Beef jerky knees and my ever-growing stupidity

Finals are next week and I should be building my study guides and then studying my face off but instead I'm eating cookies and banging around on the blog.

For you. This is all for you.

OK OK OK, it's also for me.

My brains need a break from ALL GROWING ALL THE TIME.

I mean, yes, I fucking love growing food and I love the garden and YAY I got a gig working in the school's greenhouses as a student assistant until I finish my degree so I'll be growing food there, too, but...um...what about let's not talk about growing stuff for a minute?

What about let's talk about me giving up one bone crushing activity and then taking up another?

Yeah - that's a fun exercise in "How is Finny being stupid today?".

So - I have, thanks to some strategic encouragement from Bubba, put my toe into the knee scraping, flesh ripping fun water of mountain biking.

Because I obviously don't do enough things to injure myself and I obviously also need to be learning new things and testing my body's abilities at all times because the stress of my daily life of WHAT THE HELL HAVE I DONE isn't enough.

Let's throw some near certain bodily injury and yet another expensive and time consuming hobby on top of that.

I should probably seek some sort of professional brain help, but instead I'm settling for the professional help of our bike mechanic.

They seem pretty profesh, anyway.

So, we'll see where that takes us. So far I've had one shin devoured by a flesh-eating pedal, a thumb stabbed by an errant pine cone, a back bruise resulting from a saddle stabbing, I've lost my virginity 3 more times thanks to the malicious advances of the Specialized Safire's rapey stock saddle and my right knee looks like beef jerky.

Spicy or teriyaki? I can't decide.

Rapist bike

The tasty Mojo. 

Otherwise, though, I'm no worse for wear and Bubba assures me that once he's back on his feet, we'll ride together and oh the wonderful places we'll go and shit, as soon as he doesn't have two broken ribs, a dislocated wrist (now relocated!) and a torn meniscus thanks to his own adventures in mountain biking.

*Sigh*

I fear for us.

In other news - I've planted pumpkins and spaghetti squash in the front yard because I ran out of space in the garden and people who know me too well (hi neighbors!) dropped off some wayward plants that needed good homes and oh you don't want them to die do you?

Like I said - they know me too well. And also I ended up talking about growing food even though I said that I wasn't going to.

WHAT IS MY PROBLEM and goodnight.

Yeah, so about Crossfit...

Fuck Crossfit.

Yes, I realize that by saying that I'm putting myself opposite from some VERY fit people, but after hyper extending one big toe, resting off my feet (like, no running either which BLEW) for a month and then going back only to hyper extend the other big toe - fuck Crossfit.

I can't be going to a class where I'm to do a number of exercises that I have to modify to the point of uselessness lest I end up with a You're Going To Have To Sit Out For At Least A Month injury.

I'm over it. Even though I was seeing marked physical improvements (Why, is that an AB I see emerging?  YES IT IS WHOA.) and felt stronger by the day - I'm over it.

I mean, what's the use of having a few emerging abs and upper body strength if you're afraid of stepping off of a curb at an odd angle and accidentally bending your forefoot *just* a tad too far and triggering The Hell Pain and then crying in the street like a pussy girl?

There's no use and that would just look odd: an apparently able bodied woman mincing around shrinking from things like two step staircases and sidewalk curbs.

Also, no running which is No.

I need to run. Otherwise The Crazy happens.

But I was making progress on my pull-ups. Like, I was moving to a less resistant band and able to do more at a time and just basically not just hanging there all desperate and pathetic trying to yard my poor bod up toward the bar.

And my push-ups were getting stronger.

And my abs were starting to vaguely, in the right light and if I hadn't eaten anything yet and wasn't all bloated from a night of gin martinis with extra olives - look like abs. 

What about all of that? No more Crossfit meant probably no more of that stuff too and...sad.

But still, I decided after last month's Oh Fuck Now The Other Toe's Busted injury resulting from walking push ups (there's a gem exercise by the way no thank you) and two months spent favoring the other toe, that I was going to do an extreme Crossfit "modification".

I was going to do it at home.

Myself.

Without the looming fear that I'd walk in to the prison gym and the day's workout was going to involve all manner of lungey toe-bendy movements. Hi, Mountain Climbers, Burpees and Olympic Lift Splits plus also walking lunges and lots of other too-much-toe-bendy-activities.

Instead, I was going to finally - and without injury hopefully - train myself to do a few things that I've never in my whole life been able to do or thought I'd ever be able to do but really want to do like a proper pull-up and a solid number of consistently top form guy push-ups. Plus, I feel like I should be able to dead hang without slipping weak-fingered and shouldered off the bar after 15 seconds.

This is what I was hoping to get out of Crossfit and I was sorta on my way to doing that when I managed to bust up both of my big toes doing a bunch of other shit that I don't care to work on. I mean, I can do a fucking lunge - I don't need to be doing them to my own detriment with a heavy bar over my head thankssomuch.

Another benefit of the home workout that we call HomePoop because Bubba called Crossfit, "CrossPoop", and now I'm at home doing it so you see how this happened, is that I get to use a bunch of equipment that was just hanging around not being used for its expressed purpose meanwhile taking up space in our not spacious garage.

So, now I go out to our rickety ass garage three mornings a week after running with the dog for a warm up and do a few reps of  bike sprints on the trainer-mounted Boss Lady, a boatload of sit ups on the Abmat and then either 60 pull-ups, push-ups or 3 minutes of dead hangs.

I guess now she's Boss Lady of the garage.

I'm sorta ashamed of myself for buying one of these things, but at least my back will be happy and maybe one day I will have an official ab to go with my mat. That'd be swell.

Our hangboard. One day I will be able to do a legit pull-up on this thing. I'm just not saying which day.

Because I've decided I'm a trainer of myself.

Which is probably a bad way to go since I'm no qualified professional personal trainer, but I figure if I managed to train my slow dead ass to run four half marathons, too many 10Ks and 5Ks to count, a few multisport events and I speedworked and fartleked my way to sub-60 10Ks and sub-30 5Ks, then surely I can train my body to do a single unassisted pull-up and a series of solid and real push-ups.

If nothing else, I can train my body to hang like a dead hog's carcass for a minute at a time.

Because that's actually a useful proficiency in the event that you're hanging off of a cliff or the rungs of a helicopter or whatever.

Seriously though - when I see movies where some dude is clinging with the last of his finger strength to the crumbling edge of the cliff and people are all, "Why doesn't he just pull himself up?" and shit, all I'm thinking is that I'd have fallen off ages ago because not only can I not *just pull myself up*, I can't even hang there like a useless mass long enough to cry for help with any chance of anyone coming to my rescue.

Pathetic.

Here's to the small hope that one day I'll be able to cling to a cliff's edge long enough for someone to come rescue my ass because it's going to take me a long time to bag that first pull-up.

Remember how I'm a garden psycho? Also - tell who sent this awesome thing.

I realize the irony.

I blab for a hundred years on this blog about the garden. Gardenblahblahblah I believe we started calling it, you and I.

And then I decide that - HEY! Let's make this garden bullshit all official and I quit my normal person job, start a garden type business, go back to school for a horticulture degree and then radio silence on the gardenblahblahblah.

Um? Hullooo? What's with the garden then?

Yeah - the garden, my garden, is totally IN for the summer. And I think you know, but I'll say it once for any new people here (HI NEW PEOPLE! Put your drinks on coasters, you fucking animals.) that when I say garden I mean the vegetable one.

The rest of the plants on my property, while they may be lovely and serve special purposes like making food on a perennial basis (artichokes, rhubarb, cherries, apples, lemons, limes, kumquats, etc forever) or bringing in beneficial insects or whatever - my real psychoness is the vegetable garden.

I fucking love to grow vegetables. That's true. Particularly the warm season ones.

And the warm season vegetable garden is SO IN.

BRING IT. Oh. It's here.

National Pickling cucumber because obviously. And all those spring greens in back that are, as we speak, burning to a crisp in the suddenly scorching May sun yay.

One of two Toma Verde tomatillos because you know.

Silver Cloud Cannellini beans because we eat a lot of them and also because WHAT IF I COULD GROW THEM MYSELF? 

The spring greens are really nice and also really on their way out. Sad.

A Small Shining Light watermelon for squaring because of our ongoing desire for food in square shapes. 

Just a volunteer cilantro doing what all cilantro does. BOLT. Jerk.

A Better Boy Tomato because ALWAYS.

A Jaune Flamme tomato because as of last year ALWAYS.

A Paul Robeson tomato because Love Apple Farms says it tastes fancy and I believe them so we'll just see about that.

Uh...have you see the random poppy field that sprung up in front of my beehive? Because it's awesome.

Right, OK - that last picture is not one of the I FUCKING LOVE IT warm season vegetable garden, but I will say that it for sure falls into the I FUCKING LOVE IT category because just look at this shit:

Hi! We're just going to be awesome over here. Hope you don't mind.

And when you sit at the beehive being all ARE THE BEES OK? YES. then you'll have this nice view.

Even when you're standing back there under the tree, the view is still pretty kickass.

And then the bees have this badass runway so they'll never forget where home is.

It's like a big badass banner that's all, "HEY BEES! Home is here. Come home. NO SWARMING."

So yeah, it's good times in the vegetable garden and in the bees' poppy field.

But because I've been so shitty about Gardenblahblahblahing, you get extra double lucky bonus garden love:

The grapes are all OH RIGHT IT'S YEAR THREE LET'S GROW OUR FUCKING FACES OFF. Which is nice.

I remembered to sow sweet peas in the fall, so that's happening 24/7 now. 

I shall braid garlic this year. That is my solemn vow.

GRAPES ARE YES.

This probably doesn't seem all that impressive, but the kumquats are putting on a lot of new growth.

Future cocktails.

Sweet peas...

And sweet peas...

And sweet peas some more...

And sweet peas in the neighborly vases that my neighborly neighbor made and hung in the doorway of our neighborly dutch gate.

Artichoke forts are Jada's new favorite thing. Because of the sudden hotness and the super hugeness of the artichokes.

The ladybeetles are on the fucking CASE around here. Love that.

Rocket is in on the fort making. She's such a copycat. CAT HA GET IT YES SORRY.

Hops. Did I tell you I was growing hops? I am. We are hopheads. Make yer jokes.

More poppies. In the front yard meadow. Just because.

A shitastic photo of what are actually very pretty bush anemones. Or something like that.

There are so many artichokes OH MY GOD SAVE US ALL. Also, get butter and garlic.

Peas. They are going to die a quick scorchy death in the heat wave we're having, so I must eat them imediatemente.

So yeah. All of those photos are now out of date because it's been wicked blasting sunuvabitching hot already even though it's barely May and the plants have shot up another foot in the process. Which is cool with me because I haven't had a homegrown fresh tomato (or any other fresh tomato because who's eating that shitshow at the grocery store? Not I.) since 2012 and I'm ready to shove them in my face.

OH! And here's a random late-to-the-game plea:

Someone please tell me who sent this awesome time lapse camera that is, as we speak, documenting the seed to seed life of my favorite tomato.

It just showed up at my house last year and I don't know who sent it even though I've interrogated all of the likely subjects and they're not copping to it.

I swear - it's awesome. I won't hate you or call the cops for your stalking! Mostly I will thank you and then probably apologize that I'm using it for something as absurd as chronicling the life of a tomato instead of something more glamorous like chronicling the life of an Idontknowhat.

A kitten? I bet you'd want to see a kitten. Everyone fucking loves cats, which I don't get. Even though I have a cat. BUT WHATEVER - this is about the camera. If you sent it to me, I'm willing to overlook the fact that you super sleuthed my home address and that creeps me the fuck out and just say thank you and VIRTUAL HIGH FIVE and such.

Also, maybe I'll send you some canned tomatoes? Whatever. We'll work it out. Just come clean.

Oh. So that's what bees are supposed to do.

You perhaps remember my bee adventures of yore. If not, please avail yourself of my retelling and also the horrific video in which I am hilarious in most every sense of the word.

Now, anyway. Now it seems hilarious in the funny way, but I can tell you 100% for sure that when this happened I was only hilarious in the crazy SOMEONE RESTRAIN ME way.

Good times.

And I've thought back many times since to the innocent How To Hive Your Bees flyer that came with my package bees wondering who gets to have a hive install like the one they so whimsically outline in the flyer.

It even says, "Enjoy your hive!" at the end as though you just assembled a dollhouse rather than just having wrestled 10,000 stinging insects and their flighty lady leader into a box.

Seemed a little off to me, is what I'm saying. And kinda mean, frankly. Like they were off in Perfectly Behaved Bee Land being all, "What do you mean you have bees swarming all over your yard and face? We've never heard of *that* happening. You must have done something stupid."

Though they'd have been right. I did do many somethings stupid that first time. And then I did some other stupid stuff with the bees and then, last week, I did it all right.

Or so it would seem based on the very orderly and well behaved manner of my new package of bees.

I LOVE THESE FREAKIN' BEES.

Seriously.

They're so damn mellow that using a smoker is, so far anyway, totally optional. Even when wearing flip flops and shorts and bare hands like was necessary today because it's 92 degrees in April WHAT THE FUCK. 

These super well behaved angel bees went into their hive without error and emerged single file in the early morning hours to commence pollen harvesting. No extreme crowding at the small entry in the entrance reducer (fancy name for the stick with a hole in it that blocks out all but enough space for a few bees at a time), no swarming all over the fence or stinging the dog or buzzing Bubba as he went about his business in the garage and no taking years off of my life by acting like a bunch of dive bombing psychos.

And then today I went in there to replace the one frame that I had to leave out when I installed the package to make room for queen and found that - yay - the queen has been released from her cage, they're drawing out comb and would you effing look at that they're storing nectar and pollen like proper ladies.

Also, they made this where the 10th frame was supposed to be, so apparently they're about this whole hive building thing.

Which I like. TONS.

I'm leaving it out there so they can reharvest all the nectar they stored away. Which is why it's sitting there all perched against the hive weird. If it's not all melted down the side when they're done, I can save it and maybe make some more lip balm out of it or something.

I'm just excited that in an effort to start my hive anew this year that I didn't take an additional 10 years off of my life in the process. Because that first hive install and ensuing madness knocked me back a decade at least.

Brains melting. Bees hived.

It used to be that I'd have all of these random rants or sometimes more constructive things sort of banging around in the empty space in my head so that when I'd sit down to write a blog post, I'd just tap into that empty banging space (whoa, what?) and pour it out onto the keyboard.

BAM - Blog post. Plus swearing and alienating of different ethnic groups and also people who decorate their houses for the holidays as though they have a severe mental deficiency.

Now though, no empty space remains. I mean - hardly anyway.

My brains are so filled with STUDY FOR ALL OF THESE TESTS SO THAT WE CAN CONTINUE OUR STRAIGHT A GETTING STREAK and WORK ON THAT BUSINESS and TAKE CARE OF THE PLANTS and Hey try to spend some time with the lovely Bubba and let's go running and...yeah - the empty space is no more.

So, when I sit down to write a blog post, I am drawing blanks.

For reals.

Like where my brain goes..."Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh...what are we doing here? Shouldn't we be studying?" and then I say out loud (because I'm that person now who talks to herself and inanimate objects and also NPR like I'm an old woman), "Yeah. I need to study." and then I don't blog.

And I hate that.

So, rather than not blog because what I'm going to write about isn't all pre-crafted out in my mind, I'm going to try something new.

That something new being just the first thing that pops into my head.

So, yeah - let's see how this goes...

I hived my new package of bees yesterday and the horrors of previous bee installs did not recur.

OH THANK YOU SERIOUSLY.

I had the install just lingering out there at the end of a busy weekend and, I'm not going to lie to you people, I was semi-dreading it.

For the first time in probably months, I was going to spend the day of Sunday with Bubba just doing whatever it was we used to do on our weekends when I hadn't filled my days with studying and garden coaching and growing a billion plants and things.

Not that I don't love those things - I do - but it hasn't left a lot of time for Bubba and I to piss away hours in the garage and riding bikes to tacos and things.

And I really like those things. And also Bubba. He's very cute and makes good jokes at other people's expense which I enjoy muchly.

So anyway, at the end of this weekend that was half BUSY and half making cruel jokes, I was to install this buzzing package of bees and it was sort of stressing me out because of the way I left the beehive last year.

Specifically, shit did not end well.

And then over the summer, after my hive was empty and sad for a few months, I cleaned all of the comb off of all of the frames and put the whole hive away where it couldn't remind me of my shame every time I went to the garden.

But I totally missed my buzzers.

Like, the garden seemed sorta lonely without them and I felt like a failure and lots of other fun emotions that I won't go into so I totally went ahead and ordered another bee package over the winter while we were sitting in the cabin in Steamboat.

Because isn't that what everyone does on a ski vacation - order bees?

Knew it.

Anyway, they arrived on Friday and then sat in my kitchen buzzing up a fucking storm for a few days so that Bubba could get nice and nervous about what if 10,000 bees get loose in the house and hey I think I'm going on an all day bike ride tomorrow like last time you did this. It was kinda not the best for him, frankly.

"KEEP AWAY FROM BUBBA LEST HE SWELL UP"

And then, after zero getting loose in the house and a certain amount of preparation wherein I hunted about for marshmallow to jam in the queen's cage, I set out to install the hive during the hottest day of the year so far.

Thanks for that, Mother Nature. You're a peach.

Thankfully, it took all of 10 minutes to get rigged up with the camera and get the bees installed in the hive so that I could remove the sweat-makingest garment in all of fabric and textiles - the coated polyester beekeeper's jacket and veil.

Sweet fucking shit, friends, I should wear THAT next time we're skiing -54 temps. I'd probably break a sweat.

But the bees are hived and the queen is safe in her candy-stuffed cage awaiting the diligent rescue courtesy of her new dedicated workers and I can take a break from playing about in that soul-sucking jacket during what is turning out to be Heat Wave #1 of 2013.

Welcome home, bees. Please enjoy your poppy forest and the sweaty woman lingering nearby.

In April.

Dudes. It's April and it's 90 degrees. That is not right. Global warming is upon us. I must make SO much of The Best Iced Tea Ever and then sit in the house and try not to think about how 3/4 of my labs this week have me working in the greenhouse at school.

OH THAT SOUNDS FUN NO.



So - does this new approach work OK or do I need to go back to trying to craft coherent rants and stories? I suspect that it's fine and seems a lot like my old ways of just spilling my brains out onto the keyboard and if I hadn't said anything you'd have been all, "This post seems like all of her other posts except maybe not *as good* because clearly she's exhausted and we should all just cut her a break and then ship her a case of gin." and I'll take that, too.

I forgot how to spring break

Is it still called spring break when you study, write papers and finish school projects ahead of schedule because Oh yay! I have a week off so I can get all of this shit done so that when classes resume I won't have to choose between sleeping and showering?

I don't think that it is.

I think it's called something else, but no one has come up with the Something Else name for the spring break that returning students take.

Probably because it would be something super boring like Paper Writing Week.

See - boring.

Anyway, what I'm saying is that I am officially old and lame now and my week of writing papers and doing schoolwork was in no way as fun as a week spent drunk and topless in Key West with only a yellow thong covering my nethers while I scorched my buns out snorkeling.

Man, did I used to be fun.

I daresay that I am now less so. But I still had drinks! Cocktails are oh so important when spending a week doing schoolwork. And going back to Crossfit after being off for a month thanks to a sunuvabitching foot injury resulting from said Crossfit.

I've told you about how Crossfit is terrifying. It is. Particularly at 6am because you're barely awake and yet you're forcing your body to exercise well beyond its limits in a loud scary prison-style gym among a sea of ungodly fit people.

But it's also a bit treacherous and the reality is that you can get hurt. Now, I'm not saying I was Call The Attorney hurt, but rather that my enthusiasm for deeeeeeeeeeep walking lunges was perhaps tragically misplaced and in the future I will be extra careful not to get toooooooooooo enthusiastic about my movements lest I hyper extend anything else.

Which is what I did to my big toe back in January. I hyper extended it by lunging like a loon. I have learned that toes do not like to be bent at extreme angles before being properly stretched.

This is a fact noted indelibly on my brains since I just had to spend a month doing nothing. Like - off the feet with one foot elevated whenever possible reciting the RICE methodology except where C is for Cocktail rather than Compression because obviously.

No running. No Crossfit. No wearing my cushionless but beloved Vans or awesome work boots. No excess standing about or walking unless absolutely necessary or in the event of a supremely awesome backcountry ski trip.

Whatever - I lived. And last week I went back to Crossfit during my Paper Writing Week after being off of the stuff for a solid month.

I think it hurt worse to go back to Crossfit after taking a month off than it did to hyper extend my big toe.

Seriously.

I barely moved my arms for two days afterward and didn't even make it to another class last week due to said immobility.

Pathetic.

I managed to make it to Crossfit this morning, which was a feat at 6am, but my dedication was met with none other than one of the "Girls" workouts.

They have workouts named after people. I don't know who these people are or why they have horrible workouts named after them. I also don't care, so no reason to tell me. The thing I've come to learn is that any workout with a girl's name, like NICOLE for instance, is awful. It's exhausting, extremely difficult and typically involves doing as many awful somethings as you possibly can in an extensive period of time.

Today we did "Nicole" and the awful somethings were pull-ups. Like, do as many pull-ups as you can in 20 minutes and, oh by the way, when your weakening fingers slide off of the bar and you fall to the ground in a heap because you've lost all strength in your upper body - go for a 400M run and come back and try some more. Repeat until the forever-taking buzzer goes off in 20 minutes.

GEE THAT SOUNDS LIKE FUN LET'S DO IT NO.

On the up side, the coach evaluated my pull-ups today and decided that I need to start using a band with less resistance because I was doing my pull-ups "too easily".

Ridiculous. It is simply impossible to ever describe pull-ups as easy. They are the devil's own exercise and I have the muscle-crushing soreness to prove it.

But I am also very self-involved so I will of course be trying this band with less resistance because I want to be able to do pull-ups with the cool kids someday and I think this is the only way to get there. Unless I'm too sore tomorrow to ever lift anything again, much less my own entire body's weight.

We canceled TV and now I like TV again.

Am I the only one that looks at the monthly cable/satellite/TV bill and immediately bends over to assume the apparently accepted position?

Well, I'm here to tell you that I will bend over NO MORE.

For that - for TV. Not that I'm bending over for other things, but let's try to keep it somewhat clean around here, you big pervs.

As of last Friday, we don't have our massive, all-inclusive, gets all the channels even the movie ones, satellite TV service anymore and, suddenly, I like TV again and it's not just because I'm not paying upwards of $170 a month on the shit.

Yeah. $170 a month. That's ABSURD. I don't spend that much money on effing groceries, people. Like, I have been spending more money putting commercials into my eyeballs than food into my body.

That's just not right. I mean, yes, our grocery bill is sort of absurdly low because so much of it comes from the garden, our neighbors' chickens and fruit trees and the farm/beef/chicken/pork shares BUT STILL - the math could not be done to make the TV bill work and you know I don't do math if I can help it anyway, so that was the final nail in the coffin.

I was forced to do math to justify this rapist TV bill and that alone meant that No More TV.

No more TV of the old-fashioned kind anyway - we still have the Roku and such to stream Netflix and Amazon Instant and all of the other online-y media that we can't live without and that's probably why I like TV again. Suddenly.

One week after canceling traditional TV and I'm all, "Hey! There's so much good shit on TV!" since suddenly I'm not spending all this time scrolling through hundreds of useless channels filled with nothing good or maybe, if I'm lucky, something marginally watchable but usually packed with commercials or with half the screen covered by the in-program network ads whoring their other stupid unwatchable shows and YOU KNOW they're bleeping out all the good parts.

I want the swears, people! And for $170 a month - I want them ALL.

So, now I'm not watching commercials (or even half watching them as I fast forward through them). I'm not watching stupid crap that I barely like just because it's on when I feel like sitting down in front of the tube. I'm not sending good money after bad service and I'm not giving up all kinds of space to the big stupid satellite boxes and remotes and wires and such. I'm also NOT having to fill in all the bleeps with what I assume they're ever so hilariously saying behind the carefully placed bleeps.

No. Just no more of that, thank you.

But I am now faced with a new issue that perhaps some of you can relate to - I'm, at the same time, drawn to and repelled by The Walking Dead and I can't cope effectively without the intrusive commercial breaks.

Since we've been watching it on Netflix like the greedy streamers that we are, I watch this show without any commercial breaks and the fucking show gives me a heart condition. I've had to resort to just getting up and going to the bar to freshen up my drying ice cubes and other such methods of self-imposed commercial breaks because I can't handle how anxious I get with the lurky zombies and the face eating and the Who Is Going To Do What Fucked Up Thing For No Apparent Reasoning that is just all over that show.

Are you like this, too? Does this show make you mental? Do you find yourself waking up every 20 minutes throughout the night having dreamed about zombie cashiers at the grocery store? Have you started noticing crossbows for sale around town? Do you carry a shovel to bed?

Regardless, I'm loving the no-normal TV life we're now leading where, when I decide I'm going to sit in front of the TV for a bit, I can be all, "Hmmm...I feel like watching something that will scare the ever loving crap out of me and then I'm going to watch Drawn Together because I just remembered how awesome that show was and then I'm going to watch a documentary about Alaska because I've always wanted to go there and then I'll do something productive."

BUT ONLY THEN.

You're not bored of pretty spring yet, are you?

OK, so that title is a bit of a tease because I'm just going to bitch about midterms but I promise to show you pretty flowers as we go though, so just sit there and fucking enjoy it.

Get right in there and enjoy it, damn you.

Wow. I'm quite the hostess.

Poppies from the front yard meadow are getting all FANCY with their frills. Or else they're deformed. Whatevs.

So, here's a fun thing - as midterms were approaching this week a lovely case of PMS attacked my face and guts so that I got the supreme joy of studying my face off meanwhile also wishing to die and being extra pleasant about it.

At least someone is behaving around here.

Thankfully Bubba is in San Francisco for a conference all week and doesn't have to endure my daily rantings on Hwy 17 and PCH drivers, the parking situation at school, the annoying people from class, the bullshit 53 question take-home midterm from one class, the insane Every Question is a Multi-part Short Answer Question midterm that's going to take one hundred years to complete in another class, how I'm going to spend my entire spring break writing papers and doing school projects or how come some of my pepper plants are so shrimpy.

Though...is he really at a conference or are his skills of self-preservation so well honed that he is just off at the bar with his buddies hiding behind a giant beer?

I really wouldn't blame him. After I lost my damn mind, of course.

I HATE EVERYTHING.

AND WHY DON'T WE HAVE ANY DESSERTS IN THIS HOUSE? WHO IS THE GROCERY WHORE WHO ISN'T DOING THEIR JOB?

Oh.

Right.

Still with me?

And then, when I had finished studying for today's massive forever-taking midterm yesterday evening, I found that STOP THE PRESSES I'm out of tonic and nearly out of gin.

Panic at the disco, y'all.

Thankfully again, there was enough left for one G&T if I subbed most of the tonic for sparkling water and an extra few ice cubes. Because I think you know that I was in no state to be going out to the store to deal with any three dimensional people and their annoying fucking asses after spending three hours (or years, who can really tell) studying the intricacies of biological control of the wild world of insect and pathogen pests.

Let's just say that it seemed ill-advised to interact with anyone at all. Almost even including the dog.

I'm taking my backpack and fleeing the building. Peace out.

Thankfully a third time, my beloved Bubba, arriving home at 11:30pm after conferencing and client handling and schmoozy partying waltzed into the house and produced a big fresh awesome bottle of local gin for me.

Because he knew I was running low.

And that midterms were here.

And...crabbiness...crazy wife needs her medicine...etc.

Damn, I love this man.

And then my neighbors brought over some lilacs off of their gorgeous plant because they "just know how much I love them." The lilacs, not the neighbors. I mean, I do love our neighbors but that's not what they meant.

YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN WHY ARE YOU FUCKING WITH ME?! Sorry. I'm crazy right now.

Perhaps they heard my scream-crying.

So, yeah - I'm taking this whole feared semester right in stride. Which is to say that all of my fears were well-founded and, even though I have yet to begin the most feared month of the most feared semester (April - hi! See you soon. Try not to be a total whore.), I'm already melting down as though I'm in the thick of it.

But hey, I'm not one to wallow (there's a fun lie) so let's shift our focus to one of the few things keeping me from stabbing every last person or chore or accountant (OH MY GOD LET'S NEVER SPEAK OF TAXES I HATE YOU IRS) that crosses my path: the extra exuberance of the front yard meadow.

 Plus, do you know how good these smell?

They smell super good. And I carry them, and now the lilacs, from room to room with me and then to bed at night so that I can be one with their awesome smells around the clock.

I've contemplated taking them in the car with me and into class but I'm not ready to be that kind of freak. Probably soon though.

Stay tuned.