...that I fucking HATE with a BURNING FIREY PASSION the first person dog descriptions. SEPRA told me to write one up for Isabel, so I whipped out some of my OHS magic and presented them with a clear, concise, balanced description of the dog, written in a thorough but cheerful style. I was quite pleased with it, and emailed it to my contact as instructed.

When my profile of Isabel appeared on the website, someone had tacked on to the top "Hi, my name is Isabel! I am an owner surrender, and am now looking for my loving forever home! I am so excited to meet my new family! Here is what my foster family has to say about me." (Insert awesome OHS-style, non-lame description that I'd emailed them here).

So yes, apparently the rule is that dog descriptions must be written "see spot run" style, in the first-person. Because you can't trust a profile of an animal unless that animal explicitly endorses it herself.

*headdesk*

Some people really seem to insist on being irritating. Even when you give them an out, when you pass it to them on a silver platter, the whole exchange doesn't seem complete to them until they've injected some of their own personal LAME into it. I think that pretending that the little homeless pug is talking to you is creepy, but hey, I'm not very positive on the whole rescue pug thing right now* anyway.

*I am so totally going to do it again after Isabel. I know, I'm an idiot. Just don't tell W, he'll murder me.

I am going thorough one of those periods when everything is due. RIGHT NOW. I was taking three classes at Lanier Tech and this is finals week. Additionally I'm registered to take several entrance exams, I have a paper due in my American Govt. class, and I just took a Chem exam. Oh, and there are about 1000 pages of chem homework due this week, several hundred of them on the same day as the most important of my entrance exams.

So, what am I doing? Besides wailing and not sleeping?

Oh, you know. Looking at shoes on the internet. Cross-referencing various sites with designers' websites to compare prices on ridiculously unaffordable items. Reading the news. Updating myself on lolcats. Generally fucking off.

Avoidance: it's how I roll.

Multiple punctuation marks to indicate extreme and uncharacteristic enthusiasm. If I haven't texted you 1440 times in an hour yet, let me be clear: it's coming. My new phone has a keyboard! No more relying on the craptastic suggestion function of my previous (samsung) phone, which always assumed that I was trying to type "of" or "shizzle!" I realize the fact it was a BIG PROBLEM for me that my phone's text program messed up my spelling is totally lame. I'm with you on that one. But hey! I fixed it!

Verizon gives you credits to buy a new phone online every two years (with a renewed contract, of course...*waves sadly as her iphone recedes once again into the distance*). This made it possible for me to get a brand new pseudosmartphone worth $50-$220 for free. The variation in price reflects Ebay vs. Verizon comparison shopping. So, basically they gave me a brand new $50! With a full slide-out keyboard! I am pleased.

But, long story short, I've lost my contacts list. So I need numbers, people! And I know that most of you (all three of you) have been calling me on W's phone, so you can cut that out and use my old number again. It's weird for him to get calls--when his phone rings he gets all suspicious. I like to keep him isolated.

Isabel, the ferrier of phones across the river styx, is going home with someone! Probably! Good news, right? BUT. The interested party is an MBA student in Missouri who won't be able to drive down to GA to get her until the END OF FUCKING TIME/September. I know it's mean, but I can't help feeling like Isabel may be his cosmic punishment for seeking such a degree...

As far as I can tell, this little dog officially has it out for me now. We've got her on a tie-out in the front yard when we are home, so that she can hang out on the porch in the shade with her food and blanket. When we go out she goes into her crate inside. Yesterday I let the little fucker out in the house to hang out with me while I made dinner, after she'd spent most of the afternoon outside. I kept a close eye on her and followed her when she snucking into the living room for a second, thus managing to catch her in the act of crapping on the floor. I raised holy hell and let W chase her around the house, but I'm at loss. The dog had only been in the house for maybe 5 minutes. She appears to have HELD IT IN for several hours outside so that she could give me the finger and crap in the house. I'm glad we caught her, but I doubt that the correction she recieved will do her any good. I hate to anthropomophosize, but this looks like "acting out" behavior. The only other dog I've had to physically tie to my belt to keep from destroying the house was Mojo. And his behavior was clearly marking--he never crapped in the house or sneaked around peeing on beds. He had been an outside dog and he treated the inside of my house just like every structure that he encountered outside: something to pee on. But Isabel was a house dog who was surrendered for aggression, not housetraining issues.

I just keep telling myself that it's only for a few more weeks, but GOD that seems like a long time. And I feel a little bad about leaving her outside--she's obviously depressed and hates it. But, but! Isn't it worse for her housetraining to bring her in so that she can have "accidents" in my house? Doesn't that reinforce bad housetraining behavior? Or am I being completely self-serving?

Even if I am, isn't it better for her if I DON'T beat her to death with my shoe?

School is going relatively well. I was so busy the first week, ferrying Hailey all over christendom and hanging out with Lisa and Ashley (I MISS YOU GUYS!! DOUBLE PUNCTUATION!!). Now it's quiet again and I'm consoling myself by looking forward to Andrew's upcoming visit. Mom and I have been brainstorming vegan recipes. She mentioned a fish recipe that I recently made, and when that was rebuffed she suggested lasagna. Vegetarian lasagna! And I was all, "without cheese?" And she was like "whhhhhhat?! You can't make lasagna without cheese!"

So. There you have it.

I actually have a number of real, honest-to-gaia vegan ideas to work from. W and I have been cooking almost no meat at all lately, and he hates creamy things so that rules out virtually anything with dairy. And gelatinized food molds are so 1956! I'll have to scrutinize the ingredients labels on some of my sauces, but otherwise I think that we're good to go. And you see, accomodating alternative dietary philosophies is NO TROUBLE because we're trying to eat like that anyway!

W had a friend in Seattle that eventually gave up honey in his quest for perfect veganism. I always wondered why he was so gravely concerned with giving up honey, couldn't he still use cane sugar? Honey is great, but refusing it doesn't create a hole in your life like giving up sugar does. Just ask my sister, who WILL NOT STOP STARING AT MY DONUT AND ASKING IF IT IS GOOD. Is it? Is it? DO YOU LIKE IT?! Gah.

Picture posts...For when you've finally found your camera cord.
These are a few from our trip across the country, 8 long months ago.

Eastern Oregon.

Neutrino on a leash.



The Loneliest Cemetery In Nevada



Abandoned House In Nevada



Eastern Oregon Scrub



Terrible's In Battle Mountain, Nevada



Lovely Idaho.


Hoover Dam


Throwing Beaure Over The Side At Hoover Dam


Embiggin For Details: I Always Thought That Golf Was Rather Lonely


My Old Hair

I just watched the film Doubt, with Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Intense. There should definitely be Oscars awarded for this one. I recommend that you all watch it. I'm going to see if I can't force my father (the newly redeemed catholic) to watch it again with me...I don't know how he'll interpret its content, but there are multiple ways of looking at how it all turns out.

She's on her way to Vermont, and I really, really need a nap. Fucking 6am on a Saturday morning!?! What the deuce?!

Pug people, I tell you. There was some old hippie chick at the meet-up planning to stuff shaking, out-of-her-mind anxious Zoey with "herbal sedatives." And I was like, dude, what the hell is that? What's in them? Because if it ain't Xanax, she ain't interested.

Poor little dog. I hope she winds up happy and safe. When I turned to leave she tried to break free and run after me, and I felt terrible for leaving her. Even though I know she'll be much happier in the Vermont weather, with her new family. It's just that I can't explain any of that to her.

...And I've been busy. For Gainesville.

Microbiology and its accompanying lab started on the 8th of June, and we got our first exams back today. I am pleased. Additionally, it turns out that my lab partners aren't all monkeys. Of course, the one who made that comment about crackheads is most definitely monkey, but the other two seem basically okay. They are allowing me to write our lab reports and do all of the drawings, so that our answers are not wrong/lame/incomplete, while they busy themselves with exposure to infectious pathogens. A wholly satisfactory arrangement.

My other three classes at Lanier Tech start in about 3 weeks, right before W's mother arrives to throw our half-assed schedule into turmoil. I've got so much cleaning to do, I can't even begin to think about it. My father had a terrible pipe leak that destroyed the floors in his bedroom and in the entire basement, so he has enlisted me to help him go though all the crap that he, Sonia, and Hailey had been piling up in the basement study since the Dawn of Time, essentially, to clear everything out so the floors can be replaced. There are unopened boxes of files and trash and priceless keepsakes and pornography (all mixed together, oh yeah) stacked and stashed all over the basement and garage from when we moved into that house 15 years ago. I kid you not. So that has been an ongoing project.

A lot of the stuff is mine that I left when I went to college in various drawers and cubbies, and it has been a somewhat conflicted experience going through all that crap, trying to decided what to save and what to finally throw out. Sweet, whistful, hilarious, and totally humiliting. Never go through a box of your old fanfiction with your serious, talented writer-husband looking over your shoulder.

Erin, I found a box of fliers that we made to launch The Delaware. Those were excellent times. Speaking of times, where are you? Should I text?

Ashley, I have some of your poems, back from the old laser printer days. You were so, so good, even way back when, it gives me chills. If you need inspiration for your writing these days, I'd be happy to remind you how awesome you were/are.

Lisa! I found hundreds of flows from our debate rounds in 9th grade, yours and mine. Remember how I used to write out big sheets of paper for your final speech and you would nail it without ever looking down at the podium? We kicked some serious ass. How goes it in HK? Are you traveling yet? Heading home?

Also, Andrew, I found your student ID from CHS. Do you have any idea why I might have that? Because I haven't the foggiest.

I have found many, many strange, lost items from my past thus far, and I haven't even started on the garage. I'll keep you all posted.

On the FosterFront--GAH! Right now I have Zoey, who is very insecure and bites. For those of you who are counting (I hardly am anymore), that's Mojo, Lucy, and now Zoey. And I've been offered and refused about 6 other dogs for medical reasons. Tomorrow I'm driving Zoey to the Hamilton Mill Exit off of 85 so that she, too, may make her way to Vermont. My foster contact swears up and down that they normally don't do things this way, blah blah blah, but I'm beginning to get frustrated. I want to help, but I did not exactly enter into this relationship with the understanding that I was going to become the bellhop in my own fosterpug hotel. Add to the general stress of 3 dogs passing through our house/hotel in a month the hassel of having to cart said dogs back and forth to a cranky vet's office in Cumming for bizarre paperwork and you've got one very dissatisfied foster...person.

I am NOT this dog's mother. That is weird and creepy.

The cats are all eating dog food right now. I don't know what this means, but it can't be good.

So, this morning at 8:30am, Lucy came to stay with us. She is very, very obese, and she's also kind of a muppet. She runsrunsruns, then she collapses in a giant pugheap and falls asleep. She's the Gene Simmons of pugs, W says, with her tongue hanging about a foot out of her mouth at all times. While I think that the Gene Simmons comparison is particularly unkind, I do feel that Lucy is kind of a rock star. Even Beauregaard likes her--when she charges around panting, he gets all excited. She's totally awesome.

So far this morning she's spent her time alternately asleep with her tongue touching the floor and trying to stuff herself underneath our dresser to dig out a piece of Beauregaard's food that got knocked under there several months ago.

Mojo is leaving for Vermont tomorrow, so our 3 pug overlap is for a limited time only, but I feel a little bad for bringing another pug in while he's still here. Mo is very insecure...probably because I'm always yelling at him about peeing in the garage/running through my vegetable garden/jumping up on me with muddy paws/chasing the cats/etc., etc. Actually, although being in trouble virtually ALL THE TIME does seem to upset him, I think that his main problem is that he's a very sweet, needy little guy who can't seem to find his place in the world. He needs his own people. Beauregaard no longer expends very much energy growling at him, but he does still hate his guts. He actually managed to bite him in the face yesterday, which was something of a Beauretriumpth. He's been trying to bite Mojo in the face for more than a week now.

Wish Mojo the best of luck in Vermont! May he find someone who can housetrain him!

His name is Mojo. He's very underweight, very sweet, and very determined to catch at least one of our cats by the tail. Preferably all three. He may be a short-term foster--it depends on whether or not SEPRA decided to send him to a rescue in Vermont that has offered to take some of their overflow dogs. If that's the case, he'll be with us until June 6th. Should they decide to keep him and send another pug to Vermont in his place, he'll stay longer. I'm going to put up pictures of him, just as soon as I wake up from my nap.

Foster pugs are exhausting and, if you're a cat, terribly upsetting. Neutrino is so traumatized, he may never come out from under the bed again. But then again, Newt doesn't deal well with excitement of any kind. He didn't let any of us come within 15 feet of him for a week after the time W chased me down the hall and I accidentally squealed a little. Which apparently, for a chickenshit Siamese, is VERY UPSETTING.

Oh, also, Beauregaard hates his guts. He growls and snaps whenever Mojo comes anywhere near, which is totally as cute as it sounds. So far he's only managed to actually bite me in the elbow so there hasn't been too much bloodshed, but make no mistake about it, The Beaure wants him dead.

Alright, I'm officially done whining about how I wasted all my own time putzing around instead of making more nursing school progress. I'm doing fine. I don't have to be finished with school by a certain date: my long-term plan is to get a masters anyway. So fuck it. Enough with the "blahblahblah I'm so worried but I'm not going to really do anything about it" crappola. I'm SO over myself right now! =) I think that I'm just going to write those memoirs anyway. A fictional past in Prague is better than no Prague at all, right?

Annnnyhoodle. Yesterday I played with kittens! On Monday I'm going to see Erin's new house! Things are l-l-looking up!

I miss you guys. Now that I've gone though my periodic blog-update-spasm, I feel justified in complaining about the fact that Ashley never updates. Miss hot-professional-chick! How are things?

I was supposed to go with Mom and Ken today to visit a greenhouse in Washington County, but instead I have been left at home to kittensit. Partly this is because I was not exactly raring to go at 7am this morning. Additionally, when given the choice of kittens or plants, I can reliably be counted upon to select kittens. I like to think of myself as a Kitten Socialization Specialist--I let them scratch and bite me, and they eventually become so comfortable taking advantage of my poor bleeding hands that they deign to sleep on the bed with me and purr when I snuggle them. Which is what they're doing right now. It's adorable, cat scratch fever be damned. We (Caelyx, Jasper, and I...as far as I'm concerned these are their names because my mother has proven herself to be completely inadequate to the task) are at this moment laying in bed watching television on the huge flat-screen. Which I'm sure is as much a treat for them as it is for me. I'm planning to take a nap, and later I might go outside and do a little weeding/sabotage of my mother's garden. A pretty relaxing day, if I do say so myself.

This morning I got an email from Lanier Tech about the courses that they're willing to transfer, which told me basically what I expected to hear. Depending on their timeline for A&P classes, I may only have 2 health sciences courses and 1 biology course (damn micro!) to take over the summer. I'll have to ask my advisior about it at registration, I suppose. And hey, somebody remind me to find out how I'm supposed to register for the NLN-PN? Because I've got to get on that, too. It occurred to me yesterday that I have now, as of May-almost-June, wasted AN ENTIRE YEAR without really accomplishing anything toward the goal of getting some type of nursing degree. Which, holy crap. That went by fast. I'm pretending that I spent June 2008 to June 2009 backpacking through Europe and writing my memoirs. Somebody ask me about my summer in Prague! Seriously, I can tell you exactly how fantastic I imagine it would have been.

Ah, well. Water under the bridge. I suppose I'll go back to treading it now.

So, the pug people came and went. They seemed unimpressed by the live electrical wire curtains that I put up, and shrugged off my poisoned dog treats decorating scheme. So we'll see--I may get a foster pug. Which may turn out to be a terrible mistake. But that's the beauty of a foster situation! If the foster pug really sucks, you can give it back to them, because you were just being nice and it isn't your damn dog anyway! I keep dwelling on the possibility that the foster pug will turn out to be the sweet, devoted little lady pug of my dreams--that I'll totally fall in love with her and be heartbroken when she is understandably snatched up by some deserving family--but the more realistic scenario is that we will get stuck with an awful, practically adoptable animal which we (and yes, W, I mean I, ME, SINGULAR RESPONSIBLE PARTY) will feel sorry for and thus put up with long enough for it to destroy the house and cause my father to throw us all out into the street. The lady that came by today is herself fostering a Chihuahua/Pug mix that bites and craps in the house. But oh well! I'll just press merrily on, half-cocked as usual. You never know, right? It might be fun!

In other news...well, there is no other news. The garden is doing fine, despite my frequent fussing. My mother's plants (which are several weeks older, probably get more sun than mine, and are living in 400 lbs of miracle grow, etc.) are much bigger and stronger-looking than mine, so this has been causing me some anxiety. Will they fruit/vegetate? Did I do something wrong? Have I stunted the poor, helpless little plants entrusted to my care by home depot? W says that he might once again do battle with the FREAKING PREHISTORIC LAVA underlying our backyard in order to extend the garden a few feet in a sunny corner, so that I have a bit more room to plant a few extra cucumbers and some beans. I'm also attempting to sprout an herb garden in jiffy pots, but I don't really believe that it's going to work. I still haven't completely bought into this whole "seeds" idea. We'll see if they actually sprout...then I might have to concede the argument to mother nature.

Oh, wait, actually! There is some news. Mom got 2 new kittens. They are both male, about 8 weeks old. One is a smoke/black tabby, and the other is a regular gray tabby (kind of a soft silvery color, with a creamy tummy!). They don't have names yet. I'm personally pushing for "Jasper" (the black one) and "Caelyx" (for the gray one). My mother has rejected these names, in favor of "K1" and "K2." Do ya'll have any suggestions? Because if YOU tell her that "K1" and "K2" are sucky cat names, maybe she'll listen.

On Friday, at 11am. They're going to inspect my house, to determine my eligibility to foster some godforsaken pug thing. I can't decide if I want to try and do something about all the exposed wiring and bowls full of household chemicals sitting in all the corners, or not. Because, yes, foster pugs deserve to live in a safe environment, but really, how safe should it be? Do we want to give the little puggies unrealistic expectation of their future conditions? Should we let them become accustomed to a world without sharp edges and exciting opportunities for gastrointestinal distress? I think not.

There is a four page article about Portland, OR in the New York Times! It can be found here. And there are accompanying pictures!

I suppose that I don't need to tell you guys how intensely, desperately homesick this has made me.

Le sigh.

W: Hey, have you heard about that UGA professor that killed somebody?
E: No, when did that happen?
W: Today, I think. Just now.
E: Who'd he kill?
W: His ex-wife and someone else in a theater.
E: What the fuck? People are seriously starting to crack up in this country, dude.
W: Yeah. But a professor?
E: Well, what'd he teach?
W: I don't know, probably business.
E: Oh, snap!

UPDATE: The dude in question is in fact a marketing professor at the business school. W and I, we win at the news.

This is HILARIOUS. I nearly died laughing. And woe, the Canadian backlash! "Here comes the gravy!"

Typically, celebrity gossip news is soooo not my bag, baby. But the Christian Bale freakout remix was so good that it renewed my joy in celebrity-baiting. Ahhh, America.

I know, I know, poor form for even a piss-poor blogger such as myself, but I just had to kill that "VaGInal" sex post. That guy was starting to get on my nerves. Every time I clicked to my blog (all of my favorite links are here...), there he was, staring me in the face, very possibly not kidding. I am officially sorry that I subjected all three of you, my dear readers, to that. I don't know what I ever saw in him. In my defense, I was drunk at the time.

So, the state of things. I'm unemployed but again actively looking--something about being unemployed for a month or more that I hadn't considered is the amount of inertia you've got to overcome, just to get yourself off the couch and out the door. Hunting for a job is depressing and overwhelming, and in many cases having a job isn't much better (such has been my experience), so when you find yourself in that strange twilight period between what is sure (for the foreseeable future) to be crappy, low-wage and borderline degrading employment, it's hard to stay motivated. The other big problem for me these past two months has been the collapse of my most recent educational venture. First, it turned out that Gainesville State wanted me to pay out of state tuition, to the tune of $1,400 per 4 credit class, not including my book costs. That was galling, to say the least. If I'm going to be trying to come up with that kind of money to go to school, I want to be doing it in Boulder or Portland, not fucking Gainesville! It seems like outright highway robbery to be charged that much for a couple of damn chemistry courses in MY HOME STATE. Grrrr.

Then, even better, my father chose to unilaterally renegotiate the school payment agreement that he and my mother had come to several years ago. When I say "unilaterally renegotiate," I mean he decided entirely on his own that he wasn't going to pay the percentage of the total that they'd both agreed to (based on their respective incomes...my father, despite his tough times of late, still makes a lot more than my mother and perpetually laid-off stepfather combined). He didn't discuss this with anyone but me, and our little talk was mostly yelling. This came at a bad time for W and I financially as we had literally no finances to speak of, having just spent our savings moving across the country. Which, yeah, what a totally great idea that was. I'm more adjusted to it now that I was, but jeez, people, the next time I have some brilliant idea like that will somebody please just fucking shoot me in the foot and be done with it.

When I mentioned moving to GA to spend some time with family and pay in-state tuition at GA nursing school prices, I mentioned it based on the assumption that since my father owned a house that was sitting empty and attracting the unfavorable attentions of local miscreants, he would be more than amenable to our moving in and helping him look after the house. It was not exactly understood to be a "landlord" sort of deal. However, since it turns out that my father benefits significantly if he claims to be renting the house on his taxes, that is what our situation has become. Except that we have no money, and wages in Gainesville are a LOT lower than they are in Portland (surprise!). But I digress...

Anyhow, while I was trying to scrape together the money to make up the difference in my (exorbitant!) tuition cost, Gainesville State dropped me from my class without ever notifying me of this fact. They never even sent a second bill. Thus, I did not learn that I was no longer in the class until I happened to be looking at my records for an unrelated reason. My teacher had happily continued grading my tests and homework for months following my ejection. It was awesome. You would not believe how intensely I stressed about those Chemistry exams. And I actually DID WELL!! This whole exercise has probably shortened my life by several miserable years.

Ultimately I didn't have the money to be paying GSC to screw me over anyway, so I just took my knocks and didn't try to get reinstated in the class. I know, I'm a loser. Additionally, the only school that I was planning to apply to that required a year of chemistry was Brenau University, which was probably stupid. Even if I could actually get in, Brenau is an expensive private women's college, and for W and I to accumulate more debt so that I can get an RN-BSN (from, admittedly, a very well-respected school) in addition to my BS, seemed foolish. Taking on huge amounts of debt in order to become a doctor or a lawyer makes sense, because in those occupations you're very likely to make enough money in your first few years to significantly pay down those debts. Nursing is an excellent career, but most people don't get rich.

Apparently, being "in school" or "having a direction" is a big part of my identity, so sitting around in Gainesville and doing CNA stuff with all the other people who aren't in school and don't have the ability to make plans beyond paying their bills was disorienting, to say the least. It was real life. And I'm here to tell you, reality fucking sucks. Too much reality can even be actively bad for you.

So! I'm going back to school this summer, to Lanier Tech, as an in-state student. The cost? Well, it's much, much cheaper. Cheap enough that I can actually pay for it myself, if W gets enough financial aid to cover his classes. $35 per credit. And honestly, getting my RN from a technical school (like Athens Tech, where I also applied and have been accepted) and then taking the extra classes to turn that into a BSN while I'm working sounds pretty good to me. They have an LPN program at Lanier that I can apply to in winter, and while I know that doing the leg work to get into an RN program is what I really want to do, at this point I'm getting a little desperate just to GET STARTED, fucking DOING SOMETHING, NURSING, at whatever professional level I can.

It is time to get on the road here!

In other news, I've started a vegetable garden in the backyard. I wondered why no one had ever tried this before, and as soon as I started digging my initial bed, I found out. Underneath the entire yard is a LAYER OF SOLID ROCK. It appears to be some kind of mica, shale, and fucking-dastardly-alien-lava thing. Let me tell you, this shit is tough. I screamed and cried and planned to blow up the back yard with minor quantities of explosives. The garage was going to be unfortunate collateral damage, but seriously, fuck that garage. It's not even really a garage, it's just a carport. It doesn't even have a door. I wanted my mother to help me rent a jackhammer, but she wasn't down.

I eventually, after much whining and the enlisting of my reluctant husband in the project, managed to get the bed dug and put in a couple of blueberry bushes (did you know that when you plant blueberries you've got to put in two different types, so that they can cross-pollinate? True fact!). Now I'm trying to plant a couple of fig saplings and some cantaloupe mounds, which requires more digging, which makes me want to attack and viciously maim something. Something large, something that thinks too highly of itself. Errrrr...

Right now, the main bed contains only pepper plants (Bonnie Green Bell, Macaroni, and Banana Peppers), which are doing splendidly. This will probably sound ridiculous, but I never knew that plants moved so much. When I go out in the morning to tie up the dog and check on them, the peppers looks so cute. Before the sun hits, they stretch their little green leaves up toward the sky, almost like they're reaching for it. Actually, they look like little plant version of this. Which, OMFG, how cute is that? I almost died from the cuteness, for reals. Later, as it gets hotter and they start getting direct sun their leaves drop and they seem to settle in for the day. It's sweet. I'm getting a bit attached to these peppers, to tell you the truth. I hope they make it.

The rest of the bed is supposed to have beans in it, but I haven't gotten around to planting them yet because I am very pessimistic that seeds will actually sprout. I know it's silly, but sprouting seeds always mysteriously eluded me during those plant projects in school. Give me a plant and I can occasionally keep it alive, but seeds? Uh-unh. So, although I have what appear to be perfectly serviceable seeds, I keep looking for sprouted bean plants to transplant. I think that part of my problem with seeds is waiting. I only put the cucumber and cantaloupe seeds in the ground a few days ago, but I'm already sure that they're dead. I'm not an optimistic farmer.

Also, I forgot (since I started this project when it was still cool) that GA gets fucking HOT in the summer. Yesterday I got a nasty sunburn right on top of the new tattoo, which I've decided to think of as "breaking it in." Fucking skin cancer.

I just finished The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein, and if you only ever read one book on the politics of the last 50 years, this is it. I'll even loan you my copy. I'm going to start on her other other book, No Logo, as soon as I can get my hands on it. But, disaster capitalism is a subject for another post.