Remember that raised flower bed we built last summer out of a few tons of rocks, then filled with a few tons of dirt, then surrounded by another ton of paving stones? Well after half a year of growing nothing more than a bumper crop of some rather determined weeds (thanks in no small part to the impressive storms we’ve had lately), last night we finally filled it with actual flowers.

A few months ago we ordered a pre-planned garden set from High Country Gardens, which specializes in plants that do well in drought-prone areas, and they were finally delivered today. The instant I got home I tore open the box and carefully plucked out a few dozen plastic bagged pots, and then Richard and I went outside with large mixing spoons (because we are a garden trowel deficient household), and in an extremely quick rush of laying out all the little pots and consulting the sheet of info on how big and wide each of them will get and trying to remember which was which and getting very confused, we somehow managed to get all of them planted before it was too dark outside to see what we were doing.

You can see the collection we planted here (it’s the one on the top of the page – the ‘Hot and Sunny’ collection). Of course, currently it looks less like the colorful perfusion of foliage you see in the picture on their website and more like a few random dots of sad and pathetic half-wilted weeds scattered in some vague semblance of order in a flower bed too big for such itty bitty patches of green. But if all goes as planned, in a few months those teeny little half-wilted plants will fill that huge raised flower bed we spent so much time building with lots and lots of beautiful flowers.

Last night I wasn’t in the mood to do anything productive. All I wanted to do was eat dinner and sit in front of the TV and watch something mindless. Unfortunately we didn’t have any DVD’s of Star Trek: Next Generation episodes left to watch (the next batch isn’t scheduled to arrive until later in the week) so we were reduced to flipping through the channels looking for a relatively non-offensive sitcom.

Anyway, as we sat there eating our dinner and staring slack-jawed at the TV I saw a commercial that made me sit up and take notice. New radio station in Sacramento. A new *oldies* radio station. Those oldies it plays? Would be music from the 80’s.

Way to smack me upside the head with the ‘old’ stick, people. The music I grew up with is now classified as ‘oldies’. Ouch.

I did, of course, immediately tune one of the buttons on my car radio to that station this morning as soon as I got in, and then spent the entire drive to work belting out songs I still apparently know by heart even though I haven’t heard some of them in over ten years. Because while I may be old, nothing says I actually have to *act* it.

As an aside, last night for dinner we decided to give the new low carb, low fat pizza from Papa Murphy’s a try. I am not normally a fan of thin crust pizzas, but one learns to do a lot of compromising in the name of counting one’s Points.

Surprisingly, it was quite good, and didn’t taste all that much different than their regular pizza, even for having half the amount of cheese and a crispy sliver of crust. I think we’ll definitely be eating that again. Although maybe next time I’ll load my half with extra veggies, just to make it feel more like the bulkier pizza I’m used to.

A few weeks ago our choir director noted that the minister had asked for the choir to sing a special song this coming Sunday, to go with her sermon. He gave us the choice between this song we’d never heard versus one that is lovely, but extremely difficult to sing. Naturally, the choir chose the one we’ve never heard, because we are nothing if not prone to music-related insanity.

We got the choral part of the song last Thursday, and then some of who are more insane than others (one of those would be me) volunteered to do the solos, all still without having actually heard the whole song. It was only after this all happened that he gave us poor soloists the sheet music, and accompanying mp3’s, and we all realized just what the heck we had gotten ourselves into.

If you have access to someone with the latest Sting CD, go borrow it from them. Then listen to “Dead Man’s Rope”. It sounds deceptively easy, doesn’t it, until you realize that how impossible the rhythm is to follow. The only saving grace is that all the solo work is, well, solo, so if we didn’t stick exactly to the rhythms or notes written we would be okay.

We drove down to Richard’s parents Thursday night so we would be there early enough for the wedding rehearsal this morning without having to fight the Bay area traffic, but we got a later start because I insisted on going to choir practice first, if only to have a chance to actually sing the song at least once all the way through.

It was painful. We were all struggling, and by the end of the night the pool of soloists had dwindled to just three of us. I burned the song onto a CD and subjected Richard to far too many repetitions of it as we drove to San Jose and back over the course of the last few days, trying desperately to figure out just how to get my notes, and how to rewrite the phrases in my head so they fit into my vocal range.

This morning during practice it finally clicked for me and for the other two soloists. When we sang it in church I think we amazed them. It’s a different type of music than we normally do, but somehow, today, it worked.

I know that there is no possible way to get a recording of the songs we did for the Robert Burns dinner, even though I would love to at least have gotten a chance to hear how we really sounded (because it’s very different being one of the singers than being one of the audience). Someone did record the song this morning in church. I only hope it sounds as good when I hear it again as it felt when we sang.

The rehearsal went as all wedding rehearsals do. We milled around in a small and slightly confused group until the wedding coordinator ordered us to our various spots (she came by her nickname of ‘the wedding Nazi’ honestly, although I’m not so sure she would have found the same humor in the moniker as the rest of us). The flower girl freaked at the accumulation of strangers, combined with being in a huge and strange place, and refused to rehearse. My mom (the ‘official officiate who will be officiating at the wedding’ – title courtesy of the perky woman who was the site coordinator) slapped sticky notes with hastily scribbled reminders all over the ceremony in her little notebook. We bridesmaids did our best to take things as non-seriously as possible and skipped down the aisle during the second practice round. In other words, everything went as expected for a wedding rehearsal – especially one early in the morning when not everyone had had their coffee first.

Afterwards people trickled back to Richard’s parents’ house over the next few hours for the rehearsal lunch until the house was full of wedding party members and their respective families. There was talking and there was eating and there was mingling for hours and hours.

There was non-wedding stuff during the rehearsal lunch as well. Richard and I got to drive his aunt’s shiny new red Prius – which is just like the one we want to get (well, either red or blue), and fell even further in like with the car. The entire family took turns entertaining Richard’s cousin’s little girl (that would be his first cousin once removed, for those of you who actually comprehend that part of the family tree concept), and she, in turn, charmed every single one of us until we would all have cheerfully done anything just to get her to laugh once more. She’s a fairy-like child, with one of those little pixie faces and a mop of red curls and we all agreed she would not look at all out of place sporting wings and taking part in a Midsummer Night’s Dream.

At one point Richard’s mom and I drove over to the Almost Twin’s house, so I could see their newest cats (they have huge cats – the type that are almost wildcat – huge ears and long, lean bodies, and they slink with wildcat grace. Such a distinct difference than our motley crew of mix-breed pound kitties. But lovely as they are, I prefer our cats to theirs). Later that night a smaller group of us piled into a car and had a late dinner at a Japanese restaurant. For doing nothing more strenuous than mingling for hours with family and friends, it was an exhausting day.

Yesterday all we had to do was get to the site and rehearse. Today started far earlier. I pretty much insisted that we stop by Starbucks on the way to the site because I needed coffee and food, in that order, and Richard was feeling the same way. We retired to our respective rooms – bridesmaids and brides in a little conference room on one side of the hall and the groomsmen and usher on the other side. It didn’t take us long to get dressed so we had plenty of time to keep the Almost Twin calm and peer out the windows at all the arriving guests. There was a brief exodus to the front of the club to take pictures and then it was back to the room to pace and wait and check each other’s lipstick for the umpteenth time before it was time.

It was a lovely wedding, as all weddings are. No one slipped on the tile floor. The flower girl forgot to drop her petals until she reached the front and then remembered, flinging them with great concentration onto the floor in front of her because we’d told her how happy the bride would be to have the floor made so pretty. During the ceremony I could see one of the groomsmen turning a bit red in the face from trying not to cry and the groom himself was sweating nervously. The flowers were beautiful and the arboretum provided the perfect backdrop. One of the screens fell during the ceremony, but it happened so quickly after the wedding kiss that it gave us all something to tease them about later.

There was applause and then there were more pictures. There was food and dancing. There was sun directly in the eyes of all of us sitting at the head table, until we all abandoned our assigned seating and took over empty chairs at other tables with less of a glare. There was cake and hugs and noisy laughter and little girls holding hands spinning as fast as they could go so their skirts would swirl in great circles around them, and then there were hugs and kisses and good-byes, and welcomes to the family.

And it was perfect, as all weddings are perfect. But it was especially perfect because it was theirs.

When Richard and I left Benthic Creatures last year, I went straight to a fulltime job (which I still have, and still like quite a bit) while he went back into the temp pool for the university and was immediately placed in a technical position, wrangling databases and coordinating development. A few weeks ago the department finally got approval for funding to hire for the position he’s been doing, and there was extremely strong encouragement from all of his coworkers to apply.

Friday morning they finally told him he got the job. After nearly a year of temping, he’s back to permanent status. To say that we are both relieved is putting it mildly. And the main reason we’ve been hoping for this is that now he finally will have benefits of his own.

It’s not that we’ve been without benefits – we’ve both been covered by the insurance provided by my employer – but the insurance provider is one of the worst either of us has ever had to deal with. It’s not so much a problem for me since I’m relatively healthy, and usually only have to go see a doctor for that yearly exam that all women love so much. But for Richard, with his asthma and allergies and everything that goes along with them, the type and extent of the health insurance makes a huge difference. So – color me heaving a huge sigh of relief.

********

We started the day this morning by shrugging on our biking clothes and going out for a 6 mile ride. It was raining lightly and it’s still mostly dark outside at the time we were riding, and we had to ride into the wind on the way home, and the water from the rain kept dripping in my eyes and running into my ears (Cold! Cold!). But it actually felt good to ride again, if only because it meant that we’re both finally recovered from this winter’s batch of illness and ready to start racking up the miles to reach that 1000-mile goal.

Then I got to go do something that I’ve always really dreaded in the past. I got to go to the dentist to get some cavities filled. This is because I have horrible teeth, made worse by years of braces when I was younger, and they get cavities if you even think about decay in their presence.

This time, however, wasn’t bad at all. For one thing, the dentist asked if I wanted to try without the Novocain, which took me completely by surprise because it had never even been an option anywhere else. But as he pointed out, they were shallow cavities, nowhere near the roots. So I figured why not, and they were the quickest and least intrusive cavities I’ve ever had filled.

Of course, as I discovered later in the day, there is one benefit to Novocain. The numb feeling in your jaw reminds you you’ve had cavities, so you do not accidentally try to chew on that side of the mouth later and get a sudden and rather painful reminder. But all it took was one bite of my sandwich to let me know that chewing needed to be more carefully planned, and all was fine.

A few years ago my older sister and I went to a Cross Stitch convention in Sacramento. The convention center was packed with displays of cross stitching both beautiful and awesome in its complexity, as well as row after row of vendor booths selling every conceivable cross stitch item known to womankind. There were kids. There was thread. There was cloth of every sort, needles, thread organizing gadgets, lights, sewing stands – the list was endless.

So when my friend (the one who’s been teaching me to knit) noted a month or two ago that there was going to be a similar convention for knitting and crocheting in Oakland, I jumped at the chance to go. And in preparation for such a convention I mulled over how long it has taken me to do the projects I’ve done so far, calculated out how long it might take me to finish a few more projects, based on stitch to length and width ratios and other vague measurements, and decided that this meant that I needed to buy yarn. Obviously, it was fate.

Of course, it being in Oakland, this meant we had to get an early start. I crawled out of bed with just enough time to feed the cats, take a shower, and pack a quick lunch. Then I nudged Richard awake long enough to ask him to sort through a few piles of his stuff in the garage (because the garage organization project could not move forward without it!), drove to the next town to pick up my friend, and we were off.

We got there early enough to find a perfect parking spot right in front of the convention center, and then joined a rapidly growing throng of hundreds and hundreds of woman, all wearing things they had knitted, or carting in-progress projects, or trailing balls of yarn, everywhere we turned. There was a little time before the doors opened so we found a table and joined two other women – one of whom was working on a shawl and one of who was working on a hat. We rapidly traded names and details of our respective projects (since naturally we brought our own knitting along) and when the doors opened we joined the throngs of people lining up to buy tickets to enter knitting nirvana.

I could have spent so much money at this convention. It takes an incredible amount of willpower to walk into this kind of thing and not purchase anything. The fact that I had specific projects to find yarn for was my only saving grace. We wandered up and down the aisles and I fingered dozens and dozens of skeins. There are more varieties of wool available than I had ever known existed, and they come in any color imaginable. There were tables crammed with pattern books or heaped with skeins of yarn in wool and cotton and hemp and any other fiber that could conceivably be spun into yarn, including hair of dog. There were hand carved knitting needles and spinning implements for those who like to start from scratch, and entire displays of specially dyed yarn that knits into intricately patterned socks with nothing more than a simple garter stitch. We spent the first few hours blissfully wandering from booth to booth, daydreaming of having the time and money and wrist strength to not only afford all the yarn we wanted, but to somehow manage to make all the projects we’d have to make to justify the yarn expense.

I did manage to find the yarn for my next three projects, diving excitedly into an untidy heap of alpaca wool to find just the right shades of brown, and then sorting through pile after pile of an entire rainbow of others to find pale green that melts into a watery greenish blue just for variety, and a purple that is more blue than red. I also succumbed to a particularly gorgeous skein of hand-dyed variegated pale purple that included enough yardage for me to make several things – as soon as I can figure out just what I should use it for – just because I could not resist. After all, the other yarn purchases aren’t really for me, so I decided I was allowed to get something for myself too.

It is hard, now, to have all this yarn. I want to start one of the next projects immediately, if only to work with something far more vibrant and fresh than the dark olive green I chose for the sweater I’m working on. But I am trying to be firm with myself. Only one project at a time. Once this one is done then I can have the delicious joy of trying to decide which one to start next.

Tonight was the Robert Burns dinner. The choir gathered at the church a few hours before the event and we ran through all the songs a few times, just to get them fresh in our heads – although I’m not sure at this point whether I’ll ever get ‘Ye Banks and Braes’ *out* of my brain after all the work I have put into that darn song. And then we all piled into cars and drove over to the fairgrounds, where we gathered on chairs at the front corner of the room and waited for everyone to sit down with their food, and for the program announcers to work their way through a series of toasts before we could actually perform.

I will note again, just to make it perfectly clear, that this was a Robert Burns dinner, hosted by the local Scottish guild. So naturally it was attended by a great number of men who were wearing kilts. Men whose mothers apparently never told them that when one is wearing a skirt (or anything resembling a skirt) that one should keep one’s knees together.

Our seating arrangement was such that we were facing the rest of the room. This meant that we had a clear view of all the participants. And it was shortly into the toast to the laddies that we all suddenly realized that we were now being blessed with knowledge that heretofore had been kept secret.

Yes, I think you know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s very hard to keep a straight face when you are face to…er…pleats with finding out just what it is that they wear under their kilts. And once the door to such a mystery has been left so…um…wide open, how does any self-respecting choral member avoid taking the inevitable peek?

Last month the choir director asked who would be available to sing for a Robert Burns dinner, because the local Scottish guild was holding theirs in February. About half of us could do it, and we had all four parts represented, so he tracked down a few songs based on Burns’ poems so we could start practicing.

Except that some of the songs were more difficult than others, which is always a challenge when half the choir doesn’t actually read music, and we had other songs we always had to practice for our ‘real’ job, which is singing in church, even though for this gig we would actually get *paid*, and I think some of the people who said they wanted to do it didn’t take it very seriously and didn’t even bother to listen to the practice CD that the choir director very cleverly put together, even though the rest of us noted over and over how useful it was for learning the songs. And then suddenly it was last night and the Burns dinner is tomorrow night and I’m not sure we could have sounded any worse.

It didn’t help that for the most difficult song it was decided only last week that the men wouldn’t sing, which meant that while the sopranos got to keep their part, the altos were suddenly moved to the second soprano line and I switched from melody to alto line. It’s one of those songs that looks deceptively simple until you start singing it and realize that you are singing in a waltz tempo and there are marvelous little 16th note trills at the end of every phrase and the composer thought it would be oh-so-amusing to not only make everyone sing higher than our normal range, but also toss in a few random octave jumps, and oh did I forget to mention that there’s no where at all to breathe? Needless to say I adored the song – finally something that was a challenge to sing! After all, I could pick my part out on the piano and I had it down pat by the Sunday after he made the switch, but I was in the strong minority in my comfort with it.

After practice last night, we were all feeling pretty lousy about the impending performance – a feeling made even worse by the fact that we are getting paid, which usually implies an expectation of quality that we just didn’t have at all last night. So this morning I tossed out the idea of trying to get an impromptu practice together with my boss, who also happens to be in the choir, and suddenly I was on the phone, leaving frantic messages for everyone I could get a hold of, and it was pretty obvious I wasn’t the only one who thought an extra practice was a really good idea.

Not everyone could come, but there were enough of us to cover all the parts. It was cold in the sanctuary as we all stood in a lopsided little group, occasionally leaning over to stab at a particularly difficult note on the piano. We sang to each other and focused simply on hearing each other’s parts. We critiqued each other and encouraged each other and ran through everything over and over. There was no pressure. There was no feeling of impending doom. There was, instead, relief, and a lot of laughter. So what if in the women’s only song we kept giggling because invariably one of us would end up gasping for a breath in the middle of a word. We blended. We sang. We made music – actual music, not the muddled noise of last night. It was only one extra hour of practice – and in the grand scheme of things, one hour doesn’t seem like it would be worth the effort. But when we left the church there was a distinct change in all of us. Sometimes it’s amazing how little time it takes to make such a difference.

Monday did turn out to be a nice day to stay inside. It was gray and wet and dreary outside – the advent of another bout of winter storms – making it easy to lose track of the time of day. I did a lot of knitting and poked around online, and we watched a few episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (we’re up to season 4 now) as well as a movie called Little Secrets which I thought was going to be some silly fluffy teen flick but in fact turned out to be rather thoughtful and sweet.

It was mostly a good way to spend a holiday day, except that later in the evening my stomach decided to rebel rather suddenly, sparking a several-hours-long bout of puking my guts out, long after there was anything left in my guts to puke. Most of Tuesday I spent feeling vaguely queasy, which I suppose is a rather novel way to start off a new diet plan (we’re doing a two week Quick Start thing from Weight Watchers), but not one I would recommend. A quick chat with one of my coworkers suggested that this was just one of those 24 hour things that’s been going around, because by Tuesday night I was back to normal.

Of course, tonight I figured out that it wasn’t so much a 24-hour bug as it was a reaction to a new food. A week or so ago I found Quorn at one of the local grocery stores and since I’ve heard about it from friends online, I decided we should give it a try. We both really liked it, and this weekend we went back to that store (which is one we don’t usually go to because it’s not as nice) specifically to buy more Quorn – this time in a few different varieties. Unfortunately tonight I found myself getting suddenly and seriously nauseous by the end of the workday, but this time I put the pieces together and realized I’d eaten exactly the same thing for lunch on Monday as I did today. Voila. Add Quorn to the list of foods that I might love, but which quite obviously do not love me.

Richard didn’t get home until late last night. So I talked my mom into going to dinner with me, and we split a pizza and then a slice of mud pie because, after all, it was Valentine’s Day and our respective sweethearts were out of town (or in her case, out of the country).

Today has been the usual mix of busy and slow for a Sunday. The instrumental ensemble played in church today, which meant that I had to be there early to lead the practice (And can I note right now how glad I am that my dad will be back next month to take this over and I no longer have to worry about it?). I led a rather abbreviated class on Harry Potter because I think all the usual class members decided to sleep in instead of showing up early for Sunday school, and then after church three of us from choir gathered around the piano in a desperate attempt to nail down the song we’ll be singing next week at the Robert Burns dinner (because one time eating haggis this year simply was not enough).

We actually did our Valentine’s Day celebration (such as it is – neither of us is really into making a big fuss over a holiday inspired by the greeting card and floral industries) by trying out the new fondue restaurant in Sacramento. I’d been to La Fondue in Saratoga twice and had been wistfully dreaming of repeating the experience, but alas, La Fondue is not a chain. However, a quick Google search turned up the Melting Pot, which may be a chain, but there was fondue involved so we really did not care. They seated us in a tiny little two-person alcove and fed us melted cheese which we could not finish and then gave us herbed broth in which to cook a massive amount of meat that we could not finish, and then finished off the evening with a combination of chocolate and caramel and pecans which we did finish because there was no way either of us was willing to let perfectly good chocolate go to waste. One must have one’s priorities, after all, even if that involves eating the remaining dregs of chocolate directly from the pot with the stirring spoon because one has run out of dipping food.

Finding parking was a challenge, but then that’s always the case in downtown Sacramento. In the spirit of cheese and chocolate, however, we threw caution to the wind and took our chances on getting a parking ticket by parking in a one-hour spot. Luckily the gods were smiling on us and our car was ticket free by the time we emerged from our dinner two hours later.

It started raining this afternoon and has steadily gotten drearier and grey outside, which I think means that tomorrow will be a lovely day to stay indoors and do nothing remotely productive, just to celebrate having an extra day at home to try to digest all the cheese and meat and chocolate that we did manage to eat.