Thursday, June 30, 2011

In The Meantime

The real news is that I just got back from the amazing and inspiring Eyeo Festival. You wouldn't believe the things I saw/heard/learned unless you were there yourself. I'll try to post links to the most extraordinary stuff if I can find it.

If you hit the link above and do a little reading the festival may seem to be a bit code/data heavy for an analog gal like me. There was, in fact, a great deal of overlap with many of the things I think about. Now I just need to chew on all of this and figure out what it means to what I do.

In the meantime, of course, shoes:


Irregular Choice does it again.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Canal Street Twizzler

Canal Street Twizzler

Pete and I celebrated our twentieth wedding anniversary this month. Yep, that's 20th. What better place to celebrate anything than New Orleans?

The people! The food! The lack of responsibility for me! I LOVE THAT TOWN! It was just what we needed.

I could write many posts about it. I probably should. In any case, here are some more traditional photos of New Orleans-y things:






Saturday, June 11, 2011

A Little On The Random Side

My friend Jenn kicks ass. She sent me an awesome tote bag with this image on it. Thanks Jenn!

I felt very proud of myself yesterday. It was my last day of a short course of antibiotics and the day I figured out that certain of the possible side effects were affecting me: I was depressed, disoriented and drowsy. Despite this (sorry about the alliteration) I was very productive. For example I set up this automatic container watering system for when I can't be home to water the plants:


I also did a lot of other dumb junk that's too boring to mention here. The end result was that when bed time rolled around I was pretty satisfied with myself. I re-read a little "Mindfulness in Plain English" and hit the hay.

At three AM Pete woke me up saying, "I think Fay's out in the hallway." He turned on the light and Fay was, in fact, in her bed. "Something's in the house," he said. We got up to investigate. Have you ever seen a flying squirrel? They're really cute. About the size of a chipmunk only grayer and they have the most adorable big eyes. This one was sitting on the windowsill in the upstairs room Pete uses for his office. It looked calmly at us when we turned on the lights. 

I eased over to the next window, opened it and removed the screen. We probably should have watched what happened next but we didn't. We just shut the door and checked back in five minutes. We think it left. We hope it left. We hope it doesn't come back with other family members.

Here's a photo of another peony in my garden. I love the intense color. I read the plant label yesterday. It's named after some lady but I don't remember who. (Note that there's a decorative "head" in the background of the photo)

Not to be confused with Paula Fay. Picture a bumble bee in there. Nice, huh?
 

Finally, I like these shoes:
They're Doc Martens.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Viva Zucchini Pants!

I should have typos all the time! I'm getting lots of fun comments on the one below (some via e-mail/Facebook so you won't see them here) Keep 'em coming!

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

More Garden Turbulence

When I returned home to Vermont the other day, I encountered this sorry mess:


Yes, this is one of the risks of mail-order gardening. These tomatoes arrived shortly after I left for Long Island. I asked Pete to put the box in the garage for me (the garage stays cool) Clearly I should have asked him to take the plants out of the box as well. They frigging rotted in there! Total loss.

This is one of those little things that Life is pissing me off with. If there weren't other, larger things going on as well then maybe this wouldn't have been quite so irksome. Maybe.

I have such gardening guilt. I try to talk myself out of it. So often I've had to be away at key gardening times. Still, I keep trying. I'm not a complete failure at it, I just wish I could do better.

This morning I woke up before five AM after dreaming that my mother and I were homeless. Funny thing, I couldn't get back to sleep. Maybe because I couldn't stop pondering the reasons why the dream was not entirely far-fetched?

It's been hot lately so I figured I might as well get out there and finish watering the roses and weed out the lettuce and see if I could find the pea vines which still need to be given supports.

So that's what I did and boy did it make me even surlier. First I was cursing myself for never being around. I was also cursing the many, many weeds sprouting up in my lettuce and in the paths between the beds (The beds looked more like paths than the paths did) I also cursed the lettuce that had already bolted. I did find the pea vines but it wasn't easy. 

I got three mosquito bites through my bug shirt. I worried that it was getting too hot and that the lettuce would dry up and expire because I'd unsettled it. It was ten AM and already too hot for me to do any more. I didn't get the pea supports set up.

I dumped a little water on the lettuce beds and hoped for the best, then I went in and had second breakfast.


That, to me, is a great color to look at when you're feeling pissed off or down in the dumps.

The front walk looks pretty nice. I've never had pink lupines before. I love lupines.

I love garden photographs because it's so easy to make them look so beautiful: just don't put the bad stuff in the photo. Also, all the green stuff kind of looks alike. The weeds just blend away into the verdure, as illustrated below:
There are some big honkin' weeds in the front of this photo but even if you click on it and see it in a larger size the weeds are hard to spot.

I wasn't planning on posting this photo. I just took it for myself two days ago to have a record of the peony. It's called "Paula Fay." (I'll buy anything with "Fay" in it) 

It did delight me this morning when I was fortunate to see it wide open, its bright, golden anthers contrasting beautifully with the deep pink of the petals. Then along came a giant bumblebee to roll around in there and make it look useful and even prettier.

It got to be over ninety degrees today. Those kind of temperatures make me furious - not that I needed any help with that. The sun's setting now though and things have cooled down. I'll probably put my BuzzOff clothing on and have a Cuban Mint Julep on the patio. I cooled myself down earlier by going out and getting three pints of ice cream. No, I didn't eat them all. I did have plenty though!

But it was so hot, look what it did to those peonies pictured above. These are the same flowers but this photo is from this afternoon:

So bleached out. It looks like a completely different bloom. Still pretty though. The deep pink bloom that opened today is a better example of the color it would normally be.

Also, I went and checked the lettuce. One bed has some survivors, the other is pretty much decimated except for the lettuce that bolted. Go me! Oh well, what's done is done. It's supposed to be in the nineties again for the next two days. Maybe when it mellows out I'll plant some more lettuce. Or maybe I'll move on to some other plant. I wonder if it's too late to buy some zucchini pants? I've never grown them.

Sunday, June 5, 2011

Fight

Me and Life are having a fight right now.

Life's like, "I do all this great stuff for you and all you do is mope and complain. What's your problem?"

And I'm all, "What's your problem? Why are you always hitting me all of a sudden? You're really pissing me off!"

And Life's all, "What do you mean I'm hitting you all of a sudden? You have all this great stuff. Nothing lasts forever. Nobody gets to keep everything. I took it easy on you for a long time there and this is the thanks I get? You're not here to get massages and presents every day. You're here to learn stuff. Grow the hell up!"

And I'm all, "GRRRRRR!!!!! I WANT NICE PRESENTS EVERY DAY AND I WANT YOU TO STOP BUGGING ME!"

And Life's all, "NOT GOING TO HAPPEN, DUMBASS. And P.S., you have to make up with me."

Friday, June 3, 2011

Amagansett, June 1, 8 AM, 2011











It seemed foggier to me at the time than it does in the pictures. Probably my glasses were just fogged. If only you could hear the birds that were singing.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Nice Boat Ride But The Rest Of It...

Man, it's a good thing I didn't know how my drive home would be. I would have gone right back to bed.

The ferry ride was beautiful but once we got to the Mass Pike all hell broke loose: flooding, hail, tornadoes! Nowhere to pull off, I just kept driving thinking, "am I being a complete idiot?" and "how do I get out of this?" White knuckles for sure.

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

I'm Scared

Here I am, alone (with Fay) in the beach house. Mom just left for the airport to go back to California and I'm not leaving for another hour.

I'm scared. I'm scared that I did something wrong. Not anything special, just something. Or a lot of things. I'm scared that I'll never come back here again. I'm scared that all the good things will go away. I'm scared of all the difficult things I can see that I'm going to have to do in the next few months (I have a couple of fun things planned but they're not making up for the hard things right now) I'm scared of disappointing the people I will inevitably disappoint one day (or have already disappointed only I don't know it yet)

But hey, I can't just curl up and die - I have a ferry to catch and I love a boat ride.