Friday night and Saturday morning

It's really spring here, now. Everything is green. I've bought my herbs and tomato plants. Yesterday the weather was absolutely gorgeous and dinner was cooked 100% on the grill -- sausages, asparagus, potatoes and onions (in the big foil packet), artichokes (in the smaller foil packet), wine for me. Delicious. I will be grilling EVERYTHING from now until it gets too hot, which is usually sometime in July. And then I'll grill everything again from mid-September until the time changes in November and it gets too dark. That's just how I roll.

This morning after dropping H at a theater contest, P and I took the dog to the farmer's market. I just started going again after not going for months and months. I get out of the habit in the fall -- this market is only open on Saturday mornings and we can't do anything then during football/marching season because C has contests every Saturday. Last week I came home with eggs, beets, radishes, asparagus, artichokes (the ones we ate last night, actually), strawberries, mushrooms and broccoli. This week it was eggs, strawberries, asparagus, mushrooms, bloody mary mix, pecans and dog shampoo. And a food truck breakfast from The Peached Tortilla -- chorizo-egg taco for P and bacon jam slider for me. So good!

Now I'm back home drinking an iced coffee. It was damp and foggy and grey up until about 5 minutes ago; now it's sunny and gorgeous again. I think it's going to be a good day.

(All of these photos were taken with my Droid 3 phone using the FX Camera app, ToyCam setting, Dreamy Blue and Vignetting (Soft) filters. NOT a sponsored post; it's a free app I've had forever and I love it.)

Oak pollen is bad, m'kay?

Oh, hi! Hello there! I did not mean to disappear for so long, I swear I didn't. It's just that last week my kids were on Spring Break, and this week my mucus membranes are so caked in oak pollen and I am sneezing so often and so violently that it has taken me three hours to type what I've typed here so far. Not much that's supposed to be getting done around here is getting done, you know?

Also I'm still recovering from something very traumatic that happened a couple of weeks ago: P switched us from Time Warner to DirecTV. I know. It's awful. I am the worst person in the world when it comes to change, or learning curves, or things not staying exactly the same forever and ever and ever. I do not like this DirecTV thing, I do not like having to learn it, I do not like how it keeps recording shows I don't want and not recording shows I do want and changing the channel all by itself when I'm watching something I want to watch. I think it might be possessed, or maybe I'm just stupid. I'm pretty much watching all of my TV online now, which I also do not like. Argh.

There are some things I HAVE been liking just fine, though. Like, the bluebonnets are up! I have no photos to show you, alas, because they're all along the highways and I'm bad at taking pictures out the window of a moving car. Especially when I'm the one driving. Plopping your kids down in a field of these suckers for a photo op is kind of a thing down here, but I have never done that with my kids, because hello! HIGHWAY. Moving cars. Death, doom, destruction. Also, bees. *shudder* (Also, my kids are teenagers now and one of them is bigger than me so my kid-plopping days are over before they even began. If you want to hum a few bars of "Sunrise, Sunset" somewhere in here, I won't stop you.)

More things liked recently: two very different books. The first was I Want It Now! by Julie Dawn Cole, the actress who played Veruca Salt in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (that's the one with Gene Wilder, kids)(also known as my favorite movie of all time). The bulk of the book deals with her experiences filming the movie, though she does bookend that bit with the story of her childhood and how she came to be an actress, and the various projects she's done in the 40 or however many years since the movie came out. Really wonderful and fascinating stuff. I kind of fell in love with her. And there are a TON of pictures. I got this book for free on my Kindle Keyboard (it's not free anymore) but went ahead and bought the paperback so I could get a better look at the photos, letters, postcards, etc., of which there are many. However, both the Kindle Keyboard and the paperback are black and white, and some of the photos are actually in color, which I found out by paging through the Kindle version on my laptop. So! If you can find a way to read this sucker on a color screen, do. It's delightful.

The other book I read and loved was Lauren Groff's Arcadia. Oh, how I loved this book. It follows (with some serious time gaps) 50 years in the life of fictional character Bit Stone, from his childhood and adolescence in a '70s hippie commune to his life as a middle-aged father caring for aging parents. Wait, that sounds kind of boring. It probably could be in other hands, but Groff is seriously one of the most lyrical, beautiful writers I've ever read. The whole thing is a bit like a wonderful dream, the kind that comes when you're dozing in the sunshine on a gorgeous balmy day and the sun shining through your eyelids as you nap makes everything look all funny when you open your eyes. It's an absolutely lovely book, but not ultimately a very HAPPY book. More of a melancholy, bittersweet book. Don't let that keep you from reading it, though. I loved it anyway.

In other news, Mark Bittman is confusing.

"This will probably kill you, but here's how you should cook it." Alrighty, then.

(Dear Everyone: Eating meat is not bad for you if your body can't metabolize non-heme iron. In that case, NOT eating meat is really REALLY bad for you. Just saying.)

Okey doke. Back to sneezing and complaining.

The bright side

Okay, well:

1. It's a cold and rainy day.
2. My car battery is dead. Which I found out in the cold and rain!
3. My fibromyalgia is in flare.
4. My cough is back.
5. While making breakfast, I accidentally dumped half a tub of organic baby spinach on the garage floor, OMG. (I was not making breakfast in the garage. That's where we keep the refrigerator. It's a long story.)

HOWEVER:

1. It's the last day of school before Spring Break. Which means I don't have to get up at ridiculous o'clock for NINE WHOLE DAYS.
2. There is literally NOTHING written on my calendar for today and there is nowhere I have to be.
3. I have something like 60 unread books on my Kindle.
4. I have Season 1 of Game of Thrones and Season 3 of True Blood on DVD.
5. My bed, it is so comfy. And I see no compelling reason not to spend most of today in it.

So it all balances out.

Happy Friday.

Spring

It's full-on Spring here and the weather has been mostly fantastic. I missed my chance to take photos of bare branches against the winter-grey sky because now everything is either blooming like crazy or leafing out in a green so bright it hurts your eyes. Or both.

I've been grilling dinner pretty much every night and walking the dog pretty much every morning and sneezing my head off and trying to just BREATHE whenever I get a chance, because from now until late May it's going to be one long thrill ride of band concerts and theater competitions and high school course selections and birthdays and standardized testing and summer camp registration. Whew! I kind of wish I hadn't written all that down.

... breathe ... breathe ... breathe ...

In other news:

• Son C bought a trumpet. Yep. He plays tuba in his high school band, and before that he played it three years in middle school, and he has no desire to switch to trumpet, you know, professionally or whatever. He just wanted one and saw a used one on Craigslist that he could afford. This kid can play any instrument you hand him, so it was no surprise that in less than 24 hours he sounded like he'd been playing for a year. I don't know where he gets this freaky savant-like musical talent. I only know he didn't get it from me.
• Daughter H is getting ready to say goodbye to middle school and hello to high school, which I sort of can't believe. Didn't I just give birth to her a couple of years ago? She already has a dress for the 8th grade formal, which is like a mini-prom, and she's picked out all her classes for next year and her graduation track and everything. So super exciting. H is a planner and she has pretty much her entire life mapped out. I hope she lets me visit her at her summer home in Paris someday. I mean, SOMEONE will have to dust all those Oscar, Emmy and Tony awards, right?
• I've been reading House of Thieves, a short story collection by Kaui Hart Hemmings, and it's pretty great. Hemmings wrote The Descendants, the book on which the movie was based, as an expansion of one of the stories in this collection and boy howdy, I haven't seen the movie or read the book but I can hear George Clooney's voice delivering every line of his character's dialog in the short story. That was some perfect casting, right there. I'm not sure what I'll read next but I am SUPER excited about Lauren Groff's Arcadia, which will be out later this month. I haven't been this excited about a book since Joshilyn Jackson's A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty, which was excellent, by the way.

That's about all that's going on around here. I'm still making granola and eating salads and just trying to breathe.