Eating cherries and spitting out the pits

I was eating cherries and the phrase "eating cherries and spitting out the pits" kept on running through my mind, just as it always does whenever I eat cherries, when I started thinking about how neat it is that somebody thought up those words and wrote them in a book and now I can't eat cherries without thinking them. I guess I just realized what it is to publish stuff and have other people know it. And I think it's pretty cool. Like...people create things that they then make public and other people love. I think everyone else already knew about this phenomenon. But I don't think I ever realized how much other people were people too enough to understand.


In other news, I'm really into this apocalypse rainstorm going on out there. As I was writing this darkness fell and the wind picked up like crazy and now it is raining like the middle of the end of the world jungle. Yum.

Family Night

Mmmmmmmmmmmm today was great. I think I'm finally my normal level of happiness. My happiness levels have been low for the past while and I've been still having fun and all but having fun is more fun with full happiness. So I am ready to live August up.

Today I went with K and J for a delightful swim in the lake. The water was warm and deep and the lake bottom was sandy and the company was thoroughly enjoyable. J and I helped K overcome her fear of swimming and realize her true swimming abilities. And like...I'm not sure I can express how great being in that water felt, floating around and being surrounded by cooling yet not too cold liquid. It felt like we were swimming in a lake of molten happiness. That may sound dumb in words but I swear that's what it was.

On the drive home I was in a great mood and the sun roof was open on the van and the breeze was coming in the windows and I was listening to all the songs I wanted to be listening to and I couldn't contain my dancing or singing, so I was driving along dancing and singing and feeling so young and happy and summery. I always forget that other cars can see me when I'm driving so I didn't feel self conscious about driving in my bikini and flailing my arms around to the music even though I probably should have. But oh well.

Then we went to Father's birthday dinner at Doyle's in JP. It was just so family night and so nice and my parents and J's parents bonded and K's brother showed up out of nowhere with free pizza and starbursts. After dinner K and A and J and Sister and I all went for a little exploration around my old neighborhood and saw my old house and old school and old food co-op. I saw so many things that I liked on that walk, including a bunch of great murals, some black eyed susans growing through a picket fence, a really pleasant looking side porch, and some flower boxes. I liked them.

BIKING BIKING

Yesterday I was driving home from dropping of A after work and I saw an old man walking with two canes down the sidewalk wearing a large cowboy hat, a big fluffy mustache, and an unbuttoned button down denim shirt. And pants. And we made eye contact as I drove by and he smiled at me and I smiled at him and it was a beautiful moment.

Today I decided to go for a bike ride. I hadn't ridden a bike in years, probably about five, but I thought I might give it a try. I always thought I hated biking but as it turns out I was very wrong. Well I was right once, back when I hated biking, but that apparently was just a phase. Turns out these days I love biking. Who knew! I raised the seat on my old bike and started biking and it was just so much fun. I listened to my 70's music and felt like I was flying and biked down all the roads I used to bike on when I was little. The sky was beautiful and the breeze felt great and I loved that I was the power behind my transportation and how fast I could go and how much distance I could cover. Biking! It's great!

I biked past so many houses and looked into so many windows and lawns and thought a lot about life. It isn't/wasn't in my control that I live here, but here I am anyway because children end up living where their parents live, but pretty soon I will reach that age where I go off and live in a place that I choose. All the adults who live in the houses that I passed were once nineteen year old kids on bikes wondering how their lives would turn out, and then they got jobs and bought houses in the suburbs and that was their life. I'm here because my life started here and I guess my life is still starting because I'm still here. But it just really won't be long before I'm someplace else.

Have I got a story for you

It all starts with me painting blackberries hanging over the stone wall in my backyard. I found this really nice branch of blackberry bush propped up on the other spiky plant that grows on the wall and the black blackberries and the red blackberries and all the different greens in front of the wall looked so nice that I really wanted to paint it. So I packed up my paints and my turpentine and a little canvass and pallet and sat down and started painting the blackberries and it wasn't long before I discovered the serious flaw in my plan. Painting in the garden on a hot summer evening in not enough clothes sounds glamorous until you factor in the mosquitoes. And those mosquitoes were all about my upper thighs. I don't know why, but I ended up with nine mosquito bites on the outside of my left upper thigh and three on the inside. The right had two on the inside and seven on the outside. I look diseased. And they hurt like the dickens. I smashed a bunch of mosquitoes but I kept on forgetting that I was holding paintbrushes and my hands were all painty and all the attempted mosquito killing ended up getting a lot of paint on me and my clothes. One dead mosquito dropped onto my pallet, and without really thinking what I was doing I mushed it up and mixed its blood onto my paint, and then I thought oh god I just KILLED AN ANIMAL and now I am PAINTING WITH ITS BLOOD. And I creeped myself out a little. I seriously do not know what compelled me to do that. But ANYWAY I didn't want to take a picture of the blackberries and paint from the picture since I like painting from life much more, but I have kind of a race against time in this painting since the red blackberries will ripen and I really like the red.

So I went back inside and I got out my camera to document the blackberries. I hope to get out there again tomorrow afternoon and paint more from life but if time and tide end up doing what they do it is nice to know that I have the picture. After I took the picture of the blackberries I took a picture of the sky behind my house since I had been watching it while I painted. My issue with pictures is that I can never get them to look as good as things look in real life. I know people who are good at taking pictures can get things to look better in the pictures than in real life but I always end up disappointed with mine. So I took a few more pictures of wildflowers that I were disappointed in and then moved on to eating blueberries. I started out reaching through the net that Mother put around the blueberries this morning to keep out the birds and picking the good ones and eating them and having a great time, and then I noticed a bit of commotion back behind the bushes. So I looked over closer and found two birds tangled in the net flapping to try to get free.


I don't know what the proper protocol is for saving trapped birds. I know what to do when a baby bird falls out of its nest but I had never before heard of this issue. I was singing sort of quietly to them to try to calm them down and I told them I was helping but I'm not sure they understood. When I saw how badly tangled they were I ran inside and got Father and Grandfather to come help.



Grandfather ended up holding the birds still while I cut away the net with scissors. The first bird died in Grandfather's hands but the second one flew away after I cut it free. It was all pretty intense. But now I have this memory of Grandfather and I working together to try to save birds. I like all my memories of Grandfather, but I feel like this one will really stick. He's so great.

That's my story.

Farmer Boy

I was reading my book in my room when I started thinking. Once I started thinking I realized that though I was reading through all the words I wasn't thinking about them anymore, and then I gave up reading and lay down and thought so much that I ended up falling asleep. I didn't plan to fall asleep and I didn't notice that I had slept until Mother woke me up to go eat Father's homemade Indian food. But that's another story. My story is just about all the thinking.

I started thinking about how much I would enjoy having a farm of my own when I grow up. I could have a big solar greenhouse that I would grow food in all through the year. I'd have a chicken coop in the greenhouse and rabbit pens and the body heat of the chickens and rabbits would help heat the greenhouse and I would harvest eggs and meat from the chickens and fur from the rabbits. It would be modeled after the greenhouse of my youth. It's weird to think that the greenhouse of my youth doesn't exist in real life anymore. Our old farm lady friend couldn't manage it anymore and couldn't stand to see it operating in shambles under the control of other people, so she sold the land and now a huge mansion is in its place. I could bring it back, though, if I had some land of my own. I could take all the lessons that I learned growing up with that solar powered super sustainable farm and combine then with everything I learn in farm class and make something that actually works.

I really think I could do it. Our old farm lady friend has so much stuff figured out and I know she would be excited to coach me through making my own farm. All she wants is for somebody young and spirited to make all her ideas happen. I could do that. She has so much information online about how to make a sustainable farm work, and she always says that her farm plans can make $500,000 per year. I don't know if that is true in practice, but I could do that!

I would have a little pond on my farm with ducks and turtles. I could eat the duck eggs and turtles are just cool. I would have a bunch of sheep and a big field for them but instead of letting them graze wherever they want in the field I would make a little collapsible sheep pen and only let them eat in certain areas. That way I would make sure they weren't princesses about the grass. I would help with the lambing in the spring and then there would be lambs in my life. I would milk my dairy cows and learn how to make my own cheese. I could get into beekeeping and have fresh honey and bees to pollinate all my plants. Maybe I'd have an apple orchard and blueberry bushes. And of course there would be all of the vegetables growing in the greenhouse and in the fields in the summertime.

It would be a lot of hard work but it would be my life so I would have all day to do it. I wouldn't have to be shut inside. I would live every day taking care of my plants and my animals and helping them grow. My hands would get rough from all the digging in the soil and it would take a lot of physical effort but I would get strong. I'd have to wake up with the sunrise and go to sleep early, but it wouldn't matter because that would just be me synchronizing to the sleep schedule of a farm, which is the same as the sleep schedule of the sun. I could live like that.

When I had my one farm child I would have to cut back a bunch from all the long working hours, but maybe by then I would have a few farmhands to help and then in a few years when the farm child was old enough I could go back to working as usual. And the kid would get to grow up with so many farm animals as pets and learn about life from the farm perspective and always have dirty feet and fingernails. I think that would be a great way to raise a child.

When Father was falling in love with Mother she was living on the farm lady friend's farm before the farm lady friend was the old farm lady friend. Father called the farm the Goddess's garden. Mother has her garden now, and it's a pretty nice garden, but she very much is not living in a shack just big enough for a bed on an organic farm. I thought about how that was sad, and then I realized that Father is still doing soul healing and traveling the world and trying to make a life from what he is passionate about even though it doesn't really make money or sense from the normal perspective. So I guess I don't mind that he doesn't have a real job, since new clothes and jewelery and objects are all unnecessary, and I just think I want to buy them sometimes since all the industries have so much power that they've wormed their way into my consciousness. And if all my current clothes continue to fall apart until they rip to shreds, I can just sew new ones because who needs fashion anyway. Or I could just be a naked farm girl. Worse things have happened.

So I think in conclusion screw the establishment I want to be a farmer.

You look like my face

I really like this picture that Father and Sister took in Paris.


I also finished my self portrait!

Doing the Karen Cheng

I MADE A DRESS GUYS!



I mean not to take blurry poorly lit pictures of myself in the bathroom mirror or anything. But yesterday I just ended up making this dress and K made a beautiful pink one and we didn't even have a sewing machine or patterns or knowledge. We just set out with the old sheets and our needles and thread and ended up with dresses we made ourselves. So I figure I should document it before it rips to shreds.

If I get my hands on a sewing machine who knows what could happen!