Lunch, Phenology interior and exterior

It's so sticky today that I haven't turned off the air conditioner in my bedroom, and so cool that I haven't turned on the one in my office. It's raining in a desultory fashion.

This afternoon I had an appointment to meet clindau at Natraj India Kitchen for lunch. I looked my bus route up on the Metro Transit website. I was unsurprised that the 23 was the bus of choice, but a bit puzzled to see that I was expected to get off at Lagoon and Fremont. There are several glitches in the Trip Planner system, though -- it doesn't recognize any address on Blaisdell south of 78th Street, for example -- so I just made a note that I should get the 12:11 bus, and didn't worry about it.

As I took my card out of the reader, Nate Bucklin came up the aisle to greet me. I went back and sat in the seat ahead of his and we had a wide-ranging conversation that caused me not to notice what the bus was doing. When he said that we had reached his stop, I looked up into a landscape familiar but unexpected. "Where ARE we?" I said. "Lake Street is coming up," said Nate, and then I realized that we were at Lake and Hennepin. You didn't use to be able to do that on the 23. I forgot that my instructions from Metro Transit indicated that the bus must loop back via Lagoon as far as Fremont, and leapt off the bus with Nate, who was telling me that they had, in fact, changed the route; bidding him a hurried goodbye, I charged down Lake Street to the restaurant.

clindau was there just before me. We've only met in person three times, but we never lack conversation. I got to hear about her adventures in taking the Guthrie's Othello on the road all over the country, and about the adventures of the Meno-jade, a piece of which she had brought me all the way from lblanchard in Philadelphia. She had to remind me twice to take it with me, but it did get safely home. We also discussed cats, London, the theater more generally, and my book and some of the fans of the previous ones.

I can't remember what I meant by "indoor phenology." Unlike most other people I know, we don't have ants. We had huge alarming flies, but I pursued them vigorously and they went away, at least the ones that I didn't smash did. I hate killing things, but there were too many flies to capture individually under glasses and release into the wild, and they roused a lot of atavistic antagonism in me, until I didn't kill one cleanly and felt awful about it.

Outside, we have gigantic doofy spotty robins and similarly spotty and gigantic bluejays. I know that laurel has been observing young robins for some time now, but mine only just showed up. I saw the first Monarch butterfly in my actual yard yesterday. A few days before that, I saw several damselflies disporting themselves in the again-uncut grass; and we have some white-faced meadowhawks working on the mosquito population in the side yard. Plants are starting to look a little ragged and discouraged. I have from time to time put in things that bloom in August and September, but the only one that ever thrives is the physostegia. It's making some buds, in a very leisurely and absent fashion, about as energetic as the rain.

Despite mrissa's sterling example, I didn't write anything while I was sick, and am having a bit of trouble picking up the threads again. Maybe if I cleaned my desk first. Since the reference books I used to write Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary are still on the shelf for "reference books for the book in progress," you can see that this is not just cat vacuuming.

Pamela