Colour Yours Truly absolutely perplexed as to how it has taken this long for the second disc of Beth Orton's pass in time to be spun on the hi-fi. Three years to be exact. I am utterly amazed and gleeful as it really is summer cd parfait. This is the one with the haunting song made with the ChemBros - Where Do I Begin.
Dropped about a dozen or so of my grain elevator images (drawings, photographs) on the gallery near the teahouse. Propped them up alongst the walls and assume I'll get some sort of call as to when the non-public hangings are to happen, to hash out details of a reception involving the usual sundries and sips.
Off to a slew of girlie gatherings for various occasions - live music, the birth anniversary of beloved Annie, gardens.
Of the garden variety, lunched along the Middling City's bustling avenue and it actually felt urban. I was transfixed.

Transfixed, focused Love.

How is It.
It is a thumping landscape of Thom's voice all warbulated and thin and tremolo even. And I just read a critic who stated how much she loathed the lyrics of this and the predecessors and I have to agree at points, like the one song (fercrissakes I've had it not even long enough to have left fingerprints on the elongated innards which fold out like an art project accordion book I had the little inner-city + rural campers make sometimes for my favoured book projects and the cd is still in the automobile)that features Thom singing the word Algebra and Yours Truly thought Did he just insert the word algebra into this symphonic astral plane.
Why, yes He did.
New Experiment.
YT is going to ingest Advanced Gingko Smart until the 90 gel caps run out to see if not only I can recall the harrowing moments of learning algebraic equations and such, but to see if I can pull words out of the air on demand - like radon. This one came up last evening. Radon. I've done the gingko thing/k before, most notably last when I was careening back and forth between adulthood and studentness, between the Middling City and the Shiney Apple.
Most in need of some SA time, wending about as the summer months, in my non-humble op, are the best to be there. All seasons are grand there but summer there is full of different noises, parks in a bluster, the galleries are not operating at full throttle, all the a/c is, and onwards.
Gig this fine morn featured children learning stage lighting. Yesterday they mastered stage design, more or less, and today lit their constructions. Much of this gig happened in the near-dark Drama Theatre out at Center for the Arts and Mediocre Coffee.
Then I tunneled my way back to the pelting rain.
This MC rain means that some floral offerings of Nature are growing hugely. And, merrily, I discovered that my gorgeous and delicate nigella plants returned, their primitive and gentle lilac-coloured flowers saying a big Hello.
I will admit that these seeds were chosen last year out of my deep admiration for chef/cook/joie-de-vivrant Nigella Lawson.

Nigella Love, all varieties.

Yours Truly is sipping a Molson Canadian.
This is unusual, surely You know.
When it's time to sip it's usually Oban, a sauvignon blanc.
But I've been slicing down little trees, You see, and thoughts of a few random cold bottles of beer in the film-laden fridge beckoned.
The cat, Extra, has been most amused by my yardly antics. Mostly by my rushing the lawn mower over saplings. He sits up tall in amazement at my human undertakings, I don't think really comprehending why a collection of approximately forty young trees deserves to die.
I say, or will say, when back in the back yard, Extra, it's like this. You take down the occasional bird. I do not ask why. I, on the other hand, succumb to the trope of lawn smoothness and mow shit down. Comprends. He will amuse me, look interested, wander back to his cat bowl, tail high, as I shove the Murray brand mower here, there, everywhere. After the beer.

Break Love.

Yesterday was one of those types of days that Yours Truly truly finds remarkable, one that careens from moment to moment, gig to gig, conversation to conversation, a salad, if You will, of good and mediocre bits tossed about.
First gig was documenting a rather far-flung garden walk that spreads over possible five miles, a disjointed affair under a flowery header and featuring, as they do, gardens of the usual items reconfigured to be made into someone else's own.
I headed to one garden as it featured a maze. Imagine the surprise of YT when I walked around the corner, scanned said yard, saw no maze at all, and then noted a most petite maze made of bricks in a maze pattern, separated by neatly planted rows of thyme. I spent some time marveling at the concept and placed gardened plants when the owner/gardener emerged from her home. I liked her at once, a familiar face that screamed I am a friendly gardener with a solid sense of humour. We talked mazes. And then her bamboo was noted and YT was off and running. Figuratively.
Her neighbor appeared and we spoke more bambooese. I saw this garden and saw the most gorgeous bamboo ever - goldenrod bamboo which looks like some gardener with OCD has taken brush to bamboo, painting neat little gilded areas. These two fellow bamboo lovers tipped me off to a fab, they say, bamboo joint in Rochester.
My beloved grandmother Victoria had a stand of hale bamboo in her garden in Smyrna, GA, outside of Atlanta well before it was Hotlanta.
That's one of several childhood garden memories. As kids are tossed outside to amuse themselves, or at least they were then, my sister and I meandered about a lot of gardens, these imprinting very florally.
The next gig was up in Canada, a wedding and this was for guests a four-day affair. For me it was a long collection of hours, it ending truly at 10 but the mom insisting I stay to get a certain photo memory about one hour later. So I sat off in the shadows, watching all from afar, making some random calls as, happily, the cellie was registering these far reaches as Middling City = no roaming charges. Finally, and YT does mean Finally, the moment happened. Frame. Frame. Frame. Then off into the pitch again to wander down a road, the music carried off in a slow Doppler wind.
Saw some fireflies. Saw no mayapples.

Fire fried Love.