Flowering primaries

I sometimes wonder how my kids will think of me, what kind of mom I will be.... I was cooking rice tonight, and I left the kitchen with the burner on high heat, knowing full well that I would probably forget to come back in and check it before it had boiled away half the water, and my rice was sticking to the bottom. Yet I did it anyway. I think all that means, actually, is that I need a timer for my kitchen.

The moon is 99% full right now, aka "waxing gibbous" (according to igoogle). I can see it out my window if I lean way over, being careful not to fall into Charity's hibiscus with the bud getting ready to bloom. Hanging at the top of the window is Cha's bougainvillea which I have been babysitting for months now, and have even managed to have that bloom too. After almost killing it of dehydration in an attempt to protect it from the weird fruit-fly-like fungus flies that share Susannah's and my humble abode.

These flies first took up residence in the fall in the soil of the gorgeous rosemary plant that Susannah had given me for my 25th birthday this summer, and then when that died, they proceeded to infest other unwitting plants in our care. We have also been plant-sitting for Susannah's sister, Sal, and so far we've only lost one of her's. It was a tiny lavender plant that she started from seed, and it just dried up and died. We are hoping that maybe it will revive come summer, with lots of sun and water and fresh air. Anyhow, after thinking for awhile that we had a fruit fly infestation, a nice man told Susannah that our problem was probably some fungus flies, and that we should try drying out the soil of our plants in hopes of killing them. So far that hasn't worked, but I did manage to almost kill Cha's plants in the process. Maybe that's why they are blooming.... they figure they better put out any attempt to carry on the species. Little do they know that they live in a bedroom in Portland, Maine, and there are no fertile grounds nearby in which to spread.

I don't know when Cha's obsession with Bougainvillea started, but it was definitely in "full bloom" when we sailed together in the Caribbean on Harvey Gamage in the spring of 2003. I think obsessions with flowers are some of the best kinds... I guess they just don't seem like they would be harm full in any way to the obsessor, or the obsessee. Charity almost succeeded in transporting a beautiful bougainvillea from somewhere in the south all the way home, but i think it died after being drenched in salt water, and starved of light partway up the east coast. I'll have to check on that....


I have been having an absolute blast with my new digital camera, and I'll post a few slide shows along with these words. I documented our attendance at the Democratic caucuses in Portland, along with 4500 other folks ( attending, not necessarily documenting). We waited in line for about an hour before we were even able to get inside, and then once inside we waited in long snaking lines, sort of like a nightmare at the airport, except that everyone seemed to be in a pretty good mood. Apparently they had only been expecting 2500 voters, though even with that many I think there still would have been a pretty LLLLOOOONNNNG wait. We finally reached our destination after at least an hour and a half of standing in line, and it became obvious why it all took as long as it did. There was only one person, with a huge, long list of names, for each letter of the alphabet. They had to look up each person, find their precinct, fill out their ballot, and then finally move onto the next person. I kept thinking, Man, if we had seen this mess as we came in the door, I might not have waited so patiently in line all that time. It was definitely an experience to remember, marking my first time participating in the presidential primaries.

A surprising service

The scent of my mom’s home-made “vertabrod” was wafting into my room on a wave of warm air as I woke up from my afternoon nap. My bedroom was filled with sunlight shining in from the windows lining three walls of the spacious, upstairs dwelling my parents built for me. I was in highschool and getting ready to leave home to go sail the seas by the time the room was finished. Until then, my bedrooms had been little attic-like spaces under the eaves. I am actually pretty good with small spaces, making them into cozy little nests, but by the time I had reached the end of highschool, I had too much stuff for my tower/loft above the living room and I was so excited to be able to explode into my new room in the addition.

The floor is all wide, pine boards, and the walls are plastered and then painted a peachy-pink color that my mom and I mixed in “milk paint”. When I was home for Thanksgiving last month, I removed the screens and got through cleaning half my windows. I guess the nice thing about having the job only half done is that now I appreciate the clean ones more. I’ll probably get around to the other half of them next spring right before we put the screens back on.

As I lay there visualizing the warm Swedish tea rings that my mom would be pulling out of the oven soon, I heard my Uncle’s and Aunt’s voices at the door. It was the day before Christmas and they had walked through the woods to deliver our presents: a screech owl house for my mom and dad, and a pair of slightly bulged envelopes for my brother and I.

The topic of conversation was the recent memorial service for my great aunt, the late Peggy Jones (my mother’s namesake, though the first was her great Aunt Margaret, I think.) My uncle Curry had chosen the Presbyterian church because he didn’t see eye to eye with the minister at the Episcopalian church. The Presbyterian minister turned out to be quite the evangelical; He requested 15 minutes of the funeral service to speak and spent that whole time trying to convert them to the church. Apparently my mom and her cousin were laughing so hard they were crying, and crying so hard they were shaking their pew. And her cousin’s husband just wondered why they there were quite so moved at that part of the ceremony. My grandma said later on that it was the sort of thing that made you just want to get up and leave. Uncle Curry said to his daughter, “You’d be surprised how much your mom would have liked that service”, and Carol said, “Yes, you’re right, I would be surprised.”

It’s funny how there are things that I look forward to all year long, like our Swedish tea ring for Christmas breakfast, and fresh tomato pie in the summer, and grape jelly in the autumn, and I wonder, would Vertabrod ever taste quite as good if we had it one morning in August, or would tomato pie be quite as delicious if I made it once every couple of weeks?

Funny Features

Ben's been bugging me lately for a new post, and I promised to write one on the bus, on my way back up to Maine from the Vineyard. And I did. On my laptop. Which is in the car. In the parking garage. And I am upstairs in the windowless office on the third floor being not-quite-content to be here, without even a glimpse of the celestial dance between sun and clouds today.

The massage business is picking up somewhat and I am thankful for that. And I turned down the heat in here so it's no longer a sauna-type atmosphere. The thermostat has this funny feature where it will suddenly start whining shrilly, and the only way to make it stop is to turn the temperature up or down. Apparently, recently, the preferred direction had been towards sauna, and the counteracting movement had not yet been applied. But it's behaving today, and I am happily chillin' at 70 degrees.

Unlike last night when I had mistakenly worn my flannel pajamas (it being winter and all) to bed at Ben's house. He does not have the same funny feature on his thermostat, but he does like the temperature in his bedroom to replicate a sunny summer afternoon, complete with fan to blow the heat around. SO, NEEDless to say, last night I didn't have the NEED for any covers.*

I think I may finally have succeeded in using my time at home on the Vineyard to relax. I was a little under the weather, so my health necessitated taking naps and hanging out at home, and by the time I got back to Maine yesterday afternoon, I was in quite the spaced-out state. Bizarre. So very different from the way I left for Christmas: running around making and wrapping last minute gifts, packing and re-packing, making plans and running out the door. I have to say that I am a lover of the Christmas holiday, and somehow, even though Christmas morning at our house often starts off with someone being grumpy and me threatening to call the whole thing off, we usually manage to have a really nice day.

This year Christmas had an added bonus of babies. Not mine, but close enough to count. Two of my dearest friends have had babies in the last year, and while playing with them, the rest of the world seems to just fall away and I find myself splashing about in baby heaven.

mmmmmuffins....that melt in your mouth.

Sunday morning means it's time for muffins and I'm about to go make 'em. Melt-in-your-Mouth muffins are the variety that the Knight-Morris family likes to make.

This evening's specials, HICCUP.

On Saturday evening I served dinner to a father and daughter and I had somehow gotten the hiccups just before they were seated. I can usually get rid of them pretty quickly (the hiccups, that is), but I didn't have the time while running around the restaurant, so I stood at their table to recite the specials, and, hiccup, it was table 4 - right next to the kitchen and Harding (Chef/Owner), so I couldn't just give them my notes about the specials. I started off, and made it all the way down the list managing to hiccup in the middle of pretty much every dish. The father and daughter just looked amused. They even remembered some of the specials, despite the distracting, inappropriate punctuation that my spasmed diaphragm provided.

The other thing that had me giggling that weekend was the sermon at the Woodford Corners Congregational church for the Sunday morning service. The church was half empty that morning and Susannah and I suspected that it was because everyone was exhausted after putting on the church fair the day before and didn't want to get up for church. So the folks in church were the ones that maybe just attended the fair and then also the real go-getters who planned the fair, worked there all day, and gosh-darn it, they were going to be in church on Sunday to get their recognition. Well, it was a worthwhile morning to come to church, I think, if not just for the lovely job on the organ by my roommate Susannah's dad, then certainly for the comic value of the sermon. The church has two ministers and both were involved in delivering the sermon that morning. The first one got up in the pulpit and pulled out the "heavenly news". Apparently in this week's celestial newspaper there was a help-wanted advertisement for new members of the "God Team". It sounded like a pretty powerful position from the ad. You got to have dominion over all the plants and animals.... The minister pulled out his cell-phone and dialed the number: 1-800-god-team. God (the female minister in the back room) answered and they proceeded to have a long conversation about what it means to be a member of the god team and all the responsibilities that it involves.

We had just watched Keeping Mum a few nights before and as Susannah and I were riding our bikes to church that morning, she said to me, I keep hoping it will be Rowan Atkinson (who plays a minister in the movie...not for the first time - Remember Four Weddings and a Funeral?) delivering the sermon. He had taken it one step further in the movie to the point where he was actually delivering jokes as part of his sermon. The things that the church will do to keep people interested and amused...

Intellegence (Kloog, ger.)....a different kind.

1. Sprechen Sie deutsch?
2. Est ein underst campingplatz en der near?

Number 1 I said to Amie just before she went into her massage, and she replied, "No, but I love to sing in German. I can understand a lot of it, I just can't speak it." Number 2 is the one sentence I've committed to memory after listening to the Berlitz guide to German over and over again. And today, as I was finishing up the exercises (Ubungen) in my German lesson, I laughed at myself as I answered the question, "Sind Sie klug?" (are you intelligent?) because, not minutes before, I had been writing down the vocabulary (der Wortschatz) words from the lesson and had written klug = intellegence. Hmmmm. I know that intelligence doesn't necessarily have to do with one's spelling ability, but I have to wonder....

Last night at the Front Room I cut off the tip of my thumb, a very tiny tip mind you, but enough for it to take four hours to clot, and for me to panic just a bit about how it was going to affect my other profession -the one that I actually went to SCHOOL for. We had, just minutes before, been talking about how we liked this bread knife, how it glided through the fresh-baked foccacia bread; I had even called it SEXY! And then it became my enemy. On the bright side, it got me out of closing the restaurant and home to my freezing apartment where I lay in bed watching Al Jazeera cover the beginning of the war in Iraq (movie: The Control Room) and propped my left thumb up above my head while I pinched it against an ice pack. Around midnight the red stuff finally stopped flowing and I let my droopy eyes close and I slept. I was so tired I didn't even brush my teeth.

Now, brushing my teeth is not a practice that I skip often but it seems that desperate times call for desperate measures. I've been interested in the idea of practices lately. I've started a writing and meditation practice in the mornings and it's not nearly as ingrained as my practice of brushing teeth, but I hear it takes awhile to make a habit of something.

Other things I've made habits of or wanted to make habits of are: playing violin or piano, running, yoga, a morning cup of tea, eating a sit-down breakfast looking out over Casco Bay, emptying my capture tool, writing in my journal, keeping my room tidy, washing the dishes, locking my bicycle, watering the plants, practicing a foreign language.

Habits I've tried to break: drinking out of the milk or juice bottle, eating in front of the refrigerator, having a bowl of cereal before bed, leaving my clothes and bags and other belongings strewn about the house, letting the tea kettle boil itself dry, leaving all the kitchen cabinets open, having 5-7 different programs running on my computer at once....

I'd love to hear what those habits are that you've tried to make or break over the years....