Doing all I can

We are 16 days from “launching” this application, and it’s missing some critical and very high level-of-effort functions. So I’ve been hitting the country chicks to help get me through the days.

Today I’m thinking a lot about this one—I first heard Martina McBride sing it, but here we have Emmylou Harris. Seems appropriate for mid-pandemic as well as complete work cluster. Crank up the volume.

It’s not literally true, but I certainly feel like I’ve been living in a warehouse in West LA.

Purple (and white) glory

On Monday I talked about one of the floral memories from my SoCal childhood. Today I’ve got some pix of a flower I only discovered in North Carolina: clematis.

I’ve seen different ones on my #homework walks; here’s a sampling of their spectrum of beauty:

  

You’re welcome.

Ides of July

I finally got my tax records together over the Independence Day weekend and uploaded them to my accountant. I just could not drag myself to do the necessary because this government is so demoralizing—even though we had an extra three months to file, this was the latest I’ve been at hawking up the documents.

Well, Friday they told me I’m getting a modest refund from both the feds and the Confederate Commonwealth of Virginia. I was so burned by the liability in 2018 that I might have over-withheld when I started my new job in September.

You just can’t win with these clowns, but at least it’s over now. 

Until it starts again in [checks calendar] six months.

Allons!

It’s Quatorze Juillet, the 231^st anniversary of the start of the French Revolution. AKA Bastille Day.

Sadly, the normal celebrations are off—no French waiter champagne races, no champagne-fueled conga lines, probably a lot fewer and smaller champagne-and-fireworks parties.

(I myself shall be cracking a bottle of bubbly and attempting to make Chicken Cordon Rouge for the first time. But I’m socially-distanced.)

So let’s have a clip of Hollywoodized French patriotism. As in, the sequence in Casablanca where Major Strasser and his boys, full of caviar and Veuve Cliquot ’26, have commandeered Sam’s piano and are belting out “Die Wacht am Rhein”, and Victor Laszlo demands that the house band play the French national anthem.

Now, Die Wacht am Rhein is a fine piece, but La Marseilleise is probably the best national anthem on the planet—truly fit for leading armies or parades. For a few moments, there’s this amazing quodlibet going on between the master race and the conquered, but you know who prevails.

Vive la revolution!

Gratitude Monday: the scent of summer

The house in which I grew up was old by Pasadena standards; I believe my mother checked and it had been connected to the sewer system in 1902. (Fun fact: it backed onto one house where Julia Child spent part of her childhood, and was about a block away from another.) I don’t know what the yard looked like when we moved in, but my parents relandscaped both the front and back, probably based on Sunset magazine designs. And one quadrant contained the lemon tree, a bunch of roses and some gardenia bushes.

I’ve never been overly wild about growing roses—they seem way fiddly to me—but I do miss the gardenias. On summer nights, the scent used to waft through my bedroom window, so I always associate it with library reading clubs, juicy apricots and biking around the neighborhood.

A couple of years I bought a gardenia shrublet. It lives in a pot, which comes indoors for the winter (along with my pathetic dwarf Meyer lemon, which has yet to produce one single fruit larger than a walnut in three years). A couple of weeks ago I was so chuffed to see a flower beginning to emerge.

And another.

Then a couple more—one after the rain and one with a visitor

When I counted six, I brought it inside, because you can’t smell gardenias through double-paned patio doors.

I have to say, it looks like it’s topped out at nine flowers, which isn’t very much of a school try. Maybe it’s the lack of full sun—that patch in my parents’ garden got the whole SoCal blast of summer solar power. But this is enough that every once in a while, I get a whiff of the scent, and it reminds me of home.

And that’s my gratitude for today.