I am making a list of cookie ingredients at ten to nine in the morning, at work.
Somehow my jobs always end up just a little off-kilter. I take that as an important sign that I'm doing something right. Not necessarily properly, but definitely right.
My singing teacher announced on Friday that I should try a duet on stage somewhere, my timing is getting tighter and I can almost fake rythm.
My singing teacher told me to sing on stage.
Just watch my power, she said, a duet would be good practice in control -- assuming the hapless mezzo had enough guts to kick me when I lost track of my diaphragm and begin to drown out the roar of the cars outstide...
Sitting around the campfire at Wiccanfest, discussion of music came up and suddenly a very sweet new friend was asking me to sing. Right there. On demand. In front of people.
I did, eventually. And there was silence and it was good silence.
And then Patti wanted to sing together, and we sat on a log by the fire with a yellow notebook writing jazzy words in broken lines, and I sat right there and right there learned the melody and we sang it together.
It was a very simple melody. But I learned it. By ear.
And the rest of the week I sang and sang, in the forest and alone in a meadow with geese eyeing me suspiciously, and I sang with a baby in my arms and I sang while Chris whistled the melody for me.
I came home and I sang, and in the forest I had heard myself, and there was something sweet in the notes, high and coming from the right places.
I went to my singing lesson and we argued and I sang and she picked and poked and no longer has to sit and tell me half-heartedly "good, that was good, but..."
Now it's just her ruler and my steep climb from this new plateau.
This weekend we ran and raced and hurled money like beads.
A pale green yoga mat from a store that I couldn't walk any further into for all the perfume and shelves filled with vanity, a trip to MEC for birthday camping gifts.
Computer shopping, watching the salesboy's arms fill and overflow with this motherboard and that CPU and this fan and that hard drive and on and forth...
Laughing in a thronging store, barely aware of the crowd, so much SHINY tugging my eyes in all directions.
Dim sum lunch and children to flip upside down, they remembered the clown that had hugged them on Hallowe'en.
Racing for cables and then it was screwdriver time, we managed to share the task (just as we somehow manage to cook together in a kitchen) and screwed and plugged and clipped until the sleek black beast was humming away, and I was passed out on the futon beside it.
Guests ran in and out all weekend, crashspace here and there, "you're welcome to just sit and chill while we're out running around" and they did and they gloried in the warmth that I cannot repeat often enough -- that is our home.
Six hours in a cuban-obsessed polish lady's basement and four of us emerged dyed and trimmed and slightly tipsy and filled with pizza.
Hours upon hours in the garden, this morning the poppies had already bloomed and their red clashes horribly with the dark pink roses, and the yellow of the snapdragon balloons just starting to peek out amongst the high grass and once again I've proven that I should NOT be allowed to play with colour.
It's beautiful to me anyway, and yesterday we spent the afternoon smoothing over scars in our spirits, using the back of an axe to nail trellises up against the fence.
My bare foot tangled itself in the honeysuckle, and to me this was the most glorious thing ever.
And right now I am making lists of cookie ingredients for work.
And avoiding asskissers. Ever since they announced a promotion last week that I actively started working a month and a half ago -- there've been droves of them, their lips wet and slick with falseness.
Suddenly I am not quite so thrilled to understand the executives here... But their standoffish attitudes are becoming somewhat... Almost... Reasonable.
In the meantime, this morning I pulled a tomato plant straight, it is getting to heavy to stand on its own.
In the meantime I am filled with a sense that I can't quite name, from spending hours in the dirt, playing with metal, speaking from my heart and kissing the soft cheek of a face soft and graceful like a deer.
As six o'clock this morning our houseguest asked me if I ever count my blessings.
Some days there are too many of them to assign numerical values to. Most days, even.
The horseshoe is no longer up my ass. I am the horseshoe.
Welcome to the first week of summer. May the change in the air affect your heart as much as it has (unbeknownset to me) affected mine.