purple columbine)
ASTILBE Peach Blossom (supposedly more tolerant of dry conditions, which we need)
HYDRANGEA quercifolia Little Honey (a "dwarf" oakleaf hydreangea, only grows 4' tall and 4' wide)
TRICYRTIS Taipei Silk (I love toad lilies!)
TIARELLA Sugar and Spice (foamflower)

And for sun:
ARTEMISIA Powis Castle (this exact variety is commonly available, but we love it, it will grow fast and the price was fantastic)
ECHINOPS Platinum Blue (aka "globe thistle," gorgeous blue flowers)
EUPHORBIA Excalibur (I'm so crazy about euphorbia I had to get two, a big one and a small one)
EUPHORBIA x martinii Tiny Tim
OENOTHERA Tetragona Summer Solstice (bright yellow flowers)
CALAMINTHA Nepetoides (white catmint)
RUDBECKIA hirta Solar Eclipse (a bicolored black-eyed susan)
WALDSTEINIA Fragarioides (some kind of non-fruiting strawberry that forms a "weed choking carpet." We sure need that.)

Looking over the list it's mostly blue and yellow flowers in the sun, and mostly white flowers in the shade. I'm excited about the shade plants! We haven't had much space in the shade to plant before. I've been wanting astilbes and an oakleaf hydrangea for a long time.

Had a rather rude awakening this morning: Jane was outside (we've been getting up around 6 and opening the door so she can sit outside, then going back to bed), and there's a big pile of choke cherry branches out front waiting to be chipped, and Jane must have chased some poor animal into the pile and gotten herself caught on a branch. Maybe it went into her collar or something. Anyway I awoke to this colossal racket coming into the house, then into my room. From my position lying in bed all I could see was branches and leaves going this way and that as the noise headed into the bedroom.

I thought Jane had chased an animal into the bedroom and, okay, I screamed like a little girl. In fact she was scared by having a branch attached to her, and ran into the bedroom because that's her safe spot. The hideous din was caused by her being freaked out and not able to see that well around the branch, so she was bumping into things and her claws were scrambling against the floor. When she finally stopped moving, Georg got the branch off her and then it was all over. Except for my heart palpitations; they haven't stopped yet.

When a soldier removes his helmet in a combat situation, it means one of two things:

1. He's the star and he has nice hair.
2. He's about to die.

We've watched a lot of war movies this past weekend and it always turns out that way. The helmet comes off and he either tousles his thick wavy hair, or dies. Whenever a character actor or old guy took off his helmet, I was shouting at the screen, "No, don't do it!"

1. Buy two pie crusts already in tins.
2. Make pie filling.
3. Pour into one crust.
4. Lift the other crust out of its tin and set it on top of pie. Press crusts together.
5. That's it! Easiest pie we ever made. If it tastes good, I may never make pie crust again.