Click on the photo to get just the scenic shots from the 4th in Florida.

Suzan was having a weird week. I've been thinking of things I wanted to post all week, and then just not getting to it. I went back to the online book I wrote about a trip JF and I took in 2002, to bicycle in Holland and then to the family for a christening (the kid is now 8 and a total hellacious malicious little beast and the marriage is falling apart and the whole situation is sad) then to Berlin, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and finally back through Prague before checking in with our friends on the coast of France. You can access The Road, The Road by going to www.travelertrish.com and then clicking on the top icon. The splash page says "Enter and Please Donate" but ignore that and just click.

That was really towards the end of my life as a writer. Blogging was new then. Almost nobody was doing it. I'd heard of it because I'd posted photos of girls in Afghanistan around the time we went to war there after 9/11. Remember the war in Afghanistan? One of the first bloggers mentioned my photos on his blog and somehow I heard about it. I decided to try out this new form while I was traveling that summer. Reading over my words, I thought, hey this isn't bad!

I just finished Three Cups of Tea this week. At first I was thinking that The Great White Hope was at work...again...but Greg Mortenson, the hero of the book, is a genuinely unique kind of guy and I think he's gotta do what he's gotta do. And I do think he's right that a solid non-religious education is the ultimate weapon against terrorism. On both sides of the ocean, actually.

We saw an African film tonight that was just incredible. The Silence of the Forest. About a guy educated in the "West" who comes back to build a new Africa, and ends up going to live with the pygmies in the forest...at first to "educate" them, but they end up educating him. Lots and lots of identity/ colonialization/ anti-colonialization/ who's teaching who what stuff. Complex and also naive. Interesting.

Well, Netflix scored a hit tonight. I asked for foreign romantic comedies and ended up with one about a hairdressing salon in Beirut, Lebanon called Caramel. For those of us who think we have the picture about women in the Middle East, this is a lovely movie.

Oh, and I got some actual gardening in, too. Deadheading the roses as well as the hydrangeas. We're keeping Danielle's three bunny rabbits and JF felt bad for them in the rain, so he built a roof for them.

Raf saw his future apartment today and declared it quite nice. I got the ruling on the savings account under the control of The Man from Birmingham. I was afraid they'd see that that money and have some idea that it belonged to Raf. Here's how it works. He's disabled and also makes very little money at his dishwashing job, so he's entitled to Supplemental Security Income (SSI.) Except if he works and makes money, the govt reduces his monthly check by roughly half of what he made working. BUT, if you have a Plan to Achieve Self-Sufficiency (PASS), they will allow you to open a savings account and put "their" money into it every month. Do not imagine it is YOUR money; it isn't. But with a bunch of bureaucratic locksteps, they WILL let you spend it on what they have determined is in line with your PLAN. For Raf, that means he can pay for his college classes. His expensive animation software. Maybe, one of these days, a new computer.

But heaven forbid the housing people think it's HIS money. He'd be positively RICH. But...luckily...this branch of the government money doesn't think THAT branch is Raf's money, so his rent for the new place is probably going to be reasonable.

So we're percolating along here. JF got in last night. It's different around here now, but it's also back to what passes for normal around here. Check out that movie.

I got home fairly early today from work. I'd planned to "stay as late as it takes," and lo and behold, it only took until about 4:30...so off I sneaked. I worked on projects both days of the weekend, so I felt not a twinge of guilt, though when I take much of Wednesday off to deal with Raf issues, we'll see.

I got a technology plan together yesterday, and did a bunch of work on the movie-making class Saturday. Today, with a little help from my former boss and good friend Don, I got the grant proposal ready for the community foundation. It was one of those days where plans and efforts come to fruition in their modest little ways and of course it felt just sassy.

The weather was fine when I pulled into the library. I checked on Danielle's rabbits...I'm rabbit sitting for the next month and a half...looked at the various plants I've been worried about...wilting leaves, yellowing leaves at the bottom of the plant, stuff like that. Nobody had died, so I repaired to my bedroom and a rollicking tale of Rumpole the barrister and how She Who Must Be Obeyed actually landed him. And took a break to make myself some pork chops, saurkraut, baked beans and fried onions (a meal my beloved would NEVER fix and probably wouldn't even EAT), and then...finished the book. Not a whit of gardening on an evening that would have been perfect for it.

Unrepentant...totally.

It's finally Saturday and I'm having one of those mornings where a dozen ideas pop into my head about my various projects. I've had five movie-making ideas already this morning, including how we can use this one art teacher at the Newcomer School (posters? flyers?). Also had a few Salesforce ideas (getting people to sign up for hours from me when I get back from Admin Training). That one resulted in a request for a meeting week after next from the head of the nonprofit consortium.

I have a technology plan meeting on Monday and I want to get some pine bark scattered around, shore up some of the plants that have been pounded by all our recent rains. Looks like a pretty nice day.

I think if I could be home every evening of the summer, I could take great pleasure in working in the yard. Is that me saying that? Ms. Neglect? True though. I was out deadheading the hydrangeas and cutting back some of the shrubs on the side of the house tonight. It takes me a little push to get myself out, but once I'm doing it, I feel so good.

Utterly satisfying and glorious week.

My dear friend Mary from the desert came in for nearly a week, starting Tuesday. I picked her up from the airport and we went directly to the beach to stay with Chip and Susie at their place. All my childhood, my family had a place at the beach in Navarre, Florida. Sometimes, when we were flush, we had a boat, once a beautiful Chriscraft. We lived on the Santa Rosa sound and either took the boat over to the island or, in later years, drove over the newly built bridge to the beach.

All this flooded back to me-- the beach vacation par excellence. Seafood for dinner every night. Long walk on the beach. Getting into the water and jumping through the waves. Hours reading curled up in a favorite chair. We added a yoga session. Even cooking was more fun: We decided, on the spur of the moment at the fish market, to buy scallops and to have Coquilles St. Jacques, the way we always had them at my parents-in-law's in France. We had to go in search of a recipe, since the one in my head was definitely fuzzy. So we made our way to the local used/new bookstore (a REAL bookstore! owned by a PERSON!) and found a recipe in a lovely old meats & main dishes cookbook from what looked like the 50s. $4. But the recipe I remember has the scallops in a pastry shell with a wine sauce over them, so we bought fillo dough and disposable muffin tins and when the time came, painstakingly brushed each sheet with butter, folded it over and over and fitted it into the muffin tin. Of course, in France, you can buy the ready-made pastry shells. The recipe I've referenced above calls for sauteing the scallops, but the one we found has poaching them slowly in milk for ten minutes. They were delictable! If I ever make them again, I'm putting more wine into the white sauce. It was nice, but not wineful enough.

The house-- I'm hoping for Mary's photos at some point, she was better about taking pix than I was-- was exactly what you want in a beach house. Everything you need and nothing more. Good books on the shelves. One set of dishes and pots and pans. Porches front and back, so you always have the shade. Rocking chairs. A hammock. An outdoor shower with a good clothesline for wet suits and towels. Bird-feeder. A sunset view over the marsh to the inland waterway. Binoculars ready at hand.

And talk, talk, talk. The kind of conversation flow that feels seamless from one topic to the next-- personal, complex, families, large philosophies and great fact-filled discourses on topics of specialized interest. Life, the universe and everything. Catching up after six years with Mary. Pleased that she and my newer friends could connect on such a real level, practically from the git-go.

We stayed an extra day, and stopped on the way home to tour the battleship USS North Carolina. Mary's husband had been in the engine room of a destroyer during the Vietnam War, and so now she is fascinated with those engine rooms and bunk beds, the ice cream parlor and movie projector, the various communications rooms. Three hours we walked around that ship. Then home, to outsource a salad from Harris Teeter and sleep.

Saturday, we'd planned cherry-picking, but it was an hour and a half in the opposite direction from her airplane, so instead we did our hair. We got practical identical cuts, beautiful and expensive from my hair salon housed in an old firehouse, and then colored our hair. George, our hairdresser, had said to me, "You need color. Today." I tried for platinum blond and got a creamy light blond I can feel good about. Mary went for dark auburn and looks lovely deep red.

My friend Carole-the-poet came over for a little while Saturday afternoon and the two poets got a chance to talk shop a little. Turns out they were both in Prague last year at the same time and didn't know it.

Then off to Cary, to spend the night at Bill and Louise's. They live about 15 minutes from the airport and Mary's plane was at 7:15am. An evening of eating cherries (bought, not picked) and ice cream, talking GLBT diversity issues (a subject dear to Bill's heart) and teaching and how to deal with bullying at school. And birds and travels and languages.

So why the title of this post? Because both of my friends' houses possess toilet paper that is more expensive than the one-ply puny stuff we buy. At Susie's, theirs was positively luxurious, and I realized that it is truly false economy to buy what we've been buying. Theirs can do with three sheets what mine takes a yard or more to accomplish. Every time I visited the WC, I was struck by how much NICER theirs is than ours. Change is coming to the Llorens-Perkins household! Bet on it.

I did check out the price of a spot in the RV park. High season: $329 a WEEK. Off season: $187 a week. Guess we'll keep hanging out in the back yard. But with different toilet paper!

Delicious awakening. The best waking up I've ever had was when I was crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a sailboat. I'd never experienced anything like it before. I think I analyzed it this way: I became conscious BEFORE I actually woke up, so I could in a sense watch myself moving from sleep to wakefulness. It felt a little like emerging from a tunnel or swimming, yes, it was very like swimming up from the bottom of the pool. I would break the surface...and then I'd be awake. I never get that now that I'm back on land, so it might have to do with the rocking of the boat. I don't know but it definitely puts a glorious horizon on your day.

This morning, before I heard the rain, I lay there just letting my mind roam pleasurably over the various things I could do upon getting out of bed. Yoga, definitely yoga. But then, what? Vaccum? Maybe some cooking? I just imagined the various things that crossed my mind. I have nothing on the calendar.

I had this sensation of a wide day in front of me, and realized that I have rarely felt that this year. My experience has been that I'm never able just to think lazily about what I might want to do, that I have plans, and when I don't have plans, I have chores. The weekends seem crammed full of laundry and cleaning and doing the family finances and taking care of critical paperwork. It FEELS as if I don't have any time. Of course, we know that's false. We all have time, and we have the power to choose what we do with that time.

One of my LJ friends talked yesterday about seeing time and the things to do moving towards her rather than her moving along the time line. Now that I'm trying to articulate it, I'm not doing such a good job. But while her picture feels too passive to me, not empowered enough, it does get at the pleasure that comes when I'm still, and imagining moving, the moment before the decision to act. Maybe that's why it is so yummy. It's like being conscious before I'm awake.

English, French, a little Nepali, a little Turkish, a little German, a little Spanish.

Tags: writer's block

Spending a morning at Handy Capable is like being in the roots of the garden one tends all day, every day. They FIX computers. They fixed ours. Or made it work. Now, will Eric be content? He didn't want THIS one, he wanted another one. Can he live with this one? Ah, now that is another story.

On the way home from Barbara's, I stopped by the local Lowe's-- the hardware store. And garden. And instead of agonizing, I said, "I'll have one of those yellow ones, and that pink and purple looks good, and those blue shoot things are nice and oh, something with elephant red leaves." And I bought okra and four different herbs and a huge container of potting soil and some pine chips.

I tied the tomatoes up yesterday, and so today's foray into the world of gardening came as much of a surprise to me as to anyone. I'm floating these days, not trying to be "disciplined," and indeed not being disciplined much at all. Chocolate chips, sweet cranberries and pecans, indeed!

I learned how to fix the old clunky laptops we have, and now all I need to do is advertise that I'm giving them away. I'm thinking the first fifteen immigrants who apply for the movie class will get one. They are really out of date, but for someone who doesn't have a computer at all and wants to learn a little...this is perfect.

My fingernails are still lined with black. I put the herbs on the back stairs, on the landing. They smell so nice. Oregano, marjoram, thyme and cilantro.

The real triumph here is overcoming this weird reluctance just to BUY the damned plants. I walk through these huge garden centers and I feel overcome with the inability to act. There is so much I don't have a feeling I know how to choose. Today, I just went, one of those and one of those and hey, I'll take two of those! And came home and didn't even PREPARE the plot. I dug holes in the ground, filled them with potting soil and stuck the plants in, filled in and watered. Possibly I've killed them all.

It feels lovely.