Isn’t she just darling? She matches absolutely nothing in my room but that’s no matter, I’ll just include her in all of my tea parties and she’ll fit right in.

My sister also brought me home a new ampersand trip from her beach trip last week! It is the one on top in the photo, isn’t it cute? I really just love ampersands.

Other things that are making me happy this week:
1. the freedom to sit around and drink icy cold drinks outside.
2. being on the computer on the front porch with an orange kitty at your feet and hummingbirds on the breeze.
3. The promise of real, good summer fun in the next month!
4. Kiwi fruit for breakfast and nutella for lunch!!

What is making you happy right now?

(image by Todd & Barbara)

I want to go and feel the real heat, none of this 80-one-day-55-the-next Oregon summer. I want to see the giant Saguaro cacti and trip over a prickly pear, be paranoid about meeting a rattlesnake or a scorpion, visit pueblos and get sunburnt. Drink a diet cola and feel the ice condensing around the glass in a place that gets less than a quarter the amount of rain I consider the ‘norm’.

But this post isn’t about that eventual trip, really. I’ve realized in that last few months that I really, really, really like cacti. And succulents. Succulents are really neat, shaped like twisty-orby-jointed-creatures, bent over and leaning against each other like drunken friends or something out of a Doctor Seuss book.

My family thinks I am crazy. (This is not different than any other day of the week, just a fact.) I keep looking at all the cacti in stores or in stranger’s yards and talking about how I want some. I want an aloe vera plant, I want a theolocactus and a Arthrocerus rondonianous and many, many, many, Sempervivums!

I recently bought a little pot of assorted cacti. I love it. I named it Horatio and smile whenever I see it around my house.

I like to think of Horatio as “a collective”.

I just figured out that my favourite part of Horatio is actually an aloe aristata, and that makes me very happy. I don’t know why. I just love little cacti.

This week, I almost turned into one of my beloved cacti.

It started out with attending a class with a professor that set me off in any way and I immediately started growing prickles. My roots expanded, absorbing all available water during the three-hour-class that I ‘endured’ and when I left, I was prickly and puffed up with my frustrations and loathing.

I tried to let go of my irritations and my anger, but every day I walked into that classroom a giant bloom grew out of the side of my face and I lashed out sarcastically at everyone around me, a little prickly pear of hatred.

It culminated on Thursday. I called my Mom after class (like I had the last three days) and we ended up getting into a completely unrelated argument. I realized then, that a four-credit class isn’t worth turning into a cactus.

So I dropped the class, and breathed a sigh of relief. I’d like to think that there was some romantic image associated with this, the cactus revealing the true desert flower or something romantic and disgusting and cliche, but really, nothing happened. I’m still pretty prickly about the entire subject, but my prickles are smaller and more like feathers than jagged edges, and I’m letting go of my frustrations.

But I still like cacti, even though I don’t want to be one. I hope that next time I can recognize the cactus symptoms a little bit sooner, though.

Because I then had to ride the train back home after waiting for a half an hour for him to show, I was able to run into an old friend’s older sister who is only in town for the day.

Because I left class early I got to see a co-workers brand-new baby niece, complete with baby flip-flops and chubby arms.

Because today is Wednesday I got to spend the afternoon with my Mom and go to Goodwill and find a new outfit (that I LOVE) and have a milkshake and basically find the coolest thing $1.99 can buy you:

So put in persepective… today was an amazing day.

I say that of course, realizing that it is completely usual in it’s unusual-ness. My family is really not that strange and confusing, and just like everyone else’s family, it is filled with random members that collect hurricane shelters full of tinned yams and horde wood for y2k. It also has (just like everyone else) a quartet of organ-players, a banjo-soloist, a tarzan impersonator, a unicyclist, a zebra collector, a fraud specialist, and some Australians.

The thing about my family is that we really don’t have that many heirlooms. Some people have heirlooms up the yin-yang! Some people have hutches and desks and cabinetry built by their great-great-grandfer on the prairies of Oregon and hand-crocheted cat-ear cozies crafted crazily for a crotchety kitten who crankily crammed their cute meta-carpals into his craw.

It’s not like I’m jealous.

But my family is severely lacking in heirlooms. We haven’t been close to my paternal Grandparents in my lifetime. My maternal Grandmother began suffering from Altzheimer’s when I was about seven, so even my memories of her are tainted with memory loss, both of hers and my own.

I was twelve when she died, and not old enough to understand the desire to preserve trinkets and memories. I am left with photographs of her as my heirlooms. I love them! Seeing her as a young woman makes me feel like maybe I did know her, in a somewhat metaphorical way.

My Grandpa remarried a few years later, to an old friend of the family he reconnected with at my Grandmother’s death. I never identified with her, but now I wish I had tried harder to get to know her. She passed away this spring, and we have been slowly helping Grandpa weed through her possessions and send them off to her relations.

The entire time they were married, she had a collection hanging on her wall.

A collection of spoons.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. In fact, I thought the same thing when I first saw them. “Oh my gosh. SPOONS. How typically old-lady! What a silly thing to collect. I mean, SPOONS.”

If I knew how to triple-underscore and draw skulls and cross-bones around a word like I would in the notes I’d pass around school in the 7th grade in HTML, I would do so. That would fully-articulate the true disdain and hatred I felt whenever I saw them hanging on the dining-room wall.

Spoons.

I hated them. And honestly, as a 16 year old whose Grandpa re-married to a woman who had never had children of her own, no-less, I found that woman and her spoons to be-less-than-fantastic.

When she died earlier this spring, and Grandpa started sorting out through the last of her possessions, I knew the spoons would end up at a thriftstore.

When I visited his house, Grandpa would trot out many items of hers and offer them to me. I turned most of them down. He finally offered me her collector’s spoons.

They stared at me. Silver and tarnished, covered in plastic, embossed and emblazoned with words and names of places. I realized that she had travelled the world with her spoons, and had no one to look after them.

I hadn’t recieved anything from my grandmother, so it’s not like I had an issue with competing storage space. And the spoons… the spoons with their windmills and tarnished silver camels and necks covered in wildflowers… they were kinda cool.

In fact, oh hey! That one has a windmill that spins! And a cuckoo-clock that dangles! Oh wow, yeah I forgot she was a missionary in Bolivia… and she even went to Vatican City!

I suddenly was overwhelmed with this strange and fulfilling need to keep her heirlooms, as a substitute for my own. As a collector and a person who finds happiness in collecting things, the concept of leaving behind my favourite items without someone to value them too is pretty heartbreaking.

So I agreed to take the spoons, to everyone on the planet’s shock and awe.

And I love them.

The collection is rather large (to me!). I think I am now the proud owner of 30+ spoons from various places around the world. These are just my favourites to share right now.

I love seeing all the places she has been, and have even… started collecting a few of my own.

Here and there, you know, to commemorate big trips. Not anything… excessive.

They are spoons, after all.

Just spoons.

The other side of the road contains miles and miles of farmland.

This was not taken by my house, but is an adequate illustration of what the fields look like, minus the adorable miniature donkeys.

I love where my home is located. Even though the buses run irregularly and I live with my parents and there’s nothing to do after 7pm on a weeknight (besides roller-skating, but that doesn’t really count anyway*), there’s something to be said about driving less than five minutes and being surrounded by endless fields and the occasional old barn.

I’ve been learning a lot about boundaries in the last few years. Learning to set my own, and to break the ones around me. The boundary of how far I can walk in my new teva sandals, (and whether or not it’s worth the blisters to break it), the boundary of where I’m willing to travel by bus, the boundary of how far I’m willing to go to make a relationship work, and how setting boundaries with money affect my daily life.

Last week, I broke a boundary. I flew 679 miles to San Jose, California by myself, to visit my boyfriend. Not only did I fly (!!!) by myself (!!!!!!), but I went to visit my boyfriend (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!). I was pretty much knock-kneed and stressed my entire flight. Excited, nervous, afraid we’d crash and I’d end up on an island with Matthew Fox, I tried to ignore the sensation of my feet slowly freezing into bits (a side-effect of wearing flip-flops on the plane, where the air-condititioning is, I don’t know, directly on your feet) and nervously took photographs of my newly-painted turquoise fingernails as the pilot announced we were making our descent.

Of course, the vacation went off without a hitch. The visit was glorious, the sun was amazing, and I’m now completely discombobulated in Oregon, wishing there were more palm trees in my neighborhood’s vegetation.

So, I’m changing my (previously-set) boundary of Oregon. I’m moving my weekly boundaries to include graduate-school planning and trying to make myself work more this summer, instead of working less.

And while I still have yet to break the how-far-can-I-walk-in-these-shoes-before-I-die-of-blisters-boundary, I’m working on breaking the “stay forever in Oregon” and “be safe with my school choices” and “never take any risks” boundary. I’m not skydiving yet, but it’s a step.

And I’m so excited to see where it takes me.

*I say this because I cannot walk upright without falling over, let alone successfully attaching wheels to the balls of my feet and attempting motion, not out of any prejudice against Roller Derbies or the romance of roller disco.

taking the same photo I take everywhere I go,

finding jeweled seashells,

being a tourist,

and standing in the mouth of an exposed sea-cave as the tide came in.

.

It’s so hard to return to normal life after such a fantastic weekend. I’m trying to hold onto the hope and fun between those blue seashells as I stumble through my last two weeks of this term.

It was lovely. I’m from the Pacific Northwest, but I’d never visited Mt. Rainier before, and it was awesome to get away from the city and into the trees and snow and cold for a day.

L: iron oxide dyes a small streem blood-orange. R: The park used to have a hot spring and accompanying resort. The baths are still around, and just gorgeous.

I’m lucky this term because I’m getting spoiled with time off. After five weeks of working full time and experiencing bilateral wrist tendonitis for the first time, I’m finally getting some small sorts of vacations.

Yeah, I’m super cool.

This coming weekend I get to go to the coast with my whole family, and the promise of warm weather awaits. I’m sure the change from snow to freezing rain to warm sand will be a bit of a culture shock, but it IS the Pacific Ocean, it won’t be that warm!

I know, I know, it’s been awhile. And I’ve been busy, what with school and work and actually attempting to have a social life beyond the computer in my bedroom. Fun fact: I got a call from Australia last week, commending me for focusing on my studies instead of blogging.

I’m breaking my silence this week because 1) I miss writing to y’all and 2) I had to share… of course I am still thrifting and finding neat and random things to wear. 3) Also I am tired of analyzing Renaissance poetry. REALLY.

Two weeks ago I attended a booksigning for the lovely Winona’s new book, Closet Confidential, where I got my autographed copy and enjoyed some sparkling apple cider at Mabel & Zora.

Me and my sister at the Closet Confidential party!

Shiny, right? I was ecstatic to find an appropriate party to wear my sequined dress to. The drive home in the rain-slick, lamplit dark night was super fun, as every stoplight we drove through made a mini disco-ball-fueled rave in our old car.

On the subject of sequins, they are among my new favourite things. I mean, we’ve discussed how much I like sparkles.

I am wearing my silver sequined shoes everywhere, even though my feet get wet in the rain.

And yesterday, on an unexpected Goodwill run, I found this little number:

I’m thinking: luncheon with my great-aunt, afternoon tea with The Duchess…

I am still taking outfit photos, and I am still planning on updating this blog, as I go, this is just a formal announcement that it’s going to be patchy for awhile.

This weekend I took a day off from work and was carted off to the beach my two of my favourite customers and their lovely dog, Max, who I house-sat for a few weeks this summer.

The Oregon Coast is sunny, warm and bright for about three days every summer. The rest of the year it cold, blustery, rainy and wet. Which really is how the beach is supposed to be! The Pacific ocean is freezing and the sand is puddley and the wind blows you about like a leaf.

It was a relief to take a day to just be–my weeks have turned into a frantic run-around of getting things done and What Project Is Next, which really is hard to enjoy.

I took a collective breath of fresh air and am knuckling back down to it. I’ll still be around, posting, but I do feel the need to announce: The Lemon Life is a bit crazy at the moment.

I’m making lemonade, just a bit slower than I have been this summer.