This past weekend wasn’t all dirt and Harry Potter. Saturday evening, after we’d collapsed from hauling dirt and come inside to take showers and naps, we headed off to the Sacramento Convention Center, where we first spent the usual five minutes searching for a parking spot somewhere in the five-mile vicinity of the center, and then had to make our way through cement barriers to actually get in. This is because the big agricultural technology meeting was supposed to start on Sunday so the local police force had been busily setting up road blocks and barriers and stringing ‘no parking’ signs all over the surrounding six blocks (making the parking spot search just that much more difficult) in preparation for what turned out to be a disappointingly low turnout in crazed and destructive protestors. Although I’m sure it was almost worth it just to see all the protestors who turned out dressed as fruits and vegetables, but I am digressing here. Since the convention didn’t actually start until Sunday we managed to get into the convention center without any hassle whatsoever and did not have to do much wandering at all before I spotted an open door and a room full of Methodist ministers in robes, and we knew we were in the right spot.

A few years ago I wrote about the night my mom was consecrated as a diaconal minister, which took place, conveniently enough, in the exact same room in the Sacramento Convention Center we ended up in Saturday night. Well, since that night the Methodist church went and changed a few things such that they decided they really wanted to phase out diaconal ministry and so all the current diaconals were strongly ‘encouraged’ to become deacons instead. It’s not a promotion or a step up in ranks – it’s simply just another branch of the same tree – both diaconals and deacons are called into service ministry (as opposed to those who are called to pulpit ministry, which is the type of preachers/ministers most people are familiar with). There are a few added benefits to being a deacon – namely that they can perform such things as weddings and funerals and technically, diaconals really aren’t supposed to. But on the down side, deacons are required to do a bit more pulpit work, and if one was a diaconal who really did not feel called to the pulpit, this would certainly be considered a rather big drawback.

The whole point of all that rambling is that Saturday night we attended the Ordination Service for the local Methodist conference, at which my mom received her deacon’s orders. It was a very long service, mainly because along with a fairly small group of people becoming deacons, there was a much larger group of people becoming other things as well. And it was much like a graduation, in that each person’s name was called in the slow and deliberate way taken when the person reading the name isn’t exactly clear on the pronunciation, and then this was followed by a few ceremonial steps, including kneeling, praying, and the inevitable hugging and shaking of hands that followed.

Eventually, however, it was all over, and my mom is now a deacon – a state which includes not only a spiffy new stole and a new title, but which (best of all) means that we can *finally* call her Reverend Ma (said with as much twangy drawl on the Ma as possible). Even though she still has yet to use the Action Figure Jesus her loving children gave her in a sermon.

A few weeks ago we broke down and preordered The Book, figuring that with everything else going on in our lives, we didn’t know if we’d be able to make the release date party. The shipping notice arrived Friday afternoon, and Saturday when we returned from lunch there was a note in our mailbox indicating that the mailman had tried to deliver a package. Why he didn’t just leave it in the little lock boxes right next to the mailboxes-on-a-stick like he does with every other package we receive I have no idea, but the whole point of me telling you this is that our copy ended up sitting at the post office, unavailable to us until 8:30 this morning.

Yesterday afternoon after we finished the happy fun that is dirt hauling, we ended up meeting my parents for lunch. Coincidently, they’d just picked up their copy (and in fact lunch plans were made because my mom called me and started reading out of the first chapter, amid my wails of protest because I didn’t have mine yet). And then as we stood in the parking lot outside IHOP (because chocolate chip pancakes are good for muscle pain, I swear) in order to give them back their shovel, they very nicely gave us their copy of the book so we could read it until we got ours. This was certainly above and beyond any parental duty, or the bounds of love because I will freely admit right here that there is no way I would have handed over *my* copy before I had a chance to read it.

But I digress. We got in the car and I decided to heck with my usual issue with the way reading in the car makes me a bit queasy; I immediately opened it up and starting reading the first page aloud. And then when we got home I fell into a chair and commenced reading in earnest.

It took me about four hours to get through the book and by the end I think I surpassed even my own records for speed-reading. And the instant I set it down on the table and announced I was done, Richard snatched it up, fell into a chair right next to me, and was immediately lost to the world. I queried as to dinner plans, he grunted, and I gleefully ordered pizza and finally read The Outlanders across the table from him because I knew he wasn’t going to emerge for any sort of dinnertime conversation. He finished it last night, of course, which is wonderful because the minute I finished the last page I was dying to talk to someone about it and I left him alone as much as I could (except to occasionally ask where he was so I could see how close he was to the end) in order to avoid giving away any of the surprises.

Anyway. I liked it. I liked it a lot better than the 4th book, actually. Petulant angsty Harry was a bit annoying, in a way, but he’s growing up and dealing with normal teenage things. I felt at times overwhelmed by how very much was going on in the book – all the little subplots and such – but I didn’t feel like it was too long. With the fourth book (Goblet of Fire), I felt as if Rowling had really dragged out some sections and thrown in all sorts of filler and the book was far longer than it should have been; with Order of the Phoenix I wanted it to be longer because I felt like there was almost too much going on and nothing got explained as fully as I would have liked. But some things were explained and now I just hope that it doesn’t take her nearly as long to write the next two books because I am far too impatient when it comes to Harry Potter.

I picked up our ‘real’ copy this morning before work and found great amusement in the fact that they had made a very special packaging box just for all the Harry Potter books that were shipped all over the world this weekend. This evening we dropped it off with my parents, figuring the least we could do was give them our brand new fresh-out-of-the-box pristine copy.

It’s a good book. I’m not sure it’s the best of the series, but it’s still quite good. Even Azzie thought it was marvelous. And I ask you – would this cute little face lie?

A helpful suggestion. When you are feeling extremely sore and stiff in muscles where you didn’t even realize you had muscles after spending the better part of a day heaving several tons of dirt into a wheelbarrow and then lifting and/or shoving said wheelbarrow up a ramp or just over the side of a 2-foot wall over and over and over again, here is what you probably should not do the following day.

What you should not do is drag your aching body out of bed, down enough ibuprofen to numb the pain to a dull roar, and then do the hauling/lifting/shoveling/pain-inducing activity for another two hours the next morning.

Or in other words, that’s exactly how I spent my morning.

The pile of dirt left over from yesterday was so much smaller than what we’d started with that it felt as if we were working much faster than before. We kept loading wheelbarrows and dragging them to the back yard and dumping them into the pit, which by this time was mostly full of dirt anyway so things were a little bit easier because there wasn’t as much shifting of the dirt once we’d dumped it inside the walls. And because I could visibly see the pile of dirt shrinking rapidly with each load, I was rather surprised to learn that we’d been at it as long as we had when the last wheelbarrow of dirt had been transported and dumped.

And then because we were already out there and sweaty and covered in dirt, we decided it made sense to move the last of the leftover stones off to one side of the yard. Oddly enough heaving those stones to and fro didn’t seem nearly so much an effort now that I’d spent a few hours shoveling dirt.

I have come to the realization now, after two days spent in heavy manual dirt-related labor, that ibuprofen will have to be my very best friend for the next few days. The rest of the day I have spent carefully doing as little as possible to exert my aching body. My back hurts, but the worst of the muscle pain is in the shoulders and the upper back, and oddly enough in my forearms, especially in my wrists. This is due, I can only surmise, to the fact that shoveling dirt requires an interesting twist of the hands every time I lifted dirt from pile to wheelbarrow. It has also made life a bit difficult, in some odd ways. The simplest things – opening a door or turning a knob – now take more effort. And it feels as if there is a large band around my chest, making it hard to breathe too deeply. Every few hours I pop a few more pills and then sink cautiously into a chair and hope that the drugs kick in long enough to allow me to get back out of the chair eventually.

But we are done. Despite the fact that I hurt in places I had no idea I could hurt (did I mention even my wrists hurt? Opening doors should not be painful, people), it actually feels good to know we did the whole thing by ourselves – not just built this circle of heavy stones but filled it to the brim with dirt just waiting to nourish something green. And what makes me feel even better is knowing that, with the exception of laying the stones and planting the creepers around the base of the wall, this is the last of the big gardening projects for the summer.

Oh, and just in case you were wondering what five cubic yards of dirt looks like…

This entry is a collaboration for On Display. This month’s topic is “perfect circle.”

All week I have been planning for this weekend. All week, whenever someone asks what I’m going to do this weekend, I tell them – we are moving dirt. I have also volunteered to let anyone come and help us move the dirt, but for some odd reason I have had no one take me up on that offer. Go figure.

Tuesday I called the place in the next town that delivers dirt in sufficiently large quantities and set up an appointment to have 5 cubic yards of dirt delivered to our driveway Friday morning. I did this so that we could get up as early as we wanted today and get started, without having to wait for anything. I had it all planned out. Friday morning the dirt would be delivered, and Friday night after Richard and I got home from work we would go off to the hardware store in town and buy us a wheelbarrow. I’d already coordinated with my dad to borrow their wheelbarrow and an extra shovel so we’d have two of each.

And then Friday afternoon I came home from work and there was no dirt. The driveway was pristine. And worse yet, it was late enough that the dirt-delivering company had closed for the day so we had no idea if we would still be able to get our dirt and get this chore done!

Needless to say, there was a fair bit of grumbling last night. So instead of going off to buy ourselves a wheelbarrow and load our car with borrowed shovels and such, we went out for Chinese food, and then came home and consoled ourselves with an episode of Veggie Tales (yes we are still going through all of those). This one included not only a romantic tango about Barbara Manatee, but also our favorite character (Larry the cucumber) singing about how he loves his rubber ducky, *and* a highly informative flannel-graph (In our defense, the latest trio of movies from Netflix also includes What Dreams May Come, so it’s not like silly cartoons about singing vegetables are the only thing we watch these days. Really they aren’t. I swear!).

Luckily all turned out just fine. This morning I called them the instant they opened and they promised to come right out to deliver our dirt. They gave us a time window; we eyed the clock, got dressed, and figured we’d have enough time before they arrived to go grab some breakfast and my parents’ dirt-lugging paraphernalia we were borrowing. So imagine our surprise when we turned onto the main street through town and saw the truck of dirt heading toward our house, much earlier than expected! We hastily did a slightly illegal u-turn, and hightailed it after the truck, since I didn’t really want to go to through the whole “where’s my dirt?’ scenario a second time.

The lady driving the truck dumped a huge pile of dirt on our driveway and after a short trip to get the aforementioned breakfast, shovel, and purchase a shiny new blue wheelbarrow of our very own, we got started.

Dirt is heavy. In case you were not aware of this, let me repeat this statement. Dirt is heavy. Very heavy. We had two different types of wheelbarrows and I would fill them both with dirt in the front of the house, and then we would lug them into the backyard and dump them into the bed, where I would leave Richard to spread the dirt all over the bed (since the bed is 10 feet in diameter) and I’d lug the empty (and much lighter) wheelbarrows back to the big pile o’ dirt and repeat the process over and over and over again.

We aren’t done with the dirt-lugging fun, unfortunately, but we’re definitely more than halfway there. We knew it was time to quit for the day when both sets of arms abruptly decided that lifting and toting were no longer options. The muscles had had enough.

I am hoping that it will only take us a few more hours tomorrow to finish, if only so that we can park the cars back in the garage by tomorrow night. The (not quite as big as it used to be) pile of dirt in the driveway makes that just a teeny bit difficult right now.

I am also hoping that my arms will have decided by tomorrow morning to play nicely again and be willing to last the few hours it will take, because no matter what, we have got to get this dirt moved. And if my arms refuse to cooperate before we are done, I’m a little nervous, because frankly, I do not relish lugging wheelbarrows with my lips.

We had the gardener come over tonight to look over the plans and get things finalized for the next phase of our backyard. Or rather, one of the next phases; putting in the decomposed granite pathways is something we’re more than happy to pay him to do, while filling the raised bed with dirt and laying the path around that fall onto the ‘hey, we can do this ourselves!’ list of back-yard-related fun.

I get excited every time we anything for our backyard, because I can see it slowly coming together, and I know that eventually it is going to be amazing. Soon, very soon, I am hoping we’ll be able to do more than build walls and lay paths and haul dirt; soon I hope we’ll get to the part where we can start actually planting trees and bushes and things. But I have to remain patient, even though sometimes it is so hard.

We preordered season 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD (but I think I already mentioned that), and that arrived last week, so the past week we’ve fallen into a routine. We come home from work, we get dinner (in some form or another) and then we curl up on the couch in the living room and watch episodes of Buffy until we’re too tired to watch anymore. Granted there were quite a few moments where we were both laughing our heads off, and moments where I could not help but reiterate my deep and unabashed love for both Giles and Spike, but there were also far too many moments that weren’t quite so good.

Alas, we watched the last episode last night. No more new Buffy until probably early next year. Sigh. And now that it is done I think I have to agree with the general consensus that this is not the best season of Buffy ever. Nothing to do but set our sights for the new Harry Potter book due out this weekend, and hope it lives up to its hype.

Yesterday was the first half of the Father’s Day festivities, when we drove down for Richard’s dad’s combined birthday/Father’s Day celebration. There was a delicious asparagus and mushroom frittata, followed by chocolate pound cake. There was much talking and laughing and opening of presents. And there was a cute new kitten to play with, since Richard’s little sister finally got the cat she’s been pining after for years. Roxie is a lanky little lynx point siamese mix with plenty of spunk (which she’ll need to hold her own in a house with two fluffy little dogs). We dutifully provided implements of amusement (for both humans and kitten) by bringing with us a laser pointer and a crinkly catnip toy.

Today was Father’s Day for my half of the family. It started with church, before which there was a hastily assembled choir rehearsal because even though our summer season has started and technically the choir was officially done until fall, some unexpected visitors to the church had the choir director leaving frantic phone calls to as many of us as he could reach. Then after church the weather was so beautiful that Richard and I decided we needed to go for a bike ride. We filled our Camelbaks with water, hopped on our bikes, and made it most of the way to Davis before it occurred to either one of us that we had neglected to put on sunscreen.

Yes, “ouch” would be the operative word here. How my face avoided frying I’ll never know, but my arms and my legs could rival a lobster and Richard didn’t fare much better. We very gingerly showered and changed and headed up to Napa for dinner, where I presented my dad with an appropriately humorous card, and then we all feasted on meat grilled on my brother-in-law’s Father’s Day present- a new gas grill. He noted with wry amusement that my sister gave him the choice of the grill or a flat screen monitor. I sympathized with such a difficult decision, as he is just as much of a computer nerd as Richard and I are.

And now we are home, where I am poking experimentally at my sunburn and hoping that if I drink enough water and slather on enough lotion in the next few days, it will not start to peel.

As we wander through the house it is customary to announce to each other, occasionally, what particular cats are doing. Hence our house often rings with a chorus of “Honey, Allegra is being wonky again,” or “Honey, Azzie is being cute at me,” or if they are cleaning themselves, then the announcement is more like “Tangerine is cleaning her toes,” with the appropriate response always being “Well, one must have clean toes.”

I tell you this in explanation as to why it was that I told Richard that Rosemary was cleaning her butt this morning. This was only because she was perched on the rug in front of the fireplace upstairs, assuming the perfect cello position as she did her business and it was kind of cute. How the conversation jumped from there to what was next I’m not exactly sure, but I do know that Richard made some comment that everyone should have a clean butt and I retaliated with the fact that not everything *has* a butt to clean, because having a butt implies that you have a digestive tract, and for the rest of the day, especially as we drove down and back to his parents’ house for his dad’s combination birthday/Father’s Day party, we had animated and laughing arguments over whether certain creatures have butts. Earthworms, we agreed, had butts, as do octopi and most fish, but plants don’t (even though Richard kept singing about how all God’s children had butts and thus all God’s children could fart), and then we got hopelessly stuck on whether jellyfish have butts because neither of us is exactly clear on jellyfish anatomy.

It is little things like this that indicate just how smart it was for us to get married. After all, who else in the world would have been willing – nay, eager – to participate in a discussion on whether or not jellyfish can fart? Yes indeedy, we’re soul mates. What can I say?

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Jennifer’s Helpful Hint #72:

When you are driving to work and you pick up the coffee cup that you just bought at the local bakery and which they filled a little too close to the top, and your car hits a bump and you dribble coffee onto your cream-colored slacks, and when you then dash to the bathroom to try to wipe it up as soon as you get to work, here is a little something to keep in mind. Avoid the paper towels. Trust me on this – even the most sturdy of paper towels will shred into trillions of tiny little pieces that adhere themselves to the fibers of your garment, such that even if you do manage to sop up enough coffee so that it does not stain, it will be obvious you did *something* because the coffee will now be replaced with an irregularly shaped splotch of paper towel tidbits that will flake off slowly over the course of the day.

Instead, grab a toilet seat cover. They may be flimsy and not necessarily as absorbent as a paper towel, but they don’t shred and stick to your clothes, and they still manage to hold enough water to clean away the stain.

Richard is taking a class this summer on books for children. Naturally this means he has to read lots of children’s books, and write reviews and come up with educational activities, and so on. He can keep the reviews and activities, however, as long as he hands the children’s’ books over when he’s done with them. Because sometimes there’s nothing like grabbing a book you know you can read in less than a minute that also comes with really cute pictures.

We have learned one very important fact from this class so far. There are a lot of crappy children’s books out there. The pictures might be nice, but the story goes nowhere or the plot makes no sense or the book cannot decide exactly what it wants to be. It’s a little disconcerting to know this, considering just how many children’s books there are out there. But then I suppose this is a good thing to learn if one is going to be a librarian (like Richard), or even if one is simply pondering buying books for ones nieces and nephews (like me). After all, why should children be left out of all the fun of trying to sort through the mounds of junk to find the random gem of good writing?

We’ve got a pretty decent collection of children’s books already, between the two of us. Anyone else remember reading the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books, or all the stories by Zilpha Keatley Snyder, like Egypt Game, and The Headless Cupid? In fact lately I’ve been trying to find some of my favorites from when I was younger. I finally own the entire Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper, which was probably one of my favorite sets of books when I was a kid, and was also most likely one of the reasons I dove headfirst into science fiction and fantasy somewhere around the end of elementary school, and never really left.

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As time progresses my job is starting to divide into two separate categories. There is the computer side of things, which has evolved from just two puny databases into what will eventually be a fairly large and complex database that is keeping me busy wrestling with data relationships the more I learn about how they’ve stored their information in the past. And then there is the research side of things – which involves actual research (of the journalistic variety), composing all the research into comprehensible documents and reviews, and collecting and analyzing data.

It’s the last bit – the data analysis – that has been keeping me busy the past two days (after spending the rest of the week heads down in database code). All along my boss has made vague mumblings about how we need to get some better software for creating graphs and charts because Excel just doesn’t cut it. So yesterday he started poking around and today we actually bought something.

Here’s the cool thing about being the research department. Some days my job gets to consist of huddling in front of my computer with my boss, poking around a new piece of software and going “ooh! Wonder what this does? Ooh – pretty!” for hours on end. Granted shortly after that it became me huddled in front of my computer poring through FAQ’s and online manuals trying to figure out just how the heck to *make* some of those pretty little things we were looking at, but it was still rather fun. Of course I have a feeling I may live to occasionally regret these words, since now that we’ve got a much more powerful program to play with, the expectations for what we can produce will increase. But for now I’ll just focus on the fact that I know how to make spider charts and box-and-whisker graphs and surface charts with or without ribbons in lots of pretty colors. Whee!

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The DVD arrived on Wednesday but because of my dad’s birthday dinner, we didn’t get a chance to open the package until Thursday. We had to wait 24 hours before we actually got to start watching season 4 of Buffy! I’m not exactly sure how we survived.

I have heard mixed reviews about this season – mainly that while it has a few shining moments (“Hush” being one of them, since it is arguably one of the best episodes of Buffy ever produced, along with “The Body” and “Once More With Feeling”), that overall, it ranks fairly low on the list for best season ever. I’m not too concerned, however. Once we’re done with this set we’ve only got one more season to catch up on before we finally have seen the entire storyline.

It is June. I know it is June because tomorrow is my father’s birthday and my father’s birthday is always in June. Plus this weekend is Father’s Day, which I know is also in June, and my nephew’s birthday is next week, and my father-in-law’s birthday this weekend as well so yes, it most definitely is June.

Of course the instant I walk outside I have a tendency to get confused again because outside it doesn’t look like June or feel like June at all. In this part of California, June is supposed to be hot. Temperatures should be in the 90’s or higher, and the only way it might feel cooler is if there is a breeze. June is supposed to remind us, yet again, that the worst of the summer weather is yet to come.

But instead the weather is beautiful. In the afternoons the temperatures hover in the mid-80’s while at night we open the windows upstairs and then huddle underneath heavy blankets and comforters in bed and pretend it is still winter because it gets so chilly. In the day I look at my window in the office and listen to the birds and watch the river flowing by and it isn’t even warm enough that I am tempted by the thought of diving into all that water because I know it is too cold to be refreshing.

I know that these perfectly lovely and unseasonable cool days cannot possibly last much longer, but oh, I can cross all my fingers and toes and wish with all my might that they will stay as long as they possibly can. It’s June and it’s beautiful outside and I am reminding myself over and over to remember how lovely it was this month because the summer heat will descend on us eventually and then all these lovely, windy days will be gone.

After yesterday’s ride, I would have loved to spend today lounging around in bed with nothing at all to do. But today was the last time the choir sings before we go into summer schedule at church, and today the recorder group (now tentatively dubbed Driftwood) was to perform, and so there was nothing to do but lay in bed as long as the cats would let us and then get up and go to church.

Surprisingly I am nowhere near as sore as I expected. Compared to long rides last year, this time I can still zip up and down the stairs with almost no twinges in my muscles. It’s actually a nice feeling to know I can pound out 32 miles and still be (mostly) functional.

The rest of the day has been nice, if not necessarily the ‘lounge around with nothing planned’ sort of day I’d envisioned. After lunch Richard and I headed off to the mall to go a bit of shopping. He needed jeans and I – well, lets just say that I have come to the realization that even the best of underwear has a shelf life, and after the underwire suddenly attacked me in a second bra, I knew that time had been reached.

Years ago my friend and I descended on Victoria’s Secret and spent several hundred dollars on underwear. I know this might seem a bit insane to a lot of people, but there really is a difference between good quality and the cheap things you can get at the bargain stores. I may have resigned myself to the fact that it is next to impossible to find a bra *without* an underwire, but I refuse to have to wear ugly underwear. So when I emerged from that shopping trip, it was with a bag crammed with silky bras and panties, in matching colors, and it was a marvelously girly sort of thing to do.

Today I descended on Victoria’s Secret again, but this time it was with my husband instead of a female friend. And I got to giggle madly about the act of men in lingerie stores.

Men in lingerie stores, for the most part, all seem to have the same hunted look on their faces. You can see it in their eyes – they know they cannot stare at the lingerie, and they certainly cannot stare at other women who might be shopping, and so they tend to hover anxiously near their wives or girlfriends, eyes darting from here to there, trying desperately to unfocus their gaze so as not to appear as if they are noticing anything in the store at all. From the point of view of a woman, I can find this all grandly amusing. I do realize that perhaps it isn’t quite so amusing from the point of view of the man.

We did a little bit more shopping after that, and then we called a friend and met her at Mimi’s Café because when there is a Mimi’s near where I am, I have no choice but to succumb to the lure of their buttermilk spice muffins. During dinner we did a lot of talking and laughing and ate crème brule cheesecake for dessert and actually managed to have conversations about things other than Benthic Creatures or the Company to be Nicknamed Later (even though those topics did occasionally creep in). After dinner we had to take advantage of the fact that we were within walking distance of a Barnes and Nobles, which aside from being chock full of books, also has a coffee shop on site. So we wandered around the books and managed to escape that side of the store with only a few purchases each. I talked our friend into buying Good Omens because every time I read it, it always makes me laugh out loud, and she talked me into getting Outlander because isn’t some cheesy romance, and Richard got something by Bill Bryson because he really likes Bill Bryson, and then we dragged each other kicking and screaming away from the books before we spent all our money, and instead got coffee and chai tea lattes and mochas and sat around a tiny little table and talked and laughed for another hour or two until there was yawning and realization that the evening eventually had to end.