Mr. MacGregor's garden

we had a delicious fresh salad of baby garden leaves last night... pale green, purple-y green, speckled like robins' eggs, striped, tender, sweet and bitter... ALL PICKED FROM MY VERY OWN GARDEN. i felt like skipping over the clouds. finally! growing things from seeds *does* work.

now i am impatiently waiting for the peas to appear.


while i'm waiting, however, i am preparing the house for painting. scott and i picked out colors last night at home depot - and we didn't even fight about it! we picked "mood indigo" for the brick part of the house, "black suede" for the shutters, plain ole white for the trim, and "purple blanket" for the door. i am prittee excited to see what it looks like. hopefully not too too dark. or else people might confuse our house with Chez Munster.

my boss is away for the day. we celebrated by having egg-n-bagel sandwiches in the library. food in the library!! scandalous. now i am fooling around on the interwebs, entertaining myself. every once in a while I stare out my enormous office windows at the little sculpture garden outside. the grass is so green that i get butterflies in my stomach. the white azaleas are peeking out of their leaves, just barely blooming. tree trunks are dark with rain and bright with moss. i can't believe we finally have spring, after such a fucked up winter!

i just filed my taxes last week, but i have my DC return in my checking account already. huh??!! that was fast, alrighty. but even faster, i have it spent already. i ordered a pushy-clippy-old-fashioned lawn mower from amazon! on sale ($119) and free shipping; got pages of rave reviews from folks. it'll get here by may 15, and boy i can't wait. i've been using a weed wacker to mow the grass and it's a royal pain in the ass. i hope this works as well as promised.

maybe i'll wander around the building and kill some time until lunch. i mean, it's after 11:00? how can i start a new project now? :) it's nice to have a lazy day at work. they are so few and far between.

painterly things

so! out of the clear blue sky, our neighbors (who occasionally say mildly racists things, and occasionally put their garbage in our yard...) approached us with a house-painting deal. ??? Odd, yes. But considering the cheapness of the offer, and the looseness of my morals, we shook hands with the devil and picked out some colors for the outside of the house. i am PSYCHED! let me just tell you. i hate the current boring color of the house, and now that the boring color is flaking off and turning all moldy (and not in a romantic grey gardens way) i hate it even more. we hardly have time to think of color, but right now we are settled on dusty-blue + black + eggplant. sounds gloomy, but looks pretty. at least in the mind's eye. my mind's eye, that is.

it also makes me feel sad and weird to get so excited over the color of my house. aren't there other, better things to get so excited over? i'm sure there are. like the paintings i keep intending to paint. the knitting i keep thinking of learning. the exercising i should be doing... ahhhh, me. the days, they do slip by.

it's so beautimous outside today - breezy blue air, skippy clouds, sunshine, and the leaves are all unfurling. these are the days that i wish i was back in school, babysitting during the day. swinging at the kalorama park playground. petting the cows at the zoo.

here is my current favorite picture. i have it on my desk at work, to remind myself that there was a time when i was not aware of my own image, when i was industrious and curious:

nonsense; twaddle.

hey! look at me! twice in one week! you are the luckiest person in the world to be reading this drivel. speaking of "drivel," i wasn't sure if i spelled that correctly so i checking teh internets and this is what i got:

driv·el /ˈdrɪvəl/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[driv-uhl] -eled, -el·ing or (especially British) -elled, -el·ling.
–noun

1.	saliva flowing from the mouth, or mucus from the nose; slaver.

2.	childish, silly, or meaningless talk or thinking; nonsense; twaddle.

–verb (used without object)

3.	to let saliva flow from the mouth or mucus from the nose; slaver.

4.	to talk childishly or idiotically.

5.	Archaic. to issue like spittle.

–verb (used with object)

6.	to utter childishly or idiotically.

7.	to waste foolishly.

so maybe i should change the name of this blog to something more drivel-y. because, honestly, i don't like talking about "issues" and current events. i listen to NPR every morning and every afternoon. i read US weekly at the grocery, and i read the funnies on sunday. that's about all the news i like to hear. i used to be more embarrassed about that, especially living in washington. but now... nyah, i don't care so much. people can suck my toe. i like to gossip about celebrities sometimes, and i will step up my news coverage during times of elections and big ticket items. but i can only stand discussing my views on partial-birth abortions for so long before i just want to give up.

so don't read on, thinking you will be expanding your world view. you'll be sorely disappointed if you do. instead, i prefer to pretend that no one is reading this (since, probably, no one is...) and that i am talking to myself! how pleasant. on the plus side, if i keep posting more regularly... think of how nice it will be, about ten years from now, for me to have a record of the minutiae of my days. my memory being what it is, i will have likely forgotten most of the details.

mi·nu·ti·a /mɪˈnuʃiə, -ʃə, -ˈnyu-/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[mi-noo-shee-uh, -shuh, -nyoo-] plural -ti·ae /-ʃiˌi/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[-shee-ee
–noun

1.	precise details; small or trifling matters: the minutiae of his craft.

so! that said, on to the drivel!

i am FINALLY moving my indoor wundergarten to the great outdoors, where it belongs. this creepy awful cold miserable weather is finally over, so it's safe for my little plantlings to go outside and stop dirtying up my house. my peas and lettuce are still doing fine outside, but soon (read: tonight and sunday) they will be joined by poppies, bells of scotland, hollyhocks, marigolds, cosmos, parsley, dill, basil, chives, spring onion! probably more, but i can't remember... i am pretty excited about it all. i also want to go pick out our hedge plants sometime soon.

the sugar-caffeine diet continues: i cheated twice - scott brought home cadbury creme eggs and i ate two. i am trying to not eat refined flour, but i haven't been good about advanced planning for that. today, for instance, i ate soup that contained noodles. it's only been 4 days, so i am going to wait a week or two before judging any results.

i am attempting to kill the last 40 minutes before i can safely leave. *technically* i shouldn't leave until 4:30... but my boss is gone for the afternoon... and it's friday, dammit. i am leaving at 4:00, and no one can stop me.

yesterday, two of my co-workers were leaving a little early to go to a wine-tasting festival thingie downtown. i was working on the reference desk, and julie was stopping by to talk before she left. we chatted for a bit, then she said quite loudly "well, i'm off to go drink some wine!", then stomped into her office - just as our boss walked by with a puzzled look on his face. the thought-bubble over his head said "julie? wine? in your office?" i am still laughing on the inside about that one.

well, i've managed to whittle my time down to a half hour. one last time-draining thought to share: play this game. it's so peaceful and addictive.

Success... then failure.

The sisters have returned to their homeland (Florida) and Scott and I are left to pick up the bloated, hollow shreds of our bodies and wallets. Well, bloated bodies and hollow wallets anyway. As their farewell meal, the girls requested Meskerem. I love Ethiopian food. I had it for the first time back in August, when mom and Jess were visiting to paint... that's when I found out that Ethiopian food gives me the loudest braying-est burps known to man. I sound like Homer Simpson at his best. I thought it was an isolated incident, possibly unrelated to Ethiopian food. But after last night, I know better. But will I still eat the mushy good stuff with my hands? Yes, by golly, I will.

Today was also the first day of my self-imposed restriction on refined flour, caffeine and sugar. I had decaf coffee this morning (i know, i know it has trace amounts, but lets not split hairs or food particles over this...). Jennifer brought in celebratory danishes and left a platter of them on the reference desk to taunt me through the bleak pre-lunch hours of 11:00 to 1:00... but I resisted! Then I ate my lunch like a good girl, doin fine. Then the snacking/witching hour of 3:30 hit and I blithely ate a square of cherry and a square of apple. DUR. i am so weak. But I console myself with the face that the squares were very small (they were! i swear!) and that I only ate two. by this time last monday, under similar circumstances, i would have consume far far far (read: lots, perhaps 6) more. So the danish killed sugar and flour, but instead of feeling pissed and worthless, I feel like I still made a good start

It's ass-cold and extremely wind-ey out there today, and i'm not looking forward to the breathtaking dash to my car parked out in the paved tundra.

Speaking of the tundra, the gerbils are doing fine! I still haven't taken more pictures.... and on an unrelated note, I still haven't done my taxes. surprised? you shouldn't be.

oh yeah, and....

i forgot to mention that STARTING MONDAY (i swear) i am starting the no-caffeine-no-sugar-no-refined-flour restriction again. i would like to say that i am starting now, but i can't set myself up to fail like that. scott's sisters are still visiting and we have lots of eating-in-restaurants to do this weekend so i know it won't work. but! starting monday, by god and by golly, the magic begins again.

seriously. i lost... like.... 5 or more pounds in a month just by avoiding those evil/delicious things for a mere 30 days! but that was last fall. and i tried to start it up again once, but my heart just wasn't in it. but this time! we'll see.

Friday the 13th?

So the weather has really let me down this spring. I got excited, early, and bought a shit load of seeds and greenhousey trays... and I planted and I tended and I watered and I loved. And I almost moved the seedlings outside. Thanks be to Johhny Appleseed, or who(m?)ever was guiding my hand... because at the last minute I changed my mind and kept the baby plantlings inside the house. Then the bottom dropped out of the thermometer over the next day or so, and they all would have surely perished. And boy, would I have been p-i-s-s-e-d. So now i am stuck with a miniature greenhouse in our sun room. I just checked the weather, and it looks like it'll get warm enough by the middle of next week. NEXT WEEK. arg. I think it's warm enough for shrubbery, though, and i have this really scraggly hibiscus bush in my office... i think i'll throw caution to the blustery April wind, and stick in the ground this weekend. I am tired of seeing it's tired old leaves and pot-bound roots in my office.

on an unrelated note, some fool hit my car last night! i walked over to my car this morning, started to unlock the driver's door... then I noticed that my side-mirror was dangling by its gruesome stalk of an electrical cord. just slumped there, limply, on the side of my car. THEN i noticed the long grey stripe of either: a) schmutz from the culprit's own side mirror, as it scraped down the length of my car, or 2) the color of the body of my car shining through a hideous scratch running the length of my car. either way, it's unattractive. Scott brought up a good point, that maybe my insurance would cover it, but then I remembered that when I changed agents last spring I never had him take pictures of my car. I was scheduled to take the car over there for pictures... then I got that awful stomach virus and was too weak to get out of bed. then i forgot. i guess i will think about it later. it could be worse - the side of my car could've gotten all smashed up. i suppose i should be thankful for that.

speaking things avoided, then forgotten - it's my last chance to do my taxes! I told my co-worker this morning "yeah, i think i will do them tonight while scott is at a movie"... but i knew in my heart that was a huge lie. but even just now, as I typed the words "that was a huge lie" I thought, "no, really! I will! I swear!" but i probably won't. sigh.

mostly because it is sunny right now, and the workday is nearly over (well, okay, 2:00 is not that nearly over...) and i can't wait to go home for the day.

i need to recharge the digital camera and add some pictures.