My heart is beating a little faster than normal. I have a huge smile on my face. What could bring this on? Good sex? Finding a $50 bill on the ground? Discovering a new element? No! I have finally managed to order a mouse-tail plant online. Collector's Nursery finally fixed their stupid order form. I've been waiting for them to do so for three months. Boy, was I excited when I realized I could actually order. I suffered through my computer's attempt to cope with their overly fussy, slow loading pages, I got all the info typed in correctly, and as I moved to the bottom of the page to click the submit key I suddenly stopped cold, stupified at my own idiocy. I am about to leave on a week's vacation. This is the wrong time to order fragile, valuable plants. Rats.
Luckily, they had a box on their form where you can specify when to ship. I chose next Friday so I'll get my plants on Tuesday when I am back home. Life is good again. Along with the mouse-tail plant, I decided to order a small blue hosta (small being the operative word as I don't have that much container space left), and a very handsome heuchera with coppery red leaves. I know it won't bloom until next year, but I can put it in the ground in the fall so what the heck. The foliage is nice all year.
Today was gorgeous again. Are you bored with my saying so? Look, I suffered for eight years with horrible summer weather. Humor me; I'm still thrilled by hot days that aren't humid. It's so marvelous to go out in the heat without needing a change of clothes afterwards. This is the best tan I've had in years.
I took advantage of the good weather to drive 25 miles south to see a friend who lives on the far side of San Jose. I've mentioned her before: DarkShadow of RiverMOO. She was home with a severe case of poison oak. She looked like she had a third degree sunburn everywhere but her feet and her face. It was horrific. Actually, she was over the worst part and was quite her old cheerful self, but I felt kind of queasy looking at it. We sat around and gossiped, made samosas, and watched Labyrinth. She had a high school friend over, another MOO pal, who turned out to be the daughter of a physicist at SLAC so we had plenty to chat about. Two of DarkShadow's friends came by at one point to see if she needed any help around the house. They were Mormon elders, all of 20 years old, dressed in white short-sleeved shirts, black pants, black ties, and shiny black shoes, baby faced and sweet as could be. I thought they were charming, and well mannered, and wholly unnatural. If they had been my children I would have been sobbing into my pillow wondering where I'd gone wrong.
That was my excursion for the day. Now I'm at home alone eating chips and salsa for dinner. John is doing the family duty attending a friend's birthday party. I begged off. I'm kind of sorry to miss the Nepalese restaurant excursion but I have just about had my fill of seeing people and being pleasant. It's weird, even perverse, to feel this way since I like the birthday girl and all the people who will be at the party, but there it is. I've learned hermit habits, and I can't entirely break free of my dislike of socializing. Lately I feel like I've done nothing but socialize. One of the things I look forward to on my vacation is a blessed lack of interaction. No clients. No phones. No claims on my time. It'll be me, John, and a lot of dead people. We'll be going to cemetaries looking for ancestors, going to county seats looking for birth and death certificates, going to country towns looking for clues about John's genealogy. I'm going to enjoy it.
And the weather ought to be just about perfect.
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