All my eggs in one basket

The family has flown away, every person in my life in one budget aircraft. I spent 9 hours keeping busy at work and cursing myself for watching that John Oliver episode on Boeing. When a text came in from Japan before bed, I was able to relax. Until they have to fly home. 

After yelling songs at my last class of summer students for the week, I took a few days off. It is my time to go feral. So far that has meant cleaning, doing workouts, cooking gross health food, taking walks to find flowers, painting the flowers, and then going to bed at 10pm. I did spend a lot of time chasing a wild rooster around the yard in my pajamas, though. I finally gave up and named him Steve*.

Gratuitous fitness cult progress picture:

(7 lbs to goal. I didn’t take “before” pictures when I started working on the surgery weight, but I’ll find a picture from last year and put on the same outfit or something.)

Why I’m blogging instead of working out right now:

ADVENTURE

One of the flowers I picked was crown flower (milkweed), and it came with a tiny baby caterpillar. It has doubled in size every day, and I’m getting kind of attached to it. Yesterday I went sneaking back to the neighbor’s bush to clip a bigger snack for it, but the neighbor was outside in the garden, so I kept walking. About 20 paces on, I realized I could just ask for a cutting like a normal person, so I turned back around, then chickened out again when I thought of her noticing the pruning shears sticking out of my pants and guessing what I had been up to, so I just went home. This is why I don’t work as a secret agent.  (Edited to add: to be clear, I only pick flowers growing on public easements by the road, I don’t mess with people’s gardens, I just don’t want them to worry that I will.)

Today I tried again, and walked in the other direction around the neighborhood until I found a different bush of overgrown milkweed to clip a stem from. On my way back, I stopped at a telephone pole with a faded flyer for a lost dog stapled to it - the lost dog we found last month! I texted the owners to see if they had been reunited, and they hadn’t, so I walked over to the neighbor’s house to find out if he still has the dog. His green truck wasn’t parked in front, but the folks next door peeked over their fence and confirmed that he still has the dog and it looks healthy, so I left a note with the flyer in his mailbox and texted the address to the owners. They’re so relieved he didn’t meet a terrible fate! I’m pretty sure the neighbor doesn’t know who I am, but of course now I’m home alone and imagining all the future true crime podcasts about my stupid meddling ass. Fingers crossed for happy people all around. 

*Steve is an old family friend from Indiana who calls my mom at exactly the worst moments to interrupt us with increasingly weird Internet conspiracy theories and political rants. He was already on my shit list for arguing about Tolkien canon in favor of the terrible Hobbit movie and refusing to believe he was wrong even when I read the actual passage in the book out loud, mumbling something about the Silmarillion, which he hasn’t read since 1975 - and THEN he called during 4th of July to explain how the Palestinians are not actually humans, they’re all pure evil, even the toddlers, until my mom blew up at him and he realized he fucked up and she might cancel the packages of coffee and oatmeal she sends him every month. GET OFF OF YOUTUBE AND READ REAL BOOKS, STEVE. Anyway, the rooster interrupted my staycation and has been making a lot of aggravating noise, so he’s Steve now.