I was going to include handy-dandy pics with this post, but my camera apparently decided to freak out and refuse to give me the shots I took, so no piccies. This should please at least a few people.

My chock-full-o’-adrenaline day started when my phone rang and the caller ID said “Happy Hippie School.” (No, really. That’s how I have my kid’s school listed in my cell.) It was the 13-year-old, who was — to hear her tell it — bleeding to death. I threw on clothes and drove out to the Happy Hippie School to retrieve her …or at least her corpse. When I arrived, I was given the gory details: at lunch today she was granted a lesson by the Instant Karma Fairy! While in pursuit of some boy who she was threatening to kill, and wearing flip-flops instead of actual foot-protecting shoes, she managed to tear off the entire end of one of her big toes.

Apparently bleeding a lot makes you a celebrity in the junior high circuit, because half-a-dozen groupies were ooh-ing & aah-ing over her injury when I signed her out.

And now for something completely TMI…

More icky hot weather, which is pleasing nobody except my garden. My pea plants are growing so fast, it’s making me worry that the seeds might have been radioactively mutated or something. I swear, they’re growing 1-2″ every day!

After the cats’ naughtiness in escaping off the balcony several times, I kitty-proofed most of the railing with some tomato fencing I found wadded up in the corner of the property, and chicken wire that Anxiety scavenged from a finished school project. I still need to get more chicken wire, but at least the cats can’t exit the left side of the balcony anymore. And they are so not pleased about that!

Zadya is quite pleased that she gets to lounge about on the balcony, which is a privilege she really doesn’t deserve, considering she’s become the feline Houdini and regularly escapes the house these days. She doesn’t go far, and I almost always can catch her within a minute or two, but it’s still aggravating. During one escape attempt, she actually knocked the back screen door off the track, deliberately, by running into it! At least she’s not stupid…

I moved some of the plants (the ones that need more direct sun) just outside my front door, and those are all doing much better. There are at least 10 large pumpkin seedlings…if I’d known those were so easy to grow, I might have grown my own every year!

And here’s a pic of my balcony garden! The pea plants are well over 2 feet tall already, and most of the other plants are coming along nicely, too.

I had most of a post written, in the manner of an advice column parody (with the cute advice columnist name of “Miss Shut Up And Listen!”). I thought it was all kinds of amusing, and I was really getting into it, when a thought slowly sauntered across my mind. That thought was, basically, “Y’know, none of this is going to matter one whit to anyone.”

I think perhaps that means I’ve officially become Cynical.

There are times when I’m dealing with the kind of frustrations & annoyances that the Imperial Princess of Cute blogged about today, and I react similarly to how she describes reacting to it. But most of the time, my reaction to that kind of crap can largely be summed up as, “WHY are people so stupid?!! They keep doing things that make themselves (and others) miserable, and then whine about being miserable! I just don’t get it!”

And the only answer I’ve ever been able to find is laziness. Most people seem to find so much comfort & familiarity in their misery, that they can’t be bothered to make the effort it would take to change their lives in positive ways. That is, if they could even be bothered to make an effort to examine the lives of people who manage to keep their shit together and attempt to follow their examples.

That’s the whole secret to life. It isn’t luck. It isn’t being born with privilege, or beauty, or lots of brains. It isn’t anything but not being lazy.

And I don’t think much of this post will probably matter to anyone, either. But I feel better to have said it than I would have felt in not saying it, and as far as I can figure out, that’s the whole reason to having a blog anyway.

I just found out that my best friend from high school Brenda, who is 4 months younger than me, is going to become a grandmother in a few months. I helped raise her daughter when Bren & I were roommates for a few years; she called her mother “Mommy” and called me “Auntie Mommy” (which is also what Angst called Bren). Hell, I held her daughter for the first time when she was a week-old baby, I put her on the school bus on her first day of kindergarten, I read her countless bedtime stories — and now that little girl is soon going to have a baby of her own.

This is severely weirding me out. A lot.

(Of course, it’s probably weirding Bren out a lot more. And I feel kinda bad for feeling a bit relieved at that thought.)

It’s 91 degrees, according to the local weather people, and that was a record high for today in Portland. Totally icky!!! The freaking wind is HOT. This is mid-May — it’s just not right.

For the love of little green apples, it’s over a month until the official start of summer. Traditionally, May is cool, often rainy, and generally quite pleasant in Portland. Maybe a few minor early summer thunderstorms. The hot-and-nasty weather usually holds off until late June and runs (off & on, like the weather in all our seasons) warm through September. Western Oregon is pretty much the ideal place when it comes to the seasons actually following the calendar of equinoxes & solstices!

The evil daystar is sapping my will to move.

I woke to find a wonderful card on my nightstand, made (and snuck in while I was still asleep) by my 13-year-old. It had a purple heart on it (oh, how appropriate!) and said I’m the best mom in the universe. Aw!

When I went downstairs, I found she already had the coffee going. Now there’s a kid who really loves her mom! A bit later, she made me lunch. I’d told Geoffrey and Anxiety that all I really wanted for Mother’s Day was for nobody to ask anything of me. Geoffrey did some dishes, folded a ton of laundry, and got me dinner (a rich seafood chowder made by the soup goddess Jenn). I felt positively spoiled. Yay!

I got “Happy Mother’s Day” phone calls from Lyse, and the eldest demonspawn (despite the fact that she worked a 10-hour day). And I was totally lazy all day. It was very cool.

And a happy Mother’s Day to all the moms, stepmoms, and everyone who can say, “I’m not exactly a mom but I take care of your kid without getting paid”!

My beloved Geoffrey found this site for me, and of course I had to share here, since I know at least 3 or 4 wild Pagan chicks (hi, Molly, Lyse, Jaz, & Ro!) who do crafty-type stuff — as well as Crafty-type stuff! — and who read this blog.

They have wonderful projects like the Curse Your Boyfriend sweater, a coffin purse, and the cutest little knitted voodoun doll you’ve ever seen! Of course, Geoffrey’s favorite was the Valentine article called Stalking Made Easy!

I haven’t done any crochet projects that are strictly Craft-related, but I’ll definitely submit them if/when I do! (Molly, they include “cooking” as a craft on the submission page, so drag out any Sabbat-related recipe you particularly like & send it to them!) If you’re considering contributing, the next submission deadline is Aug. 7 for the Samhain issue.

My dear daughter Anxiety has a penpal. Not an email penpal, no… She signed up online to a site which matches international penpals, who then write snailmail letters. She got her first letter from Sweden today, and she’s just over the moon! She’s also planning to write to penpals in several other countries; I can tell we’ll be frequently checking the USPS Postage Rate Calculator. (1 ounce letter is 84 cents to Sweden!)

Way back when rocks were soft (the early nineties), I used to have over a dozen penpals, from 4 continents! As a stay-at-home mom with 2 small children and absolutely zero social life, getting the mail was the highlight of my day. But after I got an Internet-capable computer (yes, there were computers too weenie to go online, and I had one!), writing letters with pen & paper just seemed so …slow and boring!

What’s next for retro communication, notes carried by passenger pigeons? Or a bunch of people learning Morse code so they can telegraph one another? Maybe the seriously anti-tech types will go so far as chiseling stone tablets!

Because the Other Purple Goddess did it….

9 lasts
1. last place you were: On my back patio
2. last soda: Mr. Pibb
3. last kiss: Last night (Geoffrey’s still sleeping)
4. last movie seen: The Sound of Music (to torture the demonspawn)
5. last CD you listened to: Styx Greatest Hits
6. last bubble bath: A month or so ago?
7. last time you cried: Watching Extreme Makeover Home Edition — always a tearjerker
8. last alcoholic beverage: Too long ago to remember.
9. last time you got drunk and threw up: The first time I got drunk, at 15.

8 “Have you ever?” questions
1. dated someone twice: Yup.
2. been cheated on: Probably, I don’t recall.
3. kissed somebody and regretted it: Yuppers.
4. fallen in love: A few times.
5. been depressed: No, I’ve just been in a very bad mood for 30 years.
6. hit another person: A few times.
7. skinny dipped: Oh yes.
8. broken things for fun: Oh YES.

7 states you’ve been to
1. Washington
2. Oregon
3. California
4. Alaska
5. Hawaii
6. Nevada
7. And a few others.

6 things you’ve done today
1. Had coffee
2. Checked email
3. Cuddled the cat
4. Talked with Robert
5. Smoked ciggies
6. Gotten a wrong-number phone call

5 favorite things in no particular order
1. Books
2. Cats
3. Coffee
4. Neopets
5. Kisses

4 favorite colors
1. Purple
2. Black
3. Green
4. Silver

3 people you can tell anything to
1. Lyse
2. Geoffrey
3. Karel

2 things you want to do before you die
1. Visit the British Isles
2. Figure out why I’m here

1 thing you regret
1. Getting married

Jenn & I went to the store today for odds & ends, and I found the coolest thing EVER:

Purple carrots

They are supposed to be extra sweet! Of course I bought a package of the seeds, and some more soil & another planter for my balcony container garden. Everything’s coming along very nicely, except that my cantaloupe pot was flooded and I’ll probably have to start from scratch on those. I’m going to need at least 3 more large planters in a month or so, maybe sooner if I want to plant more vegies and have a second (and possibly third!) harvest later in the summer.

I’m totally hyped about being to eat purple carrots that I grew myself, sometime in August!!!