Song of the weeds

We shall go to seed
We shall go to seed
We shall go to seed some day

If we stay small
She’ll never see
And we will go to seed some day….

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Earth Day Quince

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Then of course, this is a thing that needed to happen

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And when you are done, you are not yet done

For behold:

. And also —

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Afternoon of a prawn

That actually has little to do with the content of the post, although it would be kind of funny to see how either the tone of the music or the accompanying animation might be different with the substituted creature.

I just needed a starting point, and there’s a lot of substitution going on in the next room: I’m not the one cooking, the recipe is being adjusted on the fly, the cooking implements are not exactly the ones recommended, and it’s not our kitchen anyway.

My choice is to be as far away from all this as possible while still having wifi access.

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Insufficient saintliness

That’s the ‘glass is half-full’ version of the mood. The other title could be “The down side of reasonableness” — when you are a reasonable enough person, you know that you can’t have all the niceties you might like; you can’t outright change the basic ways other people interact with the world. But the side effect is that you don’t get the satisfaction of getting really angry about these facts.

And if I was more saintly, I wouldn’t feel deprived and thwarted about that.

Feeling this way on a night that people around the world are reflecting on mixed motives and the consequences of our actions….well, that’s complicated too.

I’ll just put away the uneaten food and continue hanging up laundry.

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Little random magic things

I assemble a sandwich for Word while noshing leftovers for my own dinner.

While my meals and the weather have both been a bit haphazard lately, life is being pretty good. The magnolias have started their show, the daffodils and cherry trees have been blooming, and I think the redbuds will be going fuschia any minute now. Dark purple spires that will fledge out as lilacs are beginning to pop up at the tips of branches; lilies of the valley are erupting from the driveway.

Oh, and the IRS knows we’re married now. No, that is not why there was a rusty-orange full Moon yesterday…

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Song of the New-Bee

Tis fact, not shame or pride, that bids me say
Indeed, I was born only yesterday…

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Rumbling along

Oh, any number of topics have sprung to mind while I’ve been driving: grumbling about GM’s industrial design choices, the quality of local roads, the easily-eroded border between routine and chaos…

And these come together, roughly, when I hit a pothole.

The asphalt mix around here is optimized for milder winters, and the unusual combinations of hard freezes, thaws, and precipitation types have combined to create some truly impressive divots/ruts/axle-breakers.

I say ‘axle-breakers’, but I am not fearing for my car’s axles. I’m thinking of my Saturn’s ignition cylinder, that inconvenient little part that cost just enough to make GM opt for inaction, prioritizing their bottom line over the lives of drivers, passengers, and innocent bystanders.

For many people, the idea that a bump in the road could disable ones car is conveniently abstract. They’ve hit bumps before while driving their cars, and are none the worse for wear. They might think removing their keyfobs and other janglies from their ignition keys to be overkill.

Not so with me. I haven’t lost a loved one to this engineering fiasco, but I did once clip a curb on a rough patch of road one night when coming up off a highway… and my Ion went dead. An unfamiliar light flashed on the dash as everything went out, my brakes and steering were “gone”…. and I was heading straight towards a corner gas station.

Thank heaven no one else was in the area at the time. Thank heaven I’ve driven cars without power steering, and know that stomping down on the brakes is better than doing nothing. I wrenched the wheel as hard as I could and came to a stop in the lane between the pumps, rather than through one of the pumps.

I turned the car off and sat in the darkness for a while.

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Not exactly a bowl of cherries

We are months away from the berry season, so I’d like to thank the US Department of Agriculture for these lovely little boxes of hope:

This does remind me, though, that I need to prune the grapes, raspberries, and figs…

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