2003-05-14 - 12:33 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "Here Comes the Rain Again", Eurythmics

Lately I have noticed that I am seeing people I recognize when I'm out walking. Freaky! In the last week, while out walking (outside my own neighborhood, even!), I have seen:

- A guy who works at the flower shop
- A guy who works at a local market
- While waiting at a traffic light on my way home from dropping Poindexter at work, I saw the guy whose company painted our house and did our floors
- A guy I saw while waiting in line at the post office.

The last guy was really hard for me to remember, 'cause I'd only seen him the one time. He looked like he recognized me, too, but couldn't figure out out either.

Center City Philadelphia is SMALL. I ran into the geezer's realtor once (she works a couple blocks away though), and Poindexter saw OUR realtor while waiting for me to meet him at Rittenhouse Square.

This is cool. I like it. People say the city seems large and anonymous, but I'm not finding that to be the case at all.

Some boring details that I want to remember personally from Tower City last weekend:

After the bathroom incident, despite having ice blocks for feet a few times during the night and having to warm them up between Poindexter's knees, I slept REALLY well. Nice and warm and cosy and I felt well-rested when I awoke. Last time we camped, people were out riding until 1am and started up again at 6am, but this time nobody seemed to be riding between 11am and 8am. That was GREAT.

I hate quads. Good christ, I hate them. I understand that they're easy to ride and more stable and blah blah blah, but they kick up dust like you wouldn't BELIEVE. I can ride behind Poindexter on his motorcycle and he hardly kicks up any dust, but a single quad kicks up so much dust it's hard to see. Ugh.

Things I want to work on:

- Gradually increasing the steepness of hills I can go up/down
- Being able to navigate a narrow trail, especially a curvy one, and ESPECIALLY on a downhill that curves at the bottom
- Being comfortable the back tire slides around on loose ground (this is an OK thing)
- More practice in familiar areas on surfaces that make me nervous (rocky or gravelly downhills especially)

Poindexter says more than anything I need confidence. He seems to think I can do just about anything at this point, it's just that I get scared about unfamiliar things.

Fortunately I am remembering that I can just step off the bike if I get into a situation I can't handle -- there's no law saying I have to stay on the thing. It's designed to take a bit of a beating, and I am not.

Things I must take pictures of next time:

- The abandoned railroad trestle and the pieces of track that seem to be dropped in the middle of nowhere
- The coal-sandy "hill climb" that made my heart leap into my throat just LOOKING at it. It is unbelievably steep. Poindexter watched someone try to climb up it and lost momentum and had to step of the bike, which slid halfway back down. Some local dad actually pulled over across the county road from this hill climb and stood there watching the crazy people for a while with his two young sons. It's really quite entertaining, except that I worry too much about the crazy people.
- The abandoned buildings and equipment scattered around.

Well, this weekend was EXTREMELY PRODUCTIVE. Along with general housecleaning maintenance stuff (dishes, laundry, sweeping, vacuuming, food shopping), we did the following:

- I rearranged three of the kitchen cabinets which were badly organized.

- I rearranged the garage a little and cleaned up some of my stuff in there

The office, of course, is still a disaster. Sometimes I think I haven't actually organized anything; it's just that I've managed to localize all the chaos to the one room.

- Poindexter worked half a day at the office and rearranged the living room:

He's been wanting to rearrange it like that for a while, but was having trouble figuring out how to get the TV cable to the back wall. He finally decided to just drag the cable under the couch across the room for now, and hide it with a throw rug. I'm really glad he did, 'cause the LR looks a LOT better and he's really happy with it.

- I planted some petunias and basil in 2-foot troughs

I think I need to clip off two of the smaller basil plants in each grouping and eat them -- so that the biggest one will get really big -- but I feel guilty doing this. I am pathetic. I can't even kill a plant, much less an ant, without agonizing. If I had to get my own food supply instead of being able to stick my head in the sand and pick up stuff in the store, I'd probably be a fruitarian.

Poindexter has been making fun of me for lumping all my flowers in one corner of the back deck and leaving the rest of the deck bare. So I tried spacing things out a bit:

You can see the basil and the petunias (with lots of room to grow) at the left and bottom of the photo.

It seems like things are a bit too spread out, but I'll be growing a few more things in pots and in that long trough on the back wall, so that oughta help fill it in a bit.

Damn squirrels are already digging in the window boxes. Little fuckers. I'm gonna have to think something up to keep them out of the dahlias and ranunculus when I plant those, so they don't eat the tubers.

Also, this didn't require any work, but here's my new front porch flower grouping:

DAMN, I LOVE THAT FUCHSIA. Sometimes during the day I go out there just to look at it. I think I might sometimes sit on the sidewalk in front of the house and look at it.

On Sunday afternoon, the folks came over for Mother's Day. We drove over to Girard Estates, a neighborhood in South Philly, and went to a church there for Mass. My mom likes to go to new places for Mass, and this place had a 5pm Sunday Mass (very unusual), so that was cool. It was in the chapel, but afterwards we wandered around upstairs in the main church and looked at stuff.

A lot of South Philly appears to be somewhat poor and icky (remember "Rocky") -- from what I understand, many of the neighborhoods contain small row houses originally inhabited by poor immigrants -- but Girard Estates seems to be very pretty, more upper-class, and has always been a strong neighborhood. There's a neighborhood tour there several times this summer, so I'll go down there at some point and find out about it.

I'm running out of gratuitous photos and need to find some more soon. Meantime, here's a photo my MIL took last fall of me with my bag-lady cart. MIL says that when I'm lugging that thing around, people STOP looking at me, and turn away, because they must be assuming I'm a crazy person and therefore they don't want to get involved in any way. That cracks me up.

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