pretty crabby

A tale of two porches.

This weekend it was 80+ degrees in Boston. Which is weird because you may not know this but IT'S APRIL. It is completely bizarre to be sweating from the sun when there are no leaves on the trees. It confuses my brain which, let's be honest, would probably be more used to seeing snow on the trees in April than hot hot sun on them. 

I have been spending a lot of time on my porch garden. 

It looks good, right? I planted a few things from seeds and they are actually growing (aside from about 6 seed pots which were duds. Phlox? Peppers? Wherefor art thou?) and that excites me. Sometimes at night I bring them inside like a nervous mother. I hope the birds or squirrels don't eat them. Hmm, maybe I should run home and bring them back in and wrap them with a blanket and make them tea... 

Anyway. So, the porch. It's nice! But in the morning (actually any time until about 2PM) it is hard to sit out there because of the GLARING SUN. I mean, sun in your face burning your skin off. 

And now it is also home to The Swarm. You sit out there (in the glaring sun, being blinded) and five to ten giant bees buzz around your head. Some just sit there flying in one spot, seemingly staring at you. I call those the Zen Bees. Yesterday I looked it up and deduced that they are carpenter bees. I like that they are described as "gregarious" and they also may have gay tendencies since the women soemtimes live together. Or maybe that's just a phase they go through in college. Something else I read said that the male bees tend to hover to intimidate, mostly it's just really annoying. 

Sitting out there has become not terribly pleasant with the end of the world bee situation and the glaring sun so I decided maybe I should clean off the back porch. I hadn't been out there since I moved in in September and... oh, it was gross. It was home to a couch, a disgusting chair filled with cat shit (!!!), and about fifty seven empty Bud Light bottles. But look at it now! 

I should have taken a before picture. But you are probably glad I didn't. The Dude asked why the cats would shit on the chair and I was like, "well, some cat probably peed on it and then they just kept trying to one up each other." Lovely! 

I am looking forward to going home and sitting outside with a beer and not getting attacked by bees. My dreams, they are big. 

My deliciousness.

Miss Heather B and I have started a new site about our mutual love of goat cheese and red wine. Or, wait, I guess it is about all food. Well, either way, it's pretty. We are kind of funny sometimes (some of us may be drunk I am not naming names or anything). We will try to cook things and some of them may be awesome and some of them may be... less so. 

Please join us in welcoming our new baby - Leisurely Pancake. 

Live it, learn it. Love it. 

And you're not the kind who likes to tell me about the birds and the bees.

Spring is springing around here. Finally. Going to California was good and bad. Good because it was lovely to see green and flowers and bad because it was hard to come back to not much green and no flowers. But now we have things coming up, cheerfully. I picture the flowers as little faces like in Alice in Wonderland. It's so wonderful to talk to the flowers, especially in the month of Juuuune!

Suddenly I am trying to plan a bunch of trips and parties and weekends are filling up and why do I forget this is part of spring every year? Too much to do, too little time to fit it all in. Last year I was getting all psyched for the Virgin Islands, but let's not talk too much about that or I might start crying. I don't have any tropical trips planned this year. Boo.

Heather came to visit last weekend and we hung out a bit. We met up at the Apple Store and stood next to each other on computers typing and chatting. We could have opened a Gmail chat window and talked that way if we got too nervous. We also ate two delicious meals and talked about some new ideas for the Internets. We are "cooking something up" now, so stayed tuned for that. I think it will be pretty cool.

This weekend I am going to plant some stuff and work on my porch garden. I planted a bunch of seeds and they are actually coming up. I feel proud. I am trying not to get too attached to them in case they all die in a tragic seedlings accident. It has been known to happen. If they do all actually take then come August I will be buried under tomatoes so that should be interesting.

Today I wore flip flops to work. I heard a woodpecker on my street. Elroy sat in the window and talked to the birds (or rather, wanted to eat their little heads).

Spring is springing.

Limbo

Eighteen: I start college and am crammed into a room with THREE other girls. One room. The day I move in two of them (who already are friends) show me their line dancing routine in the middle of the room. I go to dinner with my mom and that night I cry myself to sleep. The third girl is friendly at first but one weekend when I go home she systematically breaks the heads off of my collection of small wooden and ceramic turtles. This might be funny if it wasn't so weird and, eh, crazy pants. The one friend I make in the first 6 weeks has to go and have an abortion but doesn't have cab fair. I give her the $5 I have. When my dad comes to visit me two months in, we walk silently around the campus and I feel like crying the entire time. When I call him at Christmas to tell him I have flunked some classes, he says "I don't think you should go back." And I don't.

Nineteen: On my dad's birthday and three days before mine our 12 year old family cat is run over in the street before our eyes. We sit in the street with her and sob our eyes out and the man who (accidentally) runs her over sends a card which is bunched together with birthday cards on the mantel for awhile.

Twenty: My dad and I sit on the stoop and listen to the cicadas on our street. He tells me how they only come every seven years and someday I will remember how we sat on the stoop and listened to them. One day when I am sitting on the floor of my closet and crying I think maybe I should start going to see a therapist. She tells me she really thinks I just wish my parents were still together. She won't let up on it and I eventually stop going.

Twenty One: At my birthday party my friends and parents surround me with sparklers and then someone says we need to go get margaritas so a group of us heads out into the dive bar on the corner. They don't have any so then we parade into the grungy liquor store and I buy tequila from a man behind bullet proof glass. During August I pack up all my belongings and take them to the UPS store and send them to California. A week later I put my cat in a box and we get on a plane and move to San Francisco. For the nine months I am there I see a lot of movies & drive around listening to a lot of Billy Bragg. I spend most of my time alone and the rest of it with a baby who can't talk or do much of anything. I am completely homesick and miserable but at night when I sit in the hot tub and look up at the palm trees, it doesn't seem so bad. When Elaine and Ellery, who is two years old, come to visit in February it makes the homesickness so bright and clear and when I drop them at the airport I drive home wanting to cry the whole way. I don't know it then but in three months I will pack everything up one more time and turn around and fly home to Boston. Finnegan, begin again.

(Before)