catvalente

I've meant to post all week, but it has been the Week of Houseguests around here, and that leads to socializing, and less internet.

First, over the weekend, we had the wonderful nex0s and midnightstation, who arrived with their adorable child. nex0s  is secretly a gardening superhero, and she designed us a garden and we had a party full of emilytheslayer , lynxreign , babymonkey , and mishamish  to put it all in. I built planters! With power tools! nex0s  has pictures and a full write up here.

It was a pretty amazing experience--just what dedicated (and awesome--thank you everyone who put their back into it, we are in your debt!) people can do in a weekend, and capping off an rather epic planting spree (we now have a nascent sunflower labyrinth plus tomatoes, eggplant, squash, beans, cucumbers, snap peas, blueberries, strawberries, rainbow chard, basil, cilantro, red peppers, hot peppers, lemon balm, and three kinds of pumpkins! Plus nex0s  picked plants with fairy tale names for me, so we have Hansel and Gretel eggplants and such delights) settling down around our fabulous new firepit (finally! We had one in Cleveland and missed it so much) and making smores with friends. Even telling the THERE WAS A HOOK! campfire story because justbeast  had never heard it before and those are the pleasures of Dmitri.

So now we go out and peep and hope for shoots every day, and I finished up the herb planters between the New York crew leaving and my friend from junior high/high school Jennifer arriving.

Jen is pretty much the only person from high school I'm still in touch with--between graduating early, running away from home, changing my name, and not taking a terribly mainstream path through life, I'm not really more than Facebook friends with anyone else. But somehow Jen and I keep running into each other. I ended up in a poetry class with her in grad school, and she came to a Palimpsest show, and yesterday she made a cherry pie in my kitchen and we watched Jennifer's Body and I thought a lot about my childhood in California. I do love living in a place where people want to come and visit me.

Also I practiced my accordion and she didn't run screaming away! I had my first lesson on Tuesday and it was a lot of seeing where I am with piano and musical theory (which is not far--I always got a year of lessons in any given thing when I was a kid and then money or time ran out. But I tell you what, I am grateful for my mother teaching me what she did of piano at this point, because otherwise I'd be way lost) and deciding what books to use and being like "the button with the rhinestone on it is C" and making noise. My assignment for the week is to order all my books and sound out melodies on the keyboard and practice the standard C-G-C-G oom-pah-pah sound. So yesterday I plinked out Mary Had a Little Lamb and Three Blind Mice easily, and then (I'm fairly proud of this) figured out the melody line to Katyusha and part of Dark Eyes. I'm still having a little trouble with the fingering on the oom-pah-pah but hell, it's only been two days. I like it a lot, I think about it even when I'm not practicing, and I want to practice all the time. These are good signs. Also I have a shiny red loaner accordion until I can get my magical one, and I am calling it Temporarily Gretchen, for it is not mine to name permanently.

Tonight I'm going to see my accordion teacher and the island accordion ensemble play a concert, and copyediting Fairyland. It is a busy life, and the fact that I managed to get a long chapter of a Secret Project done this week is a small miracle. I am very tired, physically and mentally, and needing to cocoon after so much social time.

But I have a garden. And an accordion. And coffee brought to me in bad. Not so bad.