Of a Garden, Friendship, and Sunshine.

This past week has been so wonderful.
I'm not exactly sure what made it so good, but the weather definitely had some great influence. \
At any point during the last week, I was able to go outside after I came home from work, and get some sun, or eat my lunch on the picnic table outside, making for a warm, wonderful week.
I finally told some of my housemates that I decided to go vegan. They are taking it well. I'm also enjoying the fact that I love beans!! and I eat them WAY too much. But they are yummy and cheap. What am I supposed to do.

Besides Wednesday's Canoeing fake-out that was actually super serious--we arrived at the place of canoeing and waited around. All of a sudden this guy who worked there started setting up cones, and made Sanj, Bry, and Fets get off the dock. He told us that there was a body floating in the water, and then all the fire trucks, police and some FBI folk showed up. The guys said that they only saw the oil floating on the water, and some decomposed skin, and then we were told that we needed to leave, as much as our curiosity wanted to stay and cross that yellow tape boundary.

Instead of going to work in the morning on Wednesday, I went in the afternoon, to American University, to Colman's class there, and it was a great class. I enjoyed listening, and felt like I should have been coming to that class all along--I had wanted to, but it was on Wednesday when we had seminar.

Thursday approached as my day off-which I declared to myself at the beginning of the week. And I think that it may be a large part about why this week was so good. Just the fact that I established a day of rest, and then the rest of the day's events were also pretty awesome.
I decided to spend the day working in the yard, I pulled weeds in the front, and then cleaned up all the yard waste in the back--I finally got bags from the hardware store. I also dumped the fish pond out, which some of the pond water, more or less, is still sitting in the hole. But that is NOT my fault. If it were up to me, we would have a lot of good draining soil.

I showed Emily my masterpiece and then we decided to plant seeds! We went to the hardware store again and bought Spinach, Kale, Lettuce, Corn, Pole beans, Cherry Tomatoes, Zucchini, and Watermelon. When we got back, Emily realized that she had a shortened amount of time, and we did some speed planting. Which has to be the funnest way to plant things in the world. It's a race. We did pole beans, tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, kale, and corn in fifteen minutes. I love how it's going to look in a few months.

Emily invited me to her dinner party while we were working on the garden, and talking, as we have talked about many things this past semester. So I went to that, and had a great time. I met new people, I made curried vegetables, I yelled at a rice cooker, I played the piano in the basement, ate chocolate with poprocks in it. (which have lactose in them. poo on them) Conversations went from the tea partiers that were demonstrating on the mall on the 15th, to cats, and food. :)

Friday morning started much too early. But I went to Bethesda without any regrets-- we had our weekly protest with both classes and I had good conversation with students in both classes, although, as always, the second class was more interactive, even in class. Before the protest in the second class, Colman asked, "who haven't we met yet?" It's a routine thing--he gets everyone to stand in front of the class and talk about themselves. This time, I told Colman that they hadn't met me yet, so I stood up in front of the class, and answered the questions. The last question is always, "What's something about you that people would never know?"

Thinking back now, it's something that any observant person would know--the second graders in Mr. Abdullah's class noticed--"I have my tongue pierced." And of course, Colman being a former reporter, was "probbing" *insert sign language for prodding here" and asked what the benefits were.
I paused, and then told him that there were no benefits whatsoever, and that it was just for decoration.
Later when we were protesting, Lea, a senior from Germany who sits next to me in that class was talking to me about it, and said how Colman just did it for the laughs sometimes.

I went home, and decided to plant things in the garden, and nap later, so Emily and I went outside, and planted more lettuce, spinach, and kale, around the outside of the circle in the back, and little patches of onions all over!! I'm excited about these onions, and also several hills of zucchini and watermelon that we mounded all over the back, in between everything else that is going on.

When I came inside, the entire house deciding to go out to eat for lunch, with our 6400 money. So I put on a spring dress, and we headed over to Colombia Heights. We thought we knew which restaurant we wanted to go to, but no one ever does, so we walked around for a good half an hour before we picked one. We had Mediterranean yummies.                                        

I babysat Olivia in the evening. We watched part of Annie and I taught her how to double crochet.

When I came back to the house, I played Rook with Alli, Sanj, and Giles (Alli's brother). Alli and Giles were at the house because they had to catch a flight in the morning.