three-and-a-half months of PURE UNADULTERATED BATSHIT BUSY, done.

now i can just kick back and relax!

bahaa, yeah, yeah, i know.  i laughed when i wrote it, too.  but:  the last two weeks did represent the grand-slam end of several months of non-stop ass-busting, in the form of eleventh-hour mad preparation for the farm market, followed immediately by six days of class, which finished this evening.  and my reward for all the craziness is this:  nearly-empty calendar spaces for the next six weeks, and some photos from class. 

the week's goal:  purify green fluorescent protein.  i took this class because we have three labs at work:  mine, the protein purification lab, and the antibody lab.  i don't really give a crap about antibody work, but the protein work interests me well enough, and i wanted to get a bit of a clue about what they do over there all day.  if this class was any indication, protein purification essentially boils down to fucking around and drinking a lot.  and i can totally get behind that, bahaa.

exceedingly poor photo of the lecture instructor. 

exceedingly poor photo of one of the other lab groups (mugging for camera) and my lab partner (with half a head.)

our lab instructor.  i told him to "look scientific."  note the alcoholic beverage in the background, bahaa.   he gave me a lift from the lab to my car on his motorcycle - which was so rad, btw.  i said, "you're not going to kill me, are you?"  he said, "of course not.  the trail of blood you leave behind is what will kill you."  bahaa well in that case, sign me up! 

weird.  science.

punishment for failure is swift, and harsh.

i spent more time blabbing with this chick in a week than i have with any of the people at work for the last six years.  i told her to look scientific, and she glared at the stir plate in her hand. 

yeah, that about sums it up, bahaaa.

in the immortal words of inigo montoya:  lemme sum up.

vendors:  four. 

visitors:  lots! 

sales:  brisk. 

honey:  won't last but a couple weeks.

me:  tired.

outlook:  positive.

photos:  natch.

my hives at the farm.  there are five, total.  i miss having them at my house.

post-harvest wax cleaning.  i took all the drained cappings, spread 'em on a tray, and let the bees reclaim whatever was left. 

taking a break for ice cream. she ain't foolin' nobody with that halo, yo.

quick 'n dirty market display, as opposed to the more elaborate festival set-up.  this worked for two reasons:  fast set up, and fast break-down.  and anyway, it's a farm market.  this was taken after the honey had been pretty well picked over already;  i sold out at about the half-way mark.  shoppers who came by after that, bought soap.  i came home one abe short of 500, which is a drop in the bucket compared to how much i've spent on this venture, but is nevertheless heartening because i'm very confident that once i max out on hives (which will happen somewhere in the 30-45 range, 2-3 years in the future, i'm guessing) i will actually be able to pay us back, with interest. 

final summary:  booya.

tooooooo busy to blog, farm market kicks off saturday (and "kicking off" may not be such a bad way to describe it, either; they are apparently "hoping for 4-6 vendors to start."  um, four to six?  including me?  that's not a farm market, dude, that's a glorified lemonade stand.  i guess we'll see...) and i have so much still to prepare.  plus i have to make soap for lamy, and soap for fall, and next week i'm doing 12-hour days at rutgers in a protein purification class (i asked to do that, by the way.  so you can see how very very unlikely it was that i should ever have found someone to marry me, because i am THAT EXCITING.) 

good news in the world of shameless self-promotion, though:   someone blogged my etsy site, which has been doing well, spurred on by a couple spots on the front page last weekend and a number of spontaneous mentions/threads in the forums.  whether or not they like my soap, people do seem to dig the... well, i guess you could call it "marketing."  if you didn't really have many other words in your vocabulary, bahaa. anyway, it's going well, and that makes me happy.  you can see the... well, i guess you could call it an "interview."  if you didn't really have many other words in your vocabulary.  anyway you can see it here.  booya.  (bahaa, the "tiny cut" she mentions - and it's a shame it was cut, because i think it really added some depth to the interview - was this exchange:  Q:  who encourages you to create?  A:  my husband.  if by "create," you mean "perform oral sex.")

digging in the yard in kraphaus one day, i unearthed a small plastic statue of st. joseph.  or st. francis.  or whichever saint it is that you're supposed to bury upside down in your yard, to ensure the quick sale of your home. 

mystical effects of mass-produced polyvinyl religious icons aside, if i ever sell this house, anyone digging around in the yard will - if they are so careless as to move aside the paving stones that serve as grave markers - likely find a collection of small perches and bells and jingle balls, for no pet of mine is given back to the earth without the object he or she loved most in life. 

today i will be adding a green and red and blue plastic mirror.

and it sounds so god-awful self-indulgent to write that.  i had, in truth, written a long and generally disordered blog about this, some days ago, and refused to post it just on the basis of that self-indulgence alone.  forget that it was also truthful. 

but it's been in my head, for several weeks now.  the bird, onion, is dying.  she has been dying, and now, today, i will drive her to the vet and change the tense of the verb and bring her back and bury her in the yard, along with the little mirror which has served her faithfully in her sickness.  presiding over this bird's death, and being the one to make it final, has taken its toll on my mental and emotional states to some extent - as well it should.  but there exists a thunderous discord between holding the power of absolute, final control over another creature's life, and the flailing impotence of actually wielding it.  the fish said, do i like this?  oh no, i do not.

onion's state has informed at least one ostensibly-unrelated decision in the last few weeks, as well:  i told bill that i don't want to adopt his sister's cat.  it's been over a goddamned year now, and i still mourn mr. woogums - with nearly as great an intensity as when she died.  i suspect, although i cannot prove, that part of that is due to the fact that i so acutely feel the absence of ANY cat in the house.  i was ready to get another one last september, after we came home from maryland.  but bill's response then, and forever after amen, was a simple, unqualified, unexplained, and - in my bruised opinion at least, unfair - no. 

so his offer to have us - i.e., me - adopt this cat should have been met with something like joy, or excitement, or... you know, something.  instead i found myself utterly indifferent to the idea, and over the next several weeks i made a couple of different excuses why we could take the cat, but not just yet - we have no supplies... kim is coming... we should wait til after we get back from maryland again... 

the truth is  i want a cat so much it actually hurts to consider too deeply.  the fact that i still think i see mr. woogums in the house out of the corner of my eye sometimes and am actually surprised and disappointed to remember that she's gone, and that i do believe that having another cat in the house would at least alleviate that sucker-punch aspect of grief, would have - should have - made this opportunity... well, an opportunity.  instead, i found it depressing and unsavory, and i avoided it.  

onion's continued decline, however, brought my reluctance into full light, eventually.  because onion - and her partner green bean, and the lovebird, and the cockatiel - came to us from nowhere, through no one.  they existed before they lived with us, but they did so under circumstances that nobody knows, and nobody cared to know, because whoever those previous owners were, they bought these animals believing they were bringing home not family members, but rather, possessions.  and possessions get tossed aside when you tire of them.  somewhere along the line, i became the garbage collector.

and caring for onion these last couple weeks has made it clear to me that i don't want to do that anymore.  i don't want to take in another someone's unwanted, cast-off pet, and shoulder the responsibility of seeing it through til the end of its days.  i don't want to be any more animals' last owner. 

i don't mind keeping the vigil, and digging the hole, and placing the stone: these are the things you do for your loved ones, when you've already done everything else.  but that's the thing, i guess:  i want to do everything else.  i want a pet i can choose, and name, and raise up, and yell at for hairing up my laundry, for years and years.  i want to earn the right to make this last decision, not have the onus of it thrust upon me because someone else couldn't be bothered with it.  i didn't earn it with onion - or if i did, it's only because i gave her somewhere to be until now, and kept watch at the end.  but that's not really enough, i don't think - and i guess that's goign to be the dealbreaker from now on.  because this shit is hard, and it hurts, and i don't think i'm willing to take that pain from yet another indifferent person who stumbled into something more appealing than actually taking responsibility for their choices.  i'm willing to take the pain, but i also want to make the choice.

because i'm weak

i got up this morning, staggered into the bathroom, turned on the water in the shower... and then just sat there on the toilet seat, staring blankly at the floor, trying to remember exactly how many of my very few sick days i have left, and finally decided that i didn't care, i was just too fucking tired to go to work today.  so i turned off the water, crawled back into bed, and slept for another four hours.  normally this would have meant that i still had most of the day to do stuff at home (and there is still.so.much.stuff that needs to be done before the farm market starts,) but for the first time in... well, quite awhile, i just do not have the energy or the motivation to do any of it.  i'm really tired, people.  and here's why:

kim arrived wednesday evening and we were home by dinnertime.  "dinner" in this case consisted of about twelve pounds of sliced turkey and ham, because bill and i are retards who couldn't get it straight who was supposed to go to the store, so we both did. 

thursday i had tried repeatedly to plan some kind of awesome daytime activity, but nothing really panned out.  kim's shoulder is bugging her, so we ditched the whitewater river rafting idea, and bill's dad is apparently no longer a member of a gun club, so he couldn't take us shooting.  i thought it might be cool to drive up to paterson to see the Great Falls, but i was worried that it might not turn out to be so great, and the weather was kind of iffy in any case, so we bagged that plan.  in the end we just dropped evie off at her friend's pool party and kim and i took billy to starbucks and the mall for a couple of hours.   it cleared up into a nice evening, though, so after bill got home from work, we went to see a minor league baseball game, and eat cotton candy.

we got special permission to take bill out of the home for the evening.  

requisite stupid self portraits...

we spent a good portion of the game trying to knock evie's loose tooth out.  it was about the only time since i've known her that she's refused to open her mouth.  (kim, on the other hand, will open her mouth for anyone.  but you knew that.)  the tooth was finally extracted the following morning, in the same way they all are:  with lots of screaming and flailing, followed by an "oh.  that didn't hurt at all." 

friday afternoon kim and the kids and i drove out to new hope, and spent a couple of hours looking around and eating lunch.  after some level of effort, we even managed to get ice cream (the place on the main street that usually has, like, seven trillion flavors?  had about six.  and like four of those, they were out of.)  afterwards, we ditched the kids with mom, and went down to lake como (say it fast, you'll know why we laughed) to see the amish. 

i really thought this was a throw-away shot, until i looked more closely and found that the lead singer, on the right, had suffered some horrible mutation and grown an extra right arm.  amos seems pretty horrified by the whole thing, too.  bahaa.

sex is gonna require two mints, isn't it, kimberly.

is this photo so wrong that it actually becomes right again, or is it totally irredeemable?  debate amongst yourselves.

occasionally - and if you all know me, you know it's not often - a photo will be taken that's so awful even i'm ashamed to post it.  this was totally one of them, bahaa.  but really, you neeeeeeded to see this dude.  according to one of the amish dudes, this guy's name is steve, and he's a regular at their jersey shore shows.  they say that he invented the flavor for crunchberries, retired off the money, and now hangs around the shore, gambling (and getting his picture taken, bahaa.)  i find this story highly unlikely, personally, (and a call to quaker oats provided no information whatsoever,) but in any case, it was quite something. 

i took kim's photo with ezekiel.

she took mine.

and then he and bill eloped to california, where this sort of nonsense is acceptable now.  lake como, indeed.

so after getting to bed at 3am friday night/saturday morning, we dragged ourselves up around nine, and hauled ass out to dirty pennsy, to see hot rod and heike.  after a lovely lunch of bratwurst and tube mustard - ask kim; i find it too disturbing to discuss - we celebrated Very Belated Christmas.

say hello to his leetle fren.

kim has unquestionable street cred, yo.

jess seems unconvinced about mine.

and heike thinks bill is a tard.

dim got age/mentality-appropriate gifts.  ("why is the book... like... stained?"  because the previous old lady who owned it was incontinent, kimberly.  i can't believe you even needed to ask.)

kim (because she is NOT my mother, and actually gives people more than one chance to look right in photos) took this shot twice.  in the other one, i appear to have one hand on my crotch and the other on ron's ass.  heike appears equally happy in both versions, and good for her for not being the jealous type.)

even though it was about a billion degrees out, we (and when i say "we" i mean, "not me") made a large and quite lovely fire, and had some wine, and shot the shit.  we also unleashed a hundred bucks or so worth of fireworks, per kim's enthusiastic request, bahaaa.  (this is a photo of the fire, not a firework gone horribly awry.  just fyi.)

bill playing with his noodle.

heike playing with hers.

and rod playing with... with... um.  don't read anything into the fact that i am not visible above the water in this, okay?  mmm delicious noodle.  baha.

heike said she thinks i look like gollum.  it looks as though rod concurs.  (and kimberly, wtf were you staring at, bahaaa?)

good times, yo.