ode to the restless

T E E N S may appear

Aggravating
Random and
Entirely unstable, it's

Anyone's guess what

Tweaks their noodles, but
Really
I find them
Possibly the best

Source
Of interesting insights and
aMusement as they
Experiment
Time and time again
In attempting to find ways to push
My buttons, and failing to succeed, managed to
Exceed my wildest expectations and
Surprise me...

ain't doin' a damn thang

today just one of them days...don't feel like doin' nothin' and it feels good.

just layin' up on the couch wrapped up in a blanket watching the winds blow outside.

got most of my seeds squared away last night and will be in good shape next year come plantin' time. In the way of vegetables I have a bunch of chard, collards, kale, green beans, pole beans, tomatoes, a few pumpkins, leeks, and corn. the corn did suprisingly well as mentioned other times and i'm looking forward to planting more next year.
herbs: most of ours are perennials, the only annuals i grew this year were cilantro. i have some lavender seeds and some salvia seeds also.
flowers were something i put more effort into obtaining and growing this year. since I didn't have that many comin' into the year aside from some sunflowers, calendula i yanked from albina and some cosmo seed i had saved last year, I made more of a point of walking around the neighborhood and obtaining samples of my neighbor's offerings so I'd have even more next year. So now I've got some minature poppies, different colors of calendula, shasta daisies, echinacea (2 colors), nigella, linaria, lavatera, zinnias, cosmos, and some seed off of the marigolds that were growing by PCC. having all those pollinators hanging around the yard from the cosmos seemed to help the production rate of a lot of the vegetables. And I like to think planting sunflowers entices the birds to hang around and eat our bugs.

yep, it's a nice quiet sunday. just in time for the start of a new grading period, and who knows what all kinda projects, and the start of the madness of christmas shipping season. yep, time to roll over and take a nap.

back in town

after the tedium and logistical oddities of the day before, i made a point of sleeping in REAL late. time to let the body realize it's back in PST and reset so i can handle the rigors of getting up in the dark and hauling myself off to some schoolin'.

now you'd think a thoroughly sensible person like me (okay go ahead and laugh at that statement, i know it's a bit of a stretch) would know better than to go to a mall on the saturday after thanksgiving...but no sometimes you just gotta be crazy. and yep it was wild up in there.

but it's not like i have tons of free time and am getting to the point where having a new pair of glasses is starting to sound mighty attractive. i thought these were only 3 years old, but actually i realize they're 6 going on 7. amazing that they've survived for so long, and what time's they've seen. urther proof that they're over 5 years old, when I bought the frames they were $29.99. Now yer hardpressed to find something that's under $80. An eye exam was around $50. Now they're more like $70. None of these things are good news for someone as chronically broke as me...but oh well. time, it is.

while walking around the mall trying my damndest to avoid toxic clouds of perfume, and watching latino men in stylin' cowboy hats, and tripping over kids runnin' every-which-a-way, i observed that i'm feelin' pretty lucky. i feel utterly content in a lot of ways, i pretty much already have everything i need in my life. watching people run themselves ragged on a quest to shop til' you drop, i got to thinking, for the most part, i really don't need or want anything (except for the aforementioned glasses, because seeing is kinda important) and i'd be perfectly happy if no one gave me anything other than a card with a letter inside or maybe some tea for when i run out of what i have. having a roof over my head, a loving husband, a purpose in life, a wonderful family, and the rewards at the end of the harvest season, i'm feeling pretty good with where i'm at, thank you very much.

after all that capitalist immersion, i was glad to git on home and sit down with my big project, organizing and puttin' away all the seed i've been saving all summer for planting next year. you wouldn't believe how much seed i've got lying around here (or maybe you would if ya knew me) but let's just say that if you have a community garden program you might want to get in touch.

get me offa this plane

days like this make me absolutely long for greyhound...being on a plane all day makes me feel:
1. tired/exhausted
2. cranky/grouchy
3. achy/crampy
4. badly dehydrated
5. nauseated/queasy
6. like killing everyone around me

I am already peeved about the whole liquid thing...i've been dealing with it by taking an empty bottle with me and filling it up inside the airport so i don't have to keep buying water over and over again. but there's nothing you can do about screaming babies, people kicking the back of your seat, annoying conversations, hot/cold/dry/dusty air, a bumpy/nauseating plane ride, seats that were designed for the diminuitive in stature, perfumes, and people who should just be shot as a public service, it's also aggravating that i can't sleep on a plane to save my life.

We made it home alive, but missed the last train out of the airport by minutes due to a luggage mix up, prompting a $30 cab ride, and when we got home, we didn't have the house key but got lucky and the door was unlocked. whew, what a day.

Thanksgiving 2006

Drove all day through rural TN and KY listening to a U of M game on the radio (the only other possibilities being country music or modern christian-eww!) and finally arrived in Owensboro without any hair-raising deer episodes, although there were a lot of victims on the road. Sometimes I think deer are suicidal maniacs...

When I arrived no one was home but the dogs. Turns out they were all over at Alice's so I went over there and kicked it with them for the rest of the evening.

Hung out there again before everyone arrived and we took baby Luke out to check out John's tractor assortment. He's decidedly going through the "transportation stage" that all boys seem to go through (and some never get out of) and putting him in the seat of a tractor made him smile and giggle all afternoon until John brought out one of the smaller ones and let him "drive" which probably blew his mind. He "drove" around the yard with us in the trailer with Cassie. Needless to say he walked around all the rest of the weekend going "tractor!" "tractor!" Talk about some hands-on learning.

The next day I spent mostly at Alice and John's house until people began arriving later in the afternoon. After awhile enough people had arrived to generate a party of 20 or so which we marshalled to commandeer the Schnitzelbank for the rest of the evening.

Thursday we all kinda lazed around the house most of the morning and afternoon until we got motivated enough to go do Thanksgiving. It was so warm we ended up eating outside in 70 degree weather until the sun took the heat with it and after dark we did our part to increase UFO sightings in southern Indiana.

Luckily we had a bit of the afternoon the next day to hang out a bit, talk to my brother on the phone and run around with the kids until it was time to head back for civilization. I missed them all something fierce by midafternoon. The drive home was uneventful but the flight sure was strenuous...

adios portland

it is not often that i get to go somewhere these days. but i decided this year there is no way in hell i will be sitting around here on thanksgiving day. nooo way. nuh-uh! i am missing out watching babies grow up and with the old timers who knows how much longer some of these guys will be around. plus i got friends to see too.
so we are gonna hit the road and go back to our homelands.

4 am is not a kind time of day to the body that rises no earlier than 6 but these days you are lucky to get on a plane at all, much less when you want. and what the hell happened to the night bus going east out of memphis? now THAT is about my speed.

yep we're in the south

whew it's nashville. i was so glad to be offa that plane, let me tell you. but it wasn't as bad as the trip home, because i was so tired i was able to sleep nearly all the way after i got over gawking at the aerial splendors of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. Someone shoulda warned my father in law that you can't just roll up in a Cracker Barrel on a friday night in the south...so after a spell we ended up over at Loretta Lynn's country kitchen and for the first time in a long long while i heard the sounds of Tennessee rollin' around the room and felt the impact of being back in the south.

For the rest of the week, i got the royal treatment in Memphis and got to savor long lost faces, have people say hi to me regardless of whether or not they knew me, and got my fill of good times. I've been gone now in exile for about 2 1/2 years now and it's been long enough that a lot of things have changed and there's no way i could go slide back into any semblance of my old life...or could I? I don't know...the south is forgiving in a lot of ways, but I'm feeling my age just the same. It was nice sitting around fires, seeing familiar faces and reminiscing about times long past. I miss a lot of things about Memphis but mostly it's the people. Y'all rule!

is there anything better...

Is there anything better than reading story books to children and getting paid to do it?

occasionally my life DOES rock! word.

Meth-addicts, te odio.

I just want to take a minute to express my intense loathing and hatred of meth addicts.

Although there are potentially numerous perfectly legitimate reasons for one to hate these subhuman pieces of worthless hyped-up freaked-out trash collectors, I've got my own personal reason and it is because once again meth heads are ruining my life. Yep, thanks to these witless lowlifes and their insatiable desire to take perfectly good cold medicines and turn them into the WORLD'S LAMEST DRUG EVER, respectable productive citizens (like myself) are unable to obtain needed cold medications.

Yes meth addicts, I hate you. Because thanks to you I can't get anything to shake off this horrible cold...except this pansy-ass 4-hour shit that doesn't even work! "Oh but you can still get the 12 hour stuff with a prescription..." Yeah right. Like my uninsured ass has $75 just to go to a doctor to get a prescription for something I used to be able to buy OVER THE COUNTER for around $5. (While I'm at it, I could reflect on our lack of decent healthcare in this country, but that's better left for another day...a day when I don't have oceans of snot coming out my nose and can go for 5 minutes without inadvertently increasing the stock value of paper companies)

Yeah, thanks a lot, meth heads, you make crack hoes look like REAL WINNERS. And now I can spend all the hours I'm not getting any fucking sleep (because mucus keeps coming out of my nose all night too) contemplating all of the ways that you should die and trouble our beautiful planet no more with your wasting of oxygen and other resources you do not in any way deserve to partake in.

Thank you.

worst trimet experience ever

granted when you ride the bus, you don't have a lot of high expectations about the experience except that you hope maybe the bus will come more or less as advertised, and that eventually you'll get where you need to go.
but you would THINK that if you paid the fare, that would entitle you to at least the above...

Off all the lousy luck I could have, I found my self standing on the side of the road out on east 82nd avenue in the rain wondering which end was up.

Now I'm not what you would call a casual bus rider. I'm not one of those pansy-ass downtown commuters that drives to some comfortable parking garage and climbs on the train with a laptop and a latte for that short but sweet ride to the office, or enterprising thrifty souls who drive to some nearby eastside neighborhood and rides across the river to save several dollars a month on parking downtown. Don't get me wrong, I totally respect these people, but their experience with bus commuting is vastly different than mine. I have to ride the bus a bare minimum of 4 times a day, and often 6. The loop encompasses about 40-50 miles a day and takes the better part of 3 hours and almost always involves a few transfers and usually a good amount of walking as well. So needless to say I am deriving the full benefit from my purchase of a monthly pass.

But lo and behold, the first slipped right by me, and Tuesday morning rolls around and I have to pay a cash fare. But on one of these 50 mile days I figured it would make sense to get a day pass...so here I am about to get on the 72 for a 3 mile trip down 82nd ave. But when I whip out my pass, I discover to my horror, there's nothing printed on it. No date, no time, NOTHING! Needless to say the driver tells me to get the fuck off her bus. Now it ain't my fault I'm left holding the bag, but I got waay too much dignity to argue over $4, so for the rest of the evening I had to pay the cash fare---over---and over---and over. What should have been a $4 day quickly turned into a $10 day, which amazingly is still cheaper than driving...

So I guess the point of this rant against Trimet is that if you are gonna put ticket machines up by the trains especially in a very high traffic area that is used by a lot of tourists, you could at least keep them maintained so that the people who NORMALLY purchase day passes (eg TOURISTS) don't end up in a situation where not only do they get screwed and stuck on the side of the road with nothing but a worthless daypass and a credit card, but instead of merely blaming trimet, they'll end up hating the whole city of Portland as well.

word.

On the plus side, it was a good thing that I didn't just give up and go home. A lot of people showed up for tutoring and boy did they need all the help they could get. poor kids. ;)

attack of the killer green tomatoes

"Blow wind blow, wherever you may go..."  I woke up in the morning feeling like I got
run over by the norfolk and southern after a night out wandering the streets in the
east gorge winds.  To be blunt I felt like hell.  The wind was still whipping around
outside, and my short trip over to the bank convinced me that staying home was the way
to go for wednesday.

I spent the afternoon on a canning mission, and made some more green salsa, green ketchup
and something i call salsa diablo verde, which is a jalapeno sauce and a fitting way
to use up some of the 10 million or so we have around the house. 
And in between that and fooling with the spaghetti sauce going in the slow cooker,
I simmered away an entire  afternoon (which may be hard to believe for some, but for
anyone who understands the canning process isn't that surreal after all). 
I figure on All Souls Day, it's a fitting tribute to my ancestors who spent many a
day hunkered over pressure cookers with stacks of jars peeling and slicing the
bounties of summer.  It is from them that I learned the secrets of making applesauce,
grape juice, pickles and ketchup.  I don't know if they would have approved of green
ketchup but you never know...

Who knows what I'll manage to do with over 12 quarts of salsa verde, but I reckon I
better make some cornbread.  I love that combo.

Quote of the day:  (highly appropriate me thinks, in this, the last week before
election day)

"My highest hope is that the community voice will start drowning out the shoutfests
on television (and radio for that matter!). If people start turning off their televisions
and listening more to each other, then I know I've done my job. We can only reach
understanding when we listen to each other a lot more."
--Paul Shapiro http://digitaldivide.net./profile/pshapiro