(Sprout like a sonovabitch! Above, one of my creepy daily green smoothies.)
The heat is oppressive. In some ways it’s worse than the cold because in our home we can always make ourselves warmer (down blankets, layers, body heat, heaters, fucking cats). But this? We’ve got the window blinds down like normal on hot days – but today it’s too hot to even open them (so it’s stuffy and dark, ugh). I rigged up a swamp cooler which made me feel wistful for my Engineering school days when I knew stuff in my brain (reader, I am not even kidding, I recently realized I have been feeling very Stupid lately) and that really did help.
Sure we could go to a restaurant (air-conditioned) – except we kind of can’t, having a pathetic little stack of bills for next week’s mini-vacation and it’s my mom’s birthday tomorrow and I’m still panicking over that. The vacation we are all very excited about, except me, because it’s mostly just even more cooking for more people, but I shall enjoy the fact everyone else is having such a good time, and I hope to sew some gifts while we’re there if I can finish up my current project.
We went to the Young Artists’ Show at Six Rivers Gallery. The substantial breeze while biking was hot enough it didn’t help much.
At the Gallery. Doesn’t Phoenix look like a flower?
Ralph played music for atmosphere.
He’d done it as a volunteer effort but was, surprisingly, paid in cash. That’s very nice for our vacation stash!
Details of Nels’ and Phoenix’s work:
I love this series of Nels. You can see him as he begins to fall deep in thought:
We got home and did what cooking we could – heating up roast chicken in coconut oil and serving it atop basmati rice, alongside simmering fresh peas from the farm and strawberries cut with a little cane sugar and topped with cream. I sewed a bit. Ralph and I were crawling from the heat. He gave himself slight heat stroke mowing the lawn. He went out to bring home gin and ice cream. I refreshed the swamp cooler setup. Slowly the heat backed off.
Hey and anecdotally, this spider we found on our kitchen sponge was so horrific it made me feel angry and sarcastic. Ralph said, “It needs a haircut.” It seriously had really shaggy pedipalps. Here’s my hand too, all casually giving you a sense of scale.
And some kind of goddamned venom sacks!
Dear Nature: FUCK YOU. I am totally serious.
Some things just shouldn’t be allowed. I’m pretty sure that in a just world, that spider would be illegal.
Ew. I sympathize with you on the spider. We’ve got a black widow that I just discovered in our garage. I was all, “La la la, oh, say, an egg sac! I wonder what kind of spi…. WHOLE GRAIN JEEBUS!” and jumped back five feet. It’s still there. We had an exterminator come today, but they want a year contract and he was an hour late so I sent him home having declined his services. Being an hour late’s just rude.
Also: er, hi! [waves] First time commenting here. I can’t figure out if we’ve actually interacted online (it would have been under a pseudonym for me, if so) but we know some bloggers in common, I think? Anyway, like your blog and your tweets, and plus we’re the same age and your mom’s birthday is one day off mine. Destiny!
PS – Yours is a male hobo spider, yes? Their bites sound horrible. Glad we don’t have them around these parts.
@schoolofmom
The only thing worse is a gaboon viper with its 2 INCH LONG FANGS and horned nose and bulbous HEAD.
WHY
@Sarah MB
Yes, we corresponded on May 26th after some announcements re: Shapely Prose. Thank you for the compliments! & yes, IT IS DESTINY. Also, “WHOLE GRAIN JEEBUS” = best exclamation ever, rivaling even “Great Odin’s Raven!”.
I really dig those bikes, but it’s been so long since I’ve ridden I wonder if I could handle the weight of a pack like that on the back.
@Kidsync
If this li’l mama can handle it you probably could too!
I still remember getting used to the longness of the bike. In fact when I started (almost 2.5 years ago) I also had a big ol’ baby seat mounted with a heavy “baby” (four year old) and that was pretty difficult with the center of mass being up higher. I got rid of the seat fast when I realized Nels could cling like a monkey to his sister. Ralph used it for a while until I got him the Ute then we sold the seat back to the bike guy and someone bought it, yay!
A couple weeks ago I had my first ride on the back of Ralph’s Ute. It was scary at first to be the monkey-clinger, and to top it off I was wearing this tiny jeans skirt and holding on with my thighs and got massive inner-thigh bruises. Believe me when I say it is rare for me to wear a short skirt, very rare, but of course the day I did it I put myself in such an uncomfortable and scary position and I think all of HQX saw my dimpled buttcheeks. Ralph was very kind and didn’t say anything about how much work it took to haul me. But his very, very sweaty face told the tale.
I think I should make him carry ALL of us. Kinda symbolic.
Ahhh, those horrific spiders are happily making their homes in our house and I am ready to give them the boot! If you haven’t checked already, they are wolf spiders. A friend of mine took one to be tested a few years back and was told they are wolf spiders and their bites look awful, but arn’t life sucking. Hope that is the only one you have!
@Christie
One way to cut WAY down on spiders in the house is to get all the vegetation that’s up against your house, cleared out. We did this one year in PT and our house went from about 1 giant spider per day in the basement, to never seeing one again.
But I remember the day Ralph pulled out this one tree at the base of our driveway, and all the dirt came erupting OUT of the hole. Then we realized it was merely an army of very hairy, brown spiders just like these, running for their lives.
< shudder! >
I think this “spider post” is my most popular post ever. People are sick.
See, that’s what I thought, but then I went back and looked in my now out-at-sea Gmail account and couldn’t find you! So I thought, “Hum, maybe I imagined everything.” Which would have been strange because I had a pretty good mental image of you and memory of our conversation. I am very glad to know I did not make it up. Whew!
@Kidsync The weight takes a while to get used to, but they handle so well. I was loading up a ton of groceries at Safeway the other day and Random Stranger said, “It’s probably really hard to turn with all that stuff on there, huh?” And I paused for a moment, trying to think of a way to non-rudely convey that actually it isn’t at all. The distance between the wheels makes them less shaky, in my experience. Then again, I haven’t done any kid-hauling, though I have done some 170-pound-man hauling, and that went OK.
Again I say, “whoa…” to the spider. Love the pics of Nels. I get a kick out of watching my kids when they’re deep in thought. I asked my daughter once what she was thinking about and she said, “how’d you know I was thinking?” Ha!
I agree with Paige. They are very EASY to handle (esp. with load down low). As for kid- and adult-hauling, it took me all of one day to get used to them being there.
Oh, the horror of that spider. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that ugly, and we just went to a bug museum where there was plenty for me to be grossed out by. I’ve always thought spiders had far too many legs, but that one seems to have some extras besides.