March 2007

Random Catch Up

I dreamed the other night that at work we had a new building, similar to the old apartment building we used to work in, but more house-like. I shared an office with Amy, in the 2nd floor bathroom. Her desk was in the tub, and mine was in the sink. Our printer sat on top of the toilet. If anyone wanted to bring us anything, they had to shimmy up the drainpipe on the outside wall, and shove their papers in through the window. Ben and I are phone-interviewing candidates for our open web designer position, and most of the people that we really like want way too much money — like, $60-$90,000 annually. It’s really disheartening. There are two people we’re bringing in this week who fall somewhat within the salary range we’re offering, so hopefully one of them will work out. If not, it’s back to the drawing board, reposting the position and probably end of summer before we’re able to hire someone. I’m the only designer on staff right now, and my workload is completely insane. I may only be the dried out empty husk of a designer by the end of summer, if we have to wait that long to get some help. Last night Doc and I watched “The Science of Sleep.” It was a pretty good movie, and a really spot-on representation of the strangeness of the dream state. Things kept shifting, changing, appearing in different places at different sizes, in different environments. I had a nice productive weekend. Saturday I was awake at 6:30 and doing yoga by 7. I know, crazy. I couldn’t get back to sleep after Neko woke me up. I did some gardening and a bit of housecleaning, and Doc and I saw a movie (“The Last Mimzy,” which […]

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All is Good on the Satsuma Front

When my parents moved six years ago, they gave us their potted Satsuma orange tree. The first year, it produced a glorious crop of 40-50 little oranges. Then, because I’m such a horrible gardener, it was attacked by whiteflies and black sooty mold, and it took several years of regular treatments with garlic-pepper-seaweed tea, compost tea, horticultural oil, and insecticidal soap (and me spending hours with wet paper towels, gently scrubbing the soot off each individual leaf). The poor little tree was too sick to produce any oranges. Eventually, the whiteflies stopped coming back. Last spring it produced dozens of tiny little orange blossom buds like this, which turned into teeny tiny oranges, about 1 mm across… and all promptly fell off after about 2 weeks of growth. This spring we’ve got teeny tiny orange flower buds again. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for fruit!

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Spring Cleaning

I managed to pull off one of those rare energy-filled productive sprees this past weekend, consisting of paring down and trimming away the old, and encouraging growth of the new. I guess I have spring on the brain. NEW GROWTHI bought a bunch of seeds and planted our garden (some directly in the container pots, some in what passes for “ground” here, and some in a seedling starter tray). With luck, we’ll have tomatoes, onions, French heirloom green beans, heirloom Chinese Giant bell peppers (I love that name!), zucchini squash, pickling cucumbers, jalapeno peppers, blue star morning glories, sweet pea vines, and coleus. I’ve been reading “Under the Tuscan Sun” by Frances Mayes (I haven’t seen the movie but apparently the book is very different) and I think that part of the reason that I’m in a gardening mood is her beautifully simple, poetic language about fresh food. I think that I may have overextended my reach with this garden. I have four long “windowbox” style containers, and three of them are full of beans, squash, and cukes. My starter tray has everything else in it… but I only have one container left to put seedlings in once they’re ready! I have a feeling I’m going to have to invest in more containers in a few weeks. Also, the instructions on the seed packets direct you to plant the seeds pretty far apart. I’m not sure exactly how this is going to turn out, because I bunched the seeds up in the pots. I guess that if any of them do take off, I can thin them out once they’re established. I put the morning glories in the red containers that the giant rosemary used to be in (those finally got transplanted to their nice ceramic pots), and set those […]

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Every Tape Tells A Story

When I was in middle and high school, during the dark ages of the 1980s, it was a common occurrence to see a long string of cassette tape fluttering on the side of the road, trailing away from a broken and discarded mix tape. Mix tapes, for teenagers in love, were not given lightly. A tape full of songs with pointed and poignant lyrics was a gift to be analyzed for hours; what did the selection of THOSE particular songs mean? Why were they in THAT order? And creating a mix tape for your objet d’amour was an hours-long exercise in subtleties. So to spot one of these fragile magnetic love-poem-collages in a ruined state, littering the roadside, tossed out of a car window in a fit of pique, always made me a little sad: this was concrete evidence of love gone wrong.

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Purrin’ With My Homies

A few nights ago, I dreamed that I heard rap music coming through somebody’s closed car windows. A few minutes later I woke up slightly, and realized that I was actually hearing the incredibly loud, rhythmic purring of Neko standing on Doc and kneading him in his sleep.

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