sharpie advice

from 2010


from last week

I sense the same hand at work, despite the varying message.  It's sort of a "two sides of the same coin" thing, don't you think? Or can you Chillax and Adventure Now at the same time? So many questions.

deep into summer

These are from Tuesday. I went walking the park, which is something I used to do all the time and for whatever reason quit doing. I've missed it! It was fun and helped becalm my BRAIN ANTS. I've had so many brain ants lately, I can't even tell you. Internal brain ant investigations are underway. It will be okay.



Typical Portland lawn by this point in the summer. I know it might look weird to people from other parts of the country, but our summers are usually dry and most don't water their lawn.  Every other season is WET, so we get plenty of green grass time. (exception: the neighbors water their front lawn, but they've got two little boys who run around all day long. There are sensible exceptions to brown grass predominance!)



I have probably taken 100 pictures of this tree. I still love it.

in list form

1. I have 9 different nail polishes on 6 fingers.

2. I'm reading The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith aka J.K. Rowling. I like it! She has such a gift for description and I'm enjoying the slow unspooling of the story.

3. Sewing, sewing, sewing. Not as fast as I'd like, but that's entirely my own doing.

4. Do you ever have one of those snakeskin moments where you just want to shed whatever stupid thing you've cloaked yourself in and start all over? ME TOO.  It's fine, though! Great, even. If you stop evolving what's the point?

5. I miss mixes - Leslie made me a Prince one (which is fantastic), but it just underlined how lacking in mixes my ears are! So I'm working on one. It is so ridiculous it makes me laugh whenever I think of it. HahaHA. I don't even care if I get caught laughing to myself is how much fun it is!! Do you still make mixes in this ipod age?

6. In the Questlove book (which is excellent) there is a section about roller skating with Prince and it is everything you would hope a memoir retelling of roller skating with Prince would be like. Read this book!

7. Speaking of books, I recently read a romance novel that was written in the 90s. Oh, man. That was a long time ago - the culture has changed dramatically and some things did not age well. It was hard to finish, but I did. I mean, it wasn't quite 45 year old Greek Billionaire who "romances" his 18 year old ward/secretary but it was written so long ago that OJ Simpson was a minor character as a sports guy. (!) (I'm just going to let "so long ago that OJ Simpson was a minor character" stand in for all the things that bothered me. It's enough.)

8. There was more, but now I am TIRED so I'm going to bed.

9. I love sleeping!! Not an inordinate amount or anything, but I'm an enthusiast. WOOOOOOO, sleep!

summer evenings with spiders and bats

This summer has been BUSY so far - so busy I haven't uploaded any new pictures mostly because I've barely taken any new pictures. (this one is from a few summers ago, but from about this general calendar time.)

Tonight after work I went outside to read because it's hot inside but conveniently breezy and still light enough outside. Hooray! In the non-hooray column, spider webs are almost impossible to see in the twilight hours. Spider season is in full tilt - they build webs EVERYWHERE, which I'm sure seems like the thing to do if you're a spider, but as spokesperson from humankind I'm not a fan of the ones hanging at face-height.

(TRUE STORY: The neighbors have caught me talking to the spiders more than once - "Spider, I thought we talked about this! This is a terrible place for a web, I'm going to break it every day!!"   The first time I was so embarrassed I went in the house via another door rather than go near the fence between us. Since then one of their kids got a drum set for his birthday - if I can deal with that, they can deal with a little exasperated spider talk.)

But on to the bats - once it was too dark to read but still a little light, I saw a bat! They're really cool, especially when they're in the air doing their bat thing. (which I hope is eating mosquitos.)