02
Jul, 2005

harmony makes me happy again

last night i went to singing group–a small group of people from my church who get together periodically to sing hymns. i always mean to go, but something else always seems to come up. this time, it was a potluck, so i started baking my contribution (which i’ll discuss later) early in the morning so i was committed to attending.

i went. i sang. i got “chilly bumps.” the first song or two had a guitar accompaniment and i was getting a little disheartened because what i really love is the acapella stuff, but then we dropped the guitar for a couple and just sang. it was lovely. this is the food of my soul. singing in a group of people, close harmony and no one seems to mind if i doodle around a bit. in fact, i wasn’t the only doodler and most of the time the harmonies all worked out anyway. we had fun playing around with the songs, too–singing them in a twangy voice, adding an extra beat to each measure to change it up a little, singing different melodies than the one written to see if the lyrics fit….i loved it! my voice was very tired after two hours, but my cup of happiness was full. i should really make the time to go more often!

two other happy things:
the item i took to the potluck is a dish called “scandanavian sandwich wheel” that my mom used to make in the summer. it’s a wonderful, unique concoction built on a crescent roll crust topped with a layer of dill cream cheese and then consecutive rings of tuna, tomato, black olives, green peppers and cucumber slices. it tastes so fresh and summery! the man isn’t fond of most of the ingredients, so i don’t make it very often, so i thought a potluck was a perfect time to make it and share it with friends. yum.

on the way home late last night, i noticed some flowers blooming in a neighbor’s yard. i stopped to smell them (like the old adage dictates) and they were so sweet! they reminded me of honeysuckle, which i love. as a kid, our backyard fence was covered in honeysuckle. the whole back yard smelled like hot honeysuckle every time you went outside in the summer. i loved the smell and i loved the taste of the nectar–what other flower can you drink the nectar from? i also liked to watch (from a safe distance) the fat, fuzzy bumblebees that hovered around it. i wonder if honeysuckle would survive a wisconsin winter…

Posted in la la la!, stuff that sparks a glow in my soul, summer, yum | 2 Comments
30
Jun, 2005

curb harvesting

it’s really amazing what people throw away. for work, i put out a request to my church e-mail list to see if anyone had a small plastic castle that i could borrow for a program. last night, two friends called and said they’d found a castle on the curb and they snagged it for me. i picked it up this morning. it’s actually a bookshelf/toybox, but also, quite obviously, a plastic castle! ask, and it shall be found in the trash for you…

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29
Jun, 2005

bike guru

last night, i drove a friend and her bicycle home after a workout (she didn’t have her headlight and didn’t want to bike at dusk on busy frontage roads–who could blame her?). I helped her load her bike into my trunk and we ended up taking the front wheel off to make it fit the trunk a little easier. as we were doing that, she pointed to the computer component that attaches to her spokes and said, “what’s that?” and i explained that it was part of the computer and also a good indicator as to which way her wheel should be when we remount it. when we got to her house and unloaded the bike and i put her wheel back on, she was very impressed and called me a “know-it-all bike girl” or something like that. i don’t really know all that much, but it felt good to have someone admire me for my sports-related knowledge.

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28
Jun, 2005

wildflowers

this morning on the way to work, there were clouds of blue wildflowers hovering on transparent stems about 3 feet off the ground. below them were tiny rolling hills of yellow wildflowers. pretty.

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26
Jun, 2005

harmony makes me happy

today i sang in a quartet at church. the song was a very simple, repetitive song, but it had some rhythm. there is something about singing in close four part voices, especially with only one person per part, that thrills my soul, resonates with something deep within me and pulls out a smile everytime.

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24
Jun, 2005

today’s good things

lunch at a chinese buffet–not the best chinese, but hey, i got an eggroll and lunch was free! (well, i had to babysit for a few hours to “earn” it…)

having a baby fall asleep on you while you fall asleep

i swam in a lake for the first time since i’ve started learning how to swim. i’m not sure if little green stuff stuck between your suit and your skin is a happy thing, but it sure does look funny.

eating mulberries from the trees along the bike path. mulberries always remind me of the mulberry tree in our back yard in spencer. every summer evening i ended up with purple bottoms of my feet from walking on all of the fallen berries.

our softball game was forfeited (to us–the other team was short on players), but we played a casual game anyway–which is my favorite kind and i wish we could play like that ALL the time! i actually hit the ball and i actually made it to first base (JUST barely) and i ended up scoring a run for our team! oh hey, i just remembered that i also did that last week, but this week’s somehow seemed more fun. oh yeah, it’s because i actually hit the ball and didnt’ get to first on a walk.

sharing strawberry custard pie with my teammates after the game.

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23
Jun, 2005

reasons i like my job

i get to say things like “whose bubotuber puss is this?” and “when you’re making the exploding filibusters, DON’T shake the flasks of danger!”

today i learned that cleaning slime off of weathered wooden picnic tables is a pain in the petunia. but i got to sluice the sidewalk with a bucket of water which felt good on my bare feet. mmm…hot sidewalk, cool water, bare feet…

i had almost thirty teens at my program this afternoon (entitled “professor snape’s potions)–a runaway success! and also…some crazy madness. i was cleaning slime off of the walls about 9 feet off the ground. i have a smear of blue food coloring (aka “blast-ended screwt fluid”) on the back of my hand.

next week: catapults!

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23
Jun, 2005

finishing a mini-tri–in less than 24 hours!

last night as i was eating supper, i realized that i biked 18 miles the night before, ran/walked 3 miles (or 5k) that morning and had just finished swimming 1/4 mile before supper. that means that i finished a whole mini-triathlon in less than 24 hours! granted, i had at least 8 hours of rest between each event, which would be less than practical in an actual race, but nonetheless, the fact remains, i couldn’t have done any of those things, let alone all of them in less than 24 hours when we first moved to madison. this city is (and my friends are) good for my health.

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22
Jun, 2005

strawberry ice cream soup

i had fresh, crushed strawberries with sugar over vanilla ice cream and stirred in into a soup before eating it. i think aunt c. was the first one to show me the joys of soupy ice cream. recently, i was talking to someone that was really grossed out by people eating their ice cream that way, but the conversation simply made me nostalgic for ice cream soup, so i had to make myself some. yum.

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22
Jun, 2005

papi & kiki

as i ate supper on the porch, i was entertained by a hispanic father and his two sons practicing soccer (and shouting “gooooooaaaaaaaalllll” a lot) in the park right across the street. it made me smile.

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