We made flyers and organised a bicycle parade to celebrate the equinox. We gathered at the loop near the river, rode thrice in a circle before heading off along a path crowded with strollers, wheelchairs, joggers, bicyclists, and flâneurs. I'd tied a crowfeather to my handlebars, and two bells. I wore a chicken feather in my hair. I always keep my ( Read more... )

On Christmas Eve every one of us worked until we bled. Covered in scales, meat like dirt under our fingernails, we smiled for the customers. But among ourselves, we cursed, and flirted, and let filth fall from our tongues until we'd all successfully made everyone else blush. And after a fourteen hour shift in which he didn't stop running once, my ( Read more... )

My floor is covered in tools and sawdust and compost. This is usually a sign that things are going well. Today my amazing friends Penny and Mark borrowed their friend Glen's truck and tools and trekked to South Philadelphia.

They collected me, and we ventured forth to the Philadelphia Organic Recycling Center in Fairmount Park. This place, even ( Read more... )

My garden is small but good. My mother just gave me a gift of herbs growing in a pot far nicer than the ones I usually manage to salvage. I spent a couple of days recently cleaning up the abandoned lot next to my house. I found construction materials from the people who refurbished my house, cement and paint poured onto the ground, beer bottles and ( Read more... )

I work long hours, and that does not trouble me much. I dislike it, however, when I must rush from work to some other thing, or leave when my shift is done but there is yet more to do because I have another appointment. I run home from work or fencing in order to catch something barely approximating enough sleep before I dash off to work, or yoga ( Read more... )

Pardon my silence. The last while has been painfully busy. I work until I drug myself to sleep so that I can rise and work again. I'm building new muscles, tearing them again before they have time to heal, and gods, they hurt. Shrove Tuesday I was running to work by four thirty in the morning, but when I was done I was racked and cracked, then ( Read more... )

Timing her arrival with a marvellously dramatic sunset, the amazing Westlinwind found me at the train station and stole me away to a whiskey tasting. The event was a fund raiser for the Colonial, a theatre that hosted Houdini when it was a vaudville venue, and later, as a cinema, was featured in the film The BlobOur whiskey expert, Riannon Walsh, began ( Read more... )

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Flour, salt, butter, water, a red onion, a portobello mushroom, two purple potatoes, one parsnip, half of an acorn squash, and some spices were all combined in such a way that a vegetable pie was the result. Vegetable pies are better than messes and inedible lumps by a vast margin. And I barely bled at all! I'm most pleased.

Beth and I have taken to laughing, "I get everything I want!" for those moments that manage to be irrationally perfect, more than you'd ever ask for piling around you all at once. And yesterday was better than that, a consistently and unreasonably lovely day. I'd stayed up late the night before dancing around a cauldron of glue in my oven room, a ( Read more... )