Dispatches from a happy Hullian

I'm writing from the couch with Pixel the Relatively New Cat lying on my legs. She's kind of the Ernie to Noisette's Bert: sociable, talkative, stripey and drives Noisette a little crazy. They're getting along a bit better than they did at first, though.

I'm in my second week of a two-week vacation: Elizabeth's music school shuts down for two weeks in the summer, and my projects are all long-term enough that two weeks in the summer without me won't kill them, so we co-ordinated. Happily, Kaleioscope Gathering was also on, and so we hopped on our (fully-loaded with panniers and a trailer full of gear) bikes and went out to Planatagenet or thereabouts to camp under soft pines, participate in a communal camp kitchen, learn about partner yoga, thai massage, herbs, relationships, vocal techniques and esoteric stuff, hang out with fun pagans and pagan-friendly people, acquire a thumb piano, and attract most of the security on duty to our campsite — with rumours of chocolate fondue. Like teinm_laida was reporting, people there for the most part have their guard down and are their genuine, enjoyably weird selves.

The garden is doing really, really well. The exciting bits lately are red Russian kale coming up where the spinach was, and a zucchini patch that wants to take over the world. Also of note are the beginnings of a blackberry patch behind the compost!

I commented with "words" over at stateofwonder's journal, and she gave me five words to riff on:

( biking • Quebec • Scrabble • Mathematics/Statistics • home cooking )

Well, it seems that this time last year is still on the first page of my Livejournal — I guess I'm a little uncommunicative on here. I hope a few more meaty updates will be in the near future, as well as the traditional good/blah table for all your point-form needs…