The Ramblings of a Mental Meanderthal

The time around the equinoxes is when the sun appears to make the most progress northward or southward every day, so I've been moving things around the garden every week. At the moment, I have: 1. a compost bin with worms doing their thing 2. a few empty pots or pots with dirt waiting to be used 3. a patch of dirt covered with wood chips and pretty rocks (the rest is concrete) 4. a pot of lavender 5. a pot of daisies 6. three pots of amaryllis 7. a pot of geraniums 8. a pot of grass for the cats to munch (and then puke up once they're inside on the carpet) 9. a cheap utility table with boxes of:   a. kale   b. spinach   c. two kinds of lettuce in three boxes The light is complicated because my patio is a 13 by 8 foot rectangle, the long ends north and south. Apartment 8 (directly upstairs from me) has a balcony that shades different parts of the patio as the sun moves each day. The building to the south is two storeys tall, with the added joy of two satelli...

I see weekend and morning bike riders on their ten-speeds with the bike shorts and helmets and looking all sleek and cool and zooming down Pacific Coast Highway. I want to be one of them. I haven't ridden a bike since 1994, though. I rode daily from when I was 6 to when I was about 16, though, so I hoped the adage "It's like riding a bike; you never forget" was true ... about riding bikes. I'm working as a temp at City Hall. The department I work in does several different things, including overseeing the city's bike share program. Once I settled in and learned most people's names, I asked one of the people who oversees bike sharing about it -- specifically, the weight limit for the bikes. Excess weight can pop a tire or cause damage to the frame, so I wanted to make sure I wasn't going to murder a bike by riding it. He gave a number that is more than 100 lbs more than my current weight, so I created an account with the website. And then I d...

We just had a concert weekend, and it came at the end of a gruelling week. Mom had chest pains on Monday morning, and she was in the ER and then in hospital from about 4 am Monday to 4 pm Wednesday. I missed a day and a half of work (still at the temp job with the city), I had two evening rehearsals, I was fetching and carrying for Mom a lot, and I wasn't eating or sleeping well. I don't think I've gone into a concert weekend so tired, and I'm sorry to say it showed. During the concert, we sang two songs in a mixed formation: sopranos next to altos, and no one was to stand next to anyone singing the same part. I normally stand between two sweet, handsome ladies of mature years. I don't feel out of place with either of them. But mixed, I was between two stunningly beautiful, young, petite women. I felt like a toad amongst roses. I even told some other chorus friends about that, and when I said I was standing between D. and F., they just nodded and made noises of ag...