Today I managed to let a garter snake into my parents’ house through their front door. (They live in the woods. This has happened more often than you’d think.) I panicked. The snake panicked. The dog got very excited. The snake slithered over the first door mat, under the second door mat, and down into the air vent along the baseboard. And disappeared.
Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.
As I was driving back to my folks’ place this evening, I saw this hot air balloon coming in for a landing near the town of Pomfret.
My weekend began with a trip to the garden, where I spent time pulling out plants and trying to reestablish some order. The epazote is gone, along with at least one tomato plant that it had been providing support to. The crazy seven-foot-long tomatillo is gone, and I unearthed my first potato of the season in the process of yanking it out. The Sweet 100 tomatoes I grew from seed are still going strong and there are still more peppers to come. I need to get some greens in the ground soon or they won’t take hold until the spring and I should really harvest the basil soon, but the last big harvest I did went to waste, so I’d rather wait until I have time to make pesto.
I spent the afternoon in Georgetown, stopping by the library to exchange one book for another, and spending some time sitting in the sun before doing a little shopping. I bought work shoes (which I’m not fully convinced about yet), a pair of jeans (which Rudi tells me look good, but he might just have been trying to get me to leave the house without a second wardrobe change), and another bra (my third in a week).
Last night, Rudi and I went up to the Tenleytown neighborhood for their Art All Night celebration. We ate bibimbop (the restaurant was one of the stops), did the Time Warp with a band, and bought a painting of a D.C. bookshop.
Today included the farmers market, cleaning, two cultural street festivals (Turkish and Latinx), an hour’s worth of work, and the premiere of the tv show God Friended Me, which Rudi and I both enjoyed. I should have spent more time cleaning (my apartment has looked like it exploded thanks to all the recent floods and our moving stuff away from the problem area) or at least painted my nails so they’d dry while I read, but I didn’t. But my hot chocolate was tasty and the book — by an author whose work I’ve loved, but which didn’t appeal to me through the first few chapters — has finally picked up some steam.
October — filled as it is with birthdays and anniversaries (none of them mine), cider doughnuts, and fall foliage — awaits. I look forward to the beautiful things it holds.
Portions of the next few weekends will be spent on the road, which means I need to make this last one at home count.
I’ll spend tomorrow morning at the garden doing some work on the communal spaces (and hopefully tending a bit to my own plot, which I’ve neglected of late). I need to make a trip to Georgetown to pick up a library hold and need to procure more quarters.
There are several festivals I’d like to take advantage of. Tomorrow afternoon is the the Barracks Row festival and tomorrow night is Art All Night, which runs until 3 a.m., although probably I won’t stay out the whole time (although maybe I will, because I like to encourage people to plan activities during my favorite hours, rather than in the morning). Sunday includes an arts center’s anniversary block party on the other side of town and the Turkish and Latinx festivals closer to home.
In between, I’d like to do some cooking, cleaning and laundry, hang some art on the walls, paint my nails, and hit the farmers market. I’m tired just thinking about it all, so I guess I’d better get in some sleep, too!
This is the Unisphere at Corona Park in New York City, erected in 1964 for the World’s Fair. This photo does not do it justice for just how big and impressive the statue is.
Friday night we had concert tickets to see Paul Simon perform here in D.C. (Yes, we saw him in Boston at the start of the summer. And we’ll see him again in New York City next weekend for the final tour performance of his career. Rudi is a big fan, and the D.C. dates weren’t announced originally, or we might not have travelled north.) He didn’t vary the songs at all, although the stories were different. He started off stronger this time, but he looked more tired. You believed him, when he sang, “I’m just trying to get some rest.”
On Saturday, I ran some errands and visited the garden, where I yanked out some plants that had grown to monster size and picked some tomatoes, beans, ground cherries, and peppers. I have peppers in a couple places in the garden, but thought one of the two plants in the back of the garden (near where the yellow jackets live) had died. Turns out, it was growing bell peppers (or something similar; less mature fruits were white) all summer long, and I had this lovely specimen to bring home, in addition to the two other types of peppers (one’s a sweet frying pepper and the other might be a poblano) that have matured.
Today included a trip to the farmers market, some time reading, more errands and laundry, and the final day of the last grand tour race of the cycling season on tv.
Honestly, the weekend felt a bit off, or maybe the weekend felt fine and I felt off. But either way, it was disappointing, which feels weird and ungrateful to say about several days that did not include dangerous weather conditions or water seeping into my apartment, particularly when so many others were not so fortunate.
The week ahead is a busy one, with my last free evening just having been filled with an anti-Kavanaugh protest. Please don’t forget to contact your senators, particularly with this week’s revelations. We have more power than we think, but we have to wield it. (Since I lack senators, you get to hear me ask again and again for you to avail yourselves of yours on my behalf. Even senators we think are solidly on the correct side of things should be dropped an email or phone call/voice mail, since they don’t know you think this is important if you don’t tell them, and they might be swung by those they do hear from. This is a lifetime appointment, and we’ll have the rest of ours to rue this if we don’t do enough.)