Haiku redux

Finally, I need to blog the haiku that would not leave me alone, even after the end of the all-haiku edition below.

Dear, dear Amazon,
Neil Diamond? No thank you.
iTunes? Nick Cave, please.

In which the house is unnaturally, spookily clean

It turns out that cleaning house (or, at least, my house, what with all the deferred cleaning/decluttering) is *more stressful* than writing a dissertation. Boggle. So here are some before and after pictures, including closeups of various pieces of anxiety-inducing detritus. One of them, the sideways one that no one is going to be able to read, has a list of pages I have to read *on anxiety* which it turns out is a really funny and dark thing to write a dissertation on, if you think about it, which I did, with the help of my therapist. One of them is an equally teeny and illegible closeup of two of my little self-imposed calendars with the number of pages I had to write on any given day in order to finish on time. Which I did, remember?

All of which is to say - it's still more hair-raising to establish and maintain the fancy clean-house pictures at the end.

Mother's Day, upcoming

Peter told me today about the surprise that he's making in preschool, to be presented to me at the Mother's Day Tea his class is holding on Thursday. "It is a picture of you! And I drew a green hat on your head. And your hair is black and brown, because your hair, it is black and brown. And blue for your eyes. And you have a pink dress on, wif purple flowers, and a blue shirt. And rainbow shoes." I'm excited, to be honest! The tea is always kind of fun - one year a little girl in Grace's class got the call from her mother, who was absent because she was in labor, that the new baby had been born. The whole room waited in silence while she talked to her mother, and then her aunt turned to her and said expectantly, "So?" and the little girl yelled triumphantly, "A SISTER!" because after one younger brother she had put her orders in early in the pregnancy.

I'm going to drag Mike and the kids downtown at an ungodly hour on Mother's Day to run a 5K that's a breast cancer fundraiser - it's huge and we've seen other people running in in previous years. I'm not sure what our follow-up will be, because surely we'll need something to eat, but any kind of schmancy thing is probably out if I'm all disheveled. Maybe a bagel picnic?

My huge freaking declutter job for today is to sort through my desk and box and file the contents. Then we're moving the desk into the garage, so as to make more space in the living room, or something. We chose the realtor who was the most pragmatic and grim about our selling prospects, because she's also demonstrably the busiest of the various people we interviewed. Anyway, a cleaner house will surely be easier to sell, hence the desk moving plans. Maybe I'll post before and after pictures once I've dropped my sidekick off at school for the afternoon.

Special all-haiku edition!

Big phallic flower
Is bursting with purple bloom
Now looks more girly.



"Compost is stinky!"
At least we can be certain
That his nose works right.

Gorgeous big beebalm
Nameless purple things blooming
Lucy Duck at rest.



Sweet lemon sorbet
Nothing nicer in the heat
Except adding gin

To the hardware store!
None of these, and none of those
Thirty minutes gone.

Realtor interviews
One coos over the clean house
We hire her pronto.

Is it a wreath or
a cute throw pillow? If so
no buying for me!

Today was cleaning
Hours of grueling dirty work
House? Still too cluttered.

Today was basically perfect.

The weather is gorgeous, things are growing like crazy (some botanical, some human children), we ate outside and biked after dinner.

In no particular order: lilacs! salvia budding! ferns! huge hostas! coral bells blooming! weeded out garden space! gorgeous kids! and oh, dear, is that an oddly phallic looking flower bud? Yes, yes it is. (An allium, for the non-naughty-minded.) Plus, in Endless Dissertation News, the title page has been pronounced acceptable. I'm working on the acknowledgements, so get those appeals in now! As always, cash is acceptable as a bribery unit.

In which Mama's dissertation gets approved.

News from the last three minutes! This one has no visual, but imagine a very happy and relieved Mama, planning to bake celebratory something for dessert.

In which I am done in by Sundance.

Not the film festival, sadly. (Damn Robert Redford!) No, by the Benjamin Moore color, painted over a medium blue that proved to be the hardest color ever to cover. It took me four quarts and two days to paint one small bedroom (yes, I'm aware that four quarts equals a gallon, but an optimist buys her paint one quart at a time, thereby providing endless amusement for the paint store guy who always gives Peter a lollypop.) It did turn out well, and Peter's in favor, so I'm just glad to be done.

In garden news, our blooming tree out back is blooming, I've decided to nurture some vines that might be weeds, might be flowers by providing them with a trellis, and one of two rosebushes seems to have survived the winter and the onslaught from rabbits. I think I'll replace the other one. Finally, goofy self-portrait from Peter - he's such a big and capable guy these days.