Summer Begins (dress rehearsal)

And I'm in the front row, on my porch, doing the last weekend of Astronomy homework EVER, and trying to get some solar remedial treatment for my head and chest cold. Alas, it is breezy and in the low 60s, a tad chilly to be in this tanktop and shorts, but I just keep moving into the widening band of sun.

It feels like I've been somewhere, even to me, like Spring Term was some sort of season on Survivor, a show I don't even watch. And I'm still on the island, somehow, holding the soggy torch and looking very pitiful. Sort of how my tomato plants look right now, waiting for the heat and sun, limping along, in their fixed tomato plant way. When we were through with April, I was happy to be done with it and don't need a three week nostalgic rehash of it in June.

Almost 4pm and the wind is still chilly, tarnation! Perhaps I should put the books and notes away, to show the proper sunshine readiness, to call in the blazing rays.

My neighbors' raised bed gardens are doing so much better than ours, with their fresh black sifted organic soils from Portland Nursery, and more shelter from the wind than ours. The inches of new mulch look great still, the herbs and roses look splendid, the lavender and lamb's ears are purple as far as the lot line. Next weekend, when exams and work are done for the week, I will come out here and make up for all the lost time I spent studying and writing papers for Keanu.
Who I am not giving a copy of my paper to after all. What if I wind up being a TA in the department and he's got students reading my paper on a sensitive chapter of my life? Eeww.
It's flattering and all, but I'm already over that and experiencing the relief of being done with his class and all the folderal of the dynamics in there.

Besides, he revealed that his real full-time job is being a writer and editor for something or some place, and this is just his part time gig, jacking people around in the name of anthropology.

This only raised my hackles some more. That's why he was grading my syntax and not the substance of my anthropology work. Putz! But I've moved on. Really.

Sure, this is merely stalling, taking a break from the second half of the dreaded-A practice exam. My head feels like a skewered cork you found under your refrigerator from a previous tenant, the dry coughing has blown my eardrums back and forth too many times to be good. "All I wanna do is have some sun..."

Weeding in the Rain

please read today's Poppalina

Washed my hands long enough to throw a load of clean clothes into the dryer, and check Poppalina, otherwise known as Shula in Australia, whom I adore and want to have a drink with someday. Okay, one of those swimming-pool sized mojitos complete with umbrellas and plastic jewel-colored monkeys hanging from the rim.

And pulling weeds in a misty rain rewards me with the complete 8" long withered roots of the freakin' dandelions and their cousins the thorny variety, and that is a Warm Fuzzy to we gardening types.

This has been a stiff term for me. It's almost over, no more Professor Keanu and astrophysics will return to being a hobby, thanks for all the software and the Hubble websites!

I got the job on campus with the bankers hours, and was beat tired after only the first week. Too funny. It will all blend in nicely with the rest of my life and classes, so I will sleep more, big deal. Having today off both work and school to make a a three day weekend was very restorative, hurling me out to the weed bed between loads of washing and chatting with neighbors, talking tomatoes. I added some borrowed mint varieties to the herb rock garden, cleared away some of the lambs ears obscuring the blooming thyme and blooming sages, and left space for the basils yet to be procured. My echinaceas came back, and now I'm thinking yarrow, both red and yellow. Portland Nursery again in my future. Another neighbor has some bronze fennel---wonder if he'd want some of these lambs ears? Another neighbor has some beautiful monarda, and Steven's getting rudebeckia. If it were up to me, I'd pull out all but one clump of the lambs ears and plant more lavenders, there are sweet white and pink varieties. A bunch of my mammoth sunflowers are emerging from the dirt, and four cucumber plants are ready to put in.

If we had a goat, these weeds would get eaten and recycled as fertilizer. I want to be an urban homesteader...

Heliocentric

Whatever I'm doing, whenever it is, if there's a sustained sunbreak, I drop my piddling little task and bolt for the outside. It's just time for winter to be finally over, and time to sit on the porch in something other than black solar-magnet clothes to ward off the chill while waiting for the blaze.

How funny is it that in Astronomy class we are studying the Sun, being tantalized by films of solar flares, boiling radiance of the photosphere, waving heat coronas in eclipse---and I get to walk home from the bus in sideways frozen rain. Brrrr.

The astonishing thing lately is that I am starting to begin to understand some of this trigonometry.
The calculator I bought has helped, and the professor is focusing more on the 'what' instead of the 'how', but neat pieces of this whole snarl of Greek letters, exponents and subsets are falling into place. Slowly, I should add, so as not to challenge the Math Gods with my arrogance.

There are all these websites to visit with animations of a full day's Sun rotation, seeing sunspot frequency, the granulations of convection cells rising to the surface and cooling (to 5 million degrees Kelvin) and sinking back under the surface to be reheated. In the presentation, there are all these cooking and stove analogies, and who knew that neutrinos came in three flavors?
During the break after the first hour of class, I saw my face in the ladies room mirror, and I looked sunburned.

This is the official Midterm week, and I just found out today I am getting an aid package for the summer term that starts the end of June. It's what I was hoping would work out, to stay at it and make up for some of all the lost time. Hopefully, there's going to be something offered that I want to take, now that I'm committed. Until the summer schedule is posted, I hover in the mysterious cloud of unknowing. Flirting with the sun.