6 posts tagged “summer”
Little mouse that visited my office: you're very cute, but you need to move along. Also, I advise against going down to Slavic. They have snap traps.
Wow. French movies are really different. Nothing like getting what you believe to be a drama and finding out there's a blow job in the first 15 minutes. A real blow job. Not an off-screen simulated one. Now, I'm not a prude. I have nothing against cock-sucking. Some of my best friends are...okay, that's not actually true. My best friends are not cocksuckers, but I do have close friends who are. Still, even for racy French cinema, I wasn't expecting that. Imagine trying to get funding from the National Endowment for the Arts to make an America film that has a blow job in it. I'm not a prude, but I didn't keep watching. I figure, if I'm 15 minutes in and I don't like either of the main characters, I don't really want to watch one of them perform oral sex on the other one. I'm weird that way.
Bacon food-ku
Grease popping on me
Ow! Even when you hurt me,
I will still love you.
Never mind art movies with blow jobs, you know what we need to borrow from the French? A month of summer vacation. Summer is awesome and it would only be better if we all got to take a month off.
I guess summer is officially here in Kansas. It's hot, it's humid, and we're not likely to see the high temperature go anywhere below 85 or 90 for several months. On the other hand: thunderstorms, tomatoes, bike rides, and my screened in porch. Wonder what it's like in Utah.
My whole life is under construction these days.
At home, my sisters came to visit over the weekend to help me get my basement half-bath functional. It's a nasty little specimen of manly gas-station hell hole proportions. So we yanked the toilet and sink, scrubbed the stone walls, installed sheetrock on the open studs on one side, moved wiring, installed a new light fixture, reinstalled the sink brackets, and after I paint, I'll reinstall the sink and toilet. You think I'm crazy for home remodeling, imagine me plus two 'Zilla sisters. All of us inherited the "I don't know, but I'm not afraid, and I'll figure it out," gene from our mother, so we pretty much waded in and wrought havoc until we reached the other side with most of the work done. (I even managed to do some re-wiring, although traditionally I'm the plumber and Hubbicula is the electrician.) Today, I'm nursing some blisters and a burn on my drill bracing hand, and a pair of enormous bruises--one on the inside of my arm and the other on my right boob--my drill grip. Because drilling into limestone and concrete requires all the body weight I can bring to it, plus one of my sisters leaning into my back.
At work, my whole office was covered in a fine layer of dust when I came in this morning. Perhaps concrete dust. Perhaps asbestos dust. Perhaps magic pixie dust. Perhaps stripper dust. At any rate, the electricity was off in the whole building this weekend, so we came back to some interesting things--like a defrosted fridge and a fax machine on the fritz.
On the walk to work, they've ripped up the street north of my house. The street I have to cross to get to work. Last week, I was able to simply sneak past the barricades and scurry across the street, which had been stripped down to its underlayment. I felt like a political dissident, trying to sneak across the Demilitarized Zone to the safety of South Korea. This morning, I found they'd gouged long channels three feet wide and two feet deep into the underlayment and piled mountains of dirt everywhere. So, no more sneaking across the DMZ to safety. I had to walk three blocks over, one block up, then three blocks back to get to my regular work route.
I think I'm ready for a vacation.
I haven't had a real garden since I was in college, assuming you don't count my citrus and pineapple plantation in Florida. (And by plantation, I mean 5 citrus trees and 6 pineapple plants, plus a handful of mango and banana plants that never produced much.) What I've been wanting for the intervening 10 years are homegrown tomatoes. Sure, I get a lot of them at the farmers market, but I want my own tomatoes. Plus cucumbers, corn, watermelon, cantaloupe, and, god help me, zucchinis.
That is, until today, that was the wish list for this year's garden adventure. As of today, add wheat to the list. Oh, yeah, you read right. I'm going to try to grow wheat this year. It was a confluence of things.
- Spent the weekend with a good friend who was crowing about wheat prices in the midst of the bio-fuel boom and the drought in China. Imagine, $9.50 per bushel. (Usually, a wheat farmer's lucky to get $3 a bushel.)
- Read an article in the NY Times about that massive spike in prices and what it looks like on grocery store shelves: 20% increases in pasta and flour prices since last year.
- Read an article over on BBC's website about...growing wheat in your home garden.
- Found a heritage seed consortium that sells Red Fife wheat seed (an old heritage strain used in North America in the mid-nineteenth century) by the ounce.
Yup, grow your own wheat. After all, you don't need any fancy equipment--our ancestors grew it when all they had was primitive tools. You can harvest, thresh, and winnow by hand, and grind it into whole wheat flour with a coffee grinder.
Okay, sure, on the surface it looks like madness, but it's not like there's going to be any TV to watch this summer.
They come with their futons and their mini fridges, trucks laden with plywood and cinder block bookshelves, bean bag chairs and microwaves. Heaped on top are milk crates full of textbooks, battered posters of scantily clad women, and lamps of all denominations: Tensor, Pier One paper, lava and halogen. The better to illuminate the late nights of collegial endeavor.
Damn them. Damn the pitiless way in which they invade my town, usurp my favorite booth at my favorite restaurant, clog traffic, founder at unfamiliar intersections, and speed through the residential neighborhoods where I walk. They are the bane of my existence and the source of my income. They are college students. They are legion.
Now that August has arrived in Lawrence, the college kids are back. They're here to pillage and plunder, loiter, befoul, and manifest all forms of degrading, crapulent behavior. Ostensibly, they're here to learn.
Although I was once a college kid myself, I was one of those who stayed year-round. I came to college and didn't leave for 8 years. I learned to enjoy those ghost town summers, when most college kids left, and the townies came out of hiding. The summer seems shorter now, but the last two months have still been gloriously peaceful. I look forward to next summer.
Although we had a fun week, with a house full of cats and big dog to take for walks, I think we're all relieved that my sister's cats and my folks' dog have gone home. The girls, of course, are the happiest of all. They just keep walking about the house, rubbing their scent sacs on things to reestablish ownership. This includes hubby and me.
The problem with this is that hubby is suffering from some serious poison ivy. He went on a running group expedition through the woods and brought home this:
How can summer almost be over? I feel like such a fool, because I haven't had a real summer supper since summer started. It's the traditional supper of my childhood, with all the contents of the garden: fried potatoes, sliced tomatoes, corn on the cob and what my grandmother called "fresh pickle" (sliced cucumber in vinegar, salt, sugar.) Yummies. It's so refreshing and you don't have to heat the kitchen up much to fix it
In this case, it's all the contents of someone else's garden--I went to the farmer's market.
