A better post

I do whine a lot sometimes, don't I?

I'm in a much better mood now that I spent most of yesterday stomping around. So here are some random happy pictures, including: Me and B, my mom and step dad, my amaryllis, and my awesome new Ikea tea kettle (a present from B's mom, who has discovered that if she buys me things she thinks are ugly, I usually like them)

Frustration

Right now, I'm technically still on vacation. Since we moved into this house, I have not taken any vacation time over a day that did not involve driving across the country to visit people. So this Christmas break was supposed to be my chance to relax, work on my house projects, and get centered again. I took off 10 days. Which promptly got whittled down to 4, in order to visit family on opposite sides of the state. And now I sit in front of my laptop, working. I have a conference call in a few hours. I am very dissatisfied with my work-life balance. These are the things I wanted to do on my vacation:

Work on tiling my kitchen floor
Work on painting one or more rooms
Organize my office
Work in my garden
Read some poetry
Read a book for longer than 10 minutes, uninterrupted
Walk my dogs in the greenbelt
Attempt to make some fancy pastries with Julia Child
Scan a bunch of pictures into the computer
Reflect on the past year and make plans for a much better next year

I feel like I am suffocating under the minutia of ordinary life. I think I am burned out. I just need a break, but I can't get one.

I'm alive!

Really! I'm in Plano, TX! I don't know why I'm using exclamation points!

On Saturday we drove down to Lake Jackson where my Mom lives, and yesterday we drove all the way to Dallas. My butt hurts.

I'm a little late, but Merry Christmas!

The best time waster since Boing Boing

People Doing Stuff Random Image Finder

Everytime you refresh, a new random Google image search shows up. My favorite so far:


via Boing Boing

Poetry Thursday

Snow water

A fastidious brewer of tea, a tea
Connoisseur as well as a poet,
I modestly request on my sixtieth
Birthday a gift of snow water.

Tea steam and ink stains. Single-
Mindedly I scald my teapot and
Measure out some Silver Needles Tea,
Enough for a second steeping.

Other favourites include Clear
Distance and Eyebrows of Longevity
Or, from precarious mountain peaks,
Cloud Mist Tea (quite delectable)

Which competent monkeys harvest
Filling their baskets with choice leaves
And bringing them down to where I wait
With my crock of snow water.

-Michael Longley

Explainer

Some of these are funny, but most just make me sad.

Peace and joy. And peace. Did I mention peace?

So after three years, and lots of growth and restructuring, I have found myself in the position of being the second most senior person on my team. And through a combination of that and luck, I will be moving to The Back Cube. No longer will people wander by our area and ask me "do you know where so-and-so is?" No longer will people hang over my cube wall and chat while they wait for someone else to come back to their desk. No longer will everyone in the West conference room know whether I am really working or posting stupid pictures on my blog.

The back of my cube will no longer be a 5-ft tall panel of bright green felt. It will now be a real, live, stripey wall that goes all the way to the ceiling! I shouldn't be so excited about this! But I am! It will be almost like an office! Almost! Except without a door! And with only one wall! Yay!

Discovery

A friend of mine who knew I went to see the opera Madame Butterfly was reminded of an old cd she had by Malcolm McLaren (who looks like a muppet), the Sex Pistols manager. It turned out to be a bizarre mix of opera music and electronica and very early hip hop. It should be a disaster, but somehow it isn't. I've added it to my permanent iPod rotation.

Apparantly, the track for Madame Butterfly made it into the UK top 20. However, I was two that year (1984), so that's my excuse for not remembering.

I know it when I see it

My amaryllis has gone rather Georgia O'Keefe on me...

(sorry, Mom)

Overheard

Overheard at the window, while waiting for Jimmy Carter to leave BookPeople across the street:

"I've got a water gun in my office. Anyone want to point it at the window and see how long it take for us all to get arrested?"

"Have you noticed that Republicans never speak at BookPeople? I wonder why that is."

"Chris said he thinks they dehydrated him and put him in a shopping bag and put him in the car earlier. They're just faking us out right now."

"Who is Jimmy Carter?"

Results

I don't find this very accurate. But I'm strangely proud of being defined as a freak.

Freak- INFJ
20% Extraversion, 80% Intuition, 46% Thinking, 53% Judging

Well, well, well. How did someone like you end up with the least common personality type of them all? In a group of 100 Americans, only 0.5 others would be just like you. You really are one of a kind... In fact, I do believe that that's one of the definitions for the word "FREAK."

Freak's not such a bad word to describe you actually.

You are deep, complex, secretive and extremely difficult to understand. If that doesn't scream "Freak!" I don't know what does. No-one actually knows the REAL you, do they?

You probably have deep interests in creative expression as well as issues of spirituality and human development.

You've probably even been called a "psychic" before, because of your uncanny knack to understand and "read" people without quite knowing how you do it. Don't fret. You're not actually psychic. That would make you special and you'll never accomplish that.

You're also quite possible the most emotional of them all, so don't take this all too hard. Nevertheless you most definitely have the strangest personality type and that's not necessarily a good thing.

*****************
The Brutally Honest Personality Test

My life in pictures

Monster in the cold


A mutant carrot that looks like a pair of legs


A spider I found in my closet (he was relocated to the lime tree on the porch)

Poetry Thursday - one for my fellow tea snobs

Tea Mind

Even as a child I could
induce it at will.
I’d go to where the big rocks

stayed cold in the woods all summer,
and tea mind would come to me

like water over stones, pool to pool,
and in that way I taught myself to think.
Green teas are my favorites, especially

the basket-fired Japanese ones
that smell of baled hay.

Thank you, makers of this tea.
Because of you my mind is still tonight,
transparent, a leaf in air.

Now it rides a subtle current.
Now it can finally disappear.

-Chase Twichell

Memories

Three years ago today, it was really cold outside. But we wanted an outdoor wedding, so we had one. With a bonfire. I wore sneakers under my dress. We had tiki torches and hundreds of candles. The caterers forgot half of the food, so we didn't get to eat anything. We almost forgot to sign the wedding certificate. My sister didn't realize she would have to make a toast until it was time to do it, but she managed a great one. Afterward, we went to the Driskill hotel, where bellmen took our bags, opened doors, and swept us in. It was like something out of a movie.

Two years ago today, we were very sleepy. We had spent all day and night travelling, and we were seriously jet lagged. But we dragged ourselves to a little cafe for croissants and chocolate, and then explored Ile de la Cite and Notre Dame. We looked for where the Bastille had stood, but weren't ever sure whether we found it. After dark, we got lost on the Right Bank near the Louvre and tried to take pictures of all the Smart Cars.

One year ago today, we ate bbq sitting on the plywood floor of our new house, which was under construction. We kept our coats on because the gas had not been turned on yet. We dreamed up plans for future renovations. We discussed where to put the few pieces of furniture we had and who got to use which room for an office. We were excited.

We will probably spend this evening at the Trail of Lights in Zilker Park. It's not what we expected to be doing, but it will still be memorable.

Thank you, B, just for existing.

*UPDATE* Anonymous only

Okay, you can successfully leave comments if you do it anonymously.

A Cautionary Holiday Tale

A few weeks ago, near dusk, B and I were driving around with Sebastian and Monster. We were vaguely aiming toward a park in Rollingwood. Instead, we noticed a little road off Bee Caves that we had never seen before, so we turned. The road was rough and overgrown. It eventually dead ended at a small creek under Rollingwood Drive. We parked, let the dogs out, and happily wandered around for awhile.

When it got dark, we loaded the dogs back up and headed the way we had came. Pretty soon, we found the road partially blocked by a horse trailer and some sumptuous looking palanquins. We managed to maneuver around and kept going. Then we found that someone had closed a metal gate with a padlock across the road. We were stuck.

We hiked back to the trailer and the palanquins and found a path leading up a steep hill. At the top of the hill, we found an angry and unchristian Baptist who snarled and told us that the road was private (it wasn't) and interrogated us about what we were doing (he wasn't convinced by our 'hiking with dogs' excuse - obviously we were out to rob him of his camels).

Finally, he said he would send someone down to unlock the gate for us. We hiked back to the car, and then discovered that the padlock was not actually locked. So we let ourselves out.

I hope that man gets camel poop on his shoes.

Guest entry

Since B refuses to get his own blog, even though he spends most of his days at work surfing the internet and coming up with blog-like diatribes, I am usually the only recipient of his delightful wit. Today, I am sharing the love:

My new Degree deodorant had "LIVE LIFE" boldly imprinted upon its product surface. Such powerful affirmations upon my bathroom products help me live my life to the fullest. This is a worthwhile improvement to the previous, unadorned version that I had grown accustomed to. It is fortunate that my deodorant manufacturer makes this effort to emphasize the vitality and vivacity of its customers' otherwise dull and hopeless lives.

And I can only wonder about the poor fools using a different brand.

A love story for the ages

The Bride of Frankensteer

Corridor

I saw this picture after hearing an NPR story on a book of Ellis Island hospital photos.

I'm not sure what it is about the photo that struck me as so beautiful, but I have made it my desktop picture. I was very disappointed and sad when I heard that a group is cleaning up the hospital up to make it into a museum. The 'stabilized' corridor has lost everything that made it so haunting and beautiful.

Peace and fog

One thing I love about my house is that when it gets rainy and foggy outside, I am enveloped and isolated in my own bubble. You can see the branches of the trees close to the house - big bur oaks and ancient cedars - but nothing beyond. It makes me feel like I'm up in a peaceful treehouse, removed from the rest of the world. It makes the noise from the city recede and, along with it, the noise from the rest of my life. I am so lucky to have a retreat like this.

Feed

On Tamara's suggestion, I just finished Feed by M.T. Anderson. In the tradition of 1984 and Brave New World, Anderson takes current trends and extends them to a believable, if not exaggerated, dystopian future. In the book, consumer culture and the internet have been taken to extremes. Every child has a feed implanted at birth. The feed is basically a brain connection to the internet, which allows companies to beam advertisements directly into your head. People have become dependent on the feed - most are illiterate and have lost the ability to think independent thought. For all its depressing themes, the book is funny. The details of the consumer culture are disturbingly recognizable in such things as a show called Oh? Wow! Thing! and the slang used is dead on.

The main character Titus (presumably as in Andronicus) is a typical teen. On a trip to the moon, he meets a lonely outsider and rebel who could teach him a lesson. I think the cliched plot is a part of the message - an original story could no longer take place in M.T. Anderson's world. The novel is funny, subversive, and ultimately tragic. It's one of those books that makes me feel as though I need to push it on other people. So I am. Read it.

Mourning

Yellow Snapdragons was one of my absolute favorite blogs and will be sorely missed.

Poetry Thursday

Staying at Ed's Place

I like being in your apartment, and not disturbing anything.
As in the woods I wouldn't want to move a tree,
or change the play of sun and shadow on the ground.

The yellow kitchen stool belongs right there
against white plaster. I haven't used your purple towel
because I like the accidental cleft of shade you left in it.

At your small six-sided table, covered with mysterious
dents in the wood like a dartboard, I drink my coffee
from your brown mug. I look into the clearing

of your high front room, where sunlight slopes through bare
window squares. Your Afghanistan hammock,
a man-sized cocoon
slung from wall to wall, your narrow desk and typewriter

are the only furniture. Each morning your light from the east
douses me where, with folded legs, I sit in your meadow,
a casual spread of brilliant carpets. Like a cat or dog

I take a roll, then, stretched out flat
in the center of color and pattern, I listen
to the remote growl of trucks over cobbles on
Bethune Street below.

When I open my eyes I discover the peaceful blank
of the ceiling. Its old paint-layered surface is moonwhite
and trackless, like the Sea—of Tranquillity.

-May Swenson

A happy dog

B and Star Trek are two of Sebastian's favorite things. And he's not even on the doggy prozac anymore - he was just having a delightful evening.

Photos

Nothing says holiday cheer like bunches of terrified children. Enjoy!

via BoingBoing

First Christmas

This is our first Christmas in our house. We owned the house last year at this time, but it was missing some floors, toilets, a shower, and most of the kitchen, so we weren't really able to enjoy it. This year, however, I feel very settled. While we still have several years of major projects before the house is finished, it feels like home. Between my parents' nasty divorce and years of anonymous apartments, it has been something close to 10 years since I have really felt like I had a home. It's a nice feeling.

Help wanted

Can anyone tell me about Alain De Botton? I would rather have reviews from people I know, as opposed to random Amazon patrons. Is he worth reading? If so, where should I start?

Poetry Thursday

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

-Wallace Stevens

I know I've posted this one before, but every time I come across it, I fall in love with it all over again. It's just so exactly describing a particular feeling that it's as if he got it straight from my head.

Drama

We are currently having our rotten, ugly, purple siding replaced with shiny, new, subtly colored siding. There have been crews and noise and trucks for a few weeks now. My busybody neighbor across the street, who doesn't like crews, noise, or trucks, called me at work yesterday afternoon and said something funny was going on in my front yard and I had better come home. As it turns out, our foreman and his crew hadn't been doing a good job and were replaced by a new foreman and crew. The old foreman and crew didn't like that, so they got drunk and began throwing all the old siding and trash and beer cans out of their trailer.

When I got home, they were getting ready to drive away. There was an enormous pile of trash on my lawn. I could have taken all that in stride, except that they had thrown siding all over the baby tree. When I saw that, I might have lost my temper just a little bit. Apparently enough to scare five large, drunk men. They got out of the truck and moved all the siding from the tree to the yard next to it, but they still left it on the lawn.

The new foreman was very nice. He apologized several times, even though he had nothing to do with it, and he stayed late to wrap the pile up to keep it from blowing away before the new trailer arrives. According to the owner of the company, the mess should be completely cleaned up by the time I get home from work today.

I meant to take a picture of the lawn this morning, but between the door and my car, I thought I might die of frostbite if I stopped. (No comments from you insane people living in places like Washington and Michigan. I don't do well in the cold.)

Notes

1. I did not get any of the three jobs I applied for, presumably because I have neither an MBA, nor any experience whatsoever. To make myself feel better, I took a long lunch yesterday, ambled around in BookPeople, and bought myself a bunch of new books. Coincidentally, this is probably what I would have done to celebrate if I had gotten the job, although maybe on a larger scale.

2. I heard on NPR that all of Emily Dickinson's poems can be sung to the tune of the Yellow Rose of Texas. Wikipedia says this is because most of her poems are written in common metre, but I still think it's neat.

3. Maybe I should take Felix's suggestion and go work for Hallmark, creating treacly photographs for Valentines Day cards.


4. "Treacly" is my word for the day. I'm trying to fit it in as many sentences as possible.

5. Finally, B and I have each bought a TerraPass for our cars in order to alienate our red state relatives as much as possible. Or maybe it was to help save the environment, I can't remember. In any case, if you want to take a step toward being carbon neutral, or you want to shore up your green street cred, buy one.

Poor Sebastian

In our continuing effort to make Sebastian a little less psycho, we have taken the dog whisperer's advice and gone to REI for a dog backpack. The idea is that this will both give him some responsibility (we're going to start charging him rent next) and also make him too tired to bark maniacally at the UPS man. An added bonus is that he can carry water bottles and emergency medical supplies in case we get stranded on the wrong side of a Lost Creek Boulevard.

So whenever we put the backpack on him, he tolerates it silently but gives us his best martyred look and starts out dragging his feet as if he was carrying lead weights, rather than two 20-oz water bottles. However, he usually forgets his torture act as soon as we're in the street and he senses the possibility of the park. Then he starts strutting around with his tail held high and just looks silly.

She eats roses

This is my next submission to SOMC.

I am pleased to report

that my first turkey turned out wonderfully (brined, stuffed with oranges, lemons, onions, and herbs from my garden, slathered in olive oil, and roasted crispy), our big party (15 people) was a huge success, and everyone was thankful and happy and stuffed. Today, I am working, but I am looking forward to being thankful for a turkey/stuffing/cranberry sauce sandwich at lunchtime.

I am a very lucky person.

Infatuation

I love my new shoes. Thank you, Anthropologie, for coming to Austin and parking yourself across the street from me. I only wish I could afford your dresses.

One of my pet peeves

"Quotation mark" abuse

Celebrity!

Bella the Devil Cat is on Stuff on my Cat!

Culture and stuff

B and I went to see Madame Butterfly last night. I love getting dressed up and going downtown like a grown-up.

This was my first opera, but not my last since I accidentally bought season tickets. Our seats were in the next to last balcony, so high up that it was a little bit scary walking around. I had a strange reaction to the show. On one hand, I've never been much interested in opera music, and an opera tends to be full of opera music. On the other hand, it was fascinating to know what they were actually saying. I never got bored of hearing a dramatic soprano belt out a beautiful Italian phrase, while the captions says something like "you must be hot after walking up that hill." I wish I had rented some opera glasses, both to get a better look at the set and also because then I could have pretended like I was in a movie about upper-crust British people.

Next up is Philip Glass' Waiting for the Barbarians, which appears to be very avant-garde and modern. I don't think I'm culturally competent enough to appreciate it, but it should be fun anyway.

Dame de Coeur

So who hasn't seen a beautiful, fragrant, hybrid tea rose at the nursery and thought "hey, I'm a novice gardener with no skills and no time - I should buy a persnickety plant that has to be coddled and petted."

In this case, at least, it turned out well. This is a Dame de Coeur rose from 1958. The flowers start out bright red and turn violently crimson as they get older. They smell wonderful. This is the first flower that bloomed after I brought it home, so I consider it grown by me.

Oleander

The only plant Monster shows any interest in eating (aside from grass), is also the only poisonous plant I have.

Laundry day cancelled

Due to Sebastian and Monster's foolish insistence on "dignity," Laundry Day has been cancelled until further notice. Or at least until they forget to hide on Sunday mornings.

Ever feel like you're in a VW commercial...?

Extra super special exclusive Poetry Friday

Tavern

I'll keep a little tavern
Below the high hill's crest,
Wherein all grey-eyed people
May set them down and rest.

There shall be plates a-plenty,
And mugs to melt the chill
Of all the grey-eyed people
Who happen up the hill.

There sound will sleep the traveller,
And dream his journey's end,
But I will rouse at midnight
The falling fire to tend.

Aye, 'tis a curious fancy –
But all the good I know
Was taught me out of two grey eyes
A long time ago.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay


To purchase this poem and many others in kickass, bluesy song form, check out Kris Delmhorst's new album.

Recent reading

Lately, I'm all about Michael Pollan. I read The Omnivore's Dilemma because of the controversy that WFM was involved in, and I loved it. I didn't agree with all of it. In fact, I rolled my eyes at large parts of it. But he made many good points, his arguments were interesting, and his writing is wonderful. Currently, I'm reading Second Nature, a kind of gardening memoir/meditation he wrote about fifteen years ago. Here is a paragraph that gave me something to think about on my way to work this morning. He is writing about a forest of old-growth pine trees that was destroyed by a tornado. Environmentalists wanted the debris to be left alone to let nature take its course, while the town nearby wanted to clear the fallen trees and plant new ones.

But the discovery that time and chance hold sway even in nature can also be liberating. Because contingency is an invitation to participate in history. Human choice is unnatural only if nature is deterministic; human chance is unnatural only if she is changeless in our absence. If the future of Cathedral Pines is up for grabs, if its history will always be the product of myriad chance events, then why shouldn't we also claim our place among all those deciding factors? For aren't we also one of nature's contingencies? And if our cigarette butts and Norway maples and acid rain are going to shape the future of this place, then why not also our hopes and desires?

Poetry Thursday

What Is the Earth

The earth is a homeless person. Or
the earth's home is the atmosphere.
Or the atmosphere is the earth's clothing,
layers of it, the earth wears all of it,
the earth is a homeless person.
Or the atmosphere is the earth's cocoon,
which it spun itself, the earth is a larvum.
Or the atmosphere is the earth's skin-
earth, and atmosphere, one
homeless one. Or its orbit is the earth's
home, or the path of the orbit just
a path, the earth a homeless person.
Or the gutter of the earth's orbit is a circle
of hell, the circle of the homeless. But the earth
has a place, around the fire, the hearth
of our star, the earth is at home, the earth
is home to the homeless. For food, and warmth,
and shelter, and health, they have earth and fire
and air and water, for home they have
the elements they are made of, as if
each homeless one were an earth, made
of milk and grain, like Ceres, and one
could eat oneself - as if the human
were a god, who could eat the earth, a god
of homelessness.

-Sharon Olds

Garden

Thanks to the warm, sunny weather, my front garden is having a little bit of a resurgence. I've added pictures to the end of my garden album showing the progress. There is also a closeup of a gall on the baby tree. Apparantly, all the galls are full of baby gall wasps. The nursery told me that this wouldn't hurt the tree, so now I'm just excited about my new bugs. I check every few days to see if anything has changed. So far, they just keep getting bigger.

Garden

Exciting

So my interview was this morning. We do group interviews here at Whole Foods, which can be a little bit harrowing. I'm not sure I did well enough to get the job(s), but I don't think I made a total fool of myself. I'm in the enviable position of being in a no-lose situation. If I get this job, I'll will be very excited and happy, but if I don't, I still have a job I enjoy with a company I love. At least that's what I'm telling myself.

Not to long after I went back upstairs to my desk, the building alarm went off and we were told to evacuate. As it turns out, a truck caught on fire in the parking garage. The entire building, including the store, was evacuated around noon. I would be interested to see the lunch sales increase in surrounding restaurants...

I'm a little jealous

Chloe looks a lot better in my new hat than I do...

Holiday hell

As much as I like the holidays, and spending time with family, and cinnamonny goodness, and all that happy crap, I'm starting to think it just isn't worth it anymore. I am so busy with so many things that the thought of taking time off work and house projects and gardening is just overwhelming. Not to mention the financial aspect. Has anyone else noticed that a house somehow costs a lot more than just the mortgage?

Anyway, enough complaining. I am interviewing for three (three! no, I don't know how that happened!) new positions on Wednesday, and I'm still catching up from my week off, and there are lots of new projects that I'm involved in, and this is just a busy time of year and I might be just the tiniest bit frazzled. Just a bit.

Laundry Day - A Fairy Tale

Part one: the beautiful Princess Bella is held captive by the evil, hooded Monster.


Part two: the suave Prince Sebastian comes to her rescue after finding just the right pair of sunglasses.
Part three: Princess Bella is restored to her (somewhat in need of reupholstering) throne

THE END

How I wasted my day

We watched five episodes of Star Trek TNG, and then watched Harold and Maude (highly recommended - morbid and wonderful in the way that only 70's cult classics can be). We ate cinnamon toast for breakfast, Panera Bread soup and sandwiches for lunch, and Chipotle burritos for dinner. We laid around on the couch in pajamas and did not do any of the things we said we were going to do this weekend.

Boy, it's been nice.

Poetry Thursday - A short one

Night Watch

The heart I hear in bed tonight
Is mine—it frightens me
To hear my heart so clearly
It could stop at any time

Keep your ear to the ground
I was told without fear
Now I am hollowed for sound
And it is my heart I hear

-Samuel Menashe

Garden

I have put all my current garden pictures into Picasa for the approximately three readers who might care.

Garden

Election

So Kinky didn't win. Not a surprise by any means, but I thought he would get more than 12%, especially in Austin. Presumably, he has "retire[d] in a petulant snit" as promised and I will never get to see Willie Nelson installed in public office.

Rather than being for any particular party, I tend to vote for gridlock. I distrust anyone who is capable of winning any major political office. How cynical is that? But I voted for Kinky. I even had bumper stickers. Oh well, maybe next time.

A really boring post

I got a new gardening book in the mail yesterday. Until now, I have been buying books by Neil Sperry and Howard Garrett - good, basic gardening guides. Unfortunately, I discovered that those weren't basic enough. So I got a huge, all-in-one compendium of Gardening for Dummies. I swear to god, one of the first chapter headings was "Making plants grow, not die." That's more my speed.

Right after the baby died, I discovered that gardening has incredible healing powers. Just thinking about my flowers and plants makes me happy now. So I have been developing grandiose plans for our yard. Since I can't do a lot during the winter, I am going to study up in the Dummies book (and maybe get around to finishing tiling the kitchen). Then, sometime around February, I am going to rip up a good portion of our front yard, including a section of lawn, some really ugly boxwoods, three mystery bushes, and my accidental parsley garden and then design and plant a large-scale garden. I have other, longer-term plans also, but that project will do for now.

Tomorrow, maybe I will update on my vegetable garden experiment.

Trip

I'm back!

Felix has a hilarious description of the farmhouse and goings on in the great metropolis of Quincy, MO (on 11/2/06 - I can't figure out the unique URL because his RSS feed is broken).

We visited many relatives and friends, ate much food, played much scrabble, shook many hands and kissed many babies. I think that about sums it up.

Click below for a photo album full of exciting pictures of things like leaves.

Trip November 2006

Laundry Day - Bon Jovi edition

Once again, Sebastian went mysteriously missing while I sorted laundry.