Screamin' Petals

Haven’t updated, no excuses, blah-blah-blah.

My dad caught the evil awful cold I had for six solid weeks. It was one of those ones that slammed you back and forth between being hot and cold and energetic and dead. It was not a fun illness to have. My dad has it now, though, and while normally he’s pretty stoic about illness, shunning medicine and all of that, he finally got his foot surgery scheduled, and since he’s been waiting for that since before we found out who was going to be the new President, he’s reluctant to let a cold force them to reschedule. So, he’s been acting like a big baby about the whole thing (which is completely understandable and not the point). This morning when I came downstairs, he was attacking one of those little blister packs of cold pills with an eight inch kitchen knife. When I said something like, “Whuuh?” He glared at me, brandished the knife at the pills and said, “Why do they make them so hard to open when the people that’ll be trying to open them are sick? It makes no sense!” I couldn’t argue with that.

I watched an unemployed homeless man with five foster children pick up a woman yesterday, and I’m still in awe of his skills. (On that topic, though, I wonder just how an unemployed homeless man has five foster children—not with him, he just mentioned them—I mean; you wouldn’t think the state would allow that).

I was mildly disappointed to learn that the Frankie in the love song Frankie and Johnny was a woman. I mean, it’s an older country song, so of course she is, but when I saw the title and heard the opening line, I felt a moment of surprised excitement that was quickly quashed by the chorus. Still, it shouldn’t take too much lyrical reworking to fix the injustice.

My boyfriend has been making the most beautiful jewelry. I’m so wildly impressed with what he’s been doing. I can’t believe that he just started doing it recently. We were at the craft store, and he goes, “I’m going to get some wire and some beads and start making jewelry.” I said, “That’s nice dear.” I thought he was going to basically take the wire and throw the beads on it, and be like, “Ta-da!” What he did was so much more impressive than that. I’ll get his permission later and throw the link to his etsy account up here, so that the one person other than me who reads this can go see what I’m talking about. Seriously, this stuff’s gorgeous.

Speaking of gorgeous, I saw a really beautiful sunset the other night and it’s still making me happy. Also topping my list of things that made me way happier than they really ought to have are the two canceled classes I have NOT going on this week, and the motivation I’m feeling to really do better in the second half of this quarter than I’ve done so far. I think I’m hitting the tail end of that evil cold, and I’m getting my second wind, so to speak. It isn’t that I’m doing all that poorly; I’m just not really applying myself the way I ought to be. That will change, though, and I’ll start emulating those people in my life who do so much better than me at everything with the exception of scraping by with the minimum effort (and perhaps baking pound cake).

I also learned that I have not grown out of being terrified by haunted houses. I went to a theme park with my boyfriend rather than watching that super-huge football game people seem to care so much about, and went into the haunted house they had and I screamed so much that the small child of approximately six years old looked back at me as if to say, “Please, lady, shuuut up!” He was completely incredulous. On the plus side, I did get everyone laughing, and that felt good.

There are these trees on campus that bloom in late January/early February, and they smell so, so awful. 100% of people polled agree with me.

I asked two people.

Rock on, alfalfa.

I love my body. I don’t mean that in the egotistical, YE-OWW sort of way-- I don’t think I’m that hot. But I do love the feeling of being. I’ve been putting on a teensy bit of muscle, and it feels great. I can completely understand why people get addicted to body-building. This feeling of being stronger is amazingly heady, especially in my legs.

I’m riding in the car right this second, on my way to the museum (no, I’m not driving) and the clouds are really pretty. The weather has been pretty wild for the last couple days, and our hills, which are normally just a flat, sun-burnt yellow have become a softly beautiful grey-green yellow, and the normally dull and dusty bushes have become a much more lively green. Funny-- we didn’t see the burros.

There’s something wonderful about the huge boulders that stick up out of the ground here. I don’t know why I like them so much, but I do.

I was eating lunch with a very nice lady at school the other day, and I went to refill my water bottle out of the drinking fountain, and she mentioned to me that the water in this area has a lot more lime in it than most places. I told her that it made sense because this whole area used to be underwater, and I might just be overly sensitive, but I think she gave me an odd look.

My dad loves to “rock hound,” or search for rocks, and I have been known to go with him. Once, we were digging through some soft sediment near a freeway off ramp, and a police officer pulled over to ask what we were doing. His hand hovered near his gun until my dad handed me the pickax, and he didn’t believe our story until we showed him the fossil mollusks we had found.

I think prickly pear cacti are really cool. In fact, most cacti are neat. Succulents in general, they’re fascinating. Actually, I find all of the adaptations that plants and animals make to dry climates very interesting. What’s really kind of cool is that in the areas where there really is very little precipitation, the plants tend to be the kind that store water somewhere, so I wonder if that’s part of what animals are able to eat just those plants and get enough water? Food for thought, anyway.

I think if I were going to be a mythical sea monster, I’d have to pick the kraken, and probably just because of the cool name. When I was little, I had this book of monsters that had the most beautiful illustrations. They were like collages, and were less than hyper-realistic. Some of the monsters even had paisley patterns. I must have read that book a hundred and fifty times.

I like how dense orange trees are. I had a dream last night where I was flying around, over all of this farm land, but the strange thing was that the things I was flying over really shouldn’t all have been growing in the same area, unless I’m totally crazy. There were normal crops like oranges and avocados, but there was also alfalfa (which I wouldn’t recognize in reality) and corn, and probably a whole lot of other stuff whin I recognized in my dreams but wouldn’t awake.

We just passed a sparrow harassing a crow. I wonder who the crow was molesting to get that sort of reaction out of such a little bird. Perhaps the sparrow was just attempting a preemptive strike, though.