Category / Bunberry

by Sixer

In Which the Author and a Friend Stroll Around

The weather has been a little nippy out now, but three or four weeks ago, a way back in March,  the weather was glorious and warm. We, the Geekette and I, celebrated this by taking the day off and going to the Brookside Gardens. I don’t think words can describe a beauty like that, simply because half the beauty is in the effect it has on the viewer. That a gently sloping hill and a mirrored lake can ease a soul of all its cares is a  magical thing in and of itself.

I took an outrageous number of pictures, so I’m not sure what to show you all. We walked around for about four hours, leaving the gardens at one point to stumble into the adjoining park. We came prepared for the ramble, the Geekette brought a dozen still-warm chocolate chip cookies and I packed bento.

We ate lunch in the back of my car – no picnicking on the lawn, I suppose. Since it was barely spring when we went, being the end of March, I was a little surprised to see so much out. A dozen varieties of daffodils, moslty miniutare; ten or twenty magnolias of varying scent and color, their petals carpeting the ground beneath them; tulips and snowdrops and poppies, filling beds with color and gracing river banks. My favorite were these:

 

Hellebores – The Lenten Rose

Don’t they look like death roses? But beyond that, their shape and color is really charming. I wonder what’s in their bed now. I’ve been to the Brookside Gardens in the summer before (it was summer, right?) and it was much more colorful. The azaleas were in bloom everywhere you turned, and even the bugs were out in brighter array – we got to watch a whole hive of bumble bees dive bombing each other over the pond, and even saw one eaten by a watchful fish. But the best part was the wisteria, awake and blooming over our heads in the covered walk. It’s one of my favorite features, and it was all shriveled and barren when we went this time. But despite that, and the overcast skies, the day was warm and bright and filled with spring hues. Let’s go again soon Geekette, okay?

by Sixer

Fredrick

Yesterday I drove an hour north(ish) to visit a friend in Fredrick.

So what does one do in Fredrick? We’ll, first they see horses. Did you know horses are huge? I read about them all the time, “such-and-such was as big as a horse” and what not. Mentally I acknowldge that wow, that’s big, but then I move on and forget about it. Actually, funny story, a group I was in once spent fifteen minutes arguing over whether a centaur could jump down a twenty foot hole safely, only to have one of its more silent members finally ask if the centaur would even be able to fit through the hole. We all were kind of like “oh, probably not.” I would like to report to you today that we were compeletly in the right. No trapdoor made for humans is ever going to be big enough for a horse. They are big. Their rumps come up to my head – surpass it even. It’s a good thing too keep in mind next time you want to throw around “horse” as a measurement.

We didn’t stay with the horses long (they were at a training barn, so we couldn’t ride them or anything) and soon made our way down to the downtown.
Downtown Fredrick is full of lots of cute shops and funky novelty stores. Boasting two tea shops, two record stores, a soda fountain, and a chocolate store, the city (meaning, the two intersecting streets that make up the tourist section) is packed with things to look at. Because we were strapped for time we didn’t really go inside any of these stores. Instead we entered a Thai restaurant and ordered something to appease our demanding stomaches (it was a delicious and spicy curry that had a name I neither can remember nor spell). Satisfied, we ventured further down the main street, only to find that it was now so late that most of the shops were closing and taking photos was becoming increasingly tricky. This didn’t stop our enjoyment of the city at all, but it did mean we didn’t have time to go check out the historic grave yard. Oh well, there’s always next time.

Please tell me it comes in pints

by Sixer

In a room with the shades drawn against the mist

There is something really delightful and magical in contrast. In the warm glow of a lamp amidst  the gloom and gray seeping through the windows, filtered partly by the shade. In the comfort of sheets, warmed through and through, folding around you; falling away at the shoulders to let in the cold. In bright, glorious days ending in stormy nights, and tenuous, unreadable mornings that refuse to promise anything.

I am in a mood to go on, poetically, without rhyme or rudder. To merely meander in thick, wordy sentences until the birds stop their half mournful, half mirthful conversation. And yet, there is a part of me which wishes to be doing, to be focused upon a point and be able to measure my approach. I wish to document how much time I wasted yesterday not knowing what I was about, and how many plans I have for today, and Sunday, and all the tomorrows to come after. I want to get up and, in defiance of the weather which has chosen my day off to be nasty, ride my newly repaired bike through the neighborhood, across the busy street, and down the wooded trail that leads to the library.

Yet, how nice it would be just to sit here and soak in the gothic beauty of the day, as if I were in a Bronte novel.

I’ve already done that, though. I have read the first chapter of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I have read it and exulted. Already, in the sixteen pages that make up the first chapter of the first volume, there has been one whole page made up almost entirely of footnote. I love footnotes, and, in a fictional work, they leaned such an air of bookishness   and respectability – believability, if you will. And with the book being about Victorian gentlemen – regency really, I suppose, so pre-Victorian – who make the study of magic dull to nearly everyone else and value books and discussion over all – well. I do have many weaknesses, but not many as deep as the one I have for descriptions of someone’s private library.*

But I suppose I really should wind-up here. Should shower and dress and arm myself against the pervasive air of laziness. How can a morning be so divided? For the very cold that makes me want to curl up and read on grabs at my toes and tugs me towards an adventure of my own making. And the birds, as they penetrate the solemnity of the damp and clouds, send thrills of possibility down my spine with every other chirp.

_________________

*See Inkheart

by Sixer

Hello World

I want to share something with you. It’s something I came across when I was still more worried about choosing my domain name than writing the First Post. But after I read it, I knew this was how I wanted to introduce myself anew. So here it is – written in September, 2011 – and it begins:

I started thinking about Writing on Tuesday.

Tuesdays are good days, because you have the whole week to look forward to, with one day already under your belt. And, if you’ll allow me to digress, the second and forth Tuesdays are wonderful excuses to show off a little. I think every one one of my flesh-and-blood connections has heard of how astonishingly horizontal my job is – how each person is content to control his or her little patch of paper work with only a few unofficial treaties to allow documents to flow easily between boundaries. It’s not necessarily bad, it even works really well and provides a wonderful sense of autonomy which I do enjoy. But, dear reader, there is a dark side to every light reflecting orb. In this instance the result is that when our office memo system changed no one really knew what to change it to, because no one was really in charge of it anymore, so they turned to the junior staff (me) and said “you do it.” So I did. And then they liked it, and so now I’m stuck doing it. But I don’t mind because, as I said, it’s an amazing opportunity to show off. I love to write, despite all the evidence to the contrary, and I work wonderfully with deadlines. The office memo gives me both without me having to worry about finding it lying around at some later date and wondering “how was I not expelled for this massacre of the English language?” I was never really fond of The Essay and have never written one I’ve felt proud about more than two weeks after getting it back. The office memo, however, not only obligingly dissapears  from my sight by Wednesday, it also doesn’t require me to be intelligent. It’s like a research paper (my favorite kind) only without field work or formal language. So Tuesdays are good days because I get to enjoy that feeling of creating something, of molding and forming, of drawing – out of dry facts and terse reminders – laughter and warmth and wit. They also lead to ego-inflating Wednesdays, but hey: everything has a dark side.

All that to say, it was perfectly normal for me to be thinking of writing on Tuesday, and I haven’t really stopped all week long. It has finally occured to me that saying I have nothing to write about is inaccurate. Surely an office memo has to be somewhere below “nothing” as far as content is concerned, and I refuse to describe my life as less eventful than an office memo. So what can I use as an excuse? There is nothing, really, but I do think that what I’ve meant all a long was that my life has no cohesive focal point. No plot, if you will. Writing about seemingly random events would work if I thought of this blog as, say, a strip in a newspaper, but not if I try to see it as a chronicle of life, or an epic novel. And, of course, that’s what I read. Knitting blogs, Sewing blogs, Cooking blogs – all of which have a very obvious thread running through them. We see the fabric bought and the patterns purchased. The pieces are cut. Then tragedy strikes. We read disaster in a crystal goblet. What will happen? Will all that work, all those dreams, be doused by a burgundy stain? The dilemma described, decisions must be made. The solution, perhaps drawn from the readers themselves, is finally settled on. We breath freely again. Or perhaps we mourn, why did she try bleach? Then, a month or year later, there it is again. The skirt she tie-dyed, worn with her new white blouse. That pattern (first blogged here) remade out of blue navy, with these and these adjustments made.

This is what I’ve been trying to emulate. It’s not strange, is it, to copy what you love? But it doesn’t appear to be working all that well yet. I may be the center of a sprawling saga, but I’m still on the farm plot wise. During the week when I originally wrote this post I saw The Phantom of Opera’s 25th anniversary performance – the recording played in theatres, that is. I made beingets and scones, and successfully sewed the front of a jumper. I did my homework, un-aging a picture in photoshop. I tried to sew the back of said jumper, only to hit a snag when my bobbin holder mutinied. I spent hours trying to find a book to read – I was all over the place. Even just this week I’ve been here and there, girl-lyfying my wardrobe with shoes, studying Japanese, moving songs I never heard before off of their native vinyl and onto my computer, and, of course, trying to cram a whole world’s worth of geekiness into one week as I prepare to move from Blogger to WordPress.

Even though most of this posts was originally written back in September, even though the idea for Pandamonkeyum was started a year ago, in that strange period of time where I worked as a nanny, they still ring true. I’m not sewing, or baking, or candle making, or any of those nice artsy, focused things. I’m a dabbler. I’m attracted to beauty, whether it’s pure ingenuity, unvarnished, or an attention to detail that leaves a bit of the attender’s soul. Sometimes the beauty is only skin deep for me, a sparkle or flash that I feel no need to return to, and sometimes it’s like a river which refreshes and renews the land it flows through. In that case I’ll mark where it lies and vow to return and drink from it again, but I probably wont set up store. Maybe one day I will, we’re supposed to settle down as we age, right?  But I haven’t yet, so I’m going to admit that my real hobby is joy, and that talking about interesting, cool, intriguing, sublime things is one of the most joyous things I know, especially when talking really means writing.

And that is why I’ve started Pandamonkeyum. It’s chaotic and sprawling, like me. It has strange categories that don’t always seem related and then suddenly overlap in a way that makes you wonder if they really ought to be grouped together after all. It’s a little bit of everything and all things, with quite a lot of potential for something, even if that something isn’t ever really specified.

I hope you enjoy your time here. I hope we (the blog and its author, and whoever else may come along and add their thoughts to the fray) can make you laugh a little, or just shake your head and smile. That we inspire you to try your own attempt at making beauty, or help you see how much wonder there is already in this topsy-tipsy world: not just beyond the pandemonium, but in its very midst.

by Sixer

Tasting Sounds . . . .

Rather like not consuming, but to the contrary I have been consuming life in large quantities this month. Big, thick drafts of sweet life: full of variety and pleasant old friends. For instance, my car got released from the shop two weeks ago. It had been in there for three weeks and I was starting to forget it’s brilliant copper color, but there it was on the driveway when I was driven home for the last time by a Gracious Parent. Gumiho, I named it right there on the spot. I’ve been trying to call it Ali Lee all year, since that’s what her license plate spells out, but for some reason when I saw her there on the driveway I knew her name was Gumiho. A gumiho (literally, nine-tailed fox)  is a mystical beast native to Asian folk lore. Gumiho is the Korean name for it, and yes, the Korean fox is a malevolent, carnivorous beast. The thing that makes it perfect is . . . well, do you remember Pokemon? Yeah, one of my favorite Pokemon was a Vulpix, which evolves, of course, into Ninetails and is, quite coincidentally, a gorgeous fiery red.

Moving on.

Having a car again made the literal tasting portion of this month much easier. It was at just such a tea tasting event last year that I got my foot into the doorway of teas, and I’ve managed to keep it pretty wedged in there over the past year without going in or coming out. I’ve been drinking a lot of tea at work, though, because it fits my need for something melodramatic and mysterious. Despite my burnt mouth (I’m very rarely without one in the winter), the three teas we sampled all had wonderful depth of flavor, being brewed to a perfection that I usually only get to imagine. Let’s see, we had Oolong, Puerh, and a Yellow tea – which I had never even heard of before – and they were all delicious, with varying notes of earth, and spice, and barley, and honey.

On Friday I drank in, not hot beverage, but clear, cool, sound. I went to a performance of the Nordic Voices and loved it. I’m not of a temperament to love listening to classical styles of music all day long, but give me a bit to sit and listen to, eyes closed so the rises and falls of the melody can paint with delicate brush strokes a scene upon my mind, and I’ll be in raptures. It’s not so much because I can fully appreciate it, but because it seems so new and mysterious. It helps that the first half were Latin songs drawn directly from Jeremiah – I’ve been in the Old Testament prophets for what seems like an age now, and their powerful, visual language does beg to be put to verse. But I’ll readily admit my favorites were the happy Nordic songs they sang for the latter half of the evening. The things they did with their mouths were astonishing. The first Norwegian song they preformed, which they said had been written to emulate a sunrise – all misty at the outset and then light and “dancing” at it’s end – opened up with eerie, new aged moans which perfectly mimicked a day cloaked in clouds. There was even the sound of fog horns. And later they did something similar with – not groans, no, but not humming either – some stranger application of voice then, that makes it an instrument of wind and sinew distinct from the ability to vocalize. This they pared, at times, with the most controlled whistle. A whistle so high and sweet, but so full of tones, that you would think a flute had been secreted in their robes.

Not that they were wearing robes.

To top the bliss off, this Monday I got a taste of Shoe-fever:

Aren’t they a dream?  They were practically free. Practically, since I went there only to buy sunglasses and came out with quite a bagful of goodies (including four Olivia Newton-John records. I don’t remember ever listening to her before outside of my one encounter with Grease, but I burned two of them on my computer yesterday and loved them). I’m chocking the expense up to the sunglasses and treating my other purchases as promotional freebies.

My accounting practices might be a little shady.

Anyway, that was February in a bite sized sample. I have some pretty big plans brewing for  March, which hopefully y’all will be a part of. Don’t die of shock if you hear from me before April.

“I put my French heels on and I pretend, pretend, pretend I’m twenty-one!”