an end.

There’s a funeral happening today, right now, in fact, down in scottsville and I am on a train headed to dc. I hate to miss a funeral. And while this one if for a man who I really didn’t know well, his passing looms large in my heart, marking the end of an era.

Sidney Tapscott died last week. I can’t claim that he was my friend, but he was a constant presence in my adult life and his absence is marked. Time was, there were fewer people on the downtown mall, and it felt like we all knew each other. I was very young, and more on the fringes of that scene than I probably thought at the time, but it felt like we were the whole world. There was art of all kinds happening and there was always somebody to talk or sit near. Some huge percentage of buildings were empty, but there was no feeling of emptiness. There was just a sense of possibility, which is, I suppose, what youth is.

And there was Sidney, far from young, with his push broom balanced awkwardly in an old grocery cart, sweeping the bricks in front of Miller’s or hitting up somebody at Bizou for ice cream. He’d ask every girl he recognized for a hug and got away with it. He wore sweatbands on his wrists and on his head, and if it was hot, he wouldn’t wear a shirt under his overalls. He kept at least one watch buckled over those sweat bands. His hair stood up crazy all over the place and I often couldn’t understand what he said to me. He was remarkable in that he was an old man in the midst of a group of bright and creative and young people and we saw him and cared about him He was not invisible.

Sidney, may your service today be full of the people you loved. May your wake at Blue Moon be full of music and stories. I am glad beyond words that you had a friend to hold your hand as you died. May we all remember you. Rest in peace.

Links: obit, nailgun, Waldo, the hook, donate.


somebody should do some tidying around here

Aiming for once a week for the rest of the summer is do-able, don’t you think?  I mean, I’m hardly working.  And then perhaps I could also do things like clean up my blogroll, which is sadly out of date, and maybe log my lunch everyday.  Really, I have no excuse.

It’s been a hard couple of years, y’all.  But I think I am feeling better.  Time. I’ve taken two years of it and now I am calling you, though not in the morning.

Here are things:

  • it is hot as fuck here, again, and there has been no rain and the plum tree has lost about 1/3 of it’s leaves.  Jim Waive saw fit to remind me that I like to freak out about the weather in July.
  • I am gearing up for (yet another!) embryo transfer, avec steroids and lovenox, which is said not as if you planned on marrying an ox, but as if you started to sing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and then changed your mind and wanted to talk about vans and oxes.
  • there is Neighborhood Dramaz.  Really.  More than one drama.  One neighbor is concerned that my cats mistake her front flower bed for a litter box.  Oops.  Not much to be done but apologize and give her some eggs.  Production has improved slightly since my last post,  btw. Other neighbor, previously featured on Caved as a Serious Cat Person, is very upset that another neighbor has vicious sounding big dogs that are not supposed to be at his house but for some reason keep coming back.  Written out, it sounds so silly, but she is truly distraught.  To the point of sounding irrational.  And the offending neighbors do nothing, which is the shame of it, I think.  Starrhill is pretty tight; there are really only a few of us in the place and this is how we usually handle shit: if you’re upsetting somebody, go talk to that somebody, hold your damn hand out and try to make some compromise.  I fear it has gone on too long for that at this point.  And that the actual owner of the dogs seems to be the sort that thinks she doesn’t need to hold her hand out.
  • LB and I are splitting a share from Appalachia Star farm again this summer and it’s pretty great.  The tomatoes are about to come rolling in and I am very excited.  In other food news, I have pots of herbs that I am actually using for the first time in years.  It’s like being born again.  Sort of.  Being home to make a lunch is like being born again.
  • I had another miscarriage awhile back – whee.  This one didn’t hurt, which was nice.  The sliver lining is that it put me up to the magic number of three miscarriage, which makes my insurance company willing to pay for the Big Giant Pannel of Autoimmune tests.  I do love a good visit to my lab people.
  • my old neighbor, who should just move back to Starrhill, solving all the Neighborhood Dramaz, loaned me the book about running everybody read like 2 years ago, and which I also happened to give my dad but never read myself, and for about 5 minutes I was all “I could run!”  And then I laughed at myself.  Because the part of the book about eating beans and tortillas is really much more up my alley than running.
  • one of the search terms I just saw in my stats is tiny tits.  Hahahahahahaha!  Sorry,  wrong blog.

I have been thoroughly enjoying Twitter and Instagram.  We can blame that for my lack of blogging, but didn’t everybody have that particular crisis like 4 years ago?  Only my laziness to blame, as per usual.


some time

Oh, hello there, as my grandpa used to say. Hello. It has been some time hasn’t it? It has. And guess what? Three guess. First two don’t count. Yes! You got it. I’m still infertile.

But that’s boring, old news. Boring and old. Entertainingly, there is little else going on that is new and interesting. Maybe I’ll make y’all a list! I love a list.

  • school: was good, challenging in the full sense of that word, but good. Challenging like cho-girl and I took a deep breath at the end and said “whew.” And also said, “damn, us, we do some good work, gold Montessori stars for us.”Also, I am working camp some this summer. Until noon, so it almost doesn’t count. The paychecks also almost don’t count either.
  • home: also good, if less challenging. One of the remaining chickens went broody for damn near three weeks in June and so egg production is for shit. What this boils down to is that they aren’t getting the fancy organic local food this summer (see also paycheck as mentioned above), because I’m not going to spring for that shit if I don’t get enough eggs to give away. The cats are shedding with abandon, except for dear Louise who manifest her grief for her late brother by over-grooming rather horribly. Poor Louise. The kittens are big, but still kittens and Fifi is old and just as hateful, though sweet to me.

other random things:

  • Super CLAW was last month and there are lots of other places on ye olde internete that talk about it, so I’ll just say that it was fab. And I got a shirt. And another shirt to send to my cousin, who is an official for roller derby
  • Speaking of my cousin, I went to LA and it was great. Saw my afore mentioned cousin and we laid around in bed together taking and drinking coffee and she braided my hair for me everyday, like her mom used to do for us when we were little girls and we went to the beach.
  • I had The Spring of Company, which was pretty much the biggest treat ever. In order of arrival, not importance: Anna with her delightful tiny fam, the Bionics, who have already blogged the trip, if you want deets, Hard Girl and her not so tiny fam, and then trailing at the end of May, aj , who sadly didn’t stay with me, but did come over for whiskey. Yay! Company!
  • I am on the train for a super secret trip to Brooklyn. Well, not really secret, bt I didn’t tell lots of people I was coming up. Just a couple folks. I am going to lay around and read and eat and visit and not make myself crazy trying to see fifty bah-thousand people. But I’m going to go to the bra store. Woo! The bra store.

What else? Is that enough catching up for y’all? And by “y’all” I mean “the two of you that are still reading”.