Garden:
Lilacs:






Bridal Spirea (thanks to for the ID to yarrowkat)




Irises:




Baby:
My syadmin gave me this pacifier for her. :-D


And my father is a horrible influence-video games already! Well, video game button pushing...

Oh, spring...

Livejournal keeps going down. I'm guessing they are in some sort of political war. Perhaps this is what I get for continuing to use a product based in Russia. They have 20 million Russian users. I suppose someone must have annoyed someone else...

Yesterday was crazy. It was almost 90 Saturday, then almost as warm only CRAZY WINDY yesterday. Winds of 60 mph in Albuquerque, 70 in Socorro. For those of the uninitiated, that is ALMOST fast enough to be hurricane-worthy (hurricane level 1 starts at 74 mph). Today it is cold again and relatively calm. The power is out in Edgewood because it was crazy windy. Some idiots keep setting fires in the foothills. Drought+fire do not mix people, especially with crazy winds. Choppers dropped all sorts of water everywhere Saturday just to make sure that there weren't crazy fires in the crazy winds.

I've found people who LOVE LOVE LOVE making paper snowflakes who are often at my house. This is great because of my plans for snowflake curtains of various colors in the atrium. RAINBOWS EVERYWHERE. It took me MONTHS to make a green one. MONTHS. I still had 5 left. I think they might make themselves... :)

Slowly the garden is waking up. I have some serious work to do still, including replacing the head of one of the spigots outside the house. This house is incredible-there are FOUR spigots outside and one inside the atrium. I have a bed picked out for tomatoes and one for sunflowers. I've already planted the tomatoes in the atrium for transport later. Shortly I'll have some seeds from someone I admire for the sunflowers and hopefully be able to grow sunflowers for years to come. Edibles in the garden this year so far are plums, cherries, pears (2 types), strawberries, blackberries, grapes (2 types), tomatoes, sunflowers, and apples. I'm going to add some peppers too. I'm going to add pictures later.

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I spun fire poi this month. It was fun. I'm going to do this again. J and I have a deal-I drive more carefully, he gets over the fact that I might burn myself. Don't ask-it made sense to him.

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Little J is sleep crawling now. It kind of creeps me out. This is scary to me after reading all sorts of dire warnings on children smothering in their mattresses and then that evening finding my child with her face directly down in the mattress while asleep because she's sleep crawling. Dear child, stop that!

She's so darn alert. I've met only a handful of people as alert and focused as she is. Distracting her from her goal is really difficult.

Yesterday, she and I learned a new game. It is called "mommy can do the dishes IF she bangs on them and makes noise in between dishes. Otherwise, baby monster will scream." J came home to a cookie sheet drum solo yesterday and stared at me like I was insane. He's probably right. I was really getting into it.

But really, cookie sheet drum solos are AWESOME.

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I'm in the process of befriending someone at school. She is awesome and keeps pushing me to read things I've never come across on philosophy. It was time, I suppose. I don't know what I'm going to do when I graduate this semester. I really enjoy the academic climate where I'm continually meeting awesome people who know more about things than I do. Maybe I should go back for a dance degree. :-P

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I'm going to stay in my current job for a while, as there is this child I need to take care of and the flexibility of my position is hard to beat. Even though I'm going to have my Masters and full ability to make (much) more money, the flexibility wins. I love being able to work 32 hour weeks and have extra time to spend with her. Speaking of which, back to work. Ten minutes of brain break over now.

Behind

So, since my last post, I got married (Yay!) and had a baby (on purpose, even!). She's my first baby and a true delight.

I love my husband and my baby is the most awesome thing ever. Seriously, you might think your baby is the most awesome thing ever, but you are wrong. Mine is.

Well, on my planet anyway. Your planet might have different rules.

She says OMNOMNOM a lot.

Yes, that is my child eating another child.

NOMS.

A Fairy Tale

The last 6 weeks were made of a fairy tale. I joined a group that did circus, I met the most supportive and loving group of women I could have imagined, each beautiful by her own right and with a sense of humor.

In the performances, something went wrong for everybody and everyone broke a little at some point, but every time I saw another girl or more was there ready to help her get back up and at it. If you even looked frightened someone was there to help you.

Yesterday was the cast party. It was fun, with people running around and just enjoying themselves. Children and dogs were welcome. People were responsible with their children and generous with their food. There were none of the little annoyances we ignore every day.

I was going to let it all end there originally, but it appears there will be a 6 week fabric class for only $15 a class and a tumbling class. I might take these. It is ridiculously tempting. What is more, one of the girls I met wants to go skating and another wants me to start dancing with them. She can teach me poi and I can teach her weapons. It sounds wonderful. I'm not ready to part ways with all of these fantastic people. It makes me want to cry that it is over.

I have no idea how I am going to be able to go and handle real life when I know that people can be like this. I feel like I was in a fairy tale and now I have to go back to the real world filled with insecure nasty cynics.

Circus Day 15

Spent all of circus today going over acro stuff for the show on Friday. This is apparently the most ambitious show they have ever attempted for this level. It was a lot of fun and I realized how far we have all come as we prepared for it and were able to do moves easily that we thought were really hard a bit ago. Nothing new, but there were three things that I was able to do without a problem that I had not been able to do in the past. I have a giant painful bug bite on my elbow, but barely noticed during the class (I have since discovered all anti-itch creams in my house have aloe as the first ingredient, which I am allergic to).

On the way back, we had a hitchhiker who was along for the ride to help on costumes. She is from Montreal, so I asked a question that has been seriously bugging me. This is whether there are other circus school opportunities like this one. She said yes, one other, in Australia. This amazes me. I really hope that other circus groups will take that to heart and start helping random women work on circus stuff. This has been one of the nicest groups of girls I have ever met and a seriously positive experience. It has renewed some degree of faith in humanity for me.

Circus School Day 14

Tonight was fun. I did a clown piece with . We have a lot of good interactions together. It was hilarious and we are perfecting it even more.

Aerial was a blast. We did a couple of runthroughs of the act and the music is awesome. I was able to get up the cloth in a way I wasn't on Tuesday, but I am still having a major problem making myself do one of the drops. I have watched THREE other people do it. I was in a hugely painful position for many minutes looking down at the ground thinking "okay... NOW... I mean... NOW!" I have done it in slow motion three times. I will get this damn thing down before the show, but I seem to have major trust issues with things even as solid as a piece of fabric.

I will get this. I will I will I will.

The instructor for fabric told me she had the same damn hangup.