Potted plants and the necessity of cleanliness.

Well, the house is a mess. I haven't been cleaning, which I suppose has been caused by the spurt of freedom that I have been having from work as of late. Who knew, the price of time is complete inhibition with respect to household cleanliness? But I think the first step is having realized that I have kind of let everything go a little bit, so now I can move on, pull out a broom and sweep the mess away (metaphorically). The sad part, for me at least, is that everything hasn't completely fallen away and become messy or dirty; but instead, has fallen into this sort of cluttered disarray, where at first glance, everything seems okay, but in reality and at further inspection, there are these microcosms of chaos unlcean.

Now naturally, I am going to put most of the blame on John, who has come into season, bringing out the spinning wheel and clay from his workshop, to make all sorts of pottery. Now, the other side to this tale that I am less eager to tell, is that he's making the pottery at my bequest, so I don't have to spend exuberent amounts of money on this year's plant pots and containers. I somehow got it into my head, after reading far too many gardening and DIY magazines, that this year's gardening feat would be potted flowers and plants rather than the normal veggies and fruits that I go for (don't worry, I've still got plans for them too though). I started up all these different sprouts in the greenhouse, and I'm going to plant them in pots . . . that until John fires them, do not exist.

He's already started throwing them on the wheel and is planning to fire them sometime this weekend. Over the summer, while I was away in Europe, he added an entirely new installation to his workshop, so that he could unpack quite few of his old supplies that have been packed away since the move, however long ago.

Anyways, I'm excited. I get to start planting again, and well John gets to twiddle around with his gadgets in the workshop, win-win. Well, I suppose I should get to it with the cleaning and all. I'll think I'll work my way into it, starting by finding the table underneath all of my paperwork.

It's cloudy and raining, so naturally all I want to do is muck around outside.

As I was walking up the stairway to the front door this afternoon, I slipped on the flagstone stairway and fell down it. I've had this problem before, as falling seems to be my natural state, so during the fall I removed the large, thorny bushes at the bottom of the stair way that always seemed to stop my fall and provide sufficient thorny pain. However, after removal, I never though past what would stop my fall once I past the former bush threshold. This morning, I found out.

I tumbled down the twenty-so steps of the staircase, rolled about a meter to the former home of the thorny bushes, and began to pick up speed as I slid down the steep muddy hill in front of my house's entryway. When I finally came to a mucky stop at the bottom of the hill, I was covered in grass and mud could look up the spans of the hill seeing the now wet and disheveled spattering of my belongings. Thankfully most of my paperwork was dropped before it could be throw down the hill with me.

So now, I've showered, cleaned up all of my belongings, and turned on the Silver Jews. Over the weekend, or whenever chance comes that it has dried up a bit and is no longer raining, I'm planting new bushes, or at least something that will act to stop my falling motion. Maybe trees?

Sleeping in the Stacks.

I realized something today that I found oddly disturbing. In the five years that I have been living, breathing, and existing in the state that is my graduate student life here on campus, I have never been to the campus library, not a single one in the nearly 20 on campus. So yesterday, I left the office walked up the hill to the library door and walked through it to go and curl up in a forgotten corner somewhere. I was somehow transported through time back to the days when I was and undergraduate in Illinois and I would crawl into the stacks for the daily pleasure of naps and the smell of old worn books and dust. It was unnatural how easily I fell back into that routine.

The spot I found was on the fourth floor, east wing, among what I can only assume to have been the section on Asian literature, because all of books seemed to be written in Mandarin. I curled up and got cozy in the worn desk that I would assume hadn't been used by another person in a few months due to the fine layer of dust coating it. Then I put on some music, something aptly appropriate from my younger college days, Ted Leo & the Pharmacists. Then, I, almost poetically as if being drawn from the past, fell asleep.

Unnerved by Shifty Glances.

Tomorrow I will finally be free. For the past week, I have been playing, rather uncomfortably, the role of hostess for John's parents. They have been staying with us for the week and will thankfully be leaving early tomorrow morning to go back to St. Louis. It's not that I don't or didn't enjoy having them stay with us, but honestly they kind of put me on edge. John, the assimilated son of Scandinavian immigrants, doesn't understand my unease, because to him his mother is just as any other mother. However, in reality, when he is away a work, and I am impressed on with the task of entertaining, she spends her waking hours berating me in broken English on the exact nature of our relationship. Then, after a hard questioning, she relays her take on our conversations to his father in foreign tongue, while they both exchange shifty glances in my direction. And of course, naturally, John just smiles and laughs when I relay these occurrences to him in the privacy of night after the elderly Hagebaks have gone to sleep. It's unnerving, to say the least.