Living "sturdily and Spartan-like"

Well, I spent nearly the entire day in the garden, which was exhilarating, and also a bit exhausting. I'm having a blast with it, remembering the joy of working the soil, interacting with plants, and getting a bit of exercise, sun, and fresh air.

It's also both rewarding and humbling, seeing the landscape transform with your labor, and also seeing how much depends on time, weather, and so many other factors you have no control over. And, realizing how, even if you push yourself, there's only so much you can do in a day. It cultivates a sense of acceptance of both my strengths and my limitations that feels very healthy, very connected to what I feel is fundamental to being human.

I am sitting here after my long day's work and a simple supper of fresh salad, homemade rye bread, olives, and salty Bulgarian feta cheese, and I just poured myself a cup of Moroccan-style tea made with green tea my brother carried home from Taiwan and fresh mint I clipped just moments ago in the garden. It smells positively glorious.

As far as the garden work goes, the biggest part of the labor was the process of ripping up grass and weeds out of the area of the pathway (this is what it looked like before). I was inspired to try to expand the purslane planting into this area, to see if it would cooperate as a groundcover. Given that the soil is very shallow and comprises more compost than real soil, it's not a fabulous place for planting. But since the purslane had already started cropping up there a little bit, and since the plant only develops a fairly shallow root system, I thought it might be worth a try to get more to grow between the paving stones.

I almost finished; I just have a few more weeds to pull, and I obviously need to clean off the paving stones and compost the remaining grass pullings.

Above: Here's one spot of the newly replanted purslane, which I was hunting all over the garden amidst the sad, anemic, dry grass today.

While I was at it, I also transplanted some succulents from a patch at the far end of the lawn into the entrance to the path (above), and into the bed beside it, with the Moroccan mint plant (below). I also marked this little bed (below) with stones, once again against the lawn demons.


And, also, between the bricks outlining the herb garden (above and below). I thought if they got covered a bit by succulents, perhaps it would look a bit prettier. I don't love the delineation of the space with the bricks, but it prevents misunderstandings with the lawn maintenance guys who have a tendency of getting on the riding mower and destroying everything in its path.
Finally, I also did some weeding in the purslane bed next to the steps. I think I'll harvest a portion of the largest plants already in the next week to encourage root development on the plants. And to try my new crop! Hooray . . .

Tagging web images dynamically with roll-over labels -- where's the software?

I've been wanting to edit those photos to dynamically identify the plants rather than just list them. So, I'm looking all over for simple freeware software that allows me to identify items (objects or persons) in a photograph and tag them, as is done in Facebook (much to our chagrin, sometimes, after a bad hair day gets captured). And somehow, it doesn't seem to exist. The idea is a good one, and I'm sort of amazed, given the pace of Web 2.0 development, that it isn't possible to do yet.

You can tag whole photos with thematic tags (that relate to the whole file), and you can geocode photographs to identify where they were taken on a map (the basis for the fun of Panoramio, the map features of Flickr, GoogleEarth, as well as the images connected to Googlemaps). The latter is also, obviously, a label (or, if you prefer, piece of metadata) that applies to the whole photograph. Labeling component parts still seems out of reach outside the context of applications for Facebook.

I found an Eastern European-developed software called TagHim 1.0, but it's impossible to download. Their own website has, in fact, been suspended. Perhaps it's because they spammed most software review sites with the exact same content (in noticeably non-native English), including reference to Facebook. Or, maybe they violated the terms of use for their website host. I'm not sure.

TagHim even has a YouTube video of the developer demonstrating the software with his charming Slavic accent and misspelling of "Mickey" in his process of tagging a photograph of Mickey Mouse and Pluto. It looks, effectively, like exactly what I want. Simple, free, fast, effective. What's the holdup, folks? Does anybody know anything about this?

Ice cream ball

Oh no! I want one.

Garden Tour: Week One.

Looking at vegetable garden advice is getting me so excited, and wistful. I wish I had planted even more in my garden: carrots, lettuce, beets, broccoli, potatoes, kale, spinach, chard, peppers, zucchini, brussels sprouts, cabbage, cucumber, more green beans, bigger tomato plants, fava beans, and rhubarb. I think I can still add some of these, for a fall/early winter harvest. But next year I'm going to be prepared by spring, seriously.

Anyway, I promised more photos of my garden. I'm going to try to be be annoyingly diligent about keeping track in my blog of how it's growing, so be prepared. Complete identification of the plants to follow in an edit tomorrow.

WEEK ONE.
Here we are, after a week of planting. From what I remember now, I bought the plants two weeks ago tomorrow, on June 15, and started planting on Saturday the 21st, starting with the herbs and perennials. I moved onto the beans, eggplants, and tomatoes early this past week, and finished up planting the rest of the vegetables today.

Above: The herb garden, clearly delineated to protect it from idiotic landscapers who weedwack everything that's green. From the back, going in concentric clockwise circles from the outside, there's chocolate mint, sweet basil (ocimum basilcum), French tarragon, thyme, oregano, sage, dill, mother of thyme/creeping thyme (thymus serpyllum), rosemary, horehound (marrubium vulgare), pineapple sage (salvia elegans/s. rutilans), basil (variety unknown; Thai, maybe?), more sweet basil, more tarragon, Russian sage "Taiga" (Perovskia afriplicifolia), salvia, lavender "Munstead" (Lavandula angustifolia), Sonata carmine cosmos, rosemary, variegated sage 'tricolor' (salvia officinalis), lavender, English lavender, and German chamomile (Matricaria recutita). I also sowed in seeds for phlox and zinnia, along the borders, that obviously aren't visible yet, though I thought I saw a little sprouting already today.

Above: The path leading to my cottage, along which I've planted mint borders. You can see a little patch of it there beside the light on the right side, and smaller plants on the far side, beside that black PVC piping they seem to think makes for neat borders beside lawns here in Michigan. To my aesthetic, it's just ugly.

Above: Another patch of mint of a different variety from most of the other stuff, at the very beginning of the path on the left side. I think it is Moroccan mint, but I can't remember: I bought and planted it in the garden plot last year.


Above: To one side of my door, here, I've got the eggplants, and in front of that, a new little bed with mint and purslane.

Above: Close-up of the eggplants, week 1. They're the Japanese variety.

Above: Close-up of the mint, which I transplanted from the far side of the garden. I'm pretty sure it's standard spearmint.

Above: The other side of my door, where I've got another bed of purslane and a little more mint.

Above: Close-up of the purslane. I've been digging it up from ALL over the garden and transplanting it into these beds to cultivate consciously since Scrumptious kindly pointed out to me that it is rich in nutritional content. Since then I've also been reading rather obsessively all about it.

Above: The tomato plants, which I fit in on the other side of the door, behind that other bed of purslane and mint.

Above: Being out in the garden inspired me to cut the dead growth off the butterfly bush (to the left). Now it looks so pretty next to the hydrangea (to the right).

Above: Some of the perennials I planted. From left to right, they're Maltese Cross 'Molten Lava' (Lychnis x haageana), summer sun (heliopsis), Columbine 'Music pink and white' (Aquilegia), Beard tongue (penstemon dwarf hybrids), and Blue Queen salvia. I also planted flower seeds -- a kind of daisy, California poppies, zinnia, and phlox.

Above: In that same bed, there's Italian parsley and cilantro on the far end to the right.

Above: My raised beds on my garden plot across the way. They aren't tidy or pretty, but I hope they'll do the trick.

Above: From back to front, on the left: Something I lost track of the label for and can't identify, but I think may be okra, garlic, butternut squash, and acorn squash. On the right, Blue Lake beans, sugar snap peas, cantaloupe, and a sweet potato.

Above: Some close-ups of the veggies.

Above: Sunset dappling the herb garden with light. You can see the lake in the background. So very peaceful here.

After snapping all these photos, I went for my first swim in the lake this year. It was simply glorious, alternately warm and cool, so refreshing, so fresh against my skin. I breathed deeply and looked up at the sky and felt somehow more human than I have in quite a while.

Ohh, I want a puppy and a flock of sheep so they can fall in love with each other . . .

Grad student life in Michigan -- the highs, the lows.

There's a new yoga studio in the area. I was excited to see that, because up until then the only one I knew of around Livingston County was Yoga Center for Healthy Living in Brighton, which is a bit on the pricey side. Unfortunately, this new one in Pinckney doesn't offer that many classes, and no morning yoga. Boo.

Why isn't there full cooperation from the rest of the world for my dream life of weekend days of sun, yoga class and farmer's market in the morning followed by a smoothie and coffee while catching up on the news, whole grain baking and organic gardening, a little reading and writing, a little country bike ride, and a swim at sunset?

I did pretty well in realizing my vision today, though -- I biked in the snippet of sun after our downpour this morning, came home and made a blueberry/strawberry/nonfat milk/Vanilla protein smoothie and some coffee & milk, took care of a little personal business, and made another new version of quick rye bread, this time including buckwheat and quinoa flour, sesame and sunflower seeds, to complement the rye & molasses. I'll let you know how it turns out . . . it sure smells good in the oven, though. :)

The mosquitoes are really bumming me out -- I'd like to go back to the garden and do some more work, and I think I'll brave them anyway. But even covered from head to toe and hovering close to two citronella candles, I get divebombed without a mosquito net covering my face. And I don't have a mosquito net, unfortunately. I'm resisting DEET products, though I did order some Avon Skin-so-soft bug spray to see if that does the trick. Gwen's suggestion of vanilla was clever, but it didn't work for me, nor did citronella essential oil. I've been so itchy the past few days, I can hardly fathom exposing myself to more bites right now. . . never mind the diseases they can carry . . .

I'm thinking now about the rest of my day. Some house cleaning, I think, a closet reorganization operation, a bit of gardening, some work on an archaeology paper, and maybe a house party and some visiting with friends this evening. That is, if I get paid on Monday. I need to drive to Detroit first thing in the morning for a job interview, and my gas tank is (as usual, lately) running low, along with my bank account. If I can't buy gas on Monday morning, I actually can't afford to go anywhere at all between now and then. Oh, if only I could afford to buy a more fuel-efficient car. If only housing were more affordable in Ann Arbor. If only gas prices weren't so damned high.

I have several jobs potentially in the works, a few hours here, a few hours there. Three tutoring gigs, a research assistantship, and a research analyst position. (I've applied for others, but some didn't come through, and I gave up on the baking job when I heard that fifteen people had interviewed for that one full-time minimum wage position starting work at 5 am.) It's so confusing I've created a spreadsheet to keep track of it all. But if I get one or both of the ones I'm really hoping for, I'll be doing fine for the rest of the summer. Otherwise, I'm just going to have to turn to prostitution to fill in the gaps between tutoring gigs so I can make rent for August and September, until I start my next GSI position at U of M, and get my first paycheck at the very end of September. Just kidding. Mostly.

Oh! My bread is ready, and I'm already devouring it with ripe avocado. MMMMMmmmm.

Baking details HERE in the Kitchen Empress.

Trans-american children

I tuned in partway through the rebroadcast of Barbara Walters' 20/20 report last year on transgendered children and their parents tonight.

Watching the report was interesting to me in part because it reinforced the point we try to nail home for the anthropology 101 students about gender as a social construction, and how gender is enculturated. It's amazing how attached parents are to the ideas of what a boy is, or what a girl is, and that they can mourn the loss of that boy even when they still have the transgendered child who is alive and well and insisting that the world recognize her as a girl. I'm not meaning to dismiss the pain that these families experience, because it is real, but I just mean to say that culture is a profoundly powerful force in building our understandings of the world and the way it ought to be.

Maybe this was out of context, since I tuned in late, but I was also struck by the fact that Walters initially seemed stubbornly to return to the pronoun that anatomy declared rather than the one the child -- and, in most cases, the families too -- used for himself or herself. This shifted over the course of the broadcast, and by the end she seemed generally to use the pronoun used by the family.

Another thing that I can't help but notice in American journalism is the isolationist kind of approach to the subject of gender, as if the US is the only country in the world where this could happen*, and that given the biologically driven theories that many people currently believe, there's no room for talking about culture. Even the explanation Walters offers of this theory belies the American cultural framing of science, where anatomy = biology. She explains that many believe that a hormone surge during pregnancy results in "the wrong gender" for these children. Why "wrong"? Because a penis necessitates male gender identity, a vagina female gender identity? The orientation is puzzling to me, for sure. We know that dark matter populates the universe with far more than we know how to identify in cosmology; why is there the popular assumption we have biology all figured out?

I've seen the interesting film No Dumb Questions a couple of times in social work classes taught by Liz Gershoff, which also deals with children and their conceptualizations of gender and gender identity, but from the point of view of children watching their relative transition from being Uncle Bill to Aunt Barbara, rather than a child experiencing a transgendered identity himself or herself. Though it's rougher in its production, I think it's somehow more intelligent in certain ways than Walter's piece, because its absence of an omnicient narrator leaves more room for interpretation and self-discovery, rather than pronouncement.

One thing that Walters does do really nicely, though, is capture (ethnographically) the parents' varied reactions to their own children's declarations of alternate gender, and given the large audience of its mainstream broadcast, it has the potential to have a huge impact on people who share exactly the same assumptions that she herself falls into at times in the documentary. As she claims in the final moments of the one-year-later broadcast, there has been an enormous rise in the number of trans-identified children participating in conferences since the initial airing of the episode, and there's been a great deal of attention given the show by internet readers as well as schools.

Even with the faults in the program, I'm thrilled to see this topic being talked about in mainstream media with a fair amount of sensitivity. Hooray for Barbara Walters.

*The wonderful French film Ma Vie en Rose (1997) deals with just this topic from the child's perspective.

The "espresso" book machine

An intriguing development at the University of Michigan library.

I always say that the three things I really miss about University of Texas, being a student at U of M, are the weather, the IT department and its advanced spam filters, and the incredible library system, including a Gutenberg Bible in their special collections. Well, I believe this is finally one interesting thing our library has got on the Longhorns.

Outrageously beautiful (Busby Berkeley) dreams

It really changes my feeling of being in the world, putting my hands into dough and soil. I can't explain it, exactly, but it's profound. Like when I was walking up to campus from the Hill Street parking lot the other day, I was interacting with every landscape choice actively, looking at the plants, their maintenance and care, the selection, their health. . .

I haven't felt this way since I lived in my cottage in Austin, and had a garden of native plants I propagated there.

My dreams of the lakeside gardens here grow greater and more vivid. They involve a massive vegetable garden full of squash, kale, beets, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, garlic, peppers, chard, rhubarb, and everything I can think of; lilacs, scarlet runner beans, thornless blackberry vines, and everbearing raspberries, heavy with fruit, covering every inch of ugly chain-link fence; a goat, a sheep, and perhaps a cow taking the place of the inept gardening service for trimming back the anemic lawn; lilies, bleeding hearts, delicate ferns (like maidenhair and dryopteris), and oyster mushrooms encircling the trees and crawling the hillside down to the lake; window boxes bursting with red geraniums; containers filled with jade and Mexican sage surrounding a wrought-iron table and chairs on the deck overlooking the water; and California poppies, Texas bluebonnets, zinnias, columbine, and phlox exploding with blooms in the beds beneath my neighbor's rock garden laced with succulents.

I can't wait to have a real job, to be able to settle down for real . . . .

In the meantime, though, my yogurt from yesterday is glorious with muesli for breakfast. Yes, breakfast at 3 pm. It is summer, after all.

Plant Mystery, continued.

I've tried comparing my little sample against the list of weeds offered by the Illinois Council on Food and Agricultural Research, but I haven't found a match. I've done a less comprehensive search on the British site Find Me Plants and the Ladybird Johnson native plant database (Oh, how I miss the wonderful Wildflower Center in Austin!)

I'm inclined to think that it is some kind of herb that I did plant last year, though I still have not a clue which. In part, because it doesn't appear anywhere besides the one spot where it is. It seems very healthy and robust, but it is definitively situated where it is, unlike most weeds that have a tendency to spread all over the damned place, like Creeping Charlie (which covers most of my garden plot, sadly), and Purslane (which likes to hide everywhere else).
Above: Creeping Charlie and Purslane, two of my most pernicious weeds here in Livingston County, Michigan; photos from the Illinois Council on Food and Agricultural Research.

So . . . tonight I planted both my Blue Lake beans and my Japanese eggplants, despite the fact that I was being dive-bombed by mosquitoes, and was half-drunk on beer from my growler from Grizzly Peak. Now I just have a few more veggies to put in the ground. I wish the bugs would go away for long enough. . .

Another beautiful sunset.

Mmm, simple pleasures.

Garden mysteries on early lakeside morning

An early-morning shot of my new herb garden. More to come in evening, in brighter light, with a virtual tour of the varieties of herbs.

The benefits of waking up early are so numerous. Here it is, 10:40, and I've listened to BBC world service streaming for two hours, having already finished planting the mint borders in my garden, transplanted the oregano/marjoram (I still can't tell the difference) and thyme, prepared more than a quart of yogurt (which will incubate and be ready this afternoon), and put another big loaf of quick rye bread into the oven.

Yogurt, so very easy. Just heat the milk, cool it a bit, add a hint of yogurt culture, and cultivate it in containers.

The bread is also a breeze.


Here, a couple shots of the mint I've been planting as a border to the path to the cottage. I've been irritated by the ugly black PVC dividing the sod from the path since I moved in, so my concept is finally to cover it with mint. I hope the walkway will be a lot more attractive as it inevitably fills in.

. . . So now I am puzzling over one plant in my garden. It looks like it could be a variety of thyme, because the placement of the leaves, the color, and the stem formation look very much like thyme. But it doesn't taste like thyme, from the tiny bit I tasted, and the tiny, thin needles don't look much like the leaves of most thyme plants I know.

It also grows in a pattern that is unlike other types of thyme I know -- it grows a bit like a groundcover, very close to the ground, and spreading outward from its central root.

Anyone familiar with it? I'm wondering if it might be summer savory. Or, it may just be a big, hardy weed.

Dawn on the lake

There was a time when I thought there could hardly be anything more beautiful than sunset on my lake. But lately, I have been thinking that dawn is far more magical.

Summer on the lake. . .

A strange summer thus far. I'm trying to settle into it a bit more, now that my GSIship in Slavic has ended for the spring term. And, so, I'm madly looking for work, because I won't get another paycheck from U of M until the end of September. Rent still has to be paid, food still has to be purchased . . . It's a little scary, really. If I'd gone abroad this summer, I would have been able to get some funding from the university to support the research. But nobody ever wants you to include your expenses in Michigan in your budget, so where the money for rent ($850/month), cable internet/TV/phone ($70/month), car insurance ($40) and inevitable small utility bills, are supposed to come from remains mysterious.

I'm opting instead to stay in town to rest and work on some old papers, since I have some incomplete work leftover from past semesters when I felt pressured into taking on 5-7 classes at a time, knowing that it would be unworkable. But the financial situation isn't really any saner being in town.

Entertainment has to be the free or nearly free kind. And I'm trying to limit my trips back and forth from Ann Arbor, too, since the cost of gas has gotten so bloody high. I've been hanging out a lot with a friend in town, baking quite a bit, and watching lots of streaming internet TV (Bones is my new obsession, thanks to Ms Scrumptious.) Now that the water has warmed up, I'm about ready to start swimming the lake. Umlud was also kind enough to pump up my bike tires, and I'm also ready to take it out for a spin now and see if the rust on the gears is bad enough to need professional work, or if I can ride it as-is, so I can hit the road on the nice easy bike trails around here. And, hoping to generate some produce at the end of the summer and enjoy some flowers and herbs in the meantime, I am finally planting the lovely selection of perennials and herbs I got at the farm stand the other day. Gardening should be a fun diversion in the evenings, if I can find a way to keep the mosquitos at bay.

(A bit later. . .) My muscles are comfortably sore from hours of hard work today. I have effectively planted all the flowers and herbs; now it's just time to find space for the vegetables tomorrow. I opted to move my herb garden to the space right in front of the cottage instead of the plot across the way, since the hose isn't really long enough to comfortably water over there, and I get to enjoy the plants more when they're right outside my windows. Also, after my previous "gardener" debacle, I feel protective of my plants, and I feel irrationally that having them closer to the house will make them more likely to be preserved by the folks who come to work on the lawn.

The more demanding work, more than planting the new plants, was transplanting some of the old ones. I uprooted a sage plant and two hardy tarragon plants (straggly though they may look from being weedwacked by the supposedly more competent gardener) and brought them over to the other side. The hardest part, though, was my work to bring over the mint. I'm planting it all along the border of the path to the cottage, so that it will grow to fill in and mask the ugly black plastic piping along the sod line, as well as the artificial fibers of the fabric beneath the path itself. I'll finish up the job and show photos tomorrow! I plan to move my marjoram and thyme also, so I'll have the raised beds exclusively for veggies.

I'm going to do some internet research to find out if there are any deer- and rabbit-resistant plants I could plant around my herb garden, especially the parsley and cilantro, so I can keep them for my own harvesting. :)

Today turned out to be a beautiful day, with morning meditation after a bit of coffee, hours of gardening, and a successful job interview for a tutoring gig in Ann Arbor. I talked to my Mom on the phone, saw a stunning sunset over the lake, and had a coffee date with Umlud. Tomorrow I have two more job interviews, for another tutoring job and a full-time baker position. And more fun in the garden!

Punchy anti-racist retorts in television

Bones just keeps getting better and better. Cheekier, punchier. Like today, in episode 2.5:

Angela: What you thought were teethmarks, Dr. Sorion, turned out to be Chinese characters, engraved along the side.
Hodgins: What do they say?
Angela: (sigh) They say, "What make foolish man, think I speak Chinese?"
Hodgins: I thought you were half-Chinese.
Angela: And I think you're half-Swedish. Let's hear some Swedish!

Canadian Goslings on Huron River Drive

There's a family of Canadian geese who've made their home beside Huron River Drive in Ann Arbor, and I get all giddy every time I drive by the little goslings, in all their cuteness. This drive-by cell phone camera photo doesn't really do them justice, but you get the idea.

Umlud initiated me into the delights of Sunday brunch at the Aut bar today. An outdoor patio space so peaceful and lovely with the dappled sunlight under green trees and the sounds of Billie Holiday crooning, I was reminded of lazy Sundays in Budapest. Lots of really darling kids out with their families, in honor of Father's Day. I was grinning despite my intense dislike of the holiday.

Ms Scrumptious has gone home after a delightful almost-week-long visit to Michigan. I always like the quiet self-collected feeling I have after time with a dear old friend. And though it's been rather a rough couple weeks, I mostly have great memories of the time, with my guardian angels K & J keeping me company out at the cottage last weekend, and Alice woven in here and there amidst her prelim craziness.

A lingering legacy of L's visit is a minor obsession with Bones, even despite its terrible science, and a delight in seeing an anthropologist depicted on TV. I wish season 2 were on Hulu, because the low quality of Surf the Channel and the Chinese subtitles there interfere with my viewing pleasure, and they only have the first season on DVD at the video store here. No hope for the library on this one, and it's not worth it to me to start up Netflix again just for this.

I bought lovely herbs, veggies, and perennials this afternoon at the Alexander Farm Market on Whitmore Lake Road, which I'll plant tomorrow after I finish this round of grading for the Central European cinema course. I'll take more photos and identify everything when I do. Below, though, you can spy some salvia, beans, and German chamomile.


It's positively beautiful weather out here, 80 degrees and no humidity, and the intermittent thunderstorms have been keeping the dust down. Stunning. I hope it's like this all summer. It's just about time to start swimming in the lake again, finally.


As I was getting back home today, the son of the older couple next door was clearing some dead needles out of the pine tree in their yard and the ladder broke a foot underneath him. The whole family was out there around him, and several other neighbors were out. We saw him fall almost as if in slow motion. Luckily it wasn't so far, and it was onto a relatively soft patch of grass. Nonetheless I'm concerned . . . They've been visiting all afternoon, though, so I guess he must be all right.

I feel a sense of accomplishment from having finally taken care of a little personal business and, especially, for having tackled the puzzling task of setting up my computer to sync with my Palm Treo 650. Vista doesn't seem to like the device very much, but I managed to get it to work with Bluetooth. Hooray! Now, if only Virgin Mobile or Tracfone would allow the SIM cards for their prepaid service to be used with an unlocked GSM device, I could start using it as a smartphone again, instead of as a Palm pilot and camera.

The fresh hope of spring is finally yielding to the lushness of summer. Not a moment too soon, I think.

Summertime, and the living is easy . . .

Hmm, nothing like reading the small town papers for the hippest events to attend. Laura Moehrle of The Courant raves about the "touch of Germany" you can enjoy at end-of-the-month Saturday summer picnics at German Park in Ann Arbor. Mmm, spaetzle and lederhosen? I think I'm there.

Other local summer fun includes, of course, the Ann Arbor Summer Festival, with the frustratingly out-of-reach ticket prices (no student rates) for main events and the Top of the Park, with free concerts and movies in front of the Rackham Graduate School building on East Washington St.

Naturally, even though it's more than a month away, those of us living in the area can all undoubtedly feel Art Fair coming, like a runaway train.

ohhhhh, cat love . . .

I had a whole series of anxiety dreams last night, one involving a police car parking in front of my house, presumably to take me away for something that I'd done. And the other, a very involved dream about filling up the bed of my pickup truck with piles and piles of garbage to dispose at the community dump.

I'm ready to get rid of the garbage.

Today was just fine.

Avoiding my work. Blogging on Kitchen Empress. I was sad to realize it had been months since I'd updated there. Things got busy, my computer crashed, and my camera was acting fussy. . .

There is much to be nervous about. Too much work, not enough money, and many other things. . .

I am tired.