Garden of Thought

I am leveling up, I think. I now have my very own private dance student who comes to my place once a week, and I just got an invite from a pro dancer to meet at her place a few times so she can help teach me choreography tips and how to better use the stage space.
0.0 She says she wants me to dance at their holiday show.

I am simultaneously pleased and terrified.

Hubby is home for the long Labor Day weekend plus a couple extra days on either side of it, nice to have him around at least for a bit. Too bad I have so many things that need fixing on the house before the rains come back that he's kind of just having to be a drive-by handyman. I am so grateful for every bit of it, though - he even went up and cleaned all the needles off the roof yesterday and didn't seem to mind while I would have been a bit freaked out running around up there.

Today is Fix the Leaky Outdoor Faucet day, which will be a great disappointment to the little patch of green plants around it in this summer heat. I potted a volunteer Rose of Sharon and was pleased to find it was a survivor of one that died last year so it's a different color than my surviving shrub.

Also, my Italian plums are definitely ripening up like mad. Got my spiced plums put up, taking a huge metal bowl of them to church this morning for folks to take some home. Yum! I felt very picturesque picking plums in the sunrise, gathering them into my grandmother's old calico apron over my church dress.

One of those miraculous amazing old gentle men from my church came and helped me install the boards for my front steps because I was concerned I'd get them crooked and someone would trip. They look fabulous! And golly he was fast - I'm still carefully tap-tap-tapping away at the nails to tack down one end of the boards and there he is with over half of his side done already. I am SO grateful!

Also, "I did the thing!" and pat myself on the back, which was performing a solo dance up in Ilwaco and it went beautifully. My daughter filmed it on her phone - not perfect, of course, but I'm surprisingly pleased with it. She got me to put it onto facebook (I rarely use fb) so she could share it. The Lavender Festival folks even transformed a tool shed into an amazing dressing room for the dancers and all the quaint outbuildings were decorated with beads, drapes, persian rugs, etc.

I'm signed up for solo performance at an upcoming Lavender Festival, it's an outdoor stage at the coast so I'm not risking veils in the possible breeze but I made some nifty silk streamers for my wrists. I'm a slow bloomer, I guess - I've been dancing for eight years now but only performed as part of a group, so this is kind of a graduation to another level, where you need your own 'Nom de Dance' to register and get to pick your own music.

I'm happy and a little freaked out all at once, but it's good for me like vitamins for the soul.

Went out and picked 2 gallons of blueberries this morning, now they're freezing on trays so I can bag them up without them all sticking together into a lump later on.

While picking a young family went by me with two little kids "helping" pick (Look what I got! Look! Look what I got! Look! I got some! Look! I can pick A LOT!) and the parents going along in good humor (Yes, I see. Yes. That's a lot all right. Berries! Yes. Pick the blue ones. You have berries. I see. You picked them! Good job. Now let's pick some more. The blue ones.)

As they were paying for their berries I could hear him (he was too short to see over the bushes): "I ate a...a...GALLON of blueberries! Weigh me!" - then he climbed into their car jauntily calling out "Have a BERRY NICE DAY!" while laughing at his own joke. X-D

Happy summer fruit time everyone!

One of the dancers in our troupe showed up recently with a custom outfit - a blue ghawazee coat done up to be the TARDIS, matching earrings, harem pants made from cotton with the pattern of the "Vincent" swirl artwork featuring same - and a homemade Four scarf. Now she bounced over to me to lend me three Big Finish eps with Ten and Donna (with commentary on how she despises Rose Tyler). Hee! Another one has a Star Trek costume and dance routine including producing tribbles from a concealed pocket and using them like hand candles. The geekery apparently permeates every part of life it you wait long enough.

So, my daughter introduced me to "Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir" which she discovered while learning some French - hee hee! Yes, the episodes are predictable and have about as much content as a bag of potato chips but I'm finding I'm quite enjoying the characters. Ended up watching the entire first season on Netflix over the course of a week, quite pleased to see the second season is supposed to be out this summer. Also, I realize now I'd seen their 'miraculous' sidekicks as keychains at some point but didn't know what they were then.

You do have to allow that in this universe the "Superman Effect" is functioning, i.e. that Clark Kent's glasses have the ability to somehow keep everyone from knowing he is Superman. The two leads work as a superhero team without knowing each other's identities but are also classmates at school - she has a crush on him as her classmate and he has a crush on her as Ladybug but they never figure out they are the same people because....well... because a mask changes everything? The only explanation given is "magic" - works for me.

I get the distinct impression that the illustrators just really like to draw Paris. Also, it's way better in French with subtitles than with the dubs. Want some light superhero fun? I recommend!

Took a shop vac out to the greenhouse to suck all the cobwebs, dirt, lichen and other crud out before coating the inside with wood preservative - it has two shelves of spaced apart slats with an aisle between them, the planks have a corrugated trough underneath to catch drips and such.  Going along poking the vacuum nozzle in wherever it would fit and it clogged.  Pulled up the nozzle to see what was clogging it, expecting a wad of moss or something.

It was a bird skull.

Looking down through the slats I could see the flat remains of an entire bird skeleton with cobwebby, dusty feathers.  How in the world did it get down in there? The wings were spread so it must have been trapped alive?  It was long ago either way.  The Tomb of the Greenhouse Bird. 

My son considered the skull.  "Man, that's totally metal." 

I recently realized from the way my cat responds that while her name is Pi, she believes her name is Beautiful Kitty.  It has made me suddenly self-aware of how often I greet her as "Hello, beautiful" and "Come up here, beautiful kitty!"  Now that would be a nice sort of nickname to acquire, no wonder she has such confidence in our servitude to her.

My eldest came by to pick up her official papers we keep in our safe because she needs to expedite her passport renewal all of the sudden - she's going to Cambodia on a missions trip in June!

She's always had a heart for the people of Asia so she's excited at the opportunity. Says "I've been studying their history and language, it has a lot of the same sounds that Japanese uses so I'm picking it up." Now I get to be the gathering point for whatever monetary support she can wrangle on short notice to cover the passport, shots, plane ticket etc. She needs 3k, we'll see how it goes.

Life is never boring, is it?