Tag: wponthego

Summer evening (with kitties)

July 6th, 2016

It’s evening, after swim practice, and our daughter reads on the couch, smelling of swimming pool, while my husband grills chicken and blends fresh pesto. An Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong record plays on the turntable.

Our cat, Tubbles, loves chlorine, kid feet, laying on outstretched legs, and our daughter. She’s got all of those tonight. She has made our whole family happy by loving on our daughter’s feet. We giggled and snapped photos with our devices.

I had a productive day at work. Our house is clean. We ate at twilight on the porch. Our kitty made me laugh.

It’s been a perfect summer evening.
Free falling

July 5th, 2016

Our 10 year-old daughter saved her allowance for weeks last year so that she could buy herself a guitar. I fully supported her effort, and I pitched in by loaning her money when she was short.

She’s been taking lessons for a while now, maybe even for a year, yet she struggles to remember to practice at home. Which made me wonder if she actually likes playing guitar. If she liked it, wouldn’t she want to play? Wouldn’t she not need to remember because she’d be excited about playing?

When I probed in the car on the way to her lesson, “Are you enjoying your guitar? Do you like playing it?”, she ended up in tears. She sobbed that she feels like she’s not practicing enough, that she does want to play and doesn’t know why she isn’t remembering.

“Are you having fun? You probably won’t be motivated to play if it’s not fun. Are there things you’d like to learn that you’re not learning at lessons?”

She cried, feeling bad about whatever she was thinking. I squeezed her knee. “I just don’t really like some of the songs I’m learning,” she said. She doesn’t recognize a lot of them — she’d never heard them before her teacher taught her.

“That’s ok!” I said. “You can tell Greg what you want to learn and he’ll be happy to teach you, you know he will. What do you want to learn? Do you want to learn how to tune your guitar?”

She nodded and sniffed, “Yes.”

“Cool. Ask him, he’ll show you. He loves teaching you.” Taylor Swift sang in the background on the car radio. “What about any songs?” I waited for her favorite pop title of the day.

She wiped her eyes. “Free Falling,” she said.

I looked sideways at her as I drove. “The Tom Petty song?”

“Yes! I love the guitar in that song.”

We parked and she got her guitar out of the trunk. She was smiling now. “I want to learn how to tune my guitar, but I’d rather learn Free Falling.”

She and Greg went back into the lesson room, and I slumped into the guitar shop couch. I pulled out my phone to catch up some work and became absorbed in a discussion when I heard the opening riff from Free Falling drift out from the back of the shop. Then her laughter as Greg said goofy stuff to help her learn.

I stopped working to listen. She’s in the guitar shop lesson room right now, playing the opening to Free Falling.
Die aphids!

July 4th, 2016

I think I may be deriving too much pleasure from finding aphid corpses all over my milkweed plants. But it is so satisfying to squirt them with soapy water, then come back the next day to find desiccated aphid bodies where plump, orange life-suckers once were.

Killing aphids may be the highlight of my mornings now. Today I went out in quite a getup: purple workout clothes, green rubber boots, a flowery coffee cup in one hand, and a plastic spray bottle filled with sudsy water in the other. I giggled as I squirted aphids, thinking of my friend J when she played out a similar attack on hornets. She used RAID and screamed a battle cry, “Die MoFos!* ” as she lunged in with the killing spray. (*cleaned up for public reading). She’s my hero.

The milkweed is for the caterpillars. Aphids beware.
Mobile blogging

July 3rd, 2016

Mobile is the future of the web. Some folks live on the Internet exclusively through their mobile devices these days, and more are getting comfortable checking email, browsing for restaurants, and consuming content on their tablets and phones than ever before.

So of course, I figured I should get on board too. I like to set challenges for myself to keep blogging fun and new, and to inspire me to keep publishing. My newest blogging project is to publish exclusively from the mobile WordPress app for one month. I started on the train to the airport in Vienna, and since then I’ve only been posting from my phone.

It’s an interesting experience. I’ve noticed I write differently depending on the device I’m using. Pen and paper feels contemplative and goes deeper into my imagination or psyche. On the laptop, I write more businessy type posts. In fact, if I want to write about career or work, I don’t use paper at all – I go straight for the keyboard. Creative writing requires ink.

Mobile writing is immediate. I can take it anywhere. Right now I sit alone in the car in the aquatic center parking lot on an early Sunday morning. Rain dribbles down the windshield, Justin Bieber is on the radio, and I feel an immense satisfaction from the tapping sound of my phone keyboard. I’m pretty proud because for years I have been a single finger typer on my phone. As of three days into this project, though, I transitioned to turning my phone sideways so I can use my thumbs, and I can now use both hands.

It’s the small victories.

Posts published via mobile will be tagged wponthego.
Summer with Windows open

July 2nd, 2016

It’s Saturday morning, 7:30. Early for a weekend day. I’ve already been to the grocery store and started laundry. My husband and daughter are en route to a swim meet, our near-teenaged son is still sleeping, and the kitties are lying in sunbeams, shedding fur in clumps now that summer is here.

I’m sitting in the lounge chair by our front windows, green smoothie on the sill, my bare feet up on the chaise cushion. Birds trill, insects buzz, and Bob Marley croons softly from the record my husband left spinning for me.

The early summer air is cool and fresh. It smells like green leaves, hay, and sunshine. Sunlight stretches across the garden. The butterfly plants — red, orange, white, and purple coneflowers — are already in full sun; the herb garden is in the shade of our neighbor’s dogwood. The morning shadows are long, but they’ll soon shorten.

In the time it took me to type the previous paragraph, the sun rose enough to drench the basil in light. Happily, our basil is thriving. We’ve already made two batches of homemade pesto this summer, and I bought pine nuts today so we can make more. We started in with the basil gin smashes last night as well, and I use the basil in a basic chick pea salad that’s been my staple lunch this week (chicks peas, lemon juice, olive oil, basil, salt). We will still have basil to spare, though. If you have favorite basil uses, please send them my way.

Summer Saturday mornings are lovely. Especially when enjoyed sitting by an open window with a soundtrack of reggae and birdsong. The day stretches before me. It will probably be filled cutting grass, pulling weeds, work I need to catch up on, laundry, heat and strong sun. Maybe a trip to the nursery to find some annuals to fill gaps in the garden.

But for now, it’s soft and cool, nothing but leisure time for me to practice writing blog posts on my phone.*

*More to come.
Morning in the garden

July 1st, 2016

When I left for WordCamp Europe, our garden was pregnant with plump flower buds: echinacea, milkweed, hydrangea. While I walked the streets of Vienna, admiring the red geraniums that spilled from window boxes, I wondered how my flowers at home were doing. We can never get our flower boxes looking as good as the ones I saw in Vienna, but that’s ok. I have my whole life to keep tinkering.

It was dark when I arrived home after 24 hours in trains, airplanes, airports, and cabs, but not so dark I couldn’t see the outline of a new purple coneflower when I dragged my suitcase into the garage.

Every morning since I’ve gotten home, I make a smoothie*, walk downstairs to the garage, slip my feet into green rubber boots, and walk out into the dewy grass. I inspect the milkweed, parsley, rue, and passionflower for caterpillars (none yet) and check out the progress of all the flower buds. I deadhead a few withered blossoms. Sip my smoothie. Listen to birds trill. Nobody in the neighborhood is outside. I have it all to myself.

I keep trying to get a good photo for y’all but I’ve had zero luck. Despite digging close to 200 holes and putting a plant in each one, there are still large open spaces in the beds. I know they’ll eventually fill in, but for now the garden is young and I just have to accept that. My husband said we can take our daughter to pick out some annuals this weekend to plunk them in the open spaces. She will be very excited.

Morning in the garden is my favorite way to start the day: beautiful, serene, full of life.

*For the smoothie-lovers, my smoothie usually has kale, banana, walnuts, flax seeds, frozen pineapple, frozen strawberries (or peaches or mangos), and pineapple juice.

Tag: wponthego

Summer evening (with kitties)

Free falling﻿

Die aphids!

Mobile blogging﻿

Summer with Windows open

Morning in the garden

Free falling

Mobile blogging