let's go fly a kite (or not.)

Sometimes, cute things happen that i take cute pictures of & then having nothing cute to say about them.  Like the time Lauren & i drove out to the Dorothy Akin Memorial Prairie..

& we wanted to fly the cute kite that a friend had sent me while i was in the Keys.

Sadly, the wind did not care to participate. That previous shot was a fluke.  The rest of the afternoon looked like this:

Which was still pretty cute.

spring is happening. thank god.

A couple of years ago, i planted bulbs in the tiny 'yard' behind our house.  Crocus & tulips mostly.  Those that have survived the low-light, high-traffic location bloom throughout the spring.  They aren't very impressive, there is no color scheme & the still young bulbs do not produce thick stands of blossoms, but i still get excited.  I feel like they are saying, 'You didn't freeze to death! Great job!!'

The bulbs are the only thing that will grow back there.  I am trying (once again) to grow herbs in terra cotta pots.  My plan is to buy several of each & hope extra hard.  I only have one basil, & i only bought the curry & thyme plants because they were cute & smelled nice, but i also have two different types of rosemary (which my being excited about makes for pretty boring blogging, obviously.)

I do not have any pictures of my herbs.  Even the cute ones that smell nice.  I do, however, have picture of the non-food plants in cute containers.  Tropical plants do better than edible plants with the lack of light, so i keep a lot of them around to make me feel better about my other failures.

I plan to donate my greententions, my aspirations of tomatoes & melons & delicious delights, to my friends whose yards are more hospitable.  Like my friend who accompanied me to the nursery & fell in love with the lemon tree.

After a couple coats of gold spray-paint, a layer of moss & violets, i was jealous, but too exhausted to wish i could have fruit trees of my own.

there's no place like home...

This last Thursday evening, i hung out on my back porch with my gurlfriens, drinking box wine, enjoying the weather.  Then, i walked behind the house to see my favorite band play. It made me glad to be home.  In fact, i cannot remember the last time i was so glad to be anywhere.

o. hai.

We moved to Big Pine, & i got a different (much, much better) job on Bird Island, i even had a truck for a couple of weeks. These are things that happened while i was away. They would have been great to blog about (if by great i mean fun for me & likely boring for you,) but i did not have a computer, & i was just too damned lazy to type anything up on my mobile browser.
Big Pine was great, & my new job was great. But, all great things must come to an end, & now i am living back in Kansas. If you must know (which i guess everyone must, since it is all i am ever asked,) it is freezing. Duh. No joke. Holy cow it is effing freezing. Aside from that, it is really wierd to be back. There is a nice young man who lives in the part of the apartment that was formerly our office, & all of my furniture is still at my parent's house, so it's strange to be both in my own house, & also kind of in someone else's house.
I have been home for about a week now, but haven't actually done anything. I've left the house a couple of times, but haven't looked for a job yet, & haven't unpacked at all. Except for my kitchen.
I suppose it makes me a little old lady, but it was amazing to cook with my own appliances & accoutrement. Who knew how much you would miss a knife? Or vegetable peeler? Oh! To have pots & pans again!! Yep. Nerd.
So overjoyed was i, that last night, i made (what is hopefully) all my dinners for this week. Maybe even a couple of lunches! After prepping five heads of garlic, six onions, four carrots, four potatoes, & six beets, i compiled a pot roast & a beet-pear casserole while making a pot of chicken stock (which also results in a whole cooked chicken!)
Tonight is yoga, so i started the pot roast a couple of hours ago, to be enjoyed in a few more. Hooray!

on being a stereotype

In the Keys, everyone else, like me, is from another place.  It makes it interesting: unlike Kansas, where everyone has the same easy, unaffected manner of speaking, each person you meet has a unique accent.  Working at a resort employing three hundred people, i like to listen to the different dialects against one another.  In the HR office, is a young Texan & a middle-aged Bostonian.  My department, answering phones & manning the radios, is headed by a mother from Delaware & staffed with a grandmother from Michigan & a girl from Jamaica (among others, whom i rarely work with.)  Early in the morning, as the sun rises, i ride to work with men from the maintenance department who are from South Carolina, Tennessee, & New Jersey.

It's also great for conversation.  Asking where a person's from can easily segue into why they left, & what they're doing here.  You can learn a lot about a person very quickly.  Which is good, given that, for the first time in decades, i do not know everybody.  Quite contrarily: i know no one, & have little in common with anyone.  So i like being able to eat up minutes of small talk with that one question, & it's nice to get to know someone without needing to do much of the talking.

Obviously, this line of questioning usually veers next to where i am from.  The love of Kansas is deep in my heart, & i am not embarrassed by my newness to this place.  However, it's still awkward.  I think the main weirdness stems from the fact that i seem to be the only Kansan anyone has ever met.  Clearly, everyone has heard of the mythological state - Oz, evolution, tornadoes - but as far as i can tell, they assume nothing ventures to or from this bible-belt bread-bowl but wheat & beef.  I go suddenly from feeling like everyone else - transplanted like a seed in the island breeze - to feeling like an overwhelming stereotype - Kansas farm-girl with a boyfriend back home.  

Of course, no one knows about Lawrence.  About Thai/Vietnamese/Indian food, or gourmet coffee.  No one knows about my lip piercings, or that i break dress code with my 'extreme style' earrings: no one has seen me out of the 'island elegance' business-casual dress composed of all the clothes i own that could fit into the required category of 'conservative'.  It is a strange feeling, knowing no one, & being unknown to everyone.  To no longer be the girl back home, missing a few far away friends, but to now be the far away friend, missing everyone back home.

escape velocity

In the twenty-six years that i have been alive, i have lived within twenty-six miles of where i was born. From four to seventeen, I attended the same school district. My parents & grandparents still live on the land where I was raised (where my own mother grew up.) The past nine years are the only i have spent living in a city, a college town of about 90,000.

Now, i am in the process of extricating myself from Kansas to live with a friend in the Florida Keys.

Anyone who has ever lived in & moved from a little oasis is surely empathetic to my situation: excited to leave, terrified to be gone, & effing tired of talking about it. Obviously, the constant dialogue about the perfect weather & the ocean view is helping to keep my spirits high, & is a definite nudge towards optimism. However, working as a barista in a busy Downtown coffeeshop, i have started to feel like a broken record.

Besides the obvious resident-turnover that will accompany a Big-12 state school, there is a constant ebb & flow of townies who all have the same Dorothy desires. It is expected that you will move. And when you do move, it is expected that your take-off attempt will fail, & you will return, tuck-tail to the motherly embrace of her limestone alleys.

Unlike a lot of others who have come & gone in the years i have been here, i love this town. It cannot be overlooked, the obvious drawbacks of living in a university town: alumni, greeks, basketball, football, freshman, art students, business majors... Undeniably, the suffocatingly exponential expansion of the 'west side' is only getting worse. And, a small town, is a small town, is a small town. We may not be rural, but Downtown is tiny enough that everyone knows everything, personal & otherwise. The frequent farewell parties all share the same refrain, 'I'm just so tired of this damn town.' & 'I can't stand any of these effing hipsters anymore.'

Ridiculous. I have the most incredible life i could ask for here. I haven't owned a car in seven years, everything i need is within a five block radius of my amazing apartment in a pre-civil war house, & there is convenient & reliable public transit for the rare occasion when i am required to leave Downtown. We have a lively (albeit wheezy) art scene, & most importantly, the ability to sustain one's self by 'living locally' (groceries, restaurants, shops...) It's a town where you can barter! A community where you all live & work nearby, therefore, you know everyone! I lead a blissful, luxurious life here. I fully intend to come back someday to grow old here.
While I have yet to make any kind of decisions concerning kids & career, I feel safer assuming that someday I could have one or both of those. So, why wait until having them binds me irreversibly to the Midwest? I am aware enough of the passage of time to recognize that the now is an opportunity to save myself from becoming an elderly woman who settled down without exploring her options.

Mostly, I just hate winter. I hate being cold. I take it as a personal affront. As if every bone-chilling breeze, & soul-crushing ice-storm is an attack on me, as an individual. For a third of the year i wear long-johns, thermal socks, undershirts, sweaters, gloves, boots, a coat, & a thick scarf. It's suffocating! Not just the scarf over my mouth & nose (or the frozen air when scarfless,) but the layers & layers constricting your movement & rendering you as unsexy, & uncute as possible.
Do you know where they don't have winter? The tropical islands known as the Florida Keys.
And what they do have in the Keys, besides beaches, palm trees, sunshine, & crystal clear water? Weather that allows me to wear sundresses for two thirds of the year.

summer sundays

I live in a kickball town.
Now, i know that Vice has talked trash on small-town, hipster kickball leagues. And until this spring, i'd never been to a single game (despite having worked jobs in multiple business with kickball teams in the last 5 or 6 years.) A couple of weeks ago, i was lured to the night-time game at our Municipal Stadium to watch a rousing game of the drunken sport.
When school lets out (as our town can also be called a college town,) my city is laid-back & generally more easy-going. Most obviously, a certain percentage of the town packs up & leaves, much to the relief of we that live here year round. More importantly, the weather in the springtime is amazing, especially in sharp contrast to the brutal wintertime we all feel lucky to have survived. So, true to our college town stereotypes, when the weather gets good, the good get drunk. Here, we get drunk at a public park while we make fun of our friends falling down when they attempt to steal second & lose their still-lit cigarette in the dust.
The circa-1947 stadium is only a few blocks from my house, so unlike most of the fans, balancing coolers of PBR on their bike handle bars, i can walk over with the dog as dusk starts to settle into the tops of the trees. Some weeks we come armed with coozies & a case of beer, but there have been a couple of glorious evenings filled with jugs of homemade sangria (perfect for a hot summer night.) Which is not to imply that it's about drinking. Sure, it's fun to get drunk with your friends, but it's also fun to sit around in a crowd of people who are all excited about the same thing. Everyone has been doing this for a few hours, so we're sharing in this community moment that lasts all afternoon.  And that's what i really like about it., that feeling of camaraderie, especially amongst drunken compatriots.