I've been extremely busy these days, partially just from a perfect storm of events at work (movement! events! ideas! presentations!) and partially from spending much of my extra time with my friend Z, who is here from New York for a few weeks. The blog has been too far down on my list of things I've gotten to, but it's been foremost in my mind. It's a time of great personal activity, and, as far I as understand from Caroline Casey (http://www.visionaryactivism.com/), it's a time of great astrological and astronomical events as well. I can't remember them all, but yesterday we just got of the most recent Mercury retrograde (Mar 30 to April 23), and I'm looking forward to some successful communication.
Watching those Great 70's & 80's Movies
Lately, I've been in the mood to watch some of those great movies of the late 70's and/or early 80's: the first summer blockbusters, the Spielberg moments I grew up with: ET, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jaws. I watched Close Encounters just last week and it was spectacular - the scene when Richard Dreyfuss' character first encounters the spaceship, and the lights and railroad crossing and even gravity go all a-hooey. And it freaks him out. It's such a good scene, and so masterfully directed. You can feel how well the story is being told even as you are captivated.
Of course, there's a other classic films of that era which don't have that same summer masterful blockbuster-y touch but are still classics, real classics: War Games, Tootsie, Grease, Back to the Future, the Blues Brothers, Risky Business, Footloose (actually, it holds up, really), and, of course, the first (and only real) Star Wars Trilogy. You can't be the age I was when those films came out - and be female - and not count Han Solo as one of your first loves. I mean, I loved that guy. And then he was also Indiana Jones, who of course is one of the best characters who has ever existed; Raiders of the Lost Ark is basically, like Annie Hall (which, incidentally, was only four years earlier, but from a totally different era) a perfect film.
I don't have anything special to say about these films, except they are great, and if you haven't watched them recently, you should watch at least a few of them. No matter whether you grew up with them or not, they are part of the collective culture, and have shaped our world.
Garden Update
One of the worst things about being very busy is the need to properly prioritize your tasks. When there's not much time to do things, you want to do things in the right order, to try and get as much done as possible. But the garden is a hard one, because the very nature of...well, nature...requires that certain things - like planting, harvesting, etc - happen at certain times, or it doesn't work. I can't put off planting the flowers in the garden for too many Sundays, or it will be too late. So, even though I had to work today, it was Easter Sunday and only one week from May, which is way the end of planting season, so I made some time to stick those seeds into the dirt.
I'm experimenting. Last year was the first year of the herb garden, so this year I'm starting to see what died off and what should have been trimmed back (and looks like it's going to die off) and what self-sowed and popped up again, and what seems to just have bounced back when it looked mostly dead, like the mint, or certainly dead, like the lemon verbena. I don't know what I am doing so I have some books on herbs and I try and go by the scanty advice they give you. I've discovered that, although you would think that it'd be easy to write down how to take care of an herb, the directions I stumble across in most books are inexplicably vague, and I'm doing the best I can but not all herbs have equally thrived. The sage is bushy and full, the thyme as well, the rosemary is finally branching out and the yarrow is just about to turn yellow.
There's also the fun of trying new things, of looking at a seed package, of being attracted to the picture (I used ones that have sketches on the front, prettily watercolored in), of reading the description and deciding to try it. I plant the seeds, I label the pots (because I have no idea what the seedlings are going to look lie), and I shrug and wait. It's all very mysterious. Sometimes things grow, and sometimes they don't. It's cold and foggy sometimes, or we can let the seeds dry out (accidentally), or there's something you don't even know you didn't go in terms of preparing the soil or drainage. Those little fiddly bits make gardening seem more like a science than an art, and those details get me down. I look for seed packages that suggest "this plant thrives on neglect" or "trim back once a year and you'll be delighted by ____." Those feel reassuring.
Eureka!
I went to Eureka - a town up in Humboldt, about five hours north of here - last weekend, for my godson's first birthday. It's a bit of a long haul, especially alone (which I was) but it's quite a lovely drive, especially once you get up past Willits, where the mountains roll along and the mists swirl in the shade of the giant trees, disappear in the slanting sunlight. You can take an optional scenic route, up near the northern section, called Avenue of the Giants, which used to be the old Highway 101 - just a two-laner now - and drive slowly under and in between (and, in some cases, through: see Leggett, home of the BEST of the Drive Thru Trees!) the ancient redwoods. It can't be beat.
I've got more Eureka to describe, but I've found I'm out of time. True to the spontaneous nature of blogging, I'll go ahead and leave this teaser here, as a way of committing to get back to the blog as soon as I can.
Happy Easter, if that is your thing.
Watching those Great 70's & 80's Movies
Lately, I've been in the mood to watch some of those great movies of the late 70's and/or early 80's: the first summer blockbusters, the Spielberg moments I grew up with: ET, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jaws. I watched Close Encounters just last week and it was spectacular - the scene when Richard Dreyfuss' character first encounters the spaceship, and the lights and railroad crossing and even gravity go all a-hooey. And it freaks him out. It's such a good scene, and so masterfully directed. You can feel how well the story is being told even as you are captivated.
Of course, there's a other classic films of that era which don't have that same summer masterful blockbuster-y touch but are still classics, real classics: War Games, Tootsie, Grease, Back to the Future, the Blues Brothers, Risky Business, Footloose (actually, it holds up, really), and, of course, the first (and only real) Star Wars Trilogy. You can't be the age I was when those films came out - and be female - and not count Han Solo as one of your first loves. I mean, I loved that guy. And then he was also Indiana Jones, who of course is one of the best characters who has ever existed; Raiders of the Lost Ark is basically, like Annie Hall (which, incidentally, was only four years earlier, but from a totally different era) a perfect film.
I don't have anything special to say about these films, except they are great, and if you haven't watched them recently, you should watch at least a few of them. No matter whether you grew up with them or not, they are part of the collective culture, and have shaped our world.
Garden Update
One of the worst things about being very busy is the need to properly prioritize your tasks. When there's not much time to do things, you want to do things in the right order, to try and get as much done as possible. But the garden is a hard one, because the very nature of...well, nature...requires that certain things - like planting, harvesting, etc - happen at certain times, or it doesn't work. I can't put off planting the flowers in the garden for too many Sundays, or it will be too late. So, even though I had to work today, it was Easter Sunday and only one week from May, which is way the end of planting season, so I made some time to stick those seeds into the dirt.
I'm experimenting. Last year was the first year of the herb garden, so this year I'm starting to see what died off and what should have been trimmed back (and looks like it's going to die off) and what self-sowed and popped up again, and what seems to just have bounced back when it looked mostly dead, like the mint, or certainly dead, like the lemon verbena. I don't know what I am doing so I have some books on herbs and I try and go by the scanty advice they give you. I've discovered that, although you would think that it'd be easy to write down how to take care of an herb, the directions I stumble across in most books are inexplicably vague, and I'm doing the best I can but not all herbs have equally thrived. The sage is bushy and full, the thyme as well, the rosemary is finally branching out and the yarrow is just about to turn yellow.
There's also the fun of trying new things, of looking at a seed package, of being attracted to the picture (I used ones that have sketches on the front, prettily watercolored in), of reading the description and deciding to try it. I plant the seeds, I label the pots (because I have no idea what the seedlings are going to look lie), and I shrug and wait. It's all very mysterious. Sometimes things grow, and sometimes they don't. It's cold and foggy sometimes, or we can let the seeds dry out (accidentally), or there's something you don't even know you didn't go in terms of preparing the soil or drainage. Those little fiddly bits make gardening seem more like a science than an art, and those details get me down. I look for seed packages that suggest "this plant thrives on neglect" or "trim back once a year and you'll be delighted by ____." Those feel reassuring.
Eureka!
I went to Eureka - a town up in Humboldt, about five hours north of here - last weekend, for my godson's first birthday. It's a bit of a long haul, especially alone (which I was) but it's quite a lovely drive, especially once you get up past Willits, where the mountains roll along and the mists swirl in the shade of the giant trees, disappear in the slanting sunlight. You can take an optional scenic route, up near the northern section, called Avenue of the Giants, which used to be the old Highway 101 - just a two-laner now - and drive slowly under and in between (and, in some cases, through: see Leggett, home of the BEST of the Drive Thru Trees!) the ancient redwoods. It can't be beat.
I've got more Eureka to describe, but I've found I'm out of time. True to the spontaneous nature of blogging, I'll go ahead and leave this teaser here, as a way of committing to get back to the blog as soon as I can.
Happy Easter, if that is your thing.
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