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Mid-January, Rain - January 13, 2012
Almost Midwinter - December 14, 2011
Saturday, Noonish, Sunny - November 05, 2011
October, White - October 31, 2011
October, 2011 - October 04, 2011


March 23, 2004

11:50 a.m.

Dog at Door

I can't decide whether to feel cheerful today or mimsy. (Remember the borogroves? They were mimsy.) I put on music this morning for the first time since I can remember, and largely to help ignore the music coming from downstairs. (Why do my neighbors always have teddible taste in music?) It stopped by and by, so I turned mine down a bit. It's actually been pleasant to listen to a little JT, and now Norah Jones. I'm home! I'm carless! I can toddle around my apartment and do things! This is no different from yesterday, really, except knowing that errands are not possible somehow makes me feel better. Exempt from certain responsibilities.

I was reviewing some of my road photos and came up with this cute scene which I took in Clinton, NY. Carol had forgotten to bring a coat on this trip, so we visited a local thrift shop to get her another. I was done first, so went outside to wait, and saw this:

Whose mistress is inside??! Good boy!

That was the place Chris also got a handbag to put his microphones in. We make a lot of jokes about him being in a girl band, and of course the fact that he's purchased a purse is now very suspicious. That, and the red wig incident and all. Carol actually put blush on him last weekend for a gig. And he keeps asking if his pants make him look fat.

Honda just called, and my car service will actually cost a little less than what I was quoted. The brakes are okay for now; the noise was just a little dirt. Do you suppose a lot of the noise in my life is just a little dirt? And I still have 2-4mm of wear left?

The exhaust pipe, however, is on the way out again. How come exhaust systems have to be replaced so many times in the life of a car? Why can't they make them to last longer? It's not like the technology isn't there.

Mmmm, got a whiff of flowers. My jasmine plant is in prolific bloom right now, and it wafts across the whole room. This poor baby has almost been killed twice when my sibs forgot to water it in my absence; the first time it was just crisp throughout, and I cried and cried. I promised it, it would never be treated that way again. Amazingly, in the next few weeks it started to sprout again, from these dead-looking sticks, and though it's never gotten as big as it was, it did revive. A few weeks ago it happened again, not so bad this time, and I just looked at it, said, "Okay, it'll come back," and cut the crispy parts off. Sure enough, up from the ashes. Now it's looking pretty sparse, but decided to put out a Spring bouquet right when I was home for a week. I love this flower more than any other, except perhaps sweet pea, and that's more of an outdoor favorite. This one also has intermittent visitors (maybe spider mites) so I have to give it a bath now and then.

I guess this is the extent of my mothering instinct.

I also have an ivy, a philodendron, an almost-extinct Christmas cactus (I've never been able to kill these things, but this one decided to eject all its branches one by one until there is only one tenacious one left, and that bloomed) and a dwarf palm.

I've always had plants; in Willimantic I had about 40, and lots of light, and they just flourished. In Mansfield there were spores and mysterious bugs and almost everything suffered. One orchid finally kicked the bucket, and when I took it out of the pot, there was a HUGE COLONY OF BLACK CARPENTER ANTS COMPLETE WITH A QUEEN inside it. How disgusting! And the heating/ac unit brought in more evils � there were fruit flies nesting inside it, and in the Spring they'd come into the apartment looking for water, so would congregate in the bathroom. (I don't have slovenly kitchen habits, either � they weren't eating fruit and so forth.) The only way to eradicate them was to vacuum them out of the air as they flew. Then, in a puzzling ecological twist, mushrooms started growing in all my philodendrons. Tall, skinny, neon yellow mushrooms, the like of which I'd never seen indoors or out.

It wasn't a healthy place.

There are no mushrooms here, aside from the ones I get at Stop and Shop. I only have a few plants, as window space is limited and I don't want to make Rose have to water that many. Last summer I had a lot of deck boxes � petunias, geraniums, pansies, begonias. I'll do something again this year; I don't think we'll be travelling that long at a time. It's great to have a balcony; it gives the illusion of a lot more space, even in the winter when I don't go out there. If it weren't for the noise of my neighbors, and the debilitating rent, this would be a fabulous place for now. I think every day about the house I want and wonder how in the world I'll get there. Red says to chant, "Housing cometh." I want my own garden, my own fireplace, my own bit of woods, away from other people. One good piece of ground. I'm the dog at the door, singlemindedly waiting for it to open.




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