spark

9 things: balancing out the bad

9 things that made it not such a terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad day:

1. Adorable overall-clad toddler digging raisins out of a box with his still-a-little-chubby fingers. So what if those same fingers wreaked havoc on my laptop earlier today.

2. Getting my garden plan done.

3. SuperHubby bringing chocolate AND flowers AND a macchiato home for me. Decaf, because Lord knows I didn't need any more caffeine.

4. SuperHubby taking the kids to friends' house for dinner and friends understanding that everybody's sanity depended on me not coming with them, and forgiving me for it.

5. A tweet telling me that sweet free art is on its way to me. (Maybe you'd like to nominate somebody.)

6. Chatting with neighbors about compost.

7. Knowing that my preschooler has teachers who are absolutely, positively perfect for him this year. 

8. 7 year-old really wanting to tell me about his day.  And giving me pretend mail that demonstrates that he knows our address and understands how to address an envelope.

9. Aforementioned preschooler doing this:

word of the day 120/365: compassion

This is the new - and not inexpensive - abstract art that was installed in my bedroom today.  Notice the colorful stripes, the ghostly marine imagery on the left, the intersecting curves not unlike the flaking of thin plates of some crysalline substance.  Mica, perhaps.  Observe how the arcs radiate out from (and draw your eye toward) a single, dark point. 

There is, in fact, crystal involved, and the dark point is where a toddler forced the pointed end of a whelk shell through a layer of glass into an LCD display.  Namely, the LCD display of my laptop, rendering an otherwise completely functional computer absolutely useless. 

I was oddly calm when my attention was called to the damage, which happened while the toddler and an older brother were watching a video.  Feeling compassion for the kids? No problem.

Feeling compassion for myself? Somewhat harder.  What kind of idiot allows two children under the age of five to use a laptop without sitting right on top of them? 

In all honesty, though, even if I'd been sitting right there, I might not have known he had the shell.  Even if I'd seen the shell, I never would have expected him to put it through the screen.  And experience had shown me that nothing bad happens when the kids use the laptop for Netflix or PBS games.  Two-and-a-half years and this is the first damage done.

So I'm chalking this up to experience and giving myself some grace.  I haven't figured out yet how (or when) to fix the computer, nor have I worked out a timely way to get the information I need off of it.  Like, um, a million years' worth of unanswered email that I was going to sift through this weekend.  Yeah, I hadn't switched to web-based mail yet.  Back to what kind of idiot...  

And you know? It's rather pretty.  Hard to be mad at yourself or your kids when you discover something so beautiful. 

word of the day 119/365: small

The little unlooked-for moments are the things I live for. 

Yesterday I noticed the lifeless critter habitat that houses several overwintered chrysalises and remarked to myself that I really ought to empty it into the compost.  I had assumed that any survivors would eclose early in the season, and since I've been seeing adult swallowtails for three weeks and found eggs over two weeks ago, I'd given ours up for dead. 

But today! Today, Griff and I were walking past the neglected habitat and I heard him exclaim, "oh! a butterfly!"  Sure enough, one full-fledged imago sat on some leaves inside.  If Griff hadn't noticed her (yup, she's female), I probably would have walked on by, since I stopped checking daily a while ago.  She might have starved!  

After giving up just yesterday, finding her today seemed like a miracle, and it added a touch of extra excitement as we freed her from the habitat and watched her fly away over the neighbors' fence.  I've resumed thrice-daily checks on the remaining chrysalis.  Will it eclose and give us another small thrill?

wordless wednesday

the hug

word of the day 118/365: gardening

Ok, yeah...so I haven't actually planted anything yet but a few dahlia tubers and a handful of wildflower seeds.  I'm sortof - slowly - working on expanding our veggie patch, but I'm ripping the sod out by hand, and at a rate of maybe 2 hours of work every 2 weeks, so that's going slowly.  When it's done, though, I'm going to transplant the herbs to the new portion, plant seeds, and buy some additional veggies like cherry tomatoes and squash plants.  And maybe make some stepping stones.  

I kinda mark my success by how much fun I have and whether or not plants go in the ground before June 1.  The year we didn't plant until early July, we still got some green beans and tomatoes and squash to eat, so hey, no pressure, right?  And there are already a good half-dozen or more teeny swallowtail caterpillars on the parsley that seeded itself last year.

For now, though, I'm mostly tearing out three clumps of grass and listening to Griff dream up a crazy motion-activated robotic scarecrow.  Which he totally would have drawn for you, today, but we were too busy dreaming instead of doing.  Some of our best gardening is done in our heads.

...and pick berries with them!

A little birdie told me that The Berry Patch will be open this weekend with plenty of yummy yummy strawberries!  Kneeling by a row of strawberry plants, staining your fingers as you pluck the fruit and fill your basket, is one of the supreme holinesses in the world.  Go forth! 

Farmer's markets are also starting up here in RVA and CSA deliveries, too.  I believe I'll be picking up my very first Edible Old Dominion veggies at SOTJ this weekend, and next Wednesday is the first Agriberry pickup.  It's springtime bliss.

word of the day 117/365: leisure

Currently reading:
Beloved (Toni Morrison)
The Drama of the Gifted Child (Alice Miller)

Next book club selections:
Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel García Márquez)
Breakfast at Tiffany's (Truman Capote)
Let the Great World Spin (Colum McCann)
Cutting for Stone (Abraham Verghese)

Stuff I heard about at our book club selection meeting that intrigued me:
Nurture Shock (Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman)
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Haruki Murakami)
The Thirteenth Tale (Diane Setterfield)

And you know I don't read that many actual books these days, so other things I heard about that I want to check out:
Man on Wire
Crayola thanks tea-partiers
Nerello del Bastardo

word of the day 116/365: love

I know, we did love already, but it went into the hat twice and the world always needs more love, right?

Today's big LOVE is this amazing 1980s Pentax K1000 that was sent to me by a friend who had it and didn't need it.  I had no idea how cool it was going to be.  It came with a microscope adapter which I haven't quite figured out yet.  I'm on the hunt for a 50mm f/2 lens like the one that probably originally came with the camera.  Then, oh, baby, I'm grabbing some film and using my manual skills to the fullest.  This vintage beauty - which has a light meter but no automatic features, not even film winding - will require me to use every bit of what I've learned!  And if I can get the microscope adapter to work, too? HEAVEN.

I love good friends, vintage finds, and geekery!

word of the day 115/365: symmetry

molting dance of the triops