Rachael

Okay, that was teh awesome. Really. Neither Lala nor I had ever been to a show on that scale, let alone a Britney Spears anything. We didn't own a whole album of hers between us in our vast iTunes library.

But it was so exhilarating! We went to In'n'Out for dinner beforehand, and for a moment, when we saw the line, I was worried about timing — would we make it to the show? Then we noticed that the ENTIRE restaurant was full of teenaged girls, some wearing handmade Britney 2009 puff-painted tee-shirts, most sporting gold or silver lame of some type. I tell you, I've never seen In'n'Out like that. The level of excitement almost lifted off the roof and we weren't even at the Coliseum yet.

We took our hamburgers and drove to the BART parking lot, which is just a raised walkway away from the Coliseum. Free parking, yo. We ate our dinner in the car and chased it down with Brooklyns from the flask (there are a few different cocktails named this, but I named our cheap Costco brandy Manhattans this, and I'm sticking to it).

Outside the Coliseum, I almost lost it, cocktail-buzz notwithstanding. We were CRUSHED in a thirty minute wait to get in the doors. So many teenaged girls, all screechy, and their bitchy mothers. Also, lots of lovely gay men, who made it all worth it. (Favorite overheard saying of the night: "Look at all these hot moms! I might go straight for a night! Get a cougar! Yow!")

But inside — amazing.

The noise of thousands and thousands and thousands of screaming little girls is truly painful, but exhilarating. Everyone danced. It was mostly a standing-up show. Britney gave only the slightest pretense of singing at all, but who cared? The dancers were great! She said Oakland and meant Oakland (she has a track record of greeting the wrong city, which I kind of wanted to happen).

And I have to say, she's so COMPLETELY  fun. I've spent time listening to Circus recently, in preparation for the show, and I LOVE IT. Really. The other night, when it was 90 in the house, the only thing that made feel better was cranking Mmm Papi, soaking my dress in the sink,  and then dancing in front of two fans. (I mean the blowing kind, not Digit and Clara, although they were duly impressed from their heat-flattened positions on the floor.)

I'm so glad we went (thank you, Martha! You are the BEST!).

(The usual.)

Do you know Sarah Haskins? If you don't, you should. And now that she's done her thing with my favorite commercial, the ad for the Schick Quattro, I would like her to run for president. Or move into my house or something else fun like that.

Please, do yourself a favor and go watch her piece on Your Garden (and then get time-sucked as you have to watch everything else she's ever done). It's completely safe for work, although suggestive enough your boss might think otherwise, just so's you know.

Now, I'm going to turn on Freedom to get some dang work done. Fighting an alpaca of a migraine, but I will WIN!

It's FREEDOM, people.

No, not that kind of freedom. It's the freedom from the evil internet (o, Internet, I loves you, don't be mad). It's a free program for the Mac (sorry, not for the PC) that disables all connectivity to the outside world. You set how many minutes you want to be offline (up to eight hours — but that's just crazy talk), and then it pushed you off the internet. You can't get back online until the time is up, or if there's an Internet Emergency (as if), you can restart your whole computer, but we wouldn't do that, would we?

It's awesome. I've used it three times this morning, for 45 minute bursts of writing, free of the siren call of email-checking/twitter-posting/facebook-browsing. I usually try to write for 45 minutes at a time, and then I give myself 15 free minutes, to get more coffee, to check email, but it's SO easy to get frustrated with a sentence or a word, and flip out of the document and over to the promised land of immediate gratification and wasted time.

But when the document is the only thing in front of me? Then I write. I just sit and write. I know, I know, I could simply turn off my AirPort connection, but then it's only a simple flick of the wrist to turn it back on. Freedom doesn't let you do that. You simply have to sit there and work (or stare grumpily at the clock) and wait for the internet to turn back on.

It's really good. I recommmend it. (Found via VSL, although Lala swears she had already told me about it.)

The Easter fambly walk:

Look at those poppies!

This is up in Leona Canyon, only a mile or so from our house. It's hard to find, but the BEST dog-walking route when you get there. It's unbelievable that urban butts up against rural like this.

Anyone know what these flowers are? They are CRAZY awesome.

Click to see those wild petals better.

Lala and Harriet!

That is all. xo

Look at that! We didn't expect this harvest! In cleaning up the yard yesterday afternoon, I found a thick stand of something hiding in the grass that had infested my square foot garden. I pulled — green onions! Loads of them!

And Lala harvested a bunch of collards from her garden, and there is SO much rainbow chard, and that makes us happy, since last week we had some and IT IS SO GOOD.

Amount of care put into our gardens in the last six months = 0.

Okay,  I weeded my garden once, in preparation for putting in seeds a couple of months ago. Then I didn't put in any seeds and the goddamned bermuda grass grew back. I'll just have to be diligent in pulling it out more regularly from now on.

Yesterday was so unexpectedly productive in the garden. Lala was on a mission to move her whole 4X4 squarefoot garden from its concrete pad (yes, the grass attacked us on a concrete base) to the yard below, and I got home from my RWA meeting in time to help. We'd put the gardens on weed cloth two years ago, that was awesome, because basically, she took lifted the plywood frame, moved it out of the way, and then we lifted the whole garden and moved it to the cardboard base she'd laid out on the grass. Then she put the frame back on.

The chard and collards didn't even seem to notice:

(That's one of our tremendous artichokes in the foreground.)

We hate the grass. Well, what we hate is that it's bermuda grass and foxtails, a horrid combination. I mowed the "lawn" yesterday (using the lawnmower I got on Craigslist for twenty bucks — I'm the only person who can start it. It takes more than a hundred pulls  to get it to turn over), but the real goal is to cover everything with cardboard and then build up mulch on top of it. (Anyone with a line on free mulch in the Bay Area? We have a HUGE driveway, ready to receive it.)

And me, I weeded (again) my bed, leaving the onions, adding a zucchini (I know, I know, but I love zucchini bread).

Then I went CRAZY with the seeds. I'm working on a polycultural garden. Doesn't that sound cool? (Yes, we're living by The Urban Homestead. LOVE this book.) A polycultural garden is one in which you sow the seeds of everything you want to grow, hopefully things that have different maturation dates. Since I sowed just about everything, I think I did well in that category. You eat the baby things as they grow, allowing a little room for other things, but what you want eventually is a pretty dense chaotic tangle of plants. As you eat through one thing, say, the radishes, then you fill in the holes that occur with other seedlings as the season progresses.

It was hard for a type-A person like me to throw seeds willy-nilly, but it was good fun, too.

For posterity and my inability to remember a thing, here's what I sowed:

Radishes
Stumpy carrots
Golden beets
Rainbow beets
Dark red beets (oh, for one homegrown beet, full failure last year)
Lemon cucumbers
Buttercrunch lettuce
Rainbow chard
Basil
Super bush tomatoes
Heirloom baby leaf lettuce
Italian bush beans
Edamame
Foxglove and columbine, for fun.

Hopefully out of all those, I'll get some nice return on investment. I can't kill everything, can I? Hmmm.

We also set out ten tomatoes, including two different heirloom types (including Mr. Stripey! I want a Mr. Stripey!) and two Early Girls.

Now, today, on an unexpected Easter off, we are going to the store to prepare for an impromptu dinner to which we just invited sisters and brother. I think we'll do the traditional Easter sushi roll-yer-own dinner, followed by Pavlova and hot cross buns. Time to get my ass in gear.

But you know what I have for you?

 

HOT CROSS BUNS!

Oy. I feel psychically damaged from putting those photos up yesterday, and it's because you were all SO NICE. Seriously. I was exhausted last night, and then I realized it was mostly due to the pictures. People voting on my looks. It felt like a game of hot-or-not with myself. I was winning! But I was losing! Ack! This picture is good! No, THIS picture is good, not that one! Ack ack!

I am so bad at this.

There are now more than 600 votes a day after I put them up. (Hi, New Zealand! Hi, Iceland! Hi, Newfoundland! Hi Taiwan!) Number one was far and away the winner, and I thank you for voting. It was VERY exciting, and I'm done now, so I'll try to divert you a bit, okay?

Things I've been thinking about:

• The bumpersticker I saw the other day. GODSNO1   Wehn I saw it, I thought, Well! She has a good, high opinion of herself, doesn't she? If she's God's number one, what does that make me? (Number 134,425,791 — I asked.) Then I realized it could also be read God is no one. What? I passed her and looked in her window -she looked kinda churchy. Lala had to explain to me that there was a third option: God is number one. Duh. But boy, that was a versatile plate.

• This just in yesterday: Stephenie Meyer is ruling the universe. USA Today reports "sales of her novels accounted for about 16 percent of all book sales tracked by the [USA Today bestseller] list in the first quarter of 2009." Think about that! Sixteen percent of ALL BOOK SALES. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. I hope she's having a GREAT time. I love that.

• And lastly, a quote I've fallen in love with:   Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else. – Gloria Steinem