I know to everyone else this is just a really fun story, but for me, it’s my life. Just show some gentleness with regard to my emotions.

The Italians have a saying, I recently learned: “A fat pope follows a thin pope.”

A good sleep night follows a bad sleep night.

A good neck day follows a bad neck day.

A happy day follows an unhappy day.

So if you’re happy, be happy. And if you’re unhappy, be happy, because tomorrow you’ll probably be happy.

Even on a drizzly day (yesterday) we manage to pull a great outing out of Vermont including biking, brewing, & beauty.

Imagine there’s a parallel life where you didn’t spit in the tube for ancestry at all. Imagine another where you did but wasn’t able to track anyone down. Imagine another where you tracked people down but nobody answered you. Imagine another where you did not have somebody pushing for you & biodad to meet next week. Imagine another where he refused to come.

Imagine one where he backs out next week. Imagine one where he comes and you hit it off beautifully and you gain a new friend and some great new stories. Imagine one where he comes and you can’t relate to him at all. Imagine one where he comes and he stinks (thanx Sara) or he asks for a kidney (thanx Ruth). Now imagine one where he comes and everything is just kind of middle of the road.

So, this is the parallel life you’re in right now. All the dominoes clicked to have you very close to meeting your sperm donor very soon. Which life will this turn out to be?

My garden is now an adolescent – pretty much able to take care of itself.

String beans, a row of green & a row of yellow…

Cherry & grape tomatoes, various… I forget what I ordered…

I know it basically looks like a jungle, but that’s the way (uh huh uh huh) I like it (uh huh uh huh).

The view from Bent Hill Brewery. This is a great place, but talk about the middle of nowhere – Braintree, VT, way up a dirt road with no commercial activity around for miles. I find that you cannot throw a rock in Vermont without hitting a beautiful place. Every place in the world has at least little pockets of beauty. We have rolling hills and mountains of it. I was drawn to want to try this brewery when I heard about the great variety of styles they have (an appropriate number of IPA’s – maybe 3 out of the dozen offerings, thank you!), and that their taproom menu was fully vegetarian. It is still my preference to eat low on the food chain. However, as I’ve been telling people, I’m finding it harder to do lately – Xopher recently got some blood work results telling him to lower his saturated fat intake, so there goes all the cheese I like to put on things. Dairy fat & refined carbs are usually what make vegetables a meal, and they aren’t as healthy as certain birds and fishies. Finally, it was a lot easier to cook solely vegetarian at home when it was winter – surprised, since it’s summer that offers all the fresh vegetative matter? Well, three reasons: split pea soup; black bean soup; and mushroom barley soup. These were all great go-to veg meals in winter, but I just don’t want to make soup in the summer.

But I digress. Back to beauty. I tried to find an official kind of bike, rec, or rail trail in the vicinity of Braintree to no avail. So I just used a map and found a loop we could do that was 8 miles and didn’t look too hilly. It was in fact too hilly but I am better at hills than I used to be. And it was such a beautiful and peaceful ride, on the Randolph-Braintree border. It’s so amazing to be able to just pull out the gazetteer and make your own journey and trust it will very likely be fabulous. I love you, my state!

Let me just say insomnia makes me want to die.

Sometimes the only thing that calms me down is promising myself that I’ll kill myself in the morning.

Anyway, today was like a dog walking on its hind legs:

‘I told him I had been that morning at a meeting of the people called Quakers, where I had heard a woman preach. Johnson: “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”‘
Boswell: Life

I told myself I didn’t have to do today well, in any respect. As with a dog walking on its hind legs, I would be satisfied as long as today got done at all.

And today got done. Good night.

The blues they sent to meet me

Won’t defeat me

It won’t be long till happiness steps up to greet me

Remember that one? It was the theme song to a movie released the year I was born, and it was the first American hit of the 1970s.

Anyway, I like it, and it reminds me of my favorite Kinks song.

I know tomorrow you’ll find better things.

I like them because they posit happiness as something that will find you, or that you will find. I.e. one way or another you’ll bump into each other.

I found a lakeful of it yesterday; when I stepped in to get my feet wet, it stepped up to greet me.

In a rare straying from vegetarian cooking I tried this NYT magazine recipe last night, and X deemed it “excellent,” as did I! That’s mushrooms and breadcrumbs on top. Copious butter, and some white wine, white vinegar, and lemon juice round it out.

From the department of Don’t Tell Anyone: Sometimes I think X thinks of me as some kind of household appliance. But it’s OK because sometimes I think of him as some kind of a pet.

If I had wings, and I could fly, I know where I would go.

But right now I’ll just sit here so contentedly, and watch the river flow.

X checks out a sculpture in Waterbury Center. This on a return from our bike along the Stowe rec path. There is darn fine biking in this state.