Rowan berries!
And the tree is a rowan. Beautiful. Photo courtesy of Jill in Norway.
new glasses!
A quick snapshot. But hey, I upload because I can.
the morning after
Penultimate drum-and-dance of the year in South Amherst yesterday. I brought my drum, even though I don’t have a bag for it yet and it was raining a little – but Molly and I threw garbage bags over the drums, and I’m very happy we did. By the end of the evening my hands were somehow hurting and a little numb at the same time, and I could still feel the just-played drumbeat in my ribcage.
I did better than had seemed possible, given how out of practice I’ve been with things that require sustaining a regular rhythm with my hands (drumming, juggling, playing the guitar which I haven’t done in any sort of sustained way since my first year in grad school). Concentrating on picking out, playing and sustaining relatively simple rhythms for several minutes at a time was great practice.
Molly and Natalie and I stayed over at our friends’ place in Hadley (Inspirit Common), and had breakfast at Cafe Esselon there. Natalie kept feeding us pretend food. The more ridiculously we reacted, the more giggles scattered, sparkling, across the table.
dad
Today my father would’ve been 71 years old. But he’s seven years gone, buried on a gorgeous hill in Lost Angels. I miss him a lot.
I’ve inherited a lot of him. I have his eyes, and his love of driving, and his dislike of being in financial debt to anyone, and his temper – though, I like to think, version 2.0. And also I have his indomitable will, and his analytical skills, and his sense of commitment (with some additional flexibility thrown in; I tend to tinker with recipes).
Thanks, dad. Happy birthday. And to the rest of you, have a fitting instrumental by Daniel Lanois; it’s called “JJ Leaves LA.” I left LA in 1994 with no regrets, having hated it there, and now mom doesn’t live there anymore either – but I’ll go back to visit dad.
baby it’s cold outside
It almost looks like coffee, but it’s tea – Twinings Lady Grey with citrus added, which is inexplicably unavailable in the States but was so kindly supplied by a wee goddess. Over-brewed because I forgot, with whole milk added, it turned out to be the perfect strength – the kind that needs dairy to cut it.
Today I am catching up on overdue work. Everything, sight and sound, is muted by a thick invisible blanket of gray. It looks miserable outside. But inside, the cats are sleeping on the bed, there’s a book on performance in medieval France at my side, and I’m thinking of digital text scholarship in both its senses. This is good.
spring is coming to somerville
A week or so ago. I touched the tender fuzzy buds with one finger for several minutes before snapping out of my reverie and snapping this shot.
3am comfort food
(Really, this is just a post to test Flickr’s blogging feature. Not much of interest here.)
Came home from a four-hour job interview yesterday and didn’t know what to do with myself. No problem! My body did. I ate dinner – first real meal of the day – and promptly fell asleep, from sometime before 8pm (!) until after midnight.
Then I stayed up until 5am. Around 2:30 I glanced around the kitchen cupboard, saw the mac-and-cheese box and realized I was ravenously hungry. So I made some, tip-toeing through the quiet house full of sleeping foik behind closed doors. Pietro the canary seemed amused and perplexed at my timing, insofar as a canary can seem to have any moods at all.
Interview itself went… well enough, I think. I’m too close to it to tell. Now I wait, and maybe finally de-lame and paint some walls in my landlady’s other house like I’ve been promising for something like a month and a half. And have comfort food at 3am.
