Brought To You By Insomnia

Well hey, folks—it’s been a long time. Excuses? Nothing good, just unpacking/working/kids/lameitude, the basics.

Spring has just about spent her bloom here, and summer is looming like a thunderhead. We’ve already had a 90-plus degree day, though it doesn’t get so bad here on the windy hill. The garden is bursting; we’ve planted tomatoes, basil, blueberries, lettuce, pumpkins, melons, squash, and sunflowers to complement the parsnips, garlic, asparagus, herbs, strawberries, and onions that appeared when the snow melted. I joined a CSA (community-supported agriculture) group, where we pay for a share of a local farm’s crop and in return get more produce than we can eat. One of our farmers lives right next door, and there’s something satisfying about knowing that my investment is staying so close to home. Moving to this close-knit community (which has welcomed us with open arms), so entrenched in nature, makes me much more conscious of where I spend my money and place my carbon footprint, especially since I am driving so much more than before. There are so many easy things I can do to help reduce the amount of energy we use that I’ve hardly thought of as energy-conserving before, like buying local produce instead of air-shipped strawberries from California and apples from New Zealand. It just makes sense, as well as tasting better. And if I buy items from the local farmer’s market, I’m helping support people I know, like the sexton at our church who makes jewelry, my old friend’s dad who sells organic seedlings, and the cute Eastern European pastry man. Plus nothing there has been shipped 10,000 miles (except maybe the pastry man). Anyway, maybe being up since 2:30 is making me loopy, but I think the gist of this paragraph is: Me happy, settling into little community, figuring out place in world and how to impact it less negatively; fresh strawberries and pastry, mmmmmm.

The small people are thriving, physically and mentally. Biggie can now read everything, which seems great until she gets ahold of “Oprah”—I don’t really want her to know about what’s happening to women in the Congo, or how great sex can be after 40. The Wee One is still wee—at 3 and a half, she is wearing the shoes Biggie got when she was 20 months old, and people still give me funny looks when she clambers to the top of the climbing structure, somersaults over and hurtles to the ground like kids twice her size. My mission for the summer is teaching them both to swim and ride bikes.

Work is going great, that’s one of the reasons I haven’t been posting as much. I went to an all-company conference in April and finally met the people I’ve been talking to on the phone for two years. I was impressed with how educated, energetic and down-to-earth everyone is, and with the company’s mission to make it the best place to work.

The husband’s job is going great guns; he’s criss-crossing the country talking to potential investors and they just opened the new lab in a renovated typewriter factory here in town.

The alarm just sounded, so my time’s up!