Rachael

I was in the store yesterday, a little veggie market not far from my house. It gets pretty crowded after work, and I felt scowly and headachey as I stood in line.

The sound-system was playing "Under the Boardwalk." A deep baritone joined in for a few lines. I didn’t turn around.

"Come on! Sing with me!"

A short man in a purple suit was holding a huge bunch of greens to his chest, three customers back.

"Let’s make the cashiers happy! Let’s make them give the food away!" A checker grinned and shook her head.

"Look at these! Have you ever seen such pretty greens?" He shook them with a vegetable rattle. A woman asked him how he was going to cook them.

He spoke to the store at large. "I cook, sure. I cook all the time. I’m a great cook. But no, these aren’t for me. They’re for the rabbits." He heaved a dramatic sigh. "Those rabbits eat better than I ever do. Avocados. Raisins. Peanut butter, but only the fancy fresh kind. These greens. They eat more than me, too." He had such a big smile that just looking at him made me feel less scowly.

"Are they angora?" I asked. I had to know. I had visions of him spinning the fluff while they ate avocado on his lap.

He beamed at me. "No, lop-eared. Big lops. Great big lops. I get home from work, and sometimes I’ll sit on the couch. Maybe I’ll fall asleep. The white one, she’ll hop up and pull on my pants until I wake up. She wants her food."

"But Harriet," he paused for effect, looking at his audience — we were all rapt by now, "Harriet, she dances. Right in time to the music. She gives a little hop, like this. And then another to the left, see? Hop, hop, hop. Dancing! She dances for me when I’m tired. Who could be sad when Harriet dances like that?"

As I picked up my bags to leave, I told him it was the best thing I’d heard all day. He said that God would bless me. I walked out, thinking maybe he had.

*Lala’s Harriet dances too, with a waggy spinning tail. Must be in the name.

I would really like a night’s good sleep. Really. What with police action and new-job dreams and the migraine I woke up with yesterday, I’m having a rough time. The other night, I had this terrible dream in which it was my first day of work, and someone was supposed to drive me there. She wouldn’t tell me where she was going to meet me, though, and ignored my questions. Finally, I shouted, "WHERE AM I GOING TO MEET YOU?" at the top of my lungs and woke up both myself and Lala. You might know from her blog that Lala can sleep through things like alarm clocks and ringing telephones and nuclear detonations, so I was quite proud of my lung capacity.

I’m pre-blogging this, since I have a minute while Lala showers, and then we’re going out to dinner, and then I’m going home to bed, where, by the time you read this, I hope I will have managed a very nice, sound, long sleep. I haven’t knit a stitch in days. I want sleeeeeeppppp……. Wish me luck.

I’m loving the new job. I’m in dayshift in-house training for the first two weeks, then I go to San Francisco for a training there, and then I go back to midnight shifts for a couple of months of training (I won’t be online much for a long while – I’ll be reading them from home, but not leaving many comments. Forgive me?).

It’ll be nice to have the three or four days off a week (alternate weeks), but I have to say I’m enjoying this whole 8 hours a day thing. I did some new fancy math (are you ready? Got your calculator?) and worked out this astounding figure:

If you work eight hours a day, instead of twelve, you have FOUR MORE HOURS a day to play with. Isn’t that WILD? Can you believe it?

I know, it boggled my brain, too. After working twelves for so long, I thought that they were just a normal day, and really, they are. When you’re working twelve or more hours, it doesn’t really feel like that much more than any normal shift. It’s just your day. You’re at work. You get to go home whenever you’re able to, when the relief arrives.

But when you go home after eight hours, you can still go out to coffee with your girlfriend and her cute little dogs, and then go home and make dinner, and then watch an hour of TV, and then take a bath, and then go to bed in time for an eight-hour sleep (which was sorely needed, as I haven’t been sleeping much, but there was MAJOR police action out in front of my house last night, so I didn’t sleep that much anyway. You know how I live within stone’s throw of the freeway? The police action led to people being stupid on the freeway, and I kept hearing the same thing, at half-hour intervals — SCREEEECH, [metallic] thunka-chooooosh. Tinkle, tinkle. And then later, SCREEEEECH, [metallic] thunk-choooosh. Tinkle, tinkle. Hard to sleep through that. All lived, thank goodness.)

Also: Five days is one whole day more than four. (What would you do without me to help you like this?)  So while I’m liking this eight-hour thing, it’ll be nice to go back to longer weekends.

But tonight, I’m glad I’m home.

Busy and tired, but I promised more photos of the weekend’s festival, so here are a few:

Camilla, who’s running the Aids Marathon, ran TWENTY MILES and then came to watch the music. I did that last year (Em was there!), and dude, Camilla’s a trooper to walk so far after running that much. She looked good doing it, too.

Christy and Beth might have been enjoying the music, but the kids, they like their iTunes.

Me, I like my cowboy hat. Or Lala’s, truth be told. I forgot mine.

Look! Jeni was there! Yay!

It was hard enough to navigate the festival ourselves (OHMYGOD, there were so many people), so we left the dogs at home. Many, many other dogs came, though. They like them some bluegrass.

I almost forgot one of the best things! See this unassuming trailer? Yeah, it’s a bathroom. Backstage, Friends and Family area.

One of the many Rach(a)els in Lala’s harem is dating a guy with connections (and as they met at the karaoke bar we went to for my birthday, I felt completely justified in taking the passes. Didn’t I earn them?) Free food, water, drinks and best of all, bathrooms with no lines. (But Janine, darling, we hated all of it. It was horrible. And we missed you. Next year….)

You can’t tell, I know, but that’s Dolly. Man, she was fantastic, as were Bethany and friend Nate who arrived at about nine in the morning to hold a blanket. We were about fourteen rows from the front, and it was worth it. I can’t tell you, cannot hope to explain how many people were there. They shut down the gates at one point and let no one else in (thank god Lala and friends had their passes, because they’d been out watching Ralph Stanley at another stage). It’s hard to tell from the next picture, but there were people packed in, standing room only, as far as the eye could see. We looked up on the hills surrounding the stage area, and people were quite literally hanging from the trees.

Lala takes a picture of (another) Rachel with Dolly. Okay, Dolly didn’t know, but she would have been happy about it, had she known.

I have no idea who these two were, but how cute are they?

My Sunday hat, with friend Sarah.

Emmylou Harris was also amazing that day, but we were just too far back to take pictures, sorry. But all these photos are with my new cellphone, you like? I got the Treo 650 in the mail after I spilled wine last week on my 600 (I always insure my phones, since I break them without fail). They didn’t send out the 600s anymore, so they upgraded me. And the bluetooth in it goes with the new computer! New job, new computer, new phone. You know what? Thank god we don’t have a new house. I think that would be a bit much, don’t you?

[new stuff] mwah!

Doc Watson, yo. Taken with my cell phone, at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. We’re on our way back for the rest of the festival today, and I must I just say: Dolly. Freakin’. Parton. Later today. I’m going to keel over, just thinking about it.

Yesterday, there were sisters with sardonic expressions:

And there were sisters dancing:

And there was me, looking scary-weird:

Sexy, ain’t I? More tomorrow or the day after, lovies (tomorrow I start my new job, so I might be overwhelmed and exHOSSted tomorrow)

Happy Sunday!

    My baby.

https://rachaelherron.com/_my_baby/