Black monukka grape (this thing is blowing my mind, it’s been growing in a 2-gal pot in shade for 3 years now. Josh and I are planning on transplanting it, but it’s a two-man job since the roots have grown out of the pot and firmly established themselves in the ground beneath. The upshot is, order your bareroot plants from Peaceful Valley, everything they’ve ever sent me has been tough and wonderful)

8 Quinalt strawberry plants, plus about 30 wild strawberries
1 “delicious raspberry” or thimbleberry

Chives
Greek oregano
Thyme
Lavendar (oh alright I’ll spell it correctly for once, here: Lavender)

Salad greens
Carrots
Radishes
Peas
Violas

Wishlist:

Blueberries – this is what I was looking for today, and while I found two bushes at our local nursery, I didn’t want to pay $45 total for both. They’re still on my wishlist, I think blueberries would do really well on our sloped, rocky, shady property.

More raspberries – I didn’t realize what I’d purchased was a thimbleberry until I’d brought it home. I’m happy to have it, because it supposedly does well on dry slopes at higher elevations, but I’d like some more traditional caneberries and other fruits.

Other perennial vegetables like asparagus and artichoke.

Tomorrow I’ll pick up a bag of soil and start our annual vegetables –
tomatoes
bell peppers
beans
eggplant

These will all largely be in containers, as I’ve tried them all planted in my back garden and they did beautifully right up until they were eaten by pests. At least in containers, I have a bit of an edge in keeping the bugs down and the chipmunks deterred with old bird cages.

This is the difference between a poem and the sting of real life –
in a poem I can tell you of the victory the lavendar felt as it wore my blood.

Lavendar, if you are listening
remember that I left everything that was green.

When this was my bedroom, the walls were papered with 1970s era weird Western-style images – flour grinders and sacks, wagon wheels, that sort of thing. The panelling on the walls was thin and unpainted, and there were builtin bookshelves that weren’t deep enough to hold any books. The bookshelves are now flowerbeds in my garden and the room is all bright blue, painted by my cousins for their kids years ago when they were renting this place from my mom.

We’ve been using this room as a storage area while we tried to sort and reorganize and give away the multiple households worth of stuff. It’s still jampacked with boxes, only I was able to get rid of enough in the last week that I can now walk across the room, unfold a TV tray, and sit here and write like I used to when I was that other me who lived here before. Today’s Brianna still wonders why she is here, but I’m hoping by clearing out more things and unpacking my art supplies that have languished in these boxes for three years, I’ll find some kind of balance between that me and this me.

It’s springtime and the bulbs are bursting into daffodils and tulips. The periwinkle is dotting the hillsides with purple. The morning sun only touches this room for a few minutes a day – the rest of the day it is in shade and cool. If I were a feng shui expert, I would point out that this room houses the area that would be the creativity center. It’s been a source of guilt that it’s just sitting here unused, but then I think about what I’ve actually had to do in order to unearth this space like an archaeologist and I realize hey, not so bad. My grandmother still has two storage units full of her mother’s things, that she refuses to look through. Me, I went through everything three or four times before finding a home for it. Even though it was tough every time.

I don’t want to get too comfortable in this spot. I’m tired of being followed around by shadows of that old life, feeling like I’m in limbo in the present. I want to be in a place where I can make things grow. I miss having a studio, and this room would make a nice one, but my eyes don’t work right here. I never see the room that it is, only the room that it used to be. I haven’t unpacked my things because there is something in me that says “Not yet. Not here.” I’d like to find that place, where I feel at home.

This shifting and moving of boxes, the tapping of nails and the rolling of paint on the walls is all in preparation for putting the house on the market as soon as possible. It’s a darling mountain cottage and the first house I ever lived in. When my mom and I pulled into the driveway the first time and I saw the little star-shaped blue flowers growing under the window (the window that is now behind me), it felt like magic. Like a fairy tale. It still has that feeling, like happily ever after happened here, only I’m still me and I’m in the present and I don’t like putting endings on my vast, unknowable future.

We’re selling this house, and we’re looking for a little acreage, probably back in Missouri but we’re open to the possibilities. I’ve said “no” to a few things recently in preparation for this move – adopting a cat, for example, a decision that wrenched my little heart but still felt right. But I’ve also said yes – planting more flowers, culling things we won’t need wherever we go next. I’m looking forward to the part that comes after happily ever after, even if it’s difficult or dirty or confusing or heartbreaking, because that’s how you know you’re still in real life and not just treading water in the fairytale.

It’s a nice place to write, under this window. I like the way the blue changes throughout the day, and I have always loved the faraway quality of the light. If you gaze out of this window, straight ahead, it’s all mountain and trees and flowery hillsides.

Okay so books:
1) Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut – I haven’t read this since high school, when I loved it, and when I finished it this time around I adored it.
2) Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott – I bought this secondhand just before I left for Greece, but didn’t get a chance to read it. Instead, I borrowed Jane’s copy, and finding my own copy in a long-unopened box was like Christmas.
3) My Man Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse – Pay attention to all the ways Jeeves manifests himself into the presence of Bertie. He “trickles” into rooms, “slithers” into them, “shimmers” even. I think I’ve read everything Jeeves at least twice.
4) The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell – yeah I freaking love this book, I think it’s why I wanted to be a linguist in high school.

I unearthed all our Saul Bellow and Discworld novels as well as Turgenev, Faulkner and Hemingway. I’ll find something new to read in the Bellow, or find myself re-reading Terry Pratchett over and over.
***
While I’ve been sketching each topic for IF this year so far, this is the first one I’ve completed:

Hoping to catch up with the other two before the next topic is chosen. Only three weeks behind!

If you friend me on Facebook so that you can then slag off on IF immediately after I accept your friend request, I will de-friend you and daydream about writing cursewords on your forehead with a sharpie. IF is very simple – we post a topic once a week and you draw a picture about that topic if you want. If you don’t want, we don’t need to hear your lameass opinions about it. And by “we” I mean me.

If you friend me and immediately start trying to recruit me for Jesus or tell me how the gays are tearing holes in our social fabric, I will unfriend you and block you from my email. You might notice that I don’t often offer opinions online. This makes me pretty boring to read but has the effect of disguising what is a rather notorious hot temper (on my part). I’ve gone off half-cocked on the internet enough times to know that it is completely not worth it, and much simpler to pretend you don’t exist.

If you friend me and your feed consists entirely of self-promotion, I may hide you from my status feed because I get tired of people selling me things all day. Unless I like your work, in which case I won’t.

If we’re related and you do any of the above, I will politely hide you from my status feeds but not unfriend you because I’m mostly just happy you’re around and that we have this amazing thing called the Internet making it possible for us to disagree.

I don’t always check Twitter. I don’t always check Facebook. I never check MySpace. I have these accounts so I can explain to our clients how to use them (and so I can make fake farms and grow fake things in FarmVille and CountryLife, there, I said it). If you posted important life news and I missed it, you don’t really have the right to be irritated with me about it because you didn’t actually tell me in the first place. Also, I am simply not equipped with the emotional numbness necessary to read 1000+ people a day bitching about movies, standing in line, eating lunch and the other numerous things that people bitch about when they have an audience. I’m not really a dumpster for negativity. Sorry.

Email is always the best way to get a hold of me. It is more reliable than calling me on the phone. Email, email, email. You have my email address. I don’t check GMail every hour, just once a day or so, but my direct lines at Utopian.net and Brianna.org are always being piped straight into my forehead.

No matter how you get a hold of me, you are very important to me. I don’t always respond immediately because sometimes I need to think about my responses. It doesn’t mean I’m ignoring you -quite the opposite. It means I’m thinking a lot about you, and what to say, and how to say it.

Random brianna.org screenshots set to Vivaldi:

Sunbeams

Originally uploaded by briannaorg

I haven’t written anything in nearly three weeks, since our cat was taken ill and subsequently put to sleep, so I figured I’d write a little bit about Fitzgerald here and see if it helps me resume the tenuous writing habit I’d so carefully built up over the last six months.

We found him at a pet store in Long Beach in 1999, both of us telling each other the entire time that we didn’t want a cat, we were only looking. The shelters were closed and only one place in a 20 mile radius (that’s a wide swath for LA, btw) had any kittens. We found the shop, walked in, and Fitz was in a tiny cage looking at us. There was another kitten, about a year old, but very sick, and a third kitten, tiny and sad. Fitz was quiet and just looked at us, until Josh opened the door of the cage and picked him up. He crawled up to Josh’s shoulder, looked at him and meowed, and Josh looked at me and said “I want THIS one.”

They told us he was nine weeks old and I laughed in their faces. My first job was at a pet store and to my “trained” eyes, Fitz was at least four months old. He was huge. I’d never heard of the Ragdoll breed and it would be a year before we figured out that was what he was.

We brought him back to our little blue apartment where he promptly hid under the couch, until we coaxed him out with a feathery toy on the end of a stick. Then he climbed into the leg of Josh’s shorts and sat and watched TV for awhile. Josh and I were both smitten. I wanted to name him Mac or Jpeg. Josh said “Clearly, he is a Fitzgerald.”

I figured for awhile he was mostly Josh’s cat except I took care of him, laying with him on the couch at night when he cried to be allowed in the bedroom, feeding him. He would jump into my lap when I sat at my desk and lay on his back so I could rub his belly. He smacked his head every time he did that, so I started keeping an eye out for him, and when he showed up next to my desk I’d just lean down and pick him up before he could brain himself.

I have a distinct memory of Josh and Fitz laying on the couch napping one afternoon that first summer, both laying in exactly the same position, Josh with his arm over his eyes and Fitz with his paw up over his own eyes. I always wished I had a camera for that, so I made a point of remembering it.

He learned that we would leave our respective rooms at the same time every night to watch the Simpsons, so when the theme song came on at 7 he would come to each of our rooms and meow until we followed him, then he’d sit between us and watch. Through the years, The Simpsons was the only show I ever caught him paying attention to on a screen. Once he tried chasing the race cars on the screen when we watched an Indy car race, but he was too smart to do it twice once he figured out they weren’t going to come out from behind the TV.

He liked to sneak sips of water from everyone’s glasses. He chewed on every cord in the house until we poured hot sauce all over them, and recently Josh realized the ancient mouse he was using still had hot sauce on it from our kitten deterrent period.

I can keep this up all night, we had him for eleven years. He went across the country with us twice. He played like a kitten with his toys until the very end of his life. I will forever be grateful to my mother that for the last three years he had a huge backyard with loads of trees that were all his own, it was something I always wanted him to have and it felt like an achievement to give that to him – sounds silly to say about a cat, but he truly detested life in our 2nd story Kansas City apartment, even going so far as to jump from the balcony to the roof, checking out the other apartments, until he jumped back to our balcony from the one next door. He was closely supervised on the balcony after that.

He held his own in his few spats with the grey neighborhood kitty that snuck into the backyard occasionally. The raccoons were afraid of him, and he was afraid of them. He loved the taste of butter and the scent of carrots, and while he didn’t deign to lay on anyone’s lap too often, when he did it was either because the house was cold or because he sensed we were ill or upset.

Josh doesn’t have the best hearing, so when he gets excited about something he sometimes raises his voice – Fitz always meowed at him to keep it down. He was very talkative, and we joked that he was so close to being able to say my nickname “Anna” that we may as well just do whatever he said, since he was learning English faster than we were learning Cat.

I miss him.

After that, I slept the longest I’ve been able to sleep in a few weeks. The cat urgently awakened me around 8am, when I fed him and checked for snow on my neighbor’s roof. There was about an inch of icy white sleet and a leaden, close gray sky. I went back to sleep and when I finally arose to greet the day the white was gone but the sky was still heavy.

The sky is still heavy as I type, and I have stepped outside once just to hear it brushing the tops of the pines. I like tracking the movements of the planet by the sound of the sky passing overhead. It’s a soft, ceaseless rushing sound, lighter than static or water, too consistent to be the breathing of a giant. Just one long suspiration.

I’ve carved out time for creativity every day, and it’s given me an enormous feeling of relief. The title of this post refers to the Revelations I have had about once a year for the last three years, where the little voice of my conscience reminds me that, you know, some people make art, some people sell art, but I need it like breath.

Gradually it has been dawning on me that my noble intent to “face reality head on” has led to the most anti-social period of my adult life, a deep depression that was unceasing and wearing me down, and the loss of an outlet that I didn’t know I had until it was gone.

Josh used to tell me that he’d never met anyone as compulsive about creating things as I was. Some people smoke cigarettes, I make stuff. Paper crafts, photos, crochet, weaving, I take whatever is within ten feet of me and I turn it into something else. I used to do it without thinking – I never had the deep television watching habit most kids my age had, if the TV was on and I was sitting near it, I was making something. I didn’t see a whole lot of value in the things I was making, it was the activity, the process that I focused on. The output I considered “experiments” and they either ended up in the trash or in a box or rescued by a friend or relative for their own enjoyment. I always loved that. If I keep the things I make, they will eventually be pillaged for their elemental ingredients to make something else.

As I grew up, I tried to gradually change my attitiude about this compulsion to create. I should care more about what I make. I should focus on a medium or a technique and sell the output. I should call myself an artist, I should go to school, I should I should I should.

So when life got dark there for awhile, I told myself I would just focus on my business, building software and websites, and not “put any pressure” on myself to create. Except, I never did put any pressure on myself about that. Other people did, occasionally, but anyone who’s spent five minutes with me knows that had little effect. I could definitely get twisted up about writing sometimes, and I could angst about web art like a pro, but the wax sculptures, the papercrafting, the painting – that was just stuff I did, I didn’t think about it too much.

And that was the key to my revelation. When I “took the pressure off myself” to not create anything, I was actually pressuring myself to focus only on income bearing activities. I felt a deep responsibility to make our business not only work but be SUCCESSFUL, in all capital letters. I had to grow up. I couldn’t laze around in my studio all day just daydreaming. It wasn’t practical.

After three years of being in a fog, it finally occurred to me that maybe that compulsion, maybe that unconscious act of creation was me feeling things. That when Death came (and it did, and it does, often in my life but far more often in the lives of others who have lost many more loved ones and friends than I have) maybe “facing it head on” was completely wrong for me and how I operate. It made me feel like someone else. It made me unrecognizable, and lost.

My grandpa is dying of cancer. In the last three years, since I lost my mother, I have lost more loved ones to cancer, and I was not surprised, only saddened when I heard he was undergoing chemo. We were very hopeful, but it’s been clear in the last month that there is no longer any treatment. This week, he has stopped recognizing people.

Today, when I got the phone call, I tried to go for a walk, but the dogs wouldn’t stop barking and it made me furious. I tried to eat something but my throat wouldn’t open to swallow. I listened to the song my grandpa used to play for me on his rose-inlaid guitar, even though he and I both knew it would leave me wailing with tears, and after two tears struggled out, the flow stopped. I could feel the hurt and fear and sadness welling up and bottled in and I didn’t know what to do with it, even though I know what grief is, the Universe has kept me practicing it since childhood. There has not been a single year of my life since I was five years old that I did not lose someone precious and important to me, and I keep thinking that each time is a time to practice loving openly so that there are no regrets after, and practice grieving openly so that the feeling of being stifled by loss can’t keep me afraid. I don’t always live up to that.

But I told my grandma what a good job she is doing, I offered the help she would let me give, I will see them both at the hospital tomorrow. I told my grandpa I love him, even though he’s not quite sure who I am. And when the woods didn’t work and the tears didn’t work and I was afraid I might not be able to breathe with everything I was feeling all at once, I started to write.

An hour later, the cloud has passed and I remembered the Revelations. Art is how I feel the big things, the things that can’t be expressed only in words. It is mine and has always been mine, when I was a little girl alone in her room sewing dresses and recording music on a tape deck and painting lavish imitations of the Taj Mahal.

Some people can feel things in public for others to understand, I can only make things and know later that what I felt is there, even if a pair of paper mache earrings or a handsewn bikini don’t immediately seem related to the event that made my hands start to work in the first place.

The compulsion to create never left. I still sit in a room covered with half-finished items, finished items, gifts I’ve made that I’ve never given because they didn’t feel complete. It’s just that now I’m letting it back out without apology. This is who I am. I make stuff. I feel stuff. It’s for me alone, but I’ll tell you about it here because you might be like me, and you might need permission to feel life with your hands and some clay or paper rather than the Seven Stages some book laid out for you to use as your Guide to Feeling.

And if this doesn’t make any sense to you, that’s fine too. It isn’t about you, and these losses of mine aren’t about me. I am here to bear witness to them and look up to the sky and say “These people existed, these places existed, and I loved them the best I could with everything I am, and I grieve them the same way as proof of that existence, mine and theirs.”

When the year turns and the air is chilled and sharp, these scents make a single scent, the smell of visiting my grandmother’s house when I was very small, of scuffing my feet in the heaps of dried brown cedar fronds at the edges of the asphalt on the driveway. The scent of decaying oak leaves in piles that gather in all the creases where the shape of the mountains folds in on itself. All of this a single scent, that I can call up in my imagination no matter where my feet stand, the unique fingerprint of the place I was born.

But we’ve hit a level of mass consumption where people don’t understand their machines any better than they did ten years ago, so programmers have been essentially made slaves of the lowest common denominator of user (and, to explain further, we’ve sort of created a monster user who finds virtue in not understanding, because they expect their software to be at a certain level of minimum difficulty for usage. And this is appropriate and great for like, accounting software and stuff [which at its worst is just a checkbook ledger, with simple calculations of adding, subtracting and multiplying if necessary] but terrible for innovation and for really deeply exploring these relationships between these personal machines and the people on the other side of the screen.) And yeah, first and foremost, I am a computer artist, I see the web as an art medium and the computer as a tool – but I’m beginning to understand how other people see their computers, and it’s not the same.

To explain a little bit better, a ledger is really the first step of using computer – logging information. Input. And it seems people today don’t go beyond that, but you have so many options for USING that information – graphing it, automating tasks, etc. Collecting data is so useful, even if it’s just a personal journal, but what about the next step? What about something as simple as knowing that you’re always bitching on May 17th of every year because you have a mood indicator on your journal that’s not just decoration, but provides readable feedback to you?

No eggplant for me this year! Danged rodents.

And let’s be honest – did you want incessant philosophical ruminations based on my daily bird feeding excursions, or did you want me to take advantage of the fact that I love public domain video archives and share my faves? I guessed you’d want the latter. But we’re back to the former.

In September I switched my CMS of choice from WordPress to Habari. I was really excited – Habari was going to allow me to grow this site easily for another ten years, and another ten after that. And the interface! Oh, it was a joy to use – pretty, fast, clean and simple.

Then I didn’t use it.

Habari was never going to get a fair shake from me, I have to admit. I spend 8-12 hours a day using WordPress on behalf of our clients, and to participate in Illustration Friday. As irked as I was by the slowness of the WordPress 2.7 admin panel, eventually my stubbornness was worn down simply by numbers – all the plugins I worked with and customized daily were for WordPress. When I outlined new features for this site in my imagination, the underlying framework was always WordPress. Yargh.

This site has always been my web playground – sometimes I break things and leave it, sometimes I turn it into a video blog, sometimes I wipe it clean and leave a simple splash screen up for months at a time, until the changing of the seasons romances me back here. This is where I ask all my questions – how can I explore my travel photos to really convey a sense of the places I visited? How can I dress it up like a magazine so all this useless streaming info about my web wanderings gets displayed? What can I do to bring a little sunshine into these pixels?
It’s my messy notebook and my digital imagination, and it’s shown up in my dreams for over ten years now. I’ve dumped some of my thirteen years of web making into WordPress since I first installed it here five years ago, and there’s much more archived outside of it that I’ve yet to integrate – and I may never. Let it be a mystery to explore, this digital past. For once, I’m more excited and curious about what Brianna.org will be like in the future.

Josh gives some usability straight talk over at Joshix.com

I am re-launching brianna.org in August to celebrate 10 years of experimenting on the Web at this domain name (my first personal site launched in late 1996). As part of this project, over the last year I’ve been adding to my archives and moving things from my hard drive of collected digital ruminations to the WordPress backend that currently powers this site. I have over 10,000 photographs of my travels through Europe and the United States that I have been adding to my archive.

I decided when the Orphan Works issue was first raised at the Illustration Friday blog that we need more artists who are actually living the models of radical copyright freedom and open source art distribution – to really live the model to see if it could work, to make a living as an artist while openly sharing creative works. To that end, I am going to release all of my artworks that are seven years old or older into the public domain, and license the rest under a Creative Commons or BSD license (I haven’t decided yet – the BSD license actually says what I want it to, but the Creative Commons folks are working for a larger agenda that I really support) with the intent of all my works at brianna.org being free to use for personal AND commercial purposes.

My biggest fear when this idea first occurred to me (oh, in 2000 or so – I’ve had time to work this one through) was that my pieces would be used to further hateful or violent agendas. Overtime, that one fear didn’t seem like a big enough obstacle for me to desist from doing as I feel is right – opening my art to the global creative community. Anybody who spends five minutes talking to me knows that I am 100% for the art of the mashup. Take what I have made, and make something else from it. Please. And then send me a link, not because you have to, but because I will be so pleased to share what you’ve created.

I’m still working out the kinks and legal details, but I’ve modified the licensing on my Flickr images to a Creative Commons license that should be free for personal and commercial use, possibly with attribution (Flickr doesn’t offer the full range of CC licenses). This does not mean you can use pictures of my friends and family in your advertisements: I don’t have model releases for those photos, and I’m slowly setting all of my Flickr photos with people in them to a different license to make sure they’re protected. Everything else is freely available – I’ve recently added a selection of pics from Rome and Venice to Flickr to test it out. These pics aren’t the best – they need work. So I uploaded them at a high resolution and you are free to clone out the little blurry spot in the sky from my time in Rome when I wasn’t able to clean my sensor.

I will be saying a lot more on this as we get closer to the 10 year anniversary of this site.

Lastly, this should go without saying, but my opinions on copyright law are my own and are not a component of how things are done at Utopian.net.

ANATHEA

Fresh from the desert mountain, a shade of red you’re not likely to see again this side of a Belle Epoque bordello.

via CuteOverload

by Waverly Films

Kale, carrots, dill
Look how far we’ve come since January! These were all sown when the moon was waxing gibbous in the sign of Cancer. I’m not being very scientific in my moon phase sowing experiments, and I have no idea if it had much bearing, but I do know that I’ve been sowing seeds only during a waxing moon for as long as I can remember, so I don’t have much to compare it to.

Attempting to sow by moon phase means I found myself on a prime planting day (astrologically speaking) without any of my seed starting supplies. So I improvised with pie pans, warming trays, coffee cup sleeves and toilet rolls. For anyone trying out the coffee cup sleeves, I am having a hard time with them collecting damping-off fungus – it hasn’t mattered to the seedlings yet, the cinnamon is keeping the soil alright, but the sleeves themselves get fuzzy without treatment. Vermiculite and seed starting mix from the local hardware store (plus a touch of compost from the garden). Everything kept moist with rainwater so far, a rather stunning feat in the arid California climate, but really I’ve only need about a gallon of water yet – we’ll see how long I can keep it up when the weather is actually warming up.

Baby dill

Originally uploaded by briannaorg

Winter surprise

Originally uploaded by briannaorg

I just adore this picture. Today my mom would have been 48, and Cathy’s birthday would be coming up in February.

To me, 2007 started with our departure from Paros and our return to the Valley of Enchantment to make it our home. So the story begins in December and moves through January. Tomorrow, I’ll post photos from February and March, and so on until we meet the New Year and sign off for a few days. Most of these photos have never been seen before, and few, if any, have been post-processed. My refined photos will be on display in my portfolio – until then, these are the messy documents of my real life.

You can view the Flickr set here.

December 2006 at brianna.org – we leave Paros and pause a bit in Athens and London before heading home to our newly renovated little house in the Valley of Enchantment.

January 2007 at brianna.org – I read fortunes in Greek coffee dregs and try to settle in to life in the little house without Mom.

Also, I imported some journal entries from 2001 forward into my WordPress database, so check out either the Categories list on the left or the Archives dropdown on the right to view some Briannalicious history.

We finally broke down and got a room air conditioner, so we’ve moved into what is CURRENTLY the bedroom but will soon be just the office (our bedroom is full of bamboo flooring and boxes from our move, so the bed doesn’t fit in there yet). It’s a darling room, full of light. It’s a good thing I like it, since we’ll be living almost entirely in here until the end of October.

This used to be the view from my desk, when I sat in the living room. Very cozy.

This is the view from my desk now. You can click these images to view my Flickr pages with more complete descriptions. Back to work for me!

“Good programmers manage to get a lot done anyway. But often it requires practically an act of rebellion against the organizations that employ them. Perhaps it will help to understand that the way programmers behave is driven by the demands of the work they do. It’s not because they’re irresponsible that they work in long binges during which they blow off all other obligations, plunge straight into programming instead of writing specs first, and rewrite code that already works. It’s not because they’re unfriendly that they prefer to work alone, or growl at people who pop their head in the door to say hello. This apparently random collection of annoying habits has a single explanation: the power of holding a program in one’s head.”

It isn’t even so much that he gives tips for programmers on HOW this is done, but he explains it so well for those who don’t code at all, who are trying to figure out why their geek friends are such robots. I needed to read this today.

It has been a strange week. Saturday, I took an impromptu road trip to Primm, Nevada (“Stateline”) and for the first time in my life, played the slots. Oh, and roulette. Significant only because I’ve been through Vegas about fifty times and had never played a slot. And never will again, now that milestone has been met. Looking back, I think it might have been therapeutic to get sloshed on vodka and two-step to the cover band in the casino lounge, but I never think of these things until it is too late. I swam in the hotel pool, talked with my aunts, and fought to keep my anxiety at bay. I paced the casino until after midnight, trying not to blow a wad of cash, avoiding the cocktails out of habit until it occurred to me that a beer might help me sleep. Three sips of beer, and my anxiety spiked and I threw the rest away. I had eaten ice cream a few hours before, and it sat sour in my stomach like a rock.

A strange week. Is it strange to say I had fun at Stateline even though I found myself compulsively talking all weekend, culminating in my dredging up a bunch of old bullshit in the car on the ride back, arriving home exhausted and overwrought and twitchy? I did have fun, I like hanging out with my aunts, and I’ve never spent a full day and night in a casino as an adult (we vacationed to Laughlin a bunch when I was a kid, so I’ve spent loads of time in casinos, just never as participant). Had I recognized how uptight and nauseated and freaked I’d been under the surface all week, I might not have gone and I’d have missed the fun.

Josh surprised me on Sunday when I arrived home from Stateline with a rosebush to honor my mother. Such sweetness!! We planted it early on Tuesday morning and it is flourishing. He has also cooked me dinner or taken me out every night this week, gotten me out of the house to get some exercise and/or coffee at least once a day, and has just been so all around glorious that I sort of want to tell everybody how much I love him, so I just did.

Sunday, Monday, Tuesday – lots of sleeping and feeling like I wanted to cry but couldn’t. At this point I’d figured out that I was not taking this whole anniversary-of-my-mom’s-death thing with my natural grace, and was basically waiting to either collapse and cry and spend a day or two wallowing in my sad movie collection, or get past it and get back to work. Except. Except those two options didn’t really leave a lot of room for the reality of the situation, which was simply that I’ve had a bunch of shit going on in the last few weeks (school, then no school, the minutiae of being an adult like securing health insurance and all that crap) and I’ve been so focused on shipping the project I’m working on that I had been completely not recognizing the stress I was under. I always recognize work stress, and am always broadsided unexpectedly by any other kind of stress. Since my project was going well, I had blithely ignored the other stresses I was under and kept trying to plow ahead. As I’ve learned over and over again, if you do not give yourself a break, you will find that you are forced to when the stress gets overwhelming. So I gave myself a break this week. I carved myself the space I should have carved the week before, and have laid low and quiet and thoughtful. I have gotten too much sleep every night, but then I wake up early and work on the house or on the computer and before I know it twelve hours have passed and I’m exhausted again because I’ve been working all day without realizing, so I fall asleep too early and am up too early and that was how I spent all the days past Tuesday.

Thursday, I began re-painting the nook in the living room from the awful cantaloupe color dubbed “Barbie Flesh” by Jenn, to a plain white. Not because I decided the nook should be white, but because I found the white paint I’d bought for the bathroom last year and realized that ANYTHING would be better than that orange color. So I started painting on Thursday, Josh cheering me on, and sometime on Saturday I finally stopped. It took me about five times longer to do than I expected, and I was positive after the third coat that I was going to run out of paint, but it is finished and I painted three picture frames to match the glossy white of the nook and now they’re hanging in there too. The painting was a great project – long and tedious and kind of back-breaking because my head has been so far up my own ass this week that I started all wrong and didn’t rough in the trim thickly enough, so I spent about eight hours on the step ladder filling in every little edge and corner, letting it dry, then doing it all over again when there was still orange showing through. So, my methods were sketchy and time-consuming, but I’m…if not PROUD of the result, at least relieved to have covered up the old color. Which I also picked, by the way. I chose…poorly.

I was writing in my journal this morning, about how I wanted to write here but it seemed disingenuous to write about home improvement projects and Harry Potter and the surface flotsam of my life this week when I know damned well that what I’ve been doing this week is simply riding the rollercoaster. I am so grateful for my life today, and Josh, and how and where we live, and our friends and family. All week I’ve been feeling that gratitude in soaring highs – then crashing down into a morose lump for really no good reason. I am a frustrating character in my own novel because I refuse to have emotions when it is appropriate to the scene- I’m always practical in the moment and then emotional months down the line, whenever my subconscious decides it is safe.

Well, it is beautiful here. I’m happy with my work and my home and my partner and my life. I would not change a single thing, and if that’s not big fat sign to my subconscious screaming “SAFE”, maybe for the first time in my whole life – well, I don’t know how else to explain it. Today, though, I am going respect it and continue working, dipping into Harry Potter occasionally (of course I’ve already finished it, this is just for snacking, later) and rubbing Fitz’ belly when he’s asleep and drinking lots of tea and taking a nap in my oyster-shell nook and absorbing the stillness. No more rollercoaster, for today at least.

These wild strawberries are taking over the front flower bed. If you hike a little ways up the creek, you can find scads of them. This is what I rescued before the birds found them.

The Life magazine advertisement that I found when I was in middle school, that later became the inspiration for the name Utopian.net.

Yeah. I’ve decided to withdraw from my graduate program and not travel to Austria. It is one of those decisions where the answer was obvious from the beginning, but I spent a year going back and forth. I wanted to give myself the chance. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but it spread me too thin. I was afraid, though, to make the decision in the swirl of negative emotion that was my interior landscape last fall and winter, so I kept trying to do the work and make the arrangements as if I was positive I could commit to it.

I spent all weekend holed up in my house, making lists. To my credit, I waited a whole twenty-four hours before dragging Josh into Decision Limbo with me, but by the time I even brought it up with him I knew what my final decision was. I think I just had to try it out on him, see if my reasoning was sound.

So even though I knew on Sunday, began telling people and cancelling my travel arrangements on Monday, it was still today before I was able to bring myself to make it official. I was due to leave on Saturday.

There were a couple of conferences and events I was going to be missing for school that now I can attend, and I will be honest – I am absolutely luxuriating right now in the knowledge that I’ve chosen to focus this commitment to Utopian.net. I feel like I have held us back from from really moving forward with our services because I had so many things on my plate. Making careful choices to narrow that focus to what is really important to me, to what gets me fired up and excited – that’s such a positive investment in myself, in our company, and absolutely surpasses the loss of continuing my education.

All I know is that I’m excited and positive and moving forward again, when I had stagnated for a couple of weeks under the stress of trying to make room in my life for school and travel in the midst of a lot of big stuff happening with Utopian.net. And even THAT feeling has met with my scrutiny – am I relieved because I made the right decision, or relieved because I made the FINAL decision?

It is so tempting to try to impose our own control in our lives, by flagrantly executing big life decisions left and right like Napoleon. I WILL go to this school, I WILL have this career, it WILL happen on my deadline. I will marry this boy or that girl, we will have these children or no children at all, we will be big big stars.

Some decisions need the luxury of time. Some decisions are organic, not binary, and are really not one decision but a series of decisions and choices that end up looking suspiciously like a jagged journey plotted out on a map. Sometimes you discover that by not deciding, you are allowing the decision to be made for you. Sometimes you decide and it doesn’t turn out anything like you expected.

Daffodil time

is past. This is

summer, summer!

the heart says,

and not even the full of it.

No doubts

are permitted–

Though they will come

and may

before our time

overwhelm us.

-William Carlos Williams, The Ivy Crown

I knew our local community website would have a post up within an hour giving all the details, so I finished making my coffee and stopped looking out of the windows for smoke. After growing up here and spending many sleepless nights trying to figure out what this or that “boom” was, I LOVE that I can just hop online and find out, instead of hearing it through the grapevine the next day. One of those sleepless nights was after a local restaurant exploded into flames a block away from my grandparents’ house, another was when an ancient pine fell outside my window during a thunderstorm. While I was watching Night of the Living Dead. At home by myself. My mom walked in an hour later gasping in horror and asking me if I had known the tree had fallen, to which I could only reply, “Woman, are you nuts? I wasn’t going to open the door to find out!”

Ah, all that exposition aside, turns out the noise we heard this afternoon was the space shuttle Atlantis.

Jenn and I went to OUR dance class Tuesday for a marathon session that totally wiped us out. For the last month we’ve been going to Bollywood classes at a temple in Riverside. The music is awesome. The dancing is impressive. It’s a fusion of Bhangra with some hip-hop moves, with music from the soundtracks of various Bollywood films.

It is kicking my ass.

I started taking dance classes (ballet and tap) when I was seven. My first recital was performed to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and I had a rainbow tutu. I was the tallest (the only time in my life I can say that was the case – it was because I was seven and the other beginners were five and six). I got to wear a ton of makeup. It was awesome. I eventually went on in middle school and high school to take some pretty intensive dance courses (and some really easy ones) – but I can’t remember ever learning the choreography to a six minute song in three sessions. It was more like, if we got four counts of eight nailed by the end of the practice, we were doing well.

So after the second session, when we were four minutes into the song and I still didn’t have the steps down for the intro, I decided to give it one more shot before calling it quits, and I’m glad I did, because Jenn and I taped the last two classes and practiced a bit on our own and it feels a lot better. I’m starting to relax into it. I tried to reassure Josh that I wasn’t going all Zelda Fitzgerald on him and trying to recapture my lost youth, but he doesn’t care. Bollywood dance involves a lot of booty shaking – that’s good enough for him.

The more life moves, the more I see these hesitant moments as opportunities for growth. I know. It’s pretty disgusting when I phrase it like that. I think what I mean is, I’ve learned to not take that feeling of being out of my depth at face value – instead, it’s almost a promise that I’ll improve.

You could tell which of the blackbirds were his frantic parents, and little guy was very manfully attempting to fly (but didn’t have the feathers for it just yet), so I gently deposited him up onto the wall of the garden center where he flapped into a clump of columbine and hid. I don’t imagine he’ll make his way back to the nest, but if his parents keep an eye on him for a day or two longer (and he doesn’t find his way back into traffic) he’ll likely be able to fly soon.

Click through to view the notes on each frame.

I can’t sleep tonight. I want to sleep, but I read a sad story and it made me cry and that made me think of other things that used to make me cry until suddenly it was 3am and I had been laying in bed for a long time holding Josh’s hand and sort of torturing myself. Lately, I’ve been getting fairly emotional, and it’s such a relief that I kind of pick at it a little bit, fascinated, as if a scab had just fallen away revealing the shiny pink skin underneath.

“Grief is a multi-faceted response to loss. Although conventionally focused on the emotional response to loss, it also has a physical, cognitive, behavioral, social and philosophical dimensions. Common to human experience is the death of a loved one, whether it be their friend, family, or other close to them. While the terms are often used interchangeably, bereavement often refers to the state of loss, and grief to the reaction to loss.”

I am not a stranger to loss, and therefore my own grief surprises me less and less as I encounter it. In the first rough weeks after my mom died, I still laughed at jokes and TV shows that I knew were funny, but I did not cry. Other people’s tragedies could not move me individually, but only add slightly to what seemed like the already unbearable weight of the world’s losses. As the weeks went on, I moved farther and farther away from my own emotions, occasionally being slapped in the face by the sharper ones like rage, but mostly existing on a pretty rigid path. My grief would expose itself in outbursts – usually directed toward Josh, who has the rather unenviable position of being the person closest to me. But I am not a stranger to my own grief, and would usually make very rational sounding statements like “I know I am not actually upset about this thing I am screaming about, but in fact reacting to the death of my mother” only at top volume and possibly while throwing something.

Anger is very seductive and warming after spending a few weeks on the frigid path of emotionless grieving. I indulged in it about once or twice a month, less frequently as I found other ways to respect the emotions that were obviously there, working under the surface. Josh was, and is, a brick. He never left my side.

Today, or rather, yesterday (it’s still in the hour of 3 o’clock, dark of night and all that, the hour of introspection) I had trouble getting started. I was restless again. Frustrated. Hamstrung. Hands tied. Too many decisions to make, no clear place to start. I ended up working outside most of the day, burning off the restless energy in raking and trimming and sweeping and tidying, and it was a good choice. I have a goal, you see – at the end of this week, I’m emptying out the storage unit that holds my Mom’s stuff and our stuff still in boxes from the Kansas City move, and I am having an enormous garage sale. It’s all going. What isn’t sold or stolen or given away will be donated and then I can cross this major milestone off my list and we can settle in a bit more. So it’s important that the front yard be tidy, both because it gives me more room to put stuff out and because I am proud of this little place and want it to look its best.

I am not “at one” with my emotions. I tend to find myself reacting before I fully understand what it is I’m feeling. This isn’t a permanent condition – it’s definitely a side effect of grief, one that I anticipate and try to correct as it comes up. Some days I’m better at it than others. Today I was sniping at Josh as we ran some errands when it occurred to me that I was inexplicably sad and tired and hungry and thirsty all at once. Then I remembered I hadn’t had anything to eat or drink, turned and looked at Josh and before I could open my mouth to apologize he says “Dude, you haven’t eaten yet today. That means you have a free pass for thirty more minutes but if it continues I’m afraid I’m going to have to beat you.”
Then he gave me a hug. In the middle of the grocery store. I can’t play chess with this man, he’s way too good.

All day long, I raked last year’s leaves and trimmed back the ivy and occasionally I’d stop and think “I can’t believe it”, shake my head, and continue with my work. They say sometimes that it gets worse with time, harder, that it doesn’t really “sink in” until later. I think for me, that means that after the initial protective shock wears off, it might seem to others like it’s gotten worse because they might actually catch me in the middle of processing some real emotion about the whole event.

I follow a yearly cycle. I know this now – I’ve been noticing these patterns for a long time. Sometimes I used to find myself in what seemed like an inexplicable funk, only to do a quick check and realize that it was exactly a year to the day after some sad or tough event. I didn’t consciously recognize it, but my body did. People worried I would be upset on Mother’s Day, but I wasn’t in the least. Today though, I grappled with my own feelings all day long, hurt and confused and angry and very simply sad and maybe a little joyful? Is that too much? The joy comes from the emotions themselves, having them and being able to savor them, even the painful ones, this recognized sign of healing. I like that I can cry. I’m proud of myself for feeling what I’m really feeling, instead of sublimating it into something else.

I thought about it in bed tonight, still clutching Josh’s hand while he slept, and thought back to this time last year and what I was doing and how I was feeling. It was almost too much, once I remembered – here’s an entry almost a year to the day, and it’s not nearly as honest as I wish I it was. I was in a bad place this time last year. I had just visited Josh and just been to Havasu with Mom and we were settling in to the period I now think of as The Wait. I didn’t know when I would see Josh again, I didn’t know when my Mom was going to die, only that it was going to happen, and I was already worn out. I was terrified and depressed and fairly unaware of it, aware enough to censor my journal but not my memories of that period. This time last year, I did not go an hour without checking Mom anxiously. I tried not to let on too much. My aunt was staying with us and it made an enormous difference, and my other aunt was on top of all of Mom’s medical care, and when I think about how it might have been if I hadn’t had them I have to quickly try not to think about it at all.

Secretly, I gave myself a year. Not a year to “grieve and get over it”, because you don’t get over it, you assimilate it and it becomes a part of you and you move on through life, a little more polished or roughed up, a different shape altogether sometimes. No, I gave myself a year for the worst of it – a year to fuck up a bit, a year to not be entirely on top of things, a year to get through the wall I knew would be thrown up the second she died and only relieved when I could honestly face up to the fact that she was gone. You might think that I’m patting myself on the back for good “grief planning” but I already told you I know my grief well, and I learned this from experience. When my aunt Cathy died eleven years ago, I didn’t cry about it for five years. I spent five years willfully and knowingly lying to myself because I couldn’t face it and it didn’t make any sense to me and I couldn’t find any way around the shocking and horrible reality of her dying and death.

I had been living with Josh for over two years before I finally looked up one day and burst into tears and spent about two days in bed, heartbroken over the fact that my aunt wasn’t just gone, she was dead. Josh was mystified. So was I. I had been telling myself I was over it, but how could I have been over it when I would hardly acknowledge it had happened?

This time, I knew better. And oh, I wish it could be simpler, of course – that I could wail and gnash my teeth, tear my hair and rend my garments. Get a really good Biblical grief going on. Get out all the rage and confusion and heartache all at once then pick up the pieces and move forward into some new kind of life without a mother, spent and empty, waiting to be filled up. It’s not easy to give myself the freedom to grieve. I did a pretty good job of not compounding my early grief with guilt – it’s easy to slip into, that habit of turning on myself. It’s an egotistical response – if I can make it somehow my fault, even partially, I can feel like blame has been placed and it makes it almost seem sensible. Logical. The few times I caught my thoughts turning in that direction I stopped and refused it. I refused to feel guilty. I did the best I could and of course it wasn’t perfect, but I was there. I didn’t leave her alone. You would not believe how many times I have repeated that thought in my head, over and over. I didn’t leave her alone. I promised I wouldn’t and I didn’t and there have been many dark moments when that was what I was holding on to.

So yeah, it’s been hard to give myself this gift of a year of acceptance and understanding. I’m ten months into it, and I’m starting to recognize just how much healing has taken place already. There is still a ways to go, but for right now there is something satisfying about feeling as if I’m back in the flow of human experience, laughing real laughter and crying frivolously over fairy tales. Like I’m so in touch with my emotions I can afford to have extra.

Oh, the title – this entry was meant to be something different at the start, a little musing about all the caterpillars in our garden that are dripping from the eaves and eating Spring away from my beloved plants. Some of them turn into crane flies – those winged long-legged bugs that clumsily float around lights at night. I kept telling Josh they were mosquito eaters, but he’s learned to ask Google and discovered that they’re ephemerata, crane flies, that they don’t eat anything after they reach adulthood because they only live for 24 hours, long enough to mate then die. The cat adores them because they are easy prey. I myself don’t feel one way or another about them, except that I might have lied about their mosquito eating prowess so that Josh would leave them alone and just let them bumble crazily around the lamps for awhile. Why the hell not? Life is short. Find the brightest light you can and beat yourself to hell against it if it makes you happy, little bugs.

(Just as I typed that, a small crane fly batted against my monitor, the only light in this room. Nice timing, my friend).

It felt so good to come home. Since I hadn’t planned on making the trip with Josh, I had decided to work on the house while he was gone and in anticipation of that, ordered some new linens and storage stuff. They were waiting in our living room in a huge pile when we arrived, and the first thing I did was make up the bed with the new quilt to see how the colors fit. My verdict is, perfect.

Waking up in this room is always dreamy – no alarm clock. Just the gradual shimmer of daylight bouncing off the walls and the raspy arguing of the Stellar’s jays outside the window.

There are a lot of new features in the works for this site – a huge expansion, of sorts. I’ve got notebooks four feet high that go as far back as 1998 full of drawings and schemas and ideas. I always jotted things down with the idea that I would bring them to fruition when I had the time – and it seems the time is right now. The road trip did me some good, and was just as inspiring as I’d hoped – lucky girl. Josh and I hashed out some details for the Utopian.net hosting service that brings it a huge leap closer to the vision I had for it when I registered the domain in 1999. Slow going, maybe, but I feel like I’m close to achieving some really important goals – and it feels like a hundred of my dreams coming true all at once. It’s tempting to not voice that feeling out loud, to not tempt the fates – but life is good right now, and I’m going to document the hell out of it while I can, revel in all the small goodnesses and just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

I dug into my archives to find this photo – the necklace was a gift from my friend Jenn, and one of my favourite painting subjects ever. You can buy Jenn’s tribal jewelry, online now, and I totally have my eye on a couple new pieces – for painting AND wearing.

Greek religious icon. Figured out how to take pictures with my Coolpix through my Holga lens. Click for more.

He’s got some funny and amazing analyses of current and past United States politics, and his site is quickly becoming one of my favourite blogs. It helps that he hasn’t quite overcome “new blog mania” so he posts about every third hour. And in the interest of full disclosure, I am totally hitting that. Just so you know.

The best part to watch, tho, is his fascination with all bells and whistles like YouTube embedded videos and trackbacks and all the bloggy goodness that new bloggers can take advantage of nowadays that were mere dreams to us whose sites began in, you know, the nineties. Josh also completely overcame the debate over ads on personal/opinion blogs by pointing out the Amazon links he uses. “Look at that! They pop up! Every time I hover over the link! That is SO COOL! I’m going to use this for ALL the books I reference!”

A comprehensive overview of just why it’s a big deal that eight U.S. Attorneys were fired, and the consequences to the United States justice system.

read more | digg story

This one, however, I created to aggregate some of the content I post elsewhere – mostly Flickr photos and Twitter jabberings to start with, deeper integration with Bloglines and del.icio.us as I flesh out the pages and polish things up. About five minutes before I went live with this, I browsed over to Alex’s site and read almost in parallel her thoughts about her recent re-designing and suffered a moment of self-contempt.

See, I have definitely moved more towards making things live without polishing or perfecting, and orienting this playground more toward the writing I do here and the photos I take rather than the web design itself – and that’s great, it keeps things moving, but it also makes me uneasy. Things move so fast that I find myself compromising more and more – the photos on my Flickr site aren’t my best photos, they’re just the photos I’m working on at the moment, usually in their original state (something in me that is very stubborn about posting results of post-processing work I’ve done in Photoshop). Every post to brianna.org since I installed WordPress in 2005 has been a first draft, usually only edited to correct the most egregious grammar errors or bad links. Rarely anymore do I get the satisfaction of feeling as if I have crafted something well, that I have done my best work here.

On the flipside, this site is the most active it has ever been – and I have a new confidence in my own voice that I never had before, simply from posting frequently and not winding myself up about the quality or importance of what I am doing here – trying to stick to the definition of “playground” at its simplest. You don’t strut around the playground in your Sunday school clothes showing off the latest Shakespeare play you’ve memorized. You get your hands dirty, you fall down and skin your knee, you learn how to do a cherry drop off the highest bar after many painful attempts.

Still, after reading Alex’s post and then noticing that Lance has re-designed and unified the brand of his three websites, I hesitated before launching this new ‘face because I knew it wasn’t my best. It didn’t explore anything, it didn’t push any boundaries of the current blog aesthetic, it didn’t teach me anything about Prototype or any of the tools I’m using over at Utopian.net. And even though it collects all the disparate content I’m pushing out into the web on a daily basis, it does it in the most straightforward, bland way possible (did you SEE the feed reader on Lance’s site? Check that shit out!).

But it does meet the most basic requirement of getting all this information together in one place, and it has a transparent flower overlay in the top left hand corner. It’s satisfying like junk food – and I am okay with it. The best part is, it serves as a reminder that next time I want to do better.

Sé keeps asking me why I stopped blogging, and I kept answering “Because I’m not doing anything interesting!”, but that’s a total cop out answer, and one that makes me internally uneasy – like when I hear myself saying I’m bored. They’re trigger phrases that let me know there’s something I’m not addressing.

So I thought I’d write a little bit about what I’ve been doing – we launched the Illustration Friday blog, and it’s hopping! We’re working on a new project that will be revealed soon, one that I’m totally excited about and whose idea was so obvious that we had the fundamentals built in two days. There’s so much in progress – I’m cramming my time with standard work-for-hire development projects and toys I’m building with RSS and AJAX to try and meet the Utopian.net goal of making the web easier for artists. By artists I usually mean “me” because every single idea I have for Utopian.net comes directly from a need I am addressing as a website owner or a question I find myself answering often for our friends and clients.

We don’t sleep much, and we carry on fifteen conversations at once – Josh fills me in on the trail of campaign destruction Karl Rove has been wreaking since he was a fresh-faced lad of 20, then tells me how to figure the cross-weight on a race car. I send him links to pictures of cats.

Our garden seedlings are doing weird things but are nearly ready for the ground, and an explosion of purple vinca and yellow daffodils in our domain has heralded today’s equinox. Even the rose at the deserted sandy edge of the driveway is thriving. Our maple tree is red with blossoms and I can hear the bees buzzing around it even with the windows shut. Buzz is a good keyword to describe the last month of my life.

We punctuate the days with moments in the sun out on the deck – the scrub jays and Stellar’s jays have pilfered through a kilo of peanuts in just a few short days. Fiends. My aunt Tammie leaves tomorrow for Malawi to work at a hospital there for three weeks (she’s the nurse manager of the oncology department of her hospital, and I’m so freaking excited that she’s doing this – it just fits her). I went and saw a movie today, 300, and it was just as full of naked abdomens and Gerard Butler’s Scottish accent as I was promised. These are all the things I have been doing, and as for exploring my feelings – well, I’m buzzed. Spring is humming, Utopian.net is blossoming, I’ve redesigned Brianna.org and am ready to launch it shortly, and I get to spend every single one of these golden days with Josh right with me.

A golden-haired girl who lived in a small white cottage in the mountains had a red parasol.
It was supposed to be for when it rained, or when the sun was too bright, but she carried it everywhere, even on medium days when the clouds were soft in the sky and the sun was pale and far away.

Sometimes the parasol whirled around her like a bird. Sometimes it was content to let her spin it herself.
Sometimes it got angry and threatened to tear itself on the wind, and she held it close and whispered to it until its spiny curves relaxed and the red silk lay softly moving with the breeze.

There were days when they didn’t leave the house at all, but sat together piecing puzzles and arguing softly. Some afternoons they visited the park together, the parasol bobbing in dignified step with the golden-haired girl.

After the fourth afternoon, the Fox knew their habits, and one day decided to introduce himself.

Foxes are crafty. They can make themselves look like anyone, except they can’t change their face. Most people are easily fooled, and this detail does not signify. The little girl paid close attention, however, and if she hadn’t the parasol would have poked her rudely until she noticed that the Fox stood before her, dressed exactly as she was. On his right shoulder was another red parasol, mean and haughty looking. Somehow its points seemed sharper than that of the red parasol on the little girl’s shoulder.

I suppose you think if the girl was in any danger, her parasol would find a way to fly away with her. But that is ridiculous, because parasols can barely fly on their own, relying instead on the element of surprise and a stiff wind.

The little girl wasn’t worried. She knew a few tricks of her own.

She wished the Fox good morning. He lingered like a shadow behind her as she tried to walk past.