Aubergine

July 30: it has been a blur

Last week was a wild ride of fun things that lead to too-late nights and lots of work that lead to not enough taking care of myself.  My iPhone arrived and I have been neglecting the big black camera.  I have been spinning at high speed and not slowing myself down enough to honor my practice of observance that I have learned is necessary to keep me sane.

I moved offices at work at then end of the week before last, out of an office I've had (and loved) for over four years, across the building to an office that has lovely light and better proximity to the folks I work with most often.  But it was sad for me to pack up my stuff, take apart my cozy space, leave the spot that held so many memories.  A lot has changed in my career while I lived in that office.  And I had made it a pretty nice space to be.  Pictures and paintings on the walls, plants, a red curtain and a red leather comfy chair.  Friends tended to stop by just to sit with me and soak it up when they needed to wind down a bit.  I packed up my boxes on a Friday night (with some assistance from sweet meriko, who brought me a glass of wine and kept me company while I disassembled) and left them for the movers, then arrived on Monday morning and reported to the new spot.  Since then I have only unpacked the minimum of stuff to get my work done.  I need to have the desk in my new office re-configured, and in the meantime I don't have quite enough room for me in there.  My lovely red chair is shoved under the desk, and my boxes are still stacked by the door.  When people come by for meetings we have to do a complicated dance of chair and door and filing cabinet to get the door shut and make a place for them to sit.  Late in the week meriko busied herself while waiting for me to talk to someone by digging out my red curtain and draping it over my still-empty shelves.  "Not enough color in here," she said, when I raised my eyebrows at her climbing on my desk.  I hung the curtain properly in the window before I left work Friday.  Today I will get some help jettisoning the enormous and superflous filing cabinet out of there, so I can use my red chair again. 

Last week was also the first week of a three-week marathon of me covering for someone's (much needed and deserved) vacation.  He did a great job of setting me up and handing off his work, but I have no less of my own work to do, so I'm juggling priorities and watching the things I can't catch fall apart.   Not my favorite way to work.

But there was good stuff last week, too.  We went to see Patty Griffin with a group of friends, and she sang beautifully.  Lisa and I went down to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk to watch The Lost Boys on a big temporary screen set up on the beach, as part of the Boardwalk's centenial celebration.  It was pretty cool to see the lights of the actual boardwalk behind  images of the boardwalk lights on the screen.  That movie is 20 years old now, completly corny, and so much fun.  Fun to see scenes of the town I'm so familiar with worked into the plot. Hundreds of people showed up to sit in the sand and watch.  Outdoor movies are the best.  We haven't been down to the Guerrilla Drive-In in a while.

What else...  I got my hair cut, and it is looking pretty cute.  A visit to the farmer's market, of course, some quiet time for me at a coffee shop with my journal, and then a lovely slow dinner with a friend from out of town who we hadn't seen in a long time.  I took a walk along the ocean Sunday morning, did a bunch of laundry, worked for a couple of hours on the computer, and worked on a pretty knitted shawl that I'm finally nearing the final stretch of.  I'm probably forgetting some other stuff, like, oh, yeah, I finally got my iPhone.  Did I mention that? 

I wrapped up the weekend with another concert, this time Joe Sample/Randy Crawford and Tower of Power.  I was tagging along with a friend, and got to meet some of his other friends as a result.  He'd been excited about the Sample and Crawford part of the show, but I didn't know anything about the other group, and was totally surprised to have them come out playing really awesome soul/funk dance music.  It was an outdoor show, the evening was warm, the moon rose full and gorgeous, and I stripped down to my tank top and danced and danced.  Back when I was a goth, I used to go dancing every week.  I loved to dance alone, close my eyes and lose myself in the music.  I miss the dancing.  I think I need more dancing in my life.

July 23: in the studio

I've been spending a lot of time in my studio recently.  Making stuff.  Thinking about stuff.  Tinkering around.  Playing with color just for the joy of it.  Just being.  I found this old receipt last night in a pile of old book pages that I bought from somewhere a long time ago.  It says, "Received of Mr. J. Frailey Smith one hundred and fifty dollars payment in full for instruction to March 1st, 1889.  James H. Penniman.  March 7th '89."  It has a hole punched in it, like it spent a while on one of those receipt spikes (that always make me think of Death of a Salesman and cringe).  I have no idea what I'm going to do with this piece of paper, but I think it is pretty cool.  I wonder what kind of instruction Mr. Penniman gave to Mr. Smith in the early spring of 1889?  And where has this piece of paper been for the last 118 years?  How did it avoid getting tossed in the trash somewhere along the way?

July 22: casting circles

July 21: A semi-urban garden harvest

July 20: extravagant

My flower-arranging style tends toward extravagant.  Because if 5 tulips are pretty in a vase, obviously 15 or 20 is better.  I prefer to arrange a bunch of the same flower rather than make mixed boquets, and use really big vases whenever I can.  I love heavily-scented flowers, too.  Old-fashioned roses, lilies, freesias.  I want the flowers to make an impact.  Bam!

Right now our dining room has an enormous vase filled with asiatic lilies - two shades of pink - and a few stems of stargazers.  These come from Thomas Farm's booth at the Saturday market and they last far longer than a week, as the buds just keep opening for days and days.  They smell heavenly, although Lisa complains that the scent is too strong to eat at the dining room table so close to them.  Whatever.  I love them, and am happy to eat on the couch.

July 19: iPhone in the house

Not mine, unfortunately, and I forgot to take a picture (this one I took later).  This one was for Lisa.  Lisa is so not a gadget girl. Although she does love her iPod and the small digital camera I gave her for Christmas last year, she probably would not have made these purchases for herself.  So when she expressed interested in having an iPhone, I didn't really believe her.  She's been using the same cell phone for probably 5 years.  It is ancient, no longer works well, and drives her (and me!) crazy.  But she's a good non-consumer, so she just used it less, rather than go by another, newer one.  I was marveling at it last night - it has a 1", 2-color screen.  No camera.  That's some ancient technology.  Wow.

I was planning to get her an iPhone eventually, but when we talked about it, she suggested I wait until there were enough in the sales channel that they were offered to employees at a discount.  Who knows how long that might be, at the rate these things are selling.  But then last weekend we hung out with that group of people who all had them, and Lisa played with meriko's a bit.  Even then, she didn't look too impressed, but did ask me later when was I going to get her one?  I reminded her that she wanted me to wait for the discount.  "Oh," she said, "I didn't really mean that."  Oh, really?  OK then.  Yesterday she admitted that she'd "tried not to look excited" when she tried meriko's phone, "but it was really really cool.  I love the finger slidey thing." 

So I found a local Apple store that had some in stock and picked up her new phone last night.  I made her do the whole account set-up thing, because I wanted her to see how easy it was, and feel empowered about connecting the phone to the computer via iTunes (she's a bit wary of all things computer).  It was really easy.  Took about 10 minutes to transfer her number from Verizon, open a new account with AT&T, and activate the phone, and that's only because she types really slowly and deliberately.  Unfortunately, we can't get it to receive calls yet - they still go to her old phone.  But she can call out, and send and receive text messages (SMS is new and novel to her - the old phone didn't do that!), browse the web, etc.  We didn't set up her email yet , but we loaded up some photos and some music, and she's been checking out the various applications, including finding our house in Google Maps in the satellite view (it is an old picture - our neighbor's pond wasn't complete yet in the image, and he's had it filled for a couple of years now).  The first time she went into one of the applications that was new to her, and she moved the window by sliding her finger and found a new screen that way, she looked up at me with this look of wonder that was just priceless.  Really, if Lisa finds this thing this easy to use, that's some good UI.  She's no dummy, but even Mac OSX confuses her sometimes.  But not this phone.

The first time we went to Europe, I remember being on the Metro in Paris, looking around, and seeing a whole bunch of people using iPods.  And I marveled at how cool it was to work at a company that made a product that had become so widespread.  You say iPod, people all over the Western world likely know what you are talking about.  They probably have one, or someone in their family does.  I wondered if this was what it felt like to work at Sony when the Walkman became so popular.  I sat on that train, looking at all those Parisians using a product that I contributed to, I helped to create in some way, and I was very proud.  We make cool stuff.  Yeah, they are consumer products, and e-waste is a big problem, and I know they are expensive and not, you know, necessary to make one's life fuller, richer, or more happy.  But man, we make some cool stuff, stuff that I like to use, and would even if I didn't help to make it.  And I'm really proud of that.

Just now while I was writing this, I got a text message from Lisa: "Good morning, thank you so much for my iPhone."  Aw.  My honey has joined me in the world of modern (future!) technology.

July 17: how we mark our territory

Lisa's been reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle recently and a few nights ago we had a conversation about asparagus, and how Barbara Kingsolver talks about planting an asparagus bed at each house she lives in, even though it takes a few years for asparagus to start producing - hardly a fast-growing, rental-property kind of crop.  But she plants them because she doesn't feel like her house is home until she has some asparagus in the garden.

That conversation got me thinking about the kinds of plants I've carried with me from house to house, and what plants different people put in their garden to make a house feel like their home.  For Kingsolver, asparagus.  For my mom, daffodils.  For me, home must have roses, and a lemon tree.  I don't really know when the lemon tree thing originated.  My mom had a lovely lemon tree in the condo she moved to after I left home, but I can't remember if we had one at the house before that or not.  I don't recall one, though I fondly remember the cherry trees and the Fuji apple that lived in that back yard.  The first lemon tree that made a big impression on me was the huge tree that grew just outside the front door of the first house I lived in in Santa Cruz.  It was a big, crumbling, sprawling house filled with students, and I lived there for several years.  My room was a converted dining room - converted by means of an old mattress propped up in the archway between the living room and my room and covered with fabric hangings.  It was in the back corner of the house, with old sliding-sash windows that opened into the calla lilly-strewn side yard and the back patio and garden. I entered  by way of the kitchen, and there was a single french door that opened to the back yard.  It was never entirely quiet, between the kitchen and the dining room common areas, and once in a while the mattress would fall over and have to be re-assembled into a wall.  But I loved that room, that house. 

The rent was laughably cheap, which was good, because I was extremely poor.  There was a period of a year and a half or so when I didn't even have a car, although I was both working and going to school in downtown San Jose.  There was an express bus over the hill that stopped about a mile from my house, and I walked to the stop at about 6:30 in the morning each weekday, worked a half day shift at my office, then attended classes at the university in the afternoon and into the night  The bus ride took about a hour and a half each way, and I often didn't get home until almost 11pm, then stayed up longer to do homework or visit with my housemates.  I cat-napped wherever I could just to get barely enough rest into each day.  I was single, often achingly lonely, poor, exhausted, but also painting a huge amount and I felt so very alive.  Although that was nearly 15 years ago now, my memories from that time are vivid and richly colored.

I remember sitting on the front porch of that house on sunny weekend afternoons, in the shade of that huge lemon tree.  The sweet scent could be dizzying, and there were lemons all across the arc from green to yellow all the time.  We could never keep up with all the lemons it produced, although all 7 of us housemates used them for cooking, tea, and lemonade on a regular basis.

When we decided that we were going to buy this house and stay here, I got Lisa to go with me to buy a lemon tree.  We got a 1 gallon dwarf Meyer, which will never reach the size of that Spark St. tree, but will produce lemons that I prefer to use in my cooking and baking and drink-mixing.  And then we waited.  The first season it put out lots of leaves, produced flowers that set into miniature fruit that then dried up and fell off.  And then again, same cycle.  We watered it, we weeded around it, we fertilized it, we scraped a scale infestation off of the branches.  I worried over it.  Too much fertilizer?  Not enough water?  I gazed longingly at the 10-year old tree across the street that practically groans with fruit two or three times a year.  Finally, this year, the third year, it has set fruit.  It only set two lemons that made it past the infant fruit stage, but they are going strong and just starting to show some yellow.  The tree went through another bloom cycle about a month ago, and this morning I noticed a bunch of new baby fruits, already swelling past the stage where they used to drop off. And more new leaf growth, which will be followed by another bloom of flowers.

In our landscaping class last semester, our instructor mentioned in passing one day that 1-gallon lemons always take three years to start produceing - better to buy a 5-gallon plant, which will produce the first season.  Huh.  Wish I'd known that three years ago.

July 15: outside

It has been an usually sunny summer here.  Sunny and hot, and very little of the coastal fog that I've grown used to.  This actually feels like summer, like the summers of my childhood, when I lived in the valley and it got hothothot in July and August after the June winds died down.  We'd wish we had a pool, or wheedle invitations from our  friends who did have pools, or, if we couldn't find any friends like that, we'd fill up a wading pool in the yard and sit around in it.  For the most part I really dislike being hot, and my skin is the color of an egg (not a nice brown farm egg, but the white grocery store variety) and I can't stand the feel of sunblock on it.  So really, the coast is a better place for me to live when we are having our normally foggy summers.

But this warm warm weather and bright sun brings back good memories of being young and having lazy long hours where our only concern was how to get cool and where.

July 14: taken with an iPhone

Not MY iPhone, unfortunately, because mine hasn't arrived yet.  I'm glad the company is gifting me one, but that means I'm in line behind all you paying customers.

We went up to the city (that's San Francisco, for those of you not living in the orbit of this city) Saturday night for a concert.  We met our friends at their house, walked down to the Mission for dinner and to meet up with another friend, then took BART over to The Warfield for the show.  It was fun, like being a SF native, all that walking and public transportation.  I love that about visiting the city.  My friends who live there mostly use their cars for exiting the city, but leave them parked for their travels around the city itself.

In our group of 6, there were 4 iPhones.  Lisa and I now have serious iPhone envy.

July 12: still

I am out here studying stones
Trying to learn to be less alive
Using all of my will
To keep very still
Still even on the inside

- Ani DiFranco